If you happen to be a fan of Mary Shelley and live in southern England, there’s a new attraction that will likely interest you: Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, which is described as a “visitor attraction [that] blurs the lines between museum and immersive visitor experience.”
The museum is located in Bath, England, and is now open to the public and serves as a way to explore the life of one of science fiction’s most important authors.
Shelley was born in London in 1851, but after her famous trip to Geneva where she conceived of Frankenstein, she and her family relocated to Bath, where she wrote the novel.
The museum is located at 37 Gay Street in Bath, and notes that it’s an interactive experience across four floors of the building. The first looks at Shelley’s life, which features an “8ft monster recreated exactly as Mary imagined,” while other floors are dedicated to “all things Frankenstein, and his monster, in our popular culture rooms.” There will also be a laboratory-themed escape room, but that’s not open just yet.
The exhibits, the museum describes, feature “interactive, multi-sensory environments and assorted body parts,” designed to deliver an “unnervingly visceral, illuminating and entertaining experience.” Indeed, the FAQ page warns that not all areas might be advisable for children, and that it’s “not suitable for those with asthma, epilepsy, claustrophobia and heart conditions.”
Tickets for the experience are £12.50 per person, with a discount for groups.
Q works beautifully on TNG because deLancie and Sir Patrick Stewart have simply perfect chemistry, which will likely hold true when the entity appears on Picard. His appearances on Voyager have been a sequence of diminishing returns, and when they finally address the elephant in the room regarding the fact that Q can get them home with a snap of his fingers, they botch that, too. Just a sodden, awful mess.
As I said back in…I think it was either the “Death Wish” or “Q and the Grey” talkbacks…”All Good Things” really should’ve been Q’s swansong — at least at the time.
I mean, we’ll have to see how his encore on the new Season of Picard fares (and his Lower Decks guest role was at least fun).
But I didn’t really care for this episode back in 2001 either — and not just because, at the time, it seemed a poor sendoff for DeLancie (since, as far as we knew, VOY’s final Season was the last hurrah of the 24th Century on TV).
Q’s crossover appearance on DS9 in retrospect should’ve been a warning that he wasn’t going to work outside of TNG — apart from, heh, Sisko decking Q.
Yes, a massive letdown and an unfortunate cheapening of the Q concept — never a great concept, but at least it had a certain consistency that’s largely discarded here. A Q child acting the same as a human adolescent is rather ridiculous. Q are transcendent beings that merely cosplay as humans so that we may comprehend them. It’s the equivalent of a zookeeper using a vulture hand puppet to feed baby vultures. It doesn’t reflect the underlying reality.
True, Voyager has made that mistake all along, with Q’s flirtations with Janeway. Although at least that had the excuse of giving close friends Kate Mulgrew and John DeLancie an opportunity to play Hepburn and Tracy together. Having q send Seven’s catsuit to the cornfield is just juvenile pandering.
The one thing about this episode that I’m grateful for is that it set the end of Kirk’s 5-year mission in 2270. The Okudas’ Chronology had conformed to Roddenberry’s preference that the animated series be ignored and had put the end of the 5YM in 2269, shortly after “Turnabout Intruder,” and thereby left virtually no room for either TAS or any of the novels or comics. Putting the end in 2270 provides room for those things again, at least up to a point.
Well, one more thing. Icheb’s mention of Kirk saving the Pelosians from extinction shortly before the end of the 5-year mission was the basis for my version of the end of that mission, which I described in retrospect in Ex Machina and then depicted in Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History. As for the other two species Icheb mentioned as being saved from extinction by Kirk years earlier, I covered them more recently in The Captain’s Oath.
Thank you for the cornfield reference. The shot (pictured above) of Neelix without a mouth is 100% “It’s A Good Life” and just as horrifying and sudden.
“That’s all the television there is!”
The best part about Q appearing in Star Trek Picard season 2 is that this will no longer be the final appearance of the character.
Steven: Well, it wasn’t anyhow, thanks to Q’s appearance in “Veritas” on Lower Decks.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@4/krad: And Q was back in his Post-Atomic Horror Judge cosplay in “Veritas,” raising the same question you raised about the Q judges here.
Christopher: True, but I can forgive the deLancie Q wearing it out of nostalgia, if for no other reason. (Out of the box, it also made it easier for him to be identified given the rather simplistic animation style of LD….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3,
The best part about Q appearing in Star Trek Picard season 2 is that this will no longer be the final appearance of the character.
I’m still on the fence about bringing back Q at all — at least into Picard’s corner of the franchise.
I was fine with “All Good Things” being Q’s final appearance within the context of TNG and its own overrarching narrative. His final scene with Picard in the Court Room was, and still is, a perfect sendoff.
As happy as I am to see DeLancie snapping his fingers again, I’m still concerned Q’s role in the new Season of Picard will cheapen that.
The challenge is going to be what more you can add to the Picard-Q dynamic at this point.
One thing I can say in this episode’s favor is, in my opinion, the Janeway / Q dynamic works better here than in the previous two episodes, and I actually really enjoyed the dynamic in this episode. Q’s not trying to do that stupid pursue-Janeway-as-a-love-interest thing, he’s just trying to be a good parent. And I can see Janeway as one to give better parental advice than Picard would.
I had almost totally forgotten about this episode. Offhand, I’d recalled that Keegan deLancie played Q’s kid on Voyager, but I hadn’t recalled that it wasn’t part of “The Q and the Grey” or something.
“Don’t you Aunt Kathy me.” Deja Q was a better episode, but only because that’s one of the few Q episodes I really enjoyed (along with Tapestry, but Q seems a minor part there). They were more often than not tied in with boring holodeck type silliness. I also think Janeway’s role and performance were strong overall, and she does a good job as godparent. I also liked Itchy and Q-ball palling around. My heart broke a little at Q’s reaction to q’s essay. At least they provided a half-hearted reason why Q doesn’t send them home this time. Uses Janeway’s own words against her.