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  • Accidental Aesop: In the review for the DS9 episode "In the Cards", Chuck states that the moral went from "Don't waste your money on frivolous things" to "Throw away your life savings on frivolous things" because Jake makes Nog blow his life savings on a baseball card from the 1950s for his father Sisko because Jake can't or won't just replicate a copy and since the Federation doesn't use currency Jake can't get the card in the auction.
    • In the same episode he summed the episode up by noting that many goods and services exchanged hands during the course of the episode, and for the most part everybody ended up happier, or at least got what they wanted out of it. Maybe that's an idea worth investigating? And if there's nothing you want immediately in exchange for your goods and/or services then maybe you could instead accept some kind of token that represents the value of the service rendered/good exchanged? Then you can use that token later on in exchange for something you want then? Maybe this is something worth investigating?
  • Adaptation Displacement: The video reviews started life in text format; many of the earliest Opinionated Voyager Guides were taken verbatim from the text-only versions. This helps to explain the Early-Installment Weirdness, as they predate all the catch phrases and running gags he introduced later (though he's been shoehorning them in ever since he started re-uploading them).
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Many characters, especially Janeway and Archer, have all their actions viewed through the lens of the kind of characters they would be if the writers knew what they were doing. Generally, Chuck has two versions of a character. The first, and more prevalent, is the one that is played for comedy.
    • He depicts Kathryn Janeway as an oversexed, tyrannical, Trigger-Happy lunatic who abuses her crew as she carves a swath of destruction and ruination through the Delta Quadrant. (a joke, a sort of Flanderization to add to his menagerie of transvestite Harry, cannibalistic Neelix, polymath Tom, and office clerk Borgs, along with other caricatures from TNG and ENT). Chuck occasionally uses Mulgrew's take on Janeway as well, interpreting her condemnation of Captain Ransom in "Equinox" as a projection of guilt for her own questionable actions. Even more interestingly, he speculated that Janeway's fake identity in "Workforce" — toiling away in obscurity at a dead-end job and entertaining the possibility of a second love — was fueled by a subconscious desire to escape the burden she's been shouldering for over six years.
      "People have their limits, period. Picard had his in "Family", or Sisko had his in "Emissary". Given the choice between watching your crew die one after the other — year after year — with home still decades away and a self-imposed isolation, or thinking that she could've resigned and taken a job on Earth with a husband and a pile of dogs, well... There's a lot of days where the former makes the latter look pretty damn good."
    • In the review for "Friendship One", despite his penchant for portraying Janeway as a homicidal despot, Chuck had a genuine theory that she was promoted to admiral because she was too emotionally broken to take a command again, but too popular to retire. When they were flying over the planet, was she holding firm out of a belief that they could see this mission through, or was she secretly wishing that the aliens would launch their missiles and put her out of her misery?
    • In "Fair Haven", the Doctor (playing the role of a vicar) dismisses Seamus who seeks to repent for repeatedly breaking the fifth commandment, apparently unaware the Catholic fifth commandment is "thou shalt not kill." Seamus spends the remainder of the episode murdering people offscreen and dumping them in shallow graves. Cue screencap of the Pope facepalming.
    • In "Suddenly Human", he plays this straight and averts it, by first theorizing that the episode has more weight if you consider that Jono's insistence that he isn't human is a metaphor for a child trying to assert sexual identity, similar to many teens who do so... before admitting that he simply finds the whole episode boring and that trying to add anything to liven up the episode is a better use of his time than continuing to watch it.
    • He reinterpreted "Demon" and "Course: Oblivion:" as an unintended commentary on the Prime Directive. Janeway carelessly breaches it in "Demon" by letting the Silver Blood copy Voyager's crew and become sentient, and as a result, in "Course: Oblivion" an entire species is wiped out without a trace.
    • Points out in the X-Files episode Paperclip how very unlikely it is that an "information wants to be free" type hacker would encode a tape with copy protection, and that the more believable answer is that Skinner accidentally destroyed all the data on the tape and is now trying to find an excuse for why they can't copy it.
  • Anvilicious: When Chuck gets all moral, he lays the speech on thick.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: Chuck freely admits that he is not an anime fan and really does not like or understand many anime tropes. This all comes to a head in Destiny of the Shrine Maiden where he ends up so pissed off at the constantly crying Himeko and Psycho Lesbian Chikane that he makes a point of noting that he is only continuing to watch this show purely because he has been paid to.
  • Awesome Music:
    • Using "Adiemus" as the theme song for his Farscape reviews. The song and the show work so well together, it's amazing to think they're actually completely unrelated.
    • AC/DC's "Who Made Who" is a quite fitting theme song for Blade Runner.
    • "Eve of Destruction" as the theme for the Evangelion review is pitch-perfect, especially with the shot of the blood-red sea during the lyric about bodies floating in the River Jordan.
    • Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around" is used to excellent effect during the opening of his review of The Day After.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
    • His review of "The Outrageous Okona" pauses for a couple of minutes while he conducts a hilarious "battle of the wikis" between Wookieepedia and Memory Alpha. He compares their web pages that are devoted to breasts.
    • His recap of Next Generation events in his Star Trek: Generations review (sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture), which he specifically warns never to bring up again as soon as it's over. Fans are still bringing it up - by requesting the song in audio format. It's widely considered a Moment of Awesome.
    • After seeing Riker in a coma during "Shades Of Gray", Chuck cuts to... wait for it... a floating Riker head bobbing along to Donuts, Go Nuts! Though, he does claim that earlier in the Review that Jonathan Frakes performance makes it seem like Riker is thinking of doughnuts, so there is set up to it... though, it is still random, Eh?
    • He pauses mid review of "Profit and Lace" to talk about the wonders of Quaker Oats products.
  • Broken Base: His hatred of Rob Liefeld. Some say it's justified, others find it incredibly obnoxious and irritating and makes him sound extremely unprofessional.
  • Crazy Is Cool:
    • His version of Janeway, especially after the events of the "Unimatrix Zero" review, where her plan A to fight the Borg involves getting assimilated.
    • His version of the Warden, Tim the Enchanter, whose goal in life is to find the most creative and hilarious ways of killing people with magic, and is a Blood Knight that would make a Klingon proud.
    • His Imperial Agent character, a blind sniper utterly failing to cover the fact up who nonetheless proves utterly unstoppable in combat. At one point he accidentally put his scope on backwards and claimed he liked the challenge.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • From the reboot, about the death of Spock's mother: "Yo momma so dead, the only thing going down on her now are the worms!"
    • In the review of the STAS episode "Yesteryear", when talking about putting down fictional animals, Chuck mentions the time when Rainbow Dash broke her leg and had to be put down. Smash-cut to "I can still fly!" BANG!
    • Describing the Silence from Doctor Who as having the power to make you forget about them the second they're not in your line of sight, "like homeless people."
    • Dukat and Major Kira's increasingly mean spirited exchange of insults, which culminates in:
      Kira: When you go around on your rape sprees, are you worried that you’ve sired so many bastards, you may accidentally be plowing one of them, or are you just happy that you're finally doing something with your abandoned children? (beat) Again, no offense, Ziyal.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Ensign Darwin is dead. Chuck's prime suspect: Richard Owen.
    • In "The Naked Now", he jokes about the Cyrillic lettering on the USS Tsiolkovsky's dedication plaque, specifically claiming that Russia is so poor that they have to use the number 3 instead of a letter. The 3-looking letter is actually the Cyrillic letter Z, but Chuck never mentions this. Then, in a Genius Bonus Brick Joke later in the episode, he calls Wesley a "spaz - S, P, A, three, spaz!" In fact, this was so much of a genius bonus that he actually had people trying to correct him in the comments.
    • The only reason Kirk became a Captain was because of droit du seigneur.
    • In the Old Republic playthrough of the Imperial Agent storyline he insults Hunter as a "scared little girl" hiding from the galaxy. It doesn't come up in his playthrough since he shoots Hunter down at the first opportunity, but this is 100% correct.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Chuck has done jokes about Captain Picard having a Hilariously Abusive Childhood and in particular one reference to him being attacked by his drunken father. Sadly, Who Do You Think You Are? revealed that Patrick Stewart actually did have an abusive father, lending an uncomfortable unintentional Reality Subtext to the whole thing. Acknowledged in his review of "Suddenly Human", where Chuck makes another joke about Picard's abusive parents while subtitles clarify that jokes about Picard are not about Patrick Stewart.
    • The "Memory Alpha vs Wookieepedia breast-athon", where Chuck compares the pages on breasts from the Star Trek and Star Wars wikis in order to distract himself from a bad episode, with Star Trek losing both times and Chuck joking that they should step up their game. In Star Trek: Discovery a couple years later, Star Trek did in fact get its first topless shot... in the middle of a rape scene. When he finally got around to reviewing the episode in question, even Chuck noted that the joke wasn't as funny anymore.
    • On the 19th of June 2015, a white supremacist opens fire in a church and kill 9 black Christians. On the 20th, Chuck publishes his review (recorded days before) of "Far Beyond the Stars", expressing that while the situation is better than in the '50s, everything that happened like the Civil Right's movements or the election of Barack Obama do not mean the issue is over, but there is hope.
    • Chuck, in his review on "Legacy of Terror," jokes that the Geonosians will be in the upcoming films (played by meerkats from The Lion King (1994)). Rebels established that after the Clone Wars, the Empire wiped out all the Geonosians with poison gasses.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In his review of "A Night In Sickbay", Chuck joked about how Jack Black isn't likely to be brought to a strange new world and start peeing on things. And yet later that exact same week...note 
    • His final consensus of the Doctor Who story "The Underwater Menace" was that he would not mind if the lost parts of the story (the first, second and fourth episodes) were never found. Later that year, and for the first time since 2005, two episodes of Doctor Who were found... one of which was from "The Underwater Menace".
    • From First Contact, he sarcastically mentions some of the original ideas for the story, like the Borg in medieval castles, being great ideas... for a Doctor Who episode. A few years later, the episode "Nightmare in Silver" comes out, which depicts Cybermen with abilities very similar to the Borg attacking a castle within an amusement park.
    • During his review of Mass Effect 2, he made a joke about the Collectors' leader freeing himself from the Reapers' control and preparing to help fighting the Reapers... before the base blows up with him inside. Cue to Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and the Reckoning DLC, which let's you play as Collectors who managed to get free from the Reapers' control.
    • In "Samaritan Snare", Chuck makes fun of how the doctors seem to be operating on Picard's leg when they're supposed to be fixing his artificial heart, that's not unheard of (the blood vessels in the leg are a great entry point for an endoscope, and heal a lot easier than a chest incision).
    • In his analysis of the Prime Directive, he talks about a hypothetical nature documentary ending with the narrator saying, "And so the volcano on the island became active, and the entire species will likely die out... and it can't happen soon enough for me, by god! I would've run them over with a jeep if I thought I'd get away with it!" In the opening scene of Star Trek Into Darkness, the Enterprise crew violates the Prime Directive to save primitive aliens from a volcano.
    • Mentions an example of this having occurred whilst making a review. Having made Shiva Shepard a blonde to be in line with the officially voted look for default FemShep, he was halfway through his playthrough when the fan backlash lead to a re-election and default FemShep being made officially a redhead instead; at which point he couldn't be bothered to re-record the footage just to make her ginger.
    • Crazy!Janeway's idea about a device that weaponizes emotions has canonical basis in Star Trek.
    • His statement that Marvel wanting to release a special edition Blu-Ray of the Howard the Duck film is just one more piece of evidence of Joe Quesada's soullessness, after The Stinger of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) featured a far better received version of the character, which may have been the actual reason they wanted to do it.
    • The description of individual Daleks as Stephen Hawking if he was a supervillain becomes funnier after seeing The Theory of Everything, in which Stephen Hawking uses his new voice to chant "EXTERMINATE".
    • In his Gag Sub Astromech Spy, R2-D2 is portrayed as a Snark Knight who doesn't get along with anyone, while Chewbacca is surprisingly intelligent. A year later Star Wars Rebels came out, which featured among its main cast a snarky astromech who doesn't get along with anyone based on R2-D2's original concept art and a Genius Bruiser based on Chewbacca's original concept art.
    • In some of his Clone Wars Reviews, he questions what happens to Ahsoka and Captain Rex after the Clone Wars; and then Season Two of Star Wars Rebels airs, where they appear on a regular basis. And as of the epilogue to the Grand Finale, Chuck's prediction that Vader would kill her becomes even more ironic as it's revealed that she outlived him.
      • He jokes about how improbable Darth Maul's survival was in his review of the "Nightsisters" arc. By the time he gets to actually reviewing the Maul episodes, years later, Maul had been Killed Off for Real in Rebels.
    • In his review of Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Geonosis arc, he jokes that now that the franchise is owned by Disney, the Geonosians, a vicious race of termite-like creatures with massive catacombs and spires, will be made more family friendly by Disney, with a song about digging from The Lion King 1 ½. When a Geonosian actually appears in Rebels, it is depicted in a very sympathetic light... although the plot of the episode is about as family unfriendly as it gets (it's the last survivor of a successful genocide).
    • In his review of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, he made a crack about Walter Koenig barely managing to tolerate being in the film long enough to get his paycheck and make Moontrap. Come June 2015, he's released a review of Moontrap.
    • In his Dragon Age: Origins review he jokes that Dalish Keeper Zathrien (voiced by Tim Russ) used to work for Flemeth (voiced by Kate Mulgrew). Given certain revelations in Dragon Age: Inquisition, namely that Flemeth is actually the old Elven god Mythal, this is entirely plausible.
    • At the end of "Wiped, Junked, But Not Forgotten," Chuck admits how unlikely it would be that any new missing episodes of Doctor Who would be found, but if it happened, it probably would be through private film collectors. Regardless, he then ends by noting that Phil Morris and Paul Vanezis are searching African TV stations for any missing episodes, and plays Toto's "Africa" over the end credits. That was in 2011. Two years later, "The Enemy of the World" and nearly all of "The Web of Fear" were recovered... by Phil Morris at a transmitter station in Nigeria.
    • In his Mass Effect 2 review Chuck wondered if Quarians went to the bathroom in their suits. Well, we now have an answer to that question.
    • It seems that a certain world of magical equines inspired Janeway to engineer her tarantula army.
    • In his review of Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The First Duty", after Chuck plays Picard's speech to Wesley about The First Duty of a Starfleet Officer, Chuck then has Wesley make poop jokes, joking about how the Captain is interested in Wesley's "Doo-Dee" and calling Commander Riker "Number Two". Patrick Stewart would later play "Poop", a talking poo emoji, in The Emoji Movie.
    • Chuck mentioned a couple of times that he ships Nyssa and Tegan. Russell T Davies revealed in 2020 that he wanted to have a reference to them being a couple in "Journeys End". The webcast Farewell, Sarah Jane, released as part of the "Doctor Who: LOCKDOWN" event during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, outright confirms they are a couple at the time of Sarah Jane's funeral (albeit this would later be overruled by Jodie Whittaker's last episode as the Doctor).
    • In his Star Trek: First Contact review, he depicts the unlucky conn officer of The Defiant as lamenting about how he just wanted to be a botanist and now he's stuck with Worf, the one Starfleet officer who wants to die in glorious battle. In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode Kayshon, His Eyes Open, one of the commandos admits she joined Starfleet to study moss. The series also establishes that even the worst ship in Starfleet goes on crazy adventures.
    • When Chuck reviewed The Most Toys in the early 2010s, he made a joke that if Lore instead of Data was there, he'd be smashing up Kivas Farjo's collection singing Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa." Cut to 2020 and a heroic variation of this exact joke ends up being the climax to Glass Onion.
    • At the end of his review of the Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor", Chuck jokingly theorizes that the Valakians eventually became the Breen, while the Menk would become the Pakleds. Lower Decks subsequently showed that the Pakleds had gone from being a mild annoyance to a serious threat to the other Alpha Quadrant powers, making Phlox's actions an even more spectacular case of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero than Chuck had implied.
  • Ho Yay: Loves to joke about it In-Universe.
    • Chuck repeatedly calls out when it appears Harry is in love with Tom, particularly in "Non Sequitur". "Before and After" gives us this gem, where in an alternate timeline, Harry is Tom's son-in-law.
      Chuck: Well, screwing Tom's daughter is one step from screwing Tom himself...
    • Notes that the first film gave yaoi fans fainting spells from a couple of lines and scenes.
    • It keeps happening in his Doctor Who reviews until he finally can't ignore it.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Several examples resulted in the minor internet meme "Don't fuck with the Sisko."
    • Referring to the Defiant as the "U.S.S. Ben Sisko's Motherfucking Pimp Hand".
    • Lots of fans probably referred to Neelix as a shithead long before the reviews began, but the epithet has really stuck, especially after the "Basics" review.
    • "Bunny-cat is a dick" not only became popular with Chuck's audience, but with the general Madoka Magica fanbase as well.
    • "Off-Button Hypospray" has become popular as an alternate name for Instant Sedation.
    • Shoulder Spider and it's consistent demands that those who hear it eat people have grown steadily more popular.
  • Memetic Psychopath: Is the origin of Janeway's status as one.
  • Nightmare Fuel: His short story, "You Better Watch Out" retells the origin of Santa Claus, as a conman turned murderer, forced to deliver presents as his Ironic Hell. The story starts with feeling of dread, and keeps getting worse as it goes on. You'll never think of Santa the same way again.
  • Shipping:
    • He ships Mulder and Scully. It's played for laughs, but nevertheless, it's still very sexy. "Ah, sometimes the fan fics just write themselves."
    • He keeps it under his hat a lot more (he's barely mentioned it, despite having reviewed dozens of Voyager episodes), but he also ships Paris and Torres.
    • And now, Madoka and Homura. He says that they are in love and "soulmates" though does claim it doesn't need to be romantic.
    • He also makes occasional reference to shipping Nyssa and Tegan in his Doctor Who videos.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Similarly like Ho Yay above: Not the reviews, but it's sometimes discussed for the shows he analyses.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: A minor example with the Voyager "Threshold" review. In the original video, some of the lines were made funnier because of the delivery ("He's Dying" and "We Are Not Pokemon!" for example). In the updated Blip version, the delivery was different being harsher in tone than before. However, considering how bad "Threshold" is, anyone would be crankier having to deal with it again.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Chuck has called the show a "political Rorschach test" because of the strange tendency for people from all political alignments constantly accusing him of spreading propaganda for their opponents' ideas. Often from the same joke.

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