Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/User:Black flamingo11/garak

garak

Link: Garak

Ok, this is about the Star Trek character "Garak", who has been a red link on the requested articles for ages. I haven't mainspaced it yet 'cause I think it's pretty shit, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Black Flamingo 19:47, June 22, 2010 (UTC)

PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS Hyperbole is engaged in the dual processes of giving you his opinion and pretending you care.

Humour:	5	Hi, Black Flamingo! You've been waiting three weeks for this review. That's, like, a quarter as long as I have to wait for Fallout 3: New Vegas. So, I hope this review is at least 25% as exciting as Fallout 3: New Vegas. So, I'm going into this article with no idea who Elim Garak is. I've watched a lot of the original Star Trek, all of TNG, most of Enterprise, and a few episodes of DS9 and Voyager. I'm guessing... Voyager? Okay, let me look him up. Nope! DS9. And I see he's an exiled Cardassian spy and a tailor. He's cheerful and optimistic and he is possibly down for some sex with men. Okay, so that's what I know going in. Now, section by section: Lede: Decent. It isn't funny, but it has the feel of setting us up for something that is. Garak's insistence that he is a plain and ordinary tailor obviously implies that he is not. Early life: Little weak. First of all, it's predictable. Garak murdered his cat and his girlfriend. I feel like it's a weak payoff for the tantalizing lede: oh, he's a serial killer with flimsy excuses? Well, ho-hum. Also: if he's being interrogated by a police officer, why does the police officer start by asking him to tell him about his childhood?? If he's not going to ask police-like questions, maybe you should make him, I don't know, a psychiatrist or a journalist instead. Reaching adulthood: Still mostly weak. My philosophy on writing an Uncyclopedia article is that if a sentence doesn't either tell a joke or contribute to a joke, it has no place in an article. So, for example, the first question and answer - why are they there? Garak's just kind of rambling about stuff that doesn't have much to do with the article at all. I did like the sentence "my employment began around the time of the assasination of Proconsul Merrok, and ended in the aftermath of The Great Rateg Massacre" - that's subtle. That's the kind of stuff that should be in the previous section - Garak should be arousing suspicion without making it blatantly obvious that he's a serial killer. (Plus: is Garak a serial killer? I thought he was a professional assassin - which isn't really a job description that involves killing your pets and your prom date.) I did really enjoy the sentence "I mean, I never actually read any of the files, just arbitrarily moved them from one part of the office to another." That was the first real smile I got out of this article. That's just so absurd, and a perfect example of a pathetic attempt to create a cover story. Life on Deep Space 9: Better, but still wastes a lot of time. The mysterious disappearance of the parents - it's like you're retelling the same joke over and over. He mentions a crime he was clearly responsible for and then says he wasn't responsible for it. Without a lot of clever word play, that gets old fast. Speaking of clever word play, though, I did somewhat enjoy "Why Officer, everything I have told you is true. Even the lies." It's a funny sentence, but it should probably be really close to the end of the article. I think an article like this should escalate: start off a little suspicious, get more and more and more suspicious, and then just make it absurdly clear that he's full of it. I think my biggest problem with this article is that it blows its wad too early and leaves me unsatisfied, with semen dripping down my thighs. Relationships with the Crew: Mostly lost me, since I didn't watch DS9. I liked the line "...Some other Garak perhaps?" a lot, as though there are Garaks all over the place. Otherwise, though, it's short on humor and kind of long on words. Concluding the Interview: I hate it. Sorry to be blunt, but I hate hate hat the way you ended this article. Garak's been acting like a complete idiot this whole time, overplaying his hand while he thinks he's being sly. I think the funniest way to end this might be for the officer to prove himself equally clueless by believing everything Garak says. It's a little The Simpsons, but it's a tried and true gag. But turning him into a super archvillian who murders everyone on the station is not a satisfying ending to this article at all, for me. Ugh. I guess... there's just something I hate about people who aren't clever at all being suddenly portrayed as very, very fiendishly clever, just because the author says they are.
Concept:	7	I think your concept is just fine: Garak is up to something, and he denies it in a way that only makes it more and more clear that he's up to something. That's all good. The problems with this article aren't in the concept; they're in the execution. It needs to be more joke-dense: highlight the funniest bits and trim away the cruft. It needs to escalate more steadily: start off slightly suspicious and get more and more so. It needs to play Garak as a little more of a buffoon and a little less of an evil genius. And it needs a new ending. Other than that, I think it's all good.
Prose and formatting:	7	The prose is very readable. You misspell "Bjoran" a few times, I think. Your use of commas can be a little non-standard, but it didn't really bother me. I don't really have any gripes about the prose. The formatting's all right. The color changes were helpful. The small, irregularly sized pictures down the right margin were a little ugly but they didn't bother me when I read it so maybe I'm just fishing for criticism.
Images:	7	They're fine. They all look kind of similar to each other, but I guess that can't be helped, since they're all from the same show. The captions are reasonably amusing. I'd caption the second photo in Garak's voice: having four of them in his voice and one in the officer's voice is a little inconsistent. You could switch off between Garak and the officer, but I think it's cleaner just to have Garak caption his own photos.
Miscellaneous:	7	I shall assign this a seven.
Final Score:	33	Okay, so, 33. According to the Pee Review guidelines, that's juuust shy of "adequate: the average article." I wouldn't hesitate to mainspace this: it's not a bad article, and it's certainly in no danger of deletion. Tighten it up, and it could possibly be a feature, although there's quite a bit of tightening ahead of you. It's cool you're picking stuff off of UN:REQ - I know from experience that it can be a lot harder to write an article on a predetermined subject than to just come up with a concept and article together in your head. Keep on keepin' on, Flamingo!
Reviewer:	pillow talk 18:08, July 12, 2010 (UTC)