williams_482 @ williams_482 @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

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Ah, well I had a more thorough comment typed out, but unfortunately that was on the thread that got locked and the app I’m using on mobile ate my response when it failed to post.

Sorry to hear that. We had some problems with language settings which required replacing that post; most people couldn't see it. That shouldn't be a problem going forward.

I thought this episode was fantastic.

The pacing was good, the interactions between Kirk and La'an were fun, and the closing acts were a real gut wrench. Being forced through such a traumatic situation and completely unable to talk with anyone about it is a piece of the time travel/Prime Directive secrecy that Star Trek hasn't really dug it's teeth into before, and there's clearly something very powerful to work with here.

Also, hilarious use of their immortal chief engineer. In retrospect, no surprise that someone in that position wouldn't maintain exactly the same hobbies and skills throughout the centuries, and also no real shock that this particular individual got her jollies stealing priceless artwork. And then arguing statute of limitations when she is challenged on it centuries later? Brilliant.

I do not give the slightest of damns about a TOS one-liner placing Kahn in the 1990s. This is a good story which wouldn't work properly otherwise, and that was a poor choice from writers who couldn't have possibly known better. Absolutely do not care, and so much happier for it.

After a fairly meh first episode, SNW S2 has reeled off a pair of real bangers. Looking forward to the next installment.

Excellent question. Yes, that policy is in effect (and apparently quite relevant with today's episode). I'll be updating the sidebar shortly.

It's the lack of really small, niche, but still relatively active communities that is the biggest loss for me (so far). For example, I want to to talk about Brentford FC, a tiny English football club which was only promoted to the Premier League a couple of years ago. But we're a million miles away from that when there are exactly two communities for general soccer and one community for Liverpool FC, all three with exactly one subscriber.

Any other Bees fans out there? This Flekken guy seems pretty promising, even if I had hopes for Alban Lafont.

There are some huge fans of shittydaystrom on the team here, we'll definitely be hosting a community for that eventually. For the moment, we're worried about fracturing users by creating too many different communities.

If you have a shittydaystrom appropriate thing you want to post, stick it in /c/Risa. I'll upvote it.

this tribute video

You may want to adjust the link here; currently it skips to the 66 second mark, after Janeway's speech. Otherwise though, this is a good callout.

I’m not sure how a Lower Decks intro would work. Despite being a comedy, Lower Decks plays Star Treks tropes straight and with dignity, even if they have some fun with them. The monologue would have to go to Mariner, or maybe Boimler. But Mariner, as she has yet been portrayed on screen so far, would be incapable of giving the intro the gravitas the monologue would demand. Freeman certainly could, but that would steal the focus from the Lower Deckers.

I think it has to be Boimler. And I expect they would go for something clearly riffing off the classic structure, but inserting some comedy by referencing the relatively unglamorous work the Cerritos does. Something like:

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Cerritos. Our continuing mission: to support known life, and known civilizations. To boldly go where others have gone before.

They could tack on a closing quip, such as "...and clean up whatever mess they left behind." Carefully timed to line up with an embarrassing part of the opening credits sequence, of course.

Galaxy class starships definitely could eject the core, but for whatever reason they couldn't manage to do so in Generations.

Yeah, that's a plausible scenario, and folding that into a Lower Decks episode is totally doable.

The only thing I'd tack on is that a hero ship getting lost chasing a Romulan Warbird is definitely interesting enough to merit an episode. With or without the saucer attached.

Sure, go for it.

Include a mention that even running queries against the database won't necessarily be easy if you don't know what you're doing. where it is located and (separately) how best to access it will depend on how it was installed.

That's a fair point. The utility of the saucer as a separate craft doing different jobs is pretty limited though, which is another reason why we might not see it in day-to-day operations. There is only so much a 600m disc with no warp drive can accomplish on it's own.

Relatedly, Disco, and IMO Picard, have oddly underrated first seasons which may actually be the shows’ best, with deeper problems, for some fans, coming in as the show goes.

I fully agree with this take. Or at least the DISCO parts of it.

Fair question, but given the sheer volume of notable things that happen to the Enterprise over the course of the show, it seems unlikely that an event serious enough to warrant saucer separation wouldn't have been shown.

We deleted them from the local_user database table outright based on some sketchy shared attributes, and then manually updated the user count in site_aggregates to the correct figure so our stats wouldn't look so sketchy.

Pretty simple for anyone comfortable in SQL who knows where to look (a helpful user DM'd and gave us a hand here), but not something anybody should try willy nilly if they don't know what they are doing. Editing production data on the fly is not to be done casually.

I think this is well laid out and largely accurate, mirroring a lot of what I have felt about the contrast between SNW and DISCO (in my opinion, heavily in favor of SNW).

I will note that Discovery has got this right before in a slightly different format with the Tardigrade in The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry and especially Choose Your Pain. I think they did a wonderful job walking the audience, via Burnham's perspective, through a pretty dramatic shift in how "Ripper" is perceived: first a horrific monster, then a weird, interesting alien and a technical puzzle, and finally a suffering creature deserving of sympathy and protection. They balance that out with competing perspectives around the intimately connected ethical questions around potentially killing that creature to save their lives (and potentially the Federation), culminating in Stamets making an extremely forceful endorsement of the creature's right to life.

Nothing else in Discovery's catalogue (save perhaps S4), or any other pre-SNW nuTrek show, did nearly as good a job tackling a classically Trek ethical dilemma. Plus, they took full advantage of the continuity between episodes to do so, drawing a benefit from the format which seemed to have far less beneficial effects on the later seasons.

This was an absolute gem. I don't have much of substance to add just now (except that those dress uniforms are very nice), but after being on the whole disappointed by the season opener I am extremely pleased with this episode. Definitely one of the strongest in the show so far, which is no small feat.

Awwww. Thanks guys!

There is a S4 Enterprise arc which was clearly intended to explain the smooth headed Klingons (it's a disease brought on by attempted genetic engineering, basically). If one wishes to find a visual literalist explanation beyond that, it would simply be that there are lots of Klingons out there and some of them look very different.

The other approach would be to accept that aesthetics change with budget and technology, and just shrug it off. I've grown increasingly supportive of that position as new material has come out, but it's hardly a new take: Roddenberry himself, asked about the Klingons in TMP, said that they were always supposed to look like that, but the show never had the budget to make it happen.

It's clear that the Lorca reveal was planned out at some level, and there are mixed claims that Jason Isaacs wouldn't have taken the role otherwise. But I'm not even convinced the Lorca reveal was part of whatever original version of the script they wound up using, and very skeptical that the whole thing would have fallen apart without it.

The overwhelming majority of what Lorca does, and what other people do in response to him, works just fine if taken straight up as a mix of extreme pragmatism and PTSD. The part that really goes out the window is his very strange "bring her back, or don't come back at all" order to Tyler in Lethe. There needs to be some pressure on Tyler to add more stakes to the character conflict inside the shuttle, but I don't think Lorca's very strange command was necessary to create that.

For example, watching Lorca cold reading Cornwall makes for a compelling wrinkle on the second viewing, but I feel like my first watch read - that Lorca wasn't cold reading, but otherwise has exactly the same motives in preventing an old friend from realizing that he isn't really the same person after the loss of the Buran - is every bit as compelling on subsequent viewings. I don't think the scene would be made any weaker if that was all there was to it, without this Lorca being a dimensional interloper. Frankly, I've been mentally treating it as if this was all there was to it, because I know going in I'm not going to bother with the MU stuff and I find misguided PTSD Lorca to be far more compelling.

The final episode of this sequence does start to unravel a little more than the others if you change where it's ultimately going, but that's expected. I personally can take on faith that they could have progressed from there in a different direction which ultimately still worked very well with the setting and characters they had established.