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@wirehead@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 5x05 "Series Acclimation Mil"⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s too bad that everybody I know who has a theramin has eventually gotten rid of it. Eventually they realize that it’s just sitting there collecting dust because they never touch it.

  This one was hard, for me, to get through. SAM is the character who posesses the most cringe and I don’t like cringe. And, OK, I have to say “for me” because how many commedians and commedies get most of their mileage with effective use of cringe? So I kinda fast-forwarded a bunch of scenes, started to piece together what was going on, and then went backwards to watch it again.

  I thought of it a lot like “Data’s Day”. Not exactly, because for poor SAM, the stakes are as high as “Measure of a man” instead of completely low stakes. But the structure is the same.

  SAM’s evolved. They said that they had an idea for SAM’s character and then when Kerrice Brooks arrived, they adjusted her characterization based on her and she’s a bit different than she was in the past. She scrunches up her face a bit differently this time? Her movement’s a bit different? Did they just write a memo somewhere between the production of Ep 4 and 5 “Hey, let’s make SAM more Kerrice Brooks?”

  There’s definitely some fast-forwarding because we don’t see SAM learning how to go from the kid who nobody greeted to the kid who gets a new name every time. The Voyager episodes where they were trying to teach Seven how to be more human were super-cringe and I’m actually kinda glad that we skipped over that.

  Also I kinda wonder if Ocam’s affection for SAM in giving the best greeting is maybe a bit like in Tin Man, where SAM is the only person he doesn’t need to filter out.

  I never got around to watching all of DS9. When it was on the air, I thought of it as a bit of a Star Trek universe rip-off of Babylon 5 and had stopped bothering to watch TV most of the time, so I never caught either show. And I remember having a vague rant as they started off with Voyager that what we really needed was a next next generation … which takes us to now, where we have a next next generation that’s going back to DS9. And I guess DS9 had a reasonable ending that people are OK with whereas the Babylon 5 fans recommend that you just treat it like the series ends after season four, which is entirely because the studio shenaned. Also, both DS9 and B5 really could use a nice HDTV remaster and aren’t getting one.

  I guess, as far as the DS9 part of the tale, it’s a bit like Deadpool and Wolverine, where they didn’t want to revisit or change the ending for the Logan movie and therefore had to zig-zag around the story. And creativity sometimes needs some good constraints because Deadpool and Wolverine worked out quite well. But the ending of DS9 was constrained because of what Avery Brooks required out of the Sisko characterization. He said he’d be back, which was something very important for him to keep, and they couldn’t violate that. At the same time, he’s retired from acting and overall done with Sisko, which is also his right. So, we end up with Confronting the Unexplainable.

  We saw Jake from what he chose to write down, translated into a personality by SAM. We didn’t see Jake. So one might assume any number of things ranging from that Ben Sisko came back and Jake didn’t record it to something more prosaic. And, I dono, we’ve lost some of the elders in my family lately and I guess I have thoughts about how one might interpret taking care of someone from beyond the grave that I won’t go into. But I can accept how it was written.

  I was really really slow. I know what Tawny Newsome looks and sounds like. Illa looked familiar but I couldn’t put it together that she was Illa Dax until the reveal and I didn’t put it together that it was Tawny. For a few, I thought they’d brought Terry Farrell back because of the Jadzia Dax manerisms being so spot-on at points, then I read that it was Tawny and suddenly it made sense.

  It’s neat to have a Black co-writer doing an episode that focused on a Black character doing a tribute to a show with the first Black captain. So while there’s the very practical story aspects of Jake and SAM, there’s also the meta aspect of the Black experience that the show is able to put a mirror to. I loved Sisko as a character and Avery Brooks’s interpretation of the character but it’s never going to hit me the same way to have seen him for the first time on DS9 as it did for Tawny.

  And, conversely, there’s no in-universe reason why the form that SAM took had to be a Black girl, but I like the way the puzzle pieces of casting and character and story are fitting together to bring us here.

  I was thinking that I really love the trio of Dzolo, B’Avi, and Kyle and was hoping that we’d see more of them so … we saw more of them. Dzolo and B’Avi always trying to start shit with the two-people one-two punch and Kyle laughing at Jay-Den’s jokes instead.

  We see Genesis with her hair down in this episode of the first time.

  The San Francisco shots look like they’ve got the extant buildings in the foreground and then substituted skyscrapers as you go back. I am happy that the eyesore that is Salesforce Tower is not present. Whatever out-of-focus building backdrop they found probably in Toronto felt San Francisco enough, LOL.

  Digression to San Francisco history, by the way. Today people think of the city as the home of tech and, by extension, tech douchebags. During World War II, it was a critical Navy town for the west coast. There were Navy bars. There was a complicated sort of history for being gay in the military during that era – Check out Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé. The military had to back off on the persecution of gay sailors during WWII because they needed everybody they could have. Drag performers, gay or stright, were men and therefore could be in combat zones and the drag show was a ray of light in dark times. Then between after the war and until they started to draw down the naval presence in San Francisco, where they suddenly didn’t need every person they could, they went back to kicking gay people out of the military. Thus, lot of people got kicked out of the Navy for being gay so they’d get cut loose and, being unwilling to return home after being outed, settled down to slummy inexpensive Victorian houses in the unfashionable Castro neighborhood of San Francisco until it became a hotbed of gay culture.

  So, a Starfleet bar with a drag queen tending bar where Kyle and Jay-Den (in a skant) share a moment… yeah, that’s to the heart of what the city once was and still halfassedly tries to pretend to be.

  And, on that, I guess we can go back to a video from 2022 about skants and skirts where it’s pointed out that the real thing missing, so far, was that none of the lead male characters appeared in the skant and point out that Jay-Den is one of the leads.

  I don’t like the intense save-the-universe plotline that is standard in shows these days. But I do appreciate how we’ve got a lot of call-back to past episodes. We have the change from SAM in the first episode trying to greet people and getting ignored to now having her getting greeted her way. We have the aftermath of the Vitus Reflex prank.

  Someone in the writers room has seen Red Dwarf. There’s the Gazpacho incident but also there’s the whole Rimmer/Lister vibe that Kelrec and Ake have. Except they are stealing like artists, because Kelrec isn’t a Rimmer and Ake isn’t a Lister.

  I think the B plot, Kelrec’s big diplomatic incident, was a little squeezed and not quite so engaging, but again it does harken back to Capt Ake’s big lesson to the students from ep 3, that you can use patience and empathy to defeat your opponent.

  So, yeah, I think I was watching it expecting for this to be the episode that really really really didn’t land. It really could have landed really badly. But it came out pretty good, actually and I think that’s credit to the writers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can be considered Trekkie or just a viewer?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re like the hell’s angels. We don’t recruit, we just recognize.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The way I see it, each of the cadet main characters could be a Wesley Crusher but isn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah, wasn’t really trying to glorify the Ottomans. Have to think about how to re-state that more neutrally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The Klingon Episode. Also the Jay-Den episode. We really haven’t gotten a lot of details about Jay-Den before this episode, just vague hints.

  The Klingons are near and dear to my heart, I’ve not gotten around to watching the Discovery and DS9 and Enterprise eps, but I do so love some of the classic tales and not-canon stuff from John M. Ford.

  I can totally see the Klingons being hit hard from the Burn specifically because of the martial society. Learn to run a ship’s reactor by running a nearly identical reactor on land, whereas less martial societies would look at the stack of antimatter containment chambers that would blow a sizable chunk out of an inhabited planet and decide that … maybe not.

  Also, if you know your history of the Middle East, one way to view the extremists there is that, in centuries past, the Ottoman empire tried to be more cosmopolitan and eventually Europe and then the US went in and took advantage of them. Ergo, they tried being like the rest of the world and that didn’t work, let’s be more fundamentalist. So, whatever direction they were moving in the past, I can see how the Burn would cause them to be fundamentalist-Klingon in less than a century. It making less sense from an American perspective is probably a good thing – the US has caused so much damage to the Middle East and Africa while bumbling around lacking empathy.

  They’ve clearly set up some thrown bricks here? When Jay-Den was a bit weird with how he spoke in the first ep, that was here to set up him really messing it up in the debate society not because he was having problems getting the character’s voice right or because they were having problems digitally altering it. When he freaks out in the first ep about healing Lora Thok that’s because he had just not healed his brother 18 months prior.

  Poor Terry Farrell did a damn good job while being thrown through the wringer to represent being Dax, ancient joined Trill, but … Holly Hunter gets to show Capt Ake being similarly old without the benefit of swapping bodies. Including a complicated relationship with Obel and personnel files that took the dadmiral seven years to work through.

  Also note that David Keeley is white and … they kept his skin light for Obel. Like, compare how he looks to how Gowron looked. Taking white people and darkening their skin to make them look black is … totally offensive these days. But Klingons are within the normal range of human melanin, which makes it somewhere less offensive than blackface but something that people have changed how they look at these days. A lot of people I know in the cosplay community are dead-set against the darkening or lightening of skin (not counting changing skin colors to something not on the human melanin skin color range) and this thread of discourse is fairly new.

  I kinda figured out where the story was supposed to go the second that Faan Alpha was mentioned that it was going to be important for the Klingons to conquer their own new planet. Also, I had just lately watched reruns of “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter Of Honor” and there’s a lot of shared story beats. Presumably all parties knew that it was not a battle-battle but, like in “A Matter Of Honor” they needed to do the ritual and get punched in the face. Hence the USS Riker. What did come as a bit of a surprise was Lura Thok being the Klingon elder and re-interpreting Jay-Den’s father’s arrow missing.

  It feels like maybe Capt Ake should have come up with the solution on her own. Riker did, while being distracted by the question “One … or both?” Then again, there’s a certain amount of Starfleet in a Klingon suggesting a course of action for his own culture vs a part-Lanthanite Human saying it and I don’t think it would have made Jay-Den’s path better for him to have gotten the idea that Capt Ake came up with it herself ahead of him.

  I found the debate club the least interesting part of the story? I love that we’re returning to the Judge Aaron Satie quote and showing the kids trying to learn, but for me the more important notes was the other kids interacting with Jay-Den outside of the debate. But … there’s a thing there. The colonialist perspective is that we’ve got things to help the “lesser” people of the world so of course we should go in and fix things, but at the same time we’ve got a really really really bad history of really screwing things up. The kids will join the Academy with a perspective that they are there to fix the problems of the universe and will need to become Captains who can answer questions like Tuvix and part of how they get there is not just making good arguments but making bad ones. I dono, not the debate club type.

  But, yah, there’s that Problematic Masculinity point with Jay-Den, amplified with Klingon-ness about how one deals with their own trauma… by bristling and being angry instead of by being open.

  Lesee, so things keep moving quickly so while a it would be nice to have a little more time to “breathe” and let Caleb and Reymi be bigger assholes to each other, there’s only so many episodes in the season? Lura Thok was all mentor no drill sergeant.

  Oh, and the musical callbacks. One thing that I noticed with the Trek movies is that they’d work their own themes in while preserving the big core TMP theme within the larger suite. Klingon music, the TMP theme, the TOS theme … one thing that was I guess less fun about all of the Trek after mid-series TNG was that they did not really preserve the musical language. The soundtrack here was just grand and I’m realizing that I’ve been mad about post-mid-TNG soundtracks for decades now.

  I’m not the person to suggest the what, but I’d love to see someone taking the non-white perspective in the writer’s room figure out how to return to Klingons in this timeline in a later piece of Trek. Klingons are brash storytellers. The truth of the American Revolution is far less grand and much more nuanced if you study it in college but the not-quite-as-brash American storytellers turned into it’s own cultural mythology. A follow-up could show, on one hand, the grand mythos of New Qonos. On the other hand, a way of honor and warrior culture that is … a little more Jay-Den and a lot less corrupt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x03: “Vitus Reflux”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I really want to see that joke, done well, now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x03 "Vitus Reflux"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Where I am right now in the real world is such that I could use … I dono, somehow low-stakes but fun? I get that good scifi is sometimes high stakes / somebody might die / high drama entertainment, but sometimes something that’s more … down-to-earth is good. I think that scifi has spent too much time lately trying to be intense, but hey I’m just a rando on the internet so what do I know?

  I still adore Capt Ake. I don’t think that Capt Ake had the actual plan that they implemented in her mind. She was expecting them to settle this “their way” or I guess “her way” which she was trying to imprint upon Starfleet. She figured that the Vitus Reflux spores would be really funny. And they had no way of knowing one critical piece of information, which was how to get into Kelrec’s hidey closet, and I’m imagining that she was probably totally surprised and delighted as to how they fit things together into a proper workable plan. And this is kinda how you get people to grow? If they don’t have the complete plan right away (hacking their computer during exam week is a bad idea) but look like they just need a poke in the right direction, don’t give them a plan, give them a poke.

  Likewise, Capt Ake didn’t go to Kelrec for the first prank, she went there once it was clear that he was acting as ringleader.

  “Leadership, according to Capt Ake” is clearly a book. It’s a different, more eccentric book than “Leadership, according to Capt Picard” but no less useful.

  I was spoilered that Thok and Reno were going to be a thing but the scene where they show it had me dying with giggles. “It’ll brie allright?” And then also Thok’s earlier “They shenanned once, they’ll shenann again” shows either that one of them has been encouraging the other or that they are two peas in a very bad pod.

  Also, I am glad that we can welcome Darem into the ranks of disaster bisexuals without quite as much need for subtext as … well, Kirk or Riker.

  I think it’s funny that Thok can’t just say “there will be tryouts for Calica” without tossing in a mini speech about how lucky they will be to live until tomorrow or stopping a potential fisticuffs by saying that no blood shall be shed without her permission. And then returning it to the end with the line about meditating on decapitation. Her over-the-top “RELEASE THE DRONES” and everything.

  I love the extra bits of silly Klingon lore. Klingons loving blood in their cuisine … yeah, that is saying what was logically there the whole time. But then the “what is this gagh doing in my aO’mat Gri?” joke.

  And it was really funny to have the quality of the Mugato mascot costume be … at about the level of the actual Mugato costume in TOS.

  With the Romulan cadet Dzolo from the War College, Genesis, and Capt Ake, you have three very small and unassuming women being very spicy. I also love that B’Avi stood up with the same sort of Vulcan “have you prepared new insults for me?” energy that baby Spock was on the receiving end of in the 2009 Star Trek.

  Oh and they put everybody in the underwear without nearly the same energy as the decom room on NX-01 or Star Trek Into Darkness.

  There’s a little bit of Starship Troopers, the movie, in here. Enough to maybe even be a bit intentional? Same mixed-gender showers, recruiting video, etc. Even the tryouts for Calica felt like they were channeling it. And … just like I hope people are getting the intention of Trek trying to show what a better future might be like, I am hoping that the writers knew what Paul Verhoeven was trying to show in that movie.

  This supports the War College vs Starfleet Academy thing that I was hoping to see. The ending with both the notion that you can use empathy to win without combat as well as Capt Ake’s follow-on to Caleb’s question about what to do when somebody does want the fear. Also Jay-Den being a pacifist.

  There’s a lot of speeding-up here, e.g. Darem could have been a little more show and a little less tell, but also it’s a short season? Clearly making room for whatever the Caleb / Tarima story is going to be.

  So, yeah, it’s accidentally what I wanted right now, so I’m still having fun watching it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x03: “Vitus Reflux”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My headcanon suggests that they were either running out of words on the cladistics tree and went to Slavic languages because all of the Latin had been taken … or a space Slav decided to honor their roots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Very minor Academy spoilers] Does anyone else think the marketing undersold Holly Hunter as Chancellor Ake?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that what makes the character fun is all of the combinations of different seemingly-incongruent elements and so I don’t think there’s a way to cut a trailer that shows all of the different parts in context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ep 2 thoughts …

  So, in present day history, we’ve got the US Space Force, newly created, with a logo that looks an awful lot like the Star Trek arrowhead. But Trek has gone back many times to remind people that Starfleet is not the military. There’s a lot to unpack here because actually exploring means that you are potentially wandering off into dangerous places, where you need either semblance of order and discipline (think civilian ships where the skipper tells you to do something) or the ability to defend yourself against someone who might not be friendly.

  Thus, Lura’s drill sergeant act fits this model. She doesn’t want to turn you into a killer so much as making sure that you can stare death in the face and not loose your shit.

  Likewise, if they write the whole plot with the War College and the Academy next door to each other right, there’s the potential to restate the original base idea behind Star Trek TOS but adjusted for the present day. There was a lot of back and forth about the rank braids on people’s sleeves because they wanted something that shows authority but isn’t too military. Kirk’s stripes were two solid stripes and a broken stripe, whereas the navy would have him wearing four solid stripes because emotionally Gene thought that was the right combination of Authority but not Military.

  The Vulcan xenomythology class was perfect, for me. You’ve got one of the many great Vulcan deadpan moments as well as keeping to the very Starfleet ideal of understanding.

  Given that they did not know what the heck to do with Troi’s powers as an empath and if they had Luxana Troi there the whole time, the episodes would have been boring a.f. as she’d mind-read powers out of everybody, I guess I respect the choice to play with betazeding. I’m interested in the potential for Tarima in the War College with everything just because I like the never-explored idea that Troi as Counselor was supposed to be Counsel and not Therapist.

  Tarima’s cinematography is almost cloying? Science fiction, coming from its roots as boy’s magazine fodder, is always a little bit about that eternal quest to find exotic, sometimes alien, women … and bang them. And the camera lingers, kinda obviously. We have had a bunch of scenes with Caleb shirtless in Ep 1 where the colored lights gave him some amazing muscle definition so it’s equal opportunity. It was far better than Alice Eve’s somewhat notorious underwear scene in Into Darkness.

  The Namibia instead of Paris for the Federation HQ was a nice throwaway line.

  The … international dialogue in front of the Academy was … something. I really like the 1988 play “A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing and they way they showed the process was two diplomats going for a series of casual walks where they do not at all talk about the negotiations over the course of a year. You could have written almost the same story between Caleb and Tarima and migrated a decent percentage of the story beats over as-is but also I think you’d loose the audience. So having the speeches with an audience where leaders make their demands and then following up most of the time with something else got the idea across while keeping things moving. And I do think that Tarima’s primary goal was to be a member of the diplomatic staff where actually liking Caleb was more accidental. Who better to get the real story than the person who is the least Starfleet out of the entire cadet corps?

  Also, diplomacy was always one of the things that Starfleet did, not so much being a diplomat at an embassy but understanding how to avoid conflict and make a good first impression on the species you made first contact with.

  Caleb keeps chafing at the order of things and that’s good. I’m assuming that Nahla intentionally put Caleb and Darem in the same room. And so there’s his quest for his mother (however they are going to resolve that) and disrespect but at the same time he’s able to put himself second, albeit with effort. One bit I really like is the reference to his mother studying physics. An oft-ignored thread of Trek was the waste of people’s lives in the 20th century on account of them not having access to that which they need to grow on account of today’s capitalist system. And then also Nahla cutting him off with “It’s not about you”

  I knew that there was a Red Dwarf reference coming in Ep2 and it still caught me unawares.

  I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history. It would be cool if it was a brick joke.

  Caleb, Ocam, and Darem all in a room has some serious potential to show … 31st century bros, charmingly?

  It really got me towards the end, the idea that rebuilding does not mean rebuilding it exactly as it once was.

  So, yeah, it’s landing well for me. Nahla keeps serving as my surrogate in the story because … I watched TNG when it was new and I do think about the world we’re handing the kids of new generation. Uniting the galaxy in peace and understanding is what the Federation was supposed to be out and if they can keep the story moving well enough people won’t be yearning for a big battle scene that kills off a bunch of characters?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, didn’t see that it was a spoilerific thread. Edited for ease of reading.

  I went in cold, LOL. I’d not bothered with the trailers or the preview reviews. Yesterday, I saw a post on reddit that said that people were mad because it wasn’t white enough and impulsively decided that I’d watch it before bed … which then caused me to go to bed late because I had to rewatch the fun bits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just watched Ep 1. Spoilering everything.

  spoiler

  Star Trek (and science fiction) exists as a mirror of it’s time, different enough so that we can look at ourselves from a distance, with a required added component of playing with the ideas about what the future might be like. TOS and TNG were both mirrors of their time, with a Klingon on the bridge predicting the end of the cold war. I definitely feel the “ok, the present generation of kids is inheriting a shitshow” vibes to this show. If you understand that there were a bunch of past efforts to do the Burn in Star Trek, it seemed like something that floated around for a long time now to break the universe (the abortive Star Trek: Final Frontier animated series being one) and … I dono, I’m more OK with it now than I would have been in 2009 because, as I said, Trek is a mirror of it’s time. Comparing things to Star Wars, the sequel trilogy started out with the idea of “Guess what, fighting nazis again!” and it was prescient and it’s altogether too bad that they hadn’t actually thought things through well enough to bring it to a really smashing conclusion. There are a lot of threads (Caleb’s mom being a big one) where they could totally bungle things. So, we start with family separation. Wonder where that came from! And then we kinda bounce around the subject, too. Nahla having done a thing, regretted it, leaving Starfleet, trying to make it better while also showing that whatever they do end up doing, it’s not “solving” what they did in the first place. Nus Braka chews up the scenery. This is important, in a Trek series. Yes, it can be quiet and thoughtful and serious but we always come back to the spectacularly overplayed antagonist. I’m fairly OK with NuTrek trusting the audience less and driving a point home harder. A lot of people ascribe old Trek with values that it never had and part of that’s because the writers trusted the audience to see the point, but folks just don’t have the same attention span to do that anymore. Very very nerdy side note: on Outpost Pikaru there’s a whole set of grating panels that I assume are a deliberate callback to the freezer spacing grates that were all over the TNG-era Trek serieses as well as a bunch of other science fiction properties. They look very very similar but they aren’t. On the reddit side of the fence, someone suggested you look up Gina Yashere’s standup to realize just how Lura Thok is basically Gina playing herself but in the 31st century. She reminds me of one of the assistant principals at my high school, actually, except she’s got more drill sergeant edge to her. Jay-Den Kraag… when I was but a wee little trekkie, I knew a trans person who was deep into hardcore Klingon fandom and I think part of why it made sense for him was that Klingons was part of how he settled into his new gender? So the idea of Klingon males as a mirror to masculinity … toxic and otherwise … has been a thing, at least for me, for a while. I feel like Jay-Den Kraag was someone looking at the Klingon Therapist meme and making an actual character out of it. The entire scene where the Klingon is de-escalating things between two cocky assholes is something at least I needed. SAM’s first few scenes I skipped past the first watching and then when her character made sense, I had to go back and actually watch them because they were a lot less cringe. Genesis is an interesting version of charming because at first glance she starts out as a “mean girl” but then you realize that she’s parodying it hard. Okay, and the Doctor back as the anchor to the very past. Robert Picardo is keeping the Picard name alive in that he kinda aged to a certain age and he hasn’t really aged much since, much in the same way as Patrick Stewart does. There’s lots of fanservice, but in a good way. The half-white/half-black species from TOS, a green Orion, the Doctor, etc. One thing that’s interesting with the characters who don’t stay locked up in the dorms when the big action is happening is that they all have plausible reasons to be there. Caleb has been living a life on the run for a long time now. Jay-Dem is a Klingon and shows some moments of self-doubt. Genesis has been living on starbases her whole life, shades of Beckett Mariner actually. Darem is cocky and it gets him in trouble. And then SAM, doesn’t know better, but also doesn’t know fear in the way a biological would. Meanwhile, one of the other cadets is screaming senselessly. And I guess back to Nahla … she goes from “just following orders” to “Bajor schoolteacher on ice cream day” to supportive nurturing captain to playing high stakes poker with a space pirate and back. And she’s small, except for the part where she’s able to exude authority when being towered over. They were asking her to sell a lot and I think she did it. I looked through her IMDB and my past experience of her was the mom from Thirteen and Elastigirl. One thing I hope, as a long standing Ex Astris Scientia reader, is that there’s … some sort of sense to the programmable matter, the wild 31st century designs, et al. TNG had a lot of particle-of-the-week stuff but Voyager was a crazy-quilt of nonsense particles. It’s important for the viewer to, albeit not from the first episode or two, gain some vibes for where the boundaries are, otherwise there’s no stakes. A transporter ruins basically any “locked room” detective novel puzzle. Likewise, how they wrap up Caleb and his mom is going to either make or break the emotional arc of the series?

  So, overall … it landed with me, based on where I am in my life. I empathized with Nahla in a bunch of ways that make me angry about the world I empathized with Jay-Den in a bunch of ways that made me content about the world. I’m not sure how the younger generation or casual Trek fans are going to react to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

  There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

  The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

  So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

  If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

  So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨is it possible to be married and still feel lonely?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

  First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

  Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

  There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

  Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

  Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

  Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

  But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul Giamatti Boards ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he’s been saving for a special occasion.