Seto Kaiba

As per NuTrek's usual, there's an absolutely massive gulf between the glowing reviews the professional critics are penning and the much less positive feedback from verified viewers in the audience. The series is currently sitting no-so-pretty with an audience score of 43 against a critic score of 87. A Discovery-esque 44 point gap. The positive reviews from the critics are full of vague praise for the show's "creativity" and "vibe", and the negative reviews have surprisingly little to say about culture war BS and are mainly focused on the issues with the show's writing and to a lesser extent the obnoxiousness of Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter. The need to make every character "quirky" comes up surprisingly often.

Getting ready to watch Starfleet Academy's 2nd episode... pray for me. 🤮 Still wanna know where my Cerritos and Protostar are in this new 60th Anniversary eyecatch... maybe the showrunners are just jealous that both shows are jealous that both shows are something fans actually liked. OK, right off the bat... what is with this series and the f***ing piss filter? Seriously. First Bajor looked like we were watching it through a used coffee filter and now San Francisco looks like we're seeing it through a pint mug of cheap pilsner. Like, I realize the visual effects team is probably three unpaid interns and a AI tool but come on. At least send the interns out to touch grass and maybe see the sun for once... unless they've been in captivity for so long working on Discovery they've devolved into Morlocks. What happened to Starfleet? Before the Kurtzman years, Star Trek treated Starfleet Academy as a not-quite-military college with various postgraduate programs that was designed to take the Best of the Best and turn them into consummate professionals. The sort of people who didn't need to be told to make their beds or to get to class on time. The Starfleet Academy series is treating it like high school, full of inept children who need their hands held at every moment. Like, I don't even like these characters and I'm still offended on their behalf by how patronizing this is. I will say one thing in its favor. I do like that they've gone to the trouble to include a decent helping of alien cadets in the academy class even if most of them are minor background characters. There's one particularly noteworthy blink-and-you'll-miss-it minor detail among them too. The Ferengi cadet is wearing a skirt, and is likely female... meaning at some point in the intervening millennia their species finally got its sh*t together. Lots of reused makeup here. Several of the aliens towards the back are clearly wearing prosthetics that were used for background aliens on Discovery. The Federation War College apparently has a lot more aliens too, their representative closest to the camera appears to be Romulan. A Prodigy-style Brikar shows up at one point. We don't see any Cardassians but there are apparently enough of them to have their own student association. A singer who belongs to the same species as Natalia from Star Trek: Beyond appears at one point (a rare Kelvin timeline reference). There's also a Starfleet Exocomp whom the subtitles reveal is named Almond Basket. We keep cutting back to this stupid f***ing speech. Holly Hunter's voice is rapidly becoming The Most Annoying Sound. They are doing one thing right about depicting her as an educator. They've successfully depicted her as someone who is simultaneously in love with the sound of their own voice and incapable of writing an actual speech anyone might want to listen to. I'm not gonna criticize the jerkass behavior of Cadet Reymi. Even Kirk had to deal with a classmate like that... so much so that his fantasy on the Shore Leave planet was a chance to sock him one. Interrupting a lecture to poke fun at a fellow student... not funny, just annoying. All that before the OP! Ugh... As for the OP itself... this doesn't really say "Star Trek". It's mostly just watching buildings get built and cherry blossoms blow down hallways. OK, there's a Lower Decks reference. There's a Starfleet Exocomp just hanging around in the turbolift. It keeps having to move out of the way because the Doctor apparently still can't read body language despite 900 years of practice and Captain Ake is practically fleeing from him. There is a brief moment where this series comes dangerously close to being self-aware about how unfunny it is. They're really committed to trying to sell the idea that everyone's just so quirky. The Chancellor of Starfleet Academy just wanders the campus out of uniform and without shoes. Even her colleagues look annoyed. We of course have to have a Discovery character remind us how stupid their plot was before being interrupted by Caleb. Why bother setting a series at Starfleet Academy if your entire cast save for the annoying girl are characters who firmly believe they're Too Cool for School? This is worse than boring, it's downright frustrating to watch. Every class they attend is just a venue for them to act out. Honestly? The biggest problem with this episode is that the writers suffered a Critical Research Failure about what Betazoids are. They seem to have mixed up a combination of traits from the half-Betazoid Deanna Troi and the Ramitisian mediator Riva from TNG "Loud as a Whisper". Instead of the dark-eyed telepaths who can speak but communicate mainly via telepathy they are in every other series, these Betazoids are light-eyed mute empaths who communicate via sign language. Actually, another huge problem with this show's logic. Why are the negotiations for Betazed's reentry into the Federation taking place at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco in front of a class of cadets? It's not even the right place or audience for it. Betazed's reentry into the Federation should be something negotiated between the Betazoid delegation and the Federation Council headed up by the Federation President. Those absolutely critical stakeholders aren't even on this planet. They're at the Federation Headquarters space station! I have a feeling that quite a few of the people who worked on this series either never went to college at all, or only went to art school. The tour of the Academy only seems to visit a coffee shop and the quad between some buildings where the students are reading outdoors, tossing around a ball, playing frisbee and hacky-sack, and generally doing everything you only see in the staged photos for college brochures. They couldn't even be bothered to make a replicator for the replimat... they just have cups appear on the serving area of a completely modern-looking espresso machine. That might actually be worse/lazier than Picard using an off-the-shelf 3D printer as the La Sirena's replicator. No corner left uncut. Honestly, it feels like it's more rewarding to watch this series for the background continuity nods than the actual story. At least there it feels like there's some affection for Star Trek as a whole... even if it is entirely superficial. ... ok, when your plot is so badly written that your antagonist starts to sound distressingly like the voice of reason, it might be time to reconsider your entire plotline. So after some fairly weak rationalizations, the plot wraps up with Starfleet seemingly arbitrarily deciding that the Federation will put its next capital on Betazed instead... noting that the entire Federation council and Federation President have been absent this entire time and probably ought to weigh in on that. This kind of further diminishes the relevance/significance of Starfleet Academy on Earth. It would've meant something if the Federation had reestablished the capital in Paris as it'd been since the founding, which would have made that Academy campus the de facto flagship campus again. Now there doesn't really seem to be a reason for it to exist there at all, since there are many other campuses with presumably better staff and conditions than what's available on an Earth that only came out of isolationism two or so years ago. This episode is... "better" feels too much like praise. Let's go with "Less awful". It's following a very old Star Trek diplomacy episode formula that's been used since TOS... but it's just not doing it very well because it's not committing to the bit. It wants to keep drama at arm's length and focus on being "quirky" and "funny" in a very forced and unnatural-feeling way so it ends up in this emotional flip-flop where there are scenes that were meant to be tense and dramatic that are just bland and emotionless because the series keeps trying to shift attention from the drama to a kid in the background who won't stop playing with his zipper to the great dismay of the adults.

How can I put this gently? That's her doing her job. One of a producer's main responsibilities is ensuring that the production is as profitable as possible for the investors and whatever network, studio, theater company, etc. is putting the production together. Hell, there's an entire classic comedy movie built around the premise of producers abusing their financial authority for personal gain: Mel Brooks's The Producers. That's more an indictment of him than a defense of him, TBH. Like Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas is an auteur weirdo who isn't a very good writer and functions best when he has a small army of people filtering and polishing his ideas for him. As Harrison Ford once said to Lucas about his writing "You can type this sh*t but you sure as hell can't say it." Filoni is a promoted fanboy, and like many promoted fanboys working on franchise fiction he's blinded by his profound affection for the source material. He has a very narrow view of what Star Wars is and what kind of stories Star Wars can tell, and that's reflected in his body of work. He's an imitator not an innovator. His creative "comfort zone" is what Star Wars was when he was a regular fan. It's a sucker bet that his attachment to The Clone Wars has a lot to do with it being where he worked with his idol, George Lucas. That's why so much of his work feels like Expanded Universe franchise slop. He's not interested in broadening Star Wars's horizons and exploring what new and different kinds of stories the setting could accommodate. He wants the comfort of the familiar. So what he writes are elaborate and unnecessary backstories for minor/secondary characters and factions (e.g. the Tales anthology) and various forms of The Continuing Adventures stories built around established characters and their descendants that are positively infested with fanservice, continuity nods, and tie-ins. Everything has to revolve around the Jedi and/or tie back into the Skywalker Saga too, as though they were the center of the universe and literally the only thing happening in the galaxy. Not being crap is kind of what sets Andor apart in the first place. It stands out by not being franchise slop. Filoni builds Star Wars stories around tie-ins and references to other stories, pre-established characters, homages, and other forms of continuity porn. The character writing in his stories is never better than mediocre because the story treats the characters more like props than people. Their interactions are shallow and superficial most of the time because they're just filling time between action scenes. Andor is character-first writing. That's why it's so much better than the others. It takes pains to ensure the audience gets to know the characters as people and get invested in the struggles they face. Not just the protagonists, the antagonists too. References to other Star Wars characters and titles are little more than set dressing because all attention is on the interactions between the characters. You could take it out of the Star Wars universe and it would be just as compelling because its connection to the rest of Star Wars is not a main focus of its story. This is a perfect example of the above. The Mandalorian's third season was where continuity nods and whole-plot references to other Star Wars media fully overtook Din's story as the driving force of the plot. The whole thing is an attempt to tie up a plot thread from The Clone Wars that Rebels had already picked up and run with. Ahsoka was an unasked-for continuation of Rebels after that story had reached what was Very Definitely The End (Rebels itself being an almost-direct continuation of The Clone Wars) that only really exists to get two fan favorite characters back into play: Thrawn and Ezra. Its story is extremely heavily dependent on Clone Wars tie-ins to the Mortis Gods arc and the Witches, both of which were kinda dumb even in their original context. The Acolyte is a promoted fan creator's love letter to Expanded Universe media and has a plot structured almost entirely around callbacks to Prequel Trilogy and Clone Wars events. Its writing suffered terribly because its characters and entire first season story were largely irrelevant to the story's actual goal of introducing the mentioned-but-never-seen Darth Plagueis and providing a backstory for the terminally underdeveloped Knights of Ren. Its showrunner was so sure everyone was as invested in her fanservice as she was that it lost the audience almost right away and got cancelled before it did any more than hint at its goal. That's a problem with franchise fiction. Once a franchise is popular enough, finding a creator who understands the assignment but can balance affection for the source material with the need to tell a compelling story that is accessible to everyone is REALLY FREAKING HARD. Star Wars, as a cultural icon, is stuck with a lot of writers who adore Star Wars and thus are mostly writing Star Wars fan fiction and finding a capable writer who isn't a fan and will put in the effort to tell a compelling story is a big ask.

Eh... now, I'm pretty sure Star Wars did a pretty decent trade for a decade and a half with no new films coming out because they had comic books and novels and such building up the setting and doing their own thing. In fact, isn't that that material got tossed one of the things the fans were upset about when the franchise changed hands? Not enough of a problem to stop the movies from making serious bank. 🤔 They may be bland, uninteresting, forgettable, or even downright cringeworthy at times... but they still put buns in seats in epic numbers at least temporarily. Filoni's the man behind Star Wars's forgettable franchise slop on Disney+. Almost every series there is based on his work from The Clone Wars directly or indirectly. Genuine, utterly unambiguous flops like The Acolyte have his fingerprints all over them.

So... wading into this with my expectations as low as possible. The new 60th anniversary eyecatch is nice. I have to wonder why the Cerritos and Protostar didn't make the cut, though. The tech here looks... like... honestly the prison transport looks like it belongs to Archer's era, more than a millennium ago. We finally get to the opening credits after 14 minutes of agonizing generic slop... and the title card looks like it was thrown together in 20 minutes using GenAI assets. Honestly, like everything else about 32nd century NuTrek, Starfleet Academy seems to be built around a plot hole. Namely, the idea that reopening the Starfleet Academy campus on Earth is in any way significant. It's the oldest campus, sure. But it's far from the only one. There were EIGHTY campuses in 2401 and that number almost certainly went up not down. There is zero reason for Vance to be recalling an officer who has been out of the service for 15 years and doesn't want to be there to run the reopened San Francisco campus. There's no real reason to reopen the San Francisco campus at all other than creator provincialism. But we have to have a protagonist who's playing the martyr, having resigned in "disgrace" over having made a child a ward of the state after his mother was sentenced to a penal colony for piracy and murder (which is incredibly stupid) and Admiral Vance has to kiss her ass to get things rolling. Also, what is the Discovery-era's fetish with making every protagonist an ex-convict? OK, no... I can't take this seriously anymore. The acting here is absolutely terrible, and the writing might be worse. I am twenty minutes in and I am ready to stop. It's not Section 31 bad, but it's getting there. Robert Picardo delivers a pretty typical performance as Voyager's EMH. It's a shame he's wasting his time here. Because Discovery got made fun of for not bothering to name the bridge crew, Starfleet Academy takes the time to have the Captain personally name every bridge officer on taking command so we know that the writers weren't that lazy again. I have a nasty, nasty feeling that Kerrice Brooks is going to get a lot of hate for her character. Like Mary Wiseman, she seems to be stuck playing a character who is what can only be described as Hollywood Autistic. It's overacted in a way that makes her feel less autistic and more developmentally delayed? Even the Doctor ends up actually fleeing from her due to how obnoxious she is. Yes, the doctor really doesn't know what the word "casualties" means now. "Do not kill your instructor on day one". Words to live by. That's got to be at least second semester curriculum. Also, medical technology seems to have taken a massive step backwards with tissue regenerators now being incredibly painful for some reason? The fight scene at the end has enough shakycam to make you think the lead cinematographer was Michael J. Fox. Oh no, the first episode is bad. It's worryingly bad. "We have learned NOTHING from the failure of Star Trek: Discovery or Section 31" bad. Based on my own experience, I doubt it's culture war BS driving the generous helping of negative reviews. The writing is atrociously, cringe-inducingly bad. If they could fix that it might actually be watchable, but as it is it doesn't matter how good (or bad, in the case of Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti) the actors are if they're delivering dialog and following storylines that read like someone asked ChatGPT to write Star Trek in the style of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series can't decide if it wants to be serious or funny, and it REALLY needs to pick a lane because it can't do both.

I was just about to start when I saw this post. One of my friends watched it earlier, and could only manage damning it by faint praise as "more fun than Discovery". EDIT: The initial batch of reviews and review scores are NOT promising. This sucker's sitting at a 35% audience score. That's enough to put it in Trek's bottom 10 titles right off the bat.

That hasn't really been the case for a long time. Star Wars is a merchandising empire that goes far, far beyond the movies. That's what made George Lucas a billionaire. If anything, it would be more accurate to say the movies and TV shows are a way to milk more money out of merchandising because they're launchpads for toys, for games, for novels, for comics, and all manner of other goods. Does the studio's president deserve some of the blame when the work her subordinates do doesn't produce the intended result? Yes, absolutely. Most of it belongs to the project's creative team who dropped the ball. But that's not what Star Wars's crybaby culture warriors are complaining about. In their desperate delusion, they imagine her to be chiefly if not solely responsible for every single thing they don't like about the franchise (which is ridiculous) and conveniently overlook that those projects were still financially successful and that she presided over a number of extremely well-regarded Star Wars projects like The Mandalorian, Rogue One and Andor as well. The hilarious irony is her anointed successor has a far better claim to being responsible for what ails Star Wars than she ever will. 😆

IMO, Rebels was pretty good. Its main problem is that, like The Bad Batch, it's basically a direct continuation of The Clone Wars and puts at least as much effort into picking up and running with plot threads from that series as it does coming up with its own story. Ahsoka and The Mandalorian are basically spinoffs of it with Ahsoka literally picking up right where Rebels ended. My guess would be that Filoni is going to run the Disney+ Star Wars originals and future movies like the Expanded Universe. It's going to be "continuing adventures" and continuity porn, because that's what he does. His idea of a good time is origin stories for one-dimensional villains from the 2000s (e.g. the Tales series).

Even so, blaming the president of the studio for a lack of leadership on the part of the lead producer, writer(s), and director(s) is a bit like blaming the CEO of a restaurant for a line cook getting your order wrong or blaming "Can you hear me now?" guy for a cell phone network outage. 🙃 Kathleen Kennedy was just a convenient blame figure for the fandom's culture warriors because she was a woman in authority and they're sexist AF, and because her position as the studio's president made her highly visible as the company's de facto head cheerleader responsible for all manner of promotional work. Give it time. Those reserves of goodwill will only last so long... especially if he continues trying to turn Star Wars into Star Wars: a Clone Wars Story. The man genuinely cannot let go of a 20 year old cartoon and he's rapidly running out of ideas. If Ahsoka is anything, it's a desperate plea for help and a sign that the well is running dry.

Oh yeah, it's gonna be wild when the fandom's culture warriors arrive late to the realization that nothing's gonna change because Kathleen Kennedy was the company's president not someone who was heavily involved in the day-to-day creative work. 😜😆 I wonder who the new scapegoat will be? If it's Dave Filoni, at least they'll be blaming someone deserving for once.

The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter dropped a new episode today. So... um... Crunchyroll's list of applicable genres and short description of the series is missing a very critical detail. Their series page lists The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter in the Fantasy, Slice-of-Life, and Romance genres with a 14+ content advisory for "suggestive dialogue". The actual genre this series belongs to is Boys Love, as protagonist Seiichiro found out "the hard way" in this week's episode. 😅 I didn't look the series up on Wikipedia before starting it, and nothing in the entire first episode gives any hint that it's anything other than an isekai fantasy slice-of-life title taking a couple shots at Japan's toxic work culture. The first (and only!) warning of where things were headed was when the protagonist gets sick from drinking too many of the potions that are this world's equivalent of energy shots and, after being rushed away for treatment, [...] Once that's over, it's right back to firing shots across the bow of Japan's office culture like nothing happened with the knight order's doctor being absolutely horrified by Seiichiro's overall poor health, lack of sleep, and atrociously unhealthy vegetables-only diet. The rest of the episode is the knight commander borderline bullying Seiichiro into abandoning a whole array of ingrained toxic corporate culture habits like constant overtime, excessive use of stimulants, skipping meals and poor diet, taking work home after work hours, and so on... which sounds distressingly like a bunch of the conversations I've had to have with contract staffers at my day job. 😕 Still, I'll ship it. Probably the first human kindness that the poor bloke's felt since graduating college and entering the workforce. Honestly, I'm having a real problem writing this because 90% of the turns-of-phrase I want to use to describe how unexpected that was sound like double entendre in context now. 😅 Still an interesting series... the adult content was frankly unnecessary and adds nothing to the story.

In most cases, those "hows" and "whys" of the ancient constructs in question had already been found out and fairly well documented years if not decades before von Daniken put pen to paper. Von Daniken's books ignore the findings of real archaeologists in favor of fantastical nonsense about alien intervention because they aren't trying to present a serious scientific theory, they're a vehicle for racist ideology. The whole premise underlying the ancient alien intervention hypothesis von Daniken popularized is minimizing or handwaving the achievements of indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (but not Europe) by claiming those native civilizations couldn't have built or discovered what they did when they did without a superior civilization's assistance. Looking up who his editor was is enough to make it very clear that that is not accidental.

Tried out You and I are Polar Opposites today over lunch. It's very similar to Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota in its basic premise of "someone with no poker face is very clearly down bad for their incredibly stoic classmate". IMO, it functions a lot better as a story because the protagonist Miyu is very aware of her feelings for her stoic classmate Yusuke and just not quite able to spit it out instead of being a bratty bully. It sold its romance well enough that it got me in Miyu's corner before the end of the episode, so I'm looking forward to more. 👍

For all the vast and far-reaching harm his pseudoscientific quackery has done in the fields of history and archaeology, it can at least be said that he indirectly did some good in his first book inspiring Stargate.

Also sampled The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom and A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans. Both appear to be passable but unremarkable, utterly by-the-numbers examples of the otome game isekai and "normal guy teaches a class at paranormal school" genres respectively. The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom is the story of a girl reincarnated in medias res as the villainess in the otome game she was playing when she died by Truck-kun, regaining memories of her past life just before she's due to meet her fate in the usual otome game villainess manner. Her story starts in earnest when her ex-fiance's plans to send her into exile are derailed barely a minute after being voiced by a prince from the neighboring kingdom declaring that he has Always Loved Her and immediately popping the question. It's not bad. It's just... really committed to that formula. A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is similarly formulaic. Another one of those series about an eccentric but otherwise normal human getting hired to teach at a school for paranormal beings in part because their life kinda-sorta sucks and also because part of the school's curriculum is teaching said paranormal beings how to act human. In this case, the teacher is a guy with social anxiety who quit his job as a regular teacher and is now stuck with a class containing three animal girls and a mermaid. Also not bad, but following its formula so strictly that you'd suspect deviation is published by caning or something.