Seto Kaiba

If it goes to streaming on a service like Netflix or Disney+, it can truly honor the legacy of the original by getting cancelled after one season.

Drama, mainly. One problem with NuTrek is that the titles without a strong connection to golden age Star Trek shows is that they don't seem to have a good head for detail and struggle to grasp the scale of things even more than Star Trek writers usually do. This is less of an issue with NuTrek titles that lean heavily on pre-Kurtzman shows and movies like Discovery seasons 1 and 2, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy since the writers of the latter three (esp. Lower Decks) seem to include longtime fans who actually understand the setting. The shows that try to "break the mold" and do their own thing (Discovery S3+, Picard, Starfleet Academy) struggle a lot more. For instance, there's this recurring problem in Star Trek (2009), Discovery (S1), Discovery (S3), Picard (S1), and now Starfleet Academy where an interstellar power with the might to rival the Federation is mistakenly treated as being so small and so profoundly top-heavy that the loss of a single planet, ship, or leader is enough to collapse the whole thing utterly. They keep forgetting these rival empires are civilizations as big or bigger than the Federation, with dozens or hundreds of worlds under their control. NuTrek's 32nd century setting seems to get hit with this especially hard, because the writers are creating new factions to rival the Federation but aren't bothering to think them out in any meaningful detail. The Emerald Chain is the main threat to the much-diminished Federation in 3189. It's supposedly a massive criminal cartel that wields so much power that it's not only a de facto interstellar government... it outclasses the Federation politically AND militarily. We only ever see one ship - its flagship, Viridian - and the loss of that single ship in conjunction with the death of its leader Osyraa causes the entire organization to collapse practically overnight. Its collapse is so abrupt and so total that just a few years later in 3195 the impact of the Emerald Chain is proposed as a historical topic for a debate class at the Starfleet Academy. The Venari Ral have the exact same problem. We're told roughly where they ply their piratical trade, but the scale of their organization is never elaborated upon beyond being "smaller than the Emerald chain". We can say for certain they possessed at least eight ships based on dialog from that very episode, and that's about it. Capturing Nus Braka again is presented as the de facto end of the Venari Ral. Ep6 seems to exist to establish two things: Nus Braka and the Venari Ral are brutal and cunning enough to be a serious threat to the Federation, but lack the military strength to oppose the Federation directly. That it's going to be the cadets rather than the captain who ultimately save the day and defeat the Venari Ral in this series. We've seen that the Venari Ral's ships outclass smaller, lightly armed Federation starships like the Academy-class training ships and the Intrepid-type Sargasso. Presumably larger, more powerful Federation starship classes rival or outclass them in turn. Not to mention Starfleet seemingly has a LOT more ships at its disposal. Nus Braka's plan was, by the standards of NuTrek, actually pretty clever. He manipulated a rival pirate crew (the Furies) into attacking the Starfleet Miyazaki training exercise and taking the cadets hostage because he knew Nahla Ake was in command of the exercise. He knew that the Furies reputation for killing hostages would, bare minimum, get her to panic and use her connections to pull every Starfleet asset in range out of position to support the hostage rescue and thus reduce the number of ships in range to reinforce that starbase when his forces attacked it. Ake's initial panic was enough that Vance pulled IIRC five capital ships out of position to support her. By that point, Braka had already won. That she was so worked up and desperate she went to him looking for a silver bullet solution that would 100% guarantee resolving the situation with no further loss of life gave Braka the opportunity to antagonize her with impunity, further compromise her judgement, and sell her a solution that conveniently required pulling the one ship that was still defending his target out of position too. The starbase's defenses were formidable enough that, even with a clean run at it with no chance of enemy reinforcements, the six Venari Ral ships that Braka sent on the raid still needed almost 20 minutes just to take down the station's shields and we don't know how much damage they took in the bargain. Had Ake not panicked like an idiot and pulled every ship in range out of position Braka's six ship raiding force might've found itself facing the station, the Sargasso, and at least five Starfleet capital ships warping in. A harder fight, and potentially a losing one depending on how powerful those other ships were. Once he finally graduated to the status of a Major Threat, Starfleet sent a force too big for him to cope with and that was Game Over.

Government insider guy understands... but presumably only because he's government insider guy who knew about the aliens to begin with. I'd assume Joe Average on the street is just hearing the newscaster lose the fight with her breakfast burrito.

Potentially. Of course, that would require them to put a lot more thought into the story than they did. The only thinking the showrunners and writers seem to have done is coming up with a string of weak excuses to handwave away the aspects of Star Trek's far future that would have otherwise made the central conflict of their story irrelevant or laughably easy to resolve. Y'know, like why anyone is using warp drive when they've had better alternatives for around 800 years or why the Federation Temporal Agency didn't simply look back in time to find the origin of the Burn or ret-gone the event from the timeline. But all of those things would have diminished or eliminated Michael Burnham's ability to be The Messiah and singlehandedly Save The Universe. The whole plot was in service of Burnham's in-universe savior complex and the writers determination to make her the franchise's Main Character. Pretty much anything to do with fast sublight or faster-than-light travel or communication depends on subspace in Star Trek. Early impulse drives used subspace fields to cheat the ship's inertial mass down so fusion rockets could push the ship up to a decent fraction of c. Late impulse drives (TNG era and beyond) are basically sublight warp drives. Warp drives use subspace fields to expand and compress space to move the warp bubble through space at FTL speeds. A conventional transwarp drive is just a more potent version of that. Coaxial warp drives use a conventional warp field to fold space. Transwarp conduits and wormholes are essentially tunnels in subspace connecting two or more points in the universe. Quantum slipstream ships are basically a Star Trek hyperdrive where the ship travels through subspace. FTL sensors and comms are subspace-based, and transporters use subspace to send the matter stream to/from its destination. That why, in Voyager the Omega Directive was a By Any Means sort of special order. If subspace goes bye-bye thanks to omega particles then pretty much everything modern civilization depends for travel and communication goes bye-bye. YUP.

We know NuTrek doesn't have the support of a team of science and technology fact-checkers the way golden age Star Trek did... but you'd think they'd at least have checked its Wiki page, consulted a chemistry textbook, or at least loaded up a NileRed video on YouTube. It's a lot easier to research these things now than it was 60 year ago when Star Trek was first being written. Seems like that the creative team knew juuuuuust enough to know that strontium is often mentioned around things like nuclear fuel waste and nuclear bombs and assumed that all strontium was the dangerous radioisotope strontium-90 that is occasionally used in RTEGs due to its short half-life. Naturally occurring strontium that you might dig up out of the ground is non-radioactive strontium-88. Pure strontium is reactive enough that it can be made pyrophoric when finely ground, but the danger level is more "mistaken for fireworks" than "mistaken for an attack". Assuming Nus Braka is telling the truth about his parents, for all practical intents and purposes his family likely accidentally blew themselves up when their homemade signal flare accidentally ignited the fireworks factory they lived and worked in. Either that or he told an embarrassingly easy-to-debunk fib.

Anisha Mir's reason for being mad at Captain Ake seems to wander a bit and suffer some motive decay as the episode progresses due to the dodgy writing. She starts out being angry at Ake for separating her from her son when she was sentenced to prison and her son's subsequent hard life. That seems to gradually blur into her just being angry that the Federation made her face the consequences of her actions (prison time), then being angry at Ake as a proxy for the Federation because she was living a hard life without the Federation's foreign aid, and by the end of Ake's "trial" she seems to have settled on hating Ake personally for taking the easy way out by resigning and feeling bad about it all from a cushy job on a safe planet instead of doing something. Of course, at no point does she ever seem to confront the fact that she is far more responsible than Ake was for what happened to Caleb. She's the one who told him not to trust the Federation and encouraged him to run away. He did what she said and ended up living on the streets. Had she not said that (or had he ignored her) he would have gotten to have a normal, peaceful childhood as a Federation citizen living on Bajor. Let's ask Jonathan Archer. 😅 The implication of the episode seems to be that these are representatives of fence-sitter powers that either weren't affected badly enough by the Burn to be prioritized for foreign aid from the Federation or resentful minor hostile powers looking for the enemy of my enemy. With the Emerald Chain destroyed and the Breen Imperium having collapsed into a succession crisis, the United Federation of Planets is essentially the only remaining superpower in the region. Hostile powers are probably feeling pretty threatened even though the Federation isn't an expansionist power, and Braka clearly sees an opportunity to exploit this make the Venari Ral into the next crime syndicate so powerful it's a de facto government. It wouldn't have worked for two reasons. The writers were trying to do a really hamfisted allegory about fossil fuel depletion, even though the parallel doesn't work because dilithium isn't a fuel. Omega particle detonations damage subspace for millions of years, meaning the destruction wouldn't be "fixable". Pretty much every established technology would be left unusable, forcing them to totally reinvent the setting.

Yeah, this trailer does have a lack of emotion to it doesn't it? Everything is a sort of neutral "I'm coming off dental anesthesia" or dull surprise at best.

Y'know what Starfeet Academy really needs? Hammy 40's newsreel announcer guy from Star Wars: the Clone Wars. I feel like all the absurdity, all the pants-on-head stupidity, and all the completely inane character writing could only be improved with a sassy matter-of-fact voiceover. The season one finale - and, sadly, not series finale - is "Rubincon". Did the screenwriting team (or ChatGPT) forget to use spellcheck? That's not how you spell Rubicon. Oh well, here goes something... This is an Idiot Plot. A story that is literally only possible because everyone in it is behaving as stupidly as possible at all times. There's a wonderful little meta moment where Nus Braka makes a string of forced and painfully unfunny jokes and then gets upset that nobody is laughing. You can almost hear the writers speaking through him, demanding to know why almost nobody likes this show and why the studio had to resort to an astroturfing campaign to try to depict its critics as paid trolls. "Come on, guys, I made a funny! Laugh!" - it's almost the perfect encapsulation of every moment of dogsh*t writing in this series. So... the Doctor's mobile emitter from Voyager is back. It was at this point that the Paramount+ app on my streaming pod died... apparently a valiant suicide attempt to save me from the rest of this episode. Honestly... Braka's making some excellent points here. Yeah, his slant is obvious but he's actually got Ake's number on several topics especially how she dragooned Caleb Mir into Starfleet by giving him a choice between service or a death sentence in an alien gulag. We learn that the guy that Caleb's mom went to prison as an accessory to the murder of was on his last rotation before retirement, because no cliche is getting left behind today. Using a real element in Braka's speech earlier turns out to have been a mistake, as the writers are now inventing fictional properties to the stuff... Honestly, the fleet shots we get in this episode serve to remind how little Starfleet Academy resembles Star Trek. So few of those ships look like they belong to Star Trek at all, many look like they'd be more at home in Star Wars. Very little of the franchise's iconic design language is on display. The credits definitely make it feel like they weren't expecting the series to get renewed too, going through the cast's childhood photos (or younger photos of the older cast) in a setup that feels like it was designed for a series finale. With the first season of Starfleet Academy now officially over, I can say this of it. It sucks. It really sucks. To paraphrase the composer Gioachino Rossini: "It has some good moments, but awful quarters of an hour." There are a few moments of solid character writing scattered across its ten episodes, but the vast majority of the series is just pure low-effort slop. It'd be a fairly generic, but painfully unfunny, coming-of-age school dramedy if it weren't for the paper-thin Star Trek veneer over the proceedings. The writing is fairly cringeworthy throughout and has three main recurring problems: It's incredibly patronizing. The cadets are meant to be audience surrogates, and it's incredibly clear the showrunners do not respect their intended audience. The cadets are audience surrogates and college-age students who the series insistently treats like unruly primary school children most of the time. As much as it tries to respect past Star Trek, it can't help sh*tting all over it. Not just in depicting this class of cadets as immature morons, fratboys, and meatheads who lack all of Starfleet's signature discipline and desire to learn. They also unintentionally assassinate several legacy characters. Especially Ben Sisko, who is ex post facto turned into the absent black father his actor Avery Brooks fought so hard to not present him as. It's clear the respect for past material is purely superficial and an attempt to get fans invested in the series. Every time the series attempts to step away from generic fratboy hijinks and do actual Star Trek-like storytelling it immediately serves up an idiot plot every time. The whole crisis defining the second half of the season was brought about by a string of unforced obvious errors by Captain Ake, whose depiction veers from desperate to reckless to simply out-and-out incompetent most of the time. These problems were/are fixable. This series could be made watchable, if not actually good. I definitely agree with how it landed on Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators. It's not as dog**** as Discovery, but it's still noticeably worse than Strange New Worlds's worst effort and light years short of the high mark set by Prodigy and Lower Decks.

Huh... so... yeah... that was certainly a trailer. Kind of an underwhelming one when all's said and done. I'm sure that was probably meant to be weathergirl getting possessed by aliens, but between the face she was making and the sound effects all it was missing to be a rejected Pepto-Bismol ad spot was the tagline "Where will you be when diarrhea strikes?". Kind of a tension-destroying audio choice... unless you're the one mopping the floors, I guess. Having the aliens come to Humanity speaking the dreaded language of the Ta-ko B'el (or is that Wytte Kast-El?) feels like a "fire your sound engineer" sort of decision. Doing another movie around the fairly generic premise of the government covering up the existence of aliens until first contact because Mankind Is Not Ready is certainly a choice too. That premise aged like milk, and in the present day it seems especially silly and unbelievable. Unless they've got a better trailer waiting in the wings, I'm definitely waiting for this to hit streaming.

Hopefully we'll get news of the western release soon.

They have their own approach to it... The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force has a profound love of theme naming. In most cases, all the ships of a particular class follow the same theme. You've got the usual ones named for provinces, towns, islands, peninsulas, etc. Then you've got the ones where they really went ham with it and every ship of the class is named for kinds of rain, or wave, or ocean current or just different adjectives stuck in front of a common word. <Something> Dragon, <Something> Moon, <Something> Whale, etc. China does something similar, with all their submarines of a type have the same name. All the boomer subs are Long March #, and all the regular ones are Great Wall #. Maybe farther down the road, once some of these emigrant governments in Macross are more established, we'll start seeing more idiosyncratic naming schemes for their warships. (Though I guess it's pretty hard to maintain a theme across potentially hundreds of warships.)

Nah, this is what happens when Dave Filoni has creative control. IMO, there's not a lot of difference between his output and an AI tool's. They both mindlessly regurgitate and recombine preexisting material into a glorified mad-lib story because they lack imagination. The AI does it because that's all it's really capable of. Filoni does it because he thinks that's actually a good way to write. Everything has to be a crossover, a callback, a continuity nod, or a cameo. Every character has to know, meet, or be related to every other character with the fewest possible degrees of separation. I'm sure Filoni didn't think it out any farther than "Well, Mando's going to an ice planet so we have to have tauntauns". One more callback in a promo that's been nothing but.

The leftmost one definitely has two. I have a question of my own, though... there are no runners on that sled. Did the LucasFilm art department forget to model them or is Mando completely unnecessarily having a bunch of animals draw a powered hovercraft?

It's all fun and games until someone has to actually serve on the Northampton-class Domo Arigato Mr. Furigato. Well, you'd think with dozens of different nations right here on Earth each maintaining their own navy there'd be some pretty significant variation in naming schemes... but most of them go in for the same basic strategy of naming ships after places (major cities, states/provinces/counties, landmarks), heads of state, celebrated veterans, objects of national pride (e.g. official state flowers, birds, etc.), or various adjectives of an aspirational nature (e.g. "fearless"). Most of the emigrant fleets and planets don't have enough history yet to have their own body of celebrated veterans, heads of state, etc. and the like to name ships after.

Dave Filoni really is starting as he means to go on, eh? Everything's a Clone Wars callback.😅