Seto Kaiba

Looks pretty good for a first try. Given what they're used for, honestly the more dinged-up the better IMO. Frontier's Destroid Works and Delta's Workroid probably find a lot more use than the military version. After all, this is basically a cheap piece of multipurpose heavy machinery that can be used for all different kinds of heavy work with modular parts or handheld equipment. We know from the Macross Frontier TV series and movies that they're used for disaster recovery and cleanup, firefighting, construction, and even mining. They're spaceworthy and the rollers they have on their feet can be magnetized, so they can be used for repairing ships and space stations from the outside. The Workroid version is shown to be the world's most OP freight handling machine, able to manhandle multiple 20ft-class ISO storage containers at one time exponentially faster than any crane... Mining, construction, and demolition is already a pretty huge portfolio for a single multirole machine. It's basically the equivalent of a Zentradi skilled tradesman without the resource issues of sustaining a population of giants.

That, of course, being the question that hangs over the Cheyenne II's entire existence. "Aside from jobbing, why are you even here?" Macross Frontier materials tell us that the Frontier fleet chose the Cheyenne II for a very specific corner case... air defense inside of the Island ships where the regular air defenses can't reach. This is seemingly only a concern because the Island Cluster-class emigrant ships are SO HUGE that enemies flying inside the dome without being forced into a virtual trench run by skyscrapers is a realistic concern. Why they didn't use a more conventional self-propelled anti-aircraft platform like Japan's Type-87 SPAAG is anyone's guess, esp. given that their other defenses include conventional tank destroyers (based on the B1 Centauro). (The real-world answer being a cost-save by reusing an existing CG model leftover from Macross Zero.) Because it's based on the same technology, and has the same basic limitations, as real-world anti-aircraft weapons. Of course, AI is not magic. What you get out of it is only as good as what you put into it and AI technology in Macross is limited by hardware and by law. As far as we know, the CIWS systems in Macross are very much like the ones in the real world just with better/more powerful missiles and with particle beam weapons in place of high rate-of-fire solid ammo cannons. They're using radar and other sensors to identify and track targets, feeding that data to onboard computers to predict trajectories to gain a missile lock or calculate lead time for a gun firing solution. Much like modern equivalents, these systems can be confused or outright defeated by stealth, speed, or simply flying erratically. VFs use a mixture of passive and active stealth measures to diminish the ability of enemy radar to detect them. This makes it harder for defenses to spot and engage them at range since it takes powerful ECCM to cut through active stealth. Red raw speed is an option to defeat many types of tracking systems. Even though it is normally easy to shoot down a target that is moving in a straight line, you need at least two data points about its location over time to compute an estimated trajectory and speed and plot an intercept based on that. If the craft or projectile is clear of the sensor's FOV before that second sweep needed to establish speed and directionality, the system cannot track the target and usually writes it off as a false detection. This was the cause of the 1991 Dhahran barracks disaster during the Gulf War (due to a software bug in Patriot missile systems providing air defense) and is also the working theory behind "uninterceptable" hypersonic missiles that have been talked about in the last few years. Flying erratically can also make interception more difficult by making it harder to establish a viable firing solution by simply being difficult to predict. VFs are quite good at this since they can turn on a proverbial dime by transforming and the ones we see doing most of the AA-dodging are 5th Gen ones that can accelerate and turn beyond the limits of what a human pilot could normally endure thanks to the ISC (Vajra flight performance is as good or even better). This was one reason that Iraqi scud missiles got through air defenses unusually often. Modifications made to increase their range made their flight paths erratic and reduced their accuracy, sometimes causing them to tumble or corkscrew through the air. Combine those as most VFs do, and a kill shot with anti-aircraft guns and missile launchers is far from guaranteed... which is why AA guns need to improve alongside the aircraft themselves. Even modern AA guns need to put hundreds of rounds in the air (often from multiple guns) for the chance of connecting with just a few of them to score a kill. Destroid weapon systems work exactly the same way, they're just mounted on a more expensive self-propelled platform. The center of that particular Venn diagram being that we are told that quite a few of those Cheyenne II's, particularly the ones used on ships like the Macross Quarter, aren't even manned. They're remotely operated, making them just an overpriced regular AA gun. From what we're told, modern AA systems c.2058-2059 are mainly designed to counter 4th Gen VF levels of performance and need an update to be able to address the greater performance of a 5th Gen VF or something like a Vajra reliably. We do see the Frontier fleet's air defenses scoring kills on Vajra at several points in the series, but that's likely as much down to a dense field of overlapping fire as skill or good judgement.

It's more than that. It's that the setting itself is designed in such a way that Destroids are not, and never will be, relevant. They are land warfare weapons in a setting where there's not really any land warfare going on. If you have to radically change the rules of your entire setting in order to make something viable in context, you're better off just making a new setting. You've demonstrated that you understand this principle through your example of Muv-Luv and how that setting explains the absence of fighter jets as a central part of its premise. What's your pitching here is essentially the same thing as reintroducing fighter jets to that setting. If they were practical, sure. The main problem with this logic being that advancing a useless weapon offers no real benefit. Yeah I can absolutely make a better sword out of unobtanium, but it doesn't do me any good if the enemy will shoot me dead from a kilometer away. The Destroids all have essentially the same problem. No matter how much you improve their systems, it won't make them useful because the problem isn't their performance. It's that they are designed for a type of combat which is fundamentally obsolete in the setting. Macross Galaxy actually tried modernizing Destroids using VF tech in Macross the Ride and the end result was that it didn't really help. Those improved destroids fared no better because they were ultimately stuck hanging around on the hull of a ship in purely defensive roles waiting for the enemy to come into range. They had no way to take the fight to the enemy, meaning they offered no material advantage over just having beam CIWS systems and missile phalanxes that could do the same job for less money and without the need to put a human operator at risk. Which does them no good because, again, they can't go on the offensive. That would actually offer no benefit at all. Because, as a ground weapon, they're pretty well below the minimum altitude for radar. They have no need of active stealth. (Putting aside the fact that even on a Valkyrie active stealth is basically ineffective in Battroid mode, since it depends on the passive stealthiness of the fighter mode, so it wouldn't really work on a destroid anyway.) There really isn't much in the way of "BS fold magic" going on outside of the YF-29. It's all pretty well within the realm of science. I'm not sure what the benefit of staying still extra hard would be when the fundamental problem is that they literally can't get into the same ZIP code with the enemy 99% of the time. But what are they shooting at? In this setting, a ground-based weapon is fundamentally sitting out of the fight because the fight is going on in deep space or in orbit. It's not shoot and scoot if you're never close enough to the enemy to do any shooting. Considering the orbital bombardment is carried out on the strategic scale, you can't even say you're providing the gunners a moving target. Macross doesn't usually go in for genocide, so you've already thematically left the ballpark right at the start. Might as well just make that a new setting for a different franchise.

Really? The official writeup of the Destroid Works is very blunt that it's literally just a Cheyenne II that's been stripped of its military hardware and given a coat of hi-viz orange paint. The Cheyenne II is a barely-there presence in Macross Frontier and Macross Delta because Destroids in general are pretty useless in a post-First Space War world. Destroids as a whole were designed around the idea of fighting a land war in a conventional alien invasion scenario. Something that just does not happen in Macross. They're land warfare weapons in a space war setting. Making it transform would defeat the other key attribute of a Destroid... being cheaper than a Valkyrie so that they can be fielded in larger numbers. Not that a transforming tank would be any less useless in a space war than a regular non-transforming ground-bound robot. The main reason the Frontier fleet uses them is because they wanted mobile AA defenses they could deploy inside the dome. Outside the dome is protected by more cost-effective static beam CIWS and missile phalanx systems. So... that's not quite how it works. Let me explain. It's not as simple as just "Destroids don't need to split power so they should be a lot tougher." You're assuming that all things are equal, and they're not. Valkyries are aircraft as much as they are giant robots. Their armor has to be kept thin and lightweight in order to preserve their flight performance and leave room for the internally carried fuel and other vital stores and systems. As such, they have to rely on more advanced and expensive composite armor reinforced by energy conversion armor driven by their pair of high-output thermonuclear reactors to achieve the required defensive performance. Those reactors HAVE to be high-output in order to meet the needs of the various other energy-hungry systems on a Valkyrie too, like thrust generation and active stealth, which makes them incredibly expensive. Destroids are walking AFVs and artillery built for land and surface warfare. They don't need to fly, and that means they don't need to make the same design compromises that the Valkyries did. They can achieve the required defensive performance by just having thicker composite armor. Not needing to provide plasma for thrust production or feed energy-intensive systems like active stealth and energy conversion armor means they can get by with a single, much cheaper and lower-output reactor instead of a pair of expensive high-end thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. At the end of the day, this makes them much cheaper than a Valkyrie. The early Destroids were about 1/20th the cost of a VF-1 back before the First Space War. Of course, this also means they don't have tons of extra power to throw around because their systems are tailored to their needs not the far greater needs of a Valkyrie. Because Destroids are inherently groundbound in a world where most combat is in the aerospace domain, keeping Destroids as cheap as possible is the only thing keeping them going as a supplement to even less expensive conventional anti-aircraft defenses like beam CIWS guns and missile phalanxes. If you were to give a destroid all the same tech as a Valkyrie, you'd have just made a Valkyrie mode-locked in Battroid mode and gotten rid of most of the cost advantage.

I'd assume so. Either that or he's just been given a massive amount of computer memory in order to continue functioning without running out of space like he did in Voyager. IMO, one of the weirder aspects of NuTrek's 31st/32nd Century setting is how the writers lack of respect for continuity has led to Federation technology either not advancing at all in 800 years or actually regressing in many areas for no clear reason.

IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager. His design lifespan (per VOY "The Swarm") was 1,500 hours. 62.5 continuous days of operation. He started to break down after about 2 years of on-and-off service (substantially less than 17,500 hours) and was band-aided back into service using the matrix of a diagnostic hologram meant to provide field service for him. But now he's been online continuously for over 7 million hours. Over 4,666 times his design lifespan. How his software even works with modern technology is a mystery and why they'd keep him around to teach anything is a mystery since his program has been outdated for 821 of his 824 years of service. It's like learning medicine from someone who was a practicing doctor in 1205. (Fodder for snide jokes like Spock's calling McCoy's medical tools "beads and rattles".) Considering they've un-personed Benjamin Sisko's extremely important-to-his-fate child by his second wife, I'd expect the Doctor's backup will be completely forgotten. Then again, of all the possible scenarios there's a strong possibility that he may not have even left for Federation space yet at the time of Starfleet Academy. Spoilered, because I am about to overanalyze the **** out of this in my habitual manner.

I've seen a number of people raise that hypothesis in various corners. If that is the case, the bridge does not seem well laid-out for it. The students would be stuck standing around the perimeter of the room watching the bridge officers from the outside. Ordinarily, if you were going to do a training cruise you'd have either: Small groups of cadets shadowing officers in the course of normal duties aboard a ship during routine operations (e.g. the cadets on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek II or Red Squad on the USS Valiant in DS9 "Valiant"). A larger group of cadets crewing an old, decommissioned ship under the supervision of an experienced commander and team of instructors (e.g. Pike's final training cruise on that J-class freighter or Picard's first training cruise on the decommissioned USS Leondegrance.) Honestly? This series isn't bad enough to merit calling it a "hate watch". The first episode is a train wreck and the second episode is a real stinker, but it's actually getting noticeably less shite with each episode. The Klingon episode could even be called "almost Star Trek". If this trajectory continues it might actually be good by the end of the first season. Quality-wise, we're basically watching the series crawl out of the wreckage of its first two episodes and start staggering to its feet. It remains to be seen if it'll finish up by walking away from a sick explosion without looking back or if it'll just catch a bit of errant shrapnel in the back of the head and fall over again without any dignity.

New episode's out. "Series Acclimation Mil". Guess we're getting a Sam-focused episode. We get one interesting piece of trivia out of the opening narration. "In the last thousand years, the Federation has encountered 4,633 sentient species." The episode opens with Sam narrating over herself walking through a corridor on the USS Athena, and I am once again struck by the thought... Does nobody go to class at this Starfleet Academy? This whole scene is shot the same way you'd shoot a scene of someone walking down the hall of a high school on the way to their locker between classes. Complete with some very modern, very out-of-place pop music. There's also a lot of that same "scene from a college applications brochure" going on. We see a group of girls sitting and chatting by a sofa, with half of them sitting on the floor for some reason. They've carrying potted plants around with them. There's a bunch of students wearing totally unmodified modern backpacks looking as out of place as you'd expect on a spaceship 1,000 years into the future. A bunch of other students are carrying rolled-up yoga mats for reasons unclear. There's a bunch of cadets holding sports equipment too, including several basketballs. Was a dance segment with a hip-hop beat really required here? Sure, Kerrice Brooks is a black actress but is there a reason to treat Series Acclimation Mil like a stereotypical token black character on a sitcom? She's playing a sentient hologram from a planet populated by AIs who haven't seen a human in generations. It feels weird in a subtly racist way, like how they had to make Michael Burnham an ex-convict. There's another easter egg or two in her introduction. When she introduces her homeworld of Kasq, the other worlds listed in the "Holo Matrix Specs" dropdown menu that shows up on the right side of the screen are: Earth, Vulcan (not Ni'Var!), Orion, Denoblia (misspelled Denobula!), Andoria, Bajor, Delta, Ferengar (misspelled Ferenginar?), Hirogen Prime, Kazon Prime, Risa, and Betazed. Most of those were already Federation members or, in the case of Ferenginar, in the process of applying to join the Federation as far back as 2381 (LDS: "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place")... but the implication that somewhere along the way the Hirogen and Kazon got their sh*t together enough to join the Federation is WAY more interesting than whatever's going on here. Sam is apparently just 217 days old at the time of this story. And we're treated to a rather cringeworthy montage of her various nicknames bestowed by other cadets. Honestly though, what's worse is the constant condescending childishness of her explanation. She has to explain, via infographics with childish handwriting, that she's meant to be her people's emissary to the Federation... which makes her a diplomat and is therefore a "big job". The audience aren't Pakleds, please assume a bit more intelligence than that. OK, having looked at the daily news some audience members might be Pakleds but let's assume they're at least more intelligent than the average Pakled. The idea of a sentient AI needing to explain organic behavior to her creators is itself a fascinating premise I hope they actually DO something with. Sadly, it seems to be limited to explaining basic biology, the very concept of Starfleet, and pranks? You are NOT hurting my feelings with the constant lore dumps though. We get to see a Kasqian in its "natural" state... which is a wholly non-humanoid mess of energy strands that hovers in the middle of the room. (One has to wonder why Sam is taking personal calls in the middle of the atrium instead of in her quarters, but whatever.) More childish generic school drama antics ensue... like a "turf war" over the atrium between the War College and Academy... incited because the War College is now forced to use the Academy's classrooms due to the "stupid talking plants" infesting the war college grounds. Honestly, viewing it through the warped lens of a not-all-there AI attempting to understand and, worse, explain Human behavior to another AI that has never even seen humans does make the show's rampant stupidity a bit easier to tolerate. Played for laughs in Sam's observations of Caleb lusting over the Betazoid president's daughter still. Sam has a great deal of that early TNG Data level bluntness going on... but it doesn't land quite as effectively without the studied neutrality of Data's every remark. Sam is... too human? Really getting a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe from this episode, and the Kasqians in particular. Particularly its fondness for overlaying infographics and emojis. The seminar for "Confronting the Unexplainable" has a bunch of easter eggs hiding in it too. The Guardian of Forever is one of the items on display. Another is the Ben Sisko thing from the series teaser trailer. The class is taught by a new character played by Tawny Newsome (LDS: Beckett Mariner). Apparently even now, eight centuries after the fact, the Bajorans still haven't made peace with the fact that Ben Sisko thought the emissary role was bullsh*t for most of his time in their space and venerate him as one of the Prophets now. The idea of a Cardassian Starfleet officer with strongly held opinions on the subject of tomato in gumbo recipes is... something. Sam is winning points with me for being mildly put off by the idea of just biting into a raw tomato like it's an apple despite being a noncorporeal piece of software that does not eat. A tomato is not a handfruit, people! The line must be drawn here! This far! And no further!😅 Honestly, the less we have of Captain Ake and the professors in this series the better it seems to get. Which is funny, given that they were leaning REALLY hard on having the Doctor, Jett Reno, etc. as a main draw for the series. Bad decisions seems to be a theme here... The B-plot rears its ugly head again at that point... feeling increasingly like Kelrec is being pranked, and even Reno seems put off... Once again, the feet thing. I keep having to check and see if Quentin Tarantino has died, because he seems to be haunting this series. All in all, not a bad episode despite a rough start... it feels like the writers are gradually inching closer to understanding what Star Trek is. This one just leans way too heavily on the DS9 references to be accessible to a new viewer and doesn't go far enough into them to have much for the long-time fan.

I'm not sure that necessarily even implies anything. After all, the Excelsior's prototype-era bridge wasn't that much bigger than the regular Constitution-class refit bridge of the era or many of the more modern bridge designs that would follow and Starfleet ships of that era seem to swap out bridge modules with a fairly high frequency. (This, of course, being an in-universe justification for having struck sets, redressed or modified sets to the point of being unable to revert them, or simply built more advanced sets to replace the ones previously used.) The change in the bridge design may have nothing whatsoever to do with ergonomics and simply reflect whatever Starfleet settled on as a standard operational design or include some unspecified modernizations. True, but at the same time it's also true that fuel has never really been a concern for Starfleet ships in normal operations in Star Trek's various series and movies. Fuel concerns only ever really come up prominently in Voyager and Enterprise. In both cases, those are stories depicting a Starfleet ship ill-equipped for its current situation that is operating many months or years away from the nearest friendly ship or starbase that might be able to replenish its stores. Mind you, it's worth noting that in both of chose cases it's also true that the entire plot hinges on a critical research failure. It's always deuterium they're running out of, and while deuterium is rare relative to elemental hydrogen it's simply not that rare. The implication going back as far as TOS - and explicitly confirmed in the tech manuals and some onscreen okudagrams - is that a Federation starship typically carries enough fuel to operate away from base for months if not years. Even the Danube-class runabout in TNG "Timescape" is said to have enough fuel for a month and a half (over 47 days) for each engine. And given that mass does not impact acceleration or flight performance for these starships due to the way they get around by bending space-time and the amount of other stuff they're carrying, a bit more fuel mass seems like a negligible concern at best.

The bridge module Excelsior had as a transwarp system testbed wasn't that much bigger than post-commissioning bridge it entered fleet service with. Of course, it also makes sense for a testbed starship to have extra stations on the bridge to monitor all of its various systems during testing. (Though it actually had fewer people stationed on it than the fleet service version did. NX-2000 Excelsior's bridge seated 13, the service version had 17.) It took me a bit to figure out why the Academy-class starship's bridge feels so uselessly huge. It was so stupidly obvious I can't believe that I missed it. Look at the walls. Up to now, almost every Starfleet starship bridge we've seen has been liberally festooned with consoles around the outer perimeter of the room. This goes all the way back to the TOS-era Enterprise where every inch of wall that wasn't the viewscreen or turbolift door was occupied by a console of some description. This tendency was carried over into TMP's refit, and from there into practically every other Federation starship design. There are a handful of exceptions like the Ambassador, Galaxy, and Olympia-classes that put most of their consoles across the rear 90 degrees or so of the bridge, but practically every Federation starship before or since has positively ringed the bridge with consoles. What's different in the Academy-class USS Athena is that the bridge is still practically a ring of consoles... but the walls have moved outward 6-10 feet on each side, leaving all the previously wall-mounted consoles freestanding in the middle of the room. The actual bridge is an island sitting in the middle of Deck 1, with a huge walkway around it like it's a zen garden in a Japanese estate. Instead of wall mounted consoles, the bridge seems to have five viewscreens around almost the entire perimeter of the room. The one mounted starboard aft seems to be pulling similar duty to the big Master Systems Displays on older starships, while the others don't seem to be being used for anything. So there's just this massive ring of NOTHING around the actual bridge... and because they're using holo-comms instead of the viewscreen, the actual viewscreen is pretty much surplus to requirements 90% of the time. All things considered, I'd assume that's a negligible concern at worst. After all, in the 32nd century Starfleet ships have clearly advanced considerably from the 23rd and 24th century designs we know. They've been able to delegate a lot of repair and maintenance work to autonomous robots, they've made programmable nanotechnology a core feature of almost every part of a ship's structure down to things as mundane as the crew quarters furniture, replicators have been commonplace for almost a millennium, and surely they've improved the output and efficiency of things like the impulse reactors and warp core in the intervening centuries. The Athena has, by any reckoning, at least two warp cores and possibly more than that depending on how "disconnected nacelles" work... given that we've seen that at the very least the Saucer section is capable of independent warp travel without the nacelles or engineering section. If they've gone all the way back towards early TOS explanations, the Academy-class may well be able to lean on THREE warp cores worth of output to provide for its energy needs. (Which makes Braka's attempt to steal one of them feel less like a major crime and more like pickpocketing.) Shipwide holograms have been something ships could manage on the energy budget of the late 24th century, so that's clearly no problem. (Back before the "warp core" was invented as a concept, TOS Main Engineering was the impulse reactor room at the back of the saucer section and the warp drive's power system was inside the nacelles themselves. The whole reasoning behind the nacelles being a thing was that any power source potent enough to warp space and time must be radioactive AF, and thus should be kept away from inhabited sections of the ship and be jettisoned if needed. If the nacelles are powered individually like that, and the saucer has its own warp drive as we saw recently, that's 3 warp cores if we assume the secondary hull lacks one or at least two if they're doing things the newer way.) They've got enough spare juice kicking around to give everyone a personal transporter and tricorder built into their commbadge and officers on space stations are shown literally unmaking the bed at the molecular level each morning.

Had a thought about what we learned in this latest episode that might constitute a plot hole. ... they were using surface-based matter-antimatter reactors as power plants. Starfleet's Academy-class ships like the USS Athena are partly used as surface installations and given what we see in "Vox in Excelso" they're capable of saucer separation and both the saucer and secondary hull have their own separate warp drives. The saucer and secondary hull both land to form the surface complex used for an academy campus, meaning there's two warp cores in close proximity on the surface anytime one of these ships is landed. Are the Academy-class new? Or did potentially hundreds of these ships explode on the surfaces of Federation planets during the Burn when the dilithium moderating their warp cores failed? Yeah, no matter how much I muse on it I can't seem to come up with a sane/cogent reason why the USS Athena's bridge would need to be as big as, or bigger than, DS9's Operations Center.

They seem to be pursuing a romance angle with the character... which is hard to do with fifty pounds of prosthetics on your face. It's also pretty costly, and they've blown a LOT of the show's cash on sets and heavy prosthetics for minor background characters like the Ferengi and Kelpian cadets. Starfleet Academy's showrunners clearly blew a huge chunk of the show's budget on the enormous and elaborate sets used for the Athena's bridge and Sato Atrium. Given its layout and size, I'm inclined to suspect the Athena's bridge is a redress of the circular Federation Headquarters main hall from Discovery that also served as a courtroom at 23rd century Starfleet Headquarters in Strange New Worlds's second season. It looks to be double or better the size of a normal starship bridge for no practical reason (to the point that Captain Ake has no ready room. The Athena's Sato Atrium appears to even bigger and vastly more complex than Trek's previous biggest interior set, the Deep Space 9 Promenade & Quark's Bar multi-level set. It's much more structurally complex and a LOT more electrified since many walls have rows of built-in flat-panel monitors and almost every surface seems to edge-lit from within using programmable LEDs. There are water features and plants and all manner of other decorative items. After blowing what I'm sure was tens of millions of dollars on this set, they had little choice but to make it as multipurposeful as they could. This overspending is probably also the reason why location shooting for the series was so profoundly half-assed. Starfleet Academy's non-starship spaces like the James T. Kirk Pavilion, the quad, the War College dorms, and the gym all appear to be almost totally unmodified spaces at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. All they really did was stick some Starfleet signage on various exterior and interior walls and hung a few banners. The academy grounds are just Trillium Park on East Island in Toronto.

Oh, you're thinking of Hallmark movies. The ones that all go "big city business girl with business boyfriend has to go to generic country town where she grew up before moving to the city and falls in love with some guy she just met because he's different from her stuffy big city boyfriend". I wouldn't really say the leads in those are arseholes... they're just regular guys living the 9-5 life instead of making a quaint, folksy living farming christmas trees or whatever in a town so small the annual bake sale determines its continued existence.😅 That's not really Noah Centineo's bag. He's more in the himbo comedy genre.

Slop's on. This week, it's Episode 4 "Vox in Excelso". Apparently it's a Jay-Den Kraag-centric episode... or so the blurb would have us believe. We open on the Athena, back in deep space for... reasons. The series couldn't be bothered to have a ready room set so apparently Captain Ake just throws everyone else off the ship's bridge when she wants to record a log or an address to the students. As per her usual, it's a meandering mess of a speech that reads like a collection of cliches from some form letter graduation speech delivered with all the passion and enthusiasm of someone coming off a high dose of dental anesthetic. Also, does nobody go to class at this academy? The entire time she's talking it's montaging over students doing generic admissions brochure stuff like sitting in common areas with random objects laughing at nothing in particular. The writers are leaning really hard into Kraag being the un-Klingon. He's not Proud Warrior Race guy... he's got some aspects of their culture but he's kind of a coward, he's socially anxious, etc. Starfleet Academy does throw an interesting curveball in that Kraag apparently comes from a three-parent household. He has two fathers and a mother. Not entirely outside the usual for them, given that in the relaunch novels that inspired parts of NuTrek the Klingons were pretty darn LGBTQ-friendly. What is it with the current Star Trek showrunners and trying to kill off the franchise's most iconic aliens? Jar-Jar Abrams tried to kill off the Vulcans in Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Picard tried to kill off the Romulans, and now Starfleet Academy's trying to do in the Klingons. Kraag's memories of home are ALSO subject to the piss filter. What is it with every outdoor space looking like world is being viewed through a pint mug of cheap pilsner? We get a "Master debater" joke. This is how far standards have fallen. 'lil bit of Ho Yay for Darem and Jay-Den? Admiral Vance seems to have forgotten the very basic Klingon cultural tenet that they have no gods. They killed their gods back in their ancient mythohistory. "More trouble than they were worth", as Worf put it. We get to see a few more Federation starships at a distance... USS Capricorn, USS Crimson, USS Horizon, USS Lexington, and USS Riker. If we could only ditch the immaturity and the incredibly dated writing, this episode would be dangerously close to sounding like an actual Star Trek episode.

Unless something awful happened to romcoms while my back was turned, I think that's just the domain of a few specific actors whose films skew more comedy than romance like the ever-cringeworthy Adam Sandler. You can bin most romantic comedy male leads in one of three basic categories: the Himbo, the Shy Guy who isn't really shy in any meaningful sense, and the Humorless Workaholic. Traumatic backstories are usually fodder for the "serious" romance stories, especially fantasy romance stories. Definitely feels to me like Gundam's live action movie is kneecapping itself before it's ever reached the starting line with a terrible set of casting decisions.