Seto Kaiba

Sadly, several of this season's shows that I was really hoping would be good turned out to be pretty mediocre... but there've been a few standouts to compensate for it. Just finished The Champignon Witch, which starts out as a fairly cutesy and insubstantial little fantasy series about a witch who lives in the woods whose powers cause her to leave a trail of mushrooms wherever she goes. That superficially cutesy start hid a LOT of depth and by the end the series was a rather bittersweet tragic romance. Ironically, the third season of the Initial D sequel/spinoff MF Ghost is proving to be a lot slower than I'd hoped. There's a lot of emphasis on the relationship between Kanata and Ren (and Aiba's jealousy of it) and they're really dragging the races out into five and six episode affairs now. It makes the third season feel a bit padded, especially since Ren and Kanata's relationship is a pretty threadbare affair and adding his ex-girlfriend into the mix doesn't really do anything to further it. Jujutsu Kaisen season three has a very particular vibe to it. Specifically, that Jujutsu Kaisen mangaka Gege Akutami decided what he needed to liven up his series that was feeling too derivative of Bleach was to copy Jojo's Bizarre Adventure instead. So every new character introduced in the "Culling Game" arc that this season centers on eschews the more generic-feeling, obviously combat-focused supernatural powers like "cut", "punch REALLY hard", or "summon shikigami" in favor the kind of bizarre, highly situational powers you'd expect to find in Diamond is Unbreakable. The problem is Gege Akutami is no Hirohiko Araki, so these bizarre powers aren't really all that interesting... they're just an excuse to pad volumes or episodes to the max with "how my power works" exposition. So far all we've really seen is "man with helicopter hair", "woman with jet engine hair", "unfunny amateur comedian who can make his punchlines literal", and "man who summons stuff from receipts". It's a painfully weak story that relies on what's now called "aura farming" to build hype without substance. A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation is... so unremarkable it has left no real impression at all. You and I are Polar Opposites is a generic, but serviceable romcom that also doesn't really make much of an impression. The Casebook of Arne is, to the bitter end an example of how NOT to do a detective story. None of the cases are ever really solved with deduction and none of them really follow any kind of logic, per se. The cast mainly just blunders around until the supernatural monster of the week outs itself and gets one-shotted by the vampire king detective guy. Hana-kimi is this weird time capsule of a series. This manga ended serialization more than twenty years ago and the story really shows its age. It's not BAD, but it feels weird to watch it because of how dated it feels despite having totally modern production. Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is... dreadful. That's the only word I have for it. There's no sense of direction to the proceedings, and it's stuck in a loop of doing the most blatant kind of character shilling where everyone is constantly falling over each other to tell the protagonist what an amazing genius wunderkind he is. The Invisible Man and His Soon-To-Be Wife remained cute but insubstantial until almost the very end. Only right at the end does it actually start to explore the characters themselves in any depth, particularly how a human subspecies of invisible men function within normal society. The most recent episode has an actually-pretty-interesting extended digression on the subject of one of Akira's childhood friends from the town of invisible men who moved to Italy to try and become a fashion model, how he struggled because to people who were concerned only with appearance any/every invisible man is the same, and how he made himself visible and defined himself as a person through art. The Daily Life of a Part-Time Torturer is a series that continues to make me ask "Why does this exist?". It's not bad. Indeed, if I had to describe it in a word it would be "bland". It's an utterly generic workplace slice-of-life series where the workplace just happens to be a private firm specializing in torture. It's treated as casually as you would treat any kind of blue-collar manual labor job. Wash It All Away is sentiment without substance. It's one of those stories that doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, it's just sort of there to put its protagonist adjacent to the incidental daily goings-on of other people so she can dispense the occasional bit of pseudo-profound philosophizing and move on. The Holy Grail of Eris has me a bit torn. It was interesting at the start, the idea of a shrinking violet getting possessed (willingly) by a vengeful ghost looking to identify the people who framed her and arranged her execution, but its story kind of meanders a lot and I gather the light novel it's based on is painfully short so it frequently feels like the story rushes to get from Point A to Point B. (It's also the kind of mystery story that would be over VERY quickly if the police weren't completely incompetent.) Isekai Office Worker: the Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter is definitely not what I expected going into it. Instead of the slice of life that was advertised, it's a Boys Love romance series and it's actually not bad. It's actually a little light on the actual romance, truth be told. It mostly involves itself with the protagonist bringing his profoundly unhealthy Japanese work ethic to a western fantasy world and having everyone around him take shots at how toxic Japan's corporate culture is while he tirelessly works to correct the country's finances and root out corruption. A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is an eminently skippable copycat series. The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom is a pretty formulaic otome series played laser straight. Tamon's B-Side remained a frank examination of the toxicity of the idol industry wrapped in a romcom to the very end. I enjoyed it, though I suspect many might not. Still working on Roll Over and Die and Tune in to the Midnight Heart.

Hey, it's the Jedi's fault for not reading the patch notes and seeing that lightsaber damage was nerfed. But recovering from a lightsaber wound isn't coming back from the dead if the wound isn't explicitly fatal. The list of people who've actually come back from the dead is very, very slim indeed. EDIT: I'm not even sure Palpatine counts as coming back from the dead since he's visibly a rotting corpse... more a lich than a returner anyway.

Now, in all fairness, the total number of characters in canon Star Wars who have actually officially died and come back to life afterwards is what... three? Two? "No one could survive that!" is invoked fairly often, usually as an immediate precursor to revealing that they absolutely DID Survive That. That's what Dave Filoni leaned on when he decided to retcon Maul's death in The Phantom Menace so he could use the character in The Clone Wars. He was still alive after being cut in half and was presumed to have died in the fall. Same deal with Boba Fett, really. The only characters who've actually explicitly died and come back from the dead are Palpatine and Asajj Ventress... both due to "unnatural" dark side sorcery. That's not exactly a huge percentage of the cast, certainly not enough to call it "The Death and Resurrection Show".

Nah, I'd say superhero comic book fans are at least as bad in that regard. Star Wars at least has a story with a sense of direction and intent. Superhero comic fans have spent decades huffing the copium and making excuses for stories that go nowhere and do nothing, full of characters who never change or develop beyond shallow stock characterizations, and which end in reboots when sales slip or soap opera stasis becomes impossible to maintain any longer. All that and a bunch of the art is traced from TV, porn, and stock photos. The Star Wars fans may have been conditioned over decades of "canon" Expanded Universe content to accept and praise slop that would get a D- in any creative writing class, but they still have standards enough to reject a real turd no matter how much fanservice it's wrapped in (e.g. The Acolyte). They're more discerning... just not by much. Star Trek and Lord of the Rings kind of have the opposite problem. Star Trek is suffering because it's currently in the hands of creators who, in many cases, either do not understand it or actively dislike the aspects of its story that made it into the cultural icon it is. They keep trying to take it in darker, more dystopian directions in order to make it more Star Wars-like and action-friendly and don't understand that the reason audiences hate it every time they try is that that's fundamentally antithetical to Star Trek's identity and core themes. Lord of the Rings is trying to keep milking a brilliant adaptation of one of the foundational novels in western fantasy, but they've exhausted the available body of original narrative material and are trying to scrape a prequel together by adapting the book's appendices! They're trying to spin a dry, historical abstract about Middle Earth's prior history into this epic fantasy tale in its own right and struggling because they're adapting something that wasn't important enough to include in the main story and having to fill in the gaps with material of their own devising. Small wonder it doesn't test as well as adaptations of the main story. Star Wars is suffering because its chief creative officer and far too many of its showrunners have excessive, even obsessive, devotion to the source material that paralyzes their creativity and leads to endless retreading of old ground.

For a professional translation, yeah.

Well, that trailer certainly met expectations. That is to say, it's made the series look like a typical Filoni project... mindless fanservice wrapped around Filoni's masturbatory self-obsession and belief that The Clone Wars was the be-all, end-all of Star Wars. Original ideas need not apply. This is the third series where Maul has a story arc revolving around him attempting to groom an impressionable young padawan for his sinister ends. It's a good thing Kenobi put him in the ground permanently in Rebels, he was probably on some kind of list with a track record like that.

That could get expensive. Last time I looked into having a professional translation done, it was for Master File and the price was astronomical... around $25K/volume.

Macross's official timeline has been updated several times over the years since the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series aired to reflect changes in real world history after the 80's... like the aforementioned replacement of references to West Germany and the Soviet Union with Germany and Russia or linking the VF-1's development to design proposals like the Super Tomcat 21 that didn't exist until the early 1990s. No such conflict occurred in the Macross timeline, though. That's a Robotech-ism. The conflict in the backstory of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series is a period called the Unification Wars. The Unification Wars was a period between 2000 and 2008 in which a large number of small, regional conflicts erupted around the world as reaction to the damage caused by the Alien Starship 1's crash and the nations of the world moving to establish a world government (the Earth Unification Government).

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.