Seto Kaiba

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.

Maybe a comic relief secondary character, not a main. Gundam protagonists only really come in a couple flavors: Moody and socially-withdrawn teenager with parental abandonment issues (Amuro, Camille, Banagher, Judau, Uso) Pre-traumatized PTSD enjoyer (Shiro, Domon, Shinn, Seabook, Garrod, Loran, Hathaway, Jona, Suletta) Emotionally dead PTSD donor (Heero, Setsuna, Mikazuki) Doing fine until fate slapped their head and said "This bad boy can fit SO MUCH trauma" (Al, Kou, Kira, Oliver, Bellri) Complete and Utter Sh*thead (Io, Advent Casval, Iria, Machu) Not really a lot of call for comedy there... unless you're Judau.

... an own goal, perhaps. Netflix acquires the distribution rights to the live-action Gundam movie starring the flop queen of 2025 and a guy whose big break outside Netflix romcoms was Black Adam? Big oof. The odds weren't exactly in this film's favor as it was.

Starfleet Security was a division of United Earth (later Federation) Starfleet that, role-wise, were normally depicted as being somewhere between naval infantry and military police in practice. They guarded ships and bases against intruders, escorted and protected VIPs, and investigated criminal activity. They're not soldiers, but they've got that "mildly military" thing going on that all of Starfleet does. You're probably thinking of the MACOs from Enterprise. They were a detachment of soldiers from an elite United Earth military unit that seem to the space version of Army Rangers or a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit. They were on loan to Archer and the NX-01 Enterprise for the duration of the Xindi emergency, but had a separate chain of command that led to all kinds of jurisdiction friction with the ship's Starfleet security chief (Lt. Reed).

The War College being a post-Federation United Earth institution would have made more sense. No such luck, though. The series makes the War College out to be an alternate Academy that may have existed alongside Starfleet Academy as far back as the 28th century, that this is its first year active on Earth alongside Starfleet Academy, and that at least one Starfleet officer in the cast (Lura) graduated from the War College instead of the Academy. To each their own. I had kind of the opposite reaction, though didn't think either set of episodes was great. I do agree that one of the show's main weaknesses is its insistence on treating the freshman cadets like a particularly unruly grade school class instead of the fairly mature and highly professional young adults you'd expect to be attending one of the most exclusive educational institutions in the Federation. The vibe is less "fun shenanigans" as "standards must've slipped".

About the choice of terminology, certainly... but unlike NuTrek's usual fare, I feel like there's actually some method to their madness on this one even if it's a good deal less clever or subtle than Trek's better-woven Aesops. The War College wasn't a thing in Star Trek: Discovery or any other prior Star Trek series or movie and it doesn't make a lick of sense in context for Starfleet to have two separate, rival service academies with radically different educational priorities. That means it was almost certainly created for the series with a specific narrative purpose in mind. The obvious, ham-fisted, explanation being that the War College is meant as a vehicle for examination and deconstruction of the wildly unpopular decision Discovery, Picard, and Prodigy all made to go and sh*t on everything Star Trek stands for by rewriting the Federation and Starfleet as militaristic isolationists. At the very least, it suggests someone at Paramount understands why audiences hated Discovery, Picard, and Section 31. ... and the Star Trek 2009 reboot trilogy, and Picard, and Section 31. If you're watching Star Trek and you're not thinking you're either not watching real Star Trek or there's something wrong with you. This franchise made a name for itself as cerebral sci-fi that taught moral lessons and examined complex social issues through allegorical space adventure.

Officially, all of the NuTrek shows are within the Prime timeline... that includes Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Section 31, and now Starfleet Academy. From Discovery S2 onward, the showrunners have been backpedaling and drafting excuses/explanations for various anachronisms or inconsistencies. The Discovery S1 Klingon makeup is being treated like a cosmetic inconsistency the same way it was when Klingon makeup evolved in TMP and TNG and a subject for in-jokes (as in LDS). Spock and the unmentioned sister problem is being handled via the Sybok clause. Other inconsistencies were handwaved, like the holo-communicator being a "trendy" bit of tech that Starfleet experimented with on and off and never really worked right until the far future. The bridge windows are being treated mostly as a 23rd century design fad that fell out of fashion later on. etc. etc. I know some fans consider the far future parts of Discovery and so on to be a Bad Future timeline. EDIT: Star Trek's creators have been beefing over how military Starfleet really is since Star Trek II, where Gene Roddenberry and Nicholas Meyer squared off over the topic at length and to Gene's considerable dissatisfaction. (Even Gene himself wasn't always consistent about it. One of the alien species created to be background characters in Star Trek: the Motion Picture - the Arcturians - are said to be a highly militaristic species who reproduce entirely by cloning and who cheerfully provide billions-strong armies for the Federation in wartime.) The War College seems to have been introduced in Starfleet Academy to allow the story to tackle the subject of the Federation's militarism in an unusually direct manner. (In past titles, it was usually the domain of an Insane/Corrupt Admiral or Starfleet officers in wartime reflecting that they did not sign up to be soldiers.)

Maybe you might want to read a bit more carefully? After all, the question being answered was "Why have something as off-brand for Starfleet as a War College?"