Seto Kaiba

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.😅

The final twist of the knife is that the fansub groups who are distributing the leaked version w/ subtitles are crediting Khara with the raw release.😆 Yoko Taro has to be wondering WTH kind of amateur-hour circus he just signed up to work with after this.

Oh hey, isn't that the short we've been hearing about that was supposed to be event exclusive, got camripped basically immediately, and then Khara accidentally leaked the actual file by attaching it to their DMCA takedown requests for the bootleg uploads? 😆

I can't speak to the concert Blu-rays. That's not really my thing, so I haven't collected them. Macross Frontier has two movies: The False Songstress and The Wings of Goodbye. The two films together form a single DYRL?-style alternate version of the events of Macross Frontier's TV series with different approaches to the characters, some original designs, etc. It also has one epilogue OVA, The Labyrinth of Time, which is packaged with the second of Macross Delta's movies, because they were released together as a double-feature. There is also the aforementioned Macross 7 crossover/clipshow OVA thing Macross FB7: Listen to my Song!, which is kind of a 7-Frontier mashup similar to Flash Back 2012. Macross Delta has two movies: Passionate Walkure and Absolute Live!!!!!!. The first (Passionate Walkure) is a DYRL?-style retelling of the events of the Macross Delta TV series, albeit without much in the way of new/original design works or radical changes. The second film (Absolute Live!!!!!!) is an all-new original story set after the events of the first film with an emphasis on wrapping up the various dangling threads of character arcs for characters like Hayate, Freyja, and Mirage. Absolute Live!!!!!! also came packaged with Macross Frontier's epilogue short The Labyrinth of Time.

Aside from any eccentricities specific to your preferred online storefront, the main thing you have to worry about is sticker shock from the cost of physical media and the cost of the international shipping. CDJapan has been my preferred store for a couple years now. I've generally had a very good, problem-free experience with them. I've typically used DHL or FedEx for international express shipment and that's been largely problem free for me aside from one or two delays in customs. Yes. Yeah, aside from I think one specific box set the Macross Frontier releases are Japanese-only while all the Macross Delta Blu-rays were cheekily given English subs in anticipation of them being purchased internationally in defiance of Harmony Gold's then-ongoing blockage of licensing outside Japan. Quite good, IMO. The movies, mainly. You've already covered Macross II and Macross Plus. The Macross 7 "Complete Fire" two-volume box set has all the Macross 7 supplemental material including the Macross Dynamite 7 OVA, Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! movie, the Macross 7 PLUS omakes, and the unbroadcasted episodes sometimes referred to as Macross 7 Encore. Macross FB7: Listen to My Song! is sold separately, and the Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time is included with the blu-ray of the second Macross Delta movie. Macross Zero's available in the US already, so you don't have to worry about that one.