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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    While it's not one of TNG's strongest episodes, "Devil's Due" is one of my all-time favorites because of how hammy Ardra's delivery is... and how much FUN Patrick Stewart is clearly having in the end.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I would be amazed that this out-of-control landfill fire of a series succeeded in limping to a third and final season if it weren't for the fact that the sunk costs fallacy is about all that's currently keeping the lights on at Paramount+ and the Star Trek franchise as a whole. In a way, it's oddly appropriate that Picard is going to finish its mercifully brief time as the very thing its showrunners swore it would never become: a TNG cast reunion. While it is nice to know that the writers didn't murder Geordi offscreen the way they'd initially appeared to after establishing that he was assigned to Utopia Planetia when it was destroyed, I can't say I'm at all looking forward to seeing the entire TNG cast as depressed and miserable senior citizens. (Five'll get you twenty Worf's found a way to get discommended and exiled from the Klingon Empire at least two or three more times in the intervening years.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Paramount. Voyager was originally going to be a much more serialized story with persistent problems and damage to the titular ship a bit like the "Year of Hell" two-parter. UPN wanted a more episodic series like the recently concluded Star Trek: the Next Generation, and they won out over the showrunners in the end. (This was a major part of Robert Beltran's discontent with the series, having signed to play Janeway's rival opposite Geneviève Bujold before cast changes and retooling of the story at UPN's behest left him playing Janeway's lifeless yes-man.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Frontier is probably the best Macross series to date. It had everything. Engaging characters, amazing mechanical designs, a fascinating and incredibly detailed setting, fantastic music, and a lot of references and nods to past titles while remaining completely accessible to new viewers. In my book, its only major flaw was that its love triangle was pretty uneven. Ranka got almost no play in the series version, and in the movies they had to make her a childhood friend of Alto's so that they didn't have to introduce her AND Sheryl in the space of the same movie. Ranka got so little screen time compared to Sheryl, and spent most of it just complaining at Alto, that it felt like a bit of a foregone conclusion that Alto chose Sheryl in the end.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's one of the main problems of episodic storytelling. Each episode is developed more or less independently of the others, which means the ending of every story has to reset things to the status quo or there will be problems with subsequent stories. That's why there's very little episode-to-episode continuity most of the time. It wasn't until Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that the showrunners were able to transition to a more serialized format that allowed for more episode-to-episode continuity without the requirement to reset things to the status quo every time a story ended. (That was undermined in Star Trek: Voyager by executive meddling.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I remember a convention appearance where Patrick Stewart related a story about driving along and having someone pull alongside him and yell that he'd ruined their summer because of that cliffhanger. XD
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's basically what I mean... an endless stream of references is not humor, even if it's "hey remember this dumb thing from way back when?". Mariner's still a prat in season two too...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'm only slightly surprised. WB has been struggling with its DC movie franchise for a while now, and after Marvel ran out an embarrassing flop with Morbius not once but twice, I'm almost wondering if (and indeed hoping) we're seeing the beginning of the end of Hollywood's manic obsession with adapting American superhero comics. Batman and the extended Bat-family seem to be hard to adapt well. It's not surprising they'd struggle with Batgirl, which looked to be a good deal less grim and brooding than the other Bat-fare on offer lately. The audience has expectations of such an old legacy property, and that's increasingly an expectation of a rich emo kid punching the mentally ill rather than a colorful film that feels more like an actual comic book.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Fold carbon is used to make the Gravity and Inertia Control (GIC) systems that is the core component of Overtechnology-based thermonuclear reactors. The GIC system produces the ultra-high mass exotic matter called heavy quantum and the fold waves that manipulate it to produce the artificial gravity the reactor uses to compress the fuel and confine the plasma produced by the fusion reaction the compression triggers. This is one of the things that makes OTM thermonuclear reactors so efficient. We haven't been told what fuel is used in shipboard thermonuclear reactors, but given that elemental hydrogen is the most plentiful resource in the universe it seems likely that it's also the fuel of choice for ships. (The use of Gravity and Inertia Control for fuel compression and confinement is acknowledged to allow the reactors to use a variety of different substances as fuel beyond those considered viable in pre-OTM theoretical fusion studies, but hydrogen seems to be the fuel of choice due to its abundance and ease of manufacture.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    In a way, it's a shame that TNG never got to do a Mirror Universe episode. The DS9 cast always had enormous fun with them because they were an excuse to get WAY out of character and really just ham it up massively. (We got something in the neighborhood in Picard's second season, but because the show is misery porn nobody was able to have any fun with it.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting. It's weirdly similar to Spy x Family in a lot of ways. The main character (Kirishima) is a hypercompetent badass - though in this case, a feared yakuza enforcer instead of a James Bond-esque secret agent - who finds himself unexpectedly tasked with having to look after the boss's daughter after she comes to live with her father. Interestingly, The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting doesn't shy away from the fact that Kirishima is an infamously violent yakuza member (or showing him taking unapologetic glee in his "work"). Instead, he's completely thrown by his young charge's belief that he's actually a pretty good person and struggles a fair bit to relate to an innocent kid. All in all, it's quite a sweet series which feels like it's got some actual substance to it just a few episodes in. I've got a good feeling about this one. Overlord's 4th season is off to a pretty good start. I was surprised by how little was cut from the story to make it fit so far. Four episodes in and they've already finished the Ruler of Conspiracy adaptation. About all that got left out was some of the details about Jircniv's penultimate psychological breakdown where he could feel someone watching him but his court magicians couldn't tell how or by whom.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The trailers got me rewatching TNG while I unpack after my move... I'd forgotten they closed "Up the Long Ladder" on an appalling joke. "Send in the clones!", spoken with indecent cheer by the walking Irish stereotype from the Bringloidi colony.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So... I finally got around to watching Lower Decks season two today. To be honest, I feel like I'm missing something here. I'm watching this, but I'm not being entertained by it. The sheer density of the in-jokes and references to past Star Trek shows in Lower Decks is impressive in an abstract sense, but it feels like that's all it has to offer most of the time.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    "Spatial torpedoes", nuclear missiles of the type mentioned in "Balance of Terror". It should be noted that Starfleet having photon torpedoes before the Earth-Romulan war is a bit of a plot hole, since "Balance of Terror" established that the war was fought with nuclear weapons.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It was the favorite plot hook for a Chakotay episode... it feels like he crashed more shuttles than all the other crewmembers combined, and he was supposedly an ace pilot. As far as things could be replicated, anyway... there are a bunch of materials involved that can't be replicated for plot reasons.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Now, in all fairness, the only thing that the Enterprise crew were established to have actually invented was the early incarnation of red alert. The rest was implausible feats of mass manufacture, like building two new phase cannon systems from scratch based on an unassembled prototype they had in storage, making a ton of phase pistols, or those quantum beacons that Trip manufactures practically overnight despite the tech being way beyond him. (It's not quite to Voyager's level, though... where they were seemingly pulling extra photon torpedoes and shuttlecraft out of hammerspace to suit Tuvok's love of torpedoing people and replace shuttles piloted by Commander Crash... er... Commander Chakotay.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Quality issues aside, audience fatigue was the (counter)argument the Star Trek showrunners made to the UPN executives when the network insisted on another Star Trek series to fill the void Star Trek: Voyager's imminent conclusion was going to create in the broadcast schedule. Star Trek had been on the air with at least one series for nearly fourteen years in a row and it was starting to get stale. That was a recurring problem with Enterprise. I really liked how aesthetically primitive they managed to make it. Especially with the shipboard sets being strongly reminiscent of submarines with the low ceilings, exposed conduits, visible rivets on the bulkheads, and actual mechanical switches for controls. The writers introduced upgrades too quickly in the series. The EM-33 plasma pistol didn't even last the entire pilot two-parter, for instance. Apart from a few minor glitches and goofs, the transporter quickly became the norm for certain uses. The ship sprouted phaser cannons just a few episodes into the first season. The spatial torpedoes lasted only until the end of the second season before being replaced with photon torpedoes. The only things that really remained primitive was they kept preferring the shuttlepods over the transporter, and force fields never really became a thing. That's the consequence of the show getting hijacked by the executives... a lot of characters got radically retooled when the show's original, much darker, premise was abandoned in favor of a more episodic format. Robert Beltran kept trying to get himself released by demanding outrageous salary increases because he loathed his character's Hollywood Indian new age BS tendencies (inspired by Native American consutant and charlatan Jamake Highwater), and how his character who was supposed to be Janeway's rival ended up as her yes-man instead. Oh yeah... it was pretty much the Archer/Tucker/T'Pol/Phlox show for a good while. Not that anyone particularly minded not hearing from Hoshi after she was introduced as such an obnoxious whiner. Travis really got it in the shorts, though, since he never got developed past "wide-eyed kid" and they backed down on making Reed openly gay. Ah, I don't recall where I read it, I think it might've been in something associated with the novelverse and its adoption of a lot of unused concepts and story outlines intended for later in the series.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure if that's a difference of perspective among staff or what, because there was a modest amount of material they produced while "thinking about it". The most prominent piece being their rough draft and early CG model for a Kzinti spaceship. They've also talked about some proposed and draft scripts that were tentatively slated for season 5, like an arc about T'Pol's father that would've explained her unusually emotional behavior. IIRC, the Columbia-class that appeared in the Ships of the Line calendar and became Federation Starfleet's first (human-built) prestige class in the Relaunch novelverse was originally designed as a potential major retrofit the Enterprise would undergo in a future season as well. The issue with the Vulcans was probably the number one complaint with Enterprise... or at least the longest-lasting, most consistent one. The complaints were strident enough that they attempted to band-aid the problem late in season four with the Kir'shara story arc, but too little too late.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    TOS was definitely a bit of a troubled production... thanks to a sort of low-key passive aggressive jockeying for creative control that was going on and culminated in much of the show's writing staff bailing for the third and final season. It has its moments, though, and for the time it was pretty damned revolutionary. Yeah, Picard is a best-skipped series... it kind of sh*ts all over everything the character was. The only reason to watch it would be if you really desperately want to see the entire cast miserable. TNG's first season and a half are TOS-level rough though, thanks to Gene Roddenberry maneuvering himself into a position to have full creative control over the series at that time before being ousted. It really hit its stride in season 3, but season 2 was the first signs of its true potential. That it coincided with the studio having Riker grow a beard led to the series finding its feet and taking off being called "growing the beard". Enterprise was the prequel nobody asked for. With Voyager's ratings falling and the showrunners protesting that audiences were burning out on Trek after being on the air with at least one series continuously for over a decade, the production crew all wanted to give the franchise a few years off before trying again. But the network insisted, so what we got was a kind of very halfhearted prequel that quickly dismisses a lot of the non-cosmetic trappings of being a prequel. It got dragged pretty hard by fans when it was new. Partly because of its retcons and the Vulcans being incredibly out of character until the end of the series, but mainly because the writing was incredibly uneven and there was a massive multi-season plot tumor called the Temporal Cold War hanging over it all. Audiences are a LOT kinder to it now after new shows like Discovery and Picard proved to be SO MUCH WORSE. Sadly, Enterprise didn't really hit its stride until its fourth and final season, by which point it had cut its way free of the whole "Temporal Cold War" mess audiences so hated and started doing some proper Boldly Going. Its ratings had already fallen too far, though, and the network cut them off while season five was literally on the drawing board, making it the first Trek series to be cancelled rather than end on its own terms since TAS. It has its own thread... but the short version is that Discovery is probably the single most polarizing series made under the Star Trek banner. So much so that many fans, myself included, struggle to call it a Star Trek series in light of how dark, depressing, and downright miserable it all is. It completely lacks Star Trek's optimistic future and light hearted camaraderie among the Starfleet crew. So much so that the show was radically retooled to get it the hell out of the actual Star Trek setting by jumping almost a thousand years forward into a setting that is somewhere between Star Wars and Mad Max for themes and content.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It must be convenient to be stuck in an all-female fleet when you're voiced by Show Hayami. Yeah, the VF-XX is actually pretty important but was in the process of being phased out at the time of Macross II. The VF-2SS Valkyrie II had become the main fighter of the Space Forces about a decade earlier and some units were still transitioning. I think a big part of that is just that the Regult is the iconic Zentradi unit. The Nousjadeul-Ger does show up quite a bit here and there, it's just less common in-universe than the dirt cheap Regult series... and like most Zentradi designs, the movie versions retroactively replaced the TV ones in most instances. It makes sense that they're not super common among the New UN Forces that favor the Regult and Queadluun series... because the New UN Gov't captured factory satellites that make the Regults and Queadluun series. The Esbeliben factory satellite was seized in the original series and has been parked at Earth-Moon L5 for decades, and the Quimeliquola factory satellite's orbiting Eden.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are several UN Spacy Marine Corps aircraft in Variable Fighters Aero Report in the back of that book. Frontier more or less states outright that the NUNS 33rd Marines was a unit specifically set up as containment for Zentradi soldiers with a history of discipline problems. Assigning the unit to garrison duty on a planet on the arse end of nowhere was presumably an additional containment strategy. (Characters who'd previously been depicted in the 33rd appear in the Frontier movies as inmates at Alcatraz prison, suggesting they were similarly problematic in that version of the story.) Presumably the Zentradi marines on Al Shahal were a unit with a much better disciplinary record given that they were based directly in a major city. Preferring a lifestyle of military discipline doesn't necessarily mean that they're also one step from becoming terrorists. Bucking the standard sci-fi trope, most emigrant planets in Macross are not depicted as single-biome planets. There are worlds that have deserts, but Al Shahal is the first that we've seen that has had only deserts depicted so far. Even then, I'd wager there's more diverse terrain on the planet and that the desert locale was simply the area with best access to key resources or the area most conducive to landing an emigrant ship. (A significant part of Macross 30's story takes place in a desert region on Uroboros, for instance.) As far as we know, the only explicit appearance by the UNSAF was in Macross Plus. The only other explicit appearance I recall for the UNSAF is in Macross R, with Macross Galaxy Corporate Army's 3rd Combat Air Wing 8th Tactical Fighter Squadron "Pegasus". Almost all of the squadrons actually seen onscreen are carrier-based units belonging to the Spacy. (Despite not being a "Space Navy", the Spacy's squadrons use US Navy-inspired squadron designations that mark them out as different from the Air Force and Marine Corps units which use designations modeled on those branches of the US armed forces.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Nice that this thread should pop back up right now. 😀 I'm moving, so I've got all my framed posters out at once... and a few more I'll be having framed once I'm done moving now that I'll have the wall real estate for all of them. Still got half a dozen from the last SDCon before the start of the pandemic waiting on frames.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eventually rehashed as the Admiral Leyton's coup plot in Deep Space Nine once Gene was out from underfoot. Some ideas are just too good to let go of... Unfortunately, the Relaunch novelverse's obsession with tying up loose ends from the TV series saw them revisit the parasites from "Conspiracy". The big reveal there was that the parasites were... "Q Who" really makes it out that Guinan is something much more powerful than just an El-Aurian. Q actually warns Picard about her twice, and her reaction implies that she was aware of his abduction of Picard and that she can actually prevent him from "expediting [her] departure" or defend herself against his powers in some way. It's probably better that way, yeah... especially given the quality of modern Trek's writing. OK there are a few ones there I've never seen before... especially that clip of Gene, Michael, Barrie, and Patrick singing. One of the favorite things I've learned about the show's production is that Patrick Stewart was the one who wanted everyone to grim up and stop goofing around initially, and he ended up being one of the worst offenders when it came to goofing off on set. I remember reading that The DS9 cast was aimilarly grim, until Michael Dorn joined the cast and became their patron saint of screwing around. (TBH, I find that hilarious somehow... the actor behind the incredibly grim and deadpan Mr. Worf was Mr. Fun Times on set.) (Right up there with learning at a convention from no less a person than Kate Mulgrew that Voyager's prankster-in-chief was Tim Russ, who at one point broke into her trailer to cover every surface with photocopies of his posterior.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I like 'em both... but I have to admit, the Macross II setting was definitely not set up on the same massive scale as the main Macross setting. The main/ongoing Macross setting is way more "adventure-friendly" and open to different approaches to storytelling. That said, I'd probably find Macross every bit as boring as I find Gundam's Universal Century if all it did was endlessly repeat the same story with the same character archetypes in the same circumstances where all that really changes show-to-show is the proper nouns the way UC Gundam has done for decades now. Macross II is very Gundam-like in a lot of respects, possibly the influence of the Gundam veterans staffing it, but I find a fair amount of probably-unintentional hilarity in that its story has the UN Forces getting bored and a bit complacent because they've been fighting the same war over and over again for decades and always winning the exact same way.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... different strokes for different folks. As I understand it, Macross Plus got something of a lukewarm reception in Japan because of how different it was from what audiences expected in a Macross sequel. Much like the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, it was more popular in the west where those expectations weren't as defined and audiences were generally more open to a more action-focused story. (That situation was reversed with Macross 7, which Japanese fans adored and western fans watching the fansubs found very polarizing.) Plus supposedly found itself seeing a bit of a renaissance after the Macross Frontier movies and the Blu-ray re-release the same way II did.
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