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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Really, that much could have been addressed with makeup or just hiring an actor who looked like the previous actors who played the Borg Queen... it's actually kind of weird they didn't, since they went to the trouble for Data and he DID have the ability to age. ... that is highly debatable. For my money, the best Star Trek comic or novel is How Much for Just the Planet?... which achieves peak TOS flavor by refusing to take itself or its subject matter seriously and going all-in on camp. (Imagine Kirk and the Klingons visiting a planet where the locals spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance numbers ala Disney just to mess with you.) It's one of the main reasons that the Star Trek: Titan novel series is basically unreadable. They gave Will Riker the most diverse crew in Starfleet history and any moment not spent on him and Deanna having relationship trouble is spent on him agonizing over whether he's imposing his human beliefs and values on his nonhuman crew. Fans breathed an audible sigh of relief when they decided to leave that sh*t out of Picard AND Lower Decks.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    No. The Star Trek "relaunch" novelverse that picked up where the various Star Trek TV shows and prime timeline movies ended never got that far. The last few books released for the TNG, DS9, and VOY relaunch series were set in 2382, five years before the destruction of Romulus that precipitated the creation of the Kelvin timeline and Star Trek 2009. AFAIK only Star Trek Online, which was its own alternate universe setting separate from the novelverse, actually made it to and past the point of Romulus's destruction with the present day there being in the early 25th century. You have no idea how relieved I am to say that the answer to that is also "No". Star Wars ran into issues with throwing out its licensed novels, comics, etc. because they were canon or pseudocanon until Disney pitched them and started over. But for a brief period right after TOS, the Star Trek franchise's official canon policy has always been that only the TV shows and movies are canon. The licensee-created works like the novels, comics, and video games are non-canon and some unofficially or implicitly style themselves as alternate universe stories (e.g. Star Trek Online). Few, if any, fans are all that upset that the relaunch novelverse is on indefinite hiatus because of Discovery and Picard. Most will quite cheerfully admit that a lot of the novels and most of the comics are frankly awful and borderline unreadable unless you're a die-hard fan, infested as they are with terrible fanfic-tier writing. No, the Star Trek fandom's grievances with Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard are motivated entirely by the quality (or lack thereof) and content of those shows. I can't imagine there are any Star Trek fans out there on the warpath because Paramount disregarded wonderful story arcs like "Janeway becomes the Borg Queen and destroys Pluto", "Bajoran archaeologists discover atheist scripture (no really) and society loses its collective sh*t", "Will Riker of the USS White Man's Burden", or "Trip Tucker, Secret Agent". 🤣 Unlikely, IMO... especially given that Discovery's second season basically borrowed most of its plot from the DS9 relaunch's Control story arc. I suspect no other motive besides the novels being non-canon already and frankly awful in the eyes of fans and casual readers alike.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Considering they apparently spent big to bring back John de Lancie, I'm interested to know why they didn't bring back either of the actresses who've previously played the Borg Queen in First Contact or on Voyager... ... and, for that matter, why does the Borg Queen look old now? She's not a person, she's an artificial construct that with barely any biological components that the Borg assemble on an as-needed basis.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    So... if that trailer was meant to entice fans back into watching, then mission failed. This is enough to make me go sign that petition that's going around to have Paramount classify all Kurtzman-era Trek non-canon. This looks like ARSE. Especially that Borg Queen makeup. The Borg Queen makeup and visual effects from Star Trek: Voyager looked infinitely more convincing and impressive than this sad mess, and that effects technology is now over twenty-five years old! This Borg Queen looks like costume, makeup, and effects are so unmistakably cheap that they look like they'd be more at home on Red Dwarf IX: Back to Earth or an episode of Power Rangers than a Star Trek series that supposedly has $8 million per episode to play with. If you told me this was actually a cosplayer who coincidentally wandered onto the set in a costume and makeup of their own design, I'd believe you. But I guess that's on brand for the Picard series. The Borg makeup and effects in the first season looked like something out of a mid-90's PC game cutscene too. The writing clearly says "We remember First Contact was the last time anyone liked Jean-Luc Picard as a character", and the decision to ape First Contact's story with a time travel plot to just after the present day says "we needed to film this season as cheaply as possible". All in all, I would be absolutely floored if this series hadn't received a VERY large budget cut between this season and the last. Either that or they couldn't get a budget approved for season three and are spreading season two's budget across both. There's no way a show this expensive should look this cheap, unless someone is engaging in some "creative accounting". (Bialystock und Bloom~!)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the New UN Forces are using twenty or so factory satellites to produce hundreds of warships a year and not using anywhere near the full capacity of those facilities, I'd assume that the individual factory satellites set up to manufacture warships are likely producing them at a pretty respectable clip. The rate probably goes down the larger and more complex the ships get, but I'd assume that warship factories are likely churning out hundreds of ships a year.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. Attack on Titan needed an ending that brought actual closure to the story. Instead, there's a 30-gambit pileup as the different flavors of genocidal fascist in the story turn on each other that is almost immediately capped by... But the author still wants Eren to be sympathetic, and thus tries to excuse him becoming a Complete Monster by revealing... We're apparently supposed to be sad for him when Mikasa and co. finally catch up to him and she... And, of course, the aftermath of it all proves that nobody in the story learned a goddamn thing... The ending doesn't offer any real closure for any of the characters, it doesn't really do anything to resolve any of the mysteries surrounding the Titans themselves or the ontological nonsense surrounding their connections to the Eldian royal family, and it absolutely doesn't offer any hope for the future. The last chapter all but directly states it's all going to keep happening over and over again... Basically, the story doesn't so much end as it does just drunkenly lurch to a halt and the aftermath leaves only the uncomfortable realization that the closest Attack on Titan has to a character who isn't running on black-and-also-black morality is... And that's completely horrible too, when the distance between your protagonist and final antagonist is simply a matter of disagreeing...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Other way around, actually. Fantastic Beasts was originally planned as a trilogy, but after the first one they announced they were going to do five of them.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Not unless you're really really bored. As Star Trek novels go, the writing's actually not that bad.* They're a long way from "great", but the main problem with both The Last Best Hope and The Dark Veil is that the writers (Una McCormack and James Swallow) spent most of their respective books frantically tying the story in knots in their efforts to introduce, explain, and justify the various pants-on-head idiotic parts of Star Trek: Picard's setting. The ill-advised decision to not retcon the Kelvin Trek movies out of existence by incorporating the destruction of Romulus into PIC's storyline proved to be a huge mistake in the TV series, but the implications are way worse in the novels. The only way the writers could justify the infamously cunning Romulan Star Empire being wiped out by the its homeworld's sun going supernova was for the entire Romulan government to be Too Dumb To Live on a level that makes even the dimmest Pakled would find deeply concerning. The lemming-like determination the Romulan Senate, Tal Shiar, and Zhat Vash show in suppressing and dismissing any concerns about the impending destruction of Romulus by supernova is a truly bizarre thing to behold. It's so nonsensical that you could be forgiven for wondering if the Romulans actually hate Picard for interrupting some kind of species-wide ritualistic mass suicide. They know their world is doomed. They know that it's going to be destroyed SOON. But even though they're still on the planet that's about to be destroyed, they keep doing everything in their power to hinder their own efforts to evacuate. The Tal Shiar spends its time abducting and torturing scientists to get them to retract their analyses of the timetable of their star's destruction, while the Zhat Vash launch a major operation to commit an act of war against the Federation and destroy the Starfleet rescue armada that an enormous percentage of their population are depending on for evacuation for the flimsiest possible reason. In hindsight, it makes both Picard and the 2009 Kelvin Trek movie absolutely ridiculous. In what way is anything Picard's fault? The Romulans did absolutely everything they could to kill themselves en masse and succeeded spectacularly. Nero's complaint now makes NO sense, given that the Federation DID send substantial aid to Romulus and only stopped because the Romulans sabotaged shipyard servicing the humanitarian fleet. Personally, I suspect a TNG-era Picard would suspect PIC-era Picard was some kind of alien imposter or a terrible prank being played by Q. * Which is Damned by Faint Praise, at best. Next to turds like Shatner's The Return**, almost any licensed novel would come away smelling of roses. ** A book that is already terrible for being Shatner's attempt to permanently settle the Kirk vs. Picard debate in his own favor, made worse by the realization that Shatner originally pitched it to Paramount as a Star Trek movie script after Generations.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So... Star Trek: Picard now has three tie-in novels out that attempt to explain the show's backstory. They aren't great, which is expected given that they're basically Fix Fics intended to justify or handwave the dumber bits of writing in Picard season one... ultimately making the story worse, not better. The Last Best Hope Sets up Picard, Musiker, Maddox, and Jurati's backstories. The Dark Veil Riker and Troi's backstory. Nothing of any actual relevance happens, really. Rogue Elements Rios's backstory. It could best be summed up as "All those jokes about him being a walking collection of slightly racist Latinx stereotypes and a terribly obvious ripoff of Han Solo were surprisingly on the nose." All in all, pretty disappointing offerings that do more to undermine the show's story than anything. Only the first book actualy has much to do with setting up the series, and there's precious little in terms of takeaways except that Picard is so self-obsessed that he not only blames himself for things that he had no control over, he blames himself for things that don't involve him at all AND believes that he is so utterly indispensible that Starfleet will buck the orders of the Federation government to do his bidding. (It really lends something to the criticism of PIC Picard as an entitled old man manipulating everyone with sob stories because he's upset that he's no longer relevant or influential.) Raffi's tragic backstory turns out to be entirely her own fault, which would actualy have made her arc in the series more poigniant if she hadn't laid all the blame for her actions on "JL".
  10. Seto Kaiba
    He's currently 81 years old... so if he looks old, he's earned it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Got caught up on The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest... and I swear if there's an actual direction to this plot, I can't grasp it. Six episodes in and the first major story arc just sort of ends without any real fanfare or sense of anything being accomplished. Perhaps it's because the protagonist is just so stupidly overpowered that nothing in the plot is any more than the most trifling inconvenience to him, but the story was at least starting to toy with subverting the whole unstoppably-overpowered protagonist schtick with a partially developed subplot about part of the difference being a major drop in the level of basic competence in magic since his past life. Then they kind of just abandon it so he can go do generic adventurer things elsewhere.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm still keen to see where this one is headed... and obscurely pleased that a few of Newt's critters got posters of their own.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    This makes me very happy indeed. Getting caught up on the various new titles now that I've finally found some free time. In the Land of Leadale's still form letter isekai fantasy... and, six episodes in, I have a distinct feeling that either the production committee cut the budget or Maho Film lost interest in this one. The production quality was never great on this one, but the number of off-model moments increased dramatically. It's not too bad yet but there are some really jarring moments where characters faces are radically different shapes shot-to-shot. Caena's granddaughter gets hit with it real hard. The plot's still a mess too. A main plot thread Ceez stole from Overlord gets forgotten completely when Caena, who had set out into the world partly to see if there were any other players left alive, runs into another player out of the blue and completely forgets about her own motivation. The plot changes gears so often, and with such an audible clunk each time, that it feels like an anecdote being related by an exciteable child.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely not going to the writers, that's for sure... Given the badly-rendered CG cyber-tentacles criss-crossing the bridge in that scene, it looks like a very safe bet that we're seeing the Borg Queen hijacking another Starfleet ship. Given that we know this entire season takes place in an altered past where Earth is evil, that means the Borg Queen likely took it into the past. It's looking unpleasantly like this is going to be a literally low budget remake of First Contact.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    What in the hell did I just watch? It looks for all the world like Star Trek: Picard's showrunners decided that the best way to promote the series would be to show a bunch of badly-constumed extras coming out of a turbolift, running down a badly lit hallway that looks like something out of Alien: Covenant, and getting into another turbolift. This looks like a f***ing fan-film. And not one of the good ones either. Paramount's supposedly spending ~$8M per episode... where the hell is it going if the series looks this amateurish? Are we watching Patrick Stewart's Springtime for Hitler? Was he so reluctant to return that the entire budget is being spent on retaining him, Jeri Ryan, and Lohn de Lancie?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it's more likely than him making a Star Trek movie... Why not solve two problems and kill off Pine's Kirk again, but permanently this time? Or, better yet, just retcon the entire Kelvin timeline out of existence at the end of Kelvin Trek 4. Have the Federation Temporal Agency and/or Temporal Integrity Commission roll up to fix Nero's mess with the help of the Enterprise crew and Ret Gone the Narada before it can attack the Kelvin. Then none of that sh*t has to happen and they can retool the timeline to make the characters less unpleasant to watch.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It does a bit, yeah... It'd probably have helped matters if Abrams had gone into his bastardization of Star Trek with a plan for a story arc. The original six Star Trek movies have some overarching themes that help link them up into a rough story arc about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy coming to terms with growing older and Kirk having to confront true no-win scenarios and accept loss. The Kelvin Trek movies don't really have anything like that... which might hurt the fourth installment, since it doesn't really have anything to build on.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... hm... really, I feel like that's almost a symptom of a deeper, more fundamental problem with the character. The James T. Kirk of the official Star Trek timeline was a decent, upstanding, highly principled man and a hard worker. The James T. Kirk of the Kelvin timeline is a sh*theel. And not even a capable sh*theel, come to that. His (dubious) achievements are mostly attributable to a combination of riding his dead hero father's coattails and nepotism from his father's friend Captain Christopher Pike. He's infuriating because most of us have known someone exactly like him. He's that one brainless jock who peaked in, and mentally never left, high school. The one who gets admitted to college as a legacy and joins the frat his father belonged to in order to spend his days drinking cheap beer, smoking pot, and trying to pick up every girl who'll give him the time of day while trusting his father's connections to keep him from being expelled or worse. He's unprofessional and his rank is undeserved, but that's really just a symptom of the fact that he's so painfully underdeveloped as a character that he's mostly just a flat character mindlessly going through the motions of Kirk's backstory armed with only the jokes Star Trek fans have always made about the behavior of Shatner's Kirk. To be frank, it's just lazy writing. The studio wanted an origin story, but for some reason they felt compelled to make it a shared origin story for ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE instead of for the main character. So there's a lot of moon logic in play to make it work. Hrm... I disagree, for one main reason. From its inception, Star Trek's Starfleet was always intended to be at-most Mildly Military. Gene and co. were insistent even in the early development of the original Star Trek that Starfleet was a non-military space exploration service. A future analogue of NASA (and the Soviet space program). That aspect actually got carried forward throughout the prime timeline clear to the end of Enterprise, with references to Starfleet being an outgrowth of the United Earth Space Probe Agency. It wasn't until Nicholas Meyer took the helm in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan that Starfleet started adopting the trappings of modern navies with any real devotion. Of course, those trappings also disappeared when he left because the creators working on the TV shows and most of the movies were following the originally laid-down concept that Starfleet was the Federation's space agency not its armed forces. That idea also got carried through into Enterprise, where there was a clear distinction drawn between Earth Starfleet's personnel and the Earth military's MACOs. It's not that the production staffs of the pre-Kelvin Star Trek works didn't know how the military works... it's that they were specifically NOT depicting Starfleet as a military. It's not a bug, it's a feature. What Abrams did was just take that to its illogical extreme with a Designated Hero who has to be The Captain because he's famous in the real world as Captain Kirk, not Cadet Kirk, so the plot bends over backwards and makes confetti out of common sense to make it happen.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Odd thought... if they wanted to do Kelvin Trek 4 as a comedy-focused story like Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, Seth MacFarlane would actually be a pretty good fit given his work on The Orville. I might actually go see that in theaters if they did it. I know it's been said that they've thrown out several story treatments for Kelvin Trek 4 because the studio rejected them or actors were unavailable/too expensive...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    If the only thing that entertains you is mindless violence, you need help. Badly. The arts do not exist purely to entertain, artistic expression is a form of communication and education. Star Trek has always been political, always been driven by social commentary, to the extent that it would not be even a slight exaggeration to say that that is very much The Point of the franchise. How subtle it's been about it has varied over the years, but it has always been driven by that. If that bothers you, then Star Trek isn't for you and it never will be. Y'see, Star Trek's creators were/are educated people... people who paid enough attention in their history, political science, and civics classes to know that western democracies aren't exactly different in that regard. Imperialist western democracies like the US, Great Britain, etc. have perpetrated just as many horrors as the "Communist" or fascist autocracies... in many cases the exact same horrors attributed to the Communists, as a hostile joint venture with them in the great zero-sum game that was the Cold War. Star Trek is not exactly a subtle voice on that topic. Indeed, there's hardly any bit of scenery without toothmarks once they really get going about the Cold War. They, and indeed most Star Trek fans, would find your argument here hilariously hypocritical. Doubly so since you profess your favorite Trek movie is Undiscovered Country... you're basically making the exact same unconvincing argument as Cartwright or Chang, the villains of the piece. Nobody in this universe - or any other - cares. For the record, Paramount has tried going the "dumb action movie" route with Star Trek several times in the past and it has never ended well for them It was the cause of two of the three worst financial disasters in the franchise's history: Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek: Beyond. Might be four for five given Paramount+'s significant losses, poor reviews, and slow-to-minimal merchandise returns for Discovery and Picard as well. Yeah, that's definitely been a spanner in the works for new Trek. Though, IMO, the reason that's such a problem is because [CBS/ViacomCBS/Paramount] insisted on retrying ideas that they knew from past experience didn't work. It's a big universe. All they needed to do was put enough space - literal and/or chronological - between the new developments and previous material to prevent any crossover and the creative staff would have had a lot more freedom to work. A lot of new Trek's problems - especially with the Kelvin movies - stem from trying to simultaneously hold existing material at arm's length and lean on it to drive sales. If they'd either just made a new main timeline Trek movie or done a straight AU story focused on an all new group of original characters they'd be in better condition than they are now because they would either be able to lean on continuity fully or dispense with it fully and do their own thing. By trying to have it both ways, they're trying to run a marathon while dragging a bicycle behind them. Seth MacFarlane has, at least, proven that you can do something that respects the spirit of Star Trek without any direct connection to existing material as long as you have decent writing behind it. Kelvin Trek 4 - or Star Trek XIV - is probably not going to get made, IMO. If it does, I expect it'll run afoul of the same problems that sank the previous three because Paramount doesn't learn from its mistakes anymore. I dunno... Mel Brooks kind of lost his touch as time went on. The remake of The Producers was pretty weak stuff compared to the original.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    If there is, it's never been published.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It loses a certain je ne sais quoi without the Scooby-Doo scrambling noises...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... I would think the answer would be obvious. You're not going to be able to march an infantry column very far - or at all, really - through the vacuum of space. The Zentradi are a predominantly fleet-based space force waging a forever war against another predominantly fleet-based space force. Aside from basic deck protection duties in case the ship is boarded like in DYRL?, there's not a lot for infantry to do. It's not like they can roll down a window and start shooting out. Battles take place at ranges of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of kilometers, well beyond the reach of man-portable weapons. Most operations against enemy forces based on a planet take the form of a massed bombardment of the planet's surface, which also leaves little for infantry to do. Not to mention the Regult battle pod is more agile and more heavily armed than a soldier on foot. Yes and no. That first one is an unarmored regular-duty space suit used by regular crewmen and various battle pod pilots. The second one is an armored space suit used by some battle pod, battle suit, and light spacecraft pilots.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... I see the dial marked "DRAMA" in Doomcock's lair still hasn't been turned down to a reasonable level. As far as I can tell, there is not a (direct) reaction to the announcement of Abrams Trek 4, Strange New Worlds, the impending cancellation of Picard, or Discovery's terrible reviews. It's a reaction to three factors: ViacomCBS's decision to rebrand itself again... this time to "Paramount Global". (Multiple rebrandings in a short span of time not being indicative of stability.) A lukewarm 2021 Q4 earnings call that confirmed that, while total revenues and subscribership are up, direct-to-customer (streaming) is hemorrhaging money like nobody's business and the rate at which it's hemorrhaging money is expected to increase for years to come. They're losing over $1B a year on Paramount+ and that's expected to go nowhere but up thanks to significant increases in spending on new content development. Guggenheim Partners, Bank of America, and other financial institutions downgrading the stock's rating based on reassessment of its risk level. This is actually the third time since December last that the stock has dipped this low... which is nothing compared to the 62% plummet the stock took back in mid-March 2021 after ViacomCBS execs moved to raise $3B for streaming development by selling stock. That dip had nothing to do with anything except the erosion of shareholder positions due to the massive spike in the number of shares in circulation. Granted, that Paramount+ is losing over a billion dollars a year does reflect rather poorly on its incredibly expensive, poorly-received, flagship shows Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard... but that doesn't really have any connection to the proposed Star Trek XIV, which is almost certainly not going to be bankrolled by Paramount to begin with. (Finding someone willing to fund it is a whole other kettle of particularly odious fish considering the last installment finished well in the red... but hey.) Yeah, the old Trek movies did a lot of strange things to work their way around various aspects of the MPAA's guidelines.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Not that I'm aware of. The production reason was that the MPAA of the time would have slapped an R rating on Undiscovered Country had the blood been red. I know the production staff have excused or dismissed it on occasion by claiming it was an effect of microgravity on the blood. ... eh, if you completely miss the point of Star Trek, maybe. The endless technobabble is iconic of Star Trek, so to most viewers that's a feature not a bug. 😉 Janeway's inconsistent characterization was partly just bad writing and partly executive meddling, but it is an oft-cited complaint with the series even by its cast. Kate Mulgrew has previously opined that inconsistent writing makes Janeway come off as having an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Not that I am aware of. Species 8472 largely buggers off after "In the Flesh" and aren't really heard from again afterwards. I don't recall Roddenberry ever putting a label on his personal political views. He is on record as saying that Star Trek reflects his philosophy on things like politics, racial justice, and social/religious matters. The United Federation of Planets was always Gene's allegorical stand-in for the United States... albeit a future, "perfected" version of the United States that actually practiced what it preached regarding equality, liberty, personal responsibility, etc. and had resolved all contemporary sociopolitical problems like racism, sexism, inequality, and so on. If you were to put a modern label on it, the Federation is a post-scarcity democratic socialist state not a communist one. They've gone back and forth on whether or not there was money in the Federation depending on the writer, but they've never depicted an absence of property rights or autonomy... only that, in an enlightened post-scarcity society, there isn't a social emphasis on accumulating material possessions anymore. Mind you, Roddenberry was an educated man and knew full bloody well that the Red Scare was nothing more than a convenient and well-traveled boogeyman politicians used on the naïve and credulous to justify the ever-escalating Cold War defense spending that was returning to them as kickbacks and donations and as a way to demonize any movement intent on sociopolitical reform like labor unions, feminism, and the civil rights movement. In modern terms, much like insecure 90's kids falling back on "gay" as the I-don't-have-a-decent-comeback comeback, calling someone a "dirty commie" was nothing more than a cheap ad hominem used by people who didn't have a cogent counterargument. 😉 He displayed his disgust for such blatant chicanery in "Encounter at Farpoint", when one of Q's attempts to cajole the Enterprise into returning to Earth took the form of dressing up like a Cold War-era USMC Captain and imploring Picard to "go back to [his] world and put an end to the commies". Picard casually dismisses it as nonsense with barely disguised incredulity.
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