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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the monotonous regularity of tragic backstories among named characters, one could be forgiven for cynically suspecting redshirts are a form of assisted suicide. Few are the Star Trek protagonists who haven't been traumatized in some way prior to the "present day" of their respective shows...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda, yeah. After all, the Titans are the only ones left in the story with a halfway plausible claim to being victims rather than villains. They're just Eldian convicts from Marley who were sentenced to a fate significantly worse than death: the limited immortality of being trapped in one's own mind as an unaging mindless titan. Even that's only halfway convincing because a lot of the mindless titans were Eldians like Grisha who wanted to overthrow the vicious, expansionist, titan-using nation of Marley... by restoring the vicious, expansionist, titan-using empire of Eldia. Knowing that a fair number of the titans are titans because their sole objection to genocidal oppression was not being the oppressor puts a lot of them into "*sshole victim" territory at best. It's impossible to sympathize with the protagonists when the first thing they did after defeating the titans and making contact with the outside world again was to immediately validate everything Marley and the rest of the world believed about Eldians being inherently evil, bloodthirsty monsters. The closest anyone gets to heroism in the second half of the series is... And that's objectively horrible.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the winter season is limping to its conclusion. In the Land of Leadale fails to go anywhere or do anything of interest in its twelve episode run. It's only really remarkable for its sheer number of orphaned plot threads, with Cayna having essentially forgotten all of the goals she started the story with by about the seventh episode. It takes no risks, it pushes no envelopes, and it adds nothing to its genre. The series is, for all intents and purposes, a participation award. So congratulations In the Land of Leadale. You showed up. Didn't do anything, but you showed up. The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is also wearily crawling to its twelve episode mercy killing with Mattias facing the first enemy in the series to actualy pose a challenge to anyone instead of going down like a chump. Unfortuately, there's no actual buildup to it so it feels like a combination of Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. The best they could come up with for an ending was a dark lord whose existence was never so much as hinted at previously. This series is so scattered and its story so poorly told that it feels like a SparkNotes summary written by an exciteable toddler. Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department is definitely feeling some arc fatigue with its concept, having abruptly changed gears to do an idol singer episode for no apparent reason other than that Zombie Land Saga was popular when it was being drafted. The salaryman gags are fine, but there's no sense of direction to the story anymore as of episode 10. Attack on Titan is... Attack on Titan, which is to say it's still a tedious exercise in darkness-induced audience apathy that's frantically searching for something to hold the audience's attention and coming up empty. They're definitely bringing across the final arc of the manga as faithfully as possible. Unfortunately, that means it's padded like a menstruating fire hose and the characters are all unamibguously terrible human beings.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If it weren't such an old, and comparatively obscure, property they could probably have made some decent money giving it a full-ham tokusatsu treatment as a kids movie. Unfortunately, Hollywood's short memory means every few years a new idiot crawls out of the woodwork convinced they'll be the first to turn a profit on a live-action adaptation of a classic anime property instead of losing tens of millions of dollars like everyone else who's tried.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Voltron might not be at the top of the list of things which will not translate well to live action... but it's pretty damned close. Beast King GoLion was inherently high-camp as a super robot show, and Voltron only made it campier. I wonder which live-action anime adaptation route they'll go with? Will they attempt to do a faithful adaptation of part of the series while paying extensive homage to its anime roots that turns it into a nigh-unwatchable mess (ala Cowboy Bebop), "grim up" the story to make what was a childrens show more palatable for a nostalgia-driven adult audience and suck all the soul and fun out of it in the process (ala Speed Racer), or make an in-name-only adaptation that has no connection to the title besides the proper nouns in an attempt to put their own "stamp" on it (ala Dragonball Evolution).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I wish Discovery's writers and showrunners had enough self-awareness to try something like that. Then again, if they had enough self-awareness to parody their terrible decisions they'd never have made them in the first place. Maybe Lower Decks will give that one a go.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    'lil bit, yeah... though Star Trek has always been kind of rough on Starfleet officer protagonists. Many of them have either tragic backstories, tragic eventual fates, or both. Trauma makes drama, I guess? Though I guess part of it is probably just an acknowledgement/tie-in to the fact that in TOS living in the colonies seemed to be pretty darn rough as the Enterprise and other ships spent a LOT of time charging to the rescue of some colony or other. (Enterprise had plans on that front that went unused after its cancellation, like T'Pol supposedly being half-Romulan via her sleeper agent dad or Archer being the true identity of "Future Guy" trying to correct the distortions in history.) He gets to do both in the novels, which are based on some of the unused plans for the show's later seasons. Archer's promotion to Admiral in the novelverse came because he lost the Enterprise in the Earth-Romulan War and accumulated damage from transporter use left him with a neurological disorder that would otherwise have made him unfit for duty. It's one thing to throw in a nod to them here and there, but they're rushing to appeal to fans by saying "Hey guess what, Kirk is in this!" as if they're not at all confident that they can actually sell the series on its own merits. Kirk, Spock, et. al. are supposed to be nobodies in this time period. Spock's only real reason for drawing attention would/should have been the fact that he was the son of Vulcan ambassador Sarek. Kirk was just some guy until he became Captain of the Enterprise in the 2260s and went on a bunch of space adventures so exciting Starfleet routinely wrote his reports off as bullsh*t. When Discovery brought Spock in, they made a huge fuss over him totally out of all proportion to the fact that he wasn't anybody special except for his parentage and wouldn't be for another fifteen years or so. I kind of expect to see the same from a young Kirk as a scene-stealing squad with Spock. I can certainly understand them being a bit gunshy about fan reactions based on Discovery's... reception... but that was as much a result of their stupidly over-the-top grimdark take on Trek as the characters being a bunch of miserable and utterly unloveable bastards. This is supposed to be a return to classic form in multiple senses, and that means running on an ensamble cast.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    For my money, I want Strange New Worlds to spend less time leaning on established characters and more time building up the mostly undeveloped or original crew of the 2250s-era USS Enterprise. We've had quite enough of Kirk and Spock as it is.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, if they're going to reference the NX-01 Enterprise and her crew, it's probably better to stick to file photos. FWIW, I think they'd be better off flashing back to the transfer of command where Captain April stepped down and handed the Enterprise to Captain Pike.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It shows a lack of confidence in the series and the franchise... they're still leaning on established characters rather than develop their own. (Also, shouldn't Jim Kirk be on the Farragut in 2258?) Assuming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds picks up approximately where Star Trek: Discovery season two ended in 2258, Jonathan Archer would be 146 years old... and 13 years dead. (Production materials for Star Trek: Enterprise revealed that Jonathan Archer passed away in 2245, the day after he attended Starfleet's christening of the USS Enterprise.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Only if they were weeping for the fate of Star Trek as a whole... because the crew of the Discovery are still unlikable berks.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Long story short, they ended up in default on their loans after they released a retraction of one of their regular financial reports indicating they'd overstated their financial resources after overspending on acquiring new properties.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Kew Media Distribution.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    No, the intermediary company that Harmony Gold used to set up their original licensing deal with Funimation went under due to a bankruptcy triggered by "creative accounting" practices. That's why it took like two years for Funimation to actually put up any of HG's episodes.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, they pulled it a while back... I believe around the time they initially negotiated their new license with Funimation that fell through when the intermediary went bankrupt and then out of business.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Considering Picard was the network's saving throw to win back the Star Trek fandom after Discovery bombed... I feel like the meeting probably went the other way around, with the network showing a Ferengi-like willingness to agree to anything as long as Patrick Stewart would consent to come back and save them from themselves. He probably didn't have to twist any arms at all. Ah, yeah... that's definitely what it feels like. There's no subtlety, there's no pacing, the whole concept of an ensamble cast seems to be dead as Patrick Stewart and Sonequa Martin-Green dominate their respective shows to the point that everyone else is just sort of "also present", etc. It's really evident in Picard, where they all but completely abandoned the new characters in favor of walk-ons for TNG veterans because nobody liked them.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek's original series was able to be the success it was (in syndication) in part because the production had people who could, and often did, tell Gene "No" and rework or reject his crazier or more offensive ideas. It probably wouldn't have been as successful without people like Dorothy Fontana and Gene Coon to rein in Roddenberry's excesses and make his ideas into something marketable. TNG Season 1 was, of course, what happened when the network let Gene off the leash and it wasn't until his health forced him to bow out of the project that Rick Berman and others were able to salvage the series and grow the brand. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I feel like Kurtzman and Chabon don't really have someone... or enough someones... around to tell them when they're workshopping a bad idea or a bad approach to an idea. It was really telling that Discovery's second and third seasons were revivals of pitches for stories that Berman-era Trek showrunners had rejected as patently unworkable. It's clear Sir Patrick has a lot of sociopolitical commentary he wants to work into the story, but the delivery is so unsubtle that it feels like self-parody instead of allegory.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... so I did. Credit where credit is due, Star Trek: Picard's second season is shaping up to be even worse than my most pessimistic imaginings. That's... actually kind of impressive, in a "if you were half as committed to doing a good job as doing this, you'd sweep the Emmy's" sort of way. With the Borg Queen on board and time travel back to the 21st century in the offing, I had suspected we were in for a lazy rehashing of First Contact since that was the last time our boy Jean-Luc Picard really got to shine as both a badass and a highly principled human being. What we actually got was worse. MUCH worse. Apparently the writers - Sir Patrick included - felt Picard was owed a Mirror Universe storyline because he never got one when TNG was on the air. So we're getting an entire season of Mirror Universe bollocks. It's not the Mirror Universe we know from TOS and DS9, though. The timeline of campy scenery-chewing was getting its sh*t together in the latter half of the 24th century as the Terrans gradually learned to stop being awful to all and sundry while resisting the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. That bad future is apparently too rosy for the likes of us, though, since Star Trek: Picard decided to introduce a NEW Mirror Universe even more stupidly over-the-top grimdark than the sh*tshow in Discovery.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    For hostile VFs? Not just Windermere. Armed anti-government movements with widely varying MOs and goals quickly became a thing in the early years of space emigration. There are a number of (offscreen) civil wars on various emigrant planets that led to the 4th Generation VFs being designed for stealth insertions behind enemy lines to end such wars with minimal casualties, anti-government terrorist movements like those suppressed by Max and Milia's Dancing Skulls special forces team, Zentradi rebel groups like the organization Struggle also faced by the Dancing Skulls, paramilitary organizations like Black Rainbow and Vindirance, armed criminals like the whale poachers in Macross Dynamite 7, and space pirates like the Bandits on Uroboros in Macross 30.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Smart money is on Funimation, as Harmony Gold is functioning as a release partner/coordinator for Macross and they have a pre-existing licensing partnership with Funimation.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Even after the First Space War ended, the Zentradi are still very much the #1 threat to the New Unification Government. The Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet that was defeated over Earth in 2010 only lost its flagship and around half of its total fighting strength, with ~3 million surviving warships from the Boddole Zer main fleet scattered across tens of thousands of light years of space. On top of that, there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 other Zentradi main fleets just like the Boddole Zer main fleet active in the galaxy. Each of those main fleets has thousands of branch fleets and other scouting forces scattered across thousands of light years of space in the pursuit of the Supervision Army that also pose a threat to any emigrant ships or planets they may stumble across. As if that weren't bad enough, there is also the question of Zentradi terrorism within the New UN Government's sphere of influence. Even if we were only looking at the use Battroids have as a means to fight the Zentradi, they are still very necessary. They have many other advantages too, in terms of making it easier to navigate infrastructure designed for Zentradi use, in various kinds of heavy labor (esp. space construction work), and for the unconventional forms of maneuverability they offer in air combat. Plus their uses against other, similarly large opponents like the Vajra, the Dyaus, and enemy VFs.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    On that front, it's probably worth noting that the "easy out" explanation for why Airiam was able to receive extensive cybernetic prosthetics while Pike was confined to a wheelchair and reduced to speaking in beeps is how they were incapacitated. Airiam's injuries were ordinary, but extensive, physical trauma from a shuttle crash. Pike was incapacitated by a near-fatal level of exposure to exotic radiation from a warp drive system. They could easily explain it that Pike's near-fatal delta radiation exposure caused too much neurological damage for him to accept extensive cybernetic reconstruction. His wheelchair was supposedly brainwave controlled, so if that's the best they could do his nervous system must've been a complete wreck. As for why they didn't clone a body for him... that one's answered right in TOS's worst episode, "Spock's Brain". Transplanting a living brain was beyond the expertise of Federation medicine in the mid-23rd century. McCoy was only able to do it using knowledge from the Eymorg's "Teacher" system in order to successfully perform a brain transplant and as a consequence of the technology not being designed for humans was unable to retain the knowledge after. This was apparently still true a century later in TNG's "Ethics", in which Worf's severed spinal cord was not repairable by conventional means and the only fix was to graft a whole new spinal column to his system using an experimental and dangerous process that would've killed him stone dead if not for his Klingon anatomy's excessive redundancies. (There may also be the ethical issue alluded to in TNG "Up the Long Ladder" and DS9 "A Man Alone" regarding the ethics of cloning and the rights of cloned beings.) Dr. Hawking's ALS didn't completely incapacitate him, he was still able to use manual controls to maneuver his wheelchair and operate a text-to-speech system. Pike seems to be completely immobilized and dependent on rudimentary brainwave control to maneuver his wheelchair and answer "Yes" or "No" via beeps.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I think almost everyone would be very open to dismissing Kurtzman and Chabon's Trek as an alternate universe... or likely just a part of the Kelvin timeline, given their dystopian focus and shared aesthetics.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... why does this feel like we're going to have to sit through another plot where the main character is a broken old man sitting around waiting to die? Other than the hints of the omnipresent misery that defines Kurtzman and Chabon's imitation-brand Star Trek, this almost looks promising. I'm not going to get my hopes up, though. I've been burned by this stuff too many times already.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The name of that someone is "Sir Patrick Stewart". He's an activist and a very progressive one at that. His views are actually quite well-aligned with the morals of Star Trek as a whole, which has always strongly advocated for social justice causes. Unfortunately, the writers gave him a lot of creative input on Star Trek: Picard and that seems to have contributed significantly to the show's problems. The show's first season is very much Stewart's ten episode soapbox diatribe about American and British xenophobia and isolationism, Brexit, and discrimination against minorities. On a high level, it's 100% consistent with Star Trek's overriding themes and message. They just did an absolutely terrible job with the delivery, to the extent that the show's moral is often at odds with the show's story, basic science, and/or common sense. Since season two is supposedly angling to be an even less subtle diatribe about contemporary society, I expect the writing to be every bit as unworkable. Ah, yes... Robert Beltran was very unhappy with Star Trek: Voyager and his role in it. His main reasons for signing up to play Chakotay were that he would be playing opposite celebrated film actress Geneviève Bujold, and that Chakotay was supposed to be far more aggressive and adversarial towards Janeway as the leader of the ship's Maquis contingent. Bujold quit after just two days of filming because she was unable to adjust to the stricter, faster-paced production environment and her role was recast. Executive meddling from UPN also completely declawed Voyager's premise. The network wanted TNG 2.0, and so its premise was retooled to avoid the longer story arcs that'd worked so well for DS9, to lighten the tone considerably, and to remove the interpersonal conflicts between the Starfleet and Maquis members of Voyager's crew. You can see some of the vestiges of the original concept in "Parallax", "Worst Case Scenario" and "The Year of Hell". As a result, Chakotay was left in plot with little or nothing to do since he was supposed to be butting heads with Janeway on a daily basis as the leader of the Maquis. Instead, to Beltran's disgust, they made Chakotay into glorified extra and Janeway's right hand man. He's also gone on record a number of times to attest that he found the writing surrounding his character's Native American background often veered into racist territory. UPN had hired Jackie Marks AKA "Jamake Highwater" as a consultant on Native American culture. Where this became a problem for Voyager and for Beltran was that Jackie Marks was not a Native American. He was a Jewish man of Eastern European descent born and raised in LA, who adopted a stereotypically Native American-sounding penname and falsely claimed Cherokee and Blackfoot ancestry in order to help his writing career and later to receive grant money earmarked for Native Americans under false pretenses. He's been outed nine years earlier, but somehow UPN missed that little detail... and Marks's knowledge of Native American culture could best be described as an unholy mélange of early 90's new age spiritualism and things he remembered seeing on old western films and TV serials. So, to his great disgust, Beltran was stuck reading dialog written with Marks's consultation and feeling every bit like he was wearing redface while doing it. Oh, living there is outrageously expensive... but that's a function of property values (rent or mortgage), for the most part. The area differential between much of the midwest and SoCal in terms of rent/mortgage costs is easily 50%, and often more. ... well, either a Riker-centric version or the inevitable adult film parody will have a ready made title in Star Trek: Pound Town if they go that route.
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