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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Kew Media Distribution.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Overall, I feel like Star Trek: Picard gives the impression of a series that's just going through the motions. Star Trek: Discovery, for all its many faults, feels like a series where the showrunners are actually trying quite hard but consistently miss the mark because they never took the time to understand their audience and its expectations. They just keep plowing ahead with all the wrongheaded self-assurance of a conspiracy theorist. For its part, Star Trek: Picard's presentation feels distinctly halfhearted. The production values are shockingly low for a series with such a gargantuan reported budget, and it keeps showing up in bizarrely high visibility ways like the terrible visual design, the weirdly low-quality and poorly-composited CG effects, etc. There's nothing quite so telling about how far standards have fallen in the time Kurtzman and Chabon have had stewardship of the franchise as fans getting excited about the series using Star Trek Online updates of TNG ship designs because they actually look like Star Trek designs. (One has to wonder why they didn't just update the textures on the already well-traveled CG models of the actual TNG ship classes. Starfleet doesn't exactly just usher working ships out the door... the Excelsior and Miranda classes were a century old during the Dominion War and still putting in good work.) Aside from shifting funds from Picard to Discovery under the table or getting fleeced on location shooting fees, the only other possibility I can think of for why the show looks like complete arse most of the time is that they got Robert Beltran'd by actors who didn't actually want to appear. (Robert Beltran made several attempts to get himself fired from his role on Star Trek: Voyager by maliciously demanding increasingly outrageous salary increases between seasons, only to be thwarted each time as UPN met his demands without any complaints.) With so many Star Trek veterans, they can probably get away with some pretty outrageous demands for compensation. Even in Los Angeles, $25 a plate is well into middle-tier sitdown restaurant territory. It'd be one thing if this 10 Forward: the Experience were a recreation of the 10 Forward fans are familiar with from TNG or the TNG movies like the Quark's Bar in the now-defunct Star Trek: the Experience in Las Vegas... but this is just an utterly generic-looking American bar like the 602 Club set used in Star Trek: Enterprise. It also might get a pass if those photo ops were photos with the cast members fans actually give a flip about. Or even if Star Trek: Picard had a merchandise line worthy of attention beyond cheap wine sold at a huge markup because of a novelty "collectible" bottle, given that they're promoting "exclusive" merch. But this is food truck food at a generic looking theme pub in a Los Angeles arts district rental office space. At the hotel most SD Con attendees use in the Los Angeles fashion district, $26'll you get a steak dinner with two sides and a non-alcoholic beverage at the hotel restaurant. The more upscale options nearby aren't significantly more expensive either. Food truck food and cheap pub ambeance at hotel restaurant steak dinner prices? Someone must be mad.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I've heard that rumor a number of times, in connection with the news reports about Netflix's dissatisfaction with Kurtzman's constant overspending on Discovery's first and second seasons. It would not surprise me. Picard's second season was filmed while we were still more or less at peak pandemic. All in all, I can't imagine that filming on location was that expensive when most locations would've been desperate for ANYONE to show up. Likewise, I'd have a hard time believing they paid out significantly for hotel reservations given that Picard was filmed at Santa Clarita Studios in Santa Clarita, CA and all of their on-location filming was within easy driving distance of the studio: Chateau Picard was the Sunstone Villa and Winery in Santa Ynez, a two hour drive from the studio (171km) Vasquez Rocks, playing itself, is a mere 30 minutes from the studio (31.1km) Starfleet Headquarters was the Anaheim Convention Center, an hour and a half from the studio (112km) Starfleet Archive Museum was the College of the Canyons campus in Santa Clarita, not even ten minutes from the studio (<5km) Daystrom Institute interior shots were the Sony Pictures Plaza in Culver City, about an hour's drive from the studio (58.8km) Daystrom Institute exterior shots were filmed at Golden Cove beach in Rancho Palos Verdes, about an hour and a half from the studio (91.5km) Vashti Colony was the Mexican Street backlot at Universal Studios, half an hour from the studio (44.8km) Stardust City exterior shots were also filmed at the Hollywood CityWalk right next to Universal Studios, half an hour from the studio (45.5km) The Nightbox Bar was Jillian's Bowling Alley at the Hollywood CityWalk, half an hour from the studio The Troi-Riker household was on the Universal Studios backlot, a log cabin originally made for The Great Outdoors, half an hour from the studio (44.8km) The world where The Admonition was located (Aia) was the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch in Santa Clarita, less than 20 minutes from the studio (12.4km) Coppelius Station, A.I. Soong's residence, was a private residence on Rambla Pacifico Street in Malibu, an hour's drive from the studio (73.6km) Santa Ynez was the farthest-afield they went by a pretty significant margin. The only one who had to leave California for filming was Jonathan Frakes, since the Zheng He's bridge was a redress of the USS Discovery bridge set at Pinewood Toronto Studios in Canada, on the other side of the continent. Even that was cost-economized because it was done while Frakes was present there to direct an episode of Discovery's third season. EDIT: I should add that this is not an indictment of their method... if anything, I'm actually quite impressed by the efficiency of their operation here in terms of finding all the locations they needed within two hours of the studio. $25 a head to eat literal food truck food in a hastily-assembled, blue-tinted, TGI Friday's knockoff as part of a two-hour sales pitch for Star Trek: Picard's lackluster wine collection with "photo ops"? Seriously. Food truck food. We can't make this sh*t up. Someone at Paramount is taking the piss. Possibly the entire company.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    In all seriousness, it really is bizarre and off-putting how bad the design work is on Star Trek: Picard. It's hands-down the second most expensive Star Trek series made to date... but where its sister series Star Trek: Discovery's (admittedly hideous) sets, costumes, makeup, props, and visual effects look like they blew the entirety of the show's gargantuan budget on making it look impressive, Star Trek: Picard looks like they could barely spare any money on anything that wasn't on-location filming. The La Sirena set is so dull and so spartan that it could easily be mistaken for a warehouse if the helm console and chairs weren't in the frame. Most of the UI is bad CG effects, so the sets look even duller with none of Star Trek's usual backlit displays and blinking lights. They couldn't even be bothered to redress the one crew quarters set, so Picard has to live in a holosuite that's conveniently recreating his home so they could film on location at that cheap winery in Santa Ynez. Costume choices are regular contemporary clothes that look like they came out of the actors own closets for the most part. The props - especialy the phasers - are unmistakably cheap. The La Sirena's armory is full of what appear to be completely modern rifles and pistols with some plastic bits glued to them to disguise their shapes a bit. The new uniform for Starfleet in the first season was clearly a rush job and so poorly tailored it didn't fit anyone properly. Now we've got a new season set in almost the present day, so the props are mostly off-the-shelf and sets are looking like mostly unmodified location shots. Combine that with a noticeable dip in the quality of the digital VFX when the Borg Queen beams over to the Stargazer and you have to wonder where all the money went. So is Star Trek: Picard now. Season two's opener is set a year and a half after Picard's death and the Federation's last second gunship rescue of Coppelius. That means it's in mid-to-late 2400, before they go back in time.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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~!)
  23. 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.
  24. 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...
  25. 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.
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