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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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".
  3. He's currently 81 years old... so if he looks old, he's earned it.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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...
  13. 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.
  14. ... 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.
  15. ... 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Considering preventing alterations to the timeline - retroactively or otherwise - is literally their job, it's kind of amazing they haven't stepped up to do something about it. (The DTI novels, amusingly, did have the TIC retrocausally prevent the existence of a timeline based on the rejected series pitch that became Discovery's 3rd season... and get rather cross about having to do so.)
  18. Now now... his other achievements include getting the sh*t kicked out of him repeatedly, getting accused of having sex with farm animals, and admitting to having sex with farm animals (allegedly in jest, but I have my doubts). Maybe they can salvage it down the road by reinventing him as Harry Flashman... he's certainly enough of a tosspot to walk into that role without issue. It couldn't possibly be as bad as the proposed Section 31 series... Though time travel in Trek is messy enough as it is, and I'm still waiting for the 29th century Temporal Integrity Commission or 31st century Federation Temporal Agency to roll up and make the Kelvin timeline un-happen.
  19. When they fit with the story, sure. Being a more cerebral sort of sci-fi, Star Trek doesn't offer quite as many opportunities to work that kind of thing into the story and when they become a bit too frequent it starts to feel out of character for the series and the franchise. Deep Space Nine balanced it with a lot of character-heavy breather episodes in the Dominion War story arc, though Voyager's story got criticized a lot more heavily for its increased emphasis on action in later seasons and Enterprise really felt the impact of (relative) darkness-induced audience apathy as the Temporal Cold War story arc dragged on. The space battles and other action sequences were a lot easier to justify when it was the TOS crew under Jim Kirk, since they were always more a "cowboy cop" outfit. When the movies turned to the TNG cast under Jean-Luc Picard it got a lot harder to take seriously. Picard was a consummate diplomat who always had a vocal disdain for violence, so to many fans it felt like a bad fit when Insurrection and Nemesis tried to turn him into an action hero. (After all, he had Riker for when things needed to get physical...) It's more a bell curve sort of situation, really. The producers and writers had Roddenberry on a short leash because he, like George Lucas, was a good idea man but a desperately awful writer. TOS was a lot of allegorical morality tales, but it was tempered by the staff reining in Roddenberry's excesses. When he slipped the leash and secured full control of TNG in its development the staff really struggled under his rather dictatorial edicts as he took the utopian concept to its illogical extreme by mandating that the crew were all just such consummate professionals that interpersonal conflicts weren't a thing anymore. Everyone had to be a Saint, and that made the series boring. After he was ousted, the new showrunners reversed course back towards the more nuanced and tempered version of that utopian vision that'd been used in TOS. DS9 was itself an act of rebellion against his crazy edicts, and spent a lot of time exploring the logical implications of that kind of setting without actually compromising the core of that vision of a more enlightened future. Sisko's "Saints in Paradise" speech is basically a distillation of what DS9's showrunners thought of the unchecked Gene Roddenberry's creative edicts. Whether or not it goes over well is all about managing audience expectations. People expect to see amazing space battle action sequences in, say, Star Wars... it's right in the title. It's not something people usually come to Star Trek for... which was part of why the action-centric Abrams movies didn't test well.
  20. Yeah, even the most devoted Star Trek fans will generally admit Trek movies in general are VERY hit-and-miss. Usually, you'll hear that the even-numbered movies (Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Undiscovered Country, First Contact) are the good ones and the odd-numbered movies (The Motion Picture, Search for Spock, Final Frontier, Generations, Insurrection) range from "less good" to "just plain bad". It wasn't until Nemesis - the 10th and final Trek movie - that the pattern finally broke with a lamentably bad even-numbered movie. The Abrams movies... the first one wasn't bad, but it wasn't in any way memorable either. The second was a real stinker, and the third bombed badly enough that it killed the series and lost enough money to leave the whole affair a wash if not a loss. Not a lot of enthusiasm among fans for Kelvin Trek 4. The reactions I've seen have been more like a wary sort of "I wonder how they'll screw THIS up".
  21. As ever, it's weirdly impressive how completely you miss the point of any story that isn't about endless pointless warfare. It's enough to make me rather worried about you, TBH. Star Trek has always been high-concept sci-fi about allegorically examining the human condition and the promise of a better, brighter future where the better angels of human nature have prevailed. It's never exactly been super subtle with its allegory either. It's what separates it from the thousands of generic sci-fi or sci-fa titles that are just weak excuses for a bunch of ray gun battle action scenes. The questionable writing inherent in terrible fanfic-tier ideas like the uber-powerful black starship with the edgy name aside, that Admiral Marcus had colluded with an unsanctioned rogue intelligence agency to launch a genocidal preemptive strike against the Klingons was the giveaway that he was The Bad Guy... because that's massively counter to Federation ideals on top of being shady AF and a great way to start an unnecessary war for no reason. It's a great example of the kind of dodgy, ill-conceived writing that we've come to expect from the so-called "Kelvin timeline". It's not really Star Trek, it's a generic sci-fi action movie thinly disguised as Star Trek... like a mockbuster, but higher budget.
  22. I'm not sure that's actually an obstacle. I'm kind of hesitant to just say it in plain language out of respect for the late Mr. Yelchin... but I don't think audiences are really all that attached to, or invested in, the Abrams Star Trek cast. The Abrams movies were stand-alone, and even their positive reviews tend to mention how forgettable the films are. The Abrams cast isn't immediately recognizable and associated with the characters the way the TOS and TNG casts were/are because they haven't been around long enough to build up the necessary familiarity. So they could probably recast Chekhov (and any number of other characters) without anyone really noticing or caring.
  23. Well, yeah... if you're only looking at the raw box office gross and literally nothing else. The problem with that view is that it's so badly out-of-context that it's a meaningless factoid. Yeah, the new movies brought in more dollars in absolute and unqualified terms... but that ignores literal decades of inflation, the increase in ticket prices over that period, the simply gargantuan literal order of magnitude difference in product costs, etc. Unadjusted for inflation, Star Trek: Into Darkness had a worldwide box office gross five times the size of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan's... but it cost 15.5x as much to make. Adjusted for inflation, Into Darkness cost 6.5x as much to make and only earned about twice as much. So the ratio of box office gross to budget actually massively favors Wrath of Khan (2.5x vs 8.1x). Even that is a pretty significant distortion, however, because it doesn't account for advertising spending. The global advertising blitz that accompanied Into Darkness is estimated to have left only about $30M of the film's $467.4M box office take as actual profit. Adjusted for inflation, if Wrath of Khan made $12.5M or more in profit in 1982, it outperformed Into Darkness. If only the international box office take was profit, Wrath of Khan blew Into Darkness into the weeds. (If you look at the cost performance of Trek movies in terms of spend vs. box office gross as a percentage, Into Darkness is outperformed by every single pre-Abrams movie except Insurrection and Nemesis, two films virtually all Trekkies agree were stinkers. In those terms, Into Darkness is the franchise's third-worst performer overall, slightly behind Final Frontier, and Beyond is the second-worst, with Nemesis taking the all time turdburger prize it so richly deserves.)
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