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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Not just a major power... THE major power. Given the alleged scarcity of dilithium and its alleged indispensability in warp drives, the Federation now has every other galactic power over a barrel. Everyone else is scrounging for scraps to keep what few ships they have running while the Federation now has the reserves to dictate who gets to have interstellar capability.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely against Discovery. Say what you will about Voyager, but its crew actually got along pretty easily with the sole exception of psychopathic murderer Lon Suder and borg drone Seven of Nine. Discovery's crew all treat each other the way Seven of Nine treats Harry. Sneering contempt. We shouldn't expect Discovery to be anything but unapologetically bad. The worst part is that Discovery's showrunners are aware of at least some of the show's problems... but their efforts to address some of those issues only result in them digging a deeper hole for themselves. One thing @BlackRose pointed out to me while we were working on the next PI's work plan is that the ending of Discovery's 3rd season has effectively upset the apple cart in the interstellar political scene. The Federation has an effective near-monopoly on dilithium now, the all-important glowing rocks needed to make interstellar travel work. A monopoly on the dilithium supply means that the Federation can dictate terms to ANYONE. They get to decide who can sustain an interstellar civilization and who can't.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's a reference to the plot development in Attack on Titan's last two story arcs. Its author was already known to have some... questionable... views and sensibilities given who some of the characters are based on. The story arcs that followed the time skip changed the setting considerably in a way that can only be described as "putting on the Reich".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    So... any artistically-minded soul want to photoshop Mikimoto's head onto Duke Nukem's body?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, no problem. Unlike the start of Discovery's second season when Captain Pike took over, there really isn't a moment in Discovery's third season that actually feels like Star Trek. A lot of the time, what it really feels like is Star Wars. Booker feels like another poorly developed ersatz Han Solo ala Dash Rendar. He's the rogueish loner cargo ship captain running cargo out of various seedy and lawless spaceports, who later ends up on the run from that crime syndicate (which, in this case, is also the closest there is to the government) as the result of a falling out over some cargo. His ship even bears more than a passing resemblance to the Millennium Falcon or Outrider. Osyraa's basically a mix of Jabba the Hutt and Darth Vader, being the leader of the crime syndicate he used to work for and is on the run from, running an oppressive regime that profits from slave labor, indentured servitude, and extortion while oppressing basically everyone from the comfort of a large gray wedge-shaped space battleship. Like Han, the catalyst for Booker's transformation into an idealistic believer in La Resistance (in this case, the Federation) is meeting the True Believer girl of his dreams as she champions its cause and getting wrapped up in her agenda ending with him signing on himself after their first major victory. Yeah, there really aren't any moments like that in Discovery. There are some insincere "heartfelt" reunion moments like when Burnham finally catches up to the Discovery at the end of episode 3x02, but even three seasons in there's no sense of the crew coming together as a family. The closest they get is Saru's staff dinner, which ends in everyone storming out on him (and Georgiou stealing the wine on the way out). The crew of the Discovery just don't like each other personally or professionally, unlike the tightly-knit crews of the Enterprise, Enterprise-D, Deep Space 9, Voyager, and NX-01 Enterprise.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    There have been no new or noteworthy developments since that thread was locked. Harmony Gold USA still holds (under license) the "rest-of-world" distribution and merchandising rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross and "rest-of-world" merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and is still using registered trademarks on the Macross title, logos, and key art in various markets in a bid to keep legitimate Macross licensing botted up so they won't have to compete with it. They've lost, or are in the process of losing, their trademarks in the United Kingdom, European Union, and People's Repubic of China, and Big West is in the process of releasing all of Macross in China. Unfortunately, because US Trademark law is written differently, Big West cannot challenge the trademarks which Harmony Gold registered in the US the same way so the licensing deadlock in the west will continue. (The loss of these trademarks isn't really much of a blow to Robotech or Harmony Gold, as their own disclosures in court while disputing Big West's applications to register Macross's trademarks in the European Union revealed the European market for Robotech is basically nonexistent.) In terms of news that isn't noteworthy, the only quasi-recent development is what @Einherjar has already acknowledged. Namely, that the sequel to Titan Comics' widely-panned loose adaptation of Robotech's Macross Saga - which bore the uninspiring title of Robotech Remix - has seemingly become the latest Robotech property to take on Robotech's traditional "not cancelled, honest!" status for prematurely cancelled works. Publication of the monthly series ended without any notice - even to Titan's distributor - after the release of its fourth issue in January 2020. Titan Comics kept silent about it until months later, when they attempted to lay blame for the "delay" on the UK's COVID-19 lockdown even though the book had missed the release dates for multiple issues before the lockdown began. Speculation about the book's actual fate has been minimal, with most fans assuming that it was cancelled due to low sales. Basically, selling and reselling the streaming rights is pure profit... the production costs were amortized decades ago. It's not much, and it's definitely not honest work, but it is a tiny stream of supplementary income. The same deal with the ultra-low volume or print-on-demand collectibles that are about all the Robotech brand has left in terms of merchandising. Harmony Gold itself will claim that Robotech Academy is still under development (it isn't, according to the studio that did it) and that the live action movie is being fast-tracked (it isn't) to become a tentpole franchise for Sony Pictures (it isn't). Most fans suspect that Harmony Gold is holding out hope that Big West will want to distribute Macross in the US badly enough to either buy out their license for a king's ransom or pay them royalties for the use of the Macross name and logos that HG trademarked in the US.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was a fun trip down the Wikipedia rabbit hole... You have an excellent and well-made point about the enduring nature of piracy in specific regions... and it's not at all unreasonable that space piracy would be an enduring problem on the periphery of Federation space and outside of it, given the number of species that aren't quite sold on Federation values like the Orions and Nausicaans. I suppose a better way to frame my grievance with Discovery's new 32nd century setting WRT the Orions would be that they too are victims of this bizarre form of "setting stasis". We're 1,035 years into the future from Earth's first (depicted) contact with the Orions in Star Trek: Enterprise's fourth season and they seem to exist exclusively in the context of piratical, slave-trading crime syndicates. Discovery S3's writers dithered a bit mid-season about whether the diminished Federation's main antagonists - the Emerald Chain - were a government or not. They were initially introduced as an Orion-Andorian alliance, and subsequently zig-zagged between that and "it's just an Orion crime syndicate" in subsequent episodes as they depicted the Andorians as just hired (or coerced) muscle and went on to depict it was increasingly villainous and seemingly exclusively Orion-led. It lurched back towards "alliance" for a spell in the season finale when Osyraa proposed her truce and presented herself as a government official, but the writers walked that all the way back towards "crime syndicate" very quickly. (Presumably it had something to do with the implications of Burnham gunning down the Emerald Chain's leader... which would be a diplomatic catastrophe unless she were a crime syndicate leader nobody would miss, and whose syndicate would fall apart due to infighting without her.) The canonicity of Lower Decks is dubious, but that offers the ONLY instance of an Orion who isn't a crime syndicate member... who, in a rare moment of self-awareness, actually gets a little offended at being stereotyped as a space pirate.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    All told, it wasn't just stagnant... it was almost like a different timeline where the events and advances made in other Star Trek shows largely never happened. There are nods to them, like the USS Nog, the Voyager-J, and Picard's recording of Spock's speech on Romulan reunification, but that just serves to make the prominent absences and plot holes weirder than they would otherwise be. Of course, the oversights and research failures weren't restricted to Discovery. Lower Decks still has the Borg around long after Janeway destroyed their transwarp network and Picard has the explicitly-destroyed transwarp network still being used. I'm not so sure... there's not a lot in the timeline between 2379 and the mid-27th century, but once you get to the mid-26th century you're into the Temporal Cold War era established by Enterprise but referencing events in TNG and other shows. From there, the Temporal Cold War era kind of dominates things until the late 31st century.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    That, in and of itself, is kind of emblematic of how Discovery's writers don't seem to have had any real ideas for advancing the Star Trek setting. The USS Discovery might've traveled forward into the 32nd century, but literally all that accomplished was to better-justify the set design looking far too advanced for the period it was originally intended for. Everything else either stayed the same or got worse. 930 years have passed and everyone is still using conventional matter/antimatter reactors moderated with refined dilithium to power conventional warp drives, despite better alternatives for both having been available for over eight centuries. Replicated food is still somehow "bad" or worse than "real" food despite being indistinguishable down to the molecular level, despite replicator technology despite eight and a half centuries of technological advancement. The Orion piracy problem that Earth Starfleet was dealing with in the 2150s is still a problem a thousand years later. The Discovery's spore drive is still a unique and impossible-to-replicate drive system 930 years after it was trialed (despite tech that does the same job better having been discovered over eight centuries ago and put into service six centuries ago). Discovery has been updated, technologically, but nothing functional changed internally or externally except the interface for the spore drive and the addition of a cloaking device. It seems like the only thing that changed was the year on the calendar.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Quite the opposite! In an unusual twist, Vance actually called Osyraa out as a spoiled, entitled, elitist, hypocritical space Karen precisely because she doesn't eat sh*t. As bizarre and implausible as it sounds, the very 32nd century cosmopolitan Osyraa apparently doesn't know how replicators work. Replicators were far and away the most economical and accessible source for all kinds of basic needs... including food and clothing. Osyraa would have to be living in obscene luxury if she never eats replicated food even aboard Viridian and never wears replicated clothing. That would mean that she's carrying massive stocks of natural foodstuffs and water, that she's got one or more private chefs working for her to prepare that food for her on-demand, and that her clothes are all individually tailored for her. When much of former Federation, even the parts that are now Emerald Chain territory, is still struggling with basic necessities, Osyraa is living like Louis XVI right before the French Revolution. Holodecks must work differently in the 32nd century, since when they were invented they used replicator technology heavily to create anything that might be worn, eaten, or otherwise inert matter that might leave the bounds of the holomatrix. I'd assume programmable matter must be involved now though that raises some awkward questions about whether that's something that can be safely eaten, drunk, or inhaled. Yeah, Fleet Admiral Vance was set to be the Reasonable Authority Figure in Star Trek: Discovery until he mysteriously developed a blind spot regarding Burnham's insubordination and chronic reg-breaking about two-thirds of the way through the season. That he allowed Burnham to be promoted to command the Discovery is difficult to swallow, even if he did effectively demote the ship to a glorified freighter.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... well, maybe Georgiou and Tilly, but that'd just steal the remaining 40-something votes Burnham got. ... oh god, you're right. This series DOES resemble one of the Star Trek novels penned by Shatner. Did he have a writing credit on this turd, or is this just an unfortunate coincidence? (Specifically, The Return... where Shatner un-kills Kirk after the events of Star Trek: Generations and has him not only defeat every major member of the TNG crew including Worf and Data, but also briefly captains a Defiant-class USS Enterprise, defeats a secret Borg-Romulan alliance, and dies destroying the entire Borg collective after sucker-punching Picard.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So, I was perusing a Facebook Star Trek group I frequent and saw that they were running a poll about who was the best Captain of the USS Discovery. At time of writing, 865 users had voted and the votes fell as follows: Can we just appreciate this is a major Star Trek group with over 135,000 members and Burnham came in dead last by a huge margin in a Captains popularity poll specific to the series she's the main character of? She barely managed eleven times the number of people who entered an invalid response!
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There are some good moments in there... though a fair amount of it is inconsequential extras. "Spiritia Dreaming" actually shows the Protodeviln being released by the investigation team and Gepernich and Gigile possessing their hosts. "TOP GAMRIN" (sic) shows Gamlin's entry into the (New) UN Spacy and his training under Milia.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Like common sense, common knowledge is often surprisingly uncommon. Normal, ridge-headed Klingons were back to being the norm from 2271 onwards... so by the time of "Trials and Tribble-ations", the TOS Klingons hadn't been around for a good 102 years and counting. It's not entirely surprising that they might not know since one is a physician and the other is an engineer. Neither of them are historians, and by the time things started to get properly historical (the Khitomer conference) the ridge-headed Klingons were the ones on display again. Kang, Kor, and Koloth may have been insulated somewhat from the consequences of their condition by the fact that their families were extremely influential Klingon nobility, back in a period when the Empire wasn't quite so meritocratic as it was in the 2360s and beyond. In the case of others, the IKDF troops along the Federation border may have simply gone to promote from within if commanders who weren't augment virus sufferers were unwilling to command a ship of dishonored troops. (That the Klingons on the frontier weren't so Proud Warrior Race Guy as the ridge-headed ones we're familiar with from before and after would make sense... someone who hasn't got the opportunity to earn great honor wouldn't be as obsessed with honor in general.) (If the civil war from the relaunch novels happened in canon, the influential augment Klingon families may also have been doing a bit of wearing fake forehead ridges in public in the more urbane parts of the Empire.) It does explain a lot of the show's problems... especially if we assume the in-universe author was not actually Starfleet and didn't know how a lot of the tech works. It's a neater explanation of the contraction between Burnham's mutiny conviction and Spock's later line about there being no record of a mutiny on a Starfleet ship. It explains why we see so much anachronistic tech, why the non-anachronistic tech doesn't work the way it does in other shows, why Discovery has a propulsion system that's clearly ridiculous and setting-breaking, why these Starfleet officers behave so unprofessionally, and why Burnham seems to never actually face lasting consequences for anything she does and has every major galactic event revolve around her and only her on a level even Q doesn't stoop to. That kind of heroic fantasy only works on the holodeck or in badly-written popular fiction. The level of edgy ham is certainly reminiscent of the Doctor's holonovel "Photons Be Free" in Voyager.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Peter Grill is basically just that one episode, twelve times.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah, this is the part where Hajime Isayama's manga jumped every shark on Earth in every possible reality and decided to change genres from dystopian young adult fiction to being the author's love letter to both far-right militant nationalism and violent antisemitism. I've tried watching the final season but my tolerance for misery porn is limited and that's all this story arc is.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... to be fair, all "Trials and Tribble-ations" did was acknowledge an issue that was already a subject of substantial speculation and debate in the Star Trek fanbase. For what it's worth, "Affliction" and "Divergence" did a pretty good job of explaining it in a way that tied up almost all of the loose ends and meshes well with what'd been established about Klingon culture and its warrior ethos. Dr. Antaak, General K'Vagh, and the other Klingons in the ENT two-parter mention several times that Klingons afflicted by the accidentally created augment virus would be regarded as physically deformed, mentally compromised, and "contaminated" by human genes. They believed they would be outcasts in the Empire, and it's not hard to see why they would think that. We heard from Martok in "You Are Cordially Invited" that Klingons even in the late 24th century still have a strong bias against other races and cultures. His wife Sirella believed that inviting aliens into their families meant risking losing their identity as Klingons. Now imagine how Klingons of an earlier, less open-minded era might regard fellow Klingons who are "contaminated" with human DNA. They would have been outcasts as a threat to Klingon cultural and racial purity. Then, of course, there's the Klingon culture's attitudes on subjects like physical deformity and disability. The Klingons considered deviations as minor as albinism to be culturally taboo, to the extent that having a child with a deformity is considered dishonorable and the child is either disowned or killed as in DSC's first season and DS9 "Blood Oath". The Augment Klingons were much more deformed (by Klingon standards) than Voq or Qagh/"The Albino", meaning they would essentially automatically lose honor in the eyes of their fellow Klingons for living with a deformity. We've also seen how the Klingons handle physical and mental disability. In TNG "Ethics", we saw that the standard Klingon approach to nontrivial physical disability is for the disabled person to commit suicide. Their attitude towards people with mental disabilities like the elderly Kor's senility in DS9 "Once More Unto the Breach" was dismissive at best, abusive at worst. Then, of course, there's Starfleet's role in the augment virus since the whole reason the augment virus came to exist was Starfleet's sloppy job dealing with the augments that Arik Soong stole from Cold Station 12 and their hostile actions against the Klingons in a bid to cover their tracks. That got Antaak working on Klingon augments, leading to the virus which caused the deformity, mass-sterilization of Klingon colony planets, and an inheritable disability afflicting generations of Klingons. Five'll get you twenty Earth Starfleet just buried the everloving hell out of the records pertaining to that little disaster. When you think about it in those terms, it's not surprising that Worf's attitude would be "we don't discuss it". The TOS Klingons are Klingons living with an inherited genetic illness and thus living in a permanent state of dishonor that their families couldn't escape from, living as outcasts among their own people on the Empire's borders, and all because of one of Earth's - and Starfleet's - greatest heroes. It's understandable Worf wouldn't want to explain that to his Starfleet colleagues. Dusting that one off would be disrespectful to all of the Klingons visiting K-7, would be sure to upset his Starfleet colleagues, and might draw attention because that's not something outsiders are supposed to know. Of course, there is also the possibility that Worf, having been raised on Earth by humans, is just as in the dark as his crewmates are and is making a joke about it in his trademark deadpan manner (or bluffing his way through the conversation since he's Proud Warrior Race guy and doesn't want to admit he's not familiar with this chapter in Klingon history). Given how Discovery massively exaggerates the physical traits of the Klingons to render them bestial and monstrous-looking, flanderizes their entire culture into a single-minded lust for violent conquest, gets the Klingon religion completely wrong, outright dismisses the entire concept of Klingon honor to depict Klingons as opportunists with very flexible loyalty who will sell their own leaders out for a decent meal or just to get ahead, includes a wannabe messiah who blasphemously proclaims himself their second coming, and has the "token good" Klingon be the one who abandons everything Klingon about himself... I have a rather different theory. My headcanon is that Star Trek: Discovery is the 23rd century equivalent of the Turner Diaries or some other insane tract fantasizing about race war and intent on dehumanizing an entire group of people by exaggerating racist stereotypes. Probably a low-budget holodrama penned by the real Michael Burnham, casting herself in the role of the protagonist who overthrows the Klingon Empire and saves humanity from an adversary depicted as bestial, subhuman, and so intent on malice as to be immune to reason. That the reason nobody and nothing from Discovery are ever referenced anywhere else being that 1. it's wholly fictional and 2. the Federation is so deeply embarrassed by its very existence that it wasn't circulated widely when it was published.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It definitely has that feel. The interior of Discovery was straight-up Death Star/Starkiller Base nonsense for scale. Contrast "Charlie and the Great Glass Turbolift" to Star Trek V, TNG: "Disaster", or VOY: "The Haunting of Deck Twelve"... all of which show that Starfleet turbolifts travel in close shafts with emergency bulkheads and even come equipped with ladders for emergencies. Though my favorite Starfleet safety faux pas is that there's a fair amount of evidence that Starfleet ships have actually had seatbelts since at least 2269 if you don't count J.J. Abrams movies, and the Starfleet crews just don't use them. The original Constitution-class USS Enterprise had seatbelts in TAS (see TAS: "One Upon a Planet"), and at least some shuttlecraft in TNG like the Type-15 shuttlepod were shown to be equipped with what looks like a full five-point safety harnesses for all occupants (TNG: "Power Play"). Yeah, there have been some weird takes on that over the years. Prior to Star Trek: Enterprise, it was generally assumed that first contact with the Klingons occurred after the formation of the Federation at some point in the early 23rd century. The comics and novels produced back then ran with the idea that there was a series of border wars in the early 23rd century that devolved into a cold war before Kirk became Captain of the Enterprise and that the Organians prevented the cold war from going hot in "Errand of Mercy" in 2267. Post-Enterprise, the conflicts were pushed into the late 22nd century in the relaunch novel 'verse when the fallout of a lot of Archer's decisions in episodes like ENT: "Dead Stop", "Affliction", and "Divergence" destabilizes the Klingon Empire badly enough for there to be a brief but furious civil war between the regular Klingons and TOS Klingons over TOS Klingons afflicted by the augment virus revolting over being consigned to second-class citizen status in the Empire and de facto exiled to its borders. Starfleet ended up having (more) egg on its face with the Klingons because the TOS Klingons acquired drone warships from a civilization that was dominated by the tech from the repair station in "Dead Stop", which Starfleet had been attempting to free from their dependency on it and Starfleet got the blame.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The potential was strictly illusory. They just traded one narrative dead-end for another. They were very limited in what they could do with Star Trek: Discovery in seasons one and two because the 2250s were a fairly well-documented era, and they were flat-out prohibited from doing anything that would have far-reaching consequences because they were hemmed in by TOS in the 2260s. Then they moved to the 3180s, and discovered that they had to basically break the Star Trek setting beyond all repair in order to have any potential for the kind of drama they wanted to write because Enterprise had established the Federation was a huge utopian society in the 31st century, that warp drive and matter/antimatter reactors were long-obsolete, and the scientific use of time travel would have allowed the events of the season to retroactively un-happen by fixing the Burn before it occurred. Yeah, on the outside Discovery is about the same size as the original Enterprise minus the warp nacelles being longer. On the inside, it seems to be about as big as V'Ger. Mind you, there is precedent for starships of the 31st century to be literally bigger on the inside... but this vast emptiness in Discovery serves no useful purpose and there wasn't any acknowledgement that Discovery possessed that kind of displacement technology. (Indeed, most of the technology in that ship seems to no longer exist in Discovery's setting, since that would've rendered "the burn" moot.) The weirdest part is that Osyraa was clearly willing to make some SUBSTANTIAL concessions in the name of forging an alliance with the Federation and Starfleet... but the minute she was asked to sacrifice something personally she lost her sh*t and started shooting. Even more glaringly... why is there a massive column of inert programmable matter anyone could just fall into and suffocate? Even by Starfleet's lax standards, the 32nd century Discovery is an OSHA nightmare. Even more of a headscratcher is why the Sphere Data was still there in the first place. Discovery's original computer was duotronic. That technology was obsolete by the early 24th century, never mind the 32nd century. If Discovery's systems were modernized as Saru says, they would have replaced the entire computer core (or cores) with the latest technology not tried to run a new OS on a 930 year old system. The Burn being caused by a radioactive mutant who developed magical subspace psychic powers that affect dilithium AND NOTHING ELSE is just some cr*p-tier writing. It's like the writers got to the part of the season where they were going to unveil the cause of the burn and realized they'd never actually come up with one. The showrunners excuse seems to be that Su'Kal's ability ONLY works because he was physically present on the dilithium planet and the massive dilithium reserves there. If he goes anywhere else, his powers are useless/inert. The writers at least tried to backhand an explanation for why Starfleet never properly investigated the Burn out in a few episodes. Admiral Vance is pretty blunt about Starfleet in the 32nd century being spread VERY thin due to the massive losses it sustained in the Burn and the Federation having shrunk to a tenth of its original size with key members like Vulcan and Trill bailing. They were so busy trying to keep what little was left of the Federation together and fend off the Emerald Chain that they didn't have the time to conduct major investigations of the burn... though analyzing the black boxes should've been SOP, and there's no excuse for them having not done that. It was a teaspoon shallow obvious setup for Burnham's second karma houdini and end-of-season promotion. I'm more amazed that they let Tilly live, since her character is now redundant with the addition of Tal. The worst part is the writers acknowledged what a pointless stunt the whole thing was right in the episode. Booker had been missing for three weeks. Another twelve hours wasn't likely to change anything in his status. Section 31 is in development hell, and unlikely to ever be produced given the franchise's money troubles and the general audience dissatisfaction with the grimdarkness of it all. Smart money says this was just Michelle Yeoh's exit from the series and franchise ala Denise Crosby. It's even more glaring when you watch it in close company with either season two or later season three episodes and you realize that it's all completely insincere. This crew HATES EACH OTHER. Passionately. There is real loathing here. Put them in a room together outside of a professional context and the loathing spills out into everything they say and do. That's been a problem since Nemesis, with the miniature transporter that Data used to rescue Picard. Mind you, if the 32nd century transporters works more like a spatial trajector (from Voyager) or the subspace inverter (from the Next Generation) then they may have an easy out. Those were folded-space teleportation rather than "disassemble you at the subatomic level" teleportation.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That seems to be the general consensus of the season finale on the Star Trek Facebook groups and subreddits I've been on. There are a few folks gamely attempting to defend it, but most fans seem to be either disappointed, upset, or downright disgusted with Star Trek: Discovery now. Even the official Star Trek subreddit has abandoned its usual role as an echo chamber for pro-Discovery fans and started taking shots across the franchise's bow. The main bones of contention seem to be, in descending order of vitriolitic-ness: Interior shots of Discovery during the turbolift fight sequence. In previous Star Trek works, turbolifts traveled in narrow elevator shaft-like spaces that ran both vertically and horizontally through the ship's tightly packed interior. Discovery's season finale features a bizarre, and shockingly long, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator-esque sequence where Burnham and Booker are fighting on turbolift cars which zoom hither and yon through a MASSIVE empty interior space far larger than anything that could be contained within the Discovery's internal spaces with the turbolift shaft being just airborne rectangular frames springing into existence as the car travels and disappearing once it's past. Normally turbolifts can travel anywhere in a ship in a matter of seconds, but this is a fifteen minute long elevator ride to nowhere through the unspecified bowels of the ship that now seems to be slightly smaller than V'Ger. The warp core ejection. Normally, a ship's warp core is depicted as being a substantially large device - normally a good half dozen or more decks high - and in or directly adjoining main engineering and connected to various plasma conduits which carry the reaction plasma off to the EPS grid that powers the ship and to the warp nacelles to charge the warp coils. On the USS Discovery, the warp core is seemingly located in the middle of nowhere, isn't connected to anything, looks like an oil drum with blue LEDs, and when ejected spends a not-inconsiderable amount of time sliding down a shaft (seemingly under gravity) and bouncing off the sides of said shaft on the way out. Designing a warp core that can't even be ejected cleanly when it's full of highly volatile antimatter seems like a REALLY bad idea. Osyraa's death being a non-event. Despite being the main antagonist for this entire series of Discovery either directly or by proxy via her organization the Emerald Chain, Osyraa's death is treated almost as an afterthought. Her fight with Burnham in Discovery's computer core ends with her walking away assuming Burnham is now suffocating to death inside a column made up of programmable matter and Burnham shoots her dead seemingly by accident. She just gets hit once and goes down like a sack of potatoes. Burnham doesn't even check to see if she's actually dead or not. Granted, the lack of drama is certainly realistic... but it lacks closure when the villain gets hit seemingly entirely by dumb luck and dies with the protagonist not even bothering to check the body. We only find out she's dead and not just stunned or wounded in the closing narration! Burnham's Designated Hero status allowing her to pull yet another Karma Houdini and become Captain. Since this particular problem only crops up at the very end, it's kind of overshadowed by the writing problems elsewhere. Burnham, who had mere days earlier in-series been the recipient of a demotion and a severe dressing-down from the Starfleet commander in chief and her captain with the explicit indication that the only reason she wasn't up for her second dishonorable discharge from Starfleet was because she'd saved lives with her stunt on Hunhau, is promoted to Captain and given command of USS Discovery once Saru decides to take a leave of absence to help Su'Kal adjust to life on 32nd century Kaminar. Burnham crying all the damn time. It's been made fun of a lot. Burnham cries at least one in like eight out of thirteen episodes this season and as often as three times per episode in some cases. It's somewhat exacerbated by Sonequa Martin-Green's unconvincing acting, but it compares unfavorably to Kathryn Janeway's ability to handle even greater stresses with a calm, collected demeanor and considerable grace. The way it was handled felt more like an attempt to telegraph to the audience that the scene was supposed to be dramatic, which lacking direction and acting tended to render comical or dull. In the wake of the Discovery being disabled by detaching its warp nacelle at warp, I've noticed a lot more people taking shots at the ugly Starfleet ship designs that hang around in Starfleet Headquarters as well. Especially comparing a lot of them to ships from Stargate SG-1.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That Hope is You, Part 2 (DSC 3x13) OR "The Culmination of Your Poor Choices" So, we have come to the end of this particular atrocity against the honorable name and legacy of Star Trek. On one level, I am relieved that this mess has finally reached its screeching, juddering halt like the saucer section of the Enterprise-D crashing on Viridian III. On others, I am depressed beyond measure that this is the standard of writing that now passes for a flagship Star Trek series and that these horrid characters are going to be held up, in their own story, as heroes of Starfleet and quite possibly the saviors of the entire United Federation of Planets. It's one thing to be hailed as a hero of the UFP when you have saved it from an exterior threat, saved peace negotiations with a major hostile power, or defeated an existential threat to every species. The Discovery crew are going to be hailed as heroes for cleaning up a series of problems they created through their own idiocy, shortsightedness, and unwillingness to abide by Federation law and Starfleet regulations. It's cold comfort that Star Trek: Discovery will probably never get a movie, so this lot will be forgotten once their series ends. Curiously, the credits music they chose for this episode is the Original Series theme. Please CBS. Let this turd end here. Don't go any further. Make it easy for whoever replaces Kurtzman and Secret Hideout to strike this dumpster fire from the record so we can have real Star Trek again some day.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    There is a Tide (DSC 3x12): AKA "Space Karen demands to speak to Starfleet's Manager."
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Su'Kal (DSC 3x11)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The way it's presented both here and in TAS "Yesteryear", the Guardian of Forever seems to have a singular consciousness and memory spread across all the universes where there is a Guardian of Forever. Either that or it's a singular entity who physically exists in multiple realities at once. Its memory is immune to changes in the timeline or the creation of alternate timelines... like when a Federation research team accidentally failed to close a stable time loop that created an alternate reality where Spock died as a child, it still have knowledge of both the alteration and of Spock's interactions with it in a different timeline.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Terra Firma, Part 2 (DSC 3x10)
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