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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    So... since I'm in kind of a foul mood and can't sleep, I figured I'd get cracking on my retrospectives for this steaming turd of a season Star Trek: Discovery is nearly done evacuating from the bowls of CBS All Access. That Hope is You, Part 1
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Really, they should have flooded the damn ship with 32nd century Starfleet officers for precisely that reason... to keep the 23rd century crew from screwing things up by approaching every problem from a 23rd century angle. *incensed beeping on the behalf of the Temporal Prime Directive* ... yeah, and the penultimate episode of Discovery's third season isn't making it any better. The season's big bad, Osyrra, has a brief moment where she's actually more competent and sane than any of the main characters. She hijacked the Discovery to go to Starfleet headquarters and propose an alliance between the Federation and Emerald Chain. One that would have forced her to make significant concessions and basically have ended the conflict in the series in a way that did literally nothing but benefit the Federation AND the people living under the Emerald Chain. Negotiations break down when it becomes apparent Starfleet is hung up on wanting Osyrra to stand trial for her various acts of piracy. It comes freighted with an absolutely terrible attempt at a quip involving waste recycling on starships where replicated food (despite its structure being identical or nearly identical to the genuine article depending on the replicator's mode) is repeatedly compared to (and acknowledged to be technically made from) biological waste. Burnham and Booker come to the rescue and it seems we're ending this season by doing Die Hard on a Starship. Stamets is the latest casualty of Burnham's sociopathic tendencies, since he wants to go back to the nebula to rescue everyone who was left behind with Su'Kal, and Burnham spaces him to keep him out of the Emerald Chain's hands. (Yeah, he's rescued immediately but she doesn't even have the kindness to use an airlock. She traps him on one side of a force field with an overloading phaser. All in all, a flat, boring, and lifeless episode where the writers seemingly forgot the Sphere Data AI can't be deleted... because Osyrra seems to have a special Fonzarelli touch that can, and forces the AI to take shelter in a bunch of those anachronistic repair robots that Discovery shouldn't have had in the 23rd century.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not... the way the Guardian of Forever worked in previous episodes, the only way to bring him to the 32nd century using it without massively screwing up the timeline would be to send someone to 23rd century Talos IV and collect him after he'd been cripplied in that training accident and left there to live out the remainder of his life. Not to mention using the Guardian of Forever would probably be considered a violation of the Temporal Accord and the subsequent ban on time travel. The Guardian of Forever itself went into hiding during the Temporal Cold War and wouldn't let anyone use it without them passing its secret test of character. (Talk about an insane arbitrary rule... how do you even enforce a ban on time travel? Whatever agreement banned it seems to have involved dismantling or destroying all temporal technologies. How do you enforce a ban like that when you no longer have all the infrastructure to monitor and police the timeline and protect yourself from unauthorized changes to it? Moreover, it wouldn't exactly stop factions from the past from traveling into the future to interfere there either. It smacks of a really badly thought-out idea intended to work around the existence of 31st century institutions like the Federation Temporal Agency who could've potentially solved "the Burn" and made it un-happen without the intervention of Discovery.) I'd imagine 32nd century Starfleet could drum up a few good men, women, and/or beings of no, other, indeterminate, or multiple gender to babysit Saru and the Discovery crew without having to resort to abducting capable officers from the past.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know... that's more or less what everyone from the online pundits to casual fans predicted was going to happen when the word leaked that Patrick Stewart was too expensive for the show and that his character going to be killed off at the end of the show's first season. It certainly wouldn't be without precedent. 24th century Starfleet had named at least two ships after deceased Starfleet officers in canon: the USS Chekhov in TNG (among the ships lost at Wolf 359) and USS Archer in Nemesis. The relaunch novelverse had a USS James T. Kirk as well.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Why are literally all of us better writers than the people actually writing for Star Trek: Discovery? Yup... at this point, Saru seems to be playing to the reverse of every Vulcan trope. Instead of being the one who's always on an even keel and is consistently immune to whatever the weird space condition of the day is, he's the one who's always losing his cool and being affected while the rest of the crew is fine. Tilly's... "performance"... as Discovery's first officer is a very strong argument for why the chain of command exists in the first place. Sylvia Tilly is the least experienced officer on Discovery. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. She didn't even finish her training at the academy. She got a commission to the rank of ensign as a reward for her at-best peripheral involvement in the events which ended the Klingon War. She rates herself as the top student in her year at theoretical engineering, but we have no reason to believe this is anything other than her exaggerated opinion of herself (and all her knowledge is now 900+ years out of date). Her only noted skill on her Memory Alpha profile? A proficiency at beer pong. She entered the command training program but was only in it for a few months at most. If Saru actually followed Starfleet regulations, Tilly would literally be the last person in line for the big chair. Burnham disqualified herself based on her own egregious displays of incompetence and disregard for orders, but there's still (in rough order of rank): Commander Nhan (Chief of Security) Commander Reno (Chief Engineer?) Lt. Commander Stamets (Deputy Chief Engineer?) Lieutenant Rhys (Tactical) Lieutenant Detmer (Helmsman) Lieutenant Haj (Helmsman) Lieutenant Nilsson (Spore Drive specialist) Lieutenant (JG) Bryce (Communications) Lieutenant (JG) Owosekun (Operations) Lieutenant (JG) Linus (Science) ... and a number of other officers who are not named, but serve as second or third-shift bridge officers and relief bridge officers. The only named characters on the show who wouldn't be ahead of her would be Dr. Culber and Dr. Pollard, who are not part of the normal chain of command as shipboard physicians. Basically, the way it should have worked is as per this quote from O'Brien and Nog in DS9 "Behind the Lines": The only way Sylvia Tilly should ever have become First Officer is if every other commissioned officer on Discovery was dead or missing except for herself and Saru. The one thing we can say with certainty is that, now that Tilly's incompetence is directly responsible for the Emerald Chain seizing control of the Discovery and likely using it to stage an attack on Starfleet Headquarters, her mother's statement that allowing her into the command training program was a terrible mistake will be triumphantly vindicated after 900 years. THAT'S ANOTHER QUESTION. Why is the Discovery still apparently crewed exclusively by 23rd century Starfleet officers? The USS Discovery is this dismal 32nd century Starfleet's most important and versatile ship due to its spore drive allowing it to instantly teleport anywhere the way that any Starfleet ship should have been capable of for six hundred years if the showrunners had done their homework. She was even upgraded with 32nd century Federation technology during a refit at Starfleet Headquarters. Her crew's scientific, technical, and situational knowledge is NINE HUNDRED YEARS out of date, and none of its crew are qualified on the new 32nd century systems. Even if Starfleet were going to charitably allow the 23rd century crew to remain aboard, the Discovery didn't even have a full crew complement. She went into the future with a skeleton crew of about eighty. It's insane that Starfleet didn't assign a 32nd century Starfleet captain to the ship to replace acting captain Saru and make sure the crew followed orders and fill out the crew with 32nd century Starfleet officers who could retrain the 23rd century ones on all the new tech that'd been incorporated into the ship. Actually, that raises further questions. Why is the Sphere Data AI still present? The USS Discovery's systems were all upgraded with 32nd century technology. The only system that didn't get replaced wholesale was the spore drive. How is the sphere data AI still around if the ship's computer cores were replaced with 32nd century ones? You can't tell me that the Federation made no advances in computer technology in those 900 years, because we know that's not true via other Star Trek shows. The USS Discovery had duotronic computer systems, a technology introduced in 2243 which lasted about eighty years before being replaced by isolinear optical systems in the 2320s. Bio-neural circuitry was introduced in 2371, and by the 31st century Starfleet ships had organic circuitry. On the wrong side of the grave on Talos IV for about the last eight hundred and fifty years... also, waiting for filming to start on his own show.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That, in and of itself, was implied to be a pretty fun philosophical argument in-universe and definitely was outside of it... at least until the showrunners spoiled it by revealing that a person maintained continuity of consciousness throughout the entire transport process and could literally feel themself in two places at once during the process (as in "Realm of Fear"). That kind of had some fridge horror of its own when taken with "Relics" and "Counterpoint" where people were stored in transporter buffers for very long times... presumably aware but helpless the entire time. Jean-Luc Picard didn't have continuity of consciousness during his alleged transfer into the golem body Dr. Soong had created, so it's open to debate whether that golem is Jean-Luc Picard or just a replicant that thinks it's Jean-Luc Picard because it has copies of his memories.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Apparently not... and not just because of how dilithium works. They've got enough egg on their faces to make omelettes to feed an army after declaring that nobody could make a warp drive without dilithium and following it up by revealing the Romulans were members of the Federation for centuries before the Burn. The subspace pulse in Prime Directive didn't destroy the Enterprise either... it just messed the ship's engines up something fierce. Hell, the Burn would've made a lot more sense if it HAD been a prank by Q or some other higher-dimensional lifeform. If it weren't for the death toll, it'd be exactly the kind of thing Q might've done to troll Picard or Janeway. It doesn't even really make sense that they're still using conventional warp drives in the 31st or 32nd century. USS Voyager brought back an enormous amount of data on Borg and Voth transwarp drives, Borg transwarp conduits, quantum slipstream, and coaxial warp drive in 2378... all of which are faster and more efficient than conventional warp drive and none of which need a dilithium-based warp core. Starfleet was already adopting quantum slipstream as its next-generation FTL system in the late 24th and early 25th century, and based on remarks by designer Doug Drexler about the Enterprise-J design, Starfleet's engineers had developed a production version of coaxial warp drive (space fold) technology by the 26th century. That the Federation and every other major power in the galaxy was entirely dependent on dilithium-based matter/antimatter reactors to power conventional warp drives instead of the more advanced and capable alternative technologies over eight centuries after Voyager returned with its goldmine of alternative propulsion designs from the Delta Quadrant. They never even address the fact that Booker mentions his humble little courier ship has a quantum slipstream drive. Why is anyone faffing about with conventional warp drive that tops out around 5,100c (Warp 9.975, based on the TNG-era warp factor speed formula) when you could be getting places at ~2,630,000c (derived from "Hope and Fear" that put slipstream at approx. 300ly/hr).
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Picard didn't leave itself a sequel hook to build on in "Et in Arcadia Ego Part II", which was a rather odd choice given that it was supposed to be an ongoing series. There's no obvious direction for the story to continue in for its second season. Jean-Luc Picard died trying to save the (incredibly cynically named1) planet Coppelius from the Romulans, Starfleet arrived just in time to save the day, and Sutra's plan to summon extradimensional artificial lifeforms to destroy all sentient life is foiled. Picard had assembled his crew for one reason only: to locate and save Dahj's twin sister. That was the only reason any of them stayed together and everyone's minimal character arcs were resolved by the end of "Et in Arcadia Ego Part II". Rios got vindication for his dead captain and the crew of the ibn Majid who were cashiered out of the service by Oh after assassinating the delegation from Coppelius. Musiker got snubbed by her son because of her crappy decisions but was ultimately vindicated in proving that the Romulans had infiltrated Starfleet and were responsible for sabotaging the evacuation of Romulus. Dr. Jurati found Bruce Maddox (and murdered him) then met the Soong-type android population on Coppelius that were her life's ambition. Seven of Nine got revenge for Icheb by killing his murderer in cold blood. Elnor had no ambition besides Picard's mission. What's left to build on? The only unfinished job in season one's story was taking Dr. Jurati to the nearest Federation starbase to be arrested and stand trial for the murder of Bruce Maddox. The Federation has more or less abolished the death penalty, so her fate will be serving a long rehabilitation sentence in a comfortable Federation penal colony like the one in New Zealand seen in Star Trek: Voyager. It's unlikely they'll get much mileage out of the fact that Jean-Luc Picard died and was replaced by a replicant that thinks it's Jean-Luc Picard. He's not a Starfleet officer anymore and he has no security clearances to speak of, so nobody really has any stake in that except his few remaining friends and anyone who might want to argue the philosophical point about whether the Picard replicant is the same person as the flesh-and-blood Jean-Luc Picard or whether or not it has a soul. (Picard's friends, also being old friends of Data's, are likely to take this in stride and not think too hard about it.) 1. As a reference to Coppelia, the name implies that the showrunners and/or this latest Dr. Soong don't think that the androids are people.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Like @sketchley said, with that one reference you've officially put significantly more thought into this than the writers of Star Trek: Discovery did. If we were being really charitable - and I mean REALLY charitable - we could hypothesize that they were drawing on take that some Star Trek novels from the 90's that started in a book called Prime Directive that asserted that dilithium crystals had higher-dimensional properties and could be compromised by a sort of subspace pulse. That's never been referenced by any Star Trek TV series or movie though. It sounds like whatever Su'Kal did caused the dilithium's properties to temporarily change, preventing it from reacting with the EM field.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm not at all enthusiastic for Star Trek: Picard's second season. There's nowhere for the story to go... unless Jean-Luc Picard and/or Starfleet is going to spend the next ten episodes grapping with the fact that he's not really Jean-Luc Picard. He's a replicant that thinks he's Jean-Luc Picard.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    "The Burn" spread gradually across space from its origin point, albeit at incredible speeds faster than any faster-than-light stardrive. That it was a gradual phenomenon was what allowed the Discovery's crew to triangulate its point of origin using data from the "black box" data recorders of Starfleet ships that were destroyed as a result of it and a sensor network erected by a Vulcan experimental stardrive project. It didn't detonate dilithium, it made dilithium go inert temporarily. This meant that any ship powered by a matter/antimatter reactor that used dilithium to moderate the reaction between the matter and antimatter suffered an immediate catastrophic warp core breach when the reaction was suddenly uncontrolled. (We HAVE seen one technology that used subspace to teleport anywhere instantaneously... the coaxial warp drive from Star Trek: Voyager.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Su'Kal's psychic powers being the origin of the Burn didn't have any established precedent anywhere. Various forms of psychic powers - telepathy, empathy, telekinesis, and precognition - were known and tested-for by Starfleet and the Federation even in the 23rd century. Gary Mitchell's personnel file in TOS included his aptitude scores in various psychic disciplines and notes about a history of psychic ability running in his family. You'd think that if Saru's people had any innate psychic ability it would've showed up when he was screened for that kind of thing during his application to Starfleet. His people's history doesn't include anything like evolving into energy beings or anything that might explain a Kelpien suddenly developing powers that could cause havoc on a galactic scale. There's never been anything to suggest dilithium had any unusual properties in interaction with life forms. Apart from being used in antimatter reactor cores, the one thing we've seen it used for is jewelry on planets that didn't understand its value in more engineering-oriented applications. They never actually attributed the subspace shockwave or the destruction of Praxis to dilithium. Praxis was just identified as [the/a] key energy production facility in the Klingon Empire. The one time they've commented on what was actually going on there, it was described as a geothermal power station tapping the moon's core for energy and a separate mining operation for unspecified mineral resources. (There have been a few stories that've discussed dilithium as a potentially volatile material, like "Pen Pals", or a few expanded universe stories where the stuff can be straight-up ignited like what happened to Coridan during the Earth-Romulan War.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... but that often isn't enough to make a movie succeed on its own. (e.g. Ghost in the Shell with ScarJo still lost a millions.) General audiences, women included, also aren't necessarily interested in seeing a movie simply because "girl power" either... which sank the remake of Charlie's Angels and several other films from the last year or so. An interesting coincidence... I ordered pizza for dinner and was Order 66. It'll be interesting to see if the new stream-centric outlook on new movie releases has a significant impact on Rogue Squadron's prospects. It's going to be harder to tell quickly what movies are successes and what aren't when they start becoming direct-to-streaming exclusives or parallel releases.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's all green screens, so probably not. ... that's different from what they've been doing how? Star Trek has always kind of danced around the idea of future fashion, but Picard's wardrobe seemed to be ripped from contemporary closets for the most part. Seriously, look at the cast. Everyone's wearing polo shirts, cable knit sweaters, and jeans except the Romulans, who are just wearing leather. Ah, the Ewan McGregor maneuver. It almost feels like we're headed in that direction. The production values of Picard's first season were already pretty poor for what the show allegedly cost to make.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... I wonder how bad this latest round of budget cuts were. Picard started with just ten episodes in its first season. They can't cut many more before it becomes a miniseries.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's not so much that they were a forgettable bunch... it's that, compared to the Galactic Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy, they were downright toothless. General Hux was the highest-ranking First Order line officer in the first two sequel trilogy movies. He was, at best, an ineffectual commander who was all pomp and bluster with nothing to back it up and his incompetence was routinely played for comic relief. Captain Phasma, the commander of the First Order's stormtrooper legions, was the very incarnation of disappointment. They try to build her up as this top tier badass who commands the unflinching obedience of the First Order's ground forces, but the only thing she does is get her ass handed to her. Finn holds her at gunpoint, forces her to deactivate Starkiller Base's shields, and then he and Han Solo throw her down a garbage chute. The next time we see her, she's presiding over Finn and Rose's execution at Snoke's flagship and is killed when Finn smacks her in the face and lets her fall to her death. Ben Solo (alias Kylo Ren) was an angsty Darth Vader cosplayer who so busy trying to look and sound intimidating to actually be intimidating. He can't pull off being the First Order's intimidating masked man because he keeps taking the damned thing off, and Adam Driver just is not intimidating-looking on his own. It doesn't help that the only fight he actually wins unassisted is the one against Finn in the first movie. It's hard to take him seriously as The Dreaded when he gets his ass handed to him by Rey (who, at that time, had never held a lightsaber before), by Luke (who wasn't even physically present), by Snoke's guards, and then by his own Knights of Ren. You can't help but suspect if any competent Jedi had faced him he'd have been over their knee getting his ass paddled for being a naughty boy inside of five minutes. Supreme Leader Snoke looks creepy and deformed, but apart from repeatedly bullying Hux and Kylo Ren (a low bar) all he manages to do is throw Rey around the room a little before he misreads the future and is summarily cut in half by his own protege, in a death he literally saw coming but did nothing to avoid. It's no exaggeration to say that the most effective and intimidating was the one stormtrooper who shouted "TRAITOR", threw away his weapons, and dueled Finn... and even he got killed without an ounce of dignity. Now that we've all seen, in three movies, how utterly incompetent the First Order was... it's gonna be nearly impossible to take Rogue Squadron seriously if they present the First Order as a genuine threat. It's more or less canon that the only reason the First Order gained any ground is because the New Republic and Resistance were breathtakingly incompetent. That was more a joke about Snoke's questionable wardrobe choices than the character himself... After all, haven't a fair number of us also been working from home in our PJ's for the better part of a year?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I haven't translated the interviews at the back of the booklet, but there's nothing new or noteworthy in the majority of it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well... this went downhill quick. I'll admit, the news that Rogue Squadron is to be set in the sequel trilogy era does not inspire confidence in me. I'd have a much easier time getting on board if there were a closer connection to Rogue One. It was the last truly good Star Wars movie, and I'd have liked to see them actually build on it by showing the formation of Rogue Squadron in the wake of the fatal derring-do that led to the Rebellion's first real victory over the Empire. Setting it in the sequel trilogy era means the connection is just the name and nothing else. Nobody's really all that invested in the Great Value brand version of the Galactic Empire as antagonists. They look the part, but they're not half as intimidating as the Empire because their leaders are hot garbage. (Admittedly, that Snoke telecommutes to run the First Order while in his pajamas and bathrobe feels a lot less silly now than it did a year ago.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There's one piece of art in the liner notes booklet that isn't in previous publications... but it's nothing particularly noteworthy. It's unused art for a revolver that would have belonged to Sylvie.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Star Trek: Discovery's writing leaves a lot to be desired... more so with each new season's fresh batch of poorly thought-out gimmicks and token attempts to convince the audience that it's "real" Star Trek. We're nearly at the end of the show's third season, and Star Trek: Discovery still feels like it doesn't really have a sense of what it wants to be or where it wants to go. The first season tried to go for nostalgia by having the pre-TOS Federation be at war with the Klingon Empire, but that ended up being so relentlessly grimdark that the morally ambiguous crew of the Discovery ended up looking scarcely less villainous than the Klingons did. So relentlessly grimdark, in fact, that the series itself seemed to quickly tire of it and switched gears to an equally grimdark plot involving the Mirror Universe in a bid to make the Discovery's crew look more heroic (or at least less villainous). Its second season tried to be more optimistic but its bait-and-switch with Captain Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise ended up devolving into an ill-considered ripoff of Terminator halfway through and its overwhelming focus on Burnham as Great Value John Connor meant that the rest of the cast still hasn't been properly developed. Now they're almost to the end of season three, they've jumped nine and a half centuries into the future to get away from the criticisms of their playing fast and loose with canon, they've once again fallen back on grimdarkness as a substitute for depth, and most of the cast still isn't developed because our new attempt to show that this show is drama is that Michael Burnham cries A LOT. To be honest, as we near the end of season three it really feels like a big part of the show's problem is that it never took the time to develop the rest of the cast. The ensemble cast that was the heart and soul of Star Trek for decades just isn't present in the writing of Star Trek: Discovery. Much of the bridge crew didn't even have names until the second season... something lampshaded rather cleverly by Harry Mudd in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad". Mirror!Georgiou was more a vehicle for various catty one-liners than a character, and has now departed the show after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past (whose name is apparently Carl). Saru and Tilly got an episode each in season two but haven't had anything meaningful since then. Only Michael Burnham is a fully-developed character, and she's an awful Mary Sue precisely because as the only fully developed character she has to do EVERYTHING herself in order to move the story along. We've had practically nothing for the rest of the crew... to the point that it was an obvious death flag when the show suddenly started developing Airiam. They're trying to make Sonequa Martin-Green carry this entire show and neither she nor the writers are up to the job. Now that the Discovery has found the incredibly lame source of "the Burn" and then been hijacked by Orion pirates who seem to be fixing to attack Starfleet Headquarters, they've got just two episodes to wrap this turd up and it feels like it's going to be a pretty rushed affair. Five'll get you twenty Starfleet Headquarters gets blown up and they hail Burnham as a hero anyway. He can't get much more inert than he already is... he's dead, and has been replaced by a replicant.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that was always around in at least limited quantities. That's how the writers of previous Star Trek shows gave us gems like "Spock's Brain", "The Practical Joker", "Code of Honor", "Profit and Lace", "The Omega Directive", and "Regeneration". Apart from Voyager's "The Omega Directive", the glaringly stupid episodes never really had any consequences that lasted beyond the end of the episode or outside the scope of the planet/ship of the week. This nonsense about a guy whose psychic powers cause him to emit radiation that specifically makes dilithium inert AND NOTHING ELSE wouldn't be at all outside the spectrum of usual bad episode BS for Star Trek if it wasn't the crux of an entire season-long serialized story arc that impacted the entire galaxy. The inconsistency WRT dilithium recrystalization wouldn't be so glaring if Discovery's seasons weren't less than half as long as the seasons of previous shows either, I guess.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, the best part of this is that this statement could be sincere or sarcastic with literally no change. It's just so bloody ridiculous that the origin of "the Burn" - the catastrophe that caused the deaths of millions if not billions and effectively ended interstellar civilization in the galaxy - was caused by a Kelpien manchild's fear of a holographic fairytale creature known only as "the Kelp monster". In a way, it's the perfect microcosm of Star Trek: Discovery. Poorly thought-out drama that builds to an unsatisfying conclusion where everything revolves around an emotionally and mentally underdeveloped character whose ego must be appeased at all costs to save the universe. We'll get there. Started season one of Star Trek: the Original Series earlier today. There's a related "did not do research" plot hole in Discovery's third season where it's indicated that the galaxy was running out of dilithium in the 31st century somehow. Discovery's writers seem to have missed that the Federation developed a method to recrystalize refined dilithium back in 2286 (Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home), making dilithium an infinitely recyclable resource almost 800 years before "the Burn". It's an even more glaring oversight given that Discovery's own writers wrote TWO stories that involved dilithium recrystalization technology 30 years before Star Trek IV... one of which was the climax of the show's second season! Everyone was a bit gunshy about going back to using dilithium since nobody knew if the stuff would just spontaneously stop working again the way it apparently had during "the Burn", but it was also (nonsensically) much harder to come by which is why there are multiple plot points in the third season that involve dilithium scarcity. (The Orion pirate organization "The Emerald Chain" wants the Discovery because their dilithium stockpiles are drying up... apparently because the writers forgot that dilithium was a catalyst not a fuel.) Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and the other nine Enterprise crew who were affected by the energies of the galactic barrier were so affected because they were already documented powerful espers (by human standards) before encountering the barrier... and even then it still killed nine of the eleven people exposed to it. His personnel file in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" showed that documented esper abilities went back at least six generations in his family and that his were good enough for him to carry on prolonged telepathic conversations. (Various Star Trek novels have suggested that Gary Mitchell's incredible powers weren't actually his... but that he was taken over by some higher dimensional entity, in one case an injured Q.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    And my rewatch of Star Trek: Discovery's first two seasons draws to a close tonight with "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II"... On my first go-round, my initial reaction was that season two of Star Trek: Discovery was a marked but short-lived improvement over season one. I have to reverse myself on that one. Season two of Discovery is actually the worse of the two, for one important reason. In Discovery's first season, its protagonist Michael Burnham is an arrogant know-nothing know-it-all who sincerely believes everything is always about her and always has to be right. In Discovery's second season, everything really is all about Burnham. It's obnoxious, really. She immediately gets into a dick-measuring contest with Pike's science officer that ends up getting him killed. She has to be rescued and becomes the first person to see the Red Angel after getting left behind on the Hiawatha. She has to involve herself in Spock's disappearance because he's HER brother and his psychological baggage is her fault. She has to be the one to take him to Talos IV to recover his lost marbles and reveal her shameful secret. Her dead parents invented the suit that the Red Angel wears and she takes up a new one to become the Red Angel and close a time loop, making even the episodes that weren't strictly about her into episodes about her. Even Control lampshades that everything is about her. The Mary Sue-ness of it all is just... off-putting. It was bad enough when she only believed she was the center of the universe. When the writers decided to establish it as fact that she actually was... that was just a terrible idea all around. Though the events of Discovery's most recent episode "Su'Kal" may well go down in history as the worst, most setting-breaking garbage in the Star Trek franchise's history. This show is just the Grand Central Station of disappointments.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    As is my custom, I started a rewatch of Star Trek as things at work wound down towards the start of the holiday season. Going in chronological order, I just got to Star Trek: Discovery's first episode last night. I have to say that it might actually be worse the second time around... and that's kind of impressive in its own right. One thing that really struck me this time was how very much Michael Burnham comes off as having a REALLY bad case of chuunibyou. Her establishing character moment at the very start of the series when she and Captain Georgiou are on that desert planet is her pretending to possess the same uncannily accurate predictive abilities and obsession with precision that was a signature trait of Vulcan characters like Spock, Tuvok, and T'Pol, and elevated to a high art (and running joke) by Data. She clearly believes she's a Chosen Hero of Destiny and The Only One Who Can Save Us as the episode drags on. After nearly dying from radiation damage she interrupts the treatment of her injuries to go running off to the bridge to immediately tell everyone it's the Klingons... a fact that they would have known fifteen seconds later without her input. Then she convinces herself that she has superior insight into the Klingons motives and uses that as an excuse to try to take over the ship to (in her mind) valiantly save her captain from fatally misjudging the situation. She's even more obnoxious in the second episode, when we see her in a flashback trying really hard to pass for Vulcan... by being incredibly arrogant and condescending towards Captain Georgiou. She tries to overrule Georgiou about dealing with T'Kuvma's ship, and when that goes pear-shaped she tries to claim credit for the entire war at her court martial because she's deluded enough to believe that she really was the sole cause of the war. Once you notice that, the rest of the flaws in the opening two-parter feel kind of trivial. Burnham is just flat-out delusional and it's actually kind of weird that nobody notices or comments on it. Especially when she first showed up and was acting like she was Vulcan. It kind of brings to mind that TNG episode "Hero Worship", where the orphaned kid from the Vico starts imitating Data as a really unhealthy coping strategy for his parents deaths.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever Coming... when it's done.
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