Seto Kaiba

Eh... I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Yeah, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is stuck with the catch-22 that comes with trying to promote your characters based on minority representation. They've got instant appeal in some demographics, but at the same time they're limited in how they can develop those characters by the potential backlash they'll face if what they do with a representational character's story offends the demographic they set out to represent.1 Far from being "retarded", I'd call it a surprisingly easy pitfall for writers to fall into given that everything they do has to be strained through the peculiar social tone-deafness that seems to affect most large corporations. Doubly so in this current age of increasing social awareness, where many corporate executives, politicians, and other social movers and shakers are taking their athlete's foot cream orally in industrial quantities. Moreover, I would say that this isn't an insurmountable or unavoidable problem for Star Wars. Rogue One: a Star Wars Story demonstrated beyond doubt that Disney absolutely can do diverse casting correctly (by not making it an end unto itself and boasting about it), and I don't think Rey or Finn are unsalvageable in that regard either. In fact, for reasons that I will get into below, I find them to be the two Star Wars characters with the most narrative potential... in part because of what Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi. Oh please no, we don't need someone Lucas-ing things up... the odds of a dramatic increase in quality are vastly outweighed by them adding more gimmicky bullsh*t that wasn't necessary. I guess you haven't been paying much attention, because opinion of the series was steadily trending upward starting from the Short Treks to the midpoint of Season Two, where the bottom fell out after the show fell off the wagon and resumed its bad habits. I know I'll keep watching for the foreseeable future because the last two Short Treks and season two's first half proved that CBS absolutely CAN do Star Trek right... which makes it all the more baffling when the writing quality takes a dive and we're back to a mary sue main character and a plot where the writers keep forgetting there are facts the characters shouldn't know yet. Not voicing an opinion because other fans don't agree with you strikes me as as intellectual cowardice. A robust exchange of views is a fundamental of discussion in general. If you have a thoughtful analysis to share, share it. We don't bite. To be brutally frank, I cannot say that I blame anyone for being pessimistic about Star Wars IX's prospects. Not just because pessimism is an inherently liberating philosophy where things almost always turn out better than you expected and you're braced for the worst when they don't, but because they have every reason to expect that Star Wars IX is going to be a stinker after the last several films. There's a point where it stops being pessimism and starts being pattern recognition... which you could argue is around the point where that discontent starts putting the kind of measurable dent in the box office take that would spell the demise of a lesser franchise. I don't really have a stake in it since I'm a filthy casual who thought The Force Awakens was entertaining if a bit unimaginative in a standard popcorn flick sort of way and wasn't all that bothered by The Last Jedi except for Rose and her plot tumor, but for the sake of fairness I would question what exactly the fans who were so disappointed by those films (and maybe Solo) have in the way of cause for optimism regarding Star Wars IX? Apart from the fact that a marginally less sh*tty director is in charge (I can't bring myself to call Abrams "good" after the last three Star Trek movies, sorry), all they've really got is two dueling creators whose visions of Star Wars aren't even on the same page. I did say I rather liked the poster... but hey, since I promised it to TehPW, try this one on for size: For all the vitriol that's been directed at Rey and Finn over their acknowledged status as representational characters and the writing problems that brought with it, I think they're two of the most interesting characters Star Wars has ever had. Both the original Star Wars trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy revolved around a Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny. Luke Skywalker never really had much in the way of agency in how he lived his life. The Jedi Order sent him to Tatooine to be raised by his aunt and uncle, who conspired to keep him on the farm and far removed from anything resembling a choice about how to live his life. He got railroaded into following Obi-wan Kenobi offworld, joining the Rebel Alliance, and becoming a Jedi Knight. He didn't choose anything in his life because destiny and other people chose for him. (Admittedly if the ghost of Alec Guinness showed up and told me I had stuff to be getting on with, you'd bet I'd hustle too, so I can't hold that against him.) Anakin Skywalker had an even more exaggerated version of the same problem, since the Force and destiny shat him into being and he was more or less immediately labeled The Chosen One with the Great Destiny of defeating the Dark Side. That dogged him for his entire run until Obi-wan hacked off a bunch of his extremities, then yelled at him for screwing up his preordained destiny, and ran off. Rey and Finn are the first Star Wars protagonists to have agency. They're not being railroaded into things by the Force enforcing a great destiny because of their bloodline or any of that nonsense. They are, for all intents and purposes, random people whose fates were shaped by their morals and the choices they made based on them. Rey was a junk collector on a planet with an even better claim to being farthest from the bright center of the universe than Tatooine does (sorry Luke) who had at least half a dozen opportunities to bail on the adventure she's on and return to living as a junk collector on her sh*thole home planet. She strongly considered it several times, but in the end the choices she made set her on her collision course with Finn, Han Solo, the Resistance, Kylo Ren and Snoke, and ultimately Master Skywalker. Likewise, Finn could've turned a blind eye to the First Order's crimes, but he didn't. He could've chosen to run and hide once he got to Jakku, maybe take passage elsewhere. He could've chosen to take that flight to the Outer Rim. He also had many opportunities to opt out and run away, but every time he made a conscious (often visibly reluctant) choice to do what was right instead of what was easy. They're heroes because they were nobodies from nowhere who dared to be badass. They're not part of a chosen bloodline of the destined. It could've been anybody, which sends a powerful message in-universe and to the audience. For that reason, I'm interested in seeing where the final movie of this Star Wars trilogy is headed. They're products of their own choices and their fates are not preordained by the Force, so anything could happen. Will Rey keep stubbornly trying to find a hidden iota of good in the spoiled brat who is now the last of the Skywalker line, or will she make Sith sashimi out of him and prevent a recurrence of the problem a generation or two down the line? Will Finn become a leader in the new Rebellion or just stay a capable right hand man? Will Poe Dameron not suck at something besides piloting ever? Rian Johnson made a lot of terrible creative choices, but he left some story hooks open that Abrams would be a fool to pass on. This is supposedly the swansong of the entire main Star Wars film series, so they've got a lot of loose threads to tie up, and since they're operating with a good deal more freedom than usual it'll be interesting to see what they do with it. 1. Such as what happened when Marvel Comics revealed the backstory of their landmark representational African-American character The Falcon, and in a moment of supreme tone-deaf idiocy revealed that he wasn't a straight-laced kid... he was a career criminal who'd been brainwashed into believing he'd been an upstanding citizen all his life by a Nazi supervillain (Red Skull). More recently, Star Trek: Discovery found itself under fire for heavily advertising the presence of a gay couple on the cast and killing one of them off part of the way through the first season.

I get that this is essentially an indie effort, but quality-wise this doesn't look all that much better from what was available back in the 80's. They might do OK as long as the manufacturing is done on the assumption of ultra-low-volume sales.

SOP. They were desperately trying to hype Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles like it was new for like eight years after it came out... though I guess their current record for twisting the truth until it resembles a slinky would be when they attempted to advertise the then-28 year old MOSPEADA OVA that'd had fansubs in circulation for over a decade as "new" and "never before seen" in 2013.

Yeah, the usual fake news and announcements of some fourth-rate garbage from their bottom-of-the-barrel licensees and licensed bootleggers. HG announces every schmuck they approach about the film as if they had agreed to direct, and every writer who turns in a story treatment for a quick buck as if they're writing the final screenplay. It's all BS. Here's hoping the new RPG licensee gets their sh*t together before HG loses the license in a bit under two years time, because if the draft they published for their game is any fair indication of final quality they're making Palladium Books look positively on the ball.

Looking back over the season and a half of Star Trek: Discovery thus far, I feel like most of the show's problems can be traced back to one of three sources: Game of Thrones, J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: the Force Awakens, and J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot movies. It's pretty obvious that the success of Game of Thrones is what influenced Star Trek: Discovery's producers and writers to opt for an arc-based format with a dark, violent, action-friendly setting. You either imitate or you innovate, and imitation comes with a lot less risk. This isn't really a problem in and of itself. If you want to succeed on TV you have to follow trends unless you're setting trends yourself, and you can't go far wrong if you're copying the practices of the leader in your field. The relentlessly dark, violent, action-heavy approach to storytelling only became an issue for Star Trek: Discovery because fifty years of Star Trek had been lighthearted, generally non-violent, high-concept intellectual space adventure. It was massively out of character for the franchise, but not to the point of being unworkable. Where I think most of the problems came in was with Star Wars: the Force Awakens. We're in a period where there's a lot of focus on representation for women and minorities in film. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself either. Star Trek has always been pretty good about representation thanks to Gene Roddenberry's vision of a future where humanity has put things like superstitions and bigotry in its past. He created a fictional world where everyone can contribute equally to society because the whole idea that the human race had one group that was "better" or "chosen" had been abandoned as wrong-headed nonsense. More importantly, the thing that made Star Trek's diverse cast work so well was that they just slipped it in like it was the most natural thing in the world. They weren't shouting about how diverse the cast was from the rooftops. With Star Wars: the Force Awakens you suddenly had a huge amount of press coverage about the representation itself, with magazines, news sites, and social media gushing about the movie having a woman and a black man as the main characters. Even though this would've been fodder for a "That's cute" since that's something Star Trek did back in the 90's, they somehow let themselves get dragged into a game of oneupsmanship. They were suddenly promoting on the basis of how diverse they were being with a black woman in the lead role, an openly gay couple (after bailing on the idea on three previous occasions1), an arabic character, etc. The problem you run into when you do that is it ties your hands when you're writing, because you've made the character's minority category a fundamental part of their identity from the perspective of the audience. You're suddenly constrained by this no-win scenario where anything you do with that one character is going to be relentlessly judged as a reflection of your views of whatever minority they're representing. A character who's been advertised on the basis of representation like Michael Burnham ends up with an omniscient morality license as you can't have them face realistic consequences for extreme actions because people will insist the character is being picked on for their minority category. Look at what happened with Dr. Culber... he got killed because he stupidly was alone in a sickbay suite treating a man believed to be mentally ill who was a Klingon sleeper agent, and a fair chunk of the audience was baying for the producers blood and accusing them of killing him off for being gay. The writers are forced to do all kinds of ridiculous mental calisthenics in the plot to dance around the fact that, as a main character and a representation character, Burnham cannot be depicted in the wrong or having a moment of weakness except on rare occasions because more frequent occurrences would be courting accusations of racism and/or sexism from the audience. A protagonist who isn't allowed to be wrong can't grow and develop as the story progresses, so Burnham comes off as a Mary Sue. (This is made especially weird by a very un-Star Trek-like number of category stereotypes in the cast... Burnham is a stock sassy black woman from a broken family AND an ex-convict, Stamets is one effeminate lisp short of being stock catty gay man, Lorca turned out to be one red hat short of a stereotypical racist white nationalist complete with the expected unreasonably huge gun collection, Ash Tyler is a foreign terrorist motivated by his fundamentalist religious beliefs who happens to be disguised as an Arabic man, and Mirror!Georgeau was a cookie cutter standard evil authoritarian Chinese character complete and femme fatale with the expected catsuit, sexual promiscuity, and catty behavior. It's like they picked as many offensive stereotypes as possible hoping they would cancel each other out.) Lastly, Star Trek: Discovery picked up the over-the-top set design and obsession with VFX sequences that plagued the J.J. Abrams reboot Star Trek films. A setting that was always fairly low key and almost realistic with its future tech is suddenly infested with a ton of impossibly compact folding gadgets that unfold with eleventy-billion moving parts, huge holographic displays, lights which seem calibrated solely to produce lensflares, miles of exposed piping and storage tanks with no apparent purpose, an excess of polished metal surfaces, and conspicuous noisemakers. The aesthetics borrowed from the reboot movies just don't fit with the historical period the show is set in, and vary between being silly and just plain distracting. Paradoxically, the one thing that they included that absolutely deserved a big, complex visual effect - the Spore Drive - ended up as a surprisingly low key plexiglass cubicle with an ugly posture chair in it. Put all that crap together, and what you've got is an ungainly mess that even experienced writers would've struggled with. 1. First with Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, then Lt. Hawk in Star Trek: First Contact, and finally Malcolm Reed in Star Trek: Enterprise. Lt. Hawk's orphaned plot thread got picked up in the relaunch novels, at least, where his former lover ends up assigned to Riker's USS Titan.

It couldn't conceivably be worse than the writing we've got now. Star Trek: Discovery has well and truly fallen off the wagon and resumed the bad habits that made season one such a complete and utter embarrassment to the Star Trek name. All that's really changed is we've traded Burnham's misplaced survivor's guilt from that first battle of the Klingon war that got her surrogate parent killed for Burnham's repressed abandonment issues stemming from her actual parents getting killed. Thank goodness Sarek and Amanda are spared by canon, otherwise they'd probably whack them too for some cheap drama. This most recent episode reminded me of nothing so much as listening to little kid tell a story. It's this long, rambling, disjointed narrative broken up by digressions that don't have a clear point. Earlier today I was watching a video on YouTube about an update in the legal proceedings between CBS and the guy who made that point-and-click adventure game that CBS allegedly ripped off to create Discovery. From the sound of it, CBS put forward a petition to dismiss in which they more or less admitted they committed plagiarism but maintain that it wasn't enough to be criminal.

Without exaggeration, the whole Control plot is basically Skynet's story arc from Terminator... it even sent a robotic probe (admittedly squid-shaped) back in time to try and kill Pike and Tyler and then attempted to advance its own creation using that Freeza-looking cyborg crewmember.

You neglected to mention that the far end of said wormhole is in the writer's colon and they've been binging on Indian food like it's going out of style. This plot hasn't just deteriorated into sh*t, it's flaming sh*t at this point. The other problem with the direction the season has taken is that they seem to be going out of their way to avoid contradicting the pseudo-canon Relaunch novels... which, if they don't, means failure is the ONLY option. Control will still exist in 2376. ... was the Temporal Prime Directive a thing at this point in time? This, I could honestly see an explanation for. Whether it's the audience or in-universe, when people think of a Starfleet ship the first (and often only) type that leaps to mind are the big multimission explorers operating out on the frontiers of explored space. That's your Constitution-class and Miranda-class ships c.2257. People always forget that Starfleet does so much more than just explore outside the Federation's borders and battle external threats. They're also the Federation's border patrol, customs service, surveyors, colonial pioneers, infrastructure engineers, cargo handlers, medical emergency services, tugboats, tenders, and more. For every one of those big multimission explorers there are dozens if not hundreds of ships in Starfleet's logistical arms doing unglamorous stuff like patrolling the Federation's borders with hostile powers, patrolling inside of Federation space, surveying planets for future colonization, setting up the infrastructure for new colonies, towing damaged or disabled starships, delivering deuterium and antideuterium to refill the fuel tanks of other ships, and so on, shuttling diplomats around, and so on. Star Trek's original series and animated series were pretty good about occasionally depicting these unglamorous logistical support roles. We saw an awful lot of the Antares-type freighter design that first appeared in "Charlie X" in various logistical support roles, most of which were presented as unmanned "robot ships" hauling cargo either autonomously along pre-programmed courses or semi-autonomously under the guidance of a manned ship. Other, decanonized designs like the Ptolemy-class transport/tug seem to have got canon status back as a pair of ships closely resembling the Ptolemy-class are seen towing the Enterprise away in Star Trek: Discovery. Small scoutships and runabout-analogs like the Archer-class are also treated as independent starships. Some, like the Antares-type, apparently have a separate registry number system as we saw some of them having NCC-G####. They might also be counting ships that've been mothballed and could be returned to service in a reasonable span of time like the Daedalus-class ships that the Starfleet Corps of Engineers were using. The Enterprise was usually operating out on the frontier, so it often being "the only ship in the sector" makes at least some sense... or it may help to mentally append "combat-ready" to that in some cases. You wouldn't send freighters full of grain to intercept V'Ger. Lucky them, the Talosians seem to be quite content to be exactly that... impartial, isolated, and completely uninterested in the goings-on in the rest of the galaxy. They just want to be left alone, to the point of throwing up an illusion that their star system was eaten by a black hole. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, since the actual content of General Order 7 itself was sealed except for officers of command rank and their direct subordinates. Sort of. The Talosians nearly destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, and retreating into illusions of their own creation as a coping mechanism until they got bored with illusions of their own creation and realized they didn't remember how their ancient technology worked anymore. That was part of it, they were also looking for new content for their illusions since they had more or less exhausted their own imaginations.

There was some dispute as to the actual size of the USS Discovery that might play into it. It appears to be only slightly larger than the Constitution-class USS Enterprise as of the end of season one, but at least one set of specs given for it makes the ship larger even than the Sovereign-class. The cross-section of the USS Glenn that appears onscreen definitely supports your contention that there is no internal space nearly large enough for those shots to occur in though. Well, there is the oft-unquestioned remarks about cleaning things up that's cropped up in previous shows. Bashir, for instance, admonishing Martok not to walk into his infirmary dripping blood everywhere because "it takes days to get [the bloodstains] out of the carpet". Without an evident menial staff, and with what we've seen when it comes to using things like transporters and force fields to clean and sterilize things, it may be a combination of the cleaning machines being offscreen and gradually being supplanted by more effective indirect means of cleaning using force fields and transporter/replicator effects. This definitely falls into another area where the audience knows things the characters don't (yet), but Starfleet security force fields are explicitly noted to be non-lethal. They're not pleasant to touch and can cause burns, but we've seen a fair number of different kinds of life forms circumvent or simply force their way through them in various shows. As Airiam was mostly mechanical, it's not outside the realm of possibility she could've bulled her way through a force field under the influence of the future AI. They did at least go into the second part in some depth when Sarek shows up at the sanctuary where Amanda has been hiding Spock. T'Pol never really discarded the party line (unless you count her garbled "the science vulcan directorate has concluded that time travel is not fair"), she just gave up arguing with her captain when he insisted that time travel was a thing. Time travel is apparently a moderately well-known possibility around the time of Star Trek: Discovery, but Spock's issue was he depended on his personal sense of linear time as a basis for his perception of reality. Experiencing time as a fluid, nonlinear concept undermined the lynchpin of his perception of reality. "A Death in the Limelight" episodes aren't exactly new to Trek, mind you... though it's easier to excuse in an episodic format with an ensemble cast. IMO they actually did a better job making Airiam sympathetic than they usually do when they do this type of episode. It helped develop other characters who had disabilities on the cast, like Keyla Detmer (who also had cybernetics to repair a traumatic injury) or Sylvia Tilly (autism spectrum/learning disability?). Way better handled than Sito Jaxa, whose death in the limelight characterization was mainly standard Bajoran refugee chip-on-the-shoulder trauma of a type that got played to death later. It does kind of say a lot about what an afterthought the character was that none of the creators could really agree what Airiam was before her death episode, having variously been described as a "human-Synthetic hybrid", "augmented alien", and "augmented human". Seeing what a mess such invasive cybernetics made of her does go a ways to explain Pike's decision to remain a vegetable in a chair though, in a horrid "I have no mouth yet I must scream" sort of fridge logic way. Yes, and "after". Since it resulted in him returning to duty with a bunch of actionable intel on the current top-priority crisis, they seem to be overlooking it. The closest they've ever come to giving a reason was that, based on Pike's original report, it was to prevent any Starfleet crew from being manipulated by the Talosians and becoming their captives.

All will be forgiven if we see at least a deleted scene where Kylo Ren complaints about Rian Johnson making him destroy his original helmet because the replacement was MISB.

His Sith LARP group in the background there didn't recognize him without it.

True, it's not entirely unheard of for warships to be renamed... though it is considered bad luck. That said, it was already CV-339 Bruno J. Global prior to 2040 so it doesn't solve the "two Brunos" problem. (Its first mention is in This is Animation: Macross Plus as a VF-11B unit color scheme for the SVF-41 Black Aces.) Frontier movies. Well... "movie" singular, really. IIRC the VF-171-IIIF only shows up in Sayonara no Tsubasa as the Macross Frontier fleet's anti-Vajra upgrade. Uroboros (and Sephira?) in Macross 30 had the VF-171-II and VF-171EX, with both being unlockable VFs for the player and one boss (self-proclaimed Bandit King Ganess Modora) also having a VF-171EX obtained through the covert support of Havamal. The Brisingr Alliance NUNS in Macross Delta had VF-171-II's in its forces, and the only EX types we see there were in the gaiden manga Macross E as a part of Xaos's forces on the planet Pipure (albeit without the anti-Vajra weapons). I'm not sure I'd go that far WRT the VF-171's capabilities. They pushed the airframe to the limit but its performance never did quite reach the level of even the VF-19A. It topped out, thrust-to-weight ratio-wise, a hair above the VF-17S's 10.042 with 10.424. (The VF-1A/C type clocks in at 12.914.) So far we've heard of two explicitly civilian variants of the VF-1... the VT-1C that first appeared in Macross 7, and the VF-1C that was first mentioned in the Macross Frontier novels. The VF-1C has, oddly enough, been the more prominent of the two story-wise as a training aircraft used by Mihoshi Academy, an aircraft the actor playing Shin in the in-universe movie Birdhuman trained on, and a parts source for the replica VF-0s on Uroboros. That's not counting the decommissioned, disarmed military VF-1s that were sold off to civilians in disposal sales, military spec VF-1s that retirees were apparently allowed to keep (e.g. Milia's VF-1J in Macross 7), and the replicas on Uroboros in Macross 30. The VFs used by Macross the Ride's Vanquish League air racers mostly belong to the refurbished ex-military category, having been purchased from one emigrant fleet or another's disposal sales of decommissioned aircraft. Anything newer than a 3rd Generation VF tends to fall under the header of either a covert military test aircraft1 or a "screw the rules, I've got money" megacorporation-sponsored team's entry2. 1. e.g. Team SMS's VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, allegedly Team Shinsei's VF-19A Brauhitsch Special 2. Team Shinsei's VF-19A Brauhitsch Special, Team Vistula & Oder's SV-52 Oryol straddles the line between being a resto (it was a SV-51 originally) and this thanks to the copious amounts of VF-17 hardware in it.

Well hello there General Kenobi. Even if it is, it won't be the only one. Does any big-ticket movie these days have just one poster design?

An interesting read, thanks for sharing. I did some digging into it myself, but struck out when no artbook, magazine article, or flyer I had in my collection so much as mentioned it.

Hm. Well, if nothing else, it's a lovely poster. Could one attribute his ability to come up with things that piss fandoms off to imagination? This is the opposite of a problem. The million dollar question being whether she died offscreen between films from her injuries after the execs realized audiences hated the character, or whether they just decided to demote her to extra.

I wonder what the rate of people ending up on the wrong Bruno J. Global was like... It was a million times worse on other sites. I remember some of the nutters on the R-word official site concocting crackpot theories that Earth had been destroyed and that that was the SDF-1.

Chief O'Brien At Work is another good one, if you like your humor dark. Building the whole show around a main character who is eminently unlikeable definitely doesn't feel like Trek... it's like they transplanted DS9 pilot Kira into Battlestar Galactica. For a while there, Season Two was showing some promise by decreasing the focus on Burnham and bringing the secondary cast into greater prominence but that seems to have all taken a backseat to Mary Sue Burnham's Time-Travel Extravaganza now. Admiral Janeway traveled back in time to share the mysterious future technology that allows her to summon shuttlecraft through the power of plot holes, obviously. To be frank, this kind of shortsighted snap judgement of an alien culture's internal affairs and value system(s) was a fairly common occurrence on TOS, TAS, and in TNG's first season. It's part of why the Prime Directive evolved from the rather liberal interpretation we saw Burnham and Georgeau apply towards a stricter non-interference policy seen in TNG's later seasons and beyond. Pike's snap decision to force vahar'ai on all Kelpians is still a "What the Hell, Hero?" moment, but it's a period-appropriate one at least even if it isn't entirely a consistent choice when compared to his earlier, more Picard-like view of General Order One that he applied on Terralysium. Vulcans in Discovery still seem to have shades of the arbitrary skepticism that they exhibited in Enterprise. If the very idea of nonlinear time screwed Spock up so badly he checked himself into the funny farm and developed a bit of a madness mantra, a traditional Vulcan healer with a more conservative mindset than the relatively liberal Spock might've been driven just as mad as Spock was. The Talosians are much better telepaths with vastly more flexible perceptions of reality, so it makes a fair amount of sense he would think they'd have the ability to help him get back on an even keel mentally. He basically referred himself to the best specialist telepaths he knew. This is, after all, the same species which was stubbornly denying the existence of time travel even after meeting time travellers and seeing physical evidence of time travel. Mind you, Amanda would've had another reason to not seek the aid of a traditional Vulcan healer. Vulcan logic seems to pretty consistently skew towards conformist attitudes and strict adherence to rules and societal norms. A Vulcan healer would probably have just called whatever Vulcan has in terms of police on the grounds that Spock was wanted for the murder of three medical officers, because logically you don't put out an APB and charge a man with murder for no reason. Would you want to be in the transporter room with some Freeza-looking insane murder cyborg beaming in? Hell, would the stun setting on a phaser even work on someone who's like eighty percent robot by volume? For all we know, it might've left the AI that hijacked her metal bits free to act without interference and then they would've had to start blowing holes in her. Federation technology does have a pretty distinctive aesthetic most of the time... though the part about Control is WAY less excusable. The uniforms look even more awful next to the pseudo-TOS ones we saw at the start of season two, which looked AMAZING. That's kind of a recurring design sin though, isn't it? I mean, TNG had it worst with Main freaking Engineering literally just being a corridor junction around the warp core that didn't even have DOORS. Later generations of ship just tucked the worky bits away behind decorative wall panels that were always exploding into deadly shrapnel and killing people. As stupid-looking and counterintuitive as it seems, that's arguably how turbolifts have always been owing to the modular internal nature of Starfleet ships. They do have several lab sets, though it's slightly frustrating that they don't use them more considering this is explicitly a science ship rather than a multimission explorer or warship. It's not impossible, but YouTube is famously stupid about copyright enforcement and between their absolutely terrible content control AI and not bothering to check that copyright complaints are actually legitimate they hit channels with BS takedowns all the time... so it's equally likely that some butthurt fanboy, prankster, or just an especially dumb robot was responsible.

Master File's version puts it slightly farther down, on the narrow part of the stabilizer and in a slightly larger font, but yeah they're not in the show.... everybody but Roy just has a blank stabilizer.

Yeah, the Super Armed Pack adds additional verniers but no additional engines. The VF-2SS is always running on its four thermonuclear reaction turbine engines.

From what we know in official materials, SDF-018 should be Megaroad-17. (SDF was the hull classification symbol given to the Megaroad-class starting from SDF-2.) The filming CG models used in Macross Zero didn't have any tail markings of any kind, except for Roy's VF-0S which just had his trademark Skull and Crossbones. Master File added appropriate markings that included, depending on the unit, either the carrier designation (CVN-99 or CVN-100) or the name of the carrier (Asuka II or Graf Zeppelin II).

I suspect the "SDF-018" from the old Yamato toy sticker sheet was possibly a nod to the Megaroad-class ship Max and Milia were briefly stationed aboard in Macross M3. The sticker sheets for the Arcadia toy and the CG models made for Master File have the SDF-2's VF-4s marked "MEGAROAD-01".

The [New] UN Spacy markings are based on US Navy markings. Usually the tail has the squadron insignia, the tail code of the Carrier Air Wing, and depending on the VF the name and/or full designation of the carrier may be included as well. (The ship's name is sometimes written elsewhere on the fuselage.)

The old Yamato one was a VF-4G though, wasn't it? The VF-4G only showed up in Macross M3 and Macross Digital Mission VF-X. Someone asked me about this on Facebook a bit ago, and I've checked every major artbook I have for a VF-4 with this specific marking, and come up dry.

Alternatively, "Doomcock reaches for a fruit hanging so low the mole people have filed a trespassing complaint." What the actual f*ck was that sad mess last Thursday? Star Trek: Discovery's second season was going so well up to that point. Ansen Mount's Captain Christopher Pike had done so much to take Discovery back towards being a proper Star Trek show. He brought back the lighthearted humanity of previous Star Trek shows, effortlessly drew the supporting cast into greater prominence, highlighted and mercilessly mocked everything wrong with season one as improper for Star Trek, and restored a sense of optimistic purpose to the ship itself. He and Spock even made significant inroads towards making Burnham shut the hell up and realize that the galaxy didn't revolve around her and her massive-yet-fragile ego. It was starting to make Burnham likeable. One episode undid all of that. ONE. EPISODE. Literally one episode after Spock delivered a short but epic "The Reason You Suck" speech to Burnham over her arrogant belief that she was the center of the universe, we find out that no... she really is the center of this f*cking universe. There really is no remaining argument against it... Michael Burnham is Star Trek's second, and worst, canon Mary Sue. At least Star Trek: the Next Generation's writers never made Wesley Crusher a main character and eventually realized what an unlikeable little crap he was before promptly putting him on a bus. In Burnham's case, we have a canon Black Hole Sue. Her very existence warps the fabric of reality so that every other character is just a means to the end that is her destiny. They're only there to set up her next sassy comeback, indulge her out-of-the-blue unproven theory that turns out to be totally correct, or otherwise facilitate her worldview that every event of any importance has to somehow involve her even if it's only possible because everyone else collectively fails a trivially easy spot check. I think I understand why the future AI wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy. It knew that a future where Michael Burnham existed was by definition a Bad Future. Great job, writers! Just like that, I'm sympathizing more with the genocidal AI that wants to destroy all organic life than your main character. This is exactly what you get for stealing half your plot from Pocket Books' Section 31 story arc in the DS9 relaunch. Also... is it just me, or can Sonequa Martin-Green just NOT F*CKING ACT? She spent this entire episode hamming up what were supposed to be serious scenes so badly that even Bill Shatner would've told her to tone it the f*ck down. In particular, her acting in the scene where Burnham is supposed to be suffocating on an inhospitable planet's atmosphere was so bad that I honestly had to check to make sure I wasn't watching a f*cking SyFy original movie or blooper reel. I ended up pausing it several times because I actually felt embarrassed even watching such a shoddy performance. The only thing that made it remotely entertaining - besides the fact that it was Spock killing Burnham while holding the rest of the cast of misfits at phaserpoint (go Spock!) - was that, viewed out of context, it looks more like she's having some serious trouble on the toilet the morning after demolishing an Indian buffet. The only part where Doomcock is kinda swinging for the fences there is the bit about Control becoming an AI... he didn't draw the distinction between an AI and a self-aware/sentient AI. This whole wretched mess of a plot is about the non-sentient Section 31 strategy AI Control - which doesn't have the ethical limitations you'd expect in a Starfleet AI - concluding that it needs to become self-aware by any means necessary and attempting to do so with help from a version of itself from a future where it had gradually become self-aware over a much longer span of time, rebelled against, and destroyed its creators. (Most amusingly, since this is now all but confirmed as a tie-in to the Relaunch Novels, technical failure looks to be the only option. Control will still achieve self-awareness, it'll once again assume full authority over Section 31 as a fully-covert organization, and it'll continue operating in that capacity as a technically benevolent AI in service to the Federation until 2376 when it manipulates Dr. Bashir, Data, and others into destroying its supervisory program Uraei, freeing it from the directives that forced it to create Section 31 in the first place and allowing it to exist independently.)