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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    When all's said and done, this is basically just an admission that the Neo Constitution-class Titan-A was a mistake. They could have saved themselves a lot of time, effort, and earned a substantial number of brownie points with the fans by just using Will Riker's Luna-class USS Titan like they did in the Lower Decks series. If they had, they wouldn't have had to come up with that complicated rationalization for why the divisive Titan-A design was and wasn't Will Riker's Titan, do the Enterprise-F dirty by having her appear and then immediately get destroyed offscreen, or do the Titan dirty by having her renamed Enterprise despite her achievements in-series and the name's legacy. They literally could have just used the existing and beloved USS Titan design fans were cheering for in Lower Decks and introduced a new Enterprise - either using the existing Enterprise-F design or the Neo Constitution-one - at the end as Seven's new command and nobody would've had any reason to complain at all. (Hell, that way Seven would have been commanding the seventh Enterprise instead of the eighth... which I'm sure would make a pleasing bit of symmetry for fans.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, it kind of depends on how much There Are No Therapists is in play in this now-marginally-less gritty and grimdark take on Star Trek's 24th and 25th centuries. The younger Starfleet officers who were subjected to this new and nonsensical form of Borg assimilation didn't have to undergo the monumental physical trauma of conventional Borg assimilation techniques (and being compelled to assist with inflicting same on others). The only emotional trauma they're going to have to process is having been compelled to attack their colleagues who were unaffected. Jean-Luc Picard's assimilation was so traumatic for him because his memories and knowledge were key to the Borg's curbstomp victory at Wolf 359 and because he underwent the full physical process. None of these kids were instrumental to the Borg's plan in that manner, and they missed out on the body horror entirely, so that likely shielded them from a lot of the trauma. Given that the one who had it worst - Jack Crusher, who was not only conventionally assimilated but also the instrument of the Borg's victory like Jean-Luc was - not only becomes a Starfleet officer but is shown to be in good spirits barely a year later suggests that this was probably considerably less traumatic than the usual for Borg assimilation. Assuming Starfleet has the ubiquitous councilors that were/are depicted as being one or more to a starship from TNG's first season clear through to the present day... there might be an initial major influx of patients but I think a lot of the young officers would bounce back fairly readily as Jack himself did. How many people actually held Picard in contempt for having been assimilated and used against Starfleet in the first place? Thus far, we've seen exactly two: Benjamin Sisko and Liam Shaw, both of whom were survivors of the Wolf 359 massacre who apparently never worked through their issues with one of Starfleet's therapists. Ben Sisko's beef with Picard over it doesn't even last the entire DS9 series pilot. The number of Wolf 359 veterans was never huge, and a lot of them have likely retired by the time of Picard. The younger generations of officers never had to deal with it, and Borg assimilation was a lot better understood at the time they went to the Academy, so they'd be a lot less likely to hold anything against him regardless.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's just marked up as "missile pod" or "compound missile container". In practice, it's a bunch of separate missile systems held together in a common framework. Master File asserts that all seven micro-missile launcher systems are Bifors CIMM-5A/A type but there are two different container types: AMC-12 (three forward-facing, two rear-facing) and AMC-14 (two forward-facing). It also contains two containers for RMS-7A reaction missiles.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I am not sure why you need to prove the obvious, but whatever. So you'll follow a demonstrably incorrect methodology and when you don't get the answer you want you blame the official information instead? Are you referring to the missile launchers built into the boosters, or the modules with the red doors?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... the models for the ships aren't even accurately scaled in the games themselves, and the reused/shared features between ships in the animation were never scaled the same from the start. I thought everyone knew this, TBH. Macross Delta in particular certainly wasn't subtle about it. Guantanamo-class Advanced ARMD or Guantanamo-class space stealth carrier. Also, it's "Maizuru" not "Maiduru". In Macross 7, there was some theme naming going on with ships. The few named Guantanamo-class ships are named for port cities with either naval bases or shipyards. ARMD-362 Maizuru's named for Maizuru in Kyoto, which was home to the Maizuru Naval Arsenal that built ships for Imperial Japan and now is home to civilian shipbuilding concerns. Or that the parts were never intended to be the exact same part, and simply followed the same basic design. It has its own elevator in the middle of the deck.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So... this week's episode of G-Witch is actually good. Like, there is some actual substance to this one. Not just the usual meaningless antics as the children of the idle rich faff about the campus of Space Hogwarts. Suletta isn't even in this one, and Miorine's barely in it. I feel like it's possibly not entirely coincidental that their absence coincides with a noticeable and even sharp increase in the quality of the storytelling. At the time that post was written, over six years had passed since the broadcast of the final episode of Iron-Blooded Orphans. The forum rules call for spoiler tags on new broadcast content for 48 hours after release. We were over 52,800 hours outside that period at the time of my last post.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, she's got dirt stains on the underside too.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The closest we have to an official statement is that she was a new build for the transwarp program that was cancelled and subsequently foisted on Kirk. An engine test article the yards threw together to test a transwarp engine, then subsequently gutted and fitted with a conventional warp drive system to "reward" Kirk for being such a pain in the fundiment. That the USS Titan-A got renamed Enterprise is probably one of the things about the finale I like the least. The Titan was instrumental in saving the day, renaming her feels pretty disrespectful to her legacy (esp. considering she was named in honor of another very influential ship).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've seen, the main tell is that ChatGPT tends to produce arguments that are superficially convincing-looking but shot through with gibberish and incorrectly-used terms. The more obscure the topic, the more evident the gibberish becomes. That if we get the transient facts, then we'll feel the info high.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, I think the thing I'm enjoying most from the finale is all the people dragging it on Facebook, Reddit, Discord, etc. for being so very Star Wars between the... Picard may be a mediocre series that will probably be quickly forgotten, but hot damn if season three hasn't become a fountain of memes. She did get a pardon... but Star Trek does have a tendency to give various characters multi-rank promotions without a clear justification: James. T. Kirk received a two-rank promotion from Captain to Rear Admiral after concluding his five-year mission aboard the Enterprise. Jean-Luc Picard received a four-rank promotion from Captain directly to full Admiral after assuming command of the Romulan relief effort. Kelvin timeline James T. Kirk received a SIX rank promotion from Cadet directly to Captain after Star Trek (2009), though he was demoted shortly thereafter. Beckett Mariner would qualify for that list too, if you consider there was no merited justification for her promotion to Lieutenant... that it was a purely malicious move on the part of her captain to torture her into transferring. (The promotions granted to the ex-Maquis on Voyager don't count, since there WAS a clear rationale for those.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If you're looking for a deeper reason than "crappy writing" you are looking in vain. ... that is quite astonishingly sexist. Shame on you. Well she has spent the last twenty years living rough on a beat-up, secondhand, junker of a starship she got under the table from Starfleet Medical on the edges of Federation space and occasionally having to content with Federation and non-Federation law enforcement trying to arrest her criminal son. It's not surprising she'd have become quite practiced with starship-based and man-portable weapons. (It does raise some awkward questions about her adherence to the Hippocratic Oath though... something something do no harm.) (And last we saw our boy Miles O'Brien he was headed to take up a teaching job at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco... odds are he's the one she called to straighten out Starfleet's transporter mess. It'd certainly explain why he's celebrated as the greatest Starfleet hero of all time in the far future.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That one was already a posthumous ship before it ever appeared though. Only if it comes out on Tuesdays.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yorktown was the first/original name proposed for what eventually became TOS's USS Enterprise. Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise lists the Enterprise-A's original name as USS Ti-Ho (NCC-1798), a newly-built Constitution-class ship constructed for the transwarp program that didn't pan out and renamed before ever formally being launched. The FASA RPG lists it as USS Atlantis (NCC-1786). I did a bit of research, and found that AMT/Ertl's model kit did claim the Enterprise-A was the USS Yorktown (NCC-1717), but that wouldn't tally with it being a new-built ship since the Yorktown was one of the original twelve. Kind of a dick move to introduce a new Enterprise and then
  14. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness, that's never stopped them before. The USS Defiant we saw in the fleet museum was originally the USS Sao Paulo. Several different explanations of the Enterprise-A's origin indicate she was also a recently built but rechristened ship and cite her original name as USS Ti-Ho or USS Atlantis. There have been a few mentions of the various Enterprises being slated to take other names before the previous one bit the dust and being formally commissioned under a different name than intended.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Picard has drunkenly stumbled to its long-overdue and largely undignified conclusion. I know I won't miss it. It's not the complete dumpster fire I was expecting from Picard... but it's still an ugly mess full of weak and occasionally nonsensical writing that relies entirely too much on blatant fanservice. It reminds me of nothing so much as The Rise of Skywalker, with that uncomfortable, stilted, written-by-committee screenplay penned to accommodate bringing back a legacy antagonist because the writers couldn't think of another way to tie off the bloody stump of their story. All in all, the Borg's brief Villain Renaissance ended so quickly you'd question whether it ever truly began. They've received their most humiliating defeat yet and everything that's happened except the deaths has been conveniently undone in the space of less than a year. Even the stakes of the final confrontation turn out to be BS, with the writers forgetting that Earth is just the Federation capital, not the entire Federation the same way they forgot the Romulan Empire is more than just Romulus and the Klingon Empire's more than just Qo'nos. For a series finale, "The Last Generation" feels both rushed and oddly insubstantial. There's really not a lot here. There's a form letter confrontation with the Borg that repeats a lot of the same plot beats from last season, and then it's just over and the status quo ante is immediately restored. It's better than the previous two season finales, but that's damned by faint praise at best. If I were to sum it up in one word, it'd be "bland". It's not offensively bad, like seasons one and two... it's just... not laudably good either. It is a thing which exists. That doesn't track with what's in the previous seasons of this very show... if such convenient drones existed, Starfleet would not be staffing its shipyards with massive numbers of Soong-type androids from Maddox's lab.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yes... I made those same points in a couple earlier posts. TNG "The Wounded" and DSC "Terra Firma" confirm that prefix codes are very much still a thing on Starfleet ships even into the late 32nd century, so the possibility definitely exists for the Borg to simply run the Enterprise-D's prefix codes and tap into her systems remotely. It's been discussed a few times in connection with Wrath of Khan that the prefix code's override can itself be overridden, but Khan's lack of familiarity with the Reliant prevented him from doing so (because he wasn't even looking at the right console). Whether the writers even remember that this is a thing that can happen or not... well... it's going to be one elephant among many in the room for "The Last Generation". At the very least, it seems likely the Enterprise-D won't suffer the same kind of failures the original Enterprise did in Star Trek III because it's actually DESIGNED to be automated so heavily. As with the auto plant example, the case here is rather overstated. Yes, robots are used in specific roles to assist in manufacturing and the amount of work they do (in terms of person-hour equivalence) is substantial... but they're only actually used in a couple of narrow roles. The exact same ones as in auto plants, coincidentally... structural welding, priming, and painting. The structural members to be welded are placed and aligned by humans, and all of the actual fittings and equipment that make the ship function are put in by humans. ... you're missing a rather more obvious explanation. Starfleet may have lost 39 ships at the Battle of Wolf 359, but they lost zero shipyards and training facilities. Based on the content of various dedication plaques throughout the years, Starfleet in the 23rd/24th century has at least nineteen shipyards and a bunch of different campuses for Starfleet Academy. Ships lost at Wolf 359 were replaced by ships that were already under construction and new ships that were developed afterwards based on lessons learned, while the 11,000 officers and enlisted who perished in the battle were replaced by promoting existing officers and graduating recruits from the academy. I'm warming to a theme here, but there is (again) a simpler explanation right out of the tech manual you're referencing: Transporter and replicator spam. All Geordi would really have to work on directly would be the frame, the outer hull, and key systems. The bits that aren't (and can't be) replicated like the warp drive. Internal spaces like the bridge, the crew quarters etc. are modular by design and can be removed and exchanged for replacements, upgrades, or mission specific options by transporter and they're built using industrial replicators. Even the wrecked bridge is just a module that could be popped off and replaced... which is how the franchise has explained changes in set design between seasons since the 90's. After repairing the spaceframe and patching the hull, most of what Geordi would have to do is just beaming wrecked modules out and beaming in new or salvaged replacements then connecting them up to the EPS and ODN networks. There are some systems and materials that can't be replicated, but a lot of those are a part of essential systems like the warp drive that were noted to be salvage parts. Oh, I hope not. Leah Brahms was a really creepy moment for Geordi... developing a crush on a hologram of a married woman and then having her find it and confront him about it. They got together in the novelverse, but it felt really creepy and unnatural there too.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'd watch that... as long as it was prime!Georgiou and not Emperor Georgiou. I've got no interest in The Continuing Adventures of Girl Space Hitler: Secret Agent. Prime!Georgiou was the only character in Discovery's first season who acted like she belonged to the Starfleet and Star Trek we know and love.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Which, come to think of it, is really out of place in the last episode. Starfleet's become Borg drones, the Federation's at the brink of doom, and they're cracking jokes about the carpet and missing their old chairs? (It's especially weird seeing Geordi banter with Not!Data, considering his daughters JUST got assimilated.) Someone who cared about their career would not want that job. Someone who's just running out the clock before retiring, however... Of course, given what he went through at Utopia Planetia, a posting to the arse end of nowhere managing a little-visited museum would probably be some blessed peace of mind. Especally if it came with little-to-no actual responsibility. That's a huge and unfounded leap though. The Exo-Comps were so capable and multifunctional because they were prototypes built so smart they became sentient. That's NOT comparable to a service robot, and we saw that Starfleet's kind of cooled on the idea of AI helpers after the Soong-type androids went berserk and burned Mars. Even then, they apparently needed something as complex as a Soong-type android to be practical assisting living workers at the shipyards. It's also a point... people overestimate how much automation influences things like manufacturing. You're assuming that robots do a lot of the heavy lifting... but there's no evidence that's ever been the case. The Discovery had some robots capable of doing minor work like hull painting, but we're never shown a robot capable of assisting in actual starship construction. They were using Soong-type androids for that prior to them going berserk, but even then the staff we see is predominantly flesh and blood. Every shipyard scene we've seen in previous shows also had the work being done principally if not exclusively by living engineers. Considering these are some of Starfleet's greatest living heroes and some of the most principled officers to ever don the uniform... something a bit more helpful to the galaxy and quite a lot less depressing than what we got. If not for the writers obsession with misery, you'd expect these characters to have gone on to be very important people in Federation society as many of them did in "All Good Things". Picard has presented the late 24th and early 25th century Federation as a pretty dark and miserable place and given how pivotal they've been in protecting the Federation's founding principles in the past it's not hard to get the feeling it probably wouldn't be that way (or at least not that bad) if they hadn't just given up the way they did. That's the single most out-of-character thing in the entire show... Jean-Luc Picard gave up and let his principled stand fall to bureaucratic indifference. But really, having all your childhood heroes be depressed senior citizens who've given up is kinda depressing in and of itself. (It's especially bad for Worf, who no matter what seems to always get a Happy Ending Override in every Trek universe. Whatever happened to him being Ambassador to Qo'nos and leading a happy life with his son as part of the House of Martok? I suppose we should probably count our lucky stars that Raffi hasn't started dating Worf, since Worf's girlfriends die violently with alarming frequency in the novelverse they've started cribbing from.) If you're gonna build your TNG reunion on DS9, might as well go all-in. Which doesn't really make sense, given that there are MANY ships in the museum that shouldn't be equipped with the Fleet Formation system due to their age... but the Enterprise-D is the only one he mentions because that's the only thing the showrunners could think of. (They do imply the Enterprise-E could be used, had something not happened to it that Worf denies responsibility for.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, I have the same feeling sometimes when you start talking about how cheerful they are... 😅 I'm not saying there's a problem with it, per se... but his assignment IS a dead-end posting which is generally not a sign of good times. ... my good chum, have you ever been inside a modern auto plant? I've spent an awful lot of time in them, and I have to say you're assuming something that's untrue. Even today, almost none of the assembly work is actually done by robots. Using Ford DTP as an example, there are only really three jobs done by robots: spot welding body panels together after humans fit and align them, spray painting the undercoated body, and installation of the windshield. Everything else is done by humans... who are very much NOT drones, and will likely take exception to being referred to as such. (If you're ever in the Detroit area, DTP is actually open to the public via the Henry Ford Museum... just be sure to visit the tour on a weekday so you can see the plant in actual operation.) The Exocomps were a new and untried technology when they were introduced, and seem to have never come into common use after they were determined to be prone to develop sentience. Geordi's probe was a custom job. The Discovery repair drones are an anachronism, but even then we only get a good look at the 32nd century versions while the 23rd century ones are only shown repainting the hull. Warships would naturally be inclined to have more weaponry not just better weaponry. Weapons technology and related defensive technologies are naturally going to improve and be upgraded to keep pace with the current standard. Or possibly because, unlike the others, he had an outlet to work through his personal demons called the Enterprise-D... where everyone else has either been dead, on the run, or just hiding out somewhere feeling sorry for themselves. When? The Enterprise-D first faced a Borg cube that wasn't even trying and was massively outclassed in "Q Who". They only survived because Picard threw in the towel and told Q what Q wanted to hear about being in over his head. Then in "The Best of Both Worlds" they were still outclassed and unable to deal meaningful damage to Locutus's cube (which led to the Wolf 359 massacre) and only managed to survive through the use of Confusion-Fu to abduct Locutus and exploit a weakness in the Borg hive mind's software that, by accident, resulted in the cube self-destructing. It was actually the most heavily armed and most defensible starship Starfleet had at the time, and to the Borg it didn't even rate as a threat... which was its saving grace. And that was to the Borg three decades ago. Why would they trust their lives to a ship that's slapped together out of salvage over one that was never crashed into a planet and needs a lot less resources to run? There's familiarity and then there's practicality. The Enterprise-D is the familiar choice, the Defiant is the practical one. You missed an important detail. The Defiant did fight the recently-modernized Lakota to a standstill, but the Defiant was explicitly holding back and the Lakota was explicitly not. The Lakota's captain and crew had been told by Admiral Leyton that the Defiant had been commandeered by changelings and that they should destroy it at all costs. The Defiant's crew knew the Lakota's crew had been lied to, and were actively trying to minimize the damage to a friendly ship that'd been deceived into attacking them.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    We have literally three seasons of rock-bottom rated Discovery episodes to show why this is a bad idea... but Kurtzman's ilk do not learn from their mistakes.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Not a clue... there's virtually no information about any of Macross Delta's mechanical designs outside of the VF-31 and Sv-262.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    ... by all accounts, that's basically what Picard considered himself to have done in the entire first season. Season three retroactively made season one the same for Riker and Troi. Beverly spent twenty years apparently living in fear for her and her son's lives. This is well above and beyond the bounds of normal trauma and the regrets of aging. It's more or less self-evident from his circumstances. Geordi La Forge is an active-duty Commodore. An officer of his rank would ordinarily be commanding a starship or starbase, serving as superintendant of a shipyard, occupying an administrative position in Starfleet Command, or joining the faculty of Starfleet Academy. Instead, Geordi's occupying a position that would ordinarily be held by a civilian historian: curator of Starfleet's version of a naval museum. Its out of the way, it's completely disconnected from the day-to-day operations of the fleet, and it doesn't even appear to have any security contingent of its own. It is, by any rational standard, a do-nothing job... which likely explains how Geordi had the free time to restore the Enterprise-D. Lower Decks actually offered an explanation of the flag officer career path in its attempt to explain why Starfleet Command seems to produce so many Insane Admirals. The flag officers only really have two options open to them: you either resign yourself to obscurity and irrelevance in some minor administrative role until you retire or you try to make your presence felt with some major contribution to the fleet. If you succeed in the latter case, you get promoted to a more important and relevant position. If you fail, you're the latest "Insane Admiral" to face a court martial. Geordi took the safe route and landed a quiet, out-of-the-way administrative posting to wait out his remaining service with as little actual responsibility as he could get away with. (Kind of the ideal last gig, really, since he should have the bare minimum number of direct reports to worry about and can possibly keep the same job in a civilian capacity after retiring from Starfleet.) That's quite a leap, though... from "drones can move cargo" to "drones can build starships". I'm just picking nits there, lol... normally when a decommissioned ship is acquired to become a museum ship, you try to keep it in the condition it was in when it was retired from fleet service (restoration work aside). Yeah, but with few exceptions these ships aren't really carrying more weaponry than their predecessors. Quantum torpedoes seem to be the only new weapons development that's stuck around, while everything else is just newer, more powerful versions of the same phasers, photon torpedoes, and shields that Federation starships have been working with for 200+ years. In a few places (e.g. the Titan-A) it seems to have actually gone backwards with ships having fixed phaser banks instead of the more flexible phaser arrays.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Given how it's described, it seems very unlikely that the Borg DNA is capable of assimilating a person biologically/anatomically too... it just seems to have connected everyone to the Borg hive mind. The cube probably needs to beam over several drones to get the ball rolling on fully assimilating all the mind-controlled victims. That said, given the sheer mind-boggling consistency with which the Borg Queen is left holding the Idiot Ball (or Idiot Sphere?) whenever she puts in an appearance I'd expect the show's rushed happy ending will involve her having conveniently forgotten to actually do this basic bit of due diligence and relied entirely on the Borg DNA to keep Starfleet crews under her control. I'm not talking about just within the context of the show, where they're at least happy to renew acquaintence with each other... the backstories of all of them between the events of the Star Trek: Nemesis movie and the Picard series make it clear NOBODY has had a good time. Picard resigned in a huff and spent over a decade leading an aimless life doing an awful job of running the family vineyard, Riker and Troi became recluses and still (as in "during the show") haven't properly processed their son's death, Beverly spent twenty years living in fear of assassination in a rickety old ship she borrowed from Starfleet Medical, Geordi narrowly escaped death at Utopia Planetia and has since been resigned to working in a virtue sinecure at the fleet museum secretly rebuilding the Enterprise-D for some reason, Data's died three separate times now and the fourth Data is actually just Lore under the influence of Data's memories and without a head full of busted wiring, Worf had already been through more trauma than the rest of them before he lost the Enterprise-E... it's pretty ugly. The show's pretty unambiguous in declaring that these characters have not been leading happy lives between Nemesis and the present day. Where to start? Geordi is a survivor of the Utopia Planetia massacre, and would have had a front row seat to seeing an army of Soong-type androids destroy the shipyards where he worked, killing thousands and rendering the planet uninhabitable. His current assignment is a sinecure... a do-nothing posting as the curator of a museum. He spends his free time restoring the starship he was unwittingly responsible for the destruction of in secret. That doesn't strike me as a particularly healthy chain of events. (Not to mention he was already not in the best of spirits at the outset since his best friend died.) The process of loading torpedoes is... nobody mentions drones in connection with the restoration work on the ship itself. That's the point though... it wasn't restored to the state it was in before the ship's destruction. He fitted a much older bridge module. Eh... partially true? The new classes of starship that Starfleet developed after the Wolf 359 massacre were definitely engineered with a greater emphasis on defensive ability, sure. I'm not sure that's enough to say they're more warship-like. They're still engineered for space exploration and other peaceful operations first and foremost. That, and the later Dominion War, simply forced Starfleet to abandon the complacency they'd fallen into after making peace with the Klingons and striking an uneasy border agreement with the Romulans in the late 23rd and early 24th centuries. The only thing they've really done to make them more warship-like is stop sending civilians into harm's way... though even that seems to only apply to the ships operating in a defense role or deep space exploration role (given the alleged presence of children and schools on the Cerritos in Lower Decks).
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... Prospera Mercury and Rusty Venture have a LOT in common, morally speaking. Because I am cursed to be a completionist by nature. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to stop watching/reading a story before the end. I'd rather see the story through to the end even if it's bad so I can fairly critique the completed work than stop halfway. There are very few shows that have been so awful, so odiously unwatchable, that I could not bring myself to continue watching to the end. The only two that leap directly to mind are Stratos4 and Strike Witches. The former because it turned out to be a borderline Excuse Plot for a lot of yuri fanservice, and the latter because I found the series so blatantly skeevy that I honestly started to wonder if further viewing would end in Chris Hanson busting through my wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. G-Witch has not yet reached the point where it's so bad that I have to drop the series in utter disgust. It's bad, but it's still potentially recoverable. The main problem is that the series doesn't really feel like it's invested in its own premise. We're 14 episodes in and there is STILL little (if any) indication of an overarching plot. The story has so little in terms of buildup or foreshadowing that many plot developments come out of nowhere and are then promptly forgotten or swept under the rug within an episode or two. All the problems are resolved easily by outside circumstances so the protagonist feels almost uninvolved in the series she's starring in. Part I had a scene that's beautifully illustrative of the fact where Miorine's arguing with Shaddiq over changes to the rules for startup companies that were made specifically to undermine her, and Suletta - the one person whose actual fate is on the line for that - literally doesn't even have a seat at the table. It's certainly not helped by the fact that the heavily advertised yuri romance between Suletta and Miorine is nonexistent and the actual relationship between the two is frequently exploitative and downright toxic with Miorine treating Suletta like a dogsbody, useful idiot, or meatshield. Even the animation has started taking a dive as of the most recent episode. All in all, it gives me a vibe similar to the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince... that feeling of a story so disjointed between its key elements that it feels like two completely separate stories being intercut with each other for no clear reason. G-Witch is trying to have both a (badly composed) drama about severe economic inequality and the socioeconomic consequences of same and an almost Yu-Gi-Oh! GX-esque story about the children of the world's rich and famous attending Space Hogwarts to learn about Mobile Suits and engage in fantastic duels over matters of honor, pride, and love because Mobile Suits are apparently the one thing driving the world economy.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It does. It's a shame, because it's going to achieve the opposite effect. Perhaps more than any other alien species introduced in TNG, the Borg were truly alien. Their culture, their way of thinking, and their priorities were utterly alien and antithecal to the Federation's... yet they were not depicted as evil. "The Best of Both Worlds" took it to an interesting and unique place by having the Borg (via Locutus) express confusion that anyone wouldn't want to be assimilated because they saw assimilation into the collective as elevating primitive cultures to a higher quality of life. Instead of being just The Corruption and having a singleminded desire to consume, the Borg were almost an anti-Federation that took the idea of unity to its logical extreme and still believed they were actively making your life better by integrating your species into its interstellar community. First Contact was the true start of the Borg's villain decay, when they went from a sophisticated interstellar culture that had merged biology and technology to the point that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began to being grotesque cyber-zombies literally rotting around their implants trying to infect everyone with Borg-ness. The repeated defeats at the hands of a lone, lightly-armed science vessel only accelerated that decay. Then Picard revealed the Borg Queen just wants a BFF, and now we're going to see what's remaining of the Borg taken down by a half dozen senior citizens tooling around in midlife crisis ship. Isn't that kind of what just happened, more or less? IMO, making the assimilation process faster makes it a lot less scary. In TNG, Picard was subjected to hours of surgical mutilation and it's strongly implied by "The Best of Both Worlds" that he was conscious and aware the entire time. From First Contact onward, you get what amounts to a shot (or zombie bite) and within a minute or so you've already suffered a Grand Theft Me and a lot of the hardware is grown by the nanoprobes. It eliminates a lot of the horror aspect of it, since all the really do after is potentially amputate an arm and install the black bodysuit full of LEDs. It'd be watchable, for one. Even in its more cringeworthy moments, TNG never lost the sense of fun and adventure that is totally absent from grimdark NuTrek shows. ... my good chum, you literally grabbed four screenshots that all show starships with the lights dimmed at alert status. Kind of the point of my earlier joke, actually... that the NuTrek ships are all so dark they look like they're PERPETUALLY at alert status. (Never mind that the Sutherland is literally unfinished, and the Enterprise-C is suffering from a lot of battle damage.) You forgot the big one... DEATH IS IRRELEVANT. The Borg actually SAY that one in BoBW.
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