Seto Kaiba

Did you forget about the Borg cube? The one the Borg Queen rode in on? The one they're going to have to confront to get Jack back? Mind you, that may no longer strictly be true depending on how long those ships have been left alone in the care of the Borg. As we saw in First Contact, it doesn't take much for one Borg drone to start assimilating an entire ship and its crew. It wouldn't take much for the Borg to start properly assimilating all of those ships and their crews considering all the surviving crew are already drones minus the implants. They would just need to beam a couple drones over to each ship and within a couple hours they'd have to worry about actual Borg drones capable of conventional assimilations and armed with Borg weaponry and shields. Not to mention the Borg might have started upgrading those ships with proper Borg hardware. If DS9 is any indication, she's a hell of a lot tougher than Galaxy-class tough and on more than one occasion was shown to fight on an even or superior footing against far larger ships. I don't expect the Enterprise-D to square up with that armada for the far simpler reason that she would get absolutely bodied by even one of those new, more advanced, far more powerful starships. The Enterprise-D was a heavyweight in her day, but her day was three decades ago and not only has she not had any upgrades she's literally been rebuilt with surplus and salvaged parts and still has visible damage from the crash landing that ended her the first time. It's pretty openly shown in the series so I'm not sure why you have trouble seeing it. Putting aside for a moment that this is quite literally Jean-Luc Picard's Unresolved Emotional Baggage: the Series, Will Riker and Deanna Troi quit Starfleet and ran away to live as recluses on a frontier planet because they couldn't cope with the loss of their son, with this season revealing that they still haven't processed the trauma because Deanna's used her empathic powers to prevent her husband from processing that trauma. Data is a twice dead software revenant who is now technically actually Lore with Data's memories, a literal walking corpse that was suffering from a violent form of multiple personality disorder and is joking about wanting to die quickly. Geordi was not only estranged from part of the crew and part of his own biological family, he's been using his position as a museum curator to privately rebuild a ship that was destroyed because of him... a hobby which does not speak well of his mental state. Worf at some point lost the Enterprise-E and is now a loner working in intelligence... considering the implication that he was the ship's captain as he was in the novels, that likely means he was unable to secure another command. Beverly Crusher got pregnant by her boyfriend and ran away into deep space to avoid her child's father for 20 years, living for her job and raising a son who is a criminal wanted by a laundry list of Federation and non-Federation governments for crimes like gun running and the transportation and sale of controlled substances. Raffi is a nominaly clean former junkie who was cashiered out of the service for being such a massive failure that the only thing keeping her in was Jean-Luc Picard, and her family wants nothing to do with her. Rios was traumatized by the murder-suicide his mentor and Captain committed and became a stereotypical heavy drinking troubled space trucker before the crew literally abandoned him in the past. Elnor was a Romulan orphan with abandonment issues. Seven of Nine was a hard-drinking space vigilante on a quest to avenge the murder of her surrogate son at the hands of a trusted friend and possible former lover before joining Starfleet to become the executive officer to a captain who actively resents her existence. Jack Crusher, for his part, has all kinds of issues thanks to having the Borg collective in his head and having seen his own biological father say that Starfleet is the only family he needs... and that's not getting into all the crap he got up to that led to a substantial number of outstanding warrants for his arrest. It seems pretty evident that nobody here is happy. They're smiling and joking, but it's over things like being snubbed by their juniors who don't have the proper reverence for them and as a way to cope with the incredible stress of the nightmare scenario they're currently in. The reason I hypothesized that Geordi might be motivated by guilt in part or in full in his restoration of the Enterprise-D is that there's really no other rational explanation for it. We know that Starfleet had to remove the wreckage of the saucer section from Veridian III for prime directive reasons, but the ship was explicitly a write-off. She was space garbage and not worth the time or effort to try to repair for Starfleet itself. That the wreck ended up in the museum itself is questionable. That, instead of being preserved in its final state, he spent 20 years repairing it on the sly and even went so far as to appropriate the drive section from a different starship in order to fully restore it raises an awful lot of awkward questions. If this were posterity project sanctioned by Starfleet it would not have been a secret. Certainly it would not have been a secret kept from the ship's former captain on prior visits to the museum. For the record, I didn't even suggest that that was the cause of any kind of trouble for his family. Just that he clearly would have to take a fair amount of time away from his family in order to work on that ship clandestinely the way he did. Odds are the bridge is probably not the original bridge either in in-story terms. It was probably replaced by another bridge module taken either from a Galaxy-class ship that was sent to the breakers or from surplus. It's just an interesting note that, for some reason, the bridge was not restored to the state that it was in before the ship was destroyed. Considering what these ships are supposed to be for, you'd expect them to all still look like bright, open, pleasant places to be. These are not warships. These are diplomatic and exploratory ships that also happen to double as security force. The kicker of course is that we see other ships from the 2380s and beyond that still look like this. That are still bright and open and comfortable places to be. Just not in these shows. They're so obsessed with being gritty and dark that you almost miss those massive JJ Abrams lens flares. At least that was illumination.

Wow. This week's episode is an absolute goddamn disaster.

... and yet, ironically, still wrong. They recreated the bridge from partway through TNG, not the bridge the ship actually had when she went down on Veridian III. Yet, for all that and despite how dated it looks, this is far and away the nicest-looking set NuTrek has produced so far. Everything else - from the Discovery to La Sirena to the Titan-A - is so dark and so grey and miserably depressing-looking because the sets are so under-lit. It's a bit garish, but this looks like it would actually be a nice place to work while every other ship in the fleet seems to have the dimmer switch stuck at "Red Alert" the entire time. One has to wonder if Picard's delight at seeing the carpet again is him actually missing the carpet, or just missing a light level higher than "half-dead flashlight". (Dear Starfleet, when Captain Picard said there were only four lights you need to understand he was being tortured by the Cardassians not giving interior design advice.)

I'm not sure that argument tracks. Sure, the Defiant didn't solo the Borg cube in First Contact... but then, it was never meant to. It was meant to fight as part of a fleet, and as a small escort warship aggressively min-maxed for combat it was meant to punch way above its weight class with disproportionately heavy armament and tank hits that would cripple or even destroy Starfleet's larger and less specialized ships so that it could hang in a fight as long as possible instead of being one-shotted. That's exactly what we see in First Contact, and in its prior appearnaces in the DS9 series. The Defiant was part of the fleet that intercepted the Borg cube and it hung on in that fight all the way to Earth, tanking hits from weapons that we'd previously seen one-shot Starfleet ships at Wolf 359 like a champ. So much so that she's noted to still be spaceworthy and repairable after the fight ends. The Defiant occasionally was shown struggling against Jem'Hadar attack fighters, but mainly because there are just so bloody many of them. By the same token, let's also not forget the many times the Galaxy-class was depicted as a one-hit-point wonder in TNG or that newer classes like the Sovereign-class were developed specifically to address the Galaxy-class's deficiencies in a defensive role. It's probably even worse now, since the Enterprise-D is 30+ years out of date technologically and literally built from reclaimed garbage and war surplus parts. ... actually can we muse for a moment on how completely F'ed up it is that Geordi spent twenty years painstakingly reconstructing the Enterprise-D. If it were anyone else there would not be Unfortunate Implications, but as it's Geordi in a series that's depicted every member of the TNG cast as broken and miserable... is reconstructing the Enterprise-D for the Fleet Museum Geordi's way to "atone" for having inadvertantly caused the ship's destruction in Generations? How much time did Geordi take away from his family over TWENTY YEARS to painstakingly restore the totalled saucer section, replace the stardrive section, and repair the whole mess using salvage and war surplus parts? The crew are basically flying Geordi's midlife crisis project car into battle with the Borg. In all fairness, the series IS titled "Star Trek: Picard". It is still pretty damned awkward that EVERYTHING has to revolve around Jean-Luc Picard, his incredibly skewed and self-centered perspective, and his post-retirement struggles for relevance. (Like in the first season where he makes a ludicrously inaccurate analogy comparing the Romulan resettlement effort to Verdun and gets angry because everyone else refuses to subscribe to his personal morality) *points to Jack Crusher, Picard's bastard son and this season's plot-critical MacGuffin* They... they kinda did. It's so ill-considered that it not only goes against how transporters work and how Borg assimilation works, it literally forgets that there was nothing special about Picard being able to hear the collective after his implants were removed. Seven of Nine did it frankly all the freaking time in Voyager, as did several other one-episode characters. The only ones who didn't were Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok, who had some magical anti-assimilation drug they got from the Doctor when they went undercover on a Borg ship in "Unimatrix Zero". (The previous explanation was simply that it's more or less impossible to remove 100% of the Borg's nano-hardware from the body, so rescued former drones still have some small residual link to the collective at short ranges.) Moreover, why does this DNA work on literally everyone regardless of species? (And how did permanent changes in Picard's DNA get missed when Starfleet routinely performs genetic scans of its personnel as part of physicals?) Only a couple months! They couldn't have started before stealing Picard's remains from the Daystrom black site. We thought they'd done exactly that last season, when Dr. Jurati became the new Borg Queen and the Borg applied for Federation membership.

Against any other foe this might be a pretty good argument. Where it falls down a bit is that draining a ship's shields in a matter of seconds using their tractor beams or some other weapon is pretty much the Borg collective's signature move. Once the shields are down you're working with the strength of the outer hull. The Defiant's reinforced hull and ablative armor make it much more resilient without shields. And if you're looking to sneak about, the smaller ship is kind of the common sense choice. If it can also punch way the hell above its weight class the way the Defiant can, so much the better. Considering the previous season depicted an alternate timeline where Starfleet had wiped the Borg out entirely and were planning a public execution for the Borg Queen... the Borg Queen may be entering the find out phase of **** around and find out. Starfleet is about to have an awful lot of extremely pissed off people with a bone to pick with the Borg collective. (Assuming that Admiral Janeway and Captain Janeway blowing up that transwarp hub in the late 2370s doesn't count as the start of that phase.)

This is certainly true... though flying and fighting on at least a basic level can be done by the computer. With expert hands on the main systems, their main problem is going to be battle damage taking down automations and manual repairs to critical systems. The Changelings weren't a TNG antagonist either, but here we are. I'm pretty sure the Defiant can take more punishment since she was built as a warship and was uparmored and upgunned to fight the Borg and then the Dominion while the D was built as a deep space explorer. She's also a much smaller target. Seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager for starters... The only difference we've seen has been the Fleet Formation system that has twice now allowed the Borg to seize control of entire fleets. It's been established since Wrath of Khan that Starfleet ships are heavily networked and that it's possible to remotely override systems by connecting to those networks from the outside. (The explanation given for how prefix codes work is that the consoles aren't just linked to the computer using fiber optics, they're also connected through the use of some short-range subspace communication systems that allow them to communicate with the computer faster than light. This subspace communication is what the external computer taps into by authenticating on the network using the same encryption key that the ship's own consoles use. In that way, they can send commands to the other ship's systems as if they were operating a console directly aboard that ship. The inherent weaknesses of this system were also a major plot point in the Star Trek Enterprise relaunch novel series with the Romulans using a computer virus to infiltrate the systems of Earth's ships and take the ships over remotely.) Exactly what this fleet formation system does is not entirely clear, it just seems to mean that all the computers of all the ships in the fleet are linked together constantly instead of on-demand. In practice, that's a terrible idea and whoever came up with it is kind of a dimwit. Then again I am a network engineer so I have strong opinions on that particular topic colored by my professional experience. Yeah, that seems pretty likely. Probably going to undermine the whole point they were going for regarding Shaw's refusal to use anything but her legal name.

That presumes there is something up there to reach. I think the writing in this last episode demonstrates rather succinctly that they're groping about in a void. It's easy to get swept up in cheap nostalgia - like the characters themselves are doing - but it's a fast-fading high that's quickly replaced with the realization that we're still watching a version of Star Trek so senselessly bleak that even the characters themselves are indulging in escapist reminiscing about the "better days" when they were younger. (Never mind that the writers had to bend over backwards and engage in more moon logic than any previous Star Trek story for these characters to be in any way relevant to galactic goings-on.) That actually gets a pass. It was established way back in the TNG Season 1 writers materials that the Enterprise-D was so heavily computerized and so advanced that it's theoretically possible for one person to operate the entire ship in at least a basic capacity. This premise was used in a few different episodes including TNG "11001001" and VOY "Message in a Bottle", as well as a Star Trek board game. Living crew can just do the job with greater flexibility and precision than a wholly-automated starship, and the crew are needed for things like maintenance and repair. There are a bunch of other problems with the whole idea of dusting off the Enterprise-D: The Enterprise-D isn't even the best option available in the Fleet Museum. They have access to a newer, smaller, faster, more defensible, dedicated anti-Borg warship which can operate far more flexibly with far fewer crew in the USS Defiant. That Worf never points this out is honestly a bit odd, since she was HIS command for several years. Geordi is the curator of the Fleet Museum. Who in the nine hells received a requisition for photon (and possibly quantum or even transphasic) torpedoes from a non-combat, non-fleet posting and was just like "Yeah, that sounds legit." Come to that, who approved the Fleet Museum's requisitions for enough deuterium and antideuterium to power a Galaxy-class ship? Why is any ship in the Fleet Museum outfitted with live weaponry? These are DISPLAY pieces. You'd think they'd at least have disconnected the phaser arrays and stripped any classified technology before putting the ships on display. The Enterprise-D really isn't any less networked than the ships that the Borg took over. All any of the assimilated ships has to do is run her prefix codes and seize control of her computers remotely and it's game over. I've got a feeling the writers copout for that is going to be that only the area immediately around Earth was affected, and that Starfleet in the other ~150+ systems and innumerable space stations and planetside installations were unaffected. If that were the case, they've maybe lost a few hundred senior officers... not decimation of the ranks but still problematic with the fleet around Earth losing a lot of experienced officers. There's a much bigger problem in that thousands and thousands of junior officers will have had to endure the trauma that comes with assimilation, not just mentally but very likely physically too by the time the old farts get back to save the day.

By Jove! Truly my roguish mischief knows no restraint or penalty! The only reason it came to mind at all is that that's one of the few details that just keeps coming back. Almost every time cloning has come up as a topic (for sentient beings), there is mention of a gene sequence degradation that is a product of the cloning process that can easily out someone as a clone and that keeps someone from being cloned over and over again forever. I have the same question. Jurati merged with an alternate timeline's Borg Queen after that timeline's Borg Collective was wiped out and came back to her original universe where the Borg Queen was dead and took over that Borg Collective to ally with the Federation as a new, benevolent Borg. What sofa cushion was the original Borg Queen hiding under all this time? Especially one deep enough to fool the other version of herself in the alternate universe who had multi-dimensional awareness. Yeah, all in all changing antagonists with just two episodes to go is... problematic... for the writing. Especially since the new antagonist they chose was largely declawed by Star Trek: Voyager and has had no prior involvement with the antagonist they went with for the first eight episodes.

At this point, I don't think there's any non-bullshit way for the writers to salvage this one. The is a literal museum piece that is at least 30 years out of date compared to the rest of Starfleet. As it was intended for display and nothing more, it would be quite odd for the ship to be fueled, never mind equipped with live weaponry like photon torpedoes. It lacks the advanced weapons and defensive systems developed to fight the Borg that manifested in the ships of the Dominion War era and beyond. It's designed for a crew of a thousand, and it's being operated by seven senior citizens and a middle aged ex-Borg drone. For their part, I can't see a way out of this that doesn't involve some never-before-seen bullshit or an incredibly weak attempt to sweep this all under the rug.

And there it is... the lurching, cadaverous wretch called Star Trek: Picard violently crap itself and died. Next week, emergency services arrives to tag 'em and bag 'em. We're not just back to the same trash-tier writing that has been Picard's stock in trade for almost its entire run, the writers were apparently so desperate for some way to put a bow on this turd and hope we wouldn't notice the stench that they forgot the existence of the entire previous season. Mind you, the entire previous season was pretty forgettable even by the standards of NuTrek, but still... this is 1/3 of the total runtime of the Picard series they apparently forgot about! This turdburger of a series literally cannot be retconned out fast enough for my taste. What a goddamn mess. This might actually be worse than Discovery's first season. As per their usual idiom, this season has amassed quite the body count. The series as a whole has killed off more legacy characters than any other by an enormous margin: The entire Romulan Star Empire Hugh Bruce Maddox Data's recovered consciousness Jean-Luc Picard The Borg Queen of the Confederacy timeline All Borg Queens everywhere in the multiverse (via destiny) Agnes Jurati Cristobel Rios (via time travel) Q Ro Laren Alton Soong Data's recovered consciousness (again) Lore's recovered consciousness Lal's recovered consciousness Alton Soong's recovered consciousness and now... I'd be OK with that explanation had Star Trek not established on multiple prior occasions that repeatedly cloning the same individual leads to fatal genetic degradation in a lot shorter timeframe than what we've seen for the identical Soong family history.

That's fair. One could argue that Data was probably the only member of the extended and occasionally artificial Soong family to actually attend an Ethics class. The majority of the members of the Soong family we've seen in Star Trek to date are kinda... either insane, murderous, or murderously insane.

That was his position 20 years ago after Star Trek: Nemesis. The reason he gave at the time for agreeing to the writers killing off Data in Star Trek: Nemesis was that he'd visibly aged enough that he felt it was implausible for him to continue to play a physically-unaging android character like Data. His return to the franchise as Data coincided with the (inexpert) use of digital deaging technology to make him look closer to his TNG appearance, but they seem to have stunned him into agreeing to return with large amounts of money for Picard's third season and the TNG cast's last hurrah. That said, I think Picard's first season created an even bigger problem for Data returning. Data made it clear to Picard, and through him to Soong, that he wanted to die. Picard went and disconnected Data's program from the simulation it was running on to grant that wish. Apparently Data's final wish to meet death with dignity and to rest in peace didn't matter much to Dr. Soong, who effectively exhumed the corpse of Data's consciousness and resuscitated it in a golem with a bunch of other dead androids so they were all trapped inside a single body fighting for control. That is, as they say, a dick move. So does large amounts of money. Paramount+ is burning something to the tune of $8M an episode filming Discovery and Picard.

It wouldn't. All in all, I think that's one of those ideas that sounds good as long as you don't actually think it through. Kind of like how some fans were excited for the proposed Section 31 series until they remembered that Section 31 is basically War Crimes Inc., that the show's would-be protagonist is one of the most unrepentantly evil people to ever appear in Star Trek, and that the writing would be similar to Discovery's cringeworthy second season. A show built around Liam Shaw and Seven of Nine sounds like a fine idea in the context of Picard's third and final season because they're the only two functioning adults on a ship overrun with incontinent senior citizens. On its own merits, though... it's a point of pride for Shaw that the USS Titan didn't get up to any high-concept sci-fi bullsh*t during his multi-year tenure as its captain and Seven's nearly as stiff and no-nonsense as he is. It'd be Lower Decks without any of the comedy, unless they decided to have Seven revisit her short-lived, ill-considered cowboy cop phase. That is an incredibly safe bet.

That'd be the Neo-Zentran movement/party, yes. Though based on the setting materials I've received the movement/party is named the way it is in order to emphasize that, while it's a Zentradi political movement, it represents a new generation of Zentradi raised with Earth's culture who understand both the value of military force and of peace and culture. They're a reform party that's looking at rearmament not because of any warrior ethos, but as a tool to address the fleet's economic and foreign policy problems. Having its own NUNS forces and defense industry wouldn't just create jobs and stimulate the economy, it'd reduce Macross 29's dependency on its neighbors and its neighbors ability to force unfavorable terms on Macross 29 during trade negotiations.

More or less... from what I've been read and been told it comes up partly because Macross 29's head of state is the brother of the Frontier fleet's deceased president Howard Glass. Macross the Musiculture's Macross 29 fleet was in pretty rough shape in 2062. It doesn't seem to have been bankrolled by a megacorporation like the Frontier and Galaxy fleets, and its government's decision to adopt a policy of unarmed total pacifism eliminated two of any fleet's largest employers AND ruined its economy by making it an extreme doormat during its trade negotiations with other fleets. The resulting economic downturn led to demonstrations that turned into riots and then eventually evolved into a legitimate political movement in the fleet that was pursuing rearmament. It's kind of a polar opposite of the Macross Frontier fleet, which is wealthy thanks to the backing of Bilra Transport, several major tech companies, a robust defense industry developing original weapons for the fleet and for export sale, and cultural exports and tourism.

Not really... all five of Xaos's "Siegfried" custom VF-31's have the same specs and equipment barring the different monitor turrets. On paper, they allegedly have different operational roles but nothing in their specs or equipment actually bear out those differences except in Chuck's case. Arad's VF-31S is said to be (as expected) a Command machine tuned to the limits of its performance. Messer's VF-31F is said to be a space superiority model optimized for atmospheric combat... which is kind of paradoxical if you think about it. Chuck's VF-31E is set up as an ELINT/AWACS aircraft. Mirage's VF-31C is said to be a "tactical support fighter" whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. It's said that it has command unit capabilities too, though technically that's just software that could be installed anywhere. Hayate's VF-31J is said to be a "space superority support" model, with no real indication given as to what THAT means either. In practice, all of them except Chuck's are used as dogfighters with no real sense of unit organization or different operational roles. In the comparison to the VF-25's used by SMS in Macross Frontier, it's worth remembering that the VF-25's we see are all production-intent variants from the VF-25's trial production lot. None of them have been customized. The VF-31's used by Xaos, however... the VF-31A type is production-intent, and because it has the ordnance container system it's meant to be a "one variant fits all" approach to mission equipment. The same single variant should sufice to fill any role by swapping out the modular container. Xaos customized five of the VF-31A's they were given to make the Siegfried type, and in so doing gave them cosmetic differences... but in practice it's still a jack-of-all-trades unit.

It's really more a return to the show's baseline level. Up to the final episode, Part I was a disjointed mess that never established any kind of consistent narrative. It just jackknifed from one crisis to the next at breakneck pace with each being treated like it was the end of the world for two episodes before being either easily resolved by some never-before-mentioned bullsh*t or simply forgotten. We're just back to that... with the Part I climax ending up as the easily-resolved and almost forgotten event.

Well, The Witch from Mercury has drunkenly stumbled back onto the broadcast schedule and vomited up another messy, poorly-written excuse for an episode that can't seem to make up its mind if it wants to pick up where Part I left off or not. All in all, the episode is disjointed to the point that it feels like a clipshow from three or four different episodes running in parallel. I'm not sure what's more off-putting... the writing's inability to maintain anything like a consistent tone or reasonable pacing, or the way everyone is just SUPER cool about Suletta having straight-up killed a dude in the most grusome manner possible two weeks ago.

Picard's whole thing with these rogue Founders doesn't really make a ton of sense if you think about it. That Founders were captured during the Dominion War and subjected to study is, on its own, pretty reasonable and even Section 31's involvement in it makes sense since they'd have had to experiment on someone to prove out their nasty little anti-Changeling doomsday virus. That the experimentation somehow made them better shapeshifters doesn't make all that much sense since their supposed new capabilities are things they were already capable of back in Deep Space Nine. Odo was pretty clear from the outset that the Founders are better (or more experienced/proficient) shapeshifters than him and that their shapeshifting ability was good enough to fool even Starfleet sensors. Likewise, the Martok Changeling was able to pass multiple blood screenings without issue prior to being outed and gunned down on Ty'gokor. Section 31's experimentation allegedly made Vadic and her ilk better shapeshifters, but they never address how and the only appreciable differences from the Founders as they were during Deep Space Nine are all negatives: They need to periodically return to their liquid state to regenerate, and if they don't they'll gradually lose control over their shape anyway with visible physical deterioration. This limitation was previously unique to Odo. They can be stabbed with injurious or even incapacitating effect. They can be vaporized with a single phaser discharge, when they were previously shown tanking dozens of disruptor blasts. (Barring Mirror Odo, who exploded when struck with a kill shot from a Bajoran hand phaser, presumably also on Odo's inexperience as a shapeshifter.) The most coherent explanation we can assume is that they discovered, during that experimentation, that simulating the full internal anatomy of a living being instead of just doing the outer appearance and lifeform readings let them evade detection by anti-Changeling countermeasures at the cost of being way more draining to carry off. That'd make it not so much an improvement in their abilities as a dangerous forbidden technique.

Possibly - and I would be endlessly amused if it were the case - a dig at Star Trek: Picard's own merchandising. The Star Trek wine collection. The novelty bottles modeled on various noteworthy liquor bottles from Star Trek shows make rather nice collectibles but the actual wine therein is unmistakably the cheap stuff. Some of it was passable, but a lot of it wasn't. It reviewed poorly, even in publicity puff pieces with Picard cast members involved. Like the wine tasting and review with John de Lancie, where the "Cardassian Kanar" red wine blend was described as something that could be mistaken for tapwater with wine essence added. That is pretty close to murder with malice when it comes to a wine review. I'm no wine snob and certainly no vintner, but AFAIK there are a large number of factors contributing to that including the type and quality of fruit used, the acidity, the alcohol content, how long it aged, the balance of flavors, the quality and consistency of the barrels, etc. (I have an aunt who makes wine, I only narrowly staved off a multi-hour lecture.) The Star Trek wine collection compared unfavorably (IMO) to the products of my local winery, and my home state isn't exactly well-known for its wine.

Dunno what to tell you there, but almost all of the discussion of Rey that I saw when the movies were coming out was negative. Filthy casual that I am, a lot of that was filtered through friends who are more avid consumers of Star Wars media so maybe? I've gotten reamed a few times in discussions for suggesting Rey was a missed opportunity to defy the usual "Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny" malarkey and have her just be the "nobody from nowhere" that she claimed to be while still saving the day. Y'know, saving the day because she's got principles and chose to stand against tyranny instead of being railroaded into it by Destiny. But yeah my key takeway from all that was definitely that fans hated her... and I'm seeing a LOT of that on social media right now, which is why I mentioned it. That was pretty ****ed up. It's one thing for audiences to have a negative reaction to an actor because they played a villain so well that audiences can't help it (like the guys who played Draco Malfoy and Joffrey), it's quite another for a character to be in a subplot so obnoxious and unnecessary that audiences can't separate their dislike of it from their dislike of the actor.

This feels like an appropriate response: All things considered, I'm surprised that The Powers That Be at Disney want to do another Star Wars movie with Rey. For a while there, I'd have sworn that she was competing with Jar-Jar Binks to be the single most hated character in Disney's Star Wars franchise. The 51.86% plummet in the box office take across her trilogy doesn't augur well for yet another outing with a character who has (not entirely unreasonably) been accused of being a Mary Sue. Disney can occasionally do a great job with Star Wars, but what I've seen has been far more miss than hit and far more dependent on fanservice than quality storytelling. Rogue One and Andor stand head and shoulders above the rest. Then again, I'm also a filthy casual and think the Jedi are far and away the most boring part of Star Wars. To me, there are few characters less relatable than bland ascentic space monks and evil-for-evil's sake space cultists wheeled helplessly from set piece to set piece on their way to a destined encounter with a preordained outcome because The Force Says So. A setup like that kind of denies that your protagonist or antagonist have free will or agency within the context of the story, and a boolean choice between objective good and objective evil leaves little to develop a character around. I'd rather see them put more effort into telling stories about the normal people of the galaxy who aren't simply puppets of The Force.

Oh Star Trek: Picard, it truly is impossible to underestimate you. "Surrender" has a fitting title, because this is clearly where Picard's showrunners and writers simply gave up and stopped even pretending they were trying. There's barely enough story here to fill the back of a cereal box, never mind ten episodes of a television series. It's just depressing.

I know the ones you mean... those have a Beware of Blast markings as if they were engine nozzles.

Poorly? I think that much was inevitable. This is less a narrative and more a string of poorly thought-out references and in-jokes driven by moon logic and garnished with a plethora of plot holes. A few moments of almost quality writing were unlikely to ever change this show's course away from the ending being another disappointing arse pull.