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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a while since I examined my DX VF-25s up close, but I'm fairly certain the two sets of six nozzles seen in the line art are actually present in the toy. They're hard to see due to being small, but those nozzles on the underside of the backplate are very much there.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It is, at least, acknowledged from a relatively early point in the franchise that the Zentradi's nature as a designer species based on the ancient Protoculture's own DNA resulted in some of them possessing unusual genetic traits as a legacy of the biotechnology engineered into them. It strikes me as unlikely... because the reason that giant Zentradi are not often seen in emigrant fleets and the reason giant Zentradi were banned on Earth are different. Giant Zentradi were banned on Earth because of the armed revolt in the late 2020s. The scarcity of giant Zentradi in emigrant fleets is presented as more of a resource problem, with the giants consuming exponentially more resources and space than a miclone on ships were space and resources are at a premium. Based on Sheryl's reaction, that the Frontier fleet emigrant ship Macross Frontier maintains a bioplant artificial ecosystem for resource recycling and has enough space and resources that it can spare enough of both for a permanent and luxurious giant Zentradi settlement is a highly conspicuous display of the Frontier fleet's incredible wealth.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Brings to mind an unanswered question from VOY "Author, Author". Do personality rights apply to holosuite/holodeck programs? As in, if someone makes a holoprogram and uses the likenesses of real people without their consent or potentially in an objectionable or defamatory manner, can the person depicted seek some kind of redress from the Federation or foreign court systems? The first two times we see this happen are in private use on TNG and the people depicted are offended but the offender receives no real consequences. On Voyager, it was done for commercial purposes with the Doctor's holo-novel that used the likenesses of the entire Voyager crew and it just kind of gets forgotten about in the brouhaha over the publisher denying the Doctor is legally the work's author. Picard is nothing if not defamatory in its relentless character assassination of Jean-Luc Picard and other former Enterprise crew...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    They don't even stand out in that regard, considering the number of Humans in Macross with unusual hair colors like blue, purple, and pink. How much of that is simply anime doing what anime does and how much is people taking medication to change their hair color as Sheryl is indicated to do in Macross Frontier is not clear, but it seems skewed heavily towards the former since nobody seems to find the amazing technicolor hairstyles on display unusual or noteworthy. I can't quite see someone so straight-laced as Gamlin Kizaki dying his hair that interesting shade of lavender for aesthetics. Max had it in the original series, but for the sake of a terrible pun.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Zentradi and part-Zentradi are actually fairly common in postwar society... it's just that, as in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, many Zentradi and part-Zentradi miclones are all but indistinguishable from Humans even up close. It's even harder to pick them out of a crowd by the time of Plus and beyond since many of them are "peace children" who'd been born and raised after the First Space War, and have few or none of the culture-otaku tells that the First Space War veterans so often display. There's often little to no way to tell that someone's part-Zentradi without being told, or them having a conspicuously Zentradi surname like Elmo Kridanik. The First Space War-era veterans... well... they often give the game away with their unapologetic Earth culture-otaku behavior and tendency to do things like take Human names.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That would probably be wise, yes. I have no idea what goes on on that Fandom Wiki, but a lot of people seem to just put completely unsubstantiated fan theories there as if they were fact. This seems to happen a lot when characters have an unconventional appearance somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary. The closest Gamlin got to "raised by Zentradi" is having been a favored student of Milia's in the military academy.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, that is far and away the most likely outcome. Given how previous grimdark NuTrek shows have performed, I expect Picard's season three and series finale to stick the landing about as well as Wile E. Coyote usually does... As lame as that premise was when Enterprise did it, I'll happily accept it from Picard as long as it ends with "Computer, delete program." I swear, every one of these that drops I'm torn between wanting to say "Damage report!" and having the same feeling of irritated resignation everyone had hearing another one of Dukat's canned "Attention Bajoran workers" announcements from DS9 "Civil Defense".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and that's one of the major weaknesses in the writing of Star Trek: Picard's as a whole. Normally, Star Trek tries to humanize its antagonists. To give them a sympathetic or at least understandable motivation behind their actions so that they're not simply doing it "for teh evulz". There's nothing redeeming about Picard's antagonists. Season one's Zhat Vash are basically just the space Klan, season two has the Confederacy (which needs no explanation), a Dr. Soong motivated by nothing but his own self-aggrandizement, and the Borg, and season three has rogue Changelings who hate the Federation for *checks notes* not letting the Changelings destroy the Federation. As a final villain for Star Trek's most celebrated crew, they could and should have done a hell of a lot better than Vadic. Especially since she's basically doing a low-rent General Chang impression half the time and reminding the audience of a much better, much more developed Star Trek antagonist.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, that kind of moral myopia is 100% on-brand for a Founder and shows up consistently throughout Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Throughout Deep Space Nine, the Founders use the claim that all "solids" hate and fear them as an excuse to use their shapeshifting abilities to do things that are all but guaranteed to make people hate and fear them like... Abducting and either murdering or imprisoning people and replacing them with Changeling imposters. (DS9 "By Inferno's Light") Using stolen identities to infiltrate, destabilize, and subvert sovereign governments. (DS9 "Apocalypse Rising", DS9 "Homefront", DS9 "The Adversary") Executing terrorist attacks. (DS9 "Homefront") Attempting mass genocide. (DS9 "By Inferno's Light", DS9 "What You Leave Behind") Yet somehow, it never seems to occur to the Founders that their own overtly hostile actions might be the reason that "solids" supposedly hate and fear them. For a species that, at least by Odo's reckoning, has such a great affinity for seeking order and finding patterns they really seem to suck at spotting the rather clear and unambiguous causal link between how the Founders behave and how the rest of the galaxy sees them. Whether the majority of the Founders have had that long overdue Heel Realization after Odo rejoined the Great Link the way they did in the Relaunch Novelverse or not remains to be seen, but Vadic and her clique seem to be committed to villainy. Vadic and the other rogue Founders are definitely a-hole victims at best. Nobody deserves to be tortured, but the reason Vadic and her colleagues ended up imprisoned and in Section 31's hands in the first place was that they infiltrated the Federation on a mission to subvert its sovereign governments, enslave its people, and impose totalitarian autocratic rule over its territory. It's asking a bit much of the audience to muster up sympathy for the captured Founders knowing what their mission was and having seen them attempt genocide twice in the previous series they're referencing and heard them talk about their plans for a third genocide. Instead, Vadic feels like a rather hollow and pointless villain whose motivation seemingly goes no deeper than "How dare you capture and study me in order to prevent my people from exterminating your entire species the way we said we would". It also loses a certain something in that the offense she's mad about was carried out by a rogue intelligence service not an actual Federation agency. Section 31 doesn't answer to anybody, and they're rather vocal and showy about that for an agency that's not supposed to exist. It wasn't even the Federation that did it. Section 31 did it, and the Federation authorities just rolled with it once they found out because at that point there was no hope for any kind of diplomatic resolution. Any attempt by Federation medical authorities to research a cure would doubtless have been hampered by Section 31 sabotage in exactly the way that Dr. Bashir and Chief O'Brien predicted and exploited to capture Director Sloan.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... like Odo in DS9's final season, this is deteriorating rapidly. Come to that, I'm still not clear on why Picard's final season and its TNG cast reunion are set against a backdrop consisting almost exclusively of references to Deep Space Nine. The USS Enterprise presumably participated in the Dominion War at some point, but they were far from the center of events and had little-to-nothing to do with the Founders. If you're gonna have Jean-Luc Picard get the old crew back together, why waste it by having them fight some rando nobody's ever heard of or an enemy from another series that hasn't got any personal relevance for anyone except maybe Worf? They come out hard and fast with the continuity nods to non-TNG shows in this episode too... with Tuvok (now a Captain) and the Titan-A hiding out in the Chin'toka system where some of the bloodiest fighting in the Dominion War occurred during Deep Space Nine. In previous works, they had one... though it wasn't consistently enforced. When it was first mentioned in TAS, it was implied to be mandated differently based on the species of the officer in question. In 2270, it was set to 75 for humans. It seems to have possibly been raised a bit in the 2360s and beyond. Mark Jameson from TNG "Too Short a Season" was 85 and still on limited duty. Jean-Luc Picard was 82 when he retired for the first time, and was 96 when he retired the second time... admittedly from a glorified sinecure as chancellor of Starfleet Academy. Admiral Janeway would be 73 at the present time in Star Trek: Picard based on her stated age in "Endgame".
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... I see Kurtzman et. al. are back to scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is a rescue from the same pile of perpetually-rejected series pitches that gave us Star Trek: Discovery's much-loathed third season and the incredible stupidity that is "The Burn". Star Trek's producers have been rejecting this one over and over again as unworkable since the 80's. They did try to explore the idea with a comic series, but it was very short-lived.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The bloodiest rivalry in Macross! Pineapple salad did in legendary ace Roy Focker, pineapple upside-down cake put Ozma Lee in the hospital, and pineapple took Arad Molders out of action before the final battle against Heimdall. With all the jokes about Messer being reassigned to delivery boy duty, one has to wonder if some deviant's pineapple pizza didn't get him in the end...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    They never got divorced. They separated for a short time, but reconciled during the events of Macross 7 and as of 2068 and Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! are explicitly still together. He even jokes that one of the major celebrity gossip rags has ranked him and Milia as the #1 celebrity couple most likely to break up for fifty consecutive years with every sign of good humor. EDIT: They were also explicitly still together in the Macross Frontier movie novelization, where they sortied together in VF-25s as part of the reinforcements arriving at the Vajra planet. Based on what Max says in Absolute Live!!!!!!, yes.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Pilots vs. Pineapple... the most enduring rivalry in Macross.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that's on the audience so much as the new showrunners. After Enterprise was cancelled and the relaunch novelverse shouldered the role of moving the Star Trek story forward, new storylines that featured Section 31 consistently made the organization out to be unrepentantly villainous and utterly repellant to any principled character. The closest they get to not being completely abhorrent are one storyline in the ENT relaunch and one in the TNG/DS9 relaunch where a main character joins the organization to prevent game-changing technology from falling into the hands of an enemy power. In even those cases, that cooperation is in the name of infiltrating the organization for the protagonists to obtain enough information to dismantle the organization... something that they technically succeed in doing the second time.) It wasn't until Discovery that the story started reinventing Section 31 as heroic or antiheroes instead of well-intentioned extremists and dangerous villains. Apparently the idea was just too much for edgelords like Kurtzman to resist.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I am not sure where you got any of that. Gamlin was born on Mars. His personnel file, seen in Macross 7, lists his birthplace as "The Solar System #4 Planet Mars - H.G. Wells City". There's no mention of him having been adopted. His father died when he was young, and he's shown attending his father's funeral in the Macross 7 PLUS episode "TOP GAMRIN" (sic), but his mother is very much alive... she's the veiled woman he's standing next to in that scene. Her line art is clearly labeled "Gamlin's Mother". Given that he left Earth as part of the Macross 7 fleet when he was just twelve years old, she probably moved there and took him with her. He's a Human, not Zentradi or part-Zentradi. His blood type (AB) is not a Zentradi blood type, and his bio says he's of Japanese descent. Whether both of his parents are Japanese or only one is unclear, given that his surname is Japanese but his father's funeral was officiated by a Christian priest. (Christianity is a very small minority religion in Japan.) His upbringing was definitely heavily influenced by Japanese culture, given that he's noted to frequent Japanese restaurants in the fleet (inviting Mylene to one during one of the radio plays) and the gift he gives to Mylene when they meet for the first time due to Milia's attempts to arrange a marriage between them is traditional Japanese silk (tsumugi). Why he is so gung-ho about his military career is never stated.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    He'd probably fire back with something about acceptable vs. unacceptable risks, Starfleet captains being responsible for minimizing risk to keep their crews safe, and some sort of biting remark about the lives lost because of the risks Kirk took in <list of famous TOS-era shenanigans>. Shaw seems to take a lot of pride in not being anywhere near as reckless as the likes of previous Trek protagonists. Stealing any older ship would probably be a waste... modern Starfleet ships seem to be quite a bit faster even than Voyager given that the Titan-A sustains Warp 9.99 all the way from Earth to that nebula.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As proud as Captain Liam Shaw is of his USS Titan-A's solid, unremarkable, and shenanigans-free service history, I'd expect Star Trek: Titan to be singularly boring. My mind's ear wants to give it the TNG theme, but played slightly out of tune by a choir of kazoos... or maybe just some generic muzak.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    One of the many unfortunate consequences of the current group of Star Trek showrunners being so heavily influenced by J.J. Abrams and his failed attempt to reboot Star Trek as a generic sci-fi/action franchise. Until the viewership numbers so conclusively proved it didn't sell, they were so determined to make Star Trek as dark and edgy as they could that they went all-in on every dark and edgy premise they could think of... and there are few premises in Star Trek more evocative of "edgy fanfic" than Section 31. So, despite the fact that DS9 and ENT had depicted them as being so clandestine almost nobody who wasn't working for them knew they existed, the writers of Discovery jumped at the chance to include them and completely forgot about the clandestine part. They not only showed them operating openly and undisguised on regular Starfleet ships as early as Discovery's third episode, they also made them immediately recognizable as such by having them all openly wear black version of the Starfleet insignia. A point so stupid that even Lower Decks struggles to make a joke out of it. It's definitely not their finest writing, but its original execution does mesh well with Deep Space Nine's theme of examining Star Trek's utopian ideal in execution and how it interacts with the non-utopian lifestyles outside of the Federation's model society. As Odo points out, it shouldn't actually be a surprise that the Federation would have an intelligence organization like Section 31. It's a functioning interstellar government and its broad-minded, utopian ideals are emphatically not shared by many of its neighbors like the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians, the latter two of which operate similar agencies quite openly (the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order). Starfleet Intelligence is purely a military intelligence organization, so it's only natural that the Federation would have at least one, and more likely several, nonmilitary intelligence organizations committed to protecting it and its interests on the interstellar stage. Sloan makes a similar point, that a utopian society like the Federation will inevitably need an organization that is willing to violate those lofty morals to defend those same morals from those that don't share that sense of justice. (And it's not like we didn't see Starfleet get up to a MOUNTAIN of shady sh*t in TOS and TNG anyway even before Section 31 was introduced...) The main problem with Section 31 is that, from the outset, their writing is so completely over-the-top and hammy. They're a super secret intelligence service that's been operating autonomously since the Federation was founded, somehow completely hidden from the public eye and from other intelligence services, appearing and vanishing seemingly at will whenever someone looks away like Batman, they dress all in black (pleather), and as of Discovery they were black commbadges, hide out in secret space stations protected by literally edgy minefields, and roam the galaxy in edgy black starships concealed with holographic camouflage. It's like something out of a bad fanfic even without Director Sloan doing his very best Bond villain impression... whether that's just how he rolls or he's doing it for Bashir's benefit. That Discovery and Picard have decided that needs to have more attention rather than mocking it for its stupidity like Lower Decks did is one of the bigger mistakes in the franchise as it is currently.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    "Alex Kurtzman talks a lot, says nothing of substance or value." That is some serious wishful thinking on display. Discovery was a flop. Picard was a flop, and is only recovering slightly because its writers gave up and turned it into a TNG cast reunion. Short Treks was a flop. It's unlikely Paramount will continue to invest in a failure like Picard by doing a movie or spinoff miniseries. It says a lot that he's still trying to get hype going for Section 31 nearly five years after it became obvious it was never going to happen. Michelle Yeoh was wasted on Discovery, I doubt she'd come back to be wasted playing a racist caricature again when she can have her pick of the industry. (She's already committed to at least four other projects too... American Born Chinese, The Brothers Sun, A Haunting in Venice, and Wicked.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know... I'm beginning to wonder if anyone working on Star Trek: Picard has ever actually seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The idea of a rogue Founder isn't exactly unprecedented - that's basically what Odo was after rejecting the Great Link and siding with the Federation - but the writers seem to have forgotten a bunch of key points about the Founders from Deep Space Nine. It was a plot point in Deep Space Nine that the Founders were better/more practiced shapeshifters than Odo and didn't have the same need to return to their natural gelatinous state periodically to rest. DS9's producers considered that to be a limitation effectively unique to Odo. So the Titus Rikka changeling shouldn't have had any need to ruin its cover the way it did. They also valued unity above everything else, with the female Founder even going so far as to claim that she would consider it a victory if she brought Odo home even if it meant losing the entire Alpha Quadrant. The idea that a substantial number of changelings refused the consensus of the Great Link and reopened hostilities of their own accord is pretty out-of-character for the Founders. This trailer, however, has what might be the most out-of-character moment for the Picard "changelings" so far. They're threatening each other. With violence and/or death. So much for their mantra "No changeling has ever harmed another" (except Odo).
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... it's especially problematic that none of the three actual Starfleet officers in the room - including the one getting seven shades beaten out of him - seem to have seen anything amiss about the interrogation of an elderly Starfleet hero taking the form of a vicious beating. It takes Vadic abandoning all subtlety and killing the two real security officers for Riker to notice something's wrong. Like Quark once said, "We're not Klingons." Starfleet's supposed to have principles... torture isn't really compatible with those principles. Prior to joining the cast of Deep Space Nine, Worf was usually on the receiving end of the beatings.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I was afraid of this... the quality of the last two episodes didn't last. We're back on that weak sh*t. Weirdly, this episode isn't just rife with excuse plot level writing... it seems determined to undo events not only from previous shows but from Picard itself. I have to say, I'm oddly impressed. This is even dumber than what I expected for the reveals surrounding Moriarty and Brent Spiner's new character. The one thing that lives up (or down) to expectations is that nobody is ever happy to see Picard. We can now technically say that list extends to Picard himself... again, if we're counting Nemesis.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    History may not repeat itself, but it sure does like to rhyme. 🤷‍♂️ The news that was coming out of CBS around the time Picard was in production suggest that the problem may even have the same cause. Namely, producers with too much power over the production riding roughshod over the writer's room and refusing to compromise or workshop their ideas. A huge portion of the TNG's issues in its first two seasons were the result of Gene Roddenberry, and later his lawyer Leonard Maizlish, wrangling full creative control over the series and instituting bizarre creative diktats that drove the writers bonkers and led to many of them quitting. The CBS/ViacomCBS writers room was apparently not a very nice place to be in the late 2010s, with writers and producers both getting dismissed by the network over unprofessional conduct. It's kind of ironic in a way, since The Next Generation was seen as a big risk when it got green-lit, with Patrick Stewart even refusing to unpack his suitcase because he was so sure it would fail, but Picard was supposed to be an idiot proof recovery plan for the franchise after Discovery's first season bombed.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    We've got Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, so the fanbase hasn't exactly been starved for quality content for a while now. People's impressions of Star Trek: Picard's third season are naturally going to be a relative judgement based on their experience with seasons one and two. Since seasons one and two were unqualified disasters and some of the worst Trek ever produced according to review scores, it's only natural that the competent but still problematic season three is going to seem great by comparison. It's still very problematic writing full of plot holes and pretty mediocre television by the standards of the franchise as a whole, but if you're looking at the Picard series on its own... ... but for how much longer? More than any other title, Star Trek: Picard seems to like killing named secondary characters to build drama. Season one killed off Icheb, Hugh, Dr. Bruce Maddox, Data (again), and the show's namesake Jean-Luc Picard. Season two killed off Elnor (temporarily), Rios (effectively), Dr. Agnes Jurati (by fusion), the alternate Borg Queen (by fusion), all of the other Borg Queens in the multiverse (by destiny), and Q. Season three's already killed Ro Laren, but there's still half a season left and we're looking at a ship full of legacy characters who are here for their last hurrah. I don't think any character could be called safe at this point. Undeniably, season three as a whole and the last two episodes in particular just sort of leave you wondering "Where was THIS two seasons ago?".
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