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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Also, given the recent news, can we now say that Disco is, in fact, dead?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Like the real/original Captain Georgiou and Captain Pike, he's one of the few characters on Star Trek: Discovery who seems to understand he's in a Star Trek series and what that means in terms of themes and tone.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The unfortunate implications of how she got pregnant... which, from what we know of how contraception works in later Trek, would require either negligent or deliberate malpractice on her part. The James T. Kirk Memorial Conference Room... so known for the large dartboard on the wall emblazoned with a portrait of the room's namesake.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Her. Poor Admiral Vance seems to be something approximating a decent, principled being. He's an arse for enabling her, and he had many far better options to command the Discovery than her, but Burnham is very much a Designated Hero. It won't be missed. Ironically, Picard's sudden reversal thanks to becoming the TNG cast reunion it promised it would never become has left Star Trek: Discovery as the worst-rated Star Trek series of all time by a substantial margin. Not all of them... but most. For instance, her saving the day by recapturing the USS Discovery after the Emerald Chain pirates take it over is 100% solving a problem she herself created. She wasn't responsible for "the Burn", though... so solving that incredibly stupid mystery and unintentionally securing a new source of dilithium for the Federation is one of her few genuine achievements despite being a confluence of multiple massive plot holes. The fact that the show has plot holes so large they comprise entire seasons is something Discovery will NEVER escape.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    "Kirk was the problem." Somewhere, there's a boardroom of Starfleet admirals nodding along. Of all the scathing indictments of the series I've seen and read over the years, this one might be the closest I've seen to an honest-to-goodness sucker punch. I felt that one. "Other Me disgusts me" is 100% how a TNG-era Jean-Luc Picard would react to seeing this broken, self-obsessed relic that was once one of Starfleet's most principled officers. Much like Michael Burnham repeated (or presaged) the murderous xenophobic paranoia of the USS Phoenix's Captain Benjamin Maxwell in TNG "The Wounded", Jack Crusher here in Star Trek: Picard's third and (mercifully) final season is repeating the sins of Admiral Mark Jameson, who traded weapons to one faction on Mordan IV to secure the release of the hostages they'd taken, and then armed the opposition too to "balance the books". The end result of Jameson's gambit was 40 years of war that caused so much destruction that, once the dust settled, the Mordans tried to lure Jameson back so they could punish him for his crimes. Both he and Beverly do imply he's a trained medical practitioner at various points in "Seventeen Seconds". How much of that training is formal and how much of it was him being Beverly's nurse is open to interpretation. I doubt the writers thought that far ahead... if they had, they'd realize they'd make Beverly a borderline sex offender and Jack an even scummier person than they were going for. IMO, the likely explanation is that the various warlords probably don't have the resources to divert troops to exterminate refugees without compromising their front lines against other warlords. Weaponized disease is a means of attack that doesn't require diverting any soldiers long-term.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    In Star Trek IV, Kirk et. al. had a LOT of mitigating factors that prevented them from experiencing the full consequences of their actions... the biggest of which was probably not having just saved Earth, but having just saved the son of the hugely influential Ambassador Sarek. Burnham's various Karma Houdini moments never really end up making sense. There's really not a lot that could be called meritorious about using a weapon of mass destruction intended for a planetary genocide to force a regime change on Qo'nos which is propped up by "obey me or I will destroy us all". That it works at all is kind of outrageous. That the Chancellor that Burnham installs manages to hold onto power for any length of time is astonishing. Somehow, this is enough to convince the Federation president to not just pardon her for her earlier crimes of mutiny and assaulting a superior officer, but also to reinstate her commission AND award her a medal. Luckily, they never get a chance to put her on trial for visiting Talos IV. In season three she violates direct orders from both her Captain and the Starfleet Commander in Chief to go charging off on a rescue mission that results in Starfleet's only non-warp starship falling into enemy hands and nearly causes a second Burn... but she's rewarded for it with a promotion to Captain and command of the single most stratically-important starship in the fleet. Made worse by the fact that she'd been told just a few episodes earlier that she was unsuited for command precisely because she couldn't follow orders.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That one, I'm not sure we can explain. I'm not familiar with the specific model kit or decal sheet you're referring to, but as you noted Minmay left Earth in September 2012 aboard the SDF-2 Megaroad-01. It wouldn't be possible for her to hold a 2013 concert in Paris because she wasn't on Earth in 2013 and Paris suffered a catastrophic existence failure about three years before that point. Was that model kit or decal sheet released in 2013? Or for some special event? Master File only "adopted" a few of Hasegawa's unique kit designs as in-universe paintjobs, some are simply products meant for fan enjoyment not necessarily representative of an in-universe thing. I'd assume so... especially if there were a fair number of Japanese personnel assigned to that suspected base in Clavius crater. And that trend of doing gaudy redecos of secondhand Valkyries like we saw in Macross 7 had to come from SOMEWHERE. The Queen's Knights are a favorite of mine... not just because the paint scheme itself looks nice on the VF-25F, but because it's a subtle but very cute touch on Sheryl's part to ask for the MODEX numbers of the two VF-25Fs in her SMS bodyguard detail to match her and Alto's birthdays. (727 and 1123). I'd quite happily buy a matched set of Queens Knights VF-25Fs from Bandai Spirits to go with the rest of the Frontier stuff I've got.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Kosher shuttlecraft. Can't be used to haul ham and ham products.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If they liked it once, they'll love it thrice! Which is understandable. Goodness knows it was probably the single worst-enforced embargo in galactic history. Lampshaded in the same DS9 episode where the ban's repeal was mentioned with Admiral Ross joking that the ban's enforcement was so poor that he was probably the only one in his class at the Academy who hadn't tried the stuff before they repealed the ban. What's the alternate explanation for a cargo hold full of illegal weapons then? I can't imagine one that's less awful than what he's already proposing. Mind you, he's supposed to be a doctor. Part of the Hippocratic Oath is a vow to Do No Harm. That this is part of the Hippocratic Oath even in Star Trek comes up in multiple past shows. Selling arms to further a war is definitely, DEFINITELY a violation of "Do No Harm". Mind you, the warlords warring is what created those refugees in the first place. All he's doing by further arming the warlords is raising the body count, creating MORE refugees, and ensuring that whoever's left is exceptionally well-armed to come take out the refugees the hard way when someone wins and they return to the question of the refugees. Yes, we are. These are things that are acknowledged and explained in-story. Yes, they absolutely can do that. Why don't they? Because it's so stupidly dangerous that the Federation and other galactic powers banned it after several misadventures. We get to see several of the Federation's in TOS and TAS. There are also literal time cops from several different eras in future history who intervene to prevent alterations to the timeline. Janeway had several run-ins with members of the 29th century Federation's Temporal Integrity Commission and Archer got a LOT of gray hair from his dealings with the 31st century Federation Temporal Agency. Sisko got the business from his contemporary version, the Department of Temporal Investigations, after his unintended outing to the 23rd century. Apparently the Temporal Cold War was such a mess that the major galactic powers outright banned time travel even for benevolent and scientific purposes by the time of the 32nd century portions of Star Trek: Discovery. That's why the Federation had to cover up the origins of the USS Discovery with a retrofit and new registry... it was an illegal time traveler. This one was less explicable initially. Gene Roddenberry's position on the matter of cloaking devices was that sneaking about was unheroic, so the Federation simply didn't use cloaking devices even though they had captured several prior to the 24th century. In-universe, this was later explained that the cloaking devices came with their own set of significant drawbacks that the Federation had decided just weren't worth it. (For instance, being unable to use shields, weapons, active sensors, or higher warp speeds while cloaked.) Later justification was added in TNG with the Treaty of Algeron, where the Federation agreed not to use or develop its own cloaking technology in exchange for a number of major concessions from the Romulans. I'm not sure which incident you're specifically referring to, but I'm sure there are probably explanations for it provided. Prior to NuTrek, the staff were pretty good about closing plot holes of that nature.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Gene... had a lot of ideas that were not necessarily suited to television, both from a writing perspective and a general "the limits of good taste" perspective. One of his stranger and more problematic mandates after gaining full creative control over Star Trek with Star Trek: the Next Generation was that 24th century humans were simply too advanced and enlightened for interpersonal conflict. That caused a lot of writers and production crew to quit or get fired during the show's first two seasons, until Gene's failing health and mounting problems with the production led to him being ousted and Rick Berman taking his place for the third season. It's actually kind of amazing that their distrust and borderline sociopathy didn't get more of them killed in the series thus far. Somehow - by which I mean a directorial fiat - Michael Burnham's rogue actions never seem to have actual lasting negative consequences for her or anyone else... except at the very start where it's required to kickstart her "arc".
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that argument tracks, to be honest. Beverly and Jack Crusher are allegedly running their little Doctors Without Space-Borders operation at the behest of the Mariposa Medical Group. I say "allegedly" because I doubt very much that a Federation medical aid organization like the Mariposas would condone the Crusher family's criminal activities. The Mariposas benefit from the Federation's post-scarcity replicator economy. They should not need to commit crimes to obtain the supplies they need. A potential explanation for why they would need to commit crimes to get supplies would be that, well, the open warrants for their arrest make it difficult to go near Federation systems anymore. Two problems with the flashback you're referring to: The Romulan ale that Jack Crusher used to bribe the Fenris Rangers probably isn't illegal. The Federation lifted the embargo on Romulan goods in 2375 (DS9: "Inter Enim Arma Silent Leges") and the USS Cerritos is transporting Romulan ale as goodwill gifts for the Karemma in 2381 (LD: "Hear All, Trust Nothing). Sarnia's outside Federation space too, so even if the ban were reinstated (it probably hasn't been, given that the Romulan Free State is said to have better relations with the Federation that the Star Empire) it still wouldn't apply there. Jack Crusher openly acknowledges that he is running guns to the warlords who spread the plague on that planet. He uses a portion of that shipment of illegal weapons to bribe the Fenris Rangers to let him pass, but his brilliant plan - which he shares with them - was to supply arms to multiple warlords in the hopes of making the fighting worse and increasing the death toll! He literally says his goal is to get more people killed because it's "bad guys killing bad guys". That's not a Robin Hood move... that's a complete monster move of a type normally reserved for the insane admiral du jour. Specifically, Mark Jameson from TNG S1E16 "Too Short a Season". It was Toby Russel who kills at least one person in the course of that episode by using them as test subjects for untrialed and unapproved treatments... and nearly gets Worf killed after convincing him to try a never-before-tested procedure to replace his entire spine. But it was Dr. Crusher who flat-out refused to respect the culture and customs of her Klingon patient and openly dismissed them as barbarism. It's Dr. Crusher they're lampooning there.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Someone once told me that autocorrect and speech-to-text are very much like having a gnome or leprechaun in your phone that very much wants to help, but is also very drunk. Sometimes, less is more. In the VF-4's case, less mass but the same amount of fuel and rocket thrust means more endurance. Hmm... hard to say. Not just for lack of official information, but just in general terms. Apollo Base and the adjoining lunar colony city are in the Sea of Tranquility near to, and named for, the Apollo 11 landing site. While it's not as immediately evident, Clavius is also a location on the moon. It's a crater near the lunar south pole (south of Tycho). Presumably, at least based on the kit, there is a colony or military base in Clavius (possibly both, if the Apollo Base situation is the norm) in which Minmay held a concert at some point between the end of the First Space War in 2010 and her departure from Earth in 2012. The few times that such paint schemes have shown up in official or semi-official material, they've been presented as some sort of special promotional concession to a visiting idol by the local government. It may have started that far back, or it may be a more recent development. We can't say for sure. The few examples we have in those materials are from a lot later in the timeline like the Ranka Lee Visit commemorative paint scheme adopted by the NUNS Sagares Defense Force SVF-1429 Prismatics when she visited the planet on tour, or the SMS platoon Sheryl Nome contracted as bodyguards while visiting Macross Olympia who adopted a special paintjob, new MODEX numbers, and a new identifier as the Queen's Knights for the duration of her visit there.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    That was a beautiful line... made all the better by John de Lancie's Q being the one to deliver it. That's the very episode that Lower Decks was spoofing with the "Medical Ethics" simulation: If Lower Decks is canon - and in this case I dearly hope it is because this is hilarious - Dr. Beverly Crusher's lack of professionalism is apparently so widely known that one of her very worst lapses of medical ethics is the basis for a standard Starfleet training simulation. Even funnier, this particular ethics test was apparently so appallingly easy for trained Starfleet medical personnel that the drill administrator had to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel (the crew of the USS Cerritos) AND tweak the difficulty level to find someone capable of actually failing it. Finding someone who could do as bad a job of respecting a patient's culture and wishes as Beverly Crusher required not only finding Starfleet's worst of the worst... but cheating too. ... I want this for the final episode of this series. So does Jack Crusher, apparently... All in all, I'm tempted to call BS on Beverly's claim that she's out in the middle of ****ing nowhere on a decommissioned old medical courier ship she got from Starfleet Medical on the sly for fear of her son being assassinated by people who hate Jean-Luc. Somehow, knowing about Jack's criminal background, it strikes me as rather likely that she and he keep to remote regions of space because they know if they landed in any major port they'd be arrested and extradited to any one of more than a dozen planets with outstanding arrest warrants for her son and she'd likely face criminal charges herself as an accomplice to his crimes or at least an accessory to his resisting arrest. If it weren't for the currently-vague hints of a conspiracy to destroy the Federation that can somehow only be foiled by a bunch of senior citizens so out of shape that they need to worry about reduced bladder capacity (yes, this is actually in the show), this would read like an episode of Cops or maybe Dog: the Bounty Hunter. Maybe Vadic really isn't involved in the conspiracy at all. Maybe this really is just her, as a top flight bounty hunter, attempting to collect on Star Trek's second attempt to get a Han Solo from Wish.com.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Quark gets caught all the time, and has a rather extensive criminal record. His saving grace throughout Deep Space Nine was that, on most of the occasions where his criminal ambitions exceeded relatively petty crimes, his co-conspirators either died (e.g. Rao Vantika), did something that allowed him to claim he was a victim rather than a co-conspirator (e.g. Pallra and Verad), or he was conveniently shielded from prosecution by the connections his business partners had to the Bajoran government (e.g. Hagath and Gaila). A few other times mentioned in the series, he only avoided prison himself by turning on his partners as the state's witness for the prosecution (e.g. Fallit Kot). Apart from his brief stint as an arms dealer, Quark's crimes tended to be relatively innocuous stuff like buying and selling stolen goods and the occasional bit of smuggling. Jack Crusher, on the other hand, seems to be a rather more hardened and callous criminal than Quark if the list of criminal charges filed against him is to be believed. He's wanted for transporting and selling illegal weapons, controlled/banned substances, and bootleg liquor. It's weirdly indicative of what an arsehole he must be that he's managed to end up as a wanted criminal on Bajor and Cardassia Prime. Like, those two planets don't agree on much but they both agree that Jack Crusher belongs behind bars. Unless there's been a major overhaul of the justice system on Cardassia, he'd better hope the Bajorans catch him first or he's going to have a VERY bad time. One must wonder what other worlds Jack's wanted on... Nausicaa? Qo'nos? Edo? Probably not Ferenginar, at least... his antics are practically boys-will-be-boys stuff there. Maybe we'll find out he's wanted by the Dominion too. Y'know, collect the complete set of galactic powers with inhumane prison systems. Yeah... though admittedly Dr. Crusher's grasp of medical ethics was always more than a little questionable throughout Star Trek: the Next Generation. So much so that it got lampooned in Lower Decks episode "I, Excretus" with one of Tendi's simulations titled "Medical Ethics". True, but if the audience's memory is better than the writer's it becomes a plot hole... one with significant Unfortunate Implications. Having human failings is fine... but what the writers have done here is just make everyone 100% miserable all the time. Nobody is allowed to be happy. Ever. Because the writers think Misery = Drama. So, of course, Jean-Luc Picard is a whiny, manipulative old man who's spent over a decade sulking over something that wasn't his fault because It's All About Me, Riker and Troi are burnouts who went to live in the space boonies rather than seek treatment for depression (despite one of them being a therapist), Data's so disgusted with it all that he opted to stay dead, Beverly's been living off the grid for decades in some sort of bid to be Galaxy's Worst Single Mom, Worf has already been through so much that I'm kind of afraid to find out what they've done to him since then. Did Geordi just... win at life compared to everyone else by having an apparently not-dysfunctional family and healthy career?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Once I noticed you were talking about a VF-1 with four booster packs, the field narrowed REAL quick... since that's about the only book that has that. ... wow, I just noticed the speech-to-text that I used to write that while folding laundry did a rubbish job with context-sensitivity. "Their in" instead of "therein". Good grief. That particular volume has a fair amount to say about postwar attempts to make the VF-1 a somewhat more efficient/effective space fighter. They're almost all brute force solutions like eliminating the transformation system to make room for more and larger fuel tanks or just strapping a ton of extra boosters and fuel tanks to the outside. Going back as far as Perfect Memory's "The Lost Two Years" piece about the timeskip in the original series, Apollo Base on the Moon was more or less THE headquarters for the New UN Forces out in near-Earth space and where many of the space-based VF patrols were launching from. It seems that Master File's writers decided to run with that when designing the 1.1 version of the FAST Pack. Than those unofficial versions? Hard to say. The VF-4 was, in general, a much better space fighter than the VF-1 Valkyrie. Its design allowed for a lot more fuel to be carried internally and that meant not just greater range and operating time in space but an effective weight reduction vs. the Super Pack since they weren't adding mass for large external tanks and verniers. Macross Chronicle claims it was a 40% more effective space fighter than the VF-1.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, took me a hot minute there to place the specific models that you were talking about in your question. It's been quite a while since I last considered the Variable Fighter Master File: SDF-1 Macross VF-1 Squadrons book. The version 1.1 FAST pack configuration describe their in is primarily intended for range extension for Valkyries operating in the vicinity of the Moon. The W-ST configuration has replaced the HMMP-02 micro missile launcher assemblies with a pair supplemental fuel tank modules for the NP-BP-01 boosters. Master File presents this configuration as one mainly or at least commonly used by Apollo Base due to the additional fuel requirement that comes with operating in and around lunar orbit rather than simply in deep space. It could be described as a ferry configuration if you were so inclined. The only appreciable difference between it and the W configuration described beneath it is that, instead of fuel tanks, the W configuration has a second pair of HMMP-02 micro missile launchers. Both of these versions are presented as something of an ugly compromise in order to have Valkyries operating in deep space and near lunar orbit before the introduction of more space capable models like the VF-4.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not wanting to raise a child aboard a flying disaster magnet like the USS Enterprise is one-hundred percent reasonable in and of itself. Beverly Crusher's reasoning, however, is even more completely insane than it appears at first glance. First... how did Beverly get pregnant? Contraceptives exist in Star Trek and as of Deep Space Nine contraceptive injections administered to men seem to be the norm. Kassidy Yates got pregnant by her boyfriend Benjamin Sisko because he forgot to get his scheduled injection from Dr. Bashir despite repeated reminders. Captain Jean-Luc Picard's physician at the time was none other than Dr. Beverly Crusher. He would've been going to HER for contraceptive injections while in a relationship with her. Given that the two broke up while taking leave together on Casperia Prime, it's unlikely that they were planning to start a family together. That means Beverly either got pregnant as a result of her own professional negligence... or through deception. Neither of those is a great look. Second... she decided to keep the pregnancy secret from the father. While there's typically no legal obligation to inform the father of the child, it's still kind of a scummy move on Beverly's part. It raises some awkward ethical questions especially given the above-mentioned problems WRT contraception. Third... while remaining aboard the Enterprise and trying to raise a child there would not be a healthy environment, neither she nor Jean-Luc Picard remained on the Enterprise for more than a few months after Jack's conception. Jean-Luc Picard took a promotion to Admiral that came with a shore posting to Starfleet Command on Earth. Beverly Crusher's options were by no means limited. She had almost two decades as CMO of the Federation flagship and could easily have arranged a shore posting for herself almost anywhere, including Starfleet Medical's headquarters in San Francisco. There's not really anywhere more secure than Earth, and in the very shadow of Starfleet Headquarters no less. That she'd had her son educated on Earth for an unspecified span of time and then took off into lawless regions of space on a secondhand decommissioned medical support ship in search of "safety" is gun-eating madness. Fourth... for someone supposedly so concerned with her son's well-being, she's done a stellar job of raising him. His criminal record makes Quark look like a rank amateur. He's wanted under at least four separate aliases throughout Federation and non-Federation space... and not for little stuff either. If you zoom in on his rap sheet as it comes up, he's wanted on Archer IV for possession of unregistered weapons, on Bajor for possession of unregistered liquors, on Minas V for fraud, and distribution or possession with intent to distribute of illegal firearms and/or controlled substances on planets as diverse as Risa, Betazed, and Cardassia Prime. And that's just the highlights! There are at least two more aliases we don't get to see rap sheets for! Her little Jack, who she was so desperate to protect from everything, is a massive piece of **** who runs guns, sells drugs and bootleg liquor, and defrauds people. While Jack seems to resent the absence of his father, his behavior and sheer list of outstanding warrants suggests that his mother was probably just as absent from his life as Jean-Luc was. Jack's conception and birth is dodgy enough as it is. Making him thirty-four and having Beverly conceal his existence from both his half-brother Wesley AND his father Jean-Luc for five years aboard the Enterprise-D and then another decade or so aboard the Enterprise-E would be even more monstrous than what she's already done and make her a consciously absentee parent when they're busy guilt-tripping Jean-Luc for unknowingly being one.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It likely helped considerably that many of Chakotay's people were ex-Starfleet to begin with, that the Voyager crew outnumbered the Maquis more than five to one, that serving under Janeway as part of the Starfleet crew promised a far higher standard of living than spending the next seventy years in an improvised jail cell, and that Starfleet disciplinary measures are a lot less Klingon than "the Maquis way": I don't think that was ever really a thing. Esp. since Gene Roddenberry had full creative control of the early seasons of TNG and he was death on the entire idea of interpersonal conflict among the crew. Disliking and distrusting Burnham is a completely understandable reaction for most anyone on the Discovery, but the only crew member who really has a reason to be unhappy to be on the Discovery at all is Chief Engineer Stamets. He was a researcher who was more or less drafted into the war effort because Starfleet shifted to exploring military uses of his technology. Nobody else in the crew really has a reason to just hate everyone on the ship the way so many of them seem to.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That broadly echoes one of the main complaints audiences have with the writing in Star Trek: Discovery. Namely, that the lighthearted camaraderie that audiences are used to seeing among Starfleet crews in Star Trek is almost totally absent from Star Trek: Discovery. We see bits of it here and there, on the USS Shenzhou early in the first episode and among the crew of the USS Enterprise, but the crew of the USS Discovery seem to absolutely LOATHE each other. It might have been understandable if it were confined to interactions with Burnham, who'd given everyone in Starfleet and especially the survivors of the Shenzhou ample reason to despise her, but it's almost everyone. It says a lot that the most affable person on the crew in the first season is (Mirror) Gabriel Lorca, a man considered excessively evil and overly racist by Mirror Universe standards. It never really gets better either. Captain Pike replaces Captain Lorca as the token nice character and he treats people with more respect, but it's not until season three that the writers seem to realize that the crew are frankly awful to each other and they seem to struggle to address it. There's that dinner party in S3E4 "Forget Me Not" where the crew's loathing of each other spills out into the open and almost everyone storms out after several minutes of trading barbs. It gets a little better in season four, but that's partly because the focus of the discontent shifts from Burnham and the Discovery crew to their interactions with the rest of the Federation and especially the new President. They never really manage to overcome the fact that these characters vocally hated each other and there's no real resolution to it. It just sort of peters out. That's not a generational thing. As a hiring manager, I can say with a good deal of confidence that's a change in how corporations operate and especially in how they consider the question of staffing. That's also off-topic, and veering towards another warning from the mods.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I never looked up Kurtzman's full filmography before now. It's unsurprising to see that it's a stream of unremarkable pap punctuated by the occasional stinker. Imagine my surprise to see his portfolio as a producer and writer extends to titles like Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. It seems it was all downhill from there. Unfortunately, Hollywood's as much about who you know as what you know and idiots like Kurtzman often manage to fail upward the way J.J. Abrams did. I'm not sure people in general are necessarily getting tired of grimdark sci-fi. After all, there's talk of a Warhammer 40,000 TV series in the offing and there've been a number of quite highly regarded bits of dark or dark-ish SF recently like Halo. There are whole franchises that make that their bread and butter. Star Trek just isn't one of them. That's the "why" of NuTrek's negative cashflow problem. Audiences clicked their way over to Star Trek: Discovery's series pilot expecting some optimistic high-concept sci-fi only to be given a big budget production of a pointlessly (and often literally) dark and edgy Star Trek fanfic seemingly penned by Buckets of Blood Guy. If you want your audience to like and/or relate to your protagonist, it's a good idea to actually make them likeable so the audience will become invested in their story and their struggle. Michael Burnham was a dangerously irresponsible, manipulative, paranoid, racist shitheel whose main hobby seemed to be gaslighting her crewmates. That's not going to win anyone over. It's like she once read a book about the traits of toxic coworkers and decided to collect the complete set. The last time Star Trek had a character like her, that character was unambiguously the villain. The writers only managed to give her the briefest moment of self-awareness, when she goes to the Mirror Universe of genocidal bigots and worries she's fitting in too well.* Nothing about that is likeable or relatable. The audience is supposed to feel bad for her, but the few folks who didn't drop it in disgust were sitting there going "Well *****, if it isn't the consequences of your actions." and then getting annoyed when she pulls a Karma Houdini once a season. None so insulting, perhaps, as when Burnham was made captain of the Discovery just a few episodes after being told she was utterly unsuited for command by the same admiral who promoted her. People turn on Star Trek to see a vision of a brighter and more hopeful future. You don't turn on Star Trek to see horribleness... and that's what Discovery offered. Horribleness. A genocidal war with an even more bestial take on the Klingons. A genocidal AI bent on wiping out all life. The collapse of modern civilization into a nightmare of isolation, slavery, death, and green Karens. Then casual genocide because fancy dress genocide had apparently lost its charm. None of that it the upbeat, charming, optimistic spacefuture that the audience tunes in to Star Trek for... and it cost them the audience. The very faithful audience with a very long history of spending big on merchandise. * FFS, the only three people who actually LIKE Michael Burnham in the whole of the first three seasons are an undercover genocidal Klingon zealot, a genocidal despot who rules known space because she's massacred every alien race in range, and the guy that genocidal despot considers too dangerously unhinged to hold a position of power. If these are the people in your corner, that's a strong argument that you're a villain if not THE villain.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Being a radio drama, I've never listened to Macross Generation... the only person I know offhand who IIRC did is Gubaba, of Gubabablog. I think he's done some writing about that on his site.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It'll be interesting to see if the writing in Discovery's newly-announced-to-be-final 5th season will be as dreadful as this obviously phoned-in mess. I'm sure it sounded better in the writers heads, but having Will Riker tell Picard... ... is insensitive to the point of bordering on cruelty. Jean-Luc Picard is not just chronically single and unlucky at love, he's the last living member of his family. It's even harsher in the episode's in-story hindsight, since the real Jean-Luc Picard died back in season one... ... and the character we have now is an android programmed to believe it's Jean-Luc Picard running around creeping everyone out. Beverly Crusher's... motivation... makes little to no sense in context or out. The way the Titan-A gets its arse handed to it at the end of the episode is just embarrassing. That is some yakity sax-level dumb.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Are we sure those two things are mutually exclusive? (Just joking!) Jokes about our mutual cantankerousness aside, there's absolutely nothing political about the cancellation of Star Trek: Discovery. It's purely a matter of dollars and cents. The show's cost-performance has been abysmal for its entire run. Production ran over budget so frequently that several producers were fired for it. Its viewership numbers on streaming services were never better than mediocre, with Discovery being handily outperformed by multiple shows even on Paramount+ and Netflix being so disgusted with it that they not only tried to quit the project they passed on Star Trek: Picard. Merchandising revenue was practically nonexistent with many Trek licensees passing on the series altogether or settling for reduced stakes because they knew its aesthetics would not be popular due to its resemblance to the Kelvin timeline. The series was a money pit, and one that got deeper every season thanks to overspending on production and underperforming revenue streams. On the whole, I think this is part of a larger trend of the industry being in the "find out" part of "**** about and find out". We're seeing a bubble burst. The networks got jealous of Netflix's success and decided to launch their own streaming services instead, only to discover that doing so is far more expensive than most of them thought. Paramount+ has been running over a billion dollars in the red since it launched with even Paramount's own quarterly financials predicting losses to continue to mount until at least 2024. It's doubtful that any other network-run service was doing much better. Now we're at the part of the story where the cost-cutters move in and start slashing anything with a poor return-on-investment, and that means a lot of these massively expensive direct-to-streaming titles are first on the chopping block.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Best news I've had in ages. The main thing keeping the series going was the sunk cost fallacy, thanks to overspending on the show's development. Rather than canceling it and taking a loss after it flopped and the sponsor bailed, they just kept spending in the hopes that it would take off if they just gave it enough time. I guess all the red ink finally caught up with them. Either that or the legal department announced that they're not allowed to sell any more stock to fund the production due to the risk of violating their merger agreement. Here's hoping that everyone who worked on this mess finds their career marched into an early, shallow, unmarked, and entirely unmourned grave. Between the news of Discovery's premature cancellation with just five of seven seasons produced and Picard ending after just three of its proposed five seasons were produced, it seems that we may soon be seeing an end to the tyranny of this odious vision of abject misery. The future of Star Trek is looking a little brighter today.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    This is a fair point, and one I hadn't properly considered. IMO, the only one that's really inexcusable is the Titan-A. Kathryn Janeway's Intrepid-class USS Voyager was a ship so ridiculously out of its depth that the fact that it made it back at all is flat amazing, never mind with most of its crew, the majority of the Maquis crew they went chasing at the start of their misadventure, a Borg kill count that dwarfs every other Starfleet ship's record combined, the destruction of most if not all of the Borg transwarp network, and the head of the Borg queen to boot.* She EARNED that letter. It's not unfair to assume that, by the 32nd century, Starfleet would've had so many ships that a couple dozen displayed such uncommon valor that they were rewarded with their registry numbers not being retired. Even the Discovery's letter makes a moderate amount of sense, since Starfleet effectively broke the Discovery down to the spaceframe and rebuilt her with modern technology and needed to cover up the fact that the ship and its crew were illegal time travelers. The Titan-A doesn't really make sense, since we know what the previous USS Titan was up to and the bits we've seen haven't exactly been remarkable. They don't reward ships which went to the breakers due to obsolescence or battle damage with continuation of their registry... not even if the captain doesn't want to bother remembering a new registry. It REALLY doesn't make sense given that the series keeps acting like the Titan-A and Titan are somehow the same ship. * Prior to Picard retconning the network and Borg collective back into existence because why not?
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