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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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...
  3. 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.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Pilots vs. Pineapple... the most enduring rivalry in Macross.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.)
  11. 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).
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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?".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps... though I suspect Star Trek: Picard's third and final season wouldn't get nearly as much praise that way. It's not great, or even particularly good, television being about on par with Nemesis or Insurrection. Much of the praise it's getting is a product of the two previous seasons lowering everyone's expectations significantly.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'm really unhappy with this episode. Once again, the writers are so caught up in throwing in as many references to TNG as possible that they're not bothering to stop and make sure the references make sense in context. They have Shaw deliver three faulty premises in a single rant, when he: There was a similar gaffe in the previous episode involving the search for the... The whole idea of the rogue... Even moreso, it feels odd and out of place because they were always a problem in Sisko's wheelhouse. Jean-Luc Picard never had to deal with them and none of them had any real issue with him personally. I guess after they ruined the Borg and the Romulans, Picard was out of antagonists since the last surviving member of the Duras family is a disgraced mook with no influence whose grudge is mainly just against Worf and Sela's likely just dead since the showrunners have said Denise Crosby's not in the show. And the writers are back on their old bullsh*t bringing back another minor recurring character that Picard has history with just to kill them off. Given the teasers, that body count is likely to increase.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    A Battle Bridge is mentioned on the MSD and several displays, so one would assume it can.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was predictable.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it can fairly be said that the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard does compare favorably to the previous two.* The reason that statement has a rather damning asterisk hanging over it is that Star Trek: Picard's first two seasons were such an absolute goddamn train wreck that the frankly basic level of competence on display in the show's final season comes off as a substantial improvement. It's visually impressive but otherwise utterly mediocre television compared to the pre-Kurtzman state of Star Trek, but compared to the previous two seasons it's actually borderline watchable even if the writing is frequently nonsense. If you love the character of Jean-Luc Picard as he appears in Star Trek: the Next Generation then you are pretty much guaranteed to HATE Star Trek: Picard. It goes way beyond character derailment to full-on character assassination. Its writers are deeply, depressingly committed to depicting the surviving TNG characters twenty years after the end of their adventures in Star Trek: Nemesis as deeply depressed senior citizens living sad and lonely lives with their repressed traumas in a dark and depressing future that hasn't just forgotten them and moved on but become dark and miserable itself. Deep Space Nine alternates between episodic and serialized storytelling, but was probably the best Star Trek has ever done in terms of an ensemble cast. Voyager suffered a lot from executive meddling because the network wanted another Star Trek: the Next Generation and struggled a bit towards the end due to audiences being burned out on what was then a solid decade of Trek on TV but if you liked TNG you'll probably like VOY.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Go in production order on the Trek shows... esp. when it comes to the TNG-DS9-VOY era, since Picard makes a fair amount of references to events from the TNG movies, and now the events of DS9's final few seasons.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    After some research, it seems that a rather vague explanation was provided in Star Trek: Picard's social media accounts. So... based on that, it seems the reason for the Titan-A's outsized impulse drive cluster is that the class is designed to be a sublight speed demon that's quick off the line because that is somehow advantageous for operating in high traffic regions of space. As with so much in Star Trek: Picard, the writers can't quite seem to make up their minds about the Titan-A. The brief piece that the above quote was taken from starts off by claiming the Constitution III-class ships were intended for long-duration deep space exploration like the original Constitution-class, then reverses course almost immediately and describes it as designed for support roles within Federation space. The end result is the Titan-A sounds less like a successor to Will Riker's USS Titan and more like a patrol ship or logistics ship one level above ships like the Cerritos or Vancouver from Star Trek: Lower Decks. The latter would definitely fit with Shaw's by-the-book attitude and the way the ship was chilling out near Earth instead of being out on the frontier for five years at a time. EDIT: Just realized I forgot to include my hypothesis as to why this is advantageous. I assume it has something to do with Star Trek's off-again on-again stance that using warp drive inside of a solar system is dangerous (for reasons unstated). Populous systems presumably have quite a bit of traffic, so I could see there being a case for a fast sublight starship for patrol, security, etc. purposes in systems where the traffic pattern may be too dense to safely use warp drive to go to a ship in distress or intercept a criminal safely.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Now, if this Constitution III-class USS Titan-A were a late 23rd century design as its fan-made USS Shangri-La it was based on it would make a lot more sense. At some point between TOS and TNG, the way impulse engines produce their propulsive effect changed. In the TOS era, impulse engines were fusion rocket systems running off the same fusion reactors that also provided secondary power to the entire starship. Plasma from the fusion reactors was expelled as reaction mass to produce thrust and also provided power to a subspace field generator that reduced the ship's inertial mass to the point that the thrust the rockets provided could accelerate the ship to relativistic speeds and shielded the ship from relativistic effects while doing so. In the TNG era, according to Doug Drexler and Rich Sternbach, modern impulse engines are borderline reactionless drives that are essentially just sublight warp drives powered by the ship's fusion reactors and that the thrust provided by exhausting plasma from the reactors was negligible. The actual visible impulse engine is more like a tailpipe for venting plasma waste from the drive than a proper engine nozzle. The Titan-A's design looks like it hearkens back to the TOS-era design where impulse engines were producing thrust via reaction mass and needed to be relatively big. ... yeah, that didn't translate well from the original Shangri-La design, a Constitution-class derivative, to this new model that's supposedly several times the size. Each of those windows must be several decks high if that length is correct.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Most instances of the UN Forces roundel are the standard red and white one. There have been three separate versions of a ship's badge for the SDF-1 Macross which all incorporate variations on the roundel. The version scene on the floor of Brigadier General Global's office in Ep20 of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and the version seen on the floor of his office in the Do You Remember Love? movie are very similar. They have the same basic design, but the TV version differs from the movie version you have attached in your post in that it has the normal coloration of the roundel with the red background and the white arrowhead instead of the colors reversed. It also has a block letter M superimposed on it and the text that accompanies it in the art book diagram has the UN Spacy on top left, SDF-1 top right, and Macross across the bottom. Another slightly different version appears in episode 21, which has the reverse colors of the movie version but no stars and a blue block letter M superimposed on it. That version shows up in General Global's address to the ship's population but has no text. Other than that, the roundel shows up on various items like cups of dishes in the ship's mess, though it's usually just the normal roundel formatted either as SD(ROUNDEL)F-1 or SDF-1 (ROUNDEL) MACROSS on things like cups, plates, and trays from the ship's mess. Thereafter, the only major variation in the roundel was the Macross II: Lovers Again version, which changed the proportions of the arrowhead such that the left side is much bigger than the right. That version showed up in a number of different colors including plain white with no background color, plain black with no background color, the normal red and white, red and gold, and also green and gold. Macross Plus and Macross 7 retained the classic roundel from the original series. It would not change again until Macross Frontier completely replaced it with a new insignia.
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