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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The trailers got me rewatching TNG while I unpack after my move... I'd forgotten they closed "Up the Long Ladder" on an appalling joke. "Send in the clones!", spoken with indecent cheer by the walking Irish stereotype from the Bringloidi colony.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So... I finally got around to watching Lower Decks season two today. To be honest, I feel like I'm missing something here. I'm watching this, but I'm not being entertained by it. The sheer density of the in-jokes and references to past Star Trek shows in Lower Decks is impressive in an abstract sense, but it feels like that's all it has to offer most of the time.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    "Spatial torpedoes", nuclear missiles of the type mentioned in "Balance of Terror". It should be noted that Starfleet having photon torpedoes before the Earth-Romulan war is a bit of a plot hole, since "Balance of Terror" established that the war was fought with nuclear weapons.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It was the favorite plot hook for a Chakotay episode... it feels like he crashed more shuttles than all the other crewmembers combined, and he was supposedly an ace pilot. As far as things could be replicated, anyway... there are a bunch of materials involved that can't be replicated for plot reasons.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Now, in all fairness, the only thing that the Enterprise crew were established to have actually invented was the early incarnation of red alert. The rest was implausible feats of mass manufacture, like building two new phase cannon systems from scratch based on an unassembled prototype they had in storage, making a ton of phase pistols, or those quantum beacons that Trip manufactures practically overnight despite the tech being way beyond him. (It's not quite to Voyager's level, though... where they were seemingly pulling extra photon torpedoes and shuttlecraft out of hammerspace to suit Tuvok's love of torpedoing people and replace shuttles piloted by Commander Crash... er... Commander Chakotay.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Quality issues aside, audience fatigue was the (counter)argument the Star Trek showrunners made to the UPN executives when the network insisted on another Star Trek series to fill the void Star Trek: Voyager's imminent conclusion was going to create in the broadcast schedule. Star Trek had been on the air with at least one series for nearly fourteen years in a row and it was starting to get stale. That was a recurring problem with Enterprise. I really liked how aesthetically primitive they managed to make it. Especially with the shipboard sets being strongly reminiscent of submarines with the low ceilings, exposed conduits, visible rivets on the bulkheads, and actual mechanical switches for controls. The writers introduced upgrades too quickly in the series. The EM-33 plasma pistol didn't even last the entire pilot two-parter, for instance. Apart from a few minor glitches and goofs, the transporter quickly became the norm for certain uses. The ship sprouted phaser cannons just a few episodes into the first season. The spatial torpedoes lasted only until the end of the second season before being replaced with photon torpedoes. The only things that really remained primitive was they kept preferring the shuttlepods over the transporter, and force fields never really became a thing. That's the consequence of the show getting hijacked by the executives... a lot of characters got radically retooled when the show's original, much darker, premise was abandoned in favor of a more episodic format. Robert Beltran kept trying to get himself released by demanding outrageous salary increases because he loathed his character's Hollywood Indian new age BS tendencies (inspired by Native American consutant and charlatan Jamake Highwater), and how his character who was supposed to be Janeway's rival ended up as her yes-man instead. Oh yeah... it was pretty much the Archer/Tucker/T'Pol/Phlox show for a good while. Not that anyone particularly minded not hearing from Hoshi after she was introduced as such an obnoxious whiner. Travis really got it in the shorts, though, since he never got developed past "wide-eyed kid" and they backed down on making Reed openly gay. Ah, I don't recall where I read it, I think it might've been in something associated with the novelverse and its adoption of a lot of unused concepts and story outlines intended for later in the series.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure if that's a difference of perspective among staff or what, because there was a modest amount of material they produced while "thinking about it". The most prominent piece being their rough draft and early CG model for a Kzinti spaceship. They've also talked about some proposed and draft scripts that were tentatively slated for season 5, like an arc about T'Pol's father that would've explained her unusually emotional behavior. IIRC, the Columbia-class that appeared in the Ships of the Line calendar and became Federation Starfleet's first (human-built) prestige class in the Relaunch novelverse was originally designed as a potential major retrofit the Enterprise would undergo in a future season as well. The issue with the Vulcans was probably the number one complaint with Enterprise... or at least the longest-lasting, most consistent one. The complaints were strident enough that they attempted to band-aid the problem late in season four with the Kir'shara story arc, but too little too late.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    TOS was definitely a bit of a troubled production... thanks to a sort of low-key passive aggressive jockeying for creative control that was going on and culminated in much of the show's writing staff bailing for the third and final season. It has its moments, though, and for the time it was pretty damned revolutionary. Yeah, Picard is a best-skipped series... it kind of sh*ts all over everything the character was. The only reason to watch it would be if you really desperately want to see the entire cast miserable. TNG's first season and a half are TOS-level rough though, thanks to Gene Roddenberry maneuvering himself into a position to have full creative control over the series at that time before being ousted. It really hit its stride in season 3, but season 2 was the first signs of its true potential. That it coincided with the studio having Riker grow a beard led to the series finding its feet and taking off being called "growing the beard". Enterprise was the prequel nobody asked for. With Voyager's ratings falling and the showrunners protesting that audiences were burning out on Trek after being on the air with at least one series continuously for over a decade, the production crew all wanted to give the franchise a few years off before trying again. But the network insisted, so what we got was a kind of very halfhearted prequel that quickly dismisses a lot of the non-cosmetic trappings of being a prequel. It got dragged pretty hard by fans when it was new. Partly because of its retcons and the Vulcans being incredibly out of character until the end of the series, but mainly because the writing was incredibly uneven and there was a massive multi-season plot tumor called the Temporal Cold War hanging over it all. Audiences are a LOT kinder to it now after new shows like Discovery and Picard proved to be SO MUCH WORSE. Sadly, Enterprise didn't really hit its stride until its fourth and final season, by which point it had cut its way free of the whole "Temporal Cold War" mess audiences so hated and started doing some proper Boldly Going. Its ratings had already fallen too far, though, and the network cut them off while season five was literally on the drawing board, making it the first Trek series to be cancelled rather than end on its own terms since TAS. It has its own thread... but the short version is that Discovery is probably the single most polarizing series made under the Star Trek banner. So much so that many fans, myself included, struggle to call it a Star Trek series in light of how dark, depressing, and downright miserable it all is. It completely lacks Star Trek's optimistic future and light hearted camaraderie among the Starfleet crew. So much so that the show was radically retooled to get it the hell out of the actual Star Trek setting by jumping almost a thousand years forward into a setting that is somewhere between Star Wars and Mad Max for themes and content.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It must be convenient to be stuck in an all-female fleet when you're voiced by Show Hayami. Yeah, the VF-XX is actually pretty important but was in the process of being phased out at the time of Macross II. The VF-2SS Valkyrie II had become the main fighter of the Space Forces about a decade earlier and some units were still transitioning. I think a big part of that is just that the Regult is the iconic Zentradi unit. The Nousjadeul-Ger does show up quite a bit here and there, it's just less common in-universe than the dirt cheap Regult series... and like most Zentradi designs, the movie versions retroactively replaced the TV ones in most instances. It makes sense that they're not super common among the New UN Forces that favor the Regult and Queadluun series... because the New UN Gov't captured factory satellites that make the Regults and Queadluun series. The Esbeliben factory satellite was seized in the original series and has been parked at Earth-Moon L5 for decades, and the Quimeliquola factory satellite's orbiting Eden.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there are several UN Spacy Marine Corps aircraft in Variable Fighters Aero Report in the back of that book. Frontier more or less states outright that the NUNS 33rd Marines was a unit specifically set up as containment for Zentradi soldiers with a history of discipline problems. Assigning the unit to garrison duty on a planet on the arse end of nowhere was presumably an additional containment strategy. (Characters who'd previously been depicted in the 33rd appear in the Frontier movies as inmates at Alcatraz prison, suggesting they were similarly problematic in that version of the story.) Presumably the Zentradi marines on Al Shahal were a unit with a much better disciplinary record given that they were based directly in a major city. Preferring a lifestyle of military discipline doesn't necessarily mean that they're also one step from becoming terrorists. Bucking the standard sci-fi trope, most emigrant planets in Macross are not depicted as single-biome planets. There are worlds that have deserts, but Al Shahal is the first that we've seen that has had only deserts depicted so far. Even then, I'd wager there's more diverse terrain on the planet and that the desert locale was simply the area with best access to key resources or the area most conducive to landing an emigrant ship. (A significant part of Macross 30's story takes place in a desert region on Uroboros, for instance.) As far as we know, the only explicit appearance by the UNSAF was in Macross Plus. The only other explicit appearance I recall for the UNSAF is in Macross R, with Macross Galaxy Corporate Army's 3rd Combat Air Wing 8th Tactical Fighter Squadron "Pegasus". Almost all of the squadrons actually seen onscreen are carrier-based units belonging to the Spacy. (Despite not being a "Space Navy", the Spacy's squadrons use US Navy-inspired squadron designations that mark them out as different from the Air Force and Marine Corps units which use designations modeled on those branches of the US armed forces.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nice that this thread should pop back up right now. 😀 I'm moving, so I've got all my framed posters out at once... and a few more I'll be having framed once I'm done moving now that I'll have the wall real estate for all of them. Still got half a dozen from the last SDCon before the start of the pandemic waiting on frames.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eventually rehashed as the Admiral Leyton's coup plot in Deep Space Nine once Gene was out from underfoot. Some ideas are just too good to let go of... Unfortunately, the Relaunch novelverse's obsession with tying up loose ends from the TV series saw them revisit the parasites from "Conspiracy". The big reveal there was that the parasites were... "Q Who" really makes it out that Guinan is something much more powerful than just an El-Aurian. Q actually warns Picard about her twice, and her reaction implies that she was aware of his abduction of Picard and that she can actually prevent him from "expediting [her] departure" or defend herself against his powers in some way. It's probably better that way, yeah... especially given the quality of modern Trek's writing. OK there are a few ones there I've never seen before... especially that clip of Gene, Michael, Barrie, and Patrick singing. One of the favorite things I've learned about the show's production is that Patrick Stewart was the one who wanted everyone to grim up and stop goofing around initially, and he ended up being one of the worst offenders when it came to goofing off on set. I remember reading that The DS9 cast was aimilarly grim, until Michael Dorn joined the cast and became their patron saint of screwing around. (TBH, I find that hilarious somehow... the actor behind the incredibly grim and deadpan Mr. Worf was Mr. Fun Times on set.) (Right up there with learning at a convention from no less a person than Kate Mulgrew that Voyager's prankster-in-chief was Tim Russ, who at one point broke into her trailer to cover every surface with photocopies of his posterior.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I like 'em both... but I have to admit, the Macross II setting was definitely not set up on the same massive scale as the main Macross setting. The main/ongoing Macross setting is way more "adventure-friendly" and open to different approaches to storytelling. That said, I'd probably find Macross every bit as boring as I find Gundam's Universal Century if all it did was endlessly repeat the same story with the same character archetypes in the same circumstances where all that really changes show-to-show is the proper nouns the way UC Gundam has done for decades now. Macross II is very Gundam-like in a lot of respects, possibly the influence of the Gundam veterans staffing it, but I find a fair amount of probably-unintentional hilarity in that its story has the UN Forces getting bored and a bit complacent because they've been fighting the same war over and over again for decades and always winning the exact same way.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Well, remember... different strokes for different folks. As I understand it, Macross Plus got something of a lukewarm reception in Japan because of how different it was from what audiences expected in a Macross sequel. Much like the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, it was more popular in the west where those expectations weren't as defined and audiences were generally more open to a more action-focused story. (That situation was reversed with Macross 7, which Japanese fans adored and western fans watching the fansubs found very polarizing.) Plus supposedly found itself seeing a bit of a renaissance after the Macross Frontier movies and the Blu-ray re-release the same way II did.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume they probably forgot. TNG's first two seasons had a fair few orphaned plot threads thanks to some concepts initially developed turning out to be unworkable and others simply being abandoned because the writers couldn't figure out what to do with them. Guinan and Q are in a few episodes together thereafter and he never shows any fear of her in those except when she straight-up shanks him with a fork to prove that he's lost his powers. The big one, of course, being that the aliens from "Conspiracy" were supposed to be the advance scouts of the species that was eventually reworked into the Borg. The budget balked at the idea of the cost of practical effects for an insectoid race who used biotechnology, so they were rewritten into more TV-friendly cyborgs. (Guinan gave Q astronomical amounts of sh*t in the novelverse and independent novels too... really, all the Q. Trelane included. In one book, Trelane attempts to buy drinks for the house and Guinan takes his directive of "Drinks on me!" quite literally.) Guinan's been around for an unspecified but very long time... centuries if not millennia... I'd assume she and Q simply bumped into each other when Q was on his bullsh*t in one or more of those stunts that caused much of the galaxy to hate him. If Vash's account is to be believed, quite a lot of planets have him as persona non grata for various reasons.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I can honestly say that my first thought when I saw the above announcement was... Wow, I can hardly wait to see how they'll f*** this up! Then I read the actual article, and noticed this is being done by and for Netflix Japan... which means there's actually about even odds of it being watchable, instead of ten episodes of entirely unintended self-parody loosely based on a classic like Netflix US's Cowboy Bebop adaptation. I'm not going to get my hopes up, because past performance has painfully taught me not to do that, but I'm gonna keep a weather eye on this one.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    In Macross II, the Zentradi warships operated by the UN Spacy are mainly (if not exclusively) ones whose crews defected to Earth's side during or immediately following one of Earth's frequent encounters with rogue Zentradi fleets. For a while, the core of their forces were the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet until most of those ships were lost in the 2054 war. In fact, all of the Macross II Valkyries incorporate technology derived from reverse-engineering the Nousjadeul-Ger series battle suit. The VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie was the proof-of-concept for a new generation of VFs based on Zentradi battle suit tech in Macross II's setting. The VF-2 series is derived from the VF-XX. Nah, even in the original series materials (e.g. Perfect Memory) the depiction of the two types of battle suits is VERY different. The Nousjadeul-Ger's presentation vaguely mirrors that of the VF-171. It's a solid, dependable, workhorse of a battlesuit with good all-around performance and a wealth of options to let it operate well in a bunch of different roles. It's high-performance, but not so much so that a well-trained soldier can't get the most out of the design. While it's more costly than a Regult, it's cheap enough that it can be deployed in significant numbers while remaining more survivable than the Regult as well. The Queadluun-Rau, for its part, has always been depicted as "awesome but impractical" to some degree. It's much more specialized and its super-high flight performances comes at a corresponding cost in materials, manufacturing complexity, and failure rate. It was much more than an average pilot could handle, so rather than fuss about building something less over-the-top the way the New UN Forces did the Protoculture simply went and built a better grade of pilot. Despite that, the number in operation is small (relative to other mecha in the Zentradi forces) and they are mainly used by defensive fleets for their ability to punch way above their weight class. The Macross II UN Forces studied the Nousjadeul-Ger while developing improvements for their Valkyries because they were looking to improve the overall durability and reliability of Valkyries, especally in close combat scenarios. That led to the adoption of improved actuators and materials based on those of the Nousjadeul-Ger, as well as the adoption of more powerful reactors, generators, and engines to improve offensive capabilities. The main Macross timeline New UN Forces seem to have been more interested in improving flight performance, and so studied the Protoculture's last word on agility... the Queadluun-Rau... for its high maneuverability and especially its inertia capacitor to let pilots endure higher g-force loads. That's the thing... it seems like a fair number of fans prefer the VF-31A over any of the Ace Custom versions. Enough so that the DX VF-31A seems to be the show's most coveted DX Chogokin toy. I think that might be partly why movie 2 shelved the Siegfrieds in favor of having the protagonists fly an ace custom that looks more like the production model. Yeah, the continued existence of a blue-water Navy is a confusing one in Macross.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly. If there's one thing that's been consistent about the presentation of the Q in decades of Star Trek official media, the novelverse, and other licensed/non-canon media is that the Q are either truly omnipotent or so close to it that there is no practical difference. The only time that a Q has ever been depicted as struggling with something outside of scenarios involving them being deprived of their powers by others in the Q Continuum is Quinn's attempts to commit suicide in Star Trek: Voyager. He seemed to be unable to bring enough force to bear on himself to end his life, but it's well attested-to that Q are perfectly capable of killing each other. The only being ever hinted to have the power to actually resist or defend against a Q is Guinan, in a forgotten moment in "Q Who" in which Q seems to be on guard against her or even afraid of her. The only thing stopping the Q from exercising their powers in ways that would have upsetting consequences for the fabric of reality is the Continuum's social conventions and the majority's holier-than-thou view of the Q as being the multiverse's highest form of life. In the novelverse, the Q are basically omnipotent. They're almost never depicted as being threatened in any way, and on the rare occasion they are it'll be by a one-of-a-kind entity that nearly rivals a single Q for power. That's 0, the ringleader of the gang of ne'er-do-well higher beings Q summons into the galaxy in prehistory for a laugh and who was sealed outside the galaxy by the great barrier the Q erected for his crimes. Also Afsarah Eden, a one-of-a-kind anti-Q created by all the horrible things Janeway has done to the fabric of reality from "Endgame" thru the first half of the Voyager relaunch novel series (mainly Q Junior using his powers to bring Janeway back from the dead after she was killed off for real in the runup to Star Trek: Destiny).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    OK, now I am legitimately excited.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I know in the novels that Q once used to run with several other less-powerful entities including a novel-original one named 0, the Beta XII-A entity, Gorgan, and "The One" (AKA the "God" from Star Trek V). Dunno if he ever tangled with Nagillum, but considering how he bullies the Calamarain... (That said, when Worf was busy insisting that there is "One Riker, One Bridge!" he turned out to be a bit wrong about that later on in "Second Chances". Turns out there really were two Rikers.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of my knowledge, it has never really been explained why the few all-Zentradi units we see fall under the header of the New UN Spacy Marine Corps. If I had to make a guess, I'd say it's probably because their ships routinely carry assault landers for things like battlepods even though the Zentradi as a whole seldom actually fight planetside. It's worth noting that the Spacy Marines existed in the lore for over a decade before Macross Frontier introduced the all-Zentradi 33rd Marines, and their few described units prior to that point were Valkyrie squadrons. Similarly, while the relationship between the four branches of the planetary forces is reasonably well understood because of their modern parallels (Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines) the three branches of the Space Forces are more ill-defined. The Spacy is the fleet-based force we're so familiar with, while the Spacy Air Force appears to be a space-based aviation branch is for some reason distinct from the Spacy's own flying corps and the Spacy Marines appear to be space-based infantry of some description but it isn't all that clear.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Overlord season 4 is now underway... the OP "Hollow Hunger" seems to suggest that this season is gonna cover everything up to the conclusion of The Witch of the Falling Kingdom. Brace yourselves, sh*t's about to get DARK.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Michael Dorn really was criminally underutilized on TNG. DS9 did amazing things with Worf's character. Made him a lot more subtle, but also a lot more fun when he had another deadpan snarker to play off of in the form of Odo.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Roy Brocksmith was an inspired bit of casting as Kolrami. He really brought Kolrami across as the gleefully officious, bureaucratic, judgemental arsehole desperately in need of a big slice of humble pie and made the one-two punch of Riker exceeding all expectations and Data forcing him into a ragequit in his game of choice incredibly satisfying. I love Worf's deadpan delivery of exactly how unfortunate it would be for the Hathaway's warp drive to fail to activate. "Very unfortunate. We will be dead."
  25. Seto Kaiba
    First Contact made them too human, and Voyager just absolutely destroyed them... repeatedly getting REKT by a Starfleet science vessel is not exactly dignified for a species that supposedly far exceeds the Federation in power. Loved this one... not just because it's the second use of the Picard Maneuver, it's also the moment Data learns how to be a massive troll.
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