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Lexomatic

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  1. Lexomatic
    I also watched the first ep last night (on live TV, which is unusual for me), with my parents. From the clips of future episodes on the official site, it looks like the models get more complex. I suspect that during the first challenge, the contestants were still getting accustomed to an alien build environment -- the bricks are waaaay over here, and how are they organized? Moreover, we didn't get a close look at contestant technique, or specific criticism from roving judges Amy and Jamie ("colors X, Y and Z work well together", "have you considered a chain of gears?") -- that might just be lack of time in an episode with all ten initial teams. I'm also curious about the 15-hour build time. If stuffed into one day, that would be 7:00 to 22:00, or similar, not even counting the judge-review and results-reveal -- a real marathon, and it would be counter-productive if the show's contestants dropped from exhaustion. Maybe it was actually split across two days?
  2. Lexomatic
    I've been accumulating LEGO since 1978 with no "dark age" interruption (with eclectic coverage: DUPLO, System, Technic, Bionicle, CCBS, Znap ... but not Modulex), so obscure elements probably won't be a problem, but thanks for the advisory. Ooh! Redecos! Blacktron I and Ice Planet 2002 are perennially popular among AFOLs. Some models, a person can't really appreciate the ingenuity until their fingers get into the nitty-gritty. I mean, in the photos above, M'Kyuun has somehow used a minifig-accessory sai in combination with a claw-click hinge connection to ... limit the travel of that joint? The lack of compact, medium-friction sliding-joint/telescoping solution is really the single greatest obstacle to LEGO transformations, isn't it? It's not even available to LEGO's own designers of action-oriented models (Ninjago, Chima, Nexo Knights, etc.).
  3. Lexomatic
    I'm not a fan of the Variable Glaug's proportions, but this is a very impressive interpretation. "Five or six years ..." As a fellow AFOL MOCist, I know the feeling. I was thinking of attending that one myself -- it's been 13 years since I did BrickFest PDX in the same venue. (The first Modular Town set was revealed there, the 10182 Café Corner, with a "here are several copies of the set -- stack it taller" activity.) Would you like a second copy of your MOC, so that it can be displayed side-by-side in two modes simultaneously? I don't need full instructions; if you temporarily break it into sub-assemblies (which you may be loath to do, fair enough) I can probably interpolate the specifics.
  4. Lexomatic
    It's not a reboot -- the project was mischaracterized in the title of the initial story at Hollywood Reporter (17 Sep 6:00 am. PT). Mr. Esmail quickly clarified via Twitter (17 Sep 8:49 am, no TZ) that this is a spinoff, a new story set in the "mythology" -- that tweet actually appears in the story, as its fourth paragraph.
  5. Lexomatic
    So, based on my own inklings and Seto Kaiba's summary of ... off-screen setting materials, I surmise ... I suspect this is one of those things that started with "rule of cool" for which the Macross brain trust subsequently had to invent a plausible-sounding explanation for the techies in the audience and their own satisfaction. I imagine a story meeting, possibly during the phase when SDFM was still a Gundam parody: "We need to confront our protagonists with impossible, disheartening, paralyzing odds. How about fifty thousand enemy ships?" "Nah, go big or go home. Let's make it five million. For the drama!" The Protoculture might have spanned the galaxy and satellite clusters, but that's not the same as colonizing any significant fraction of the 400 billion stars. And if they did, that's the kind of demographic growth that in serious SF takes millennia. And what fraction was already claimed by the Vajra? --If "claimed" is even the right characterization. The two species may have coexisted amicably, with a preference for different kinds of worlds or stars. Several of the screen projects have encountered Protoculture remnants, but not in a way amenable to answering deep cultural questions. I'm assuming that most information supplied to fans is, therefore, ex-cathedra. Logically, even the humans in-universe would be stymied. Zentraedi records are eroded, and no doubt omitted irrelevant detail ("was there a religious motivation to create sub-Protoculture races?") and a lot of strategic detail. Planet-bound remains are so ancient that investigation is more paleontology than archaeology. They have to tiptoe between Zentraedi patrols. A Macross story in the vein of Stargate Atlantis would be gratifying (following something like the 117th Long-Distance Research Fleet alluded to in Frontier), but probably not what the powers-that-be are interested in bankrolling. Even a magazine-based project like Macross the Ride is an excuse to play with model kits, and I don't expect a lot of interest in "type-3 inflatable research shelter" or "arctic-terrain gravitometer van".
  6. Lexomatic
    On the non-diegetic side -- Were the writers of SDFM enamored of absurdly big fleets, Lensman-style? Does "five million ships!" sound impressive in Japanese, more so than other numbers? ("Gohyaku man-hai fune yo", I guess.) The diegetic reason -- Did the Protoculture occupy that many star systems? Did they prefer overwhelming numerical domination? Did their civil war start out that large, or was it an escalation related to the creation of the Supervision Army, or have the factory satellites been cancerously self-replicating for the past 500 millennia? (Millions of ships in each of thousands of fleets, if DYRL is to be believed.) (The Iain M. Banks coinage "aggressive hegemonizing swarm" seems apropos here.) This may be a matter of magnitudes for which there is no good answer. (As a question, it doesn't IMHO fit the "newbie and short questions" or "mecha fun time" threads.) (This happened to occur to me (a) while perusing the "Robotech by Titan Comics" thread. and (b) for thematic similarity with a Quora question, "why isn't the Imperial fleet in Star Wars bigger?" The size of the Tirolian empire, as depicted in the Sentinels novels, doesn't seem to justify a subjugation-fleet of that size. If Carl Macek had balked at the number and opted to downsize it in the Robotech dub script, it's not like anybody would actually count the number of dots onscreen -- a fleet of 50,000 ships would be less insane but still seemingly-unbeatable.)
  7. Lexomatic
    As a professional macroeconomic librarian, I agree. Of course, I'm also the kind of fan who when reading "Dragonriders of Pern" wants more colonized-planet geology and agriculture and fewer dragons, and is disappointed that on-screen "Star Trek" has never provided a clear explanation of how legal authority is divided between the federal government and individual planets or planetary alliances.
  8. Lexomatic
    Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (1972) got two different English-language adaptations: Battle of the Planets (1978), by Sandy Frank Entertainment, which used 85 of 105 episodes and replaced the most controversial segments with the "7-Zark-7" narrator interludes. The title, the modified premise ("travel through space to fight Spectra on other planets"), and 7-Zark-7 (his shape and name, anyway) were all riding on the coattails of Star Wars. It also got a new score by Hoyt Curtin (you'll notice cues similar to his contemporaneous work on the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends shows). The name "G-Force" was assigned to the team. G-Force: Guardians of Space (1986) by Turner Program Services, which restored most of the footage, but had new names and a new voice dub. The later sequels, Gatchaman II (1978) and Gatchaman Fighter (1979), would be adapted by Saban as Eagle Riders (1996). When the alien Sosai X recruited humans to form the Galactor terrorist organization (called "the Luminous One" and "Spectra" in Battle of the Planets), it always intended to destroy Earth in the end (this was quite the shock to chief catspaw Berg Katse). I suspect it got some jollies by seeing how far its minions would debase themselves in pursuit of personal gain. ("Humans like masks, but are embarrassed by funny masks, eh?")
  9. Lexomatic
    Re: Faithfulness of the adaptation -- From the get-go, Disney's fairy tale movies have been more "inspired by" than "adaptation of", so "take a dump on" is a misplaced characterization; also, IMHO, hyperbolic -- the Disney film doesn't parody the HCA 1837 story, or attempt to supplant it. It should be thought of as "Disney's The Little Mermaid" and not "Disney presents Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid". The world of ideas can accommodate more than one version of a story (*), although admittedly, Disney's market power gives it unprecedented mindshare. 1968, Russian, animated 1975, Japanese, animated 1976, Bulgaria-USSR, live action 1977, Finnish, animated (Possibly another version, from some kind of "classics animated" anthology series of the early '80s) 1989, Disney 1992, USA (Golden Films), animated 2016, USA, live action 2018, USA, live action Re: Ariel's skin tone -- As conventionally pictured, nothing about mer-person anatomy and physiology makes sense (why so much hair? where are the gills?) and skin pigmentation is the least of it. Assuming natural selection is even pertinent, maybe they haven't lived in a low-UV environment long enough to lose said pigment. Maybe it's random, like the coloration of a litter of tabby kittens, and Ariel's sisters will be various shades of brown (or blue, or striped, or ...). For alternate takes, see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), or the Fisher Kingdom in Aquaman (2018). Me, I'm wondering how they'll re-interpret the "seashell bra" trope. Consider that in the current live-action Aladdin, Princess Jasmine's wardrobe has rather more midriff coverage than in the 1992 animated film. (*) The world can accommodate multiple versions, but it's possible a single brain can't. From their complaints, some people seem resistant to the whole notion of alternatives and nuance; if two ideas are even slightly similar, they get conflated. This might reflect a real neurological difference, or simply a lack of effort. The tendency has become particularly apparent in 20/21-cen pop culture where a mythos gets repeatedly reinterpreted within a single person's lifetime.
  10. Lexomatic
    <skims the proposal> Interesting. The crowdfunding model was successful for Bee and PuppyCat by Natasha Allegri (an alum of Adventure Time) (Kickstarter from 2013 hey wait that was six years ago yikes) with a target budget of $100,000 per episode, each 5 to 10 minutes. Has it been successful for anything else? There's a TV Tropes page for Kickstarter, listing ... lessee ... new seasons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (oh, right), Reading Rainbow, English dubs for Vision of Escaflowne and Wakfu ... but a market analysis also requires: how often has the model failed? Indeed. The Answerman columns are what I usually cite when somebody newly discovers this dirty truth of the Japanese animation industry. That species of complaint would probably be from producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki. This might be addressed on fan site Cosmo DNA, which is a tremendous resource of translated vintage news coverage, but difficult to search for specific questions.
  11. Lexomatic
    One feature of Siege Jetfire I can't figure from pictures I've seen: There seem to be a pair of doors on the "underside" of the red backpack, behind his head, with helical springs. What's their purpose?
  12. Lexomatic
    Whether you enjoy Star Trek: Discovery (ST:DSC if you follow the established pattern of abbreviations, STD if you're feeling malicious) depends very much on what you're looking for in (a) a product with the "Star Trek" name, and (b) modern SFTV. Internet discussion implies that both correlate strongly with age and experience with prior iterations of the franchise. Objections to the show fall into this hierarchy: It's paywalled instead of airing on a free broadcast network. The look doesn't resemble the era, as depicted in TOS. The technological capabilities don't match TOS, and often exceed TNG. Many of the Starfleet characters aren't laudable. The structure is main character not ensemble, long-arc not episodic. The writing and photography are often bad ("why did the characters do this?" and "I can't see what's happening"). The themes are neither aspirational (humanity can improve itself) nor inspirational ("I want to be an astronaut / I want to invent that gadget"). If you're a fan of Macross you've probably made peace with inconsistent "visual canon", and with a little practice you can discard "fanon" and "head canon" that restrict what you believe things "should be". Point (5) gets into Macross Delta territory. Why the mess? CBS and the production crew haven't broken ranks, but reading between the lines, there has been a lot of instability -- repeated changes in the showrunners and their vision, people who don't "get" what's distinctive about Trek as opposed to adventure-SF, "change for the sake of change", clumsy attempts to reverse direction, and writers with limited SF and long-arc experience. TNG-DS9-VGR-ENT started to get "samey" because the same people had been running the franchise for 15 years, but by the same token, they were a well-oiled machine. Conversely, The Orville on Fox is unapologetically a TNG homage: space exploration, first contact, cultural conflict, allegorical morality plays, impossible decisions; in an episodic-with-callbacks structure. The characters are more overtly human and imperfect than the paragons of TNG. The main objections are "ew, you got Seth McFarlane humor in my Trek" (an element that has been gradually reduced from the start of the series) and "ew, you put Seth McFarlane in the literal captain's seat" (more an objection to his acting skills than to his everyman personality, which is directly addressed by an admiral in the first ep: "let's face it, you're nobody's first choice for a captain, but we've got 3000 ships to crew").
  13. Lexomatic
    I haven't bought any of these third-party boutique figures, even after seeing them in person at TFcon USA 2017 -- very nicely done, but too rich for my blood (*). What I have is a spreadsheet (because I'm all about the analytics) with 500 molds and 600 characters (counting re-decos) from a dozen makers (GigaPower, Iron Factory, KFC, Planet X, etc.). What I'm really curious about is: WHO is making them, and HOW? I presume they're leveraging modern CAD/CAM and China's low-cost manufacturing expertise, honed on official Transformers and other Japanese robot toys -- but are they true amateurs, or former employees of Hasbro, Takara, Bandai, etc.? The few official websites I've found have not been particularly enlightening. Anybody aware of any interviews or designer profiles -- or are the specific personages still keeping a low profile, even if their products aren't? (*) The Iron Factory "Wing of Tyrant" figures are particularly enticing, because I was a big fan of the scale and detail of the G2 Cyberjets in the mid-'90s -- but $30 to $45 for four inches of plastic feels wrong. FWIW, after filling my basement with LEGO bricks, I've drifted very much into the "pay for experiences, not things" camp.
  14. Lexomatic
    G-Saviour (1999, 92 minutes) is, if not strictly anime, anime-adjacent -- a hybrid of Sunrise-owned Universal Century with the late-'90s film industry of Vancouver, with a script obviously designed to appeal to viewers of the era's serious live-action NorAm English-language TV SF like Babylon 5 and seaQuest DSV. Viz., most of Gundam's tropes have been omitted: bad guys aren't cackling psychopaths, the good guys aren't merely less-bad guys, the macguffin is almost scientifically plausible, the names are normal -- and there's nary a teenager to be seen, in or out of the cockpit of a mobile suit. To unpack the plot: It's UC 223 (AD 2268) and a faction in the military of the Congress of Settlement Nations ("CONSENT") is suppressing the discovery of a method of undersea agriculture (viz., mass production of a bioluminescent enzyme that produces light and heat) because (as noted by their catspaw in a moment of epiphany) "there's too much power in selective starvation". Mark Curran, a former mobile suit pilot and now director of the Hydro-Gen subsea experimental facility, falls in with Dr. Cynthia Graves of the Side Eight "Gaia" settlement, co-developer of the enzyme, and is recruited to pilot the G-Saviour, an advanced suit developed by "the Illuminati", a well-funded clandestine movement in the settlements opposed to recent developments in CONSENT. The classic names Minovski particle, Gundam, Zeon and Earth Federation aren't used, although the CONSENT uniforms evoke those of the EF (viz., braid outlines a shoulder yoke). It's 140 years after Mobile Suit Gundam, so a political realignment is plausible. The "settlements" are the classic O'Neill "Island III" shape. The mobile suits have beam sabers and field-bucklers, but the combat could be replaced with Starfuries with no change to the drama. Set design, costumes and acting are all quite passable for a TV movie. The CGI quality is more 1995 than 1999.
  15. Lexomatic
    "Greetings, local sophont! We are members of Symbol Table Entry One, engaged in armed conflict with members of Symbol Table Entry Two, with whom we have a long-standing disagreement over the political organization of our homeworld, Symbol Table Entry Three." "Symbol table ...? Forget it. If you lot can't be arsed to come up with sensible names, I'll just call you Simwunnites and Simtoonians. That copacetic with you?" "This entire mode of communication, with the linear packaging of concepts and emotional modulations, delivered through narrow-band vibrations in a gaseous fluid medium, is arbitrary to us. So, yes." Tune in next time for thrilling adventure with the altruistic Simwunnites versus the self-aggrandizing Simtoonians! On "The Combative Space-Aliens Who Intriguingly Change Shape".
  16. Lexomatic
    Lessee, I tuned out when the Klingons and Kelpians arrived and skipped forward to the denouement and epilogue. Vis-a-vis the repeated moments during the season that can be interpreted as "trying to dig ourselves out of a hole / placate the fanbase", it feels significant that: Spock's proposal to the interviewing (admiral? all the shots were over his shoulder) was essentially "and let us never speak of this again". We see Discovery vanish into Burnham's wormhole, but the final scene is the launch of the repaired Enterprise. The end-title music intercuts the DSC and Alexander Courage TOS themes. During the battle, Enterprise deploys a crew of repair bots ("D-O-T-sevens") from several ports on the saucer, confirming what I had suspected re: "is some of the maintenance automatic?" Also, it's a lot like the scene with Amidala's yacht and astromech droids from The Phantom Menace -- the bots are even white with blue trim. When Spock and Burnham are ready to launch from Discovery's docking bay to open the escape wormhole, during the battle, there is once again gratuitous "worker bee moving crates" action in the background. Pike flubs a line ("the calvary has arrived" -- i.e., cal-va-ry, not cav-al-ry) and it's inexcusable that nobody noticed and fixed it, at worst by looping. This isn't a spoonerism on a made-up name like "Taralians" vs. "Talarians".
  17. Lexomatic
    Be careful what you wish for -- visual SF is replete with entities that are more interesting the less you know, until later showrunners or tie-in novelists plunge their grubby mitts into the sandbox and spoil the soup by evaporating the veneer of mystery. According to its Memory Beta entry, the Guardian of Forever has appeared in many stories, including: In Imzadi (Peter David, 1992), future-Riker uses the Guardian of Forever to save Troi, thereby also explicating whatever mystery we'd had about their early relationship. (Also features a female Orion scientist going by the name "Mary Mac" who has to dress down to get other species to take her brain seriously.) In The Devil's Heart (Carmen Carter, 1993), the titular artifact, coveted by one ruler after another, is implied to be a seed that will eventually grow into another Guardian, elsewhere. (Ob the topic of this thread, we should count ourselves lucky that DSC has trotted out only a limited number of TOS icons. We did encounter the Sarek family, redesigned Klingons, Andorians and Tellarites, Harry Mudd and android copies thereof, the Pike-era Enterprise, and Talosians; but thankfully haven't seen Romulans, Tholians, Garth of Izar, Organians, Gary 7, the Guardian, or Antares-class freighters.)
  18. Lexomatic
    The pattern of offerings implies that the bulk of existing fans remain more interested in merch associated with older shows, and the new show hasn't drawn a mass of new fans who are principally interested in new stuff. (When redesigning everything, it seems "new fans won't like the old-fangled style" is an excuse for "we want to exert our own creative vision".) Contrast with Macross (which continues to produce updated plamo of VF-1 alongside redecos of VF-31s) or Hasbro, which produces the same Transformers character in six different forms and price-points for different customers. It's not just that the merch selection (casualwear, drinkware) is generally low-priced, but also a low time investment (models take time to build, novels take time to read). Star Trek is certainly not a modern anime (whose priority is to be a late-night infomercial for tie-in soundtrack, light novel, character goods, papercraft, plamo, etc.), but where it could promote, it has done so poorly. Potential products are either impossible to see (murk-toned space battles), rarely seen (few beauty shots of ships not numbered NCC-1031), or ugly (Klingon ships). If you're accustomed to picking a uniform that's yellow or red or mostly-black to suit your skin tone, sorry, you're limited to blue with metallic accents (or, I guess, white-for-Medical). Characters rarely carry props, and when they do, it's a weapon (too bad if you want to accessorize with a nonviolent tricorder or medical kit). (The uniforms of ENT were also mostly-blue, but (a) jumpsuits are more flattering to different physiques, (b) they look like a reasonable extrapolation of submarine and NASA wear, and (c) they have plenty of pockets.) We're 19 months into the series (premiered September 2017) and we've had only four novels. True, we're not in the 1990s heyday of Pocket publishing a TNG and DS9 title every other month, but still disappointing. And what happened to the kid-oriented heyday of role play items from Playmates sold at Toys "R" Us? What kid is going to be inspired to re-enact these adventures? Any parent who wants to recapture the magic is going to stick to TNG or DS9. (To be fair, Hasbro also has no idea what to do with that segment -- it's always "arm-gun" or "Optimus Prime mask".) There are no constructible toys, but that's probably a mercy after Bayverse KRE-O and Game of Thrones in brick form. (I'm skeptical of the mindset that seems to be "my favorite property hasn't arrived until it gets a big-budget movie and LEGO sets", but MEGA Brands-now-Mattel has been successful for years with its Halo theme.)
  19. Lexomatic
    Hmm. What merchandising is there, exactly? I've seen a few products reviewed on TrekMovie.com, but I haven't gone looking for anything myself (and most of the categories are too obscure to appear at mass-market retailers anyway, so I'm not going to encounter them in passing). Lessee. Amazon and StarTrek.com list... Home video Expansions to Star Trek Online Books etc. Novels - Desperate Hours (Sep 2017), Drastic Measures (Feb 2018), Fear Itself (Jun 2018), The Way to the Stars (Jan 2019) Comics (by IDW) - Mirror Universe limited series Other printed matter - The Official Companion (Sep 2018), Designing Starships Vol 4 (Sep 2019), wall calendar 2020 Stickers (by Popfunk) Models (Official Starships Collection by Eaglemoss) - Starfleet (Buran, Clarke, Discovery, Europa, Kerala, Shran), Vulcan cruiser, Klingon houses Roleplay apparel Badges (by QMx aka Quantum Mechanix) - Starfleet departments, S31, Mirror universe DSC tracksuit-type Starfleet uniforms (by Rubies) Other apparel T-shirts (by Popfunk) - DISCO, S31 black badge Polo shirts Hoodies - NCC-1031, Enterprise with DSC-style delta, S31 Burnham standee (the only character to get one ... as if we needed additional evidence of who the main character is) Coffee mugs - Saru, Stamets, Spock salute, Burnham salute, DSC logo, #Silly4Tilly, S31 Thermal bottle But nothing in the way of: Plastic model kits Action figures Roleplay accessories (aside from badges) - phaser, tricorder (the BBC has not missed a trick in making the Doctor's sonic screwdriver toyetic) Christmas ornaments Funko Pop vinyl figures Plush aliens (umm... space-tardigrade and space-whale?) Soundtrack album (does the show even have music outside the theme song? I honestly can't recall)
  20. Lexomatic
    Agreed, although that's not the thrust of my comment. Also, I'm not going to take anything a character says, or what the crew alleges in an interview, at face value. Rather, my method is to step back and assess the holistic pattern to see what the show is actually delivering despite any reflective statements about its intent. To rephrase my thesis: Picard: "Is Michael Burnham a lousy main character who's distorting the entire Trekkian dramatic paradigm?" Inquisitor Q: "That's three questions. Is Michael Burnham the main character? Is she lousy in that position? Does a main character distort the paradigm?" However gratifying a validation of our stance ("this isn't just bad Trek, it's bad 2010s drama. your scriptwriting is bad and you should feel bad") might be, we're not going to get a mea culpa from the cast and crew, Rainier Wolfcastle-style ("there vere problems vit the script from day vun"), certainly not for years. (I'm picturing the debate in multidimensional terms. At one corner are audience members who really like the show, at another are the ones who object because it doesn't fit their notions of what a show in this era should be, and Seto Kaiba and I are taking the "agnostic about the setting materials, but critical of the dramatic choices" position. There may be other corners.)
  21. Lexomatic
    Re: Seto Kaiba's synopsis of 2x12 "Through the Valley of Shadows" ... interesting. I'll reply at length when I screen the ep myself; I had insufficient bandwidth during a vacation in Miami (sea breezes, lizards, banyan trees and poor signage at public transit nodes). It seems that evidence continues to mount that the dramatic flaws stem mostly from the foundational decision to use a "main character" paradigm, rather than the "ensemble" paradigm of the prior six TV series (*). Per the "you can please some of the people some of the time, but ..." principle, an ensemble makes it more likely that the writers will stumble upon characters or combinations that appeal to viewers. The fact that supporting characters Saru and Pike are better received than Burnham is a problem. (Charitably assuming it's not just a preference for male characters. Tilly is a love-or-hate proposition, M-Georgiou is still a scenery-chewing duplicitous villain, and with only three eps Reno doesn't have sufficient sample to judge.) (*) Those character-relationship graphs that appear in anime "film roman albums"? I keep meaning to draw one for DSC, to see if it really does all revolve around her. A more rigorous analysis would weight the edges by the number of scenes shared by two characters, if such information was easy to extract.
  22. Lexomatic
    "Why are the writing flaws so many and so obvious?" is really disappointing for a flagship show carrying the Trek name. From the outside, the failures of a show can't be easily ascribed to any single person, or to any specific combination (writer-producer-director-editor-studio executive) -- nobody "kisses and tells" until years later, and everyone sticks to an upbeat party line during press appearances. During season 1, I checked the CVs of the writing staff on IMDb, and many were fairly new and/or lacked SF experience -- that might be a contributing factor. The decision to build a season around a single arc introduces complications; it's hard but no longer novel, so how is it being done so badly? There's no shortage of examples of SF/F shows that have been more adept at telling story arcs (foreshadowing, B-plots, etc.) but not allowing themselves to be dominated by their arcs. Such examples include: Babylon 5 (1993) Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (2000) Stargate Atlantis (2004) Steven Universe (2013) Star vs. the Forces of Evil (2015)
  23. Lexomatic
    So, in tonight's episode of Star Trek: Discovery (2x11 "Perpetual Infinity"), a flaming micro-wormhole disgorges nine paragraphs of spoilers: The problem with the direction the season has taken (i.e., CONTROL wants to evolve and kill everybody, and the Red Angel is trying to stop it) is: As a threat, it's all a bit abstract. CONTROL has no face (not even a logo), and the macguffin is a database. It's a rehash of the time war against Skynet. Trek should be more original than that.
  24. Lexomatic
    Before (TOS "The Cage" is set in 2254, DIS "If Memory Serves" in 2257, and TOS "The Menagerie" in 2267 (*)). When Burnham specifies the destination in one ep, the shuttle computer doesn't object; but upon approach in the next ep, it warns that the area is restricted, but says nothing about General Order 7 ("no vessel under any condition, emergency or otherwise, is to visit Talos IV"). We still don't know why capital punishment is associated with that order. The visit involves Burnham and Spock on the surface, Discovery and the Section 31 ship in orbit. The latter crew are fooled by a telepathic projection, and Pike is drawn to the planet by a projection over interstellar range, which is chronologically the first use of this Talosian capability (it's also used in "The Menagerie", ten years later) and might reasonably alarm Starfleet. (*) The production team is apparently keeping track of Earth-dates in Discovery, although nobody's quoted stardates lately.
  25. Lexomatic
    As stupid-looking and counterintuitive as it seems, that's arguably how turbolifts have always been owing to the modular internal nature of Starfleet ships. To expand, my beef isn't with "turbolift goes sideways" or "there's a void around the turbolift track, rather than solid decks". (The design philosophy "structural frame within which compartments are hung" is stated by the text of the ST:TNG Technical Manual by Sternbach, but not depicted in the Enterprise-D blueprints also by Sternbach.) It's with the quantity of empty space. None of the sections of Discovery (bullseye saucer section, connecting dorsal, delta-shaped engineering section) seem big enough overall, further reduced by exterior compartments with windows. Heck, the interior void has maintenance pods (full-size crewed workpods? the shots are too brief to tell) flying around. That's part-n-parcel of an emphasis on maintenance (possibly automated), what with other shots of pods performing exterior work, and that one scene of Reno's hovering "kids" (or similar devices) tidying the Mess after the Culber-Tyler fisticuffs. This makes sense in an SF milieu, and it supports the premise of the "Calypso" short (i.e., the ship has been uncrewed yet self-maintaining for centuries) but it feels odd. Either the tech has been "just off-camera" in future eras (i.e., prior shows), or Starfleet decides to use human crew for all such tasks (maybe as part of a Battlestar Galactica (2004)-style distrust of highly integrated AIs). Would you want to be in the transporter room with some Freeza-looking insane murder cyborg beaming in? I assume Nhan isn't the only security officer on the ship. And if they've got forcefield brig cells, how is it not a feature with the transporter stage? I also count this as an "audience knows to object, but the bridge crew doesn't have the same information, so they shouldn't" situation. If the very idea of nonlinear time screwed Spock up so badly he checked himself into the funny farm and developed a bit of a madness mantra, a traditional Vulcan healer with a more conservative mindset than the relatively liberal Spock might've been driven just as mad as Spock was. That's a reasonable interpretation, but IMHO the episode needed to hang a lantern on it. (There's something to be said for "trust the audience to put in some effort" but Trek is more of a "show your work" franchise.) Burnham needed to ask Spock, "Why here? What do the Talosians have that you couldn't obtain from a Vulcan healer?" I'm also not convinced that "aieee, time travel exists" should've had so dramatic an effect. In ENT, T'Pol had no trouble with it, once she was forced to discard the party line ("the Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that ..."). More generally, the Talosians were an episode-sized Easter egg, one-and-done. Any long-time fan will recognize their significance -- but isn't the show trying to draw new viewers? If an arc-based show wants to depict a thing as significant, it needs to plant and nurture seeds. Same problem with Airiam's death -- the show neglected to establish her character prior to her one flagship episode. She's just "the undefined robot-looking female who operates the Spore Drive and helped decipher the Sphere's database" character.
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