Right, I said it’s “not bad,” hardly a ringing endorsement. It had some good ideas and concepts but it also has a lot of flaws, which is why it’s quite unfortunate that it’s the best Discovery ever managed.

Right? Put Lorca on the front of my list to round out all four seasons. The outsiders carry the cast.

My problem with season 4 wasn’t that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a “stepping on an anthill” situation by… episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.

I’d rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I’d be done in an hour.

Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking “alright, not bad, I’m excited to watch this show grow the beard.”

But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don’t care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I’ll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

As much as I like SNW, it’s still not quite the show I’ve been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era… even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.

Balderdash

Star Trek is cool

La’An calls the Klingon ship a K’t’inga-class. This is a slight anachronism, as the K’t’inga-class, first seen in TMP and named in Roddenberry’s novelization, is supposed to be a distinct and more advanced version of the D7-class battlecruiser commonly seen in TOS. We could handwave it away as Temporal War shenanigans or being one of the first advanced models introduced or both. La’An is correct that the K’t’inga has an aft torpedo launcher (as opposed to the D7’s forward-only launcher).

I’ve always suspected that the D7 and the K’t’inga are the same class of ship and the differences are the result of a refit, an appropriate mirror of its Starfleet counterpart. It’s too bad we’ve heard Klingons refer to it as the “D7,” because if not for that I’d suggest K’t’inga is the classes actual name while D7 is its Starfleet “reporting name.”

The background music that plays behind M’Benga’s confession is a callback to “The Battle For Peace,” the soundtrack for the climatic battle between the Enterprise, the Excelsior, and Chang’s Bird-of-Prey at the end of The Undiscovered Country.

And of course when that confession escalates to confrontation, it transitions to the iconic Klingon leifmotif, first heard in The Motion Picture.

It’s almost as if time itself is pushing back and events reinsert themselves and all this was supposed to happen back in 1992 and I’ve been trapped here for 30 years!

This line is a pretty conspicuous breach of the fourth wall placed there by the current stewards of the franchise to tell us that we’re back to pre-Kelvin timeline time travel rules. The whole “time travel creates two discrete timelines” notion is gone. It was a one-off to justify the Kelvin timeline, and now we’re done with it.

It’s all one timeline and while that timeline is in a constant state of flux due to time travelers tinkering with it on a regular basis, it’s still one big wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey timeline. Therefore, the answer to every “are X and Y in the same timeline?” question is a continuously shifting “maybe” which largely depends on how you choose to understand “the timeline.”

To put a finer point on it, this is the writing staff telling the fanbase to chill out about timelines. Akiva Goldsman speaking to CinemaBlend, emphasis mine:

This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you’re kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world.

Translation: the Star Trek canon is going to keep shifting forward to accommodate keeping it in our future. More broadly, we should all accept some measure of canon flexibility so Star Trek is always set in an aspirational future, well suited for telling morality tales in space which are relevant to modern issues.

You’re characterizing what is likely to be the best reviewed game of the year as “nothing special” and you “don’t see how” that’s a hot take? Really?

What exactly do you think “hot take” means?

Hence, “hot take.”

… it is, to date, the best reviewed game of the year

Hot take

Compared to my previous take this one is ice cold, but Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom.

That’s all true and it’s never really bothered me because, possible hot take incoming, PS exclusives are pretty milquetoast. I will concede that Sony’s first party studios have honed their ability to make “open world third person action game with crafting and stealth elements” with impressive consistency, but that’s the most common genre of AAA game and IMO Sony isn’t even making the best ones, just accessible and consistently above average ones.

If you want that kind of game you have a zillion options on every platform.

PC player complaining about the cost of a PlayStation is new to me. Isn’t it normally the other way around? Isn’t a PS5 about as expensive as a decent GPU alone?

This is a great list and these all look amazing. Thank you for taking the time to compile it and share!

Ah. Tuvix was a person, EvilKirk was not?

To point one, yep, fair. I’ve unceremoniously dropped “The Enemy Within” into a context it was never intended to be examined from.

To point two, I agree that Janeway was both the source and the termination of Tuvix’ personhood, but I don’t see the relevancy. What bearing does Tuvix’s personhood have on how we describe Janeway’s actions, or the discussion about whether those actions were justified?