Jack is definitely much better in this episode. His banter is much less in your face, and having Mickey call him out on it is a nice bit of self referential humour.
I've never been to Cardiff. I looked up the filming location as it's one that seems to get reused a lot, it's called "Roald Dahl Plass", which incidentally is a great author to recognise, and as a filming location it is very striking.
I enjoyed this episode. Seeing a return of a villain that makes them better than they were originally is rare. The central theme of this episode is how to do right by people - whether that's treating your friends right or your enemies.
I am glad that Rose finally had to confront Mickey. It is hard to blame her for wanting a more exciting life, but just running off leaving her boyfriend in the lurch is terrible behaviour. But on this the Doctor (and Jack) haven't been great supports. At the very end, when Rose clearly needs to talk to someone, they both just completely ignore her. They are all getting along quite well at the start of the episode, so it is rather jarring to end like that.
Being forced to confront justice is a really interesting dilemma. It is pretty clear that Blon has not and will not change, and that she's manipulative, and a killer. But the raxacori..., the Rs, are not much better, engaging in public torture shows and collective punishment of whole family groups. Ultimately I feel like the resolution could have been better - the doctor and co doesn't end up having to make a choice as Blon and the Tardis make it for them. The idea seems to be that by reverting to an egg and growing up in a happier family, Blon will live a better life... but If you've had your whole life reversed and live a different one, I'm not sure that's all that much better than a slightly expedited death penalty.
Annette Badland does some really good performance here, especially in the restaurant. Which is nice because it offsets the somewhat Scooby-Doo-esque "And I would have gotten away for it if it weren't for you pesky kids" at the start and the gloating double cross at the end. I did like that they managed to direct it such that the slightly dead-eyed slitheen costume actually show some sad emotion.
Other notes:
The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.
They haven't blocked the windows feature, they're using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.
Japan has 3 writing systems and this comic seems to be conflating Katakana and Kanji together as "stabby", leaving Hiragana as "adorable". All of them are (long ago) derived from chinese, but only the Kanji still look similar.
I would have introduced Chinese first, and then in the Japanese panel present the stabby and adorable ones both being attacked by flying contraptions. (And a few floating around the korean one, too)
This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.
If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.
If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.
If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.
There's something I'm really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the "Digital euro" idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that's new?
Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what's actually new when we're talking about digital currency like this post?
There must be something I'm missing here.
You can't misgender a brand. You can't deadname a brand. You can't befriend a brand.
Answer wrong. The more of us humans that answer wrong, the less accurate we need to be to get past these stupid things. If google want me to do work for them, they can pay me.
French and Portuguese at the convention, their arms open.
I really did not enjoy this one.
The "documentary" that ends up being made feels like the worst kind of propaganda that tries to feign a sense of "there's two sides to every argument", all while clearly pushing in favour of the agenda the documentary initially tried to critique anyway. It felt at moments like a military recruitment advertisement. I would not choose to watch such a documentary in real life, and watching it within a star trek episode just feels like I've wasted my time.
The writing makes use of the idea of military censorship and a film that jump cuts around to not so cleverly hide the fact that the writers are missing a plot. We are presented with a people in conflict, who abuse a creature to create a weapon. We have no other information about the conflict, beyond "there's mass casualties". No explanation of why starfleet is involved beyond "starfleet is here to help". No explanation why they chose to make that kind of weapon in particular. On the matter of the alien war we are left to fill the gaps ourselves entirely, and because our in-universe director is acting in the role of an unreliable narrator, we have no idea if any of what ended up in the film they ended up making can even be trusted. That FOIA disclaimer at the start could be just as real as those films that say "based on a true story" when they are anything but.
We did get some good character development, particularly with Ortegas finally being up front and open about what she's been through recently. But not really enough for it to feel like it matters. Ditto Uhura and Spock. Furthermore, despite self-harm and suicide being a central theme of the episode, other than an incredibly brief argument with the alien scientists about whether thier victim should be allowed to commit suicide, it's not really debated. The crew just accept that they need to do an assisted suicide, and that's that. Fair enough, if that's how human morals work centuries from now, but then it leads again to an episode without a useful plot. For contrast, multiple past star trek series have had their take on this topic and done a much better job.
After watching this I am left unsure what wider contribution this episode is meant to make to the series. For all the silliness of the comedy episodes, at least they were entertaining to watch and usually had at least one major plot development by the end. This one could have been cut from the season roster and nothing would have been lost.
Random assorted notes:
Looking forward to the next one, it can't possibly be worse than this.