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:

• The decoded alien vocalisations kind of sounded like whalesong to me. Perfect opportunity for some cetecean ops, right? nope.
• Beto is shown to be incredibly manipulative, especially with recording people who don't want to be recorded. Why on earth is he not in the brig?
• Many times in the episode the direction attempts to foreshadow someone dying. I thought for a moment the writers were going to be brave and kill off someone in the crew. Particularly when chapel and spock are stretchered in with uhura standing there in shock. Nope, it's the random alien of the week instead.
• The alien visuals, both the CG and prosthetics were very nice. I like the idea of a species that, like some animals on earth, begins life underwater and then metamorphoses into something that lives in a completely different environment out of water. That was possibly the only highlight of the episode for me.

Looking forward to the next one, it can't possibly be worse than this.

Given it's been established the only person who can really help control Batel is Spock, and he is incommunicado for the whole episode, both Batel and Gamble should have been in confinement as soon as possible.

bottom can't drop out if they never had a bottom

This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel's relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

• Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La'an will spot this and help out.
• Una mentions a "couple of litres" of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because "a couple of litres" is a lot.
• Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
• John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
• Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it's canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
• While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov's gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

Good idea - if you also cap car speeds at 15mph

Netflix's short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that's a problem.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

• No job, grind away the entire waking day with a low paying zero hours contract while filing job applications, No videogames, no relaxation, more stress, costs healthcare providers more

• No job, spend some of the day working while filing job applications, Yes Videogames, relaxation, lower stress, costs healthcare providers less

Yet another case where if the politician seriously thought about the issue for just half a minute they'd realise their attitude makes no sense.

This clever pricing system is only available on Itch.io, [...] It is also on sale on Steam until March 7, but that price doesn't fluctuate.

I thought steam had some sort of t&c agreement where you had to price all copies of a game the same no matter the store they were on. surely this would violate those rules. or am I misremembering that?

To all the people saying they should release server source code: You don't even need to do that (as nice as it would be). At the very basic level all that is needed is:

• remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
• a description of the API for any online components (which any decent dev team will already have internally documented)

It does matter. It's safer for everyone if cyclists travel side by side in one lane because then the car driver has to spend less time in the oncoming lane to complete the overtake. A long string of bikes takes more time to safely pass.

This was a top episode

• Story about more a sci-fi concept, and it made sense
• Jokes that landed well
• Characters not being totally dumb for no reason
• Good resolution at the ending

Great finale