[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 7 points 2 months ago

I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.

I was convinced up until the reveal that the "alien" was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I'm not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they're all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn't go down well for me. It's a generational ship, none of the original "good guys" were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they've killed.

The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn't need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They're all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk's captain literally is not a human.

The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut's perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.

Random other thoughts:

  • Getting to see more of Scotty is really nice, especially his acerbic dialogue.
  • Doctor M'benga, head medical officer, warzone survivor, having little screentime other than running phone cables and joysticks around is funny.
  • Ortegas getting a light scolding for being a wee bit suicidal is all we got for her ongoing sub-plot.
  • La'an has shown a previous liking for Kirk, but we didn't really have a chance to explore what her new thing with Spock means for that.
  • I hope the transporter buffer wasn't affected by all this now that it's holding a literal horror from beyond in it
[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago

I like this as a replacement for the Winnie the Pooh tuxedo image macro

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 7 points 2 months ago

The auto-red alerts did stick out a bit, but it kind of makes sense. The computer knows where everyone is and what they usually do, and behaviour-based intrusion detection systems are starting to become normal cybersecurity concepts even today.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago

This is something I've been thinking about a lot while I've been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off "fun" episode in DS9 - this past week was "Our Man Bashir" which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren't really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that's much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock's vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that's about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there's missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn't even really there, so that's a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La'ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 4 months ago

Honestly, "country of origin" will have straight lines drawn on a map that are so far removed from where the people who lived there originally considered their borders even that's probably not pinning it down well enough.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 7 points 4 months ago

fiercely confident of their own independence

In fairness, if you let the average cat out into nature it would be fine. Dump the average libertarian into nature and they wont last the night.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 5 months ago

I think this seems to be a curse that almost every TV series is facing right now. Even for runaway critical and popular successes from companies with loads of funding (Thinking Wednesday from Netflix, all the Star Trek shows from Paramount-CBS, countless animated projects from HBO-Max-Whatever-they're-called-this-week) they seem unable to just commit to a production pipeline, everything ends up stalling, and it prevents the kind of success that the production companies wanted, all but ensuring they fail to meet expectations, as multi-year long waits for follow ups means that only the core fan group is going to want to follow up.

I don't know how you solve that, other than grabbing the executives by the shoulders and shaking them until they realise it's nonsense behaviour.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 5 months ago

Adjusted to the initial sale value of the car - Less easy to cheat by not declaring income, and bigger cars (likely more expensive) that take up more space, pay more.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 7 points 5 months ago

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It's an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 6 months ago

Would be so tempting to take some white paint between the r and the n

[-] SpaceScotsman@startrek.website 6 points 2 years ago

I've found it easier to use KDE to switch from windows as it feels like a more complete ecosystem that I'm familiar with. And it is pretty great, until I install one bad graphics driver and then I'm stuck in a terminal only session until I can fix it. At least windows has safe mode.

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SpaceScotsman

joined 2 years ago