I’m still salty about them killing off Jadzia.

Yeah, you get it!

Hearing Jack Quaid’s distinctive Boimler scream gives me life.

However, between work and my social life, there is not much time left to write these posts without losing sleep, so while getting an extra episode is cool, it also feels as much like a personal attack as the season one stardates.

I will attempt to have “Those Old Scientists” done by Saturday morning, and this week’s episode by Monday.

Not to mention the augment virus does not account for why the Excalbian recreation of Kahless in “The Savage Curtain” was still a TOS era Klingon.

It really is the most flimsy plot and, as you say, completely unnecessary.

I very much enjoyed that in season one, each Klingon house had their own uniform, and customs. In the TNG era there is a uniformity to the Klingons, which flattens them to monoculture. Even the simple touches of having House Mo’Kai engage in facial scarification, or House Kor wear war paint implies an expansion to their culture that makes me far more interested in them.

Also, I’ve always enjoyed the scheming Klingons, like the ones we see in TOS, or the Duras Sisters, so Kol really appealed to me as an antagonist.

The new prosthetic seemed like a natural progression of what we saw from TOS, to TMP, to “The Search for Spock” and TNG. I do think the decision to make them all bald in season one was a miss, but it’s otherwise a good design that effectively communicates the ferocity the species is supposed to have.

I wonder if they wanted them to all be bald if it wouldn’t have made more sense to have T’Kuvma’s followers be bald, and the others that arrive after he lights the beacon engage in tonsure once T’Kuvma becomes a martyr.

Oh, and the elongated craniums on the women was also an odd choice that I’m glad was walked back for season two.

The timeline fluidity is a bit of a frustration for me as well, despite the fact that I’ve been reading comic books for 30 years, and it doesn’t bother me a whit when I see a flashback to Spider-Man’s origin and people have smart phones or whatever. But even trying to reconcile Spock claim in “Space Seed” that the last of Earth’s World Wars took place in the 90s, with the implication in “Encounter at Farpoint” that a war was fought with atomic weapons leading up to the mid-21st century.

Part of the problem, obviously, is that they every decided to give anything actual dates. I understand the inclination though; no doubt in 1967 when they were sitting down first build out this world, they wanted to present the idea of WWIII to be looming on the horizon. A lot of the people viewing this when it aired episode would remember being shown videos telling school children to duck under their desks for protection in case of a nuclear attack. But then Voyager travels to 1996 in “Future’s End” and there’s no indication that humanity just went through the third World War.

Hell, in TOS, continuity wasn’t maintained episode to episode for some things. In “Balance of Terror” they hadn’t added photon torpedoes to canon yet, so the Enterprise was firing phasers bolts with proximity explosions at the Romulan Bird-of-Prey. There are a handful of different names for the organization the crew serves before Starfleet was named in “Court Martial” and even after that, they still called it Spacefleet Command one last time in “The Squire of Gothos”.

Anyways! Obviously I think the subject of continuity in Star Trek is pretty interesting in and of itself, and I would argue that visual continuity aside, the new iterations from Disco onwards have been fairly mindful of canon. There are occasionally things that skirt the line, but very little that actually break continuity. A big one for me is the site-to-site beaming. In “Day of the Dove”, Kirk asks if it’s ever been done and Spock discusses how dangerous beaming from one point on the ship to another is, and how it requires pinpoint accuracy, but in Disco they do it all the time, and usually just with a voice command to the computer. I also don’t like how fast the transporters on Disco and SNW work, but I don’t think that rises to the level of a continuity violation.

The idea that the new wave of Trek is lousy with continuity errors is, in my opinion, largely perpetuated by people looking for reasons to dislike the shows, and who don’t know canon as well as they believe.

Yeah, most of my pins are from various podcasts.

I do have a couple vegan pins, and until it sadly fell off, I did have a COVID-19 Vaccinated pin designed to look like the Ninja Turtles logo. Those are the most political things I generally wear.

I would argue that there are some fairly significant differences between SNW’s Klingons and TNG’s, just as there were differences between TOS’s, and differences every time they showed up in a TOS era movie.

Hell, Michael Dorn’s prosthetic for Worf changed significantly between seasons.

That sort of thing is not a continuity violation. At least not in my mind.

Who actually wears badges and pins in North America however unless they are usable in cosplay?

I have a bunch of pins on various bags. I don’t like the Fansets ones that much, though.

Obviously people can say whatever they want, but I personally don’t see any value in dragging something down when instead I could be lifting the thing I do like up. Like, imagine going in to the job at the end of the week and saying, “Hell yeah, I love Fridays!” and some sad sack co-worker is all, “Yeah, but don’t you just hate Mondays?” Buddy, why? What would be the point in being so negative, when instead you could be positive?

Or, let’s give another example: I personally think “Picard” was a bad television series, which started out kind of a mess, and got worse with every season. I know other people really enjoyed season three, but I think it is the single worse season of Trek, and it’s not even a contest. Now, imagine if every time someone made a post praising, some other series or new episode, I jumped in with, “Yeah, at least this one was better than season three of PIC.” What am I actually contributing to the conversation?

Furthermore, I don’t consider, “This doesn’t feel like [X],” to actually be criticism. Critique is detailed analysis. “I don’t like this because it’s not what I want it to be,” is just whining. Critique is an important aspect of art, but too many people confuse their hot takes as valid criticism. You brought up Shives, and while he and I disagree on a lot of things – and agree on others – regarding Trek, I would never say that he is not detailed in his videos. Biased, sure, but we all are. I can’t speak to the specific example you gave, but I know that at least in his scripted videos he generally isn’t dropping hot takes like that. Sometimes they make their way into his more off the cuff unscripted videos, but I would be staggered if he’s ever released something that was solely focused on saying one show is good because it isn’t as bad as another show he dislikes.

One issue with the more-recent shows is that they don’t have a lot of continuity, to the extent that they would seem to implicitly contradict each-other (and themselves, between seasons)

Can you give some examples?

I was actually saying this is the way the ships function on each series based on the analogies given previously.

Okay, well that’s patently ridiculous. How is Kirk’s Enterprise a monarchy in TOS, but an anarchy in TAS? How does the Discovery crew function as a dystopian society, especially in seasons two and three? Where is your evidence that the NX-01 is a military dictatorship? How is the crew of Deep Space 9 a communist society, but Voyager’s crew are capitalistic?

Where is your supporting evidence for any of this?

I’m not sure I follow the central thesis of what you’re trying to articulate here.

Are you saying that the way the ships function is similar to the government model you’ve assigned them? Or that most of the cultures the ships encounter follow those models?

Are you able to give some actual examples from the shows demonstrating that the comparison holds true over the multiple seasons each iteration of Trek had, or anything at all to support your claim?

Thanks!

When I decided to sign up a new account on reddit to talk about Trek, I asked myself what thing I could think of that people would want to see, and the answer was a Starfleet operated Tex-Mex food truck. So far the username has served me well.

Buddy, are you trying to make me pull an extra-ocular muscle from how hard my eyes just rolled?

If you like one aspect of the franchise you don’t need to whine about another not being to your taste to express that. I don’t shit on ENT every time I want to talk about DS9.

Oh dang, it’s the macrovirus from that one VOY episode!

LDecks, you never fail to completely delight me.

Who would win: 56 years of Star Trek continuity, or one silicon based boi?

You’re not wrong, but you ever try to argue with an older person who’s convinced of some nonsense because they got sucked down a facebook conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Sometimes you have to choose your battles, and I imagine La’an’s battle at that moment was trying to ascertain if Pelia actually rightfully owned all of those artifacts, and not whether or not the Federation is putting chemicals in the food slots to turn children into genderless energy beings or whatever.

I feel like at this point, it’s too early to trust Pelia as a reliable source of information.

I have no problem with this solution. See for example, the other Paris.

There are plenty of examples of cities in different countries, or even different territories in the same country having the same name. I feel like it’s different when we’re talking about a planet.

There’s a tendency to treat every alien race as a monoculture, but maybe Spock and T’Pol just came from different parts of Vulcan.

That tendency is built into Trek, for good or ill, and I would say it even applies to humans.

I actually kind of assumed that it might have been facon. While I can see the Enterprise growing real plants on its five year mission (hence Pike’s preference of real herbs), I can’t see it breeding real pigs.

In “Charlie X” Kirk does say to the galley chef, “On Earth today, it’s Thanksgiving. If the crew has to eat synthetic meat loaf, I want it to look like turkey,” which would seem to imply that in this era fake meat is not outside the norm. The question is though, is Pike such a foodie that he would throw his weight around be certain that there is a supply of real bacon on the ship for him to use vs. whatever’s coming out of the food synthesizers.

And there’s a whole other debate to be had about whether or not replicated meat would qualify as plant based which I don’t feel like the body of the post is the appropriate place to get into it. My personal opinion is that replicated meats would still not be suitable for a vegan diet, because at some point there was an original source that the replicator pattern must have been based upon.