This right here. I liked how TNG did it. Series premier bring an oldster in to launch, maybe have a special episode or two with another.

If we really wanted Colm back, have it in the premier of Starfleet Academy where the new cadets are going through a hall of distinguished professors and have an elderly O’Brien do a cameo with a sample of one of his lectures. Nice to connect the show to lore and nostalgia but short enough to let the new cast stand on their own.

That said, I agree with Colm. Let O’Brien stay as he is. He had a perfect send-off.

Yeah, they’ll probably have to check everything. Though, I wonder if even just checking that everything is good to go would save time from manually re-writing it all. While it may not be a smashing success, it could still prove useful.

I dunno, I’m interested to see how this plays out.

I think this is an interesting idea. If they’re able to pull it off, I think it will cement the usefulness of LLMs. I have my doubts, but it’s worth trying. I’d imagine that the LLM is specially tuned to be more adept at this task. Your bog-standard GPT-4 or Claude will probably be unreliable.

Yes-ish. The characters were villains, but the organization wasn’t necessarily. For instance, in Discovery season 2, Leland and his crew were the villains, but Section 31 was portrayed less as an extremist cabal and more as a misguided morally-grey organization. Less a blight upon the Federation and more an uncomfortable, but integral, part of it.

@setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world captures it well. Instead of being a cabal of extremists doing illegal and immoral things because they think they’re connected to a higher purpose, they’re a semi-official CIA-like organization.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Section 31 isn’t supposed to be a cool or semi-legitimate organization (with ships, insignia, etc.) but rather shadowy and absolutely beyond the pale of legitimacy where very few can stomach what they do. From an artistic/thematic POV, Section 31 should be there to show us that a good society requires work to maintain and that its undoing can come from within by those claiming to protect it by eschewing that society’s values. In other words, the ends don’t justify the means.

It should be a conspiracy of like-minded individuals that exists parasitically within Starfleet, not an official (or an “unofficial official” agency).

I agree. When 31 was first introduced, and Sloan explained that Section 31 was sanctioned by Starfleet under Article 14, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter, the implication was that they were people who misinterpreted or construed a (probably minor) part of the Starfleet Charter and used it to justify damn near anything.

Personally, I hate how Section 31 has been changed to be misunderstood, cool good guy/anti-hero types who are doing the wrong things for the right reason. DS9 had it right with portraying them as the villains within who should be snuffed out because the ends don’t justify the means.

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it’s beyond uncomfortable.

Same. SNW has been an interesting pattern for me. The powers that be will make creative decisions that I find dubious when announced (Kirk, musical episode, La’an being related to Khan), but each time, the show pulls it off. I think Paul Wesley has done a really good job, “Subspace Rhapsody” is just so much fun, and La’an is literally my favorite character on SNW.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat.

There’s also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there’s some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there’s just not as much content. I’d imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.

I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.

By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.

I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.

Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.

This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.

It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.

The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.

I think a big difference, though, is that there is political force to ending TikTok. The US government has no major issues with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. existing. Remember, there’s actual legislation banning TikTok. Whether that makes a real difference or not, well, I guess we just wait and see. Personally, I think they all should go down in flames.

I found myself nodding along to a lot that was said in this article. I also would trace a lot of recent issues to JJ Abrams’ take. What I said then is still (I think) true today: “They are good movies, but they aren’t good Star Trek movies.” Discovery and Picard suffered for it, but I think that the ills are being corrected. My hope is that Paramount greenlights “Legacy” as the TNG-spiritually-successor as SNW is the TOS-spiritual-successor.

Where I will disagree, though, is that Star Trek isn’t broken. Five-ish years ago, I would have said that, but after SNW, Lower Decks, and Picard season 3, I think the powers that be have a better understanding of what is needed. We were in a bit of a “dark-ages” from 2006-2020, but I think we’re back on the upswing. We may not be quite at 1990s golden age Trek, but we can get close.

I love both Star Trek and musicals, and when “Subspace Rhapsody” was announced, I wasn’t thrilled and thought it would be bad Star Trek and a bad musical. I was so wrong! I loved it so much!

The best song is “How Would That Feel,” La’an is the best, and I will fight anyone who says I’m wrong!

Now this is the content I subscribe for! Thank you!

I took a stab at it. Transliterated, it says: “Qapla’. Qu’Dunvad ghunwl’ DlSam.” I ran it through Bing’s translator (since the only word I recognize is Qapla’), and I got “Success. Your baby better is done.” I think the translation is wrong. When I was playing with another translator, it gave me “Success. For the glorious battle has begun” which seems more fitting.

No lie, he seems like such a cool dude. If I were in the area, I’d totally go to see him. And while I first knew him as Chekov, I grew to love him as Al Bester on Babylon 5, truly some of his best work!

And Number One in “The Cage”!

Hey, give it a chance. I love musicals, and I went in dubious that it would be pulled off. When it was announced, I didn’t think that they were up to the task, and I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised that SNW did it an did it well. It’s different, and it’s a risk, but you know…“risk is part of the game.” At worst, you don’t re-watch it.