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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • My problem with season 4 wasn’t that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a “stepping on an anthill” situation by… episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.

    I’d rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I’d be done in an hour.


  • Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking “alright, not bad, I’m excited to watch this show grow the beard.”

    But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don’t care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I’ll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

    As much as I like SNW, it’s still not quite the show I’ve been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era… even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.








  • Bingo. It was kinda cute at first when it was still trying to be funny, but as the parody pretense slowly fell away it just got boring.

    The strangest part about it is how each episode is a remix of a Trek episode and yet the remix makes it very clear that the writers just don’t get it. For example, season 2’s “Blood of Patriots” is a rearrangement of “The Wounded,” but the subplot about Mercer and Malloy being best friends forever trivializes what TNG successfully depicted as a nuanced dilemma.

    There’s no accounting for taste, but it genuinely surprises me that there seems to be so many Star Trek fans who think it’s any good. On the other hand, it seems pretty safe to say that season 3 was the last, so clearly the actual numbers were unremarkable.


  • What a lovely episode.

    I saw a fair amount of skepticism across the Fediverse about how musical episodes are always bad and annoying, to which someone would always respond “well, Buffy nailed it.” Apparently the SNW writers feel the same way, because “Subspace Rhapsody” isn’t just a homage to “Once More With Feeling,” it’s a love letter. They may have swapped the demon for a subspace wedgie, but they kept the idea of using music to force the characters to confront their feelings about each other, and they even threw in a bunny callback.

    10/10. I hope SNW maintains the tradition of a theatrically silly episode near the end of each season as long as it runs!


  • But again, the notion that NX-01 was called “Dauntless” before the Borg First Contact incursion is your headcanon. No one working on Enterprise ever attested to that, and Cromwell’s casting as Cochrane is certainly not evidence of this alteration.

    You started this conversation by saying “They did the same thing for First Contact” and I just want to know who “they” is and what the “same thing” that “they did” is. You’ve brought up this Dauntless/Enterprise theory twice now but that’s certainly not evidence that any “they” did any “thing.” As far as I can tell it is your headcanon for a relatively minor inconsistency that could have any number of other explanations, the most obvious one being that Arturis got a detail wrong.

    I just find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone working on Enterprise was working on the assumption that they were creating a show in a timeline that was “altered” by the events of First Contact. That was never alluded to in the show’s four year run and as far as I know no one working on that show ever said anything of the sort.