I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances - that “me” is gone and can’t do anything. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.

Our family actually has a bunch that an aunt sent once.

Was about to cite TNG Tech Manual as well - although that also said that holodeck characters’ bodies were replicated meat puppets, which I think they didn’t stick with.

That might me it - when I search older media, say The Andy Griffith show, sure enough there are a crap ton of plates.

It might be a sort of Venn diagram thing - Trek/Wars plates came at the dusk of the commemorative plate era, while the fans were more likely than others to buy collectibles like plates, making them seem unique from other fandoms.

I just realized another thing about April - assuming humans live 120 years on average in the Trek universe and April got turned roughly 20 in Counter/Clock, an elderly April could still be alive in the 2360s or 70s.

I would love that! Give the lost part of the Monster Maroon era (mid 2290s-2340s) some love.

The weird thing is April from SNW should canonically still be alive due to TAS:”Counter-clockwise Incident”.

That’s an interesting relationship with Enterprise - I’ve yet to really watch that series.

Star Trek’s been a family thing for me as well; my mom is a fan - she watched VOY:“Endgame” during its premiere 4 days after she got married. Star Trek was always playing in the house, so me and my siblings gravitated towards it.

Lower Decks was probably 2/3rds of my coping strategy for the death of my grandmother.

You’re right. I gotta be going where my heart will take me.

I need to give those a harder listen. I do like how the Prodigy theme combines cinematic and TAS vibes. Also, I like how SNW riffs on the TOS theme.

Also, my “call” is indeed a tongue-in-cheek way to say I hope that Westlake can continue in Star Trek. Admittedly, I probably should have communicated that in a more precise, less melodramatic mode.

Oh no! You can’t break the laws of physics; O’Brien MUST suffer! Take it away before the universe suffers a subspace quasar tachyon inversion burst collapse to the hull or something. 😉

TNG: “Shades of Gray”, the really low-budget, terrible finale of season 2 where Riker has a virus that makes him relive memories turns the show into a clipshow.

But are you tough enough to watch the clip show?

What! Fairhaven is the best! Computer, delete the wife user! Just kidding. You’re entitled to your opinion.

But yeh, I get the hurt of the end of a series.

As for TNG rewatches, at this point I just go back to a favorite episode and start from there; it’s hard to sort good from bad in the early seasons.

Also, you can rip Blu-rays using a PC Blu-ray drive (which I acknowledge is increasingly hard to find - my PC doesn’t even have a 5.25" bay - I just have SATA cables dangling out for the drive, which I ripped from another machine).

Honestly, it’s a nice path to media ownership, although I don’t use it a lot.

According to Memory Alpha, 10 years because the ship was supposedly obsolete by then.

At least the OG 1701 got a good lifespan - it was no Miranda, but 40 years is great for an Enterprise.

The decommissioning of the A seemed a bit premature, though, considering it was a new ship that was relatively salvageable. Maybe its battle damage was just too much and that’s why it was given to the museum. Alternatively, the A was originally a different Constitution class undergoing a refit was was already quite old by Undiscovered country.

There’s a good chance the B lasted a long time too, though there’s no canon source to its demise, only that it’s not in the fleet museum.

Or just see if the kiss happens at timestamp 10:25 in the episode.

Also, little-known fun fact: the cow is a full Lieutenant.

In which media format? Stupid Paramount+ is going to have its stupid “not commercials” at the beginning of episodes, which might bork the timing.

As it’s Tawny Newsome, I’m giving it a chance.

My dream trek show, though, would be a semi-anthology that explores different crews (mostly non-Federation, but maybe one), sort of like if LD:”Wej Duj” was a series. Each crew would have a self-contained 50 minute plot, and then you would have them meet up for a finale (hopefully in two parts) with a meetup of each crew.

The one episode idea I have would be called something like “Cetacean Ops”, featuring a Starfleet vessel commanded and mostly staffed by aquatic (and some amphibious) life forms, except for main engineering. In addition to exploring what the heck whales do in the Federation, we could explore the dynamics of how non-aquatic and aquatic crew interact and try to prevent loneliness.