For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan's ability to save the human race wasn't the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn't feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

I've always maintained that TWOK is not just a really good Star Trek movie, not just a really good science fiction movie, but a really good movie period. It transcends the franchise and the genre, which I don't think can be said of any other Trek movie.

It's a movie that's about something meaningful - getting older, confronting mortality and legacy, and renewal through sacrifice. Kirk starts out feeling old, worn out, but ends with him saying "I feel young". Maybe it's a little trite when put so bluntly, but it's executed in an elegant and impactful way.

TWOK evolves Kirk in a way we hadn't seen before. He is a different person at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning (or throughout the TV show). Less cocky, more aware of the consequences of his actions, because it literally cost him his best friend.

Spock's death scene was the first time Star Trek ever made me cry. You can argue that TWOK is more militaristic than Star Trek normally was, but the themes of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice is pure Trek idealism. One could even argue that TWOK is about exploration, but an inner journey not an external one: Kirk encounters for the first time (by which I mean in a way that truly hits him) "death, the undiscovered country" (the film's working title).

In David Marcus and Saavik TWOK introduces what might have been a new generation of characters, to whom the torch might have been passed if they hadn't been killed off and sent to the home for pregnant Vulcans, respectively, in later movies. In either case, these two new characters - especially in light of Spock's death (a death sadly temporary, to the franchise's long-term detriment) - tie into the themes of mortality and legacy.

TWOK has what's arguably Shatner's finest performance - certainly in Star Trek, maybe ever. Everyone else is also in top form.

TWOK has the best antagonist. So compelling was Khan that they keep on trying to remake the "so-and-so is out for revenge" story. Montalban was so good Paramount even launched a "For Your Consideration" campaign to get him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod. And Montalban's Khan easily has the best chest of any Trek villain.

Even though Khan is the best villain, Khan and Kirk actually never physically meet. Their entire confrontation is carried out over comms. They never get into a fistfight or even breathe the same air, something that took me years to realise. Because theirs feels like the most visceral, tense and personal battle of any movie.

Even though TWOK was made on a very limited budget, a lot of the production design and visual/special effects hold up - there's a reason why Robert Fletcher's monster maroons are so iconic for instance. So many effective little moments. Eg the Genesis simulation (one of the first uses of CGI in a movie), though primitive by today's standards, still looks really cool because of the way it was storyboarded by ILM, with the camera sweeping ahead of the Genesis effect, then the effect catching up to it.

The battle scenes have real weight. I've always thought that Meyer's conceptualisation of starships as capital ships - rather than as jetfighters - made for better fight scenes. The entire movie is basically Roddenberry's "Horatio Hornblower in space" idea realised (hence touches like the bosun's whistle and the old-fashioned look of the uniforms), an idea which carried over to how he staged the battles, with Enterprise and Reliant squaring off like galleons at sea.

Speaking of battle sequences, the "gatling gun" phaser effect is still the best phaser effect in Trek. And you've never felt the pain of the ship getting hit as acutely as the "can opener" shot: another example of a shot which is unremarkable at a technical level today, but which still has an emotional impact. Ditto the Ceti eels.

Horner's music is arguably the best of any of the movies. There are individual tracks in other movies that might rank alongside or above the best of Horner's tracks - eg Goldsmith's First Contact theme or Giacchino's "Enterprising Young Men" - but as a whole I don't think you can surpass TWOK's score.

There are so many iconic moments and lines. "Aren't you dead?", the Dickens and Melville quotes, "I never forget a face, Mr... Chekov", "I don't like to lose", "He's so... human. / Nobody's perfect Mr Saavik", "I have been and always will be your friend", "Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human".

Is it a perfect movie? No. Eg while a lot of production design works, some of it looks cheesy (like Meyer's obsession with blinkety lights). Some of the supporting characters aren't utilised as well as they might have been. (But then, the TOS movies have all been Kirk movies - it's worth remembering that TOS was not an ensemble show, but one with a clear primary, secondary and tertiary character.) But the elements in TWOK that don't quite work don't detract from its overall impact and quality.

This episode was like someone said "Let's do our version of The Undiscovered Country" and then gave it to a bunch of DS9 writers to execute. It starts with very Roddenberrian premise - the promise of a former enemy becoming an ally. But then it brings in the gritty realism of what war is really like, ala "The Siege of AR-558", and the moral cost that war extracts - that maybe the monster you see is not just in the face of the enemy, but the face you see in the mirror, ala "Duet", "In the Pale Moonlight" and the other morally grey episodes that often marked the best of DS9's run.

The danger with these "very special fun episodes" is that they can be confined to being just that. But what elevated this episode is how it used the time travel/crossover conceit to foreshadow, progress and pay off SNW character arcs, including Chapel and Spock's ultimately doomed relationship (something that I've previously said could be incredibly poignant, if handled right), Number One's legacy, and the way Pike confronts his fate. I hope the musical episode does the same.

For those who don't know, Carol Kane (though not particularly known as a singer) has sung on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and has appeared in the US tour of the musical Wicked as Madame Morrible.

You obviously feel very strongly about this.

Have you considered bursting into song to give your feelings full expression?

Both Dial of Destiny and Dead Reckoning had similar budgets (around $300M) and similar opening weekends (around $80M). But the reviews and audience reactions have been better for Mission Impossible. This suggests the movie will have longer legs than Indiana Jones. Undoubtedly Paramount is hoping that Dead Reckoning's trajectory will be more like Top Gun Maverick's (staggering) 5.66 multiplier and less like (say) Quantumania's 2.02 multiplier.

edit: The article also mentions that the global opening weekend box office numbers for Mission Impossible are a lot better than the numbers for Indiana Jones, at $235M (ie $80M domestic + $155M overseas) vs $130M (ie ~$85M domestic + only about $45M overseas). That said, it's difficult to compare overseas numbers without a detailed breakdown of which markets each movie opened in. Mission Impossible may have played in more countries its first few days than Indiana Jones did.

Robinson 110% played Garak as being sexually interested in Bashir in his first appearance. And in the (non-canon but very very good) novel A Stitch in Time that Robinson himself authored, he establishes Garak as having had relationships with men and women.

As the show developed the producers/writers/studio backed away from that idea (which, to be fair, I think is a spin that the actor himself put on the script, rather than being there on the page itself), hence giving Garak a girlfriend.

Personally I never read into any of their scenes together that Bashir was interested in Garak as anything more than a friend, but if the show had been more progressive in that respect I suppose it might have evolved into an explicitly romantic relationship. Early 1990s vs early 2020s I suppose.

DS9 was pretty progressive in that the idea of "being in the closet" wrt ones sexual orientation was never a consideration. In "Rejoined" for instance, nobody has an issue with Dax loving another woman - the taboo was about reassociation. And "Rules of Acquisition" people didn't judge Pel (who people thought was a man at the time) for falling in love with Quark - the taboo was about Ferengi females wearing clothes etc. (Not sure if that Matt Baume video mentions this - it's been a while since I saw it.)

As someone who used to hang around TrekBBS back in the day, there are actually many conservative and libertarian Star Trek fans.

It always baffled me also, but I think many of them were/are TOS fans. Kirk's swashbuckling, individualistic, break-the-rules, throw-a-roundhouse-when-you-need-to style disguised Roddenberry's socialist utopia that existed in the more civilised parts of the Federation. Certainly more so than adventures of the tea-sipping, conference-chairing, "I think I'll surrender in my very first appearance" Frenchman who followed him.

ENT was basically watered down TNG for its first two seasons. Some of the time it was good (eg "Carbon Creek"), some of the time it was bad (eg "Precious Cargo"), but most of the time it was stultifyingly mediocre. Season 3 tried something different, but it was only in season 4 that ENT found its true voice.

And it was Manny Coto who was responsible for the upswing in quality. I'm generally skeptical of prequels, but at least Coto fully bought into the premise of ENT being a prequel show, and showed us how various aspects of Trek lore came to be. I think his stint running that final season may have been his best work.

I was not a fan of introducing legacy characters like Spock, Kirk - and even lesser-explored characters like Pike, Chapel, Number One and M'Benga to an extent - in DIS/SNW. Introduce new characters I say, that aren't hamstrung by what's already been established - something that I think is even more important in a show that's set in the "past".

That said, if we were to have a pre-TOS Spock, I wanted to see a Spock who would credibly grin at a plant or exclaim "The women!". I think SNW has given us that.

However, you're absolutely right. The destination for the character in SNW is for him to choose his Vulcan half over his human half. Hopefully the writers have planned this out. There's potential for a poignant story arc here, not just for Spock but also Chapel and T'Pring.