Agree with all of the above.
Another thing I wish kbin would do, is that while kbin picks up mastodon posts (ie microblogs) - albeit not as seamlessly as would be ideal, as Mr Murdoch points out, it doesn't go the other way. When I post a thread to kbin I always attach relevant hashtags, but my Mastodon account does not pick these up. Mastodon does have the ability to follow kbin users, but not pick up kbin threads based on the thread's hashtags.
I think the official explanation is that they thought about it and judged Locarno as irredeemable - "a bad guy in the guise of a good guy" whereas Paris was supposed to be "a good guy in the guise of a bad guy". But I tend to agree that money was the determining factor, as it so often is.
Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma’ah felt rushed, almost forced.
Agreed. It's tricky injecting serious notes into an all-out sitcom and I'm not sure it worked as well this episode as it might have.
The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the “small universe” syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into
Again, agreed. Lower Decks has as much (more even) blatant fan service as Picard season 3, although because it is a comedy I find it more forgivable and less grating than I did in the other show. That said, "Lower Decks" is my favourite TNG episode, so appreciated the Sito Jaxa callback for that reason (and it was a nice way of connecting this series and the episode it was named after). As long as they're not foreshadowing her return. That would be very very bad. They thought about bringing her back on DS9 but wisely refrained. Keep your hands off Sito Jaxa's corpse McMahan!!
Boimler has his Starfleet recruitment poster seen in “Those Old Scientists”, but Number One’s face is obscured every time it’s on screen.
I'm 99% sure they were just being subtle (which I like), but 1% of me wonders if there's something in the actors', in this case Rebecca Romijn's, contract that says they have to be compensated if their likeness is used, even a cartoon likeness. And if so, sometimes the budget doesn't quite stretch far enough.
Yes.
Troy is the first Sinead O'Connor song I ever heard. It's filled with so much love and pain and rage. I was too young to understand it, but I listened to it a lot. It remains one of the most powerful artistic expressions I've encountered. Here is a live performance and the music video.
That was Picardo singing a parody of "La Donna e Mobile", an aria in Verdi's opera Rigoletto.
DS9 also had some episodes where they showed off their cast's vocal chops, eg Avergy Brooks and James Darren singing "The Best is Yet to Come" and Nana Visitor singing "Fever".
The retro poster has a Once More With Feeling vibe. Hoping Subspace Rhapsody will approach (or even meet) the standard that Buffy set as far as TV show musical episodes go.
Across the Spider-Verse Part 1 is one of the year's best movies, but I think it could have benefited by cutting about 15 minutes. The pacing felt very deliberate. Scenes took their time to play out, which taken individually were all fine and justifiable, but cumulatively took their toll. In particular I felt that most of the action set pieces could have been trimmed a little here, a little there. That way, that huge action sequence towards the end, where Miles Morales goes up against the combined forces of spider-men, spider-women and other spider-beings (and which I do NOT think should be cut), would have had more of an impact.
Dune, I'm really pleased to hear, is now a three-part movie, with Part 3 adapting Dune Messiah.
Tom Cruise hits ChatGPT in the face. Or, rather, vice versa.
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.
Kirk’s middle name, Tiberius, was established in the TAS episode, “Bem”. Prior to that, the only indication of what his middle name might be was in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when Gary Mitchell created a tombstone reading ”James R. Kirk”.
While David Gerrold canonised the "T" as standing for "Tiberius" in "Bem", we did know that his middle name started with the letter "T" as far back as "Mudd's Women" IIRC. You undoubtedly already knew this, but the way this particular connection was worded suggested that the "T" also first appeared in "Bem", when it had been established early in TOS.
Incidentally, but non-canonically, in Gene Roddenberry's novelisation of The Motion Picture, he has Kirk write, in "Admiral Kirk's preface" to the novel, that:
Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.
And quoting from that same preface just for shits and giggles and to proffer today's insight into the mind of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry:
I received James because it was both the name of my father's beloved brother as well as that of my mother's first love instructor.
One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community's feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community's home instance is on another server. So if you're a user on - say - leminal.space and you're the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community's old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you've subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.
This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn't exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they're the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.