StillPaisleyCat

Prodigy EP Aaron Waltke is continuing to update on progress on his mastodon account.

“The world needs to see this.”

We’re with you @GoodAaron@mastodon.social.

For those who missed it, Prodigy picked up a Children and Family Emmy nomination for 2021-2022 Outstanding Animated Series.

I really like the potential for this community to let us discuss and compare the broad scope of Trek against the broader cultural conversation of sci-fi. So, I’m throwing out conversation starter in case there’s anyone else ready to play…

Major Vanguard series book spoilers ahead! (Seriously, it’s a great series and I don’t want to spoil its puzzle.)

Star Trek takes a lot of heat as a franchise for taking and reworking concepts and tropes from any and all other literary and visual media works.

As recent examples, Picard season three’s final episodes have been criticized for ‘copying Star Wars’ while SNW’s season one episode ‘All Those Who Wander’ earns derisive comments along the lines of ‘It’s a straight up copy of Aliens!!!’

More famously, in the 1990s, Paramount had to defend itself against claims of IP theft in DS9 by the creator of Babylon 5 who had pitched a space station-based show at one point. (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to make their own judgement about how similar or different are the overall story arcs of the two shows.)

I’ve always thought however that Star Trek excels in taking ideas from other media and then reworking them in its own universe with its own characters. ‘The Cage’ owes a lot to MGM’s Forbidden Planet (as does some of the original visual code of Star Wars for that matter), but The Cage is very much an original work. Voyager’s ‘The Thaw’ is a retelling of the movie adaptation of King’s ‘It’ but I like Voyager’s rendition far better.

I was truly surprised then when I caught up with watching The Expanse to find that the central mystery, the ‘protomolecule’ seemed to be a direct lift of the Shedai meta-genome of the excellent Star Trek Vanguard novel series that had been rolling out over the previous decade.

I’d been wishing that CBS would adapt Vanguard into a serial streaming series, but when I binged through to the third season of The Expanse, I thought that anyone who didn’t know the Vanguard book series had concluded just as the first Expanse book was published, would see a Vanguard show as derivative of The Expanse. The later seasons of the Expanse just seem to go more in the same direction, even continuing with overlapping plots with some of the Vanguard follow-on Seeker books.

As it happened, I had tried reading the first book of The Expanse book series, Leviathan Wakes and its sequel, when they first came out but DNFd. I didn’t make the connection to the Vanguard books at that point.

I did nonetheless find the first Expanse novel Leviathan Wakes very derivative, seeming to tell stories of miners and exploitation that were better done in CJ Cherryh’s Company Wars. The protomolecule mystery wasn’t really clear enough for me to see its close correlation with the Shendai meta-genome at that point.

Trek tie-in authors (David Mack, Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore) created the meta-genome for the Vanguard Series to explain the basis of the Genesis project that first appeared in TOS movies. It also provides a genetic technical backbone across the Litverse, such as for later 24th century technologies like the dermal regenerator and other medical wonders.

Vanguard’s backdrop of vulnerable colonists and ancient technology is a classic going back to TOS, but Vanguard puts it in a long running suspenseful frame with inter species competition for new territories.

All of this has been percolating in my head for a few years.

Anyone game to discuss?

Prodigy continues a strong trend in critical nods with a nod for best YA / Middle Grade novel with A Dangerous Trade by Cassandra Rose Clark.

Litverse favourite authors John Jackson Miller and David Mack are both nominated for best novel for SNW The High Country and TOS/Vanguard Harm’s Way, respectively.

While I picked up the Prodigy books, I haven’t read them yet.

I can agree with Trek Movie’s reviewer that Harm’s Way is one of the strongest licensed fiction offerings not just in 2022, but for some time. If you’re a Vanguard fan, this is a great interstitial offering, with the 1701 at the focal point rather than as a cameo in other mainline Vanguard stories.

It’s been difficult to get a sense of what the various sides’ positions in this strike are, and some factual context.

This is a fairly helpful roundup of background information.

Bruce Horak, who plays/ed Hemmer, is a visual artist as well as an an actor.

It seems his Save Star Trek Prodigy drawing isn’t the only Hemmer@home with little gorn(s) that are up on his Instagram.

Enjoy!

Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.

After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.

Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.

As Janeway would have it, temporal mechanics can make our heads hurt.

Several of us here are still wrapping our minds around the implications of SNW 2 x 3 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow for the Prime Universe timeline. The Romulan agent confirmed that key events in history have been resilient to temporal incursions, but their exact dates may change as time heals itself.

While this appears to warrant some deep dives on c/Daystrom Institute once we’ve had a bit of time to process this onscreen confirmation a bit more, I thought to look back to see what astrophysicist and Star Trek science consultant Dr Erin MacDonald has said previously on this point.

At the main link above, there is an episode of MacDonald’s Astrometric Episode Club where she reviews the temporal science of Voyager Relativity and DS9 Children of Time that appears on point.

There’s a few passing references to other time travel incidents along the way. These touch on the resilience of time, not least the causality loop in First Contact where the Borg incursion into the 21st century causes Enterprise to return and get Cochrane into space when needed even though the events weren’t quite as they were originally. The timeline is preserved in this essential key event no matter the details.

There’s also a report on Time Travel on StarTrek.com about an STLV 2019 presentation by Dr Erin MacDonald. (The piece itself was written by a professor of physics and astronomy.)

Reporting and tracking tick-borne diseases is increasing.

It’s not just Lyme disease that’s a risk.

Ontario's top doctor expects to see a growing number of cases of three types of tick-borne illness in the province, in addition to Lyme disease -- a spread he says is directly linked to climate change. A new regulation that takes effect this weekend requires health-care providers in Ontario to report cases of anaplasmosis, babesiosis and Powassan virus to their local medical officers of health.

These sound grim.

Anaplasmosis is caused by bacteria that gets into a person's bloodstream through a tick bite. It causes fever and chills, but can also suppress bone marrow and the creation of white and red blood cells, as well as platelets, Moore said. Babesiosis, on the other hand, presents similarly to malaria, he said. Ticks transmit intracellular parasites, which get inside a person's red blood cells and burst them, so people can present with anemia, along with having fever and chills. Most infections of Powassan virus are asymptomatic, but people might have fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, weakness, or aches and pains. But after an acute phase and a period of remission, an infected person may experience confusion, loss of co-ordination, difficulty speaking, paralysis, seizures or coma,

Not sure I agree, but it’s a helpful article in its attempts to lay out the +s and -s of a largely unchanged roster.

I can’t say the prospect is making me want to keep my TSN and Sportsnet subscriptions.

Here’s the con that I just can’t see being avoided even with a new head coach.

The Raptors had players in radically different stages of their careers and they did not have a clear offensive hierarchy, which led to selfish play and frustration throughout the lineup.

Plus, there have been reports dating back several seasons that O.G. Anunoby wants a bigger offensive role, while Barnes is entering his third year and likely wants the same. Bringing back the same roster doesn’t exactly create a clear path for either of those two things to happen.

The Raptors can hope Rajakovic and his .5-second offensive system predicated on unselfish play and ball movement will lead to wins and keep everyone happy, but that is asking a lot of a first-time NBA head coach. After all, players now have certain financial incentives tied to making All-NBA teams and other accolades, giving them legitimate reasons to want to have the ball in their hands more and to take more shots.

Running it back with the same roster along with adding another offensive weapon in Dick does not seem like a good way to turn around the Raptors’ lacklustre chemistry and vibes from last season.

If the strategy was to get mainstream profile for SNW by including Jim Kirk as a recurring character, it seems to be working. Esquire has an interesting take on Wesley’s Kirk as a kind of ‘best of’ everyman captain.

Wesley’s version of Jim Kirk is a microcosm of the entire series. He is Kirk, sometimes from a different timeline, sometimes found just a few years before taking over the Enterprise, but don’t worry about it too much. He’s the guy you trust, because he believes in people when no one else will, and he’ll always do the right thing, even if nobody notices or remembers.

Personally, I’m coming round to Wesley’s Kirk (still a name combination I’d never expected to be using). Not sure I buy that “his performance reminds us that all of us could be Kirk if we wanted to be. Kirk isn’t a legend—he’s just a guy. A very competent and cool guy, but someone you’d want to hang out with all the same.” YMMV

Gizmodo’s James Whitbrook has yet more to vent on Paramount+‘s cancelation and erasure of Prodigy.

I hadn’t considered the cancelation from the perspective of systemic misogyny, which Whitbrook effectively is carating.

However, given that Janeway was surely chosen as the legacy captain for Prodigy because Voyager had proven itself to be an effective gateway for younger and new viewers on Netflix, Whitbrook’s inference Paramount views her less important to the franchise than Picard is biting.

Paramount wouldn’t dare treat what it’s done for Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard as a tax break. Casting aside everything that Prodigy stood for, and in the process doing the same to Mulgrew and Janeway’s legacy, is a cruel twist on what is already a cruel fate for the show.

Despite the impact of the WGA strike on promotional activities, and the lack of the boost of a major sports event trailer release, SNW placed well against other original streaming shows in the week ending June 16th. Opening in sixth place in the top ten with 33.4 times average demand is promising.

Hopefully way Prodigy’s cancelation and removal dominated the media and social media after the second week will not adversely impact SNW’s run too much.