ValueSubtracted

Singling out the bit that's most interesting to me:

When Cryptic passed the mantle to us folks here at DECA, one of the things we discussed internally and something we felt, and continue to feel, very strongly about was the importance of continuing their legacy - and this means concluding the current story arc in such a way as to remain true to Al Rivera and Paul Reed’s vision of what that story was about. Fortunately, we’ve benefitted from a continuing collaboration with the remaining Cryptic staff, utter professionals like Thomas Marrone and Jeremy Randall (and many others!), who have been indispensable in ensuring we understood what that previous vision was and the primary beats required to do it justice.

The fundamental challenge here was, of course, to get our heads around a game with such a deep, intricate and long-lived history, with so much STO-specific lore. So lots of research and lots of discussions to tease out the nuanced detail. The only significant change we made was to introduce one additional episode into the current arc, which we felt was required to fully explore the epic story arc that we have inherited.

“The well” is a double sequel.

I'll get even more tenuous and say that the echoes of "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" are very strong, if only because of the "unspeakable horror at the bottom of a mining shaft" imagery.

Shaya is a Doctor stand-in

Agreed. Though I assumed her reference to "monsters" was about having grown up in some kind of war-without-end hellscape. But maybe it'll come back around.

There is a real deep genre reference to all of the episode

I don't have much to say about genre tropes, but is "State of Decay" a good one? I don't think I've heard of it.

It's so weird to hear it referred to as "Netflix series" in the American trades...

In any case, I've been meaning to check it out. The buzz has been positive, and CBC has been promoting the hell out of it.

Chelsea did an AMA with us back in the Old Place when the book came out. She seemed cool, and fairly knowledgeable about, y'know, cooking.

I'd be curious to hear how the recipes turn out for you.

I'm no expert, but I'm guessing the difference is speed and range.

These are strange times indeed.

This election was so weird in so many ways, I think it will be some time before we fully understand what it all means.

Though in “More Tribbles, More Troubles”, Starfleet had developed quintotriticale grain.

They quickly came to realize that that's too many triticales.

Also, it's annoying that they don't make their little inforgraphics clickable, so here's a direct link to that.

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That's gonna be a "no" from me, dawg.

Here's the direct link.

I'm really excited to be back, it was a fun few episodes to read for Ruby.

I can't remember, do we know for certain how many episodes she's in? Is it this one and the two-part finale?

Oh, for classic series fans we also have Paul Jericho in the episode - he played The Castellan, an officious, shady Time Lord during Peter Davison's era. He's playing a new character now, publican Alfie. Or is he? Maybe the Castellan wasn't killed in 'The Five Doctors' (1983), escaped the destruction of Gallifrey and ended up running a pub in an English village? Much better, let's go with that.

How funny would it be if this turned out to be true?

It's a weird situation. Like it or not, Polievre just achieved the highest Conservative vote share since the 1980s.

That he still lost is astonishing, and it'll be a while before anyone can sort out the path forward.

But I suspect they'll keep him around.

Yeah, they'll probably just parachute him into an Alberta riding. We're not rid of him yet.