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Although Eureka has got to have one of the worst depictions I've ever seen.

Maybe from 2371-2378, while Tom Paris was busy being his Delta Quadrant counterpart.

Like, I don't hate Tom Paris (at least late VOY, anyway), but you can't deny that in combination with his early personality, that face just looks inherently punchable for some reason.

The planet had previously industrialized and since de-industrialized by choice.

Unfortunately, he died after being shot midair by Libyans while falling off a cliff into molten drip.

You mean Kruge?

Reminds me of this classic:

I do have to agree. The setting may be the best part of later seasons of DISCO, even if they (in my personal opinion) frequently squandered it.

Like, I felt like they didn’t need to make up the DMA - they had practically seasons worth of material written for them just from the inherent realities of the setting.

I take this with a grain of salt, in part because of this past headline: Robert Picardo Says The Doctor Isn’t Just Comic Relief In ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Season 2

Which isn’t to say I hated him in Prodigy. Rather, I wonder if by “deeper”, it means he’ll be absolutely ridiculous, just rambling about opera and holonovels all the time, and the writing won’t be all dark and brooding on this show.

I tried to hint at it at the beginning, but I admit mapping Ferengi politics onto human politics is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. I was honestly just trying to use commonly-understood terms, which may be a weak fit.

In terms of social-economic orthogonality, I think that can work for a more general analysis, but doesn't seem the case in Ferengi society - for instance, social left and economic left reform in the late Zek (Ishka behind scenes)/early Rom seemed like a packaged deal. Also, the social restrictions on women extend to their economic right to make profit - many of the issues in Ferengi society are a blur of economic and social issues that are intimately connected.

Also, unrelated to my above thoughts, rewatching "Family Business", I disagree with your assessment of Rom. For one, I think both Quark and Rom were equally bothered, just had different ways of expressing it; Quark let his discomfort out through visible anger, while Rom tried to hide it for a while, letting it seep through into his expression. Also, Rom, while seeming like a product of his society, seemed much more open to listening to Ishka, suggesting that while he had socially and economically conservative values, he didn't hold them as strongly as screaming Quark.

Overall, I agree with your sentiment that political categorization is complex, and I feel no one model perfectly characterizes all ideologies, that there are merely abstractions that might work well in a specific context. Heck, there's a sci-fi story idea I'm "working" on (by which I mean I haven't touched it in ages) where I created a 3D political spectrum for my main factions; I forget what my third axis was, though. In the end, as much as some humans like to nerd out about it, an ideology can't be perfectly reduced to a point on a graph or a line.

Still, there is some undeniable urge to do a deeper dive on Star Trek political mapping, down to sub-charts for characters in the individual societies where we have enough information, although you'd have to figure out how to handle different eras.

It took a good minute for me to decode that acronym.

I guess I usually don't acronym that film and just refer to it as VI or by its full name

Glorious use of sarcasm.

In terms of writing, they really captured him well on Prodigy, though he was almost entirely a comic relief character.

Looks-wise, he definitely triggered the uncanny valley and was one of the worse aesthetic adaptations of a legacy character in that show. In general, there are some unintentionally terrifying officers on that show.

I do have to say that was one thing Lower Decks did well - when they brought on a legacy character, they were aesthetically recognizable, but never a caricature.

This is probably the strongest counter so far, unless they've somehow found or are working on a way to do it without severely borking the marine biosphere.