Not just aliens. Alien, aliens.
While hardly a first for Star Trek, it’s always a treat when alien-looking, and alien-acting, aliens show up.
The season had a good pace, but in my heart, I wanted more. I really feel like it would have made a fun (if not nerdy) season if we had a few more episodes decoding mysteries and getting to know this new culture and species.
Ha! First thing I thought of when seeing the headline: “Glad Destin got everyone’s attention.”
Yup. If you want me off the ship that badly, you’re gonna have to come down here and push.
Thank you! I never saw this one before.
This sketch has everything: Patrick Stewart, Peak 1990’s SNL cast, licensed music, garbage special effects, celebrity impressions, a surprise cameo, Chris Farley flubbing his lines, and Sulu.
(To be fair I’d probably flub my lines too if I had to share the stage with Patrick Stewart on less than a week to rehearse)
This is most evident in the TOS episode “The Galileo Seven”. It’s a horrible scenario: Spock is in command of a marooned crew on a hostile planet. He fails to take both a scared crew and an aggressive native species of spear throwing giants, into consideration. He makes one logical survival choice after another, failing to address everyone’s irrationality at every turn, which ultimately costs two lives. Nothing more than the crew’s faith in the chain of command (and perhaps faith in Scotty’s engineering skills) holds this disasterpiece together.
And Vulcans in Trek kind of just get worse from there. You’d think they’d eventually learn to take “irrational actors” into account with assessing situations, but they don’t. While that seems far-fetched, our economists here in 21st century Earth don’t either.
I bet the pizza was served cold by the time it got there.
Director: RIcky? Can I call you that? Ricky, look, we have to get all your scenes during this shoot since you are using all of the bronzer we could find in the whole LA area. We can’t do this tomorrow.
Capt. Jellico approves.
$0.02:
We used to get plenty done with much less screen area, so there’s isn’t really a driving need, per-se. There’s nothing wrong with that workflow, even today.
That said, more pixels does enable some useful possibilities. IMO, the major difference comes down to using your peripheral vision (which wasn’t possible before) and less background tasking. Both converge on less cognitive load since you don’t need a mental map of what’s in the background (everything is “foreground” now). Instead, you can scan your immediate environment (screen real-estate, physical devices, etc) to find what you want. And I think it’s ultimately a matter of taste: some people will find that overwhelming instead of helpful or useful.
Production reason: without a stylus it looks like he’s reading, not writing. Without one, dialogue like “I’m writing a book” would come across as lying, which can completely change a scene for the worse.
In-universe lore reason: Jake is a romantic and probably feels that the more tactile approach is better for his creative process.
That sounds amazing. Honest question: how much more screen would it take before a full VR setup would seem more practical? Not everyone has a battlestation like this, and I’m genuinely curious where the line is. Thank you.
Reminds me of the paper printouts in the very earliest TOS episodes. Like, what do you do when you run out of paper in deep space? And do you really have the storage for 5 years worth of computer printouts? Logistically, even an etch-a-sketch makes more sense.
Lower Decks has the Tamarian lexicon dialed in, and I’m here for it. Especially when it’s explained that the universal translator can’t always figure Tamarian out, suggesting that Kayshon is speaking in more simple terms half the time.
But the single greatest use of this meme has to be in “Crisis Point 2” (S3x8).
In that episode, we see Ransom, Shaxs, and Kayshon break into the science lab to get the drop on Romulan invaders. Kayshon fires the first surprise shot shouting “Temba!”.
What I love about this is that “Temba, his arms wide” is a fond greeting. But in context, gives his remark more or less the same energy as “say hello to my little friend” or “surprise, motherfuckers!”
Edit:
Kayshon, shooting first, when the Romulans invaded.
Uh, where’s craft services?
What, food? Naw, this cast eats the scenery. But there’s a grill in the back alley if you wanna cook something.
One of the consequences of a wisely used but small budget. Simple sets and costumes, plus a LOT of creative lighting. All that’s left are actors to fill that otherwise empty-feeling space on the stage.
Also, color TV was in its infancy, so networks used the medium to compete for viewer attention. It really looks like NBC made sure that every scene was as vibrant as possible. But now that I think about it, it also had to “read” well in B/W too.
Edit: @StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website corrected me here. TOS was indeed an expensive show, which upon rewatching (as I am today), becomes more evident the longer you look at it.
McCoy is a stray that wandered in from outside, but seems to be friendly most of the time.
Dr. T’Ana?
In that case, Lower Decks is definitely Uncle Fester.
I feel like, no matter how that plays out, everyone loses.
I felt the same way, at first. Then I realized that we have other things in the Trek canon that asks as much suspension of disbelief:
Edit: my head-canon for the weirdness of Disco’s first season is that they really wanted it to be the start of a Kelvin-verse TV reboot, but were coy about it.
Edit 2: I forgot about the Kardashev Type 3 civilization of robots living just outside our galaxy, that will turn the Milky Way into a lifeless wasteland if anyone so much as prank calls them. But they made their digits really hard, but possible, to find.