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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Section 31 were created as the bad guys! Genocidal maniacs who Sisko and crew fought against every step of the way.

    And I don’t use the phrase “genocidal maniacs” lightly, but they were literally xenocidal and Sloane was, as a spy, less of an Ian Fleming James Bond type and more of a John le Carré type—an actual maniac in the piece of human wreckage who’s been turned violent and crazy by the stress of war.

    (I really wish his end had come at Sisko’s hands, and involved contrasting Sisko’s actions in Pale Moonlight with Sloan and 31’s degeneration in to xenophobic crimes of extermination, and how both shared the same origin but ended up in very different places.



  • I don’t know what the most similar novel to The Neverending Sacrifice might be, but I think the exact opposite is probably the 1970s novels satirizing the British Raj called The Flashman Papers. They are incredibly funny, highly offensive, beautiful assaults on the landed gentry, set during one of the most incompetent, badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan in the history of badly failed military expeditions to Afghanistan–the British one.

    No, not the American one with British help–the actual British one, from way back in the seventeenth century.




  • 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.

    Agree with your agreement here. If I unloaded my feelings about all the fanboy moments in Terry’s Picard, it would actually be unpleasant to read…so I won’t. How about I just say that you’re super right about Sito Jaxa, too. I thought the connection to that episode was very sweet, and really enjoyed hearing Mariner talk about how much the Dominion War sucked, too. It made sense to me that she’d be more comfortable getting that out with a stranger than her friends, at least when I think about the guys I was in the Navy with.




  • Well, that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. I happen to have grown up on DS9, and in my heart there’s not much room for Worf’s Wacky Adventures on Risa; people a couple years older than me tend to have performed some personal, private retconning of at least one episode of TNG’s first season–if not more. And I have just finished the novel “Spock’s World,” and realized I wish I’d read it years ago and some of the thing’s Diane Carey wrote in that exceptional book are better than the contradictory idea’s Paramount officially introduced in later media.

    What season 2 of Picard means to the producers is far less important than what it means to you–and if it inspires you to go back and watch TNG, you may want to jump straight to Season 2 of that show, as well.





  • (I also have a soft spot for parts of Picard season 1)

    I actually like that this is a favorite episode thread, because season one of Picard has “Nepenthe,” which I come back to again and again. I love how Troi is the central character of that episode and the primary mover of the whole plot. It’s the crowning moment for any non-titular TNG character in all of Picard, and superior to anything in S3!