Seto Kaiba

... actually, now that I think on it, there's more wrong with it than that. You see, a Service Academy and a War College are NOT two different names for the same thing and the War College in Starfleet Academy isn't a war college. 🤔 A Service Academy is an educational institution that takes in new recruits as officer cadets and provides them with the necessary education and training for future commissioning into the academy's branch of service as a junior officer. Many also provide students with a university-level education ending in a bachelor's degree. A War College is a higher educational institution that trains experienced senior officers (like Major/Lt. Commander and up)for promotion to senior command and flag officer ranks. It offers Master's degree level qualifications. The War College in Starfleet Academy is presented as a rival service academy to Starfleet Academy, training classes of officer cadets... so it's not actually a war college at all. If it were, its students would be people like Lura Thok or Commander Kelrec. Lt. Commanders and up with a decade or so of service in the officer corps being trained for further promotion to Commander, Captain, and the Admiralty. The implication behind the War College appears to be that the Federation decided to change the curriculum for future Starfleet officers after the Burn led to the Federation's collapse and forced Starfleet to switch from focusing on exploration to focusing on defense. Why they felt the need to create a whole separate institution for that is a mystery. You'd think it would be simplest to change the curriculum at the already well-established Starfleet Academy with its dozens of campuses and call it a day. The implication behind that implication seems to be that the showrunners would like us to think of Starfleet Academy as a gentle rebuke of Discovery-era Star Trek's overly militant mindset with Starfleet and Star Trek once again shifting back towards space exploration and diplomacy. I'd guess the intended arc is that the War College is going to continue to be this wrongheaded, paranoid, aggressive antagonist until it's ultimately dissolved in favor of the Starfleet Academy training program.

Okie-dokie, we got a new episode... "Vitus Reflex". Also in Academy relevant news, apparently Kurtzman is personally directing the season two finale (since this series got renewed before it ever aired in Paramount's usual "set huge piles of money on fire and hope it finds an audience" approach. The episode opens on Cadet Reymi recording a personal message for his parents after about three weeks of classes at the Starfleet Academy San Francisco campus. It seems that his parents hold him to absurdly high standards? Apparently they made him promise to be last to sleep and first to wake up? Seems like he's being set up to be Well Done Son guy. I am, I must admit, obscurely pleased that the old tradition persists... light-up props that absolutely DO NOT need to light up in order to be "futuristic". Cadet Reymi's workout earbuds and jump rope have bright green LED illumination. Kinda gross that he's cracking raw quail eggs into his post-workout creatine tho. It is bizarrely disappointing in retrospect that they didn't make the Academy's actual gymnasium look more futuristic. It looks like a completely ordinary school gymnasium right out of the 1990s. The banners are fun though... the War College sports teams are the fighting Mugatos. Apparently the Starfleet Academy mascot is the Lapling, an endangered species known for being harmless. OK, so apparently all of this is in favor of doing a sports episode centered around the rivalry between Starfleet Academy and the Federation War College? Not gonna lie that does not feel like a great starting point for an episode given how forced the whole thing feels. It's less actual "rival schools" and more Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story level banter. It's trying really hard to be funny and it's not really sticking the landing. Colbert as the computer voice Dean of Students really was not a wise decision since he seems to exist solely to dispense mildly cringeworthy dad jokes... and even the characters in-series are starting to notice. Captain Ake asks if the voiceover for what's apparently a Starfleet Academy promotional video (that looks like it was cut together in 20 minutes) is "too stupid". (Colbert's only role seems to be to interject with what's supposed to be funny dialog anytime the writers think the series has gone too long without someone saying some funny line... it's pretty insipid.) OK, real talk time for a second. Did Quentin Tarantino script this? Because the amount of time spent getting Holly Hunter's bare feet into frame is beyond the point where I can write it off as accidental. We're into "probably someone's fetish" territory. (A point I feel is supported by the fact that the conversation veers into a literal discussion of fetishes shortly thereafter.) There's a shot where the cadets are discussing the prank war in what I guess is supposed to be a botany lab, but the room has an obviously green-screened background that looks less like a botany lab and more like a video game subway tunnel from about 15 years ago? Finally Caleb says something that makes me like him. He doesn't want to engage with the tribalist attitude surrounding the prank war or team sports. Sadly, the series undermines that and some earlier respect shown to Kraag when his decision to abstain was respected by depicting the rest of the cadet class as braindead idiots who are too clumsy, too busy flirting, or so dumb they're literally attempting to eat the potting soil. I really feel badly for Kerrice Brooks because the character she's playing WILL draw a lot of criticism for being a very unkind depiction of autism that's closer to a cognitive deficit. Apparently Calica is a game-ified combat simulation "sport" that is essentially a Serious Business version of laser tag. Enough so that a direct comparison is drawn by SAM. Apparently the War College has actual working security with restricted access. Kelrec even takes a shot at Ake for the swiss cheese security at the Academy. (Thok was not kidding about Kelrec's obsession with tea bordering on a fetish.) As soon as I wrote that, the showrunner started channeling the spirit of Quentin Tarantino again with Holly Hunter needing to get her bare feet in frame. Someone on this show has a foot fetish. It's really REALLY blatant. Apparently they didn't have enough of a budget to redress the gymnasium or construct a proper set for the Calica field, so the Calica match is taking place inside the Academy's atrium which has been relit in red and blue. So Lura and Reno are a thing? Weird relationship dynamic, but whatever. It honestly makes more sense than the Dax/Worf one with the free spirit and stick in the mud. This is two extremely cantankerous women with sharp tongues. Talk about a pairing with Statler and Waldorf energy. The Unspoken Plan Guarantee isn't being invoked here, so something will go off the rails. The first actual laugh the series got out of me was how exaggeratedly casual the cadets look watching the absolute havoc unfold at the War College across the quad. Captain Ake's office has a bunch of model starships scattered about including a refit Excelsior-class (Enterprise-B-type), Oberth-class, NX-class, Defiant-class, Intrepid-class, Galaxy-class, and one or two others too small to identify properly. AND AGAIN WITH THE FEET. I need an old priest and a young priest. We need to cast the ghost of Tarantino out of this series! Creepy and intrusive foot fetish aside, this series appears to be slowly improving. Holly Hunter's character is still an eyesore and the writers are still treating the academy more like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-era high school than the incredibly exclusive university or post-graduate education it's supposed to be, and its humor is way too contemporary to not feel immediately dated, but graduating from offensively bad to indifference-inducingly mediocre is a hell of an improvement. If they ditch the dad jokes and maybe start treating these 20-something year old cadets like adults instead of braindead children who need to be told not to eat dirt it could actually be... dare I say... good.

So this one is out now... and it seems like I was right that audiences were going to be asking for Refunds for Silent Hill. Critics are absolutely MURDERING it. It's currently rocking a 15% critic score and 30% audience score on RT. I'm gonna go see it Monday night to see how bad bad really is.

Based on what's drawn there, I feel like that head in Kawamori's concept art is meant to look something more like the VF-19P's or YF-25's.

Nope. Sam Witwer is reprising his role as the voice of Darth Maul in Maul: Shadow Lord. He previously voiced Darth Maul in Star Wars: the Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels, and some Lego Star Wars projects. His voice was also dubbed over Ray Park's for Maul's cameo appearance in Solo: a Star Wars Story. EDIT: I've seen some claims saying Disney might've cut ties with Park after a social media scandal a few years ago. No idea if that's true. They didn't use him for mocap in Rebels, because that series didn't use mocap.

From the design, it looks like it became the BGP-02 beam gunpod used by the YF-27. Kawamori almost never lets anything go to waste.

I'd call him more of a Villain Protagonist at this point... and he's not so much against the Empire as just Palpatine's most dedicated hater.

OK, so... the key takeaway is that this is one for the "Another Bloody" file. Specifically, another bloody Dave Filoni Star Wars: the Clone Wars spinoff series set in the early years of the Empire in which a legacy character from The Clone Wars takes a young force-sensitive under their wing to keep the Empire from getting their hands on them. The same thing we've seen before in... Rebels, The Bad Batch, and several of the Tales short anthologies. This is truly the new management starting as they mean to go on.

Yeah, the lack of rhyme or reason was what threw me... since Dune Messiah is 3/4 the length of Children of Dune but that one somehow got published as a single volume where the others were split into anywhere from 2-4 pieces. I've been able to confirm that Toru Yano wrote for SF and that he did those translations in that timeframe for the same publisher. I just gotta find if there's a center to that Venn diagram.

Those early fleets likely had some war surplus Destroids (or the knowhow to make same) that could be adapted into the early model Workroids like we see in Macross 7. Not to mention some of those early fleets had Zentradi warships as part of their escort details, meaning they also had Zentradi crew who could assist with construction in lieu of such equipment in a pinch. My assumption - apropos of nothing in particular - would be that it would probably take a small fleet like that several years to build up a large town. They'd probably need to start with bulk manufacturing prefabricated housing units like the ones we see Hikaru living in after the war in SDF Macross and basic infrastructure like water treatment plants and/or power plants. (Though that prefab housing is said to have its own independent power systems via solar panels.) From there they could gradually scale up to urban planning with buildings for businesses, high density housing, and proper infrastructure. (Honestly, feels like I ought to refer this one out to someone who studied the growth of towns during the gold rush.)

That's not a bad headcanon. I like that. Especially since the Lanthanite name is derived from the Greek λανθάνειν (Lanthanein, "to lie hidden"), referencing how they've existed hidden among Humanity on Earth for many thousands of years (allegedly). There were El-Aurians at least visiting Earth in 1893, and it wouldn't be surprising if there were some that decided to stay there permanently in years past. IMO, the main problem with how Holly Hunter's character is written is that Star Trek audiences are used to a certain level of professionalism from Starfleet officers and that's almost totally missing from her character. Pelia can kind of get away with it because she's one of the minor secondary characters on SNW and she's mainly there to be comic relief. Nahla Ake's overly casual attitude definitely feels out of place for someone who's supposed to be running the most exclusive and demanding educational facility in the Federation. Also, since Starfleet Academy is a service academy... shouldn't her title be Superintendent not Chancellor? In past series (TNG, DS9, VOY, etc.), the head of the academy had the title of Superintendent. (Such as Rear Admiral Brand in TNG.) Edit: Come to think of it, isn't her rank a little low for that job too? The superintendent of Starfleet Academy is usually an admiral. Depends on the species and culture, I suppose... the El-Aurians live practically forever and they seem pretty well-balanced throughout. There's a running theme with the two exemplar Lanthenites we have that they both seem ill-equipped to handle their incredibly long lifespans. Pelia's a little unhinged because she's constantly bored and thrill-seeking. Nahla definitely has a lot of unprocessed trauma that's leading her to blow things way out of proportion, like the whole Caleb business.

Lately, one detail I've been looking at is where the inspiration for certain bits of Macross technology came from. Ever since we discussed a while back how Studio Nue's in-house doujinshi circle SF Central Art and its monthly get-together were how Kawamori originally became acquainted with Studio Nue and ultimately what gave rise to a lot of Gundam and Macross's technical setting, I've been wondering what their inspirations were/are. One thing I've come to suspect, but need more details to confirm, is that a good part of Macross's technical setting was inspired by Toru Yano's Japanese translation of Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune that were published by Hayakawa Bunko from 1972 to 1979. Hayakawa Bunko are, not coincidentally, also the publishers of SF magazine, the same science fiction magazine that SF Central Art formed around leading to the creation of Studio Nue. The part I need/want to confirm is that Toru Yano's translation of the books was serialized in SF magazine in addition to being published in stand-alone multi-volume releases. (For some reason, Yano broke Dune into four volumes and Children of Dune into 3.) It feels a bit much to be entirely coincidental that both Dune and Macross have a set of interrelated technologies that allow reactionless flight/hovering, faster-than-light travel by folding space, faster-than-light communication through folded space, and energy shielding via spatial distortion. Esp. when the third Dune book was coming out in Japan around when Kawamori first started drafting Macross. They even have similar limitations, like the Macross's dimensional fault-based barrier exploding when hit with too much firepower or needing relays to retransmit fold communications across long distances.

My standards are so low that I'll really take practically any Star Wars story that averts Filoni's tendency to have every established character meet, know, and have at least eight pages of backstory with every other. I'd like a Galaxy Far Far Away that feels a bit bigger than, say, Weehawken, New Jersey.

There's a term for what you just did there. "Damned by faint praise"

Considering he's been cut in half like... three times now? Yeah, probably. Eighty percent of his dialog is just him screaming "KEN-O-BIIIIIIIIII!" like he's off his rocker and the rest is him trying to persuade people he's totally sane and someone you should join or work for in the least convincing manner possible. That's what they said about Boba Fett, and we know how THAT ended.

Dave Filoni starting as he means to go on. Dave, this is the third time you've brought back Darth Maul for show and tell. Please bring something else next time.

Give it a couple projects... Filoni might not repeat whole plot references, but he'll repeat plot beats and characters to death and beyond. You'll be wishing for the Death Star Trench Run v3.0 around the time Rey is coming back from the dead for the fourth time with the help of the Mortis Gods to assist an aging Finn and Poe with the rescue the kidnapped granddaughter of Jar-Jar Binks (who is also force sensitive and a princess) from a resurgent Second Final Order under the command of Palpatine's forty-third heretofore unmentioned super-secret Sith apprentice assassin Darth Expy and his brutal gimp-suited enforcer Lzmp Stimpy. It'll be absolutely critical that the audience has read Star Wars: The Rise of The Fall of the Newer Jedi Order Part XIVI: Biflo Scrungus goes to Quiznos so they'll know Lzmp Stimpy is really a clone of Rey's long lost cousin's uncle's neighbor's ex-boyfriend's former roommate's biological son by sperm donation, that his real name is Ichabod, and that he turned evil because his mom divorced and married an elderly and abusive Sebulba. That's how Filoni writes 90% of the time. The man is deathly afraid of original ideas and wants to build stories around existing characters and set pieces whenever possible because to develop original characters and ideas is too much like work. He just wants to play with his action figures in peace. That's why the next series up is ANOTHER attempt to shake Darth Maul down for gangland drama. He's already been back to that well TWICE! Once in The Clone Wars and again in Rebels.

As far as we know... not really. It's absolutely not the safest thing you could choose to do. Strong gravitational fields complicate the math for a fold jump (which is why ships usually fold into or out of high orbit or interplanetary space) and emerging so close to a planet's surface carries the significant risk of crashing immediately thereafter or ending up defolding into a terrain feature. That said, it doesn't actually create any significant negative consequences for the ship itself or its immediate surroundings because the fold system is exchanging the area of space occupied by the ship for an equivalent volume of space inside the planet's atmosphere. You're teleporting a chunk of the planet's atmosphere into the void, which probably is not sustainable long-term, but since the volumes of space being exchanged are equivalent it's not going to cause the kind of havoc that folding OUT of an atmosphere would, since in that case you're swapping the volume of the ship for an equivalent volume of vacuum and the ensuing collapse can get messy (as seen in the original series).

Well, that'd depend on the size of the emigrant fleet more than anything. After all, the 1st Generation ones using Megaroad-class ships had populations in the tens of thousands. That's probably not a particularly tall order. The 3rd Gen and later ones that have populations in the millions... that could take a hot minute. Especially for a 5th Generation one like the Island Cluster-class Macross Frontier. That fleet had a population of ~10 million but the ship had capacity for 10x that. Building a city capable of housing and supporting 200 million people isn't gonna be quick. 'course, those City-class and Island Cluster-class ships are designed to basically be prefab cities you can just drop from orbit, so building a whole new conurbation probably wouldn't be the highest priority. I'd assume it'd probably be driven more be need than anything, so a slow expansion of a meticulously planned city over a course of at least a few years if not several decades as the population grew to require that extra space. If they really needed to with the quickness, those later ships could probably throw something together in a year or two given that they're equipped with massive semi-automated factories.

Completely reasonable confusion. After all, the Lanthanites and El-Aurians are both sharing the hat "nearly immortal Human Aliens who have lived among Humans throughout history without revealing their presence". They definitely have different aesthetics, though. The El-Aurians tend to be confident, dignified, and serene and their reputation as listeners and advisers who give sage counsel from their centuries or millennia of life experience is such a meme even in-universe that Mariner disgustedly remarks that a 30 year old El-Aurian is "just a regular person". The Lanthanites we've seen (all two of them) seem to be the polar opposite. They're irresponsible, unprofessional, seemingly ill-equipped to deal with their own long lifespans, and tend to give off a sort of elderly ex-hippie vibe. This is completely spot-on, though.

Yeah, her interview says she's not retiring completely. She's just getting out of the boardroom. She intends to continue her career as a producer.

Granted, security in Star Trek is usually a bit of a joke... but it's swiss cheese even by those low standards in Starfleet Academy. Normally, unauthorized computer access leads to an alarm, to security finding out almost immediately, and subsequently getting busted (e.g. TNG "The Wounded", "The Hunted", DS9 "Civil Defense", "Broken Link"). The Athena's 800 years more advanced than the Enterprise-D or Defiant and Caleb, a cadet with no security clearance to speak of, breaks into the ship's comms to send an unauthorized transmission to his mommy and doesn't even get caught until hours later when pirates attack the ship because of it. He then proceeds to break into the ship's computers multiple times a day to go AWOL and is only caught hours after the fact. Even the hologram set up specifically to stop him leaving the campus without permission is defeated with comical ease...

To be honest, it doesn't actually stand out that much in the series proper. The reason it doesn't stand out is that the series is trying so hard to sell her character as "quirky" and "eccentric" like her fellow Lanthanite CDR Pelia from Strange New Worlds that the writers have given her multiple annoying habits. Pelia can get away with it because she's mainly a comic relief character. Nahla Ake can't, because the series wants us to take her and her position seriously. So instead her habits just make her come off as unprofessional, rude, and occasionally hypocritical. Something something "even a broken clock is right twice a day"... Don't you be hating on my farmer's market folks now. Starfleet Academy is being marketed to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The show's actual presentation definitely feels like the showrunners don't actually respect those viewers much, if at all. With the exception of SAM, the cadets are all old enough to be undergrads or grad students but the series resolutely treats them like a pack of unruly grade schoolers. Caleb's in his early 20's, but his behavior's really childish and the faculty treat him like he's an annoying tween.

As per NuTrek's usual, there's an absolutely massive gulf between the glowing reviews the professional critics are penning and the much less positive feedback from verified viewers in the audience. The series is currently sitting no-so-pretty with an audience score of 43 against a critic score of 87. A Discovery-esque 44 point gap. The positive reviews from the critics are full of vague praise for the show's "creativity" and "vibe", and the negative reviews have surprisingly little to say about culture war BS and are mainly focused on the issues with the show's writing and to a lesser extent the obnoxiousness of Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter. The need to make every character "quirky" comes up surprisingly often.

Getting ready to watch Starfleet Academy's 2nd episode... pray for me. 🤮 Still wanna know where my Cerritos and Protostar are in this new 60th Anniversary eyecatch... maybe the showrunners are just jealous that both shows are jealous that both shows are something fans actually liked. OK, right off the bat... what is with this series and the f***ing piss filter? Seriously. First Bajor looked like we were watching it through a used coffee filter and now San Francisco looks like we're seeing it through a pint mug of cheap pilsner. Like, I realize the visual effects team is probably three unpaid interns and a AI tool but come on. At least send the interns out to touch grass and maybe see the sun for once... unless they've been in captivity for so long working on Discovery they've devolved into Morlocks. What happened to Starfleet? Before the Kurtzman years, Star Trek treated Starfleet Academy as a not-quite-military college with various postgraduate programs that was designed to take the Best of the Best and turn them into consummate professionals. The sort of people who didn't need to be told to make their beds or to get to class on time. The Starfleet Academy series is treating it like high school, full of inept children who need their hands held at every moment. Like, I don't even like these characters and I'm still offended on their behalf by how patronizing this is. I will say one thing in its favor. I do like that they've gone to the trouble to include a decent helping of alien cadets in the academy class even if most of them are minor background characters. There's one particularly noteworthy blink-and-you'll-miss-it minor detail among them too. The Ferengi cadet is wearing a skirt, and is likely female... meaning at some point in the intervening millennia their species finally got its sh*t together. Lots of reused makeup here. Several of the aliens towards the back are clearly wearing prosthetics that were used for background aliens on Discovery. The Federation War College apparently has a lot more aliens too, their representative closest to the camera appears to be Romulan. A Prodigy-style Brikar shows up at one point. We don't see any Cardassians but there are apparently enough of them to have their own student association. A singer who belongs to the same species as Natalia from Star Trek: Beyond appears at one point (a rare Kelvin timeline reference). There's also a Starfleet Exocomp whom the subtitles reveal is named Almond Basket. We keep cutting back to this stupid f***ing speech. Holly Hunter's voice is rapidly becoming The Most Annoying Sound. They are doing one thing right about depicting her as an educator. They've successfully depicted her as someone who is simultaneously in love with the sound of their own voice and incapable of writing an actual speech anyone might want to listen to. I'm not gonna criticize the jerkass behavior of Cadet Reymi. Even Kirk had to deal with a classmate like that... so much so that his fantasy on the Shore Leave planet was a chance to sock him one. Interrupting a lecture to poke fun at a fellow student... not funny, just annoying. All that before the OP! Ugh... As for the OP itself... this doesn't really say "Star Trek". It's mostly just watching buildings get built and cherry blossoms blow down hallways. OK, there's a Lower Decks reference. There's a Starfleet Exocomp just hanging around in the turbolift. It keeps having to move out of the way because the Doctor apparently still can't read body language despite 900 years of practice and Captain Ake is practically fleeing from him. There is a brief moment where this series comes dangerously close to being self-aware about how unfunny it is. They're really committed to trying to sell the idea that everyone's just so quirky. The Chancellor of Starfleet Academy just wanders the campus out of uniform and without shoes. Even her colleagues look annoyed. We of course have to have a Discovery character remind us how stupid their plot was before being interrupted by Caleb. Why bother setting a series at Starfleet Academy if your entire cast save for the annoying girl are characters who firmly believe they're Too Cool for School? This is worse than boring, it's downright frustrating to watch. Every class they attend is just a venue for them to act out. Honestly? The biggest problem with this episode is that the writers suffered a Critical Research Failure about what Betazoids are. They seem to have mixed up a combination of traits from the half-Betazoid Deanna Troi and the Ramitisian mediator Riva from TNG "Loud as a Whisper". Instead of the dark-eyed telepaths who can speak but communicate mainly via telepathy they are in every other series, these Betazoids are light-eyed mute empaths who communicate via sign language. Actually, another huge problem with this show's logic. Why are the negotiations for Betazed's reentry into the Federation taking place at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco in front of a class of cadets? It's not even the right place or audience for it. Betazed's reentry into the Federation should be something negotiated between the Betazoid delegation and the Federation Council headed up by the Federation President. Those absolutely critical stakeholders aren't even on this planet. They're at the Federation Headquarters space station! I have a feeling that quite a few of the people who worked on this series either never went to college at all, or only went to art school. The tour of the Academy only seems to visit a coffee shop and the quad between some buildings where the students are reading outdoors, tossing around a ball, playing frisbee and hacky-sack, and generally doing everything you only see in the staged photos for college brochures. They couldn't even be bothered to make a replicator for the replimat... they just have cups appear on the serving area of a completely modern-looking espresso machine. That might actually be worse/lazier than Picard using an off-the-shelf 3D printer as the La Sirena's replicator. No corner left uncut. Honestly, it feels like it's more rewarding to watch this series for the background continuity nods than the actual story. At least there it feels like there's some affection for Star Trek as a whole... even if it is entirely superficial. ... ok, when your plot is so badly written that your antagonist starts to sound distressingly like the voice of reason, it might be time to reconsider your entire plotline. So after some fairly weak rationalizations, the plot wraps up with Starfleet seemingly arbitrarily deciding that the Federation will put its next capital on Betazed instead... noting that the entire Federation council and Federation President have been absent this entire time and probably ought to weigh in on that. This kind of further diminishes the relevance/significance of Starfleet Academy on Earth. It would've meant something if the Federation had reestablished the capital in Paris as it'd been since the founding, which would have made that Academy campus the de facto flagship campus again. Now there doesn't really seem to be a reason for it to exist there at all, since there are many other campuses with presumably better staff and conditions than what's available on an Earth that only came out of isolationism two or so years ago. This episode is... "better" feels too much like praise. Let's go with "Less awful". It's following a very old Star Trek diplomacy episode formula that's been used since TOS... but it's just not doing it very well because it's not committing to the bit. It wants to keep drama at arm's length and focus on being "quirky" and "funny" in a very forced and unnatural-feeling way so it ends up in this emotional flip-flop where there are scenes that were meant to be tense and dramatic that are just bland and emotionless because the series keeps trying to shift attention from the drama to a kid in the background who won't stop playing with his zipper to the great dismay of the adults.