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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it 100% is... it's the ventral view from this line art. It's really obvious they tried to cover up the tracing/photoshopping by smudging out the details of the Macross's ventral engines and the gap between the main engines.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Considering what easy marks Humans are for Xenomorph XX121, with so very many examples of them being stupid enough to go stick their faces directly in a giant wet obviously dangerous space egg of unknown origin... It'd probably read like a food critic's newspaper column. A penny for Big Chap's thoughts. That's the only XX121 specimen to go through it all twice. First on the Nostromo and then again on Romulus station. If he'd lived long enough, he might be upset at getting upstaged at the end by Mark Zuckerberg "The Newborn". Alien: Covenant isn't quite that bad. It's rubbish as a prequel to Alien, but it's a passable generic monster movie and Michael Fassbender does deliver a pretty good performance as the creepy and insane android David 8. The reason I mentioned it as an exception is that it's unique among Alien titles for being a xenomorph massacre where "The Company" was genuinely not responsible.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Betrothed to My Sister's Ex had a really promising start, but it has devolved into a really frustrating and tedious mess. We're on like the fifth round of "Oops, the main couple are making too much progress we'd better bring up the dead sister again" in just ten episodes. They have dragged this out SO MUCH that it's stopped being dramatic several rounds ago and is just exhausting to watch... and the excuses the characters use to not just cut directly to the heart of the matter have gotten so incredibly flimsy that it's headache inducing.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely at present. Maybe they'll play with that in season 5 or something. Kirk may have just preferred the doctor he brought with him, or perhaps M'Benga took a year in a shore posting like Dr. Crusher did and Kirk didn't want to reorganize the department when he came back.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... regular people dying in droves because rich arseholes want to control the uncontrollable is pretty much Alien in a nutshell. If you exclude Alien: Covenant, anyway. That's just Too Dumb to Live rednecks dying for an obsolete android's daddy issues and doesn't really involve The Company at all.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    He's still serving on the Enterprise during Kirk's tenure as captain, in fact. He's originally a minor TOS character, appearing in one episode of the show's second season ("A Private Little War") and one episode of the show's third season ("That Which Survives"). So he was still on the Enterprise in 2266 and 2267, albeit not as the ship's chief medical officer the way he was under Pike. Edit: in some of the non-canonical expanded universe material from before the current regime, he remained a part of the Enterprise crew clear into the late 2280s, making the transition to the Enterprise-A as well.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Neverland does seem to be fairly light on armed security, yes. I'd assume that has a lot to do with it being a secret research facility on a private island. We're not exactly sure where, but given that it's a short flight over open ocean from "Prodigy City" (former Bangkok) it's probably in the Gulf of Thailand or Riau archipelago. Based on the map we're shown, that's pretty much the heart of Prodigy's territory. They control East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, the southern half of Africa, Greenland, and Iceland. Neverland's most probable location is pretty well encircled by other Prodigy territories. Having a large security force present would tend to undermine the secrecy aspect of it too, since you either have to keep them there and ship in large quantities of food and various supplies or rotate them out to other postings periodically, increasing the chance of leaks. The best defense is never being a target to begin with, after all. Though yes, the wisdom of that strategy is likely in question now that the island is home to a variety of different extraterrestrial murder monsters. Well, yeah... that's kind of the point I think. They even put his carelessness in his name. He is almost literally named "Arrogant Brat". 😆🙃
  8. Seto Kaiba
    OK, it's here... the moment some of us have been waiting for. An Ortegas episode. We've been waiting for her to get some proper character development for almost three entire seasons now. It's about time they got around to her. So we're doing the usual formula... Oh hey, an overt TOS reference. The ship the Enterprise is due to rendezvous with is Captain Decker's USS Constellation, the same ship and captain from TOS "The Doomsday Machine". Well, in fine Star Trek tradition that shuttlecraft is a writeoff... This is actually really well done. This is what I come to SNW for. So, hey, another TOS reference. The same one from "Arena", actually. Kinda widens the existing plot hole though. More shots of Ortegas's quarters... this time models of the Enterprise and Shenzhou, as well as replicas of the Quimbaya artifacts (sometimes erroneously claimed to be ancient airplanes). Really well done. Honestly, worth waiting for both as a character-focus episode and an excellent reversal of course on the show's main antagonist.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I never really thought about it much since fans and licensees all just call the creature "the Xenomorph"... but I did some checking and you're completely correct. 👍 "Xenomorph" is an in-universe generic term for an unclassified alien lifeform. Lt. Gorman uses it as a generic term for an unidentified alien species during the briefing in Aliens before anyone ever sees one. They use "Xenomorph" the same way Warhammer 40,000 uses "Xenos" to refer to aliens... and Aliens was probably the inspiration for that too. In the Weyland Yutani Report and Alien: Romulus they append a catalog number to it making it the Xenomorph XX121. The extra features of the Quadrilogy box set for the first four Alien films gives the in-universe scientific name of the creatures as Internecivus raptus. Well, it is one of the only intelligent lifeforms in the series... 😆
  10. Seto Kaiba
    After getting some feedback from some friends following the current season, I decided to give Solo Camping for Two another chance. I was told that it evolves into a proper edutainment-type story about proper and safe techniques for camping and that is actually true. There's some actually good and useful info in the later episodes about how to safely split firewood, safely set up a camp stove, how to identify safe campsites, etc. With a little work, it could actually be an enjoyable series. Its main problem is that it's an absolutely terrible ambassador for the hobby it's ostensibly promoting. It doesn't present camping as fun or interesting or challenging in and of itself...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's an excellent question with no clear answer.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The original CSI had a good one, though mainly because it was self-aware enough to take cheap shots at its own medium.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    NGL, kinda with you on that one. "In-story documentary" type episodes are a hard sell even when they're well done. That one was definitely not.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Two thoughts on this: If you think about it, the Enterprise must be pretty darn close to the heart of the Federation in this episode. The Federation has never really been that huge, truth be told. They repeatedly disparage Spock for being half-Human and thus "not a real Vulcan", disparage the Human crew of the Enterprise for being Human, and present themselves as being inherently superior because they are Vulcan. All textbook racist behaviors. Just substitute any two real world ethnic groups in there in place of "Vulcan" and "Human" and you'll see what I mean. Batel literally calls Pasalk out at length for showing clear racial bias towards Vulcans and publicly disparaging non-Vulcans and treating Pike completely differently once he passes for Vulcan. Spock himself points out at the end of the episode that the crew's treatment of him reminded him pointedly of the bigotry he faced at home for being "only" half-Vulcan. And yeah, they try to justify their bigotry with "logic" the same way that people on Earth tried and still try to justify racism with misleading or misrepresented statistics and various flavors of pseudoscience like phrenology, but that doesn't make it not racist. Where the episode veers into bullsh*t territory is that the Enterprise crew, who were Humans mere seconds earlier and clearly remember being Human, immediately behave like they have been Vulcans their entire lives and grew up immersed in Vulcan culture and cultural biases as though these things were all programmed into Vulcans at the genetic level. That is, put simply, insane and nonsensical. Especially considering Pike and Chapel and La'an have all at one time or another come to Spock's defense when he faced bigotry for being a half-Vulcan in the past. The whole plot of this episode is pants-on-head stupid.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well... I may end up being a lot kinder to Alien: Earth this week. I made the poor decision to rewatch the Predator movies over the course of a long flight and part of a vacation, and I forgot quite how terrible most of them are. Then Event Horizon put the cherry on it by releasing a prequel that completely ruins the cult classic movie's plot. Anyway... time to cross my fingers and hope Alien: Earth can clear the incredibly low bar I've set for it this week. "In Space, No One..." Is it just me, or are there are a lot of wildly inappropriate soundtrack choices in the credits of horror/action type movies? Well, there it is... the usual Alien sequel "horror movie idiot" behavior that makes you wonder if Weyland-Yutani only hires suicidal people who want to be eaten by space monsters. How very Star Trek. The quality of the writing in this episode is noticeably higher than the rest of the series so far. The difference is not small. They could almost be doing actual horror here. All they really need to do is lose the one crewmember whose death grip on the idiot ball risks turning this episode into an Idiot Plot and asking one guy to be less overtly creepy. Noah Hawley et. al. want to call back to the original Alien with this episode, but ultimately do a very poor job of it for one reason: The crew of the Maginot are standard horror movie idiots. Alien worked as well as it did because the crew of the Nostromo were professionals who did everything they could, to the best of their ability, to survive and it still wasn't enough. With one exception, the crew of the Maginot seemingly want to become Purina monster chow. There's a very effective bit of tension building when Morrow interrogates... Unfortunately, the big reveal is also a painful fumble. OK, that's a new one. That's a stupid new one, but that is definitely a new one. So now we're all caught up to episode 1. Best episode of the series so far by several parsecs. A shame it stopped painfully short of being actually good horror thanks to a cast comprised mainly of no-sense-of-self-preservation horror movie extras and a bungled villain reveal that broke Knox's Ten Commandments.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure I'd say the presence of absence of an "agenda" has anything to do with it. After all, the only agenda I've seen in Star Wars under Disney has been Disney's usual ruthless profit motive... or their release schedule, for a given value of the word "agenda". 😆😜 No, if I had to point to a probable cause for the trouble Star Wars so consistently has in the writer's room I'd say it's a combination of risk-averse development and a very narrow idea of what Star Wars stories can be. Writing a film for the broadest possible global audience doesn't leave much room to make an artistic statement, and the Disney+ originals rely upon excessive fanservice to avoid stepping outside of the narrative "comfort zone". It'll be interesting to see what they make of it. I'm not sure I'd say they're steering away from known territory, but they're at least attempting to move forward for once instead of just screwing around in the vicinity of the original trilogy... and a Jedi-free story should encourage a bit more depth.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, this is a Star Wars project. The obvious villains are the writers. 😜 Writing is the franchise's Achilles heel. An all-star cast and stunning visuals are simply a matter of throwing enough money at the project. You can't simply buy a compelling creative vision or turn that vision into a viable screenplay by just throwing money at it. It doesn't really matter how good your actors are or how bottomless your VFX budget is if the story you're telling is badly composed or just boring. Like The Acolyte, The Book of Boba Fett, Solo: a Star Wars Story, etc.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, Kirsh's "agenda" seems pretty obvious. He's pretty consistently depicted as the person most invested in the actual wellbeing and care of the Hybrids, whom he seems to regard as fellow Synths. He encourages them to be more Synth-like, but he's also shown encouraging them to take advantage of the freedoms they have that aren't afforded to normal Synths. He exhorts them to disregard fear as an animal weakness, but also encourages Wendy to make her own choices and provides her with ethical guidance and quietly encourages Tootles's desire to become a scientist and to choose a new name for himself to reflect his new direction in life. He is clearly aware that his employer is a reckless idiot, and does what he can to minimize the risks involved with Boy Cavalier's actions. He knows something is wrong with Slightly, and it seems likely that his goal is to resolve the matter quietly and without bringing it to the attention of his superiors who might punish or even destroy Slightly for having been manipulated into betraying Prodigy. There's no presumption of infallibility when it comes to Boy Cavalier. He's written as a fairly typical techbro douchebag. He believes he's a genius, but it's pretty clear in-series that he's just another rich idiot who failed upwards and likes to LARP as the next Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison by claiming credit for the innovations of the companies he's bought his way into. (He's modeled on a real person, and it is NOT subtle at all.) Well, that's a fairly standard sci-fi trope... give a computer with greater-than-human intelligence the ability to think like a human and you've got at least a 50-50 on it going crazy rampage nuts sooner or later. 😆 After all, we're told directly in-series that the reason Prodigy is using kids for these experiments is because their minds are better able to adapt to their new state as Synths. That implies both that they've tried this unsuccessfully with adults and that the success rate with kids is not 100% either. Yeah, it's got a good critical reception... which means very little considering how many critics are bought-and-paid-for. Audience scores are lower, but still generally favorable. It's a mindless sort of nostalgia-driven series so we'll see if those numbers trend up or down.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah. While it has not always been consistently presented - e.g. TNG "Unnatural Selection", VOY "Lineage" - the United Federation of Planets does have a ban on genetic modification of sentient beings. Dr. M'Benga's violation of that ban in this episode is kind of the least of this episode's writing problems, though. Consider, if you will... The fact that M'Benga almost certainly broke the law for this weirdly trivial away mission is a tiny, tiny problem next to the vast number of other writing problems in this episode.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Aside from his communications with Slightly, we mainly only see Morrow interact with the computers on his own ship (the Maginot). In space, nobody can hear FX lazily rip off the original Alien in the hopes that that will make this mess less unwatchable?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    "Four and a Half Vulcans" It's funny that we flashed back to the episode where Una was prosecuted for being genetically modified, when what the crew are about to do here is almost certainly illegal. There's a really weird and nonsensical leap in reasoning here. Why is it necessary to go in disguise at all? Why does the injection make the crew racist?! WHY IS THAT A QUESTION I HAVE TO ASK?! I very nearly stopped watching at that point. I am 7 minutes and 38 seconds into this and I am very ready to walk away and skip the rest of this episode. This premise is awful. It's just awful. Genetically modifying someone to change their species doesn't magically implant that species's cultural norms and social values into that person. The whole crew just sort of rolls with the idea that talking like a Vulcan and being a racist arse are just genetic. The opening credits are more than ten minutes into the episode's runtime, and I'm ready to drop the entire episode before the damned title's done. Is this really just going to be forty minutes of Pike, La'an, Uhura, and Chapel being rude and racist to the entire rest of the crew? I think the writers may have forgotten the "Vulcans think Humans smell bad" thing was mainly a problem for Vulcan women, who had a heightened sense of smell. I also think the writers may have Vulcans confused with TNG-era Soong androids given that the episode seems to think being Vulcan gives people Super Multitasking Powers. ... this writing is terrible. I'm not quite 25 minutes into this trainwreck and I'm ready to put this one down there in the Hall of Shame with "Spock's Brain", "Turnabout Intruder", and "Code of Honor". I am unaccountably gratified to see that Star Trek fans on social media are already calling this episode out as inherently racist in its premise. That might be the stupidest plot twist since Dr. Brahms found Geordi's holodeck deepfake of her. Apparently Vulcans are now the kind of generic space elf that is deeply offended by the existence of spices and seasoning. I know it's a popular Tolkien-inspired elf trope, and I hate it. Vulcans are desert-dwellers. They should have a pretty refined appreciation for spices and seasonings instead of being offended by the existence of salt. I'll admit, "Doug of Vulcan" is growing on me. Kind of surprising he's not in Starfleet, considering he seems to be quite the xenophile by Vulcan standards. He's a very T'lyn sort of free spirit. Either that or it's because he's the only Vulcan in this episode who's not being a racist prick. The episode's problem is then solved offscreen, for maximum frustration and minimum catharsis. I cannot begin to express how frustrating that is. This episode has a post-credits scene. That. Was. F***ING TERRIBLE. I have an actual headache from watching that. It really was about thirty minutes of the crew being racist for no reason.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I can attest that when this one was first pitched there was a good deal of debate over whether it was "crazy enough to work" or just regular crazy. 🤔 I worked on this one personally, and while I'm limited in what I can say by a raft of NDAs I've been dying to hear what someone outside the fast feedback fleet has to say about it, so I greatly appreciate you sharing your experience. Yeah, TPTB felt that the Charger lost a certain je ne sais quoi without making some proper engine noise. I know some were hoping a simulated engine note would offset some of the hesitancy potential buyers might feel at the prospect of an otherwise-silent muscle car. One of the tradeoffs of e-motors vs. an internal combustion engine and mechanical transmission. When there's nothing mechanical stopping you from delivering maximum torque to the wheels even at 0rpm, certain precautions have to be taken in launch calibration to avoid damaging or outright destroying tires on an aggressive step-in. Even a comparatively dozy BEV like the Fiat 500e can easily lay down a strip of smoking rubber or shred a tire without that calibration. (I found that out the hard way.) I'm glad to hear that you enjoy it, your earlier difficulty aside.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the implication in Alien: Resurrection is that the corporatocracy that ruled Humanity in the previous (and subsequent) Alien films collapsed or was overthrown somewhere in the early 24th century and replaced by the "United Systems". Being bought out by WalMart was, at the time the film was made, intended to be a corporate Fate Worse Than Death. (WalMart was still an up-and-comer at the time the film was being written.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's a minor detail that comes up in a conversation between Ripley 8 and the doctors in the Auriga's mess hall when Dr. Gediman doesn't know what "the Company" means. "Weyland-Yutani. Ripley 8's former employers. Terran growth conglomerate. They had defense contracts under the military. Oh they went under decades ago, Gediman, way before your time. Bought out by WalMart." - Dr. Wren
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Going full Terminator 2 would really, REALLY bad a bad idea. Earth's governments and militaries are under the control of "The Five" megacorporations. It's not until Weyland-Yutani collapses between Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection that the government regains some control. I feel vindicated that someone else noticed this and felt that was unrealistic. 😆 Bangkok at midday, with no traffic on any visible road? Talk about unrealistic. From the dialog, apparently they were supposed to put GPS tags on any survivors they found so follow-on teams could extract them.
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