Seto Kaiba

21 hours ago, JB0 said:

One assumes his heavily-modified program has been reinforced and expanded significantly since then.

Also, I didn't realize the time frames for Living Witness and Starfleet Academy lined up so closely.

I'd assume so.  Either that or he's just been given a massive amount of computer memory in order to continue functioning without running out of space like he did in Voyager.

IMO, one of the weirder aspects of NuTrek's 31st/32nd Century setting is how the writers lack of respect for continuity has led to Federation technology either not advancing at all in 800 years or actually regressing in many areas for no clear reason.

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

Awwww.  : (

I suppose it is inevitable as a near-immortal machine intelligence that he'd have far too much experience with loss, but... frownie-face.

IMO, it's surprising that he's still around at all given that his matrix was falling apart due to excessive data input after just a few years in service in Voyager.

His design lifespan (per VOY "The Swarm") was 1,500 hours.  62.5 continuous days of operation.  He started to break down after about 2 years of on-and-off service (substantially less than 17,500 hours) and was band-aided back into service using the matrix of a diagnostic hologram meant to provide field service for him.  But now he's been online continuously for over 7 million hours.  Over 4,666 times his design lifespan.  How his software even works with modern technology is a mystery and why they'd keep him around to teach anything is a mystery since his program has been outdated for 821 of his 824 years of service.  It's like learning medicine from someone who was a practicing doctor in 1205.  (Fodder for snide jokes like Spock's calling McCoy's medical tools "beads and rattles".)

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

I hope they reference the OTHER Doctor at some point. The lost backup EMH has been stuck in my head for years now. I want to know if he made it back to Federation space, and when.

Considering they've un-personed Benjamin Sisko's extremely important-to-his-fate child by his second wife, I'd expect the Doctor's backup will be completely forgotten.

Then again, of all the possible scenarios there's a strong possibility that he may not have even left for Federation space yet at the time of Starfleet Academy.

Spoilered, because I am about to overanalyze the **** out of this in my habitual manner.

 

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Haven’t watched the show and probably won’t start, but since they seem to be training, is it possible the bridge is designed bigger to allow for multiple students at some point to view what is going on at certain stations? 

I've seen a number of people raise that hypothesis in various corners.  If that is the case, the bridge does not seem well laid-out for it.  The students would be stuck standing around the perimeter of the room watching the bridge officers from the outside.  

Ordinarily, if you were going to do a training cruise you'd have either:

• Small groups of cadets shadowing officers in the course of normal duties aboard a ship during routine operations (e.g. the cadets on the USS Enterprise in Star Trek II or Red Squad on the USS Valiant in DS9 "Valiant").
• A larger group of cadets crewing an old, decommissioned ship under the supervision of an experienced commander and team of instructors (e.g. Pike's final training cruise on that J-class freighter or Picard's first training cruise on the decommissioned USS Leondegrance.)

 

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Been too busy watching old episodes of Sledgehammer and Dark Place that are fun than to start hate watching a new show 

Honestly?  This series isn't bad enough to merit calling it a "hate watch".

The first episode is a train wreck and the second episode is a real stinker, but it's actually getting noticeably less shite with each episode.  The Klingon episode could even be called "almost Star Trek".  If this trajectory continues it might actually be good by the end of the first season.

Quality-wise, we're basically watching the series crawl out of the wreckage of its first two episodes and start staggering to its feet.  It remains to be seen if it'll finish up by walking away from a sick explosion without looking back or if it'll just catch a bit of errant shrapnel in the back of the head and fall over again without any dignity.

New episode's out.  "Series Acclimation Mil".  Guess we're getting a Sam-focused episode.

 

We get one interesting piece of trivia out of the opening narration.

"In the last thousand years, the Federation has encountered 4,633 sentient species."

 

The episode opens with Sam narrating over herself walking through a corridor on the USS Athena, and I am once again struck by the thought...

Does nobody go to class at this Starfleet Academy?

This whole scene is shot the same way you'd shoot a scene of someone walking down the hall of a high school on the way to their locker between classes.  Complete with some very modern, very out-of-place pop music.  There's also a lot of that same "scene from a college applications brochure" going on.  We see a group of girls sitting and chatting by a sofa, with half of them sitting on the floor for some reason.  They've carrying potted plants around with them.  There's a bunch of students wearing totally unmodified modern backpacks looking as out of place as you'd expect on a spaceship 1,000 years into the future.  A bunch of other students are carrying rolled-up yoga mats for reasons unclear.  There's a bunch of cadets holding sports equipment too, including several basketballs.

Was a dance segment with a hip-hop beat really required here?  

Sure, Kerrice Brooks is a black actress but is there a reason to treat Series Acclimation Mil like a stereotypical token black character on a sitcom?  She's playing a sentient hologram from a planet populated by AIs who haven't seen a human in generations.  It feels weird in a subtly racist way, like how they had to make Michael Burnham an ex-convict.  

 

There's another easter egg or two in her introduction.  When she introduces her homeworld of Kasq, the other worlds listed in the "Holo Matrix Specs" dropdown menu that shows up on the right side of the screen are:  Earth, Vulcan (not Ni'Var!), Orion, Denoblia (misspelled Denobula!), Andoria, Bajor, Delta, Ferengar (misspelled Ferenginar?), Hirogen Prime, Kazon Prime, Risa, and Betazed.  

Most of those were already Federation members or, in the case of Ferenginar, in the process of applying to join the Federation as far back as 2381 (LDS: "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place")... but the implication that somewhere along the way the Hirogen and Kazon got their sh*t together enough to join the Federation is WAY more interesting than whatever's going on here.  

Sam is apparently just 217 days old at the time of this story.  And we're treated to a rather cringeworthy montage of her various nicknames bestowed by other cadets.  

Honestly though, what's worse is the constant condescending childishness of her explanation.  She has to explain, via infographics with childish handwriting, that she's meant to be her people's emissary to the Federation... which makes her a diplomat and is therefore a "big job".  The audience aren't Pakleds, please assume a bit more intelligence than that.  OK, having looked at the daily news some audience members might be Pakleds but let's assume they're at least more intelligent than the average Pakled.

The idea of a sentient AI needing to explain organic behavior to her creators is itself a fascinating premise I hope they actually DO something with.  Sadly, it seems to be limited to explaining basic biology, the very concept of Starfleet, and pranks?  

 

You are NOT hurting my feelings with the constant lore dumps though.

 

We get to see a Kasqian in its "natural" state... which is a wholly non-humanoid mess of energy strands that hovers in the middle of the room.  (One has to wonder why Sam is taking personal calls in the middle of the atrium instead of in her quarters, but whatever.)

More childish generic school drama antics ensue... like a "turf war" over the atrium between the War College and Academy... incited because the War College is now forced to use the Academy's classrooms due to the "stupid talking plants" infesting the war college grounds.

Honestly, viewing it through the warped lens of a not-all-there AI attempting to understand and, worse, explain Human behavior to another AI that has never even seen humans does make the show's rampant stupidity a bit easier to tolerate.  Played for laughs in Sam's observations of Caleb lusting over the Betazoid president's daughter still.  Sam has a great deal of that early TNG Data level bluntness going on... but it doesn't land quite as effectively without the studied neutrality of Data's every remark.  Sam is... too human?

Really getting a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe from this episode, and the Kasqians in particular.  Particularly its fondness for overlaying infographics and emojis.

The seminar for "Confronting the Unexplainable" has a bunch of easter eggs hiding in it too.  The Guardian of Forever is one of the items on display.  Another is the Ben Sisko thing from the series teaser trailer.  The class is taught by a new character played by Tawny Newsome (LDS: Beckett Mariner).

Apparently even now, eight centuries after the fact, the Bajorans still haven't made peace with the fact that Ben Sisko thought the emissary role was bullsh*t for most of his time in their space and venerate him as one of the Prophets now. 

The idea of a Cardassian Starfleet officer with strongly held opinions on the subject of tomato in gumbo recipes is... something.

Sam is winning points with me for being mildly put off by the idea of just biting into a raw tomato like it's an apple despite being a noncorporeal piece of software that does not eat. 

A tomato is not a handfruit, people!  The line must be drawn here!  This far! And no further!😅

 

 

Honestly, the less we have of Captain Ake and the professors in this series the better it seems to get.  Which is funny, given that they were leaning REALLY hard on having the Doctor, Jett Reno, etc. as a main draw for the series.

 

 

Bad decisions seems to be a theme here...

 

The B-plot rears its ugly head again at that point... feeling increasingly like Kelrec is being pranked, and even Reno seems put off... 

Once again, the feet thing.

I keep having to check and see if Quentin Tarantino has died, because he seems to be haunting this series.

 

All in all, not a bad episode despite a rough start... it feels like the writers are gradually inching closer to understanding what Star Trek is.  This one just leans way too heavily on the DS9 references to be accessible to a new viewer and doesn't go far enough into them to have much for the long-time fan.

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

No, but they did scale it back down regardless and I suspect it was because the ergonomics the classic bridge setup possesses begins to lose cohesion with larger spaces.

I'm not sure that necessarily even implies anything.

After all, the Excelsior's prototype-era bridge wasn't that much bigger than the regular Constitution-class refit bridge of the era or many of the more modern bridge designs that would follow and Starfleet ships of that era seem to swap out bridge modules with a fairly high frequency.  (This, of course, being an in-universe justification for having struck sets, redressed or modified sets to the point of being unable to revert them, or simply built more advanced sets to replace the ones previously used.) 

The change in the bridge design may have nothing whatsoever to do with ergonomics and simply reflect whatever Starfleet settled on as a standard operational design or include some unspecified modernizations.

 

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

While all that may be true, it still expends fuel (deuterium/ antideuterium) which is extra mass they must carry (the old conundrum more mass= more fuel= more mass). I'm not saying it'll "make or break the ship" per se, but that the thinking behind this is not solid by any measure and lacks the fairly tight economy of some previous starships.

True, but at the same time it's also true that fuel has never really been a concern for Starfleet ships in normal operations in Star Trek's various series and movies.

Fuel concerns only ever really come up prominently in Voyager and Enterprise.  In both cases, those are stories depicting a Starfleet ship ill-equipped for its current situation that is operating many months or years away from the nearest friendly ship or starbase that might be able to replenish its stores. 

Mind you, it's worth noting that in both of chose cases it's also true that the entire plot hinges on a critical research failure.  It's always deuterium they're running out of, and while deuterium is rare relative to elemental hydrogen it's simply not that rare. 

 

The implication going back as far as TOS - and explicitly confirmed in the tech manuals and some onscreen okudagrams - is that a Federation starship typically carries enough fuel to operate away from base for months if not years.  Even the Danube-class runabout in TNG "Timescape" is said to have enough fuel for a month and a half (over 47 days) for each engine.

And given that mass does not impact acceleration or flight performance for these starships due to the way they get around by bending space-time and the amount of other stuff they're carrying, a bit more fuel mass seems like a negligible concern at best.

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I remember in Star Trek III the size of the Excelsior's bridge, and how by the time we see it under Sulu's command in Star Trek VI, the bridge module had been replaced with one that was much more on-par with the ones we had seen previously.

The bridge module Excelsior had as a transwarp system testbed wasn't that much bigger than post-commissioning bridge it entered fleet service with.

Of course, it also makes sense for a testbed starship to have extra stations on the bridge to monitor all of its various systems during testing.  (Though it actually had fewer people stationed on it than the fleet service version did.  NX-2000 Excelsior's bridge seated 13, the service version had 17.)

 

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

The reason I'm focusing so much on this part is that from an ergonomic viewpoint, such a cavernous bridge is going to cause a great many issues with operating as the nerve center of a starship. For one thing: on previous bridges, people were well within earshot of one another, and in proximity to the captain's chair. They could clearly hear one another without having to strain or ask people to repeat themselves, and they didn't have to raise the voices to be heard (unless they were in battle and noise on the bridge made communication difficult). On the Athena's bridge, I can just imagine hearing "WHAT??!!" constantly (among other things), and folks asking one another to repeat themselves.

Another is the necessity of personnel moving from one bridge station to another. Especially in combat, you don't want to take any more time to get to a console than necessary. We've seen many times where someone at another station has had to take over for an injured/ incapacitated crewmember, let alone getting medical aid to them. While it may be only a matter of a few more moments, we've seen that seconds can count in these situations And if the bridge is that big, then how large is the engineering bay? Is it so big that the time needed to cross from one station to another becomes ridiculous?

It took me a bit to figure out why the Academy-class starship's bridge feels so uselessly huge.  It was so stupidly obvious I can't believe that I missed it.

Look at the walls.

Up to now, almost every Starfleet starship bridge we've seen has been liberally festooned with consoles around the outer perimeter of the room.  This goes all the way back to the TOS-era Enterprise where every inch of wall that wasn't the viewscreen or turbolift door was occupied by a console of some description.  This tendency was carried over into TMP's refit, and from there into practically every other Federation starship design.  There are a handful of exceptions like the Ambassador, Galaxy, and Olympia-classes that put most of their consoles across the rear 90 degrees or so of the bridge, but practically every Federation starship before or since has positively ringed the bridge with consoles.

What's different in the Academy-class USS Athena is that the bridge is still practically a ring of consoles... but the walls have moved outward 6-10 feet on each side, leaving all the previously wall-mounted consoles freestanding in the middle of the room.  The actual bridge is an island sitting in the middle of Deck 1, with a huge walkway around it like it's a zen garden in a Japanese estate.  

Instead of wall mounted consoles, the bridge seems to have five viewscreens around almost the entire perimeter of the room.  The one mounted starboard aft seems to be pulling similar duty to the big Master Systems Displays on older starships, while the others don't seem to be being used for anything.  

So there's just this massive ring of NOTHING around the actual bridge... and because they're using holo-comms instead of the viewscreen, the actual viewscreen is pretty much surplus to requirements 90% of the time.

 

10 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Finally: larger spaces require more energy, more atmospheric components, and more maintenance. We're not just talking power for lights and consoles, but SIF/IDF reinforcement energies, gravity control, atmospheric consumables delivery systems and CO2 scrubbing mechanisms, and heating/cooling power. A larger area is going to take more of everything.

All things considered, I'd assume that's a negligible concern at worst.

After all, in the 32nd century Starfleet ships have clearly advanced considerably from the 23rd and 24th century designs we know.  They've been able to delegate a lot of repair and maintenance work to autonomous robots, they've made programmable nanotechnology a core feature of almost every part of a ship's structure down to things as mundane as the crew quarters furniture, replicators have been commonplace for almost a millennium, and surely they've improved the output and efficiency of things like the impulse reactors and warp core in the intervening centuries.  The Athena has, by any reckoning, at least two warp cores and possibly more than that depending on how "disconnected nacelles" work... given that we've seen that at the very least the Saucer section is capable of independent warp travel without the nacelles or engineering section.  If they've gone all the way back towards early TOS explanations, the Academy-class may well be able to lean on THREE warp cores worth of output to provide for its energy needs.  (Which makes Braka's attempt to steal one of them feel less like a major crime and more like pickpocketing.)  Shipwide holograms have been something ships could manage on the energy budget of the late 24th century, so that's clearly no problem.  

(Back before the "warp core" was invented as a concept, TOS Main Engineering was the impulse reactor room at the back of the saucer section and the warp drive's power system was inside the nacelles themselves.  The whole reasoning behind the nacelles being a thing was that any power source potent enough to warp space and time must be radioactive AF, and thus should be kept away from inhabited sections of the ship and be jettisoned if needed.  If the nacelles are powered individually like that, and the saucer has its own warp drive as we saw recently, that's 3 warp cores if we assume the secondary hull lacks one or at least two if they're doing things the newer way.) 

They've got enough spare juice kicking around to give everyone a personal transporter and tricorder built into their commbadge and officers on space stations are shown literally unmaking the bed at the molecular level each morning.

Had a thought about what we learned in this latest episode that might constitute a plot hole.

... they were using surface-based matter-antimatter reactors as power plants.

Starfleet's Academy-class ships like the USS Athena are partly used as surface installations and given what we see in "Vox in Excelso" they're capable of saucer separation and both the saucer and secondary hull have their own separate warp drives.  The saucer and secondary hull both land to form the surface complex used for an academy campus, meaning there's two warp cores in close proximity on the surface anytime one of these ships is landed.

Are the Academy-class new?  Or did potentially hundreds of these ships explode on the surfaces of Federation planets during the Burn when the dilithium moderating their warp cores failed?

  

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I'm surprised they don't have an inter-bridge intercom system just to talk to one another...

Yeah, no matter how much I muse on it I can't seem to come up with a sane/cogent reason why the USS Athena's bridge would need to be as big as, or bigger than, DS9's Operations Center.

4 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

2. Fish face Daren what is with the human disguise? Alien faces cgi too expensive? Why not real makeup? What's the in universe reason? For such a progressive leaning show/school it seems odd for a student to be hiding their true self. 

They seem to be pursuing a romance angle with the character... which is hard to do with fifty pounds of prosthetics on your face.

It's also pretty costly, and they've blown a LOT of the show's cash on sets and heavy prosthetics for minor background characters like the Ferengi and Kelpian cadets.

 

 

4 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

3. Does every thing take place in main lobby of the academy? Classes, diplomatic events, sporting events? This multi use room would be fine if it was an assembly hall but it is just a large lobby where people go through to access all other spaces of the academy. Why aren't there more people walking through and disrupting these events?

Starfleet Academy's showrunners clearly blew a huge chunk of the show's budget on the enormous and elaborate sets used for the Athena's bridge and Sato Atrium.  

Given its layout and size, I'm inclined to suspect the Athena's bridge is a redress of the circular Federation Headquarters main hall from Discovery that also served as a courtroom at 23rd century Starfleet Headquarters in Strange New Worlds's second season.  It looks to be double or better the size of a normal starship bridge for no practical reason (to the point that Captain Ake has no ready room.

The Athena's Sato Atrium appears to even bigger and vastly more complex than Trek's previous biggest interior set, the Deep Space 9 Promenade & Quark's Bar multi-level set.  It's much more structurally complex and a LOT more electrified since many walls have rows of built-in flat-panel monitors and almost every surface seems to edge-lit from within using programmable LEDs.  There are water features and plants and all manner of other decorative items.  After blowing what I'm sure was tens of millions of dollars on this set, they had little choice but to make it as multipurposeful as they could.

This overspending is probably also the reason why location shooting for the series was so profoundly half-assed.

Starfleet Academy's non-starship spaces like the James T. Kirk Pavilion, the quad, the War College dorms, and the gym all appear to be almost totally unmodified spaces at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario.  All they really did was stick some Starfleet signage on various exterior and interior walls and hung a few banners.  The academy grounds are just Trillium Park on East Island in Toronto.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

I hate them, but my lady loves em. They seem to have more neurotic characters than they used to back in the simple 90’s. They often mix the usual problems of old with some kind of tragedy or horrifically toxic relationship that they need to escape from to find their true love. Most of the older ones had the boring dude with a boring over stressful job meeting a chaotic girlfriend that shows the guy how to be more exciting or whatever. It’s kinda flipped to where the people live absolute chaos and then meet the boring person in a small town and they end up living peacefully in the end

Oh, you're thinking of Hallmark movies.

The ones that all go "big city business girl with business boyfriend has to go to generic country town where she grew up before moving to the city and falls in love with some guy she just met because he's different from her stuffy big city boyfriend".

I wouldn't really say the leads in those are arseholes... they're just regular guys living the 9-5 life instead of making a quaint, folksy living farming christmas trees or whatever in a town so small the annual bake sale determines its continued existence.😅

 

That's not really Noah Centineo's bag.  He's more in the himbo comedy genre.

Slop's on. 

This week, it's Episode 4 "Vox in Excelso".  Apparently it's a Jay-Den Kraag-centric episode... or so the blurb would have us believe.

We open on the Athena, back in deep space for... reasons.  The series couldn't be bothered to have a ready room set so apparently Captain Ake just throws everyone else off the ship's bridge when she wants to record a log or an address to the students.  As per her usual, it's a meandering mess of a speech that reads like a collection of cliches from some form letter graduation speech delivered with all the passion and enthusiasm of someone coming off a high dose of dental anesthetic.

Also, does nobody go to class at this academy?  The entire time she's talking it's montaging over students doing generic admissions brochure stuff like sitting in common areas with random objects laughing at nothing in particular.

The writers are leaning really hard into Kraag being the un-Klingon.  He's not Proud Warrior Race guy... he's got some aspects of their culture but he's kind of a coward, he's socially anxious, etc.

Starfleet Academy does throw an interesting curveball in that Kraag apparently comes from a three-parent household.  He has two fathers and a mother.  Not entirely outside the usual for them, given that in the relaunch novels that inspired parts of NuTrek the Klingons were pretty darn LGBTQ-friendly.

 

 

What is it with the current Star Trek showrunners and trying to kill off the franchise's most iconic aliens?

Jar-Jar Abrams tried to kill off the Vulcans in Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Picard tried to kill off the Romulans, and now Starfleet Academy's trying to do in the Klingons.

 

 

Kraag's memories of home are ALSO subject to the piss filter.  What is it with every outdoor space looking like world is being viewed through a pint mug of cheap pilsner? 

We get a "Master debater" joke.  This is how far standards have fallen.

'lil bit of Ho Yay for Darem and Jay-Den?

Admiral Vance seems to have forgotten the very basic Klingon cultural tenet that they have no gods.  They killed their gods back in their ancient mythohistory.  "More trouble than they were worth", as Worf put it.

We get to see a few more Federation starships at a distance... USS Capricorn, USS Crimson, USS Horizon, USS Lexington, and USS Riker.

 

If we could only ditch the immaturity and the incredibly dated writing, this episode would be dangerously close to sounding like an actual Star Trek episode.

2 hours ago, Big s said:

Actually that description sounds pretty close to a rom com star. They’re always traumatized and kinda a total 💩head moody and socially withdrawn til they meet their special someone that’s supposed to turn things around. That’s all kinda the basic formula 

Unless something awful happened to romcoms while my back was turned, I think that's just the domain of a few specific actors whose films skew more comedy than romance like the ever-cringeworthy Adam Sandler.

You can bin most romantic comedy male leads in one of three basic categories: the Himbo, the Shy Guy who isn't really shy in any meaningful sense, and the Humorless Workaholic.  Traumatic backstories are usually fodder for the "serious" romance stories, especially fantasy romance stories.  

Definitely feels to me like Gundam's live action movie is kneecapping itself before it's ever reached the starting line with a terrible set of casting decisions.

9 hours ago, Big s said:

To be honest, a rom com star seems well suited for a live action Gundam character.

Maybe a comic relief secondary character, not a main.  

Gundam protagonists only really come in a couple flavors:

• Moody and socially-withdrawn teenager with parental abandonment issues (Amuro, Camille, Banagher, Judau, Uso)
• Pre-traumatized PTSD enjoyer (Shiro, Domon, Shinn, Seabook, Garrod, Loran, Hathaway, Jona, Suletta)
• Emotionally dead PTSD donor (Heero, Setsuna, Mikazuki)
• Doing fine until fate slapped their head and said "This bad boy can fit SO MUCH trauma" (Al, Kou, Kira, Oliver, Bellri)
• Complete and Utter Sh*thead (Io, Advent Casval, Iria, Machu)

Not really a lot of call for comedy there... unless you're Judau.

34 minutes ago, Old_Nash_II said:

https://screenrant.com/gundam-live-action-movie-netflix-distribution-report/

Point to Netflix

... an own goal, perhaps.

Netflix acquires the distribution rights to the live-action Gundam movie starring the flop queen of 2025 and a guy whose big break outside Netflix romcoms was Black Adam?  Big oof.  The odds weren't exactly in this film's favor as it was.

23 minutes ago, sketchley said:

Wasn't Starfleet Security (in the TOS–Next Gen era) something along those lines?  I may be conflating the origins of the M.A.C.O.s from Enterprise here though... 🤔

Starfleet Security was a division of United Earth (later Federation) Starfleet that, role-wise, were normally depicted as being somewhere between naval infantry and military police in practice.  They guarded ships and bases against intruders, escorted and protected VIPs, and investigated criminal activity.  They're not soldiers, but they've got that "mildly military" thing going on that all of Starfleet does.

You're probably thinking of the MACOs from Enterprise.  They were a detachment of soldiers from an elite United Earth military unit that seem to the space version of Army Rangers or a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit.  They were on loan to Archer and the NX-01 Enterprise for the duration of the Xindi emergency, but had a separate chain of command that led to all kinds of jurisdiction friction with the ship's Starfleet security chief (Lt. Reed).  

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

I just assumed that the whole 'war college' thing is a left-over from when Earth was not part of the Federation, post Burn. In Disco, we saw that Earth had it's own defense force and I'm assuming it is still in existence, in-effect right beside Starfleet, and maybe fodder for future integration back into Starfleet as things progress.

The War College being a post-Federation United Earth institution would have made more sense.

No such luck, though.  The series makes the War College out to be an alternate Academy that may have existed alongside Starfleet Academy as far back as the 28th century, that this is its first year active on Earth alongside Starfleet Academy, and that at least one Starfleet officer in the cast (Lura) graduated from the War College instead of the Academy.

 

3 hours ago, Thom said:

As to the show, the first episode was all right, but these last two were hokey nonsense! My gawd! That's not to say I have a problem with the plot, but just the decision to turn the Academy into basically a futuristic version of Animal House, and not done very well at that. Drop the attempts at comedy and get to the overall story! In fact, this would have been better if these cadets were third or fourth years, giving them more leeway to get away from the frat house um, the Academy.

May give it another episode before deciding to abandon this one. Man, really wish they'd given us another season of Prodigy...

To each their own.  I had kind of the opposite reaction, though didn't think either set of episodes was great.

I do agree that one of the show's main weaknesses is its insistence on treating the freshman cadets like a particularly unruly grade school class instead of the fairly mature and highly professional young adults you'd expect to be attending one of the most exclusive educational institutions in the Federation.  The vibe is less "fun shenanigans" as "standards must've slipped".  

7 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I said you were overthinking it, not that the thoughts are wrong.  A major difference.  You both put more thought into it then the writers.  

About the choice of terminology, certainly... but unlike NuTrek's usual fare, I feel like there's actually some method to their madness on this one even if it's a good deal less clever or subtle than Trek's better-woven Aesops.

The War College wasn't a thing in Star Trek: Discovery or any other prior Star Trek series or movie and it doesn't make a lick of sense in context for Starfleet to have two separate, rival service academies with radically different educational priorities.  That means it was almost certainly created for the series with a specific narrative purpose in mind.  The obvious, ham-fisted, explanation being that the War College is meant as a vehicle for examination and deconstruction of the wildly unpopular decision Discovery, Picard, and Prodigy all made to go and sh*t on everything Star Trek stands for by rewriting the Federation and Starfleet as militaristic isolationists.

At the very least, it suggests someone at Paramount understands why audiences hated Discovery, Picard, and Section 31.

 

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I would much rather overthink something than underthink it. That's how we ended up with Discovery and Dave Filoni's take on Star Wars.

... and the Star Trek 2009 reboot trilogy, and Picard, and Section 31.

If you're watching Star Trek and you're not thinking you're either not watching real Star Trek or there's something wrong with you.  This franchise made a name for itself as cerebral sci-fi that taught moral lessons and examined complex social issues through allegorical space adventure.

11 hours ago, tekering said:

I seem to recall discussion a few years back about incorporating Discovery (and thus its spinoffs Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy) into the Kelvin timeline, both as a means of addressing inconsistencies in canon (Spock's adopted sister?), technological anachronisms (interactive hologrammatic communications, for example), and cosmetic differences (like the Klingon redesigns).  

At the very least, Eaglemoss ran with that when it came to classifying Discovery miniatures...

However, given the continuity nods to Prodigy, the appearance of the Klingon character, and that Robert Picardo seems to be reprising his role from Voyager, I suppose Starfleet Academy is definitively part of the Prime timeline...? 🤨

Officially, all of the NuTrek shows are within the Prime timeline... that includes Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Section 31, and now Starfleet Academy.

From Discovery S2 onward, the showrunners have been backpedaling and drafting excuses/explanations for various anachronisms or inconsistencies.  The Discovery S1 Klingon makeup is being treated like a cosmetic inconsistency the same way it was when Klingon makeup evolved in TMP and TNG and a subject for in-jokes (as in LDS).  Spock and the unmentioned sister problem is being handled via the Sybok clause.  Other inconsistencies were handwaved, like the holo-communicator being a "trendy" bit of tech that Starfleet experimented with on and off and never really worked right until the far future.  The bridge windows are being treated mostly as a 23rd century design fad that fell out of fashion later on.  etc. etc.

I know some fans consider the far future parts of Discovery and so on to be a Bad Future timeline.

EDIT:

 

8 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Well, I'm the one who asked, and I'm satisfied with Seto's answer:

I felt a "war college" wasn't something Starfleet would have had; Seto explained the concept of war college for me so I understand that a bit better now. And I agree with him that it wouldn't be a rival to the Academy, and that Kurtzman is trying to set up more drama for the story (in a rather ham-fisted way IMO).

Star Trek's creators have been beefing over how military Starfleet really is since Star Trek II, where Gene Roddenberry and Nicholas Meyer squared off over the topic at length and to Gene's considerable dissatisfaction.    

(Even Gene himself wasn't always consistent about it.  One of the alien species created to be background characters in Star Trek: the Motion Picture - the Arcturians - are said to be a highly militaristic species who reproduce entirely by cloning and who cheerfully provide billions-strong armies for the Federation in wartime.)

The War College seems to have been introduced in Starfleet Academy to allow the story to tackle the subject of the Federation's militarism in an unusually direct manner.  (In past titles, it was usually the domain of an Insane/Corrupt Admiral or Starfleet officers in wartime reflecting that they did not sign up to be soldiers.)

10 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Then you should not have put in this paragraph in your previous response.

Maybe you might want to read a bit more carefully?

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Then I did a little bit of theorizing about what narrative purpose this never-before-seen-or-mentioned second Starfleet service academy is meant to serve.

After all, the question being answered was "Why have something as off-brand for Starfleet as a War College?"

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I'm thinking your overthinking it.  Some writer heard the term War College, thought it meant college, and threw it in.

No, I'm not overthinking it.  I just explained why that real world term they obviously did not bother to look up before using it in the story is wrong. 😉

Then I did a little bit of theorizing about what narrative purpose this never-before-seen-or-mentioned second Starfleet service academy is meant to serve.

 

Back before the Kurtzman years, Star Trek used to have a fairly robust research team whose job it was to prevent issues like that by checking terminology, making sure that science in the series aligned to real world science as much as possible, etc.  Their absence is keenly felt in this new Trek era.

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

What bothers me here is that Starfleet has a "war college". I thought they were peaceful explorers?

Seriously though: they could have named it "strategic college", or "planning" something or another. "War"? Erm, not something the Federations starts...

... 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.

Quote

"“Return to Silent Hill” aims for a similar uncanniness — sometimes the actors look like digital doubles — but the result is less phantom realm, more jumbled assembly of cutscenes." - NYT

"Goofy and low-rent, it’s a dire look at what happens when you can’t leave the past behind—whether you’re a horror game character or a video game movie filmmaker." - AV Club

"It turns out, making a horror movie where the hero is more casually curious (or oblivious) than scared is a tricky proposition." - Guardian

"It shouldn’t work, and it doesn’t a lot of the time" - Seattle Times

"This powerful survival horror story has been turned into an ugly, laughable adaptation that proves that maybe we should’ve never gone back to Silent Hill." - Collider

 

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.  

58 minutes ago, davidwhangchoi said:

will this have Ray Park?

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.

2 hours ago, PointBlankSniper said:

The fighter sketch looks close to the final armored design, with an extra giant gun. The gun itself is too alien for my tastes, but I'm sad that the idea of another gunpod for the armored pack was lost.

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.