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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It was severe enough that Picard's brother and nephew both died in the fire, though it appears I may have been thinking of the relaunch novel-verse's version of events where the fire apparently destroyed the house and spread into at least part of the vineyard. (It's implied that this is partly because the rest of the Picard family are rather old-fashioned and resisted incorporating advanced technology into the family home.) Given what Patrick Stewart and Kurtzman have said, it seems unlikely. They've indicated Star Trek: Picard will be set 20 years after Star Trek: Nemesis (2399~2400) with Picard having left Starfleet some 15 years previously (~2384). Kurtzman has stated the destruction of Romulus in 2387 that precipitated the godawful alternate universe reboot by Jar-Jar Abrams will play a role in the story. True... though it'd likely to be worse when the writers treat the pre-existing material with thinly veiled contempt as the creative team under Kurtzman have.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    New plot idea: Jean-Luc Picard is haunted by a thousand generations of French wine snob family members for drinking holographic wine. The bottles all say Chateau Picard... As broken up as he seemed to be over the death of his brother and nephew, I can't quite see him rebuilding the family vineyard like that... especially given all the bad blood between him and his brother over his having left to go into Starfleet.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's what was leaked... that he was going to be in Section 31. I'm more curious how he retired to a vineyard said to have burned down many a year ago?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    First, neither of those was espionage. Second, neither of those cases is even remotely close to Section 31's activities. Section 31 operates without any kind of oversight and its operations range from actual espionage to sabotage, assassination, mass murder, and all manner of other illegal and immoral sh*t. The Celtris III op in "Chain of Command" was an authorized Starfleet Intelligence operation approved and carried out under the supervision of Starfleet Command, a commando raid to destroy a suspected metagenic weapon of mass destruction. The latter was essentially just an undercover police operation to bring to justice a group that had been looting archaeological sites in Federation space. Dangerous, yes... but not spying (espionage), carried out under proper oversight, and not illegal or immoral. He wasn't the only one... the only one to object was Dr. Crusher, initially. Their lack of disquiet with a plan to destroy the Borg - something the Federation would almost certainly have approved of at the time - likely stemmed from the then-current picture Starfleet had of the Borg as having no individual will, consciousness, or conscience. They were believed to essentially be meat puppets controlled and programmed with malevolent intent by the collective mind. What changed everyone's mind, Picard included, was talking to their captured Borg drone and the ensuing realization that it was a person whose individuality was being suppressed by the Borg collective. Once it was clear they'd been planning to kill thinking, feeling people rather than just a malevolent cloud-based AI controlling a bunch of meat puppets, they scuttled the plan immediately. Yeah, it doesn't really start ramping off the wreckage of Star Trek over seas full of burning sharks and garbage until Part II of the pilot. That is, allegedly, the plan for Season 3. Even though they successfully killed the evil AI that wants to seize an alien data library full of information on AIs so that it can become an AI (if you just said "wait, what?" you're in good company) in the show's "present day" and thus essentially removed the entire reason for wasting half a season trying to find ways to get rid of the data library (just removing the affected computer core elements and vaporizing them with a phaser never seems to occur to them) by sending it into the future, the USS Discovery still heads off to get itself stranded 1,000 years in the future to keep the data out of the hands of the AI they literally just killed in 2257 who no longer exists in that future anyway. If the sh*t-awful Short Trek "Calypso" is any indication, Kurtzman is likely setting up the Federation to be the bad guys in the far future despite Star Trek: Enterprise establishing the 31st+ century Federation was still very much the Big Good and a utopian civilization. Kurtzman's determined effort to turn Star Trek from a utopian series to a dystopian one with heavy overtones of militant nationalism are probably going to heavily color the work being done on Star Trek: Picard. I don't recall if they've ever commented on it directly, but most fans suspect that Star Trek: Discovery's producers were hoping that making Michael Burnham into a never-before mentioned foster sister of Spock's was an attempt to give her instant appeal with the Trekkies. It backfired horribly, due to her being a terrible person, so they tried to salvage it using Spock himself, Captain Pike, Number One, and the USS Enterprise in season two and it still didn't work because fans were incensed over Spock apparently being mentally ill, Pike constantly taking crap from Burnham despite her being under his command, and the Enterprise only showing up as a disabled ship needing a tow back home until the very end.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if nothing else I'm interested to see how Weekend at Luke's will either finish flying the franchise into the ground like Vader's flagship in Return of the Jedi or if they'll just narrowly miss complete disaster like the Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... ... ... what gave you that idea? No, Star Trek: Discovery is so much in the mold of the thankfully-cancelled Star Trek reboot by J.J. Abrams that a lot of fans refuse to believe it's a prime continuity series. There's very little of classic Star Trek in it, between the hideous Orc-like Klingon designs, the overly busy enemy ship designs, the Starfleet bridges with a great big fragile smart window instead of proper bloody viewscreens, phasers that fire blaster bolts that just burn holes in people, lots of exposed piping everywhere in Starfleet ships, a protagonist who's an utter berk who's been mysteriously promoted WAY above their level of competence (Burnham having apparently skipped Starfleet Academy entirely and was set to become a captain after just seven years of service on one ship), etc. Actual connections to real Star Trek are few and thin on the ground. Season one is practically stand-alone except for brief mention of Kahless by some Kling-Orcs in the first episode and two terribly out-of-character appearances by a Harry Mudd who is downright malevolent. The Short Trek miniseries between the two seasons started out pretty awful with a bad comedy bit followed by a dystopian far future schtick, but then had two proper bloody Star Trek episodes (including an absolutely wonderful Mudd episode) and season two almost managed to feel like real Star Trek for a few episodes there with Christopher Pike in the center seat before the rot set back in and it once again became the Michael Burnham Mary Sue Hour via a completely nonsensical main story arc involving an antagonist shamelessly thieved from the Star Trek relaunch novel verse (Section 31's master AI "Control"). There are a few aesthetic touches that are a bit hard to make out but are distinctly classic Star Trek-ish, like the Discovery's engine room having a classic Constitution-class horizontal warp core arrangement visible in the background, the phaser looking like a straight aesthetic update of the TOS phaser pistol (and an actually good looking one at that), and a VERY lovely but moderately unfaithful classic Constitution-class USS Enterprise briefly showing up complete with TOS-era sound effects. That press was mostly bought-and-paid-for by CBS in the most stringently literal sense... they own the few websites that were actively praising the series, like ComicBook.com. The Orville is much closer to the spirit of classic Star Trek... it's not so much a straight comedy as an affectionate parody that is gradually playing itself straighter and straighter in the gap made by Discovery's failure to be a proper bloody Trek show. That's about the shape of it, yes... by the schmucks who brought you Star Trek: Into Darkness.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Most Star Trek fans, myself included, would agree with you that season two was a step up for Star Trek: Discovery... they'd just gently remind you that it wasn't that big of a step up, that it was a step up from essentially rock bottom, and that it promptly took a step back down around halfway in when the nonsense plot involving Control was introduced. Let's just say it's not accidental that both seasons essentially ended with "and let us never speak of this again". I strongly suspect that CBS wrote the season two finale in anticipation of it being the last episode, given that they added "and also let us never speak of these people or this ship ever again on pain of death" as well. Considering that CBS has renewed it but Netflix hasn't, it'll be interesting to see if there even is a season three. That Netflix told CBS and Kurtzman to go bag it when Star Trek: Picard was pitched doesn't augur well for its longevity. Going forward is good, you'll get no argument there... the big concern for Star Trek: Picard is Kurtzman shitting all over Picard's well-established character.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's very apt... and that probably has a lot to do with CBS insisting it should be abbreviated DSC instead. On various occasions, CBS has claimed or denied the claim that the aesthetic changes were motivated by a legal requirement of the way rights are split between the current CBS and Paramount. Most fans generally attribute the show's thinly-veiled contempt for the Star Trek franchise and its continuity to Kurtzman sharing J.J. Abrams's dislike of Star Trek and its iconic high-concept sci-fi narrative style. They didn't think twice about totally breaking Star Trek's continuity because they literally do not care about Star Trek itself. That the same team is working on Star Trek: Picard is why everyone's cringing so hard anticipating how they're going to f*ck it up. Just some empty talk from Bryan Fuller about wanting to return to the style of 60's sci-fi when they were first trying to pitch the idea of a new Star Trek series... nothing of that ever actually made it into the production. They didn't care enough to actually have an original design done... they just lifted the rejected Ralph McQuarrie Enterprise design for the cancelled Star Trek: Planet of the Titans film project from the 70's. You'll probably hate how disrespected Captain Pike is in the series... he's constantly taking crap from Burnham and the other female characters. Kurtzman worked with Abrams on Into Darkness, which should tell you where his bad ideas come from.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Earth parts of First Contact were fun, in no small part due to James Cromwell's portrayal of Zefram Cochrane... the portions set aboard the Enterprise-E were incredibly boring. Insurrection was just a bad idea, start to finish. A lesson nobody at Paramount learned about why the TNG crew are not action movie-friendly. Likewise, though I suspect we're in for a long wait. To say that Star Trek: Discovery's designs weren't well-received by the fandom would be understating it to a comical degree. One review I saw of the Eaglemoss Klingon "cleave ship" was basically just fifteen minutes of the reviewer laughing at how stupid the whole design was, and the backlash against the Crossfield-class design was apparent before the show'd ever aired. I'd love it if Diamond Select were to do a scale toy of Pike's USS Enterprise from the series, but I suspect there won't be any takers on that license for a good while yet in light of the show's unpopularity with Star Trek fans. Odds are there'll be new ship designs and new designs for things like phasers, tricorders, commbadges, and so on... but the licensees were reportedly unhappy with all of it and have refused to license the designs. Set course for disappointment... maximum warp. Discovery is so much like the new movies, both in terms of design aesthetic and content, that many fans outright reject the showrunners assertion it's a Prime Continuity series. Reports are that Star Trek: Picard is following suit, aesthetically and in terms of content, so that show is likely to be a massive disappointment as well. My good friend, you've never heard of The Worf Effect? (Named in honor of the TNG writers' habit of showing any new threat is truly a threat by having them kick Worf's ass.) You have no idea how much a lot of Trekkies envy you for that. Star Trek V was a train wreck, basically made to satisfy a contractual obligation to Shatner that he would get anything Nimoy got after Nimoy got to write and direct Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home. The whole premise of the Enterprise being hijacked by a rogue Vulcan on a mission to find god, who turns out to be a malevolent alien that Kirk then fights and beats, was pretty absurd... made worse by the knowledge that it was Shatner's "take that" at televangelists. Yes, Spock's brother is Shatner's take on a space televangelist, which I suppose set the pattern for Spock's siblings to be horrible people.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... sh*t, he's right. Not gonna lie, a well-made Dark Eldar kabalite warrior or a Necron Phaeron would open my wallet right up.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't every one of Sharon's tracks by a different performer? That'd make it rather difficult/expensive.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, its box office take was pretty unremarkable. I dunno, they could always take the same approach that the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch took to deal with the last few arcs of the series. "It was a lame cover story for something else" was a great way to take the piss out of it. Same. "All Good Things" was a surprisingly tight series finale that didn't really require following up on. Generations was a weak film that really didn't deliver on what it promised vis a vis passing the torch from the TOS to TNG crew, and the Enterprise getting Worf'd by a century-old Bird of Prey was downright comical. First Contact was 50% hilarious classic Trek time travel episode and 50% bad sci-fi zombie flick that ruined the Borg by giving the faceless an easily-related-to face. Insurrection... exists. Nemesis was a terrible fanfic that somehow slipped the net, with the evil twins and overpowered fanboyish uber-ship and a lot of really weak gags. Nothing will ever be quite as incandescently awful as Star Trek V: the Final Frontier, but Insurrection, First Contact, the J.J. Abrams movies, and Discovery are all strong contenders for second place.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it'd be downright criminal considering that Jean-Luc Picard spent seven seasons and four movies as Starfleet's paragon of virtue. He's the only Starfleet captain thus far who never really compromised himself in any way. Just so long as we don't have to watch Patrick Stewart lose another fistfight to a man in a rainbow pleather onesie again...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Young Luke was... there are two key differences between what we saw with Luke Skywalker and what we're allegedly going to see with Jean-Luc Picard: Time and Maturity. Luke Skywalker c. A New Hope was a painfully naive and sheltered 19 year old kid hopped up on adrenaline and idealism. He was all of about 22 or 23 when the Empire fell. He did 30 years of growing up in the real world away from the sheltering influence of his aunt and uncle between Return of the Jedi and The Last Jedi and saw plenty of things to make him cynical and defeatist in that time. He saw the enemy he and his friends gave so much to defeat come right back like nothing had happened while he was powerless to stop them... and then had years to dwell on having not only directly caused the rise of the dark side he'd thought defeated but having ensured it rose stronger than before. It's no surprise that the naive young man who believed so firmly in the triumph of light over darkness and a heroic destiny would be so badly broken by seeing everything he'd worked for fall apart in such short order. Jean-Luc Picard c. The Next Generation "Encounter at Farpoint" was a 59 year old, thoroughly seasoned, Federation Starfleet captain with 31 years of starship command experience and combat service in the Cardassian border wars under his belt. He was under no illusions about the galaxy's ability to be a random, occasionally cruel, place full of injustices and worse. By the time of Star Trek: Nemesis he was 74, with 46 years of command to his name and had seen the worst the galaxy had to offer courtesy of the Cardassians, Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Dominion, Son'a, and various corrupt Starfleet officers, and weathered it all without sacrificing his belief in the Federation's values or his explorer's soul. That's why Luke's characterization in The Last Jedi is NOT a betrayal of the character... but why a Jean-Luc Picard who has left Starfleet to head up Section 31 WOULD be a betrayal of his character. You want to judge Luke's mature self based on how he behaved when he was a rash youth who'd never truly been tested. By contrast, Jean-Luc Picard is someone we were introduced to after he had already weathered many tests of strength and character, and weathered many more in the parts of his life we got to see. "Into exile I must go. Failed, I have." - Yoda What long game? Yoda and Obi-wan f*cked off with no plan beyond saving their own hides and keeping Vader from finding his children. Obi-wan's ghost had to browbeat Yoda into training Luke. Pretty much the same thing Luke did, just Luke didn't have to wait as long. So Yoda's consistent. He spent almost twenty years hiding out on a remote planet until a potential student showed up, and even then he refused to teach him until a ghost showed up to twist his arm. What we've heard is that he's supposed to be the head of Section 31. Given the rogues he's slumming with, it sounds like he's in the thick of it doing morally questionable sh*t that the Jean-Luc Picard we know would've flipped his sh*t about.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It seems a safe bet that, if the Ultrasmurf sells well, they'll move on to the other most popular chapters like the Space Wolves and Blood Angels for paintjobs if nothing else. I'd still like a Beakie though. If they do 'em in the same scale, sure.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    If nothing else, it's one area where Chiba excelled himself... not only working out how much power it'd take to produce the amount of thrust the VF-1 needs in space, but how fast it'd burn through its fuel doing so. One fan theory posed by the doujinshi circle FANKY Publishing that I thought was quite sensible was that the large silver "blisters" on the sides of Zentradi warships are high-capacity fuel tanks not dissimilar to the external fuel tanks that officially exist on the Guantanamo-class. It's something I've been meaning to look into to see if there was any official basis for it.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, about all we know is that it's a thing... and we only have that from the line art of the overhead shot of the hangar on Vrlitwhai's ship in "Blind Game" from page 89 of This is Animation: Macross Vol.1.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... oh f*ck no. I can't believe I have to say this, but that sounds substantially worse than Star Trek: Discovery. The Star Trek fandom still largely despises Wesley Crusher. Even in reruns, ratings clearly show that episodes with Wesley Crusher have significantly lower ratings than those without him. Wil Wheaton's own stock only rose because he made the hate work for him by candidly admitting that he fully understood why the fans hate Wesley and that he hated Wesley too. (Even the knowledge that it was Gene Roddenberry's executive meddling that made Wesley a Marty Stu hasn't tempered the fandom's loathing for Wesley.) Unless something changed recently, the Star Trek fandom doesn't have a lot of use for The Big Bang Theory either given its use of Star Trek fandom as shorthand for being a socially dysfunctional ass. That's expensive, and CBS seems to be rapidly running out of money to keep Star Trek moving between Discovery generating near-zero licensing revenue, Star Trek: Picard drawing a big fat zero from the licensees, and Netflix passing on Star Trek: Picard altogether. Star Trek was doing woke crap decades before "woke" was even a thing. CBS's problem is that they let Star Trek: Discovery prioritize demonstrating how "woke" it was over literally everything else in the show... like creating engaging characters, telling an actual story, etc. They'd be fine if they'd just stick to the "woke" approach that worked so well for every previous Star Trek show: anvilicious Aesops in allegorical morality plots like TOS's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and "The Omega Glory", TNG's "The Drumhead" and "The Outcast", DS9's "In The Hands of the Prophets" and "Past Tense", VOY's entire schtick with the Maalon, or ENT's Pa'nar syndrome AIDS allegory and "Chosen Realm". Granted, past Trek has missed as often as it's hit with that kind of Aesop (Voyager mostly missed) but it goes down a lot easier when they're not doing a little victory dance about how progressive they are having a black woman main character while completely forgetting to not make her the worst human being in Star Trek so far who wasn't from the mirror universe. (That, I swear, was Discovery's one moment of self-awareness... having to go to the mirror universe and dial up its evilness to 11 just so Burnham and co. would seem like a lighter shade of grey, and then have her worry that she's fitting in too well.) Disney made Skywalker do exactly what the previous generation of Jedi masters did when they screwed up and led the dark side come to power... so it wasn't exactly what you'd call unreasonable or out of character. (They weren't terribly subtle about it either, bringing Yoda along to chastise him for stealing his bit.) What CBS has done to Star Trek is way, WAY worse... they took a high-concept intellectual sci-fi series in which humanity had transcended such petty things as racism, sexism, and petty warmongering and turned it into a lowbrow action series about a racist warmonger and garnished it with huge helpings of misandry.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The captions read: 1st Squadron S-type Major Roy Focker (the skull and crossbones) 2nd Squadron S-type Major Kabiru Hajadin (the eagle with the big red eye) 1st Squadron A-type Warrant Officer Nguyen Som Dok (the horned skull) 4th Squadron A-type Sergeant Mario Frosini (the demon?) 3rd Squadron A-type Warrant Officer Tagan Kinba (the hornet) 4th Squadron J-type Captain Georg Schmidt (the blue dragon) They appear to be markings for individual pilots, rather than unit markings.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's stated a number of times that the Vajra's abilities are on par or better than the typical 5th Generation VF's. It's also possible that they were afraid of encouraging the Vajra to change up their tactics in response to the NUNS changing up its own. The Vajra may be cheating the whole g-forces issue, given that they get around using reactionless flight via gravity manipulation instead of by thrust... their tails are one big gravity controller.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    They don't specify how.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* The bad news just keeps coming. Reports from the usually-reliable CBS insiders allege that negotiations with the licensees have well and truly broken down, with no takers for the merchandising rights to Star Trek: Picard. Amazon is also reported to be putting up significantly less money for Star Trek: Picard than Netflix was for Star Trek: Discovery's season one and two in exchange for the international rights to the show, so there'll likely be a sharp dip in the overall quality of the production. The news that Netflix officially passed on Star Trek: Picard is bad news for Star Trek: Discovery too... CBS has confirmed that they renewed Star Trek: Discovery for a third season, but Netflix hasn't (yet). The series could see major cutbacks or even be canceled should they decide they're going to scale back their funding of the series or withdraw entirely. They've got the international rights to the show, so if CBS decides to plow ahead without them they can't distribute outside of the US and Canada.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well... long story short, it's an aggressor aircraft for combat training. Long story not-so-short... after the Macross Frontier fleet's local New UN Forces got their clocks cleaned a few times by the Vajra in March of 2059, one of the many measures they took to improve their readiness was to use the combat data they'd collected to start Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT) of their VF-171 pilots against simulated Vajra foes. To facilitate this, four VF-25A/MF25 Messiahs were modified to reproduce the Vajra's maneuvering characteristics and designated VF-25VJ "Vajra Aggressor" to serve as Vajra stand-ins. The four VF-25VJ Vajra Aggressors were assigned to the fleet's 6th Combat Training Squadron "Red Bugs" to serve as DACT opponents for the fleet's VF-171 pilots. Once the Vajra realized the NUNS started adapting to their normal maneuvers they started mixing it up, and the VF-25VJs were further modified to replicate the Vajra's fold wave patterns to also serve as aircraft for anti-Vajra ECM/ECCM training. The training itself proved to be too dangerous, and the four VF-25VJ airframes were eventually returned to their original VF-25A/MF25 specification.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Just when you think the Macross Galaxy fleet couldn't get any creepier or more horrifying... I was skimming a Macross Frontier short story titled Wired Warrior, and one of the Galaxy fleet soldiers involved in testing the YF-27-3 Shahar-M one-ups Maris Stella and Project Stella for creepiest unethical Macross Galaxy fleet project. Greenwich Meridian is a prototype bioroid, and if I'm reading this right her brain isn't synthetic... it's human grey matter which was salvaged from the corpse of a Macross Galaxy corporate army pilot who'd died in battle with a new artificial personality installed on it. Meridian 01 is basically a cyber-zombie. It's so distasteful even the normally unflappable Brera is disgusted by it, and cremates Meridian after she's killed in battle.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Sure, the problem is the other half are filled with untreated sewage, hospital waste, and depleted uranium... and we're watching the train wreck in super-slow motion, so it's taking forever for the last bits of shrapnel to finally come down. After all the crap this franchise has put him through, anyone would. Game of Thrones was actually good for a good while there... so its fans being livid over what it's devolved into is a lot more understandable than, say, expecting quality from a franchise that's known for little else besides epic failure.
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