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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Not really... all five of Xaos's "Siegfried" custom VF-31's have the same specs and equipment barring the different monitor turrets. On paper, they allegedly have different operational roles but nothing in their specs or equipment actually bear out those differences except in Chuck's case. Arad's VF-31S is said to be (as expected) a Command machine tuned to the limits of its performance. Messer's VF-31F is said to be a space superiority model optimized for atmospheric combat... which is kind of paradoxical if you think about it. Chuck's VF-31E is set up as an ELINT/AWACS aircraft. Mirage's VF-31C is said to be a "tactical support fighter" whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. It's said that it has command unit capabilities too, though technically that's just software that could be installed anywhere. Hayate's VF-31J is said to be a "space superority support" model, with no real indication given as to what THAT means either. In practice, all of them except Chuck's are used as dogfighters with no real sense of unit organization or different operational roles. In the comparison to the VF-25's used by SMS in Macross Frontier, it's worth remembering that the VF-25's we see are all production-intent variants from the VF-25's trial production lot. None of them have been customized. The VF-31's used by Xaos, however... the VF-31A type is production-intent, and because it has the ordnance container system it's meant to be a "one variant fits all" approach to mission equipment. The same single variant should sufice to fill any role by swapping out the modular container. Xaos customized five of the VF-31A's they were given to make the Siegfried type, and in so doing gave them cosmetic differences... but in practice it's still a jack-of-all-trades unit.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's really more a return to the show's baseline level. Up to the final episode, Part I was a disjointed mess that never established any kind of consistent narrative. It just jackknifed from one crisis to the next at breakneck pace with each being treated like it was the end of the world for two episodes before being either easily resolved by some never-before-mentioned bullsh*t or simply forgotten. We're just back to that... with the Part I climax ending up as the easily-resolved and almost forgotten event.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, The Witch from Mercury has drunkenly stumbled back onto the broadcast schedule and vomited up another messy, poorly-written excuse for an episode that can't seem to make up its mind if it wants to pick up where Part I left off or not. All in all, the episode is disjointed to the point that it feels like a clipshow from three or four different episodes running in parallel. I'm not sure what's more off-putting... the writing's inability to maintain anything like a consistent tone or reasonable pacing, or the way everyone is just SUPER cool about Suletta having straight-up killed a dude in the most grusome manner possible two weeks ago.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Picard's whole thing with these rogue Founders doesn't really make a ton of sense if you think about it. That Founders were captured during the Dominion War and subjected to study is, on its own, pretty reasonable and even Section 31's involvement in it makes sense since they'd have had to experiment on someone to prove out their nasty little anti-Changeling doomsday virus. That the experimentation somehow made them better shapeshifters doesn't make all that much sense since their supposed new capabilities are things they were already capable of back in Deep Space Nine. Odo was pretty clear from the outset that the Founders are better (or more experienced/proficient) shapeshifters than him and that their shapeshifting ability was good enough to fool even Starfleet sensors. Likewise, the Martok Changeling was able to pass multiple blood screenings without issue prior to being outed and gunned down on Ty'gokor. Section 31's experimentation allegedly made Vadic and her ilk better shapeshifters, but they never address how and the only appreciable differences from the Founders as they were during Deep Space Nine are all negatives: They need to periodically return to their liquid state to regenerate, and if they don't they'll gradually lose control over their shape anyway with visible physical deterioration. This limitation was previously unique to Odo. They can be stabbed with injurious or even incapacitating effect. They can be vaporized with a single phaser discharge, when they were previously shown tanking dozens of disruptor blasts. (Barring Mirror Odo, who exploded when struck with a kill shot from a Bajoran hand phaser, presumably also on Odo's inexperience as a shapeshifter.) The most coherent explanation we can assume is that they discovered, during that experimentation, that simulating the full internal anatomy of a living being instead of just doing the outer appearance and lifeform readings let them evade detection by anti-Changeling countermeasures at the cost of being way more draining to carry off. That'd make it not so much an improvement in their abilities as a dangerous forbidden technique.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Possibly - and I would be endlessly amused if it were the case - a dig at Star Trek: Picard's own merchandising. The Star Trek wine collection. The novelty bottles modeled on various noteworthy liquor bottles from Star Trek shows make rather nice collectibles but the actual wine therein is unmistakably the cheap stuff. Some of it was passable, but a lot of it wasn't. It reviewed poorly, even in publicity puff pieces with Picard cast members involved. Like the wine tasting and review with John de Lancie, where the "Cardassian Kanar" red wine blend was described as something that could be mistaken for tapwater with wine essence added. That is pretty close to murder with malice when it comes to a wine review. I'm no wine snob and certainly no vintner, but AFAIK there are a large number of factors contributing to that including the type and quality of fruit used, the acidity, the alcohol content, how long it aged, the balance of flavors, the quality and consistency of the barrels, etc. (I have an aunt who makes wine, I only narrowly staved off a multi-hour lecture.) The Star Trek wine collection compared unfavorably (IMO) to the products of my local winery, and my home state isn't exactly well-known for its wine.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno what to tell you there, but almost all of the discussion of Rey that I saw when the movies were coming out was negative. Filthy casual that I am, a lot of that was filtered through friends who are more avid consumers of Star Wars media so maybe? I've gotten reamed a few times in discussions for suggesting Rey was a missed opportunity to defy the usual "Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny" malarkey and have her just be the "nobody from nowhere" that she claimed to be while still saving the day. Y'know, saving the day because she's got principles and chose to stand against tyranny instead of being railroaded into it by Destiny. But yeah my key takeway from all that was definitely that fans hated her... and I'm seeing a LOT of that on social media right now, which is why I mentioned it. That was pretty ****ed up. It's one thing for audiences to have a negative reaction to an actor because they played a villain so well that audiences can't help it (like the guys who played Draco Malfoy and Joffrey), it's quite another for a character to be in a subplot so obnoxious and unnecessary that audiences can't separate their dislike of it from their dislike of the actor.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    This feels like an appropriate response: All things considered, I'm surprised that The Powers That Be at Disney want to do another Star Wars movie with Rey. For a while there, I'd have sworn that she was competing with Jar-Jar Binks to be the single most hated character in Disney's Star Wars franchise. The 51.86% plummet in the box office take across her trilogy doesn't augur well for yet another outing with a character who has (not entirely unreasonably) been accused of being a Mary Sue. Disney can occasionally do a great job with Star Wars, but what I've seen has been far more miss than hit and far more dependent on fanservice than quality storytelling. Rogue One and Andor stand head and shoulders above the rest. Then again, I'm also a filthy casual and think the Jedi are far and away the most boring part of Star Wars. To me, there are few characters less relatable than bland ascentic space monks and evil-for-evil's sake space cultists wheeled helplessly from set piece to set piece on their way to a destined encounter with a preordained outcome because The Force Says So. A setup like that kind of denies that your protagonist or antagonist have free will or agency within the context of the story, and a boolean choice between objective good and objective evil leaves little to develop a character around. I'd rather see them put more effort into telling stories about the normal people of the galaxy who aren't simply puppets of The Force.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Oh Star Trek: Picard, it truly is impossible to underestimate you. "Surrender" has a fitting title, because this is clearly where Picard's showrunners and writers simply gave up and stopped even pretending they were trying. There's barely enough story here to fill the back of a cereal box, never mind ten episodes of a television series. It's just depressing.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I know the ones you mean... those have a Beware of Blast markings as if they were engine nozzles.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Poorly? I think that much was inevitable. This is less a narrative and more a string of poorly thought-out references and in-jokes driven by moon logic and garnished with a plethora of plot holes. A few moments of almost quality writing were unlikely to ever change this show's course away from the ending being another disappointing arse pull.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a while since I examined my DX VF-25s up close, but I'm fairly certain the two sets of six nozzles seen in the line art are actually present in the toy. They're hard to see due to being small, but those nozzles on the underside of the backplate are very much there.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It is, at least, acknowledged from a relatively early point in the franchise that the Zentradi's nature as a designer species based on the ancient Protoculture's own DNA resulted in some of them possessing unusual genetic traits as a legacy of the biotechnology engineered into them. It strikes me as unlikely... because the reason that giant Zentradi are not often seen in emigrant fleets and the reason giant Zentradi were banned on Earth are different. Giant Zentradi were banned on Earth because of the armed revolt in the late 2020s. The scarcity of giant Zentradi in emigrant fleets is presented as more of a resource problem, with the giants consuming exponentially more resources and space than a miclone on ships were space and resources are at a premium. Based on Sheryl's reaction, that the Frontier fleet emigrant ship Macross Frontier maintains a bioplant artificial ecosystem for resource recycling and has enough space and resources that it can spare enough of both for a permanent and luxurious giant Zentradi settlement is a highly conspicuous display of the Frontier fleet's incredible wealth.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Brings to mind an unanswered question from VOY "Author, Author". Do personality rights apply to holosuite/holodeck programs? As in, if someone makes a holoprogram and uses the likenesses of real people without their consent or potentially in an objectionable or defamatory manner, can the person depicted seek some kind of redress from the Federation or foreign court systems? The first two times we see this happen are in private use on TNG and the people depicted are offended but the offender receives no real consequences. On Voyager, it was done for commercial purposes with the Doctor's holo-novel that used the likenesses of the entire Voyager crew and it just kind of gets forgotten about in the brouhaha over the publisher denying the Doctor is legally the work's author. Picard is nothing if not defamatory in its relentless character assassination of Jean-Luc Picard and other former Enterprise crew...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They don't even stand out in that regard, considering the number of Humans in Macross with unusual hair colors like blue, purple, and pink. How much of that is simply anime doing what anime does and how much is people taking medication to change their hair color as Sheryl is indicated to do in Macross Frontier is not clear, but it seems skewed heavily towards the former since nobody seems to find the amazing technicolor hairstyles on display unusual or noteworthy. I can't quite see someone so straight-laced as Gamlin Kizaki dying his hair that interesting shade of lavender for aesthetics. Max had it in the original series, but for the sake of a terrible pun.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Zentradi and part-Zentradi are actually fairly common in postwar society... it's just that, as in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, many Zentradi and part-Zentradi miclones are all but indistinguishable from Humans even up close. It's even harder to pick them out of a crowd by the time of Plus and beyond since many of them are "peace children" who'd been born and raised after the First Space War, and have few or none of the culture-otaku tells that the First Space War veterans so often display. There's often little to no way to tell that someone's part-Zentradi without being told, or them having a conspicuously Zentradi surname like Elmo Kridanik. The First Space War-era veterans... well... they often give the game away with their unapologetic Earth culture-otaku behavior and tendency to do things like take Human names.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That would probably be wise, yes. I have no idea what goes on on that Fandom Wiki, but a lot of people seem to just put completely unsubstantiated fan theories there as if they were fact. This seems to happen a lot when characters have an unconventional appearance somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary. The closest Gamlin got to "raised by Zentradi" is having been a favored student of Milia's in the military academy.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, that is far and away the most likely outcome. Given how previous grimdark NuTrek shows have performed, I expect Picard's season three and series finale to stick the landing about as well as Wile E. Coyote usually does... As lame as that premise was when Enterprise did it, I'll happily accept it from Picard as long as it ends with "Computer, delete program." I swear, every one of these that drops I'm torn between wanting to say "Damage report!" and having the same feeling of irritated resignation everyone had hearing another one of Dukat's canned "Attention Bajoran workers" announcements from DS9 "Civil Defense".
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... and that's one of the major weaknesses in the writing of Star Trek: Picard's as a whole. Normally, Star Trek tries to humanize its antagonists. To give them a sympathetic or at least understandable motivation behind their actions so that they're not simply doing it "for teh evulz". There's nothing redeeming about Picard's antagonists. Season one's Zhat Vash are basically just the space Klan, season two has the Confederacy (which needs no explanation), a Dr. Soong motivated by nothing but his own self-aggrandizement, and the Borg, and season three has rogue Changelings who hate the Federation for *checks notes* not letting the Changelings destroy the Federation. As a final villain for Star Trek's most celebrated crew, they could and should have done a hell of a lot better than Vadic. Especially since she's basically doing a low-rent General Chang impression half the time and reminding the audience of a much better, much more developed Star Trek antagonist.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, that kind of moral myopia is 100% on-brand for a Founder and shows up consistently throughout Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Throughout Deep Space Nine, the Founders use the claim that all "solids" hate and fear them as an excuse to use their shapeshifting abilities to do things that are all but guaranteed to make people hate and fear them like... Abducting and either murdering or imprisoning people and replacing them with Changeling imposters. (DS9 "By Inferno's Light") Using stolen identities to infiltrate, destabilize, and subvert sovereign governments. (DS9 "Apocalypse Rising", DS9 "Homefront", DS9 "The Adversary") Executing terrorist attacks. (DS9 "Homefront") Attempting mass genocide. (DS9 "By Inferno's Light", DS9 "What You Leave Behind") Yet somehow, it never seems to occur to the Founders that their own overtly hostile actions might be the reason that "solids" supposedly hate and fear them. For a species that, at least by Odo's reckoning, has such a great affinity for seeking order and finding patterns they really seem to suck at spotting the rather clear and unambiguous causal link between how the Founders behave and how the rest of the galaxy sees them. Whether the majority of the Founders have had that long overdue Heel Realization after Odo rejoined the Great Link the way they did in the Relaunch Novelverse or not remains to be seen, but Vadic and her clique seem to be committed to villainy. Vadic and the other rogue Founders are definitely a-hole victims at best. Nobody deserves to be tortured, but the reason Vadic and her colleagues ended up imprisoned and in Section 31's hands in the first place was that they infiltrated the Federation on a mission to subvert its sovereign governments, enslave its people, and impose totalitarian autocratic rule over its territory. It's asking a bit much of the audience to muster up sympathy for the captured Founders knowing what their mission was and having seen them attempt genocide twice in the previous series they're referencing and heard them talk about their plans for a third genocide. Instead, Vadic feels like a rather hollow and pointless villain whose motivation seemingly goes no deeper than "How dare you capture and study me in order to prevent my people from exterminating your entire species the way we said we would". It also loses a certain something in that the offense she's mad about was carried out by a rogue intelligence service not an actual Federation agency. Section 31 doesn't answer to anybody, and they're rather vocal and showy about that for an agency that's not supposed to exist. It wasn't even the Federation that did it. Section 31 did it, and the Federation authorities just rolled with it once they found out because at that point there was no hope for any kind of diplomatic resolution. Any attempt by Federation medical authorities to research a cure would doubtless have been hampered by Section 31 sabotage in exactly the way that Dr. Bashir and Chief O'Brien predicted and exploited to capture Director Sloan.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... like Odo in DS9's final season, this is deteriorating rapidly. Come to that, I'm still not clear on why Picard's final season and its TNG cast reunion are set against a backdrop consisting almost exclusively of references to Deep Space Nine. The USS Enterprise presumably participated in the Dominion War at some point, but they were far from the center of events and had little-to-nothing to do with the Founders. If you're gonna have Jean-Luc Picard get the old crew back together, why waste it by having them fight some rando nobody's ever heard of or an enemy from another series that hasn't got any personal relevance for anyone except maybe Worf? They come out hard and fast with the continuity nods to non-TNG shows in this episode too... with Tuvok (now a Captain) and the Titan-A hiding out in the Chin'toka system where some of the bloodiest fighting in the Dominion War occurred during Deep Space Nine. In previous works, they had one... though it wasn't consistently enforced. When it was first mentioned in TAS, it was implied to be mandated differently based on the species of the officer in question. In 2270, it was set to 75 for humans. It seems to have possibly been raised a bit in the 2360s and beyond. Mark Jameson from TNG "Too Short a Season" was 85 and still on limited duty. Jean-Luc Picard was 82 when he retired for the first time, and was 96 when he retired the second time... admittedly from a glorified sinecure as chancellor of Starfleet Academy. Admiral Janeway would be 73 at the present time in Star Trek: Picard based on her stated age in "Endgame".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... I see Kurtzman et. al. are back to scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is a rescue from the same pile of perpetually-rejected series pitches that gave us Star Trek: Discovery's much-loathed third season and the incredible stupidity that is "The Burn". Star Trek's producers have been rejecting this one over and over again as unworkable since the 80's. They did try to explore the idea with a comic series, but it was very short-lived.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The bloodiest rivalry in Macross! Pineapple salad did in legendary ace Roy Focker, pineapple upside-down cake put Ozma Lee in the hospital, and pineapple took Arad Molders out of action before the final battle against Heimdall. With all the jokes about Messer being reassigned to delivery boy duty, one has to wonder if some deviant's pineapple pizza didn't get him in the end...
  23. Seto Kaiba
    They never got divorced. They separated for a short time, but reconciled during the events of Macross 7 and as of 2068 and Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! are explicitly still together. He even jokes that one of the major celebrity gossip rags has ranked him and Milia as the #1 celebrity couple most likely to break up for fifty consecutive years with every sign of good humor. EDIT: They were also explicitly still together in the Macross Frontier movie novelization, where they sortied together in VF-25s as part of the reinforcements arriving at the Vajra planet. Based on what Max says in Absolute Live!!!!!!, yes.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Pilots vs. Pineapple... the most enduring rivalry in Macross.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that's on the audience so much as the new showrunners. After Enterprise was cancelled and the relaunch novelverse shouldered the role of moving the Star Trek story forward, new storylines that featured Section 31 consistently made the organization out to be unrepentantly villainous and utterly repellant to any principled character. The closest they get to not being completely abhorrent are one storyline in the ENT relaunch and one in the TNG/DS9 relaunch where a main character joins the organization to prevent game-changing technology from falling into the hands of an enemy power. In even those cases, that cooperation is in the name of infiltrating the organization for the protagonists to obtain enough information to dismantle the organization... something that they technically succeed in doing the second time.) It wasn't until Discovery that the story started reinventing Section 31 as heroic or antiheroes instead of well-intentioned extremists and dangerous villains. Apparently the idea was just too much for edgelords like Kurtzman to resist.
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