Ah, the true predecessors of bumpy-forehead aliens!

I was hoping that SNW would focus on Pike and his crew and less on the legacy characters.

But it seems Goldsman has had his ideas about it since the early 1970s and he’s fulfilling his fan dreams, as an EP and writer, of filling in the backstories of the characters he and we love. I can’t naysay that and it certainly sold the suits on 5 seasons of an excellent show.

We have to keep in mind that we’ve only seen 20 of 46 episodes, less than half the full run.

I believe that the new benchmark for selling a licence for reruns on other streamers and linear has dropped from over 70 episodes to a bit over 40 based on various industry reports. So this definitely puts SNW above that threshold.

This does raise the question though whether there is a plan to morph this into some kind of TOS continuation past year 5 and TAS.

So a half season + a one-hour series finale?

Having only 5 seasons seems the new normal since they haven’t been able to actually produce one season per calendar year and actors’ contracts run 7 years.

But having a short season seems weird, like some kind of negotiated compromise.

This is just going to feed the ‘Kurtzman is done when his contract expires …’ speculation.

News flash: the original TOS gold shirts were green but the film processing didn’t give us that. Somehow that specific alternate tunic fabric came out on film closer to the actual fabric colour.

I would argue that a lot of the computational based problem solving , from middle school through early undergraduate years, focused on topics historically oriented to boys’ interests, aren’t a good measure of innate math talent either.

But those have historically left a lot of female students behind.

Male or female, most students are really looking to get through math requirements with plug-and-chug replication of algorithms to get to an answer - not genuine problem solving or abstraction. However, being able to reproduce an answer on a very slightly different problem, or just one with different numbers to plug in, does very little towards using mathematical as a means to model problems independently and find solutions.

Now I wish I had preordered Spock.

The one I want most is Number One but it would have been great to have the set.

Should we start a pool?

That one was a budget shortfall actually.

One of the things in the interview, that’s super interesting, is that the original script had a scene that would have made it absolutely unequivocal that Hemmer was killed.

And it was shot, with some significant Sfx challenges.

The interviewers asked Bruce if there were any scenes left in the cutting room floor and he responded that there was.

:::The actor was in harness for a falling scene in which he would have been fighting off young Gorn. He had been pleased to have the opportunity to have a heroic on-screen:::

But the scene was cut despite it being challenging production-wise, all the more so with a blind actor in prosthetics.

So, one has to wonder if the showrunners decided to keep the door open for Hemmer to return…

My reaction precisely.

But who knows, it may be wonderful.

And I’m always ready to champion more animated Trek.

As a woman older than you, with a mother and aunts of Lwaxana’s age, I found it painfully misogynistic.

All the more so because Picard (and Roddenberry himself) were continually chasing after younger women and nothing was made of it.

I actually am reconciled to Lwaxana and love the much-reviled episode ‘Cost of Living’ but the amount of continuing ridicule and hate she gets from younger male fans drives home the misogyny.

Meanwhile they’re all cool with Picard with Vash.

More likely not catching the predictive spelling.

It’s edited.

But Stewart’s preferences for women generations younger that he is are well established and very public. As are his interventions to give Picard younger love interests right up to the final scene.

I give credit to Majel Barrett credit for leaning into the character and script. It’s more bearable knowing she was likely making Patrick Stewart uncomfortable too!

Every show has a writer’s ‘bible’ that describes the backstory and main characters.

In the case of Lwaxana, a character written for Majel Barret Roddenberry’s wife, some fairly misogynistic stereotypes of middle aged women were laid out for the writers.

Carating the underlying sexism in the writers’ bible for Lwaxana’s character is not a way to make mothers feel appreciated.

Especially, when a lot of the joke was that she was chasing Picard - who avoided women who were mothers mainly due to his actor’s aversion to women his own age.

Picard was an age appropriate match for both Lwaxana and Beverly, both mothers.

Instead, due to Patrick Stewart’s interventions, we got Picard chasing after his much younger real life romantic interest who played Vash, and more recently Stewart’s attempts to shoe-horn in his very much younger wife into a closing scene for Picard.

I don’t think you needed [sic], just the comma that StarTrek.com omitted.

So, this is a big reveal - the scenario is a planet that has not been but now is a part of the Federation.

The viewpoint is civilian.

The resort workplace setting, like the old Loveboat or Fantasy Island, means that anyone can come by as the guest star.

The production values are sufficiently high that it makes me think it might actually be from an episode to come.

I’m flabbergasted. There’s an astonishing amount of erasure in that panel.

How about ?

As a Relaunch Litverse fan, I really liked the introduction of the competing Typhon Pact as a way to bring in a number of the less profiled species.

Having a different kind of interstellar government from the Federation in a Cold War rivalry for planets and civilizations was an interesting backdrop for the entire era. Creating an opponent that brought together a number of the less known species including the Breen, Tzenkethi, Tholians, Gorn as well as remnants of the Romulan Empire was inspired.

We never got to see as much of the Typhon Pact in the books as I would have liked. The concept though was inspired and one that would fit well in the early 25th century portrayed in Picard.

As for the Sheliak, the novelverse has them in conflict with the Breen for additional complexity.

The newest era of Trek hasn’t hesitated to integrate some of the more successful experiments from the novels, including Una’s name and Illyrian genetic modifications. The Typhon Pact of the Litverse has a lot to offer without being a direct competitor to the world building since Nemesis.