This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It’s possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.

Aside: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don’t need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot while I’ve been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off “fun” episode in DS9 - this past week was “Our Man Bashir” which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren’t really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that’s much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock’s vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that’s about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there’s missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn’t even really there, so that’s a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La’ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.

I wasn’t expecting another “fun” episode. I enjoyed it. The campy awfulness of the old TV set design and costumes was spot on.

Spock-La’an works well, I want to see more of it. It’s difficult to find a lot of plot progress in comedy eps, but pushing their relationship forward a bit is nice. I really hope it goes somewhere meaningful, but this being a prequel, I guess just how far it could go is limited, unless they’re willing to diverge off canon.

Hollywood AR walls don’t hold anything against a holodeck, but we’re getting there. It’s cases like this that make me think I wouldn’t enjoy one for real though, I’d just spend all my time getting paranoid. And did La’an get permission from everyone to use their patterns?

This earlier holodeck is lacking in any kind of true failsafe and is relying on the simulation program alone to not hurt people. Later on the enterprise, they never really figured that out. Scotty should have wrote his notes on safety much bigger than footnotes.

The writing staff must have been using this episode to vent their frustrations of the TV industry. When they were writing it, I wonder if they knew yet they had a confirmed 5 seasons, or if this was written during a hiatus.

I guess the takeaway message from this episode is “you can always rely on those around you”. Except when they’re holographic murder simulations, then all bets are off.

I just finished Hail Mary Project which I started last week - really enjoyed it. It scratched a perfect itch for some optimistic sci-fi.

The music is disappointing in this one because until now Gold has done a pretty good job. The bit you point out with the chords stood out to me. It did sound like there was an error in processing. Had it been at one peak moment, say a pivotal realisation, it might have been a good way to highlight things are going wrong. But it just seems to happen randomly. The rest of the score is kind of bland this episode.

This is a really nice episode. Not the best but definitely above average. It’s a very human one - these are the ones where usually RTD excels, so it’s interesting to see it was written by someone else.

The premise is a very natural one to imagine when you’ve got a time machine. Of course it leads to classic time travel shenanigans - the doctor ends up very upset at what rose has done, which is understandable, but I think he is being a bit unfair. This is rose, and much of the modern audience’s, first real experience with a paradox. The doctor could have done a better job of explaining the stakes instead of leaving an emotionally struggling person to witness their own parent’s death. Throughout this episode he keeps his very frank and pointed style of talking, but he starts being the emotional support for much of the human cast present, which is a great way of showing his heart starting to grow after he has been so pessimistic since we met him. The moment when he is standing up in front, like a priest preaching to his flock, is an especially nice image.

Rose’s dad seems to really have struggled in life. Pete is really smart - he figures out the reality of whats happening fairly quickly, but he seems to struggle socially. He obviously has his own problems with confidence and relationships, and jackie really isn’t helping. She goes on a few tirades here, but its never clear if what she is saying is accurate or whether that’s just her viewpoint. The whole trip seems to break rose’s interpretation of her dad, and that’s possibly the bigger message to take away from this episode than the paradox: If you time travel, you might find out things that break your idealised version of the world.

The tardis losing its inside is a really great way to demonstrate what is happening, and how the tardis itself works. It reminds me of an old tom baker explanation which I really like: https://youtu.be/JJ01T3_E6YQ?t=48. The episode also serves as an example of a fixed point in time - Rose’s dad has to die, so she can be raised in a certain way with her mum, so she can meet the doctor and do everything else she needs to.

The reaper designs are really nice. The flying monster motif makes a reapparance in the next season, and gargoyles get a brief mention in Blink. The gothic image is one that doesn’t appear so often in popular sci-fi so it’s nice to see used here, especially against the backdrop of the church. The monster designs looks pretty good even if the texturing and animation is a little janky. As far as beings in charge of timeline discrepancies go, they are more interesting than the weird bonemonsters from the most recent series finale.

Extras:

• I forgot about the mickey joke - that was fun
• The doctor mentions the isle of wight in 1987, I had to look this reference up. There was a massive storm back then that hit the south of england really badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1987
• The adults all scream when the aliens are attacking. In the playground none of the kids scream when the same happens. I wonder if that was an intentional choice or if someone at BBC standards had an issue with a bunch of children screaming as they died

I think I am starting to lean towards ebooks for the convenience when reading novels and prosey nonfiction.

However for reference books a physical thing is easier to flip through, and for anything with illustrations, physical still has better quality.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn’t mention steam or valve. I don’t know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they’ve explained it very badly.

What happens when anti-porn organisations like Collective Shout go after the currency exchanges?

Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on. I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.

This could have been a bottle episode and might have been better for it. The plant was a macguffin that could have been anything. A molecule on some random asteroid could have served the same purpose and allowed the plot to continue mostly unchanged.

Maybe without the zombies that would have given more time for focusing on discussion around what the characters are feeling - More of ortega’s struggle; something better than spock’s mind meld which seems to serve as nothing more than foreshadowing for something that’s going to be said out loud a few minutes later anyway.

If the writers were going to use zombies in a story, then they should actually use them as part of the plot.

This was an ok episode. Very character focused rather than sci-fi.

Everyone should recognise what is happening with ortegas, they really shouldn’t be letting her do anything until its figured out, nevermind chain of command training. There must be something seriously wrong with starfleet’s psych evals if she had one and they didn’t spot this.

Last week I did wonder if the Gorn DNA was going to cause problems, and here we are going to get a… hybridisation of some sort. I wonder where this is going to go - hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went. We know Pike must suffer, and I wonder if he is going to have to deal with losing Batel altogether on top of everything else. I wonder if she is going to have to deal with heightened violent emotions, as the mind meld suggested, and end up having to be “dealt with” in a permanent way.

Zombies. M’benga’s “don’t call them that” was hilarious - Zombies in Star Trek just feels kind of wrong. They were alright, but, it’s zombies. The fact that it came from genetic modification with plants reminds me a bit of Cordyceps which has featured in many other zombie stories. Something that did bug me is M’benga is a medical doctor, and the best mask he could bring was some sort of fabric wrap? Do they not have surgical masks or M95 masks in the future? I wondered if the story could have been about saving the infected, maybe a “do I have to make the choice of cutting off this limb to save someone” moral quandry. The closest we got to that was the klingon that got bit and immediately vaporised. Zombies were kind of just set dressing / a mechanic to keep the characters moving forwards.

A running theme in this episode seems to be the characters falling out of their comfort zones. For all but Scotty, this seems to leave them worse off than when they started. It’s good to see him slowly making progress after being thrown in the deep end.

Misc notes:

• The gravity loss shot was very nicely done.
• For all that I didn’t like the zombies I did like their design. There was one bit where one got stepped on the head and it slowly deflated, like it was made of plant material.
• With all the AR wall stuff, I liked the actors having some set they could really interact with.
• The viewscreen has a “rear view mirror” display :) why isn’t that always visible in the corner?

My point was that brave’s solution, like Signal’s, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don’t want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.

I picked up Project Hail Mary from the library this week. Only just started but I’m enjoying it so far.

They haven’t blocked the windows feature, they’re using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

I agree that this episode seems to be pushing more on the 9-Rose relationship than it ought to. It really doesn’t feel like they work as anything other than companionship between two people that have lost their place in their respective worlds.

I am not a fan of this episode. It has some really great plot points and themes but the whole episode fails to bring them together in a satisfying way, and most of the guest characters aren’t really useful.

Simon Pegg, in my mind, made for an OK editor, but this story would have been great with him as the Editor-In-Chief. I don’t see why we needed an alien with an unpronounceable name and a CGI design that has aged incredibly poorly. Humans are perfectly capable of being awful to each other without outside intervention, and here was an opportunity to play that up. Pegg could have been great as an evil mastermind instead of a mere henchman.

With Adam, I’m confused. Rose has changed her look since the last ep, and the way they act in the beginning seems to suggest some time has passed since they left the museum. But then it doesn’t appear that time has passed at all because Adam feigns feeling uneasy and wants to be alone. He leaves at the end of this episode with a character arc so unsatisfying it might be more accurate to say he didn’t have one at all. The doctor does something incredibly nonsensical and leaves him, a known alien artefact profiteer, with the stuff installed in him, even though he makes a show of erasing the phone answering machine. Despite trying to scare him, he would obviously have the ability to analyse, pilfer, and sell what is in him. Nothing about his character makes any sense.

Cathica and Suki are alright, but I am not sure they really did anything of much consequence, excepting cathica jumping in right at the very end.

The standout guest for me here is Tamsin Grieg as the sales medic. I forgot she was ever in DW. A future where they upsell medical treatment like they would options in a car is freaky, even down to them installing extras that are on offer without even asking. Her creepy performance really sells how weird it all is.

I don’t like the whole body horror “you can see inside your brain” stuff, even with the dated CGI. Gives me the ick. And also makes no sense - if you have a chip, why on earth do you need trepanning other than to shock the viewers?

Which brings me to the themes and major plot points. We have:

• future medical horror show (used better in the next series with 10)
• workplace political drama,
• journalism and its role in politics (I think this alone should have been the plot),
• conspiracies vs freedom fighters,
• privacy rights (very perceptive in ~2000),
• digital money and worker scrip,
• racism (RTD re-used this “you don’t see racism” idea to much better effect in Gatwa’s series); Just to name a few. If the episode had focused more on just one of these that would have been better.

The design of the station itself is confusing, even if the CGI visuals and set design are nice. It has spinny bits, but because they’re always in the central column it clearly has artificial mavity, so why does it need the spinny bits‽ I also don’t rally understand why they needed the “it’s really hot” ventilation plot point - usually larger animals tend to have a lower metabolism, not higher, and the editor was going to invite the doctor up anyway. And you don’t ventilate the get rid of heat in space, you radiate it.

As usual I enjoyed the score, from classic themes to the upbeat accompaniment during the tourism scene early in the episode, and the later conspiratorial detective melody.

The only thing that really happens of any note here is the perhaps unnecessary setup for the series finale, and a deepening of 9 and Rose’s relationship, which could have easily happened in any scenario.

My theory - M’benga’s daughter had a degenerative disease and her pattern was stable enough to put into the buffer.

But Batel’s problem is she has loads of living Gorn inside her, and so has Gorn DNA in very close proximity to her own. At one point they even say they’re co-dependent on each other. They probably didn’t want to end up with a “The Fly”/Tuvix situation.

This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel’s relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

• Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La’an will spot this and help out.
• Una mentions a “couple of litres” of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because “a couple of litres” is a lot.
• Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
• John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
• Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it’s canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
• While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov’s gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

I take issue with this article using the language “lagging behind in the use of generative AI”. That language seems to imply there is something wrong in this behaviour.

Good idea - if you also cap car speeds at 15mph