Lets just hope they don't mean the "I liked it before it got woke" jerkwads.

Star Trek on Laserdisc

*Available in TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and theatrical release flavors.

It's guaranteed very few Star Trek fans have ever seen these, they are as hard to find as it gets. What we have here is Star Trek on a fully analog video format that isn't plagued by digital artifacts found on streaming platforms and early DVD releases (such as the DS9/VOY releases), nor does it have any of the quality issues found with VHS tape.

The elephant in the room here is cost, so don't go searching Ebay/ZenMarket just yet. As with most analog hifi things, you have to spend a lot to get high quality results. Laserdisc is no exception, and it's even worse because of the rarity of the discs and the equipment all having antique status.

That being said, in my quest to transport myself back to the 1990's, I have amassed enough equipment and specialty gear to capture Laserdiscs in stupidly high quality, and have uploaded the results for normal people to see. Now the preferred way to watch these is in their native resolution with a high end LD player hooked directly to a retro Trinitron CRT or Plasma TV, but these direct disc captures will be the best possible viewing method on modern display devices.

Voyager LD Sample YT -- VOY LD Sample Direct Download

DS9 LD Sample YT -- DS9 LD Sample Direct Download

Hardware used for capture:

• Pioneer CLD-D704
• Domesday Duplicator
• Windows PC (i9-10900k/RTX-3080/32GB RAM)

Software used for processing:

• ld-decode
• Hybrid + Vapoursynth
• Premiere Pro
• Audition
• Topaz

Yesterday a friend and I got together to play board games, including and we both got our first opportunity to play the Star Trek: Away Missions tactical miniatures board game published by Gale Force 9.

So, let's talk about it!

Concept:

Away Missions is a tactical miniatures game, themed around dustbuster clubs being sent into the wreckage in the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359, to recover intel. The base game comes with a Starfleet away team made up of Riker, Shelby, Data, and Worf, and Locutus' Borg Unimatrix featuring Locutus himself and five drones.

There are also four expansions currently:
    • Gowon and three other Klingon warriors
    • Sela and four person Romulan infiltration team
    • The Duras sisters with three other Klingons
    • Picard, Doctor Crusher, Troi, Geordi, and Wesley

Each dustbuster club has it's own unique set of core missions to choose from, and then each faction has additional missions that can be performed during the game as well.
 

Components:

• The assimilated elephant in the room for a lot of people is probably going to be the miniatures. The design of them is very stylized and cartoonish; large heads and chucky bodies. Personally I like them the design, but I've seen plenty of people talking about the game saying that the miniatures are too great a stumbling block for them. To each their own.

I do think the miniature design makes the characters fairly distinctive. They come unpainted, but for the Starfleet characters at least, it would have been very difficult to confuse which one was which. Despite each sculpt having a unique pose and details, the Borg drones are a bit more difficult to tell apart. Each miniature has the character's name in raised letters on the back, but it isn't the easiest thing to read.

• In addition to miniatures, each character had a cardboard sheet representing their abilities, including little holes to accommodate the health pegs. These seem pretty good, if perhaps a bit larger than necessary. The modular board for the game already takes up quite a bit of table real estate, so it would be nice if if these character sheets were a bit smaller.

• The plastic health pegs I mentioned are fine, and kind of a neat weigh to implement health tracking in the game. The only complaint would be that while the rules do talk about playing up to four players, there's not enough pegs to accommodate that many characters. The expansion boxes don't come with extra pegs for the new characters, either.

• The various cardboard tokens are...fine. I like that they're not inexplicably in the shape of Starfleet deltas or what have you like some other Trek board games, but most of them are just a bit of cardboard with a word on it. Purely functional, and it would nice to have it spiced up a little bit.

• Each faction has two decks of cards: missions and support. The card backs for the decks feature of their faction's emblem, so you can place them beside one another to make the whole. That's neat. The cards are readable and the language on all the ones I looked at was fairly clear. I've never been a fan of using stills from movie or television show as art in a game, but I understand why game publishers do it with licenced products.

• The board is modular and double sided, so you can get different configurations of either a Starfleet ship or a Borg cube to run around on. Everything looks good, though by its nature, the details on the cube do seem to blend together.
 

Rules:

So, full disclosure, I forgot to put the rulebook back in the box after scanning through them, and thus when we got to play, we were using the quickstart document, and an online pdf on my phone. That meant a lot of encountering a situation and trying to look it up on a tiny screen, so I know we made mistakes while playing. Probably more than usual for a first time game.

The quickstart document is not, in my opinion, sufficient for learning the game. There is important information left out, and I think that a condensed version of the rules should at least have the basics of play.

The full rulebook wastes a bunch of space with three pages of fiction setting up the backstory of how an engineer on the USS Ahwahnee developed some weapons modifications to fight the Borg at Wolf 359, but she was killed by a hull breach before she was able to implement them. I suppose it's nice to get a bit of a backstory, but for this sort of game, it really doesn't seem necessary.

Anyways, the full rules seem pretty well laid out. There was never a moment where I had a question that I couldn't find the answer to.
 

Gameplay:

• It's a tactical miniatures game, so that means moving figures around the board and getting into fights. Though something I liked about this game is that combat was not the primary driver, at least not for the core missions we choose. I, as the Starfleet player, was trying to repair the ship, and my Borg opponent was attempting to assimilate it, and we got points for actions that furthered those goals.

• The line of sight rules for the game are somewhat simplified compared to other tactical miniatures games I've played, in that if a character can see into a room where an opponent character is, they can see the opponent character. You can't get cover from being positioned behind a corner or anything like that.

• There is a "take cover" action though, so it's not as though characters need to be standing in the clear for anyone to assault them (though we never actually used the action); it's just not a function of the miniature positioning.

• We played with the pre-built starter decks, but both the decks you have for your away team are customizable. I didn't cycle cards a lot even though you can always discard unwanted cars a the start of a round.

• Attacks and skill tests to complete objectives are done with dice pools of d6s. For attacks and opposed skill tests, both players involved roll dice and compare values in descending order. If one player is rolling more dice than the other, all dice that don't have something to compare against don't count, and that's disappointing.

• The game comes with a cardboard tacker to arrange the dice for comparison, and it seems somewhat extraneous. We stopped using it because we're adults who can compare results on a die without needing to line them up in a bit of cardboard.

• The game lasts for three rounds, and then it's done. Which is not particularly climatic if I'm being honest. Both players compare the number points they've scored between mission cards and their core mission, and who ever has the most points wins, even if all their characters have been incapacitated.
 

Conclusion:

I enjoyed the game quite a lot once we started to find a rhythm to the gameplay. I'm very curious to get the other away teams on the board, especially the Duras Sisters.

I also might attempt my first foray into mini-painting with these figures. Probably gonna start with the Borgs.

Components: 9/10
Rules: 7/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 8/10

I don't know whether this is an unpopular opinion or not but I actually think that the way Tasha Yar died gave the show much higher stakes throughout it's entire run. Here is the chief security officer, main bridge crew, tragic back story, potential love interest for the robot character just slapped down by the monster of the week. It made all the subsequent dangerous situations seem much more dire because "they were willing to kill off someone in the main cast". I also think that Yesterday's Enterprise was an awesome send off for that character that let them have a heroic ending for her after all.

It was a shame because I think Denise Crosby could have been awesome as a recurring character and in my opinion, we didn't get a great strong female character in the main cast (until DS9 which is an embarrassment of riches in that department). But I maintain that casually killing off Tasha Yar made my first watchthrough of TNG much more exciting.

I don't however like the additional stretch of her half-romulan daughter. It's pretty soap-opera-ish in my opinion and tarnishes the heroic sacrifice of her character.

My friends and I recently challenged each other to list our top five starship classes and were surprised by how different our opinions were despite being generally in agreement with what we like about the various series.

Personally it was hard for me to make a definitive "top five" but here are some I rank highly in no particular order:

• TOS-era constitution
• Refit constitution
• Discovery-era Bird of Prey (OG is good too obv but I love the HR Geiger-esque weirdness)
• D'Kora class Ferengi ship
• ~~Not canon, but~~ I love the original "Long-boi" Discovery design. It gives off some very cool art-deco retro-futurism vibes. Not very classically "trek" but I love it nonetheless!

I am curious to see what c/StarTrek thinks!

I've been watching the various Star Trek shows for a while now, and while not finished I saw most of them, I believe. And I cannot shake off the feeling that the messages given by these shows, especially (and almost exclusively) recent ones are pushing horrible morals that most people seem to not care about.

Slavery

I posted before, in the middle of my watching of Enterprise, that the show was supporting slavery because of the Cogenitor episode. Many comments disagreed, some even saying that they don't remember anything supporting slavery at all in the show. That was before I watched more. The show contains a full episode that is just about showing that:

• Sex slaves are not only acceptable, they're "sexy" and cool and negotiating with slavers is a good thing

• Sex trafficking of individuals groomed since they are born into being sex slaves is the fault of the victims for "seducing" men ???

How is this show not fine with human trafficking at this point? Is all that you need to avoid controversy, to paint the slaves in green? I still cannot comprehend the lack of reaction on this show. Add to that the frequent crimes of war by Archer and you have a nice cocktail of humanity's finest horror.

Section 31

This is also something that seems absurd to me. When it first appeared, it was already a gestapo/kgb-like group that ignores the concept of democracy, laws, and justice - in other words a horrible group - but its existence as a starfleet element was blurry. But with modern shows, they keep on bringing it back, and directly saying that it is supported by starfleet, and a good thing, or at least a necessary one.

The thing is that what made starfleet supposedly admirable was, if not every single individual's morals, the morality of their concept, their laws, their structure. Having section 31 be condoned by starfleet transforms starfleet from "utopian future of humanity" (which it was supposed to be) to "dictatorship that pretends to be a democracy but supports crimes of war and above-the-law groups". In other words, it destroys the concept of starfleet.

Discriminations, sexism, and other shitty ideas, morals and behaviours

Now this one is maybe more blurry and subjective, but it is scattered all across, nonstop.

Let's start chronologically

DS9

For this show, the constant misogyny is nothing hard to see. But they still went out of their way to put some nasty things here and there.

The episode with Quark "becoming" a woman was interesting. Quark discovers a different point of view, gains insight and empathy, that's nice! Until the end of the episode directly says "no nevermind, he was like that because of hormones, and was just an overly emotional woman because of that". Because after all, women are hysterical, right? .

Other than that, we have the toxic relationship between Keiko and O'Brian, the toxic relationship between Dax and Worf, the toxic relationship between Odo and Kira, the toxic relationship between Sisco and his wife, Jake who constantly shows that when a teen boy is targeted by pedophiles, the teen is both responsible for it, and liking it (one second, I need to throw up in a corner), etc.

And of course there is the rest, between Cisco crimes against humanity, Bashir (that's all I'll say, nothing else needed), and the weird pro-religious message that doesn't make sense.

Enterprise

We already talked about their view of child/human trafficking which I think gives the tone of the show.

But of course that's not enough, so let's put some sexual scenes about the women in particular, rape scenes with TPol because who doesn't like rape culture, Malcolm "PoS" Reed talking like a creep about "bums", Reed and Tucker with their "haha lol, these alien women are ugly because you can't tell if they are women or not" and other toxic masculinity scenes, etc. Oh and I almost forgot about the sex scene between teen siblings that serve no other purpose than to show teens having incestuous sex.

Picard

What do we have here, more weird sibling sexual scenes, people getting manipulated mentally and sexually to extract information, murderers who get away with it because betraying the federation and killing innocents is fine if you're a scenario character (reminds me of something else...AhemelnorAhem)...

Oh, and I almost forgot the amazing scene with a white Picard in his white British empire colonist outfit, going on the planet of the tan refugees who hate the federation, kicks everything around and tries to show that he's the boss. I guess this show regrets colonies too, huh.

Discovery

Now I didn't finish this one yet, and it's hard.

We have klingons that start off as a weird racist stereotype of africans seen by colonialists from a century ago: black skin, tribal armors, weird "foreign" language that the show intentionally refuses to translate through the UT, and when they speak english it's with a strong guttural accent. And they're barbaric, scary cannibals who fight with sticks and knives, and are a bunch of disorganised tribes, with weird magic rituals that allow them to do weird brainwashing. I'm almost surprised they don't carry voodoo dolls while dancing around a bonfire. The fact that people describe this show as "woke" is funny to me.

We have very explicit rape and gore torture scenes, for what purpose, I don't know.

We have people forgiven of murder because it wasn't their mind, but then it is and everyone is fine with it.

And then there's more section 31 shit.

There's also the vision of asylum in this show that basically says "we grant asylum whenever we want, not based on the situation but on personal preferences", with Georgiou granting asylum despite the prime directive, and then Pike refusing asylum because of it. It's surprising that starfleet would allow that, but at least it's not Archer-level, sending people to death then blaming the ones who tried to help them.

SNW

As far as I remember, nothing as bad as the rest here. The take on eugenics and "augmented" individuals is really absurd though, showing starfleet hating on Una is fine because her species is augmented (like the denobulans who are in starfleet though, no?), but the stupid security officer who has DNA augmentations from a crazy evil dictator engineered to be violent and crazy, is allowed without any issue.

All of them

One thing that I struggle understanding is the constant of racist stereotypes. They're everywhere, because all the shows use them to define their characters.

Keiko wants to eat her traditional food in a kimono, Georgiou wears a big kimono-like dress that would barely fit in a Mulan movie, Elnor is a ridiculous samurai-ninja with the fitting outfit, etc. As if in hundreds of years, after earth is united and mixed with hundreds of alien species, "cultures" would not evolve and mix but instead go back to being very split apart and caricatural.

P.S.

I'm not saying that the shows are shit, but that I am worried about the lack of discussions concerning all those subjects. Star Trek is supposed to be progressive and show a better version of humanity, one that evolved and grew, and yet morals seem to not be a consideration of the shows anymore.

Annotations for Star Trek: Lower Decks 4x06: “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”:

The title is a pun on the 2004 British horror parody television series Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace.

The Ferengi starship appears to be a variant of that owned by the Ferengi merchant Ulis in 2151 (ENT: “Acquisition”).

Rom became the Grand Nagus in DS9: “The Dogs of War”, Zek appointing Rom as his successor to carry on his reforms to create a kinder, gentler Ferenginar.

The Genesis Device is of course the central McGuffin of ST II. The one that blew up and created the Genesis Planet was thought to be the only one, but we’ve seen another model stored in Daystrom Station (PIC: “The Bounty”).

“He thinks Rom is the next Lonz.” A deep cut, Lonz was the most famous nose flute player in Ferengi history, also known as “Old Golden Nostril” (DS9 book: Legends of the Ferengi).

Rule of Acquisition No. 62: “The riskier the road, the greater the profit”, was first mentioned in DS9: “Rules of Acquisition”, among other episodes.

The Stardate is 58901.5. The Ferengi Alliance wanting to join the Federation is a huge deal. Although Nog was the first Ferengi in Starfleet (DS9: “Heart of Stone”), by 2400, there will be more Ferengi cadets in Starfleet Academy (PIC: “The Star Gazer”, a Ferengi flag is being flown during commencement among other flags showing the composition of the graduating class), and by the 32nd Century, Ferengi officers are seen frequently, even a Captain (DIS: “Anomaly”).

The foods being served on board the Parliament-class (LD: “Cupid’s Errant Arrow”) USS Toronto (NCC-70494) include a bowl of Ferengi tube grubs (DS9: “Homefront”), cheese cut out in Starfleet delta shapes and a wooden serving board in the shape of a Galaxy-class cruiser.

The bald Admiral is Vassery, who commanded Douglas Station and was the one Mariner mocked for his pronunciation of “sen-soar” (LD: “Moist Vessel”). He also appeared in Mariner’s holoprogram (LD: “Crisis Point”).

Moab IV is the location of the Genome Colony, a self-contained domed enclosing a genetically and socially-engineered society (TNG: “The Masterpiece Society”). The environment outside the dome was uninhabitable at the time the Enterprise-D visited, so Vassery’s joke might mean that has changed. Or is just a bad joke.

The 10th Rule of Acquisition is “Greed is eternal” (DS9: “Prophet Motive”); Freeman trying to quote this expresses her skepticism about Ferenginar’s application.

Leeta’s title as “First Clerk” is the title of the Nagus’ personal financial assistant (DS9: “Ferengi Love Songs”). Rom and her are accompanied by what seems to be a female Hupyrian. The species is known to be favorites of the Grand Naguses as servants, bodyguards and food tasters due to their devotion to their masters and their vows of silence to anyone other than their master. Zek’s male servant was Maihar’du (DS9: “The Nagus”).

I got to admit, the Ceremonial Invoice and the “Friends and Family Discount” made me spit out my soda. God, I’ve missed the Ferengi - the DS9 development of them, specifically. Yes, Quark made an appearance in DS9: “Hear All, Trust Nothing”, but still.

Self-sealing stem bolts are a component that nobody is quite sure what they do or what they’re for, except that they’re self-sealing. And are stem bolts (DS9: “Progress”).

For the record, “Lieutenants junior grade” is the grammatically correct usage. Much like it’s “Attorneys-General” and not “Attorney-Generals”.

There have been two travel guides published in the real world for Star Trek under the Hidden Universe Travel Guides banner: one for the Klingon Empire and the other for Vulcan. I also love the fact that the Cerritos is statistically the horniest and least committed crew in Starfleet because that tracks so much.

Finishing each other’s diophantine equations (polynomial equations where only integer solutions are allowed) could be a reference to a classic gag from Arrested Development where Michael says about Nellie, that they finish each other’s… and Lindsay chimes in with “Sandwiches?” to Michael’s bewilderment. The same joke coincidentally shows up in That 70s Show and as part of the song “Love is an Open Door” in Frozen.

Honus is the ship’s bartender (LD: “Mugato, Gumato”) and Nurse Westlake (LD: “Second Contact”) is named for Chris Westlake, the composer for LD.

We see a Ferengi shuttle (DS9: “Little Green Men”) flying by as we approach Ferenginar, on which it is always raining (DS9: “Family Business”). The Ferengi language has 178 words for rain (and none for “crisp”), rather like the hundreds of words Inuits use to describe various types of snow (DS9: “Let He Who is Without Sin”). The tall building dominating the skyline is the Ferengi Tower of Commerce, the capital building of the government (“Prophet Motive”).

Signs advertise All You Can @#S%!, Slug-O-Cola (DS9: “Profit and Lace”), Uncle Quark’s Youth Casino, Maxium Oo-Mox Rub Dungeon, Acquire Pour Homme, Lobe’s Lodge, Slug-Nasium. A marquee says “Now Playing: Latinum Lost!!!” which may be a reference to the Litverse novella Lust’s Latinum Lost (and Found), which centers around the erotic holonovel of the same title.

The things on Boimler’s to-do list are:

• Drop off Bags
• Hotel Room Inspection: Mini Bar, Toilet, Pay Wall
• View Screen Inspected
• Museum of Bribery
• Ferengi Center for Forged Arts
• Ferengi Hall of Fame Gift Shop (Hall of Fame Coming Soon)

The size of Ferengi lobes is a symbol of virility and business acumen, which is what the Slug-O-Cola commercial plays on.

Quimp appeared in LD: “Envoys”, meeting Mariner on Tulgana IV, staging a fake attack to boost Boimler’s confidence.

Oberth-classes (like the USS Grissom from ST III) take a lot of flak. T’Ana once screamed that she didn’t spend 7 years on one just to get reassigned to a station (LD: “The Stars at Night”).

The “dagger of the mind” drink probably refers to TOS: “Dagger of the Mind” where a neural neutralizer empties a mind and makes it susceptible to suggestion.

Rom was on Sisko’s baseball team, the Niners, in DS9: “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” and scored the only run for the team in that game.

The unicorn dog in the Ferengi landlord cop show is of the species from Alfa 177 (TOS: “The Enemy Within”). We last saw one of them in the menagerie in LD: “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”.

As Boimler laughs about product placement he is sitting in front of the Paramount logo. The screen also resembles the CBS eye logo.

Parth is using a holographic imager, but oddly enough closer to the Starfleet design (last seen in SNW: “Those Old Scientists”) rather than a Ferengi one (DS9: “Meridian”).

Mariner and Quimp play dabo (DS9: “Babel”) at the Ferenginar Historical Library.

Quark’s Federation Experience Bar & Grill (referring to the late lamented Las Vegas Star Trek: The Experience), has models of the Voyager and Enterprise-D hanging from the ceiling as the TNG theme tune plays. Among the decor are signs that say Engineering, Ten Forward, Where No Gift Has Gone Before, Jeffries Tube Entrance, Red Shirts and Holodeck Arcade.

Patrons enter the place between two TOS-style nacelles and are greeted by a Ferengi with a Vulcan hairstyle and eyebrows in a blue science division uniform. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss it moment, there is a naked female Ferengi (head and shoulders visible) at one of the tables as we initially pan towards Tendi and Rutherford. Ferengi females were traditionally not allowed to wear clothes, but this began to change with Zek’s reforms, helped along by Quark and Rom’s mother Ishka.

On display are a Mugato (TOS: “A Private Little War”), the Guardian of Forever (TOS: “The City on the Edge of Forever”), a Vulcan gong in the arena from TOS: “Amok Time” and a Taurean ape-man with a spear from TOS: “The Galileo Seven”.

Tendi and Rutherford are seated at a table whose wall panels have a TOS-style red trim and chairs from that era. The Red Alert sound has of course been standard since TOS. The Ferengi bouncers are dressed in TNG-era security uniforms.

Tendi’s comment about the velour uniforms catching fire is similar to Boimler talking about exploding tricorders in LD: “Those Old Scientists”.

Sitting weird in chairs is a stereotype for bisexuals, of which Mariner is one. Naturally, the Ferengi Dominion War Memorial remembers the profits lost during that conflict.

The blind box is modeled on a TOS-era shuttle. We see a rocky backdrop for one of the tables that might be Sarpeidon from TOS: “All Our Yesterdays”.

The 8th Rule of Acquisition, “Small print leads to large risk” is from the beta canon book The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

The Ferengi dragging Boimler out of his room is using a Ferengi energy whip (TNG: “The Last Outpost).

Love the original movies 🍿

• The Orion starship we see in the opening is visually similar to the Orion interceptors seen in “Borderland” with some distinct differences.

     • Notably, this interceptor has a pair of arms extending from the underside of the ship, similar to the Orion starship seen in the TAS episode, “The Pirates of Orion.”

• Starting with Risik’s tattoos, we see several examples of the Orion alphabet introduced in “Borderland”.

• Among the plunder the Orion lower deckers are sorting is:

     • A Bat’leth

     • A number of 24th century Starfleet type-2 phasers

     • A Vulcan harp

     • A 23rd century Starfleet type-2 phaser

     • A Starfleet compression phaser rifle

• ”Hey, did you guys see that Maleer got big pieces of metal attached to her head?” In “Borderland” we were introduced to the idea that Orion body modification practices do include grafting bits of what appears to be scrap metal to their bodies.

• The captain’s chair aboard the Orion ship is similar in shape to the one seen in “The Pirates of Orion”.

• The Mysterious Threat destroys the Orion vessel, just as it did the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, IKS Che’Ta’ in “Twovix”, and a Romulan ship in “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”.

• “I have put my foot in my mouth enough when it comes to Orion stuff.” Tendi was hurt by Mariner’s insistence that all Orions are pirates who love to pillage in “Crisis Point”, and Mariner again insulted Tendi by suggesting she use her pheromones to influence a dom-jot game they were attempting to hustle in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris”.

• Among his possessions on display, Boimler has a USS Cerritos commemorative plate.

• Tendi, Mariner, and T’Lyn take the Yosemite II shuttle on their away mission/girls’ trip. The original Yosemite was destroyed in when Mariner and Boimler were caught in a gravity well and forced to crash land in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”, and the Yosemite II was introduced in “Grounded”.

• As the shuttle approaches Orion, we see an Orion barge of the type operated by Harrad-Sar in “Bound”.

• Several of the buildings on the Orion skyline bear the symbol worn by the Orion crew in “The Pirate of Orion”.

• “You grew up in a castle, like friggin’ Billups?” We learned that chief engineer Billups grew up as heir to the throne of the human colony Hysperia, which is populated entirely by “ren faire types.”

• Tendi confirms that her family is part of the Orion Syndicate, a criminal organization first mentioned in “The Ascent”.

• B’rt Tendi is played by Nolan North, who’s portrayed several Trek characters, including:

     • Bridge officer of the USS Vengeance - “Star Trek Into Darkness”

     • The Half a Rascal - “Much Ado About Boimler”

     • Cerritos transporter chief, Lundy

     • Sokel - “wej Duj”

     • K’ranch - “The Least Dangerous Game”

• The A.B. Chambers is the steamboat that Mark Twain briefly worked on.

• Boimler and Rutherford both show up dressed as Mark Twain. The real Samuel Clemens encountered the crew of the USS Enterprise D when they travelled back to 1893 in “Time’s Arrow”.

• Tendi was first referred to as the Mistress of the Winter Constellations in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris”.

• The bottle the Slit Throat bartender pours from features an image of the Orion captain from “The Pirates of Orion”.

• The stir stick in Madam G’s drink is topped with the symbol worn by the Orion crew in “The Pirates of Orion”.

• New Seattle is a colony on Penthara IV, a world the Enterprise D responded to a disaster on in “A Matter of Time”.

• The pattern on the privacy screens of the hump dungeon mirror those of the fence in the fantasy Captain Pike experienced of Vina as an Orion “slave girl” in “The Menagerie, Part II”.

• T’Lyn observes that the male Orions in the hump dungeon appear to be under the influence of pheromonal chemical manipulation. It was established in “Bound” that Orion culture is actually matriarchal, with women controlling the men via the use of pheromones.

• ”Tendi’s made it clear that Starfleet made those pheromones up.” Actually, all Tendi ever said in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” is that she’s, ”not even that kind of Orion.”

• Coqqor is played by Eric Bauza, who’s portrayed several PRO and LDS characters, including:

     • Barniss Frex - “Asylum”

     • Scot’Ee and Sool’U - “All the World’s a Stage”

     • Assface and Screwhead - “Skin a Cat”

• Though there has previously not been any canon Chalnoth ships, the design here appears to be based on the ships seen on the cover of DC Comics’ “Star Trek: The Next Generation” #61, published in 1994.

• The starship boneyard that Tendi and D’Erika used to play in as children contains a Federation exploration vessel of the same design as the USS Raven, which Seven of Nine’s parents used to study the Borg and get assimilated. Ship type was first seen in “The Raven”.

• Coqqor devours Rutherford and Boimler’s bonsai tree. In “Allegiance” the Chalnoth Esoqq was unable to eat the food disks provided to Picard and the others by their captors, but did strongly imply that he could subsist on the Mizarian prisoner.

• ”I may not be a pirate, but I’ve rerouted my share of EPS conduits.” Tendi demonstrated her shipjacking abilities in “Hear All, Trust Nothing”.

• ”A report without the subject’s consent would be unethical.” Vulcans monitor other species without their consent all the time, such as in “Star Trek: First Contact”, “The Andorian Incident”, and “Carbon Creek”.

• Boimler and Rutherford end the episode on the holodeck, both dressed as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The works of Mozart have been featured in:

     • “Where No One Has Gone Before”

     • “The Ensigns of Command”

     • “Sarek”

     • “A Matter of Time”

     • “A Fistful of Datas”

     • “Cogenitor”

• Cap’n Freeman’s log records the stardate as 58759.1.

• The world of Corazonia is an artificial ringworld circling a star. In “Rosetta” and “Coming Home” we saw that Species Ten-C used similar Dyson rings to harvest energy from the stars of their original home system, and their newly established home.

     • The scale of Corazonia and its star is…questionable, but that’s hardly a new issue in Trek. Consider the USS Voyager traveling through the planetary ring in VOY’s title sequence, or the utterly massive Borg cube being visible in Jupiter’s eye in the PIC finale, “The Last Generation”.

     • Not canon, but Corazonia very much resembles the Ringworld from the cover art of Larry Niven’s 1970 novel, “Ringworld”, set in his Known Space series, which is also the origin of the Kiznti.

• Corazonia’s climate is controlled by a sentient computer, Vexilon. Other planet controlling computers have been seen in:

     • “The Return of the Archons” - Landru

     • “The Apple” - Vaal

     • “Spock’s Brain” - The Controller

     • “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” - The Oracle of the People

     • “When the Bough Breaks” - The Custodian

• Freeman roles up her sleeves before getting to work on Vexilon, not unlike the way Mariner keeps her sleeves all the time, despite it landing her in the brig at least once.

• Freeman states that she ”minored in archaic technology back at the Academy.” If Mariner is to be believed in “Room for Growth”, the USS Cerritos has been overwritten by D’Arsay technology three times.

• Boimler’s team’s shuttle is the Kings Canyon, presumably named for Kings Canyon National Park

• ”Statistically, ensigns serving under recently promoted commanders are more likely to experience death and/or dismemberment.” Wesley Crusher’s entire team in “Pen Pals” died during his first time in charge, and he wasn’t even recently promoted.

• Inside the anomaly storage room we see:

     • A probe resembling the Kataan probe from “The Inner Light” but with some notable differences

     • What appears to be an oversized Vulcan lirpa

     • Nomad from “The Changeling”, or a very similar Earth probe transformed into an artificial life form

     • A Wadi board game, from “Move Along Home”

     • What appears to be an empty transport case for a Medusan, including a visor missing the red protective lens; Ambassador Kollos used one in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”

     • A bat’leth

     • A Betazoid gift box, like the one seen in “Haven”

     • A 23rd century Romulan cloaking device, like the one Kirk and Spock stole in “The Enterprise Incident”

• Billups’ pet ferret is named Lancelot; it was established in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” that Billups comes Hysperia, a planet colonized by “Ren faire type” humans.

• Tendi, Mariner, and Rutherford are using T-88 scanners to check the chips in the isolinear chip junction. T-88s were first seen in “Cupid’s Errant Arrow” and weren’t available fleetwide yet, but Rutherford and Tendi did steal a bunch from the USS Vancouver.

• ”Is it a unotronic?” Duotronic and multitronic systems were designed by Richard Daystrom, which we learned in “The Ultimate Computer”. This is the first mention of a unotronic system, though it’s not entirely clear if that’s an actual thing, or simply a bit for Billups’ joke.

• Dirks claims he was trapped in the Wadi game for a month as a child. The Wadi are a gamma quadrant civilization who were first encountered in 2369, 12 years prior to this episode.

• Boimler refers to the large blue guy as ”Big Merp.” In “I, Excretus” the scoreboard showed that another member of the same species was also named Merp. Are all members of the species named Merp? Is it the name of their species and just what they’re all called? Or is Merp simply a common name among their species?

• Rutherford ends up in the Wadi game, where he encounters the same puzzles Captain Sisko, Kira, Doctor Bashir, and Jadzia did in “Move Along Home”.

• Dirks states the Tellarite slop jazz musician Fats B’zirtak overdosed on ketracel-white. Assuming fats was not a Jem’Hadar, I believe this is the first time we’ve heard of a non-Jem’Hadar consuming ketracel-white in canon.

• The Betazoid gift box gets zapped by the not-Kataan probe and experiences an entire simulated life, similar to what happened to Captain Picard in “The Inner Light”, though at no point from Rutherford’s perspective does the gift box appear to be unconscious.

     • ”I miss my wife.” The gift box repeats Michael Sullivan’s line from two episodes ago in “Twovix”.

• After he dies we see Boimler in room which appears to be inspired by the red room from “Twin Peaks” based on the floor pattern, lamp, and end table. Outside the window he sees the black mountain, which Shaxs described as a ”spiritual battleground” in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris”.

     • The Koala appears, and according to the subtitles it’s ”speaking Koala” but if you reverse the audio it says, “It is not your time, Bradward Boimler.”

     • This is the second time Boimler has seen the Koala, the first being when he nearly drowned in “First First Contact”.

     • Despite being at the Black Mountain, Boimler did not have to fight three faceless aspirations of his father, nor did the surviving father feed Boimler his own heart, as Shaxs described in “We’ll Always have Tom Paris”.

• ”You never forget your first death.” Ransom implies that he too has died.

Written by: Ben Waller

Directed by: Brandon Williams

Interesting extract from a longer /Film interview with in-demand director Roxann Dawson.

I appreciate how she speaks with respect for the shows of the new era.

This is good news for assuring that SNW’s 3rd season production will move ahead after the strike.

Greenlighting a couple of extra episodes and a 4th season would make strategic sense, but I’m just not willing to give Paramount the benefit of the doubt on that.

It's so bizarre to read this in the present, knowing how incredible TNG was, but I get it - the original crew WAS Star Trek to them.

The dedicated fans revived this series in syndication, well after it had gone off the air in 1969, and felt attached to the characters that they had obsessed over between then and the 1980s. Like modern fans, they thought that departure from what they knew would ruin it.

I wish I could go back in time and tell them that TNG is going to rock.