USSBurritoTruck

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Not my original content

Not my original content, but something I stand by

Not my original content.

This is the premiere of the fifth and final season of “Star Trek Discovery”, the first iteration of Trek’s modern era. I think it is important in this moment to acknowledge that, regardless of individual opinions of quality the series -- personally I am a fan, but this is not about my personal perspective -- without DIS we would not have the abundance of new Trek available to us.

With that acknowledgement aside, on with the very serious business.

• This episode is the first mention of the titular Red Directive. Starfleet has a number of directives most recognizable of which is the Prime Directive, introduced in “Return of the Archons”, which codifies interactions with non Federation cultures, and their principles of non-interference. There is also:

    • The Temporal Prime Directive forbidding interference with historical events, first mentioned in “Future’s End, Part II”

    • The Omega Directive, dictating the necessity of destroying any and all omega particles that might be encountered during the course of Starfleet activities, introduced in “The Omega Directive”

• This episode was written by DIS co-showrunner, Michelle Paradise, and directed by executive producer, Olatunde Osunsanmi.

• The episode opens with Captain Burnham [Sonequa Martin-Green] on the exterior of a ship at warp. We’ve previously seen characters outside ships traveling faster than light in “Divergence” and “Mindwalk”.

• The crew of the USS Discovery A attends a Millennium Celebration commemorating 1,000 years of the Federation. The Federation was founded in 2161, as per “These Are the Voyages…” and this episode takes place, presumably, in 2191. The cadet serving the signature cocktail, Tonic 2161, does comment ”Give or take a few decades,” when Tilly [Mary Wiseman] explains to Adira [Blu del Barrio] the context for the drink.

    • Tonic 2161 is blue with stars floating in it to match the emblem of the Federation emblem.

    • Ross claims the stars taste like jumja sticks, a Bajoran treat first seen in “A Man Alone”. Bajor has, to the best of our knowledge, not been inducted into the Federation at any point.

• Stamets [Anthony Rapp] is upset because Starfleet is “shuttering the spore drive program.” In season four, the program’s lead scientist used a stolen prototype to attempt to reach Species 10-C and kill them with an illegal weapon.

• A prototype pathway drive was mentioned as having been installed aboard the USS Voyager J in “Kobayashi Maru”.

• President T’Rina mentions the Tholian Republic and Breen Imperium as polities outside the current Federation, and seems to imply they’re antagonistic if not hostile to the Federation. The Tholian Assembly was introduced in the TOS episode “The Tholian Web”, and the Breen Confederacy was mentioned in “Strange Bedfellows”.

• The 800 year old Romulan science vessel is an update of the Romulan ship seen in “The Next Phase”.

• When L’ak removes his helmet, there is a brief moment where his face appears to be non opaque, not entirely dissimilar from how Changelings are see through in the natural state, or Mellanoid slime worms, such as Murf.

    • L’ak is played by Elias Toufexis, who previously had a role DIS season one’s “Context is for Kings” as one of the other prisoners aboard the transport shuttle rescued by Discovery along with Burnham. He never asked for this.

• Antares is a well loved name for Starfleet vessels:

    • Antares, NCC-501 - “Charlie X”

    • USS Antares - A ship both Captain Pike and Number One served aboard, according to “Brother” and “Memento Mori” respectively

    • USS Antares, NCC-9844, Miranda-class - “Favor the Bold”

    • A Kelvin Universe USS Antares - 2009’s “Star Trek”

    • In addition there are also three different Antares-class ships: one used by the Corvallens in “Face of the Enemy”; a carrier used by both Cardassians and Bajorans, introduced in “Ensign Ro”; a civilian freighter like Kasidy Yates’ SS Xhosa first seen in “Family Business”.

• There are new aspects integrated into the title sequence. For the purposes of this comparison I’ll be mentioning changes from specifically the season four sequence. Such as:

    • A rotating planet with two moons has replaced the visualization of Zora’s program

    • The captain’s chair appears earlier in the sequence

    • A 3d representation of a symbol from a Romulan journal is shown

    • The Infinity Room key appears, replacing an exploded planet, and Discovery approaching the DMA

    • Book’s unnamed ship is replaced with Moll and L’ak’s

    • A number of rotating structures are now at the very end where there used to be a long range view of the DMA

• Burnham, Owosekun, and Rhys find the mummified corpse of a Romulan wearing a TNG era uniform.

    • We will learn that this Romulan was Doctor Vellek, a scientist present for the events of the TNG episode, “The Chase”.

• Burnham is able to grasp her phaser pistol, and stretch it out into a type-3 configuration. It’s unclear what advantage the transformation has. Other than Boimler’s assertion that, ”Uh, they take two hands,” from “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”.

• Moll [Eve Harlow] and L’ak have a Romulan puzzle box, a tan zhekran, when Burnham confronts them. This puzzle box is larger than the one Narek had in “The Impossible Box”, and has more sides.

• When we see the Antares, it has the saucer of a Friendship-class starship, and the nacelles of Merian-class, both first seen in “People of Earth”.

• ”I would rather not die out here, I’ve got a saxophone lesson to get to.” Harry Kim took up playing the sax in “Ashes to Ashes”.

• Captain Rayner [Callum Keith Rennie] is a Kellerun, which have only previously been seen in the DS9 episode, “Armageddon Game”. I mention this only because Rayner lacks the somewhat distinctive topknot that all the men of his species styled their hair in in that episode.

• Book [David Ajala] has been helping refugees displaced by the DMA rebuild, as per the community service he was sentenced to in “Coming Home”.

• ”It’s like what it means to be a crew. I can’t crash all these kids on to an ice moon in order to teach them that.” Tilly is referring to the events of “All Is Possible”

• Fred is a synth with skin, eyes, and hair presumably inspired by Data. Or Lore? Or B4.

• Among the gear Moll and L’ak attempt to sell to Fred are:

    • Isolinear co-processors

    • PADDs

    • Tricorders

    • Self-sealing stembolts

• Fred claims to have not encountered a tan zhekran for 622.7 years, which would indicate he’s been functional since at least the mid 26th century.

• The script in the journal contained in the puzzle box is different from the Romulan language seen in TNG and other Star Trek shows and movies of that era; it was introduced into canon in “Absolute Candor” but was created in 1993 by linguist Trent Peherson who is credited in this episode as a language consultant.

• Fred has a number of weapons on display in his place of business, including:

    • A Klingon kur’leth as seen in “Disengage”

    • A d’k tahg,

    • A Klingon bat’leth of the type introduced in “The Vulcan Hello”

    • A TNG era Romulan disruptor pistol

    • A “First Contact” type-3 phaser rifle

• Book and Burnham are able to rent some sand bikes. The bikes have shields capable of protecting the rider from ship based weaponry, which probably has to reduce the deposit, right?

• Stamets determines that Fred’s serial number begins with AS as an homage to Altan Soong, and claims that Fred was based on Altan Soong’s designs, not Noonien Soong, despite the resemblance to Data.

• In Kovich’s quarters, he brings explains the basic plot of ‘The Chase’, and brings up stills from that episode featuring the Romulans, Captain Picard, and the Progenitor.

Not my original content

Not my OC.

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