Oh cool, ty! I was wondering.

Yeah, honestly so much is lost with the shorter seasons. And wrt LD in particular, I get that filming 28 episodes a year was hell on the actors/production, but surely doing VA is less time consuming than live action acting?

Omg yes! That scene was so good. I feel like Gates McFadden and Marina Sirtis would have enjoyed it most of all lol.

These episodes were both great. I have shipped Mariner/Ransom since s1 and, well, honestly, this new dynamic of theirs probably makes it even less likely than it ever was lol. But they were fun episodes. I do wish Lower Decks had more episodes, since they’re only 20 min/ea.

Oh thank you, that makes sense.

I love this moment in LD, but also I am not sure when it was meant to have happened. Were Kirk and Spock friends prior to being officers on a capital ship? Or was it meant to be that they were invited to the other party but left because it was boring?

I really don’t understand why they have to do this whole Chapel/Spock thing. :( I like T’Pring more.

Hrmm that is a really interesting perspective I hadn’t considered before. Ty!

Lol this is such an optimistic perspective. Thank you. :)

I feel bad about all the mean things I said in my own head about Paul Wesley as Kirk. I was deeply incorrect.

I really like both Keiko and Molly. Honestly I prefer many of the Keiko/Molly/O’Brien episodes to the standard “O’Brien must suffer”.

I enjoyed the episode a lot, but I do agree about the product placement. It really was unnecessary and jarring.

I agree about Pelia! Also Iiiii think I must be bad at TV tropes because I did not see Kirk dying until the final second of him smiling at La’an after inviting the Romulan lady to find out if he was bluffing lol.

This was definitely my favourite episode of the season, and possibly of the series. I thought Kirk was badly cast, but actually after seeing him in this episode, I get it. He is not our Kirk, but he actually does bring something very Kirk-ish to the role that I hadn’t appreciated previously.

This is a really good and very Star Trek point, and thank you for pointing it out. It reminds me of Naomi Wildman telling Seven, “cooperation is more important than competition”.

I found this episode of The Ready Room made me feel less good about the main episode. For example, at the end they’re recapping why eugenics is banned in the Federation, and they say it’s because of “potentially violent impulses”. But in Doctor Bashir, I Presume it’s established that it is not just because of the eugenics wars, but because if you allow genetic augmentation it creates a medical arms race where parents feel compelled to genetically augment their children to keep up. Is that being retconned or was just it just a badly written summary? We really don’t need Star Trek to be making the case for eugenics, you guys…

I agree with this. It was clear from when the lawyer called the eugenics laws “race laws” that Number One was going to get off somehow, but I really missed seeing in the courtroom somebody make the case that genetic augmentation is meaningfully different from genetic modification – in particular in the case of Illyrians, that they modify themselves to exist harmoniously with their environment and not to breed superhumans. Eugenics is bad, and genetic augmentation is also bad and I think corrosive to society, as is covered in Doctor Bashir, I Presume.

Overall, I thought it was good Star Trek, but missing a robust engagement with the issue at hand which was disappointing. A better episode than last week, though.

Oh also – it was very exciting to see a Tellarite! We barely see any of them, especially compared to the other three founding members.

EDIT: Thinking about it more, I do actually think it’s a bit objectionable to call anti-eugenics laws “race laws”. I get that Starfleet is fictional, but in our actual universe, “race laws” have tended to go hand in hand with eugenics, so it really feels a bit … unfortunate. And based on this episode’s Ready Room, they seem pretty comfortable with the idea that Starfleet and the Federation are in the wrong about genetic augmentation, and I don’t feel like they drew the line in the episode or in the Ready Room episode between augmentation and modification.

I agree, I really like Wesley. And not only because Wil Wheaton seems like a really lovely person.

Oh I love this explanation, thank you for writing this all up!

With regard to their relative level of machiavellianism, I think being able to see clearly all the consequences of all their decisions makes it both a given that they would be more machiavellian as well as making it fairly ethically “clean” so to speak. We as humans can’t see the consequences of our actions so we have just to rely on what our ethics tell us is the right course, since we don’t really have a better guide. The prophets, otoh, do have a better guide, and we do have a fairly broad evidence base of them seeming genuinely to care about the wellbeing of, at least, the Bajoran people. So for me anyway, I am happy to assume that their judgement was sound, being that they are operating with a level of knowledge and within an entire framework that is completely unfathomable to me and I can’t really assess any individual decisions they make fairly.

Fyi, to edit comments, click on the three vertical dots at the bottom – that will open a context menu that has the edit button in it: https://imgur.com/ftJ5HRO.