Upon further reflection, I feel like this episode undermines the plot of "The Galileo Seven". Spock is a very able commander in 2x01 when years later he struggles on an away mission…
@beefcat@Overboard8171 I didn't know that. This the first time I've legitimately intended to go to a website that is a .website TLD now that you mention it though...
Too bad, seems like a solid TLD. I guess .app,.social,.world - those I see all the time.
I admit, I’m having really weird flashbacks to usenet and the early-internet days with this proliferation of weird TLDs and subdomains coming into use for lemmy instances. Or maybe IRC.
(It’s weird, because I’m just a touch too young to have used usenet.)
Looks lego compatible or at least inspired to me. I’m wary by default from experience with other lego-compatibles. There’s definitely something nostalgic about their catalog but I wish the sets were more detailed. On the other hand the sheer number of different ships they have is pretty cool
They are 100% lego compatible. When I said different, I mean finish (sheen/color) and they don’t have LEGO stamped on each stud. Other than that, they are the same. Lego’s patent expired several years ago, so anyone can make them now. This is a new company that is taking advantage of that and some how they got a Star Trek official license.
I was trying Mlem in beta through Test Flight, but it wasn’t very functional yet, despite the nice interface. (I’ve been finding just going through the browser good enough for now.)
Yessir. They’re trying to go for an Apollo feel I think, and there’s some things that are still missing, I can actually use Mlemmy. Mlem can’t even save my login once it’s unopened for an hour or so.
I have only ordered from them once, but on that order I purchased this set, the only large one at 2,888 pieces and a bunch of the 500-600 piece sets: the defiant, NX-01, Voyager, and Enterprise E (I am probably the only person who likes that design). Didn’t have any issues at all and shipping was quick and easy. One thing to note is their prices include VAT taxes, if you are not in the EU, the price will be a little cheaper that what is shown. I ended up buying last October when the exchange rate was almost even, so for everything (5 items) it was 315 shipped to my door in the US.
As for the builds, the DS9 is fragile as you would imagine. The stand they do have you build is awesome and holds this massive things and lets you easily move it around. This is more of a display set, not a play item. This set doesn’t have, nor do the little ones, any interiors or extra little details. That is the one things Lego is pretty good about is giving you something. For example, the NX-01 doesn’t have the neat pulse cannons on the bottom. Little nit pick, but a difference between the two. All major details are there though, no mini figs. None of the sets were missing any parts and much like Lego I had a ton left over. The bricks are printed, which is nice. I have done a bunch of Lepin and King sets, quality is on par with that. It is good, but lego is just a bit better, but I doubt a normal person could tell the difference. There is no gluing, just different building techniques. The little ships are VERY sturdy, you can you pick them up and fly them around (I, as a 40ish person, totally haven’t done this on multiple occasions). Each model looks like the ship it is supposed to annnnd these are officially licensed.
I am very happy with my first purchase. I plan on buying the new larger NX-01 (which has pulse cannons) when it comes out and a couple others. At this point, I will buy anything that is not star wars and a brick. Let me know if I missed anything.
It feels as though Dr Erin MacDonald has earned her consultant’s fee helping them sort out the physics.
We’re out of the mess of the ever-expanding manifold time that Marvel and DC have bought into.
Beyond that version of infinitely branching manifold time / multiverse being offside, basically contradicting modern physics, it creates a situation where every possibility exists so nothing our heroes do matters, and nothing ever done to fix a time incursion matters either.
Instead we see that forks in the timeline can prune other timelines. Both branches can’t continue to exist, and the river of the timeline has some fixed events (time crystals) that pin it, pull it back to its original course.
So it would take something extraordinary, even on the Trek scale of extraordinary, to create a true ongoing branch. The creation of the Kelvin universe is associated with the Romulan Supernova. Knowing now that the Romulans have been interfering with human development over centuries and using temporal agents to do it, having a major disaster to the Romulans impact human history seems like a corollary. With a major event like a sun blowing up, we can say we’ve got a threshold for creating a separate sustainable universe.
As for TNG Parallels, I still love the episode, but perhaps we could reframe it as all the short run alternate timelines. For as unlikely as it was, Worf got back to his own timeline and Enterprise. Time fought back.
The Mirror Universe is some kind of true branch that happened much earlier, such that even the physics of light are slightly different.
Kovich’s explanation of branching universes suggests that they’re not common but also that as they increasingly diverge, it becomes less and less possible to corpse over and those who do may not be able to survive.
He noted that no contact had been possible with the Mirror Universe in several centuries.
The 24th century Kelvin Universe officer who came over to the Prime Universe in the 32nd century died, as would have Georgiou. But the Kelvin Universe was close enough that he was able to cross at all.
That wasn’t the Prime timeline, though, or it never really got the chance to be for very long - that we the timeline when Pike decided to write to the kids and avoid his fate. So while a butterfly effect may have ended up having Una still incarcerated, that wasn’t what we wound up with, not at the end of the episode, and not in “Balance of Terror”.
Having Una have temporal shivers from a timeline that no longer exists would be a neat idea, regardless.
Just as Roddenberry's utopian future transcends sexism, racism, ableism and other isms, so too does the cold-blooded calculation of the corporate accountant. Networks will cancel shows that lose money and renew shows that make money over whatever timeframe their cost/benefit ratio is run on. Personally, I think Prodigy is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, and cancelling it/removing it the network is a mistake from a brand/franchise/portfolio management perspective. But spinning its cancellation as an example of misogyny is silly. You might as well argue that Paramount hates kids cause there are many more children as main characters in the show and only one adult woman.
I agree these kinds of assessments require a bit of a deep dive.
Let’s look at the business case then, the economics and the long haul marketing strategy.
Does the narrative around Prodigy being unprofitable, a write off hold up? Could Whitbrook be putting his finger on something valid?
Let’s also keep in mind that the head of scheduling for streaming at Paramount has been saying that their business strategy for Paramount+, as they integrate Showtime, has said repeatedly that their streaming strategy is built on ‘the 3 Fs’:
Fandoms, franchises & familiar faces.
Prodigy quite obviously was designed to tick off all three elements of the strategy, so what’s the failure point or mismatch as they winnow?
The narrative that Prodigy wasn’t popular enough on Paramount+ doesn’t scan.
First, from what metrics we have available publicly for 2022 (Parrot Analytics mainly),
Prodigy was one of only two Paramount+ animated originals that performed well in audience demand, falling slightly behind Lower Decks.
Overall demand for the franchise and subscription uptake continued to build during Prodigy’s run in the fall-winter of 2022-2023 in contrast to the acute fall-off earlier in 2022 during the runs of Discovery season 4 and Picard season 2.
Star Trek and the Sheridan Yellowstone franchise accounted for half of Paramount+‘s subscription demand in 2022, with net subscription increases during the runs of SNW, Lower Decks and Prodigy.
So then, if Prodigy is doing well in attracting and retaining subscribers and Star Trek is one of two principal franchises supporting their business strategy, where’s the problem?
Let’s look at Nickelodeon, the original destination for the show.
Nickelodeon’s linear audience numbers have been falling overall. Prodigy’s numbers aren’t great on Nick, but none of Nick’s new shows are taking off as they once were.
Going into the pandemic, Nick was such an important anchor for cable in the US that Paramount was obliged to make promises for content exclusivity windows for Nickelodeon when it negotiated its last carrier contract for the US with Comcast. When the pandemic came, suddenly kids were online as never before, and Nickelodeon quickly diminished in its power to attract linear viewership.
So, one can draw an inference that it’s Nickelodeon, not Paramount+, that’s financial trouble is a key point in the decision. Nick is losing money on Prodigy, that needs an exit pathway for an expensive show it can’t afford to partner in.
BUT…
Why then, given Paramount’s 3F streaming strategy, animated shows less expensive and underrepresented in Paramount’s streaming offerings, doesn’t Paramount just rework the deal between the streaming side and Nickelodeon?
Here’s where systematic bias may be coming into it -
Paramount+ has been successful in building a broad subscriber base across ages, genders, race and ethnicity while still gaining ground in ‘middle America.’
This is not the case for other streamers. MAX is struggling to bring together the male-skewed HBO audience and the older-female Discovery one.
Let’s look at what else was cut along with Prodigy.
a show targeted at the LGBTQ audience canceled during Pride month
a show targeted at a niche female demographic
a family show headed by one of the strongest female leadership icon characters of the 90s, with another principal character voiced by a Black actor.
Paramount used a lot of dense marketing technobabble about fit and alignment to explain that the choice to cut and write this particular set of 3 shows. They’ve previously talked about popularity during the cuts of Showtime’s more niche, arty products.
If we listen to them, and accept their justification, the implication is that these LGBTQ, women and black targeted shows no longer are their demographic priorities. They don’t fit with where P+ with Showtime is going even if they all obviously check the 3F boxes. Meanwhile, there’s been no language backpedaling on the 3F strategy.
At the same time, Paramount Global is trying to sell off BET and BET+.
The conclusion isn’t necessarily misogyny, but clearly that Paramount Global is no longer strategically prioritizing its diverse representation of demographic groups.
They are telling us, their advertisers and their investors that Paramount/CBS is turning the entire business back towards prioritizing a much less representative audience.
There’s an implicit assumption that they can continue to retain the demand of women, racially diverse and LGBTQ demographics, while skewing their new investments towards the older, middle American audience of the Yellowstone franchise and the slice of the Trek audience that Picard season three was targeted to draw back in.
My conclusion - Whitbrook has a point. They wouldn’t have done this with Picard or Kirk.
It says more about Paramount’s strategic shift away from prioritizing representation and diverse demographics more broadly.
It’s not just misogyny, but it’s in there. Without unconscious bias and systemic misogyny, the scheduling folks wouldn’t assume that they can hold girls and women as an audience while taking them out of principal roles.
@StillPaisleyCat I appreciate the long, well-thought out reply. But I'm not convinced. Lower Decks has a black woman, Tawny Newsome, first on the call sheet and Mike McMahan has said (IIRC) that by default all of the characters in the show are bisexual (something that's been shown in various ways on-screen), so I don't think you can point to Prodigy's cancellation due to some bias against LGBTQIA+, women or people of colour when you have a counterfactual right there in its sister show. In fact, every modern Trek show has its diversity boxes well and truly checked, but nobody is accusing Paramount of cancelling Picard because of some network executive's bias against an interacial lesbian relationship in Raffi/Seven.
I haven't watched any of the Yellowstone shows (they're on my list) but I understand that franchise has Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in its stable. A show starring these actors is just going to do better than a show starring Kate Mulgrew (who's last-billed, albeit with the "and" credit), just as a show starring Patrick Stewart as the lead is inherently going to do better numbers than a show where Kate Mulgrew is a supporting character. Bring in, oh say Beyonce, as a lead on a Trek and I'm pretty sure the ratings will spike through the roof. It's not because they're white or male, it's because they're more famous.
They wouldn’t have done this with Picard or Kirk.
Maybe, maybe not. But if not, it's because Picard and Kirk are more iconic, more well recognised characters than Janeway. Star Trek was never more popular in the mainstream than in the mid 80s-early 90s, with the TOS movies and TNG TV series both in full flight. VOY ran during the Berman era's middle-age as Trek's star (nyuk nyuk) was beginning to fade. Fans know who Janeway is, but most people on the street wouldn't, whereas most people on the street would recognise Captain Kirk and the bald English guy from that space show.
By the way, I say all this as someone who thinks that Prodigy is a far more worthy addition to the franchise than the fan-lauded season 3 of Picard.
Lots of talking, probably. They probably spilled everything about their histories, and not just their personal histories, but the histories of their own universes. Thinking about that makes the ending all the more heartbreaking.
c/startrek is the "general" community of the instance, yes.
The error message on Jerboa is a known issue - unfortunately, we're going to wait until v.0.18.1 is released, as CAPTCHA is disabled in v.0.18.0, and we're not willing to give that up at this time.
There are three main workarounds that we're aware of for this issue:
When your Jerboa login fails, simply use Android's "back" button to return to the initial screen in the app - you should actually be logged in, and able to engage with the instance, at least in a limited fashion.
There is a fork of Jerboa that's supposed to compatible with instances running v.0.17 - I haven't tested this myself, so use at your own risk.
You can access the instance through a mobile web browser - the mobile web version of Lemmy is actually pretty good, and I preferred it over Jerboa even before the version mismatch became an issue. You can even install the instance as a PWA through Chrome's "..." menu.
Its interesting what they are doing but god damn are they hamstringing the timeline by moving Khan to 2022/3.
First Contact happens in 2064 pretty reliably. So that means this PreTeen Kahn needs to become a Tyrant. Rule over a quarter of the globe, I guess start or be involved in WW3 and bounce on the botany bay. All in 40 years.
It can still kind of work. Montalban was about 45 when he was Khan, so let’s say Khan was around that age when he was exiled. The young Khan we see seems to be about 10 years old, maybe a bit younger.
So say baby Khan was born in 2012 if we want to take Sera’s 30 years literally rather than as an approximation. World War III (according to ENT: “In a Mirror Darkly” but the years may have slipped) starts in 2026 and lasts until 2053 (ST: FC, SNW: “Strange New Worlds”). Khan could easily have fought in the war and took power in the end days of the war - he’d only be 41 in 2053.
Even in the old timeline Khan only ruled one quarter of Earth for about 4-5 years between 1992 and 1996. So it’s not implausible that the Eugenics Wars happen around 2048-2053 (Khan would be in his mid-thirties, and augmented) and Khan escaped after his reign was toppled during the Last Day in 2053 on a non-warp powered sleeper ship, because Cochrane only managed warp 10 years later.
In fact, having the Eugenics Wars take place around 2050 works better because Archer said his great-grandfather fought in them (in North Africa). Since ENT takes place in the 2150s, that only makes about a century between their births, which is certainly reasonable, whereas if Archer-great-grand-pére fought in the 1990s then it’d be stretching his longevity just a tad.
Having WW3 and the Eugenics Wars switched in canon would make a lot of sense. Humanity goes to war and ruins civilization, then the augments take advantage and seize part of the planet for their fifedom. Then people like Colonel Green start purging anyone with radiation altered genes in the west as part of a general paranoia over “divergent” evolution.
If we take the chronology in “Mirror Darkly” as still valid, then Green started the war in 2026.
2026: Earth’s World War Three begins, over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement. Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.
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