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The movie “Bender’s Big Score” recontextualized Jurassic Bark and made it much nicer.

Wow, I need to go eat something. I was just about to ask “when have we seen a Caitian in Lower Decks?”

To be fair, most planets they went to had pretty rugged terrain with no roads near the Stargate. They did use UAVs and MALPs sometimes.

Though one thing they could have found useful going through the Stargate would be dirtbikes, that would have been a fun addition.

Spock casually flies up a mountain using hoverboots in one of the movies. Why this isn’t standard issue on away missions is beyond me. They don’t need bicycles, they can fly.

I had Homer giving commentary in my own head as I wrote it.

It’s a fun meme trend and all, but an insistent little part of my fanboy brain keeps on bothering me to say it; Ketracel White is not actually a drug. It’s merely a metabolite that Jem Hadar were engineered to be unable to make for themselves, so that they would die if they tried to flee the Dominion.

It’s much like vitamin C is for humans. Humans depend on vitamin C, they die if they can’t get enough of it. But snorting vitamin C is not a particularly pleasant experience. And for creatures that aren’t dependent on vitamin C even less so.

There, my nerd brain is satisfied. You may continue with the funny memes.

My main annoyance was how short that bit was.

And also that they teased us with the mention of sea shanties twice without ever delivering.

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This video has a rendering of the Enterprise D’s crew standing in a group on top of the saucer section, to give an intuitive understanding of how ridiculously huge the ship is in comparison.

Worf isn’t real, it’d be a “fake” no matter how it was produced.

I think that description of Universe is somewhat tainted by comparison. It’s not as good as the rest of the Stargate series, but IMO it’s not bad. The first season was darker and more melodramatic than my tastes, but I really liked the underlying mysteries and adventures and things were looking a lot better in season 2 (after which, alas, it got cancelled).

I felt that the finale was thematically satisfying. The Ancients set Destiny in motion to discover the greatest secret of the universe, but never saw it through to the answer. The Tau’ri, the Ancients’ chosen successors, picked up the torch and helped keep it moving. They repaired and resupplied Destiny. But they, too, never saw it through to the answer. Destiny continues on.

But this stuff is important.

But our consciousness is always on while alive.

Not all the time. Sleeping is the obvious exception. You may quibble about whether REM sleep counts as “consciousness”, but there are a couple of deeper types of sleep you cycle through that go way down into inactivity.

There’s also total anaesthesia, which (depending on the particular type) can shut your brain right down deeper than sleep does.

Then there’s people who have clinically died and then recovered, including some record-holders with Lazarus syndrome and who drowned in cold water - the record there is a 2-year-old who was submerged for 66 minutes and had a core body temperature of 19 degrees C when she was pulled out.

Within Star Trek itself there’s also Cryogenics (Khan and company were frozen while traveling in the Botany Bay) and Cryonics (the frozen people who were revived in TNG’s “The Neutral Zone”). Were those people still the same people as they were when they were frozen?

Not routinely. And there’s a strict limit on how long a pattern can be held (at least until Strange New Worlds changed that bit of continuity), and a limit on how much “space” is available in the buffers.

With my freezing proposal you just need a bunch of racks in a room somewhere, and people can be easily kept on ice for centuries with very minimal support (TNG S01E26 “The Neutral Zone”). Most starships have plenty of volume to pack frozen corpses.

Heck, keep some spares on ice even when not on an away mission. If you get killed you only lose a few weeks of memories. Or source spare parts from them. That battle Worf lost with a barrel wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there was a spare spine just sitting in inventory, or Picard’s run-in with those Nausicaans back in the Academy. And in a pinch you could solve staffing issues by thawing a few out to fill some extra shifts.

I begin to suspect perhaps the writers of Star Trek might not be fully exploring all the possibilities their technology provides them.

Indeed. You could even do one better; instead of flashing the old copy to vapor once you’d confirmed that the groundside copy was working correctly, why not freeze it instead? Then if the away mission goes wrong and the groundside copy is killed, thaw the old copy back out again.

I saw a post on Reddit shortly after the episode aired that had some nice speculation about the Moopsy’s biology. It speculated that the Moopsy has a hydrofluoric-acid-based biology, with tissues based on fluorocarbon polymers, ie, squeaky plastic akin to teflon. Hydrofluoric acid is intensely toxic and dangerous to Terrestrial biology in a lot of ways, but if you spill hydrofluoric acid on yourself one of the things it does is seep straight through into your bones and start dissolving them. It really likes calcium, apparently.

According to this safety manual:

HF readily penetrates human skin, allowing it to destroy soft tissues underneath and to decalcify bone (hypocalcemea).

And down in the treatment section on this page:

Calcium gluconate (a calcium sugar) containing gels, solutions, and medications are used to treat hydrogen fluoride poisoning.

I don’t remember this Mirror Universe episode.

Indeed, this is one of the areas where Star Trek has consistently fallen short of its “Utopian future” ideal. I understand that it’s often done for storytelling purposes, but Orville shows how that’s an unnecessary shortcut - it’s still possible to write compelling stories and have the hero be a hero even if his superior officers are actually competent and in his corner.