Hell, I’m a married dude with a child, and I wear a rainbow flag. Ain’t nobody that straight.

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

I like to imagine that a mirror universe / mind swap / space madness episode is always fun for the actors. After playing the same character for years they get to try out something different. Must be a nice change of pace.

I’ve been out of the loop on most of the recent series, but there still isn’t really cursing like this in Star Trek, is there? I remember thinking it felt really natural to have the BSG reboot characters yelling “Frak!” all the time. Even though it was technically a PG cuss, the way they made every use of it come out so Anglo Saxon-sounding. It just makes sense that every once in a while someone’s got to get some swears out, even in space.

My SO and I say that all the chips they’re exchanging during the Enterprise-D poker games are exchangeable for sexual favors.

Looks nice. Non-reactive. Quark talks about gold-pressed latinum having a distinctive clink, so the gold would be a part of that.

Bajor isn’t part of the Federation, so they don’t have immediate access to all Federation tech. Also, even when they join, I’m not convinced that the Federation just hands new members everything. The Prime Directive is all about not interfering in a society’s natural growth, and although achieving warp travel is the major barrier to initiating First Contact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional steps along the way once a planet has joined the Federation.

Having seen Avery Brooks give panels at cons, I can confidently say that all the times when Sisko got space madness or was holosuite transformed into a Bond villain or was otherwise acting like a madman… all of those performances are the real Avery Brooks, and the stolid, restrained, level-headed Sisko is the character that Avery Brooks uses his formidable acting skills to pretend to be.

Boy you Starfleet officers sure are a contentious lot!

Navigational shields deflect bits of dust and micrometeors away from the ship so that the hull isn’t constantly being bombarded by interstellar debris so small that it doesn’t merit navigating around or pushing out of the way with a tractor beam. Essentially, they are the absolute weakest form of ship defense, and the laser weapons described don’t even pose a threat to them, let alone the actual defensive shields intended for use in combat.

Leave them all in. Remasters are for restoring a work to as close as possible to the way it was meant to look when it was released, and nothing more. You wouldn’t look at a painting by da Vinci or Vermeer and say “Hey the perspective is off there,” or “That kind of bird doesn’t belong in that time and place,” and then “fix” the painting in the process of restoring it.

The creator(s) made a series of decisions during the original process of creation. Maybe some of them were mistakes, but they were their mistakes to make, and not anyone else’s to try and second guess after the fact. Once you start down that path, there’s nothing preventing George Lucas style special edition madness.

Remake of Three’s Company with Garak, Julian, and Dax sharing an apartment, and Quark as the landlord.

Any time I see “Directed by LeVar Burton” I know I’m in for a good time. He was fantastic at directing episodes with heavy interpersonal stories.

And that time he tried to set Trip up with his wife.

Hell if I know how expensive a custom flag is to get printed but or both look pretty good. Worry less about canonicity and more about if the aesthetics work for you.

Is there Lower Decks two-parter titled Worst of Both Worlds? There should be.

If you count Galaxy Quest, which was released in between Insurrection and Nemesis, then the Odd=Bad / Even=Good pattern holds.

I’m pretty sure that it’s Federation, but I wouldn’t bet a major limb on it.

From TNG, “Conundrum”:

PICARD: Tactical analysis, Mister Data.

DATA: The pods are equipped with fusion-generated pulse lasers and minimal shielding.

RIKER: Not much power there.

PICARD: Forward shields to maximum. Lock phasers on the sentry pods. Prepare to return fire.

WORF: Shields up. Phasers locked on targets.

PICARD: Full impulse. Take us straight through them.

DATA: We are through the perimeter, sir.

RIKER: That was too easy.

WORF: We have yet to encounter any battleships. They may lie ahead.

PICARD: Load all torpedo bays. Ready phasers.

WORF: Aye, sir.

MACDUFF: Approaching Central Command.

PICARD: Mister Data, scan for defences.

DATA: I am picking up no vessels, no additional sentry pods.

RIKER: Optimal firing range in fifty five seconds.

MACDUFF: Phaser banks ready. Loading torpedoes.

PICARD: What are the defensive capabilities of the Central Command?

DATA: Armaments consist of four laser cannons and thirty nine cobalt fusion warheads with magnetic propulsion. Defensive shield output is four point three kilojoules.

RIKER: One photon torpedo ought to do it.

TROI: Data, how many people on that station?

DATA: Fifteen thousand, three hundred eleven.

MACDUFF: We’re within range, Captain.

PICARD: Stand by.

MACDUFF: Waiting for your order, sir.

TROI: Captain, this isn’t right.

MACDUFF: The rest of our forces are depending on us.

RIKER: How can our mortal enemy be over a hundred years behind us in weapons technology?

…and in “The Outrageous Okana”:

WORF: Still no response. Captain, they are now locking lasers on us.

RIKER: Lasers?

WORF: Yes, sir.

PICARD: Lasers can’t even penetrate our navigation shields. Don’t they know that?

One of the novels has a conversation with Zephram Cochrane that explains the origins of the arrowhead itself that I was quite fond of.

Cochrane is asked to explain his warp drive and he draws a quick sketch.

He explains that Einsteinian physics state that as an object’s velocity (V) approaches the speed of light, the energy (E) required to accelerate further grows infinite (marked by the star).

However, his calculations indicated that if one could accelerate beyond the speed of light, that the energy required to accelerate would diminish beyond that point (hence the steely rising and then falling line in red). The problem is that it’s impossible to expend infinite energy to reach that speed.

So what his warp drive does is warp space in such a way that that curve instead extends below the point of infinite energy (the green curve). One expends a given amount of energy to accelerate to light speed, and the warp drive allows one to continue to expend less than infinite energy to accelerate further.

I’m pretty sure this doesn’t jive with later canon explanations of how warp drive works, but I loved that Cochrane’s legacy was still being incorporated into Starfleet insignia even over a century after his death.