Someology

If you’re a long time Trek fan, definitely check out SNW. It is the best of all the new stuff for old-school fans. By a long shot.

I finally suffered through the first 4 seasons of Babylon 5 this year. While there are good moments, the production values, writing, and acting are just not on a level with DS9. It felt like watching a big 3 network soap opera in space a lot of the time, with that same type of acting style. A couple of characters were great, but that’s it. DS9 was just a better made show all around. Babylon 5 proves that you can have great ideas, but if the entire production situation doesn’t come together in an equally high quality way, you aren’t going to get an equally good result that will hold up over time the same way.

If you like TNG, then go find anything by Peter David.

Yes. That is definitely almost all of Lower Decks.

I am not Chinese, but I think that the concept of “Face” seems the same as one of the meanings of “honor” in English. “Honor” can mean glory, but it also means one’s reputation and standing/respect within social structure in a way that seems very like “face”. People will even say that a person does something “to save face”, and it’s very entwined with one of the ways the word honor is used. I think the primary difference is that this idea is not as important in say, the USA in the same exact personal formal way it once was in the past. Our culture has become more casual over time, and the vocabulary has changed slightly. In colonial and early America, people would fight duels to the death over a verbal insult to their reputation. In the early 20th century, some families would still hide an out of wedlock pregnancy to “save face” for the entire family. People now only worry about face very much in a professional setting, and not as much in matters of personal life. Instead of having one definition of this that crosses all person and professional relationships, the personal relationships are more individually defined. Even then, this varies with profession, and would be more common in a military profession than something like education. You will still find people who will not accept charity until they are literally starving in order to “save face” and protect their social standing reputation.

I also thought, “Wow, what a platter!” when I saw that scene.

Here’s the original version of the song: https://youtu.be/jrE5a-ehYS0

TL;DR: It’s the only symphonic march. Loads of brass chord progressions.

Because Jerry Goldsmith did a great orchestral arrangement riffing on the old sci-fi 60s style theme. He made it very grand with Symphonic March style and the layered horn/trumpet progressions. It is a revision of what he had previously written for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which might also be part of why it’s a March. So, if we look at the styles of a bunch of the the themes:

• TOS: fast 60s vocal arrangement
• TNG: symphonic march with cascading brass/french horn progressions
• DS9: Slower non-march style of symphonic theme
• VOY: Slower grand/inspiring symphonic theme
• ENT: Well, it’s a pop song.
• DISC: Very moody/pensive slow start, growing slowly to a note of inspiration.
• PIC: Similar to DISC with a very slow/moody start. Lots of melancholy layering.
• SNW: Almost between a march and mini overture in feel, but without all those cascading horn progressions that TNG had.

:)

They clearly did not know what to do with the character at first. With such a young character.

Wesley, any day. He won’t eavesdrop on my thoughts, he can help with my homework easily, and he is a genius who invents cool things and sees things in groundbreaking ways that I might learn from.

On the one hand, watching pieces of History like this can be frustrating on such issues (it is a media History artifact at this point, just as much as a Shakespeare play). On the other hand, I like to think about how much things have changed, even since Next Gen and DS9 aired. It is more common and possible to talk about a lot of social issues now than it was then. FAR fewer young women I know now would put up with the same levels of sexual harassment than older women I know from the Boomer generation saw as a thing they just had to put up with as a fact of life. It is heartening to see the positive changes overall.

Nope. His palm is definitely out. He just doesn’t have his thumb extended. Other than the thumb, it’s a completely normal Vulcan salute. Perhaps Frakes had a bit of trouble with it early on and just hadn’t got his thumb out properly yet?