This episode gave me such joy. I feel like Lower Decks leans a lot into the outrageous stories, like last week’s Evil Computer and Peanut Hamper thing. Those episodes are fun, but they lean pretty hard into that Rick and Morty humor.

This episode felt like a Star Trek episode. Mocking the over reliance on cave sets was a great premise, but from there we had a good episode showcasing several minor characters interacting with our main cast. It was a great way to allow them to branch out while sticking to the core relationship between the characters.

On top of that, the jokes were funny. I almost didn’t stop laughing at the subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at cave episodes throughout the years.

Personally, I’d like more episodes like this. It really showcases what is great about this show.

About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

I still really want to understand what those apps are doing in the background to cause this in the first place.

So what I think you want is the DS9 era Klingon emblem.

Check out this eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/225629480900?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=MsrYxcGVQCq&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

According to this article this is the banner that was used on the Promenade in DS9. This is a “chair drape” (whatever that is) but maybe you could use it as a flag, convert it to a flag, or have a custom flag made based on this?

Makes sense. I just spent 5 days reconstructing my network due to a variety of inefficiencies. Happy to say it worked out on the end, but it was hell during.

Good luck!

Huh. Well, there goes that idea.

Next I would try removing the AppleTV from the Home. Force the HomePod to be the hub and see if scenes work.

If that doesn’t work, I’d try completely starting your Home over, with the first device you connect being the HomePod and the second being the AppleTV. I realize that’s not ideal but you’re having abnormal behavior here. I have an AppleTV, HomePod, and HomePod Mini on a network with multiple smart devices and everything works fine.

When you go to Home.app>3 dots in the upper right>Home Settings>Home Hub and Bridged, do you see the HomePod there?

What made this episode wonderful was finally taking a look at Orion culture. It’s one of the oldest races in cannon, first showing up in TOS, but we know so little about them. It was fun to dig into that a little.

While Tendi is one of my favorite characters, I do find her backstory a little cliched. Having her and Billups with essentially the same backstory seems lazy. I’m happy they called that issue out with a joke, but it feels unnecessary for Tendi.

That said, I did like how they investigated how this impacted her sister, and created good character tension there. I do hope we get more backstory at some point on all of this about why Tendi hated Orion culture so much, and why so few Orions choose starfleet.

All that said, I found this to be a mostly forgettable episode. It had its moments, but the jokes felt a little off and the plot didn’t draw me in like some of the other episodes.