It’s hard to know until someone reviews it.

This evokes a lot of mixed feelings.

On one hand, I have no interest in wrestling and cringe at anything related to it. I’m also super uncomfortable about anything related to WWE making its way into the aspirational Star Trek franchise.

When the early wrestling shows were on local television in my childhood, my parents explained it was all performance and not real sport. So, I have always associated it with a kind of fraud and grift.

I’m always extraordinarily uneasy when young children talk about wrestling heroes as it seems an unhealthy influence. It always seems to represent a demographic that we have nothing in common with. While I’m sure some of our kids heard about WWE at school, they never expressed any interest so there was no pressure to bring anything related to it into our home — for which we were very grateful.

So, the other hand, having this strong aversion to ‘professional wrestling’, when ‘The Rock’ Dwayne Johnson first made his dramatic acting appearance on Star Trek Voyager, I was so annoyed that I didn’t watch the episode.

I realize now that I let my strong bias against the performance of ‘wrestling’ get in the way of assessing an actor on his own merit.

I also recognize that Secret Hideout has been doing its best to bring in actors that will appeal to demographics that are likely to be critical of Starfleet Academy while retaining true diversity.

So, I’m going to try to swallow my aversion and wish this woman performer success as she tries to break out of the WWE circuit.

(I still think Paramount+ senior executives are trying to do everything they can to make our household drop our subscription.)

Even my GenZ kids ask for they physical media not the digital.

Our youngest was just this afternoon sincerely explaining to me why they want their Nintendo games as cards not digital copies.

I’ve done it through DDG on my phone. Still get weird thumbnail.

When I can get on desktop, I can try again but it really makes me wonder about CBR.

Even with the now corrected link, it still wants to show the image from the ad.

I stripped the tracking code from the end but the other image won’t clear.

Corrected it. I initially seemed to have picked up the ad instead of the actual interview.

I’m not sure why anyone ever thought it would be?

Other than the naysayers who were looking not to like it and had to be ‘shown otherwise.’

Even Prodigy ended up an ‘all ages’ show.

Not saying you’re one of them, it’s unfortunate that the new shows seem to have to push against negative labels and narratives that are brigaded before the first casting announcements.

In this case, despite the idea of an Academy show kicking around since the 1970s, it was fairly clear that no senior network/streamer executive were ever going greenlight it until someone came up with a concept that was more than a college soap in the Star Trek universe.

What I didn’t expect was for the other perennial ‘failed to make it to pilot’ franchise idea of a hospital show also got rolled into it. That’s one that Roddenberry first tried to spin off with M’Benga in the second season of TOS.

Prof. Sam Lawler, cited in the article as a critic/skeptic, is very active on Mastodon @sundogplanets@mastodon.social and interesting to follow.

I’m finally getting back to this.

Had a work push and then a virus. I really find I have even less attention for listening and podcasts when I’m ill.

One thing that I’ve figured out is that the audio quality varies widely depending on the service one is getting podcasts from or the delivery app.

The base recording is excellent and the sound effects are there. Some of the players have so much noise that you’d never realize that.

In any event, I tried out different players and found that Cassidy’s delivery was much less mumbly on better audio players regardless of being on the same device.

Something to consider when getting podcasts even through open source players.

We can disagree on that.

I will never love TMP but I will never claim it’s not Star Trek.

I agree. These folks have no perspective or are dishonest with themselves.

I can acknowledge that it can be jarring, and it can take time to accept a major visual design update.

I felt that in 1979 as I sat in the theatre watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I had no heads up whatsoever that the Klingon design had changed. I was completely confused in the opening scenes with the Klingons. I couldn’t figure out what species they were.

But I got over it. Quickly.

I still think TMP is disappointing, long boring movie that rehashes the Nomad plot from TOS. The Klingon redesign wasn’t its problem though.

It seems more that Larry Ellison is giving his adult children amounts of money to invest to learn how to run businesses.

Amounts that for most others would be an inheritance in themselves are less than a year’s interest on Larry’s overall fortune.

David and his sister both started out with a certain amount.

His sister’s firm got into financial difficulties so Larry appointed a co head and hasn’t invested more.

David made his investment in creating Skydance profitable and so his father is investing more.

It’s a better solution than Trump taking his cut of the inheritance and bankrupting it, and then getting full control and bankrupting again.

That’s not to say even so that Larry isn’t taking advantage of the CBS part of the purchase to reshape its news to his own vision.

Celia’s hair for the panel suggests they’re evolving Uhura’s style in season five towards the one in TOS.

Which is interesting because Celia really wanted to avoid wigs and keep a natural hairstyle.

I’m wondering what kind of hair Jess will have for Chappel in the final season.

There are a bunch of the perennial brigading naysayers on other platforms already venting that this young Klingon is too skinny/lanky.

Seems that they never saw Tony Todd as Kurn or considered that TALL is an important Klingon physical characteristic.

This comes across as gatekeeping…

— from the perspective of someone who’s been watching Trek since the 1960s and has seen the same old ‘ahem, not Trek, it’s stealing from …’ chestnuts since TAS was announced, I am alway surprised how little older fans recognize that Trek has ALWAYS adapted other media (movies, television, radio plays, Shakespeare!) into its episodes.

Sigh.

Ok, perhaps I should just power through SG season one and see if I can get into it.

BSG definitely is very late 70s American but, as a Canadian, I find Buck Rogers even worse. I don’t think I made it through two or three episodes at most.

I would definitely put Farscape ahead of the others because it’s had such a profound impact on the creators and writers of other space opera shows since its run, including newer Star Trek.

Babylon 5 is very good if one skips all but the ‘must see episodes’ of season one. The original principal actor suffered a major health crisis between the pilot and the first season. His wooden, not present performance, really damages that season but the other actors and show is very much worth the effort to watch around that.

I would also throw some 1970s classics in to the mix if OP enjoyed TOS. Space 1999 is definitely worth a watch, especially season one. BSG, the original, is a fun ride.

For a show that’s ambitious and appallingly bad all at once, but that features some classic Trek actors and writers, ‘The Starlost’ is a hoot. It really deserves to be purposed for memes.

I can honestly say that I have tried to get into SG1 several times but it never sticks. (I really liked the movie though.). I started again recently and drifted away in the middle of season one.

I’m also thinking about the massive CRA data breach for electronic filers - it’s not a decade since that happened.

Uhm, didn’t physicist David Keith of Harvard, better know for his work on carbon capture, do something like this in the early 1990s in building the early atom interferometers?

He didn’t pursue the development as the applications were military at that time but my recollection was that he created a lab bench sized generator.

They’re making sure they’ll hit the February sweeps for advertiser data (which weirdly remain a thing in the streaming era).

Perhaps the new ownership are going to give the franchise more of a chance to thrive.