I don’t want to dispute this too much, because it’s obviously true, but Disney is also making the occasional thing like “Andor”, which is neither safe nor unchallenging.

But the exception proves the rule, and so on.

until now Gold has done a pretty good job.

True - I’ve already mentioned that I don’t like some of the other choices he made in this season, but he has also turned in some really good stuff by this point.

We also get his line, “An ordinary man, that’s the most important thing in creation.”

Thanks for mentioning this - it’s very much a core sentiment of the series, and is even repeated later in this episode when the Doctor gets the married couples’ backstory.

If they’re really going to join the fleet from time to time, maybe we’ll finally see this era’s Enterprise.

USS Athena

You’d think watching one (1) episode of Doctor Who per week wouldn’t be too difficult, but there are times when it’s hard to squeeze it in…

“Father’s Day” stands out to me because it’s a good episode that’s successful in spite of…just about everything about it.

The weak production values that have plagued the season are still on full display. It’s shot in a largely boring fashion, and is downright maudlin at times. I absolutely hate Murray Gold’s choices, with those string chords that suddenly turn downward, which doesn’t sound sad so much as it sounds like there’s something wrong with the audio track. The episode does everything it can to be bad.

And it fails. The story is great, and the performances are better. Shaun Dingwall nails the portayal of Pete Tyler, likeable fuckup. Camille Coduri is great as Jackie, as always. Billie Piper turns in what is easily her best performance as Rose so far. Eccleston is good as always, but since the Doctor is in a pretty dour mood for most of the episode, he doesn’t get to show a ton of range.

The creatures (apparently called “Reapers” in ancillary material) are interesting, and it’s a shame the concept has never been revisited. The episode does a lot to establish that time paradoxes can be a thing, and it’s possible to do a lot of damage with time travel, even though it’s not something the series typically worries about.

But in the end, the strength of the episode is its simplicity. Rose can’t help but save her dad, he eventually realizes who she is and learns of his own fate, and has to sacrifice himself to make things right.

They do look awfully Mogh-like…

This casting makes it easy to attack as woke and might limit its audience.

In all seriousness, that would be the absolute best reason for this series to fail. I would be incredibly proud of it.

I didn’t expect the apparent flashback framing device - Russ and Takei are a nice surprise.

Whenever this happens, it looks absolutely fine on some Mastodon instances (I just checked, and this post looks fine on my own), and “wrong” on others (like yours).

That suggests to me that the issue may lie with the Mastodon server, but I genuinely don’t know, and have no idea how to replicate the issue.

That is a bit of weirdness that happens sometimes when Lemmy posts federate to Mastodon. It sometimes grabs the thumbnail and headline from a completely different post.

I have no idea why, but it’s incredibly annoying.

Honestly, my biggest fear is that Paramount+ may not have a lot of the demographic they’re trying to capture.

How many young adults subscribe to that thing?

Like some other jurisdictions, Canada has protections against self-incrimination.

Any person charged with an offence has the right … not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence …

I think they did something similar in the Whitaker era (which I did not participate in).

Best case, it’ll be something to keep the series’ profile up while they figure out what’s next…

Commodore?

Kurtzman does confirm Klingons will be a part of the show; more specifically a “Klingon hybrid species who are several of our main characters.”

And then we have this, seen on TrekCore’s Bluesky:

Kling’Hadar?

They seem to be pushing UNIT in advance of “The War Between the Land and the Sea” - that’s my best guess.

My excitement was starting to die down thanks to the dearth of news, but hot damn, this show looks gorgeous. There’s some really interesting stuff in the interview, too:

“If you’re going to do a show about a young generation facing the future and you want it, as all Star Trek does, to be a mirror that holds itself up to the world as it is now, to situate the show in the halcyon days of the Federation would, in some ways, be dishonest,” Kurtzman, a showrunner on Starfleet Academy with Noga Landau, tells Entertainment Weekly. (The halycon days was a time period when the Federation of Planets enjoyed peace and prosperity.) “Our children are facing a lot of challenges right now and they are our hope for the future…They’ve got a lot riding on their shoulders, and they are meant to reestablish and rebuild everything that we all know and love about Star Trek,” Kurtzman continues. “They convey hope and they search for hope, and that felt like an extremely relevant message to talk about now.”

Landau adds, “It’s wish fulfillment. Every week it’s about a new part of coming of age. One week that can be a prank, war erupts another week, a romance begins another week, we encounter an alien species for the first time and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing [another week]. But at the end of every episode, what we want our audience to feel is, ‘I want to go to Starfleet Academy.’ Even in the deepest, darkest depths of character problems and drama, you get such a good feeling from watching this show [of] how much you want to be there so badly.”

“One of the things that we see all across the world now is how much hate is relied on to sow division between things that connect us as human beings and how hate is used as a bludgeon to destroy empathy, which I think is ultimately what Star Trek is about,” Kurtzman explains. “At its core, it’s about: We may not look the same, but we are the same. Finding that common ground and figuring out a way to understand our differences is at the heart of what [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry was talking about.”

Without revealing too much, Kurtzman explains that Giamatti’s character “represents a tide that has swept across the world in a very profound and upsetting way,” he continues. “I say this without taking a political stance. That is part of what it means to invite everybody into the tent. One of my favorite things about Star Trek is that it reaches across the aisle. People on all sides of the political spectrum love it for different reasons. That is something that we really wanted to hold true to here.”

It also seems like we might learn a lot more tomorrow:

The creative leads are keeping many of the character details under wraps until the big Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con this Saturday, but they confirm Holly Hunter plays the lead of the series, that of the captain and chancellor of the academy.

I can’t believe the manual had such a glaring misprint…

Yeah, it looked directly connected - if you squint, you’d probably be able to work out where on the bridge the door is.