I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it’s more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn’t hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

How did you do this?

Apparently your tap water is dramatically colder than any house or apartment I’ve lived in.

Yes, putting ice in water does make me enjoy it more, and no, letting the tap run doesn’t do nearly as much to cool it down as ice cubes do.

It’s really depressing how any internet discussion about global warming is full of comments like this which only exist to downplay small but existent improvements that others have made. It’s whataboutism, plain and simple, and only serves to discourage people from doing anything at all.

This guy getting a more efficient stove isn’t going to save the planet, but at least it helps. Your comment (and many others in this thread) doesn’t do anything at all about our climate problem, and mostly serves to make other people feel stupid and inadequate for even trying to do something.

There is so much, so fucking much, that needs to be done to save our planet. If you think that political change is the only thing that will “really” matter to save the planet (it’s obviously going to be a huge factor), and you are so deeply committed to the ideal that the only things worth doing are those which directly further said political change, then you have serious work to do on your messaging strategy because what you had to say here clearly isn’t causing global change.

Alternately, if you think the situation is so impossible that nothing can be done to save it, go find a different void to yell into and stop trying to drag down those of us who still have some hope.

I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Wrong number of wheels too.

I kept expecting William Boimler to show up before the end of the season, guess they’re holding onto that thread for next year

I think it would be pretty funny if they just never picked up that thread again. William Boimler, already presumed dead, joins S31, does ???? because ?????, is never heard from again.

Then again, this show could do a great job riffing off of how counterproductive and ultimately stupid S31 is, in addition to their absurdly twisted and seemingly inconsistent history. So I’d be perfectly happy to see that too.

This was an excellent finale (as all four of them have been, not at all a given with modern Trek or frankly modern television in general), and fully justifies the somewhat weaker setup episode before it.

“A paywall on a bomb?” might be the best joke this show has delivered in it’s whole run. I don’t often crack up while watching these episodes, but this one really got me. At the very least it’s up there with “It’s a bomb! You can only use it once!” from Wej Duj. I’m sensing a pattern.

In more typical lower key Lower Decks humor, Boimler and Rutherford arguing about if Locarno looks like Tom Paris was excellent.

I do wonder what the plan is with Tendi. We’ve seen supposed major shakeups like this dropped into previous finales, of course, with Boimler leaving the Cerritos for the Titan at the end of season one and Freeman getting arrested at the end of Season 2, which were quickly reverted in the first few episodes of the subsequent season. Odds are that’s the play here. I hope so, because losing Tendi would suck. She’s a delight.

Why was Boimler the acting captain when the command staff took off on the captain’s yacht? There was a full Lieutenant right behind him on the bridge, and surely tens of others on the ship who are more senior and more qualified. A little bit of a main character boost there.

This episode was okay, I guess? It feels very strange to be sitting on one half of an obvious two parter from this show, and recent Trek shows have left me with an instinctive suspicion of mystery-related plots. This is a good writing team so I have hopes they’ll carry this rather bizare setup into a satisfying resolution that actually makes sense, but I’m much more nervous than I usually am.

To play it all out: why the heck is Nick Locarno flying around in a little ship capable of disabling the systems on larger warships, transporting(?) the ships and crews to some planet while leaving wreckage behind? If this turns out to be another figurative Kelpian dilithium tantrum I’m not going to be pleased.

I like what they were trying to do with Mariner in this episode, but for whatever reason it didn’t land quite right with me. Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma’ah felt rushed, almost forced. The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the “small universe” syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into. Further, the “your dead friend wouldn’t want you to have emotional problems” bit is a cliche that rarely lands with me, and this time was no different: these aren’t problems that people can typically resolve simply by recognizing that their emotional reactions are irrational, so being won over with a rational argument isn’t very convincing. It speaks well of Mariner and Rodenberry’s future humans that this worked, I guess, but it does make it less relatable.

Maybe I’ll be sold more easily on rewatch. We’ll see.

The B-plot with Freeman and her deception was decent, although as noted elsewhere Rutherford’s presence feels oddly tacked on. I guess they wanted an engineer around, just in case?

The Jaxa connection does give us a better shot at nailing down Mariner’s actual age, which was presumably somewhere between 17 and 22 (and likely on the later end of that range) at the time of the Nova Squadron incident in 2368. That puts her in her early- to mid-thirties, and lines up well with her service record. We can also confirm that Mariner was not a young child aboard the Enterprise-D, which launched when she was in her mid to late teens.

We saw a CGI model for the first time in the Ferengi episode

Can you explain what you mean by this? Isn’t everything we see in Lower Decks technically CGI?

Expanding on this, I’ve convinced myself that the whole couples dinner thing exists primarily to entertain the other diners. The way it’s set up an an obnoxious and increasingly grotesque public spectacle which I suspect the vast majority of couples would find highly uncomfortable supports this, as does the remarkable timing of the (presumed fake) removal of the fraudulent couple and Tendi/Rutherford being allowed to leave on a flimsy pretense after putting on a pretty good show of their own.

I dislike cringe humor and watching characters be uncomfortable, so I didn’t love the Rutherford/Tendi plotline, but there were enough cute moments in there to make it worthwhile. It feels like the show is openly baiting “shippers” at every opportunity, and this is the most flagrant example yet.

With that said - and making no claims about if romance is in any way necessary or inevitable here - these two being so close is adorable.

For a therapist, Migleemo is either really bad at reading other people’s emotions, or deviously brilliant at appearing clueless. Possibly both?

I appreciate the continued development of Mariner as a person who keeps getting in her own way, slowly coming to terms with that and trying to figure out what to do about it. It’s a problem I don’t relate to at all in the specifics, but the more general “why do I keep doing this” is very easy to connect to, and I know I’m not alone in that. Her Ferengi friend laying it all out for her here seems like an important step, and I wonder where she’s going to turn next.

This probably deserves a deeper dive at some point, but the further we go the more I see Mariner’s path as a more realistic and relatable trajectory for Michael Burnham to have taken. Both are superbly talented people capable of great things. Both are also reckless, supremely overconfident in their own judgement, and prone to self destructive behavior, all of which combines to put them and those around them in dangerous situations. Burnham in S1 right before the Mirror Universe jump and Mariner in the first episode of Lower Decks are in fairly similar places, both having been recently bumped down from more senior positions due to major fuckups. This is where their paths diverge: both continue to display all the behaviors that got them in trouble, but Mariner remains a lower decker on relatively unimportant assignments, with both her strengths and weaknesses clearly recognized by her superiors. Burnham, meanwhile, is fully returned to her previous high station and even promoted beyond that because her most problematic behaviors are improbably rewarded by a universe which places her in the middle of multiple extraordinarily significant events. I strongly related to S1 Burnham, and really wanted to see her grapple with her weaknesses and develop into a better person and officer over time. I didn’t get that opportunity, but Mariner gives a second chance at telling that slow-burn story and thus far, Lower Decks has done very well with it.

We see people enslaved in mines for lying about being a couple to get a discount at a restaurant!

I do wonder if that was actually an arranged bit of entertainment, with the (alleged) punishment trumped up for the sake of it. Ferengi do like to put on a show.

Varitek?

I feel compelled to note that being promoted from Ensign (O1) to Lieutenant Commander (O4) would be a triple promotion, skipping both Lieutenant Jr. Grade and Lieutenant.

The typical Vulcan response of passivity but curiosity is going to work perfectly throughout Lower Decks.

It’s just perfect, isn’t it? Hardly a surprise to me given that a huge chunk of the funny parts of “serious” Trek stem from the dry bluntness of characters like Spock, Data, and Odo. Now that T’lyn is here my only question is why it took until the 4th season for someone like her to show up.