Actually this brought up a completely buried memory for me. For a few years I lived in the same neighborhood as him – at the time, cool guy that I was, I had a Starfleet badge on my coat, and one day I was at the grocery store and had an awkward moment with him where our carts got sort of wedged together negotiating the too-narrow checkout lanes. He saw my pin and gave me a Vulcan salute as he moved into his lane. He seemed nice and a bit sheepish. The staff at the coffee shop I used to go to told me he was extremely lovely.

Yeah, all of the recasts have been spectacular with this one exception; I’m fully stumped by Paul Wesley and his take on the character. I don’t need anyone aping Shatner and I love the idea of highlighting the more bookish actual Kirk as opposed to the pop culture image of him, but Ozempic Kirk spends 90% of his time looking bored out of his mind and 10% of his time doing a terrible Han Solo impression that just comes off as creepy. I cannot understand spending so much time on him when literally everyone else on screen sparkles and he has the charisma of wet felt.

Probably because he sucks

Oops you just explained all of Enterprise

I love this show, but I do not understand how they cannot create a uniform that doesn’t look like pajamas (the Cerritos-style uniforms Janeway and her crew wear look great though). The weird gray they seem to be enamored with looks so silly.

What a bizarre three ships to start with

I struggle to think of a Trek character more Star Trek than Saru. DSC has its (sometimes severe, sometimes not) flaws, but it has an impressive track record of occasionally absolutely nailing how to make some of the trekkiest Trek characters.

It’s going to be interesting where the series ends up in the inevitable reevaluation once a few years have passed.

They’re also paying attention to when they need to renegotiate contracts. After the strikes, studio leadership has really doubled down on not giving an inch on writers’ and actors’ salaries even if it means cancelling a successful show. It’s more valuable to them to keep workers in a state of perpetual gig work than anything they’d make from the show.

Totally, thank you. Star Trek is goofy as hell sometimes. I think if the Kelpian kid had been a plot device isolated to a single episode, no one would have batted an eye if it were on TNG or VOY. But as the reveal of a season long mystery, it was a big woof for a season and a concept that I was really into.

That said, season 4 really picked up that briefly dropped ball. I think the last two episodes of S4, plus the one with the debate at Federation HQ, will go down as Trek classics once Disco ages a bit.

The Orion ship that arrives to collect Tendi is inspired by the one introduced in “The Pirates of Orion”, but appears to be a more modern iteration of that craft, as well as being significantly larger.

There have been a number of references to that episode this season, but STILL no one has said “Oreeeeon” or worn a silly green jumpsuit/helmet combo. Like what are they even doing?

If Locarno had kidnapped like Harry Kim or Geordi or some shit and put them on that viewscreen like he did Mariner, we would have had a full episode’s worth of them interminably trying to find a way to play along and send a secret message out and agonizing over the situation, when just yelling “this guy’s an idiot and his plan is stupid” is genuinely a vastly better plan.

The information broker has had cosmetic surgery to resemble the puppet Balok used to appear intimidating in “The Corbomite Maneuver”

I don’t think it specifies in the episode that the information broker had cosmetic surgery, does it? I wondered if this episode was trying to semi-canonize the Dassik. I don’t really care either way because that bit was hilarious.

Are you implying that there’s a joke in a Canon Connections post? Inconceivable.

I loved this one. I’d read a Ryan North comic about Shaxs doing pretty much anything, but nice to see him in action fighting fascists.

With all the “Pirates of Orion” references in this one, they really missed the boat not having at least someone pronounce Orion the insane way they do in that episode.

The Bill thing at least is a joke about TNG season 1 - they had Troi call him Bill and it was in the early series bible that Picard would call him William and he would be called Bill by “close female friends.” I hate these shorts (although I’m glad they exist for the animation, at least), but that was a pretty funny callback.

My 8-year-old daughter loves Prodigy, and we’ve started dipping into Voyager (after 50,000 rewatches of every Lower Decks episode except the Billups one), and she loves it, but every time Harry Kim is on screen she lets out this teenagery exaggerated groan of annoyance (I’ve never connected more with another human being). I’m so hoping he shows up on Prodigy because it would be hilarious how angry she’d be.

Barclay’s actor has become a truly odious person in real life –– I don’t think the TNG cast (Stewart in particular) would have agreed to have him on the show.

Knowing a few people who have worked on series that ended up looking for new networks, I feel pretty confident that for zillions of reasons (both legal and promotional) they would never have shown this footage if it wasn’t basically a done deal –– this is just marketing to see us go bananas over the Doctor before they reveal the streaming deal. Which –– I could not believe it when I woke up this morning because I was totally sure all the “new home” stuff was entirely wishful thinking and that Prodigy was fully dead.

I wish this had been addressed, but I feel like it would be easy to see Fleet Formation as a response to both the PRO and LD incidents. If you have a ship that’s compromised (like the Protostar or one of the Texas class ships), Fleet Formation lets you immediately deprive that ship (or any other infected ships) of autonomy by locking it into a unidirectional control from Starbase One. If it really can override anything else, that would mean that in the event of a Living Construct or whatever, Starfleet could just lock everything in Fleet Formation and the ending of PRO would never happen. But I guess they didn’t anticipate a threat coming from inside Starfleet.