Dropping a line to say that the Star Trek: Lower Decks — USS Cerritos Crew Handbook is finally available for preorder in Canada via Amazon.ca.
Previously Titanbooks webpage had sent all North American purchasers to order from the US Amazon site.
I had tried earlier through a local independent comic store with no success. It’s not clear that Titanbooks is set up distribution with independents, or at least not to those across borders.
It’s possible.
The EPs have said that, in season two, they had used some script ideas that they had worked up for season one but didn’t have room for.
I don’t think we’re going to see in this show any Starfleet officers committing information to personal logs that could threaten history.
SNW seems very conscious that personal logs aren’t entirely personal beyond access.
Una recorded and deleted her personal log acknowledging she is Illyrian in season one.
Later shows in the continuity have revealed to us that some personal logs to become available to next of kin, or are even studied by future Starfleet personnel.
Having Uhura pointedly resist providing the personal logs to La’an in ‘Ad Astra Per Aspera’ also underscored to us that it’s the ethics of communications officers that protect privacy.
She left the gun that had shot Kirk in plain sight to be found be the security team she believed were on their way.
And in fact we heard the footfalls of the team running towards the room just as La’an hit the button and vanished. She didn’t even have time to get herself out of young Khan’s sight.
I didn’t expect to like this episode as much as I did.
Wesley’s Kirk is growing on me, and I give the EPs credit for using the alternate timeline Kirk’s to let his performance coalesce. I also like the deft weaving of the crazy car driving, heartbreaker Kirk with the think five steps ahead genius that he also had to be.
The acknowledgement in-universe that the timeline and humanity’s development has been interfered with is entirely credible given the accretion of temporal incidents across every era of the franchise.
I’m not sure how I feel about it giving comfort to those who feel so strongly that this isn’t the same timeline as the original TOS one. (I see some chortling on this point elsewhere.) Likely the temporal physics of this is best left for a deep dive /c/Daystrom Institute discussion, but I prefer hold to a view that this is absolutely still the same Prime timeline but that the timeline itself has been perturbed repeatedly even if the key events have kept their integrity. In fact, the Romulan temporal agent, while not a reliable narrator, gave credence to the idea that the Prime timeline had proven unexpectedly robust against major intervention by humanity’s enemies.
I was delighted to see DTI show up and be named. It seems all of a piece of DTI’s rigidity that they would leave La’an alone to deal with the trauma. It does however mirror Pike’s own experience in sealing his future with the time crystal. One senses that there must be some kind of intersection or mutual revelation to come, leaving aside the Chekhov’s gun of the temporally dislocated watch.
Knowing that Anson Mount had to relocate to Toronto with his wife and newborn explains why episodes featuring others in the ensemble were front loaded for this season. He’d said before he committed to the show that creative conversations would be needed as he wasn’t wishing to repeat the production experience he had in Discovery season two. A creative conversation with the EPs that limits a principal character’s presence is fairly extraordinary, but Mount seems to have done it in a way that’s generous to the rest of the ensemble.
With an ensemble so strong, and as we didn’t see as much of Chapel or Una as we would have liked last season, I’m fine with waiting to see more Pike later in the season. It sounds as though we have a Spock focused and an Ortegas to come before some big ensemble pieces in the back half.
The context of The Cage / TOS The Menagerie 1&2 provides the foundation.
As a Relaunch Litverse fan, I really liked the introduction of the competing Typhon Pact as a way to bring in a number of the less profiled species.
Having a different kind of interstellar government from the Federation in a Cold War rivalry for planets and civilizations was an interesting backdrop for the entire era. Creating an opponent that brought together a number of the less known species including the Breen, Tzenkethi, Tholians, Gorn as well as remnants of the Romulan Empire was inspired.
We never got to see as much of the Typhon Pact in the books as I would have liked. The concept though was inspired and one that would fit well in the early 25th century portrayed in Picard.
As for the Sheliak, the novelverse has them in conflict with the Breen for additional complexity.
The newest era of Trek hasn’t hesitated to integrate some of the more successful experiments from the novels, including Una’s name and Illyrian genetic modifications. The Typhon Pact of the Litverse has a lot to offer without being a direct competitor to the world building since Nemesis.
There is ‘Where should I start?’ In Community Info the old subreddit. It laid out the different options for viewing order. Elsewhere, many Trek sites publish ‘best of’ lists that can provide suggestions for compressed viewing.
Our mod at our new home here (who was the mod there) is still working out how to create access to some kind of linked community info resources.
In the meantime, keeping in mind that TOS, TNG, Voyager and SNW are episodic, there’s no harm in dropping into episodes in any order and seeing what you enjoy. It’s the way many of us got into the franchise in the days of syndicated reruns.
There’s a dimension of ‘killing the goose that laid the golden egg’ and eating it.
I can’t see how this is anything but a very tiny and super short term benefit to Paramount Global’s net earnings numbers for Q2 2023.
Metrics from 2022 show that Star Trek is one of the two franchises driving subscription demand, and that Prodigy helped sustain and grow the base through the fall/winter before the run up to Picard. Without Prodigy to help fill in the schedule in winter 2023-2024, Paramount+ can only expect season subscription drops by their Star Trek base.
It seems like this action might make things look slightly better at the Q2 earnings call meeting, but smart investors should see it as a an indication that Paramount will lose revenue next year, if not sooner due to backlash from the fanbase.
I guess they were concerned about all the views reducing the value of the tax write-off.
So, instead of SNW in the top of the Nielsen streaming numbers for this week (as they surely hoped), in a month from now we’ll see the figures for this week with Prodigy in the Nielsen top ten like 1923 and Picard.
I wonder what investors and the IRS will make of that…
I see that many people are really angry.
Some say on other social media that they are canceling their Paramount+ subscriptions. The petition has surpassed 15k in under 3 days.
I suspect this may become one of those marketing disaster case studies for business schools. SNW just streamed one of the best-ever episodes in the franchise ‘Ad Aspera Per Aspera’ but the runaway trending conversations are about Prodigy and how the show won’t be there when people planned to watch it.
Our household’s newly-ordered BlueRay set for episodes 1-10 just arrived. (I’m hoping 11-20 will be produced as announced, and as the EPs have said is still going forward, but I’m reluctant to count on that.)
I’m not sure exactly how the revenue and expenses work out for US tax purposes, but one can only hope that all the online purchases, downloads and merchandise orders in the past few days will diminish the value of Paramount’s write of while increasing residuals owed to the creators.
They finally got licensing in place with Playmobil, but only for the really high end collector-niche Enterprise and Klingon ship model play sets. Unlike other Playmobil lines, the Star Trek one doesn’t include the less expensive entry level sets that kids might get as gifts.