For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

Stormgate and ZeroSpace are looking like the spiritual successors to Starcraft, with the former developed largely by ex-Blizzard staff and the latter by some prominent members of the Starcraft community.

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DS9, VOY, ENT and arguably even TNG, all helped establish the “rule” that it takes Star Trek shows (after TOS) three seasons to get good. As much as I personally liked Kes as a character, there’s no denying the show took a step up after Seven of Nine was introduced. “Scorpion”, “Year of Hell” and “Living Witness” are all really good episodes.

ENT s2 was so bland it was the first and only time I ever gave up on a Star Trek show, so bored out of my mind was I. Boring boring boring. Except for “Carbon Creek” - that episode is a gem.

(I did force myself to catch up on season 2 after I decided to start watching ENT again in season 3.)

In other words… yes, you’re weird. But, you know, IDIC and all that. 😉

B5 season 5? An interesting choice. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen Babylon 5, but as I recall season 5 suffered from JMS having to write a lot of his season 5 material into season 4, as he didn’t know if the show would be renewed. As a result season 5 ended up being quite lopsided, with storylines like the telepath arc dragging out longer than they should have been. I think B5 was at its peak somewhere in seasons 2, 3 and 4.

Personally I thought season 2 was stronger. I found only two episodes in season 1 to be especially memorable: “Spock Amok” and particularly “A Quality of Mercy” (which I do think has been the finest episode of the Kurtzman era). Season 2 had four strong episodes IMO - “Charades”, “Those Old Scientists”, “Under the Cloak of War” and “Subspace Rhapsody”. 4 out of 10 is a good percentage, but - as you point out - it should be easier to produce a higher proportion of strong episodes in a 10-episode season as opposed to a 24-29 episode season.

SNW wins brownie points for doing a live action / animation cross-over episode and a musical, but loses some for playing it safe in all other respects. It’s the most overtly “conventionally Trek” modern show (after maybe PIC season 3 which was pure fan service with little interesting about it). Granted, what SNW does, it does with confidence and some measure of flair.

I’ve enjoyed two of the three episodes so far, but as burns go, this is 👍.

I would prefer this, I think, because I’ve been having trouble reconciling a sitcom spending a few minutes most episodes this season racking up a body count that would now be in the hundreds, or even thousands.

As a franchise, of course, Star Trek can handle both silly comedy and lethal brutality (and even Lower Decks has successfully juggled in a few serious scenes amongst the comedy, at times), but the way these vignettes have been inserted into the A plots this season is like if in “The Trouble with Tribbles” Arne Darvin had been gang-raped just before the credits rolled.

Without giving it too much thought, I’d say DS9 season 6 or TOS season 1, with DS9 season 4 also being a contender.

DS9 season 6 opened with the franchise’s first example of long-form storytelling, with “Rocks and Shoals” being a standout episode in that arc. It also gave us classics like “Far Beyond the Stars” and “In the Pale Moonlight”. Overall the episodes were solid with few duds.

Similarly season 4 also opened strongly, with four of the first five episodes all being strong, with “The Visitor” among the franchise’s best ever instalments and “Rejoined” also being very very good. (“Indiscretion” isn’t as good as the first three or fifth episode.) It also features “Homefront”/“Paradise Lost”. Granted, the second half of season 4 probably isn’t quite as strong as the first half.

TOS season 1 established so much of the template of what Star Trek is, and many of the episodes still hold up very well even close to 60 years later, including “The Cage”/“The Menagerie”, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Balance of Terror”, “The Galileo Seven”, “Space Seed”, “The Devil in the Dark” and, of course, “City on the Edge of Forever”.

ENT season 4 definitely gets the prize for “most improved” season. (Yes, I have seen PIC season 3, but don’t rate it as highly as most people.)

PRO season 1 gets the prize for best debut season after TOS. I think it did a great job in putting a new spin on the franchise while telling good, family-friendly stories that developed both plot and characters.

That seems like such an insanely weird decision to make.

It could have also been a mistake. The “Ephraim and Dot” Short Trek made a similar continuity booboo when they gave the TOS-era Enterprise the “NCC 1701-A” naval construction code.

Also, I do think it would have been more interesting to proceed with Tuvix from a storytelling point of view. Obviously that doesn’t work great when you have actors contracted for multiple seasons

I was okay with Tuvix being split back apart eventually, but if VOY had fully committed to the serialised nature of its premise I would have loved to have seen Tuvix hang around for, say, 5-10 episodes first. They could still have had Neelix and Tuvok appear in the odd flashback or as holo constructs or something to justify their inclusion in the opening credits. Or, to be even more daring, not have them appear at all and removed Ethan Philips and Tim Russ from the credits for a while, although I don’t think this sort of credit manipulation was permitted in the mid-90s. It would have made the impact of killing Tuvix even greater.

They never speak of it again. Probably because Janeway threatened to murder anyone on the ship who brings it up.

And that’s what makes her the highly effective officer that she is. :-D

I think that after the season of LDS is done, while we’re waiting Disco season five, I’ll try and do some Non-Canon Connections.

Looking forward to that.

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

Fair point. It’s been a few days since I saw the episode, so didn’t recall the nuances.

I did think it was a bit of a shame that one of Trek’s most powerful ethical quandaries got so easily and blithely technobabbled away, but such is the nature of comedy. And VOY did pretty much the same thing to the Borg, so turnabout is fair play I suppose.

And speaking of inside remains as a result of transporter accidents, will you do these canon connections posts for the Very Short Treks, (even if they themselves have been declared non-canonical)?

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Too used to playing Wordle rules,which is a disadvantage here.

Boimler has his Starfleet recruitment poster seen in “Those Old Scientists”, but Number One’s face is obscured every time it’s on screen.

I’m 99% sure they were just being subtle (which I like), but 1% of me wonders if there’s something in the actors’, in this case Rebecca Romijn’s, contract that says they have to be compensated if their likeness is used, even a cartoon likeness. And if so, sometimes the budget doesn’t quite stretch far enough.

This episode reminded me of what Mel Brooks purportedly said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.”

Also, Spork was one of the Vulcan proper names submitted by Bob Justman to Gene Roddenberry during the show’s production: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/star-trek-planet-vulcan-proper-names

T’Lyn is able to combine all the Tuvixed beings into one creature, which is then described by Tendi as a “Non-sentient blob of meat,” handily circumventing the ethical dilemma presented by “Tuvix”.

It really doesn’t. It’s like you lobotomising someone before you suffocate them with a pillow. Sure you turned the non-sentient blob of meat back into their constituent parts, but you’re the one who created the non-sentient blob from a bunch of sentient beings in the first place (second place).

I own all (I think) of the TOS era Bantam novels and short story collections from way back (though some in their UK Corgi editions), and just about all of the early Pocket novels (the first 50 or so); as well as a fairly comprehensive selection of early non-fiction books, including some obscure ones like The Making of the Trek Conventions by Joan Winston, Letters to Star Trek by Susan Sackett and Star Trek Intragalactic Puzzles by James Razzi.

https://youtu.be/tRsYJej2RtI

Exactly. Just as binary digit got abbreviated to “bit” and a collection of (eight) bits became known as a “byte”, I figure something similar would happen for quantum digits -> qubits -> quads (because “qubytes” sounds awkward and “quants” sounds like something you couldn’t get say on network television).