Yes, I’m not saying she’s not a capable director, but she doesn’t seem to have been the right choice for this episode.

Looking across the distribution of directors used for SNW, as well as Discovery and Picard, there definitely seems to be particular ones that are consistently asked back for specific tones.

Maja Vrvilo directed the season 2 finale Hegemony Pt I and the season 3 one New Life and New Civilizations. In season 1, she directed Children of the Comet.

Jordan Canning directed Charades last season. This season she was given Wedding Bell Blues and Four and a Half Vulcans.

I wasn’t positively impressed by the direction from Valerie Weiss in this episode.

Others have remarked about the tone being all over the map in this episode.

That’s a fair assessment in my view but it’s not a fault in the writing per se. Comic levity in the midst of intense drama goes back to Shakespeare and even Greek theatre, and certainly isn’t uncommon in episodic Trek.

But somehow it felt like the great pieces of the episode just didn’t quite come together. It doesn’t feel like the fault was in the editing or writing.

Paul Wesley’s portrayal of Kirk was excellent but at this point, I’m going to give the actor the credit over the director.

This is just the second episode directed by Weiss. The previous one was Ad Aspra Per Aspera which was a very different challenge for a director. What they needed was a director like Frakes who can do both the comic and the serious.

Discovery became increasingly hopeful and positive as it went on.

Worth watching through season two at least if you haven’t already done so.

I liked seasons three and five a lot.

Season four has a really great classic Trek premise but the constraints of the COVID protocols led to some dialogue that’s over drawn out (Picard season two suffers the same).

I don’t agree at all that it’s implied that these people never came across other humans.

It’s fairly clear, from the tales of the Destroyer/scavengers that Uhura and the others recount, that these humans do not care who they are attacking or killing to gain resources and technology.

They are known to attack and raid colonies and destroy entire planets. While some were populated by alien species, others were human colonies based on the reports.

They surely knew from previous seizures of ships that some were human crewed, by the bodies if not through language.

They had become a voracious pirate culture.

It’s not obvious that communication could have turned them away from destroying the populated planet that they were on course for.

The outcome of Kirk’s decision is that the Federation didn’t get the opportunity to try to communicate with them before destroying them as a last resort.

At least Ellison senior is giving is kids ‘loose change’ to cut their teeth on managing businesses before they need to take over.

As bizarre as that sounds, it’s better for the employees and investors than the alternatives.

Sumner Redstone fought to keep control until he was incapacitated, severely damaged the value of his legacy instead of letting his daughter learn to manage it.

Ellison seemed to be making an effort to reassure many of their longtime creative partners that they want them to stay with them.

He definitely isn’t looking to cannibalize and raise cash the way the Redstones were doing since the remerger. He’s determined to hang on to BET which I read as a significant signal.

One has to wonder what role Redstone’s desire to sell off pieces played in reintegration and failure to find synergies.

It also seems that Ellison has a personal vision of what he wants to do with legacy media that goes beyond just treating IPs as cash cows. I don’t think we’ve seen everything he intends and it sounds as though he’ll be very hands on in making sure the vision is realized. It will be interesting to watch.

Many of us used to say the same about TNG, DS9 and Voyager bringing fans to TOS, TAS and the TOS movies.

But others of us just tried to give each show a chance to become favourites on their own merits.

In terms of the GenZs in our household, who had seen all the classic series by the end of middle school, the new shows have superceded their old favourites. One’s really into animated Trek, another loves Discovery. Star Trek Online has also played a role in retaining interest in the franchise.

I’d rather talk about reactions to a show that’s actually happening — even if they are based only on a trailer and pre promotional interviews — than endless hyping, speculation and claims of groundswells of fan enthusiasm about projects that aren’t happening.

Now that it’s no longer the officially sanctioned con, STLV’s panels seem to be set up to encourage producers and actors to hype projects that never even got to the development he’ll’ stage let alone any consideration for being greenlit. These include Tarantino’s bat-sh*t movie idea, Captain Worf, Legacy and the recently revealed Unity proposal.

‘Fans’ fundraised to pay for full page advertisements in major US newspapers as a campaign to persuade NBC not to broadcast TAS even after its season one production was almost complete.

I’m still frustrated that none of the Canadian cast got good development.

Almost all of them have significant awards within Canada. Most have other shows, films or are producing themselves.

While many of them took these roles for steady work, it was clear that they weren’t intended by the executives be more than regular wallpaper. It’s unfortunate.

I feel the same about Mitchell in SNW.

However, he has made Skydance profitable unlike another famous billionaire by inheritance who repeatedly went bankrupt.

It seems that his father’s approach is to let his heirs learn to run companies on their own with injections of capital that are staggering for others but just a couple years earnings on the family’s wealth.

It’s confirmed but after a second read, I think that’s clear.

Interesting that Skydance Studios television, which was a prestigious brand, will sublimate under the Paramount Television Studios name. It does show a certain commitment to the merger on David Ellison’s part.

Is there information where the Skydance television production will go?

Is that with the Paramount side?

It wouldn’t make sense to have three television/streaming production arms.

My brain isn’t firing on all cylinders today.

Yes it’s Michelle Hurd who played Raffi.

Also, yes I am bitter that Ro Laren was killed off and even more ticked that Picard played it as though there had been a romantic tension between them rather than a mentor-mentee one.

And it sounds as though Paladin in Vision Quest will be another version of the same character but as a Mandalorian analogue.

Tawny as the principal character as well as co-creator and EP is very interesting.

The fact that she’s been able to state publicly that she would be the lead suggests that the proposal was as advanced as it could be until the new ownership and team could make decisions.

Setting it in the late 24th to early 25th century will also provide the kind of ‘legacy’ opportunities that many Berman-era fans and actors are hankering for while satisfying the apparent executive demands that legacy characters be included for marketing purposes.

Frankly, having legacy characters come to a single planet would be a lot less unrealistic than Matalas’ concept of having the Enterprise G travelling around to visit legacy characters and locations. Production costs and staging would be manageable.

If this is intended to run as a true 22-30 minute comedy, I really hope that Paramount’s streamer greenlights an initial double season as Netflix does. It really takes about 8 episodes for a half hour show to take off.

Star Trek Prodigy is the sequel to Voyager.

It’s not just for kids, although intended for a family audience.

At a certain point, I realized that from another perspective, the big divide seems to be between those who see continuous distributions as just an abstraction of a world that is inherently finite vs those who see finite steps as the approximation of an inherently continuous and infinitely divisible reality.

Since I’m someone who sees math as a way to tell internally-consistent stories that may or may not represent reality, I tend to have a certain exasperation with what seems to be the need of most engineers to anchor everything in Euclidean topography.

But it’s my spouse who had to help our kids with high school math. A parent who thinks non Euclidean geometry is fun is not helpful at that point.

My partner and I had a blast watching it.

I wanted both.

But with a truncated 5th season and the very long lead time required for animation, I can see why the animated version ended up being dropped.