The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.
Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.
All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.
Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.
Glad to have you mention that here.
So many fans of the older shows assume that Lower Decks isn’t accessible to new viewers who don’t get the references, but it’s quite the opposite. Gen Z and younger viewers are into animated comedies and it’s a successful entry point. And with the number of middle schoolers who got into manga and anime during the pandemic, the portion of the audience that prefers animation as a medium is only going to grow.
Our teens were fans of the Voyager when they were in middle school, and sampled the rest of the classic shows. Despite that they seem to be split on the animated vs live action new shows, and none of them would watch Picard.
It’s a real shame that there won’t be any new animated Star Trek after this season of Lower Decks.
Star Trek Prodigy is the true sequel to Voyager. It’s all ages / family rather than the ‘kids show’ many fans take it for. I would watch that with your GF next.
Because Prodigy is designed to be an entry point for new viewers, it introduces many of the key legacy characters and much of the lore. It has a Star Wars vibe in the pilot, mainly to draw in viewers from other franchises, but it settles into being some of the Trekiest content ever by the 6th short episode of season one.
Dave Blass said much of it was packed up in crates and shipped.
To where is the question.
Tawny is already in the writers room for Starfleet Academy as well as working as a cocreator of a new live action Star Trek comedy series in development.
It seems that she’s another alum who will be mostly behind the camera but will show up as a legacy character in other shows.
TOS ‘The Devil in the Dark’ in first run.
I was barely in school, but my slightly older neighbour who’d hooked me on Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, convinced me that Star Trek must be seen.
I quickly caught up during the hiatus reruns, and have seen absolutely all of it in first run since.
As someone who sees MS Word forms regularly force Canadians to use Month/Day/Year formats which were never native to Canada and don’t meet the ISO standard either, I am inferring the impetus transition.
But truly, I old enough to recall many standards being harmonized in the early 90s in the wake of the North American free trade agreement.
Whether or not a digital archive document demonstrates that Canada Post intentionally harmonized to match the US is TBC.
But it is a verifiable fact that the two-letter standard for provinces and territories has not been commonly established in all federal regulations or data standards or in provincial and territorial data systems standards.
That is to say, it has not been formally adopted as by Canada or as the ‘Canadian data standard.’
I hadn’t been aware that he’d also been a director for television. Truly a wide-ranging career.
The two-letter system was already in place in the United States mail system before the 80s.
It wouldn’t be the first time Canada adopted a US data standard to ease utilization of US made or standardized equipment.
It was the old form. Other than BC, the old postal short forms were 3 or 4 letters.
BC
Alta
Sask
Man
Ont
Que
NB
NS
PEI
Nfld
The 2-letter acronyms came up from the United States relatively recently.
McCoy was in Encounter at Farpoint with one meta purpose - to counter the TOS fans that were campaigning hard to say that it ‘wasn’t the same universe.’
McCoy’s presence was a nice Easter Egg, but not much more. But he did the job of saying that it was the new Enterprise in continuity with the legendary ship on which he served.
Fans argued that because Roddenberry insisted on moving WW3 back to the mid 21st century as of Encounter at Farpoint, TNG had to be a different timeline.
TOS fans understood the Eugenics Wars to be the precursor to WW3, so they just didn’t accept WW3 was going to be another half-century away. Roddenberry’s directive was to always keep the Star Trek future in our future so WW3 had to be shifted to later in time and any specific mention of the date of the Eugenics Wars was avoided.
They also hated the carpet and many other things about the ‘luxury hotel in space’ Enterprise.
Yup, that happened and continued to happen until well into TNG season 3. The brigading Berman-era fans who rail unrelentingly against ‘Nu-Trek’ don’t sound any different, they’re just more visible than the 1980s fans that relied on mimeoed fanzines and Usenet. Fans that liked TNG kept quiet at cons until at least 1990, and vendors didn’t bring TNG merchandise.
It’s October, and Trek’s new adorable horror is being unfairly usurped in trendiness by a character who appeared in all of two TOS episodes (even if the grimness of his personal backstory rivals La’an Noonian-Singh’s).
So, Moopsy + Kevin memes. . . I dare you.
I’ve been enjoying the very short stories by Treklit authors in the recent issues of Titanbooks Star Trek Explorer magazine.
I see that they’re promoting anthologies of short stories, with a new third one due to be released soon. However, it’s not clear if these are just compilations of previously published stories from the magazine, new content or a mix of both.
Anyone have the earlier releases?
