u/BorgAbbess

I know that battles should never be the main thrust of Star Trek, but what do you think are the best battle sequences?

For me, I'd say: the duel with the Romulans in "Balance of Terror", the first encounter with the Borg in "Q Who" (for the sheer "oh shit" of it), the siege of DS9 in "The Way of the Warrior", the battle to retake the station in "Sacrifice of Angels", the Cerritos and Sh'vahl versus the Klingons and Pakleds in "Wej Duj", and the Protostar and Voyager-A versus the Vau N'Akat in "Ascension". Oh, and the Enterprise-E and Romulans fighting the Scimitar in Nemesis for being virtually the only time Star Trek remembers to use the third dimension.

Thinking about the Changeling practice of launching their newborns off into space to live among solids and how, ostensibly, it's for them to gauge how other races react to the weakest. But of course, they already have a fixed idea of how the Solids react to them: as monsters to be persecuted.

And the Great Link is a sort of a hivemind; it doesn't just bear historical memories of the time when Changelings were persecuted; it bears first-hand memories of that. It's basically an ocean with PTSD, that has been left so hurt and so paranoid that has built an entire totalitarian slave empire around itself for protection.

But every living thing eventually dies. So maybe, with time, the older Changelings eventually wear-out somehow; experience senescence. Their first-hand memory is lost, or becomes less immediate, and it leaves room for younger generations to step in and ask "now wait a minute; is what we're doing to the Solids--conquering them and genetically engineering them to worship us as gods--is that right?"

So what do they do? They send off their weakest, most helpless new babies to live as lonely, isolated outsiders in Solid cultures, to be persecuted all over again like Laas and Odo, so that when they eventually come back home, they can reassure them that Solids are intrinsically horrible, and the Dominion can keep right on rolling over them. The Hundred, then, aren't being sent off for exploration purposes; they're being sent off to continually convince the Great Link that what it's doing is right.

I know I'm not exactly expressing a radical hot take here, and I like a lot of the new stuff well enough, but I just caught "The Ensigns of Command" and it just felt so...gentle. Civilised. There's no frenetic pacing, no trying to artificially juice up the action, though there is action. There's humour, but there's no quipping or plays to go viral online. I mean, the high point of the episode was literally Picard citing a subclause in a treaty and putting an alien on hold for a solid minute of screen time and it managed to be one of the most awesome things he ever did. It's like warm earl grey in a glass mug. I miss it.

So i think the idea of a 150 dark age that galactic civilization has to recover from is fine, actually, but the explanation for it--that there was a child who screamed in the vicinity of a dilithium planet, and that somehow caused all dilithium in the galaxy to blow up--is just the pits. Something as silly as that shouldn't be a load-bearing part of canon. So how would you retcon the cause of the Burn, ideally while preserving the idea that it originated in that general vicinity

For me it was the solving space mysteries through science and teamwork

So first of all, let me say that I personally am a huge fan of horror, and as such, >! The gore in the most recent episode of SNW, "The Griffin Incident" !< didn't really faze me all that much. I also think that it was positively tame compared to, say, "Conspiracy", or the first five minutes of "Stardust City Rag". But I know that a lot of the reactions to this episode do fixate upon how much gore it has, and I think it's worthwhile to ask what level of gore we think is appropriate.

Forgive me, I don't really know how to phrase this properly, but bear with me.

I understand that the full sequence of terms following the decimal point in an irrational number is infinitely long and cannot be written as infinitely repeating, as would be possible with a rational number.

However: is it the case that any finite sequence of numbers in, say, the full expansion of pi must necessarily repeat infinite times? Albeit with different spacings between each repetition? Can this be proven or disproven?

So I've been thinking about the consensual version of the Borg that Dr. Jurati created at the end of Picard season 2, and the fact that one episode Voyager had those "neural transceivers" thst you could wear on your neck to temporarily connect you to the Borg (like Chakotay in "Unity").

So, hypothetically, the Jurati-Borg could offer you free "trial" assimilation, no purchase necessary. Would anyone go for that?

Nothing against Michelle Yeoh and I actually quite liked (what little we saw of) Captain Georgiou, but I really, really can't stand Mirror!Georgiou. Just the way that she's established as an irredeemable fascist war criminal who eats people in her first appearance and then they just...ignore that? Like she's never done anything to redeem herself, or even show contrition for her crimes against sentient life, but the writers seemed to decide that she was Cool and started treating her like a funny cantankerous wine aunt. And then in season 3, they divert from the main plot for two full episodes to show us more boring Mirror Universe BS, and have everyone spend like 10 minutes of screen time mourning her as if she had ever done anything other than bullying, sexually harassing, and being generally horrible to everyone. And then she became the main character in the worst Star Trek movie ever! Like, sorry, but...WHAT were they thinking?

So it looks like a new hiatus is looming for Star Trek on the television front; however, the last time something like this happened, it gave the writers of the novels a free hand for twelve years to basically do whatever they wanted and build an extensive continuity of their own. Is there a prospect of something like that happening again? I know that the IDW comics are kind of doing their own thing now, and that's great, but I like the depth of the world building that the novels offered.