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Personal note: I have stopped, for the most part, wearing a mask all the time.  I got the new Covid shot (and the flu shot), and I have worn a mask the rare times I've flown on an airplane.  I've gone to sporting events, and I recently saw the Marvels without a mask (which was rare, I've masked up to see every movie I've seen in theaters - as I said in the Disney thread, I saw that movie with almost no notice).  We don't go out to eat a ton or go out in general much, but it's impossible to get my kids to properly mask and I feel like they're more likely to get me sick than a stranger.

I think about it every time I don't mask, though.

What I think is interesting about it from either perspective is that being sick sucks.  Not just Covid or the flu.  Getting any respiratory illness just sucks.  Feeling sick, having a sore throat, having a cough, not being able to breathe out your nose - it's all annoying and debilitating.

And, yeah, during the pandemic lockdown time, none of us got sick.  I don't think I got sick in 2020 or 2021.  Fall, winter, spring, cold and flu season, any of it.  And it was great.

So it's not just Covid virtue signaling.  I think it's a reasonable decision to wear a mask for a couple of hours in exchange for not feeling sick for days/weeks.  It's mildly uncomfortable, but if you're watching a movie or a sporting event or whatever, you'll probably be distracted enough by that not to notice.

Again, my recommendation to any Trek fan is to give Prodigy a chance.  I had no interest, but I heard it was good and gave it a shot.  It's definitely the most kiddie Trek, but it's not a baby show.  It's not edu-tainment.  The characters are somewhat young, but there's a decent amount of adult material.  If you like Voyager, it's a direct sequel to Voyager in a lot of ways.

If it's not for you, that's fine.  If you watch it and don't like it, that's fine.  But if you're open to it, give it a shot.  It can only help the Trek brand

ireactions, I haven't seen The Marvels yet so I'm hesitant to read anything you wrote yet, but I did want to say that Nando from Nando v Movies (and now the Nando Cut) did a video about how people are complaining about how they want to watch the Marvels but shouldn't have to watch Wandavision and Ms Marvel to enjoy it.

He said that it's not a legitimate concern because he's confident that there will be a scene where both Monica and Kamala's backstories and powers are summarized in two sentences.  I'll let Nando explain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be5LxTsAKuY

And before I see it, I'm genuinely curious for a non-spoiler answer to whether or not he's right.  I feel like a lot of the future of the MCU is going to depend on the answer and how well they did it.

So around the time of this, I read an article that told everyone thinking the way that I was thinking to chill out.  The reasons were:

- Trump is campaigning and Biden isn't.  So if there's news about 2024, it's news about Trump (or the also-rans in the GOP primary) ragging on Biden and life in America.  So we're only getting one part of the argument, and Biden hasn't had the chance to respond with how life under Biden is better than life was under Trump.  The economy hasn't fully rebounded, gas prices are higher than they were, inflation is still an issue, we are now involved in these wars, etc.  When Biden and his surrogates are able to blitz the media with a more positive message, people should move closer to Biden.
- Saying you'll vote for Trump over Biden is one thing.  But actually voting for Trump over Biden, especially if you did the opposite in 2020 is another thing entirely.
- The other elections are going really well for Democrats.

Obviously, last night was a good night for Democrats.  There were big wins for Democrats in Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky.  Obviously, those things aren't necessarily indicative of 2024.  There are clearly Republicans in those places that didn't vote in 2023 that will vote in 2024 for Trump.  There are one-issue voters , and that one issue is TRUMP.  They don't care about the governor of Kentucky or abortion amendments or the Virginia Senate.

But these are still big wins and indications that Democrats are ready to show up in the polls.  And that makes me feel better.  Democrats have somewhat-abandoned Biden since 2020, at least in polls, but they're still active and they're still winning.  MAGA keeps losing.

I still hope the Biden campaign is taking these numbers seriously.  They need to spend the next year listening to young men (particularly black men) and working on their concerns.  They need to raise the profile of Kamala Harris.  They cannot lose any more POC, and Biden needs to be listening and focusing on their concerns.  Not just words, either.  Actual progress.

How will you lose your job?

(Please note that I still fully support Joe Biden and will do everything I can to get him elected.  My support hasn't wavered, and I think he's done a great job).

I'm starting to get nervous about 2024.

I know polls from this far out are mostly junk, but there's a lot of bad signs that I hope the Democrats and the Biden campaign are taking very seriously.  We know that Trump has overtaken Biden in a lot of national polls, but he's also started taking over in a lot of state polls.  And important battleground state polls.  Biden was down really big with young voters, both white and non-white, even among people that voted overwhelmingly for him in 2020.  I don't know if it's because of his age, because of the economy, because of some of the unrest in the world or what.  But the polls are what the polls are, and if the polls are right and the election was today, Trump wins.

Now the polls may not be right and the election isn't today.  But the election is a year from now, and things don't look good.  A four-time indicted maniac fascist is inching his way back to the White House.  I'm getting very nervous.

Now there could be tons of reasons for this.  Because the Republican primary is happening now (and there's not really a Democratic one), Trump's name is in the news more.  There's maybe more enthusiasm for Trump because he's actively campaigning and Biden really isn't.  There isn't really a blitz in favor of Biden saying all the positive things that have happened in the last three years.  All that will come and all that will help Biden.  Right now, all people are hearing is how bad things are because the only people campaigning are Republicans.

And Trump's trials are (supposedly) coming up.  Trump is taking the stand today in his fraud trial.  There's plenty of time for things to come up, for him to get a lot of bad press, and for people to wake up.

But still.  People that voted for Biden are saying that they're going to switch to Trump.  That's scary.

And it reminds me of 2016.  Everyone in the Democratic Party coalesced around a candidate that was deeply unpopular, with (mostly BS) fraud/criminal connections that rile people up.  In Hillary's case, she tried to go for a knockout instead of a win, focusing on states that would give her a landslide win instead of shoring up states that would just give her any kind of win.  I assume Biden's team will zig where Hillary's team zagged.

That being said, I'm still just surprised that we're here.  Biden talked in 2020 about being a one-term president and passing the baton on to someone else.  The Democrats won both chambers of Congress and the White House.  They had big names in Congress and in the Cabinet that they could've lifted up and popularized.  They could've given Kamala Harris work to make her more popular and likeable.

Instead, they gave Harris the impossible task of dealing with the border.  Mayor Pete has fumbled a couple of the big opportunities he had to make a splash nationally.  No one in Congress stepped up to have a high profile.  No one stepped up, and even if Biden didn't want to run, he might *have* to run because there's no one else.  Biden is unpopular, but Harris is just as unpopular.  If Biden didn't run, who would even be able to run in his place, and would that person have any more of a chance than Biden does?

They had years to build a deep bench, and what do they have to show for it?  Gretchen Whitmer?  Gavin Newsom? 

Scary times.

Yeah, I've softened on Clinton, but she was just so entitled in 2016.  She was also entitled in 2008, but Barack Obama was able to defeat her.  In 2016, she stacked the deck, intimidated anyone competent from running against her, and she *still* almost blew it against a random independent named Bernie Sanders.  Now I wasn't anymore for Bernie, but Hillary went out of her way to attack Bernie supporters and making it impossible for all of them to unite under her.

Then, her campaign was such a mess.  Instead of just going for the simple win, Clinton tried to go for a Obama-ian knockout, and its part of the reason we're in this mess now.  I don't know if a smart Clinton campaign beats Trump, but you gotta think it would've considering how close it was.  I'm also not guaranteeing that any Democrat could've beaten Trump, but Clinton's unfavorables were so high that it really did seem like Trump and Clinton were both awful choices.

Clinton was very qualified (maybe not as much as she and her surrogates wanted us to believe - the beginning of political over-hyperbolization that Trump ran away with) but maybe an open primary would've allowed us to find the next Obama.  We *still* haven't found the next Obama.

But, of course, a Clinton presidency would've been better than a Trump one.  I don't know what would've happened - I assume Trump would've tried the same Stop the Steal stuff he tried against Biden.  But maybe Trumpism wouldn't have been so ingrained.

I thought Jordan was going to be able to bully his way in, but he got shot down.  That's a pretty solid loss for the MAGA movement.  I don't think this is the beginning of the end, but it's a sign that Trump doesn't have full control over House Republicans.  This was Trump's guy, and he was running unopposed.  Whoever gets the job now will not be (as) in debt to  Trump.  I think that's significant.

And I gotta think this hurts them politically.  Republican voters want to send money to Israel and we can't right now.  And Biden went to Israel so again maybe that helps with fringe voters.

I don't know what a good solution is for Democrats.  Who is the most moderate Republican in the House?

I wonder if the Democrats made a miscalculation when they booted McCarthy. (Note: McCarthy is terrible, and I don't support him).  He's a liar and two-faced (one republican said his superpower is that he doesn't believe in anything) but he actually worked with / caved to Democrats to get some deals done to keep the government funded and working.

If we get Jim Jordan, that ain't happening.

Now I know the Democrats can spin this to win the House in 2024 or maybe even to win the White House.  Jordan is essentially Donald Trump in the House, and if Jordan pushes for a government shutdown (which I have to assume he'll do), that will bounce back on Jordan and Trump with independents and soft/non-MAGA republicans.  There's already been a decent amount of pushback from conservative media about what a clown show this whole republican House situation has turned into.

But giving Jordan power seems like such a bad idea, even with only a year or so to wield it.

RFK Jr has a pretty high profile a politician.  He shows up on Joe Rogan's podcast (I don't listen or pay attention to that, but I know he does) and DeSantis has mentioned that he'd hire him if he were president.  I think that's a higher profile than Kanye, but I can't speak either way about his overall popularity.

Not to bring up polling again, but he polls fairly high especially among Republicans.  They're also less likely to be picking RFK on a poll because he's not Biden or because of his name (the primary reasons he was getting high poll numbers in the Democratic primary).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics … publicans/

And even if you're right, I guess it just depends on where the 100,000 votes are.

I'm intrigued by RFK Jr. going into the race as an independent.  He's been strongly supported by MAGA as some kind of spoiler to Biden, but that's because he's philosophically a conservative.  He's straight crazy, and he's supported by Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis, and Joe Rogan, among others.  He made a lot of noise early because he was polling in the teens/20s in certain polls.  Experts said it was essentially name recognition driving the polling because, again, he doesn't have any of the same ideals that Democrats would ever vote for.

But as an independent, I think he's much more dangerous to Trump than Biden.  I think the test will be whether the Democrats can convince their voters that RFK is *not* a true Kennedy and whether or not conservatives can convince his true believers to vote for Trump.

What do we think?

....no?

And I'm not even sure how you're getting that from anything I said.  I'm obviously on Biden's side.  But I'm also able to see that this election is going to be very close.  It doesn't matter whether Trump is a racist or a sexist or a rapist or a fraud or convicted in four different trials.

So Biden would be wise to do whatever it takes to get people on his side.  He's very unpopular, even with people who like him, on immigration and the border.  If he can get one vote from a Trump supporter by making concessions on the border, that's one vote closer to Biden being president and Trump not being president.

Just doing what he's been doing isn't enough.  He has to do more.  Otherwise, there's a real risk that Trump becomes president again.  That's not my opinion.  It's just the facts.

Well, Biden has been underwater for a long time for his approval rating:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/bi … al-rating/

You can cherry pick whatever poll you want for over a year and it'll be underwater.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trouble … =103436611

This is the poll that had everyone in a tizzy.  Everyone thinks it's an outlier poll, but it's from a reputable source and they chose to release it.  But even if you throw the poll out, you have to look at some of the results and pull some results out of it.  The poll had 42% of people choosing Biden over Trump, but only 37% of the people approve of his performance.  That means that even Biden voters are disapproving of his performance.  It gets worse when you see that only 26% of people don't think he's too old (so 16% of people think he's too old but still would vote for him) and 23% of people approve of his handling of the border (19% of people that chose him over Trump still disapprove of his handling of the border).

So even if the poll is bad, there's info you can pull out from the people that chose Biden.  And they're saying that they'll vote for Biden but don't necessarily approve of him or his performance.

Now Biden has a ton going for him.

1. He already beat Trump
2. Trump's legal troubles might cement him with his base, but they can only lose him voters in the middle.  I can't imagine even an acquittal doing anything positive for him with independents
3. Biden's actually accomplished quite a bit in his term.  Democrats just need to be made aware of the progress because non-political-junkies aren't going to have heard of any of it.  That's going to obviously depend on how much info Democrats can get out during the election cycle.

But one place Biden can grow quickly is the border, and I'm sure there are tons of things that he can do to gain support from moderate republicans (believe it or not, they exist) and independents.  Not only would it bolster support with those groups, but it would take away Republican talking points.  Because MAGA is just a third of the Republican party.  There are plenty of Republicans that aren't die-hard Trump voters, and you don't need them to vote for Biden.  You just need them to vote 3rd party or not vote at all.

And you do that by convincing them that a second Biden term wouldn't be so bad.  The economy is already improving and should be much better by next year unless something bad happens.  Educating voters on Biden's accomplishments will help there too.  But they also need to attack on Biden's weaknesses.  His age they can't do anything about, but the border is something they can really work on.  Since Harris is already in charge of the border, they could probably kill two birds with one stone.  Harris could spend the next year at the border, "acting tough" or whatever and it would make a difference.  Both in improving Biden's favorability regarding the border and in improving Harris' own ratings

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/po … la-harris/

Because if people liked Harris more, they'd worry about Biden's age less.

But does that matter?  I'm not sure it does.

Recent polling (and I guess all polling) has shown that Biden's handling of the border is very unpopular.  He's extremely unpopular (38% favorable) on his handling of the border.  That's not just Republicans and it's not just the Fox News crowd.  That's a lot of independents and probably some Democrats.

So whether or not the GOP and conservative media is lying, the majority of voters think Biden isn't doing enough.  So my question is...what are some things that Biden can do that would improve the border situation in the 20-30% of non-MAGA people's eyes?  The economy is improving and there's not a ton more Biden can do there.  But the border is both very visible and it's easier to see progress.

If Biden announced that he was going to restart progress on the border wall, that wouldn't move the needle for any hardcore Democrats (who are voting for Biden no matter what) or Republicans (who would vote for Trump no matter what).  But would that convert some potential Trump voters to Biden voters (or non-voters)?  If only 38% of people approve of Biden on the border, would he lose any votes if he got more "conservative" on the border?

My point is this: Biden needs to win the next election.  And I think some out of the box things are going to need to be done to get the Independent voters and soft Republican voters that Biden is going to need.  They obviously wouldn't do everything the Republicans want, but I think they gotta do *something* besides putting Kamala Harris in charge.

Again, if it was me, I would be reaching out to conservative groups and getting their list of demands, and I'd be cherry picking the ones that are a) possible and b) won't conflict with progressive values.  And then I'd be going on Fox News every chance I got, and I'd be telling conservative voters what we were doing at the border or on the economy or whatever issues Biden polls poorly on.

Maybe Trump will lose votes as these court cases drag on, but he's not losing any support in the GOP primary or in national polling.  I don't think we can spend the next year hoping that will change.

Yeah, I think Democrats need to do what they can to investigate any and all Democrats accused of misdoing.  Within reason, of course.  If they only investigate Republicans, they're feeding right into the whole "Republicans are being targeted" nonsense. 

******

So...the border.  This is something that the Democrats just get hammered on all the time.  Is there not more that Democrats are willing to do?  Are they doing more but not enough?  Does this come down to the Republicans wanting more extreme / less humane things and Democrats aren't willing to go there?

I just wonder if the Democrats would be smart to make some concessions on the border.  No separating families or putting kids in cages, of course.  But make it a point to fund the border patrol more?  Maybe even do some ceremonial work on the border wall / fence (even if it's been shown to be ineffective).  I'm sure there are some prudent and very visible things that the Democrats can do to take a chunk out of the anger that many people feel about the border.

I'll admit, even in Texas, I don't really know what is being done.  Maybe it's as much as possible.  But I assume this isn't just a Fox News thing.

I know it may seem like I'm stressing about continuity.  It really doesn't bother me as much as it may seem.  I can watch Strange New Worlds and not get bogged down by TOS continuity, particularly since I don't remember much of TOS continuity.  What I'm talking about here is more issues with overall continuity.  If Vulcan is okay in 3190, it is in no danger in 2410 or 2500 or any year in between.  If there's some sort of Federation Civil War in 2600, we know it eventually works out because the Federation survived (in some sense) in the 32nd century.

From a certain point of view, Discovery is now the official Trek "present" and everything else is prequel territory.  Just like TOS became prequel when TNG started.

Now ireactions is right that the future is fluid.  So maybe something will happen that will wipe out Discovery's version of the future.  We've already seen the TOS version of the future (and the past) altered.  Again, not a huge deal.  Just an annoyance.

Ahsoka Episode 5 spoilers

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So I don't know enough about Star Wars lore, but Anakin seems to be Force Ghost Anakin in physical form.  So he's definitely post-Vader but different than Force ghosts we've seen before (in that he physically interacts with Ahsoka).  The World Between Worlds hasn't been fleshed out that much so it could be anything.  Anakin is both calm and angry, and he sorta takes Ahsoka to the past (or a vision of the past - it's vague).

What's interesting based on our last conversation is that we actually see young Ahsoka for a decent chunk of the episode.  So Clone Wars Ahsoka.  And here's where I missed Ashley Eckstein the most, but unless they had a child actor mime the dialogue and used Eckstein's voice, I don't know what they could've done.  The voice wasn't exactly right but I thought she did a good job.  This was essentially live action Clone Wars which was cool.

Was Picard less successful than the internet made it seem like?  I thought it was quite the phenomenon, and I would've suspected that they'd want a follow-up from Matalas.  But there's been no word, despite massive fan interest.

Of course, I have no idea how the "Trek on Streaming Only" model works.  Maybe it's more expensive than the money it makes.  Maybe they do just want to try movies again.

SPOILERS FOR AHSOKA

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Is it confirmed that the Anakin we see at the end of episode 4 is post-Vader?  Where they are is in the World Between Worlds so past, present, and future are happening at the same time.  The Vader/Ahsoka fight that you referenced is actually a big part of that because Ezra is able to look at the fight as its happening (even though it happened much earlier) and rescue Ahsoka from the fight.  She gets pulled into the future.  That's how the fight ends.

So this Anakin could hypothetically be pre-Order 66, post-Vader, or maybe even some sort of parallel version of Anakin that never went to the Dark Side.

I think the Clone Wars movie is terrible and had the same thought.  I think the first part with the battle scenes is fine?  The kidnapping plot was boring and I was very uninterested.  I think if you look at some of those condensed lists, the movie is either left off entirely, you're told to only watch a certain amount of it, or they include it simply because of character setup.  I don't think anyone in the Clone Wars fandom thinks its good.

And there is a lot of filler episodes, but I never found myself bored or annoyed by the show the way I was bored by the movie.

Regarding your spoiler

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I think it's interesting.  I really like James Gunn's DCU approach.  If a character is going to be in a DCU property (be it animation, live action, or video game), he or she will be voiced by the same actor.  It adds a level of consistency that I appreciate.

That being said, when I watch something that's supposed to be the same thing, I usually defer to the original performer.  So Matt Lanter is an animated Hayden Christensen.  Rosario Dawson is a live-action Ashley Eckstein.  I guess on some level, it's weird that a relationship that started animated with two different actors is now being presented in live action with two different actors, but I guess it'd be the same thing with Ezra and Hera.

I've softened on my whole canon ideology, and since these are both explicitly canon, I think I'm just going to merge it all together in my head.

I think watching it would definitely upgrade your experience.  I think the show does a good job of explaining who the characters are at a high level, but you're obviously not going to get a lot of the context if you've never watched Clone Wars or Rebels.  So Ahsoka talks about how she's not a Jedi, but there isn't really any explanation for why she'd say that.  It talks about how she was Anakin's apprentice, but there's no sense for how long / how that relationship developed / where it landed.  So it might be a little like watching A New Hope without watching the prequels (you know Obi Wan was a great Jedi knight, but you don't really know what that means) or even watching The Last Jedi without seeing the original trilogy (you know Luke was great but not what he did to be great).

There are also a couple main Rebels characters (so far) that have appeared.  They're more or less archetypal characters who don't need a ton of explanation.  Hera's a former rebel and a pilot.  Sabine is a Mandalorian with a connection to Ahsoka.  And there's also how Rebels ended - the first two episodes are a retelling of the epilogue of Rebels from Ahsoka's perspective.  So without Rebels knowledge, you're not going to understand who Ezra is or why he was important, you're not going to know who Thrawn is or why he's dangerous, and you aren't going to know how they ended up where they are.

All that to say, I think the show is constructed to be watched by someone who has never seen any of Rebels before with story and character beats that are probably best for people who have been along the entire journey.  And I'm interesting to see how they try to explain (SPOILER) to a general audience without being handwavey or way too involved.

That being said, if you want to get some of that context without watching hundreds of episodes of two cartoons, I've seen lists that will either:

- Cut down Clone Wars and Rebels to only the key arc episodes.  This way you can experience the full feel of both shows without some of the filler or kiddie or irrelevant episodes.

- Cut down Clone Wars and Rebels to just the episodes that are relevant to Ahsoka/Sabine/Hera/Ezra/Thrawn.  Ahsoka isn't in every episode (or even every arc) of Clone Wars, and she's in much less of Rebels.  People have determined which handful of episodes from each show are give you the gist of these characters' journeys without any of the stuff that won't be relevant to Ahsoka.

So depending on your time commitment, you could do either of those.  But honestly, you could also probably watch Ahsoka first and get the context later.

Selfishly, this will allow me to catch up on a long backlog of things I have to catch up on.

To be clear, I'm on the side of the writers and actors.

At the end of the day, I say no.  The show is good and there's no Star-Trek-like open continuity errors in dialogue.  The show never tells the characters' ages, and any continuity errors are simply based on assumptions or logic.  Jason Street and Tim Riggins are best friends.  They happen to be different ages and wouldn't have had any classes together or worked on projects together or been on the same football team.  They are two years apart (an enormous gap from my experience) but met at some point and became very close friends.  Same with Landry and Matt.

The differences in the girls' ages is less of a thing because high school girls' tend to work their way into the lives of older boys.

The show never said anything, and that's okay.

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The other interesting thing about Friday Night Lights, which ties into your examples, is the Writer's Strike.  Season two of FNL is pretty reviled by the fanbase, mostly because of a hysterically stupid storyline where one of the characters kills someone (in self defense) and tries to cover it up.  The show occasionally tries to ingratiate itself into the world of crime, and it never really works out. 

Season two also follows up on a lot of season two storylines.  Superfan Buddy Garrity tries to bring street-smart Santiago onto the team to play defense, even allowing him to live in his home.  Smash Williams tries to toe the line between being socially conscious of being a black man with some name power in a somewhat-racist town in Texas.  He starts to lose some of his scholarship opportunities because of it.  Lyla becomes religious and rejects the advances of Tim by dating another boy from church.  Meanwhile the team is trying to repeat the successes from the previous season.

But after episode 15 of the season...the strike ends the season.

Now on most shows, they could pick up where the last season left off.  But Friday Night Lights moves one year at a time with each season being the full football season.  I guess we'll never know.

EXCEPT....

Friday Night Lights just moves on.  Not just as if nothing happened but moves on as if the remaining 7 episodes happened and aired.  There are references to things that happened (Smash got his scholarship situation figured out but then got hurt, Lyla and Tim ended up together, etc) and there are some "flashback" scenes that show some of the things that happened but it's no more than would've happened in a typical "reset the stage" scene.

It's both clever and bizarre.  They don't do enough to cause any problems, but it does give you a bit of whiplash as you try to distinguish between the stuff that actually happened and the stuff that you don't remember because it didn't air.  The show always does this in some sense because each season ends in November/December and starts back up in July/August.  So there's always a time jump and stuff always happens in the time jump.  But it's just a bit bizarre for the show to be like "we had a plan and we're sticking with it, whether those episodes aired or not"

Interesting.  It's been a while since I've watched much TNG, but I've always thought that Riker's arc was that he was a highly ambitious and high-rising officer who really wanted to be the captain of a ship but who eventually enjoyed being on the Enterprise enough that he maybe got too comfortable and was essentially passed over and forgotten by Starfleet Command.  But it sounds like I'm pretty wrong about that.

As you know, I like to try and re-write certain pre-prestige-TV shows in my head.  I think a modern TNG would've had Riker show up as arrogant and defiant, thinking he's better than Picard and that he should be commanding the Enterprise.  Maybe a season one of constantly trying to communicate with his admiral buddies about open commands.  Maybe even to the point where Picard has to tell him to focus on his current job and not be focused on the others.  Maybe by the time we get to Best of Both Worlds, Riker and Picard are openly hostile towards each other.  And when he finally gets to command the Enterprise and Picard/Locutus wrecks him, it humbles Riker.  He asks a de-Borged Picard to mentor him and things get better.  Then maybe Riker finally gets offered a command and turns it down (like he did on the real show).  And by season 5 or 6, I think Riker should be thrust into command of his own ship and we'd see him grow that way.  Maybe that means Riker leaves the show, gets spun off into his own show, or the show focuses on two ships.

But thank you for your excellent analysis!

Don't get me wrong - I don't remember enough about TOS to really care whether or not they break continuity.  I get that continuity, especially in that era, is fragile.  And I really don't care enough about any of it to really get bothered.

What makes me a little crazy is that *they seem to care*.  By choosing to do a prequel, the writers/producers/creators care about the continuity.  Otherwise, why do a prequel at all?  For a mainstream movie like Star Trek 09, maybe you do a full reboot with a new cast because you want to reach the right audience.  And you pick the characters that have the most cultural footprint - some random person in Wisconsin or South Carolina is going to know Captain Kirk before they know Captain Janeway or Captain Sisko.  So you pick the most famous characters and hope to get the biggest audience.

But as we've discussed before, there's no reason to do Discovery in the pre-TOS era except for the fact that they wanted to borrow some of the credibility that comes with Spock and that specific era.  But they didn't even really want to do that (maybe Brian Fuller did) because they had new uniforms, new sets, new Klingons.  They were distancing themselves from that era, and they eventually just abandoned that idea anyway.

Strange New Worlds made a similar decision.  I don't know if the Enterprise crew was put on Discovery as a backdoor pilot to a new show, but you gotta think that was part of the decision.  But instead of taking a great cast and making a new show in a new era, they decided to do another prequel.  And this one lent itself to being a prequel with the same uniforms and some of the same storylines.  So they have to care about the continuity because why else wouldn't they just do something new.  They like this era, they like the uniforms and they like the characters.

And when you do a prequel, you're choosing to live dangerously.  When Picard decided to do a follow-up, they can do whatever they want.  They could make Picard a father or bring back the Enterprise D or have Q fight the Borg Queen.  It's all new so it doesn't matter.  If they'd decided to say that Picard was a father for the entirety of TNG and just never mentioned it...that's an issue.

Because, to me, the point of the a prequel is to flesh out the stories that have already been told.  You learn about Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship and it colors the way they talk about each other in A New Hope.  It isn't perfect and maybe the story sucks but that's the whole point of the prequels - to flesh out the story.

If you're just telling new stories in an existing timeline, it's like going back in time.  If you're not super careful, you're going to change something.  It's just too dangerous.

If I ran Trek, I'd make the executive decision that no prequels.  If you go back in time, it looks like the 60s in the TOS era and the 80s/90s in the TNG era.  That's just how it looked.  If you want things to look better, tell a story set in the future.  The model was perfect when TNG jumped forward a century.  Things look better because technology got better.  End of story.

Strange New Worlds is way better than Discovery, and I'm willing to forgive any continuity errors.  I just don't like the idea of retreading if there's no narrative reason to do that.  Strange New Worlds in the 26th century is still a great show.

I liked the finale.  Very tense.

I will need our Trek historian ireactions to help me understand if we're screwing up continuity too much with this much interaction with the Gorn.  My limited understanding was that Starfleet hadn't really seen the Gorn until Kirk and that the Federation hadn't really interacted with them a ton.

I also struggle to see how this species became technologically advanced, but maybe I'm just not being creative enough.

Trump's money problems are going to be a problem.  I think the GOP would love for someone to step up, but DeSantis was probably that guy and he has so far really screwed up.  I'm interested to see how the debates go.  Trump might look like a wuss if he doesn't debate, and he might get his ass kicked if he does debate. 

The problem with both parties is that neither really has a strong backup.  Who's going to win the GOP if not Trump or DeSantis?  The field is weak.  Same with the Democrats.  If Biden were to drop out for whatever reason, Harris would be a pretty rough nominee.  Mayor Pete isn't super strong and I think it's the wrong time to risk a LGBT candidate.  Newsom has issues.  Whitmer might struggle.  I think Warnock would be nice but you'd risk losing the Senate.  Both parties need new blood.

*******

And I agree with your assessment.  I don't think Trump has the votes in the general election.  But it is absolutely ridiculous that a man under two federal indictments is this close to being able to win the presidency and pardon himself.

Trump indicted again.

My question is...since these indictments only matter depending on whether or not he wins the election, are more indictments helpful or hurtful to Trump's election chances?  Obviously hardcore Republicans won't care and hardcore Democrats weren't going to vote for him anyway.  But what about non-MAGA Republicans or true independents?  Does adding another indictment to the pile make him less electable or does it add to the idea that this is all a political witch hunt?