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I think DAREDEVIL is another project like SECRET INVASION. Like the SECRET INVASION storyline, the Daredevil character was an intellectual property and brand that Feige wanted to see produced under his banner. He commissioned a series, accepted a pitch that was very different from the Netflix version... and it didn't turn out the way he was hoping. Because of the actors strike, he had the chance to press pause and rethink it.

It's easy to backseat drive and say that a DAREDEVIL show where Daredevil doesn't show up until Episode 4 is clearly mismanaged. But the truth is, you could say that about a lot of daring creative choices if taken out of context, such as how Daredevil didn't appear in costume on the Netflix show until the Season 1 finale and didn't appear in costume at all for all of Season 3.

Anyone could, without watching the SHE-HULK finale, declare that it's stupid and silly for She-Hulk to protest the climax being a superhero/supervillain fight and demand that the writers change it into something more low-key. Anyone could declare that it's ridiculous to show Daredevil in costume walking out of She-Hulk's home in the morning after having spent the night.

I would think that Feige probably thought the DAREDEVIL D+ series ideas were interesting, but when he saw them onscreen, they didn't live up to how they'd been described or how he'd imagined them, so he put the show on hold.

I would agree: the Disney+ era of Marvel TV shows have been produced like feature films and they've run into issues where it's a lot easier to address narrative issues on a 2.5 hour movie than on a 6 - 10 episode TV show. They're probably filming entire the season throughout their shooting schedule instead of one episode at a time. Two shows stand out to me as suffering for it.

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER's villain is Karli, whose evil plan is... to provide refugees with food and shelter. Which makes Sam and Bucky the villains if they oppose providing refugees with food and shelter. The series ends up having Karli murder people for no good reason because it cannot otherwise justify Sam and Bucky hunting her down; furthermore, Sam and Bucky do nothing for the refugees.

This was an oversight from writing the whole series all at once and not stepping back to review it episode by episode. And had THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER been filmed like a more 'traditional' series, an episode could have been inserted to show Sam and Bucky doing something for the innocent people Karli was trying to help. This odd lapse, to me, made the show seem oddly tone deaf and witless and blind to its own narrative.

WANDAVISION also made an odd oversight: it never seems to decisively confront how Wanda is a villain for kidnapping an entire town of innocent people and treating them as playthings.

Yes, there are multiple scenes where SWORD faces Wanda and where Vision is furious with Wanda about this. But in the ninth episode finale, nearly all of Wanda's enemies are treated as villains: Agatha Harkness is a power hungry thief, the SWORD director Hayward leading the anti-Wanda taskforce tries to blow up the town and its people, whereas Wanda, still a kidnapper, is regarded as heroic for saving the town and grudgingly releasing everyone from the captivity she was keeping them in with no real regret or remorse or attempt at reparation.

This seems to be an error where there was no chance to address it, which made it both awkward and appropriate when DR. STRANGE II dismissed WANDAVISION trying to present Wanda as heroic and made her a flat-out villain. I think that WANDAVISION oversight happened from shooting all the episodes at the same time and reshoots being too difficult for such a large production; I think WANDAVISION should have made it perfectly clear that Wanda is a villain.

I was pretty happy with SHE-HULK and LOKI and MOON KNIGHT, but I think Marvel TV production can definitely run into problems with its approach. At the same time, lots of shows are shot in a more episodic fashion and are still tone deaf: note how THE X-FILES revival season took on an anti-vaxxer tone and implied that non-biological children are can never be loved by their parents.

I think that Marvel might consider the approach of Blumhouse, the horror production company. They did the HALLOWEEN deboot (not a typo). Their approach to lower budget filmmaking: they commission a script and then storyboard the script and assemble it into a cheap animatic with scale-salary voice actors performing all the dialogue. Then they determine, based on storyboarding, animatics and vocal performances, if this looks and sounds like a movie they want to greenlight. I think Feige might consider adopting something similar for his TV projects, even after greenlighting them, so that scripts can be adjusted in advance of filming them. This would allow him to address mishaps like Sam and Bucky having no concern for starving refugees or presenting a mind controlling kidnapper as the hero.

I am only three episodes into SECRET INVASION, a show so boring and uneventful and devoid of interest that I'm vacuuming while it plays (with headphones). But I can tell you exactly what's wrong with SECRET INVASION and it's totally obvious what's wrong with it: the SECRET INVASION storyline is a first season of a TV show that has no business being the first season of a TV show.

SECRET INVASION is about shapeshifters impersonating humans. This means that SECRET INVASION requires that the audience be highly familiar with the characters so that the potential that some or any or all of them are impersonators is compelling and disturbing; we need to know their behaviours and speech patterns and mannerisms and screen presences to look for discrepancies in the actors' performances.

On AGENTS OF SHIELD, we had spent over three seasons with the characters before we entered the LMD arc where we didn't know which team members had been captured and replaced with killer robots, so it was unnerving and frightening. On SECRET INVASION, our characters are people we barely know, so the potential that they are impersonators is hardly concerning.

Who is Nick Fury? Who knows? Fury was a limited presence at his height, more an informant making guest appearances and cameos than a main character. We don't know him well enough to tell if he might be an impostor or not. Who is Talos? Who can say? We've known him for one full appearance in CAPTAIN MARVEL and a cameo in FAR FROM HOME and since he was a shapeshifter from the start, we have no baseline for the character. SECRET INVASION is not the right story to tell without a well-established cast that has made regular, consistent appearances. SECRET INVASION would have been a great eighth season of AGENTS OF SHIELD. Instead, it's Season 1 (and probably the only season) of a Nick Fury show.

If a show about shapeshifting aliens can't use impersonation as a plot device for suspense and terror, then there's no point doing it. There is no point to doing SECRET INVASION. I would say the same about the original comic, too, where nobody that important ever turned out to be a Skrull.

The show has plenty of other problems too. It's very obvious that multiple showrunners have passed through this project because the series is clearly a clumsy mismash of different writers' mismatched drafts. The most obvious problem is the lack of exposition: where has Fury been since AGE OF ULTRON? Why didn't he find the Skrulls a home as promised? I can tell from the fumbled plots that don't explain these raised questions: the showrunner was fired in mid-scripting and didn't complete his work; the incoming writer had to whip up more pages slapdash based on actor availability and location bookings and wasn't able to work out the story.

It's interesting: when AGENTS OF SHIELD first aired, there was a certain air of impostor syndrome to it. It claimed to be a SHIELD show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it only had a brief cameo from a supporting SHIELD character from AVENGERS (Maria Hill) and none of the superheroes appeared on camera. Later, it claimed to be set after THOR: DARK WORLD, but the TV budget sets and effects, when compared to the lavish production of a feature, made AGENTS feel like a fan film phony. Eventually, the tie-in to WINTER SOLDIER and a guest-appearance from Samuel L. Jackson closed the credibility gap.

In contrast, SECRET INVASION has Samuel L. Jackson in a lead role and SECRET INVASION feels like even more of a fan film phony than AGENTS OF SHIELD ever did, and it's not closing the credibility gap at all. Nick Fury in SECRET INVASION feels like a fake. The Fury we met in AVENGERS and got to know more in WINTER SOLDIER was a master spy. The Nick Fury in this show is an inept, incompetent spy. He runs about aimlessly in a public space and haplessly allows a terrorist to detonate explosives; he's facing shapeshifters but makes no plans for his comrades to easily identify him and gets his friend killed; his intelligence skills consist of demanding information from villains who have no reason to give it; he issues death threats to people who are perfectly willing to die.

Nick Fury should be written like Ethan Hunt in the latter-era MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies: a trickster, simultaneously an improvisor and a master-planner. Ethan Hunt is a well-written spy in the last three M:I movies because the actor and writer/director on those films were able to lavish time and creativity. Nick Fury demands the same level of attention, but SECRET INVASION is rushed hackwork due to some strange personnel changeovers behind the scenes.

SECRET INVASION does not seem to have had a consistent creative hand, so a lot of its choices are not fully mined or developed.

But even if SECRET INVASION had boasted a consistent creative team, SECRET INVASION as a series is just an exercise in self-sabotage. The concept demands a level of familiarity with the characters that would require at least one season to get to know them first. SECRET INVASION is unable to create any vivid sequences of impostorship because these characters are strangers or near-strangers. SECRET INVASION should have been a season of AGENTS OF SHIELD or a second season of FALCON & THE WINTER SOLDIER or a second season of MS. MARVEL or even a second season of WANDAVISION or LOKI. It should not have been the first season of anything.

One of my favourite comic books is INSUFFERABLE by Mark Waid, which was released as a digital comic on the unfortunately now defunct web comic site Thrillbent. And, for some strange reason, I can't seem to buy the digital comics even when they're said to be for sale. And I wanted to read it again, so I grudgingly bought the hard copy, a trade paperback containing the entire series for $45 USD.

This 2012 comic is about two former superhero partners: the hard-edged, seasoned Nocturnus who trained his teen sidekick Galahad in the ways of crimefighting only for Galahad to become an ungrateful jerk who was also more successful and popular than Nocturnus who now has to struggle to hold back his resentment.

Anyway, the comic came in the mail yesterday. I haven't bought a hard copy book in over ten years. This trade paperback is so heavy and thick with its 440 heavy, glossy pages opening it makes me fear I will break the spine. There are two pages, Pages 139 and 140, that are printed in reverse order by mistake. I had to install new lightbulbs in my bedroom lamp to read it because I've been deliberately keeping the light dim for reading on my e-reader or my tablet and this is the first thing I've read in years that doesn't have a backlight of some sort. Reading INSUFFERABLE is inconvenient and a little annoying.

That said, the comic remains one of the funniest takes on superheroes ever and it is well worth the trouble and expense. I'm going to scan and print Pages 139 - 140 and use double-sided tape to put them back in the book in the correct order.

It's a great series. I wrote about it earlier:

When it comes to netbooks, I am a bit like a former cult member. I still feel a certain fondness for the idea of a netbook. I mean, wasn't it a great idea? To spend $200 USD on a 10.1 inch laptop that, while hardly a gaming machine, was suitable for banging out emails and social media posts and handling your online business. A travel laptop that you could drop out a window by mistake and replace without causing a global economic crisis. The idea was spectacular and compelling and enticing: a cramped but usable burner laptop. The junker car of mobile computers. Even today, I find myself open to buying a 10.1 inch laptop.

The reality was... not quite that. The main issue with netbooks is that because the profit margins were so low on these products, manufacturers cut a lot of corners making them. I had the Acer Aspire One, the Asus Transformer T100 TAM, the Asus Transformer T100 Chi and the Asus Transformer Mini T102. All were cheap and awful: the Acer Aspire One battery went dead in a year, the Asus T100 TAM was was so badly sealed that dust would get under the screen, the T100 Chi's trackpad would randomly go dead; the Mini T102 developed white spots on the monitor. The only netbook I ever had that was actually good was the HP DM1 with the AMD E-450 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD -- and this was indeed the well-built, reliable, low weight netbook I'd been looking for, but I gave it away to a friend who was going back to school.

I got the Asus Vivobook L210, an 11.6 inch laptop with an Intel Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM... and it was unusably slow. I got the HP Elitebook Folio G3 which used the low power Intel Core M and even with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, Windows 10 ran so slowly that web browsers were constantly freezing up. It became clear: most of my netbooks had been during the days of Windows 7. But Windows 7 gave way to Windows 10, and where Windows 7 ran well on Intel Atom processors, spinning hard drives and 2GB of RAM, Windows 10 really demanded a solid state drive and at minimum 8GB of RAM with at least an Intel i3.

Ultimately, the smartphone and tablet killed the netbook. No one wanted to buy these poorly made, underpowered computers when smartphones offered more responsive performance and tablets offered better multimedia playback at a lighter weight, even if they didn't have the versatility of physical keyboards.

I'm currently using the HP Elitebook 830 G5 with an i5 processor and 8GB of RAM and an SSD. It's thin and light enough... but despite being a good value laptop, it certainly wouldn't be cheap to replace like a netbook. I still long for the return of burner netbooks. It will never happen, the profit margin is too low.

Developments keep proving TF right on this. Cryptocurrency has proven to be useless, has no value backing it up, and it is also a massive scam.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/sb … cards.html

This sounds fun. I hope you don't change the name. REWATCH PODCAST is quite stuck in the brain. I am severely behind on your podcasts on HEROES, so you shifting gears will let me catch up a bit. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on HEROES downright peculiar trajectory.

I too am excited for a second season of the QUANTUM LEAP revival.

Joe Biden is letting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman go without consequences for murdering a Washington Post journalist. The US is too dependent on Saudi Arabia as a trading partner and oil producer and economic power to cut ties or enact any repercussions.

https://vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/ … ears-later

Fairly or unfairly, it would seem that consensus politics are simply not where we will see right and wrong handled as right and wrong. Instead, it's a matter of political and economic allegiances and a fear of crashing an oil-dependent US economy.

Sometimes, as a voter, there are no good options. If I were in a position to vote in the next US election, I would be voting against Trump by voting for Biden, but examples like this one are why Biden hardly epitomizes my values and why I don't feel good about it and why I don't believe that we should present Biden as a saint even though we all know Trump is a demonic hellspawn from the dawn of time. (Some people worship the hellspawn.)

I never really know what to make of all the statistics except they seem to mean whatever you want them to mean.
https://www.google.com/search?q=biden+a … mp;dpr=1.5

Polls at this stage aren't really meaningful or useful. In fact, given how off the polls were in 2026 and 2020, I don't know if they're ever meaningful or useful anymore.

Have you used AI much? Personally, I think it would be useless to you in terms of SLIDERS.

The main issue that the writers' guild had with studios and AI: studios wanted to have executives autogenerate scripts with AI and then hire writers for a few days' work to rewrite these scripts.

Personally, I think writers should absolutely use AI; it's just a matter of how they use it.

The main issue that the writers' guild had with studios and AI: studios wanted to have executives autogenerate scripts with AI and then hire writers for a few days' work to rewrite these scripts. Writers balked at being paid even less to polish machine output.

I can assure you that the AI-generated scripts from the studio would have been garbage. I've used AI to generate screenplays, and they are hackneyed, regurgitated non-emotion, plotting that is either simple-minded or cognitively deficient, or structurally repetitive with each scene being a variant on the previous. Ask an AI to do SLIDERS stories and it outputs Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo fighting aliens.

However, AI can be a good assistive tool. I might ask the Sydney chatbot how Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo can survive having a bazooka fired at the ceiling of their hotel room. But more relevantly: AI can help SLIDERS writers when they ask AI to generate ideas for alt-worlds that (a) reflect an exaggeration or a reversal of a common societal convention (b) are set in a world that operates at a present day level of technology without sci-fi advances and (c) provides a history for how the world arrived at this situation. AI can produce a few paragraphs for an alt-world concept -- and then a SLIDERS writer do a polish on the alt-world concept and then write a strong, human-produced script with that AI-generated alt history idea.

That's the sort of area where AI can truly help a writer speed up their process. AI is also effective at starting points for SLIDERS stories if you feed it what you want it to build its alt-history around: cryptocurrency; transgender identity; a world where blue-collar workers are the elites and white collar workers are peasants; a world where paper is considered a black market product of ecological criminality, etc..

AI is a writer's tool, but AI itself is not a writer. That said, I think AI tools would be wasted on Temporal Flux because Temporal Flux's world-building abilities need no help. Nigel Mitchell also doesn't need AI.

Recently, I got a knock on my door and a nice person handed me my wallet. He said he'd found it at the grocery store and located my address from my driver's license.

I thanked him for his kindness and honesty, gave him the $40 in cash thawt was in my wallet, wished him a safe drive home, called the bank and cancelled every credit card number and debit card number in the wallet just in case he'd photographed the card details.

It's been a bit of a rough week. Replacement cards didn't arrive for a week. Some monthly bills could self-update to the new card number for payment, but some couldn't and I didn't have the replacement card in hand to provide the new numbers, so I had to send cheques or go to the bank.

My phone's tap to pay function immediately updated to the replacement number (which I could not see), so I had to ask friends to bring a credit card on outings to pay for parking because many parking machines don't accept tap to pay.

When paying off my credit card bill, I forgot to update the old card number and sent money for a non-existent bill while the actual bill went unpaid and forgotten until the card company brought it to my attention (and waived the overdue fine).

I still think it's important to carry one payment card even in an age of using a phone to pay because occasionally, I'll need to pay for something above the phone transaction limit. But I should have definitely not been carrying every bank and credit card in one wallet.

Democrat US Senator indicted for corruption, gold bars and cash seized. As Slider_Quinn21 says: if you're really a democrat, you support investigating and prosecuting crimes even if they're on your end of the political spectrum. And as we've unfortunately observed, on the other end of the spectrum are those who claim their standard bearer has violated no laws because laws don't apply to their standard bearer.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-indict … -1.6975326

I'm not sure if there is a positive, proactive, meaningful approach to politics like these. Ultimately, I don't vote in favour of any political party as much as I vote against the worst ones.

We had a friend who saw the hypocracy of Liberals and Democrats, who very correctly observed that there were hardly liberal or democratic and merely fighting with Conservatives and Repulicans to be in charge of the oil or mining company that masquerades as a country.

This friend went full on conservative because... I guess he sided with whatever politics fed his entitlement, his sense of grievance that being white and male didn't count for as much as it used to, that women and gender non-confirming and people of colour didn't seem as scared of him or as deferential to him as they used to be.

It's scary to me that someone can accurately recognize the performative and meaningless nature of politicians preaching social justice only to brutally assail the environment with pipelines and Indigenous peoples with cops... and then embrace Donald Trump.

I guess what it comes down to is that consensus politics is not the place to find genuine progressive values of civil rights, social justice and climate justice, much in the same way the grocery store is not the place to find worker rights.

Politics and grocery stores are evils that anyone who is genuinely progressive has to grudgingly and resentfully swallow when they vote for candidates who don't govern as they campaign and buy food from corporations that don't pay their cashiers and floor workers a living wage.

I guess we have to do it, but we don't have to like it and we can also make sure not to fall into cult thinking where the Liberal or Democratic or Conservative or Republican parties can do no wrong.

As Slider_Quinn21 says, we can't declare that someone's above being questioned just because they seem to be on 'our' side.

We shouldn't worship Andrew Yang or Jill Stein or Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden any more than a sane person would worship Donald Trump or Allison Mack. We need to be hypercritical of our leaders and standard bearers past, present and potential regardless of what branding they use on their social media pages.

I suspect that THE X-FILES' longevity is not really about the diehard fans. THE X-FILES was not like SLIDERS or BUFFY or BABYLON 5 in that THE X-FILES did not sustain and survive and become successful as a niche show. THE X-FILES was a success across a wide demographic and a success for a general audience. I think it's because the science fiction and supernatural stories of THE X-FILES were presented in a highly conventional formula: the formula of police procedural.

Visually, THE X-FILES resembled a lot of dark cop shows and detective shows like NYPD BLUE or HOMICIDE. The scripting was underplayed and subtle as opposed to bombastic and stylized like BUFFY or BABYLON 5. It looked and sounded like other high profile, pseudorealistic cop shows of the era, but the stories were decidedly otherworldly and unnerving. And because THE X-FILES was able to camouflage its eccentricities in a conventional guise, the general audience was willing to accept it and follow it from a conventional(ish) beginning to some very strange places.

This allowed THE X-FILES to hit a wide range of demographics, and as a result, its viewers were just viewers in general, not a specific range of genre fans. I think this is probably why Chris Carter avoided ongoing continuity, perpetually reset the characters, never had too much advancement or development, and kept the show in a permanent holding pattern. Whatever his faults, he was trying to keep the show from alienating that general audience.

Slider_Quinn21 once remarked that his reaction to the continuity changes in the mythology were usually, "Okay! I guess this is happening now!" and admitting that he didn't remember the myth-arc well enough to be concerned by continuity errors. I suspect that's what Carter wanted most of the time, for better or for worse.

I've always disliked the idea that timelines get wiped out. I don't like it when the audience reacts to a story with a sense of, as comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis put it, "You're breaking all the toys!" I feel that destroying timelines is like breaking all the toys and throwing out the sandbox. I would prefer that the 33rd century just exist as one of many possible futures for STAR TREK rather than destroy it. However, that may be a minority view.

The post-NEMESIS novels for TNG, DS9 and VOY had a very clean slate and did a lot of ongoing story arcs, only for PICARD to outright contradict them. The publishers elected to end their novel continuity in the CODA trilogy where the novel versions of the TNG, DS9 and VOY casts discover: all timelines are under attack by the Devidians, a race that feeds on energy from destroyed timelines. The heroes realize: the Devidians first began their campaign of destruction when the Borg altered history in FIRST CONTACT, splitting the timelines into disparate paths.

The novel timeline has been what the characters call the Splinter Timeline (media tie-ins), apart from the Prime Timeline (PICARD). The CODA trilogy ends with the novel characters sacrificing their own timeline so that the Prime Timeline and all the other timelines will be preserved while the Splinter Timeline is destroyed.

This is exactly the kind of story I dislike and disagree with. The CODA writers explained that they felt that saying the novel universe continues without ongoing publication would leave things unresolved, and they felt killing everyone off to save the Prime characters was conclusive and final. That may be, but all it did was, as Bendis would put it, "break the toys" and throw out the sandbox. I think that if a writer doesn't enjoy a a toy, they should just leave it alone rather than actively destroy it. Someone else might find a use for it someday.

I think this is just something to address in a throwaway line. "Mirror Georgiou? Again? I thought we were rid of her." "No, she's back from that possible future timeline." Or even a more involved exchange:

LUCSLY: "Hello. I'm Agent Lucsly from the Department of Temporal Investigations. I'm very familiar with you, 'Emperor.'"

MIRROR GEORIGOU: "You think you know me from reading my file, as though my data footprint is all I am and nothing compared to all you represent and all you claim to be. Department of Temporal Investigations. A portentous term bound in administrative pretense, as though time can be curtailed by a flowchart and a briefing. I have seen the end of your civilization, the conclusion of all you exist within, the downfall of all that keeps you upright. I know what is coming for you, what will consume you, what will -- "

LUCSLY: "Uh. No. Sorry. What you saw was one potential future. 38B. The Burn one, right? Yeah, that's not even the worst one. There are like four thousand apocalyptic timelines out of the 20 billion we track every day. But thanks for letting me know that it left you psychologically scarred and that it bolstered your existing narcisissm."

My understanding is that their slate and budget was pretty full with STRANGE NEW WORLDS, DISCOVERY and LOWER DECKS, and given the streaming model having hit upper limits of subscriber growth, they were looking to let aging shows clear off their slate and just not replace them for awhile. And then the writers strike and actors strike happened, so the lack of plans remains a lack of plans.

Spoilers for AHSOKA

Well, there is one thing that stands out to me: Dawson and Christensen are playing an Ahsoka and Anakin after the fall of the Empire. Ahsoka is an adult now; Anakin has been through the Dark Side and returned to the light. In a sense, these characters are meeting for the first time at this new stage of their lives. (I recall reading about Ahsoka fighting Darth Vader in REBELS but don't remember how old she was.)

I do think that it would be more consistent if Dawson and Christensen had voiced the characters in CLONE WARS. Except... Dawson, even in her younger years, had this assured authority in her voice that I don't really associate with the inexperienced, frantic Ahsoka I'm currently seeing in Season 1 of CLONE WARS. And Christensen is a good actor (not that you'd know it from the prequels), but he is an actor who acts with his whole body and his face, and Christensen's voice has a certain narrow monotone to it. I'm not sure he'd come off too well as a voice actor for an animated show.

Maybe Ashley Eckstein playing Ahsoka and Matt Lanter playing Anakin in the animated shows was really for the best.

I am relieved by your response.

I think comment on misinformation is valuable and prefer that we leave the post and link.

Alex Kurtzman is certainly leaving STAR TREK at some point. You could say that about anyone working on any series: they will be leaving at some point. We don't need to use a voice-deepening vocoder and put on a metal mask and call ourselves "Doomcock" for that.

We are living in a world that has a greater density of information and therefore misinformation than ever before. Misinformation is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence text generation. I know that STAR TREK non news is not a big deal, but if I were in the misinformation game, I'd probably start with niche science fiction for training and work my way up. I don't think any of us can stop it, but we should be hypersuspicious of news where the supposed journalist hides behind a mask to talk about a TV rocketships and laser guns.

I'm going to ask you not to share any more links to misinformation in this forum.

That YouTube channel is for a notoriously unreliable fraud with the asinine moniker of "Doomcock". This phony, in recent false news, gave a completely untrue summary of INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY where he claimed Harrison Ford's Indy would be erased from history and replaced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character. This person couldn't be trust to give a weather report, never mind STAR TREK news.

Furthermore, any news of franchise directions right now is obviously false because of that minor event you might know of called the writers' strike. Regardless, if you're trusting in a news source named "Doomcock", you need a different news source and to reconsider whether or not you have a firm grasp on reality.

I have no idea what you are thinking posting this link here. I don't know if it's related to that vague post of vagueness you put in the political thread. But this is not a place for fake news and fraudulent reports and misinformation.

Hmm. I recall actually seeing the CLONE WARS movie 2008 in a movie theatre when it first released. I remember thinking at the time that the character and prop designs looked like wooden marionettes rendered in computer graphics but with all the immobility and rigidity of wood and little of the versatility and motion of animation.

I remember finding that while the writing benefitted from not being written by George Lucas and his robotic dialogue, the pacing was dull and tedious and like watching four TV episodes spliced into a film reel and even then, it would still have been tiresome halfway in.

I remember thinking Ahsoka had a lot of potential as a character, but was shallowly defined. I remember thinking that James Arnold Taylor's Obi-Wan voice was an impersonation of Ewan McGregor's Alec Guinness impression and was like a photocopy of a photocopy. I remember thinking that Matt Lanter's voice of Anakin was significantly less whiny than Hayden Christensen and therefore 200 percent more tolerable, and wondering if we might get a more convincing portrait of Anakin's fall to the dark side from Lanter.

I remember thinking that this was all so boring in a 100 minute movie and deciding not to bother with the TV show.

I rewatched it just now and had exactly the same opinion except if Slider_Quinn21 thinks CLONE WARS is good, I'll watch at least the first season.

Now, regarding the AHSOKA spoiler...

Slider_Quinn21, I was wondering: do you find it an issue that the Ahsoka and Anakin who are meeting again in the live action series are not Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter but instead Rosario Dawson and Hayden Christensen? Is there any issue with the actors who first built this relationship being absent, and two actors who are onscreen strangers to each other being the ones who get 'reunited' with each other? I don't know if there would or wouldn't be, I'm just interested.

Lucas remarked in 2008 that he didn't rehire the original actors for CLONE WARS because they were all filming projects in different parts of the world and too difficult to schedule for recording. He also remarked that hiring big name actors for animation was paying more for celebrity promotion than performance. He probably could have just said the first part and kept the second part to himself. ;-)

My irritation with politics right now: Canada has two main parties, the Liberal and Conservative parties with the National Democratic Party making up a minority.

The Liberals basically treat government as administrating an oil company. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being a handsome, left of center leader whose cabinet is 50 percent women and releases lots of social media posts and press releases about equality and feminism and climate change action and Indigenous peoples, Trudeau has driven two women out of their posts for not being gentle enough on corrupt corporations caught in financial crimes, subsidized and nationalized oil pipelines, had police drive Indigneous peoples off land that was in the way of a pipeline, and overseen an ongoing transfer of the country's wealth and resources away from the people and to corporations.

The Liberal social justice posturing is just marketing. The Liberals have shrugged off the unaffordability of housing, turned a blind eye to raging forest fires from fossil fuels, dismissed inflation and bankrupt cities, and shown callous disregard to the crises faced by working class people.

As far as I can tell, the Conservative Party of Canada is pretty much the same with the Liberals except where the Liberals pay lip service to social justice and climate justice, the Conservatives proudly flaunt their climate change denial, wealth hoarding, and their abuse and exploitation of minorities, Indigenous peoples and the working class.

I have reluctantly voted Liberal in election after election in the spirit of choosing a preferred opponent and because in my riding, voting for the NDP is effectively voting for the Conservatives. I voted for the party that didn't deny climate change... although it was still the party that opened more pipelines.

Summer polls mean little, but currently, the Conservatives are surging in the polls for a future election because Conservatives are making lots of noise about working class suffering. I don't doubt for a moment that the Conservatives, if they were to win government in 2025, would be the the present Liberal government but without the feeble restraints of performative social justice for Facebook and Instagram.

There has historically and will always be a culture war of the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, but to me, it looks like a phony war. Both sides have the same goals: corporate wealth over common good. Liberals can sometimes be bent to progressive action because the alternative would be bad PR, but that's not saying much. They're only liberal for the cameras.

THE X-FILES was definitely groundbreaking when it first aired 1993. It presented horror and science fiction in the context and budget of a TV budget police procedural. It presented itself as a show with an ongoing mythology with fans urgently combing through ancient texts from cultures across the globe to uncover Chris Carter's secret code. It delved into shadow government conspiracy theories that were often too bizarre for the mainstream and presented them in the familiar cop show context. It made ideas that were too fantasy-oriented and too peculiar seem accessible.

However, it quickly became a follower rather than a leader. BABYLON 5 debuted in 1994 and began an ongoing arc. BUFFY debuted in 1997 and showed that you could do ongoing continuity as well. BABYLON 5 and BUFFY would hint at cataclysmic events... and show them. And move onto something new.

Meanwhile, THE X-FILES, even by its ninth season, was still teasing a future alien invasion story that it could never actually show onscreen with a TV budget.

Of course, BABYLON 5 and BUFFY were niche shows for sci-fi and fantasy fans. THE X-FILES, however, was a major network show courting a general audience, and THE X-FILES had a viewership and a fanbase and a legacy that BABYLON 5 and BUFFY can never hope to match. And THE X-FILES could have absolutely achieved the same pop cultural immortality as STAR TREK if it had reinvented and updated itself.

But unfortunately, it came back in 2016 and was hilariously dated. The idea of federal government masterminding a secret shadow government was laughable in an age where conspiracies are obvious and open in the capitalistic gluttony of the military industrial complex. The idea that aliens could be hidden from the public in an age of YouTube was absurd.

THE X-FILES revival mythology was toxic: a lot of the X-FILES shadow government conspiracy concepts had become based in fraudulent health misinformation where essential and life-saving vaccines were falsely called toxic by pseudoscientists and fakes.

THE X-FILES revival doubled-down on this anti-vaccine, anti-health misinformation that was eccentric in the 90s but outrageously foolish and harmful in 2016. It was truly misguided for Chris Carter to present polio vaccines as the delivery system for the Spartan Virus, especially when Carter himself is absolutely not an anti-vaxxer and just wanted the dangerous vaccines as a plot device.

It's funny: when comparing the 2018 season of SUPERNATURAL and the 2018 season of THE X-FILES: SUPERNATURAL's 2018 season (its 14th) was a strong combination of ongoing arcs and standalones. The season premiere established the threat of a rogue archangel. Character relationships progressed each week even if individual cases were wrapped up, the rogue archangel story expanded the show's mythos with new developments and revelations.

In contrast, THE X-FILES' 2018 season seemed deeply confused. The Season 10 cliffhanger was dismissed as a dream. The Season 11 premiere established that Mulder and Scully were searching for their son; it isn't mentioned again until Episode 5, doesn't come back until Episode 10. Episode 2 has Mulder and Scully living in the same house in a romantic relationship; Episode 7 has Mulder visiting Scully's separate house and saying he's never been there. Episode 1 has Mulder driving a Mustang; Episode 7 has Scully driving an SUV that Scully drove in the 2017 season.

Episode 3 has Mulder and Scully romantically involved; Episode 4 has Mulder disappearing for days and not bothering to tell Scully. Episode 1 has Mulder and Scully losing all trust in Skinner; Episode 6 has them helping Skinner without confronting him. Season 11 had some great episodes ("This", "Lost Art of Forehead Sweat", "Ghouli", "Followers", "Nothing Lasts Forever"), but against the incoherent continuity, the characters seemed like different people in different lives from week to week. It was alienating and confusing.

I'm not saying that the continuity of SUPERNATURAL was ever perfect, but SUPERNATURAL never lost track of where the characters were living, who they were dating and what they were driving.

Looking at the 2018 series finales for SUPERNATURAL and THE X-FILES: SUPERNATURAL's season finale asked some difficult questions about why evil and injustice exist, featured some strong comedy and compelling action, and had a shocking climax where Sam and Dean confront their enemy: God.

In contrast, THE X-FILES' season finale had a shootout, a car chase, a run around a dark warehouse... and had nothing much to say about conspiracy, legacy, family, faith or science. THE X-FILES finale had nothing to say about anything.

This sort of time-slot filling, statement-free mediocrity is no longer enough for a TV show to become a global phenomenon.

There is a lot of good work in TV. QUANTUM LEAP is a heartfelt treatise on empathy augmented by technology, STRANGER THINGS is a haunting period piece, and even low stakes comedies like the SAVED BY THE BELL and iCARLY revivals were able to revisit former storylines with care, introduce ongoing arcs, and keep track of where everyone lived and who was dating whom from week to week.

It's absurd that Mulder and Scully were not receiving ongoing character arcs in 2018 when that same year featured Archie Andrews, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the Ninja Turtles with season-long development. If THE X-FILES can't meet the standard of Archie, Sabrina and the Turtles, then THE X-FILES has no business being on TV.

I hope THE X-FILES will come back someday with a showrunner who can keep track of where everyone lives and who is dating whom from week to week.

I haven't watched SUPERMAN AND LOIS' third season yet. I've been too tired to watch something that I want to enjoy with full attention, so I put on the fourth season of TITANS while doing various chores. It's a baffling series to me, using a grab bag of leftover copyrights after other licensors took Batman, Superman and the rest.

It's still up to its old habits of overpromising and underdelivering: it teases an appearance from Superman but they don't have the license, so we just get a note; Bruce Wayne corresponds via unheard phone calls; Lex Luthor is only permitted a brief appearance. Season 3 wasted a year trying to tell the story of BATMAN: A DEATH IN THE FAMILY and BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD without using Batman and Season 4 seems to nod at this bizarre trait before going into a story that, despite its flaws, actually pertains to the Titans.

The story this year seems to have an inciting antagonist and then it sparks very separate plotlines for all the characters as each episode splits them up for something else. I continue to be unsure as to how these arcs are thematically linked by anything more than moody lighting and severe cinematography and high-stress performances. I would say that for the previous three seasons too.

The series continues to emphasize bombast and moody visual spectacle for superhumans. TITANS' protagonists spend most of their time fighting their grudge matches and enmities with old enemies and very little time protecting innocents and saving people. There seems to be some congitive dissonance where Nightwing and Tim Drake kill at least one henchman in the heat of combat but Nightwing later declares that the Titans don't kill.

In previous seasons, the Titans killed various people in combat and were eager to abandon people in trouble and also let Jason Todd murder various victims and wander off freely. Raven has a lot of lines and some lip service to helping people, but for the most part, these superheroes do nothing heroic. Season 3 continues with more of the same and seems to think that these depressed, dour people have won the audience's loyalty.

I really don't get it. I don't understand why all these characters are in the show, and TITANS is using a grimdark aesthetic to make the shallow and thin seem deep and complicated. The show is well-cast, visually compelling, technically proficient and not exactly terrible, but I don't know why anyone would make a superhero show where they're never really heroes or why they would do it with the TEEN TITANS copyright. But it's inoffensive while I'm refilling Sodastream bottles and folding socks and doing other such tasks.

I haven't seen FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, but it seems to me from your description that FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, in trying to keep its cast together and in the same scenes, had to muddy its timeline and the ages of its characters into something less defined so that the character ages wouldn't overtly contradict their ongoing presence in the show.

I'm not familiar enough with the show to say if it's a serious issue or if it's a minor concern. A writing mentor of mine once said that continuity is a tool to add a sense of myth, history and context to a story and often declared that issues like the THE X-FILES' incoherent mythos or Laurie Strode's fate or ages of characters are immaterial and irrelevant. I am personally a little more continuity aligned where I think it can be a lot of fun to look at where a fictional universe holds together and where there are gaps, and I think it's important to eventually get things consistent enough to avoid confusion. I'm not bothered that James T. Kirk seems to be working for Spacefleet / Space Central / Star Service etc. if they eventually settle on Starfleet and stick with it.

I think all shows have continuity errors, but modern shows put more effort into obscuring them. Older TV shows were often written by writers who had not necessarily seen very many of the previous episodes because watching them required special visits for a screening in an edit room. In addition, there was the expectation that episodes would be broadcast as opposed to viewed on demand where audiences might be reviewing and looking more closely. Modern shows are written with the understanding that the immediate story may be more important than avoiding contradictions, but they still try to smooth them over, sometimes with a quippy line, sometimes by having Starfleet classify two seasons of DISCOVERY.

FRINGE is a favourite show of ours that has some pretty enormous continuity discrepancies: the series premiere has John Scott trying to kill his girlfriend Olivia Dunham by running her off the road only to die in the resulting car accident; later in the season, John is revealed to have been a hero who was undercover and his attempt on Olivia's life is acknowledged (OLIVIA: "You tried to kill me!") and then gently ignored (JOHN: "No, Liv. I loved you") and never explained. We're supposed to vaguely think that John was just trying to escape in his car; we're encouraged not to remember the pilot episode too much.

We get a glimpse of an alternate universe in Season 1 and it's completely mismatched to our full view of the same alternate universe in Season 2. In Season 1, the Peter character is being hunted by a local Boston crime boss; this is forgotten. Season 2 introduces a new Fringe agent, Amy Jessup (Meghan Markle) who disappears after a cameo in her second episode.

FRINGE tried to deal with its errors with sentiment, misdirection and distance. John Scott was revisited after a long run of episodes without him and his redemption story validated Olivia. An late Season 1 episode had Peter urgently avoiding someone assumed to be the crime boss; it turned out to be somebody else and then Peter's situation was forgotten.

Nearly an entire season passed before we saw the alternate universe in detail again, letting the audience forget how it had first appeared.

Amy Jessup was glimpsed in a cameo role with the unspoken implication that she would come in and out as needed; she never came back in. In each case, the viewer was subtly encouraged to not think about something 'for now', and sometimes, 'for now' became forever, and the show tried to let the viewer forget that all this once mattered. It didn't matter anymore.

HEROES is one of those shows where its continuity failures unfortunately tore it apart. I can't get into all of HEROES' continuity issues, but the main one: characters with powers each had a strange DNA helix symbol appear on their bodies. This meant their powers came from a specific source that had branded metahumans. In addition, all metahumans' powers reflected their user's psychological makeup: Peter's empathy made him mimic other people's powers, Nathan's distance made him fly, Claire's resiliency made her invulnerable, Hiro feeling like life was passing him by made him a time traveller, etc.

The implication: everyone with powers had been genetically altered by whoever created the helix symbol and given them the genetic potential to express their innermost states via their specific superpower. The alteration may have taken place before they were born, perhaps some sort of wide population experiment.

HEROES in Season 2 features Takezo Kensei, a 17th century swordsman whose blade has the helix symbol and has the power of cellular regeneration. The indication: everyone's powers in the present day are part of an experiment to recreate Kensei's gift, likely by randomly applying his genetic factors to test subjects without their knowledge. I'm just speculating, but I suspect this was laid down by Season 1 producer Bryan Fuller who left the show before Season 2 but after seeding some arcs.

Unfortunately, HEROES lost the (implied) genetic engineering orgin story. There was never any explanation for the helix, no origin story for the powers. I suspect the issue was the writer's strike curtailing Season 2. When the show remounted for Season 3, Takezo Kensei's actor, David Anders, had limited availability. HEROES dismissed Kensei and his symbol and all the hints and clues that came with him. And so, it discarded all the origin story implied by those clues. This also meant that HEROES lost its hold on the core theme of the show: the characters' powers were an expression of the characters' internal state. Without that framework, the writers lost sight of the characters: Peter was no longer defined by empathy nor Claire by resilience, Mohinder became a mutated reptile villain for half a season, the everyman Ando got superpowers that didn't speak to who he was at all. This was a situation where continuity actually mattered and they lost it.

However, HEROES does feature one of my favourite continuity patches. Mohinder's accent was originally Indian but the creators decided, a few episodes into filming, that they wanted him to have an English accent, perhaps it would convey more authority and full command of the English language (and scientific English). Actor Sendhil Ramamurthy proceeded to have Mohinder's accent gradually shift from Indian to English over course of Episodes 2 - 4 so that the change wouldn't be too distracting. This didn't really matter, but it's funny.

One of my favourite continuity issues: the demon-killing Colt was an essential prop in SUPERNATURAL. In the fifth season, the Colt fails to kill the Devil. The Colt is not seen for the rest of the season and it's unclear: was it dropped at the battle scene and lost? In late Season 6, it's finally established that the heroes lost the Colt in Season 5 and don't know where it is. Where did it go? Why did the writers take over a season to finally follow up on its whereabouts? Why was the follow up just a halfhearted shrug as to where the Colt had gone? Why did the writers lose track of the Colt, a vital weapon? This continuity issue was confusing and distracting. This mattered.

For years, I would randomly say to my SUPERNATURAL-fan niece for no good reason whatsoever, "Say -- whatever happened to the Colt?" This refrain became so obnoxious that at one point, she and I were playing the SUPERNATURAL edition of the board game CLUE and she threw the Colt gamepiece at me in highly understandable rage.

Slider_Quinn21 actually explained this: Season 5 was intended as the final season. When the Colt failed to kill Lucifer, it became irrelevant to the series, so the showrunner didn't follow up on it. When SUPERNATURAL made it to a sixth season (and the original showrunner left), the Season 6 writers realized: they had no idea where the Colt was. It was not retrieved on camera; it was not seen for the rest of Season 5. This meant the writers could not credibly show it in the heroes possession, nor did they know how to follow up on its present location as the Season 5 episodes had left no clues. And it wasn't that important because once the Colt failed to kill the Devil, it didn't matter anymore.

However, in Season 12, the writers wanted to do a PULP FICTION-esque heist film that required an important artifact; they chose the Colt as the artifact and finally explained where it had been since Season 5. They had a reason to use it again. And then, a few episodes later, they destroyed it, after which my niece smugly phoned me and said, "I dare you to ask me what happened to the Colt from now on."

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE isn't a TV show anymore, but one thing I find hilarious is how the Impossible Missions Force never seems like the same organization in each movie. In M:I1, IMF teams are assembled by the US from civilian or espionage for individual missions and then disperse upon completion or failure, the IMF has no fixed headquarters or facilities, and outside of a mission, the IMF ceases to exist. In M:I2, the IMF is composed of individual field agents who are assinged support staff from different fields for each mission.

In MI:3, the IMF is become a secret federal agency with offices, dedicated support teams, IMF-specific training programs, a CIA-style arrangement of divisions and hierarchy, and is a full organization rather than a mission-by-mission recruitment practice. In M:I4, the IMF is a black ops agency so distant and outside federal government that the President can dissolve it in a single memo. In M:I5, the former IMF is described specifically as Ethan Hunt's team, and the IMF is reinstated at the end. In M:I6, the IMF is a covert team within the CIA consisting of Ethan Hunt and his associates.

In M:I7, the IMF is described this way: when the CIA or NSA have a mission too complex or difficult for themselves, they "leave word" with "a man" who decides whether or not he'll accept the mission, implying that the IMF is now just Ethan Hunt and his direct associates. Paradoxically, there's a scene where Ethan welcomes a new IMF agent who doesn't appear again, suggesting Ethan is just one agent among many, suggesting that the IMF is merely a conduit to reach Ethan as opposed to being Ethan's employer. Also strangely, Ethan describes the process of being recruited by the IMF: the prospective agent must approach the recruiter and that recruiter is the CIA Director.

Somehow, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE manages to make these discrepancies trivial and irrelevant. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies aren't about the Impossible Missions Force. It's about Ethan, and the IMF only exists to justify Ethan Hunt's missions. In five out of seven movies, Ethan has been branded a rogue agent and isn't even working for the IMF. The IMF morphs into whatever the plot needs it to be for Ethan to be a field agent supported by a small team; the IMF will also morph into an antagonist should the plot require that Ethan be a fugitive for the story. It just doesn't matter.

Do the character ages actually matter on FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS? I don't know. I've never seen it.

He means remastering projects that are only in standard definition right now, and re-releasing them as HD or 4K.

Interesting. Why 24fps over 29.97fps? The Universal DVD files are 29.97fps. Is it because the original film would have been 24fps and the 29.97fps framerate is just the SD broadcast format achieved through frame duplication?

Your new settings seem to eliminate the MI settings that were used at some points for particularly problematic areas of shots with straight lines. Is that addressed elsewhere or would you recommend preserving the MI settings for specific episodes with a lot of jagged edges?

Would you recommend re-doing the Pilot at 24fps? The current version I have is 29.97fps.

Thanks so much!

Throughout seven seasons of TNG, Riker was said to have turned down command of the USS Drake, the USS Aries, the USS Melbourne, and Q said in VOYAGER that he'd expected Riker to beat out Janeway for captaincy of Voyager. The explanation given is that he felt he had more to learn on the Enterprise, which is meaningless nonsense to justify Jonathan Frakes being on contract.

My head-canon analysis was that Riker felt his niche was handling all the tasks that tend to make a commander unpopular. He wasn't confident about inspiring loyalty.

I don't necessarily know that the William Thomas Riker I describe is the Riker that was intended. It's possible that Ronald D. Moore, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga and Jonathan Frakes would tell you: Riker wasn't normally like that and that my analysis is overinflating outlier examples.

However, my impression of Riker is reflected by most of the STAR TREK novelists I've read from fan favourites like Peter David to William Shatner himself. In THE RETURN, Shatner and co-writers Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens see Riker as the 'bad cop'. Riker aggressively questions Spock and Dr. Bashir on the resurrected Kirk and alienates both; Riker is ruthless and tricky in trapping Kirk; Riker is ready to shoot a senior citizen, Dr. McCoy, (on stun) when McCoy tries to defend a violent Kirk. Riker takes on work that others would hesitate to do for reasons of conscience.

As for a more pronounced arc for Riker:

There is a character on the medical sitcom, SCRUBS: Dr. Bob Kelso, the hospital chief of medicine. Dr. Kelso is always prioritizing wealthy patients over poor ones, focused on hospital budgets and actively sabotaging the spirit and comfort of his doctors and nurses. He also tries to prevents doctors from volunteering their own time to treat uninsured patients. He is constantly bragging to his lower-middle class staff about his lavish vacations. Kelso is the villain for the first four seasons, defied by the heroic doctors.

In the fifth season, we see Dr. Kelso shut down a pre-natal clinic for being unprofitable, and then he chooses to prioritize care for a rich patient which causes a poor patient to die. This is normal for Dr. Kelso except Season 5 actually offers his rationale: Dr. Kelso pressures the rich patient for a donation which reopens the pre-natal clinic. Dr. Kelso admits he has spent decades sacrificing the individual patient to save mass numbers of patients; his uncaring bitterness is a facade and defense mechanism.

We also later learn that all of Kelso's lavish vacations are a lie; he's going to medical conferences to update himself on new techniques.

It's unclear why Kelso presents himself so unflatteringly to his staff until Season 6. We learn that Dr. Kelso has been deliberately making it difficult for his doctors to treat uninsured patients to create deniability with insurance companies even as Kelso leaves his doctors just enough loopholes to get away with it.

We also have an episode where the doctors and nurses are distracted from work over arguments about the Iraq War. Dr. Kelso addresses this by discontinuing the employee discount at the coffee shop while sadistically flaunting how he retains the discount himself. The staff instantly set aside all political differences to unite in hatred for Dr. Kelso.

Season 7 retains this softening of Dr. Kelso; he has gone from "evil boss" to "practical realist who accepts all the tasks that make a boss unpopular". We also learn that Dr. Kelso has stayed in his job for far longer than is good for his sanity because he fears his successor could be everything Kelso only pretends to be.

Season 8 has Dr. Kelso retire after appointing an ideal replacement, but he keeps hanging out at the hospital to avoid his wife and enjoy the lifetime supply of free muffins he won in a contest. Without the burden of being the bad cop, Kelso offers grandfatherly advice and medical mentorship. He goes from Riker to Picard.

I assume that Riker, like Dr. Kelso, was someone who had accepted a conscience-taxing job that both felt someone had to do. A job they didn't want to inflict on anyone else, hence Riker refusing every captaincy and Kelso staying on as chief of medicine even when it was making him a lonely, miserable isolationist hated by everyone in his life.

I assume that at some point between Season 7, Riker experienced... something. Something that changed him. I don't know what changed; maybe there's something in those pre-NEMESIS TREK novels that I never got around to reading. Maybe Number One is still alive in the TNG era and sang her song to Riker.

Kirk and Number One do not agree with Riker and Kelso's approach to leadership. I don't either. However, I don't work in a hospital. I don't work in the military. I can't say for certain that their approach isn't needed in life and death situations.

I'll simply note that a lot of the time, the Rikers and Kelsos of the world aren't mistreating their staff out of a strategy to covertly protect and empower their people; they mistreat their staff because they are abusers and harassers.

We should be wary of this myth of the heroic bad boss.

While I like STRANGE NEW WORLDS-showrunner Akiva Goldsman's work, I feel that Goldsman's use of Section 31 in DISCOVERY and the Gorn in STRANGE NEW WORLDS reflects a lack of creativity.

Why the Gorn? It's a fair question. If Goldsman wanted STRANGE NEW WORLDS to have a primary villain the way THE NEXT GENERATION has the Borg and DEEP SPACE NINE has the Dominion and ENTERPRISE had Brannon Braga -- why didn't he create a new one? Why did he instead choose a one-off villain from "Arena"?

I don't know, but I do notice that Section 31 featured heavily on DISCOVERY under Goldsman. It made no sense for Section 31, established as a black-ops team outside Starfleet, to be presented on DISCOVERY as a generic spy branch within the Starfleet chain of command. It would seem Goldsman wanted the recognition of the name "Section 31" over "Starfleet Intelligence", and if it weren't for the Section 31 name, the spy branch on DISCOVERY would be unmemorable and indistinct.

And with the Gorn, it would seem Goldsman wanted an underfeatured but well-remembered name from THE ORIGINAL SERIES to serve as the STRANGE NEW WORLDS villain, and prioritized the name over any previously established characteristics of the Gorn.

The Gorn of SNW are known to the Federation instead of unfamiliar; they're a quadriped-reptillian variant on ALIENS-style parasites instead of humanoid bipeds, they're nimble and fast rather than strong and slow; they're active invaders rather than defending perceived threats to territory.

It's like Goldsman decided to use the Gorn name for the recognition factor, even when the parasite villains he'd written didn't resemble the Gorn in "Arena" and contradicted the first Federation/Gorn encounter in "Arena". Goldsman's use of "Gorn" was to add identity and meaning to an otherwise generic space-parasite monster that, if given an original name, would be utterly unremarkable.

Goldsman has his strengths and weaknesses. I think he captures the progressive, diverse, peacekeeping tone of STAR TREK and Starfleet as well as Gene L. Coon and certainly better than Gene Roddenberry. I'm impressed by Goldsman's daring: casting swimsuit model Rebecca Romijn (a person not known for her acting) to play the highly intellectual Number One was a baffling choice. But it turns out Romijn is actually a brilliant actress who is spectacular as Number One.

However, Goldsman is not as creative as Gene L. Coon (Starfleet, the United Federation of Planets), Maurice Hurley (the Borg), Ira Steven Behr (the Dominion and Section 31). Goldsman has not created anything as vital as Starfleet, the Federation, the Borg, the Dominion or Section 31... and is instead assigning the names of inventive concepts to extremely generic ideas.

Ira Steven Behr doesn't seem too busy right now. Maybe Goldsman should call him up to create some new villains.

**

Why a prequel?

From what I can tell, STRANGE NEW WORLDS was not originally planned. Bryan Fuller wanted to do a STAR TREK anthology show that would start before TOS and then time travel into the TNG-DS9-VOY era and then go forward. Fuller wanted to do a neo-retro look to TOS that was going to look... pretty much like STRANGE NEW WORLDS. Then Fuller got himself fired.

Why Fuller keeps getting fired from his own TV shows (DEAD LIKE ME, DISCOVERY, AMERICAN GODS, AMAZING STORIES, THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES) is probably a post in itself.

According to interviews, Akiva Goldsman (of BATMAN AND ROBIN feature film infamy and FRINGE renown) joined DISCOVERY after Fuller left. Goldsman had agreed to join DISCOVERY sight unseen, simply eager to be part of a STAR TREK show. Goldsman had assumed that this prequel would feature a revamped-retro look on THE ORIGINAL SERIES and feature Captain Pike, Number One and Spock.

Goldsman was baffled to discover that DISCOVERY featured no TOS characters and that CBS had rejected the retro costumes as looking too retro. CBS also demanded that DISCOVERY start shooting. With the clock ticking, Goldsman and the costume designers went with a new variant on the ENTEPRISE costumes because they knew CBS would approve them, grabbed whatever unfinished scripts and napkin-notes Fuller had left, and hurriedly began scripting and shooting. Goldsman wasn't in a position to start over with DISCOVERY, but it would seem he steered the show towards the Season 1 finale in which the Enterprise NCC-1701 rendezvous with the Discovery, the first step in reconciling DISCOVERY with TOS. Goldsman pushed for Pike, Spock and Number One to appear in Season 2, and pitched STRANGE NEW WORLDS, the show he had mistakenly thought DISCOVERY would be.

**

... why does Bryan Fuller keep getting fired from TV shows? I am trying to think of a way to offer my theory without being sued for libel. It's easier to be frank about David Peckinpah and Bill Dial because they're dead. I think I'll finish my Kirk vs. Riker post first.

My supposition at this point would be that most of the onscreen Gorn in STRANGE NEW WORLDS are young, infant, feral Gorn with whom the universal translator has no ability to interpret, at least for now. The humanoid Gorn of "Arena" was an adult Gorn, and the universal translator still seemed to struggle until the Metrons stepped in.

Also, we don't know that these feral Gorn or the savage adult Gorn of "Arena" are a representative consensus of all Gorn. Twitter isn't a representative consensus of the human race, after all, nor is Sliders.tv a full representation of all science fiction and fantasy fans.

Case in point:

I think that it's fair for a fan to observe that fiction in an ongoing franchise written by numerous creators over decades isn't going to have seamless continuity. At the same time, I think it's a fun game to try to stitch the gaps of continuity back together.

I think the "Get a life" remark might be better applied to those who engage in "battling" about continuity on TrekBBS. I personally like to think that Sliders.tv isn't that sort of community.

In THE ORIGINAL SERIES episode "Arena", the Enterprise crew definitely doesn't recognize the Gorn; the Metrons tell the crew the name of the Gorn. Kirk says in his log, "This is Captain James Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. Who ever finds this, please get it to Starfleet Command. I'm engaged in personal combat with a creature apparently called a Gorn." This doesn't track with STRANGE NEW WORLDS set around a decade before "Arena" where the Gorn are known to the Federation, albeit with few survivors to tell about them. STRANGE NEW WORLDS is not maintaining continuity with "Arena".

However, I'd like to think that here on Sliders.tv, when we discuss continuity breaks like this one and how they might be bridged, we aren't really quibbling about who said and did what in what frame of what episode. We are really discussing storytelling: how stories told by many hands over many decades will have variability in themes and details and interpretations of the mythology, how well those interpretations fit together or don't, and how these interpretations reflect different eras of TV.

"Arena" was written by Gene L. Coon in the 60s and on that 60s production model, the Gorn was an alien made for one episode with a rubber suit made for use in one episode. Writer Gene L. Coon gave zero thought to how the Gorn might recur or what their backstory might be in prequels or what their society or culture or origins could be. They were an enemy for Kirk to pursue, to be imperiled by, to defeat, and to spare. The elaborate rubber suit meant it took multiple performers just to play one Gorn, so the Gorn would not be effective as a recurring foe and this was definitely a one-off. The casting and costuming needed for Gorn are why they didn't return until ENTEPRRISE. "Arena" is so determined to contain the story to a single episode that they introduce godlike beings, the Metrons, to force the story to a conclusion.

The Gorn being different in continuity and approach in STRANGE NEW WORLDS speaks to how modern TV wants to create a mythology and a past, present and future for the Gorn in order to use them across many episodes and make them an identifiable part of this particular show's mythos and iconography.

One possibility for why Kirk in "Arena" didn't recognize the Gorn: the Gorn in STRANGE NEW WORLDS are seen obscured by suits or not fully grown or in a non-humanoid form, feral and wild rather than the fully-grown, humanoid Gorn in "Arena". Federation society didn't have a coherent, consistent portrayal of the Gorn and the Gorn, while public knowledge, weren't widely known or recognized and popular memory simply categorized them as "unknown alien" with the other unknown aliens.

A similar tactic was used in ENTERPRISE: when the Ferengi and the Borg showed up two centuries before Starfleet officially first encountered them, but their races were never identified during ENTERPRISE, and these pre-First Contact contacts weren't recorded. However, this is going to take a lot of having Kirk conveniently being absent whenever the Gorn were an issue, and I'm not sure STRANGE NEW WORLDS can sustain that when Starfleet admirals are bracing for war with the Gorn and the name is known.

The blanket possibility is that the Romulan-Federation temporal incursions, in pushing the Eugenics Wars to later in time, also altered the Federation to advance at a faster rate into space to leave behind Earth's past conflicts. The Federation in this new timeline met the Gorn earlier, so the events of "Arena" will occur with Kirk recognizing the Gorn, knowing of them as the voraciously predatory monsters of STRANGE NEW WORLDS and pursuing them vengefully only to show mercy when realizing that humans have (accidentally) been breaching Gorn territory in ways that (to the Gorn) seem like invasion. The time travel of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" actually explains pretty much every interseries discrepancy of the STAR TREK franchise.

Again, this isn't something that anyone ever needs to be "battling" over. TrekBBS can be hilarious. Sometimes, TrekBBS will be screaming blue murder over a starship Enterprise that predates the NX-01 and have a heart attack over Christine Chapel being written as a capable career woman who can enjoy casual sex. Sometimes, TrekBBS will insist that Section 31 is totally an official part of Starfleet and insist that no one on DEEP SPACE NINE ever had any specific dialogue that specifically said that S31 was outside the Starfleet chain of command.

The reality is that fans have always had to stitch together discontinuities, often within individual shows themselves. Of all the shows, THE ORIGINAL SERIES has the most discontinuities within itself and with its sequels and prequels.

THE ORIGINAL SERIES can't keep track of what century it's supposed to be. It's set in the 22nd or 28th century. Kirk's employer goes from being United Earth Space Probe Agency to Spacefleet to Space Central to Space Command to Starfleet. Kirk's government goes from being United Earth to the Federation to the United Federation of Planets. Spock's people go from being the conquered Vulcanians to the Vulcans who founded the United Federation of Planets with humans. The Enterprise alternatively has spheres or vents on its back nacelles depending on what stock footage they were using that week.

Part of the fun of STAR TREK, I think, is coming up with increasingly insane explanations for all of this as we eventually get to the altered Klingons and uncharacteristic unreliability of the transporter in THE MOTION PICTURE to World War III being shifted forward in THE NEXT GENERATION. Or Data having emotions and using contractions in TNG Season 1 only to become more machinelike in Season 2.

Then there's "Turnabout Intruder" declaring women can't be starship captains when ENTERPRISE shows the NX-02 captained by Erica Hernandez. Or VOYAGER and PICARD visiting the 90s and 2020s with no sign of the Eugenics Wars or World War III, the Borg Cooperative of PICARD's second season dismissed as the Borg Collective returned. Or DEEP SPACE NINE declaring that Sisko's father is dead only for Joseph Sisko to be alive and well and running a successful restaurant in San Francisco.

This stuff happens. I think "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" is going to be a good continuity patch for decades, explaining why the Federation and Starfleet didn't seem to exist until the middle of TOS Season 1.

But there comes a point when it's more worthwhile to discuss the variations in storytelling and when it comes to continuity. What stands out to me: Gene L. Coon created the Gorn as an inhuman monster: its reptillian appearance makes it impossible to anthropomorphize the design with human expressions. It's designed to look predatory and bloodthirsty. But Kirk chooses not to put the Gorn down as a monster, but instead spare him as a person and try to make peace with the species.

Compare that to the first Kirk episodes of STAR TREK, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "The Man Trap" where Gene Roddenberry's STAR TREK is about being threatened by monsters whom Kirk and company exterminate with explosives and phaser fire. Roddenberry got distracted by merchandising STAR TREK and Coon took over as showrunner and in "Arena", he completed the transition and changed STAR TREK from being about soldiers in space to peacekeepers in space with "Arena" declaring that the Gorn, whatever its crimes, however frightful it might be, was still a person. So far, STRANGE NEW WORLDS has presented the Gorn as monsters, but the story isn't over yet.

Hopefully, STRANGE NEW WORLDS won't pull a Season 2 DISCOVERY and put everything under a classified non-listing to never be discussed. I think you can only get away with that once and Slider_Quinn21 would argue that you can't get away with it at all.

Anyway. In 2013, there was a STAR TREK videogame to tie into INTO DARKNESS. I've never played it and it's by all accounts an abomination akin to "Spock's Brain", but the commercial advertising it with William Shatner and the Gorn was a delight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hnBp7x2QAE

Well, I feel TF has captured the important stuff in Dimension of Continuity which is currently available via Archive.org. I admit, I've been so busy lately (hence the lack of posts) that I haven't even managed to finish converting SLIDERS REBORN to ePub format (although I am about halfway through converting the sixth and final part).

In podcasts, Carter had alluded to a novelist writing a new X-FILES novel that he had been reviewing. It definitely wasn't this project, though, and Carter did not name the author. Since then, I haven't heard anything about it. Maybe it didn't go forward.

Before the writers and actors' strike, there was some indication that the excellent Ryan Coogler (BLACK PANTHER) was going to be reviving THE X-FILES either as a reboot or a continuation with a new cast. Obviously, it's all shut down now and who knows what will survive the strike. Hopefully, THE X-FILES will be back in some form, preferably with a more competent creator.

It was absolutely necessary for the storyline with Spock and Christine.

The musical episode features the Spock/Christine breakup and it happens in a shockingly humiliating and horrific manner for Spock, making a public spectacle of how she is leaving him and leaving Enterprise and didn't even tell him that she was departing until nearly everyone else knew -- except it's not totally Christine's fault.

Christine applied for a fellowship and got in, but held off on telling Spock, wanting to break up with him privately and personally, only to be unexpectedly feted in the crew lounge by friends who were present when she first received the news. She isn't happy about the celebration because there's currently a crisis and she hasn't had a chance to speak with Spock.

Spock sees her and asks why she didn't tell him that she is ending her time on Enterprise and their relationship as well. Christine asks to speak privately, but Spock, needing to trigger a song for more data to resolve the musical security crisis, elects to ask Christine to explain herself in the lounge with a large number of crew present to witness it.

Christine proceeds to belt out a lengthy song with dance accompaniment about how the fellowship is freedom and ambition, and the song indicates that Spock doesn't even factor into Christine's considerations except an afterthought comment about how she wouldn't hesitate to ditch him for a great job. It's not that she contemplated what it would mean to leave him, she flat-out didn't spare him a moment of thought.

Spock been humiliated in front of his shipmates, treated as a joke and an irrelevance in the most insulting fashion possible. He has sacrificed his own dignity and self-esteem to save everyone else's. I've followed Spock's career across TV, movies, novels and comics and I think this is one of the most heroic things Spock ever did. Yes, he died saving the crew in WRATH OF KHAN, but in "Subspace Rhapsody", he has to watch Christine crush every hope he ever had for their romantic relationship in public in a mortifyingly embarrassing display for all to see, and continue face his crewmates after that.

Christine is dismissive and hurtful towards Spock. It's only understandable because the music is making Christine say private things in public, and also because in "Those Old Scientists", where she found out from Boimler that the future Spock will close off his human side, confirming that Christine and Spock's romance has no future.

It's understandable that after that, Christine realized she couldn't let her not-to-last relationship with Spock be a factor in her career decisions. At the same time, due to Christine's withdrawal and silence, and due to Spock refusing to go somewhere private to discuss it (for scientific reasons), Spock is humiliated in full view of the crew happily celebrating how Christine is dumping Spock.

It is a grotesque scene. And without the musical situation where Christine is genuinely not able to moderate and control her emotional expressions and Spock is deliberately triggering them to restore everyone else's privacy, Christine would be a complete monster to behave this way. The musical plot device was essential for making sure there was some outside force to justify otherwise unforgivable behaviour.

It's also quite a moment that really demonstrates why Spock is such an icon and a beloved figure of STAR TREK. He will give up his own dignity to save ours. Spock truly is our friend.