The “Riker Maneuver” blooper absolutely killed me.

This is an excellent post.

Wrong number of wheels too.

We saw a CGI model for the first time in the Ferengi episode

Can you explain what you mean by this? Isn’t everything we see in Lower Decks technically CGI?

Expanding on this, I’ve convinced myself that the whole couples dinner thing exists primarily to entertain the other diners. The way it’s set up an an obnoxious and increasingly grotesque public spectacle which I suspect the vast majority of couples would find highly uncomfortable supports this, as does the remarkable timing of the (presumed fake) removal of the fraudulent couple and Tendi/Rutherford being allowed to leave on a flimsy pretense after putting on a pretty good show of their own.

I agree, except when they play Newcastle, who are less far along in their sportswashing project and whose owners are even worse. The fact that PSG are so incompetently run is definitely a good thing; Newcastle’s ownership appearing to be good at this an extreme disappointment.

Every Newcastle win makes the world a sadder, more dangerous place.

I dislike cringe humor and watching characters be uncomfortable, so I didn’t love the Rutherford/Tendi plotline, but there were enough cute moments in there to make it worthwhile. It feels like the show is openly baiting “shippers” at every opportunity, and this is the most flagrant example yet.

With that said - and making no claims about if romance is in any way necessary or inevitable here - these two being so close is adorable.

For a therapist, Migleemo is either really bad at reading other people’s emotions, or deviously brilliant at appearing clueless. Possibly both?

I appreciate the continued development of Mariner as a person who keeps getting in her own way, slowly coming to terms with that and trying to figure out what to do about it. It’s a problem I don’t relate to at all in the specifics, but the more general “why do I keep doing this” is very easy to connect to, and I know I’m not alone in that. Her Ferengi friend laying it all out for her here seems like an important step, and I wonder where she’s going to turn next.

This probably deserves a deeper dive at some point, but the further we go the more I see Mariner’s path as a more realistic and relatable trajectory for Michael Burnham to have taken. Both are superbly talented people capable of great things. Both are also reckless, supremely overconfident in their own judgement, and prone to self destructive behavior, all of which combines to put them and those around them in dangerous situations. Burnham in S1 right before the Mirror Universe jump and Mariner in the first episode of Lower Decks are in fairly similar places, both having been recently bumped down from more senior positions due to major fuckups. This is where their paths diverge: both continue to display all the behaviors that got them in trouble, but Mariner remains a lower decker on relatively unimportant assignments, with both her strengths and weaknesses clearly recognized by her superiors. Burnham, meanwhile, is fully returned to her previous high station and even promoted beyond that because her most problematic behaviors are improbably rewarded by a universe which places her in the middle of multiple extraordinarily significant events. I strongly related to S1 Burnham, and really wanted to see her grapple with her weaknesses and develop into a better person and officer over time. I didn’t get that opportunity, but Mariner gives a second chance at telling that slow-burn story and thus far, Lower Decks has done very well with it.

We see people enslaved in mines for lying about being a couple to get a discount at a restaurant!

I do wonder if that was actually an arranged bit of entertainment, with the (alleged) punishment trumped up for the sake of it. Ferengi do like to put on a show.

Varitek?

All posts and comments in Daystrom Institute must be substantive and explain their reasoning. Simply declaring that a season of the show is so bad that it shouldn’t exist is not sufficient.

If you want to point out specific discrepancies and argue that they are a reason to view S2 and S3 and contradictory, that would be appropriate here.

If you have something substantive to share about the episode, please feel free!

I feel compelled to note that being promoted from Ensign (O1) to Lieutenant Commander (O4) would be a triple promotion, skipping both Lieutenant Jr. Grade and Lieutenant.

The typical Vulcan response of passivity but curiosity is going to work perfectly throughout Lower Decks.

It’s just perfect, isn’t it? Hardly a surprise to me given that a huge chunk of the funny parts of “serious” Trek stem from the dry bluntness of characters like Spock, Data, and Odo. Now that T’lyn is here my only question is why it took until the 4th season for someone like her to show up.

Grief is complicated, and two years is no time at all to recover from the death of a parent. It makes complete sense that watching something you associate with him would still be painful, and there’s nothing to be gained by forcing it.

Eventually you’ll reach the point where reminders of your father bring up happy feelings, with the pain of losing him still present, but not overwhelming. That won’t happen fast, but you will get there. That’s the time to give TNG another go, and see how it makes you feel.

Hang in there, friend.

I’m honestly disappointed about the double release, because now I have to process two awesome episodes at the same time and I keep getting them mixed up.

Quick hitters, in no particular order:

• love Ransom demonstrating competent personnel management, another “surprise” twist of stuff working as it should.
• the Shax/Ransom exercise scene is fabulous
• Did that macro virus really get stuck behind a panel on the bridge for a decade (ish), or did curator guy cook it up to enhance the exhibit?
• the whole Tuvix sequence was the perfect absurdist sequel to the original episode. Apparently T’Lynn and all of the merged persons are also cold blooded murderers in their own special ways.

Of course Kurn is victimized by bad kerning.

My personal bet is that until the bechdel pass rate goes up into ~90%, your point won’t really fly and the reverse will be passed all of the time … still interesting to find out.

In the era of “just asking questions”, I certainly understand any implicit assumptions that I’m oh-so-cleverly concealing some ill-conceived “point” about feminism. Certainly a case can be raised that by presenting a possible chink in the supporting evidence of your post is an inherently disruptive and destructive act; clearly your broader point about closet bigotry affecting fan biases is both correct and worth emphasizing. I’d far rather strengthen your argument than tear it down. I hope that’s ultimately what I’m doing here.

Given the numbers and the low bar of the Bechdel, some quick sampling could probably be done to get a picture. Select 10 episodes that pass the Bechdel test and 10 that fail, maybe some from TNG ans some from voyager, and we here collectively try to see if they pass/fail the reverse bechdel test in a group effort?

I don’t think I would trust the results of this, unfortunately, as there’s probably a reverse correlation between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel tests; in a sample this small that would pollute the results. For example, take any episode where two characters of the same sex are stuck together in some sort of trouble. That episode will surely pass one of the tests (Bechdel for two women, reverse for two men) but has an increased chance of failing the other because much of the dialogue for the rest of the characters is likely to revolve around the plight of the imperiled pair.

…which isn’t to say that what you suggest isn’t worth the attempt. Certainly raising an issue and then shooting down a proposed solution to it isn’t very helpful. Episode transcripts are out there; maybe there’s a software solution here? Automatic identification of conversations between two characters would be imperfect but manageable, running that dialogue up against a list of names of male/female characters and then manually checking up on the episodes that missed to avoid false negatives would probably be the most technically efficient way about this?

Circling back on your actual point, though… You are absolutely and unambiguously correct that TOS did a horrible job with gender representation, much worse than TNG did (or could have been expected to by fans when it was about to air). It’s also clear that Voyager did much better than it’s contemporaries, and ENT was a pretty harsh step backwards. You don’t need to know the base rate to establish if one number is bigger than the other, only to draw more nebulous, general conclusions about how well shows are doing with gender representation.

For level setting, I would like to see the results of the “reverse Bechdel” test: a scene where two named male characters talk about something other than a woman.

The numbers will surely be higher than for the standard Bechdel, but I doubt they are 100%: for example, any episode primarily about heterosexual romance will risk failing both tests. TOS seems like it should hit that mark pretty reliably, but the prevalence of episodes where Kirk gets stuck on an alien world and spends most of his time chatting up a lady cut into the odds. (Likewise if we were to take literally Kirk’s absurd characterization of the Enterprise as a woman, but… no). DS9 and TNG will run into problems with their volume of mixed-gender conversations, and for TNG especially the prevalence of significant female guest stars who male characters are likely to be discussing will cause some failures. Etc, etc.

To be clear, we know damn well that Star Trek has had problems with sexism, with instances both subtle and gross (Qpid and clay pots, anyone?). The Bechdel test also seems to be accepted as both a ludicrously low bar and an unreliable measure, but I have yet to see it put in appropriate context against the reverse test. What does it tell us if 98% of Trek episodes pass the reverse Bechdel? or if “only” 75% do? Does Voyager’s 86.9% standard score exceed or fall flat relative to their reverse Bechdel? Etc, etc. I would posit that the relationship between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel should tell a pretty strong story about the level of subtle sexism in how the show is written, while an aggregation of the two scores is mostly just a measure of how (in)frequently the characters are chatting about their coworkers.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is definitely not a “bottle episode”. Bottle episodes are episodes which require minimal or no additional budget for SFX, sets, etc beyond what is already available from previous/upcoming episodes. They exist as a money saving device which was necessary for shows to run 26 episode seasons and shell out for expensive productions while remaining within their budget. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow wouldn’t have been the most expensive episode to film, but there’s still a lot of exterior scenes, VFX, etc which make it quite a bit pricier than an episode almost entirely confined to a handful of existing sets.

It is a happy accident (whether by chance, or because the format forces an emphasis on the stories Trek has been best at telling) that Trek bottle episodes tend to include some of the best writing and character moments of the various series. This naturally leads to some confusion about what a “bottle episode” actually means.

Strange New Worlds has not had any true “bottle episodes” to date, although they certainly have been able to work in a lot of high quality character moments.

I could tell that Chapel and Spock’s songs had some significant structural similarities (I am largely ignorant of the technical aspects of music, so I couldn’t say what exactly). Is that typically a part of the “rebuke and reprise” sequence (which is also totally new to me)?