Latverian Diplomat

As any reasonable person would. 🙂

I was going to say "how well known is the possibility of time travel in this pre-TOS show? Maybe they wouldn't think of it" then I remembered that Enterprise existed and was full of time travel shenanigans from the get go. Unless Archer never finished those mission reports T'Pol was always reminding him about. 🙂 Those other two are an interesting contrast, since Lost didn't have a plan, and HIMYM stuck to the original plan that the show had outgrown, IMHO. BSG was probably closer to the former, I suspect, but I don't know.

"It may not look like much, but it's military grade...I got it at Old Navy" -- Super-soldier Brad 🙂

This is consistent with what we've seen in the show so far, I think. For example, the woman in the cabin was left alive and ultimately turned. In fact, it appeared she probably would have ultimately died from blood loss, but she lasted long enough for the virus to kick in and "heal her". However, there was almost no waiting period like the several hours for the people who received the virus by injection. Maybe the dose from a severe bite has a much higher viral load than the injections (they were trying to weaken the virus for Project Noah).

Sure, but it was such a breath of fresh air at that point in Titans, I appreciated it. And heavier though it may be, this episode still has enough humor, (even dark humor) to strike a better balance than most of Titans did, IMHO.

I really enjoyed the Titans episode they were in, but I thought this was also really good despite the changes. I missed the lighter "hangin' with the Doom Patrol" vibe of the Titans episode though. One change I didn't care for, I find Crazy Jane more annoying than intriguing. MPD is not a trope I enjoy, and so far her "personas" have mostly been just one amped up emotion (e.g., anger, sadness). Her acting was fine, the character is just not well conceived, IMHO. Maybe Jane will work better as the show develops. Alan Tudyk's narration, including the fourth wall breaking, was very fun.

Andromeda was an airborne contagion. A lot of that would be overkill here. What they really need are back up generators and batteries, better security, more frequent personnel rotations and UV floodlights everywhere. And maybe tinfoil hats? (Does that block vampire telepathy?🙂)

That's true, but even when the UT is working fine and doing required translation, that's what happens. Clearly it's some sort of holographic add on. 🙂

The UT is basically magical, and it's there as a storytelling device, more realistic approaches to the language issue would quickly become tedious. But it's a bit too powerful to make much sense as a technology. The consoles could just support multiple written languages, I'm not sure the UT would be needed to implement that. But it all seemed connected.

Good observation about the new Saru. I have the impression that what Saru is going through is a natural maturational process, becoming a true adult of the species perhaps. The fear ganglia thing, though I'm not a fan anyway, make more sense as a juvenile feature, perhaps. Saru seems to think that the Ba'ul are real, and that the idea of what he went through ends in madness so that death (by harvest or self harm) is preferable, is the Big Lie that keeps his people down. And he is pissed. And one would have to admit that fearless Kelpians would be challenging adversaries.

I'm still not sure that they don't. Burnham surely doesn't speak Klingon as her default language. It was pretty chaotic, but I had the impression the UT was changing their speech into random languages as well as their consoles. And no offense to Saru, but 94 languages is a drop in the bucket in terms of Earth languages, let alone Federation languages. He should have been only slightly less useless than everyone else.

Yes, I'm confident that the producers fed that question to Tom (to direct to Adrienne, not Sara), and got exactly the result they wanted out of it: ginned up drama. Since it's a mix of three dry ingredients in standard proportions, I don't see what the big deal is, either way. It's not a big deal to use a mix, but it's not hard to do yourself either. It's probably not the reason the waffles were soft. But, production saw an opportunity, and the cheftestants walked right into it.

Frankly, that seems patronizing to me. "I wish I could be idealistic like you, but I have to do the dirty work of saving the universe so you can pretend I don't exist and you don't need me." The parallels to Col. Jessup's speech in A Few Good Men seem pertinent to me. Don't get me wrong, TOS and TNG both dealt with the necessity of espionage and secrecy, but it was not something compartmentalized into a phantom organization with zero accountability and a secret charter. It was part of Star Fleet's responsibility.

Not a big fan of the whole Section 31 idea anyway. The idea that democracies are full of soft ignorant people who need secretive bad asses who are above the law to quietly save the day while the ordinary citizenry sleeps doesn't seem very Star Trek to me. At least DS9 tried to pretend it was a dangerous institution (though it saved the Federation there too, with the founder plague weapon). Disco seems to see it as more like James Bond, at least in this episode. I thought the treatment of the spore creature was a bit off as well. Tilly wasn't in any immediate physical danger, and while it was in her they at least had a way to communicate with it, find out what it was trying to accomplish, and search for a peaceful solution. I mean, "Lights of Zetar" looks enlightened in comparison, and it was made fifty years ago.

It's certainly debatable, but the Prime Directive isn't about individuals, it's about cultures. The "kidnap victims" went on to forge a unique culture, that would probably fall apart if say, Pike had given them a library instead of a battery. Also, unless the Spore Drive or something similar becomes common place, (and we know it won't) these people are on their own anyway. No Federation ship will be back for quite some time. Why not let them be as they are for now? Once contact is made, it's a final decision, that bell can't be un-rung. I know there is still at least one human society that is kept almost completely isolated for their benefit, the Sentinelese on the Andaman Islands. It depends on the episode. Certainly in "Bread and Circuses" TOS takes it very seriously and says Starfleet officers are sworn to die rather than break it. The problem is, it most often comes up in the script when it can be used by the writers as a source of conflict, an obstacle, or even a trap. In the hands of a deft writer, it can do that and still make logical and moral sense. Clumsier writers tend to muck it up.

To me this is just bad writing, and writer's who don't understand the moral underpinnings and real reasons for the prime directive. Enterprise didn't really get this right either, and they were supposedly trying to explain how the Prime Directive came about in the first place. Even the idea of a "strategic exception" Pike and Burnham discussed makes the Fed being OK with contacting pre-warp strategic-mineral-rich cultures in TOS more plausible (e.g. the Capellans, perhaps the Halkans). I give this show credit for drawing a distinction between intervention that could devastate a culture, and an intervention that the locals would never even be aware of, but which would do them nothing but good. On the other hand, the resolution of the crisis really made no sense to me, technobabble and dark matter magic notwithstanding. The asteroid has a gravitational field powerful enough to vacuum up all the radioactive debris quickly and cleanly, which the ship can't match, but somehow the ship has been neutralizing all that gravity in the shuttle bay all this time, and can easily drag the asteroid through a precise maneuver around with the very tractor beams that were too weak to deal with the debris directly. That...doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

For that matter, I'm never sure why the magic universal translator doesn't translate what they're saying to "Welcome to earth" or "Welcome to the ground". That would probably be the literal translation. Maybe there is special "code" to override that literal a translation.

I talked to somebody who read the books, so spoilers (kinda, no biggies) ensue: AnimeMania, that second book spoiler is such a better explanation for the "the chase" than what we were given in the show. I'm amazed they changed it. It makes me a little worried that maybe the show runners don't value story logic as much as they should. IMHO,A lot of sci-fi/horror media goes off the rails because creators don't seem to get that you get one big dose of "suspension of disbelief", then everything else should be rigorously believable with respect to motivations, reactions, consequences, etc. These genres are not a free pass to do whatever you want/what's easy/what's "cool", etc.

IIRC, Wolgast said as much. Of course, this implies they have zero reason not to kill him the second he is out of Amy's sight (I can understand why they wouldn't when she was standing right there, a minimal level of cooperation from her is desirable).

IIRC, he wasn't a demon but a particular type of ghost that is the spirit of a deceased, very evil person. "Mike the Spike" is a created for the show serial killer that Ava recognized from her vast memory of serial killer facts, by his choice of victims and MO, (stabbing young blondes, I think it was?). So, "Mike" was the evil ghost of an evil serial killer Ava had heard of in the course of pursuing her hobby.

Just don't use an LED bulb. :-)

Professors get drafted into administrative tasks all the time, but usually this sort of thing would be done by a committee, not one person with unquestionable authority (especially since the money didn't seem to be earmarked for a specific department). I guess we are supposed to accept that the amount was small enough that that would be overkill. A lot of budgets are effectively "use it or lose it". (If you don't spend your whole budget the powers that be assume you didn't need it and give you less next year). So often there's a rush to find ways to spend money at the end of the fiscal year. Though I've never seen management afraid to make the call on who gets what, they rather like it, I think. :-)

Cousin Oliver is on the phone with your (meta)explanation. :-)

They slipped that in, then she diplomatically said it was because he would feel too guilty. Both can be true, and she apparently believes both.

Pretty sure cancelling a class midterm because too many students drop is not a thing. For example, it's tremendously unfair to the remaining students in the class. Classes do get cancelled before starting if not enough students sign up, but that's a very different situation. </reality> I felt like a couple of rejected Frasier scripts were the basis of this episode, though without the artistry of escalating farce that Frasier could pull off. It was weird how the Jay/Gloria misunderstanding was resolved immediately after setting it up, though I agree with the above comments that it's refreshing that Gloria is just not worried about Jay cheating on her. They milked the Dunphy misunderstanding longer, but then took an odd turn. I am uncomfortable with how Phil was "vindicated" in what should have been an embarrassing moment for him. The writers like Phil, I guess.