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Spoilers Section 31 General Discussion Thread

A Section 31 series. Yay or nay?

  • Yay, a Section 31 series!

    Votes: 80 40.0%
  • Nay, give us anything else instead!

    Votes: 120 60.0%

  • Total voters
    200
Oh look, Bernd hates it. Shocking.
I mean, low rating or not, "It is pointless and soulless and generic - but at least entertaining as a caper story and a murder mystery" is more generous than a lot of other reviews I've seen, including here.
I swear that guy is a real life Simpsons Comic Book Guy.
I've had some long, frustrating arguments with Bernd, and this comment still feels unnecessarily mean-spirited to me.

And, frankly, you need a certain level of obsessiveness to produce a site like EAS, so I don't know what you expect.
 
Ex Astris Scientia's review is up. Good points made in how for a group that's supposed to be secretive, Zeph and Fuzz in particular stick out like a sore thumb (even in a galaxy full of strange aliens). They might as well just have signs saying "We're Section 31". It's certainly a far cry from how they were described in DS9 as "being in hiding for over 300 years".

How they were in DS9 was fine. Then other writers saw the cool black ops guys and have to go over the top, now we're getting positive depictions of them.
 
He doesn't think it's the worst Trek ever? Wow. I honestly expected he would have.
I see where he is coming from. At no point did I want to turn this off whereas there are episodes of Enterprise and Discovery so painful that I couldn't keep going. I only got through PIC 2 & 3 because they were short and it had Patrick Stewart.
 
I love how he included “well, I wouldn’t say yes to being allowed in the party anyway even though I’ve never been on the guest list” sour grapes about not being an official reviewer. Boy, that’s a self-own if ever I’ve heard one.
Wow. You try to start a few hate crusades against cast & crew going as far back as Enterprise and no one wants you to hang around? I'm shocked.
 
He doesn't even like most of the franchise if you look at the average scores of all the shows on the site.

He's more a 'I like the universe' than a "I like the stories" guy.
I don't want to assume, but there's a fair chance you're not catching that he scales ratings differently from many people. From https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/episodes/ratings.htm:
I can explain my ratings as follows:

10 points: Among the best Star Trek episodes ever, simply awesome
5 points: Average Star Trek episode, delightful watching but with some flaws
0 points: Among the worst episodes ever, almost a waste of time but at least it's Star Trek
Glancing at his statistics pages (all linked from https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/index-episodes.htm ), his average ratings are:

TOS 4.68
TAS 3.64
TNG 5.23
DS9 5.21
VOY 5.32
ENT 4.56
Movies 1-10 6.40
Movies 11-13 4.67
DIS 3.94
PIC 5.33
SNW 4.55
LOW 5.36
PRO 5.31

So his average rating for every series other than TAS or Disco is within a point of "average Star Trek episode" or higher. His rating system may be different from most people might use, but I'm definitely not getting dislike out of it.
 
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I've awkwardly converted Jammer's star system to numbers, but it's in the ballpark.

Honestly, this doesn't look like a guy who hates Star Trek, just someone with a harsher rating system.
 
I've had some long, frustrating arguments with Bernd, and this comment still feels unnecessarily mean-spirited to me.

And, frankly, you need a certain level of obsessiveness to produce a site like EAS, so I don't know what you expect.
Eh, I find the guy way too tightly wound for his own good and have always thought so, even in my youth when I was a rabid canonista. Of particular note, it really gets his blood boiling whenever a ship model is reused, he'll froth about it being "irresponsible worldbuilding" and how it "completely ignores how engineering works." Really, anyone who knows anything about how television works knows reusing ship models as well as props, costumes, sets, whatever is necessary in order to keep the shows under budget. Or then there's his whole thing of determining a starship's size based on the number and alignment of its windows, because apparently every species in every part of the galaxy in every era has to make their windows the same size. He really needs to learn to chill out.

Another Trek site I used to dig in my youth was DITL, which is also almost as comprehensive as EAS, the difference there is the guy who runs DITL at least understands the realities of television production and is willing to come up with fun little explanations for why the same designs show up everywhere. I don't know if those explanations stand up to scrutiny, but it shows that he's not taking himself or the franchise too seriously. Unfortunately, DITL is of the Old Guard Gatekeepers and refuses to acknowledge anything from the current era with the exception of Picard S3.

Getting back to EAS, Bernd also loses serious points given a majority of his reviews for modern Trek have him complaining about it being "too woke" and he's the first to cry whenever a white male is abused or disrespected. I stand by my comment.
 
As I've mentioned several times in this forum, TOS established in 'That Which Survives' that the Enterprise can do 1,000 light years in 11.5 hours. They go to the center of the galaxy in TAS. Then again in ST5. Suddenly by TNG the stated warp speeds are MUCH slower, and Voyager needs 70 years to make 70,000 light years (something that would've taken a month by TOS speeds). There has never been an explanation in-universe.

Until now! Because I'm just going to pretend that the explosion of the macguffin at the end of this Section 31 movie, that was said to be able to destroy an entire quadrant, instead mucked up the entire galaxy's dilithium and/or subspace such that warp speeds all got much slower. :lol:
 
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