- I can't wait till we get a better look at the Starfleet tugs, and there's been a fair amount of discussion of them already. What resonated to me is how we're finally seeing the Franz Joseph-esque arrangement of tug an cargo modules realized.
Also, the relative dimensions are pure FJ: two container clusters in tow, both the same relative length as the FJ cylinders. Although, as said, clusters. I wonder how those move from orbit to surface and back. No doubt Khan's hut made it to Ceti Alpha V the same way...
Also, the highlight hull color is a rust red, which hasn't been seen before in TNG-era starship design - the Sovereign class has darker grey paneling here and there, but not a contrasting color like red. Does it signify the ships' Martian origin? Or were they just built so quickly that LaForge forgot to apply Rust-eze to some of the parts?
Built on the surface, with certain bits catching the rusty dust more readily than others? Gravitics leakage, say.
More color highlights is good. DSC had some, even if in the end all of it was black.
- We've seen media interviews in Trek before, but I think this is the first time we've seen an entire camera crew. Usually it's just the reporter themselves plus a wearable camera or portable doodad. Also, why are the camera (?) drones buzzing around like that? The shots we see from the kitchen TV are from typical locked-down camera angles. Even the push in to Picard's face was done from where we don't readily see a drone. Wouldn't it make more sense to set up a holographic field to capture EVERYTHING, and then for the news crew to edit down from there?
We might argue that while a tricorder or "Identity Crisis" style headcam or somesuch can produce enough data to create a workable holosimulation where the obscured areas are guesstimated, a "true", "authentic" 3D image still requires actual line-of-sight shots from many directions. Not constant shots - just references so that the computer can calculate the simulated left and right cheek of Picard correctly for every millisecond. So the drones gather the reference shots, possibly again and again if the target to be depicted moves or changes or is lit differently or should have more of the surroundings included.
- Further use of holography as a mirror, as established previously in DSC.
...One wonders about future mirrors in general. The flat and simple-looking ones in the E-D bathrooms often went dark (that is, the camera crew put cardboard there to prevent themselves from being reflected). What's the in-universe explanation for that? Are the mirrors viewscreens that can be turned off? If so, perhaps they can do nifty things - but what nifty things?
- 900 million Romulans were to be evacuated by 10,000 warp ferries. Obviously this DOESN'T necessarily mean that each ferry would carry 90,000 Romulans each in one go... They probably made some relatively simple calculations about where they would have to go, how long it would take a ship at a certain warp speed to get there and back and how big a ship of the needed speed they could build by a certain deadline to effect an evacuation before the supernova hit Romulus. Add to that the logistical preparation of both the evacuating population and destination site(s), and the need to sustain them along the way, and you balance everything out to start designing and building ships in waves that would start the evacuation as soon as they were ready to go. Also, I'm sure the Romulan Empire wasn't standing idly by and was doing their own thing in concert with Starfleet's plan.
It's a bit odd, though. They had four years, minimum. The average trip to another star system of interest (in general, one with a Class M planet) in most shows takes less than a day. During the Dominion War, troops were being ferried; would those troops make a difference unless they represented at least some decent fraction of the manpower currently/classically needed in infantry ops? The troop carriers might be expected to handle a billion people in four years without further construction already - 1,400 days, so perhaps a thousand times a troop convoy which could be expected to move divisions, that is, thousands to tens of thousands at a time. We get a million to ten million there already: how many troop convoys simultaneously during the war?
- One wonders if the Index program is pre-EMH. Her flickering effects suggest they are more utilitarian and less flashy, and she doesn't directly touch anything (though she isn't called to).
...Perhaps they are currently experimenting on flickering, for the exact same reason they are experimenting on humor?
- Speaking of flickering, Dahj's phone's holo interface is relatively flicker-free, except when the image of her mom conveniently goes janky as if she's talking to a computer program... OTOH, the phone's interface is moving around with her hand whenever you see her hand, but it's pretty static when we look over Dahj's shoulder at her mom, no matter how she moves.
Yes. But perhaps it's a point-of-view issue? Much like how we saw Stamets viewing that recording of Culber, weirdy distorted from the POV of the audience. If the camera is not the eyes of Dahj, it won't correctly prompt the imagery to adjust to eye and body movements.
- So how exactly does Dahj die? The assassin apparently cracks a tooth and spits on her, but also the gun. She (and the assassin) start melting right away, but the liquid also apparently sets off the gun to blow up BOTH their melting bodies.Was that the intent?
It would seem so. That is, the intent was for both to die: certainly the Romulan himself started immediately rotting away at the jaw, and couldn't have expected to survive. And there was catastrophic damage to Dahj's body even before the gun blew.
- So the "police" (Starfleet security, no? Who gets jurisdiction for an explosion on the Headquarters campus?) find Picard, and just send him home unconscious? How did they get him there? And why did they drop him on a couch instead of upstairs? You'd think they'd put him an a hospital for observation, or at least until he woke up!
Starfleet is the police, unless PIC becomes the first-ever Trek show to tell us otherwise...
Perhaps we can play the old man card, and assume that Picard was waking up for the third time, having little recollection of the previous times at the hospital and at the police station?
- The Daystrom Institute is in Okinawa, Japan. Having BEEN to Okinawa, I can confidently say that cliffs such as the one the Institute is built over are rare. It's not a large island.
Well, in US WWII history, Okinawa is famed for the cliffs where the civilians jumped to their deaths because they so feared the propagandist image of the white devils...
...But perhaps the cliff is the result of an interesting Daystrom experiment gone wrong? (Or right?)
- They keep B4's components in a box and apparently that's the only one they have in the lab. What about Lore? You'd think they'd find a place there for his body - and not reactivate him under any circumstance, ban or not.
Perhaps they wanted to test to destruction one of the brothers, and were torn between the idiot and the homicidal maniac, but the faint hope of recovering bits of Data tipped the scales against Lore?
Or then the more clever Soongian, captured first, conveniently got misfiled at some point, and currently is nowhere to be found. But Soong presumably left plenty of prototypes behind, including the ones known to his "wife", and the ones unknown such as B-4. His Omicron Theta lab wasn't exactly destroyed, either, even if it was sterilized; his later lab was thrashed but not annihilated. Daystrom might have plenty of material to research, and never mind the androids hopefully recovered from TOS sites.
- Among the collection of tools on the robotics desk are a bunch of 20th century calibrated pipettes, used to measure liquids for scientific application. One wonders what kinds of fluids are being exchanged in this lab to warrant them.
...No doubt ones containing a fair share of nanites, whatever the purpose.
- Dipping a bit ahead to the next episode clip seen on Wil Wheaton's "Ready Room" show, the VFX guys went through all the trouble of making a new GC model of the Enterprise -D to use presumably for both the opening shot of this episode and for the holo-display in SFHQ's lobby... But then they have to use THAT version of the Enterprise alongside it. And with a notable janky flicker between the images too, instead of a smoother transition! One can only hope that it's a temporary art installation.
I'm sort of happy the cat is out of the bag. The more the sorta-TMP nil-ship gets screen minutes, the clearer it becomes that we
have to rationalize it in somehow...
And of course what we get is the best of both worlds, because once again this is clearly a rotating display, allowing for it to feature not just multiple ships but multiple incarnations thereof. I wonder if any other
Enterprise got that many...
(Perhaps the E-B did turn into a standard
Excelsior at some point? And perhaps the E-C was utterly rebuilt into the Probert specs, making it an even more amazing transformer than the nil.)
Timo Saloniemi
