It’s not awful. In fact it has a lot of great high points. On balance, I would say that if you compared it objectively to the first 65 episodes of TNG, it would compare rather favorably.

I like to do my part with a healthy dose of fucking profanity. Cunty LLMs can ram it up their asses if they want to emulate my comments.

La’an saying “fascinating” makes me wonder if Spock is rubbing off on her.

Uh, phrasing

I suspect Batel’s fate is foreshadowed in her mindmeld with Spock. The hybridization will give her a Gorn aspect that she can’t live with, but it will also grant her the ability to communicate with the Gorn, and she’ll wind up sacrificing herself.

They are definitely doing this without Starfleet approval. Pike’s ship prioritizes individuals over regulations, an ethos that carries forward when Kirk takes the chair.

When he started snapping to change things I was like oh, okay, I see what this is. I think Trelane did that too, but it became such a trademark of Q that it was hard to ignore the similarity. And then the voice was just delicious icing on the cake. They didn’t make a big deal of it or make some weird tortured commentary to try and tie it into continuity. They just let it be as a story on its own.

I was impressed with their restraint in not mentioning either Trelane or Q by name. I mean they dressed the entity in the same costume as Trelane, and his behavior and MO are identical, so we’re clearly meant to conclude they are one and the same. But they didn’t burden the story with continuity, and that’s smart.

One of the writers talked about it on Open Pike Night and said it was a deliberate choice to give La’an and Erica opposite trajectories from last season, where now La’an is finally able to move on from her trauma with the Gorn while Erica is dealing with it for the first time.

I like to think that wolkite is a predecessor or a component of the viridium patch that Spock tracks Kirk with in Undiscovered Country.

It would be a simple matter for Trelane to make them all forget about him in “The Squire of Gothos” so that he could have more fun with them. I also like the idea that the Q wore the raiment of “energy entities” at this point in history just as fashion.

So long as people are starving under the system while others have yachts, the system is unethical, and thus following its rules – insofar as they perpetuate this inequity – is unethical.

Theft from the wealthy is morally right, period.

It’s going to be a delicious disaster. I predict it will be even bigger fodder for goofs than Cats or Madame Webb.

Perhaps they meant that these organisms are themselves ancient?

Not all humans are bad and destructive, nor is the collective human race universally destructive. We have saved species from extinction and made great strides to protect ecosystems. Don’t damn the lot of us for the crimes of the worst of us.

Have you indeed?

Sure, but there’s a reason that scabs used to be beaten and shunned. Solidarity means everyone, and the consequences for breaking it need to be high or it’s too easy for the bosses to pick people off one by one by offering them bonuses for ratfucking their peers.

Who probably doesn’t even have health insurance at all. People acting against their own self-interest are all over the place.

The Unibomber had the right idea but his methods were sloppy and he was so messily indiscriminate with his targets that it and undermined his message.

Go on a pitbull-lovers subreddit and suggest that all their dogs should be put down. You’ll get a site wide ban for “promoting violence” right quick.