He didn’t necessarily know that Pike would be an option. He likely didn’t know that Lorca would be an MU character.

Isn’t that what the sitcom Tawny Newsome is developing will be?

She brought such positive energy to fans during her time on Discover.

Her Twitter was full of enthusiasm. CBS was so much less limiting of the actors’ social media engagement. Paramount really hasn’t done well by limiting engagement to the EPs.

It’s unfortunate there hasn’t been opportunity for her appear in Strange New Worlds.

It sounds like he was in premed when he met his wife, but then went on a different track while she became a physician.

Controlled technology and not easily built from scratch even by Starfleet engineers.

The Relaunch novelverse expanded the concept and importance of industrial replicators. When Voyager returned to the Delta Quadrant, she led an small ‘Full Circle’ fleet that included a large engineering ship that did have industrial replicators large enough to reconstruct ships when severely damaged.

Lowere Decks and Prodigy have brought industrial replicators into onscreen canon.

Prodigy gave the Protostar prototype ship an industrial replicator large enough to construct shuttles. Lower Decks has shown the Cerritos and other ships tasked with delivering and bringing online very large industrial replicators on planets seeking Federation support.

It feels like the chose them to fill in the gaps in the collections of fans across every show and the movies - but also to profile legacy characters featured in new productions.

Rachel Garrett is surely there because of S31 and Jellico is more popular than ever after Prodigy.

Most structural starship components would require large industrial replicators.

These seem to always be centrally located and powered.

What someone can do with a small home model would be quite different.

I saw him at a con in the late 80s.

By way of concession, when responding not so enthusiastically to questions from the audience about the shenanigans Shatner and Nimoy got up to in order to blow off steam during long shooting days, Doohan said that since he’d been in real combat in WW2, he had a different approach to work and not a lot in common with them.

He doesn’t want to hear because he is known for blurting things out to media and fans…

Came here to say this! THE WHITE BELTS!

If they’re in primary school, start them off on Odd Squad.

It’s a madcap Canadian TVO Kids (TV Ontario) public broadcaster educational math show that was made with partner funding from PBS in the United States, and is now available online in many other countries.

The creators and writers clearly knew and referenced Star Trek.

‘The Trouble with Centigurps’ ’ episode is a straight up Tribble Trouble homage with skip counting.

Here’s a season one Odd Squad trailer.

Ok, what I’m seeing in this picture is Coneheads.

Here’s another take.

We know that everything was reshaped to flatter and entice Patrick Stewart to come back and play Picard.

He kept refusing and keep on insisting on Picard’s life should be a reflection of his own.

But the suits at ViacomCBS (and later Paramount) put priority on greenlighting anything they could get with Picard as a character.

So, whatever initial concepts with and without Picard were all sacrificed in the end in order to indulge Stewart enough to play the role.

It’s absurd. Our kids ended up playing Star Trek with Playmobil’s space and ‘Future Planet’ planetary exploration lines. (I doubt these even still exist.)

When the Star Trek line finally arrived it was only TOS.

All of which begs the question “How is it that Jeff Goldblum has not yet appeared in the Star Trek franchise”

And this is why Discovery and other new shows are only getting 5 seasons.

Contracts are for 7 calendar years not seven seasons.

With problems launching new shows, COVID-related slowdowns and a writers strike, Discovery managed to produce 5 seasons in 7 years.

The colours are unrepentantly psychedelic 70s fashionable and so are a few of the plots.

It’s always a good time to do a watch through of TAS.

The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.

Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.

All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.

Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.

Glad to have you mention that here.

So many fans of the older shows assume that Lower Decks isn’t accessible to new viewers who don’t get the references, but it’s quite the opposite. Gen Z and younger viewers are into animated comedies and it’s a successful entry point. And with the number of middle schoolers who got into manga and anime during the pandemic, the portion of the audience that prefers animation as a medium is only going to grow.

Our teens were fans of the Voyager when they were in middle school, and sampled the rest of the classic shows. Despite that they seem to be split on the animated vs live action new shows, and none of them would watch Picard.

It’s a real shame that there won’t be any new animated Star Trek after this season of Lower Decks.