It’s too bad that everybody I know who has a theramin has eventually gotten rid of it. Eventually they realize that it’s just sitting there collecting dust because they never touch it.

This one was hard, for me, to get through. SAM is the character who posesses the most cringe and I don’t like cringe. And, OK, I have to say “for me” because how many commedians and commedies get most of their mileage with effective use of cringe? So I kinda fast-forwarded a bunch of scenes, started to piece together what was going on, and then went backwards to watch it again.

I thought of it a lot like “Data’s Day”. Not exactly, because for poor SAM, the stakes are as high as “Measure of a man” instead of completely low stakes. But the structure is the same.

SAM’s evolved. They said that they had an idea for SAM’s character and then when Kerrice Brooks arrived, they adjusted her characterization based on her and she’s a bit different than she was in the past. She scrunches up her face a bit differently this time? Her movement’s a bit different? Did they just write a memo somewhere between the production of Ep 4 and 5 “Hey, let’s make SAM more Kerrice Brooks?”

There’s definitely some fast-forwarding because we don’t see SAM learning how to go from the kid who nobody greeted to the kid who gets a new name every time. The Voyager episodes where they were trying to teach Seven how to be more human were super-cringe and I’m actually kinda glad that we skipped over that.

Also I kinda wonder if Ocam’s affection for SAM in giving the best greeting is maybe a bit like in Tin Man, where SAM is the only person he doesn’t need to filter out.

I never got around to watching all of DS9. When it was on the air, I thought of it as a bit of a Star Trek universe rip-off of Babylon 5 and had stopped bothering to watch TV most of the time, so I never caught either show. And I remember having a vague rant as they started off with Voyager that what we really needed was a next next generation … which takes us to now, where we have a next next generation that’s going back to DS9. And I guess DS9 had a reasonable ending that people are OK with whereas the Babylon 5 fans recommend that you just treat it like the series ends after season four, which is entirely because the studio shenaned. Also, both DS9 and B5 really could use a nice HDTV remaster and aren’t getting one.

I guess, as far as the DS9 part of the tale, it’s a bit like Deadpool and Wolverine, where they didn’t want to revisit or change the ending for the Logan movie and therefore had to zig-zag around the story. And creativity sometimes needs some good constraints because Deadpool and Wolverine worked out quite well. But the ending of DS9 was constrained because of what Avery Brooks required out of the Sisko characterization. He said he’d be back, which was something very important for him to keep, and they couldn’t violate that. At the same time, he’s retired from acting and overall done with Sisko, which is also his right. So, we end up with Confronting the Unexplainable.

We saw Jake from what he chose to write down, translated into a personality by SAM. We didn’t see Jake. So one might assume any number of things ranging from that Ben Sisko came back and Jake didn’t record it to something more prosaic. And, I dono, we’ve lost some of the elders in my family lately and I guess I have thoughts about how one might interpret taking care of someone from beyond the grave that I won’t go into. But I can accept how it was written.

I was really really slow. I know what Tawny Newsome looks and sounds like. Illa looked familiar but I couldn’t put it together that she was Illa Dax until the reveal and I didn’t put it together that it was Tawny. For a few, I thought they’d brought Terry Farrell back because of the Jadzia Dax manerisms being so spot-on at points, then I read that it was Tawny and suddenly it made sense.

It’s neat to have a Black co-writer doing an episode that focused on a Black character doing a tribute to a show with the first Black captain. So while there’s the very practical story aspects of Jake and SAM, there’s also the meta aspect of the Black experience that the show is able to put a mirror to. I loved Sisko as a character and Avery Brooks’s interpretation of the character but it’s never going to hit me the same way to have seen him for the first time on DS9 as it did for Tawny.

And, conversely, there’s no in-universe reason why the form that SAM took had to be a Black girl, but I like the way the puzzle pieces of casting and character and story are fitting together to bring us here.

I was thinking that I really love the trio of Dzolo, B’Avi, and Kyle and was hoping that we’d see more of them so … we saw more of them. Dzolo and B’Avi always trying to start shit with the two-people one-two punch and Kyle laughing at Jay-Den’s jokes instead.

We see Genesis with her hair down in this episode of the first time.

The San Francisco shots look like they’ve got the extant buildings in the foreground and then substituted skyscrapers as you go back. I am happy that the eyesore that is Salesforce Tower is not present. Whatever out-of-focus building backdrop they found probably in Toronto felt San Francisco enough, LOL.

Digression to San Francisco history, by the way. Today people think of the city as the home of tech and, by extension, tech douchebags. During World War II, it was a critical Navy town for the west coast. There were Navy bars. There was a complicated sort of history for being gay in the military during that era – Check out Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé. The military had to back off on the persecution of gay sailors during WWII because they needed everybody they could have. Drag performers, gay or stright, were men and therefore could be in combat zones and the drag show was a ray of light in dark times. Then between after the war and until they started to draw down the naval presence in San Francisco, where they suddenly didn’t need every person they could, they went back to kicking gay people out of the military. Thus, lot of people got kicked out of the Navy for being gay so they’d get cut loose and, being unwilling to return home after being outed, settled down to slummy inexpensive Victorian houses in the unfashionable Castro neighborhood of San Francisco until it became a hotbed of gay culture.

So, a Starfleet bar with a drag queen tending bar where Kyle and Jay-Den (in a skant) share a moment… yeah, that’s to the heart of what the city once was and still halfassedly tries to pretend to be.

And, on that, I guess we can go back to a video from 2022 about skants and skirts where it’s pointed out that the real thing missing, so far, was that none of the lead male characters appeared in the skant and point out that Jay-Den is one of the leads.

I don’t like the intense save-the-universe plotline that is standard in shows these days. But I do appreciate how we’ve got a lot of call-back to past episodes. We have the change from SAM in the first episode trying to greet people and getting ignored to now having her getting greeted her way. We have the aftermath of the Vitus Reflex prank.

Someone in the writers room has seen Red Dwarf. There’s the Gazpacho incident but also there’s the whole Rimmer/Lister vibe that Kelrec and Ake have. Except they are stealing like artists, because Kelrec isn’t a Rimmer and Ake isn’t a Lister.

I think the B plot, Kelrec’s big diplomatic incident, was a little squeezed and not quite so engaging, but again it does harken back to Capt Ake’s big lesson to the students from ep 3, that you can use patience and empathy to defeat your opponent.

So, yeah, I think I was watching it expecting for this to be the episode that really really really didn’t land. It really could have landed really badly. But it came out pretty good, actually and I think that’s credit to the writers.

So the conundrum with the Voron world is that the Trident and 2.4 are basically as good as you are going to get for the constraints. You can add the Monolith gantry but that’s an involved mod. You can add a toolchanger or a filament changer, that’s another involved mod. And there’s a bunch of really great mods but each of them adds complexity to the build, makes the BOM larger, etc.

The one thing with the Voron is that if you want the highest accels, you probably need to ditch the extrusions. But then you can’t make it as an open source printer because you’d need to do a lot to get a rigid metal frame and there would be minimum orders, etc.

And, overall, if you look at Qidi, they’ve been making Klipper-based cube printers with active chamber heaters for quite a few years now, so the more recent Qidis are really just mods atop the ur-Qidi, kinda. So a lot of the new hotness, outside of a few Bambu things, exists as mods for the Voron. We’ll ignore that Prusa had problems delivering new printer designs for a while.

Allegedly the INDX that looks actually pretty neat that’s going to be on the Prusa is also going to be available as a kit for the Voron.

Neither of my Vorons are stock. The Trident came from Formbot so it already was a CAN-bus design with some Formbot tweaks. You definitely want a filament motion sensor, there’s a bunch of options there. I swapped to the DragonBurner toolhead, I’d probably try the A4T instead if both of them were full-sized printers. My Trident has the inverted electronics mod, that felt pretty handy. My 0.2 has the electronics compartment rearranged.

Yah, wasn’t really trying to glorify the Ottomans. Have to think about how to re-state that more neutrally.

The Klingon Episode. Also the Jay-Den episode. We really haven’t gotten a lot of details about Jay-Den before this episode, just vague hints.

The Klingons are near and dear to my heart, I’ve not gotten around to watching the Discovery and DS9 and Enterprise eps, but I do so love some of the classic tales and not-canon stuff from John M. Ford.

I can totally see the Klingons being hit hard from the Burn specifically because of the martial society. Learn to run a ship’s reactor by running a nearly identical reactor on land, whereas less martial societies would look at the stack of antimatter containment chambers that would blow a sizable chunk out of an inhabited planet and decide that … maybe not.

Also, if you know your history of the Middle East, one way to view the extremists there is that, in centuries past, the Ottoman empire tried to be more cosmopolitan and eventually Europe and then the US went in and took advantage of them. Ergo, they tried being like the rest of the world and that didn’t work, let’s be more fundamentalist. So, whatever direction they were moving in the past, I can see how the Burn would cause them to be fundamentalist-Klingon in less than a century. It making less sense from an American perspective is probably a good thing – the US has caused so much damage to the Middle East and Africa while bumbling around lacking empathy.

They’ve clearly set up some thrown bricks here? When Jay-Den was a bit weird with how he spoke in the first ep, that was here to set up him really messing it up in the debate society not because he was having problems getting the character’s voice right or because they were having problems digitally altering it. When he freaks out in the first ep about healing Lora Thok that’s because he had just not healed his brother 18 months prior.

Poor Terry Farrell did a damn good job while being thrown through the wringer to represent being Dax, ancient joined Trill, but … Holly Hunter gets to show Capt Ake being similarly old without the benefit of swapping bodies. Including a complicated relationship with Obel and personnel files that took the dadmiral seven years to work through.

Also note that David Keeley is white and … they kept his skin light for Obel. Like, compare how he looks to how Gowron looked. Taking white people and darkening their skin to make them look black is … totally offensive these days. But Klingons are within the normal range of human melanin, which makes it somewhere less offensive than blackface but something that people have changed how they look at these days. A lot of people I know in the cosplay community are dead-set against the darkening or lightening of skin (not counting changing skin colors to something not on the human melanin skin color range) and this thread of discourse is fairly new.

I kinda figured out where the story was supposed to go the second that Faan Alpha was mentioned that it was going to be important for the Klingons to conquer their own new planet. Also, I had just lately watched reruns of “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter Of Honor” and there’s a lot of shared story beats. Presumably all parties knew that it was not a battle-battle but, like in “A Matter Of Honor” they needed to do the ritual and get punched in the face. Hence the USS Riker. What did come as a bit of a surprise was Lura Thok being the Klingon elder and re-interpreting Jay-Den’s father’s arrow missing.

It feels like maybe Capt Ake should have come up with the solution on her own. Riker did, while being distracted by the question “One … or both?” Then again, there’s a certain amount of Starfleet in a Klingon suggesting a course of action for his own culture vs a part-Lanthanite Human saying it and I don’t think it would have made Jay-Den’s path better for him to have gotten the idea that Capt Ake came up with it herself ahead of him.

I found the debate club the least interesting part of the story? I love that we’re returning to the Judge Aaron Satie quote and showing the kids trying to learn, but for me the more important notes was the other kids interacting with Jay-Den outside of the debate. But … there’s a thing there. The colonialist perspective is that we’ve got things to help the “lesser” people of the world so of course we should go in and fix things, but at the same time we’ve got a really really really bad history of really screwing things up. The kids will join the Academy with a perspective that they are there to fix the problems of the universe and will need to become Captains who can answer questions like Tuvix and part of how they get there is not just making good arguments but making bad ones. I dono, not the debate club type.

But, yah, there’s that Problematic Masculinity point with Jay-Den, amplified with Klingon-ness about how one deals with their own trauma… by bristling and being angry instead of by being open.

Lesee, so things keep moving quickly so while a it would be nice to have a little more time to “breathe” and let Caleb and Reymi be bigger assholes to each other, there’s only so many episodes in the season? Lura Thok was all mentor no drill sergeant.

Oh, and the musical callbacks. One thing that I noticed with the Trek movies is that they’d work their own themes in while preserving the big core TMP theme within the larger suite. Klingon music, the TMP theme, the TOS theme … one thing that was I guess less fun about all of the Trek after mid-series TNG was that they did not really preserve the musical language. The soundtrack here was just grand and I’m realizing that I’ve been mad about post-mid-TNG soundtracks for decades now.

I’m not the person to suggest the what, but I’d love to see someone taking the non-white perspective in the writer’s room figure out how to return to Klingons in this timeline in a later piece of Trek. Klingons are brash storytellers. The truth of the American Revolution is far less grand and much more nuanced if you study it in college but the not-quite-as-brash American storytellers turned into it’s own cultural mythology. A follow-up could show, on one hand, the grand mythos of New Qonos. On the other hand, a way of honor and warrior culture that is … a little more Jay-Den and a lot less corrupt.

I really want to see that joke, done well, now.

Where I am right now in the real world is such that I could use … I dono, somehow low-stakes but fun? I get that good scifi is sometimes high stakes / somebody might die / high drama entertainment, but sometimes something that’s more … down-to-earth is good. I think that scifi has spent too much time lately trying to be intense, but hey I’m just a rando on the internet so what do I know?

I still adore Capt Ake. I don’t think that Capt Ake had the actual plan that they implemented in her mind. She was expecting them to settle this “their way” or I guess “her way” which she was trying to imprint upon Starfleet. She figured that the Vitus Reflux spores would be really funny. And they had no way of knowing one critical piece of information, which was how to get into Kelrec’s hidey closet, and I’m imagining that she was probably totally surprised and delighted as to how they fit things together into a proper workable plan. And this is kinda how you get people to grow? If they don’t have the complete plan right away (hacking their computer during exam week is a bad idea) but look like they just need a poke in the right direction, don’t give them a plan, give them a poke.

Likewise, Capt Ake didn’t go to Kelrec for the first prank, she went there once it was clear that he was acting as ringleader.

“Leadership, according to Capt Ake” is clearly a book. It’s a different, more eccentric book than “Leadership, according to Capt Picard” but no less useful.

I was spoilered that Thok and Reno were going to be a thing but the scene where they show it had me dying with giggles. “It’ll brie allright?” And then also Thok’s earlier “They shenanned once, they’ll shenann again” shows either that one of them has been encouraging the other or that they are two peas in a very bad pod.

Also, I am glad that we can welcome Darem into the ranks of disaster bisexuals without quite as much need for subtext as … well, Kirk or Riker.

I think it’s funny that Thok can’t just say “there will be tryouts for Calica” without tossing in a mini speech about how lucky they will be to live until tomorrow or stopping a potential fisticuffs by saying that no blood shall be shed without her permission. And then returning it to the end with the line about meditating on decapitation. Her over-the-top “RELEASE THE DRONES” and everything.

I love the extra bits of silly Klingon lore. Klingons loving blood in their cuisine … yeah, that is saying what was logically there the whole time. But then the “what is this gagh doing in my aO’mat Gri?” joke.

And it was really funny to have the quality of the Mugato mascot costume be … at about the level of the actual Mugato costume in TOS.

With the Romulan cadet Dzolo from the War College, Genesis, and Capt Ake, you have three very small and unassuming women being very spicy. I also love that B’Avi stood up with the same sort of Vulcan “have you prepared new insults for me?” energy that baby Spock was on the receiving end of in the 2009 Star Trek.

Oh and they put everybody in the underwear without nearly the same energy as the decom room on NX-01 or Star Trek Into Darkness.

There’s a little bit of Starship Troopers, the movie, in here. Enough to maybe even be a bit intentional? Same mixed-gender showers, recruiting video, etc. Even the tryouts for Calica felt like they were channeling it. And … just like I hope people are getting the intention of Trek trying to show what a better future might be like, I am hoping that the writers knew what Paul Verhoeven was trying to show in that movie.

This supports the War College vs Starfleet Academy thing that I was hoping to see. The ending with both the notion that you can use empathy to win without combat as well as Capt Ake’s follow-on to Caleb’s question about what to do when somebody does want the fear. Also Jay-Den being a pacifist.

There’s a lot of speeding-up here, e.g. Darem could have been a little more show and a little less tell, but also it’s a short season? Clearly making room for whatever the Caleb / Tarima story is going to be.

So, yeah, it’s accidentally what I wanted right now, so I’m still having fun watching it.

My headcanon suggests that they were either running out of words on the cladistics tree and went to Slavic languages because all of the Latin had been taken … or a space Slav decided to honor their roots.

I think that what makes the character fun is all of the combinations of different seemingly-incongruent elements and so I don’t think there’s a way to cut a trailer that shows all of the different parts in context.