I’ll stand by the position that the Enterprise augment virus arc was an error, and the “explanation” for Klingon ridges is the same one you should use for the bridge of the Enterprise looking like it was cobbled together from plywood and plastic beads. This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

It’s because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn’t be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.

As for why this worked here, I’m sure there are a whole lot of things that aren’t earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of “future starfleet” during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don’t believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).

Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.

I’m not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard’s consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Sure! Here’s my crude, MS-Paint-esque diagram:

1-6 are pretty obvious, just marked with numbers. 7 and 8 are circled with a line looping back to their number. 8 is just peeking around a corner, while 7 is only barely visible, with part of the top of his head peaking out from behind 5’s neck.

I count eight Kims (two of them only partially visible) in that shot of the prison cell, and there’s a fair bit of room around the corner for more to be hidden. I think it’s also easy to believe there are more cells containing more Kims just down the hall.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Defiant class’s 50 crew compliment is pretty close to a bare minimum already. 16-17 active at any one time is a pretty short list as it is, with roughly half that posted to the bridge during normal operations and most of the rest in engineering, plus a transporter chief, doctor, and other specialists. Having two shifts of reserves is crucial for covering both a long term assignment and for battle situations: you need to keep the crew as fresh as possible in the long run, and in combat you need those people to fill in for casualties and act as damage control, security, and emergency medical personnel. So unless Section 31’s strategic level idiocy extends all the way down to inane meddling in shipboard operations (possible, these guys are morons with dangerously inflated egos!), it should be safe to assume that the Anaximander was supposed to be staffed with about 50 crew.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

That sidesteps the question of why all of these comically evil people are okay with using this arbitrary contest to determine succession, instead of the usual route of organically murdering each other until someone emerges who is good enough at disposing of potential assassins that they keep the throne for a while?

I didn’t watch the movie, so I’m probably missing something. Did Georgiou also have to deal with a bunch of normal assassination plots after officially gaining the throne? Or are we to assume that by virtue of winning this contest, she is widely seen as too dangerous for anyone to attempt to usurp?

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.

I wonder how common is it for a starship to make their “Senior Science Officer” a two person team.

Clearly many captains don’t see filling the role as a priority: None of the Enterprise D, Voyager, or (until this episode) the Cerritos had a senior science officer posted to the bridge. This makes a fair bit of sense on the grounds that “science” is an extraordinarily broad field and most of the practical, problem-solving sciencing we see tends to fall under the umbrella of engineering, so subject specialists and engineers wind up carrying the load as appropriate. As they should! No science officer can possibly hope to be comparably well versed in any given subject than a more junior officer who happens to specialize in it.

Therefore, although scientific acumen is obviously useful, as is getting as much scientific acumen as possible onto the bridge to quickly react to whatever weird shit a ship encounters, the larger part of the job is going to come down to synthesizing the larger knowledge base of the ship’s contingent of scientists into an actionable answer. The Senior Science Officer should be asking themselves not just “what do I know about this”, but “who else on the ship knows more about this” and, in a pinch, “which of these different ideas are we actually going to try.”

Having two people in the role is beneficial for getting more scientific knowledge on the spot and ready to be used, especially if the two people involved work well together, but it’s a potential liability in that final point where two people can reasonably disagree, but someone is going to have to make a call on what the best option is. In many cases that person is the captain, but when time is scarce and the choice is between things the captain doesn’t understand, the choice is really going to come down to the science officer. And what happens when the two science officers disagree?

In this case, I think the correct choice between our two science heroes would be Tendi. She’s (generally) good with other people, she has actual command experience (in combat situations, no less), she knows the bridge officers better, and they are more familiar with her. Further, T’Lyn is nominally a temporary posting who doesn’t seem to view herself as a serious candidate for the role. All the conventional decision-aiding factors seem to favor Tendi, and we all know she’s qualified.

Which leaves me wondering why this was a particularly difficult decision for Freeman, and why Data recommended this seemingly unconventional solution. Heck, Data barely even saw these two officers working together, as the two of them spent nearly the entire time working independently.

So maybe having multiple “senior” science officers is a normal state of affairs, and the expectation is that the captain will ultimately be able to resolve any final-stage disputes without needing an explicit head of the science division? That’s plausible if potential awkward, and there do seem to be plenty of consoles at the back of the bridge for multiple science specialists to be sitting in.

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Wrong number of wheels too.

As other posters have pointed out to you, blithely dismissing OP’s question because they are asking about the meaning of “nonsense words made up by writers” is completely missing the point of this community. We all know Star Trek is fiction constructed by writers; pointing that out while adding nothing else of interest is both pointless and boring.

We don’t expect or require all answers to be from an in-universe perspective, but we do expect everyone to engage in discussion politely and seriously. If this is all you have to say on the subject, don’t comment.

I kept expecting William Boimler to show up before the end of the season, guess they’re holding onto that thread for next year

I think it would be pretty funny if they just never picked up that thread again. William Boimler, already presumed dead, joins S31, does ???? because ?????, is never heard from again.

Then again, this show could do a great job riffing off of how counterproductive and ultimately stupid S31 is, in addition to their absurdly twisted and seemingly inconsistent history. So I’d be perfectly happy to see that too.

This was an excellent finale (as all four of them have been, not at all a given with modern Trek or frankly modern television in general), and fully justifies the somewhat weaker setup episode before it.

“A paywall on a bomb?” might be the best joke this show has delivered in it’s whole run. I don’t often crack up while watching these episodes, but this one really got me. At the very least it’s up there with “It’s a bomb! You can only use it once!” from Wej Duj. I’m sensing a pattern.

In more typical lower key Lower Decks humor, Boimler and Rutherford arguing about if Locarno looks like Tom Paris was excellent.

I do wonder what the plan is with Tendi. We’ve seen supposed major shakeups like this dropped into previous finales, of course, with Boimler leaving the Cerritos for the Titan at the end of season one and Freeman getting arrested at the end of Season 2, which were quickly reverted in the first few episodes of the subsequent season. Odds are that’s the play here. I hope so, because losing Tendi would suck. She’s a delight.

Why was Boimler the acting captain when the command staff took off on the captain’s yacht? There was a full Lieutenant right behind him on the bridge, and surely tens of others on the ship who are more senior and more qualified. A little bit of a main character boost there.

This episode was okay, I guess? It feels very strange to be sitting on one half of an obvious two parter from this show, and recent Trek shows have left me with an instinctive suspicion of mystery-related plots. This is a good writing team so I have hopes they’ll carry this rather bizare setup into a satisfying resolution that actually makes sense, but I’m much more nervous than I usually am.

To play it all out: why the heck is Nick Locarno flying around in a little ship capable of disabling the systems on larger warships, transporting(?) the ships and crews to some planet while leaving wreckage behind? If this turns out to be another figurative Kelpian dilithium tantrum I’m not going to be pleased.

I like what they were trying to do with Mariner in this episode, but for whatever reason it didn’t land quite right with me. Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma’ah felt rushed, almost forced. The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the “small universe” syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into. Further, the “your dead friend wouldn’t want you to have emotional problems” bit is a cliche that rarely lands with me, and this time was no different: these aren’t problems that people can typically resolve simply by recognizing that their emotional reactions are irrational, so being won over with a rational argument isn’t very convincing. It speaks well of Mariner and Rodenberry’s future humans that this worked, I guess, but it does make it less relatable.

Maybe I’ll be sold more easily on rewatch. We’ll see.

The B-plot with Freeman and her deception was decent, although as noted elsewhere Rutherford’s presence feels oddly tacked on. I guess they wanted an engineer around, just in case?

The Jaxa connection does give us a better shot at nailing down Mariner’s actual age, which was presumably somewhere between 17 and 22 (and likely on the later end of that range) at the time of the Nova Squadron incident in 2368. That puts her in her early- to mid-thirties, and lines up well with her service record. We can also confirm that Mariner was not a young child aboard the Enterprise-D, which launched when she was in her mid to late teens.