David Benfell, Ph.D.

@circuitfarmer

It was bad enough when cliff hangers spanned a few months; now they span a period closer to a year.

I mean, come on. I’m getting old and yeah, I’d like to see the next episode before I die.

@kamenlady @Stamets

When I think of Spock in the original series (#TOS), I find more than a few things implausible.

Would, for example, Spock really know impossible odds with multiple unknown variables to several decimal places? More seriously, in TOS, Spock never satisfactorily explained the Vulcan logic for logic. They’ve addressed this since, but I had realized that the attachment to life is emotional, not logical, and therefore concluded that in denying emotion, Vulcans could have no logical reason to live.

Even Leonard Nimoy’s Spock addressed some of this in the movies, and they aren’t quoting odds to ludicrous precision anymore, so I find the more recent iterations of Spock much more believable.

As for the acting, Ethan Peck plays a younger, less experienced Spock. Given Vulcan lifespans, this probably shouldn’t make quite the difference we see. But that’s how I’ve accounted for that difference and I’ve been interested in seeing the backstory.

@UrbanEdm @michaelgemar @Uranium3006 @startrek

For what it’s worth, #TOS was made in the 1960s. The women’s liberation movement didn’t really seem to take off until the 1970s.

You’ll find more than a few sexist relics in almost any medium of the era, as the challenge to sexism had yet to find her voice.

@Fuzzy_Dunlop @Madison_rogue

Actually, the Lower Decks series makes numerous references to previous series on an ongoing basis and should be regarded as a spoiler.

I would recommend especially The Next Generation before Lower Decks.

@Schal330

This might be a case where they compressed too much for coherence.

Yeah, there was the other guy. But in my mind, not enough had apparently been done to confirm a superficial and partial similarity of symptoms.

To give an idea of the dissonance, I’m remembering somebody (I think it wasn’t Miles O’Brien who got the line) encountering the Cardassian systems on Deep Space 9 and complaining that they weren’t triple-redundant.

In academia, we call it parsimony in a way that doesn’t quite seem to match a dictionary definition that I just dredged up on line: It’s when an explanation seems straightforward and satisfactory. For me, that was missing.

I think a challenge for script writing here is keeping the story moving without dragging this too far into soap opera territory. How much do we really want get into the weeds here?

Maybe the writers thought this was too deep in the weeds. Maybe they just ran out of episode time. Maybe we agree they didn’t get the balance right here.

@deweydecibel @ValueSubtracted

That’s frankly what caught my attention, even as I was watching the episode. The decision turns out to have been right, but on thin-to-nonexistent justification.

@NVariable @Albert_Newton

First, and just to make crystal clear that I agree, I agree.

Second, I’m not sure Starfleet Command is, in any century, quite up to really comprehending this.