I’ve watched most of the first season of Absentia. It’s intense and dark. It’s also more of a British or European style thriller in that it keeps you in the dark with genuine ‘who done it?’ rather than ‘how done it?’

Interestingly Violo was co-creator and senior writer of Absentis but didn’t get as much producer credit. Seems her talent moved her up into creative control more quickly than the WGA stepwise progression in titles allows.

The headline and post summary are somewhat misleading in their incompleteness.

From the article:

The federal public service’s largest union has filed official complaints asking the government to “cease the unilateral implementation” of its early retirement incentive program until its parameters are negotiated with the union…

By offering separation packages to public servants to reduce its workforce, the employer is “bargaining directly with PSAC members on terms and conditions of employment,” the union says.

Also, if you have saved more seed than you need yourself, put it into your local seed libraries now.

Flix Patrol just compiles the public rankings from the streamers themselves as far as I know.

Parrot Analytics used to make public their rankings that incorporate everything available, including social media volumes, and presumably ‘alternative views’. They were excellent leading indicators and covered many markets that the other metric companies didn’t. However, they stopped making their top ten streaming shows list available, let alone their show by country details, and we don’t see them reported in entertainment media as we once did.

It has its ups and downs but many of us view it as the strongest live action first season in this era.

For older fans, episodes 5, 6 and 8 seem to be the favourites so far.

In fact episode 8 is so important for 90s fans, that I would argue that it’s worth hanging in until then at minimum.

I have no issues with the ‘dots’ given this is the 32nd century. It really puts the fine point on assigning physical labour as a disciplinary measure.

The lens flare is part of a directional code that’s getting dated at this point. I notice that in the premiere - which Kurtzman directed himself - he went for long camera pans with fewer jump cuts, and fewer lens flares.

As long as Osunsami remains the supervising EP and supervising director in Toronto however, I don’t think that it’s likely we’ll see Kurtzman’s own style of direction reflected in the shows.

Oh! That is an interesting pair of indicators.

Nemecek tends to draw the old guard. If he’s seeing his reach increase, it would be a leading indicator for a shift.

Thanks for this.

I think I should focus on finishing Resurgence.

Giametti has said quite unequivocally that he is not in this episode.

Big bridge scene with the senior officers.

You’re right!

And I’m very curious to see where this takes the curmudgeonly Doctor we’ve come to love as fans.

After the Doctor’s rapid development in Voyager, his relatively frozen state of psychological evolution — through Prodigy and on for 8 centuries — needed an explanation.

At a meta level, I don’t think that fans would have accepted a very differently tempered Doctor at the beginning of the show. So, this allows both the writers and Picardo to take the character into new experiences and development.

As an aside, American screenwriters are so stuck on trauma being necessary for character development that it sometimes feel they are celebrating it or suggesting it is necessary for greatness. It’s good to see instead a situation where a significant trauma causes a lasting paralysis in development that might never be overcome without taking emotional risks.

Why it didn’t really register that SAM will now be the Doctor’s daughter — formed by an environment where he shared his preferences and 800 years of experiences — I can’t say.

That’s on me. But surely, this will be a wild ride for all.

The others in the household weren’t up to watching yesterday so I expect to get a rewatch with them very soon.

I suspect there are more layers in there that will hit during rewatches.

For example, what’s with the black Borg cube-shaped home of the Makers?

The Makers stated that she would retain both sets of memories.

Not sure how that would work but she’s not an organic being. Perhaps her original memories would have been encoded and available for access as she matured.

10/10. No notes.

In my view, perhaps the strongest episode yet.

Just goes to show that YMMV remains a truism.

I wonder why the old TOS fans like me are less impatient with fundamentals of human existence being presented through the growth of young adults?

Sincerely, resilience in the face of trauma is something many 30 and 40 year olds struggle with. I didn’t see this as sophomoric at all.

So, I wonder why episodes like this aren’t landing as well for folks 20 or even 30 years younger than I…

That Protostar looks great.

Really glad that Prodigy is belatedly getting some ship releases.

I’m much more excited about this episode than I had been.

And it helps settle some of the context of the first post-burn Academy class vs the fist at the reopened San Francisco location.

Given how offensive many Star Trek ‘fans’ were towards Mary’s weight, especially in the later seasons of Discovery, I have mixed feelings about seeing her choosing to go so far in her weight loss journey.

The increasing use of what was originally medication for diabetes management for obesity and general weight loss is a reality, especially for women in Hollywood.

On one hand the use of these acknowledges that maintaining healthy weights is not just a matter of self control and that behavioural weight loss approaches are largely unsuccessful and unsustainable for more than small losses.

On the other hand, it seems to be giving in to the stigmatization that Mary and others have been subjected to and that Discovery and Star Trek generally were trying to counter.

The thing is, for Darem, his family and his people, this might be a high stakes situation.

It’s a change in leadership model, with a young new monarch. It should have more weight — especially as we and Jay-Den learn that they have some advanced Ionian-level portal technology. So, they seem the legacy of an advanced species with a highly structured society.

But the feel of the event was more like a resort destination wedding than a constitutional event.

The Khionians clearly a society hiding behind masks, and Darem excels at that.

BUT in the end, Darem’s long time betrothed expresses betrayal that Darem had been wearing a kind of mask with her, never showing his true self.

So, she sees only the ultimatum of an abdication an annulment as a solution.

Being creative and allowing Darem to continue with Starfleet so he could grow and become more comfortable and confident in his own identity, was beyond her ability to imagine.

Those of us who were on the old social media boards of the day recall the outright hostility against a woman as a captain as the principal character of a show.

The number and toxicity of rants about ‘political correctness’ was extreme if less generally known outside fandom.

Personally, I loved the technobabble in Voyager — it conveys the process of engineering and science more authentically than in any other show in the franchise. At a certain level, it’s more important to have a realistic applied science and engineering process in a Star Trek show than to be restricted to what’s currently known in science or that can be extrapolated from limited current knowledge.

Voyager gave us nerds nerding out. What made it exceptional was not only was it two women with STEM expertise, but that they were enthusiastically supporting one another rather than competing.

We saw some of that positivity and STEM process with Geordie and Data in TNG, but Voyager gave us a captain who was an engineer who moved to command track. Janeway’s uncompromising work the problem dammit ethos is all engineer, and it made her the right temperament for the scenario of a ship lost in another quadrant.

LOL — saw k, thought thousand, wrote million

What I get for posting after an IM, screen heavy workday.

Yes, a thousand is huge, even if an order of magnitude lower. 🖖🏼