More than meets the eye in this episode

Back in late September, WizKids shipped their Disco themed board game based on the four mirror universe episodes of season one, striking while the iron is room temperature. I, of course, purchased this game as soon as it was available to me, and yesterday evening I got the opportunity to play it for the first time when I brought it along to family game night, much to the scepticism and jeers of my sisters.

So, let's talk about it!

(Probably worth noting that we did play it after two games of Wingspan, and it would be difficult for most board games to compare to that)
 

Concept:

As mentioned, the game largely inspired by the episodes, "Despite Yourself", "The Wolf Inside", "Vaulting Ambition", and "What's Past is Prologue", from season one of Disco. Players take on the role of either the characters of the Discovery, or their mirror universe counterparts aboard the Charon. It's an asymmetric game where each side has different abilities, limitations and goals. The Starfleet characters need to zip around the board to complete three missions, while the Terran Empire wants to successfully infiltrate the Discovery three times.

It plays two to four players in teams of up to two. For this game, I played as the Starfleet side, with my opponents being paired together as team Terran Empire.
 

Components

• Everything here seems decent enough. There were no obvious production flaws in the copy of the game that I own.

• The standees for the various ships you move around the board, specifically for the Discovery and the Charon are both dark images on a dark background, so you kinda lose the image of the ship, and instead just have an oddly shaped red or blue bit of cardboard.

• Maybe I'm getting old, but the text on a lot of the components seems a little small.

• Personally I'm not a huge fan when licensed games just use stills from the show/movie/comic/whatever as game art, but I get why they do it. It's cheaper, and has immediate familiarity with fans of the thing, who is likely whom you're trying to sell the game to. Still, it seems lazy.

• This is a hugely nit-picky of me, but players can collect resources which can be spent to enhance actions or complete missions for the Starfleet side. Those resources are dilithium, intel, and tritanium. If you're going to have a "Star Trek: Discovery" themed game, why not go all in and have one of the resources be fungal spores? Cowardly. Anyways, the little bits of plastic you collect to represent those resources are fine.
 

Rules

• This is where my biggest issue with the game is. Some of the rules are not particularly clear, and some are outright missing. Basically things would come up, and I would have to patch in a rule based on what I felt made the most sense in the moment.

• The the most egregious issue is the Threat cards. These come up for both players, and there is a section in the rule book on them, but it's too vague. The cards are divided into three sections, though one of those is only a small circle in the upper right corner. The rules are more clear on how the Starfleet players interact with the cards, but what specifically the Terran players are supposed to do is basically guess work. Even the initial brief description of the Threat cards only mentions the Discovery. What's needed here is a diagram in the rules with a specific breakdown of each section of the card and what circumstances they're supposed to be used in.

• Similarly, a better designed rules document would have breakdowns of the other cards. Most of them seemed fairly straight forward, but I could see where someone could struggle. For example, the Command cards have a circle in the upper left corner with a number in them that is their "Resolve" value, which is used when bidding on Challenges. While it's called out in the rules that's what the number is, I think it would be easy to overlook for someone learning the game, if for no other reason than that there are a lot of different mechanics here that make up the whole.
 

Gameplay

• So, I think there's a lot of neat mechanics here, which is why I was interested in this game beyond just the Trek aspect.

• Players control characters from the show. Starfleet has: Saru, Burnham, Stamets, Detmer, and Tilly. The Empire has: Georgiou, Lorca, Killy, Landry, and Stamets. Each character has a unique ability which can only be used once per game. Some of the abilities feel fairly powerful, but I'm not sure how well balanced they are. Each player chooses a single character, or in a three player game, the side with only one chooses two, and has to play two hands. I do think the game could be more interesting and a better representation of the show if all characters were in play.

• The board is made up of a number of hexagons tiles which are placed semi randomly and can be moved or rotated by certain effects available to the characters. Each side of each hexagon connects it to other points in paths that make up the mycelial network that the Discovery is able to travel along. These paths can be looping around or lead to dead ends. And the Discovery players are able to rotate any of the tiles on their turn. By contrast, the Charon and the other two Terran Empire ships controlled by the Mirror Universe player move from one hexagon to the next in a pretty straight forward fashion. My only quibble here is that the Discovery usually isn't able to move very far because it needs to stop at Nodes along the network, and that means that they're mostly limited to moving one tile at a time.

• The board has two sections representing the interior of each ship divided into five different locations, and what I really like here is that characters can jump from one ship to the other provided both are on the same tile, and mess with them by stealing resources or doing damage. You can also capture the opposing characters and briefly confine them to your bridge/agony booth.

• A stumbling block for me was the action economy, which can make turns feel pretty ineffectual. During a turn you draw cards up to your hand of three, move your character from one place on the ship to another if you choose, perform the action associated with that ship space, and then clean-up which only applies if a specific type of card is used during the turn. Things that qualifies as actions include rotating a network tile, or collecting resources, or moving one of your support ships for the Terran player. You can play cards in your hand as a free action, but you don't always have cards that are going to be applicable, and then they feel like a dead hand, waiting for the opportunity where they're useful to come up. Frequently I would take my turn and afterwards be like, "I guess that's all I can do." On the plus side, turns do seem to be pretty quick because of it, but it would be nice if say, moving the ship counted as a free action.
 

Conclusion

I asked one of my sisters for her impressions while writing this, and her reply was, "I don't think the rules are super clear. I'd play it again now that we understand what you're supposed to do, and I think it's a pretty neat concept despite all the Treksplaining, but it was definitely frustrating trying to figure it out."

I think there's a decent game here, and that it replicates the scenario we see in the show very well, but with the rules document not covering some pretty essential bits of information, there's no way I could recommend it to anyone. Especially not someone who is maybe a huge fan of "Discovery" but a casual board game player. I'll almost certainly play it again, but it's not about to become a staple of my weekly friend group board game night, or the occasional family board games nights.

Components: 9/10
Rules: 2/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Overall: 6/10

Radical leftist commune

I've been watching the various Star Trek shows for a while now, and while not finished I saw most of them, I believe. And I cannot shake off the feeling that the messages given by these shows, especially (and almost exclusively) recent ones are pushing horrible morals that most people seem to not care about.

Slavery

I posted before, in the middle of my watching of Enterprise, that the show was supporting slavery because of the Cogenitor episode. Many comments disagreed, some even saying that they don't remember anything supporting slavery at all in the show. That was before I watched more. The show contains a full episode that is just about showing that:

• Sex slaves are not only acceptable, they're "sexy" and cool and negotiating with slavers is a good thing

• Sex trafficking of individuals groomed since they are born into being sex slaves is the fault of the victims for "seducing" men ???

How is this show not fine with human trafficking at this point? Is all that you need to avoid controversy, to paint the slaves in green? I still cannot comprehend the lack of reaction on this show. Add to that the frequent crimes of war by Archer and you have a nice cocktail of humanity's finest horror.

Section 31

This is also something that seems absurd to me. When it first appeared, it was already a gestapo/kgb-like group that ignores the concept of democracy, laws, and justice - in other words a horrible group - but its existence as a starfleet element was blurry. But with modern shows, they keep on bringing it back, and directly saying that it is supported by starfleet, and a good thing, or at least a necessary one.

The thing is that what made starfleet supposedly admirable was, if not every single individual's morals, the morality of their concept, their laws, their structure. Having section 31 be condoned by starfleet transforms starfleet from "utopian future of humanity" (which it was supposed to be) to "dictatorship that pretends to be a democracy but supports crimes of war and above-the-law groups". In other words, it destroys the concept of starfleet.

Discriminations, sexism, and other shitty ideas, morals and behaviours

Now this one is maybe more blurry and subjective, but it is scattered all across, nonstop.

Let's start chronologically

DS9

For this show, the constant misogyny is nothing hard to see. But they still went out of their way to put some nasty things here and there.

The episode with Quark "becoming" a woman was interesting. Quark discovers a different point of view, gains insight and empathy, that's nice! Until the end of the episode directly says "no nevermind, he was like that because of hormones, and was just an overly emotional woman because of that". Because after all, women are hysterical, right? .

Other than that, we have the toxic relationship between Keiko and O'Brian, the toxic relationship between Dax and Worf, the toxic relationship between Odo and Kira, the toxic relationship between Sisco and his wife, Jake who constantly shows that when a teen boy is targeted by pedophiles, the teen is both responsible for it, and liking it (one second, I need to throw up in a corner), etc.

And of course there is the rest, between Cisco crimes against humanity, Bashir (that's all I'll say, nothing else needed), and the weird pro-religious message that doesn't make sense.

Enterprise

We already talked about their view of child/human trafficking which I think gives the tone of the show.

But of course that's not enough, so let's put some sexual scenes about the women in particular, rape scenes with TPol because who doesn't like rape culture, Malcolm "PoS" Reed talking like a creep about "bums", Reed and Tucker with their "haha lol, these alien women are ugly because you can't tell if they are women or not" and other toxic masculinity scenes, etc. Oh and I almost forgot about the sex scene between teen siblings that serve no other purpose than to show teens having incestuous sex.

Picard

What do we have here, more weird sibling sexual scenes, people getting manipulated mentally and sexually to extract information, murderers who get away with it because betraying the federation and killing innocents is fine if you're a scenario character (reminds me of something else...AhemelnorAhem)...

Oh, and I almost forgot the amazing scene with a white Picard in his white British empire colonist outfit, going on the planet of the tan refugees who hate the federation, kicks everything around and tries to show that he's the boss. I guess this show regrets colonies too, huh.

Discovery

Now I didn't finish this one yet, and it's hard.

We have klingons that start off as a weird racist stereotype of africans seen by colonialists from a century ago: black skin, tribal armors, weird "foreign" language that the show intentionally refuses to translate through the UT, and when they speak english it's with a strong guttural accent. And they're barbaric, scary cannibals who fight with sticks and knives, and are a bunch of disorganised tribes, with weird magic rituals that allow them to do weird brainwashing. I'm almost surprised they don't carry voodoo dolls while dancing around a bonfire. The fact that people describe this show as "woke" is funny to me.

We have very explicit rape and gore torture scenes, for what purpose, I don't know.

We have people forgiven of murder because it wasn't their mind, but then it is and everyone is fine with it.

And then there's more section 31 shit.

There's also the vision of asylum in this show that basically says "we grant asylum whenever we want, not based on the situation but on personal preferences", with Georgiou granting asylum despite the prime directive, and then Pike refusing asylum because of it. It's surprising that starfleet would allow that, but at least it's not Archer-level, sending people to death then blaming the ones who tried to help them.

SNW

As far as I remember, nothing as bad as the rest here. The take on eugenics and "augmented" individuals is really absurd though, showing starfleet hating on Una is fine because her species is augmented (like the denobulans who are in starfleet though, no?), but the stupid security officer who has DNA augmentations from a crazy evil dictator engineered to be violent and crazy, is allowed without any issue.

All of them

One thing that I struggle understanding is the constant of racist stereotypes. They're everywhere, because all the shows use them to define their characters.

Keiko wants to eat her traditional food in a kimono, Georgiou wears a big kimono-like dress that would barely fit in a Mulan movie, Elnor is a ridiculous samurai-ninja with the fitting outfit, etc. As if in hundreds of years, after earth is united and mixed with hundreds of alien species, "cultures" would not evolve and mix but instead go back to being very split apart and caricatural.

P.S.

I'm not saying that the shows are shit, but that I am worried about the lack of discussions concerning all those subjects. Star Trek is supposed to be progressive and show a better version of humanity, one that evolved and grew, and yet morals seem to not be a consideration of the shows anymore.

And why

Does anyone know when the new season starts?

It almost feels unnecessary to rave about "The City on the Edge of Forever" (S1E28) again, since it has been praised as one of the all-time best episodes of Star Trek for like 50+ years now, but I just rewatched it and want to specifically talk about how much I love the character Edith Keeler.

(If you haven't seen the episode, or it has been too long, some quick context: This is the one where they go back in time to 1930 and meet Edith Keeler, who is running a shelter.)

Within the first few few minutes that Edith is on screen, you find out that she's not only incredibly kind but also insightful and filled with hope about the future. She's a dreamer who tries to excitedly tell everyone about the things she believes humanity will accomplish in the years to come, including space exploration.

It's hard to watch this episode and not feel bad for Edith - dreaming of all these things while being stuck in the 1930s - knowing that she won't get to see the world that Kirk and Spock have traveled from. Then, for the first time, I realized that this makes her the perfect stand-in for the audience. My thought-process went from feeling bad for her in the 1930s -> to feeling bad for the people watching Star Trek in the 1960s -> to realizing that I'm watching this episode nearly 60 years later and am still living far too early to experience the times she's dreaming about. We are Edith Keeler.

This gave me a new appreciation for what they did with this episode, the series as a whole, and specifically Edith Keeler's character. Her inspiring and hopeful attitude truly represents the heart of what makes Star Trek so captivating.

• When we see Starfleet Academy in the open shot of the episode it is a recreation of the closing shot of “The First Duty”.

• In the flashback there is a figure in a straw hat and overalls tending the grounds. We only see them from the back, but based on their appearance I think we can assume it’s Boothby, the Academy’s head groundskeeper, and occasional advisor to both Picard and Janeway during their academy days. Boothby was introduced in “The First Duty”.

• We see all of Nova Squadron during the establishing shot, but Jean Hajar waves goodbye and runs back down the path before the close-up.

    • As we saw last episode, Robert Duncan McNeill reprises his roll as Nick Locarno.

    • Shannon Fill reprises her role as Sito Jaxa. This is her first acting credit since 1995.

    • Welsey Crusher is played Wil Wheaton, the host of Paramount+’s “The Ready Room”.

    • This is the only on screen appearance of Joshua Albert as he was dead before the USS Enterprise D arrived to Earth in “The First Duty”.

• “I don’t know Nick, the starburst maneuver is banned for a reason.” In “The First Duty” it was established that the Kolvoord Starburst was banned because an entire flight group was killed while attempting it some years earlier.

• Cadet Becket Mariner is excited to learn about various alien species’ history:

    • The Perseveres - First mentioned in “The Paradise Syndrome”, and have a habit of relocating Indigenous peoples and leaving their obelisks lying about

    • The Xindi - The Xindi attacked Earth in “The Expanse” and were the antagonists for much of season three of ENT

• Mariner is wearing the pips of a second year cadet, meaning she was in the same year as Wesley. Of course, at the end of “The First Duty” Picard informed Wesley that he would be losing all academic credit for the year and not advancing with his class.

• Nick’s Nova Fleet has a number of familiar alien vessels:

    • The vertically arranged Romulan-warship - “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”

    • Cardassian Hideki-class starships - “Profit and Loss”

    • A Tellarite cruiser - “Babel One”

       • I am basing this on the arrangement of the impulse engines; the original Tellarite cruiser model was a redress of the CGI model used as an Arkonian warship in “Dawn”, and then a Xindi-Arboreal ship in “The Council” but both those models had slightly different impulse engines

    • A Pakled starship - “Samaritan Snare”

    • Klingon Birds-of-Prey - “Star Trek: The Search for Spock”

    • An Orion Interceptor - “Something Borrowed, Something Green”

    • Federation Sphinx-class workpods - Andy Probert made this particular design for TNG, but it was too expensive, and until now did not show up on screen, but was in the “TNG Technical Manual”

    • A Bynar ship - “A Few Badgeys More”

    • A Ferengi ship - “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”

• Admiral Vassery was introduced in “Moist Vessel”.

• Admiral Alonzo Freeman was introduced in “Second Contact”.

• There are a number minor characters who were introduced this season who make appearances this episode:

    • Risik was introduced in “Something Borrowed, Something Green”.

    • The three Bynar defectors were introduced in “A Few Badgeys More”.

    • Malok was introduced in “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”

    • The female Romulan lower decker was introduced in “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”

    • Livik was introduced in “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”

    • Jeef was introduced in “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”

    • The second male Ferengi lower decker was introduced in “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”

• ”He looks like Tom Paris.” Personally, much like Boimler, “I don’t see it.”

• The Maquis were an independent, unaligned fleet fighting against Cardassian oppression and occupation, introduced in “The Maquis, Part I”.

• We saw Andorians wearing the uniforms here on on Tulgana IV in “Envoys”

• Petra Aberdeen was introduced in “Reflections”

• The PADD the Hysperians are using appears to be the same design as the Betazoid PADD seen in “Empathaological Fallacies” flipped horizontally and coloured peach as opposed to blue.

• The large Tamarian lower decker is wearing a towel, following the precedent established by Hans Federov (“Second Contact”), Big Merp (“First First Contact”), and one of the Klingons aboard the IKS Che’Ta’ (“wej Duj”).

• The black market Ferengi Genesis device was first seen in “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place”.

• ”This guy sucks!” Mariner’s enthusiasm for Starfleet is frequently underestimated, such as when everyone assumed she purposefully made the crew of the USS Cerritos look bad in an interview in “Trusted Sources” be she was actually full of praise.

• It’s Goodgey! From Star Trek!

• Mariner is able to take control of the *USS Passaro” NCC-52670, a Sabrerunner-class starship.

    • The Sabrerunner-class bears a lot of visual similarity to the Steamrunner-class introduced in “Star Trek: First Contact” but is significantly smaller.

    • A Gagarin-class USS Passaro was seen PIC’s “The Last Generation”

    • Both Passaros are named for Fabio Passaro, a CG model maker for Eaglemoss Collections who passed away in October 2022. The Sabrerunner-class version’s registry reflects his birthday, May 26, 1970.

    • The Sabrerunner class name was provided by producer Brad Winters on the bad social media site. You know the one.

• Mariner is able to transfer controls to the captain’s chair, causing a stick to sprout from the chair. Riker was able to control the USS Enterprise E with a joystick in “Star Trek: Insurrection”.

• D’Erika was introduced in “Something Borrowed, Something Green”

• The tryna shield bears some resemblance to the Tholian web seen in “The Tholian Web” and Q’s energy net introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint”.

• ”What about Rule of Acquisition 91: Your boss is only worth what he pays you?” This is a new rule not from any previous source.

• ”You’re forgetting Rule 289: Shoot first, count profits later.” It was established in “Rules of Acquisition” that there are only 285 rules, though the Nagus can add or change them as they see fit, as in “Acquisition” there were only 173 in the 22nd century, and Zek was going to release an entirely new set in “Prophet Motive”.

• Twaining was established as a sometimes effective means of conflict resolution in “Something Borrowed, Something Green”.

• Mariner and Locarno playing cat & mouse inside the ion storm recalls the USS Reliant hunting the USS Enterprise through the Mutara nebula in “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”.

• Boimler has been made acting captain of the Cerritos despite being outranked by at least two other officers we see on the bridge, and several more besides. In “The Arsenal of Freedom” Geordi was made acting captain over chief engineer Logan, who outranked him.

• The Cerritos’ captain’s yacht is a similar design to that of the Enterprise E but distinct enough to assume they’re not supposed to be the same spaceframe.

• ”Wow, I’ve never actually seen someone use the captain’s yacht.” Apparently Boimler skipped watching any video logs recorded during the events of “Star Trek: Insurrection”. It’s hard to blame him, but it still seems out of character.

    • Mariner signed out the keys to the Cerritos’ captain’s yacht in Boimler’s name in “Terminal Provocations” and then invited him along, though it sounds like he was either able to prevent Mariner from actually taking the ship out for a joyride, or hid in his bunk until she returned it.

• The explosion of the Ferengi Genesis device recalls the original detonation in “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”.

    • Like that explosion, this one also creates a planet, seemingly from the material in the ion storm. Unlike Genesis, the planet Locarno is apparently stable.

• T’Lyn ignores a call from Captain Sokel. In “Empathological Fallacies” she was so stressed over not being able to transmit a message to him that she telepathically caused the crew to lose control of their inhibitions.

• The Orion ship that arrives to collect Tendi is inspired by the one introduced in “The Pirates of Orion”, but appears to be a more modern iteration of that craft, as well as being significantly larger.

Rob & Kev take shelter from a patch of knife rain and watch "The Inner Fight", the penultimate episode of season four of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Inspired by Mariner's ability to unite the clashing aliens trapped on Sherbal V, they discuss other conspicuous occasions of multi-species alliances in Star Trek, including "The Time Trap" (TAS), the Dominion War (DS9), "The Enemy" (TNG), "Allegiance" (TNG), and the Promenade (DS9).

I know that canonically, Jankom is a Tellarite and not a Talaxian, but I feel that his story's justification has a Tom Paris/Nick Locarno vibe, but I haven't been able to find any relationship on Google. There's a lot on Jankom that reminds me of Neelix:

• Delta quadrant
• Split nose
• Hair, sideburns and eyebrows
• Ears somewhat
• Spots

Also, I thought that Tellarites would look closer to what the doctor on Janeway's crew looked like.

Is some writer not being paid for the creation of Talaxian on Prodigy?

The listing went down quickly, and Roddenberry's son is trying to track it down.

This is a great story. 🖖🏻

How Star Trek Brought Back A Popular TNG Actress After 30 Years

https://screenrant.com/shannon-fill-sito-star-trek-lower-decks-return/

@startrek #StarTrek #StarTrekLowerDecks

For me it is the dinner-scene in "the undiscovered country".

https://youtu.be/uK2YyfJAdGo?si=FEyTLHzs95mVD2Iv

I've never seen Star Trek TOS so I don't know for sure if this is explained anywhere. Does anyone know why they made the switch from red shirts to yellow shirts between commanding officers and security between TOS and TNG?

Better place for discussion I suppose