He didn’t necessarily know that Pike would be an option. He likely didn’t know that Lorca would be an MU character.

She brought such positive energy to fans during her time on Discover.

Her Twitter was full of enthusiasm. CBS was so much less limiting of the actors’ social media engagement. Paramount really hasn’t done well by limiting engagement to the EPs.

It’s unfortunate there hasn’t been opportunity for her appear in Strange New Worlds.

It won the only series Emmy ever for the franchise.

It sounds like he was in premed when he met his wife, but then went on a different track while she became a physician.

Controlled technology and not easily built from scratch even by Starfleet engineers.

The Relaunch novelverse expanded the concept and importance of industrial replicators. When Voyager returned to the Delta Quadrant, she led an small ‘Full Circle’ fleet that included a large engineering ship that did have industrial replicators large enough to reconstruct ships when severely damaged.

Lowere Decks and Prodigy have brought industrial replicators into onscreen canon.

Prodigy gave the Protostar prototype ship an industrial replicator large enough to construct shuttles. Lower Decks has shown the Cerritos and other ships tasked with delivering and bringing online very large industrial replicators on planets seeking Federation support.

It feels like the chose them to fill in the gaps in the collections of fans across every show and the movies - but also to profile legacy characters featured in new productions.

Rachel Garrett is surely there because of S31 and Jellico is more popular than ever after Prodigy.

Most structural starship components would require large industrial replicators.

These seem to always be centrally located and powered.

What someone can do with a small home model would be quite different.

TNG movies are tricky in that they do embed a few spoilers.

If your wife doesn’t get into DS9, I’d consider hopping over to Voyager. It’s uneven throughout its run, but has many ‘best of trope’ episodes, and has proved to be the most successful entry series to the franchise of all of them.

Here’s another take.

We know that everything was reshaped to flatter and entice Patrick Stewart to come back and play Picard.

He kept refusing and keep on insisting on Picard’s life should be a reflection of his own.

But the suits at ViacomCBS (and later Paramount) put priority on greenlighting anything they could get with Picard as a character.

So, whatever initial concepts with and without Picard were all sacrificed in the end in order to indulge Stewart enough to play the role.

It’s absurd. Our kids ended up playing Star Trek with Playmobil’s space and ‘Future Planet’ planetary exploration lines. (I doubt these even still exist.)

When the Star Trek line finally arrived it was only TOS.

The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.

Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.

All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.

Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.

Glad to have you mention that here.

So many fans of the older shows assume that Lower Decks isn’t accessible to new viewers who don’t get the references, but it’s quite the opposite. Gen Z and younger viewers are into animated comedies and it’s a successful entry point. And with the number of middle schoolers who got into manga and anime during the pandemic, the portion of the audience that prefers animation as a medium is only going to grow.

Our teens were fans of the Voyager when they were in middle school, and sampled the rest of the classic shows. Despite that they seem to be split on the animated vs live action new shows, and none of them would watch Picard.

It’s a real shame that there won’t be any new animated Star Trek after this season of Lower Decks.

Star Trek Prodigy is the true sequel to Voyager. It’s all ages / family rather than the ‘kids show’ many fans take it for. I would watch that with your GF next.

Because Prodigy is designed to be an entry point for new viewers, it introduces many of the key legacy characters and much of the lore. It has a Star Wars vibe in the pilot, mainly to draw in viewers from other franchises, but it settles into being some of the Trekiest content ever by the 6th short episode of season one.

Dave Blass said much of it was packed up in crates and shipped.

To where is the question.

Tawny is already in the writers room for Starfleet Academy as well as working as a cocreator of a new live action Star Trek comedy series in development.

It seems that she’s another alum who will be mostly behind the camera but will show up as a legacy character in other shows.

TOS ‘The Devil in the Dark’ in first run.

I was barely in school, but my slightly older neighbour who’d hooked me on Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, convinced me that Star Trek must be seen.

I quickly caught up during the hiatus reruns, and have seen absolutely all of it in first run since.

I hadn’t been aware that he’d also been a director for television. Truly a wide-ranging career.

McCoy was in Encounter at Farpoint with one meta purpose - to counter the TOS fans that were campaigning hard to say that it ‘wasn’t the same universe.’

McCoy’s presence was a nice Easter Egg, but not much more. But he did the job of saying that it was the new Enterprise in continuity with the legendary ship on which he served.

Fans argued that because Roddenberry insisted on moving WW3 back to the mid 21st century as of Encounter at Farpoint, TNG had to be a different timeline.

TOS fans understood the Eugenics Wars to be the precursor to WW3, so they just didn’t accept WW3 was going to be another half-century away. Roddenberry’s directive was to always keep the Star Trek future in our future so WW3 had to be shifted to later in time and any specific mention of the date of the Eugenics Wars was avoided.

They also hated the carpet and many other things about the ‘luxury hotel in space’ Enterprise.

Yup, that happened and continued to happen until well into TNG season 3. The brigading Berman-era fans who rail unrelentingly against ‘Nu-Trek’ don’t sound any different, they’re just more visible than the 1980s fans that relied on mimeoed fanzines and Usenet. Fans that liked TNG kept quiet at cons until at least 1990, and vendors didn’t bring TNG merchandise.

No need to fuss about calendars. Just need to revisit Dr. Macdonald’s Temporal Mechanics 101.

There have been several temporal incursions since the DS9 crew did theirs - Voyager, Picard, SNW and Prodigy, not to mention the rippling effects of the Temporal Wars established in Enterprise and Discovery.

Dates and details can slip as long as the major events stay more or less the same.

From what I can tell Americans used to use scales for dry measures (in ounces) but somewhere along the line, they switched to volume measures for everything.

As a Canadian, it’s really frustrating because often will get the American versions of UK cookbooks here which are both not metric and not weights.

I enjoy my Australian cookbooks with metric weights.