Nah.

It’s not awful. In fact it has a lot of great high points. On balance, I would say that if you compared it objectively to the first 65 episodes of TNG, it would compare rather favorably.

That’s not very funny.

La’an saying “fascinating” makes me wonder if Spock is rubbing off on her.

Uh, phrasing

“Scale” suggests to me they might be going straight to Krakoa. It’s a built-in homeland for all the mutants to be isolationists in when other stuff is happening, not unlike Wakanda and Namor’s underwater realm.

I’ve long imagined what an attempt to adapt Powers of X/House of X might look like, if such a thing is even possible.

Solidarity forever.

If this is a difficult principal for you, remember to rank your battles appropriately:

Number One will always be the people you actually disagree with on a fundamental level, the people you mean to be resisting. Way down on the list is the people on your side who are resisting in ways you don’t condone, but resisting nonetheless.

Never fight a low priority battle when a high priority fight is still going on.

I suspect Batel’s fate is foreshadowed in her mindmeld with Spock. The hybridization will give her a Gorn aspect that she can’t live with, but it will also grant her the ability to communicate with the Gorn, and she’ll wind up sacrificing herself.

They are definitely doing this without Starfleet approval. Pike’s ship prioritizes individuals over regulations, an ethos that carries forward when Kirk takes the chair.

When he started snapping to change things I was like oh, okay, I see what this is. I think Trelane did that too, but it became such a trademark of Q that it was hard to ignore the similarity. And then the voice was just delicious icing on the cake. They didn’t make a big deal of it or make some weird tortured commentary to try and tie it into continuity. They just let it be as a story on its own.

I was impressed with their restraint in not mentioning either Trelane or Q by name. I mean they dressed the entity in the same costume as Trelane, and his behavior and MO are identical, so we’re clearly meant to conclude they are one and the same. But they didn’t burden the story with continuity, and that’s smart.

One of the writers talked about it on Open Pike Night and said it was a deliberate choice to give La’an and Erica opposite trajectories from last season, where now La’an is finally able to move on from her trauma with the Gorn while Erica is dealing with it for the first time.

I like to think that wolkite is a predecessor or a component of the viridium patch that Spock tracks Kirk with in Undiscovered Country.

It would be a simple matter for Trelane to make them all forget about him in “The Squire of Gothos” so that he could have more fun with them. I also like the idea that the Q wore the raiment of “energy entities” at this point in history just as fashion.

So long as people are starving under the system while others have yachts, the system is unethical, and thus following its rules – insofar as they perpetuate this inequity – is unethical.

Theft from the wealthy is morally right, period.

That would seem to be a pretty big leap out of character for Mariner. She only acts like she doesn’t have boundaries, but she actually sets pretty rigid limits on where she’s willing to go with people she considers close friends.

I have this headcanon now that Boimler met his purple universe self once, and that’s why he started dying his hair.

Wait a minute now, is he actively dying his beard as it grows in? That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? Did he lie in his own personal log about dying his hair, or does the hair dying occur at a follicular level?

Reading these posts of yours is my favorite thing to do immediately after every new episode. Entertaining and informative as ever.

I was surprised that there was no reference to Boimler’s hair color in this episode. It has been such a non-issue that I almost wonder if there’s something in the show bible about conspicuously never mentioning it, beyond a single throwaway admission in Boimler’s personal log about dying it (LD s3e01).

It could have been fun if there was some weird connection to the purple dimension, especially with how his facial hair has been a running subplot this season. Maybe his bearded alternate self wasn’t the first alt-Boimler he imprinted on and decided to model himself after?

Kassia Nox needs a spinoff. That character was great.

I appreciate the record-straightening here. You’re doing good work