It took me forever to find the story, but I think what happened is that they sit down the Paramount+, which handled “publicity, photo, events, awards, talent relations, etc.”.

Those roles have been offloaded to the studio (CBS Studios), and I guess this event, and probably the recent Universal thing, have been put together by them?

I’ve struggled with this question for years, and haven’t been able to come up with an answer I feel good about, so the “correct” answer is probably, “consider the person’t tastes and cater to them.”

I do believe that it’s probably not a good idea to start with the “best” episodes - they tend to break the usual format, and once you’ve seen them, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Instead, I’m on a continuous search for the most “average” episodes - solid, enjoyable, and representative of what the series and franchise are as a whole. But I still don’t have a simple answer.

I’m sure it wouldn’t work for <insert technobabble reason here>, but this is the unfortunate consequence of treating it so casually in season one…

It’s definitely a case of NORAD working as designed. Which is good!

The fact that we’re borderline amazed that it’s working as designed is much less good.

I was mainly responding to the claim that there’s no base, but I really don’t see the value in stationing a combat squadron there.

In the case of an actual foreign invasion, there would be enough time to redeploy from elsewhere.

As I said downthread, that’s a very sensible use of a coastal air force base.

Yeah, the most imminent air threat has historically been over the pole, which is why CFB Cold Lake exists.

The squadrons on Vancouver Island are for surveillance and search-and-rescue, which is entirely sensible for the coast.

CFB Comox is located on Vancouver Island.

Possibly, but looking at the episode titles, episode 9 “Terrarium” seems like it could be a good candidate for a Gorn return.

It really didn’t seem like it, but:

You will see more of the Gorn. The Gorn are not gone, but the Gorn are not the primary adversary for season 3.

The entire series is set in a snow globe on Sam Kirk’s mantle, in the home where he lives to be 147.

Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language.

I was genuinely surprised that Olatunde Osunsanmi didn’t direct.

Hegemony, Part II

I appreciated the continued exploration of the Gorn as a truly alien alien species. All the stuff with their different sensory modes, and solar-associated life cycles, is a lot of fun to me.

It also seems like they’ve written the Gorn off as a going concern, which I think is fine. This is a good place to leave it until “Arena” - they even added some dialogue about the various Gorn stories being somewhat vague, so there’s some wiggle room for them to seem a little different when they’re encountered again in the future.

They managed to film the AR wall in a way that didn’t just seem like a round room, which I appreciate.

Wedding Bell Blues

Give this show all the makeup and costuming awards immediately.

It was a fun romp, and I always like it when two opposing characters have to team up against the universe. I could have done with more dancing at the end - it seems like the actors put in a lot of work for a fairly brief scene.

I’ve never been a big fan of drawing a connection between Trelane and the Q, so I’m glad neither was mentioned by name (Edit: I think…?).

Please give me a Sam Kirk spinoff that runs for 50 years.

Very cool - I honestly had never considered the logistics of these sorts of operations, but seeing the host of these videos work out the fuel stops along the way just to make it out to the ships they’re evacuating people from has been incredible.

not short sighted fiscally

Talk about a big ask…

“Unfortunately Discovery’s loss was our gain. So they basically said, ‘Look, we think we’re done after four seasons.’ And we said, ‘Hey, what about our whole ‘Let’s get the fans to the TOS era,’ because what happens to all these people, and how does this person will come up?’ And they were like, ‘No, that’s fair. That’s true.’ And they said, ‘What do you need to get there?’ And we said, ‘Six episodes’ and they said okay.”

“The good news was, when I say ‘they,’ really the folks who make this show wanted this to happen too, but there are fiscal constraints that are real. You know what’s going on with Paramount. So to move things forward in that environment was a challenge, but everybody—CBS, Paramount, Strange New Worlds, and [Alex Kurtzman’s production company] Secret Hideout were all pulling in the same direction. And that’s how we ended up getting six episodes. So it was a wasn’t really a negotiation, but it was a heavy lift for pretty much everybody, because everybody wanted not to have another Discovery circumstance where it felt abrogated in a way that wasn’t thorough.”

Surprisingly candid stuff. I’m glad that some of the CBS pencil-pushers are creative-minded enough to make this happen.

Direct YouTube link to this bit of silliness.

Yeah I’m not super familiar with the podcasting world, but I think they have technology that stitches current ads into the back catalogue.

Yeah, he cobbled together a fake Gorn transponder, and built a trap out of force fields and fake biosigns.

But he probably gave accurate time estimates like a rank amateur.

Don’t they have a table or something this year?