*Sfdebris.net

Our 'source' is our own eyes. Why in the world do you think there were so many quasi-Western worlds? Our eyes follow a group of outlaws. We're not exactly following reliable narrators. In a TV show what we see should be what it is rather than a character's opinion of it, but we see where the charac...

The Alliance is modeled after the worst aspects of both the US and China. All of the interactions with the Alliance in the show are negative. It doesn't care about the good of the settlers; the only difference between it and the slaveholding jerks are that the slaveholders get a more immediate bene...

A comparison to the Confederacy would be inappropriate, though - only people who had an axe to grind insisted that there was a connection, as viewers of the show were well aware it was spurious. It was the Alliance that decided to settle new worldlets as cheaply as possible by dumping people off wi...

Meanwhile, the only things we explicitly know about the Alliance (based on what we see and hear) are that they have parliamentary democracy, freedom of religion, and a robustly-patrolled network of interstellar trade. And River's being abducted by people who cut up her brain. I grant you, you shoul...

I enjoyed this movie overall, but one thing I didn't like about it was how much of this universe's moral ambiguity got simplified. One of the things I liked most about the tv show was that it was always something of an open question mark how "bad" the Alliance really was and how "good" the protagoni...

This episode really highlights the primary aspect of Neelix that I dislike the most. It's not that he's frequently incompetent or a liar. For example, I love Quark and Rom, and they are frequently one or both of these things depending on the circumstance. For me, its the fact that he NEEDS to be lik...

One thing I liked about this episode was that it didn't minimize what Torres went through as a kid, or make it seem like what she went through didn't matter. For someone who does not experience bigotry, it can be very easy to dismiss small expressions of it as "unimportant" or "something to ignore."...

There's a very telling moment when the two of them are arguing about the decision to abandon Starfleet's plan to evacuate Romulus and Picard declares "The Federation does not get to decide if a species lives or dies!" He was absolutely right, in that the Federation shouldn't be interfering with oth...

I remember in the second episode of the Picard tv series, when Picard goes to Starfleet HQ to ask for a ship and the admiral tells him to fuck off. There's a very telling moment when the two of them are arguing about the decision to abandon Starfleet's plan to evacuate Romulus and Picard declares "T...

I generally am not a fan of cringe-comedy myself (with the exception of "The Dinner Party" episode of The Office), but this episode had two elements I very much appreciated: 1) I'm not sure if this was intentional, but having Mariner being skeptical that Barbara existed AND having Barbara serving ab...