I just realized something else - I think this episode might contain the first mention of Cetacean ops going on an away mission, which reveals a lot about how their Starfleet lives might work.

I still wonder about several things, which I’ve been wanting to make my own post about anyway and probably will soon.

I like Debian. To save you the misery, though, you should probably just use the OBS Flatpak with it. I used to be a “native” pedant, but these days, I at minimum consider Flatpak a VERY necessary evil, if an evil at all.

You dare defile Lower Decks by calling other stuff “More cannon”! Experience bij, petaQ! 😉

In all seriousness, though, I would say DS9. The first season is much better than TNG season 1 in my opinion - not perfect, but livable. It mostly gets better from there, though like VOY, be prepared for sudden urges for Rick Berman to “accidentally fall out an airlock”, if you know what I mean.

This might be tinted by DS9 being my favorite Trek series, although Lower Decks is putting up fierce competition for DS9’s top spot in my heart.

Still waiting for word on LD soundtrack vol 2. I want more of those good Westlake tunes!

Every time I work with a Mac, Hackintosh, etcetera, the 5K upscale of XP Bliss is my default as a joke (except I think near the end of one school year, where I set the background to something from OS 9).

It was even my iPhone background for a while, though right now, it’s a random James Webb image.

Autism has little to do with it - I’m on the spectrum and I have “proprietary” Star Trek wallpapers on all my Linux machines - Ent D and DS9 on desktop, DS9 crew on laptop, Cerritos on that one old Chromebook I installed Bcachefs Debian Testing on for fun once, Borg cube on my Surface…

Now my wallpaper choices and overall Star Trek fandom… you could probably make a reasonable guess on where that comes from. 😉

iPhone, mostly because of family.

I eventually want to jump to Lineage on Pixel, but that’s not an option for me currently.

My Thinkpad has the factory Windows install on its factory-installed drive, but I only booted it once and otherwise never use it. As the laptop has 2 M.2 slots, I just installed a 2 TB SSD in its secondary slot and installed Debian 12 on it right after I opened the box. I nearly always use that install.

I recently had an exam where the spyware test monitoring Chrome extension was mad about me using Linux (I only use Chromium when I have an exam - otherwise I just use Firefox), so I had to use one of the Windows machines in the lab. This was weird, because I’ve taken other tests (including after this incident) that didn’t have a problem.

Back in high school, I had to use a Chromebook and the occasional iMac, though the Chromebook is technically a Linux device.

I need to the h*** give Babylon 5 a try eventually.

I have a few questions on uniforms.

For one, I just find it a bit strange some of them are wearing ENT-era uniforms, especially considering the base was updated in the 2260s. Although the uniforms look slick, chronologically, it almost feels like a run down American naval wessel in the 1970s wearing revolutionary war uniforms. I wonder if this points to the ENT uniforms being used for a really long time (no, my time is not finally here) much like the TOS film uniforms, if at least as a starbase uniform. Thus, it was still perfectly normal to see an ENT uniform in the 2230s and 40s, and not all that uncommon in the early 2260s.

Now what really confuses me, though, is how the base says they don’t have combadges, which conflicts with the previous depictions of base officers in LD:“Trusted Sources”:

I at first thought that maybe they were just embroidered like TOS uniforms. However, someone on Memory Alpha also caught this frame of one of these same personnel in 5x05:

The badge is gone, which suggests they are removable. This implies two possibilities: they were aesthetic, non-functioning badges, or they were real combadges.

I wonder why they disappeared. One theory might be the station used to be able to support a few, but the system broke and the few combadges in circulation were retired.

Ma’ah’s brother says all the “I can see the original Kahless” stuff at the end of the episode. That means that Kahless II being a clone is common knowledge. I wonder when that happened, though Kor seemed aware of it in DS9:”The Sword of Kahless”.

This beings up an intriguing question of when Kahless being a clone became common knowledge.

We only deal in gold pressed Latinum here.

There’s plenty of other crappy Starbases in the Federation… certain of that.

It’s going to be about the Post-Atomic Horror… Or else! Give me my campy Kangaroo court.

To be fair, I wouldn’t exactly call original Khan good representation either, in the sense that he draws on some negative ethnic stereotypes.

Still a fun villain, though.

I might also add that Ma’ah’s family career is very similar to Boimler’s in some aspects, staying in line with how in Wej Duj he was supposed to be a Klingon analog of Boimler.

In the future, could you cross post your annotations instead of making two posts? Thanks! I had to duplicate the above from the main Star Trek community version of this post.

After more research, there’s different frames than the one Memory Alpha has for Captain Tersal that confirm that at least the upper part of the uniform is a normal TNG uniform and the highlights were just lightning. The cuffs are different, but that could be personal choice - she is the captain after all.

Actually kind of disappointing - they could have thrown in the abandoned uniforms for Generations as sort of a nod to the inspiration for the LD uniforms.

I might also add that Ma’ah’s family career is very similar to Boimler’s in some aspects, staying in line with how in Wej Duj he was supposed to be a Klingon analog of Boimler.

After more research, there’s different frames than the one Memory Alpha has for Captain Tersal that confirm that at least the upper part of the uniform is a normal TNG uniform and the highlights were just lightning. The cuffs are different, but that could be personal choice - she is the captain after all.

Actually kind of disappointing - they could have thrown in the abandoned uniforms for Generations as sort of a nod to the inspiration for the LD uniforms.

I think those highlights might just be shading. It feels like a bit of a stretch to say the captain is just Mariner-ing her cuffs, though.