I like it better than the theory that Anisha Mir was always truly Vendari Ral and will betray everyone, and likely die, in the finale.

I was very relieved to see Lura back

I hope we’ll see much more of her in season two.

Looking again at the production photo of Tatiana Maslany as Anisha Mir, there may be an entirely different long con going on from the Federation side.

Could be a coincidental styling choice but, Anisha seems to be dressed in something close to a Section 31 uniform!

So, speculation…

We know from Discovery that Starfleet and the 32nd century Federation have some kind of shadowy espionage and covert operations organization.

Could it be possible that Anisha, who was known to Nahla Ake, was more than a desperate mother looking to trade her skills to the Venari Ral for sustenance for herself and her child?

Was there some kind of deep covert mission that went profoundly wrong? If so, was Ake read in?

If Anisha is somehow a Federation operative, how will Caleb deal with his being put at risk, then sacrificed for an operation?

Anisha may be less morally culpable for her actions as an infiltrator of the Venari Ral, but as a mother putting her child in the line of harm, there is a completely different calculus.

The note at the top of the article has got me speculating on the meaning of the word play:

Episode 10 of season 1 of Starfleet Academy is titled “Rubincon,” and no, that is not a typo for “Rubicon.”

The suffix con leaps out.

Brakka seems a full on dark triad kind of villain. With that comes the Machiavellian manipulation and deceit, including cons.

For rubin, the first part of the word, the dictionary definitions I find say that it’s an obsolete word for ruby (alternative spelling is rubine).

So literally, the title of the episode means, well, “ruby + con”.

Which gets us back to a sound-alike for rubicon…

Clearly the writers are making a point here with this double entendre.

My money’s on the red wall of omega-47 being a grossly gigantic con where the isolation of the Federation is not quite the threat it seemed at the end of episode 9.

However, is it only Brakka who is responsible for the con, or is and has Anisha Mir been part of a long con of both Ake and her son from the start?

And, what is it that Brakka and Anisha Mir are really after with all this?

Jonathan Frakes mentions several things in the TrekMovie interview that may impact costs.

Alex Kurztman set the direction style with more close up, tight camera work. More, he specifically ordered special long camera lenses to enable that. This means that despite the enormous sets and UHD cinematography, with long lenses they are able to block the scenes without as much extraneous detail.

Saving the wide angles for when they need them but closing up on the characters, and doing more in set internal volumes must surely reduce a lot of crew time and accelerate production.

Good point. There are repetitive signals that her expectation is that he hasn’t materially changed.

Beyond the ‘you grew up’ startlement at his physical growth and development, she expects his temperament, preferences ambitions and values are exactly the ones she saw in him at six years old.

She’s not just missed the past year as a cadet in Starfleet, they both have missed his entire adolescent experience of youth separating themselves from their parents.

Interestingly, the challenge of needing to catch up with who someone has changed into is foreshadowed by Caleb and the others’ difficulties in understanding who SAM is now - and her own struggles to reconcile who she was with who she is.

When asked in the TrekMovie interview about the similarities to Matalas Prime in Picard, Jonathan Frakes said that most of it was the virtual set volume but they reused set pieces within it.

Well, that’s a lot. I’m not sure why I didn’t expect a cliffhanger, and I hope there won’t be one at the end of the season.

As we saw the wall of omega-47 mines, it occurred to me that Brakka had told Ake what he wanted in episode 6 — a return to the isolation of planets that gave him and the Venari Rahl their power — but neither she nor Vance appreciated the scale of his ambitions to return to the anarchy of past century.

And the Federation should have anticipated this kind of challenge to come from some quarter, even if they’d come to detente with the Emerald Chain. Those who benefited from the systems that were built up over the century of the Burn would have nostalgia for it and distrust against the Federation would not vanish quickly.

I appreciate the narrative structure of the season, Anisha and Caleb Mir represent those who struggled to get by around the powers and forces of the Burn. There is a personal story and a societal story about making choices to take the risk to move towards something better — as found family and as a society.

As it goes on, this show reminds me increasingly of The Magicians, on which SFA showrunner Noga Landau was a head writer at one point. There’s the quotidian developmental, coming of age challenges of students in their undergraduate years juxtaposed with massive and truly menacing events.

Bella Shepherd, who plays Genesis, said in an interview that Frakes was originally booked for direct her character’s feature episode in season two, but then he couldn’t be available because of conflicts but was expected to direct a later episode. It sounds as though they couldn’t make the schedules mesh.

Is it just me, or did the reuse some of the sets or set dressings from Picard season three and Discovery seasons one and three?

We hear that the production packs things up and puts them in storage as much as reasonably possible.

My recollection is that he said, “I stopped trying after that one after she escaped from the penal colony.”

I loved the Relaunch novelverse but I also love the new shows.

It’s unfortunate that the IP holder decided that for the books — unlike Star Trek Online — the storytelling in the alternate timeline couldn’t continue.

These are the 2025 Emmy awards.

Not sure why a July 2024 release didn’t meet the cut off date for that year’s awards. Perhaps since the Emmys were originally for a standard September to June television broadcast schedule, July streaming releases get bumped to the next year.

I’m so very glad to see that Prodigy’s excellence continues to get the acknowledgment it deserves from within the creative community.

This Individual Achievement award is determined by the animators’ guild not an open Emmy vote. Having the winner for each of the show’s two seasons demonstrates the respect the work has within the animation community.

It would be cool to have an AMA with one of the longtime group of tie-in writers for the franchise.

They’ve seen the evolution of TrekLit from the end of the TNG movie era through the Relaunch book universe and back to standalones.

I’ve watched most of the first season of Absentia. It’s intense and dark. It’s also more of a British or European style thriller in that it keeps you in the dark with genuine ‘who done it?’ rather than ‘how done it?’

Interestingly Violo was co-creator and senior writer of Absentis but didn’t get as much producer credit. Seems her talent moved her up into creative control more quickly than the WGA stepwise progression in titles allows.

Flix Patrol just compiles the public rankings from the streamers themselves as far as I know.

Parrot Analytics used to make public their rankings that incorporate everything available, including social media volumes, and presumably ‘alternative views’. They were excellent leading indicators and covered many markets that the other metric companies didn’t. However, they stopped making their top ten streaming shows list available, let alone their show by country details, and we don’t see them reported in entertainment media as we once did.

It has its ups and downs but many of us view it as the strongest live action first season in this era.

For older fans, episodes 5, 6 and 8 seem to be the favourites so far.

In fact episode 8 is so important for 90s fans, that I would argue that it’s worth hanging in until then at minimum.

I have no issues with the ‘dots’ given this is the 32nd century. It really puts the fine point on assigning physical labour as a disciplinary measure.

The lens flare is part of a directional code that’s getting dated at this point. I notice that in the premiere - which Kurtzman directed himself - he went for long camera pans with fewer jump cuts, and fewer lens flares.

As long as Osunsami remains the supervising EP and supervising director in Toronto however, I don’t think that it’s likely we’ll see Kurtzman’s own style of direction reflected in the shows.

Oh! That is an interesting pair of indicators.

Nemecek tends to draw the old guard. If he’s seeing his reach increase, it would be a leading indicator for a shift.