My brain isn’t firing on all cylinders today.

Yes it’s Michelle Hurd who played Raffi.

Also, yes I am bitter that Ro Laren was killed off and even more ticked that Picard played it as though there had been a romantic tension between them rather than a mentor-mentee one.

And it sounds as though Paladin in Vision Quest will be another version of the same character but as a Mandalorian analogue.

Tawny as the principal character as well as co-creator and EP is very interesting.

The fact that she’s been able to state publicly that she would be the lead suggests that the proposal was as advanced as it could be until the new ownership and team could make decisions.

Setting it in the late 24th to early 25th century will also provide the kind of ‘legacy’ opportunities that many Berman-era fans and actors are hankering for while satisfying the apparent executive demands that legacy characters be included for marketing purposes.

Frankly, having legacy characters come to a single planet would be a lot less unrealistic than Matalas’ concept of having the Enterprise G travelling around to visit legacy characters and locations. Production costs and staging would be manageable.

If this is intended to run as a true 22-30 minute comedy, I really hope that Paramount’s streamer greenlights an initial double season as Netflix does. It really takes about 8 episodes for a half hour show to take off.

Star Trek Prodigy is the sequel to Voyager.

It’s not just for kids, although intended for a family audience.

Given that there is almost no French language dub options on Paramount+, it’s good on one hand to know that Ellison is aware that lack of ‘localization’ is a significant barrier.

As a regular viewer of shows produced in other languages, do I think that an AI translation subtitles would get me watching more Paramount+? — not likely. Certainly not if it was a matter of AI generated dubbing.

One of the reasons that I watch most dubbed shows in French rather than English is that the quality of the dubbing and the translations are usually much higher in French.

It’s not just enough to have subtitles or a dub, the quality of these is make or break. I’m impressed that Netflix lists the dubbing actors by name for each language in the credits. That’s taking ‘localization’ seriously!

Efficiencies and synergies according to the messaging but it could mean AI given references to harnessing Silicon Valley is the $ 2 billion reference in the article.

$16 million is given as the out of court settlement for the 60 minutes suit.

At a certain point, I realized that from another perspective, the big divide seems to be between those who see continuous distributions as just an abstraction of a world that is inherently finite vs those who see finite steps as the approximation of an inherently continuous and infinitely divisible reality.

Since I’m someone who sees math as a way to tell internally-consistent stories that may or may not represent reality, I tend to have a certain exasperation with what seems to be the need of most engineers to anchor everything in Euclidean topography.

But it’s my spouse who had to help our kids with high school math. A parent who thinks non Euclidean geometry is fun is not helpful at that point.

Given Ellison was a producer on Into Darkness, and has recurrently cited Star Trek in the listings of legacy properties in documents related to the merger, I expect that the CEO will micromanage the franchise for good or ill.

Beyond the fact that I don’t see Cheeks or Goldberg staying more than 18 months, based on typical merger transitions, I can’t see Ellison leaving Star Trek in his management.

I’m wondering about the information that one of Co-CEOs is staying on in another role. Can you provide a source?

This Variety article says:

Tom Ryan, president and CEO of Paramount Streaming, and Mike Ireland, president of Paramount Motion Picture group, also stepped down this week.

Fair enough. I mentioned Marcelle as they have truly been the hypoallergenic North American brand for a half century. One used to only see their line at compounding pharmacies.

Single ingredient lines are very difficult, or even ones that just exclude the top allergens. There have been some smaller Canadian lines, but they seem to come and go - or like Ilia, a originally Canadian brand manufactured in the EU, they go big and move their head office to the US.

This is a weird appropriation.

Sesame Street was WGBH Boston - also a gritty city. Part of downtown was literally called the Combat Zone.

The stone facades and steps are very old Boston.

The video of kids playing in the old Copley Square fountain area was unmistakable when I first visited there decades later.

Have you tried any Marcelle products?

My partner and I had a blast watching it.

I wanted both.

But with a truncated 5th season and the very long lead time required for animation, I can see why the animated version ended up being dropped.

This local article and interview with the candidate who defeated Poilievre includes a photo of Poilievre’s former constituency office in his Carleton riding.

One has to wonder about the lack of signage on the actual office and apparent challenges in accessibility.

Le Droit article

Treklit - both comics and books gets short-shrift in promotion.

No idea why, but it’s definitely a longstanding and worsening trend.

We’ll have to see whether David Ellison reorients the scheduling strategically. It’s hard to imagine he will not.

5 years ago, as the transition was happening after the remerger, the demographic statistics I saw showed that CBSAA/P+ had the best range of demographics. And it had the best youth/teen/kids audience after Disney+.

Unlike, NBC Universal’s problem with Peacock and Discovery+, which had two very different demographics with little interest the content the other offered, Paramount+ launched with a broad and diverse base.

But the programming and production choices of the past five years have brutally squandered that. It seems that the millennial, middle age Bro, and older male audience has been the target — live sports, Taylor Sheridan everything etc.

It already feels as though P+ has been reprogrammed to make the current US administration happy, pushing a certain kind of American exceptionalism, but that’s not a successful global business strategy.

It’s really only the content coming in from CBS linear and Star Trek that’s kept the balance on the platform.

We keep hearing about content being produced in Paramount’s South American studios or in agreements with partners in Spain and France, but none of that richness in offerings are making it to the North American platform. Netflix remains dominant in offering high quality content from outside Hollywood.

I agree. The more we see, the more enthusiastic I am.

The concept of an Academy show was in development hell for so long - basically, since the hiatus after Discovery’s first season.

And we know that it was originally kicked around before TNG went into production.

So, this seems to have been a hard one to make work. The cost to produce a high quality VFX-rich show that appeals to a teen and young adult demographic, requires that the show must also be rich enough elements to draw the wider Trek base.

I’m hopeful that, as with Prodigy, Starfleet Academy may be one of the rare shows that satisfies a mass demographic despite the streaming era.

The risk is that, like Prodigy, Paramount may not promote it broadly enough.

However, with A-listers heading the cast, one can hope that it will get a lot of promotion beyond the genre media.

Commodore should be abbreviated to Cmdre (Canadian Navy), CDRE (former US Navy) or CMDE (several including India).

But given all the oddities of NCOs in Trek, this a weird acronym for Commodore seems on-brand.

Still, I think it may be some kind of physicians’ designation the writers came up with. One would expect some kind of Medical Officer such as CMO, but could it be Commanding Doctor or something bizarre like that?

That makes sense. Something like this would need a lot of runway and would involve contractual obligations that could not be easily terminated.