Oh, I really enjoyed Llewellyn, too! I think it’s sometimes overlooked that these early revival seasons had excellent casting for minor roles as well. This actor just sells his excited, flustered engineer immediately, you are genuinely happy for him and his Mars probe making it (and then clearly not making it after all) 😄

Where did he get the blood? Probably from a colleague, maybe even Sally. Scientists aren’t too bothered about proper procedures sometimes. Carl Sagan’s wife did most of the artwork for the Pioneer plaques, just some convenient nepotism to get it done on time.

Edited to add:

Harriet Jones, prime minister

Yes, we know who she is.

Somehow, the news that Looney Labs are reprinting Star Trek Fluxx made me unreasonably happy. And honestly, Lower decks is a perfect fit for the game.

They probably could, technically speaking. The “audio clip show” episode they did on Prodigy felt a little graverobber-y, though. I loved seeing Spock and Odo again, even in animated form, but I thought the archival restrictions on the dialogue emphasised that.

On the other hand, I would spit bile at any attempt to “reanimate” (ie, deepfake) late actors on the show. It was creepy when Star wars did it with Peter Cushing, and it’s the same now, with “genAI”.

One exception IMO might be Majel Barrett. As I understand it, she consented before her passing to having her voice and speech patterns digitised for such a purpose. Somehow, it would be fitting for her to always be the voice of Trek computers ❤️

Geez, those Ferengi vendettas go darker than the show let me believe.

This just proves my theory that Star trek and cake has a special connection.

😭 Not Rom!

Oh hell yes for Louise Fletcher…!

Well, TOS was 110-115 years prior in-universe, and I guess Kirk and Spock would be fairly legendary by the time of LDS.

Fun fact, Spock would canonically still be around during LDS; it’s only 5 years after the series finale that he prevents the Romulus supernova from taking out a large part of the galaxy, and inadvertently causes the Kelvin timeline. But I guess with Nimoy’s passing they didn’t want to cameo Spock on the animated show. Accept no substitutes!

It’s jarring if you only know him for his cool-headed leader or mentor roles like Picard or professor Xavier… He really lets rip as this extremist POS.

Ha, sometimes even the production crew suffer from the Mandela effect 😆

I honestly don’t recall. You’d think that sort of thing would be etched onto your memory 😬

It would be easy to just gesture vaguely at all of Sir Patrick Stewart’s career. But your question was about better performances than in Trek, and I actually think he did an excellent Picard during the original TNG run. Not quite a hot take, I know.

However, for a double off-Trek billing, I suggest Green room (2015) where he plays against Anton Yelchin among others. It’s a pretty taut little thriller about a punk band on the road that realise to their horror that their gig for the night is at a neonazi club out in the sticks. It goes downhill from there.

And Re-animator, and Castle freak. He has a very good track record in a certain subset of horror movies!

Ooh, I forgot the Arthur Dent mention! And that reminds me why the Sycorax ship feels so uncanny: it “hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”. 🙂

I did watch this over the weekend, and it’s a banger of a start for David Tennant. Even if he spends a great deal of the special asleep.

First thing I noticed doesn’t have any bearing on the episode: producer Phil Collinson is credited as “Phil Collision”, which I guess is his rave DJ alter ego. This was the '00s, after all.

We see the debut of two tropes that will recur through RTD christmas specials: a murderous Santa band, and Slade’s “Merry Xmas everybody”. One is a cool idea that only happened once more, in “The runaway bride”, and the other is a terrible novelty song that might’ve been put to rest after one outing. Ugh, Slade.

The Sycorax are quite terrifying, they feel more at home in a Conan setting than Doctor Who, with their skull helmets, “blood magic” and swords, and that janky looking ship that has the air of an ancient desert stronghold. And if that wasn’t enough to sell the episode, having a third of Earth’s population sleepwalk onto the nearest roof or precipice is a haunting image.

Jackie’s neighbour Jason is Paul Anderson from Peaky blinders, BTW. A rare occasion of “where did I see that Who actor before?” where the answer isn’t Game of thrones.

For the first half of the special, I’m really on board with the Doctor-less narrative. Jackie, Mickey and Rose work so well together, trying to survive christmas like any family. And Harriet Jones is set up as a capable leader with a human side — we know what they say about “too good to be true”, but I actually rooted for Harriet all the way up to her call with Torchwood.

I think this must be the first mention of Torchwood? So what are Harriet and the general referring to, about the institute having lost a third of its staff? Maybe it’s just the third that’s on the roof at the moment.

Rose and the Doctor, though… It’s hard to revisit this episode, knowing what lies ahead. Not because I nurse some parasocial romance for their arc, quite the contrary. I find the while thing pompous and tedious at the same time, and even more so with every return of Billie Piper to the show.

There is a better, hypothetical version of the show, where the Doctor (and really RTD) just let go of Rose after “Doomsday”. No dimension-hopping, gun-toting return in season four, only maybe the 50th anniversary bit as the Moment (although that really only makes sense if they’d landed Eccleston instead of Hurt), but definitely no dumb, faux-regeneration cliffhanger after Gatwa’s exit.

But it all starts here. “ENOUGH WITH THE F—KING FLIRTING,” I shouted at the screen on this rewatch. “The christmas invasion” does set the template for the rest of the Tennant run. Good to terrific stories, with an insistently humdrum romantic subplot.

And to the point of Morn’s lifespan, another mention from Memory Alpha:

In 2401, “Morn of Luria” was identified as a known associate of the Ferengi Sneed in his Starfleet Criminal Record.

That’s a reference to the latter half of Picard season 3, and suggests that Morn was still hustling (and probably alive) some 20 years after his LDS appearance 🙂

I know, it messes with viewers’ minds that LDS is actually set in the later end of the 1990s shows’ timeframe. According to Memory Alpha,

The show’s time period is described as the Star Trek: The Next Generation-era, more specifically 2380, after Star Trek Nemesis.

LDS begins just a couple of years after Voyager returned to Earth!

Did Morn lose his last hairs since DS9 ended? That latinum poisoning really ages a Lurian.

He doesn’t exactly need to be immortal. This only takes place six years after DS9 ended, both Kira and Quark are still around. Of course, Quark did have that hologram installed, so you never know if Morn took that day off to visit his mother.

It most certainly is/isn’t (but also a celery).