The contemplative and slower tone of the coda really highlighted what was lost in switching to shorter seasons with a long serialized arc to babysit. Imagine if we had those arcs but with a handful of bottle episodes peppered throughout.

I wonder if they cut down the Moll resolution a bit to make room for the series wrap up. It did feel a bit abrupt.

I totally called Kovich being a time traveler, but them folding him into Daniels was a neat surprise, and felt like a naturally revelation. "Oh, of course he's bloody Daniels." It expanded both characters without diminishing their mystery at all.

Knowing that Calypso was meant to be the whole focus of season 6 is a hard blow, though. We'll likely never get that story now. I'm glad they were able to at least tie it firmly back to the show, but man, it would have been fun to see how it played out. Why does Kovich need this Craft, and why does it require the ship to be de-refitted? Maybe now that the show is done they'll give it a proper continuation in novel form. One can only hope.

This is an excellent distillation of what makes Tilly great. Imho she's the best written character across the board in any Trek of the past two decades. I missed her sorely in season 4.

It's definitely a a nice nod to the character. If bar patrons 600 years later still get the reference, that speaks well of her lasting influence on the Federation.

I don't really see it with Paris, but I've often thought Anthony Rapp and Alan Tudyk should play brothers in something.

I suspect if social media has been what it is now when Edison or Jobs were alive, they might have self-immolated just as badly as Musk has. Both of them were by all accounts terrible people who history paints as visionaries because the force of their personalities gave them the weight of the innovations which occurred under their watch. Taking credit for the achievements of your underlings and business partners is a long tradition across many industries.

People in the future got it wrong, that's all. It happens more often than most of us want to admit.

Uh, my dude, literally the entire industry knew about him for decades before anybody managed to take him down, and they all did nothing. In their inaction they further hurt his victims, and allowed him to victimize others while they looked the other way. That's just as bad if not worse.

No, see, you're not allowed to do takesies backsies. Once you screw up (or people think you did) you're canceled forever.

/s needed because some people actually think this way

face-saving

Talk about poor choice of words.

That's the whole point, isn't it? We shouldn't cherry-pick living figures as something that future people should universally loathe, because there are many, many examples of historical figures whose loathsomeness they (and we) also gloss over.

Kirk and crew traveled back in time to our own past on multiple occasions, ipso facto the Kelvin timeline split causes ripples both directions in time.

Subtle reminder that our own culture still repeats the lie that Edison "invented the lightbulb" and teaches children about how Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin revolutionized the American textile industry without mentioning how it also created a massive boom in demand for enslaved labor. And we all tend to ignore the fact that Einstein was a serial adulterer and a monster to his first wife, or that James Watson was a racist ass. Steve Jobs was by all accounts a terrible person and died because of his belief in quackery, but his contribution to tech history will outlast those footnotes. Henry Ford was one of the worst humans on the planet, but he changed the course of the manufacturing industry forever, and he gets credit for that in spite of him being a huge piece of shit.

The overall effects of Elon Musk's contributions to the culture have yet to be fully litigated, but his influence on the direction of private space travel is undeniable, and is probably the one thing about him that will outlive him, especially with regard to a space-oriented future society like the Federation. To them, his idiotic and toxic antics on Twitter/X/whatever-dumb-shit-he-renames-it-to-next are probably a long-forgotten historical footnote.

Sure, we expect the enlightened future of Star Trek to be better with its historical revisionism, but the personalities of famous innovators or self-proclaimed luminaries often fade into obscurity while the lasting consequences of their influence remains. People on Star Trek are meant to be an idealized version of what we strive for, but they are far from perfect, and the veil of history often obscures the ugly truth of how society-shifting change often comes about.

First Contact touches on this very topic by portraying the legendary Zephram Cochrane as a philandering drunk who lets his colleague Lily Sloane do much of the hard work while he gets all the credit.

History is messy and posterity doesn't always get it right.

I wonder if they ginned these up for Section 31 or Starfleet Academy (if that's still a thing?) and figured they could use them here, similar to the First Contact uniforms being ported over to DS9.

I really think they just overplayed their hand, and he really did overdose by accident - or because he thought it was the only way for Moll to get away. I don't believe either of them are basing a strategem on the Progenitor tech actually being able to resurrect him, but Moll is desperate now, so she's willing to believe it might work because it's the only hope she has left.

I don't think Reno was referencing The Littles, as she referred to the treasure hunt as sounding like something out of a holonovel "for the littles". Unless there's something specific in Peterson's stories relating directly to this, I'm pretty sure it was just a cutesy way of saying "for little kids".

Thanks for making these posts every week. I come here after every episode to see what references I missed.

The focus is more on Burnham and her belief in personal connection, not the crew and their own piccadillos. Discovery has always been first and foremost the story of Michael Burnham, like it or not. Docking it for what it is not and has never attempted to be isn't really valid criticism.

In that episode more time had passed, and Zora never mentions the crew by name, so the crew she was waiting for to return might have been replacements who never arrived.

Would have been funny to bring fellow Cylon Landry back and have Rayner say "wait do I know you?"

Also, what is dragging him along with Burnham and Rayner, while the consciousnesses of everyone else are presumably unaware of the jumps? Come to think of it what's the point of the Time Bug if nobody involved is usually aware of it? Is the jumping just a side effect of the ship being "frozen" in time?