Value Subtracted
Have you ever considered that the Prime Directive is not only not ethical, but also illogical, and perhaps morally indefensible?
No sitting PM wants to be seen spending millions on “their” house, and costs have skyrocketed thanks to decades of neglect.
On top of that, the house itself doesn’t really meet the needs of the role, and both the house and grounds are considered inadequate from a security perspective.
I like the Circle trilogy - the Bajoran government being unstable is a fun element to those early seasons.
It’s a shame Shakaar was such a dud of a character, and the series sort of lost interest in the Bajoran civilian government as the Dominion and Kai Winn started to take up all the oxygen in the series.
Singling out the bit that’s most interesting to me:
When Cryptic passed the mantle to us folks here at DECA, one of the things we discussed internally and something we felt, and continue to feel, very strongly about was the importance of continuing their legacy - and this means concluding the current story arc in such a way as to remain true to Al Rivera and Paul Reed’s vision of what that story was about. Fortunately, we’ve benefitted from a continuing collaboration with the remaining Cryptic staff, utter professionals like Thomas Marrone and Jeremy Randall (and many others!), who have been indispensable in ensuring we understood what that previous vision was and the primary beats required to do it justice.
The fundamental challenge here was, of course, to get our heads around a game with such a deep, intricate and long-lived history, with so much STO-specific lore. So lots of research and lots of discussions to tease out the nuanced detail. The only significant change we made was to introduce one additional episode into the current arc, which we felt was required to fully explore the epic story arc that we have inherited.
“The well” is a double sequel.
I’ll get even more tenuous and say that the echoes of “The Impossible Planet”/“The Satan Pit” are very strong, if only because of the “unspeakable horror at the bottom of a mining shaft” imagery.
Shaya is a Doctor stand-in
Agreed. Though I assumed her reference to “monsters” was about having grown up in some kind of war-without-end hellscape. But maybe it’ll come back around.
There is a real deep genre reference to all of the episode
I don’t have much to say about genre tropes, but is “State of Decay” a good one? I don’t think I’ve heard of it.
It’s so weird to hear it referred to as “Netflix series” in the American trades…
In any case, I’ve been meaning to check it out. The buzz has been positive, and CBC has been promoting the hell out of it.