It wasn’t the shock baton that came to mind, rather the TNG episode where Lwaxana figures out that the fish-alien diplomats are frauds and spies. Lwaxana’s telepathic insights could be distracted, but not for long.
Even Deanna Troi, a less powerful empath, was able to survive alone undercover on a Romulan ship.
Of course there would be Betazoid Intelligence officers embedded in the Federation diplomatic core.
Once again, Lower Decks is the show that takes things to their logical conclusion.
Not sure that it blew minds that much as much of its core audience would have seen two great submarine movies - ‘The Enemy Below’ (1957) & ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ (1958).
The episode takes and translates the submarine warfare and beats of these these movies into a space setting. It’s still marvellous television.
Recommend both of the movies BTW if you can find them.
I’m not sure that they would want to give that much of a spoiler for Coda, or may be like many of us and decide that we’d rather pretend it didn’t exist.
I think Mack, Swallow and Ward are super writers, and understand why they thought Coda was needed, but it’s brutal.
I really appreciate how Goldsman and Myers have taken a sibling who was only ever seen or referred to in TOS in order to drive James’ T’s anger, and turned him into a three dimensional character that we value in his own right.
Credit also to Dan Jeanotte for a consistently great and subtle performance.
In addition to the STLV group guide, Inhave found the flowchart created and maintained by the Trek Collective super helpful.
Here’s a screenshot of the current version to give you a sense of it. Suggest bookmarking the link embedded above.
The Fall ‘event sequence’ crossover is quite late in the Relaunch novelverse. It pays off some storylines that had been building for quite awhile.
I didn’t jump in that late, but still found it better to jump quite a ways back to where the Relaunch took off between the later TNG movies Insurrection and Nemesis.
One doesn’t have to read everything, as there are definitely some core books and ‘event sequences.’
Most Relaunch fans consider the two David Mack books in the TNG ‘A Time to …’ series (A Time to Kill & A Time to Heal) as key foundations, then Keith DeCandido’s ‘Articles of the Federation’ set after Riker takes command of Titan in ‘Taking Wing.’
Mack’s Destiny trilogy is fantastic and is the pivot point of the Relaunch novels. DeCandido’s ‘A Singular Destiny’ then bridges to set up the Typhon Pact sequence.
Who better to be a foil for a Vulcan trying to button down and gain the respect of Vulcan Exploratory leadership than a bunch of Betazoids who know what T’Lyn’s feeling and have no patience with her attempts to cover up with logic?
@gaghyogi49@tenforward.social has this covered.
See his post.
It looks like the Orion alphabet and language has a one-to-one correlation with English, just for laughs.
“Weird is our business,” sayeth Janeway.
I would love to see the Breen taken on seriously, and had hoped they were the big bad in Picard S3. This doesn’t have the feel of them at all though.
Perhaps Matalas can take a lead out of the Relaunch novelverse Typhon Pact books and give us some serious Breen machinations.
There seems to be quite a few of us who are Treklit fans here, just not quite enough to start a separate community.
I do my best to encourage those unfamiliar to get into the novelverse.