VindictiveJudge

I was thinking maybe a seahorse kind of thing.

I dunno, having Yar's baby momma show up and drop off a kid would have been a challenge to write in the late 80s / early 90s.

It's always been both, just with our current problems offloaded to aliens for scrutinization. That they're no longer using aliens for commentary is the problem.

Something I would have liked to have seen is Vidiians being assimilated by choice on the basis that being part of the Collective had to be better than suffering from the Phage. Instead of them just being enemies, they should have really leaned into how horrible it would be to live with that plague hanging over their heads. It's also implied in an episode or two that there are uninfected populations somewhere, probably under quarantine, which would have been interesting to explore.

I'm still impressed McNeill was able to say, "Yes, ma'am, his army of evil," with a straight face.

There are actually differences in the Prime and Kelvin timelines that happened before Nero's incursion. For instance, Kirk's date of birth is off by several months. They tried to justify that afterwards by saying something about the event sending shockwaves through time to change things before it even happened or something like that. The real reason probably lies in that interview where JJ Abrams admitted he never liked Star Trek, but you could argue that the removal of various down-stream time travel events, like the events of "The City on the Edge of Forever" likely not happening in the modified timeline, could actually cause retroactive changes to the timeline.

But anyway, the Kelvin timeline already diverges before the Kelvin-Narada thing, because reasons.

Seriously, does anyone know about the update settings? It's not hard to make Win10 not try to update while you're using it.

Just a reminder that she didn't actually explain why she was tearing up a picture of the Pope, she just pulled out a picture of him and tore it up without context. Nobody understood wtf was happening.

Tough little model.

That's not new. Turbolifts on the Discovery were depicted that way pre-refit, back in the TOS-ish era. It's a (mind-boggling) stylistic choice or something.

That phaser is shockingly detailed for its size.

and they certainly treated specific items as “valuable” (historical items, weapons, and especially liquor.)

Historical items definitely have non-monetary value. They can't truly be replaced since, no matter how accurate the replica, only the one chair will be the Enterprise-A's captain's chair, for example. Replicators have software restrictions on what you can make with them, so you can't just replicate weapons under normal circumstances, which creates scarcity and gives them value. Starfleet replicators also seem to be restricted from creating alcohol, which means most of the characters we see can only get it on shore leave, which also creates scarcity and therefor value. Alcohol is probably significantly less scarce when sourced through civilian replicators. The ones on DS9 are programmed with Starfleet's restrictions, though.