USSBurritoTruck

• Burnham records the stardate as 866274.3 in her personal log.

• Burnham has the recording of the projection of the Progenitor from “The Chase” displayed in her quarters.

• As with season four, it appears that aliens serving Starfleet, specifically the ones whom you would except to have hands notably different from a human’s based on their facial features, wear gloves. Apparently this mandate extends to the admiralty, as we see the Deakohn admiral here covering the shameful monstrosities we can only assume his digits to be.

• In addition to the USS Discovery A and the USS Antares, congregating around Federation Headquarters at various points we see:

    • Three Eisenberg-class starships

    • Two Courage-class starships

    • Two Constitution-class starships

    • Two Merian-class starship

    • Three Friendship-class starship

    • A Saturn-class starship

    • A Mars-class starship

• It’s grudge! From Star Trek!

• We learn that Lyrek is a burial world that was used by the Promellians prior to their extinction. Promellians first appeared in “Booby Trap”.

• ”The last recorded exploration was over a century before Doctor Vellek was even born.” That does potentially raise the question of how Burnham would have been so familiar with Lyrek in the previous episode, though of course she and most of the rest of the Discovery crew might have been alive before Doctor Vellek’s birth.

• Saru reveals that it was Jett Reno who gave him the nickname ”Action Saru,” which only makes the fact that we’ve yet to see Reno this season all the more galling.

• ”I remember the day you came aboard Discovery. A mutineer. A prisoner. You seemed exactly the wrong choice.” Saru seems to be overlooking the fact that he knew Burnham prior to her mutiny and imprisonment, as seen in the series premiere, “The Vulcan Hello”.

• Saru implies to Burnham that she should consider making Book the new first officer on Discovery. Book is not a part of Starfleet or any other similar hierarchical organization. Presumably Saru makes the suggestion so that his own choice of ensign Tilly as his first officer in “Unification III” is no longer the wildest choice of in the history of Starfleet.

    • Presumably Book could be given field commission, as Chakotay was in “The Caretaker”.

• Adira laments being separated from their boyfriend, Gray who almost immediately booked it off Discovery in “But to Connect…” after his consciousness was transferred out of the Tal symbiont and into a synth gollum in “Choose to Live”.

• On Lyrek, Burnham and Saru encounter parts of statues, including heads that have features similar to the Promellian captain whose log was seen in “Booby Trap”, but the statues have four eyes whereas Promellians only have two.

• The Promellian statues launch flying drones that set to attacking Burnham and Saru. The crew of the USS Enterprise D were also attacked in a jungle by the flying drones of a dead civilization in “The Arsenal of Freedom”.

• ”Tilly, we’re losing our foot!” Burnham is referring to a bit of shelter she and Saru have taken cover under. Nog lost an actual food in “The Siege of AR-558”.

• Lang-cycle fusion engines were established as being a feature of Promellian battle cruisers in “Booby Trap”.

• It was established in “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” that Kelpiens are stronger, and faster than humans.

• We’ve previously seen Saru’s quills stab into a wall, or incapacitate a human, but this is the first time we’ve seem them projected with enough force to obliterate a machine.

• The fact that Kelpien visual acuity allows them to see things outside the range available to humans was seen in “Brother”.

• Burnham and Saru both recognise a type of Romulan poem called a revlav. Burnham and Saru also both come from a time in Starfleet’s history when the Romulans were known to the Federation only as a mysterious enemy.

• ”Diary’s Romulan; Federation’s got no claim to it.” it was established in “Unification III” that the Romulans had reunified with the Vulcans at some point during the in the past, and in “All Is Possible” Ni’Var rejoined the Federation.

• Romulan homes having a false front door was established in “The End is the Beginning”.

• Zora uses programmable matter to create a physical copy the symbol from Doctor Vellek’s diary. This physical version is the one seen in the opening sequence this season.

• Book explained that he got his name from his mentor, the previous Cleveland Booker, in “Species Ten-C”, who was also apparently Moll’s father.

    • ”Which, I suppose, makes her the closest thing to family I’ve got left.” Book’s Kwejian family was killed in “Kobayashi Maru”.

• Saru’s pruning knife was a gift from his sister in “The Brightest Star”.

• Saru recounts his experience going through Keplein puberty, vahar’ai, in “An Obal for Charon”.

• Saru told Tilly to avoid touching the swampkelp while it was in bloom in “Choose to Live”.

This is the premiere of the fifth and final season of “Star Trek Discovery”, the first iteration of Trek’s modern era. I think it is important in this moment to acknowledge that, regardless of individual opinions of quality the series -- personally I am a fan, but this is not about my personal perspective -- without DIS we would not have the abundance of new Trek available to us.

With that acknowledgement aside, on with the very serious business.

• This episode is the first mention of the titular Red Directive. Starfleet has a number of directives most recognizable of which is the Prime Directive, introduced in “Return of the Archons”, which codifies interactions with non Federation cultures, and their principles of non-interference. There is also:

    • The Temporal Prime Directive forbidding interference with historical events, first mentioned in “Future’s End, Part II”

    • The Omega Directive, dictating the necessity of destroying any and all omega particles that might be encountered during the course of Starfleet activities, introduced in “The Omega Directive”

• This episode was written by DIS co-showrunner, Michelle Paradise, and directed by executive producer, Olatunde Osunsanmi.

• The episode opens with Captain Burnham [Sonequa Martin-Green] on the exterior of a ship at warp. We’ve previously seen characters outside ships traveling faster than light in “Divergence” and “Mindwalk”.

• The crew of the USS Discovery A attends a Millennium Celebration commemorating 1,000 years of the Federation. The Federation was founded in 2161, as per “These Are the Voyages…” and this episode takes place, presumably, in 2191. The cadet serving the signature cocktail, Tonic 2161, does comment ”Give or take a few decades,” when Tilly [Mary Wiseman] explains to Adira [Blu del Barrio] the context for the drink.

    • Tonic 2161 is blue with stars floating in it to match the emblem of the Federation emblem.

    • Ross claims the stars taste like jumja sticks, a Bajoran treat first seen in “A Man Alone”. Bajor has, to the best of our knowledge, not been inducted into the Federation at any point.

• Stamets [Anthony Rapp] is upset because Starfleet is “shuttering the spore drive program.” In season four, the program’s lead scientist used a stolen prototype to attempt to reach Species 10-C and kill them with an illegal weapon.

• A prototype pathway drive was mentioned as having been installed aboard the USS Voyager J in “Kobayashi Maru”.

• President T’Rina mentions the Tholian Republic and Breen Imperium as polities outside the current Federation, and seems to imply they’re antagonistic if not hostile to the Federation. The Tholian Assembly was introduced in the TOS episode “The Tholian Web”, and the Breen Confederacy was mentioned in “Strange Bedfellows”.

• The 800 year old Romulan science vessel is an update of the Romulan ship seen in “The Next Phase”.

• When L’ak removes his helmet, there is a brief moment where his face appears to be non opaque, not entirely dissimilar from how Changelings are see through in the natural state, or Mellanoid slime worms, such as Murf.

    • L’ak is played by Elias Toufexis, who previously had a role DIS season one’s “Context is for Kings” as one of the other prisoners aboard the transport shuttle rescued by Discovery along with Burnham. He never asked for this.

• Antares is a well loved name for Starfleet vessels:

    • Antares, NCC-501 - “Charlie X”

    • USS Antares - A ship both Captain Pike and Number One served aboard, according to “Brother” and “Memento Mori” respectively

    • USS Antares, NCC-9844, Miranda-class - “Favor the Bold”

    • A Kelvin Universe USS Antares - 2009’s “Star Trek”

    • In addition there are also three different Antares-class ships: one used by the Corvallens in “Face of the Enemy”; a carrier used by both Cardassians and Bajorans, introduced in “Ensign Ro”; a civilian freighter like Kasidy Yates’ SS Xhosa first seen in “Family Business”.

• There are new aspects integrated into the title sequence. For the purposes of this comparison I’ll be mentioning changes from specifically the season four sequence. Such as:

    • A rotating planet with two moons has replaced the visualization of Zora’s program

    • The captain’s chair appears earlier in the sequence

    • A 3d representation of a symbol from a Romulan journal is shown

    • The Infinity Room key appears, replacing an exploded planet, and Discovery approaching the DMA

    • Book’s unnamed ship is replaced with Moll and L’ak’s

    • A number of rotating structures are now at the very end where there used to be a long range view of the DMA

• Burnham, Owosekun, and Rhys find the mummified corpse of a Romulan wearing a TNG era uniform.

    • We will learn that this Romulan was Doctor Vellek, a scientist present for the events of the TNG episode, “The Chase”.

• Burnham is able to grasp her phaser pistol, and stretch it out into a type-3 configuration. It’s unclear what advantage the transformation has. Other than Boimler’s assertion that, ”Uh, they take two hands,” from “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”.

• Moll [Eve Harlow] and L’ak have a Romulan puzzle box, a tan zhekran, when Burnham confronts them. This puzzle box is larger than the one Narek had in “The Impossible Box”, and has more sides.

• When we see the Antares, it has the saucer of a Friendship-class starship, and the nacelles of Merian-class, both first seen in “People of Earth”.

• ”I would rather not die out here, I’ve got a saxophone lesson to get to.” Harry Kim took up playing the sax in “Ashes to Ashes”.

• Captain Rayner [Callum Keith Rennie] is a Kellerun, which have only previously been seen in the DS9 episode, “Armageddon Game”. I mention this only because Rayner lacks the somewhat distinctive topknot that all the men of his species styled their hair in in that episode.

• Book [David Ajala] has been helping refugees displaced by the DMA rebuild, as per the community service he was sentenced to in “Coming Home”.

• ”It’s like what it means to be a crew. I can’t crash all these kids on to an ice moon in order to teach them that.” Tilly is referring to the events of “All Is Possible”

• Fred is a synth with skin, eyes, and hair presumably inspired by Data. Or Lore? Or B4.

• Among the gear Moll and L’ak attempt to sell to Fred are:

    • Isolinear co-processors

    • PADDs

    • Tricorders

    • Self-sealing stembolts

• Fred claims to have not encountered a tan zhekran for 622.7 years, which would indicate he’s been functional since at least the mid 26th century.

• The script in the journal contained in the puzzle box is different from the Romulan language seen in TNG and other Star Trek shows and movies of that era; it was introduced into canon in “Absolute Candor” but was created in 1993 by linguist Trent Peherson who is credited in this episode as a language consultant.

• Fred has a number of weapons on display in his place of business, including:

    • A Klingon kur’leth as seen in “Disengage”

    • A d’k tahg,

    • A Klingon bat’leth of the type introduced in “The Vulcan Hello”

    • A TNG era Romulan disruptor pistol

    • A “First Contact” type-3 phaser rifle

• Book and Burnham are able to rent some sand bikes. The bikes have shields capable of protecting the rider from ship based weaponry, which probably has to reduce the deposit, right?

• Stamets determines that Fred’s serial number begins with AS as an homage to Altan Soong, and claims that Fred was based on Altan Soong’s designs, not Noonien Soong, despite the resemblance to Data.

• In Kovich’s quarters, he brings explains the basic plot of ‘The Chase’, and brings up stills from that episode featuring the Romulans, Captain Picard, and the Progenitor.

Sisko and Shaw in a single comic? Can one story really contain that much animosity towards Picard for what happened at Wolf 359?

I just finished the "USS Cerritos Crew Handbook" by Chris Farnell, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The book is formatted to be exactly what the title says, a handbook for new crew, specifically lower deckers, joining the Cerritos. It's a new update being written by Boimler with entries from several other members of the crew. Except it's presented as being a shared document with editing notes -- mostly from Mariner and Boimler -- as well as entries written by Mariner who hacked Boimler's password after he did not ask her to contribute.

It's almost certainly the closest thing we've gotten to the "TNG Technical Manual" in this new era of Trek production, even though it's more about the duties and responsibilities of the a junior officer aboard the Cerritos, and the closest thing to technical information in the book is Rutherford's entry on different tools and what the various coloured stripes on the tricorders mean. There is a complete MSD for the Cerritos, but the writing is too small for my old man eyes.

There's a lot of jokes, referencing other Trek productions, as well as LDecks. I think Farnell does a good job capturing the voices of the characters he's portraying here. My only gripe is that Shaxs, my favourite character, was a bit off. Unfortunately, I believe all the art -- and to be clear, the thing is mostly pictures -- is stills from the show or promotional material, with nothing original to the book.

Anyways! It's a fun book that can easily be read through in a single sitting. I'd recommend if it you're looking for something to to enjoy while waiting for season five.

Yesterday a friend and I got together to play board games, including and we both got our first opportunity to play the Star Trek: Away Missions tactical miniatures board game published by Gale Force 9.

So, let's talk about it!

Concept:

Away Missions is a tactical miniatures game, themed around dustbuster clubs being sent into the wreckage in the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359, to recover intel. The base game comes with a Starfleet away team made up of Riker, Shelby, Data, and Worf, and Locutus' Borg Unimatrix featuring Locutus himself and five drones.

There are also four expansions currently:
    • Gowon and three other Klingon warriors
    • Sela and four person Romulan infiltration team
    • The Duras sisters with three other Klingons
    • Picard, Doctor Crusher, Troi, Geordi, and Wesley

Each dustbuster club has it's own unique set of core missions to choose from, and then each faction has additional missions that can be performed during the game as well.
 

Components:

• The assimilated elephant in the room for a lot of people is probably going to be the miniatures. The design of them is very stylized and cartoonish; large heads and chucky bodies. Personally I like them the design, but I've seen plenty of people talking about the game saying that the miniatures are too great a stumbling block for them. To each their own.

I do think the miniature design makes the characters fairly distinctive. They come unpainted, but for the Starfleet characters at least, it would have been very difficult to confuse which one was which. Despite each sculpt having a unique pose and details, the Borg drones are a bit more difficult to tell apart. Each miniature has the character's name in raised letters on the back, but it isn't the easiest thing to read.

• In addition to miniatures, each character had a cardboard sheet representing their abilities, including little holes to accommodate the health pegs. These seem pretty good, if perhaps a bit larger than necessary. The modular board for the game already takes up quite a bit of table real estate, so it would be nice if if these character sheets were a bit smaller.

• The plastic health pegs I mentioned are fine, and kind of a neat weigh to implement health tracking in the game. The only complaint would be that while the rules do talk about playing up to four players, there's not enough pegs to accommodate that many characters. The expansion boxes don't come with extra pegs for the new characters, either.

• The various cardboard tokens are...fine. I like that they're not inexplicably in the shape of Starfleet deltas or what have you like some other Trek board games, but most of them are just a bit of cardboard with a word on it. Purely functional, and it would nice to have it spiced up a little bit.

• Each faction has two decks of cards: missions and support. The card backs for the decks feature of their faction's emblem, so you can place them beside one another to make the whole. That's neat. The cards are readable and the language on all the ones I looked at was fairly clear. I've never been a fan of using stills from movie or television show as art in a game, but I understand why game publishers do it with licenced products.

• The board is modular and double sided, so you can get different configurations of either a Starfleet ship or a Borg cube to run around on. Everything looks good, though by its nature, the details on the cube do seem to blend together.
 

Rules:

So, full disclosure, I forgot to put the rulebook back in the box after scanning through them, and thus when we got to play, we were using the quickstart document, and an online pdf on my phone. That meant a lot of encountering a situation and trying to look it up on a tiny screen, so I know we made mistakes while playing. Probably more than usual for a first time game.

The quickstart document is not, in my opinion, sufficient for learning the game. There is important information left out, and I think that a condensed version of the rules should at least have the basics of play.

The full rulebook wastes a bunch of space with three pages of fiction setting up the backstory of how an engineer on the USS Ahwahnee developed some weapons modifications to fight the Borg at Wolf 359, but she was killed by a hull breach before she was able to implement them. I suppose it's nice to get a bit of a backstory, but for this sort of game, it really doesn't seem necessary.

Anyways, the full rules seem pretty well laid out. There was never a moment where I had a question that I couldn't find the answer to.
 

Gameplay:

• It's a tactical miniatures game, so that means moving figures around the board and getting into fights. Though something I liked about this game is that combat was not the primary driver, at least not for the core missions we choose. I, as the Starfleet player, was trying to repair the ship, and my Borg opponent was attempting to assimilate it, and we got points for actions that furthered those goals.

• The line of sight rules for the game are somewhat simplified compared to other tactical miniatures games I've played, in that if a character can see into a room where an opponent character is, they can see the opponent character. You can't get cover from being positioned behind a corner or anything like that.

• There is a "take cover" action though, so it's not as though characters need to be standing in the clear for anyone to assault them (though we never actually used the action); it's just not a function of the miniature positioning.

• We played with the pre-built starter decks, but both the decks you have for your away team are customizable. I didn't cycle cards a lot even though you can always discard unwanted cars a the start of a round.

• Attacks and skill tests to complete objectives are done with dice pools of d6s. For attacks and opposed skill tests, both players involved roll dice and compare values in descending order. If one player is rolling more dice than the other, all dice that don't have something to compare against don't count, and that's disappointing.

• The game comes with a cardboard tacker to arrange the dice for comparison, and it seems somewhat extraneous. We stopped using it because we're adults who can compare results on a die without needing to line them up in a bit of cardboard.

• The game lasts for three rounds, and then it's done. Which is not particularly climatic if I'm being honest. Both players compare the number points they've scored between mission cards and their core mission, and who ever has the most points wins, even if all their characters have been incapacitated.
 

Conclusion:

I enjoyed the game quite a lot once we started to find a rhythm to the gameplay. I'm very curious to get the other away teams on the board, especially the Duras Sisters.

I also might attempt my first foray into mini-painting with these figures. Probably gonna start with the Borgs.

Components: 9/10
Rules: 7/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 8/10

• The episode title is a reference to the spaghetti western, “A Few Dollars More”.

    • “A Few Dollars More” was the sequel to “A Fistful of Dollars” which TNG referenced with title of season six’s “A Few Datas More”.

    • Badgey as introduced in “Terminal Provocations”. Jack McBrayer reprises the role here.

• The Kalla system was first seen in “Firstborn”, and it’s where the USS Cerritos fought the Pakled clumpship “No Small Parts”.

    • Here we see Drookmani scavengers collecting Rutherford’s lost implant. We already saw this happening at the end of “The Stars at Night”, but the scene ended before revealing it was the Drookmani collecting the implant.

• The Drookmani captain is voiced by Fred Tatasciore, the actor who voices Shaxs.

• The Droomani lower decker is voiced by Paul Scheer, the actor who voices Billups.

• The bisected circle emblem on the Bynar ship as also seen on the high tech fanny packs the Bynars wore in “11001001”, as well as this episode.

• The Bynars are speaking in the language we heard in “11001001”, and we see their text shown a display, also from that episode.

• While we never saw a Bynar ship in any previous iteration of Trek, I did think it worth pointing out that they are a species where two individuals are linked and act in unison, and here we see what would be a single captain’s chair on almost any other species’ ship is actually a loveseat, occupied by two Bynar.

• The Mysterious Threat adds the Bynar ship to it’s collection.

• Badgey appears to be controlling the Drookmani who salvaged him via glowing cybernetic implants, which immediately invokes the Borg. It also makes me think, however, of the fact that after having been beamed into space in “Datalore”, we learn in “Brothers” that Lore was rescued by Pakleds.

• Rutherford has outfitted the Sequoia shuttle with a grappler. The NX-01 Enterprise was equipped with grapplers as seen “Broken Bow”, and so were its shuttlepods, which we saw in “Similitude”.

    • Boimler expressed excitement over the NX-01’s grapplers in “Those Old Scientists”, as did La’an.

• The Daystrom Institute was first mentioned in “The Measure of a Man”, and is named for Richard Daystrom from “The Ultimate Computer”.

    • The view of the Daystrom Institute is recreated from the PIC episode, “Remembrance”.

    • The Daystrom Institute’s Self-Aware Megalomaniacal Computer Storage room was first seen in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”.

• Peanut Hamper was introduced in “No Small Parts” and given over to the custody of the Daystrom Institute in “A Mathematically Perfect Redemption”.

    • Peanut Hamper is played by Kether Donohue.

• AGIMUS was introduced in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”, where we also saw him placed in Daystrom Institute custody.

    • AGIMUS is portrayed by Jeffery Combs, who has played a number of roles across DS9, VOY, and ENT, including:

       • Tiron - “Meredion”

       • Penk - “Tsunkatse”

       • Krem - “Acquistion”

• Lord Tyrannikillicus was first seen in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie” and is voiced by Shaxs’ voice actor, Fred Tatasciore.

• We saw AGIMUS’ drones in “Where Pleasant Fountains Lie”, but only depicted in a mural on a world he had conquered, or in a fantasy he had; this is the first we’ve seen an actual drone.

• AGIMUS states the Mysterious Threat’s attack on the Bynar ship occurred on stardate 58934.9.

• The Drookmani ship is outfitted with a number of canons. In “Terminal Provocations”, the first episode to depict the Drookmani, their ship has no weapons at all, and uses a tractor beam to throw space junk at the Cerritos.

• ”Almost as noble as the time you snapped my [beep]ing neck!” Badgey is still upset about the events of “Terminal Provocations” when Rutherford had to ”kill” him in order to save his and Tendi’s lives.

• Rutherford’s hug causes Badgey to split into two separate entities, one of whom is named Goodgey. In “The Enemy Within”, Captain Kirk was separated into his good and evil halves.

    • Perhaps worth noting that Goodgey is silver, similar to the combadges worn by the Cerritos crew.

    • Badgey also splits off his logical aspect in Logic-y. Spock dreamed about being split into his human and Vulcan halves in “Spock Amok”.

• ”This stuff is great! All we have on Orion are, like, sharp little pebbles.” It as established in “Second Contact” that there is no sand on Orion.

    • It was also established that sand gives Boimler a rash, but he doesn’t mention it here.

• Tendi is barefoot in this scene in Ecuador.. Unrelated, this scene is also lifted directly from the pitch for the proposed Quentin Tarrantino Trek film that was being talked about back in 2017.

• ”Do you guys want to take a root beer float break?” Root beer is like the Federation, so bubbly and cloying and happy. It’s insidious.

• The EMH used neurazine gas to incapacitate the Romulans who’d hijacked the USS Prometheus in “Message in a Bottle”.

• The Tyrus VIIA research station was seen in “A Quality of Life”. It’s where the Exocomps were created by Doctor Farallon and developed sentience.

    • The interior of the Tyrus VIIA research station is recreated from “A Quality of Life”.

• Badgey develops a plan to travel at warp 9.9 and transfer himself across subspace to the entire Federation. In “Threshold” we learned that an object traveling at warp 10 exists at all points of the universe simultaneously.

• We are introduced to Peanut Hamper’s father, Kevin. In “No Small Parts” Peanut Hamper declared that the only reason she joined Starfleet was to upset Kevin.

• Among the Federation material we see Badgey infect are:

    • A subspace relay which appears to be identical to the “ancient space capsule” the USS Enterprise D located in “The Neutral Zone” which contained three surviving humans from 20th century Earth who had been cryogenically frozen.

    • The Cerritos

    • The USS Vancouver where we see Barbra Brinson from “Cupid’s Errant Arrow”

    • The VCF Sh’vhal from “wej Duj”, commanded by Sokel

    • Starbase 25, first mentioned in “The Slaver Weapon” and seen in “An Embarrassment of Dooplers”

    • Deep Space 9 from DS9

    • Douglass Station which was introduced in “Second Contact”

• Badgey, now all powerful, turns a light blue tone, and exists simultaneously across his past, present and future. He departs to an empty dimension to create a universe.

    • Badgey expresses that he has become tired of Earth. These people. Being caught in the tangle of their lives. Also, for some reason he now has human genitals fully visible on screen.

    • Badgey ascends as O’Connor did in “Moist Vessel”; he has six arms, and the outline of a great bird appears around him, with three circles at its head. He says he might hang out with the Q Continuum, introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint” or check out the Black Mountain, which Shaxs told Rutherford of in “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris”. As he ascends, we see he is travelling towards the Koala. Why is it smiling? What does it know?