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like..."anxiety" is more than just response to predators, animals get stressed when they are in environments that are too crowded or not enough hiding places or whatever, and social animals would deal with social rejection or fighting as a serious threat. also, anyone who has experienced abuse or assault or anything like that has had to deal with threats to their person

I know I'm not the first person to address this theme, but it's Tumblr, so I'm throwing in (or out?) my two cents.

Nolan is very much concerned in this movie with what he calls "Zeus's law", by which means what the ancient Greeks called xenia. Xenia means hospitality, giving help to the stranger. There is a famous myth which illustrates the importance of this virtue, the tale of Baucis and Philemon, which comes to us from Ovid's Metamorphoses. (Which means he probably invented it, but it's still a good illustration.)

Zeus and Hermes get bored, so they decide to test the virtue of human beings. Taking the form of beggars, they visit a wealthy city and beg from door to door, but everyone turns them away with contempt. At last, venturing out into the countryside, they come upon the small house of an elderly couple, Philemon and his wife Baucis. They ask for shelter for the night, and the elders welcome them in, offer them a meal, and treat them with all courtesy. They only have bread and milk to share, but the gods see that they share it without reservation.

When Baucis noticed the milk was not running out, no matter how many times she refilled the cups, she twigged that their visitors were gods. The couple fell on their knees and asked the gods to forgive them for having so little to offer. Zeus, however, said they would be rewarded for their virtue; he destroyed the city, changed the little house into a handsome temple, and granted their wish that one would not outlive the other. Upon their death, they became an oak and a linden tree, growing side by side and entwined together.

Nolan is not making it up that hospitality was a key virtue in the ancient world. (So was prowess in war, but both are true.) Penelope's suitors are abusing the obligations of xenia by showing up every night to eat and drink at her expense. They're not poor people, they're not travelers passing by, they're not really owed lavish meals at someone else's expense. (Robert Pattinson, in particular, is costumed like a man who can afford to throw down his Amex and cover everybody's tab.)

Odysseus and his men frequently use xenia as an excuse for raiding other people's stores of food. "Zeus's law says you owe us this, so if you don't give it, we have a right to take it." Which goes badly from the start, when they don't try to negotiate with the Cyclops but assume that a deep dark cave with bags of curing cheese means free cheese for everybody!

Then they make the same mistake several more times, notably with Circe. But what really weighs on Odysseus' conscience by the end of the film, besides the loss of all his men, is a personal betrayal that I won't spoil because I don't think it's in the original text. Odysseus is famous for his wit, his cleverness, his resourcefulness, the qualities that enabled him to contrive the Trojan horse (which should be called the Achaian horse, really), but by the end of the film, he regrets the deed and the betrayal that went with it.

Yes, my recollection is that sacred hospitality is all over the Odyssey. It's the cardinal sin of the suitors, it's violated multiple times by Odysseus and/or his men and costs them for it, and conversely the Cyclops responding to Odysseus' claim of hospitality by saying "fuck Zeus, and fuck his pansy-ass law!" is key to why he (unlike the Laestrygonians, Charybdis, Scylla, or most of the other obstacles in Odysseus' path) is horribly punished by the narrative by way of the Greeks. This is not being imposed on the text, it's key to the text.

And yes, sacred hospitality was a gigantic deal in the ancient world, as it is, really, in any society where you can't count on the amount of safety you can find in a modern developed nation. It's common sense, really; all you can count on is each other, you never know when you're going to be the stranger in need, so when you run into one of them, you pay it forward.

Even in the modern developed world, you still find echoes of this. There was an interesting map of Europe I saw on Tumblr a while ago showing how likely you were to be offered food when you're a guest in somebody's house (as in, just for a couple hours on a regular day). The further south the country was, the more likely you were to be offered food, and the more copious the amount of food (snacks and appetizers versus full meal) likely to be offered was. In other words, the weaker the welfare state, the greater the personal hospitality. Norwegians aren't going to fuss about whether or not they've fed you because they're secure in the knowledge that their society isn't going to let you starve. Sicilians, on the other hand... well, there's a reason the Italian Grandma stereotype is what it is.

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

But I don't think it would be a total panacea. For one it assumes they do that instead of extending the serialization to twenty episodes, but many of the problems are tonal. Star Trek Discovery season one is only five episodes shy of twenty, and I don't think five more episodes would fix how badly it wanted to be Game of Thrones. I think it would be five more episodes of a Star Trek show on a grim and gloomy starship where nobody trusts anybody and they're stuck in the Evil Universe and not like, TNG 2.0. by dint of the magic extra episode count. Strange New Worlds would benefit, because it is already episodic, but that makes it more doubtful the increased count would fix its problems since it has them while already episodic. They would do the episodes we like and the episodes we dislike and then make ten more of them.

Of course, a new show with 20 episodes would be conceived from the ground up with that in mind and maybe dodge some of these problems to begin with, but I think the thematic and synergistic concerns that lead NuTrek into being what it was would still be there. After all, it would still lack the sense of a building universe that existed from the tie-ins between TNG, DS9, and early Voyager, since all the shows are set in different eras

(I am convinced Prodigy is going to enjoy a resurgence in a few years as people find their way back to it.)

Both of those shows were unapologetic about developing their own voices and their own ideas; Prodigy set out from the get-go as a YA adventure series that was both going to succeed where Voyager failed, and do some really weird, gonzo, cosmic shit more usually associated with something like Star Wars or even Andromeda than Star Trek. Lower Decks set out to be "what if an office comedy, like 30 Rock or Brooklyn 99, but also Star Trek?" They both COMMITTED to this, and they both succeeded at it.

For that matter... I dislike DIS, and I don't think it was ever really what you'd call good. But DIS got a lot better when they decided "no, fuck it, HARD RESET, we're going to nope the fuck out after two seasons and basically make an entirely new show." Many of the ideas they put forth were bad ones (I have real issues with the stewards of creative properties deciding ad nauseum "the most interesting thing we can do to our setting is destroy it," that's a failure state in my eyes) but the writing notably improved when the writers were no longer struggling with the constraints of "we gotta slot this into the past timeline and do Spock shit and Klingon shit and Section 31 shit and bleh."

I digress.

Neither Prodigy nor Lower Decks ever really hit the high highs of the very best of classic trek; neither has a "Balance of Terror," or "Measure of a Man," or "In The Pale Moonlight." There aren't any S-rank episodes in there, and perhaps that's a failure... but there are PLENTY A-rank episodes in both of them. Hologram Janeway's speech, and her death, in "Supernova" is in my opinion the best fucking thing they ever wrote for Kate Mulgrew, delivered impeccably, animated beautifully.

Lower Decks gave us "wej'Duj," which I would place solidly as a Top 50 Trek episode, and "Empathological Fallacies," which... actually, you know what? Fuck it, I'm going to call "Empathological Fallacies" S-rank Star Trek. I will set it against ANY of the top-tier Vulcan episodes, any single one of them, "Amok Time," "Sarek," any of them, and call it as good. It's an absolutely ridiculous premise of an episode featuring horny Betazoid cougar commandos and a cannibalistic Caitian, and it delivered the most raw experience, and the most affirming uplift, of being a Vulcan in the whole fuckin' franchise, and was an especial breath of fresh air in the context of the 21st century, which has attracted a long and baffling series of writers to Trek who seem to hate Vulcans very much.

(It also gave us the best Star Trek tie-in product ever made, Warp Your Own Way, which in a just world would have won a Hugo.)

Lower Decks could pull shit like that off because it had top-caliber writers who all had a clear, unified vision for what the show was gonna be and executed. It consistently delighted us for five years and could easily have done another five. Prodigy had trouble finding an audience but it was equally unapologetic about being what it was and god, did that pay off creatively if not commercially. Both it and Prodigy also delivered on the aforementioned sense of building a universe that existed between TNG, DS9, and early VOY.

This isn't the first time something like this happens to the franchise, either. TOS had room to grow and experiment because it was literally inventing the franchise, and DS9 had room to grow and experiment because the networks and studios cared more about VOY. In both cases the (comparative) lack of expectations was the best thing that happened to those shows.

The very fact that it's so grim and dark only makes people swoon that much harder at the cops, soldiers, and spies who do it, because they're willing to take on that burden so the rest of society can live carefree and innocent and fat and lazy. And reinforces the idea that because they're dealing with something so ugly, they're fundamentally different from the rest of society and therefore we can't judge anything they do.

That's the subtext behind most of the people who repeat that "people sleep peaceably in their bed at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." They totally embrace the "grim dark necessity" point of view, they've just incorporated it into their worship of the cool people killing bad guys.

Like, he's the epitome of self-interest; the closest thing real life can produce to a Randian hero. And by any reasonable standard, he's won at life! He's the richest man ever to live, and he's getting richer; he controls the channels of information and communication; the government of what remains the world's only superpower waits on his command. If capitalism had a victory condition, he would surely have achieved it. And yet...

He's empty. He's an absolute sucking void of neediness. His own children hate his guts. He pays professional gamers to run up impossibly high scores in every game under the sun because the pale glow of being praised by epic bacon chuds online is the closest thing that he can feel to love.

If capitalism had a victory condition, he would surely have achieved it.

Isn't it kind of the point of capitalism (at least as practiced today especially in the United States) that there is no victory condition? No matter how rich you are, you're always supposed to make more. As someone once said, the capitalist mindset is the mindset of the cancer cell.

Olrik embezzled GRU funds

I stared at this title and laughed for two days.

Okay, let's put the formal stuff aside for a second and talk about Olrik's actual financial situation.

Before he was Public Enemy Number One / International Man of Mystery, Olrik was one of the most powerful men in the world. He was a close adviser, secret police chief, and sometime military commander for Emperor Basam Damdu. He was basically his regime's version of Himmler or Beria (if Himmler or Beria had briefly held the entire world in their grasp).

There's no way he doesn't have an absolute mountain of treasure left over from that time period. With the GRU, he's a consultant, so he has to embezzle funds. With the 13th Bureau, he was the boss, so he doesn't even have to do that: the sky's the limit. Think of all the rich parts of the world he's had the opportunity to loot. Think of all the political prisoners he's been able to strip of their assets. Think of all the people who've had to pay bribes to him to be able to keep operating.

Some of that probably went up in smoke with the nuking of Lhasa, but not all of it. Even after the conquest of the entire planet, he still had that moment when he reached out to Mortimer and suggested working together to free the world. This is a guy who hedges his bets. For the reason it's also unlikely that his wealth was tied up in regime-specific assets that would've lost their value at the end of the war (i.e. Confederate dollars).

So... Even with his appreciation for the finer things in life and his impulse control problems, he very likely has a big pile of gold somewhere (or more likely a lot of small heaps spread around) that would take a lot of work to deplete.

In fact, it's hard to imagine his later life working out without that big pile of gold. His postwar adventures are one long series of defeats, and even if you assume that he has his successes on the side that aren't in the comics, he's got to be drawing the funds from somewhere to bounce back from all those events - if only to find room and board and whatever medical attention he might need.

(It's also hard to imagine his life working out without that background. Again, he fails a lot. The prestige he gets from "I was Emperor Basam Damdu's favorite henchman" is probably why he keeps getting hired by so many people, who remember that role and overlook his less impressive career afterwards).