Scientific Tricorder

Especially since Michael's relationships with Sarek and Spock took up so much space in seasons one and two, it's so glaring how little we get with Michael and Gabrielle. Even the psuedo-maternal relationship with Georgiou gets more breathing room.

⬆️ tags via @bumblingbabooshka

Her character development is a work of art. She is so traumatised, so angry, so beaten down and STILL FIGHTING at the start. She struggles so much with her PTSD, with the idea that she is ever allowed to be in anything but attack mode…

And then, slowly, gradually, she becomes a whole new person. She laughs, she smiles, she makes corny jokes, she does dumb fun things for the sake of enjoying herself. She has friends, she has a family, she is surrounded by love and joy and HOPE.

Even in the middle of second war, she’s DIFFERENT now. She’s not the same miserable angry person she was, afraid to let go of the vigilant surivival instincts that kept her alive for so long. She’s come back to life as a person who has something to live for.

She has done terrible things. Her hands are stained with blood. She is never going to be able to forget her trauma or the suffering, both her own and that of her people, nor the suffering she inflicted while fighting for her freedom. But she recovers. She heals. She carves out an existence where she is truly, genuinely happy to be alive.

I don’t need to talk about Kira as much as some other characters because this all happens on screen. It’s right there, and it’s beautiful and perfect.

Kira Nerys goes from a person who cannot conceive of herself outside of the horrors she has suffered, inflicted, and fought against, to someone for whom her trauma is just one part of the larger picture, a piece of a rich and vibrant tapestry that is now filled, overwhelmingly, with joy.

Holy shit. The fucking warp core is insane. Actually fucking crazy. Let's take deuterium and anti-deuterium and fire them down massive super conductive magnet coil tubes at each other into a weird crystal that somehow interacts with subspace, use the insane amount of energy released when the deuterium and anti-deuterium mutually annihilate to break physics and let us go literally exponentially faster than light with zero time dilation.

Like, do you understand how much energy they are riding? I don't because they use measures that are actually absurd. They talk about the heat inside the warp core as being in the millions of kelvins. And like, yeah

Bro. You are standing next to that fucking thing. They literally touch it at times but the surface of the warp core is just... Room temperature. That is fucking bonkers. They are harnessing relativistic power, sometimes just to take a quick hop around the relative neighborhood.

And the "curren" warp scale? Is mad? Like, it goes from warp 1 (the speed of light) on an exponential curve to 9.9999repeating. because warp 10? You occupy all points in the universe at the same time.

AND THEN THEY FUCKING DID THAT? AND IT TURNED THEM INTO SALAMANDERS?

Like. Babes.

I love Trek.

"In a TV landscape that still often fails to allow its black characters love and happiness, I'm so glad the Star Trek Discovery gave that beautiful happy ending to its leading black couple. They get to be happy, still in love, and they get to see their son thriving and succeeding." - Captain Pike a chu

This is another large part of why I have such adulation about this couple and feel they need to be protected. It is not simply about "shipping" - I've shipped various couples, both canon and non-canon of different make ups. This is about finally getting the representation I, and many others, have been desiring to see. The writers for Discovery deserve high praise for recognizing that the happy ending with a baby may be cliché or stereotypical for other couplings; however, it is uncommon for a black couple in today's media and it needs to be seen. That's what good writers do. They have AWARENESS.

And putting race and representation aside, Michael and Book are just genuinely a great couple, who deserved a happy ending.

I recently saw a guy on tiktok saying that he's glad people are turning around on plastic surgery (i.e., becoming more opposed to it) because the real solution tp the problem that plastic surgery treats is restructuring society in a way that removes harmful beauty standards. He goes on to say that an example of this is Jean Luc Picard being bald in TNG. A lot of people ask why they haven't fixed balding in the future. He says they don't need to fix balding because they've gotten rid of the stigma of being bald

I have beef with this for two reasons:

1. I think restricting or further stigmatizing plastic surgery only serves to hurt trans people. I dont actually disagree that working towards a world without harmful beauty standards is a good thing but letting utopian ideas of how things should be get in the way of people bettering their lives in the imperfect world we currently have isn't actually helping anyone. Furthermore people should be allowed to do what they want with their bodies.

2. That's not even true. It would be cool if Jean Luc was bald just because he liked looking that way, but there is plenty of evidence in the show that that stigma still exists. In the episode Bloodlines Picard makes a joke to his fake son about how hid hairline is going to recede soon. In the episode of voyager where Kes is thrown back in time the Doctor has reprogrammed himself to have hair. In Picard season 3 (I personally dislike this season of the show but its cannon so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Jack Crusher asks Jean Luc what age he started to go bald and Jean Luc is like, sooner than you'd like or something like that. I'm sure there are other examples. These are just off the top of my head.

I am obsessed with Dr. Miranda Jones. Headcanon that she and Uhura spend part of this episode off hanging out somewhere in the ship passing the Bechdel Test by sharing backstories and comparing notes about inter-species communication.

Two women intended by a couple of creepy producers to be nothing more than a target for the male gaze, and who instead managed to work through all the skimpy outfits and situations meant to get them naked to give nuanced and engaging performances that made their characters a lasting part of Star Trek. I do hope that as Jeri Ryan's Seven has had her renaissance, Jolene Blalock's T'Pol might get a similar return.