#space command

There's no Federation, and no Starfleet. The Enterprise is part of the Space Service, and answers to Space Command. It's also very clear Enterprise is meant to be a human ship, specifically. Spock is the only non-human on the crew, and presumably he's there because he has a human mother.

When people try to criticize modern shows for having slight deviations form existing canon (that in some cases don't actually contradict canon at all, see the Cheron cadet in SFA or Lura Thook being half Jem'Hadar), maybe they should consider how the original series made wild changes to its own internal canon as time went on.

Marco Margaritoff at HuffPost:

Denver TV news anchor Kyle Clark is putting President Donald Trump on blast for relocating U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, apparently to penalize Colorado for offering mail-in voting. The 9News anchor had one word for these punitive measures Tuesday: authoritarianism. “There’s an argument that Space Command truly belongs in Alabama,” Clark said on his show. “But President Trump makes clear, in word and in deed, what this is really about for him: It’s about using the military for his personal advantage in domestic policies.”

The “Next With Kyle Clark” host also pointed to the federal takeover of Washington, D.C., and predicted that states or cities that overwhelmingly vote for Trump likewise “won’t be targeted with troop deployments.” “Vote for him, and your cities won’t be targeted with troop deployments. Vote for him and keep your military installations,” Clark added. “If all of this was happening in another nation, we would not hesitate to describe it clearly. If it was Kazakhstan instead of Colorado, Caracas instead of Chicago, we would call it by name — it’s authoritarianism.”

[...] “It’s time that we are clear about what’s happening,” Clark said Tuesday, noting that Trump is openly punishing a state that didn’t vote for him and rewarding another that did. The president is “linking military decision-making to his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. That’s a dangerous escalation.” “Trump says that Colorado, where he lost badly, has automatically crooked elections, echoing something that he says Russian President Vladimir Putin recently told him.”

KUSA (NBC Denver) anchor Kyle Clark issued a must-listen to warning about the state of America under Tyrant 47: “If all of this was happening in another nation, we would not hesitate to describe it clearly. If it was Kazakhstan instead of Colorado, Caracas instead of Chicago, we would call it by name — it’s authoritarianism.”

From the 09.02.2025 edition of KUSA's Next With Kyle Clark:

(via The buttons on Zenith’s original ‘clicker’ TV remote were a mechanical marvel - The Verge)

The Space Command is a product of mechanical engineering rather than electrical. By pressing a button on the remote, you set off a spring-loaded hammer that strikes a solid aluminum rod in the device, which then rings out at an ultrasonic frequency. Each button has a different length rod, thus a different high-frequency tone, which triggers a circuit connected to a microphone in the television to finish the command.

The Space Command crew members of the Excaliber from the Tsuburaya television series Star Wolf.

Most folks on this side of the Pacific recognize these folks from the two Sandy Frank films - Fugitive Alien and Star Force: Fugitive Alien ll - that were made from episodes edited together, and then famously broadcast on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Those films were dubbed into English and the character names were changed, including the ship, which became the Bacchus 3.

Marc Scott Zicree just finished a livestream to raise money for his current project. Only caught the end (will watch the rest tomorrow), but I'm really excited that he talked very briefly about Far Beyond The Stars, which he had the concept for. He wrote the outline, but was unable to write the teleplay of the episode because he was writing for Sliders at the time.

Far Beyond the Stars, I would argue, is not only possibly the most important episode of Star Trek ever written, but also possibly one of the most important episodes in television history.

At 1:24:00 Marc talks about the show and how it all went with Avery Brooks, Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler and recognised that yes, Paramount was willing to have a story in 1998 about cops killing innocent Black people. So that was, in and of itself, very forward of them.

He also briefly talks about his friendship with Armin Shimerman and how the characters were different in the episode to their normal characters.

After, he discusses the Writer's Strike and AI, very briefly. Please enjoy!