This is simultaneously a post-modern masterpiece and the most disgusting, atrocious thing I have ever seen.

Also, Ferenginar is rainy, so I imagine most wouldn’t want to go out into the rain nude.

Even more conservative ones might have rain coats they take off inside.

It seems like a large majority of females wear clothes sort of thing. I went through the episode to see if there were any more. I found up to seven or eight more instances, with screenshots below (some of these may be unintentional duplicates from different perspetives.:

Interestingly in the first one, she is with an older man, suggesting that she might be an older woman, although we also see an older Ferengi woman in the background as well who is clothed.

Re-evaluating the original image I posted, I notice that the person the unclothed woman is sitting with is drawn like a lot of other Ferengi women, which suggests she might be meeting up with another woman, possibly a friend or a daughter. Unfortunately, it’s not high-enough quality on my end (I’m limited to 480p by the Paramount jerks) to make out if the unclothed Ferengi is an older or younger women - maybe it’s clearer on someone’s Blu-Ray set.

Overall, wow, this was a weird way to spend an evening. I’m even less proud to say I did this than when I did the Kim counting a few months back.

Meanwhile, me:

My head canon is there is a different Musk they’re talking about that isn’t a Nazi, and Lorca’s name drop was mirror universe stuff. 😂

I hope we can yeat Saru in somewhere else - at least the occasional appearance on STA. Let’s hope that Robert Picardo claiming “he’ll be deeper” means he’ll be 99% comic relief like when he said he’d be “more than comic relief” in Prodigy, meaning the show will be a banger rather than a melodramatic despair-fest with the occasional redeeming quality.

Either that or throw him through a portal to another era and call it temporal causality, although I guess the only currently running show they could throw him in is SNW, which wouldn’t make sense for obvious reasons. Now if Prodigy got its (unfortunately improbable) season 3 and he somehow managed to appear and they made a good plot out of it, I might not mind.

I have to agree that First Contact uniform is top-tier.

Also, guy misdated the Romulan supernova.

The planet had previously industrialized and since de-industrialized by choice.

I do have to agree. The setting may be the best part of later seasons of DISCO, even if they (in my personal opinion) frequently squandered it.

Like, I felt like they didn’t need to make up the DMA - they had practically seasons worth of material written for them just from the inherent realities of the setting.

I take this with a grain of salt, in part because of this past headline: Robert Picardo Says The Doctor Isn’t Just Comic Relief In ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Season 2

Which isn’t to say I hated him in Prodigy. Rather, I wonder if by “deeper”, it means he’ll be absolutely ridiculous, just rambling about opera and holonovels all the time, and the writing won’t be all dark and brooding on this show.

I tried to hint at it at the beginning, but I admit mapping Ferengi politics onto human politics is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. I was honestly just trying to use commonly-understood terms, which may be a weak fit.

In terms of social-economic orthogonality, I think that can work for a more general analysis, but doesn’t seem the case in Ferengi society - for instance, social left and economic left reform in the late Zek (Ishka behind scenes)/early Rom seemed like a packaged deal. Also, the social restrictions on women extend to their economic right to make profit - many of the issues in Ferengi society are a blur of economic and social issues that are intimately connected.

Also, unrelated to my above thoughts, rewatching “Family Business”, I disagree with your assessment of Rom. For one, I think both Quark and Rom were equally bothered, just had different ways of expressing it; Quark let his discomfort out through visible anger, while Rom tried to hide it for a while, letting it seep through into his expression. Also, Rom, while seeming like a product of his society, seemed much more open to listening to Ishka, suggesting that while he had socially and economically conservative values, he didn’t hold them as strongly as screaming Quark.

Overall, I agree with your sentiment that political categorization is complex, and I feel no one model perfectly characterizes all ideologies, that there are merely abstractions that might work well in a specific context. Heck, there’s a sci-fi story idea I’m “working” on (by which I mean I haven’t touched it in ages) where I created a 3D political spectrum for my main factions; I forget what my third axis was, though. In the end, as much as some humans like to nerd out about it, an ideology can’t be perfectly reduced to a point on a graph or a line.

Still, there is some undeniable urge to do a deeper dive on Star Trek political mapping, down to sub-charts for characters in the individual societies where we have enough information, although you’d have to figure out how to handle different eras.

Glorious use of sarcasm.

In terms of writing, they really captured him well on Prodigy, though he was almost entirely a comic relief character.

Looks-wise, he definitely triggered the uncanny valley and was one of the worse aesthetic adaptations of a legacy character in that show. In general, there are some unintentionally terrifying officers on that show.

I do have to say that was one thing Lower Decks did well - when they brought on a legacy character, they were aesthetically recognizable, but never a caricature.

This is probably the strongest counter so far, unless they’ve somehow found or are working on a way to do it without severely borking the marine biosphere.

Update: https://startrek.website/post/21466140

Say what you will about Disco, but honestly, Rainn Wilson Harry Mudd is better than the original.

Though honestly, it helps that this Mudd wasn’t in an episode where he did human trafficking and Starfleet did nothing except validate 1950s gender roles for some reason.

I still enjoyed Those Old Scientists when I hadn’t yet watched Lower Decks, granted, I had watched TNG already and so just enjoyed it as TNG-era characters goofing around in the 23rd century.

In fact, after having watched Lower Decks, I don’t necessarily like how Boimler and Mariner are written in this episode - they feel a bit like their basic archetypes than the developed characters they were in the series.

The other good thing about Chain of Command is it gives important context for DS9 without having to stare at scrolling text.

Well, this is from Cast Your Pod to the Wind, which is full of rejects from The Else and random podcast tracks - granted some of them are really darn good rejects like “Brain Problem Situation”.

I think my taste is also skewed towards the weird semi-experimental tracks in general - I am a big “If Day for Winnipeg”.

I could understand a few across the city, but I’d say 50 miles of parkland around a city is a little excessive.

You could also probably at least partially pull off “lush” with more native species, which they don’t seem to do.

Additionally, I imagine there’s some people still enjoying desert off-roading or a newer equivalent in the 23rd and 24th century (probably with regulations, of course).

Granted, I’m a bit biased, considering I live in the Southwest and am a fan of some of the more beautiful deserts. I do hate the climate change-induced annual shattering of heat records, though. Never fun when it’s 110s out, especially when you have to walk to classes…

I think it is in Menageries, but I’ll have to check.