The version in First Contact was fine. She was basically just an avatar for the Collective, possibly a gestalt consciousness. As she said, “I am the Borg.” The problem is later writers didn’t get that.

It’s the short legs. Give kids stilts and they’re natural cross-country sprinters.

More or less. The power for everything is run through the electro-plasma system, terminating in EPS conduits at every terminal. Plasma IRL is fucking hot.

Unless they decide to orrient with the disc vertically aligned. Of if they base it on their home system.

Why is it smiling? What does it know?!

You pronounce the abbreviated form as “Eye Dee” so you abbreviate it as ID. No, it is not consistent with other instances of abbreviation in English, but half of English isn’t consistent with the other half anyway.

Also, id is an actual word, so that could cause confusion. The earliest uses of the term ‘ID’ or ‘I.D.’ are also from the US military, which absolutely loves abbreviating things and making acronyms for the sake of brevity, even if the shortening doesn’t follow the usual rules.

Try Beyond. He had basically no involvement.

It does get less hyper as it goes on, but only to a point.

The entire cyberpunk genre is about corporations destroying society and the planet for profit and is near-future sci-fi. Dune is about how human nature doesn’t change, the same revolutions occurring again and again over thousands of years, with humans always being on the verge of self extinction and the only escape being to destroy civilization so hard that any conflict will always leave survivors that have had no contact with anyone else in millennia. Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents a world where the entire universe is utter chaos, worlds can be destroyed by a clerical error, and cosmically powerful beings do random things for shits and giggles. Starship Troopers, Warhammer, and Starcraft depict humans becoming the bad guys at an interstellar scale.

So, no, sci-fi is not inherently hopeful.

Also works as a coaster for those huge coffee mugs.

Even without all the sequels and prequels Star Wars would still have been endlessly referenced for decades after the 2nd movie.

Not necessarily. Being able to stick the landing is hugely important for a series’ legacy. Game of Thrones disappeared from conversation after its disastrous final season, but would probably be fondly remembered if it had been suddenly cancelled after season five. If ROTJ had been a similar dumpster fire, Star Wars might have gone the same way.

Worf didn’t even have an interesting backstory in the first season. He was just the Klingon in the crew and was sometimes kind of stuffy. Tasha’s backstory of being from the rape planet was incredibly cringe, though, and they didn’t spend any of her nearly two dozen episodes fleshing her out beyond that while Worf spent the first season accumulating minor quirks.

They also designed and built a custom shuttle, but iirc it was an open question as to whether or not the ship’s larger replicators could handle it, which implies they left with all the shuttles they lost and the Delta Flyer was the first they made.

The other Boimler had better be coming back for the final season.

It still bugs me that they make a big deal about how few resources they have and then fire so many torpedoes and lose so many shuttles. I would have loved to have seen them pick up some locally sourced equipment.

I think it was the first one that was both broadcast nationally in a primetime slot and where the actors were easily identifiable as having different ethnicities on a tiny TV screen. Would explain the misconception.

The writers and showrunners blatantly not having a clue where the plot was going was a bigger problem for me than the soapiness.

The movie had some other solid stuff. Rey has a natural affinity for the dark side, but that she chooses the light in spite of that is what makes her the hero. Similarly, Kylo is a natural with the light but chooses the dark. The dark side also isn’t evil so much as it is playing with fire, which was a popular interpretation in the old EU. Rey and Finn are also given actual motivations instead of just pinballing through the plot. Whether the motivations actually work is a different question, but the fact they had no reason to be there in TFA really bugged me.

I do still think Rey and Kylo should have traded sides in the throne room scene, though.

Makes sense to me. The Borg love perfection, so, naturally, they would want perfect hair.

Well, most of the time, anyway. Biology is far too messy for that to be a hard and fast rule, as it turns out.