It's not just John Barroman, for some incomprehensible reason, lot's of people pronounce "hegemony" with a soft 'g'. Must be an American thing.

Also, before everyone starts starving to death forever (which does sound "uncomfortable") there will be a fair amount of violence over the diminishing food supply.

Well no, but Brain's voice is his Orson Welles, that's why PatB was full of Welles jokes. It's obviously exaggerated a little, but I agree with monkeybusiness, it's a spot on impression.

I guess for completeness sake I should complain again that you can't understand an unknown language from "patterns", but even I'm sick of hearing something that obvious.

I assume it's derived from "twinks" (UD should be able to handle that one).

Fair enough.

AI and "heuristic analysis" are wonderful hand-waves, but the problem is that language (or whatever the aliens use) is used to communicate abstract concepts in an entirely arbitrary manner. It just doesn't carry enough information to understand it without a shared frame of reference.

Ooh, burn!

How do you drink a glass of bleach accidentally? Wouldn't you notice that something went amiss, say, half way through or so?

I suppose it kind of makes sense if you take the word literally: she's focusing all of her sensory powers on a single sense. Or something? Yeah, I think they just wanted to use a cool-sounding word.

impeccable aim and the power to do parkour

I know arguing about genres is completely pointless, but space opera is definitely part of science fiction. Depends on which Trek you're talking about, too. DS9, for example, is way more of a space opera than the SW original trilogy, which is pretty much entirely "fantasy adventure".

I never agreed to any such thing!

I'm just going by the TV show (since almost no one has read those books), where all of their "magic" boils down to video recording, holograms, and computer viruses (I don't really remember, did Galen do more in Crusade?).

@sui generis: I don't actually agree with that. A "universal" translator is no less preposterous than FTL travel. More so even - it's demonstrably impossible, whereas all you need for FTL is a fundamental change in our understanding of physics.

I think she and Sam have a lot of chemistry together.

I'm seriously loving the absolutely random evil trash baby storyline.

where the hell are all the queers?

I always thought the translators were supposed to be in the comm badges.

Who's "The Architect"?