With no prior knowledge of blood eagles, I had pictured him being thrown from a cliff — but you are clearly correct!

I think the show is setting up to put them at uneasy odds with each other. Ecbert's motivation for keeping Athelstan alive is clear, and it's the exact same motivation Ragnar had: he wants to learn more about his new enemies.

I think Ecbert needs to be bumped up. Sure his beard may not be as fiercely badass as the Norsemen's — but he's repping the English Beard Team with aplomb and that deserves respect.

Exactly. That's just my point about how it's silly to complain about the English accents of characters in shows set in those time periods :)

Neat. Though, this stuff is all WAY earlier than 17th century. GoT is based (stylistically) on the history of England up to, at the latest, the 15th century, and Vikings starts in the 8th

Also, even if they are supposed to be *based on* historical English speakers, we have no real idea how such people sounded, but can be sure their accent was very different from today's British accent.

True, but the transporter thing goes even beyond that into a huge existential can of worms about what it means to be alive at all, so I was staying confined to holograms :)

Yeah the portable emitter became central to the show after it was introduced. But it actually underlined the problem, rather than fixing it, because it was never explained why the doctor must be *transferred* into the portable emitter and can't simply be *copied* to it, since he's a computer file after all. It's like…

True. Actually in that vein I guess it would be kind of amazing to see a crossover of the two ideas — like what if an old Earth staple, a Shakespeare play or something, was adapted by a Vulcan or a Klingon holonovelist and became a hit…

I didn't mean "why bother" from the characters' perspective — it certainly makes sense that Starfleet officers would use the holodeck for cultural training and language practice and all sorts of stuff like that. I just meant "why bother" from the production perspective. It would be odd to say "we have a universe of…

I like Captain Proton too :)

yah that's part of what I was thinking about — that plus the philosophical extension that if it's possible, and recursive, we're essentially definitely inside one.

The scariest (or at least most deeply existential) implication of the holodeck is the broadest one: if it's possible to build simulated universes, and build simulated universes within those simulated universes, then the odds that we're currently living in a real universe are infinitesimal.

Yeah, but, why bother with the holodeck if not for that? Trek's core premise is already humans exploring exciting new non-human environments. The holodeck is there to provide the opposite.

It's Voyager that really attempts to address the concept of holo-life, and I think Vic was meant to be a bit of a complement to that on the DS9 side. Of course, Voyager does it *incredibly* clumsily

That's why I prefer my version above. It's not graded against itself but against its *ideal* self as best as that can be estimated. Nobody's expecting this show to be Breaking Bad, but they're setting a target for it somewhere in between what it is now and Firefly.

I read the character as "what if Omar went straight" (in every sense of the word)

A show is graded against itself and, in some cases, against what it's "trying to be" when that's apparent. In the case of this show it usually is, because we have a bunch of things to compare it to — the MCU films which it wants to be a complement to, and capture some of their spirit on a lower budget, plus past Joss…

Damn you for seeing my comment before my near-instantaneous edit!

Also: the holographic data-searching landscape stuff was pretty much an EXACT rehash of Tony Stark discovering the arc reactor designs in Iron Man — except 5 years later with a much lower budget.