I agree with this point — the universe isn't short on helium, so it's hard to get too panicky here — but there was a note in the above article/link: helium is a component of rocketry? I know stuff about stuff, but I don't know shit about real legitimate rocket science, so... if we start running out of helium in…

And he answered each one perfectly.

Oh no, no, no. If that were true he'd have signed on for Shark Storm. He passed when it was played out, and he signed on when it was preposterous and well beyond the bounds of reason and good taste. This guy is smart, he held out for the job that pays AND sounds fun.

You sound like Samuel L. Jackson negotiating with George Lucas.

Obviously you're not a pedophile.

Good call. And with voice synthesis getting better and better, — all the phone sex operators will soon be out of work. One more case of robots stealing humans' jobs.

I like to think this has been true already for decades.

No problem! If I didn't happen to know that, I think I'd look at this and go, "Oh good, a probably-well-acted overly cutesy piece of backpatting propaganda from Disney's corporate PR division!" I think we're just too well-trained (hopefully for the better) to look at things critically and even cynically, to think…

When you were a teen was there such a thing as "Google Image Safe Search: Off"?

It wasn't written "for Disney." It was a script (and a reportedly fantastic one) that featured Walt Disney as the main character and took place in part at Disneyland. It's like the Hitchcock movies that came out last year, only imagine that Hitch had decided to become a corporate enterprise in addition to making movie.

The screenplay was bouncing around forever, ranking high on the Black List (most popular unproduced scripts, as voted on by producers and script readers from every studio). It isn't like it's a "commissioned piece," and the script is supposed to be just amazing. I've read part and I believe it. The end is supposed to…

Haha, ugh. I knew about the uppercase/lowercase B/b thing in general, binary system v planet, but I didn't know it applied here.

Yeah, it occurred to me that the idea of withholding internally-used nicknames, which may not be the case here, but may be the case in general? It's pure speculation but I could imagine there even being a written policy about staying tight-lipped on that sort of thing, because the media and popular culture eat it up…

That was what I was thinking when I added the clunky phrase "at least from where I'm standing."

I got no beef with saying TNG is a better show than DS9 (though I am in the DS9 camp, m'self, clearly). I don't agree with you on Nemesis, to be sure, but hey, that's cool too.

The character arc for Voyager took place in the pilot, for all the characters. Then we spend 7 more years with Neelix and Paris and Chipotle and B'Elanna saying, "Boy, we've come a long way from who we used to be, haven't we? Wow!"

Well, there are only 8 planets (*not including dwarf planets) with names. If any were named after AD characters, you'd probably have heard of them.

DS9 totally explored faith and religion from many angles, so our only dispute is one of semantics. I guess I think of a "religious show" as a show that you would say is "about religion," above and beyond more-or-less everything else. That a "religious show" is a show for religious people, even maybe.

Right, and letting both coexist without trying to cancel each other out was what made the whole "universe" feel more real and interesting.

Since this began as a discussion of how you felt Deep Space Nine was straying off the path of the rest of the Star Trek franchise... I'm confounded a little by bringing "altered realities" and how easy it was to set things right again into this. TNG and Voyager (especially Voyager, as I recall) spent way way waaay…