Which suggests that she had an undistinguished career, barely advancing enough to meet the up-or-out requirements.
When last seen, she was a Commander, and Sulu’s first officer.
I disagree, going from enlisted ranks to officer is not an undistinguished career. In the real Navy she’d be considered a Mustang.
I’m not sure how Starfleet works, but isn’t jumping from noncommissioned officer to commissioned officer kind of exceptional in present day militaries?
ETA - Ninja’d
Just saw a clip on YouTube which reminded me of another SF movie peeve of mine: people enter a derelict spaceship with minimal lighting; at most they bring a hand light with them that illuminates one tiny spot in the darkness at a time.
I don’t know about you, but if I were entering a strange place in space where there could be anything in there, I would bring enough light to illuminate the entire compartment as bright as day; screw this haunted house b.s.
Or at least use their phone.
And those giant helmets with, for some reason, an interior light that illuminates the guy’s face. Just dumb. The audience can withstand not seeing the guy’s face if the scene calls for it.
At the very least they could work that Hollywood lighting magic and find a way to show their faces without putting a flashlight inside the helmet.
What Hath Babbage Wrought (AKA “A Test for Systems Analysts”)
The cheapest thing to do would be to suggest the helmet has display on the outside showing the guy’s head, and display on the inside showing his surroundings, rendering the helmet invisible.
Or they could just do an “inside the helmet POV” like the MCU movies did with Iron Man.
I kind of get bothered when there is a weird incongruous mixture of super high tech and low tech. Few science fiction universes seem to do this well. Like people living in bamboo huts in rice paddies making phone calls on their hologram phones while cyborg water buffalo pull a space-plow around. It always feels like it’s done to show that these people live in some agrarian primitive society on the fringes of the empire.
Or they live in space shipping containers in some scrapyard outpost.
Why are none of the planets on the outer fringe stuck in 21st century suburban North American tech or 1930s Europe (other than to show some sort of “fascist” analogue)?
But the real world is like that. I’m sure there are lots people across the world with smartphones, and even more with some kind of cellphone, living in huts or shacks. Electric lights and even more modern tech has been retrofitted into centuries-old homes and other buildings. When Sputnik was launched, some railroads in First-World nations were still using steam engines in regular service.
I find the opposite in sci-fi to be jarring: uniform architecture, technology, fashion, etc. as if the society just sprang into existence and everything’s new. Unless they’re recovering from some cataclysmic war or disaster, or its a new colony, it’s unrealistic to have a setting where the old and the new don’t co-exist to some degree.
I think that’s why people mock the “everyone’s wearing jumpsuits/spandex/metallic outfits” esthetic of some older sci-fi. In the real world, even when fashion wasn’t so fractured as now, people didn’t all wear the same clothes and modern fashions recycled or echoed elements of older fashions.
Non-sci-fi example: how much Art Deco architecture appears prominently in Suchet Poirot episodes, which I don’t mind as I like Art Deco, but I do notice it as disproportionate to the other architectures a place like the UK gathers over decades and centuries.
I agree in general that it’s cooler when there’s a mix of high and low tech, but I agree with msmith about being annoyed by high tech analogs that don’t make sense. “We’re subsistence farmers who use water buffalo for agriculture, but Jim’s also got a laser rifle to protect the farmstead,” is fine. “We’re subsistence farmers who use a cyber-buffalo for agriculture,” is a of an eye-roll though. Why would that not just be a tractor?
I recently watched the series Andor, and I think they nailed it. It’s a blend of transport tech that we couldn’t dream of, and comms tech that we would laugh at, but it completely works IMO. The key thing is they fully commit to it and it’s pretty consistent throughout.
This also illustrates why the Arthur c Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced tech being like magic can be misleading.
People imagine that we’d be perpetually be in awe, or consider it supernatural until we had a good understanding. That’s not how human psychology works.
Give us a black box that does fantastical things and eventually (depending on how fantastic those things are) we’ve interacted enough to know the limits of what it can do and it becomes an ordinary household object.
Steampunk and Retrofuturism (a term I’ve just now learned of) are on the edges of this territory. The concepts are visually attractive but sometimes the level of technology is too high to explain the lack of modern technology, materials, and engineering.
Not just sci fi. Any modern cop or procedural show inevitably never turns on the lights. You’re not going to “contaminate the crime scene” by flipping the light switch. It’s right there! Flip it! Then you can see the baddie hiding.
FWIW, I’m pretty sure that’s how Columbo once sleuthed a double homicide…
“We had to throw out the evidence because it had photons all over it!”
Well, cyberbuffalo are presumably self-replicating, so you don’t need a tractor factory. If a cyberbuffalo can reproduce just by eating basic fodder, and it can plough as efficiently as a tractor, then it would be cyberbuffalo every time. A big if, but those are the options.
There’s the chance that a cyberbuffalo would make a better pet than a tractor, as well.