Frodo and the party at Weathertop - in the books Frodo shouts Elbereth’s name as a war cry and stabs at a wraith, rather than cowering and falling down as in the film.

Ent moot results and dramatic reversal - in the books, the Ents knew what Saruman had been up to and decided to go to war at once. They didn’t passively decide to do nothing then change their minds.

Faramir bringing Frodo and Sam (and the ring to Osgilath). In the books, Faramir recognized the threat the ring posed and let Sam, Frodo and Gollum go on with their quest without hinderance.

The books had no nonsensical scene with Gollum framing Sam for illicit lembas consumption.

The books had no stupid dwarf tossing jokes.

While Aragorn has periods of self doubt in the books, none of these inhibited him from taking action. In the film he has a long sequence of scenes where he’s basically paralyzed by self doubt.

No scourging of the Shire in the films. These scenes were crucial to showing just how much each of the hobbits had developed as characters and in what ways.

I could go on, but hopefully these are sufficient to illustrate the point.

The films were great with respect to casting, cinematography, art design and location. Jackson and Boyens seemed to have forgotten however that Tolkien was the master and they the students with respect to writing.

A full adaptation of Lord of the Rings that’s true to Tolkien’s vision.

You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.

Eh, it’s no more problematic than the many canon retcons we’ve gotten. It may be there was an element on both earth and the Lanthanite homeworld that maintains Lanthanite immortality, but that element was lacking on Flint’s planet.

It’s an appealing theory, but how would you square it with the end episode reveal that Flint was no longer immortal since having left earth? Was McCoy just wrong when he reported that readings from the earlier tricorder scan show that Flint has been aging normally since he left Earth’s environment, and will soon die? We know little enough about Lanthanites in general, and Pelia in particular but it is implied that they are an alien race, so their long lifespan isn’t likely to be linked to remaining on earth, unlike Flint’s. Perhaps it wasn’t leaving earth that cancelled Flint’s immortality, but some element on Holberg 917-G?

Sadly, Earl Boen died of lung cancer in 2022.

“I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire.”

I suspected the Pakled myself. That would have been an even bigger tonal mismatch, so I was glad to find that I was wrong.

Totally agree about Mitchell. Rong Fu is really good in the role and deserves some love from the writers. Mitchell is a recurring character rather than a regular, so it may not be an apples to apples comparison but still, she’s been there from the begining.

Bring Detmer in and give her some years overdue character development.

I like that both “toasters” and “clankers” are hard “r” slurs.

That’s a fair caveat.

SNW has been overusing it as a plot device. In TNG it was a one off gimmick to bring back Scotty. Still, I wondered why they didn’t buy Batel time from her Gorn egg infection by putting her in the pattern buffer. It seems like an idea that ought to have at least been discussed, but I don’t recall that it was.

To be fair, it was used the way in the TNG Episode Relics, when Scotty spent 75 years stuck in the Jenolan’s transport buffer, so quiite a long precedent.

It totally was. It’s no coincidence that it was Scotty who caught the entity and Scotty who is taken over by it years later in Wolf in the Fold.

My only complaint is that Ensign Gamble got this great episode, while Jenna Mitchell has yet to see an iota of character development and more than a few minutes of screen time away from the helm. Of course Gamble had to die for the privilege, so I guess that’s fair. Still, I think the writers owe Rong Fum some love.

That’s fair, because AI is biased against them.

We already have “clankers” thanks to Clone Wars. What more do we need?

If you’re doing it right, cooking is art.

In this case there are no competing domestic products though, or few enough as makes little difference. This is just taxation with extra steps.

“There was a button. I pushed it.” Where’s Holden when you need him?

My head-canon is that there is no retconm, or at least no need for one.

We’ve seen in ST SNW that where the Gorn are concerned, the younger they are, the faster and dumber they are.

Pike and his crew have only directly encountered hatchlings, adolescents and a very few Gorn of age to serve on starships, perhaps the Gorn equivalent of redshirts.

The logical extension of that idea is that as Gorn mature, they become slower, burlier and more intelligent. The Gorn Kirk encountered in Arena may have a very mature individual, thus his slow, lumbering pace and extreme cunning. Probably overdue for a promotion to admiral.