Entertainment
Is The New Star Trek Spinoff About To Redeem Its Worst Character?
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
While many Star Trek fans dislike various characters in Starfleet Academy, the one they hate the most isn’t one of the main characters. Like members of the early Discovery bridge crew, she has a name, but almost nobody watching actually knows it. To them, she’s mostly “the girl who ate her comm badge.”
This character (who is actually named Pickford) has only appeared in three episodes so far, and she’s always in the background, being generally useless. So useless, in fact, that you might find yourself wondering why the writers put such a stupid character in their prestige sci-fi show. Now, some Star Trek fans have a compelling theory about Pickford: that her stupidity is just an act, and she’s secretly a spy for Nus Braka!
The Woman Who Knew Too Little
In the very first episode of Starfleet Academy (“Kids These Days”), Pickford stood out in the worst possible way, nervously admitting to the Doctor that she had swallowed her comm badge. Critics pointed to this as an example of the new show having the kind of broad comedy more suitable to a Saturday morning cartoon than a new Star Trek show. After all, this was a character training to be the best of the best, but she appeared to have the wits and intelligence of a toddler in her first appearance.
She doesn’t acquit herself very well later, either: in that premiere episode, she has a full-on meltdown after Nus Braka’s pirate attack. Later, she’s rude to the holographic SAM, and in the most recent episode (“Come, Let’s Away”), she had another panic attack in a tense situation and had to be escorted off the bridge. So far, Pickford has revealed herself to be rude, stupid, and completely useless in almost any situation, prompting a growing number of Star Trek fans to ask why she was put in the show in the first place.
A Secret Spy?
Apart from just being annoying, the biggest issue with Pickford is that she doesn’t seem to be Starfleet material. Sure, she’s in the academy and wears the uniform, but she seems to have none of the emotional and mental discipline you’d expect from a future Starfleet officer. This is in direct contrast to Starfleet Academy‘s Big Bad Nus Braka, who presents himself as a goofy joke (complete with cackling monologues about time being an origami chicken) but is secretly hypercompetent.
That competence was on full display in “Come, Let’s Away,” an episode where Starfleet asks for his help in defeating nefarious villains known as the Furies. Braka pretends to cooperate, but he manipulates the situation to his advantage and has his flunkies destroy a Starfleet vessel. Later, he disables and ransacks an entire Starbase, which is quite the accomplishment; sure, the Klingons in Discovery took out a base, but now, a simple space pirate was able to obtain the same accomplishment as one of the fiercest space empires the galaxy has ever known.
In “Come, Let’s Away,” this is presented as evidence that Nus Braka is a criminal genius, but some fans aren’t buying it. A growing number of viewers believe that the only way this skeezy pirate is able to so consistently outwit the smartest people in the quadrant is because he has someone on the inside, feeding him information. The primary suspect, surprisingly enough, is the girl who fed herself a comm badge!
Hiding In Plain Sight
Why do people think Nus Braka has a spy within Starfleet? For one thing, he has shown up whenever Chancellor Ake takes her students into space; this was explained in the first episode (he tracked Caleb’s transmission), but in the second episode, he seems to know enough about the Furies and their plan to coordinate an attack that destroyed a Starfleet ship and crippled a Starbase. He was likely coordinating with the Furies and possibly with his spy, which might be why he attacked a Starbase that focuses on researching (as Nelrec says) “classified things.”
Obviously, there are many characters that could be potential spies for Nus Braka: Genesis is still very mysterious and seems to share the space pirate’s Daddy issues. Nelrec is continually disillusioned by working with Starfleet, so he might very well team up with Chancellor Ake’s biggest enemy. Heck, even the Doctor may have become disillusioned enough (or just reprogrammed) to change sides, and since multiple versions of this character exist in the galaxy, Braka might have even replaced the Voyager Doctor with a copy loyal to him.
However, I agree with the fans who think Pickford is a secret spy: antics like swallowing her comm badge are a great way to ensure that nobody thinks she is smart enough to be a double agent. Plus, her frequent meltdowns could just be a convenient way to take her out of the action. For example, she could have easily communicated with Nus Braka in “Come, Let’s Away” after being escorted from the bridge, transmitting to the pirate once she is in her quarters and away from prying eyes and ears.
Is Starfleet Academy About To Redeem Its Worst Character?
There is no definitive proof that Nus Braka has a spy, and he may very well just be the criminal mastermind he presents himself as. But now that the Federation has placed him at the top of their Most Wanted list, it stands to reason we’ll see more of this villain going forward. Honestly, it would be downright shocking if we don’t get some big reveals in the season finale, and a secret spy update would be the biggest reveal of them all.
Right now, all my latinum is on Pickford, if only because it would be such a delightful heel turn: how cool would it be if the dumbest, most incompetent cadet turns out to be the biggest traitor since Seska? This would redeem Starfleet Academy’s throwaway character in the most unexpected way and give us a new villain to hate. If nothing else, she and Nus Braka could have an earnest, onscreen debate about the most pressing question in the galaxy: what tastes better, a comm badge or an origami chicken?
Entertainment
Creative Assembly drops first look at the Alien: Isolation sequel
Twelve years after the original Alien: Isolation game was released across platforms, on the official “Alien Day” meant to celebrate the beloved franchise, game developers Creative Assembly are returning to the world of xenomorphs and unreliable robots to once again terrify the living daylights out of us.
The teaser trailer, aptly titled “False Sense of Security,” does a lot with very little, from the flashing red light in a poorly lit room to the ominous background music and eventual close-up of what looks to be a payphone, with the word “Emergency” appropriately backlit.
As you might expect from the makers of the original game, Creative Assembly is clearly reluctant to over-share, relying on atmosphere and sound to do the heavy lifting, but the brief glimpse we get of the background when the door opens suggests the possibility that, unlike the first game, the sequel might also take place on a planet’s surface, perhaps hinting at a much larger game world.
Needless to say, we’ll be covering more details about the game’s development and progress as they emerge.
Entertainment
YouTube is prompting users to enable watch history. Heres the workaround.
Before AI became the defining buzzword of the 21st century, algorithms held that crown. And frankly, algorithmic recommendations have always kind of sucked. YouTube, in particular, has long been criticized for serving up low-quality content — and more troublingly, for functioning as a gateway to right-wing rabbit holes.
The best workaround has always been simple: pause your YouTube watch history. Without it running, your recommendations pull from your likes, saved videos, and subscriptions — not from that one iceberg video you clicked at 2 a.m. that suddenly has the algorithm convinced you want an endless stream of “SJW owned” compilations.
That fix, however, appears to be breaking down. Last week, a wave of YouTube users reported that with watch history paused, the platform has stopped serving homepage recommendations entirely — replacing their feeds with a prompt to re-enable watch history so YouTube can “populate” it.
Credit: Mashable screenshot / YouTube
The issue isn’t universal. Users who recently paused their history still see recommendations, likely because YouTube has enough residual data to work with. The problem is hitting hardest for users who have kept watch history off for years — a group that, until now, had no issues. For the record, this writer has had watch history paused since 2017 without a single problem — until now, apparently.
Mashable Light Speed
This change hasn’t gone down well, with many taking to Reddit to voice their complaints. “I’ve had my watch history off since 2013. Why is this suddenly a requirement? Maliciously incompetent company,” says the top comment on one Reddit thread. Another commentor states, “Haven’t had watch history on for 9 years. Now they’re forcing me to turn it on to get recommended what they recommend me on my PC even though the reason they stated they cant recommend anything is because I don’t have watch history on??? Makes no sense and its almost blatant.”
While this isn’t the first time YouTube has nudged users toward enabling tracking, some see this latest move as a more aggressive push to harvest search histories for ad targeting. There’s also a legitimate question worth asking: why does YouTube suddenly need watch history to generate homepage recommendations when it had been doing exactly that for years without it?
Mashable reached out to YouTube with questions about the change and had not received a response by publication time.
Users have already found a workaround. Re-enable your watch history, refresh the page, then immediately pause it again. Your homepage recommendations should repopulate. To access the page to re-pause, head to Settings, click “View or change your Google Account settings,” navigate to Data & Privacy, and toggle off YouTube history.
Entertainment
Star Wars' Most Hated Plot Hole Actually Makes Perfect Sense
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Do you know what happens when Star Wars fans get together? If you said “embarrassing things,” you’re correct, but I meant more specifically. After a few conversations and a few beers (or maybe spiked blue milks), everyone starts dishing on their favorite franchise plot holes. These are supposedly narrative mistakes that make this famous galaxy far, far away feel that much less immersive. Incidentally, the one “plot hole” that comes up most frequently in these discussions is the idea that Order 66 should have killed more Jedi than it actually did.
In the Original Trilogy, we are introduced to the idea that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda are the last Jedi in the galaxy. But the prequels, sequels, and an entire universe of tie-in books, comics, and games have increasingly introduced more Jedi characters that survived Emperor Palpatine’s galactic purge of these laser sword-wielding do-gooders. However, as usual, the fandom is griping for no good reason because, based on the sheer onscreen incompetence of Palpatine and his clones, it’s a miracle that more Jedi didn’t survive this sloppy attempt at mass murder.
The Stupidest Order In The Galaxy
The Star Wars movies A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back presented Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda as the only surviving Jedi. Of course, Kenobi didn’t give too many granular details as to how the Jedi died. All he told young Luke Skywalker in that first movie is that Darth Vader “helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights.… now, the Jedi are all but extinct.” Nobody really questioned this because we had no idea how many Jedi there were to begin with. Plus, it was easy enough to imagine the most powerful guy in the galaxy using all of a vast, galaxy-spanning Empire’s resources to hunt and kill a bunch of hippie space wizards.
But in Revenge of the Sith, we see how it all went down. Palpatine had a hidden command secretly installed in the brains of all the clones who were fighting side-by-side with the Jedi during the Clone Wars. Once the Emperor commanded them to “Execute Order 66,” all of the clones stopped what they were doing to immediately kill the closest Jedi. In a montage of bleak scenes, we see how sudden surprise blaster fire was enough to kill even Jedi Masters like Ki-Adi Mundi, Plo Koon, and Aayla Secura.
Holo Pursuits
At the time, it made a kind of morbid sense. We had previously seen how Jedi like Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi could deflect a handful of blaster bolts, so it seemed reasonable to believe they couldn’t survive if a small army fired on them all at once. However, some of the clones were downright sloppy with their execution attempts. Because of their methods and the whole design of Palpatine’s harebrained scheme, it was basically inevitable that countless warriors would survive this attempted purge. This would explain why popular Jedi like Kanan Jarrus, Ahsoka Tano, Cal Kestis, and even Grogu survived Order 66.
When you re-watch Revenge of the Sith, notice how sloppy the Clone Troopers are. Cody basically fires one shot at Obi-Wan Kenobi and assumes falling into the water will be enough to kill the guy who can take on entire droid armies by himself. The handful of clones who try to kill Yoda somehow forget that he can sense their intent through the Force. Even some of the successful kills are sloppy. Like, sure, y’all blew Plo Koon out of the sky, but other Jedi flying starships could likely hyperspace to safety (yes, they’d have to get to a hyperspace ring first, you can stop writing that comment).
When The Sith Go Marching In
My theory is simple: assuming other Jedi were in similar situations throughout the galaxy, quite a few Jedi would survive Order 66. If the Clone Troopers tried to fire on other warriors who were very far away (like Obi-Wan), the targeted Jedi would likely escape. If other clones tried to sneak up on Jedi in non-combat situations (like with Yoda), these Force users would sense their intent and kill them out of self-defense. Furthermore, if there aren’t enough Clones around when the order goes through, a Jedi could survive, say, only three or four people trying to shoot him, much like Obi-Wan did when fighting Battle Droids throughout the prequels.
Long story not very short, the Emperor came up with a stupid plan and executed it in the sloppiest possible way. Plus, contrary to what Obi-Wan said in A New Hope, later Star Wars shows make it seem like Vader stopped personally hunting down Jedi and left that task to the Inquisitors. Whenever the Inquisitors fight someone other than a helpless child or scared former Padawan, they get their butts handed to them, as seen in everything from Star Wars Rebels to the Fallen Order and Survivor video games. Because Order 66 was done so poorly, and Palpatine’s brute squad sucked so hard, it’s no wonder so many Jedi survived the purge.
In retrospect, this makes sense, too. Palpatine is infamous among fans for his insane plans, which included playing the commander in chief of two different warring armies so he could land the job of “mutilated president for life.” It’s only because of (let’s face it) bad writing on George Lucas’ part that any of the Emperor’s plans ever succeed. Order 66 was so utterly stupid and handled so poorly that it guaranteed plenty of Jedi survivors. But what else would you expect from someone who spent all his Empire’s credits on a space station that’s so easy to blow up … twice!
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Creative Assembly drops first look at the Alien: Isolation sequel
