As a woman older than you, with a mother and aunts of Lwaxana’s age, I found it painfully misogynistic.
All the more so because Picard (and Roddenberry himself) were continually chasing after younger women and nothing was made of it.
I actually am reconciled to Lwaxana and love the much-reviled episode ‘Cost of Living’ but the amount of continuing ridicule and hate she gets from younger male fans drives home the misogyny.
Meanwhile they’re all cool with Picard with Vash.
More likely not catching the predictive spelling.
It’s edited.
But Stewart’s preferences for women generations younger that he is are well established and very public. As are his interventions to give Picard younger love interests right up to the final scene.
I give credit to Majel Barrett credit for leaning into the character and script. It’s more bearable knowing she was likely making Patrick Stewart uncomfortable too!
Every show has a writer’s ‘bible’ that describes the backstory and main characters.
In the case of Lwaxana, a character written for Majel Barret Roddenberry’s wife, some fairly misogynistic stereotypes of middle aged women were laid out for the writers.
Carating the underlying sexism in the writers’ bible for Lwaxana’s character is not a way to make mothers feel appreciated.
Especially, when a lot of the joke was that she was chasing Picard - who avoided women who were mothers mainly due to his actor’s aversion to women his own age.
Picard was an age appropriate match for both Lwaxana and Beverly, both mothers.
Instead, due to Patrick Stewart’s interventions, we got Picard chasing after his much younger real life romantic interest who played Vash, and more recently Stewart’s attempts to shoe-horn in his very much younger wife into a closing scene for Picard.
I don’t think you needed [sic], just the comma that StarTrek.com omitted.
So, this is a big reveal - the scenario is a planet that has not been but now is a part of the Federation.
The viewpoint is civilian.
The resort workplace setting, like the old Loveboat or Fantasy Island, means that anyone can come by as the guest star.
The production values are sufficiently high that it makes me think it might actually be from an episode to come.
Did I miss the actual Protostar announcement?
There’s absolutely no incentive to log in to YouTube now that subscriptions and bells do nothing to control your feed. End stage enshittification.
The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.
Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.
All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.
Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.
The EPs have mentioned in interviews that the alternate version will be a bonus feature on the DVDs/BlueRay/UHD disc sets.
My reaction precisely.
But who knows, it may be wonderful.
And I’m always ready to champion more animated Trek.