[Zeke]

Huh. I wasn't expecting that bit in the FAQ to just break your brain outright. I'm making a note here: "Huge success."

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

It infuriates me how many shows these days seem to think that they can abandon the formula to get a new wider (and more profitable) audience that will render the old audience irrelevant. It has never and will never work. Look at King's Quest Mask of Eternity, or the Star Wars sequel trilogy, or the Willow show.

In fairness, sometimes it works. The Mandalorian was a very different approach to Star Wars -- and it's easy to forget this now, but so was Deep Space Nine to Trek. These became fan-favourite series because they cared about both being good entertainment and inhabiting/expanding the larger mythology. The problem with so many recent projects is that not only are they ignoring the second thing, they're not even good at the first.

Your Tellarite idea is interesting, but I'm not sure it could've been used to get the Vulcans off the hook. Remember, Archer was never really being fair with the "holding us back" accusation. The Vulcans weren't holding us back, they were just letting us get there ourselves. (They probably had some incident in their past, like the Watchers or the Andalites, that taught them that lesson.) First Contact had already established the Vulcans' technological lead, so if Archer was going to have this "holding us back" grudge, it had to include them.

It might indeed have been interesting if he had this grudge against all the advanced species, and the needless bitchiness we saw from some Vulcans could certainly have been transferred to the Tellarites. But really, I think -- and I'm just realizing this now as I type it -- that the whole idea was misguided. Archer's grudge was understandable after what happened to his dad, but he should've grown out of it. We as a species should want to get there ourselves. And we should understand why we're not getting handouts -- there's more than enough proof in our own history of how badly that can go wrong.