It’s a biblical metaphor that’s made it into English usage.

But given how much the Borg love the Omega particle in Voyager, it’s fitting.

Yes. The Destiny trilogy is described as the Alpha to Omega story of the Borg.

La’an didn’t become Romulan.

That was just the inference that she and Pike made as they both had awareness that Romulans existed.

In fact, it was a misdirection and further evidence that Vulcans can be blind in their prejudices.

The two of them locked onto the explanation that they knew and never considered that La’an’s heritage of altered DNA might lead to manipulative and territorially conquering behaviour like her ancestor Khan.

It was turning off the impact of the balancing unaltered human DNA and augmenting her brain function that let the Khan-like behaviour dominate.

I thought it was a fairly deft look at the risks of emphasizing different elements of brain function through intervention.

There were references to whales before that in beta-canon diagrams.

The idea that they are a response to Star Trek IV is also beta canon or even widespread head canon.

I see that the writers are down in the fine print of the announcement.

Myers just has story credit.

It’s interesting because Mack was originally a NY Film School grad and has two writing credits for DS9. He was picked up from that by Pocketbooks to write Treklit. So, writing a radio play is moving him back towards where he started.

There’s real news in there!

David Mack and Kirsten Beyer have cocredit for the script of the Star Trek: Khan audio podcast.

This just increased my expectations that this will be a high quality script.

I do recall that Enterprise was hyped as a response to the demands from (mostly male) fans who wanted a ‘return to exploration’, less ‘magic technology’ and implicitly ‘men doing stuff.’

The 1990s BBS hate of the women in leadership roles in the early seasons of Voyager was savage.

Again, that’s an issue regarding screenwriting not tie-in fiction.

And on the screenwriting side, it’s an issue Paramount has already taken on with Lower Decks, Picard, and Prodigy’s very numerous references to classic shows and characters. All those Easter eggs were included.

Any characters created by tie-in writers are Paramount’s IP under the standard tie-in writer contract. No credit need be given even.

This has already been established as Prodigy and Lower Decks have brought TrekLit elements into canon.

Even Star Trek Online content is Paramount IP. The vfx team were able to directly convert renders of STO ships for Picard.

I bought it in hardcover and was deeply disappointed.

See my comments above.

There has been no justification for why the IP holders at Paramount insisted that the most crew of the Voyager be miserable once they returned to Earth, but it’s an acknowledged fact at this point.

I found the Voyager books when they return to the Alpha Quadrant very frustrating and disappointing. I DNFd the second one.

It seems like the tie-in auto Christie Golden was required (by the IP holder) to break the Voyager crew up and make them experience a great deal of unhappiness.

In the main series of post Voyager 24th century relaunch timeline novels post Nemesis, longstanding author Peter David was obliged to kill Katherine Janeway off in one of the crossover events!

That said, I did really enjoy Kirsten Beyer’s Full Circle Voyager novels. Beyer was eventually given permission to get the Voyager crew back together for a new exploratory mission to the Delta Quadrant with a group of slipstream ships.

Vanguard is darker even than DS9, so not everyone’s taste.

What it does have is not only Starfleet on-station but also 4 ships that are based there from a scout explorer to a Constitution class. It’s a lot of characters. Plus Tholians and Klingons. The mystery takes a bit to come together but it’s excellent.

The Enterprise and her crew show up occasionally but aren’t the primary characters. There is one Vanguard novel recently add that is Enterprise-focused and is one of the best books since Destiny.

Directors, actors and art directors seem to be very happy to tread the ground of adaptations.

What we really have is some writers that want to tell their own Star Trek stories but aren’t doing a good job of serialization and studio executives who think that rehashing existing stories and characters will buy success.

And yes we have egos like Patrick Stewart’s holding his character hostage to his own reinterpretation of his character to be a reflection of himself.

But as we have seen with the character of Jim Kirk, there can be other actors to carry on the legacy.

That’s not really the point though.

While Slow Horses, Reached or Silo had their print audiences, they are not adapted solely because they are reaching enormous audiences as books. They have become successful shows because someone made the case for adaptation to the studios.

Star Trek has been struggling to make serialized live action shows successfully. Why not go with what works and adapt that?

Tie-in writers are writers for hire.

They don’t own any of the IP for their creations. All the IP is owned by Paramount.

Star Trek television has directly taken concepts from Treklit for Discovery and Picard without any credit whatsoever to the print authors who created them.

Screenwriters who created guest characters like Locarno are owed some credit and residuals but these are very modest.

There was a good recent thread on this. Much depends on your own preferences.

I posted the image of the first book of the TOS era series Vanguard because I think it would be excellent to adapt to television. It’s about Starbase 47 serving Starfleet in a region of Federation expansion and colonization. It’s somewhat dark and there’s a mystery at the core. Tholians get extensive treatment which is rare.

If you’re looking for the Alpha and Omega of the Borg, the Destiny trilogy is excellent. It’s basically the best Borg content out there.

If you’re into time travel, Christopher L. Bennett has a series of books about the Bureau of Temporal Investigations.

There was also a great anthology of novellas focused on the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.

There are numerous great standalones too.

Frankly, we saw more in Pike’s face and heard more in his tone of voice — grim and determined - than any debates might have given us.

We were shown rather than told, and that’s a good thing.

This was arguably Anson Mount’s best, most sincere, performance as Pike since Discovery season two. There’s been a glibness in Pike in SNW. Both episodes 5 and 6 this season have turned that around.

It was also another episode where Una showed that she really was Pike’s First Officer and principal advisor.

The Destiny trilogy by David Mack is my favourite. I liked it so much that I got a print copy of the omnibus.

Cold Equations is another popular trilogy by Mack.

Vanguard is TOS era series with books alternating in authorship by Mack and the writing duo of Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore. Vanguard, Starbase 47, is a somewhat mysterious Starfleet base of operations in a new region under colonization. While the Enterprise and her crew make a few appearances across the series, it’s primarily about Vanguard and the ships that are based there.

I liked all the Titan novels.

The Fall is a multibook ‘event’ in the Relaunch novelverse with each book by a different one of the regular authors.

It comes after Destiny and the Typhon Pact series of books.

While I like most of the books in all of these, there’s one author David R. George III whose books I find unbearably dull. He clearly knew his canon cold but his books are long on excessively detailed exposition, and short on dialogue or action. By the time I got to The Fall, I had learned to skip his books and just count on the recaps provided by the other authors.

I don’t see the documentary as the A-plot at all.

It was constantly present as a frame, but the episode wasn’t primarily about the documentary - it was primarily about how Starfleet captains and senior crew wrestle with ethical decisions when their orders do not align with their values, and how they seek to find information that can provide a rationale to pursue an alternative course of action.

Basically, it showed how important the crew that is present in the situation is and how that makes Starfleet more than just a military organization serving a military mission.