VindictiveJudge

I'm honestly impressed they successfully modeled it at that scale at all. That it actually looks pretty accurate is a bonus.

Nah, too vertical.

Add in Sokel for the next round. He was T'Lyn's former captain.

Also, there was just something about it that felt like a re-hash of an actual TNG episode, but I can’t pin down which one.

"Homeward," the episode where Worf's adoptive brother evacuates a pre-warp species to a new planet because theirs is dying using the Enterprise's transporters and holodeck to make them think they're just traveling over land to a new place. It's almost exactly the plan for moving the Ba'ku.

That's not new. Turbolifts on the Discovery were depicted that way pre-refit, back in the TOS-ish era. It's a (mind-boggling) stylistic choice or something.

I am part of the group that thinks Insurrection was not just bad as a movie, but bad as a plot line all together. Literally everything about the Ba'ku-Son'a conflict falls apart at the slightest scrutiny.

Season 3 has a ton of problems, but it's still a much better send off for the TNG crew than Nemesis was, and that's good enough for me.

I genuinely can't remember if this is a shot from LD. The episode where Boimler gets a girlfriend, maybe?

For their internal politics, yes the PD applies. For general interaction, no, the PD no longer applies. You can also land on a pre-warp world if they're already buying Romulan Ale from the Ferengi. It's not like you can make it any worse once the cat's out of the bag. Consider that Kirk was sent to negotiate with the Organians back when they were thought to be a pre-industrial species; that was fine since they had already been contacted by some other people, including the Klingons.

They're actually a republic. The Vedek Assembly has a lot of influence, but they're fully separate from the Provisional Government. And they only have that much influence because the vast majority of the population follows the Bajoran faith. Think of the Assembly like the Vatican - powerful when everyone cares (Pope during the Middle Ages), but virtually powerless when nobody does (Pope now).

Phase 2 production attempts actually only lasted a year or two right before filming on TMP started.

They were going through a few different movie scripts at the time. Interestingly, a rejected one was about a black hole that threatened to consume reality, not dissimilar to the prime timeline part of '09.