ValueSubtracted

It's been a pretty poorly-kept secret - an Enterprise-D set with the TNG character figs. It looks like the official announcement will finally come soon-ish.

"It becomes a profoundly difficult thing to scale that infrastructure in a way that allows you to scale growth in the retail sector," he says. "So can it work? I think it could, but it would be a very difficult and painful process to get established and to grow."

One of the Federated Co-ops, Red River Co-op, ceased grocery operations in 1983 - it wasn't until the Sobeys/Safeway merger in 2014 that they were able to pick up four of the Winnipeg locations that the new megacorp were forced to sell, and re-enter the market. They now have nine grocery locations in and around the city.

It's hard to take a lesson from that, since you can't count on those circumstances to repeat every often, but inheriting existing infrastructure certainly seems to help.

There was a little Metron twinkle in the distance right before it happened.

Well I'm happy for her - it sounds like it's a good thing that she reconsidered her life goals, and found something more fulfilling.

I really think you're putting words in her mouth.

"It felt impossible to go back to that kind of a life and I didn’t want to sacrifice my time with my family" has absolutely nothing to do with the process of transferring credentials to Canada, and everything to do with the job itself. “I feel that I can be a better nurse than a physician" speaks for itself.

There are plenty of stories about the challenges of transferring credentials. This, by her own account, as quoted in this article, is not one of them.

If the process were easier she wouldn’t have been “led” to reassess those priorities.

How does an easier process change her conclusion of, "I would be happier as a nurse?"

Not exactly.

When Tretiak first arrived in Canada in December 2022, she looked into obtaining a license to practice medicine, but the complexity of the process and volume of paperwork led her to reassess her priorities.

That doesn't say she thought it was "too much." It says she decided it wasn't what she wanted to do.

You can argue that the process is too much - and it probably is, at least in places - but she pretty directly states that it led to her deciding that she didn't actually want to be a doctor, and would rather be a nurse.

She says she sees nursing as an opportunity to engage more deeply with patients through communication and empathy. “I feel that I can be a better nurse than a physician,” says Tretiak, who currently works in a retirement home for Ukrainian-speaking older adults.

“I had lost a lot of people already – including many of my friends – and I no longer connected my happiness to my professional goals. It felt impossible to go back to that kind of a life and I didn’t want to sacrifice my time with my family.”

I'm going to suggest we shouldn't force her to do something she doesn't want to do.

I thought there was a bit of a missed opportunity to delve into her training and experiences during the Klingon War. They've used that as part of her backstory, but have given the meatiest stuff to M'Benga and Chapel.

I had an idea for what I would have done with a Disco musical.

Rather than having everyone be forced to sing, the episode would be an actual stage musical put on by the crew in the shuttlebay or someplace.

The plot? The story of first contact with the Vulcans...but the "official," Borg-free version, with a glorified, square-jawed version of Zefram Cochrane.

Sometimes, she crashes the ship!

I thought this one was a perfectly enjoyable, even "classic" (whatever that means) episode - something I'd been hoping for in this season that has seemed a little too "gimmicky" at times.

I wasn't wowed by it, but it was hitting all the right notes.

And then they got to the Metron reveal, and...I just don't know. It serves little purpose aside from connecting dots of continuity, and I just don't find that interesting. It's fine, I guess, but I think the episode would have been better off without it.