This ScienceOf.org interview with Professor of Genetics/Evolution (& Star Trek biological science advisor) Mohammed Noor on the biology, especially the r-selection reproduction, of the Gorn in SNW is marvellous.
Just the kind of uncomfortable but great biological thinking I was hoping we’d get into here at Daystrom Institute.
e.g. Can we think of the Gorn in viral terms?
Treating Gorn like this, each infected person could infect four more people, so the R0 for Gorn would be 4. Not wildly big, but large enough to do the job. Of course, the hatchlings would also be going after one another, so the analogy’s not perfect.
But if you want to think of the Gorn as intelligent, viral space dinosaurs, that does get the idea across.
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.