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?
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).
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.
Early pre-production for the first movie started that year. Might have been to build hype.
I mostly chalk that kind of thing up to writers not having any idea what the Prime Directive actually is.
You can combine it with nearly anything and it will work. I love chocolate, but I'm unconvinced that it would work as the ice cream flavor in a float, for example. Vanilla? So long as the other flavor is sweet, it will work.
And a tricorder that they occasionally check while trying to look sneaky.
Add in Sokel for the next round. He was T'Lyn's former captain.