With Seven on the list, I wondered if this might be the origin of the Fenris Rangers. By collecting ex-Starfleets and lower deckers, Nick Locarno is gathering castouts who were ignored or underserved by their own people. Sounds a lot like the Rangers to me.
Sito Jaxa, the original lower decker no less! We met her in an episode before TNG's "Lower Decks", which killed her off. It's fitting that her loss shaped the trajectory of the show that took that name.
Given the mention of Thomas Riker, I wondered if they were going to reveal that Locarno was a transporter clone and Paris' dadmiral covered it up. But that would also mean Beckett kept quiet about it, and that seems like something she would have mentioned when they interacted with Tom Paris.
ONRAC is one of my favorites. They have such a lovely approach to crackpots and charlatans of all stripes. Gentle mockery leavened with genuine engagement with the aim to better understand these bowel movements of human thought and expose the underlying motives of grift behind so many of them.
I highly recommend everyone listen to Malcolm Gladwell's series he recently did on guns on the Revisionist History podcast. It lays out these points in crystal clarity.
Has crime actually gone down, or have homicide rates gone down? Malcolm Gladwell did a great series on his podcast recently that points out that when trauma centers save more lives of GSW victims, the homicide rates go down simply because not as many people die -even though there are just as many bullets hitting humans.
I love this community so much.