Spoilers for TNG S04E14 Clues
!The Enterprise encounters a planet inhabited by an isolationist species who uses a fake wormhole to knock people out so they can somehow mask their presence. OK, I’m with it so far.
This trap fails on Data who revives the crew and the aliens say they need to destroy the Enterprise to stop people finding out about them. Picard points out that if the Enterprise is destroyed Starfleet will come looking for them. Again, so far so good.
The aliens agree to let the crew live if they can wipe everyone’s memory and order Data to never say what happened. This memory wipe takes 24 hours so they modify the computer records to make everyone think a day hasn’t passed and they were actually out for 30 seconds. Then they do it again when the crew realises after finding some unforseen clues, so now at least 48 hours has passed. This is where it lost me.
I can understand them not realising straight away if they’re in deep space and not communicating with Starfleet, but surely they’re going to figure out their chronometer is 2 days off eventually and go back to try and figure out what went on?!<
Oh boy. This one really deserves a detailed post all on its own, especially since I’ve seen practically no discussion about it despite being one of the most fucked up violations of the prime directive in all of Star Trek.
Star Trek TOS S02E05 “The Apple”, or as I know it, “That Time the Enterprise Destroyed an Entire Civilization and Laughed About It”.
Alright, so the crew finds this beautiful tropical paradise planet and goes down to investigate it. But, surprise, turns out the planet is deadly! Worse yet, something is preventing the ship from leaving or being able to transport the crew off planet.
Living on the planet is a primitive race of near-immortals. Beings who are thousands of years old, never get sick, never age, but seem to have stopped progressing mentally past the point of a child. These beings worship a “god” called Vaal, that is actually an ancient computer which controls the entire planet and has taken on itself to be a caretaker to the primitive civilization; ensuring their safety, taking care of all their needs, and being the reason they are essentially immortal. It also is the thing that’s been attacking the crew and preventing the ship from leaving.
Now, everything is not perfect for the people of this civilization. Vaal is not only the reason they stop developing mentally, but he prevents them from having sex or having any physical affection beyond hugging. Now, on its own, this seems harsh, but remember; Vaal is taking care of ALL their needs. The weather is always perfect. There is abundant food. They have comfortable shelters. They never get sick. Never age. They are always happy. They live lives of such peace, that they barely even understand the concept of death. I think a lot of people would agree, that’s not too bad a trade-off, and certainly a lot better a life than most places in the galaxy.
So the ship is unfortunately in an unstable orbit, and everything the crew tries to free it, fails. At the last moment before it crashes, the ship fires a phaser at Vaal and blows it up. Now, on its own, this is not great. Without Vaal, these people are doomed. No longer will they be safe from disease. No longer will they live forever. No longer will they have free food, free shelter, or anything. But, an argument COULD be made that the Enterprise crew was out of options. Sure, it’s kind of screwing the prime directive in favor of their own lives, but the directive has been bent for less, and who knows what the ship crashing into the planet would do.
However, and here’s where things go from an unfortunate situation to “holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”, after Vaal is destroyed, Kirk and the crew meet with the primitive beings to let them know their God is dead. They are understandably concerned and ask what will they do? Kirk responds that they’ll live. They’ll grow farms, and build houses, and have children. They then ask, proving the extent of their innocence, “what are children?” and Kirk responds “Oh… You’ll figure it out” then the entire crew laughs before abruptly leaving. End of episode.
What. The. Fuck?! These people have zero life skills. You just destroyed the one thing keeping them alive and then you’re just… Leaving? While laughing about it? Oh, but they can have sex now. That’s clearly the only important thing. Not teaching them how to farm. How to build shelters or clothing. How to cope with disease. Bad weather. Death. How to raise a child. Nope. They can have sex now, and to the crew, that means it’s a job well done.
That civilization is dead. Their odds of survival are about as good as if you took a bunch of 5 years olds and dumped them in the wilderness. The only member of the crew who questions any of this is Spock at the very end where he wonders if they had essentially just ruined the Garden of Eden and doomed an entire people by destroying their paradise. Then McCoy chimes in with, “Well if that’s the Garden of Eden, would that make you the devil since you have pointed ears?” And then they all laugh again.
I’d forgotten that! I’d like to think that the Enterprise arranged for a Federation support ship who would actually ensure that the civilisation survived, but yeah, Kirk and co making a joke of it is bit much!
The DS9 2 parter Homefront & Paradise Lost
A badmiral plans a military coup using a supposed Changeling attack as justification. He uses an elite group of cadets (Red Squad) to sabotage the planetary power grid, preplans drastic moves for his former loyalist crew to positions of power, and has the ability to mobilize personnel onto every street corner and test people at random.
Keep in mind he’d already been shown to be replaced by a changeling infiltrator once, and one of the infiltrators tells Sisko there are 4 of their people on the planet causing chaos.
Yet Sisko talks Leyton down who resigns his commission, Benteen probably got demoted or court marshalled, Red Squad gets tossed on a super secret mission (that is revisited later)…and everything just kinda goes back to normal.
What about the remaining 4 changelings on Earth? What about all the others culpable with the coup?
I always thought Picard having a secret Bad Motorcycle Girlfriend was really contrived.
Another more general issue: On rewatching TNG as an adult I realized how flawed the argumentation in many of the law case episodes is. I often thought how I’d approach the issue in court, got excited and then Picard or others just start talking about the wildest stuff ever. There are some valid points in most episodes, and often they end up winning (yay), but I’d enjoy the wins more, if the arguments presented by the crew were good, and not because the writers brute forced the plot that way.
It’s more of a general ST trope but the whole “Ensigns are the lowest ranks” instead of just being the lowest of the top tier rank on a ship.
Like they are still officers, the majority of a ships crew complement are supposed to be Enlisted Rates but we never see them.
I have a vague memory of Data stating in that episode that he was re-syncing ships clocks because “the anomaly” had a temporal something-or-other. The ship experienced 30 seconds, but they were jumped ahead.
Since time is affected by gravity and the differences are magnified by distance (according to relativity), ships clocks must constantly be re-syncing if their standard time is set in sector 001.
Yeah, that was it. The crew didn’t react because a time jump from transiting a wormhole is a totally normal thing for them.
I’m not positive, but I think part of the reason for keeping crew unconscious for so long was to make time to fly the ship far enough from the forbidden planet that it would be a pain to go back for another look. There’s an exchange that goes something like this,
Picard: A random wormhole isn’t that interesting. But we saw a glimpse of maybe a planet? Should we, uh, spend a whole two days to go look again and come back?
Data: That was a sensor glitch! Don’t worry about!
Picard: Yeah that’s way too much hassle. Let’s go ahead and roll the credits.
Pretty much. They send a probe to the planet to avoid the risk of hitting the wormhole again which Data rigs the output of to say it isn’t inhabitable after all and the original readings saying it was were probably a glitch.
For the record, we’ve understood how gravity (and velocity) affect clocks since the 70’s. We couldn’t have developed GPS without that understanding (which relies on satellites of known position sending out synchronized pulses of messages that are basically just timestamps. The timestamps are used by the GPS receiver to know how far away said satellites are and triangulates based off that.)
They weren’t unconscious the whole time, they were unconscious for 30secs after a day of figuring out what to do.
They were retroactively unconscious lol
It was crushers plants that gave them a clue, it grew despite the discrepancy in time?
I mean…ghost fuckin’.
🏮👻🍆💦👩⚕️
Yeah. It bothers me that they haven’t revisited that, too.
Hemmer didn’t have to die. Step out into the cold to slow down the xeno larva inside you, bro.
Even ignoring the plot, the writers really thought “let’s kill probably the 3rd most interesting character on this show”. I do love the immortal lady that replaced him, but what they did to him was so messed up.
Yeah, that really bugged me too. It seemed so contrived - Hemmer clearly knew earlier what was happening, as did La’an.
My conspiracy theory is he was too expensive due to the heavy makeup and they didn’t want to keep accommodating the almost completely blind actor.
I think it was always intended to be a one season role. I’m pretty sure the actor said that during one of the Ready Room episodes.
That in itself isn’t a problem if the character’s exit is well-written. The writers could still have killed him off, but at least they could have done it in a more convincing fashion.
I have the same argument about TNG killing off Tasha. It was just a sort of “oop, well I guess she’s dead now” moment.
I’m sure it was at least partially intended to drive the point home that nobody is safe. Because if we saw some random redshirt (technically a yellow shirt in TNG, but whatever…) we’d know they’re marked for death. But it just felt… Incomplete? Like the whole bridge crew just sort of shrugged and moved on, and she was only referenced a few times after that.
I agree, the way Tasha’s death was handled wasn’t great. The impact wasn’t really followed up on over the following few episodes. The manner of her death was more believable than Hemmer’s, though.
It’s Ok, we have Lieutenant (junior grade) Montgomery Scott onboard now…
It’s so great for them to renew the crew once in a while with never before seen people!
This is a great topic!
There’s a multipart Voyager series where they manage to email the holographic doctor back to Starfleet to check in. It’s fantastic overall. But at the end there’s a nail biting plotline where they send the doctor back.
- That’s not how file copying works.
- Even accepting some plot nonsense reason it needed done, it would still just be a bored and tired ensign waiting on the file copy and pressing “retry” if it didn’t work.
The doctor’s program could be a quantum state that just can’t be copied, only transferred. They do it all the time, to the mobile emitter, to the holodeck, etc. And if the state degrades too much during transfer, it can’t be recovered, so all that makes sense.
Then there is that episode with the EMH backup set hundreds of years after Voyager…
I feel like “downloading a file removes it from the computer you’re downloading it from” was a weirdly common misconception in the 90s. I’m sure I remember some Star Trek episode that felt the need to specify that a bunch of data had been “copied and downloaded” from the hero ship’s computer so that the audience wouldn’t think that the data was now gone. Maybe the desktop metaphor where files are presented as physical objects that can be moved around contributed to this belief. Maybe also all the anti piracy PSAs that likened downloading music to stealing a car
I’m sure part of it was audience understanding, but the surely bigger part is that it just made for better television.
If the doctor COULD be copied, then any time the medbay was busy they’d just fire up a second one of him, or a third. And if he “died” they would spin him up again from a backup, no biggie!
It massively reduces the dramatic stakes when one of your main characters is easily replaceable.
Of course, there are always exceptions - but only when the plot benefits from exceptions - like the backup Doctor in the future, or when (human) Riker got cloned in a transporter accident.
So I suppose we can say the general storytelling rule across all of fiction is “There is only one of any character, unless there is a interesting plot reason for there to be more.”
So I suppose we can say the general storytelling rule across all of fiction is “There is only one of any character, unless there is a interesting plot reason for there to be more.”
Yep. That’s definitely why. And they made the right call. A lot of media does it, and usually I can just ignore it.
But having a full plotline of “I’m getting my file back” was just too much for my immersion. Lol.
I wish they would have cut away and handwaved over getting him back.
And let’s not even get me started on how the return trip could have been just the diff files for a few days of experiencs, and so should have been orders of magnitude easier than the original transfer. Lol.
there’s a very believable anecdote about an early p2p file sharing system, i think audiogalaxy - “just downloaded an mp3, then see that the uploader is connected and getting the same file. send a message asking why, replies “getting my song back, dick””
The one where DoucheMcBurger tried to claim Data was starfleet’s property and therefore he should be allowed to study his brain so they could make more datas, and Ryker just folded and prosecuted the case like, “hey, he’s my friend, but I’m going to argue to get his brain fried because I’ll lose my job.”
- Ryker’s assholishness is on perfect display.
- the JAG lady from the station is uterly stupid and fucking incompetent. Basically, in order for the Prime Directive to even be a thing, they would have had to establish a legal test to determine if a species were sentient or whatever. the entire question would have already been settled, and she’d just have to tick off boxes. But naw.
- When Ryker detached Data’s hand, Picard should have had Worf detach his hand as a counter argument (and reattached by Crusher.) 3B) when Ryker turned Data off, Picard should have shot him with a phaser, (and maybe have Crusher bring him back. maybe multiple times.)
also, in Voyager, there’s the entire Year of Hell story arc that just annoys the hell out of me. Classic example of why time travel should be offlimits to any sci-fi writer or producer. (Exceptions exist, of course. Dr. Who… but then time travel is kinda the point there, and it never takes itself seriously.) it’s just too much of a cop out to be like “Oh. we reset the timeline and it’s all good.” Same with that episode where the planet blew up from something and Janeway gets sucked into the past with Paris. (this is where the romance began, probably. and this shit leads to having salamanders for kids…)
(Trial and Tribulations in DS9 is the rare exception, mostly because it was just a gratuitous nod to one of the best TOS episodes ever.)
IIRC, Riker prosecutes Data because if he opts not to do so, they will not have the trial and Data will immediately become the property of Starfleet. He does not want to do it, but is told that if at any point he is thought to be half-assing his duty, they will end the trial and find for Starfleet.
I don’t think they have much experience with races that were built by other races being considered sentient and have been accepted by the UFP, so I can understand a lack of precendent here.
And I would think that if Worf pulled off Riker’s arm, hilarious though it may be, there would be little doubt about the point he was trying to make between the difference in a painful dismemberment and the disassembly of a toaster.
I would really like to see the exchange with worf ripping off one of Riker’s arms animated in lower decks.
I don’t know how military trials are usually held in modern navies (where Star Trek obviously take ispiration from) but arranging Piker vs Picard is not only an asshole move (for the two, not only for Data) but also a clear conflict of interests and there’s no way the judge gets a fair representation of both sides.
Also, this episode has a very good theme, but onestly falls flat for a very simple reason: Data is already a starfleet member, he presumably applied to starfleet academy, graduated and got enrolled on a ship. He is part of a crew, has had promotions and is capable of taking command. Doesn’t that mean he is already recognized as a sentient being? Or do they give ranks to computers as well?
Yeah that’s always been my issue, if he’s property why did he go to officer school and hold command positions on multiple ships? It’s absurd.
I don’t think they have much experience with races that were built by other races being considered sentient and have been accepted by the UFP, so I can understand a lack of precendent here.
The UFP (and starfleet would follow that,) would already have a test… a guideline that could be followed to determine if [whatever species] qualified as ‘sentient’. the prime directive would literally not work with out such a test. As for Data being built by someone… that’s irrelevant. Also, there is some weak precedent in Data’s commission as a starfleet officer.
And I would think that if Worf pulled off Riker’s arm, hilarious though it may be, there would be little doubt about the point he was trying to make between the difference in a painful dismemberment and the disassembly of a toaster.
This is why Worf should use a really sharp bat’leth. he won’t even feel it. It’s not Data’s fault Ryker is of an inferior design, in any case.
you might be right about the pretext of why ryker did it. still a prick, though.
I think the plan was once they discovered the clocks were off, Data would BS that it must have been from the wormhole.
Enterprise. S2E22 Cogenitor.
I understand that they’re trying to tell a story here about morality and culture and blah blah blah but even if this didn’t fly in the face of what Starfleet is supposed to be, the way they callously employed suicide at the end? And the way Archer informed Trip of it, then blamed him, then turned it into a “lesson” for him?
I have no words for how much I hated this episode. What the fuck.
E: I’m also watching it for the first time and just saw this episode so I’m not looking forward to… is this next episode beginning with Borg? What the ever-loving fuck, Enterprise?
Yeah, so, Star Trek First Contact made a small problem having a Borg Sphere explode in orbit. The episode you’re referring to involves people of the past discovering the debris of the future Borg Sphere.
I watched it. I just didn’t enjoy it.
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! !<Works in some clients because that’s the Reddit syntax, but it’s not part of the Lemmy markdown.How has nobody mentioned ‘Threshold’ yet?
When I read your comment, “Huh. If it was that bad, you’d think I would remember it.”
When I finished the thread.
“Wait? Are we not talking about Warp 10 Child Abandonment?”
And a quick search later: Threshold
Right. The less said, the better, I suppose.
But we all agree it probably wins this whole thread, right? Lol.
I_Has_A_Hat’s explanation about the problems with “The Apple” might actually trump “Threshold”! Although I think just about everyone wishes “Threshold” hadn’t happened (the writers included, IIRC).
SSSsssSSSSHHHHhhhhh!!!
The less people mention that cursed shit the better. Nobody should remember that.
I tried to watch Strange New Worlds.
Second episode has a Star Fleet officer just walking up to a strange machine and grabbing it.
Nope.
I really hated that episode for exactly that reason. I’m not a big fan of Cadet Uhura’s plotlines in general. It is worth going back though. There are some fantastic episodes of SNW. Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach and the Elysian Kingdom were great, and the S1 finale was a What If of Pike in Kirk’s place facing down the Romulans in Balance of Terror, which I loved. The Gorn are cool, and Spock’s hijinks are fun in an old fashioned Trek kind of way that I’m glad we have back. And season 2 only gets better!
The show isn’t worth the effort, imho. Glad you’re enjoying it.
Nutrek just doesn’t hold it as good as pre-enterprise
Another beef I have is that the SNW bridge is twenty times bigger and nicer than the TOS, which is supposed to be in their future.
I know it’s blasphemy, but I’m not a Lower Decks fan.
Contextualize this for an ignorant boob, okay?
That central character is the currator of the Voyager museum, and the Lower Decks crew is there to take the newly completed museum ship to Earth. He spends the whole time stressing over their antics.
I was actually looking for a gif of him saying “Subtle updates that do not impact historical consistency are an acceptable compromise for preservation!” but I couldn’t find it lol
They were trained for this bullshit.
It was lazy writing, imho. There are other ways to kill the character without pure dumbassery.
I never figured out the story line where Tasha somehow had a kid with a Romulan after dying.
No, please don’t explain, I’m still trying to catalogue all the Jean Greys from X-Men
Oh this doesn’t just feature time travel, this features an alternate reality AND time travel!
No cloning??
Nope, no cloning. But almost the evil twin trope.
