I would love for Kirk’s image to be rehabilitated. Way too many people who have never interacted with TOS directly basing everything they know about Kirk off Futurama’s Zap Brannigan and other parodies or the depiction in the Abrams movies. Any take with more nuance is welcome.
The Abrams chapters are action movies, so of course they’re not giving a rounded depiction of Kirk, anymore than the TNG movies were a fair depiction of Picard.
I always got the impression that Vulcan society operated similar to traditional Japanese or other societies where couples were “arranged” by families. Not sure about the one off cases though so maybe there is some kind of sex industry given the physiological toll if it’s not addressed in time
It does seem to be primarily on an arranged marriage system, but there are plenty of exceptions. Pairings that don’t come together for some reason, partners that die either due to age or accident, etc.
As I recall on Voyager with a little coaxing Tuvok was able to use the holodeck to get “relief” so I’d imagine the same goes for most vulcans who might be on long away missions
I’m not sure that it is. Voyager likely only went with the holodeck solution because they were stranded in the delta quadrant, and no other alternatives were available.
Within the Federation, a Vulcan who felt the Ponn Farr would take leave, like Spock tried to do, or couples would try to serve on the same ship/station together to minimise issues.
I think looking at the ships' different roles may answer that question. The Miranda-class is a backline support and science platform, only called to the front during extreme circumstances (Wolf-359, Dominion War). They can be efficient at simple taskings like specific missions or supply runs. Like its successor, the California-class, they're also the mass produced, easy to build/repair workhorse type, so a simple, tested design just works over a longer life time.
Whereas the Constitution-class is a much larger, more complex, and line serving Heavy Cruiser. Presumably being on the frontline of exploration and military intervention, they have a higher need for the bleeding edge tech The Federation can field, especially with the fleet flagship USS Enterprise. Its unique hardware would also make it harder to repair and maintain which probably affected the lifespan of the class as a whole.
Like others said, it's most likely more sensible to do a full redesign whenever a new frontline or special class is called for instead of relying on retrofitting to keep up with enemy tech advances. Especially with core components like warp core upgrades, computing types (ie Galaxy-class moving to isolinear), or completely new tech like the Intrepid-class' bio-neural circuitry. That could maybe answer the shorter lifespan only lasting 1-2 retrofits before class charge (ie NCC-1701-A/B to the NCC-1701-C to the NCC-1701-D/E)
A while back I am also thinking of this question, which led me to think about Klingon Honor, which led me to think of the meta origin of Klingon’s Honor comes from Samurai’s honor… which resemble “face”
From there, I posted the version 1 of how Klingon Honor is a Mistranslation of Face in here: startrek.website/post/432321
TLDR: Klingon doesn’t have Honor; they have “face” (due to meta reason of translating “face” to Honor). If you think about face, even cheating is allow; and if you consider cloaking is a type of cheating, then it’s not against face. Oh, and a society that focus on face will inevitablely have a high level of corruption dominated by those in power, be it China, Korea, or Klingon.
Is it dishonorable for an Owl to strike down a mouse, snatching it before it has any chance to react? I would say no. You could see the tactics of a Klingon Bird of Prey in the same way.
Wouldn’t sneak attacks conflict with their notion of honour?
That depends. The definition of honor is not universal in Star Trek. Hell, it’s not even universal on Earth. According to bushido, a Japanese moral or ‘honor’ code, if you sneak attack and your opponent is unprepared then that’s your opponents fault. Not yours. In the Star Trek Universe, Klingons see things very differently than humans when it comes to honor. A good example would be the TNG episode Ethics where Worf insists on an honorable death despite this horrifying Crusher. Worf also said in DS9 that “In war, nothing is more honorable than victory.”
That being said, the Klingons are INCREDIBLY hypocritical when it comes to honor even by their own standards. For examples, look at literally anything to do with Worf and the Klingon High Council. Ezri Dax said “I see a society that is in deep denial about itself. We’re talking about a warrior culture that prides itself on maintaining centuries-old traditions of honor and integrity. But in reality, it’s willing to accept corruption at the highest levels.”
So the Klingons being okay with cloaking boils down to one of two reasons, at least for me. The first option is that they’re in denial about the fact that it’s dishonorable. The other is that their alien way of looking at Honor just happens to cover cloaking as something that’s okay.
What a great comment. This makes me think about cults in society today and how they use indistinct notions like honor to manipulate others by making the moral decisions seem ambiguous through a system of rules that is not rigid but flexible. Changing rules can be justified by using a reinterpreted ideal.
There’s almost too many good things to make a coherent summary, so let me list some high points: Khan is a tie back to Space Seed, an original series episode featuring Ricardo Montalban. Also, James Horner’s sound track was incredible. Kirk’s Explosive Reply and Surprise Attack almost tell the story all by themselves. Then there’s the well paced storytelling of the cat and mouse battle between Enterprise and Reliant. Throw in some dark sci-fi elements (possibly Alien inspired) like the ear bugs and the abandoned science station filled with rats and dead bodies. There’s the Trekish ethical/moral plot of making Genesis vs using it (not unlike Oppenheimer). The self exploration of a middle aged Kirk who’s realized he’s getting older and regrets missing out on a family. The no win scenario and the loss of Spock. Spock’s death is a powerful scene that plays Vulcan logic against human emotion on the stage of a deep friendship. Generally, the film transforms Kirk into a three dimensional character. Those are a few things.
To add to this, we have to remember that Multitronics isn’t the magic formula on its own. In TOS: “The Ultimate Computer” Daystrom couldn’t get it to work - Units M-1 to M-4 were in his words “not entirely successful”. The breakthrough of multitronics as embodied in M-5 was the ability for the system to be overlaid with the engrams, personality and, fortunately, morality of persons.
Daystrom used his own engrams to bring M-5 to its full potential, and his anxiety and fears about wanting to prove himself and survive academically translated into an obsessive drive in M-5 to also prove itself and ensure its own survival. Luckily, Daystrom’s morals also translated over, and so M-5 was forced to confront the moral implications of what it had done, eventually electing to terminate itself in atonement.
When Zimmerman created the EMH, he incorporated part of his personality into the program, so it made sense to use multitronics because the technology had the ability to do just that. DS9’s “multitronic engrammatic interpreter” is an offshot of that tech, and one imagines from the name it would copy a person’s engrams in order to process and manipulate it.
So while it may have been obvious to us that sapience would arise from using multitronic tech in the EMH process, multitronics by itself won’t do that. It’s when you use it to incorporate real people and memories into its matrix and let it percolate that the potential arises.
Deuterium is toxic (in high concentrations) to multicell animals as it changes the angle of.the hydrogen bonds which is key to cellular replication and enzyme prodcution. However you would have to drink all d2o instead of h2o for about a week to begin to notice (need 25-50% of body water). Blocking cellular replication is similar to what chemotherapy does so would.be like bad chemo...eventually the dose is so large it is not useful Cancer drug.
There is also mentions of dizziness and impact on vestibular system (senses) but not the wiki article does not expand on this and the linked article just mentions nystagmus (involuntary eye movements) https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974Natur.247..404M/abstract
That’s ridiculous amounts of exposure and ingestion though. There certainly wasn’t that much time for Uhura to be exposed to it when she was going the communications array maintenance in the nacelle - which was the assumed source of the poisoning until she pointed out she was experiencing symptoms prior to going to the nacelle.
Absolutly agreed, but did find while the dosage may be completely overblown the effects where actually closer to symptoms than I thought when I initially Googled it. (I had just thought it replaced H and slowed down some reactions in body as opposed to having vestibular and circadian effects)
The phaser rifles weren’t set on kill or disintegrate, since M’Benga was grazed and was still ambulatory. The suggestion is that they were kept at a lower setting to conserve energy, since Zac probably didn’t have access to charging sources for them.
In addition, the plate might have been made of the same ore that permeated the castle, which could protect from radiation and probably from a phase blast of lower intensity as well.
The helmets protected the soldiers from the radiation so I assumed they were made of lead? But they could have all been made from whatever ore the castle was made of and made of sterner stuff.
I wouldn’t say it was the best series of PIC, but it was certainly the best received, largely because it was so fan service-y. But then again PIC was creeping that way, anyway. Season 1 revolved around Picard himself dealing with the ghosts of his past, but then they probably noticed people paying more attention when characters like Hugh, Seven and the Troi-Rikers showed up. So Season 2 features Q, and despite it being a bit of a mess and feeling like the writers and actors were using it as proxy therapy, again the best received bits were kisses to the past.
So they went all out in Season 3 as a direct sequel to TNG. Old crew, Borg, the Changelings, etc. Give Picard a son, why not? Bring back the D, you got it! Season 3 was entertaining and nostalgic and gave us all these fanboy feels, but boy, was it emotionally manipulative and a lot doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
But to contrast the way PIC echoed plot lines from the animated shows is, perhaps, not entirely fair, because they were aiming for different things.
In PIC the aim was to bring back Data and add a plot complication, so they chose Lore, just to get everyone excited. On reflection, it might have been more interesting just to have Lore on board and not Data (see how this is being handled in the current Star Trek: Defiant comic), but again then they wouldn’t have the TNG bridge crew reunion that fans all wanted to see. So damn the torpedoes, Data had to come back somehow.
If we really want to criticize it, Rutherford’s past personality issues suffer from the same problem as the Lore complication: it isn’t necessary to the plot. It could easily have been Rutherford discovering that he was the victim of a mindwipe and it would have led to the same revelation about the Texas-class feet. It didn’t have to have his past self be a different personality, but that gave them a plot to hang an episode on. So in that sense both could be said to be a vehicle just to allow the actor to stretch himself. Also, given the episodic nature of LD, it was a one and done deal just to get the Texas-class revelation out, while the Lore complication was so to stretch out that part of the story for PIC’s one big ten-hour movie.
The Borg virus seeming to come out of left field is typical of shows that want to have an overarching mystery (LOST is a particularly egregious example). To be fair, in PRO we also didn’t know how the Construct was supposed to destroy Starfleet until midway through the season. And again, the purposes were different. PRO was dead focused on having the kids develop themselves and learn lessons away from Starfleet and the Construct gave them the plot reason to do so. That was why they had to get it out in the open quickly, or make it obvious.
However, in PIC Season 3, they wanted to maintain the mystery. They did kind of foreshadowed it by dropping hints about transporter incidents and the larger question of why Jack was sought after, but they just didn’t drop enough clues for us to put together what the overarching plot was, and decided to approach it by misleading us that it would be a Changeling takeover.
So ultimately, did LD and PRO do the plots better? Maybe they held together better than PIC did, but they weren’t telling the same story. PIC was trafficking in nostalgia, trying to keep viewers excited and engaged and not so much plot cohesiveness. LD and PRO were telling their own stories as I mentioned above, so the emphases and approaches differ.
I agree that the Construct was a bit of a kludge to make it so they couldn’t just go directly back to Starfleet. But I would defend the Rutherford plot as more organic – it’s not just that he’s the victim of a mindwipe, which we already kind of knew. We need to understand why he would cooperate with something evil, or even why the evil people would single him out. Making him become a different person with the mindwipe actually adds the the coherence (or provides them with a way out of the hole they had inadvertantly opened up with the mindwipe plot… that’s the nature of long-running storytelling).
I agree that was what they were going for with Rutherford, but on reflection even that wasn’t necessary. It could have written along these lines: Rutherford was working on Badgey without realizing how psychotic he was (as he did on the Cerritos), and then when he realized this and wanted to pull out of the project, Buenamingo arranged for the accident and subsequent mindwipe. So no necessity in that scenario for a personality change.
In fact, having Rutherford be the same (and possibly serving on the Cerritos at the same time) could have helped to clean up or prevent a little discontinuity between LD: “Second Contact” and LD: “Reflections” as to the precise date Rutherford was assigned to the Cerritos, but that’s another discussion.
I don’t think it’s the best season of Picard. I think, in fact, it was the worst if only because it did not fit narratively within the rest of the Picard series. It was essentially a soft reboot of the series letting most of the primary cast disappear and replacing them with the nostalgic cast for the finale.
I agree though, Lower Decks and Prodigy did it first and did it better than Picard because they stayed true to the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation and made this a main point of the series. Something that I think both animated shows do extremely well. Contrast this with Picard’s Starfleet and Federation - they are in this position because they are spies, torturers, and liars who engage in grave robbery and allow themselves to be constantly defeated at their own hand by hubris only to be saved not by Federation and Starfleet ideals, but by the opposite (as presented.)
I also think that this same phenomenon happens in TOS as well although to a much less noticable degree. While that crew was always depicted as a little more willing to bend the rules, the movies had them breaking all the rules with a smirk and I think part of that was just the desire to hammer into the same nostalgia that Picard 3 tries to do. Unfortunately, Picard 3 doesn’t give us original characters or original concepts and so it needs to be maintained through relationships to existing characters.
One thing I noticed in my first watch through Lower Decks was just how much they use variants of the phrase “I’m Starfleet.” Just constantly touching on the optimism of the show, how despite all the nonsense these unimportant ensigns on unimportant ships have to put up with, they are still Starfleet. They are as much Starfleet as Pike, Picard, and Sarek’s lauded mutineer children. And Starfleet is awesome!
There’s an excellent OrangeRiver video that showed up on my youtube feed a bit back about why D’vana Tendi is awesome and I think it really gets at the heart of why Lower Decks works as a Star Trek show and not just a Star Trek adjacent parody. Prodigy has a slightly different perspective on Starfleet but it works kinda the same in having characters (the Janeways, I will not elaborate) that represent just how awesome Starfleet can be.
Exactly this. A captain could hold a rank of Lieutenant, based upon the size of his ship/or command. For instance LT John F. Kennedy was the captain of PT 109. Destroyers captains often have the rank of Commander. Air Wing Captains are usually captains, as well as Aircaft Carrier captains.
Generally the rule in the U.S. Navy is that if you are the commanding officer a ship or a boat, you are its captain regardless of your rank.
Pursuant to this and maintaining consistency with the CO/XO dynamic on many Starships it’s totally reasonable to have a small vessel commanded by a Lt. Cdr. who we call the Captain, with a Lieutenant as the first officer.
Purely from an in-universe perspective, he really seems to do it less once he learns that his people are the Founders of the Dominion. Perhaps he shapeshifts less to differentiate himself from their fascist rule, or so that few recognize him as a founder. We also see he is uncomfortable with the Vorta and Jem’hadar seeing him as a god.
This is what my head-cannon is as well. Later on during the Dominion war people were already lumping him in with the founders and because he’s a shapeshifter as well. I’d imagine when the founders are shapeshifting to infiltrate the Federation, it would make you hesitant to do so in public.
It probably doesn’t help that his shapeshifting ability is fairly explicitly part of his Founder heritage, which might make him want to use it less if he doesn’t identify with the Founders as much.
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