VindictiveJudge

@VindictiveJudge@startrek.website

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VindictiveJudge,

And a tricorder that they occasionally check while trying to look sneaky.

VindictiveJudge,

Their treatment of Ferengi women is also arguably slavery.

VindictiveJudge,

I mostly chalk that kind of thing up to writers not having any idea what the Prime Directive actually is.

VindictiveJudge,

The Prime Directive shouldn’t have even applied with that. They can’t stop a foreign government from executing their own citizens for stupid things, but trying to execute another nation’s citizens is an international incident and falls under standard international politics. The Federation seems to give Starfleet ship captains ambassadorial powers, so Picard should have started threatening sanctions and making comments about how executing Wes could be considered an act of war.

VindictiveJudge,

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.

VindictiveJudge,

Just double checked. Looks like beta-canon from the novels. Interestingly, according to Memory Alpha, the first episode or two with Bajorans in TNG had all the male Bajorans wear the earring on the right and all the female Bajorans wear it on the left, but right ears for both sexes became standard pretty early on. The only other named character that wears it on the left is Lt Mura in PIC.

VindictiveJudge,

My take is that nobody will care if you are bald, but with all their tech you can have as much or as little hair as you want. It’s an aesthetic choice that’s entirely yours, and no matter what you pick it’s not going to really attract attention. I mean, who’s going to care about your hair when you live next to a temporally displaced Klingon veterinarian and work with a guy who once got to be Q for a day? And even that is just kind of normal?

VindictiveJudge,

They could always bring back Touchstone to compensate.

VindictiveJudge,

They couldn’t get Chao or Meaney quite as frequently as everyone else because of their film careers. I know with Meaney they really wanted to show off his acting skills when they had him and determined that he portrayed suffering really well, so O’Brien suffered a lot. I think Keiko’s problem was that she was only in a couple episodes per season and the focus was typically on whatever horror was happening to Miles that week. She’s not so much a bad wife as a barely present side character.

VindictiveJudge,

More or less. If you’re paying attention to what’s going on around you you’ll notice other traffic stop before your light turns green. There’s also typically a second or two where all lights are red before one turns green to make sure the intersection is clear.

VindictiveJudge,

Majel Barret shows up in season 3 as Lady Morella.

VindictiveJudge,

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 34985938479 times…

VindictiveJudge,

I mean, we’ve still got authors typing up manuscripts on mechanical typewriters and GRRM writing ASOIAF on a DOS computer. Jake wanting to use a pen is possibly one of the least weird things about Trek tech.

VindictiveJudge,

Unfortunately, the writers often forget this. VOY waffles a lot on whether or not Tuvok is literally emotionless.

VindictiveJudge,

Depending on who’s writing the episode, yeah, and it’s a great concept that I felt was explored well. Other times, however, we have an episode where Tuvok talks at length about the training and conditioning he underwent to control his emotions, then in the very next episode, talk at length about how Vulcans are naturally emotionless and incapable of feeling emotion at all. This chronic lack of consistency in the writers’ room is a big part of why Moore left the show to reboot BSG.

VindictiveJudge,

I don’t think the Romulans are really any better, they just solved the problem with external control rather than internal control, that external control being an inescapable police state.

VindictiveJudge,

T’Lyn is one of the most rational and logical Vulcans in the franchise and she was booted from the Vulcan fleet for not fitting into their strict dogma.

VindictiveJudge,

Vulcans as a whole, or at least Vulcan leadership, definitely seem to lean toward caution and a dash of fear. ENT showed a lot of this with how the pre-Federation Vulcan government reacted to Earth’s rapid technological advancement.

Individually, they seem to vary a lot. Spock and T’Lyn have goals they use logic to both choose and achieve, but are fine with experiencing emotions along the way, so long as it doesn’t interfere with achieving their goal (after heavy character development for Spock). Sarek privately admits, in a roundabout way, that at least some of his decisions are driven by emotion, such as marrying Amanda, but doesn’t let his emotional private life interfere with his strictly rational professional life, often to the consternation of his children. And then you have Solok, the speciesist captain from DS9, who is totally driven by his emotions and deeply in denial about it. And, finally, Tuvok, who very specifically operates entirely based on logic, rejecting his emotions to the point that he sometimes has problems recognizing emotional behavior in others. Tuvok seems to be what the average Vulcan aspires to be, and many believe they already are, but a significant number seem to be more like Solok, with the better adjusted of them being like Sarek. Spock and T’Lyn actually seem to be a very small minority.

VindictiveJudge,

TNG’s and VOY’s viewscreens are technically holographic, but the effect is applied inconsistently.

VindictiveJudge,

I think the mushrooms almost feel too… mundane? The average person probably interacts with a lot more mushrooms than crystals. Crystals also have a long history of being associated with magical properties, and modern science has figured out some neat things that can be done with crystalline structures. We’re pretty primed for crystals doing cool stuff. Mushrooms have significantly less mysticism associated with them and related science is more biological than technological. That’s not really solidly in favor of one or the other, but it does mean the audience will more readily accept crystal hijinks with no warm up than mushroom hijinks with no warmup. The closest comparison to the mycelial network is Yggdrasil, which is solidly in the high fantasy category rather than sci-fi.

All that is to say, I think the mycelial network needed more time to set up than the show gave it. Some kind of foreshadowing, like simply mentioning something about advances in organic technology. Farscape probably would have been able to sell it pretty quick, but Farscape also has organic technology as a core part of the premise with Moya. Not an inherently bad concept, just kind of comes out of nowhere in the context of Trek.

VindictiveJudge,

And a malfunction has the potential to destroy all life in the multiverse.

I didn’t like that part at all. An infinite multiverse, which they state in DSC is the case, means that anything with a probability greater than zero is guaranteed. Mathematically, the multiverse should have already been wiped out at some point. It’s also a throwaway line meant to increase dramatic tension for all of ten seconds before the scene ends, and an empty threat given that following through would end the show.

VindictiveJudge,

Ah yes, psychedelics are famously not associated with mysticism.

Might depend on your area? I mostly just associate them with stoners. Mystic folks in my area are really into crystals.

The closest comparison is actual fungal networks that exist beneath forests supporting life through the transference of nutrients and biochemical communication, are some of the largest organisms on the planet, and are actual nonfiction science.

I meant in terms of ‘a thing that links worlds together’. Typically, a trans-dimensional plant or plant-like thing is depicted as a tree, patterned off of the mythic Yggdrasil. World trees are also typically a high fantasy thing, since they’re mimicking Yggdrasil. The mycelial network is essentially a world tree, or rather a world shroom. It’s not exactly an expected trope in sci-fi. Mixing the genres is definitely doable, but you need to get your foot in the door with some shared concepts before you spring a wrong-genre thing on the audience.

I think I can agree with you to some extent there. Stamets, by virtue of being standoffish and prickly when the character is introduced, is not the best at explaining things, and the concept could have used a better explanation early on to mitigate the response I’m complaining about with this post.

Stamets not being a great vehicle for exposition is definitely a problem, but I think the real problem is that season 1 in general has weird pacing. They spent a lot of time getting Burnham situated on the Discovery and the Mirror Universe arc took up a lot of time for how little actually happened in it. They wound up course-correcting near the end of the season by literally skipping ahead a few months on the return trip. I’m sure it’s partially a too many cooks situation with the early show’s revolving door of showrunners, but the second season did greatly improve in that regard while still having to swap out showrunners mid way through.

My point is, season 1 is kind of wonky structurally.

VindictiveJudge,

How old is she? Because Encounter at Farpoint isn’t exactly an episode that would hook the average kid.

VindictiveJudge,

I still think this would have been better with VOY sets for the background than TNG sets.

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