It’s a part of a long-standing internet tradition. I first knew the format as the Conversatron (1999). Posting in-character like this might go back as far as early IRC or Usenet.
Real question is: is there anywhere on Mastadon for this kind of stuff?
Not necessarily the level of the nacelles falling off the ship
I feel like “catastrophic” would be at least that, or maybe at the level of a warp core breach; basically losing chunks of the ship that are required for crew survival. Other categories should just work backwards from there.
I know I’m reading too much into this, but Badgey’s ascension kind of says something very thought provoking.
I can’t let go of the fact that Badgey had his personality stripped down to little more than pure vengance. Yet when he achieves omniscience, this is immediately put aside by a feeling of being something greater, then ascends to points beyond. Is this a deliberate story point to suggest the possibility of asension being a process outside of morals, inner peace, and logic, or is that an accident? Or did Badgey somehow summon new facets to his psyche out of this experience? Or is the door left open for a malevolent presence to come crashing down on everyone later?
Then again, we already had one gag where ascending was a “wait, it’s that easy?!” moment, so maybe that’s all there is to it.
This is most evident in the TOS episode “The Galileo Seven”. It’s a horrible scenario: Spock is in command of a marooned crew on a hostile planet. He fails to take both a scared crew and an aggressive native species of spear throwing giants, into consideration. He makes one logical survival choice after another, failing to address everyone’s irrationality at every turn, which ultimately costs two lives. Nothing more than the crew’s faith in the chain of command (and perhaps faith in Scotty’s engineering skills) holds this disasterpiece together.
And Vulcans in Trek kind of just get worse from there. You’d think they’d eventually learn to take “irrational actors” into account with assessing situations, but they don’t. While that seems far-fetched, our economists here in 21st century Earth don’t either.
While I know this is done for humor’s sake, I really love this critique.
Similar to the Bechdel Test, this comesvery close to perfectly illustrating the Mako Mori Test:
The requirements of the Mako Mori test are that a film or television show has at least one female character and that this character has an independent plot arc and that the character or her arc does not simply exist to support a male character’s plot arc.[2]