Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Flexo said:
This actually got me to thinking... what if THAT was the reason for the prime directive? "Look, don't go down to primitive worlds, we don't need our entire, highly trained crews wiped out because of some alien cold! If they have warp drive, then they'll probably have the medicine to treat you if you get sick."
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The fourth episode ever to air was The Naked Time where Spock and some blueshirt beam down into what is basically the destroyed Norwegian base from The Thing to discover everyone has died in horrific ways. And that wasn't even a planet with intelligent life or life at all on it, just some kind of nasty polywater that turns your blood into booze.

Honestly the threat of disease in the show is a pretty common theme so I'd much rather accept this premise than the stupid "But what if there's a cosmic plan?" arguement.
 
BScCollateral said:
I always suspected the Prime Directive was a logical result of a multicultural Federation.

The Vulcans want to teach the primitives logic; the Andorians want them to be warriors; the only thing they can all agree on is "hands off."
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L50LasPak said:
The fourth episode ever to air was The Naked Time where Spock and some blueshirt beam down into what is basically the destroyed Norwegian base from The Thing to discover everyone has died in horrific ways. And that wasn't even a planet with intelligent life or life at all on it, just some kind of nasty polywater that turns your blood into booze.

Honestly the threat of disease in the show is a pretty common theme so I'd much rather accept this premise than the stupid "But what if there's a cosmic plan?" arguement.
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I agree with both of you. In fact, I dare say a GOOD writer would find a way to incorporate both ideas together along with a few more that other people would probably come up with.

Heck if they had of the F word* to give, they could have done an entire season of Enterprise dedicated to creating the prime directive - where every week some new shit hits the fan until finally, in the season finale, they just go, "Look! Don't go bothering any planets that don't have warp, ok??"

*eFFort
 
Eh, they're practically communist in the Federation, aren't they? I figure the Prime Directive is just some post-modernist "All cultures are equal". If they found a planet where the men all kept the women in domestic servitude and wearing space - burkas, they'd probably just talk about the culture's values as being different.
 
Overly Serious said:
Eh, they're practically communist in the Federation, aren't they? I figure the Prime Directive is just some post-modernist "All cultures are equal". If they found a planet where the men all kept the women in domestic servitude and wearing space - burkas, they'd probably just talk about the culture's values as being different.
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I don't think they are communist, I think it's just how most of the shows are set on starships, that are operated by the federation directly, sort of like an aircraft carrier now.

Off the starships, it appears that people can own large quantities of property.
 
Overly Serious said:
Eh, they're practically communist in the Federation, aren't they? I figure the Prime Directive is just some post-modernist "All cultures are equal". If they found a planet where the men all kept the women in domestic servitude and wearing space - burkas, they'd probably just talk about the culture's values as being different.
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Well yes, that's the "meta answer" for why they have the prime directive - I mean that was kind of the reasoning of the writers. Thus why the debate in Pen Pals got so silly because the characters could only argue from the perspective of the writers (who are 'god' in this case, hence the "cosmic plan") instead of a perspective of how actual people living in that situation would.

I'm thinking more of a "within story" answer for it all.
 
Overly Serious said:
Eh, they're practically communist in the Federation, aren't they? I figure the Prime Directive is just some post-modernist "All cultures are equal". If they found a planet where the men all kept the women in domestic servitude and wearing space - burkas, they'd probably just talk about the culture's values as being different.
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This just reminds me of that ENT episode where Trip finds out this race has a third gender that are basically just treated as brainless baby incubators, and we he tries to help one of them Archer throws a shitfit about it.
 
I think that the general gist of the federation, atleast by the time of TNG is that its a post scarcity utopia in which technology and science has given everyone effectively a 100% guarantee of a comfortable and safe existence no matter how little they do or how useless they are to wider society, which has effectively left the entire population of each member-state within the federation free to pursue whatever their real passion is from art to archaeology to exploration to academics.

While the vast majority of the population are happy to live doing barely anything within this luxurious and unconstricting system, the mix of ambitious and motivated people with enough drive to want more than a comfortable norm who are the types to wind up in places like starfleet academy as commissioned officers and specialists, and those who just get bored enough to drift into the more menial/ground level roles in bodies like starfleet as enlisted men and women

This seems to be what Gene was thinking and heavily....often autistically...pushing for as made clear by his writing in early TNG where the above was often explicitly spelled out in sermons of varying levels of smugness

As for economics, on a micro scale its less communist and more "pretty much everything is free at a good quality so for 99.99% of the population money has no value", and on a macro scale there are regular references to interplanetary trade and commerce, not to mention smugglers and illicit goods which make me think that despite claims to the contrary, there is some kind of monetary system within the federation but almost nobody uses it or even knows about it because they are never in the position to buy/sell shit at a planetary level/illegal level.

.....though as far as I can tell everything I just wrote has been cheerfully retconned out of existence by Picard so this autistic speculation was entirely fucking pointless to begin with
 
Flexo said:
This actually got me to thinking... what if THAT was the reason for the prime directive? "Look, don't go down to primitive worlds, we don't need our entire, highly trained crews wiped out because of some alien cold! If they have warp drive, then they'll probably have the medicine to treat you if you get sick."
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They were pretty explicit that the purpose of the Directive is to prohibit interfering with the natural self-directed development of species and that it is unethical to interfere, and even that a Starship captain is supposed to sacrifice his own life or even the life of his entire crew rather than violate it. Even though the PD is usually mentioned in the context of saying fuck that and actually breaking it. Or at least with Kirk. Picard would at least pay lip service to it.

Some autist somewhere has compared all the captains based on whether they obeyed it or not I'm sure.

TaimuRadiu said:
Picard ran out of budget, and it shows.
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So have a bottle episode or two. They probably blew all the money on that ridiculous French pirate outfit or whatever the fuck that was.
 
The last thing I wanted out of Picard was a short tease for STD S3. For a brief moment of terror, I feared they were going to tie this series with STD and Michael Burnham would show up to scream at Picard.

But yeah, the season finale. That happened. I wrote a lot of notes. Under a spoiler not because I care about that, but because it got a little too long and ranty.
  • Seven pretty much mentions being suicidal and I'm just wondering if Janeway abandoned her. Did the Doctor abandon her? Did Chakotay? Why does the show keep telling us she's a loner who doesn't have anybody in her life to look out for her? Why is Seven in this show when you're not even going to give a tl;dr on her life between VOY and now. We're missing so much info and the show doesn't care.
  • How the fuck did Narissa escape the exB's? Did they all just die when the cube crashed? Did she somehow manage to kill them all? Does Kurtzman care? I also love how it's the last episode but we still gotta squeeze in some incest subtext here.
  • Why the fuck did everyone just forgive Agnes for killing Maddox? Did everyone forget she did that? I understand being forgiving of being a spy since the Shutterstock images put in her head fucked her up a bit, but she still chose to kill Maddox. And the latter wasn't a bad guy. I know Trek sometimes forgave Worf for murdering people, but he often did it out of self-defence and it was obvious the murdered guy was a true bad guy. But Maddox did nothing wrong. It weirdly feels like the show couldn't decide which version of him to go with - the man who deserved ire because he wanted to disassemble Data or the man who made friends with Data and later wrote letters with him.
  • So Romulans have a HUGE fleet they can just magic out of nowhere but a ton of their people are living as refugees because ??????? Where did this fleet come from? Also, Narek tells the story of the end of the world in their folklore and it's your standard Ragnarok story and all that. They've had this story for ages, but is the implication then that the Zhat Vash found the artifact that gave them the Shutterstock images and then decided to just combine the images with this random bit of folklore they had? If so, why did none of them ever think about doing the same for other species who have similar stories? It would bring a ton of planets to their side and they wouldn't have to go 34273D chess and first have a convenient supernova and then a synth ban and so on.
  • Watching this episode I realised how Elrond actually did nothing of use. Why was he in this story? He doesn't actually help out in the final battle as well and he gets Hugh killed (yes, I will blame him), which makes him even more useless.
  • How the fuck did Agnes and Picard escape the droid village so quickly? The pacing made no sense.
  • How the fuck did Narek and Elrond manage to, even briefly, have an upper hand in hand-to-hand combat over Soong type androids? Did New Soong make them weaker? If not, then the fleshy people shouldn't have had a single chance against them. Some Klingon fucker once tried to fuck with Data just for fun and got completely wrecked, Data didn't even flinch.
  • So, Agnes and Picard fly with Rios' ship and go against the Romulan fleet. Agnes suggests that they use the Droid magic stick Rios was given in the last episode to create a ton of copies of their ship and do a MEGA version of the Picard manouver. Fine, that's fine. But then they do it and the Romulans quickly manage to hit the main ship anyway? What was the point of that? To win time til the Federation fleet shows up? Oh on the Rommie ship was already wasting time, talking about "execute order 66 to blow up the surface of the planet". There was no need to really do anything to stop them, the Feddies had enough time to get there.
  • ALSO and this bothered me so much. Picard is very ill and you can tell he is about to croak. Why did Agner nor he himself consider using the droid magic stick to try and heal him? Even if it didn't work, it was a really good option. You never know, it could've at least given him more time til they got to sickbay.
  • One thing I liked was seeing Riker again. He looked good as a Captain.
  • Now, as it was happening, I liked that Picard managed to solve the conflict with words. There was no final battle between the Romulans and the Federation and Oh just fucks off. But then I realised - this is just a TNG episode stretched out to 10 episodes. And then you realise how pointless the whole season was. They could've solved this whole storyline with like two episodes, maybe three.
  • Oh, and for a moment they open a protal to unleash hell droid demons, whatever, that doesn't matter, Shoji closes it and the droids just fuck off.
  • Picard dies. And I shit you not, the scenes in the afterlife rip off Deathly Hallows. Specifically, when Harry "dies" and meets Dumbledore again and they have a heart-to heart. Picard "dies" and meets Data again. The scene was so similar, I just kept laughing at Alex Kurtzman copying Rowling.
  • Side note, but I found it hilarious that Rios was bummed by Picard's death. He knew the guy for a week and didn't particularly like him that much.
  • So, Data and Picard. They admit that Picard loved him (which was super weird) and Data asks Picard to kill him off for good. I understood his point and honestly, it wasn't too bad of a scene. Gave a nice ending to his character. But again, what was the point? This wasn't the driving force of the story of the season. We already know Data wanted to experience human emotions and all that, but this isn't something that is brought up a lot in the entire season at all. This should've been the core of the story, but it gets weirdly sidelined as a B-plot for the main Romulans-are-fucking-shit-up-again storyline that we've seen a million times already, in much the same way.
  • They use the golem Soong was making to give Picard a new body. So yeah, the og Picard is dead and a (more or less) clone of him is walking around. He still ages and will die, but his disease is gone. Sure, whatever. I notice no one mentioned if he has a new heart as well, but Kurtzman forgot. Picard takes out Data's USB sticks from some machine, Blue Skies plays, Data dies, the end to that shit.
  • hey guys, does anyone remember Geordi? Data's best friend? I know you could argue that we're seeing Picard's reflection of his relationship with Data, but Picard also knew Data and Geordi were best bros. Was he so selfish he was only thinking of his own pain at Data's death? Did he not care that Geordi and co would also mourn him? Did Alex Kurtzman care how this makes Picard look?
  • And after all of this, the ban on Synths is lifted, the Synth planet is given autonomy and Federation protection and everyone lives happily ever after. That was easy! We don't know what happens to the Romulans, who are either living in poverty or whatever the fuck Oh decided to yeet off to, but who cares
So that's that.
 
Wow, ok, so.

That was both better and worse than I expected it to be.

I think I called most of it correctly going into it, but...

The high points, because there were actually a few:

  • Captain Riker. Well done scene, even if we've established that the god-awful set design of Discovery is now being used in the 24th century too.
  • You know what? I actually liked pretty much every scene Seven was in. I'm realizing now I underestimated her acting ability back during the Voyager days, or else she's gotten better. She actually felt like her old self, for the most part, if you accept that things went totally south in her life and she's been, as trekkor implies, more or less abandoned by her "friends". Which I could believe of Janeway or Chakotay, maybe, but not the Doctor, so some background would have been nice.
  • Spiner's reprisal of Data was... mostly... good. Mostly.
  • It was nice to see Romulan Bitch die.
The bad points, though. Boy were there some bad points.

  • So I struggled with which of these two to bring up first, because they were equally egregious, but the ending with the synths and the space-krakens was complete bullshit. So, first of all, they just turn off the beacon and the krakens shrug and say "Oh well, false alarm"? But second and more importantly, the synths still know how to make the beacon. You've just turned a colony of basically emotional children lose with a "end all organic life in this half of the galaxy" doomsday weapon, and you all consider this story resolved? The first time they decided to use it, they spent all of about five minutes to go from peaceful space hippies to space Hitlers.
  • The second, and equally fucked up bit: So Soong has had data's consciousness reconstructed for how long now, he's had the ability to make basically an infinite supply of the bodies for how long now, and Data is still trapped in a couple of flash drives? Why are we not addressing that? Why did Picard kill Data, why didn't he just say "Make him a new body, you stupid fucker!" If Data wanted to die he could still, you know, kill himself or something, but maybe he would at least like to stretch his legs first? Say "Hi" to his old friends? Something?
  • I know he was probably nobody's favorite character, but we should have at least gotten a brief epilogue for Romulan Bastard. What's he going to do now that his sister is dead? Is he mourning her? C'mon, something.
  • Likewise with the two Tal'Shiar agents that were apparently loyal to Picard. Is he going to go back to get them and join his... I guess new crew? Or what?
  • So with the engram scanning and 3d printing synth bodies... Is everyone basically immortal now if they want to be? Or is Picard and Soong going to suppress this technology somehow?
  • Apparently the Federation of the future only has one class of starship, but it has a shit ton of them. I know by modern standards the (aftermath of the) Battle of Wolf 359 is a low-budget affair, but they managed to make it look like the Federation had a fairly varied fleet. So did most subsequent "big battle" scenes. Until NuTrek. The big battle at the end was: A ton of the Not!Rocinante, A ton of one class of Romulan warbird, and a ton of one class of Federation ship. Previously, we've seen other mass battle scenes involving tons of one class of ship. Someone in their 3D department just discovered the "array" modifier and thinks nobody is going to notice them half-assing a job.
  • The Magic Space Flowers are still a stupid idea.
  • The Magic Space Wand was only missing a bearded Scottish giant saying "Yer' a witch, Agnes!" from making it the most bullshit thing of the series, and that's saying a lot.
  • Edit: One more. What the fuck is with this show and ripping eyeballs out? I have, basically, one thing I can't stomach seeing on screen, and that's the one thing.
 
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If Picards illness was so bad, why didn't he just go the Ba'Ku planet with "makes you immortal and cures all illnesses radiation" or whatever?

Yeah they're a bunch of selfish pricks who wouldn't share it with most of the Federation, (or even half their own race for that matter) but I'd bet they're still pretty grateful to Picard for what he did for them in Insurrection.
 
UnKillFill said:
If Picards illness was so bad, why didn't he just go the Ba'Ku planet with "makes you immortal and cures all illnesses radiation" or whatever?

Yeah they're a bunch of selfish pricks who wouldn't share it with most of the Federation, (or even half their own race for that matter) but I'd bet they're still pretty grateful to Picard for what he did for them in Insurrection.
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For a while, I swore that's where they were implying Riker and Troi lived, when they talked about the planet having "healing properties", but apparently, no, magical healing planets are more common than we thought. Although Riker picked the cheap Chinese knockoff equivalent, apparently.
 
MembersSchoolPizza said:
For a while, I swore that's where they were implying Riker and Troi lived, when they talked about the planet having "healing properties", but apparently, no, magical healing planets are more common than we thought. Although Riker picked the cheap Chinese knockoff equivalent, apparently.
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Everyone would be living on them if they existed unless they built a force field and made the Romulans pay for it.
 
  • That abnoxious and pretentious teaser for STD season 3 with Burnham holding the Federation flag like on Iwo Jima or something (interesting, the rest of the cast isn't on the teaser).
  • Data's conscience was stored in a device for all those years and all he wanted was to die? I thought Data wanted to become human? Was it too hard to give him a synth body?
  • Picard dies, they apparently scanned his brain - off screen - and transfered a copy into the golem but it's not just a synth body, it has no augmentation or super ability. This new Picard synth will only live for another 10 years. What was the point then?
  • Soong is not Lore
  • The Reaper invasion gets cancelled at the last second by Soji. Are we supposed to forget that it happened? Now the notReapers know where the synth planet is and any synth can build another antenna/blue laser to call them again.
  • Seven: "I'm an xB, I have no home. I don't belong anywhere". I don't like VOY but come on, she became part of the crew, hell, Chakotay and her were a couple FFS.
  • Seven is now a lesbian.
  • Romulan Legolas is a big baby who never acts like an adult.
  • Romulan Cersei was on the Borg cube all along?! Didn't she beam out of the cube to her ship 2 episodes ago?
  • Romulan Cersei asks her brother if he had sex with the other synths on that planet. WTF?!
  • There's a synth device that makes things just by thinking about it. Perhaps Kurtzman and Chabon could have used it to craft a better story.
  • Captain Riker (on a redressed Discovery bridge) arrived with an entire fleet of badly-designed Starfleet ships (they're all metallic/grey because I guess they wanted to have a fleet of Battlestars?) but no space battle, they all stand there, face to face, like that shot from the Firefly movie.
  • Like I predicted, Agnes got away with her crime.
  • Somehow, they're making a second season.
Star Trek is dead. Secret Hideout has ruined the post-ENT/pre-TOS era, now they've destroyed the post-VOY/Nemesis era.
 
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UnKillFill said:
If Picards illness was so bad, why didn't he just go the Ba'Ku planet with "makes you immortal and cures all illnesses radiation" or whatever?

Yeah they're a bunch of selfish pricks who wouldn't share it with most of the Federation, (or even half their own race for that matter) but I'd bet they're still pretty grateful to Picard for what he did for them in Insurrection.
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That's a very good point. Picard even had a sort of waifu there, she would've gladly greeted him. Insurrection already showed that the planet helped Picard since he became more youthful and spry. I get that maybe it wouldn't have cured his brain cancer thingy (maybe), but still, why not give it a go.
 
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