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[Star Trek] Keep On Trekkin' (Lower Decks stuff in SPOILERS)
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I mean, he did cause the death of 2 cadets and lied about it after.
Slap drones are only used when people refuse treatment. Normally, the Culture simply fixes whatever problem led to murder.
It should be noted that murder is almost impossible in the Culture due to the fact that if, say, someone chops off your head, a drone can reach you within seconds to save and keep your head alive while they grow you a new body. Even situations where you're completely unsalvageable, you can still have neural nets set up in your brain (prior to dying, of course) that constantly back-up your consciousness and then they can plant "your" brain and memories into whatever body you want. (that's more like a perfect clone than you living on though)
As Gurgeh explains it, the primary punishment of having a drone following you everywhere is social. "You won't get invited to parties" and if you crash parties anyway, "no one will talk to you."
This is also a society where if you just happen to be doing a hike in some mountainous region of a Culture orbital and you see a nice house along the way, you can just enter in and be hosted by the house's drones even if the homeowner isn't around. There's no concept of ownership because anything you have can be easily and freely duplicated, right down to the landscape. "I want a house exactly like Jurno Gurgeh's with exactly the same view" is entirely possible. Imagine if the entirety of Earth's 584 million mile orbit were a ring of manufactured plates connected together and spinning around the sun (as well as each plate spinning towards and away from the sun) instead of just one planet. The ability to live where ever you want is limitless. If the right environment doesn't exist on one of the plates they already built, just add another plate and expand the size of the orbital by a little bit.
Slight tangent so gonna spoiler it for those who don't want to read:
I think this is why I was Ok with, even pleased at how Star Trek Picard handles Rafi's situation. Because the Federation as yet has not shown the ability to create entire environments out of nothing the way the Culture can (the Genesis device being a failure). So you can give Rafi all that she needs to live, but you can't guarantee her a beautiful ocean view and an army of robots to clean up after her. If you need something to live, you will get it in the Federation, but luxuries still have limits.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
The rest is not so much punishment as people not liking someone much because they don't want to be treated to make them stop wanting to kill people.
Presumably, they will just have nice conversations with the Slap drone.
On the tangent: they have plate dedicated to people who want to raft on lava without a backup, so...
I said "almost" impossible, not entirely impossible. Most medical things can just be fixed, and things like poisons can be handled by the Culture-engineered body. Dying outside the culture has more of a risk since you don't have Hub at your beck and call all day, but within the Culture proper death is difficult to come by.
Also, though the Culture may not consider it a 'real' death as long as your consciousness survives, I think I would experience it as such. Just because they could make a perfect duplicate of me with all of my memories intact doesn't mean that the me that is me doesn't stop living.
On the other hand, downloading my consciousness to a virtual world and killing and respawning that one off multiple times so you can have a war over virtual heaven and hell is more like immortality for that consciousness. Presumably I'd still be hanging around in my meat body being myself, though, the virtual version is someone else.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Sorry, I was not clear: murder is not "victim is dead", it's "murderer killed". The final state of the victim is irrelevant, it's the intent that matter. To put it in modern terms, for the Culture, attempted murder is murder.
To loop back to Star Trek, the main difference with the Federation is not so much the tech level but the willingness to intervene: the Culture is very interventionist at all scales. Being able to make things better (as seen by the doer!) is basically mandatory.
Someone is sick, heal them. Someone is violent, make them non-violent. Some society has a epidemic, heal it. Some society is waging war, make them non-wage war.
It's not punishment, that would be barbarous, it's improvement.
Contact is the society scale version of rewriting someone's personality. The society scale version of a Slap drone is significantly more slappy. But not punitive.
Borg primary objective has been changed to 'Kill Wesley Crusher for crimes against arboretums'
Even my sister, who is less of a ra ra pro-abolition angry leftist than I am, was bugged by how the episode turned out, saying something like “oh, they just return them to their prison? That doesn’t seem very Star Trek”
And I disagree that the episode comes down on eternal imprisonment being bad. After the characters learn that the spirit things are prisoners, the characters never question the imprisonment
i think it's interesting to note that the culture has the ability to "not care" about the consequences of intervention. Save these people...oh they turned out to be murderous aholes, we'll just destroy them or rewrite their dna to not be that way.
Trek doesn't seem to explore that scientific solution, it's all about, how can we "humans" find common ground with others and we don't know if we can therefore we have to be careful about if we help or not. There are of course stupid examples but there just as easily could be very valid examples.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
For example (spoilers for the books "Consider Phlebas", and "Look to Windward")
And still that conflict, while being a major event in the galaxy of that setting, basically only involved those who wanted to take part in the culture.
99% of the inhabitants of the culture just avoided it completely, because even 851 billion sentiences are a very small percentage of a whole galaxy full of beings
Also, the culture would never just rewrite DNA. At worst, they'd steer a civilization to where they'd do it themselves!
Also, not "as viewed by the Culture," but "As mathematically proven using formulae that aren't really comprehensible by organic life."
And if that mathematical solution isn't available, sometimes simmed in society wide simulations so realistic they have to keep them running forever since switching them off would be considered mass murder..
(not simmed often!)
Which is how the Culture view things, yes. Look to Windward is a pretty good look at how those on the receiving end of the math might feel about it.
Its been 900 years and that is best they can come up with?
Its a big galaxy though and they do an excuse for not talking about such things, but its one of the pitches I would have made for Disco S4. A fuckhuge orbital that is controlled by a splinter faction of the federation from before the burn. Made up of all the people that didn't see the point of exploration once they got a custom made paradise. Isolationist and embodying the worst smugness of the Federation. The Culture without Contact, Special Circumstance and Minds(or Ships). Powerful but indifferent to the suffering going on outside of their little sphere. Like many in the developed world are towards injustices going on in the third world. Sure its horrible, but that's just the way it is over there. AKA The Paradise Trap.
The Federation in Star Trek is genuinely at a cross roads, which also mirrors a lot of the issues we're going to face in the coming decades. There's also a lot of things that when you look back on them with these issues in mind, raise a lot of world building questions;
The computer on a Starship could clearly run it, but that's not what Star Fleet is about - it's the exploration that counts, seemingly requiring a organic being to experience it, and more than that - be comfortable doing so.
Discovery has definitely introduced cyborgs as people who had been injured beyond even the Federations medical tech as a way of treating an injury and we've seen that these prosthetics can also grant superhuman abilities.
It seems that the Federation should be fine with two classes of people, upgrade yourself to become a member of cyborg starfleet, or be content in your own personal paradise back home, as they're not a huge step from the current conditions.
Funny coincidence - people on my STO fleet's discord were talking about this very subject while I was at work today, and one of their issues with S3 is that it's a little too advanced - that when you add that much new future-magic technology, it starts to look just like the Culture and other SF of that ilk. The classic technologies of the Federation, with all their well-known limitations, get lost in the mix. Aside from stuff like "primary, secondary, nacelles" (and even that gets messed with a bit, with some of the new ships), what's left that's distinctively "Trek" compared to any other series or setting with a comparable tech level?
This has potential, but also some risk. An unspoken but important rule of this sort of storytelling is that you can't be too critical of current society, can't make the audience feel too bad about themselves or their way of life. They have to be given an out, a path to convince themselves that of course they would be on the right side of any moral conflict. Poke holes and point out the flaws, sure, Trek has always done that (as much as some seem to forget or pretend otherwise), but there has to be that thread of hope, the little bit of honey to make the bitter medicine/moral go down easier.
Trek has also always been deeply suspicious of this sort of transhumanism, of computers or cyborgs or genetically-engineered supermen taking over and making regular humans obsolete, irrelevant and/or extinct. Instead it prefers to embrace psuedoscientific mystical woo where all life inevitably evolves toward more "advanced" and ultimately non-corporeal forms or sometimes salamanders, through purely natural, spiritual (but not religious) and biological means. I do think we're finally starting to see some of that changing/becoming more flexible, but there's a lot of inertia and silliness that needs to be overcome.
Make you? Perish the thought.
Set up a conversation where you feel compelled to do so? Like, you can feel the words under your skin like a clutch of parasitic insects waiting to burst forth onto your keyboard? Sure, that we might do.
According to Memory Alpha, Siddig apparently praises the episode and the acting that the twist allowed him to do, but did not like the way it was sprung on him - when he got the script the day before shooting started. No warning or consultation at all.
Well the protagonist would be the Disco Crew and Starfleet and it would be focused on them being in the right to care about the outside world, with the Orbital People being the lotus eaters in the Paradise Trap. The path being that comfort at the expense of indifference to others suffering, a refusal to grow and explore the human condition and the need to look forward to improve yourself is the right choice.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
RIP Franklin.
Even when all things can be duplicated effortlessly there's still the value society places on things, if a forger could mass produce perfectly indistinguishable Mona Lisa paintings they would all still be worth the cost of his time and materials while the real Mona Lisa in the Louvre is priceless.
Similarly there would always be a real Manhattan with apartments along the real Central Park and value associated with living there rather than newly churned out Manhattan 56183 on an Orbital halfway across the galaxy.
There will always be "cool" places and everyone who wants to physically occupy that space will exceed the physical dimensions, thus scarcity and real estate values. Even if you completely stop giving a fuck about hand made works of art vs. mass produced drone items or unique historical artifacts vs. replicas, we're shown that Culture citizens still care about attending parties and making friends and cool scenes, etc.
I love the Culture, it's so nice to have an interesting post-scarcity society to contrast to Star Trek's lazy nonsense, but even in a setting where you can say "I want my own private world" and some AI says "Sure, coming right up" because fuck it, our resources are infinite, I feel it's too handwavy to just say "yep, money and trade is dead".
The Star Trek episode where Jake is trying to get an authentic signed baseball card for Sisko is a great example, he could just replicate one, but it's not the same thing. The episode acts like this is a surprising and unusual situation for a Federation citizen to find themselves in, but that shit would happen constantly. Picard owns a vineyard in the South of France. There's only one South of France and plenty of people who want to live there, it's worth a fortune and every time I see that episode where he scolds the recently unthawed 20th century rich man I want to roll my eyes.
Take anything widely considered bad or ridiculed, say the ending of Dexter, or How I Met Your Mother, or Rise of Skywalker - why aren't they better works? "That's just not the point."
This feels like "Well, man, that's like your opinion." Yes, technically true, but still unsatisfying. I get that most people don't care about Star Trek's economy but it would only be a better work if it actually made sense, especially given the focus on Ferengi in DS9.
That's not true. "That's not the story the writers want to tell" is a valid defense of criticism of elements that are beside the point of the story, but not a valid defense of criticism of elements relevant to the story.
Why does the tech in Star Trek not make sense and its impacts on society and culture not fully explored? Because that's not the point of Star Trek, it's a morality play in space that focuses on what it means to be, and how to be, better humans. Why are the TNG movies and Discovery and the second half of Picard senseless action sequences with little to no coherent character development? "That's not the point" doesn't work anymore, because characters are the point of Star Trek.
I'm in season 5 and there's some real interesting episodes here, and some not so interesting ones.
Unification 1 and 2:
Spock! But also these episodes are kind of boring? And Tasha Yar is back but she's a romulan now? Clever use of the hologram tech at the end and Data gets to do a vulcan nerve pinch, so that's fun.
A Matter of Time:
I just like watching Matt Frewer do stuff so this was a treat.
New Ground:
Oh no Alexander is back, and he's an asshole. There's a surprisingly large number of episodes with kids in them, isn't there? The little kid klingon makeup is kind of hilarious, but overall this was a little cringey.
Hero Worship:
More child actors! Except this one gets to be robotic on purpose! Figured out the reason the ship blew up pretty quickly, except then the little kid goes I DID IT, I KILLED THEM ALL and I was hoping for something more fun but nope he's just a traumatized little kid.
Violations:
Good lord this episode is terrifying. I had to skip over some of the sequences because the audio and visual stuff they did made me really uncomfortable. Which is probably the point! But it was weird how this wrapped up with so little ramifications for the offenders.
The Masterpiece Society:
Eugenics, what if they're good though? I appreciated that Picard got to say no, absolutely not, this shit sucks. Deanna falling in love with the administrator was kinda weird.
Conundrum:
This one was fun! I had to double take when it talked about Commander MacDuff, thinking I had missed a character somehow because I was picking up my rewatch. Also Riker and Ro was hilarious.
Power Play:
GHOSTS. Data being an asshole is very fun and also pretty scary. Weird how they blew up an innocent ship and killed a bunch of people and there was no repercussion other than "Well we apologized"
Ethics:
Worf becomes paralyzed, except definitely not forever because it's Worf and I'm pretty sure he shows up in other series. I liked Riker's speech about refusing to help Worf kill himself and having his son do it instead. Sub plot with the doctor who sucks at being a doctor was weird and didn't feel properly resolved to me. Beverly was mad at her, she sort of shrugged and went off to continue doing dangerous medicine, I guess.
The Outcast:
This episode felt real interesting in 2021, but resolved in a pretty weird way with Soren getting "rehabilitated" off screen and everyone just leaving sort of sad about it. Considering the age of the episode, definitely interesting to see it tackle gender like this. I do want to know more about how they inseminate husks though.
Cause and Effect:
Groundhog day episode but with the members not realizing they're groundhog daying. Fun twist on it but so many scenes were repeated without changes I was wondering if this episode was made with budget constraints in mind, although the ship collision and explosion was pretty cool. And then SURPRISE KELSEY GRAMMAR.
Been a lot of fun, looking forward to finishing out the series and maybe trying out Deep Space 9 or something. And also probably watching the TNG movies I've never seen, even if they're bad. I remember one with Picard and Kirk riding horses but that's it.
Nah. It's a specific point about what kind of story you are trying to tell.
Does the world of John Wick make any goddamn sense? Would all this shit be happening literally just beneath the notice of the wider world? It doesn't matter because it's irrelevant to the type of story it's trying to tell.
Does Omelas make sense? Does it need to make sense? It's besides the point of the story.
Something like Rise of Skywalker is not shit because it's worldbuilding doesn't make sense. Star Wars has never made much sense in that respect. It's shit because it's got bad writing that abandons established plotlines and character arcs and has shitty pacing and randomly absolutely shuts down built up romantic stories because a multi-billion dollar franchise can't risk the blowback of interracial hookups and so on down the road. I have no idea how you think these are comparable.
There is nothing here saying things don't have value or you can't have specific desires for things. It's just that it's no longer a driving need within Earth or possibly the Federation at large. When food, shelter, medical, entertainment/etc are all available for a trivial cost, you are talking about just the bonus. I 100% imagine that in the Federation there is a TON of handmade items and in general an art boom, if for no other reason than because people don't need to work a job to make money, and can do things for passion.
Actually, I think John Wick is a good example of the problem with Trek's setting. The first movie was relatively low key. It was a bit of a stretch, but yeah, you could buy that there's some weird shady underground of assassins doing business with gold coins. Third movie comes around and it's just gotten silly, with seemingly half of Manhattan and every homeless person and taxi driver involved in this shadowy world. It's gone from suspension of disbelief to just eye rolling so we can get on with the stunts and the shooting.
Trek is in a similar situation. Two seasons of TOS? Fine. The tech can do whatever is necessary to carry the main plot. After TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Picard, Lower Decks, and Discovery? Even if you weren't trying to build a setting because that wasn't important to the story, at this point you've managed to build one just from the quantity of produced material. And if it's contradictory and doesn't make much sense, then that's on the writers not wanting to do the work in the first place. And I don't think the situation has been harmless to the core stories that Trek is trying to tell. There's certainly been enough situations where 'In Episode X, why didn't they just do the thing that they did in Episode Y since that'd solve the problem right quick?' came up as fridge logic. B5 and SG-1 managed to keep things fairly well sorted on that front, no reason to give Star Trek a complete pass on it.
Incredibly accurate considering the skit ends with a Janeway Pi.