I'd like to know why she didn't think the Borg were worth mentioning to the Federation after Starfleet rescued her people. You'd think she'd be raving hysterically about it like a lunatic.
Two words: Section 31.
It's informal canon that Section 31 knew about the Borg since the incident with Archer and the NX-01, but they suppressed the knowledge from the rest of Starfleet and the Federation. It's probably why their tech is so much more advanced than the rest of the Federation, they retro-engineered salvaged Borg tech from the 24th Century. They also sponsored the Hansen family to go find out more about the Borg and report back to them. When the El-Aurian were rescued, as soon as they mentioned the Borg they were most likely taken away by Section 31, debriefed thoroughly, and told to never speak of it again to prevent a mass panic.
Also, to be fair, the only reason the Federation runs into the Borg at all (ENT aside) is that Q hurls the Enterprise directly at a cube. The Borg should not be a threat to the Federation due to to sheer lack of proximity. "Look out for these people, they're monsters,if your great great grandchildren meet one" is a bit..eh.
Now of course, once they do show up ahead of schedule...
that's not true.
Q gave the Federation a warning, there were a number of episodes before that with outposts getting scooped up by an unknown force on the Romulan border, that was the Borg getting a little taste of the Federation and they were well on their way to entering the Alpha Quadrant.
The mind controlling bugs were also originally supposed to be Borg, but they didn't have the budget for a race of Klackons so they retconned that later, so i guess it doesn't count.
The timeline for the early Borg stuff is a mess. Q throws the Enterprise 7000 light years in order to hit a cube. That is a long travel time radius before your civilisation expansion sphere runs into a drone.
I do remember the colony scooping stuff being mentioned in passing, I don’t think they managed to explicitly blame the Borg for that though, at least until after Q Who?
Relevant episode quote:
Guinan: "Q has set a series of events in motion. Your contact with the Borg came long before it should. When you're ready, it might be possible to establish a relationship with them, but now -- now, you are only raw material to them. And since they are aware of your existence..."
Picard: "They will be coming."
Just watched an episode of Enterprise, they dispersed some kind of warp dust that collected in another ship's intake and disabled thier engines. Usually I ignore technobabble but the concept of engine intakes, in the vacuum of space, made me laugh.
well there is a ramscoop that collects Hydrogen. That's those red things on the front of a warp nacelle
I think the idea is the Borg were always going to come to the Alpha quadrant. But Q sped it up and led to them establishing a transwarp network much much earlier than was going to happen since the Federation was such a good target.
Just watched an episode of Enterprise, they dispersed some kind of warp dust that collected in another ship's intake and disabled thier engines. Usually I ignore technobabble but the concept of engine intakes, in the vacuum of space, made me laugh.
well there is a ramscoop that collects Hydrogen. That's those red things on the front of a warp nacelle
Just watched an episode of Enterprise, they dispersed some kind of warp dust that collected in another ship's intake and disabled thier engines. Usually I ignore technobabble but the concept of engine intakes, in the vacuum of space, made me laugh.
well there is a ramscoop that collects Hydrogen. That's those red things on the front of a warp nacelle
no those are giant popsicles
You mean the glowing red tips, virtually throbbing with power, on the ti[ of the long, phallic shaped warp nacelles aren't...
Well, if you'll excuse me, I've got some fanfic to delete.
I'd like to know why she didn't think the Borg were worth mentioning to the Federation after Starfleet rescued her people. You'd think she'd be raving hysterically about it like a lunatic.
Two words: Section 31.
It's informal canon that Section 31 knew about the Borg since the incident with Archer and the NX-01, but they suppressed the knowledge from the rest of Starfleet and the Federation. It's probably why their tech is so much more advanced than the rest of the Federation, they retro-engineered salvaged Borg tech from the 24th Century. They also sponsored the Hansen family to go find out more about the Borg and report back to them. When the El-Aurian were rescued, as soon as they mentioned the Borg they were most likely taken away by Section 31, debriefed thoroughly, and told to never speak of it again to prevent a mass panic.
Also, to be fair, the only reason the Federation runs into the Borg at all (ENT aside) is that Q hurls the Enterprise directly at a cube. The Borg should not be a threat to the Federation due to to sheer lack of proximity. "Look out for these people, they're monsters,if your great great grandchildren meet one" is a bit..eh.
Now of course, once they do show up ahead of schedule...
that's not true.
Q gave the Federation a warning, there were a number of episodes before that with outposts getting scooped up by an unknown force on the Romulan border, that was the Borg getting a little taste of the Federation and they were well on their way to entering the Alpha Quadrant.
The mind controlling bugs were also originally supposed to be Borg, but they didn't have the budget for a race of Klackons so they retconned that later, so i guess it doesn't count.
The timeline for the early Borg stuff is a mess. Q throws the Enterprise 7000 light years in order to hit a cube. That is a long travel time radius before your civilisation expansion sphere runs into a drone.
I do remember the colony scooping stuff being mentioned in passing, I don’t think they managed to explicitly blame the Borg for that though, at least until after Q Who?
Relevant episode quote:
Guinan: "Q has set a series of events in motion. Your contact with the Borg came long before it should. When you're ready, it might be possible to establish a relationship with them, but now -- now, you are only raw material to them. And since they are aware of your existence..."
Picard: "They will be coming."
Data makes a remark referencing the events of the season one episode Neutral Zone when they see the city the Borg assimilated early in the episode. The exact quote is "It is identical to what happened to the outposts along the Neutral Zone." I haven't put in the effort to dig up the lines around that one just yet.
The biggest problem is that Q Who is involved in several different retcons they have done in the years since, and abandoning the continuity leading into it. Q is eventually changed from impish prankster to someone testing the Federation with a bit of a thumb on the scale in their favor. The Borg were being built up as a different race, got changed, time traveled, and then got addressed in a prequel series without really thinking through the ramifications. This is before we get into Voyager apparently making the Q nervous around the Borg from what I am reading? Never could get through Voyager so it is hard for me to get a read on it.
So almost any take you want to put on it is accurate depending on when you are viewing it from, and what parts of the continuity you are ignoring. You ultimately have to ignore some of it because it is very contradictory. It is a classic Star Trek problem that was baked in early on. Old stuff stops being canon as soon as it gets in the way of the current story. Gene Roddenberry was all but saying that in season 1 of TNG. It never got better.
Q being an impish prankster was the retcon; he started off judging humanity.
The Voyager thing was Q telling his child to not antagonize the Borg. I don't think it was a case of him being scared of them, but just not wanting to clean up the mess they would make. I imagine if for no other reason than the Borg by themselves are likely SUPER boring to interact with for Q and if they wiped out all of the fun little civilizations, the galaxy would get super boring super fast. Q could just snap his fingers and fix it, but one would assume Q thinks he has better things to do than cleaning up after his kid's prank.
The best not very good episodes of Voyager are when Harry should have known something was up because it seemed like something good was going to happen to him.
The best not very good episodes of Voyager are when Harry should have known something was up because it seemed like something good was going to happen to him.
yeah he knows better. Every time he gets a sugar cube from Janeway he wakes up with another lobotomy scar.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
The best not very good episodes of Voyager are when Harry should have known something was up because it seemed like something good was going to happen to him.
El Aurians are a race of listeners, not informants. When Scotty saved Guinan from that ship, she knew that one of the other refugees with her would go on to destroy worlds. When she arrived on the Enterprise she knew the circumstances of Data's death and didn't know if he could be recovered or not... She may not have known if Picard left the Nexus and thus may have suspected she knew of his as well.
The only time she shard her insider knowledge was to push Tasha Yar to change the timeline.
Someone in my STO fleet has been watching TNG for the first time (!) and streaming it on our Discord. "Time's Arrow" came up the other day, and as I said in channel, the 24th century version of her has to play a very careful game to reveal exactly as much as necessary to make sure it all happens, and nothing more.
(I also joked that, after Data gets his head stuck back on, he's going to be having a very long talk with the DTI. That business with Clemens alone... Also, this will not be the last time Deanna takes it upon herself to schmooze with the historical figure.)
So, in hindsight(and after it had been pointed out to me by a trek reviewer on youtube(jessie gender)),
doesn't it seem a bit weird how fast clone Boimler changed in just a few minutes of separation. Like I could buy him not stepping forward, but him suddenly becoming comfortable with Rikker, having no problem with drinking illegal Romulan Ale and generally becoming a laid back Titan Crew.
Doesn't that seem a bit extreme? They did mention that there where somebody smarter pulling the strings of the Pakleds. I mean replacing Boimler with a supposed Transporter clone to have a spy on the Titan, would be a pretty sneaky move. They would pick Boimler because they could count on him having read all the previous mission logs that Rikker has been involved in, including the Thomas Rikker incident. Also even if he survived the Pakleds like he said, he ran all the way back to the shuttle, launched it and reached orbit in minutes?
Edit: Sorry, forgot this wasn't open spoilers.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
The best not very good episodes of Voyager are when Harry should have known something was up because it seemed like something good was going to happen to him.
I just watched this episode! Like an hour ago! Poor Harry. Poor Garrett.
So, speeding along, lockdown giving me nothing else to do.
The 37's - Voyager finds people kidnapped from Earth, including Amelia Earhart. TACKLEBERRY HAS A GUN! Anyways, the "coincidences" here, just pulled me way the fuck out of the show. Voyager is flying through space, finds a 500 year old truck from earth floating through space, that's still operational, that Paris is able to start, then happens to find the radio, then manages to track the radio signal, that caretakers have been sure to maintain for 500 years, then manages to land the ship without noticing the apparent metropolis just over the ridge. Every new reveal was just ridiculous. Fun episode, but expects a lot to be taken for granted.
Initiations - Chakotay is attacked by a young Kazon attempting to become a warrior. NOG HAS A GUN! I knew it was Aron Eisenberg almost immediately. There's a tone and cadance to his voice that's unique. The Voyager crew seeming to accept the help of the Kazon on the "rescue", and then just walking into the force bubble, just made them seem naive as hell. I did like the twist at the end, with Kar "earning" his name in a manner that shows us something about Kazon culture. If they're going to be a recurring bad guy, expanding what we know isn't a bad thing. Why Chakotay had to do his ceremony in a shuttle in deep space, rather than just put him down on the other side of the planet Voyager was orbiting just seemed unnecessary though. Also, stepping away from the controls and not having sensors alert him of an approaching ship until after it was in firing range, seemed like a massive brainfart re tactical thinking.
Projections - Doctor is trapped in a holodeck. BARCLAY HAS A GUN! OK, Barclay doesn't have a gun. In the hands of lesser actors, this could have been a terrible episode, but Picardo and Schultz are both very engaging personalities. Speaking to the earlier issue with hologram sentience, if the Doctor wasn't sentient, the plays to his "emotional" side wouldn't have any impact.
Elogium - Spaceborne aliens accelerate puberty in Kes. Also, appear to want to have sex with the ship. Nothing much to be said about the latter, but for the former, there's something mathematical that wasn't covered. Kes says that the Elogium is the only time she can have a child, and that it only happens once. All reference to children is in the singular. "A son." "Or a daughter.". You don't need an advanced degree in biology to understand that this isn't possible for a species, generationally. Even if you don't take into account cross-species mating (and would the child still be Ocompa then?), even if the male is also able to have a child, if every Ocompa is only able to have one child, that's going to be continual negative population growth, just from attrition (any Ocompa dying before they can have a child, is never replenished).
Non Sequiter - Ensign Kim wakes up on Earth, the timeline changed. As the clip above mentions, it's a showcase of Harry Kim, and it doesn't paint him in the best light. I haven't seen Garrett Wang in anything else to know if he's just incapable of giving a better performance, or if the writers/directors have just done him dirty, like Lucas did Christensen. Not only doesn't he come up with the solution on his own, not only is he only able to accomplish this by having two people sacrifice their own futures for him (his fiance is probably going to be in shit for obstruction, Paris gives his life), but there's no real conflict for Harry. This isn't his reality, he's not really tempted by it, despite having a woman who loves him and a seemingly successful career, and he'll sacrifice everything for what the alien says is a small chance to get back to being the Delta Quadrant's whipping boy. Garrett might not deserve the shit piled upon him, but Harry definitely does.
I am begging you to spoiler this Lower Decks S2 shit so I resist the urge to read it any more than I did. And can actually stay in the thread.
Yeah, Lower Decks should definitely be in spoilers, especially as a few threaders might be waiting for the season to end so as to be able to stream it all in one paid block (Paramount Plus is monthly, right?)
I am begging you to spoiler this Lower Decks S2 shit so I resist the urge to read it any more than I did. And can actually stay in the thread.
Yeah, Lower Decks should definitely be in spoilers, especially as a few threaders might be waiting for the season to end so as to be able to stream it all in one paid block (Paramount Plus is monthly, right?)
Crave certainly is. I think PP is as well.
ETA: @MorganV , Elogium is such an amazingly biologically terrible episode, I just want to thank you for reminding g me if it.
Clearly there's a good and evil Boimler, as isn't the first mirror universe thing due to a transporter accident.
Or a quick wiki check also gives us "The Enemy Within", where while beaming up from planet Alpha 177 a transporter malfunction causes Captain Kirk to be split into two people, one "good," but indecisive and ineffectual; the other "evil," impulsive and irrational.
Seems to fit the bill rather than a Riker transport clone accident. Unless they are both separated mirror universe clones with opposed personalities and there's at least another two or more Boimlers elsewhere (perhaps back on the planet left behind by Ruthless Mirror Boimler) who are the split regular universe ones. And perhaps Thomas Riker style clones of all four of them.
Simpler theory (because last season they never did the deep complex thing):
Singular Boimler had a flash of character development when he connected with the rest of the team, which led to him concocting the plan to save them all. This was then countered by the whole screaming like a scared possum in the matter stream thing.
Beamed Back Boimler's development ended like that: screaming in terror and realizing he's definitely the worst person on the crew.
Left Behind Boimler got a chance to capitalize on that growth in a renewed crisis and emerged a better officer with a new found connection to the Titan crew.
Elogium - Spaceborne aliens accelerate puberty in Kes. Also, appear to want to have sex with the ship. Nothing much to be said about the latter, but for the former, there's something mathematical that wasn't covered. Kes says that the Elogium is the only time she can have a child, and that it only happens once. All reference to children is in the singular. "A son." "Or a daughter.". You don't need an advanced degree in biology to understand that this isn't possible for a species, generationally. Even if you don't take into account cross-species mating (and would the child still be Ocompa then?), even if the male is also able to have a child, if every Ocompa is only able to have one child, that's going to be continual negative population growth, just from attrition (any Ocompa dying before they can have a child, is never replenished).
The Ocampa are the greatest evidence in Trek for Intelligent Design theory being right. Also the greatest evidence that Intelligent Design would be better known as Idiot Design, as evolution would never produce this.
Simpler theory (because last season they never did the deep complex thing):
Singular Boimler had a flash of character development when he connected with the rest of the team, which led to him concocting the plan to save them all. This was then countered by the whole screaming like a scared possum in the matter stream thing.
Beamed Back Boimler's development ended like that: screaming in terror and realizing he's definitely the worst person on the crew.
Left Behind Boimler got a chance to capitalize on that growth in a renewed crisis and emerged a better officer with a new found connection to the Titan crew.
That's also my guess, though I think I might add
that the real divergence happened when they nodded to each other. In that moment, one Boimler decided to do a solidarity thing (maybe in the hope of convincing Riker to keep both) and the other just got distracted and thought they were doing a clone thing. Now you have one with renewed confidence of seeing his career moving forward while another feels more deflated upon realizing he's back at square one. Because who's to say that the one who went back to the Cerritos wouldn't be acting like the other if he'd gotten to stay on the Titan? In the end, they both wanted to stay and had already formed a bond with the bridge crew.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Elogium - Spaceborne aliens accelerate puberty in Kes. Also, appear to want to have sex with the ship. Nothing much to be said about the latter, but for the former, there's something mathematical that wasn't covered. Kes says that the Elogium is the only time she can have a child, and that it only happens once. All reference to children is in the singular. "A son." "Or a daughter.". You don't need an advanced degree in biology to understand that this isn't possible for a species, generationally. Even if you don't take into account cross-species mating (and would the child still be Ocompa then?), even if the male is also able to have a child, if every Ocompa is only able to have one child, that's going to be continual negative population growth, just from attrition (any Ocompa dying before they can have a child, is never replenished).
The Ocampa are the greatest evidence in Trek for Intelligent Design theory being right. Also the greatest evidence that Intelligent Design would be better known as Idiot Design, as evolution would never produce this.
I'm pretty sure Kes was in a death cult. They weren't long for this world anyway.
The Occampa only living to be 10 years old is just the icing on the shit Sunday of their existence.
What makes it worse is that there is no sign that they have any abilities to compensate for their short existence. Like Kes does not seem to have any ability to learn any faster than any other adult. Sure she works as a nurse, but that is mostly entails following the Doctor orders. "scalpel" "scalpel". I mean most other works with shortlived species has them experience time at a vastly accelerated rate, with speed learning and such. Sure Kes becomes a godlike thingy when they writer her out, but I gather that was a singular event.
Also the Occampa population has probably been reduced to 25% by the time of ST:Picard. Caretaker taking place in 2371 and Picard taking place in 2399. 28 years is almost 3 generations of these turds. So yea, they are not long for this or any world.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I actually liked the short lifespan thing (though I assumed they'd started out intending to write her out after a few years, unless they'd actually planned to be giving her old person makeup for every episode by season 5). And Kes does show herself to be a fast learner; the Doctor notes that she's gone through all the reading he's given her with some surprise. She just doesn't keep on doing it when she doesn't need to; she studies nursing so she can be a nurse, then stops because she's gotten where she wanted to go.
The negative population growth and reproduction system that seems insanely badly designed is still undeniably awful.
They're basically a dumber version of the Necrontyr.
That's very unfair to the necrons. They bootstrapped themselves out of that situation. The occampa would have stayed there forever.
that's why i said they're dumber versions of Necrontyr.
Necrontyr(which is the short lived race that became Necron) didn't evolve to be such a clusterfuck of biology they were made that way by an interdimensional star vampire pooping radiation on their planet after feeding on their sun... which somehow still makes more sense.
The Occampa only living to be 10 years old is just the icing on the shit Sunday of their existence.
What makes it worse is that there is no sign that they have any abilities to compensate for their short existence. Like Kes does not seem to have any ability to learn any faster than any other adult. Sure she works as a nurse, but that is mostly entails following the Doctor orders. "scalpel" "scalpel". I mean most other works with shortlived species has them experience time at a vastly accelerated rate, with speed learning and such. Sure Kes becomes a godlike thingy when they writer her out, but I gather that was a singular event.
Also the Occampa population has probably been reduced to 25% by the time of ST:Picard. Caretaker taking place in 2371 and Picard taking place in 2399. 28 years is almost 3 generations of these turds. So yea, they are not long for this or any world.
Kes ascending wasn't a singular event, she was developing telekinetic and telepathic powers, including a future-sense that seems about on par with Guinan's, all the way back to early episodes. Her telekinesis in particular is probably the most powerful we've seen in Star Trek from beings that aren't also reality warpers.
She also had an eidetic memory and learned years of medical knowledge in days.
When they meet the other planet of Ocampa, free of the caretaker's oversight (the Caretaker's mate treated them very differently than he treated his batch), we learn that neither of these are unique to her but normal traits of the species. They also live much longer. We don't get an exact number but we see individuals over 20 still appearing youthful and over 30 still healthy and mentally and physically active, so 40-50 is likely the range. The reproduction issue can be explained away as simply as pointing out that this other population has more than a year and a few months of child beating age to work with, while Kes's reaches elogium at 6 or later and old age around 7-8.
The race itself isn't the problem, it's that a small population of them were living in a petri dish for an extragalactic technomage who seemed to be planning for them to all die off, since he was just topping up their storage and not setting up some sustainable system to support them.
The solution that makes the most sense without retcons is that the male Caretaker had the test group and the female Caretaker had the control. Control was left alone as much as possible and would be fine without help, test group requires constant maintenance and monitoring to ensure the experiment and control emergent variables. Euthanizing the lot was considered inhumane so the male Caretaker set up a supply source that would at least allow the population to naturally die out over time.
There's other species on earth that don't make biological sense. If you collect samples of a lot of crop plants they don't make sense biologically. Few to no seeds, infertile seeds, missing a whole gender, missing a micronutrient that is unstable in nature, etc. End of the growing season should be the end of the species (a reality we already face with some banana types).
There's dogs that can't give natural birth, cows that can't eat natural food, fish that can't swim, pigeons that can't fly without hurting themselves...
The unifying factor of species that don't make sense is that another more intelligent species fucked around with them and made them what they are.
Only got a couple eps done last night before I had to go sleep for work.
Twisted - Voyager is getting distorted by some kind of spatial distortion, and the ship is rearranging itself, and Janeway being afflicted. Was kinda interesting until the writers decided "Yeah, we're just going to have it be inevitable, reset everything, and nothing the characters did meant anything.". Then there's the ending where whatever entity it was copied Voyager's databanks and also deposited a bunch of data. Hoping that might matter later? Basically same thing Discovery did with the Sphere, but it was an ongoing plot point there.
Parturition - Enemy Mine Redux. Neelix and Paris get sent down to a planet, rescue an alien baby, and bond with it. Mostly crap, but if it means the end of the Neelix/Paris/Kes love triangle it appears it is, then I'm glad it's done. Because I really hated that, both Neelix's obnoxious jealousy, and Paris's "I can't control myself!" shit. Kes should have pushed them both out of an airlock and be done with the both of them. Life's too short, her's more than most, for that to be her romantic life.
I started Persistence of Vision, but it was too late for me to finish. I'll get back to it (and a few more eps) now.
Paris has a pretty underrated arc over the course of the series.
After
they start the romance arc with B'Elanna
he goes from "what pop culture's version of Kirk would really be like" to "endearing dork." It reads as someone who chafed against the expectations set for them and rebelled, yet continued to define themselves by what others thought of them.
Paris acts like an arrogant failson at the start because that's what people expect—just look at how he responds early on when asked about Caldik Prime. Janeway and Tuvok are the only ones who see through his bullshit. Over time, he becomes self-confident enough to be his own person.
Of course, don't give the writers too much credit for this—I think it was mostly letting Robert Duncan McNeill be himself. Berman probably thinks early Paris is genuinely cool.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Was kinda interesting until the writers decided "Yeah, we're just going to have it be inevitable, reset everything, and nothing the characters did meant anything."
Paris has a pretty underrated arc over the course of the series.
After
they start the romance arc with B'Elanna
he goes from "what pop culture's version of Kirk would really be like" to "endearing dork." It reads as someone who chafed against the expectations set for them and rebelled, yet continued to define themselves by what others thought of them.
Paris acts like an arrogant failson at the start because that's what people expect—just look at how he responds early on when asked about Caldik Prime. Janeway and Tuvok are the only ones who see through his bullshit. Over time, he becomes self-confident enough to be his own person.
Of course, don't give the writers too much credit for this—I think it was mostly letting Robert Duncan McNeill be himself. Berman probably thinks early Paris is genuinely cool.
paris is the best character in the show
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Am I crazy or is Lower Decks somehow not up on Paramount plus yet?
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The timeline for the early Borg stuff is a mess. Q throws the Enterprise 7000 light years in order to hit a cube. That is a long travel time radius before your civilisation expansion sphere runs into a drone.
I do remember the colony scooping stuff being mentioned in passing, I don’t think they managed to explicitly blame the Borg for that though, at least until after Q Who?
Relevant episode quote:
Guinan: "Q has set a series of events in motion. Your contact with the Borg came long before it should. When you're ready, it might be possible to establish a relationship with them, but now -- now, you are only raw material to them. And since they are aware of your existence..."
Picard: "They will be coming."
Goodreads
SF&F Reviews blog
well there is a ramscoop that collects Hydrogen. That's those red things on the front of a warp nacelle
no those are giant popsicles
You mean the glowing red tips, virtually throbbing with power, on the ti[ of the long, phallic shaped warp nacelles aren't...
Well, if you'll excuse me, I've got some fanfic to delete.
astro pops
Data makes a remark referencing the events of the season one episode Neutral Zone when they see the city the Borg assimilated early in the episode. The exact quote is "It is identical to what happened to the outposts along the Neutral Zone." I haven't put in the effort to dig up the lines around that one just yet.
The biggest problem is that Q Who is involved in several different retcons they have done in the years since, and abandoning the continuity leading into it. Q is eventually changed from impish prankster to someone testing the Federation with a bit of a thumb on the scale in their favor. The Borg were being built up as a different race, got changed, time traveled, and then got addressed in a prequel series without really thinking through the ramifications. This is before we get into Voyager apparently making the Q nervous around the Borg from what I am reading? Never could get through Voyager so it is hard for me to get a read on it.
So almost any take you want to put on it is accurate depending on when you are viewing it from, and what parts of the continuity you are ignoring. You ultimately have to ignore some of it because it is very contradictory. It is a classic Star Trek problem that was baked in early on. Old stuff stops being canon as soon as it gets in the way of the current story. Gene Roddenberry was all but saying that in season 1 of TNG. It never got better.
The Voyager thing was Q telling his child to not antagonize the Borg. I don't think it was a case of him being scared of them, but just not wanting to clean up the mess they would make. I imagine if for no other reason than the Borg by themselves are likely SUPER boring to interact with for Q and if they wiped out all of the fun little civilizations, the galaxy would get super boring super fast. Q could just snap his fingers and fix it, but one would assume Q thinks he has better things to do than cleaning up after his kid's prank.
yeah he knows better. Every time he gets a sugar cube from Janeway he wakes up with another lobotomy scar.
Someone in my STO fleet has been watching TNG for the first time (!) and streaming it on our Discord. "Time's Arrow" came up the other day, and as I said in channel, the 24th century version of her has to play a very careful game to reveal exactly as much as necessary to make sure it all happens, and nothing more.
(I also joked that, after Data gets his head stuck back on, he's going to be having a very long talk with the DTI. That business with Clemens alone... Also, this will not be the last time Deanna takes it upon herself to schmooze with the historical figure.)
Doesn't that seem a bit extreme? They did mention that there where somebody smarter pulling the strings of the Pakleds. I mean replacing Boimler with a supposed Transporter clone to have a spy on the Titan, would be a pretty sneaky move. They would pick Boimler because they could count on him having read all the previous mission logs that Rikker has been involved in, including the Thomas Rikker incident. Also even if he survived the Pakleds like he said, he ran all the way back to the shuttle, launched it and reached orbit in minutes?
Edit: Sorry, forgot this wasn't open spoilers.
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I just watched this episode! Like an hour ago! Poor Harry. Poor Garrett.
So, speeding along, lockdown giving me nothing else to do.
The 37's - Voyager finds people kidnapped from Earth, including Amelia Earhart. TACKLEBERRY HAS A GUN! Anyways, the "coincidences" here, just pulled me way the fuck out of the show. Voyager is flying through space, finds a 500 year old truck from earth floating through space, that's still operational, that Paris is able to start, then happens to find the radio, then manages to track the radio signal, that caretakers have been sure to maintain for 500 years, then manages to land the ship without noticing the apparent metropolis just over the ridge. Every new reveal was just ridiculous. Fun episode, but expects a lot to be taken for granted.
Initiations - Chakotay is attacked by a young Kazon attempting to become a warrior. NOG HAS A GUN! I knew it was Aron Eisenberg almost immediately. There's a tone and cadance to his voice that's unique. The Voyager crew seeming to accept the help of the Kazon on the "rescue", and then just walking into the force bubble, just made them seem naive as hell. I did like the twist at the end, with Kar "earning" his name in a manner that shows us something about Kazon culture. If they're going to be a recurring bad guy, expanding what we know isn't a bad thing. Why Chakotay had to do his ceremony in a shuttle in deep space, rather than just put him down on the other side of the planet Voyager was orbiting just seemed unnecessary though. Also, stepping away from the controls and not having sensors alert him of an approaching ship until after it was in firing range, seemed like a massive brainfart re tactical thinking.
Projections - Doctor is trapped in a holodeck. BARCLAY HAS A GUN! OK, Barclay doesn't have a gun. In the hands of lesser actors, this could have been a terrible episode, but Picardo and Schultz are both very engaging personalities. Speaking to the earlier issue with hologram sentience, if the Doctor wasn't sentient, the plays to his "emotional" side wouldn't have any impact.
Elogium - Spaceborne aliens accelerate puberty in Kes. Also, appear to want to have sex with the ship. Nothing much to be said about the latter, but for the former, there's something mathematical that wasn't covered. Kes says that the Elogium is the only time she can have a child, and that it only happens once. All reference to children is in the singular. "A son." "Or a daughter.". You don't need an advanced degree in biology to understand that this isn't possible for a species, generationally. Even if you don't take into account cross-species mating (and would the child still be Ocompa then?), even if the male is also able to have a child, if every Ocompa is only able to have one child, that's going to be continual negative population growth, just from attrition (any Ocompa dying before they can have a child, is never replenished).
Non Sequiter - Ensign Kim wakes up on Earth, the timeline changed. As the clip above mentions, it's a showcase of Harry Kim, and it doesn't paint him in the best light. I haven't seen Garrett Wang in anything else to know if he's just incapable of giving a better performance, or if the writers/directors have just done him dirty, like Lucas did Christensen. Not only doesn't he come up with the solution on his own, not only is he only able to accomplish this by having two people sacrifice their own futures for him (his fiance is probably going to be in shit for obstruction, Paris gives his life), but there's no real conflict for Harry. This isn't his reality, he's not really tempted by it, despite having a woman who loves him and a seemingly successful career, and he'll sacrifice everything for what the alien says is a small chance to get back to being the Delta Quadrant's whipping boy. Garrett might not deserve the shit piled upon him, but Harry definitely does.
Yeah, Lower Decks should definitely be in spoilers, especially as a few threaders might be waiting for the season to end so as to be able to stream it all in one paid block (Paramount Plus is monthly, right?)
Crave certainly is. I think PP is as well.
ETA: @MorganV , Elogium is such an amazingly biologically terrible episode, I just want to thank you for reminding g me if it.
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Or a quick wiki check also gives us "The Enemy Within", where while beaming up from planet Alpha 177 a transporter malfunction causes Captain Kirk to be split into two people, one "good," but indecisive and ineffectual; the other "evil," impulsive and irrational.
Seems to fit the bill rather than a Riker transport clone accident. Unless they are both separated mirror universe clones with opposed personalities and there's at least another two or more Boimlers elsewhere (perhaps back on the planet left behind by Ruthless Mirror Boimler) who are the split regular universe ones. And perhaps Thomas Riker style clones of all four of them.
Beamed Back Boimler's development ended like that: screaming in terror and realizing he's definitely the worst person on the crew.
Left Behind Boimler got a chance to capitalize on that growth in a renewed crisis and emerged a better officer with a new found connection to the Titan crew.
The Ocampa are the greatest evidence in Trek for Intelligent Design theory being right. Also the greatest evidence that Intelligent Design would be better known as Idiot Design, as evolution would never produce this.
That's also my guess, though I think I might add
I'm pretty sure Kes was in a death cult. They weren't long for this world anyway.
What makes it worse is that there is no sign that they have any abilities to compensate for their short existence. Like Kes does not seem to have any ability to learn any faster than any other adult. Sure she works as a nurse, but that is mostly entails following the Doctor orders. "scalpel" "scalpel". I mean most other works with shortlived species has them experience time at a vastly accelerated rate, with speed learning and such. Sure Kes becomes a godlike thingy when they writer her out, but I gather that was a singular event.
Also the Occampa population has probably been reduced to 25% by the time of ST:Picard. Caretaker taking place in 2371 and Picard taking place in 2399. 28 years is almost 3 generations of these turds. So yea, they are not long for this or any world.
That's very unfair to the necrons. They bootstrapped themselves out of that situation. The occampa would have stayed there forever.
The negative population growth and reproduction system that seems insanely badly designed is still undeniably awful.
that's why i said they're dumber versions of Necrontyr.
Necrontyr(which is the short lived race that became Necron) didn't evolve to be such a clusterfuck of biology they were made that way by an interdimensional star vampire pooping radiation on their planet after feeding on their sun... which somehow still makes more sense.
Kes ascending wasn't a singular event, she was developing telekinetic and telepathic powers, including a future-sense that seems about on par with Guinan's, all the way back to early episodes. Her telekinesis in particular is probably the most powerful we've seen in Star Trek from beings that aren't also reality warpers.
She also had an eidetic memory and learned years of medical knowledge in days.
When they meet the other planet of Ocampa, free of the caretaker's oversight (the Caretaker's mate treated them very differently than he treated his batch), we learn that neither of these are unique to her but normal traits of the species. They also live much longer. We don't get an exact number but we see individuals over 20 still appearing youthful and over 30 still healthy and mentally and physically active, so 40-50 is likely the range. The reproduction issue can be explained away as simply as pointing out that this other population has more than a year and a few months of child beating age to work with, while Kes's reaches elogium at 6 or later and old age around 7-8.
The race itself isn't the problem, it's that a small population of them were living in a petri dish for an extragalactic technomage who seemed to be planning for them to all die off, since he was just topping up their storage and not setting up some sustainable system to support them.
There's other species on earth that don't make biological sense. If you collect samples of a lot of crop plants they don't make sense biologically. Few to no seeds, infertile seeds, missing a whole gender, missing a micronutrient that is unstable in nature, etc. End of the growing season should be the end of the species (a reality we already face with some banana types).
There's dogs that can't give natural birth, cows that can't eat natural food, fish that can't swim, pigeons that can't fly without hurting themselves...
The unifying factor of species that don't make sense is that another more intelligent species fucked around with them and made them what they are.
Twisted - Voyager is getting distorted by some kind of spatial distortion, and the ship is rearranging itself, and Janeway being afflicted. Was kinda interesting until the writers decided "Yeah, we're just going to have it be inevitable, reset everything, and nothing the characters did meant anything.". Then there's the ending where whatever entity it was copied Voyager's databanks and also deposited a bunch of data. Hoping that might matter later? Basically same thing Discovery did with the Sphere, but it was an ongoing plot point there.
Parturition - Enemy Mine Redux. Neelix and Paris get sent down to a planet, rescue an alien baby, and bond with it. Mostly crap, but if it means the end of the Neelix/Paris/Kes love triangle it appears it is, then I'm glad it's done. Because I really hated that, both Neelix's obnoxious jealousy, and Paris's "I can't control myself!" shit. Kes should have pushed them both out of an airlock and be done with the both of them. Life's too short, her's more than most, for that to be her romantic life.
I started Persistence of Vision, but it was too late for me to finish. I'll get back to it (and a few more eps) now.
After
Paris acts like an arrogant failson at the start because that's what people expect—just look at how he responds early on when asked about Caldik Prime. Janeway and Tuvok are the only ones who see through his bullshit. Over time, he becomes self-confident enough to be his own person.
Of course, don't give the writers too much credit for this—I think it was mostly letting Robert Duncan McNeill be himself. Berman probably thinks early Paris is genuinely cool.
This is Voyager in a nutshell
paris is the best character in the show
Lower Decks drops on Thursdays.