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If you love [Star Trek] you must hate [Star Trek]
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Feel the Truth.
The Meal revealed a fundamental truth to many people: even though pork is one of the most taboo meats in the world, almost everybody loves bacon.
But more importantly.
Jean-Luc would let people assume he was going to see Oppenheimer, and then happily ask for one ticket to Barbie, please. Worf is in the front row wearing a trenchcoat and shades.
"She is a powerful warrior, who shows no fear. This is an epic worthy of prune juice."
Look Dune settled this a long time ago, the shields only let relatively slow moving matter through
In Dune, the deadliest weapons is still not a knife. It's the laser pointer.
That work had already been done though. By the end of DS9 there's been a lot of examination of Klingon culture and it's complexities and how much of it's "we're all warriors grrr" image is rank hypocrisy. Klingons also had the opposite of the lazy alien design people usually complained about with Star Trek. It wasn't like some skin paint and a nose or ear piece. And it's not like Discovery S1 wasn't doing the exact same kind of work in make-up and writing but just with slightly different versions.
Like yeah, it definitely feels like they wanted to put their own stamp on the Klingons. But not because there was some fundamental flaw they felt compelled to fix. It seemed like they just wanted to be different and new and flashy. And I would say the end result was a combination of worse and just weird and disjointed. In the way so much of Discovery is weird because it suffers from "we're calling ourselves a prequel but desperately want to be a reboot" syndrome. Like so many prequels.
While this is not a universal truth of taboos, I suspect a lot of these are because without modern preservation and/or preparation methods, it's real easy to get sick from pork. So a lot of cultures and creeds decided, delicious or not, it wasn't worth taking the chance.
Also, I don't remember if it was pointed out but in s2e03 i the debrief between La'an and the Time cop, the time cop starts the conversation with "thank you again"
shenanigans!
DS9
TOS
TNG
LD
SNW
those 6 episodes of Prodigy I saw
the couple "Short Treks" I watched
Seaquest DSV
VOY
The Orville
Andromeda
ENT
(I have zero desire to watch DISCO or PIC)
A lot of shows have "the show that we pitched to the execs is not the one we want to write". By itself is not exactly bad, like Lower Decks, but when you want to write for a different franchise, the "I rather not be here" is obvious. Like "I want to wreck a lot of the setting just to have my Sci-fi story about Oil bad".
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Surely nobody would ever do this because it would create the issue of "why don't the Klingons always use anti-phaser particles to turn of phasers before melee combat?"
Honorable death by melee combat is one thing, but nobody sings songs about the first wave guys who soaked up the phaser fire so the second wave could get in there.
It has parts that show up in Season 2.
It also has the fantastic moment of hte klingons coming to help in the big battle... by dropping in a cleave ship. Which is just a giant fucking ship designed for ramming with a cloaking device slapped on it and the first thing you know about it being there is it punching straight through multiple other ships that thought they were safe from anything kinetic.
It's incredibly goofy and silyl and i LOVE IT SO MUCH.
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Here's the clip:
STO manages to recreate that moment, and is incredibly epic:
The second one does not show T'Kuvma failing to emote, which unfortunately, is an improvement, since the gravitas of an otherwise great scene gets ruined by "damn the actors can barely move their faces with all that makeup".
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Spoilered for.. spoilers, but the part you refer to is at like 5:10 in the one below.
And yes, utterly goofy but still fun.
Which is all likely true. But my point is more that as much as Nimoy ate kosher and Spock ate vegetarian, Human-Spock with his usual guardrails down did as so many others before have and fell under bacon's inevitable spell.
This actually makes me think about Vulcan dietary rules. The meat thing has been explained as ethical by every Vulcan who commented, but then why extend it to synthetic meat? And also, every Vulcan we've seen is vegetarian. They do not have such unified ethics in anything else.
It could be a cultural taboo, like touching, but I actually think it's smell. We see a lot of instances of Vulcans showing strong smell aversions, and the smell of what's effectively injured flesh might simply be something they can't handle.
Which only further justifies Human-Spock chowing down at his first chance. His Vulcan senses were gone, he was smelling bacon the way humans do for literally the first time.
Makes sense, I guess.
And just to make things even more complicated, it's iron meat, hemo-, something that was probably unknown or nearly so on early Vulcan.
I forgot that Herbert justified his futurustic melee combat preference because apparently laser+shield=nuclear explosion!?!, I mean....where is the energy for a nuclear explosion even coming from?? Enquiring Oppenheimers wish to know.
I like the idea of selling Gowron a Katana for a decommissioned bird of Prey
I honestly think after at least a few centuries of vegetarian diets Vulcans cant digest meat at all. There's kids now raised vegetarian that go into anaphylaxis the first time they try a burger
There is a lot of evidence that vegetarian diets are just healthier for you (assuming you don't eat like those overprocessed bean patties). I wouldn't put much more thought into it than "this is a much more efficient and thus logical way to get the fuel my body needs"
I think once you say directed energy weapons and forcefields work in your setting you're allowed to say how they interact as well
Even when the explanation is nonsensical? I mean, if you can get (considerably) greater energy out of the interaction between a laser and a forcefield than is powering either, congratulations, you've just broken at least one Law of Thermodynamics and possibly invented a perpetual motion machine.
And while I acknowledge that the author (in this case, Herbert) probably had very little interest in answering such questions, or anything but establishing why everyone fights with blades in this far future setting - a handwave which is very much of a kind with "where are the computers and robots", among others in the series- in my mind it's like very conspicuously hanging a gun above the mantel, placing a box of bullets on the mantel, and then ignoring/refusing to address why no one performs the apparently obvious action of actually loading and using the gun.
But there's definitely plenty of technology, not to mention biology, in the Dune setting that is complete fantasy
Very well thank you. Well unless there’s active shields. Or transporter scramblers. Or excess levels of radiation. Or magnetic fields. Or certain kinds of rocks. Look the point is it’ll be fine, now step on the pad ensign.
The real trouble comes when you abruptly change the rules to force a story point. If the equation is suddenly changed to laser + shield = harmless without explanation, then you've crossed the bullshit limit.
For a Trek example, we know that their transporters have limited range, but cross-galaxy transporters do exist. That's fine.
But if the Enterprise suddenly beamed someone to Earth from their current position at Vulcan without finding anything strange about it, that's bullshit.
It also makes the line when we meet worfs human parents that "he had some difficult teenage years" retroactively funny because yeah of course he did, he's probably physically like 35 when he's in high school.
I seem to recall that the Holtzman lasgun and the Holtzman shield reaction is basically "when the lasgun beam hits the active shield, use all the combined energy in both of their powerpacks to Very Rapidly create a Very Efficient and also Very Uncontrolled fusion reaction at the point of impact." Which, at least in the appendices to my recollection, is how they ALSO, in a far more controlled fashion, work their fusion reactors, all based on that Holtzman dude's work in attraction and repulsion of subatomic particles.
Herbert also absolutely fires that Chekhov's Gun-- IIRC Duncan Idaho sets that exact thing up to help Paul and Jessica escape, I think the exchange is basically:
something goes BOOM in the distance and makes the cave shake
"The family atomics? Duncan, I don't think that's help--"
"No, we set up a shield in the caves. That'll make them think twice about using lasguns to clear the rocks. Now get going."
In the later books (Heretics or Chapterhouse I think? Something after God Emperor at least, when the restrictions on technology were starting to loosen) they were using repulsors carrying a lasgun pointed at a shield emitter as kamikaze drones. They were kitted out with a uniform to look like soldiers but as soon as you got close enough to realize they aren't BOOM.
The thing you're referring to was the hunter seeker. They're remote controlled (because anything that can act too freely on its own gets too close the ban on thinking machines), meaning you need an assassin close to the target. So it's situational to use that versus poison, a regular gun, a knife, etc. Useless in combat because while hard to grab they can be swatted down with a sword easily. You're better off grabbing a proper weapon and fighting.
In those same later books, though, shields had largely been abandoned because there was a ton of technology that could get through them, nullify them, or explode them without endangering the attacker, so they became more liability than asset. With their demise laser weapons became more prevalent since there was far less risk of them going nuclear, and that just led to less shields because having the only shield in a laser war is stupid for the same reason as having the only laser in a shield war.
Edit: also, when Dune talks about atomics, the weapons they have run a ridiculous range above and below what we have. The ones Paul used to breach the Shield Wall are pretty familiar, but the slow burning one used in Dune Messiah only destroyed a few buildings and close witnesses were blinded but not irradiated or incinerated. On the upper end of the scale there are references to a type of atomic which can be used to detonate the core of a planet.