Wait-a-minute Wednesday: To draw attention towards a situation or decision which bares further scrutiny.
For example: the crew of the Defiant not stopping Captain Sisko from committing acts of terrorism in order to prevent other atrocities being carried out by the Maquis.
So let’s dig up the decidedly bone-head commands made by any characters throughout the Continuum, aside from the tried and true Tuvixian methodology. Or do, just provided there’s a fresh/skewed take to be had.
Everything about The Inner Light’s probe is stupid:
• It is designed to transmit its information to one person, one time. This person could be an imbecile who is working for a salvage operation. The person could be evil. The person could die immediately after it happens and no one would ever know. It destroys itself after a one-time use, meaning that the information cannot be preserved by other people experiencing it and sharing what they found out.
• It shows one snapshot of a culture that is going to die out from one perspective on one place on the planet and gives no regard to the culture’s obviously rich history. The planet also probably had more than one culture, although monoculture is a thing in Star Trek.
• It gives the person who is experiencing the lifetime no way to record what is going on as it happens.
• They could have at least added a summary text to the probe to let everyone else know what is going on.
• They could also have added any other information about their culture(s) in text. Anything. At all.
• They could have also included A BOOK INSTEAD OF A FUCKING FLUTE.
• It wasn’t even a very interesting flute. It could have been ornately carved or something. Maybe even carvings of what the people who made those flutes looked like? Which reminds me-
• THEY COULD HAVE INCLUDED A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES.
The Pioneer plaque is a more useful transmitter of information about a species than that probe.
Beautiful episode in terms of a storyline but really stupid in terms of a plot device.
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
This quote summarizes the Resikans’ entire rationale and their rebuttal to your argument. First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship). Secondly:
This is how they wanted to be remembered!
Not as some pile of artifacts and writings collecting dust in the back room of some museum — one dead civilization among countless others — but as living, breathing people. That’s what’s so profound about it! They reached across time and space and managed to get a single person to care and care very deeply about them.
Look at all the other artifacts Picard collected as an archaeologist. They’re important to him but for the wrong reason: they’re trophies of his intellectual curiosity. The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.
First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship).
Absolutely nothing in the episode suggested that.
This is how they wanted to be remembered!
They won’t be remembered when Picard is dead. And what little he could write down was, again, about one snapshot of one culture on their planet at one point in what was probably at least thousands of years of history. When he dies, most of their history dies with them. He could write down what he remembered and that’s it. Picard can’t even show what they looked like accurately. Maybe he can make a realistic drawing- based on his faulty human memory. That’s it.
So if that’s how they want to be remembered, they’re idiots.
The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.
That changes nothing about what I said about the probe being a stupid plot device and the fact that they could have added any sort of cultural information to their flute.
I think it’s hard to believe that the civilization was able to build spacecraft that could transmit mental imagery that realistic but not be bothered etch images and text into a metal flute before their civilization went kablooey. Or absolutely anywhere on the probe.
Even Superman’s parents included more than just him in the spacecraft.
How many long-extinct human cultures do you care about like they’re your own family?
What difference does that make?
All the difference. We’re talking about the values of a people who knew they were dying. You called them idiots for wanting to be remembered by a person who actually cared about them. I think if you ask most people they’d rather be remembered by their loved ones than have their life recorded as a bunch of artifacts in a museum.
According to their values, their probe succeeded wildly in a way that nearly all other extinct cultures failed. The only other ones to come close were those aliens that hid their own humanoid DNA in the genetics of all the major civilizations. Even then, those aliens didn’t succeed at getting anyone to care about them the way Picard cared about the Resikans.
TLDR: no one cares about a bunch of crap people leave behind when they die. Go to an estate sale and see.
Edit: if you have a few hours to kill, watch this video. Then come back and continue the discussion.
Been waiting to get that one out of your system for a bit, haven’t ya? And entirely justified. Their culture doesn’t deserve to be remembered if they think in such arbitrarily limited terms. No primer, no back-up, no alternatives.
Oh I rant about that episode all the time because everyone else is constantly gushing over it and the bad plot device annoyed me then and annoys me now. Absolutely a tour de force for Patrick Stewart, but it just gets to me every time.
Edit: Now I’m even more annoyed than I was before because there’s a really easy way to fix it- the enterprise salvages all that is left of a much larger probe that is destroyed in some way or other and that is what gives Picard the experience. In other words, there were a lot of other memorials of their civilization, it’s just that is the only one that survived. And then it dies because it was running out of power after being separated from the rest of the probe and burns out and can’t be restored because Treknobabble. There. Fixed pretty much every problem.
Like the obelisks in Mass Effect?
Never played it, I’m afraid.
Fantastic games!
So, in Tapestry. Picard takes a shot to the chest and he is about to die because it permanently damaged his fake heart. Q intercepts him from dying and gives a morality tale about playing it safe, Picard still gets stabbed by the Nausicans, still gets shot in the chest…and wakes up laughing perfectly alive.
So the only reason Picard is alive is because Q snap-fixed his artificial heart?
So the only reason Picard is alive is because Q snap-fixed his artificial heart?
I’ve always thought so. Q is quite fond of Picard. They have a strong one way bromance going. It’s why Q won’t leave him alone.
Of course, in Picard Season 2,
Major spoiler for Picard Season 2
Q’s entire grand scheme is, while perhaps also to fuck up history for fun, primarily to set the entire timeline to one where Picard doesn’t suicide against the Borg.
So Q has canonically saved Picard’s life twice. Possibly more, assuming that Q’s “gift” to Picard of early knowledge of the Borg also resulted in saving Picard’s life during other encounters.
Yeah I always envisioned Q as a bully and he keeps poking Picard because Q can always get a ride out of him. But in Tapestry Q saved Picard’s life, while being a dick every step of the way.
Yeah. I mean, Q definitely is a bully. He has learned no healthy ways of interacting with anyone.
He’s just a bully who also loves Picard.
That’s probably why Sisko punched Q
Lol. I’m going to point this out to my friends during our next rewatch. That’s amazing.
Letting a sentient species die from geological events to follow the prime directive violates the very spirit of the directive.
I get they don’t want to play god, but to see a light be avoidably extinguished by chance doesn’t feel like it celebrates life.
Are we talking about “Into Darkness”?
I figure there, Kirk wasn’t in trouble for saving the species, he was in trouble for revealing the Enterprise just to save one officer.
If we’re not talking about “Into Darkness”, then I’ve just illustrated how often Trek goes for this plot point, lol.
They’re almost certainly talking about the TNG episode “Pen Pals” where data makes friends with a little girl whose planet is dying.
Especially when the rest of the time it’s, “fuck the Prime Directive, they’re going to die!”
Spock in Strange New Worlds does T’Pring exceedingly wrong, which - while justifying her later behavior in TOS - made me mad. That’s not the Spock we knew and loved.
I don’t know why every writer after Roddenberry had to make Spock such a slut. It’s entirely against canon, and violates the very idea of Pon Farr, which - half-breed though he is, Spock is demonstrably susceptible to.
Him not being the Spock we know is kind of the point though, right?
He was a little messier before he got himself together. His human side maybe is less bound by Pon Farr rules, and he’s not yet the hyper competent officer we love in his later years.
He screws up and then that becomes a motivating reason to control himself is pretty compelling, to me at least. He did go a little buck wild helping out Pike in TOS, so he’s certainly still got a wild streak in him.
Also, Spock is clearly not into Nurse Chappel in TOS despite her pining over him. That annoyed me in SNW. It’s okay to have unrequited love in a story.
I actually think they nailed it, in Strange New Worlds.
The plot in Strange New Worlds had been my head canon for decades, because of Majel Barret’s performance as Nurse Chapel in TOS.
Once or twice, nurse chapel gives Spock “fuck me” eyes, and isn’t bothered by his lack of reaction.
I always thought this was Majel Barret’s way of intentionally implying a scandalous tumultuous past relationship that would never be approved on 1960s TV.
The fact that TOS Spock has virtually no reaction, other than obvious fondness for her, is largely due to Spock being TOS Spock.
I think a lot of folks assumed that Nurse Chapel was pining for the exotic aliens unrequited love - which I think is certainly part of Majels intent n in her performance.
But TOS Nurse Chapel is very emotionally intelligent. (Mainly to contrast Bones and Spock who are not.) Due to her high emotional intelligence, I was always inclined to believe that TOS Chapel probably knew what she was doing when she threw “we could still fuck (again?) sometime” eyes at Spock.
We all think she has no chance, but Nurse Chapel knows Spock better than we do.
And TOS Spock is incapable of acknowledging it, but probably still appreciates the gesture.
Edit: The SNW Spock and Chapel story makes me happy, because I think it’s exactly what Majel Barret intended to imply, during filming of TOS. I agree it doesn’t fit everyone else’s creative vision, but it makes me happy that hers became official canon.
I have to say that in Amok Time - she did way more than get back at him. She had him fight arguably his only friend to the death. T’Pring fulfilled the whole “hurt princess” trope to the letter. She wound up being the much less mature of the two (at least from Earth standards).
Which is also not the same T’Pring from SNW.
Don’t get me started on the Gorn.
