Star Trek Thread: Set Picard to Stun (spoilers)

[Toth]

42 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I do not really care for out of universe explanations when it comes to the discussions of fiction. I would just give up on Trek before doing that because continuity was never its strenght and the number of one-shot technologies that are never used again alone can make you despair.

The Borg never made much sense if you wanted to look at them as territory grabbing conquerors. Just assume that the Borg did not travel as fast as possible to Earth after encountering the Enterprise and things make more sense.

Earth is clearly not a high priortity target because those get swarmed by cubes.

Edith: Maybe the Federation was just a hobby for one or two queens and nothing of real importance to the collective itself.

I think at some point in one of these threads I already brought up my own headcanon that the Borg don't necessarily want to kill the Federation because they find to too valuable as a source of innovation, so they keep chucking single Borg cubes at it and see how they come up with solutions to improve themselves through the ensuing arms race. With that I can excuse why the Borg only made half-assed attacks so far and move on.^^

[DaveSumm]

4 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

The Borg never made much sense if you wanted to look at them as territory grabbing conquerors. Just assume that the Borg did not travel as fast as possible to Earth after encountering the Enterprise and things make more sense.

They never claim to be, I guess. They’re seeking distinctiveness. Didn’t they download the whole of the Enterprise computer in Q Who? I guess it’s debatable  how much more there really is to be had on Earth, if they already know humanities best warp theories, weapons, shields etc. Maybe they consider Earth a one cube problem, not worth putting any more resources into. Although I like the suggestion above, that they’re intentionally provoking innovative solutions from humans as they realised this is their real strength (possibly reinforced by us figuring out how to defeat 8472). 

[Werthead]

10 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

What? Those transwarp conduits have to be built? What kind of stuff is that?

I see no necessary contradiction between warp 10 nonsense and the various transwarp technologies, if they are simply using different technologies the effects might be different. That slipstream stuff also is faster than warp 10 and also doesn't lead to aquatic nonsense and also doesn't use contuits that have to be built.

Voyager is the only show that made a thing about going "faster than Warp 10," because on the TNG scale going faster than Warp 10 is impossible (although now I think on it, I think Geordi has a line about exceeding Warp 10 in Where No One Has Gone Before with the Traveller blasting the Enterprise several million light-years away, but that was very early TNG when they were still trying to figure things out), and they even baked that into the TNG Technical Manual, which the writers used as a reference guide on all the Trek shows from TNG to Enterprise. Braga just decided to ignore it and do his own thing. There was some nice speculation that the only race who could go at Warp 10 or just under it were the Q, as a race able to do that would literally be able to teleport from any one point in the universe to any other instantly.

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So they did that one episode where they thought they’d be living together forever and there was some tension, and then they moved on.

That one episode does even hint that they did actually knock boots together on the planet, potentially for several weeks, and the writers and actors deliberately left it vague, but the second they were picked up by the crew they decided to resume a strictly professional relationship. It was left open for interpretation.

Chakotay/Seven really did come out of nowhere and was pretty nonsensical. One of the DS9/Voyager novel trilogies had her shacking up with the Doctor, which I found a lot more believable.

[Lord Varys]

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Voyager is the only show that made a thing about going "faster than Warp 10," because on the TNG scale going faster than Warp 10 is impossible (although now I think on it, I think Geordi has a line about exceeding Warp 10 in Where No One Has Gone Before with the Traveller blasting the Enterprise several million light-years away, but that was very early TNG when they were still trying to figure things out), and they even baked that into the TNG Technical Manual, which the writers used as a reference guide on all the Trek shows from TNG to Enterprise. Braga just decided to ignore it and do his own thing. There was some nice speculation that the only race who could go at Warp 10 or just under it were the Q, as a race able to do that would literally be able to teleport from any one point in the universe to any other instantly.

Well, they had faster than Warp 10 in TOS, too, unless I'm misremembering stuff. Star Trek just doesn't have any internal consistency whatsoever, and never had.

Voyager has lots of 'faster than Warp 9.99999' stuff - transwarp conduits, slipstream, 'enhanced warp drive' (the thing the copy Voyager crew used to try to return home by flying through the galactic core), teleportation devices, devices that fold space, etc.

And quite a few of those things would also have implicitly shown up back in TOS and TNG with all the magical Q-like technology we saw there in a couple of episodes.

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That one episode does even hint that they did actually knock boots together on the planet, potentially for several weeks, and the writers and actors deliberately left it vague, but the second they were picked up by the crew they decided to resume a strictly professional relationship. It was left open for interpretation.

Chakotay/Seven really did come out of nowhere and was pretty nonsensical. One of the DS9/Voyager novel trilogies had her shacking up with the Doctor, which I found a lot more believable.

Janeway-Chakotay isn't just the one episode where they are stranded on the planet, it is their entire relationship: the trust, the clear liking, the attraction, etc. That goes throughout the entire series up to the point where I am right now.

I'm not necessarily saying they should have made them a couple while they were still trying to get home ... but in the end, when they were home or about to get home.

But with Tom and B'Ellana getting together and this being a pretty exceptional situation where chances are great that they will have to live their private lives on the ship until their death it is utter silliness that we assume it would be feasible the officers stick to (holographic) masturbation until their deaths. Janeway and Chakotay could have made a lot of sense as mother and father of the ship, and all that.

What they are actually doing rather well for the time 1990s in the better written episodes is making Chakotay more into a man with softer, more 'feminine' qualities with his spiritual and emotional side supporting Janeway while she is the one with the male attributes of rationality, scientific interest, staunch leadership, etc.

But at times this is barely watchable with American prudery dropping out of every scene - the worst so far was the one I mentioned above somewhere where Janeway actually forbids Harry to have a consensual sexual relationship with another species. Which is ludicrous and unheard of in Star Trek so far.

The Doctor and Seven have that one near romance in season 5 but unless I'm mistaken they continue to spend a lot of time later on. That was the natural way to go if there had to be a romance. And it is really the same with Janeway and Chakotay.

[DaveSumm]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

(although now I think on it, I think Geordi has a line about exceeding Warp 10 in Where No One Has Gone Before with the Traveller blasting the Enterprise several million light-years away, but that was very early TNG when they were still trying to figure things out),

...and in ‘All Good Things...’ Crusher’s medical ship can do Warp 13. I know there’s some fan theories that they’ve readjusted the scale by then but more likely they just threw out a cool sounding number.

[sifth]

10 hours ago, Toth said:

I think at some point in one of these threads I already brought up my own headcanon that the Borg don't necessarily want to kill the Federation because they find to too valuable as a source of innovation, so they keep chucking single Borg cubes at it and see how they come up with solutions to improve themselves through the ensuing arms race. With that I can excuse why the Borg only made half-assed attacks so far and move on.^^

Yea, but they use time travel at one point, that seems a little above the usual, even for the Borg.

 

edit: I was always wondering why Voyager had hardly any children as well. Especially after that Void episode that covered several months of the crew basically doing nothing. It never made much sense to me, much like how Voyager basically relied almost entirely on The Doctor to run sick bay and to a much lesser extent Kes and Tom Paris. You'd think they'd have the Doctor train an entire medical staff, given how often his program either malfunctioned or was captured by an alien race. I mean who the hell was running sick bay during those episodes, lol

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Well, they had faster than Warp 10 in TOS, too, unless I'm misremembering stuff. Star Trek just doesn't have any internal consistency whatsoever, and never had.

That's not entirely true. They did reset the scale between the series. Gene Roddenberry sat down with Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda during pre-production on TNG and said they needed to have more consistency than the original show, where they just threw out numbers which sounded cool. So in TNG they had this idea that the warp and impulse scales were reset at some point, probably around the same time they reset the stardate numbering system, and they used a new algorithm that started at Warp 1 = c and then went up to Warp 10 = infinity and adjusted values inbetween.

They broadly stuck to that though TNG and DS9 in broad terms but not the details, which were all over the place.

To be fair to them, it's always very hard in SFF to determine what the travel times should be. 1 light year per day sounds cool, as it only takes 4 days to get to Alpha Centauri but 274 years to cross the width of the entire galaxy, but then you realise it's still too low, as to need to get to the nearest Sun-like stars it'd take a month to do a round trip. 1 light year per hour sounds great but then you'd realise it would only take 11 and a half years to cross the entire galaxy, which might make it far too small. Babylon 5 (and Warhammer 40K for that matter) might have had the right idea here, using hyperspace/warpspace which is non-contiguous with realspace, so it might take two days to get to a planet 400 light-years away but six years to get to one three light-years away.

BSG might be the worst offender, as they had this absurdly powerful FTL drive which could basically teleport them 5 light-years every 12 hours or so (much faster with networked computers), but the colonials had never expanded past the Twelve Colonies despite having had two millennia to do so.

[Toth]

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Yea, but they use time travel at one point, that seems a little above the usual, even for the Borg.

But they also made the effort to fly up directly into their face before time-jumping instead of the rational thing of time-jumping in their own territory and bring the past collective up to speed.

[Macklunkey]

Anson Mount has changed the location on his Twitter to " strange new worlds". 

Excellent stuff.

[sifth]

17 hours ago, Toth said:

But they also made the effort to fly up directly into their face before time-jumping instead of the rational thing of time-jumping in their own territory and bring the past collective up to speed.

That's a fair point, I always thought a line or two was missing from First Contact from The Borg, saying they weren't sure if the time travel device would work, because it honestly destroys the whole reason for the opening battle.

[DaveSumm]

Maybe they can time travel within a certain period, and the reason the Borg are so advanced is cos they’ve been continually doing that with all information they have. Maybe in the first loop, the Borg were feeble and kept getting destroyed and they’ve gradually ramped up their tech by feeding it back to themselves.

[SpaceChampion]

Tarantino's pitch revealed
 

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From what we understand, the film will see the crew going back in time and revisiting past events from both previous movies in the rebooted series as well as events from The Original Series. Along the way, they’ll also run into some familiar faces who Trek fans will no doubt get a kick out of seeing, but details beyond that remain unclear.

So, it kind of sounds like Avengers: Endgame in some ways then, and we all know how this premise worked out for that film. Then again, there could be a lot more to the movie than just this time travel element but from what we’ve been told so far, that’s Tarantino’s basic pitch. Though why exactly the crew needs to go back to these past events in the first place hasn’t been revealed just yet.

 

[Rippounet]

Ok, I'm one month late but I've finally found the time to finish this show.

Welp, it was bad, I won't beat the dead horse.

Except... the one issue I just can't let go of hasn't been brought up here apparently. How the fuck did the Federation fleet arrive just after the Romulan fleet? Starfleet would have needed time to assemble that many ships, not to mention get Riker (unless he'd left for Earth just after Picard left his place, which doesn't exactly make sense either), and they still arrive a mere few minutes after the Romulans who've been on their way for days?
FFS this is Rise-of-Skywalker level bad.

[Luzifer's right hand]

7 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Ok, I'm one month late but I've finally found the time to finish this show.

Welp, it was bad, I won't beat the dead horse.

Except... the one issue I just can't let go of hasn't been brought up here apparently. How the fuck did the Federation fleet arrive just after the Romulan fleet? Starfleet would have needed time to assemble that many ships, not to mention get Riker (unless he'd left for Earth just after Picard left his place, which doesn't exactly make sense either), and they still arrive a mere few minutes after the Romulans who've been on their way for days?
FFS this is Rise-of-Skywalker level bad.

I liked the series but the copy and paste fleets were really disappointing. In universe Starfleet might have far better tech at this point than the remnants of the Romulan Star Empire.

[sifth]

3 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I liked the series but the copy and paste fleets were really disappointing. In universe Starfleet might have far better tech at this point than the remnants of the Romulan Star Empire.

I had more of an issue with the Roluman fleet to be honest. How was  that one lady who was under cover as a Starfleet admiral out of nowhere able to leave her post, to just lead a Romulan armada, without anyone noticing. Section 31 really does suck at it's job in this series. Also did the stupid looking sunglasses on her ever get explained, because for some odd reason those things are what I'm remembering most from this show, lol

[DaveSumm]

58 minutes ago, sifth said:

I had more of an issue with the Roluman fleet to be honest. How was  that one lady who was under cover as a Starfleet admiral out of nowhere able to leave her post, to just lead a Romulan armada, without anyone noticing. Section 31 really does suck at it's job in this series. Also did the stupid looking sunglasses on her ever get explained, because for some odd reason those things are what I'm remembering most from this show, lol

I think it was a clue that she wasn’t Vulcan, as Vulcan’s have some kind of second eyelid that protects them. Or something.

[Derfel Cadarn]

37 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I think it was a clue that she wasn’t Vulcan, as Vulcan’s have some kind of second eyelid that protects them. Or something.

Shouldn’tthe Romulans, as well, as they come from Vulcan?

[sifth]

34 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I think it was a clue that she wasn’t Vulcan, as Vulcan’s have some kind of second eyelid that protects them. Or something.

They do? I don't remember this ever being a thing. Also wasn't she half Vulcan, since she could do the mindmeld? Did she just always keep those glasses on when she went outside, because that makes even less sense, as to how she never got caught by Section 31, lol

 

[DaveSumm]

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Star Trek: Picard has a conspiracy at the heart of its story, but some Star Trek fans can't get past another question: Why did that Vulcan need sunglasses? In the episode "The End is the Beginning," Commodore Oh, the head of Starfleet security, approaches Dr. Agnes Jurati while Jurati is eating lunch outside. The sun is shining brightly, and Oh is wearing sunglasses. But some fans note that doesn't make sense since previous episodes of Star Trek established that Vulcans evolved inner eyelids to protect their sight from the intense light of the three suns that shine on their home planet.

Star Trek: Picard showrunner Michael Chabon took to Instagram to address that question. He's aware that a Vulcan wouldn't need to wear sunglasses. Knowing that and seeing Oh wear sunglasses, what then, he asks, does that tell us about Commodore Oh?

I don’t know where it’s from either, maybe TOS when they were still ‘Vulcanians’ and things hadn’t really solidified much yet. Possibly before they established that Romulans were cousins of theirs.

 

EDIT: TOS Season One “Operation —Annihilate!”

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A little while later as Kirk has Zahra begin recording a mission update for Starfleet Command, she notices Spock returning to the bridge – he can once again see. It seems that an inner eyelid, a hereditary trait of Vulcans developed as a protection against the brightness of Vulcan's sun, closed to shield his eyes on instinct. It's normally thought about as much as a Human would think about their own appendix: completely ignored.

 

[Werthead]

I did think - because of the eye sensitivity thing that Discovery made a big deal out of - they were hinting that she was from the Mirror Universe. I don't really want to them to go back to the Mirror Universe well again, but that could be a hint that the Romulans might be getting more resources from somewhere else (and the Mirror Universe is much more common knowledge in that time era).