Star Trek: There! Are! 4! shows!

[Lord Varys]

And when I start to think things over, cracks do appear:

Spoiler

I realized immediately that their take on the Changeling Worf and Raffi captured was false. Only Odo and other young Changelings who not yet mastered their abilities had to liquify again every 16 or 18 hours. Proper Changelings can keep their chosen forms indefinitely. Unless we assume the guy in question was also some youngling who has not yet mastered his abilities - which would little sense for an infiltrator - they fucked this thing up.

Also - Changelings are very tough. They cannot be destroyed that easily.

More importantly, though, how stupid must a shapeshifter be if he runs around in human form trying to evade his enemies? Such a being has literally thousands and thousands of ways to avoid them.

On the bridge I was irritated by the fact that Captain Riker did not immediately reinstate Commander Seven as first officer. They wanted that silly quarrel between the senile old men - which made little sense in context - but that could just as well have worked with the Admiral giving unwanted advice while Seven was back in her role as Number One.

@Jaxom 1974

Spoiler

Yes, Odo's return and the subsequent healing of the Great Link through Odo ended the war and the Female Changeling in the Alpha Quadrant became a prisoner of war. But Worf established that after Odo's return a faction of the Changelings split from the Great Link intending to some evil stuff. So it is not the entire Dominion they are up against now, but some Changeling terrorists, apparently.

 

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Salome Jens is 87 years old, it's supremely unlikely they will be bringing her back in a major way.

I didn't know she was that old, but I also didn't mean the character would have to be played by her. The Female Changeling is more like the Borg Queen. She could easily enough be played by another character - and it would make sense for the character to search her out since she might still be in the Alpha Quadrant unlike Odo.

Bringing back Odo would be harder, although I think it could be doable if they went with him coming back as a proper humanoid. It is easily imaginable that he would reach a point where he has outgrown that silly, incomplete face.

[Lord Varys]

Also, of course, if they bring back actual Dominion representatives, just go with another Weyoun version. The idea that they don't have any Weyoun samples stored back in the Gamma Quadrant was never very likely. I mean, how would it even be possible to take all their Weyoun stuff to the Alpha Quadrant? That would be as likely as them moving all Jem'Hadar factories to the Alpha Quadrant.

[Jaxom 1974]

Some fair points, but I'm convinced that the Changelings are red herrring...some of those concerns may not matter...

[Lord Varys]

Thinking about things - Discovery's biggest missed opportunity so far was not to show Dominion folks in the 31th century. Vulcans and Romulans reuniting is children's play - the Dominion being part of the Federation would have been progress, especially if we would see further developed, more aware Vorta and Jem'Hadar as well as (the same) Changelings having shed some of their earlier prejudices.

In fact, it would have been great beyond imagining if the Federation President or the Head of Starfleet had been a Changeling rather than some half-Cardassian (although that's not that bad, either).

If they bring back the Dominion in Picard, one hopes they don't miss the opportunity to touch upon it in the final season of Discovery.

Ditto, of course, with the Borg.

[Lord Varys]

By the way: I still hate the fact that Q pointlessly died.

[sifth]

12 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

By the way: I still hate the fact that Q pointlessly died.

I love how that still doesn’t make sense. Nothing about Picard season 2 made any sense though.

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

And when I start to think things over, cracks do appear:

  Reveal hidden contents

I realized immediately that their take on the Changeling Worf and Raffi captured was false. Only Odo and other young Changelings who not yet mastered their abilities had to liquify again every 16 or 18 hours. Proper Changelings can keep their chosen forms indefinitely. Unless we assume the guy in question was also some youngling who has not yet mastered his abilities - which would little sense for an infiltrator - they fucked this thing up.

Also - Changelings are very tough. They cannot be destroyed that easily.

More importantly, though, how stupid must a shapeshifter be if he runs around in human form trying to evade his enemies? Such a being has literally thousands and thousands of ways to avoid them.

On the bridge I was irritated by the fact that Captain Riker did not immediately reinstate Commander Seven as first officer. They wanted that silly quarrel between the senile old men - which made little sense in context - but that could just as well have worked with the Admiral giving unwanted advice while Seven was back in her role as Number One.

@Jaxom 1974

  Reveal hidden contents

Yes, Odo's return and the subsequent healing of the Great Link through Odo ended the war and the Female Changeling in the Alpha Quadrant became a prisoner of war. But Worf established that after Odo's return a faction of the Changelings split from the Great Link intending to some evil stuff. So it is not the entire Dominion they are up against now, but some Changeling terrorists, apparently.

 

I didn't know she was that old, but I also didn't mean the character would have to be played by her. The Female Changeling is more like the Borg Queen. She could easily enough be played by another character - and it would make sense for the character to search her out since she might still be in the Alpha Quadrant unlike Odo.

Bringing back Odo would be harder, although I think it could be doable if they went with him coming back as a proper humanoid. It is easily imaginable that he would reach a point where he has outgrown that silly, incomplete face.

The actor’s dead, Jim

[Derfel Cadarn]

15 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

By the way: I still hate the fact that Q pointlessly died.

Was weird. My ‘head’ explanation is thst the Q who died was from the distant distant future who, realising the end was nigh, decided to visit a friend.

And being a complete jackass, the closest he could find was Picard way back in thr 24th century

[Lord Varys]

4 minutes ago, sifth said:

I love how that still doesn’t make sense. Nothing about Picard season 2 made any sense though.

Somebody should eventually retcon it into some mad fever dream. And Q merely claimed he was dying for 'reasons'. We don't have to take him at his word.

1 minute ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Was weird. My ‘head’ explanation is thst the Q who died was from the distant distant future who, realising the end was nigh, decided to visit a friend.

And being a complete jackass, the closest he could find was Picard way back in thr 24th century

While that's a nice idea, it has been established that these beings simply do not die. They do have to get permission for suicide and can kill each other, but they do not just die. Not of old age and not of sickness.

Now, of course, they could come up with some new plot introducing a deadly 'Q illness', etc. But not even bothering with that makes absolutely no sense. Also, of course, the shitty thing Q does with Picard there. If he wanted him to deal with his parental issues ... why not some holodeck/illusion shit? Why mess with the timeline big scale?

And thinking about this thing - the way to give this shitty season meaning was reintroducing Picard as having married Laris and them having a child in season 3. Because if there was a point to season 2's Picard arc then it was about him understanding that the death of his mother, etc. wasn't his fault nor the fault of his father. And that it wasn't too late for him to have a working relationship and/or children. And the miracle justifying Q stuff there would have been Picard being a robot who could still procreate like a living human male - or him being transformed back into a human male by Q.

Getting back to the episode:

Spoiler

Really powerful exchange there between Beverly and Jean-Luc. That was good acting and well-written. Although Beverly really sucked there, considering it would have been easy to just drop Picard some lines in a letter or other written message. 'I'm pregnant.' 'You have a son.' That's not that hard, and it was a letdown that he didn't throw that in her face. You don't have to be with somebody to actually communicate with them as Beverly herself proved in the season opener.

But the emotions were really great. With Jack growing up on Earth it is stranger still that Bev never introduced him to Picard. I mean, the guy sat on his vineyard for about twenty years. Why not pay the old man a visit when the boy was, say, five?

Is the Riker-Picard quarrel and Riker's reluctance there perhaps going back to Riker's guilt over not saving his son? Is he transferring his guilt there to Picard's son, trying to protect him? It seems to me that's where they want to go there. Especially since they gave us the birth of plot device son in a flashback.

[Derfel Cadarn]

They had a civil war and we can assume some died then. 
Almost all we know about the continuum is from Q whonis hardly reliable. 
Maybe he just decided to die, like Quinn?

[Werthead]

On the efficacy of phasers versus changelings:

I also appreciated Odo being mentioned as a still-active character, even if his actor has passed away. And yes, of course, they could easily bring him back with a different actor, but I suspect they will not, out of respect for Rene Auberjonois.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Cant wait for Discovery to end....not because I particularly hate the show or anything, am mostly ambivalent towards it. Its more that then my thread title will finally be true and no one needs to resort to any torture to make it so.

[Lord Varys]

17 minutes ago, Werthead said:

On the efficacy of phasers versus changelings:

I also appreciated Odo being mentioned as a still-active character, even if his actor has passed away. And yes, of course, they could easily bring him back with a different actor, but I suspect they will not, out of respect for Rene Auberjonois.

That's Mirror Universe Odo, no?

I remember that scene, but there are other scenes in DS9 where it takes multiple shots to take out a Changeling.

And, yes, the reason why Odo is likely not going to come back in that show - and perhaps shouldn't come back - is because Auberjonois is dead. However, as I said - the Female Changeling is not the same type of iconic character, and if she were to show up again she could in any form of her choosing - including a male character, by the way. These beings most definitely are not burdened with either sex or gender.

The character in question only presented herself as an Odo-like female to connect with Odo.

[Lord Varys]

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Maybe he just decided to die, like Quinn?

Then they should have established something like that. Which they didn't.

[sifth]

41 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Then they should have established something like that. Which they didn't.

I thought Quinn was only able to die, by having another Q turn him into a mortal and then choosing to kill himself. Q just seemed to be randomly losing his powers.............because reasons.

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

That's Mirror Universe Odo, no?

I remember that scene, but there are other scenes in DS9 where it takes multiple shots to take out a Changeling.

He's still Odo and still a changeling.

There's only one other scene where a changeling is killed by weapons fire and that's by Klingons using disrupters against not-Martok. But it's unlikely the Klingons had their weapons charged up to maximum, whilst Mirror-Bashir was explicitly gunning for Odo so was likely going all-out to kill him with a single shot.

Plus hand phaser tech has likely developed significantly in the intervening 30 years, plus the changeling in question was severely injured/depleted.

[RumHam]

5 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Also, of course, if they bring back actual Dominion representatives, just go with another Weyoun version. The idea that they don't have any Weyoun samples stored back in the Gamma Quadrant was never very likely. I mean, how would it even be possible to take all their Weyoun stuff to the Alpha Quadrant? That would be as likely as them moving all Jem'Hadar factories to the Alpha Quadrant.

If Data can somehow be revived from a single neuron or whatever then weyoun should be no problem.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

He's still Odo and still a changeling.

There's only one other scene where a changeling is killed by weapons fire and that's by Klingons using disrupters against not-Martok. But it's unlikely the Klingons had their weapons charged up to maximum, whilst Mirror-Bashir was explicitly gunning for Odo so was likely going all-out to kill him with a single shot.

Plus hand phaser tech has likely developed significantly in the intervening 30 years, plus the changeling in question was severely injured/depleted.

A Changeling from another universe - and a Changeling Mirror-Bashir knew nothing about. And a very young Changeling who, so far, had not mastered most of his abilities yet.

Also, it doesn't strike me as likely that the default setting of a Klingon disruptor isn't, well, 'disrupt', so what I'd conclude from the non-Martok scene is that they are pretty resilient to energy fire. And don't they also shoot at the first Changeling Odo ends up killing? I seem to recall that they do.

2 hours ago, sifth said:

I thought Quinn was only able to die, by having another Q turn him into a mortal and then choosing to kill himself. Q just seemed to be randomly losing his powers.............because reasons.

Yes, which is why this didn't make any sense. Regarding the Q civil war I'm not sure if any Qs actually died there - they did 'injure' each other, though, so it seemed to be possible they could do even greater damage to each other.

In context, it was such a silly take to just randomly and apparently kill Q since he actually does have a son now, so if you revisit him, do it properly and continue the established story rather than do shit like that. Not that Picard didn't do a lot of other random shit like that.

[Werthead]

23 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

A Changeling from another universe - and a Changeling Mirror-Bashir knew nothing about. And a very young Changeling who, so far, had not mastered most of his abilities yet.

Also, it doesn't strike me as likely that the default setting of a Klingon disruptor isn't, well, 'disrupt', so what I'd conclude from the non-Martok scene is that they are pretty resilient to energy fire. And don't they also shoot at the first Changeling Odo ends up killing? I seem to recall that they do.

Low-level phaser fire can "shock" a changeling into revealing their true state, hence the phaser sweeps on DS9. A changeling can also resist phaser fire by turning into a substance that can actually reflect or absorb it (although I guess it's not comfortable for them), such as the female changeling did what she impersonated Kira-stuck-in-crystal (there's an interesting theory that her shape change extended into the floor of the cavern and she dissipated the heat out that way...also Odo didn't fire at a high setting for fear of killing or wounding Kira).

However, phaser fire can still kill them depending 1) if it's directed or at a high enough setting (this isn't Worf's first rodeo, he'd have gone for Setting 16 or whatever is max these days), and 2) the changeling isn't in a good enough state to resist (this changeling was so weak he looked about ready to die anyway and was mega slow in shapechanging and trying to escape).

This feels like an rather minor point to nitpick given Star Trek's complete inability to stay consistent on what weapons are needed to kill what ships or creatures or aliens at any given time (i.e. the inexplicable massive nerfing of the Borg in First Contact onwards, or Star Trek II's ludicrous pummelling of ships when on every other occasion we've seen starships blown to pieces by one or two torpedo hits). A better question from this episode might be the rather bizarre suggestion made by Riker that the Titan-A with its transphasic shields and torpedoes and maximum speed of Warp 9.99 is inferior to the 39-year-old Enterprise-D with none of those things.

[Lord Varys]

2 minutes ago, Werthead said:

This feels like an rather minor point to nitpick given Star Trek's complete inability to stay consistent on what weapons are needed to kill what ships or creatures or aliens at any given time (i.e. the inexplicable massive nerfing of the Borg in First Contact onwards, or Star Trek II's ludicrous pummelling of ships when on every other occasion we've seen starships blown to pieces by one or two torpedo hits). A better question from this episode might be the rather bizarre suggestion made by Riker that the Titan-A with its transphasic shields and torpedoes and maximum speed of Warp 9.99 is inferior to the 39-year-old Enterprise-D with none of those things.

It is what struck my mind, I don't really care much about techno bubble shit unless it is very obviously nonsense.

And the bigger Changeling issue there was the clearly false claim that they all have to regenerate in liquid form after a fixed time limit. They don't. Only Odo and other young Changelings have to do that. And perhaps not even all youngsters if they are better at mastering their abilities than Odo. Which means the entire scenario of the Changeling being in a weakened state is actually part of the problem.

A much better way to figure things out have been the phaser setting stuff you brought up.

Unless I'm misremembering things, the transforming abilities of the Changelings really push the boundaries of the material world, so I'd assume they are at least half-way to an evolution to 'energy beings', so the idea that they should react like solids to solid weaponry is stretching things to a point.

One must also say that the notion that Section 31 can create a virus killing the Changelings which they - who happen to be master geneticists and beings who can transform in effectively any shape - cannot destroy is also not exactly very convincing. Unless they really have magical tech and much more knowledge than the Federation officially has.

The entire 'Changelings are still liquid who just look like people' which was implied by the faces in the episodes also sucks - and kind of undermines your entire rationale there that they actually transform into stuff that can withstand phaser shots.