Honestly, after Zora became sapient, it seems like a cruelty to have her just sit around in deep space.
In Calypso, this was less of an issue, because of the implication that Discovery became sapient after centuries of floating about, developing sapience as part of that time, but Zora would be sapient from the get-go, and leaving a sapient being adrift and alone for Millennia seems like fairly unethical.
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Could also have been to make the difference more subtle, since they’re different parts of the same person, rather than being two separate people like the goatee counterparts are.
Gives him dark eyes, as opposed to the bright/spotlit eyes on good Kirk? So you can immediately tell there’s a difference between the two.
Idk why but my shitpost-ridden brain instantly went “wait… d-did they make Kirk hot?”
Depending on your taste/sexuality, they arguably do that most of the time. The man seems to have shirts made of tissue paper.
It also makes him stand out more. Where regular/good Kirk has a spotlight on his eyes (like Morticia Addams), Evil Kirk has darkened eyes instead.
Unless you’re on a California class, and someone diverts the auxiliary power.
There’s an argument to be made that an alternate timeline isn’t the same timeline, and therefore, the 24th century temporal prime directive would not apply. It may just be conventional application of the prime directive, as it applies to pre-warp civilisations. They’d likely try to get them back, and either give them the choices of keeping quiet, or having their memories of the future altered/erased, to avoid interfering with that iteration of Earth’s development.
If there is no way of them going back, then they would likely get the standard time-displacement reintegration package. The circumstances are close enough, and it would hardly be the first time ancient humans from over 3 centuries ago would crop up.
True, but that can be said of a lot of atrocities in Star Trek history. Some of which are necessary for the preservation of the Federation as we know it.
The Enterprise C incident, for example. The loss of the ship with all hands (presumably) helped prevent an escalation of the conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.
We also know that the Burn didn’t create issues wholesale. All it really did was exacerbate the existing dilithium shortage by dropping the number of ships, but the underlying problems were likely going to happen either way. The Chain had the advantage of the Courier network, while the Federation was still using warp-drive ships trundling along at low speeds.
The only notable thing that did happen is the loss of functioning ships, straining Federation resources further, and that N’var believed that their experimental stargate network caused the Burn, so they stopped developing it, but the former would have likely happened anyway, especially if the Federation was to get into conflict with the Chain.
How likely is it that Discovery went to a mutable future, just one of many, especially with the Temporal Cold War, Carl, Q, Trelane, Janeway, the HMS Bounty, and any number of other temporally active agents out there in time? How locked in is the 32nd Century?
About as locked in as any of the Time Travel in the 23rd and 24th centuries.
Star Trek time travel can be inconsistent, but usually, it tends to stick with there only being one timeline that alterations shift back and forward, something that isn’t really helped by the Time War.
The only time that we’ve seen anything approaching an alternate timeline like that is with the creation of the Kelvin timeline from the Narada incursion, which resulted in bidirectional effects that separated it into a new, independent timeline, but events like that are more the exception than the rule.
Though, normally, Trek time travel rules would suggest that anything lasting longer than a season (or into the next episode) is usually here to stay, if it’s not reverted at the end of a multi-parter. Data’s head remained centuries older than his body, for example, and the crew of the Bozeman are still rattling about the 24th century, having jumped 70 years into the future.
One distilled drop of Star Trek fandom over the decades could take it to the edge of the universe and back at salamander-speed.
im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you’re saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly
In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.
DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.
You don’t really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery’s representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.
Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn’t have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There’s no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it’s still palatable to wider audiences.
Disco had a lot of flaws, and most of them were the same flaws we saw in Picard: the writers just couldn’t write full season plot arcs that were satisfying and believable. This is made worse because each season had to raise the stakes, to the point where it just got kinda exhausting. Meanwhile the show just took itself way too seriously, without really earning my emotional investment.
Some of the were exacerbated by the production issues that happened in the early seasons of the show, too.
They went through a bunch of different showrunners/producers in that time, and it shows. Much of Seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery felt like four different shows all overlapping with each other, which did not help in the slightest. It started to find its footing in Season 3, but after that was also when CBS took it off of Netflix, which also made it harder to watch, unless you were willing to subscribe to another service (that might not even be available in your country) for the one show.
It might have been more interesting if it had stabilised itself and found its footing early on, but alas. On the other hand, it being what was basically an experimental testing-ground for a bunch of different concept gave us the short treks, Strange New Worlds, and a few other shows besides, so can’t fault it that badly.
Maybe that’s part of why the Borg never bothered with the Federation much? They weren’t actually worthy of assimilation until they started developing drone separation tech.
Seems like if you’re on an away mission to, say, a desert planet, sunglasses might be useful.
To a degree. Not all species need them, and it might not be considered necessary. Particularly since it adds the risk of you losing them, and inadvertently causing a violation of the Prime Directive.
Species like Vulcans have innate defences that are just as good, if not better than 21st century sunglasses, and they may rely on those instead.
Although that was due to hardware failure on the transporter itself, rather than an issue with the process. Even so, it’s not a perfect process, since Geordi mentions that Scotty’s pattern had some minor degradation (0.03%?) before Scotty was retrieved.
From the description of the process, it’s not exactly a stable form of long term storage either. It’s closer to constantly transporting someone in a loop, and refreshing the pattern that way. Basically the equivalent of preventing all the water from leaking out of a bucket by constantly moving it between buckets.
The replication of life seems to be more of a technological limitation than much else. One of the main roadblocks for 24th century Federation replicators creating life is that they lack the resolution and reliability to create error-free copies of complex molecules like DNA, and those errors are typically incompatible with life.
A theoretical perfect replicator may be able to produce a copy of a person, to some degree. The experimental gentronic replicator was capable of replicating a fully functional Klingon spine, and assuming that a Klingon spine is at least as complex as its human counterpart, it’s not far off from being able to replicate a whole entire brain.
According to DS9 4x10 (Our Man Bashir), during transport, someone’s “neural energy” pattern is stored within the transporter buffer. The energy pattern occupies a huge amount of memory and so cannot be stored for a long period of time. In the same episode, they also establish “neural energy” to be separate from the physical form. They use the word “store” instead of “save”; I think that’s because it’s literally something like a battery, not a photocopier. You can only move around the consciousness.
It’s also worth noting that the neural energy pattern is what is being stored, not the neural energy itself. The station’s computers would not need to be cleared if they were simply storing the energy, since they could just bottle it up in a battery.
Logically, it would follow that if they are capable of storing the neural energy pattern on the station’s computers, then it could be copied by a sufficiently advanced replicator, not unlike the replicator patterns that they normally use, or the data stored on the computers copied like conventional data.
Data’s positronic network is also designed to mimic the living neural system, using positronic neurons instead of the standard ionic ones in fleshy brains. He might have a neural signature, but the difference in brain function just makes it harder/impossible to detect, since you might normally be searching for the biological equivalent.
Similar to how Ferengi brains are thought to be resistant/immune to telepathy because they have a vastly different structure compared to most humanoid brains.
We know that at the very least, Data’s brain is completely capable of supporting a transplanted human consciousness. Ira Graves was able to transfer his over to Data and run without issue, with the only problems arising when his consciousness started conflicting with Data’s, whereas his transfer to the isolinear computers on the Enterprise only stored his memories, with the implication that he effectively died as a result of only his memories being stored.
Conversely, we know that the Enterprise’s computers are technically capable of hosting an active consciousness with no modifications at all. The Nth Degree has Barclay transfer his consciousness to the ship’s computer, which would not be possible if the computer could only simulate a consciousness. Logically, it might be able to develop a soul of its own, if given enough time to develop a consciousness, but the timeframe might be impractical, seeing as Discovery needed centuries to do the same in Calypso.
As for the bar tabs, I don’t think they ever really explained how starfleet officers paid for stuff on DS9. I always just assumed they had some kind of credit account through Starfleet or something when they were posted there.
They probably do, since the Federation deals with civilisations that use money on the regular. They likely have an allowance/stipend specifically for that.
“Farpoint Station” has Dr Crusher ask for some cloth to be put on her tab on the Enterprise, so DS9 isn’t the only station using a similar system, which might be the same system, it’s just that Quark’s is a Ferengi business on a Bajoran station, so the issue comes up more often compared to someone who might be living on a starship, or on Earth Spacedock.
The converse is that making a specific distinction based on sexuality like that is also illogical in what is supposedly the enlightened 24th century Federation.
They’re not the ancients of the 21st century, who would be so concerned with such primitive things.