Star Trek General Discussion

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, I'd seen headlines from comics sites about that. I want closure in canon though, and since Trek, even in animated form, doesn't recast characters, that means getting back Avery Brooks. Apparently he would come back for the right story. They'd have to do it right though, there's a lot to wrap up there.

^This. Section 31 is something that you are supposed to dislike about the Federation. However, it also shows a reflection on yourself. Do you adamantly want them gone or do you accept that they are a necessary evil?

I would argue that they helped bring about the end of the Dominion War.

So would Sisko, which is why he initially kept the cure to the Founder plague under wraps. But necessary or otherwise, I really appreciate that Deep Space 9 consistently treats them as evil. Discovery wanted to maintain an ambiguous relationship to them even when they were themselves responsible for the quadrant-ending threat. We're supposed to take for granted to some extent the rationalization that they keep everyone else's hands clean. In Deep Space 9, Bashir actively works to root them out and expose them, climaxing in capturing and killing a guy. He does estimate (with real conspiracy math used in the real world) that there have to be at least 70+ people involved in the coverups he knows, and we don't see him continue to fight them after he kills Sloan and saves Odo, but up to that point he openly treats them as an enemy, not a misguided ally. It's a pity he doesn't seem to have gone on to rat them out to the Tal Shiar or something.

 

[MrBlud]

I strenuously disagree with that.

DS9 let Section 31 infect the Founders AND had the Federation Council (not just Starfleet) explicitly ok such Genocide. They also got off scot free outside of Sloan dying. There were no tribunals, no resignations, etc. The DS9 writers quite clearly portrayed Section 31 as a “necessary” evil and truly responsible for safeguarding the Federation. The writers relished injecting their modern day cynicism and “realism” into Roddenberry’s enlightened Humanity.

The whole virus storyline is pretty much “I, Borg” …except the bad guys win.

That is in stark contrast to Discovery successfully stopping Section 31’s main plot of blowing up Quo’nos AND portraying them as largely loose cannons that are not beholden to ANY civilian oversight. They also continued to stop them and their plans at almost every opportunity instead of Bashir’s “resistance method” of actively helping them almost every time he was asked.

 

[Copper Bezel]

You're invoking "Gene Roddenberry's vision" so I can't take any part of this opinion seriously, but please just at least tell me you're defending Discovery S2 for the sake of your decades-old hateboner for DS9 and not because you genuinely want to be in the position of defending Discovery S2. DS9 isn't and was never cynical, it's a story of a light in the darkness, but understanding that might take some degree of effort. There is no effort involved to look at Disco S2 and recognize that the thematic conflict is way less interesting to anyone involved than proving to us that Section 31 is cool because it's dark and edgy and they have those nifty black badges and everybody respects our troops. The cynicism of Disco S2 is the cynicism of a Pop! Vinyl of a Seal Team Six video game. That does make it a whole lot less realistic than DS9, but not the way you want.

 

[MrBlud]

I hate Section 31 not DS9

And yeah, Section 31 has always been a “realism” bit which seems to to manifest solely when it comes to Humanity moving beyond their base desires rather than the “magical man and his Mariachi band.”

 

[Copper Bezel]

Okay, sorry for being a dick about it. = / I don't quite follow the reference on that last part though (Q?)

Edit: As much as it shocked me in my DS9 rewatch to remember how much Bashir's arc was ready to simply characterize Section 31 as the bad guys without qualification and treat them like enemy combatants, it's also a weird absence that we never hear about them again after Sloan is dead. I get that if Section 31 were all rooted out and put up on charges offscreen, that'd feel like an unearned happy ending, rather than saying that evil is still out there and we have to be on our guard. But we don't get an awful lot of emphasis of that point either, just Odo demolishing Sisko in one scene by pointing out how Starfleet was happy to go on looking the other way. (And it's not like you can't have both, that Section 31 takes the fall but we keep an eye on Starfleet knowing they're going to do the same again with something else in the future.)

But what makes that weird is that positive change does happen in Deep Space 9 ... to other people. The last season has to wrap up in one episode each that the corrupt Klingon empire has been set on a slightly better path and that the Ferengi Commerce Authority has adopted a progressive income tax and social safety net. Why couldn't Starfleet get the same treatment? There's probably answers for that in the writer's room back then, but what they decided to leave on the table is literally the entire villain that comes back in Picard S3, so the canonical repercussions are huge.

Still pisses me off that Picard S3 still didn't fix it because it was too busy fanwanking with dead captains on Daystrom Station to even give us the simple satisfaction of blowing it up.

 

[MrBlud]

Yeah, people/writers love to bring up “realism” when it comes to propping up Utopia with a seedy underbelly but somehow Q, nebula babies, warp drive, transporters, replicators, Warp 10 evolution lizards, etc always seem to manage a pass.

 

[Fero McPigletron]

As for Sisko and Jake, everyone noticed that. Its part of why Sisko is such an awesome character, and I can't say it any better than this one man did to Avery Brooks himself. I looked for the clip but I can't seemed to find it now. What it was, at a convention appearance, this young man told him that he didn't have a father growing up and that watching Sisko and Jake taught him how to be a father to his son. Avery Brooks was so moved, the man jumped off the stage and went and gave the man a hug.

I love that story! Thanks for citing it! I'm glad the loving paternal family relationship did not go unnoticed. Between teen to adult too, since showing it is rare compared to kids to parents.

Avery Brooks balking at the deadbeat dad trope so they changed the ending is cool too.

I'm waiting for SNW season 2 to end before I watch it whole. Can't wait since I heard about the boyband Klingons, haha. The last s2 episode is out?

 

[Copper Bezel]

I'm waiting for SNW season 2 to end before I watch it whole.

It just did!

Yeah, people/writers love to bring up “realism” when it comes to propping up Utopia with a seedy underbelly but somehow Q, nebula babies, warp drive, transporters, replicators, Warp 10 evolution lizards, etc always seem to manage a pass.

Oh, that part could never have been otherwise. Star Trek takes, and has always taken, its sociology way more seriously than its hard sciences. Deep Space 9 is slightly better at it than most at capturing verisimilitude and leveraging the various humanoid species as fully realized societies and polities analogous to the ones that exist on Earth, and they're still humans with a spot of latex on thanks to ancient astronauts seeding the galaxy with teleologically evolving DNA.

There's also good reasons for that. First, we're all still human viewers watching for relatable human struggles, and we all know how unwatchable the first three seasons of TNG are where they literally tried that already. Second, Roddenberry only introduced his evolved space humans a little under six years before Deep Space 9 premiered, and believe me, those were formative years of my childhood too, but that is a damn thin slice of Trek history. Given how much TOS often tried to be about human nature, like, of course you're going to get a more sober take if the franchise continues.

The idea that humans in the Federation are exactly like human beings today but socialized into a better society, and still just as capable of fear or revenge and so on as we are when they're put into the situation, is really the only way to do something like Star Trek IMNSHO. We want to see them struggle and make those choices. But like, Disco S4 struggle. Not whatever the hell the first two seasons of Disco and the entirety of Picard was.

Edit: Trash TV. The whatever is trash TV. Just wanted to be unambiguous.

 

[MrBlud]

I don’t exactly agree with that. They *shouldn’t* be just the same as people today (which Lower Decks 100% *is* to the point they call it out in the SNW crossover as they are visibly off from the SNW crew)

I’m not saying you need to be absent all conflict because yeah that was pretty awful and very boring but more stuff/thinking like bringing their children with them into space. That’s a WILD idea that is completely foreign to us the same way that letting women vote would’ve been 300 years before it happened too. The writers then promptly dropped it because it didn’t make sense to current attitudes (which again was kinda the point).

Normal humans with normal human foibles IN SPACE is pretty much EVERY SCI-FI EVER so I like my Star Trek to be a smidge different.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I honestly think children on the Enterprise is a 1% effort that didn't mesh with any of the other things going on in the way the show was conceptualized or designed. To make that really work, you need to drop the idea that the Enterprise is a cool ship that shoots torpedoes and is part of a space navy with cool rank badges and stuff. Gotta go completely Enterprise J with it with a lot of big green spaces visible on top. Life there would have to look a lot more like Deep Space 9 than like TNG itself.

The crews on SNW and DS9 feel right to me, but of course they're going to, that's not much guide of anything. Still, circular or not, that is what I'd picture as human beings just like us but raised in an advanced society. They're educated and professional and reflect a society that's learned from its history. TNG throws up some flags for me, enough that when First Contact asks the question, "but what if the fact that you're talking about your evolved sensibilities in the first place is like a really obvious red flag for the realities about yourself you're refusing to come to terms with and that are going to end up killing people," I vibe with that pretty hard.

 

[Cybersnark]

Happy Federation Day!

On August 12, 2161, Humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites came together to form the United Federation of Planets.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Everyone on that stage hated everyone else, but were there cause the humie told 'em it was a good idea.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Happy Federation Day!

On August 12, 2161, Humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites came together to form the United Federation of Planets.

....and on August 19, Mars (Sol IV) joins the UFP, having sat out the original negotiations in order to assert their own independence from Earth. So I recall reading on Memory Beta, anyway.

A question that more recently occurred to me about the early Federation is the degree to which it supplanted the earlier Coalition of Planets. The Coalition hadn't proven much use in mutual defense, as the Romulan War proved (it's not often referred to in 23rd-century texts as the Coalition-Romulan War, after all....), but as not every Coalition member joined the UFP instantly (the People's Republic of Coridan took over a century to join), I wonder if it remained as an expanded economic area surrounding the tighter-knit polity within it, at least for a few decades.

 

[Cybersnark]

Considering that we have no canon coverage of that era at all, and thus relying only on the books; the Coalition ceased to exist during the Romulan War (the Vulcans and Andorians both pulled out to protect their own interests and the Tellarites didn't have much of a navy anyway), and Coridan was targeted by a Romulan kamikaze attack that basically ended their existence as an interstellar power (the Romulans flew a ship into the planet at warp speeds, triggering a planetwide firestorm that wiped out half the population). The holocaust also triggered waves of civil wars that further depopulated the planet (and made it easy for the Orions to move in and start looting).

They had only begun to recover by the 23rd century (where Coridan is mentioned in "Journey to Babel" as wanting Federation membership to protect themselves from the Orions).

 

[Copper Bezel]

My feelings about Enterprise compel me to say that I really respect the Andorians and Tellarites for taking the long view of history and the most enlightened kind of self interest, and accepting cooperation and mutual investment in the future with such unlikely and unpleasant allies as they did.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Agreed, the sentiment is the essential forward thinking motive of basically all of trek; Working hard to make a better tomorrow.

Shame it was all a holonovel.

 

[MrBlud]

....and on August 19, Mars (Sol IV) joins the UFP, having sat out the original negotiations in order to assert their own independence from Earth.

Wow.

That’s the second biggest burn in Martian history…

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Considering that we have no canon coverage of that era at all, and thus relying only on the books; the Coalition ceased to exist during the Romulan War (the Vulcans and Andorians both pulled out to protect their own interests and the Tellarites didn't have much of a navy anyway)...

I suppose we were expected to draw the parallel between the Coalition of Planets and the League of Nations (with the UFP being analogous to the UN which replaced it). Given the Coalition membership of both Beta Rigel and Coridan (that did not translate into instant UFP membership), however, it occurred to me to think in terms of the EU vs. the European Economic Area.

and Coridan was targeted by a Romulan kamikaze attack that basically ended their existence as an interstellar power (the Romulans flew a ship into the planet at warp speeds, triggering a planetwide firestorm that wiped out half the population). The holocaust also triggered waves of civil wars that further depopulated the planet (and made it easy for the Orions to move in and start looting).

They had only begun to recover by the 23rd century (where Coridan is mentioned in "Journey to Babel" as wanting Federation membership to protect themselves from the Orions).

Which is interesting, as the same episode implies that, (after shedding a pro-Vulcan government and going through the war) Coridan became a Tellarite protectorate prior to the 2260s?

At any rate, the Orion Syndicate definitely saw opportunities -- both in the war and in the rise of Humanity (who in spite of having a technocratic-socialist economy often had individuals willing to buy what Orion merchants had to sell) as a local power. But when the Rigellian worlds petitioned to join the UFP, both the Syndicate and the Malurians got rather spooked as to just how much power would now be projected in what used to be much freer space....

(The Rise of the Federation novel Tower of Babel was a great help in my mapping of the Beta Rigel system, along with some older sourcebooks)

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Shame it was all a holonovel.

It's funny you mention that....

One of the cardinal rules imposed on Pocket Books by both Richard Arnold's reign of error and subsequent administrations within Paramount was "Thou Shalt Not Contradict What Was Shown On Screen." But such was the audience reaction to "These Are the Voyages", that Pocket had no qualms commissioning The Good That Men Do, in which we learn that a key character death on that infamous episode was in fact an in-universe cover story to hide his wartime-and-early-Federation adventures with the Baskin-Robbins Gang (as I sometimes call a certain numbered department).

 

[wonko the sane?]

Baskin-Robbins... OH, okay, I get it.