I have real love for TNG S1E16, "Too Short a Season."
The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he's taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.
The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife's eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole "Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides" seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it's revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.
President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.
Yeah, if you polled a bunch of American History professors or other people especially qualified to think about the entire set of presidents then that might come across as a little more convincing.
It helped me understand what the hell was going on with Batman Forever when I realized that the whole thing was riddled with tributes to the Adam West Batman.
Once Jim Carrey gets up a head of steam, he is doing a full on impersonation of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. Look at Gorshin in this scene. Carrey is doing an incredible Gorshin act.
Now I don’t want that and I don’t appreciate it, but once I understood where all of the camp in Forever came from it didn’t make me quite so angry.
Having seen Avery Brooks give panels at cons, I can confidently say that all the times when Sisko got space madness or was holosuite transformed into a Bond villain or was otherwise acting like a madman… all of those performances are the real Avery Brooks, and the stolid, restrained, level-headed Sisko is the character that Avery Brooks uses his formidable acting skills to pretend to be.
Bajor isn’t part of the Federation, so they don’t have immediate access to all Federation tech. Also, even when they join, I’m not convinced that the Federation just hands new members everything. The Prime Directive is all about not interfering in a society’s natural growth, and although achieving warp travel is the major barrier to initiating First Contact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional steps along the way once a planet has joined the Federation.
So, I learned in physics class at school in the UK that the value of acceleration due to gravity is a constant called g and that it was 9.81m/s^2. I knew that this value is not a true constant as it is affected by terrain and location. However I didn’t know that it can be so significantly different as to be 9.776 m/s^2 in...
Lucas made such a mess of the original Star Wars movies with his changes over the years that I’m sure a lot of people are probably sour in general on the idea of unnecessarily changing anything in a remaster....
Leave them all in. Remasters are for restoring a work to as close as possible to the way it was meant to look when it was released, and nothing more. You wouldn’t look at a painting by da Vinci or Vermeer and say “Hey the perspective is off there,” or “That kind of bird doesn’t belong in that time and place,” and then “fix” the painting in the process of restoring it.
The creator(s) made a series of decisions during the original process of creation. Maybe some of them were mistakes, but they were their mistakes to make, and not anyone else’s to try and second guess after the fact. Once you start down that path, there’s nothing preventing George Lucas style special edition madness.
I have a theory that explains why genetic engineering and cybernetics are a rarity amongst the main galactic civilizations.
One can point at the Eugenics Wars as a reason for Earth, at least (and the Federation, as a result), to have a phobia of genetic engineering in particular and transhumanism in general. The lasting trauma gave humanity such a collective phobia that centuries later they almost totally forbid genetic modification, and seem to limit cybernetic augmentation to corrective prostheses like Geordi’s VISOR. The encounter with the Borg reinforces this phobia, but its essence was already firmly in place.
The Eugenics Wars explain the Earth-originating phobia of transhumanism, but what about the rest of the galaxy? Vulcans might have their own half logical / half mystical reasons for rejecting augmentation, saying that such methods would be tantamount to trying to cheat one’s way to achieving pure logic. Klingons might have lingering trauma from the augment plague of the Enterprise NX-01 era, combined with the belief that augmentation is dishonorable.
We don’t know enough about the Gorn, the Tholians, the Sheliak, or the Breen to make informed guesses. They don’t seem to be chock full of cybernetics, but as to why or why not, there isn’t enough information.
But what about the Ferengi? The Romulans? The Cardassians?
All three have the means, motive, and opportunity to embrace either genetics or cybernetics, or both. None seem to be morally “above” the idea of using artificial means to advance themselves or get advantages over their enemies. And yet none seem to have embraced the idea. Why not?
This is where my theory comes in. I submit that every race that fully embraces transhumanism (Transbeingism? One doesn’t want to be too Homo sapiens-centric.) eventually either self-destructs, is destroyed, or literally transcends our conventional understanding of civilization.
As for examples, look at the Bynars. They embraced cybernetics, and were one bad solar flare away from totally destruction, saved only by a desperate theft of the Enterprise to reboot their entire planet, dependent on the good will of the victims of their theft. Look at Earth, where experimenting with genetic augmentation nearly destroyed humanity. Consider the children of Landru, who were arguably under the control of a fully cyberized intelligence, and were totally stagnant, and well on their way to extinction.
Next, consider the Borg, a fully cyberized species that has taken on the nature of an uncontrolled cancer, gobbling up unique life and technology. If they continue as they have, the other powers of the galaxy will have no choice but to destroy them out of self-defense. Also look at the example of Gary Mitchell, augmented by the Galactic Barrier, who went mad and had to be killed by Kirk before he could pose a greater threat.
Finally, consider the many beings we have seen who seem to have ascended beyond mere mortality, to the degree that they barely interact with the universe any more. Trelane, and his parents. Kevin Uxbridge. The Traveller. At the very upper scale, possibly the end result of all of this upward mobility, are the Q Continuum. But all of these beings exist in realms that defy our understanding of technology and biology. These are beings for whom cybernetics and genetic augmentation have long since been left behind; they have escaped destruction, but they also cannot remain in the same community of mere mortal beings as most other sentients in the galaxy.
In essence, augmentation is one of the great filters of galactic civilization. When a species begins tampering with its own existence, more often than not it is destroyed, but those that are not destroyed must continue to ascend; they cannot remain in a form that we would recognize as mundane life, only moreso.
TLDR: You either die the Bynars, or augment long enough to join the Q.
Hell if I know how expensive a custom flag is to get printed but this or this both look pretty good. Worry less about canonicity and more about if the aesthetics work for you.
One of the novels has a conversation with Zephram Cochrane that explains the origins of the arrowhead itself that I was quite fond of.
Cochrane is asked to explain his warp drive and he draws a quick sketch.
He explains that Einsteinian physics state that as an object’s velocity (V) approaches the speed of light, the energy (E) required to accelerate further grows infinite (marked by the star).
However, his calculations indicated that if one could accelerate beyond the speed of light, that the energy required to accelerate would diminish beyond that point (hence the steely rising and then falling line in red). The problem is that it’s impossible to expend infinite energy to reach that speed.
So what his warp drive does is warp space in such a way that that curve instead extends below the point of infinite energy (the green curve). One expends a given amount of energy to accelerate to light speed, and the warp drive allows one to continue to expend less than infinite energy to accelerate further.
I’m pretty sure this doesn’t jive with later canon explanations of how warp drive works, but I loved that Cochrane’s legacy was still being incorporated into Starfleet insignia even over a century after his death.
Oh no. This buddy just heard about the Plumber Brothers and what they've been doing for the past 40+ years. ( lemmy.world )
[Not my photo obviously]
What are some underrated episodes from each series?
Just curious as I want to rewatch some overlooked episodes from each of the series out so far.
News: Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last ( www.nytimes.com )
President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.
The littlest chimera ( lemmy.world )
He seems a bit grrrrrruff ( lemmy.world )
xkcd #2869: Puzzles ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2869...
How did money work on deep space 9?
Whenever there’s a storyline with quark, they talk about money/latinum....
Does everyone learn the same gravity in school or is it different everywhere?
So, I learned in physics class at school in the UK that the value of acceleration due to gravity is a constant called g and that it was 9.81m/s^2. I knew that this value is not a true constant as it is affected by terrain and location. However I didn’t know that it can be so significantly different as to be 9.776 m/s^2 in...
Thoughts on fixing production mistakes in remasters?
Lucas made such a mess of the original Star Wars movies with his changes over the years that I’m sure a lot of people are probably sour in general on the idea of unnecessarily changing anything in a remaster....
TIL that Geordi directed some episodes ( pxscdn.com )
Better place for discussion I suppose
Enterprise-F in all her glory ( startrek.website )
Just some fun size comparisons ( startrek.website )
Not sure how accurate it is but given the figures I vaguely recall, this feels pretty accurate....
Gene Roddenberry's first sci-fi show pitch from 1955: "The Transporter" ( startrek.website )
I thought this was an interesting read. You can see that the seeds of what would become Star Trek were already growing....
How is genetic engineering wrong, but cyborgs are okay?
Canon-friendly Klingon flags that I can fly publicly?
qaleghqa’neS!...
xkcd #657: Movie Narrative Charts ( imgs.xkcd.com )
Title text: In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively....
Why were the TOS movies better than the TNG movies?
(Not including the reboot trilogy as that’s a different altogether topic)...
The Starfleet Insignia Explained ( startrek.com )
This is an old one, but a good one, and StarTrek.com decided to republish it for whatever reason.