It turns out that what they mistranslated as "psychologist" was actually the Betazoid word for "cosmetologist"! After all, both professions involve sitting people down and helping them with problems with their heads. Picard had wondered why, during their first "counseling" session, Deanna had been adamant about giving him an apricot facial scrub and spending most of the time talking about the benefits of hair implants. He had assumed it was just some kind of Betazoid relaxation technique.
By the time they figured this out, it would have just been too embarrassing for everyone involved to rectify the problem. So Picard went and hired a Really 700 Years Old bartender to provide better advice to the crew and allowed Deanna to just float around offering the occasional pointless empathic insight.
Since it'd be kind of a dick move to leave the escape pods floating in the debris field, Riker stops pursuing the Borg ship long enough to allow the survivors of the battle to board the Enterprise. Dr. Crusher sets up a triage hospital in one of the cargo bays, and sends most of her medical staff to tend to them, which is why we don't see them in sickbay after Picard is rescued from the Borg ship. During all of this, Commander Shelby becomes acquainted with Ben Sisko, and tells him about her previous job designing anti-Borg weaponry, inspiring him to build the Defiant.
Has anyone, or can any one "map out" the political situation of all this, what's REALLY going on?
- I'm a big believer that the TNG era is shaped by the parasite conspiracy. So after Picard and Riker bust the conspiracy Troi is all over the damned place trying to diplomatically secure the borders of the now weakened Federation.
First off we are going to need a list of diplomatic missions and who was the ambassador. Go!
From this article:
- "In 1991, Roddenberry told the press that he planned to add an LGBT character to the TNG cast that season, but when he died suddenly a few months after the interview, his promise vaporized."
Since Roddenberry died around the time "Unification" aired, that would put the aforementioned interview around the season 4/5 hiatus. Ensign Ro was introduced in early Season 5, exactly at the same time Roddenberry had declared he would introduce this new LGBT character.
A few other things to note:
- Ro's first appearance after Roddenberry's death was in the episode "Conundrum," where she was sexually involved with Commander Riker. At this point, the producers (who did not agree with Roddenberry's desire to have a gay character on the show) may have wanted to explicitly establish that Ro was not a lesbian and thus prevent any further "damage" from being done.
- Ro's habit of wearing her earring on the left ear as opposed to the traditional right (even in her introduction, Keeve and Orta were both wearing it on the right) has yet to be explained. Similar hint-dropping has been practiced by the LGBT community fairly often (gay men wearing earrings, for one), and keeping things secret would make sense in a highly religious society like Bajor.
- Ronald D. Moore was involved with TNG back then. Perhaps making Admiral Cain a lesbian was an Actor Allusion?
1) Somewhere else on here I postulated that Lwaxana Troi is actually in charge of Section 31, or at least the official Federation politician who deals with 31 behind closed doors, but I looked at the timeline and realized I got it a little wrong. So, I don't think Troi infected Odo with the virus that hurt the link, that doesn't match up. However I postulate that it was HER idea. That's why when she came onto DS9 she got so cozy with Odo. She was doing recon and that time he turned into his liquid state she probably got more biometric data on him as well. During all of this she also did develop a true affection for him, since she knew that he was going to be used in such a horrific manner. I do contend though that it was always Lwaxana's plan that they would infect the Dominion and then force their surrender, she never intended genocide.
2) But that seems so out of character you say...or does it. Let's look at this as well: So it has always been important to Lwaxana that her daughter marry the right man for purposes of aristocratic marriage politics. We know that Troi had an arranged marriage, but we don't know when that marriage was arranged. We also know that Troi and Riker had an affair when he was stationed on Betazed. We also know that before being on Betazed Riker was on the Pegasus and we all know how that went. Then when on Betazed he suddenly got a promotion to some other ship on a deep space mission. SO - Troi arranges a marriage for her daughter. Then Troi is in on the cover up for the Pegasus project, but it goes blooey. She helps to basically promote Riker out of the way to keep it all hush-hush by sending him to the cush and easy post on Betazed. But while there he starts sleeping with Troi screwing up Lwaxana's plans for Troi's arranged marriage. So Lwaxanna makes a few discreet communications and suddenly Riker is posted on a deep space mission far, far away from her daughter.
Anyone else have conspiratorial evidence to back me up on the fact that Lwaxanna is a devious and dangerous chessmaster extraordinaire?
3) In "Manhunt", Lwaxana intercepts the Enterprise in a Starfleet-operated shuttle, having suddenly been appointed an ambassador and going to the same conference to which the Enterprise is transporting Antedean delegates. She proceeds to flit around pretending to be an airhead and comically pursuing Picard. Despite the fact that she is known to be a very advanced telepath, she seems utterly clueless about everyone she meets. Until the last few minutes of the episode, during which she casually exposes the Antedeans as terrorists before departing. This clearly indicates that either she has been reading the minds of everyone around her the entire time she was on the ship, or else she already suspected the Antedeans and wanted to personally confirm what they were up to. That she doesn't reveal their plans until the last possible moment hints that she was giving Picard & Company the chance to spot the terrorists on their own, and only said something because they had failed to do so. She makes a seemingly cute and innocuous remark about saving everyone's careers that is actually a little disturbing when you think about it. Then she beams down to the Pacifica conference, where she will presumably be plundering the minds of every single attendee as part of her intelligence-gathering.
4) As an aside, one might wonder at the membership of Betazed in the Federation. Their entire species is one vast security breach! Betazoids can not only read minds, they can do so across very long distances. In space it is thousands of kilometers at least, and whether this is in any way reduced when on the surface of a heavily-inhabited planet is unclear. At best, a Betazoid could sit in a cafe in San Francisco reading the minds of Starfleet admirals inside HQ! So why does nobody seem paranoid about them? Enlightened society...blah, blah, blah...just doesn't cut it. But Section 31 gains a very obvious benefit from the Betazoids, an entire planet full of long-range telepaths. Interestingly, there aren't a lot of Betazoids in Starfleet, but their species is treated as having some prestige within the Federation. Lwaxana Troi is a member of the Betazoid aristocracy. She could be posing as a flighty dilettante, spending her leisure time on diplomacy while using her carefully-cultivated Manic Pixie Dream Girl image to prevent anyone from suspecting just how on top of things she really is, and at the same time making sure that her people are respected and yet taken for granted. The Dominion going after Betazed might have been about more than just soft targets and strategic locations...
- There are already too many border conflicts from the just-pre-TNG era. It makes a lot more sense if the Cardassians were the primary aggressors with the Talarians and Tzenkethi as allies. Also, the Talarians with their outdated weapons would hardly provoke a war with the Federation (and probably the Klingons by extension) unless they had the more powerful Cardassians on their side.
- It was called the Cardassian Union, perhaps the Union was a form of alliance between them all, wherein the Cardassian were still the dominant power. The Union fell apart due to the pressures of the border war. A tense peace was made with the Tzenkethi and Talarians, however the Cardassians continued to fight until the Peace Treaty was signed.
- The Klingon renegades in "Heart of Glory" were aboard a Talarian freighter when the Enterprise found them; they may well have been trying to leave the Klingon Empire for the more anti-Federation but still partly Klingon Talarians.
- In Star Trek: The Next Generation S4E17 "Night Terrors" Guinan is still mostly lucid while the rest of the crew is losing it due to their loss of REM sleep. Perhaps the El-Aurians have some special neural processes that the Borg were interested in. Maybe that's why they are a race of "listeners".
- They can breed. That is, they show - multiple times, starting from their introduction - the usage of technology to artificially grow organics, who then are fully assimilated when they are physically old enough.
- "Canonically" they can't breed, because Voyager said they can't in one of its weirder moments, and new canon supposedly overwrites old. In this case most fans ignore the ...revelation... because 1) it contradicts stuff that actually happened on screen and 2) it's ridiculous. (So yeah, they can breed.)
- It's said they do not reproduce 'in this fashion'. They can breed, they just don't use that specific method.
- Assimilation is probably significantly more efficient than procreation because you get a mostly adult population that doesn't have to be kept in storage for years before it becomes useful. Presumably the Borg have access to assimilated cloning technology and the option of leaving the reproductive organs of their drones intact but elect not to because they consider it unnecessary
- Given the Queen and her many incarnations, the Borg probably have the technology to replicate or clone adult body parts as required and do a full or partial mind transfer when the new body is ready (but it still sucks to be an unimportant drone who won't get a personality backup). Assimilation is going to be most useful when a very small Borg population (e.g. one drone) needs to take over an enemy vessel and hasn't got a huge stash of raw materials from which to create more drones from scratch.
- Any discontinuity involving the Borg can be attributed to their mandate to adapt to new targets... until shown in a flashback predating its introduction. I always thought Transwarp was a recent acquisition as of "Descent" and "First Contact" but then "Voyager" showed they had been using Transwarp for years, back when the Hansens were studying them. But adaptation means more than thinking of using force fields after five of your drones go down. That's Ant Hive-level behavior. The Borg are supposed to be a hive, but they're also supposed to be intelligent.
- How much intelligence they display depends on how much focus the hive mind puts on the actions of those particular drones. The vast majority of the drones just operate on basic programmed instincts, like white blood cells. If something happens that these basic instincts can't deal with, like an ominpotent being flings the target ship away, then the hive mind might take notice, think on it for a few seconds and think up a new approach and download that new approach to the cube nearest the offending incident.
- Despite having a Transwarp Conduit near the Brunali homeworld, the Borg never bothered to systematically assimilate the entire species. Instead they seemed to periodically swing by and cherry pick some Brunali before continuing on their way. This does imply that the Borg only bother assimilating beings into the Collective on an as-needed basis. When the Borg assimilated the Hansen's, they would have ascertained that physiologically humans were an unremarkable species. Thus they would not have felt an urgent need rush off to the Alpha Quadrant to assimilate them all. But as they processed what they learned about the Federation, they decided that an advanced, multi-species civilization was much, much more interesting. Also, there was a mystery: the Borg were unaware that Q transported the Enterprise to its first encounter with one of their cubes, and they likewise did not know that he was what whisked the Enterprise away again just as they were about to assimilate it. From their perspective, this might have looked as if the Federation possessed some special technology that they wanted to learn more about.
- the Borg collective is HUGE, VAST. In normal operating procedures it may still take decades if not longer for new assimilations to download to every cube. In special cases the hive mind can send specific downloads to specific cubes when that cube encounters something it cannot overcome. However when the mission is done those new assimilations may in fact be re-called by the collective so they can be physically sent over to another drone somewhere else that needs it more.
- A (very) minor correction: the Borg already had self-healing ships when they were encountered by the 'D.
- True, but they didn't appear to possess nanotech until First Contact. The cubes were just designed to heal themselves by some other process before that.
- Behind the scenes, many aspects of the Borg were drastically redesigned for First Contact to take advantage of the significantly larger production budget of a feature film (the costumes and makeup on the drones became much more elaborate and detailed, for example). It's possible that the Borg always had the nanotech, but the show's limited special effects budget didn't allow it to be shown onscreen.
- Alternatively, all of the Wesley episodes are based on real missions, but Wesley inserts himself into them using the holodeck to make himself feel important and smart.
- He could even actually be a freaking genius kid and not a single bit of this theory would break.
- This is almost certain. There has to be an Enterprise-D in that timeline, or else Star Trek: First Contact wouldn't happen the right way.
- It was probably the one where the Borg had overtaken the Alpha quadrant, because the 2009 Film's universe in general is such a Crapsack World.
- Crapsack as it may be, the Federation in the new timeline is also substantially more badass and capable.
- If by "badass & capable" you mean getting the crap kicked out of the ENTIRE FLEET by one ship from the future, and all of your current captains injured or killed to the point where you're promoting a 4th year cadet directly to Captain. The 2009 reboot film's Starfleet is constantly victim of "The Worf Effect" simply to show the strength of Nero/Khan/USS Vengeance/Krall, and to make the Enterprise as the ONLY ship available. I think calling the 2009 Reboot Starfleet "badass & capable" a misnomer, at best.
- But if the Borg overtook the Alpha Quadrant, there would be no Federation at all in the 2009 film's universe. No, the 2009 film's universe is definitely the last universe the "prime" Worf ended up in.
- Except that you're ignoring the fact that the Borg only attacked Earth after meeting the Enterprise-D during the events of "Q Who." If there is no Enterprise-D in the alternate universe, there is no Enterprise-D for Q to send to the Borg, there is no reason for the Borg to seek out Earth for assimilation, and the events of First Contact never happen. Your proof is no longer self-sustaining.
- Not true. The dying Borg in the Enterprise episode "Regeneration" sent directions on how to get to Earth deep in to the Delta Quadrant. We could still be attacked, it will just take a while.
- Also, V'Ger discovered humanity decades before there was an Enterprise-D, and it's heavily implied (even outright stated in the novel "The Return") that he was repaired and sent by the Borg. It was likely in contact with them for the entirety of Star Trek: TMP, which explains how it knew just how to assimilate Illia.
- No, the Borg were already on their way to the Federation. In season 1 episode "Neutral Zone" the Enteprise found several colonies had been scooped up by an unknown force. In season 2 episode "Q Who" Q launches the Enterprise over hill and dale and discover planets where cities had been scooped up in the exact same way. Implying the Borg had already made it as far as the Neutral Zone. Yes Q introduced humanity to the Borg, but what he REALLY did with that was give humanity a chance to PREPARE for the Borg. So no Enterprise D means the Federation is unprepared when the Borg arrive and gets assimilated immediately by the Wolf 359 Cube...however, of course the issue here is about alternate Enterprise Ds Worf encountered, so if there is a timeline with no Enterprise D Worf didn't encounter it. Just correcting the factually incorrect assessment that the Borg only attacked the Federation because of Enterprise D.
- It was probably the one where the Borg had overtaken the Alpha quadrant, because the 2009 Film's universe in general is such a Crapsack World.
- Star Trek time behavior changes on a per-episode/plot basis, but the current idea is like that of Back to the Future pt 2 - that any changes cause a new temporal dimension to occur but do not undo the actual previous changes. This, for example, is how in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the Defiant crashlanded on a planet, created a minor civilization which then caused the defiant to NOT crashland. The grandfather paradox doesn't exist because time isn't cyclical. Thus, First Contact happened as depicted but Nero's jump to the past caused a new timeline which did not undo the previous time alterations. In this new timeline, there's every possibility that the Borg never will try to undo First contact in the first place. Anyways, Captain Braxton will somehow work it out.
- According to Word of God, the 2009 film explicitly uses the same rules for alternate realities as Parallels. That being said there's nothing to suggest for sure that the Borg would have made the same decisions in the 2009 timeline that they did in the Prime timeline, Enterprise D or no.
Hey, once nigh-omnipotence is granted to someone, no one can forcibly take it away — it has to be freely surrendered. And Riker is the sort of fellow who can beat androids and empaths at poker; he could easily bluff Q during the time he was one — meaning that he could still be one....
It is possible that he is not 100% aware that he has Q-powers, making him a Haruhi-class Reality Warper. Once again, his poker instincts protect him from detection.
- You say that omnipotence can't be forcibly taken away, but this is provably untrue, as it happens to members of the Q continuum multiple times, including Q, Q, and Q-Junior. If a fully grown Q can have his powers stripped, why would Riker, who only had them for a bit, be able to resist?
- Well, it may not be canon, but Q is certainly... interested in Picard. One can only imagine what you could do with an Alternate Universe. (Say, one where he never met Janeway.)
- John de Lancie (for non-Trekkers, the actor who played Q) confirmed that Q was in love with Picard. The jury is still out on Picard's side.
- Let's keep the Rule 34 to a minimum here. We're talking about Patrick Stewart, not Ian McKellen.
- Who's bringing the actor's sexualities into it? John de Lancie didn't say anything about himself, just Q.
- With Q, I'm not sure if "sexuality" is the right word for it, given that he's an Energy Being who could look like Marilyn Monroe just as easily as John de Lancie and be just as true to his own [lack of] appearance.
- He even says in one episode he wished he had originally appeared as a woman.
- Let's keep the Rule 34 to a minimum here. We're talking about Patrick Stewart, not Ian McKellen.
- Darmok and Jalad, on the ocean.
- In Winter.
- Uphill. Both ways.
- That's what she said.
- Their stomachs, contented.
- Sharnak, in shadow.
- The serpent, in the grass.
- The knife, in blood.
- In my pants.
- Lunch, on the floor. Thanks ever so.
- Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with the knife.
- I did it, in the hall, with the revolver. Take them away, Chief. I'm gonna go home and sleep with my wife.
- No tickee, no shirtee.
- The Doctor. With Rose Tyler. In the Tardis.
- Pinocchio, his nose long.
- Zinda, his face black, his eyes red!
- Peter Parker, when the spider bit him. Trixie with the amulet. Obi-Wan and Anakin at Mustafar.
- If this episode was ever MST3K'd, it would go like this:
- Dathon: "Darmock and Jalad at Tanagra."
- Crow (as Picard): "Big dumb guy, his ass kicked."
- In Winter.
- Radar, before the choppers come. Hawkeye, his heart troubled. Trapper, in the store room, with Ginger. Klinger, wearing heels. BJ, missing Peg. Margaret, charmed. Flagg, abusing authority. Frank, his face red. Blake, his thoughts elsewhere. Potter, on horseback.
- Spearchucker, forgotten.
- MacArthur, returning! (Redemption)
- The Camp, at ceasefire. (Joy)
- Adric, over Yucatán. (Thinking you failed when you really succeeded, with connotations of death)
- Derpy, when the orb hit. (Non-lethal self-sacrifice)
- The Cats of Ulthar. (Karmic Death)
- Ludwig van Beethoven, his hearing gone. (Overcoming a seemingly insuperable obstacle)
- David and Goliath at Elah. (Underdog prevails)
- The passengers on Flight 93.(Heroic Bystanders, with connotations of death)
- The soothsayer, in Nephelokokkygia. (An obvious phony suitably dealt with)
- Anansi, working hard. (O.O.C. Is Serious Business meets The Con)
- In that case, why no verbs?
- Mirab, his grammar imperfect. Jalad, his tense horrific. Syn'ttaxx, in shadow.
- All-Blue Entry: Antiquated Linguistics. Adaptation Decay. TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary. Future Slang. No Backwards Compatibility in the Future.
- "Star Trek: Frontiers", a Fan Fiction virtual post-TNG era series (now in hiatus + its server was, sadly, cancelled) indeed
explicatesexplicated a similar theory. In one episode, the Enterprise-H crew encounters a detached Tamarian colony which came into contact with the 20th century American Live-Action TV. They speak only in metaphors referring to those shows. Can you guess which metaphors the Enterprise crew immediately recognized? - Tamarians have warp drive. How coould that possibly happen? Professor Werner von Jalad explains his project to the Tamarian University grants comite "Mirab with his sails unfurled; only bigger, IN SPACE!." They might have a mythological word for "bigger", but they wont have a mythological word for "IN SPACE!".
- Why not? we do.
- "Icarus in the cool morning","Gunnar with no bowstring" OR "Munchausen and the underpants" "Grettir hidden by his hood". Professor Jalad wants to say IN SPACE!, but for Real. Myths about space flight + the literary format of The Icelandic Sagas (Gunnar and Grettir) is that they are historical records. Saga reference = Tamarian for "BUT real"
- We do because we have proper language, which can express new abstract concepts. The Tamarians can't do that, since they can only express thoughts and ideas through historic metaphor. They have devolved to be linguistically non-humanoid, and are basically smart parrots with warp capability.
- Why not? we do.
- Hmm. So I guess that the episode, in our language, would be this: Dathon of the Tamarians does a Batman Gambit, with the intent of creating Fire-Forged Friends with Picard via Back-to-Back Badasses. Poor Communication Kills, and Dathon is Killed Off for Real after passing on his sword. Picard returns, and, after telling the Tamarian First Officer You Are in Command Now, makes the a note in his Captain's Log.
- It would appear that the Tamarian equivalent of TV Tropes never instigated the No New Stock Phrases rule, then.
- We aren't hearing the ACTUAL Tamaranian speech. We're hearing the mangled results of the Universal Translator trying to translate it and failing. It is basically a literal word-by-word translation of their actual language, which I assume is more detailed than just Shaka, when the walls fell.
- I don't know, a lot of idioms in English are equally as long/short. Hell, Chinese has thousands of them literally called four-word-formed-phrases.
- Or maybe she just has better mind reading abilities than she can consciously control, and she unintentionally went into the mind of the unfortunate soul as he was dying. She IS half Betazoid after all.
- You know, Troi having much greater mental abilities than she is aware of would kind of explain why many of the plots that revolve around her telepathy tend to forget all of the other crew members onboard Enterprise from telepathic species.
- Interestingly, season three of Picard establishes that Deanna does possess greater potential than she exhibited on TNG. She was able to use Emotion Control to suppress Will's grief over the death of their son. She also performs the first ever onscreen Betazoid mind meld. Which is different from the Vulcan version in that she is able to join the person she is melding with (in this case, Crusher's son Jack) inside of a mindscape and even open a closed "door" inside his mind that revealed something that he was (rightfully) nervous about.
- Amalgamation: The knowledge and experiences of Data combined with the base personality and experience (what little there is) of B4 will merge into a separate individual who is comprised of both Data and the original B4.
- According to the site for the new Star Trek Online game, this is true in that continuity. Hooray for WMGs!
- Hooray? Look, it's great to have Data back and all, but did it have to happen at the expense of who B4 might have become? Neither the writers nor the surviving characters considered the morality of overwriting one person's brain with another. That holds even if the first person was incapable of personal growth. (Please don't overwrite the Kenner autistics...) This is Star Trek! Morality has been one of its major themes from the beginning!
- That's "Hooray, WMG got one right!" rather than "Hooray, Data crossed the Moral Event Horizon by stealing his brother's body."
- B-4 pulled a Heroic Sacrifice by re-routing the "suicide" program that Data had written to overwrite his own engram out of B-4's memory banks so it would kill him instead of Data. B-4's last words to his brother? "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
- Hooray? Look, it's great to have Data back and all, but did it have to happen at the expense of who B4 might have become? Neither the writers nor the surviving characters considered the morality of overwriting one person's brain with another. That holds even if the first person was incapable of personal growth. (Please don't overwrite the Kenner autistics...) This is Star Trek! Morality has been one of its major themes from the beginning!
- Confirmed in the Star Trek Countdown comic.
- Countdown is confirmed non-canon by its own writers.
- The hint at the end of Nemesis is that B-4 is humming a tune to himself that Data sang at the start of the film. There's an episode of Voyager where the holographic doctor gets rebooted and no one knows whether he'll get all his memory and personality developments back - then, as the episode ends, he's humming a tune to himself that he sang at the start of the episode. Of course, he's back to normal in time for the next episode. Data's chances are good.
- He had a little friend once... but he don't move no more.
- English is hard. Taking care of a cat is not.
- It was a changeling.
- Specifically, the changeling equivalent to Ship.
- Or Spot was a Time Lord.
- Spot was a Flerkin.
- Transporters create a living organism being transported as much as a car creates its driver. As in not at all. It just moves it, by turning it into energy and sending it at the speed of light to another location. Yes, it disassembles and reassembles but it's not creating anything new.
- Ask Thomas Riker how he feels about your theory.
- Transporters create a living organism being transported as much as a car creates its driver. As in not at all. It just moves it, by turning it into energy and sending it at the speed of light to another location. Yes, it disassembles and reassembles but it's not creating anything new.
- Legal restrictions and limitations in how complex things it can create.
- Data would be able to hack the system and get around the Copy Protection. He's done it with things more sensitive than his personal replicator when the imperative was strong enough. And he starts keeping cats after the system has burned him and his "species." If Spot had appeared in Canon before Lal died, then the legal argument would have merit — but the cats came after. Data wanted to be a parental figure, and the system denied him that. Thus, he keeps unlicensed cats, and the rest of the senior crew look the other way because he's usually one of the nicest people onboard.
- According to the ''Next Generation Technical Manual'', life forms can't be replicated because, to make data storage practical, the replicators work at a much lower resolution than the transporters do. This is fine for dead or nonliving materials, but "single-bit molecular errors could have severely detrimental effects on living DNA molecules and neural activity. Cumulative effects have been shown to closely resemble radiation-induced damage."
- So you can try and create lifeforms, probably even fully sentient beings, with transporters and replicators but what you create would most likely materialize as a living cancerous mass, or something that would make the Elephant Man look like Brad Pitt (too soon?). From a technological stand point it would be easy to create these mishappen happless things, so a program would have to be added to the replicator/transporter/holodeck operating systems to dissallow this. Out there somewhere in the Federation is some sick f&ck who has probably overidden this safety and creates this accursed things. Some of these sick bastards may do it out of sadism, some out of the drive to create life but with callous disregard or twisted concern for the mishappen failures. Some of them may be done by children fooling around, sort of the high tech version of children pulling wings of flies for fun. This would probably be considered one of the most abhorrent crimes in the Federation. There'd be that weird creepy kid down the way who replicates unviable lifeforms from his replicator, and the smart young kid who may have tried to replicate a pet and produced some gross non-viable lifeform and their disgusted parents had to teach the kid why this is wrong.
- Life forms have been replicated in the transporter — accidentally, but it happens. It happened to Riker...
- Okay, replicator files are highly compressed, and transporter files are uncompressed. Still, the ship officially has exactly one independent computer — two if you count Data. We know there's a lot of space in the ship computer. Data has been shown to hack the ship computer. As long as the living DNA stays living, damage to it isn't a big problem — Data isn't breeding cats, just replicating them. And it only has to be done once per cat. He can arrange to have one high-quality file in his replicator
- Minor correction: Enterprise-D has three independent main computers; two in the saucer and one for the engineering section, and each alone are capable of handling all shipboard functions. Data's personal computer in his quarters, which is implied to be rather powerful, is explicitly stated to be an independent system as well in Genesis. It should also be noted that La Forge was once able to transport an away team of three to a planet surface by "networking some tricorders together" in Brothers.
- In "Dead Stop" we see technology that seems to be the precursor of, if not the very technology that is, the replicator. That technology was not able to create an actual living being, even though it could replicate a human body in perfect detail. So it is safe to assume that Next Gen replicators would have that same limitation. Transporters work because they are moving the actual living matter, not reassembling the body using inert raw atomic components. Only on some rare occasions has a transporter malfunction managed to create a living duplicate of someone such as the time it made two Kirks and the time it made two Rikers.
- I would wager this is why you can't use transporters to clone people. You could copy someone's pattern but when you loaded inert raw atomic components the body would be a perfect replica of the original, but it would just be inert matter and not alive at all.
- Except transporters clone people on multiple ocassions. See Evil Kirk and Thomas Riker,
- I would wager this is why you can't use transporters to clone people. You could copy someone's pattern but when you loaded inert raw atomic components the body would be a perfect replica of the original, but it would just be inert matter and not alive at all.
- The Kirk and Riker duplicates were alive probably because they were made from 50% living matter and 50% inert matter which provided enough living matter to jump start life in the rest.
- So maybe to create true viable clones you need to 'seed' them with some living matter from the original. Considering living people can eat food to regain lost mass, this means you could harvest transporter clones off people.
- Have we all forgotten about the season 7 episode "Genesis", where some pesky virus causes everyone on the Enterprise to de-evolve? Riker turns into a caveman, Worf into a proto-Klingon bipedal crustacean, and Spot turns into... an iguana. Yeah.
Unfortunately s/he was exposed to a MissingNo, and so s/he evolves into other things at random. Including iguanas.
- It should be noted that due to a programming oversight, for a while it was possible for Azurill to change gender when it evolved into Marill. Maybe that's what happened here!
- Seven of Nine, you say?
- That would explain the catsuits.
After being beamed into space in the episode Datalore, Lore was never seen again. Data continued to live on for centuries until long after the extinction of the human race and probably a few other species, too. He created an entire race of androids but was ultimately unable to recapture the essence of a world where the former extinct species had existed, leaving him disillusioned about this whole thing. This whole thing ends with a temporal jump which places him conveniently within reach of a Pakled trading ship (the 'fortunate encounter' Lore mentioned in "Brothers"). Data resigns himself to the unchangeability of fate (as is his habit) and 'becomes' his own brother. This also explains why Soong couldn't tell that the "Data" he was giving an emotion chip to in Brothers was Lore in disguise: if it had been the real Lore from Datalore, wouldn't there already be an emotion chip in there?
Canon has pretty much Jossed this, what with Nemesis and all; but damn, that was a good story.
- Since this theory involves Time Travel from the far future, Canon cannot joss this. Star Trek usually has ontological inertia.
- Possible, given the WMG above talking about B4 "evolving" into Data.
- There has also been a fan theory tossed around that states that B4 himself is Lore, and that someone dumbed him down prior to Star Trek: Nemesis. I don't think this is very likely personally, but it would explain away a few of the weirder inconsistencies.
- 'Lore' didn't have an emotion chip already because he didn't need one, his positronic matrix was complex enough to allow for emotions on its own. Unfortunately it was also complex enough to allow psychotic tendencies to manifest.
Didn't "Juliana" remember building lore?
- Pressman wouldn't need specific friends. Do you think Section 31 would allow that technology to fall into Romulan hands? There was an entire episode about the Romulans working on a Phase Cloak (that failed); there's no way Section 31 is going to let them have one that does work.
- But wasn't the episode's premise showing that it did NOT work? (assuming the 1701-D was just lucky at the end)
- 1701-D was not just lucky. The device worked fine. Geordi had the expertise to use it properly, the engineers on the Pegasus did not. Laforge: "Commander, we've routed the impulse engines through the plasma conduits, but you'll have to watch the intercooler levels. If they get too high, we'll blow the entire relay system."
- Even if it didn't, there is always the chance that the Federation version was a better prototype than what the Romulans had or could have shown them where they made mistakes.
- It worked. Think what happened to Geordi and Ro in "The Next Phase"; that's what a Phased Cloaking Device is supposed to do to a ship. And only a working prototype could embed a ship inside solid rock the way the Pegasus was embedded - it just slipped back into normal space in the wrong place. Remember, they had to use the cloak to get the Pegasus back out!
- The only reason it failed was that the majority of the crew who had mutinied against Pressman attempted to disable the phase-cloak device after Pressman and Riker were forced off the ship; they screwed up and didn't know how it worked - hence the accident.
- So if they had successfully disabled the cloak where they were, they still would have rephased in solid rock. Dumbasses (the crew, not you guys). The cloak must have had a glitch/hiccup, or just failed.
- But wasn't the episode's premise showing that it did NOT work? (assuming the 1701-D was just lucky at the end)
- Confirmed in the New Frontier continuity; Starfleet Special Operations (basically, Section 31) sends Mackensie Calhoun to destroy it.
- The only thing the Romulans learned at the end of "The Pegasus" was that the Federation phase cloak prototype worked. That's it. Nobody was mentioned as actually giving them the technology, and the prototype was kept in Federation hands anyway.
- This is the case in some fanfiction, but Star Trek Online jossed it. According to STO, these critters were made by the Iconians.
- At one point, Jadzia mentioned that Trill symbionts could overtake the mind of their hosts unless those were psychologically prepared in a specific way. And it darn near happened to Ezri when the Federation had her on a mission that required her to access a past life of Dax that had committed cold-blooded murder.
- That also explains Riker being taken over, but does not explain why the lady was still the same person. The TNG trills must have also been an offshoot that prefers empty hosts.
- We didn't really see enough of the final host to see what whether she'd been merged or just possessed. That would explain the makeup differences, though.
- That also explains Riker being taken over, but does not explain why the lady was still the same person. The TNG trills must have also been an offshoot that prefers empty hosts.
- It's worth noting this was actually the writers' original intention, as well as for the Borg to have been an insectoid collective, rather than Cyborgs, as the concept was eventually redeveloped. But yeah, this is What Might Have Been.
- While this doesn't address Data directly, the Enterprise crew would simply have to manually jettison an emergency beacon, wait for another starship to respond and tow them to a Starbase to have the computer system (including Data's lockout code) completely purged and the core software reloaded (similar to what the Defiant had to do in "For The Uniform").
- Yes, but the help came too late to save the boy and thus, Data. The entire breakdown took only a short time outside his head, but seemed like years to him.
- If that were the case, then how do you explain episodes like "The Inner Light," "Frame of Mind," "Eye of the Beholder," "Dark Page," "Tapestry," "All Good Things," etc., where Data is not only unaware of but also logically incapable of witnessing the episode's action? And there are many ways for the Enterprise crew to deal with this problem. The only logically consistent explanation (if we are assuming that everything we see on screen is exactly what happened) is that what was faulty was the computer's display routine.
- Or maybe Data, being incredibly intelligent, careful and fully versed on all the Enterprise's systems, intentionally reprogrammed the computer to display incorrect characters, since due to the questionable wisdom of the original designers the code was displayed in clear text (Why...?), and Data was not taking the chance that the crew who was actively working to stop him by that point had not found a way to get a peek at the bridge. His code could even be coded again through reprogramming the computer so even if they had both the visual and verbal record, they still could not break in. With everything else he was doing to secure the ship being so thorough and his mind working a billion times faster than any human's, this isn't really a stretch.
- Man, that's one hell of a plan ! Maybe that's how the Borg generally deal with the uncreativity that results from their specific version of a Hive Mind: They not only assimilate the technologies of other species, but they push other species to invent new technologies so they don't have to do it by themselves!
- One episode of Voyager involved a race the Borg were systematically harvesting in this way whenever they got to the default Star Trek tech level.
- Holy crap, could that mean that Picard's a sleeper? We're never given any canon explanation for why he can hear the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact, and the Queen seems to be very aware that Picard's connection to the collective still exists; she even exploits it prior to the film's climax.
- Seven of Nine was remote-contacted by the Queen in "Dark Frontier". It's possible the Queen can do this with any former Borg.
- Ah, but you'll recall that in the very same episode, the Queen states that the Collective allowed Seven to be abducted by Voyager to gather information about humanity. While she was probably lying to manipulate Seven, there's an undeniably eery similarity between the two cases.
- There's also "I Borg," where Hugh immediately identifies Picard as Locutus, even though Picard doesn't outwardly appear Borg in any way.
- Seven of Nine was remote-contacted by the Queen in "Dark Frontier". It's possible the Queen can do this with any former Borg.
- The question is, would they then assimilate everything or, having nigh-omnipotence dropped in their lap, would they have finally achieved the perfection they aim for?
- And in obtaining that perfection, they will become the Q. Maybe when Q arranged the first contact, he was laughing inside that Picard can't win against them even when they were "primitives." The fear might be of destroying their own ancestors.
- This wouldn't work, as the first iteration of that loop could never have happened. Who would they have assimilated before the Q existed? And the Borg only get more powerful by assimilation.
- Either the other godlike entities we see in TOS, or just the Q. Stable time loops are a thing after all, and the Q are definitely advanced enough to set one up. Assimilate the Q, become the Q, set up timeloop so that you can assimilate the Q, and loop.
- And in obtaining that perfection, they will become the Q. Maybe when Q arranged the first contact, he was laughing inside that Picard can't win against them even when they were "primitives." The fear might be of destroying their own ancestors.
- Um, Guinan's home planet was taken by the Borg shortly before the beginning of Star Trek: Generations. (The only reason the Federation didn't learn about the Borg then was that those El-Aurians they retrieved were too shellshocked from exiting the Nexus to express it in a timely fashion.) So, if the Borg can gain the ability to assimilate Q that way, then they already have. Fortunately, the average Q can teleport.
- The average Q can teleport...or totally erase the Borg from existence.
- Q warns his son not to provoke the Borg.
- Because the Q detest having to clean up messes. One Borg cube nearly brought down the Federation! Drop one anywhere near less powerful civilizations and those civilizations would all be assimilated in no time. Since the Q generally feel obligated to maintain the status quo, they do not want their members unleashing troublesome species like the Borg into places where they do not belong.
- Well if a single Q were careless enough to get assimilated that would spell doom for the entire universe. One Q-Borg would transform the entire collective into Q-Borg, then overpower the Q Continuum and turn them into Q-Borg, then move onto assimilating everything in the Universe and turning that into Q-Borg.
- It is highly doubtful that the Borg could successfully conquer the Q. Species 8472, another extradimensional race that was nowhere near as powerful as many of the Energy Beings running loose in the Star Trek universe (including the Q), were nonetheless successfully shredding their way through the Collective and would likely have defeated it in time. Likewise, the technologically advanced Voth have lived in the Delta Quadrant for millions of years and there is no evidence that the Borg have been able to successfully assimilate them or their technology. The Borg seem to have hit a plateau, where they have assimilated most of the advanced species that they can, and the more powerful ones are beyond even their ability to defeat.
- Not so much fear of assimilation than it is being scanned. When Nero's ship in Trek 2009 was scanned by the USS Kelvin, the data they got from just that scan catapults Starfleet from the kind of technology we see in the Prime TOS timeline to the larger and more militarized kind of ships and weapons seen in Trek 2009. If the Borg successfully scanned a Q they could learn innumerable things, maybe new ways to upgrade themselves, or new, more powerful ways to assimilate others; thus the Q would want to limit their exposure as much as possible. Sure, they could snap their fingers and blink the info out of existence or go back in time to unmake the scan from happening, but that requires even more interference with the status quo and putting themselves at further risk of being scanned in more detail.
- Unlikely. Q shows no reluctance to be in the presence of the Borg. In fact, in "Q Who" he has absolutely no problem with popping into main engineering while a Borg drone is standing right there! The Borg probably cannot get any more information out of trying to scan the Q than Starfleet can.
- But she can detect telepathic forces around her, like Q's and the genetically altered child in "Natural Selection", and the grief of the alien in "Encounter at Farpoint" drove her to her knees when she sensed it.
- Is there any proof for this, or is this just a random guess? The events of The Loss show pretty clearly that she lacks the ability to read people's emotions just from conversation or their facial expressions. How do you reconcile that with this theory?
- IRL, some humans visually perceive auras, which seem to carry information about others' emotional state. A plausible explanation is that this is a form of synaesthesia, where some cognitive process that perceives (via ordinary physical means) emotional states, has crosstalk with color perception, resulting in anomalous perceptions of emotion as color. This even aligns with evidence from spider monkeys suggesting that the development of color vision in primates has something to do with emotional perception — color vision allows the detection of subtle changes in skin tension and bloodflow that betrays emotional states. Troi's affliction in "The Loss" may be a loss of the means by which she can consciously access what is otherwise unconsciously processed. This sort of thing also has precedent in neurology; some patients blinded by neurological injury exhibit "blindsight," showing by their behavior that some visual information is being processed, but they have no conscious experience of vision. By analogy everyone has blindsight for emotions, but empaths have conscious awareness of their emotional processing.
- Deanna has shown that she can communicate telepathically with other telepaths. So there is obviously something there.
Add to that the inconsistency about whether Ferengi can be read and the sheer ridiculousness of mental waves traveling over subspace, and one gets the idea that the Betazoids are being humored, just like Vulcans are when they claim they don't lie.
We will note that Deanna Troi has a psychology degree. Even human psychologists are supposed to be able to read feelings and motives without having insider access into anyone else's mind. If Deanna is really "empathic", then her psychology degree is worth less than whatever it's written on.
- The idea that an entire race is undergoing a mass delusion is an interesting one.
- And How...
- To say that Troi's degree would be useless if she were "really" empathic would be assuming that we know everything about how the human brain works, which has not happened even in the 24th century. (See "Shades of Grey.") Whenever Deanna is mistaken, it's usually because she's misreading, rather than not reading; she could be making exactly the same mistakes we do even with the extra information available to her. Her psychology degree gives her an advantage when it comes to understanding her own abilities. Being able to read a mind doesn't mean you understand what you're "seeing", and just because you get someone going "I feel angry" in your head, and can probably pinpoint the source of that anger, doesn't mean you're going to understand everything exactly. The human brain is a complicated thing, and many people aren't even AWARE of some of their own thoughts. See Post Repression of Memories — there are episodes with Deanna and Lwaxana dealing with that.
- There are several episodes that make a big deal out of the telepathy, and none of them are 100 percent convincing. Lawxana's repressed memories episode can be explained away by the similarity of Hedril to Kestra, which would be enough to freak any parent out, and a technology which allows people to get inside another's dreams, which exists in the Delta Quadrant and thus might get invented here as well. Tam Elbrun could have been faking the torture he had to live with everyday. That was one freaked-out guy, but he seemed to know exactly what was happening and why he was freaked out. As for Lwaxana... she's just teasing people.
- Maybe Elbrun was the only Betazoid who really was telepathic, and was driven mad with irritation by everyone claiming they knew how he felt.
- This also fits the rest of Trek. We don't see telepaths play a major role in any other series, and empathy is limited to Vulcan-level. It's just that the Betazoids all believe they're telepathic. Picard and Riker fell for it; most of Starfleet and the Federation (barring the woman in "The Drumhead") humour them. The Betazoid murderer in Voyager, Suder, is fittingly a Betazoid version of a Straw Atheist — he says he's never had telepathy!
- While it's true that most of the cases of Betazoid empathy could be chalked up to them just being really good at reading expressions and whatnot, there are a few episodes that might be hard to explain:
- "The Survivors" - Kevin puts music in Troi's head so she can't sense what he is;
- In "Ménage à Troi" Deanna and Lwaxana are able to communicate mentally even through doors and walls, with no ability to actually see each other.
- Troi's forewarning of Q's arrival in "Encounter at Farpoint" (not to mention an incident or two in the rest of the two-parter), of the explosives in "The Bonding," and of Roga Danar's... distress in "The Hunted"
- The entire plots of "The Loss," "Eye of the Beholder," and to some extent "Night Terrors"
- Also, Dr. Crusher in a couple episodes ("Dark Page" and "Eye of the Beholder" mentions the specific chemical used in Betazoid telepathy.
- This one is similar to the one concerning Sarek's two actors. Deanna is actually speaking English, as her second (at least) language, with an actual Betazoid accent. Her mother, on the other hand, uses a Universal Translator, and/or has taught herself to sound more like a native speaker over time, possibly even with the aid of translator output.
- Having spent time with a fair number of hearing impaired people, I hear Deanna's accent as "deafy". I wonder if she is moderately hearing impaired, or in fact, if most Betazeds are, compared to other humanoid species. (From their point of view, humans might have freakishly good hearing in the vocal registers.) Full Betazeds might be able to compensate either by projecting what the words are supposed to sound like, or just by being able to use their ability to listen to what humans think they sound like.
- They never met Voyager because Captain LaForge decided to make for New Bajor rather than Earth, and take the Wormhole the rest of the way.
- If the Nexus is supposed to bring only joy, why would it make Picard sit through Voyager, Enterprise, Insurrection and Nemesis? Ugh.
- As long as Picard's experiencing joy, it doesn't matter. Picard wouldn't need to sit through Voyager, it wasn't his ship. He had a lovey-dovey relationship in Insurrection, so that was joy to him. Enterprise takes place pre-Kirk, so Picard doesn't need to sit through that either.
- Enterprise was just a game that Riker was playing anyway.
- Picard had deep-seated jealousy towards Data for remaining "fully functional" throughout his lifespan. That's why he sat through Data's death in Nemesis.
- Or that he wasn't cast as Data... no, wait... what?
- SF Debris offered an alternate theory: Picard, is an elderly man dressed in mostly black who's been sitting in the hot desert sun for several hours. Picard isn't in the Nexis, he's suffering delusions brought on by severe heat stroke and dehydration. Everything after Generation is an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge scenario.
Here's the theory:
- Beverly has always known, probably discovering the fact through routine medical scans while she was carrying. Considering her profession and acknowledged level of competence, it is not unlikely that she performed these tests herself and therefore kept it to herself.
- Wesley discovered the truth for himself at some before being going to the Enterprise, explaining his undue fixation on Picard.
- Picard learned of it later on in the series from Beverly, thus causing his shift from seeing Wesley as an unavoidable annoyance to doing everything in his power to push Wesley toward a career in Starfleet.
- Or Picard was just pushing him toward a career in Starfleet to get the Wesley off of his ship.
- The change in Picard's attitude toward Wesley has a canon explanation. In "Where No One Has Gone Before", The Traveler secretly told Picard that Wesley had hidden potential beyond normal human ability and asked him to help Wesley develop more.
- Yeah, his attitude shift was partially due to the Traveler, but I think Picard knew all along. In the very first scene where Picard meets Wesley, Picard struggles to say something and all he can get out is "I knew your father." So Picard feels like he's obligated to tolerate Wesley above and beyond any obligation to his mother. Look at him even before the Traveler comes into the picture: he could just say "keep that kid away from me," and he seems to want to, but he never really sincerely gives that order. Then after the Traveler reveals that he's a prodigy, Picard's shift wasn't just "oh, he might be a teen prodigy, how quaint," which would be in-character, it was "he's a teen prodigy and I have an obligation to help him get a career," which doesn't necessarily follow on a logical level, unless Picard already felt like he was in some way obliged. I personally feel like this theory is as canon as it could be without being explicitly stated. That is, I think the writers definitely intended for this to be true.
- Related to this, some fans have speculated that Picard arranged for Jack to be killed. Word of God has tried to refute this, for obvious reasons.
- That's pretty much what Evil!Picard did in the Mirror Universe novel ''Dark Mirror". Original!Picard was understandably horrified by ths.
Though this theory is mostly due the fact that I don't want to think that Picard inadvertently caused all of the deaths, assimilations, and other destruction caused by the Borg after the events of "I, Borg" by being soft-hearted. It is much easier to simply think that the Borg would have survived; though perhaps the virus would have taken out the cube sent to pick up Hugh, the collective would have realized the trick quickly and adapted to it. Additionally, they may have thought of the paradoxical shape as "an irrelevant waste of time" and deleted it along with all of the other memories Hugh had picked up throughout the course of the episode.
- This makes more sense in retrospect, now that we (and the writers) know about the Borg Queen. Where a Collective might not have caught onto something like that, she would probably have been able to notice it as a problem and stop it before it got out of hand. This also helps explain why Hugh's individuality didn't cause the entire Collective to unravel.
- Plus, even if the entire collective crashed trying to solve the paradox, they may have an automatic restarting system that restores the collective from a backup prior to acquiring the paradox file.
- The Borg are equipped with Paradox-Absorbing Crumple Zones?
- Also, don't forget, in two episodes of Voyager (Collective and Infinite Regress), the Borg will cut off/destroy drones and vessels with imperfections. Soon as they found that cube in Hugh, he'd have been gone quicker than you can say "Resistance is Futile".
- Hence why Hugh's individuality only caused the one group of rogue Borg to split off from the Collective.
- It is likely that Starfleet was overestimating the real-time connectivity of the various components in the Collective. In reality, they appear to use store & forward synchronization for widely-distributed nodes, such as cubes operating in remote locations or regions of space where communications are temporarily blocked. For example, it is doubtful that Data's "sleep" command in the "The Best of Both Worlds - Part II" actually put the entire Collective into regeneration cycle, but rather just the one cube. The Collective seems to check the system health of its various nodes, and if some logic bomb were spreading through some of them then all it would need to do is shutdown the link to those nodes. This is why Admiral Janeway needed to go and face the Queen directly at the Primary Unicomplex in order to infect her with the neurolytic pathogen in "Endgame", instead of just infecting any random drone somewhere.
I've had this theory for some time that Armus, that oil-slick looking thing that killed off Tasha Yar in "Skin of Evil", is a failed Founder from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When the Enterprise crew first encounters Armus, he describes himself as "a skin of evil, left here by a race of Titans who believed if they rid themselves of me, they would free the bonds of destructiveness." The Founders certainly thought of themselves as the most perfect lifeforms in the universe. And anything that did not fit their standards of perfection was cast aside. Armus, like the Founders, has a basic form that is puddle-like, although he cannot assume a humanoid form like the Founders, they seem similar enough to make this guess.
- Odo had difficulty compared to the rest of the Founders assuming a humanoid form (he had trouble with facial characteristics) so this theory is valid. Perhaps Armus has more difficulty with the humanoid form.
- Maybe Armus was one of the infant changelings sent out to explore the galaxy, only he remembered everything and resented what the Great Link did to him.
- Or, infant-Armus wound up on a planet of people who didn't know what he was, and tried to take advantage of this alien life form, with their experiment to purge themselves of "evil."
- Odo did encounter a fellow infant changeling, Laas, with powers beyond what any of the Founders seemed to have, such as transforming into energy or flying though space at warp speeds.
- Maybe he was a Founder criminal. Maybe he killed another Founder, and was severed from the Great Link, but instead of giving him humanoid form he was deformed and crippled, resulting in the oil-slick with rudimentary shapeshifting skills. His other powers developed over time.
- The problem with that is that the founders say that no founder has ever harmed another founder before Odo. However, it does leave it open to Armus being some sort of diseased founder like a cancerous mass or something that was ejected.
- Going back to the original "Race of Titans" quote, remember that the Founders were originally solid before "evolving" to a more advanced state. Perhaps Armus was some sort of residue left over when the Founders ascended to changelinghood?
- Or an earlier evolutionary step.
- For some (most) of us, this would also fall under Fridge Horror and Nightmare Fuel.
- This troper heard somewhere that the Ferengi acted this way around humans as a trick. When the Grand Nagus learned that humans didn't use money or any kind of barter system, he thought that meant humans were, by Ferengi standards, insane. Ergo, the Ferengi were instructed to act just as insane around those crazy, non-money-using humans.
- This Troper proposes a far simpler solution: everything they were doing was part of a scheme for profit. They acted the way they did because it was part of their plan for profit.
- Kosinski, the engineer accompanied by the Traveler in his first appearance, was likely his previous companion.
- Why isn't this canon?
- That or she was assigned to the Enterprise because Picard was terrible at telling how other people were feeling, and Troi was the empathic daughter of a somewhat annoying ambassador. Hmmm, how do we solve this problem?
- Or she can't reliably tell what is or isn't obvious to everybody else, so she errs on the side of stating the obvious. Wasn't not stating something he thought was obvious part of what got Tam Elbrun in trouble?
Alternatively: It was intentionally put there to push Data out of the Uncanny Valley, as before his language skills were a little too good.
- And would Motorola have also become a Starfleet contractor? The Motorola logo◊ looks an awful lot like the Starfleet logo◊...
- The Motorola Logo at this point is inspired somewhat by the starfleet logo.
- Possible. Northern France and Northern England are surprisingly similar places.
- Patrick Stewart may be from Yorkshire, but Picard's accent certainly isn't. It's very proper RP English.
- This would explain many things - Worf speaks Klingon which is properly translated, rather than English with a Russian accent because of his parents (he was adopted, Klingon is his first language). Troi has an accent while her mother doesn't because Troi actually learned English either through her father or as part of her Counselor training - her mother is simply speaking Betazoid. Etc.
- A quite plausible theory that fits the facts on the show, but there's nothing at all unrealistic about a French person speaking English with an British accent. In fact, right now many French people who speak English speak it with a British accent, since that's the nearest English-speaking country - especially those who grew up bilingual and thus don't have much, if any, of a French accent while speaking English.
- By the 24th Century, Earth has a single language that evolved organically into something we 21st-Century Humans wouldn't recognize. "French" and "English" don't exist as distinct languages any more. The show is merely translating dialogue into modern-day English for the benefit of us viewers, and regional accents are being extrapolated based on lifestyle choices and/or social status. Picard is not speaking English with an RP British accent; he's speaking "Humanese" with an upper-class, well-educated accent (whatever that may actually sound like).
- The Universal Translator works on the audience.
- With the opening of the Channel Tunnel, it became possible for British people with the means to do so to get homes in France and commute to London, or to retire in France. What's to say a northerner didn't marry into a French family and start a trend of anglicizing their accents?
- Picard was brainwashed so thoroughly, they even managed to brain wash him into thinking he had defeated the brainwashing. Fortunately, the guy running the show fell out of favor at exactly the same time, so nothing came of it.
How dare you, sir~ THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!, although at the end...
- It would have been pretty trival for Gul Macet to simply add a fifth light outside our (the viewers') field of view and turn it on when Picard wasn't looking to make him question his sanity as one last attempt to break him.
- Or they learn the language the same way we do—how does a child learn what a rock is? Or success? Or failure? They don't, nor do they know the words that are normally used to define these words. They learn by observing how the words are used, and in what situation. So, Tamarrian kids learn the same way—and THEN are taught the myths themselves.
- It's more likely that they use visual techniques of storytelling, rather than a verbal method. The Tamarrians learn everything visually, and each meaningful phrase is associated in their minds with the associated image - "Shaka, when the walls fell" evokes a mental image for them of that event in their mythology, which they only know as "Shaka, when the walls fell". Note that the spontaneous creation of a new phrase, "Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel", suggests that they still retain the ability to construct new phrases and sentences, but that they are simply incapable of creating new mental images - as such, unless provided with a specific situation, such as Picard and Dathon being at El-Adrel during the episode, they are simply unable to create any meaningful mental image from a phrase. In short, they must learn the myths first, and then the phrases that refer to them.
- I would like to know how they deal with names for things better though, especially when they developed technology and needed lots of new nouns for all the thousands of bits of technology a star faring race must have.
- Especially for the job position of engineer (aboard Starfleet's flag ship)
- This would explain so much about Gargoyles.
- That's actually a rather disturbing thought considering Troi, Riker and Data would be playing
- I think you mean "awesome."
- This would explain how he develops interests and sets himself goals. He does enjoy working with people and actually misses Tasha Yar when she is gone. He just is not aware of his emotions. He probably has emotions, but lacks illogical reflexes and quirks normally attached with them, like laughter accompanies happiness. But he feels he is happier serving aboard the Enterprise than just apathetically lying down.
- It also makes more sense to assume that having emotions is a normal consequence of Soong-type positronic brain design, since Lore, Juliana, etc. have them, while Data is a re-engineered version of Lore with the emotions removed. So he would probably have emotional undercurrents suppressed by whatever modifications were made to the Lore design (and later, filtered through the emotion chip in a safe way). It's also mentioned several times that the Soong-type android use an artificial neural network as the basis of their AI; in the real world, emotional behaviour of some kind (unlikely to be similar in any way to what humans experience) is a necessary consequence of this design since it builds decisions on past experiences.
Even Kübler-Ross herself admitted that not everyone goes through the five stages the same way or even all of them, and the Picard of the movies experiences them thus:
Star Trek: Generations - Despair. He is more visibly depressed in this movie than at any other point in the movies or in the series before it.
Star Trek: First Contact - Anger. Since his brother and nephew played a large part in his rehabilitation after being liberated from The Borg, encountering them again after the death of Robert and René brought forth anger over their death, perhaps subconsciously, and caused Picard to regress back into deep-seated resentment toward The Borg.
Star Trek: Insurrection - Bargaining. Picard encounters a race of immortal aliens, befriending an intelligent child, and becoming close to the mother of said child. Perhaps, again on a subconscious level, he had taken the place of his brother. When the truth of what the Son'a and Starfleet are up to comes to light, and after trying repeatedly to convince the Admiral to reconsider what they were doing to the planet and its people, he violates direct orders from a superior officer and the Federation Council. He acts not only in exactly the opposite manner to how he had acted during a similar incident years earlier, but the course of action he chooses to take is fairly similar to the actions of Wesley Crusher during that same incident. He had previously reprimanded Crusher for these actions rather severely. All of this, in addition to going directly against the idea of the needs of the many outweighing those of the few, leads to the possibility that Picard was rather zealously defending these two people who reminded him of his deceased brother's family situation, doing whatever he possibly could to ensure the safety of the stand-in family he had just located.
Star Trek: Nemesis - Denial. Picard starts trying, desperately, to stop reminding himself of his own misery and takes an interest in mid-life crisis-ish things like riding around in a dune buggy. He also clings to the idea that Shinzon might not be evil for way longer than any consideration Shinzon merited.
- This might have also been a result of Picard viewing Shinzon as the only family he has left.
Naturally, at the end of each movie, some form of Acceptance begins to manifest, but by the next, Picard has regressed into another stage of grief.
At any rate, this is the best explanation I can come up with for Picard's extensive Character Derailment in the Star Trek TNG Movies...
- Except people remember plenty of things from when they were 4. Especially something traumatic like that.
- What about her ears? Remember, some romulans have the brow ridge, some don't. Half-vulcans can easily pass for humans so why not half-romulans?
- Half-Vulcans look like full Vulcans, as shown many times over in TOS.
- We've only seen three half-Vulcans in all of Trek (and one was actually a clone), so I don't think we can assume all half-Vulcans look Vulcan.
- Half-Vulcans look like full Vulcans, as shown many times over in TOS.
- Loses to Troi at chess. This would mean Data is less advanced than Deep Blue.
- Loses to another humanoid at a game of strategy and reflexes, and in a rematch is only able to tie him.
- Is consistently unable to understand metaphors. Apparently they no longer have slang dictionaries in the future. Note that other than the Tamarians, a newly encountered race, the Universal Translator can handle metaphors.
- Can never remember that Captain Picard doesn't want to know the time estimate to the nearest second.
On the other hand, there are occasions Data shows himself to be more capable than he usually acts when affected by an outside agency.
- When affected by a subliminal message from a himself in a previous time loop (long story), Data demonstrates he is capable of tracking every card in a deck and shuffling them in such a way as to produce any hands he wants. Data claims to be surprised by this. How he could have not known he could do this is not explained.
- Perhaps it's not so much he didn't know he could, he didn't know he was doing it then. My theory - whenever he plays his "Poker" subroutine specifically avoids checking his memory of previous deck states when he is shuffling and while the hand is being played. This means while he would know what cards were where, he would specifically ignore that information, rendering each card a mystery. This would allow for his subconscious to stack the deck as it would know what cards were where, which it wouldn't if he was doing something similar to deleting his memory files for previous deck states. There's also the question of how, considering his eyesight, he wouldn't be able to pick up on small creases or folds of the cards and recognize them by their specific signature, similar to how Geordi can see the cards with his VISOR but chooses not to.
- "Brothers": In response to a retrieval signal from his creator, Data commandeers the Enterprise, takes over the computers, and alters its course. The rest of the crew proves completely outmatched trying to stop him, and even hours after Data leaves the ship, the crew never manages to regain control of it until Data returns it to them.
- Note that losing to Kolrami isn't that ridiculous, given how little we know about the game. Even today there are a lot of board games where a computer program cannot beat a human, including some for which that will probably remain the case for a long time.
- Also, computers like Deep Blue were specifically designed and built to play chess and nothing else. Canon says that positronic matrices are meant to mimic the brain (in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dr. Bashir replaced half a Bajoran brain with one) and so it's possible that while he's great at doing calculations, the combination of having to sit around and wait for what he'd consider a "slow" opponent, coupled with an interface designed for human(oid) users, might have handicapped him significantly. If he'd been able to plug his brain directly into the game, the results might have been different.
- Most likely, his ethical subroutines prevent him from cheating in these games, forcing himself to hold back from using his full abilities in situations that are not life threatening. Since he is confused by his loss to Kolrani, odds are he doesn't even realize that he is doing it.
- Because he's trying to mimic humans. There have been instances where someone or something has circumvented his code and used all his strength. Recall when his "grandfather" loaded his consciousness into Data, he was easily able to break a woman's hand.
- Alternatively, she got recruited by Section 31.
- Another theory: given her constant insubordination towards Picard, her racist/speciest attitude towards the ship's 3rd in command, and her general disdain for modern medical procedures, there's every chance that she was simply kicked out of Starfleet.
- Alternatively, their "sleeping together" was entirely platonic in the physical sense, but not at all in the mental sense. When Crusher spoke of "listening in" on Picard's dreams, she was being tactfully euphemistic about how erotic they were and the degree to which she was participating... especially since they were her dreams too. People aren't much in control of themselves while asleep, and considering the involuntary mental link, it would be fairer to say Crusher was sharing dreams with Picard.
- Watch 'All Good Things...' again. Q's final conversation with Picard is essentially Picard going 'The whole of these past SEVEN YEARS were the trial, and you were helping us along. Thank you.' with Q responding 'Yeah, but only because I thought you deserved the help. Now go explore.' Your WMG is almost made explicit truth!
- Not "almost". Q specifically says that the Continuum had sentenced humanity to death. It was only at his demand that Picard was put in the position to stop the paradox and save the species, proving our fitness for survival. He all but admits that he is a guardian angel for our planet, albeit a Jerkass one.
- Alternatively he's a rogue Q, or similar being, and the Negative Space Wedgie is his prison. The Q imprisoned Quinn in an asteroid. And in the novels the "God" Being that Kirk encounters in the center of the universe is an omnipotent Q-like entity that the Continuum imprisoned there because he was utterly insane, and utter insanity crossed with omnipotence makes for a very dangerous entity.
- It's possible in this scenario Apple has had one in their R&D lab for quite a while: one of the early attempts at replicating it was the Apple Newton. Technology Levels hadn't quite caught up for it to work well by that point, though.
- Whether a self-righteous policy of non-intervention leads to more unnecessary deaths than a self-righteous policy of intervention is highly up to debate though. Also, the Q themselves seem to have something like non-intervention policies, although they're less rigid than the Prime Directive. However, your guess would explain why the Q didn't trial the Klingons or Romulans in a similar way.
- The fact that the Federation interprets the Prime Directive very flexibly depending on their own interests also comes into play. For example, in the TOS episode "Errand of Mercy", the Federation's motives in "helping" the Organians have more to do with their planet being strategically placed on the Klingon border, and thus being a valuable base, than a genuine desire to assist the Organians. Indeed, Kirk does everything he can to escalate the situation when the Organians, in accordance with their own cultural values, are much too passive for his taste in the face of Klingon occupation. Kirk flat-out tries to bribe them with technology, provokes violent responses from the Klingons via acts of insurgency that could lead to a massacre of the Organians and even openly berates them for their pacifistic behavior. Being a massive hypocrite, when it turns out that the Organians are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens powerful enough to literally put a stop to the entire war, Kirk turns around and is outraged that they are now interfering in the Federation's right to self-determination! The Prime Directive meant nothing to him because it was wartime, yet he was offended that a more advanced race would not keep their noses out of his civilization's affairs! At least the Klingons were honest up front about their intentions (conquest) and what they were willing to do in order to accomplish it. Q would later take great pleasure in pointing out human hypocrisy, and I doubt the Organian incident escaped the Continuum's notice.
Either that or Discord was just another alias of Q. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine it was mentioned that a Gamma Quadrant civilization knew him as the God of Lies, and he has had dealings with a lot of different species before.
- Weak to the viewer, maybe, but the characters themselves seem moved enough by Riker's arguments to Joss this. Picard even tells Guinan that Riker almost convinced him.
- It's possible that Riker was trying to give Picard an easy win while looking like he was setting up a slam-dunk, and Picard missed it because of his discomfort with the situation, his past history with the Starfleet JAG officer, his worries about Data's chances of victory/survival, along with still having to oversee the daily functionings of the Enterprise-D.
- Picard speaks Frainc-Comtou, an already distinct dialect of French that is likely to pick up influences from its Swiss and Alsatian neighbours by the 24th century.
- Riker speaks Alaskan, an Anglic language more closely related to Canadian languages than to American languages.
- Data speaks many languages, but his first language is probably Thetese, an Anglic language closely related to Hong Kong dialects.
- Arguably, Data would be the element that prevents tragedy in this situation, as he likely knows all the native languages for every crewmember and can thus translate until the program is working again.
- These days Worf probably speaks Klingon, but the language he uses with his parents is probably a language descended from Russian.
- Tasha Yar is canonically Ukrainian - and probably speaks, depending on where she's from, either Ukrainian or Russian.
- The Crushers speak Copernican, an Anglic language with strong Celtic influences descended from Scottish dialects.
- Beverly Crusher, at least, has identified the language she speaks on-screen (in the finale): it's English.
- Geordi LaForge speaks an African language descended from French.
- Katherine Pulaski speaks Huronese, an Anglic language spoken in the US Inland North.
- Deanna Troi speaks Betazoid.
- Troi more likely speaks the native language of her father, as the Betazeds are primarliy telepathic and thus rarely use vocal communication amongst themselves (or amongst other species, as Lwaxanna has shown time and again). Deanna did once comment that her maternal grandfather used to say that speaking "was for offworlders or people who didn't know any better". Odds are, her thoughts are heard in the native language of the person she is communicating with, allowing her to circumvent the translator if need be.
- The popular counterpoint to this (which as far as I know is also unconfirmed by canon) is that the Universal Translator is turned off most of the time, because everyone learned some English/Chinese/Vulcan hybrid language at the Academy.
- The thing is, linguistic drift tends to happen due to geographic isolation, such as how different regions of China have separate dialects, and Britain and the US have slightly different (due to less time separated) styles of English. The growth of the connected world, particularly the Internet, has slowed linguistic drift. In Trek's era, they have nearly-instant (for the scale) communications. The various dialects of colonies probably blend into a language of the top one or two languages hybridized together.
- It could be even worse. What if universal translators are relied on to excess, such that every person, in infancy, develops their own idiosyncratic language that the translator turns into a consensus language everyone understands. OK, it's crack in this universe, but maybe in Farscape, with those translator microbes...
- I know that the Time Lord thing is kind of a meme on here, but Q is both able to regenerate (he's omnipotent in our universe) and is extremely both strong and durable (because he's omnipotent).
- Q isn't a Time Lord, he's a TARDIS. He can change shape to blend in, ridiculously powerful and pretty impossible.
- Either way, that means he was probably trying to recruit a member of the crew as a Companion: first Riker (giving him Q powers in hopes of luring him along), then Picard (offering him whatever he wants, knowing that Picard has a fascination with alien archeology), then finally leaving the ship alone after Vash goes with him. And, as time has shown, she eventually got tired of travelling with him and got herself stuck a good ways from home.
Well, first of all it was Riker NOT Picard who had a problem with Ro's earring. Second, Picard doesn't seem to be very knowledgeable about Bajoran customs since he doesn't even know that for Bajoran's the family name comes first. That's why she's called Ensign Ro and not Ensign Laren. Third, if earlier speculation is correct Ro wears her Earring on the left as a subtle clue to her being gay which would make Rikers actions appear to be homophobic. But most likely Riker's just being a jerk to Ro because of her reputation as can be seen by the end of the episode when she puts her Earring back in and nothing is ever said about it again. So much for regulations.
- Picard is the sort of person who would know this, but exceptions for traditional accoutrements are likely a case-by-case favour. Worf is allowed his baldric and (sometimes) loose hair because Picard knows and trusts him; conversely, he is making a point to Ro that she cannot push him on grounds of tradition or anything else. Once again it was Rker NOT Picard who had a problem with Ro wearing the earring. "Pushing" him around? Where are you coming up with this stuff ? Picard and Ro never discussed her earring until the end of the episode when she puts it on and Picard just smiled at her.
- More likely, Picard rejected her initial offer because of her past. Worf has demonstrated on countless occasions his dedication to his duty and his willingness to follow orders he disagrees with. In return, all he asks is for permission to wear a traditional item from his culture. Ro, on the other hand, was court martialed for getting 8 people killed by disobeying orders and, upon receiving a last chance to redeem herself, immediately walks in making demands about a uniform exception. Picard rejects her demand until she proves herself and that she is willing to follow the rules before letting her break one. Picard REJECTED nothing and Ro DEMANDED nothing. It was RIKER who told her to remove the earring as soon as she stepped off the transporter pad and she complied without voicing any complaint. Did any of you people actually watch the episode before you started started spitting all this vitriol at Ro?
- In the US Navy, any ship captain has the authority to wave or modify uniform regulations at their discretion. Given that Starfleet is roughly based on the Navy, they likely have the same rule. Worf was a model officer who had earned the right to modify his uniform. Ro wasn't. It's that simple.
- Chain of Command actually explicitly says Starfleet captains have authority to allow subordinates to forgo wearing a uniform (which is only logical; even without the US Navy example it is easier for Starfleet to have commanding officers be able to give exceptions large or small than for uniform regulations to cover every single potential exception motivated on reasonable cultural grounds or even outright physical capability for Federation members), so yes. The question would be solely about Picard's motivations — though Worf having earned the right is very likely a big part regardless of what else might be part.
- Worth noting here that there's a very good practical reason to disallow loose jewelry, and long hair for that matter, aboard ship. It can get caught in things, causing accidents. Worf's baldric isn't as likely to do that and he works primarily on the bridge of the ship anyway.Except that many people on board, including Worf later on in the series, have long hair. And Ro was also a Bridge officer.
[and/or]
Hugh said that his reassimilation initially caused chaos within the Collective. However, they were able to overcome this after a short period of time. What the Collective did was "adapt" to this new threat by creating the Queen, an individual mind capable of analyzing and rejecting this unknown item that was an obvious threat. This also explains the Badass Decay that the Collective shows: by having the Queen calling the shots rather than the whole, they are more prone to making errors (like trying to invade and assimilate a dimension they knew nothing about). To ensure that her control was complete, she would likely have edited the memories of the Collective to convince them that they had always had a Queen. Thus, Picard 'remembers' her from his assimilation because of his residual connection to the Collective. Using that trace connection, she was able to insert herself into his memories of the events.
- why does it need to be a large population? for all we know there could be 3 Q, or 1 with time travel duplicates.
- The Q have shown that there is a decent sized populace amongst them. Aside from Q, we have seen Q (the one that restored Q's powers), Q (his wife), Q (who renamed himself Quinn after becoming human), Q and Q (the unseen parents of Amanda Rogers, not to mention Amanda herself), and q (the offspring of Q and Q). Aside from those Q who had attention brought to them, there are enough Q to fight a shooting war, with mounting casualties on both sides. That implies a reasonable population.
- OOOORRRRR it is one individual with time duplicates, basically it lives out the entire length of the history of the universe learning such and such lessons and developing such and such personality and then it loops back and starts again, learning new things and developing new personality. Each individual represents a different level of it's personal development, the civil war is basically like a person who has conflicting thoughts, just each thought is itself a powerful individual. This is why Q wanted to mate and produce a child, that child would be something completely new and give the chance for the creation of a new personality (Amanda Rogers not withstanding).
The reason he could not simply get artificial or even cloned eyes? His brain/optic nerves/etc were severely deformed at birth to the point that no surgery could have accounted for that and the visor was his only means of sight. His brain may have been unable to handle normal eyesight. It is the 24th century, there'd be no reason for him to see in such a primitive spectrum otherwise.
This changed when Lore and Data began their experiment on him in season 7, using Borg technology to stimulate internal nerve growth. This procedure may have caused a part of his brain to begin growing, repairing itself enough to the point he was suddenly able to accept better artificial eyes.
The reason he never just sent Voyager back to the alpha quadrant in his first appearance was because he was trying to cause the results of their later encounters with the Borg. In "Scorpion", the Borg were severely crippled, but Voyager also stopped 8472, weakening the collective and providing Voyager with Seven, an expert in their technology and capabilities, information which eventually made it back to Starfleet. In the finale, Voyager destroyed one of their hubs, the queen, and the unicomplex, a few episodes after Q refused to simply send them home for poorly justified reasons.
Lal has no problem accepting feelings such as love (she tells her father that she loves him) or loneliness (she asks Data why he continues to strive to be human when there is no hope of succeeding), but it is the fear being taken away from her father that causes her cascade failure. Fear of possibly never seeing him again, fear of being surrounded with people who only see her as a "thing". It is not having emotions that cause the cascade failure, but one particular emotion — fear. And there is no suggestion that Data ever programmed her with such a fail-safe. Perhaps if one day Data decides to try again, with knowledge gained from his own experiences with fear, he will be more successful with Lal's future sibling.
So the Parasites took over all of the upper echelons of Star Fleet, taking out the admirals and taking over the best captains. Then they moved star fleet operations around in such a way that “starfleets left hand did not know what its right hand was doing.” Then Picard and Riker destroyed the head parasite and all of the others dropped dead. That means after this incident the best of Starfleet was killed off, and the entire fleet and infrastructure was all out of whack, and the Federation was thrown into who knows how much confusion and paranoia over the fact that they had been taken over by aliens. So the parasites are stopped and the Enterprise flies off, end of episode. But here would have been the consequences.1) The Federation council would have had to catch up with what just happened. During that time Starfleet would have been in serious dissaray and the Federation vulnerable. Not only that the Parasites were sabotaging Star Fleets own efforts to win the Cardassian war, so that instead of the war being ended easily as it should have been, it has become a quagmire and a cluster fuck where they sent unwanted captains and crew to die. With the Parasites gone, the war was now going even worse for the Federation.2) In this vacuum of security, behind the scenes, quietly and secretly Section 31 would step up to defend the Federation. Not only would 31 step up, 31 would be shocked, SHOCKED, that this even happened on their watch. The Federation was almost infiltrated and destroyed right under their noses. 31 would swear by all that is holy they would NEVER let this happen again no matter what, by any means necessary because it is now proven to them that without them and their tactics the Federation is vulnerable.3) worried about the Klingons and/or Romulans taking advantage of the gap in Star Fleet's defenses Section 31 helps works behind the scenes to poison the Klingon Chancellor and manipulate the Duras family into position to launch a civil war, and infiltrating the Romulans with operatives who will later help the Romulans be manipulated into wars the Federation wants them to fight.4) After months and months of figuring shit out the Federation Council finally gets to re-staffing the upper echelons of Star Fleet. The best of the admirals were killed off, leaving only the shitty admirals who have to run the place, so the Council has to promote a slew of captains...however most of the really qualified captains were also killed off by the parasites. So the only people they have to promote aren't ready for the big desk. So Star Fleet ends up with nothing but the shitty admirals, and underqualified admirals to run everything. This explains ALOT! Even so those admirals have the task of re-organizing Star Fleet back into something that makes sense since the Parasites had flung Star Fleet all over the place. The new, underqualified Admirals, who need to pull back their forces sign a crappy peace treaty with Cardassia just to get this war over so they can re-organize the Federation defenses.5) After two years FINALLY they get Star Fleet back together again and the Federation in a secure position...just in time for the Battle of Wolf 359. Back to square one. The federation is in even less a position to enforce the Cardassian Treaty. Section 31 is more active.6) Star Fleet is trying to re-organize and rebuild once more. As part of that organization they send Benjamin Sisko to Deep Space 9...where he discovers the wormhole...and the Dominion.7) the rest is history.
- AND after the Dominion War - Chinzon destroyed the Romulan Senate, which killed all of 31s operatives in the Romulan Government. Afraid of, and seeing a newly patriotic Romulan senate coming back to power 31 learned a trick from the Dominion and used a protomatter bomb to detonate a star near Romulus. Spock attempted to use red matter to open a black hole to swallow the resultant super nova...and got sucked into the black hole along with the mining ship Narrada.
- In season 1 the episode order was "Conspiracy" and then "The Neutral Zone". So after the Parasites were destroyed and it came to light that the Federation had been gutted then the Romulans, thinking them weak, became more aggressive. They also began working with the Duras family resulting in all the Klingon drama.
- There is the criticism that the use of Section 31 undermines the utopian vision of humanity that was at the core of Star Trek, however if you view it through the lense above you can see what happens is that as Star Fleet looses power Section 31 rises in power through illicit means. So it gives us the interpretation that it is Star Fleet and its ideals that hold 31, and the dark side of humanity, in place.
- Well now, that would depend. The Hippies were a reactionary movement to the growing terror of the Cold War, rather than just something that developed on their own. We learn fairly late in TNG that the Federation apparently fought a fairly serious war with the Cardassians during the 2350's that wasn't even mentioned in later seasons. Then you have people like Deanna and Wesley, both of whose fathers were literal Red Shirts who died on Starfleet missions. Tasha grew up on a colony, Turkana IV, which had seceded from the Federation in the 2350's and degenerated into anarchy. Data's "family" issues stem from an eccentric creator and an evil twin. Riker's family was not that bad, although I don't recall them coming up much. Crusher apparently got on quite well with her family, and idolized her grandmother in particular. Worf's adoptive parents were actually excellent, and he had a good family life. Picard's main issue was his desire to follow one path of the family tradition (exploration), while his brother chose to follow the other (wine-making). Were Hippies really needed? Or was it just that there were some bad things that impacted some of the crew?
- Riker didn't have any family, apart from his father who abused him (emotionally, and possibly physically, depending-how you look at it) neglected him, then abandoned him entirely when he was 15. Riker had one of the worst family upbringings out of the main characters (though not coming close to Tash's upbringing).
The Federation is trying to make sure that should the Federation fall, civilization can continue. Part of this project is researching and preserving ancient (by Federation standards) farming techniques, which is why the Picards even have a vineyard in the first place. The Picards grow the grapes and harvest the crop, and the Federation records and disseminates the results. There could be hundreds of similar projects on Earth alone, never mind places like Vulcan.
What really happened was this: in the original timeline, the Husnock were a major player in that corner of the universe, and was at war with the Federation. A Husnock captain saw a target of opportunity and destroyed an enemy outpost. Unfortunately, by doing so he killed the wife of an Energy Being and doomed his race. The Douwd didn't just kill all Husnock in the present, but in the past as well, preventing them from ever existing.
- But if Kevin had the power to manipulate space and time (as opposed to just matter), then why couldn't he have returned his wife and the other colonists to life by pulling them forward from the moments before they died? Or the Husnock for that matter (he did feel guilty over the xenocide)? Q would have just snapped his fingers and brought everyone back to life. Then again,a Q would have also just turned the Husnock into Tribbles for disturbing their vacation home rather than trying to deter their attack with illusions.
- As Quinn told us the Q aren't truly omnipotent, they have limits. So perhaps one of Kevin's limits is that once a thing is erased from existence it can't be brought back, you can at best make and animate a copy.
- This does partially make sense if, as we are told, the temporal rift is the result of the weapon exchange in 2344. Everything in TNG up to this episode should exist in this alternate timeline. But there are two points against this idea: 1) We see the regular TNG ship and crew before the Enterprise-C emerges from the rift and 2) Guinan senses that something is wrong and knows about Tasha's death in a timeline that shouldn't exist yet. The solution is that the temporal rift was deliberately created by a third party to alter the timeline. Perhaps as part of the Temporal Cold War. Possibly by the Klingon scientist from Yoyager's Endgame.
Answer: It's for bulk cargo transport, allowing the Romulans to turn the ship into an armed freighter for certain missions. Among other things you could dock an additional crew quartering module in there big enough to carry an entire ground army. Not the 2,000 men Sela tried to conquer Vulcan with in that one episode, but something that would transport multiple infantry divisions and heavy armor support. Or you could fit a transport bay for Scorpion-class fighters.
Yes, yes, the transporter accident occurred before the events of "Up the Long Ladder", but the irony remains. Call it cause and effect violation, given we know that Time Travel is possible in the Trek-'verse.
Photon torpedoes have never been seen to create any kind of rifts: temporal, subspace or otherwise. Given how common photon torpedoes are this effect really should have been seen in other contexts, but Data was clearly speculating when he said that this effect could be possible. Tricobalt warheads have been known to create subspace rifts even in relatively small barrages such as the one used to destroy the Caretaker's array. The events of Yesterday's Enterprise make more sense with a few Tricobalt warheads thrown in.
In The Best of Both Worlds (not the Miley Cyrus version), Worf is holding his phaser when he attempts to run at a force field separating him, Shelby, Data, and Crusher from Picard/Locutus. When he gets back up and is beamed back to the Enterprise, he's not holding his phaser, and it's not holstered.
It's more the movies only, but come on, how awesome would it be for Picard to be descended from the world's strongest telepath?
- That would explain why he's so much more intuitive than The Empath sitting right next to him!
- They went through their own version of the Eugenics Wars, with the the modified humans winning, resulting in a rapid change to their biology. But it happened after they had already begun seeding life, resulting in life evolving to the unmodified form. The survivors decided that the project was still for the best, and recorded the message.
In “Up the Long Ladder” the Mariposan planet was mentioned as being complete with cities. The Bringloidi could fit in the cargo bay suggesting a much smaller population. At the end of the episode, these two groups are combined together with the instruction that the women from both groups will need to get pregnant with three different children with three different men. However, if there are so many more Mariposans than Bringloidi, the majority of children born will have Mariposan mothers. Since there are only two unique women genetically speaking, any of the children of Mariposan mothers who couldn’t reproduce with someone with a Bringloidi mother (who would be comparatively few in number) would therefore have to reproduce with a child of the other Mariposan mother. The subsequent generation descended from two Mariposan mothers, would all have the same grandmothers and so be cousins and unable to reproduce with each other. So only people with a maternal Bringloidi ancestor somewhere along the line would be a viable option for reproduction and since they’re relatively few, much of this generation couldn't reproduce. This is at the same point at which the initial cloning process was supposed to become terminal anyway. So a large part of their society is going to die out.
At some point, the Mariposan society will realise this. They'll then just take the Bringloidi's DNA and go about their initial cloning plan.
In the Nightmare Fuel reality depicted, the Enterprise (specifically its stardrive section) is on the run from the Borg, who assimilated Picard (as in the main timeline) and are in the process of consuming the quadrant. Notice that Data is conspicuously absent. In this timeline, Maddox won the case in The Measure of a Man, and Data didn't simply go on the run. In attempting to reproduce him, Maddox killed Data. Without Data there to be instrumental in Picard's recovery in The Best of Both Worlds, the Borg curbstomp Starfleet. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
- We know that in Star Trek V Sybok was contacted by something that drove him mad and made him obsess about finding God at the center of the galaxy. He has to use his advanced brain powers he gets from these visions to figure out how to get the Enterprise through the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy. They meet God, a big floating head with amazing powers and anger issues. A generation later: Lt. Barclay is hit by something that warps his mind, gives him advanced mental abilities and he uses them to get the ship to the center of the galaxy where they meet...a big floating head with amazing powers. Just this time, the head is really chill. Sounds to me like the same thing.
- No. The problem was Sybok and Kirk went down to the planet surface itself. Apparently the Cytherians are just VERY VERY xenophobic yet curious. So they called Sybok and went he, in his arrogance, beamed down the Cytherian ambassador freaked the fuck out on him. When Picard showed up this time the Cytherians figured out to just project the head to them instead of risking them coming down.
- Maybe they were two different heads. Maybe the Cytherians explore space independently of each other. One of them was a real asshole, and Kirk blew him up. So the Cytherians promote a different big floating head to explore space for them who has a much friendlier philosophy and decides to check out that Federation again and see what's there this time. Which is why a generation later the next big floating head had never heard of humans before.
- Portal, the portal for the Tkon Empire appeared as a giant floating head as well. Theories?
- Maybe the Cytherians were from Oz and wanted to give that giant floating head trick a go. It worked like a charm on the Star Trek crew.
- So Star Trek V was just a very badly done version of Wizard of Oz?
- They could've replaced the Lion with a Klingon, the tin man with Spock, Dorothy with Kirk...however no one on the Enterprise needed a brain.
- Maybe "God" was a super-powerful, criminally insane Cytherian? His essence was imprisoned in a receptacle and placed on the planet within the Great Barrier to keep his powers in check and prevent him from contacting anyone. Only Sybok's mind was unusual enough to catch his signal. To answer Kirk's question, God needed a starship to carry the receptacle out of the Barrier, where he could free himself from it.
- In the episode "We'll Always Have Paris" Professor Paul Manheim had theories of non-linear time. He eactivated an experiment taht opened a tear in time. After experiencing the tear in time he was rambling and incoherent and said he couldn't stay focused in one time. He later described it as full of colors that he couldn't describe. Then he said that there were beings in there, beings they couldn't comprehend. Sounds like the Prophets to me.
- It possible that the terminal that we see Picard ordering tea out of is only a tiny part of a really huge machine. Maybe the enterprise has a single, enormous replicator machine hidden in its walls that services the entire ship and the terminals are just outlets for it. The transporter could likewise be far larger than the transporter room, extending between the walls upwards, downwards and into the walls of the surrounding rooms.
- Janeway does once say they can't trade those technologies because they were hard wired in, so that would fit. I am now taking this as fannon.
- The minimum size can at least fit in the walls of a shuttle though, but those may have very limited capabilities compared to the ship board ones.
- Perhaps it's not so much that the Federation builds systems into their buildings and ships so much as their buildings and ships ARE huge complex machines that have enough room inside of them for people to walk around in.
- So it's not that there is a central replicator machine but more like the entire replicator mechanism is designed to form part of the super structure of a ship. Same with the transporter and of course warp engines.
- Seska did once trade a replicator to the Kazon that was a small piece of equipment and they installed it on their ship. Of course it did blow up when they tried to use it and kill everybody on board, even fusing men into the bulkheads of the ship Kitty Pryde style. So the terminal isn't enough to make it work, but the terminals are damned well dangerous.
- Maybe the rarely seen site to site transport device is obviously a very sophisticated and hard to manufacture technology which is why we've only seen two or three and either a) can be so small because it's a one time use only device, b) is actually not itself a transporter unit but just like a remote control activator for other transporters.
- I always figured the site to site transporter works by keeping the pattern for a transporter in its buffer, so that rally what it does is transport a small transporter to your target coordinates, that transporter then transports you to it and then dissovles back into the buffer of the site to site transporter.
- When Picard and Riker stopped the parasite conspiracy it left the interior of the Federation vulnerable and the leadership of starfleet decimated. The new leadership needed to move fast to protect the now exposed interior of the Federation. The Cardassian Peace Treaty was less about protecting the border worlds and really was all about protecting the interior in a rush. Of course they couldn't tell anyone this, so to everyone else it just looks like a stupidly made treaty. To be able to pull back all their warships to the core worlds the Federation just looked at the space map, drew a line at the extent they could patrol, regardless of which planets fell on what side, and called it a treaty. The Cardassians signed because they actually gained alot of the worlds they had been fighting for anyway, plus the war was ruining their economy.
- Though if Dukat gives us an insight into the Cardassian military way of thinking we can see why they military would be bitter about ending the war through this treaty because it was not a true victory. A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to have opposed you in the first place, to force them to acknowledge your greatness. This didn't happen, they signed a treaty, like equals, or worse because they were not strong enough to continue the fight.
- The main problem with this theory is we have years for the parasite conspiracy's unravelling, the armistice agreement between the Federation and the Cardassians and the formal full peace treaty — 2364, 2367 and 2370. Three years seems rather sedate for doing something in a rush — however, there was another devastating blow to Starfleet early in 2367, and if we assume Starfleet hadn't quite sorted out the aftermath of the conspiracy yet...
- In 'Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang' we are introduced to the concept of the jack in the box in a holodeck, a program hidden inside of a program designed to throw something unexpected against the users. Jack in the boxes are meant to be a sort of prank by holoprogrammers, and akin to a plot twist in holodeck adventure. When they installed the holodecks on the Enterprise D someone in the holodeck installation team had tried their hand at programming in a jack in the box. However their jack in the box had a glitch in it so that when it was activated the safeties shut off and other glitches would occur such as the perception filters failing.
- This discredited the original holodeck technology r&d team or process. Lewis Zimmerman rose to prominence in the wake of that. He instituted new types of holo-programming (unbeknownst to everyone else he is using the sentient moriarity program as the basic holotemplate resulting in sentient, sophisticated holograms), as well as a redesign of the holodeck from the black grid to a frame work of exposed projectors.
- I can see Zimmerman now, "The idiot who programmed this jack in the box didn't realize that in the new updated holodeck OS deactivating the safeties doesn't initiate the verbal warning, initiating the verbal warning deactivates the safeties."
- Holodeck malfunctions might be as common to the Next Gen era as car crashes are to us today, and get treated in the same way: It's always a tragedy, and whenever it happens people call for the technology to be made safer and safer...but no one ever questions getting rid of it, it's just too common place and beloved by people to even entertain the notion of getting rid of it or restricting its access.
- This discredited the original holodeck technology r&d team or process. Lewis Zimmerman rose to prominence in the wake of that. He instituted new types of holo-programming (unbeknownst to everyone else he is using the sentient moriarity program as the basic holotemplate resulting in sentient, sophisticated holograms), as well as a redesign of the holodeck from the black grid to a frame work of exposed projectors.
- Picard says in "I, Borg" that the "Borg are not interested in assimilating individuals, just technology". Previous to this the Borg had indeed ignored people in favor of tech (Locutus was merely a tool towards this greater goal) but after this became obsessed with assimilating people. Picard also said in that episode that "maybe through Hugh the Borg will learn to desire individuality". Maybe Hugh did indeed cause them to desire this and on some level assimilation is a misguided attempt to gain it, after all, the Borg primarily gained new things from other races before (such as tech) by taking it through force. Matti 23
- Well the Borg do adapt, which means the details of their motivations may adapt as well. Since Picard was assimilated the Borg may have altered their motivations a bit. After a few more years their motivations and methods may be slightly altered again.
- Alternatively, the Borg might not have been very interested in assimilating humans at first. According to the Borg Queen in one Voyager episode, humans (species 5618) are "biologically unremarkable". This is actually true by the standards of humanoid life forms in the galaxy. They assimilated the Hanson family, as well as both Federation and Romulan colonies along the Neutral Zone. They may have found the life forms and technology unimpressive. Then, through unknown means (i.e. Q), the Enterprise gets hurled a long way from Federation space. Suddenly the Borg wonder if humans have technology they do not know about and/or are innovating at a rapid pace. Before they can dissect the Enterprise and find out, Q snatches it away and sends it back to where it started from at speeds the Borg could not even track. Suddenly humanity became a lot more interesting.
- Also, the Borg need for new drones is likely variable depending on what kinds of conflicts they get themselves embroiled in. Attrition rate among the Borg, given that they are such a hostile entity, could actually be quite high if they are getting into fights with species possessing advanced technology that the Borg desire, but which also gives those species the ability to put up a serious fight. For example, the Borg attempt to assimilate species 8472 turned into a catastrophic disaster for them, resulting in the destruction of numerous vessels and at least one planet, probably more.
- I was always bitter about how they retconned "baby borg" out. The Borg were interesting before they got changeded from the ultimate Space Communitarians to the Space Zombie Empire.
- Just look at what the guy's done, Worf Effect notwithstanding. He's been central to Klingon politics for a decade, and he has guided it for a decade. He has killed two would-be leaders of the High Council in ritual combat — the second time specifically to reform the Klingon Empire. He even had the opportunity to become the Supreme Chancellor himself, but was too honorable to do so.
And he's performed miracles. He taught a Jem'hadar, one of a genetically engineered killing machines with no morals or code of honor, just by being a badass Determinator.
Even Martok had to exclaim that Worf had the spirit of Kahless himself.- I get the idea that Jem'Hadar have a strange sense of convoluted honour, but it's not universal and the extent varies from individual to individual.
- One major problem, though, is that Worf is not from Borath, where Kahless was supposed to return from, and has no particularly special connection to Borath either.
- These beings are in between a Higher-Tech Species and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens; they can access the power of the continuum only through constructed devices (sort of like the Q weapons Voyager uses when they enter the Continuum), though they can use the Continuum connection in its pure form if they are desperate. As a result of not promptly finishing them off in the past, they are stuck "babysitting," as in the case of Trelane.
- At one point, there was a lot of Q interbreeding with the residents of Gallifrey, resulting in beings capable of regenerating and time/dimensional travel that is dependent on a certain physical object. The TARDIS provides a link which translates Continuum energy into a usable form.
- This is why Patrick Stewart looks almost the same as he did in Star Trek: The Next Generation, while John de Lancie looks much older.
- This is why the Trill in Deep Space Nine can use the transporters with no problem.
- Sherman's Planet was the planet mentioned in Trouble With Tribbles. It was a major world in the Klingon Neutral Zone. While it was a Federation Planet, it was also open to colonization or at least shore leave, by the Klingons. And as we wish we could 4get Nimbus III was the planet in Star Trek V settled by Federation, Klingons and Romulans. So I speculate that most human/Klingon hybrids come from one of these two planets. Also Simon Tases, from the next gen episode the Drumhead was revealed to be 1/4 Romulan NOT Vulcan, so I speculate his grandparent met on Nimbus III.
- If you interact with a video game in exactly the way the developers intended you to, it can look seamless, but if you poke at the edges, the illusion becomes immediately apparent. Perhaps before holographic sentience became commonplace, those limits were still there but much broader, and the people we see interacting with holograms just knew how to avoid bumping into them. Minuet was considered unique in her ability to have a reaction to any new input regardless of context, and Picard came back from his first Dixon Hill session gushing about how much detail the world outside what was immediately relevant had.
- The Crystalline Entity looks like it could be fractal in nature, that is, it is the same at any level as the whole. TL;DR if you split the Crystalline Entity into several pieces, as shown in the TNG episode "Silicon Avatar", it might not be dead but instead separated into several smaller Crystalline Entities, that are now possibly in a lot of pain, angry and very hungry. Dr. Marr may have unleashed a plague of these things rather than destroying it.
- Kirk's habit of unorthodox, unsafe, and unauthorized activities while on away teams, combined with the unfortunate fates of many of the other Constitution-class captains, prompted Starfleet to put a moratorium on captains leading teams themselves because of how valuable they were and how damaging their behaviour could be.
- The first time we see the poker game, Dr. Crusher calls Riker's bluff and wins the game. She says she had a feeling he was bluffing. That wasn't the first time loop, and Crusher seemed particularly sensitive to the deja vu caused by the loops. Perhaps she felt that Riker was bluffing because of the time loops.
- So we know humans had trade with races possessing holodeck technology as early as Enterprise's first season. Furthermore, if you count TAS as canon, the rec rooms on Kirk's Enterprise had most of the same capabilities as an early TNG-era holodeck. So why are they treated as so revolutionary in the first few episodes of TNG that feature them?
Eventually, the stigma wore off and, akin to the 3D film revival of the early 2010'2, Holodecks came back in style. The first new mass-market ones, such as those installed on starships, were designed not to be too, realistic: one always had the sense that one was surrounded by four walls. Collision handling was also poor, seen when Geordi managed to reveal the edge of the field by throwing something at it. Eventually, tinkering engineers made the new holodecks aboard Starfleet ships even more realistic than the first wave, and the market reluctantly followed suit.
Alternatively, he has emotions that his creator did not anticipate. In simulating a human mind, Soong created the capacity for emotions naturally but didn't realize it. The emotion chip is real, but it doesn't do all that much and still mostly acts as a placebo. When it's beamed into his head in Descent, and then when it's properly installed in Generations, it causes erratic effects, because it's probably a shallow simulation of emotions interacting with his very real emotions in an unpredictable way. Later, Data learns to tolerate its effects and it no longer really does anything but act as placebo.
I generally tend to subscribe to the first theory: the emotion chip was never anything but a placebo and when it's installed Data acts how he thinks he would act with emotions, which is just a slightly exaggerated version of how he's acted all along.
At any rate, his crewmates realized very early on that the quest to have emotions was one of the most profound drives in Data's life, and together or separately decided not to tell him that what he wanted was already part of him.
So where is Tasha Yar? Some possibilities:
- A high-ranking member of Romulan intelligence
- A member of Section 31, along with her daughter, and maybe the Romulan father. We already know that Sela is involved with sketchy covert stuff. It wouldn't be a stretch that her loyalty to the Romulan Empire is less than genuine.
- Tasha may have escaped the Romulans, and gone into hiding, to preserve the timeline. Sela knows this, and is keeping her mother's secret for her.
In essence, Q lied about the whole thing. It was all part of his game with the Enterprise and Picard. The appearant end to humanity in the show's finale was simply him testing Picard on last time before parting ways.
- This is backed up by the "test" of the Farpoint Station test. Q outright tells them that something is about to happen there, which confirms their suspicions that something is wrong. When they finally have all the pieces, he tries to help them put them together (and disguises his help with insults). He finally gives up and directly tells Picard to send an away team over to the alien ship; specifically the same team that investigated the tunnels under Farpoint Station, so they could recognized the similarities.
- Enterprise supports this notion strongly.
Ever wonder how they get casualty reports so fast after being attacked? It isn't some diligent crew member typing up injury reports, it’s the badges reporting on the status of their users.