So name a Star Trek moment that you just didn't "get".

[Kobayshi Maru]

^I agree, this is inconsistent with their previous behavior.

 

[eyeresist]

I do find it strange too that Ferengi males are so attracted to human/human appearing women. They look so different, but then Leeta married Rom and was clearly madly in love with him. Those kind of things only seem to go one way on screen, as you never see an attractive human male with a hideous alien woman.

That would be cool...

Human: And this is my wife, Blurrgh.
Blurrgh: Skreeeeeeee! [waves tentacles, emits foul gas cloud]

 

[Tiberius]

Honestly, the Borg assimilating Earth in the past makes no sense at all. The Borg are interested in technology, not people. What's so technologically impressive about humanity the day they launch their first warp flight?

^That never made sense to me, either. And as humanity was not interested in significantly expanding the Federation's borders, it's not as though any territory occupied by the Borg would have been threatened by the Federation.

--Sran

I see it as the message that the Borg from Regeneration sent had information that basically said, "Yeah, this Federation group kicked our butts in The Best of Both worlds, and they kicked our butts again at the beginning of First Contact."

So the Queen gets curious, and sends a few cubes. One is eventually followed by the Hansens and the Queen says, "These guys are nothing, so I'm bringing this first cube home." But she decides to see what the other cube finds out, which does the stuff from The Neutral Zone. The Queen figures that the first Cube was right, these Feds are nothing special and there's no point in going all the way across the galaxy to assimilate them. So the second Cube heads home as well. But then Q flings the Enterprise into its path, the Borg are like, "How did they get out here? Let's assimilate and find out." Then Q sends the Enterprise back, the Borg want to know how the Enterprise escaped, so the Queen sends this Cube back, resulting in the Best of Both Worlds. And we know how it goes from there.

The point me and Sran were making is why do the Borg want to assimilate a world where the most advanced form of technology is nuclear missile with a pair of warp nacelles attached on?

Because she got a message that was sent by future Borg that said, "Hey, these humans were able to beat you twice." And that got her curious.

In any case, the primary mission was not to assimilate the earth of 2064. It was to send information about the future to the Borg in the past.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I don't get why they were so upset or even upset at all by Doctor Marr's decision to kill the Crystalline vermin. I mean I understand that their principles and some stupid rule, although I'd like to know what king of rule compels you to dialogue with cancer, but to go after poor Doctor Marr like a bunch of lunatics for having the balls (which is ironic since she was a woman) of doing what they were collectively to cowardly to do themselves, is outrageous.

end of rant.

I hate an episode where I'm rooting against the "heroes." I was thrilled when the entity was destroyed and I was utterly contemptuous of Picard for having his head so far up his ass.

I've followed the debate in this thread, and feel as strongly as ever that Picard and the "party line" were wrong.

 

[Nebusj]

True a totally new MURDERING life form isn't the same as a crazy man, it's worse, since you can assess the danger represented by a crazy man, the new life form you can only know what it's done so far, not what it's capable of doing if left to its own devices.

If only there were some way of communicating with it, perhaps, and ascertaining whether it had the capacity to reason and therefore might be dealt with, perhaps put to some harmless or even beneficial end.

(``Hey, Crystal? Yeah, the Borg are being kind of a pain today. If you can do it in one gulp, though, there's like 2^18 lifeforms you can slurp up in a shot, want to give it a go?'')

The idea, that all you have to do is communicate with an enemy to turn it into a friend is absurd. Communicating with the Nazis didn't help at all, if anything it made things worse.

The idea that something which has attacked you can never be turned into an ally is even more absurd.

The Crystalline thing killed a lot of people, yes, and left as it was would go on to kill more. Naturally the Federation wants that killing stopped. There was also evidence that it was capable of reason, able to meaningfully form agreements with rational entities. Given that:

Why was the Entity killing people? Was it killing because it had no better food source than the colony? Was it killing because Lore deceived it into attacking the colony? Was it killing for the fun of it?

How could it be stopped? Could it be contained short of being destroyed? If it had to kill to live itself --- and all life depends on death, don't forget that --- could it be directed to something unobjectionable?

If there's no way to keep it contained, if there's no way to guide it to something harmless, if it's going to be inevitably and violently destructive with no chance of remediation then it might be best killed, but that threshold was not clearly met.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

If only there were some way of communicating with it, perhaps, and ascertaining whether it had the capacity to reason and therefore might be dealt with, perhaps put to some harmless or even beneficial end.

(``Hey, Crystal? Yeah, the Borg are being kind of a pain today. If you can do it in one gulp, though, there's like 2^18 lifeforms you can slurp up in a shot, want to give it a go?'')

The idea, that all you have to do is communicate with an enemy to turn it into a friend is absurd. Communicating with the Nazis didn't help at all, if anything it made things worse.

The idea that something which has attacked you can never be turned into an ally is even more absurd.

The Crystalline thing killed a lot of people, yes, and left as it was would go on to kill more. Naturally the Federation wants that killing stopped. There was also evidence that it was capable of reason, able to meaningfully form agreements with rational entities. Given that:

Why was the Entity killing people? Was it killing because it had no better food source than the colony? Was it killing because Lore deceived it into attacking the colony? Was it killing for the fun of it?

How could it be stopped? Could it be contained short of being destroyed? If it had to kill to live itself --- and all life depends on death, don't forget that --- could it be directed to something unobjectionable?

If there's no way to keep it contained, if there's no way to guide it to something harmless, if it's going to be inevitably and violently destructive with no chance of remediation then it might be best killed, but that threshold was not clearly met.

I think when it comes to saving HUMAN lives, it's always best to err on the side of caution.

 

[Orphalesion]

I agree with Kobayshi here, the entity was slurping up world after world and killing millions of sentient life forms.

I'm a very live-and-let-live person, and always hope for a peaceful solution, but the entity was demanding a blood toll on an unacceptable level. To be frank I would even be in favor of killing it if it only consumed the biospheres of planets with non-sapient life. It's too much.
I understand the entity can't help what it is, but it didn't seem sapient to me, it was an organism jut traveling the universe to feed.
Sure all life thrives on death, but when I eat a turkey sandwich it is not the same as sterilizing a living, breathing world.

 

[The Wormhole]

I see it as the message that the Borg from Regeneration sent had information that basically said, "Yeah, this Federation group kicked our butts in The Best of Both worlds, and they kicked our butts again at the beginning of First Contact."

So the Queen gets curious, and sends a few cubes. One is eventually followed by the Hansens and the Queen says, "These guys are nothing, so I'm bringing this first cube home." But she decides to see what the other cube finds out, which does the stuff from The Neutral Zone. The Queen figures that the first Cube was right, these Feds are nothing special and there's no point in going all the way across the galaxy to assimilate them. So the second Cube heads home as well. But then Q flings the Enterprise into its path, the Borg are like, "How did they get out here? Let's assimilate and find out." Then Q sends the Enterprise back, the Borg want to know how the Enterprise escaped, so the Queen sends this Cube back, resulting in the Best of Both Worlds. And we know how it goes from there.

The point me and Sran were making is why do the Borg want to assimilate a world where the most advanced form of technology is nuclear missile with a pair of warp nacelles attached on?

Because she got a message that was sent by future Borg that said, "Hey, these humans were able to beat you twice." And that got her curious.

In any case, the primary mission was not to assimilate the earth of 2064. It was to send information about the future to the Borg in the past.

But we know they did intend to assimilate Earth, the Borgified Earth we see just before the Enterprise goes through the vortex is proof of that. Why would they assimilate what is essentially a pre-warp civilization when we know there are spacefaring, warp capable races that the Borg won't bother with because they are too primitive. If being beaten twice is motive enough for the Borg to go back to the past to deal with humanity then, it would make more sense to eliminate them, not assimilate them.

What we get down to is that First Contact willfully ignored the fact the Borg are interested in technology, and instead made them fixated with enlarging their number of drones.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

I agree with Kobayshi here, the entity was slurping up world after world and killing millions of sentient life forms.

I'm a very live-and-let-live person, and always hope for a peaceful solution, but the entity was demanding a blood toll on an unacceptable level. To be frank I would even be in favor of killing it if it only consumed the biospheres of planets with non-sapient life. It's too much.
I understand the entity can't help what it is, but it didn't seem sapient to me, it was an organism jut traveling the universe to feed.
Sure all life thrives on death, but when I eat a turkey sandwich it is not the same as sterilizing a living, breathing world.

Exactly, you eating a turkey sandwich is the main reason why there still are turkeys. If they weren't edible, it's likely that the turkeys would have simply disappeared like many of other species. With the Crystalline entity it's completely different, it likely causes massive extinctions on a planetary scale, in that respect it's not much different from the doomsday machine that Kirk eliminated at great cost. Should we have tried to talk to that one also?

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Honestly, the Borg assimilating Earth in the past makes no sense at all. The Borg are interested in technology, not people. What's so technologically impressive about humanity the day they launch their first warp flight?

^That never made sense to me, either. And as humanity was not interested in significantly expanding the Federation's borders, it's not as though any territory occupied by the Borg would have been threatened by the Federation.

--Sran

I see it as the message that the Borg from Regeneration sent had information that basically said, "Yeah, this Federation group kicked our butts in The Best of Both worlds, and they kicked our butts again at the beginning of First Contact."

So the Queen gets curious, and sends a few cubes. One is eventually followed by the Hansens and the Queen says, "These guys are nothing, so I'm bringing this first cube home." But she decides to see what the other cube finds out, which does the stuff from The Neutral Zone. The Queen figures that the first Cube was right, these Feds are nothing special and there's no point in going all the way across the galaxy to assimilate them. So the second Cube heads home as well. But then Q flings the Enterprise into its path, the Borg are like, "How did they get out here? Let's assimilate and find out." Then Q sends the Enterprise back, the Borg want to know how the Enterprise escaped, so the Queen sends this Cube back, resulting in the Best of Both Worlds. And we know how it goes from there.

The point me and Sran were making is why do the Borg want to assimilate a world where the most advanced form of technology is nuclear missile with a pair of warp nacelles attached on?

Since the thread has veered to First Contact, another "huh" moment was when the Enterprise returned to the present. I remember as they were wrapping the mission up think "OK...how are they going to return to the present day" My thought was the ol' slingshot around the sun trick, seemed the only established and logical way to do based on past ST canon.

Yet all Picard did was give some order to match the temporal vortex settings, or something like that, that they were in when they followed the Borg back in time. And he did it like it was no big deal, he'd given commands to go to warp speed, a common order, with more urgency than he gave the order to take us back hundreds of years into the present day.

I remember thinking "What?" So suddenly starfleet just has the ability to jump back and forth in time as they please and it's not dangerous or anything.

Yet it was never mentioned again. I know the movie was coming to the end, but it was the ultimate....just make up some BS so we don't have to have a big scene and we can make it under 2 hours.

 

[Richard Baker]

I could never figure out why the Borg would only send a single cube to Earth. In the 'Best of Both Worlds' perhaps it was an exploratory mission but it got to Earth with little trouble. The only way it was defeated was due to Data finding a way to put them to sleep. It is known that the Borg are always in communication with the collective, so the reason for the defeat would be known. Why not send another cube right away and this time do not bother with the whole representative speaker thing, just fly in and take care of things.
Instead we see a number of years pass before the Borg decide to send yet another single cube towards Earth. This one makes it to near Earth orbit with no problem and is only defeated because Picard could detect a weak spot. If they had sent two cubes even the result would be different- one could protect the other's weak spot. It the whole point would be to dispatch a sphere to go back through time, why not send it back in time outside Federation space and travel to Earth when there is nothing around except a single Vulcan science vessel?
In Voyager we saw a lot of the Collective and how many cubes they had. We also saw that the Borg had established Transwarp conduits, one of which ended up right on Earth's doorstep. No reason as to why the Borg could not have successfully invaded Earth whenever they wanted to-

It just does not make sense to me...

 

[JonnyQuest037]

On the TMP transporter question, I think the two transporter thing was clearly either an intentional change or a mistake on the part of the makers of TMP. No need to analyse it more than that. As both screenwriter Harold Livingston and director Robert Wise were new to Star Trek, I have no trouble believing that this might've been the case.

The conversation about the Crystalline Entity reminds me of my main complaint about "I, Borg", where everyone suddenly had all these misgivings about destroying the Borg -- A race that, up until then, had been presented as the utterly remorseless destroyer of BILLIONS of lives. I thought the whole debate about the ethics of destroying the Borg was absurd.

 

[eyeresist]

But we know they did intend to assimilate Earth, the Borgified Earth we see just before the Enterprise goes through the vortex is proof of that. Why would they assimilate what is essentially a pre-warp civilization when we know there are spacefaring, warp capable races that the Borg won't bother with because they are too primitive. If being beaten twice is motive enough for the Borg to go back to the past to deal with humanity then, it would make more sense to eliminate them, not assimilate them.

If earlier Earth is assimilated, the threat is eliminated (this might have been the cube's specific mission). It also works in broader strategic terms, giving them a beach-head into a sector with other interesting species e.g. Vulcans.

Time travel stories never stand up to close examination anyway

 

[enterprisecvn65]

On the TMP transporter question, I think the two transporter thing was clearly either an intentional change or a mistake on the part of the makers of TMP. No need to analyse it more than that. As both screenwriter Harold Livingston and director Robert Wise were new to Star Trek, I have no trouble believing that this might've been the case.

The conversation about the Crystalline Entity reminds me of my main complaint about "I, Borg", where everyone suddenly had all these misgivings about destroying the Borg -- A race that, up until then, had been presented as the utterly remorseless destroyer of BILLIONS of lives. I thought the whole debate about the ethics of destroying the Borg was absurd.

Agreed. That be like Eisenhower saying. "Look we can't carpet bomb and eventually invade Nazi Germany because there are people who really don't support Hitler who will be killed"

Sorry. Yeah it's unfair as hell for some who died, but the Nazis were an enemy who had killed tens of millions and showed no signs of surrendering and someone had to stop them with whatever force necessary.

The Borg had shown themselves to be killers without emotion who were capable of doing it again. Ethics goes out the window in that situation. It was all done to show Picard as a man with a conscience who couldn't justify that kind of action no matter what the consequences.

Sorry in real life if you have two evenly matched forces and one has ethics and plays "by the rules" and the other does whatever it takes to win the war. Odds are the ones who throw the rule book out will win.

It's terrible and disgusting, but it's war. And when the war is on a scale where your enemy has the power to destroy you, you don't hold back because of some moral code.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I agree with Kobayshi here, the entity was slurping up world after world and killing millions of sentient life forms.

I'm a very live-and-let-live person, and always hope for a peaceful solution, but the entity was demanding a blood toll on an unacceptable level. To be frank I would even be in favor of killing it if it only consumed the biospheres of planets with non-sapient life. It's too much.
I understand the entity can't help what it is, but it didn't seem sapient to me, it was an organism jut traveling the universe to feed.
Sure all life thrives on death, but when I eat a turkey sandwich it is not the same as sterilizing a living, breathing world.

Exactly, you eating a turkey sandwich is the main reason why there still are turkeys. If they weren't edible, it's likely that the turkeys would have simply disappeared like many of other species. With the Crystalline entity it's completely different, it likely causes massive extinctions on a planetary scale, in that respect it's not much different from the doomsday machine that Kirk eliminated at great cost. Should we have tried to talk to that one also?

Kobayashi, it looks like Orphalesion was saying essentially the same thing you (and I) are. I think you misread her. Or else I'm misreading you, and your eye-roll was not aimed at her.

 

[Orphalesion]

^ I think he was agreeing with me and just reaffirming the argument by bringing up the doomsday machine.

Also "her"? *Looks in his pants* no, still a "guy"

 

[The Wormhole]

But we know they did intend to assimilate Earth, the Borgified Earth we see just before the Enterprise goes through the vortex is proof of that. Why would they assimilate what is essentially a pre-warp civilization when we know there are spacefaring, warp capable races that the Borg won't bother with because they are too primitive. If being beaten twice is motive enough for the Borg to go back to the past to deal with humanity then, it would make more sense to eliminate them, not assimilate them.

If earlier Earth is assimilated, the threat is eliminated (this might have been the cube's specific mission). It also works in broader strategic terms, giving them a beach-head into a sector with other interesting species e.g. Vulcans.

Time travel stories never stand up to close examination anyway

The threat is also eliminated by launching an orbital assault on the planet, assimilation is not necessary.

 

[Vandervecken]

Until it could be argued that the Horta was acting in self defense, that's what they were ALL prepared to do, including Spock who was the first to argue in favor of the Horta.

Unless you're ready to make the same argument that the crystalline blight was acting in self defense, my opinion stands.

That's my whole point! They didn't know the Horta had a good reason for attacking the miners UNTIL THEY COMMUNICATED WITH IT!

That's exactly what Picard was trying to do with the crystalline entity, they were attempting to communicate with it and early indications were that they were succeeding but then the bitter old lady doctor destroyed the entity out of revenge, just like what the miners tried doing to the Horta!

Speaking of which, I never bought the fact that the pergium miners just said, "oh, we were killing her kids? well that makes her killing our people all ok then." Really?

 

[galleywest]

I do find it strange too that Ferengi males are so attracted to human/human appearing women. They look so different, but then Leeta married Rom and was clearly madly in love with him. Those kind of things only seem to go one way on screen, as you never see an attractive human male with a hideous alien woman.

That would be cool...

Human: And this is my wife, Blurrgh.
Blurrgh: Skreeeeeeee! [waves tentacles, emits foul gas cloud]

Okay, this made me laugh hysterically. And made me love Tony Shalhoub's character in Galaxy Quest just that much more.

For me, the thing with the baby in ENT: Terra Prime/Demons. Why was there a dying hybrid alien baby? Did the maniacal bad guy (i.e. Peter Weller) really think that they'd hold up a hybrid human-Vulcan baby and people would be horrified by it? Didn't he talk to anyone is marketing before putting this plan together?? It's a baby, surpassed in cuteness only possibly by kittens.

 

[22 Stars]

Why did the writers choose to make the situations surrounding Narendra III (Yesterday's Enterprise) and the attack on Khitomer (in Worf's past) so similar? Klingon outposts, attached by Romulans, saved by Federation vessels.

They could have picked a myriad of scenarios, why pick the same one twice?

I still don't get it!