Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x04 - "The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry"

I'll give you the latter. However, Lorca is quite literally the least approachable (Starfleet) captain I have ever seen in Trek. Hell, I'd be more at ease talking to Edward Jellico.

 

I think that your take on the character is excellent. Lorca feels very real to me, precisely because I've had more than one employer act in similar ways when they are under tremendous pressure to succeed.

For them, it was not wanting to ever have that "We're closing the place down." speech to employees while obviously for Lorca it is literally a matter of life and death.

I can understand people not liking him, it is often very unpleasant to work under someone like that. But at least in my personal experience, I would rather work for an abrasive boss who keeps the company afloat than to work for a sweet and gentle one who ultimately leads the company to financial ruin.

 

Most good managers can keep a company afloat without being a dick. You usually get lesser work from people when you treat them badly.

 

That is sometimes the case, but OTOH when you have an employee literally refusing to do their job, such as Starmets was doing, it is often not possible to resolve the situation in a tranquil fashion, especially when there is a crisis concerning how quickly something is finished and a literal life / death outcome at stake.

 

Lorca was being a dick because clearly he is a dick who is trying to impress people higher up the chain. I ran into his kind on more than one occasion working in corporate America.

Many end up flaming out because of a lack of people skills.

 

On that I will just have to agree to disagree.

In my real life job, I once had to translate for an "abrasive" type boss when he was giving a formal reprimand to an employee who did not speak English. When it was over and the employee had returned to his station, the boss that I'm sure said employee would have considered to be an inconsiderate dick literally broke down crying because he absolutely hated having to be abrasive.

But, as he told me at the time, his options at that point were to either aggressively demand improvement or to fire the employee. Major jobs were on the line and a failure to complete them would result in really bad things for the company.

In that case at least, the employee was "scared straight", eventually got promoted to management, and now considers that boss that he had thought of as a "dick" as one of the biggest helpers to him in the company.

 

A diverse and thriving society needs both Lorcas and Stammets. They help balance things out.

 

On that I agree.

Any society that begins to demand complete intellectual conformity is one destined to fall.

And as the series progresses, we may see that balance play out. I can see an argument for allowing the Space Bear to suffer temporary pain in order to save literally thousands of lives and protect the largest Dilithium source for the Federation.

But clearly if at some future date Lorca demanded a spore jump that would cause pain to another being simply to satisfy his personal curiosity or some other trivial reason then Starmets would be right to object to it.

 

i don't think starments is the one to object to stuff like that - it'll be burnham - staments isn't the type of guy who's aneasy with a little torture as long as someone else does the dirty work (same with killing klingons)

... at least that's my impression so far

 

*uneasy

please tell me i can edit after two weeks on the forums

 

One thing that people seem to be forgetting in this current line of conversation. This isn't corporate America. This is a war where the stakes clearly are life or death as established by the Klingons.

Lorca being a hardass is perfectly reasonable. Especially given the situation on Corvan. Lorca isn't "being a dick to be a dick" for any personal gain. He has established his motivation pretty clearly. Win the war, as fast and as decisively as possible.

What will be really interesting to see going forward are the ramifications for what happened at Corvan.

 

That indeed might be how It plays out eventually. Obviously, Burnham is the only person that so far has expressed any sympathy for the creature at all.

But we shall see. The writers might decide to let Starmets redeem himself at a later date, or of course they might just let him stay a whiny entitlement-mentality dick.

 

i would put money (if i were a betting man) on the fact that he also has no problem to torture ripper himself if it is for scientific reasons

 

Honestly I think Stamets is one step away from being a conscientious objector. Broadcasting the distress calls from the mine snapped him back into the reality of the situation and any other crew members who may have been having second thoughts were likely brought back into it as well. It really was a brilliant move on Lorca's part to demonstrate what's at stake.

 

How do two arseholes provide a balance??

 

So why wouldn't another race scrap the ethics and continue using the tech? Why wouldn't somebody in the future figured out how to use it?

It's a major motivator to be able to go anywhere instantly. Usually that power is reserved for god creatures and even then, most don't have it. That's how we keep the trek universe sane, the "beyond our understanding" card.

You can't play that card with the spores.

That being said you may be able to make the same argument with the genesis I guess, but the spores are much bigger in scope.

 

Because it's fiction. The writers decide who gets the Spore Drives, the Genesis Devices, the Guardians of Forever and the Slingshot Effects or why they don't work.

 

I believe @shakham brings up a good point. I think the technology is going to prove untenable for another reason--perhaps the way conventional warp travel was shown to cause subspace instability back in TNG.