...Okay, how many loops? Mudd kills Lorca 53 times, but he doesn't kill Lorca on every loop, so that only gives us the minimum (of 56). That amounts to about thirty hours of action already - no wonder he's yawning towards the end! It's not as if he could spend time sleeping between the loops. But he probably realized that and slept well before first stepping out of the fish. Still, there's a limit to how many loops he can do, even on stims. A hundred would amount to staying awake for two days...
Timo Saloniemi
Not necessarily. We're messing with time here - when Mudd resets he is back in his ship, in the gormagander ready to put his plan into action. Theoretically he is physically exactly the same, which means at every reset, his body (including his brain) is physically no more exhausted than when he first appeared. There could theoretically be a psychological component where the mind has difficulty functioning with this strange freedom from sleep, but sleep itself is primarily a physical requirement, so it doesn't apply.
It's not the confusion, it's the fact that DEE-ESS-SEE doesn't really roll off the tongue. STD has a better sound to it, other than the more popular use of this acronym.
I would say the exact opposite. DSC flows quite well, similar, as has been mentioned, to DS9. STD sounds choppy and awkward, even outside of its other connotation.
Exactly. Mudd's hand was forced here: he had to do the final loop despite knowing that Stamets would stand in his way. And eliminating Stamets right off the bat would have been one of his priorities - but to accomplish that, he'd first have to walk into the trap where Stamets was waiting.
Although does that work? The loop is 30 minutes or so. When the heroes tell Captain Mudd that he has won, Mudd waits it out. He apparently only waits for a couple of minutes, though. Why did he only march to the bridge at T=28 min? Taking control of the ship did not take him quite that long in every loop - say, during the previous loop, he supposedly gloated in Lorca's Ready Room for longer than said couple of minutes.
Or are we to think that Mudd waited for longer than that? Or that he terminated the final loop ahead of time, being so certain of his victory?
Timo Saloniemi
It had to be a significant amount of time, otherwise Stamets couldn't convince Burnham to convince Tyler to convince Lorca to find Stella and rewire the captain's chair. As for why? Obviously, he has to go through the motions of gaining control of the computer first, or Lorca would just shoot him. That accounts for some of the time. The rest could be explained by the loop being ended prematurely, though it kind of felt like Mudd didn't really do anything so much as just let a deadline pass (IE, the loop only continues as long as Mudd hits a button before 30 minutes, and only ends if he doesn't hit the button in that time frame). I'm not sure what else he could've been doing.
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On the episode, most of what I would say has been said, but I will reiterate a few things.
I love the twist of a time loop plot that doesn't directly follow the person in the loop. (Even though they kind of cheated a bit in the way Burnham's dance was driven by her conversation with Stamets which she never actually had)
I loved Burnham's characterization throughout the episode.
I agree Mudd got off a bit easy considering everything he knows about a top secret military project. I also find the idea that DSC has horribly marred the memory of poor, misunderstood Harry Mudd utterly laughable. This Mudd is perfectly in line with everything we've seen before.
I will never, ever understand people who claim to be Star Trek fans and then instantly dismiss a technology concept as stupid and ridiculous for apparently no other reason than that they don't like the sound of it. Ooh, a time crystal, it's so horribly stupid and absolutely nothing like Iconian gateways, bajoran orbs, the guardian of forever, slingshotting around a star, mind sifters, behavioral reprogramming, doomsday machines, borg, perfect androids, mind controlling games, dilithium crystals, heisenberg compensators, holodecks, and just keep going forever. IT'S SCIENCE FICTION, for christ's sake!