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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x07 - "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad"

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And keeping him prisoner means explaining him to Starfleet...which would likely lose Lorca his job. Having him killed still is t the Starfleet way even to Lorca.
I am hardly the biggest fans of DSC, Mudd, or indeed TOS...but the outrageous Okona ending is one of the few ways out the corner they had painted themselves into.

How is it you believe it would cost Lorca his job?
 
at that point he'd have way more knowledge about getting around the security than the crew has of implementing the security.

this is why I'd make a bad captain, I'd have him killed.
I would have airlocked him myself after an extensive interrogation to find out what the Klingons know about the Discovery.

I would even be tempted to arrange a trap to destroy the Klingons when they come for the ship.

Too much of a security threat to such a sensitive experiment.

Not really an option for us as we know he has to appear again in TOS.
 
Time Index: 29:25:

Burnham: "Did he ever say how he did it?"
Tyler: "Something about a non-equalibrial matter state."
Burnham: "...a time crystal. We learned about these at the Vulcan academy, but the decay rate of the lattice is too unpredictable."

So the technology is already known. They didn't need to question Mudd at all.

Burnham: "No Federation-aligned species has been able to stabilize them. A fourth-dimensional race must have perfected the technology and now Mudd has it."

Not Tyler: "Should we ask Mudd about how he acquired the technology or at least how they’re stabilized"?
Not Burnham: "What? And have him miss his big date with Stella? Besides, what are we, a SCIENCE ship?"

The AntiDiscovery Brigade:

"Too different. It is not Trek."

"They should not follow old Trek tropes!"

The ProDiscovery Battalion:

“So what if it has huge plot holes and giant leaps of logic?"

"So did Star Trek TV from 50 and 30 years ago!"
 
I would have airlocked him myself after an extensive interrogation to find out what the Klingons know about the Discovery.

I would even be tempted to arrange a trap to destroy the Klingons when they come for the ship.

Too much of a security threat to such a sensitive experiment.

Not really an option for us as we know he has to appear again in TOS.

Maybe he cloned himself before he went?
 
Burnham: "No Federation-aligned species has been able to stabilize them. A fourth-dimensional race must have perfected the technology and now Mudd has it."

Not Tyler: "Should we ask Mudd about how he acquired the technology or at least how they’re stabilized"?
Not Burnham: "What? And have him miss his big date with Stella? Besides, what are we, a SCIENCE ship?"



The ProDiscovery Battalion:

“So what if it has huge plot holes and giant leaps of logic?"

"So did Star Trek TV from 50 and 30 years ago!"
^^^^
No. It's "That's a Star Trek staple going all the way back to 1966 and it's been that way across 6 previous TV incarnations and 13 feature films."

Also, what do 'plot holes' and 'leaps of logic' have to do with the popularity or critical reception of Star Trek?

Example: STII:TWoK has ALL of the above - yet it's the film lauded as the "Best Star Trek film" by a majority of Star Trek fans to this day.
 
Then what the fuck is the point of Discovery if it's not only going to utterly fail at being the bastard child of Game of Thrones and NuBSG in it's wannabe darkness but also retreading every. single. fucking. mistake of the previous 51 years of problems with the old universe?

I mean that's the worst of both. It doesn't know what it wants to be and is failing miserably at what it thinks it should be.

"He did it first!" is the worst fucking excuse for your own failures you can make.
 
I do wonder why the Enterprise computer in "Mudd's Women" didn't go into detail about Harry's past dealings with Starfleet? Kirk would've tossed him in the brig if he knew Mudd attempted treason against the Federation.

Mudd is a very common name.

The natuŕe of the crime here is that no charges where pressed, otherwise more asshole criminals may notice that time travel is not impossible.
 
Mudd is a very common name.

The natuŕe of the crime here is that no charges where pressed, otherwise more asshole criminals may notice that time travel is not impossible.
The thing is, Mudd's only provable crime is attempted theft of a Federation starship, and they don't actually have any evidence to prove this that would stand up in a court of law. Discovery's records don't reflect any of the things Mudd did and only Stamets -- whose testimony is probably questionable at best -- has any recollection of the time loops at all. They tried literally DOZENS of different counter-moves and every single one of them ended with Discovery being destroyed, so the only way out of the loop was to let Mudd think he'd already won, which has the unfortunate side effect of him not actually committing the crime he would otherwise be accused of.

Besides, giving him to Stella and her crazy family is probably a worse and more permanent punishment than anything the Federation could give him. If there's one thing Mudd is good at, it's escaping from prisons. Escaping from pissed off gangsters is noticeably more difficult to do.
 
There’s only one ship with a spore drive. That’s as rare and exorbitant as Mudd’s crystals. Ships can be repaired or replaced but not the thousands of servicemen and women killed. Wasting resources is exactly this: Having learned about a resource like the time crystals and not caring/asking about its potential use.



So which is it? Are the crystals so rare and expensive that only Mudd can find or afford them as claimed by everyone else or not? Because that’s the excuse everyone uses for the last two pages of the thread. Did they get it wrong?

If you're asking for my take, I say the crystal is obviously rare (according to Burnham it should be completely theoretical). It also is probably not single use the way everyone thinks. Whatever the big power source was in Mudd's ship is presumably still there and using it again is just a question of figuring out how it works. So Mudd only had one and used it several times. Now Lorca has it. And I think he (or Burnham) will eventually use it.
 
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I find the hand-waving dismissal and justification here kind of ridiculous, really. As @Captain of the USS Averof pointed out, this is the most powerful device we've seen any single human posses on Star Trek. EVER.

This isn't normal time travel or transwarp beaming or whatever other nugget of lesser value someone throws out.

This is a whole new level. The fact that it was localized or only lasted for a half-hour minutes doesn't change the fact that it's still allows a person to posses power the likes of which the franchise had only ever given to a quirky mischief maker who's now partying with ponies.

And as for the limitations, all we know is that the crystal Mudd had worked that way. For all anyone knows, the technology could be capable of chagrining much longer periods of time at much greater distances. And that's kind of the problem. The writers did such a poor job of framing it - which is dismissing it as just another "plot device" is really reductive and excuses poor writing.

Because when you talk about the really great uses of such powers in all of science fiction, there are always rules and consequences to breaking them. Warp drive has rules. Transporters have rules. And yes time travel has rules and Star Trek has always presented consequences whenever someone goes and fucks with them, even when "time travel" is just the plot device.

Heck, take something like "Assignment Earth"; The time travel used in that episode was about as "plot-devicey" as it gets. The whole point was to put the Enterprise crew in a soft pilot for a different show. But then the episode became about how Kirk and Spock got in the way and mucked things up, and there were had consequences, so the new guy had to fix it all.

But let's just take time-loop episodes. I've already shoe-horned "Window of Opportunity" into this thread, so let's start there. It's been a while since I last saw it, but I do remember Samiel making a point at how they essentially altered a good chunk of the galaxy and alluded to the dangers of such a super powerful device built by God-like aliens. (Who, for-example, had their own after-life.)

Closer to home, "Cause and Effect" ended with the image of Captain Frasier, Grammer K. dressed in attire and flying a ship from the Original Series films. It was an image that so simply carried the weight and magnitude of what had happened that even a casual fan could pick up on it. So this only goes to show that, if done well, you don't need a lengthy expo scene to lay down the ground rules and consequences for breaking them.

But they gotta be there.

And no, this isn't about canon or any bullshit like that. This is about building a foundation for credible story telling
 
the only way out of the loop was to let Mudd think he'd already won, which has the unfortunate side effect of him not actually committing the crime he would otherwise be accused of.

Harry had better hope that the 29th-century Starfleet from "Relativity" doesn't get ahold of him. Because they wouldn't CARE about that last point. :devil:

Who knows, they may have at least confiscated the time greeblies. (Somebody has to, anyway. Apparently the Department of Temporal Investigations doesn't exist yet in 2256.)
 
Burnham: "No Federation-aligned species has been able to stabilize them. A fourth-dimensional race must have perfected the technology and now Mudd has it."

Not Tyler: "Should we ask Mudd about how he acquired the technology or at least how they’re stabilized"?
Not Burnham: "What? And have him miss his big date with Stella? Besides, what are we, a SCIENCE ship?"



The ProDiscovery Battalion:

“So what if it has huge plot holes and giant leaps of logic?"

"So did Star Trek TV from 50 and 30 years ago!"

Not Mudd: "Sure, I'll tell you how I managed to gain access to this technology."
Also Not Mudd: "Certainly, I'll give you the goose that lays my golden eggs."
 
Mudd murdered again and again, in horrific ways yet gets away with a verbal warning. Why? Because he has to appear in TOS. Bollocks to that.
But he didn't kill anyone in the final loop, did he? So, technically, by the end of the episode all the killing he did in the other loops never actually happened.
 
But he didn't kill anyone in the final loop, did he? So, technically, by the end of the episode all the killing he did in the other loops never actually happened.

But he did commit treason against the Federation, by trying to steal a Starfleet asset and sell it to the Klingons.

If a 45 second mutiny is a life sentence, then I think treason would be treated just as harshly.
 
No 23rd century lawyer or court will be able to convict Mudd for the murder of living people. A 29th century court, sure, but not a 23rd century court prior to the establishment of the potential everyday use of time travel discovered by USS Enterprise in the late 2260s (multiple methods even)

At least with Khan there was a dead body and evidence of a time of death on record medically.
 
So... technically Khan didn’t kill Spock or Kirk (depending on the timeline) either? :lol:
He totally did. It's just that death isn't always permanent on Star Trek.

It's sort of like theft. You can rob a bank at gunpoint, but returning the money won't result in an acquittal. Traveling back in time and returning the money before you actually stole it, though, probably would.
 
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