Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x12 - "Through the Valley of Shadows"

Can't save cadets, can't save the galaxy, now can't get a name right. The universe doesn't deserve him.

 

The Menagerie did seem to indicate that Pike actually went into an irradiated room and pulled cadets out, not that he was in there with them to begin with and told them all to leave (and helped the stragglers).

And as I mentioned before, inspection tour vs training exercise.

Which makes me think Pike does indeed try to prevent the vision only to create a different set of circumstances (inspection tour instead of training exercise) that lead to the wheelchair.

 

It was a j...nevermind.

 

Oh I know it was a joke. I probably shouldn't have quoted your post, it didn't have anything to do with what i said.

 

From where I'm standing, training exercises are fairly common during inspections. That element of the story doesn't seem like a conflict.

 

Yeah, you're probably right. I guess it's more my fan theory on how he could try to avoid his accident with his knowledge and have it still happen.

 

Agreed. Many Medal of Honor recipients "took one for the team," as it were.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating technobabble. I found it annoying in TNG when a story was resolved by teching the tech, and I found VOY basically unwatchable.

TOS remains my favorite Trek series, by far. I seem to have a higher opinion of it that some other posters, though, as I don't generally consider it silly, cheesy, fantasy-oriented, or anti-scientific. On the contrary, it was (and remains today) one of the most legitimate science fiction shows in television history.

What I found especially aggravating in the latter-day shows were episodes like (for instance) TNG "Genesis" or VOY "Thresholds," which made it abundantly clear that the writers didn't know or care fuck-all about science, and were just making things up willy-nilly. TOS didn't do that kind of thing. It had a few bad episodes, of course (fewer than most), and (like most SF) a few whoppers one has to swallow as foundational to the concept, but it tried hard to set up its own ground rules and stick to them.

FTFY.

Okay, but when they don't pull it off, it's incredibly contrived. I can see how this could work, in talented hands, but very little of what I've seen from the writers of DSC suggests they're willing or able to do it right.

They like taking the path of least resistance — just tell us something audaciously implausible, and expect us to accept it at face value because, hey, it was onscreen.

Exactly. This is the problem that sequence created. I'm fine with Pike being courageous enough to face an awful fate for the sake of others. I'm not fine with the implication that the future can't be changed or improved, because that's not what Star Trek has ever been about.

The only reason the audience is accepting this as "inevitable" is that it's a prequel and we already know the events of later years (decades, centuries). If this show were the first time we'd encountered Pike, we'd all be expecting him to seek out a win-win solution, not to accept his "fate."

Yes, and that's a problem. I like Doctor Who, but it's a very different thing from Star Trek, with a much looser set of boundaries. (A "timey-wimey ball of stuff" would never fly in Trek, nor should it!)

 

7000 ships, everywhere from 2 to 400 people each, Starfleet has campuses on multiple planets, ships not old enough to decommission but old enough to retire from active service are used to train them, several thousand 3rd and 4th year cadets being trained in active starship operations non-stop for 100+ years means several hundred ships and millions of cadets.

That's in the region of tens of thousands of active days of dozens of ships doing this routine.

Your job, as the only man who knows that a delta radiation rupture is a serious risk, is to try and stop as many as possible without taking a scratch.

Goodluck.

 

X-Files had the coolest twist on these "future" visions (spoilers for the X-Files series finale)

Spoiler

William forsees that Mulder will be killed by the Cigarette Smoking Man. So what does William do? Use his power to shapeshift into Mulder and take his place.

Pike should kidnap some hapless Klingon, "Tyler" him into a Pike double, and have him take his place while he retires to the Orion colony.

Oh, that's the new Kobayashi Maru simulation they keep talking about at the Academy. :O

 

It was deemed too insenstive. Easier to go with the racist war mongering imperialist battle simulation instead.

Wait.

 

It wasn't just one cadet. There were many.

At the beginning of the flash-forward, after the computer announces that the training exercise is aborted, there's a cadet who says "I got this!" as she's furiously working at a console. At that point, we see Pike yell "Go! Get out of here!" and a lot of cadets file out of the room. The "I got this" cadet is the only one left. Pike is in the process of dragging her to safety when an explosion hurls him across the chamber and against a bulkhead. Then he gets up and we see that his face is burned, but he is still alert and able to move. He's definitely not AS disfigured as when we see him in the chair.

So it would seem that Pike will eventually get the sole remaining cadet to safety (since in The Menagerie, we hear that he saved ALL of the cadets), and that's when he'll suffer the final dose of radiation that will ultimately put him in the chair.

 

One thing that hasn't been brought up is that Pike would likely be required by Starfleet guidelines to report if he had any indication at all of possible future harm to Starfleet personnel (himself included).

Yes, Pike may have saved the Federation in taking the crystal. But to keep silent about the vision afterward? To keep quiet out of a possibly misplaced sense of heroism literally goes against common sense and the way Starfleet (and real world institutions) operate. If you know something that could cause harm in the future, say it!

 

Star Trek has repeatedly provided stories that tell us trying to cheat to gain and advantage isn't moral. The time crystals are yet another example of this as we've been shown again and again. The monks offered a warning, you try to use these things, you will mess up your future, cheating doesn't pay. Yes there are so many people who think the lesson is, time crystals are there to let you cheat your way into a better future for yourself and that is good!

Not sure at this point why some people are so reluctant to accept this lesson that they've been taught by Trek time after time. Its like they've learned nothing that the show has preached to them repeatedly over the years. And sure, Trek has allowed such cheats to go unanswered, mostly on Voyager. But that is precisely why Voyager's writing is as poor as it is overall, as it there is any of the series which deliberately fails in its approach to the source material, its that one. If one gets all ones lessons about Star Trek from Voyager, IMHO, they are making a poor choice.

 

What did Kirk say after he was told he "cheated" at the Kobayashi Maru? "I don't believe in a no win scenario."

That's probably Star Trek's most famous lesson.

Plus I don't see how filing a detailed report to Starfleet command about Boreth counts as cheating at all. If anything Pike is required by Starfleet rules to alert command to any possible future danger. He still got the crystal, so telling them about what happened doesn't endanger the galaxy.

 

Yep. Kirk's MO was to to cheat to gain advantage. He repeatedly bullshitted himself out of bad situations.

Maybe he eventually does, but 'I touched some strange rocks and had a bad dream' isn't really that convincing...

 

IDK - the reaction he had and the LOOK on Pike's face after he saw his future was ANYTHING BUT unemotional.

 

Well, these are time crystals we're talking about. They aren't just any strange rocks.

I think it's more the fact that a decade passed and Starfleet obviously never knew about it. Understandably this episode wasn't written when the Menagerie aired, but it's not like Mendez said "Pike had inside knowledge this sort of accident would happen and we all worked to prevent it, but somehow it ended up happening anyway." It's clear Pike didn't tell the people who needed to know, which makes no sense.

That's why the best case would have been for Pike to have his memory wiped after he left Boreth, but his line to Tyler and L'Rell indicates this didn't happen.

 

Did you watch all of Wrath of Khan? Because I remember further commentary on that lesson, that kind of puts that 'lesson' into a larger perspective.