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New Short Trek: The Trouble With Edward

How Would You Rate The Trouble With Edward?

  • 1

    Votes: 3 2.4%
  • 2

    Votes: 4 3.2%
  • 3

    Votes: 4 3.2%
  • 4

    Votes: 4 3.2%
  • 5

    Votes: 4 3.2%
  • 6

    Votes: 6 4.8%
  • 7

    Votes: 6 4.8%
  • 8

    Votes: 24 19.2%
  • 9

    Votes: 33 26.4%
  • 10

    Votes: 37 29.6%

  • Total voters
    125
  • Poll closed .
And fairly little reason to assume they made alterations to the "Battle at the Binary Stars" model.

I mean, yes, the Buran got new pennant paint. But she absolutely needed that, for her new Terran Empire identity, even in medium to distant shots. The Cabot just hides in the shadows.

Does it follow that the "USS Shran" model was fine to begin with, and the "USS Hoover" one was crap and for that reason had to be shown off focus in the Mudd short? What gets revealed in the Eaglemoss brochures doesn't suggest this sort of inequality.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Having just written a little review to "Q&A" - which I liked very much - I'm gonna' give my opinion on this one too:

I didn't like it. At all.

Mostly because it felt like it had only two jokes. One being: Tribbles everywhere. But that joke was already excellently played in "troubles with tribbles". The amazing "Trials and Tribbleations" was very careful not to play this joke until it's very last scene, where it added a neat twist. This short felt like "Tribbles multiply" is their only major joke, with music numbers and CGI crowds. But any one joke only works the first time.

The other joke was "Edwards is an idiot". And that just felt mean and inhumane, the way it was handled. The type of "haha, asshole got it coming"-type of humour I despise.

And looking at this short "seriously" is quite horrific: It's a shocking failure in basic human interactions, with horrifying consequences, likely millions of deaths and destructions. It also plays the tired cliché of "humans creating the badguy" which I'm so tired of in modern SF (Ridley Scott made even the fucking ALIEN a human creation! The thing that re-defined the word "alien"! Why is nothing scary allowed to be truly "extra-terestrial" anymore?)

The only moment I actually did find funny in this short was the guy with the enourmous vacuum running around in the background. And the post credit scene was kinda' cute, I like it when Trek doesn't take itself too serious.

But overall I really did not like this one.
 
The other joke was "Edwards is an idiot". And that just felt mean and inhumane, the way it was handled. The type of "haha, asshole got it coming"-type of humour I despise.
.

I think Edward's constant repudiation of Starfleet and Federation values pretty much shows him to be a monster. It's just he didn't look like it. It's a surprise he's not an Admiral.

Mind you, I don't know what could have been done other than locking him up or phasering him.
 
I think Edward's constant repudiation of Starfleet and Federation values pretty much shows him to be a monster. It's just he didn't look like it. It's a surprise he's not an Admiral.

Mind you, I don't know what could have been done other than locking him up or phasering him.

He's not a monster. He's a selfish prick, but everything he did was for movie goals and recognition. He didn't mean for anyone's harm (... except for the Tribbles...), in fact his work was part of an effort to help. He just obviously needed more and better supervision on his work.

Empress Philippa Georgiou is a monster.
She's willingly decided to commit genocide, multiple times, and hand-picked sentient beings for cannibalistic consumption purely out of entertainment, and clearly means all of it and had fun with it, gloating in her victims eyes.

It's really crass how this show depicts one of those as a redeemable plucky antihero, just because she likes the main character, and forgets she's literally "worse than Hitler". And the other person is painted as a complete unredeemable monster who "had it coming" - only because he's anti-social and makes mistakes.

That's just fucked up.
 
He's not a monster. He's a selfish prick, but everything he did was for movie goals and recognition. He didn't mean for anyone's harm (... except for the Tribbles...), in fact his work was part of an effort to help. He just obviously needed more and better supervision on his work.

I think you forfeit your right to claim that when you don't care if a Tribble is intelligent or not. Animal Experimentation and cruelty rubs many people the wrong way.

As for better supervision, he had supervision and the result was him throwing a tantrum and ignoring orders.
 
It's really crass how this show depicts one of those as a redeemable plucky antihero, just because she likes the main character, and forgets she's literally "worse than Hitler". And the other person is painted as a complete unredeemable monster who "had it coming" - only because he's anti-social and makes mistakes.
One of those people had the opportunity to know better. The other grew up in a different environment.

I'll let you figure out which is which.
 
Of course, the victims were the problem all along, not the person who took the actions. :vulcan:

The victims were the people on the planet and the rest of the crew. NOT the people directly in charge of Edwards and that failed experiment.
 
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Funny, it looked like the crew's lived were endangered.

So what?
If you work in a nuclear reactor. And if you blow it up out of pure stupidity and recklessness, and thousands of people die.

Then it's still your fault.

Even if your life also "looked like it was in danger" during the meltdown. That's not "victim blaming".
 
You can keep spinning it, but the only person who deserves jail is Edward Larkin.

Who knows?
We never saw her taking any pro-active actions or giving any commands (open the hatches to suck the tribbles into space, securing the ship or activate self-destruct after abandoning it). We only ever saw her (and whoever her officers were) as an observant of events. Never taking action. That's the job of a Captain.

All of this is completely beside the point though. This short never tried to make a point about humanity, social interactions, crisis management or whatever. All it ever tried was to be funny. And I'm sure I would be very forgiving of all problems if I found it funny (like the post-credit scene, which I like for it's pure absurdity, and thus are very relaxed about it's logic or canonicity).

I just didn't.
Because I didn't find the "this guy is an idiot" humour funny, and the "Tribbles multiply" joke is almost 60 52 years old. That's my biggest problem with this short. Nothing wrong with you liking it, though. Humour is extremely different, and I'd much rather see some jokes fall flat than Trek never trying it. This one just wasn't my cup of tea though.
 
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