Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x03 - "Choose to Live"

[Char Kais]

The Qowat Milat is the worst addition to NuTrek.

It's not just the worst example of the "rule of cool" that NuTrek is known for, but unlike other generic SciFi action show additions, the implications go much deeper. And the NuTrek writers, of course, did not think about them.

The Qowat Milat is a murder cult. To have these murderers on the side of the Federation is unacceptable.

When the Qowat Milat organization was introduced in Picard seaon 1, I wrote this on Twitter in early 2020:

Recruiting Elnor, a killer, for Picard's private quest, it the biggest "this is not real Star Trek" moment in Star Trek Picard.

I see a lot discussion about the practicality of s sword in Star Trek. Bladed weapons as a backup / secondary option for CQB is useful.
People bring up the Klingons and dampening fields.
The vast majority of Klingons use ranged weapons as their primary weapon.

If you expect to fight in an area with a dampening field, you would replicate a ballistic weapon. (Unless you are a bloodthirsty Klingon who is after blood and glory in a CQB fight. But I'm talking about Picard here, a private Federation citizen on a private mission.)

Elnor's first and only weapon is a deadly weapon. A sword can only reliably be used as a deadly weapon. Stabbing non-vital areas, slashing the skin or cutting off limbs, are not a reliable way to incapacitate an opponent.

If Elnor is so fond of CQB, why is he not using a stun baton? Or rather why is Picard not insisting on it? (Hint: because this is not real Star Trek)

As of episode six, every time Elnor killed someone, the situation could have been solved in a non-deadly way, the Star Trek way, with a Phaser set on stun.
This is Star Trek now. Murder Trek (aka NuTrek).

I would rather have a Pakled with a Phaser on stun as my bodyguard than a swordsman.

Picard recruiting Elnor, a killer, whose first and only option is to use deadly force, is the most "non Star Trek" thing in this show. What happened to nonlethal force? What happened to "set Phasers to stun"?

People are talking about the practicality of a sword, but not the ethicality of a lethal only weapon in Star Trek. As of episode six, every time Elnor killed someone, the situation could have been solved in a non-deadly way, the Star Trek way, with a Phaser set on stun.

For me discussions about the practicality of close-ranged weapons vs ranged weapons are secondary.
The idiocy of confronting trained swordfighters with untrained swordfighters on their own turf, which is even acknowledged in dialogue but simply ignored, is also secondary for me and is simply Discovery stupidity.

The Qowat Milat is a prime example of what is wrong with NuTrek. It's immorality. It's disregard for life.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

N

in terms of character and camera placement, it seemed a bit like Arwen's vision of her future son in LOTR: The Two Towers

Fair enough but I'm thinking specifically of the way he evaporated into black dust

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

One episode of Disco did something far more interesting with the Qowat Milat than the entire season of PIC.

 

[nic3636]

Actually, they have.
Or at least sort of.
Each and every section of a corridor on a SF ship can be isolated with forcefields. (as we saw on multiple occasions).
TNG crew even put into a forcefield on the bridge those telepathic aliens who made a replica of Picard.
Even on VOY... they used this method to isolate a few intruders... and 7 of 9 when her Borg tech was reactivated by the USS Raven.

What bugs me is that when VOY crew encountered the Equinox, they devised an internal 'net' of forcefields which would automatically go around intruding aliens... on which I thought to myself: 'Why? Internat forcefields have been used in such a capacity before, so all you need to do is tell the computer to automatically erect forcefields on alien intrusion'.

That, and SF ships should REALLY have those internal defensive systems aboard that are running off a secondary system.
That way... boarding parties would have to go fight through a plethora of automated internal systems to get anywhere (even if the internal forcefields are down)... whould have come in handy with the Kazon in 'Basics' and several attempts at capture.

Yeah, ship security is an issue that's plagued Trek from the beginning. I always think of the brig. What's the advantage to using forcefields (which fail all the time) when good old fashioned metal bars wouldn't draw power from the ship and be far more reliable?

Personally I think it comes down to transporters being pretty ridiculously overpowered when you think about it. Unfortunately Discovery made it worse with the personal transporter. Even for simple things, like in this episode they were trying to figure out how to get up on that high area of the moon ship. They ended up finding the lift pretty quick but why even bother? Just use the personal transporter. The personal transporter might actually make sense for the Qowat Milat just fighting with a sword because transporting is now instantaneous so you could just zap around all over the place faster than anyone could react. There's way too many applications, it solves too many problems. At least before the transporter took like 10 seconds to do and you needed to contact the ship to do it.

 

[Tuskin38]

The Qowat Milat is the worst addition to NuTrek.

It's not just the worst example of the "rule of cool" that NuTrek is known for, but unlike other generic SciFi action show additions, the implications go much deeper. And the NuTrek writers, of course, did not think about them.

The Qowat Milat is a murder cult. To have these murderers on the side of the Federation is unacceptable.

When the Qowat Milat organization was introduced in Picard seaon 1, I wrote this on Twitter in early 2020:




For me discussions about the practicality of close-ranged weapons vs ranged weapons are secondary.
The idiocy of confronting trained swordfighters with untrained swordfighters on their own turf, which is even acknowledged in dialogue but simply ignored, is also secondary for me and is simply Discovery stupidity.

The Qowat Milat is a prime example of what is wrong with NuTrek. It's immorality. It's disregard for life.

the federation are allies with the klingons

 

[fireproof78]

Yeah, ship security is an issue that's plagued Trek from the beginning. I always think of the brig. What's the advantage to using forcefields (which fail all the time) when good old fashioned metal bars wouldn't draw power from the ship and be far more reliable?

Personally I think it comes down to transporters being pretty ridiculously overpowered when you think about it. Unfortunately Discovery made it worse with the personal transporter. Even for simple things, like in this episode they were trying to figure out how to get up on that high area of the moon ship. They ended up finding the lift pretty quick but why even bother? Just use the personal transporter. The personal transporter might actually make sense for the Qowat Milat just fighting with a sword because transporting is now instantaneous so you could just zap around all over the place faster than anyone could react. There's way too many applications, it solves too many problems. At least before the transporter took like 10 seconds to do and you needed to contact the ship to do it.

Yeah, Star Trek's transporter causes a lot of problems.

 

[nic3636]

Actually, they have.
That, and SF ships should REALLY have those internal defensive systems aboard that are running off a secondary system.
That way... boarding parties would have to go fight through a plethora of automated internal systems to get anywhere (even if the internal forcefields are down)... whould have come in handy with the Kazon in 'Basics' and several attempts at capture.

To more specifically address this point, I know you said it would run on a secondary system but someone else pointed out that these kind of things go both ways. What if there's a bad software update and the automated defenses start killing your crew? Or in Discovery's case, what if they piss off their sentient AI? Or what if someone is able to hack the secondary system, then they don't even need to board your ship to take it over. If I was in Starfleet, I'd be a little nervous walking around knowing that there's a bunch of lethal weapons everywhere controlled by a computer.

There was an episode of DS9 that kind of addressed this. The station had a bunch of automated defenses that were incorrectly targeting the crew and they couldn't turn them off.

 

[Fateor]

Too bad they never did that in the twenty-fourth century either either on the TNG TV series or the TNG films especially.

You mean other then the episodes where they did?

 

[Nerys Myk]

Kirk giving Khan Noonien Singh access to the Enterprise technical manuals is the security breach that really takes the cake in all of Star Trek.

A little light reading can really help one recover.

 

[Noname Given]

You mean other then the episodes where they did?

Please give me a TNG/DS9 episode where - when some nefarious person/group beamed over - they immediately put them in a containment field/force field/beamed them into the brig; or there wasn't a Trek fight where Security was injured/killed. On your last claim; I did provide concrete examples showing your claim was in error.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Dramas gonna drama. After half a century you get used to it.

 

[cooleddie74]

Want drama? The DS9 crew basically condemned an entire planet of their future descendants die en masse so that Odo can save Kira from dying in the Defiant crash that leads to their future descendants being born in the first place.

Now THAT'S Trek at its most heartwarming and irresponsible!

 

[Nerys Myk]

Want drama? The DS9 crew basically condemned an entire planet of their future descendants die en masse so that Odo can save Kira from dying in the Defiant crash that leads to their future descendants being born in the first place.

Now THAT'S Trek at its most heartwarming and irresponsible!

 

[thribs]

Since now they can transfer souls into a robot, do you think they could transfer one to say, a doll?

 

[Deks]

Consistency in tech? Not in Star Trek.

But it would be nice to actually SEE tech consistency in Trek.
Set up guidelines where each show in a given era should work with and work the story around that.

To more specifically address this point, I know you said it would run on a secondary system but someone else pointed out that these kind of things go both ways. What if there's a bad software update and the automated defenses start killing your crew? Or in Discovery's case, what if they piss off their sentient AI? Or what if someone is able to hack the secondary system, then they don't even need to board your ship to take it over. If I was in Starfleet, I'd be a little nervous walking around knowing that there's a bunch of lethal weapons everywhere controlled by a computer.

There was an episode of DS9 that kind of addressed this. The station had a bunch of automated defenses that were incorrectly targeting the crew and they couldn't turn them off.

On Ds9 that was only a problem because the station was Cardassian in origin.
If you noticed, most of the UI on Ds9 was Cardassian... suggesting that the station was NEVER purged of Cardassian software 100%.
And Cardassians love their booby traps it seems.
The chances of a 'bad software update' are pretty much a rarity on SF ships... and besides, NOTHING is necessarily 100% safe.
The crews take chances every single time they go to Warp or use any kind of system

Point is, with that analogy, every single system on the ship can easily become a problem under the right circumstances... and you can't be living under that kind of paranoid state... which would mean, you wouldn't be cut out for Starfleet or serving on ships in general (also, Trek Computers DO run a huge number of things on board).

The automated defensive systems would only come online when necessary (when the ship is engaged in combat - just as a state of readiness to fight off potential invaders). They can pop out of the walls and would ALWAYS be set to heavy stun (SF default)... never vaporize (in fact, I'd just prevent internal automated systems from being able to achieve high enough yields to vaporize people - aka, the vaporize setting wouldn't exist for automated internal systems).

Forcefields automatically popping up to contain boarding parties should also be a thing... but SF ships should really have transporter inhibitors integrated onboard which would also come online during yellow and red alerts - and only authorized crew members can let certain aliens beam in or out.

Discovery was an outlier because I scoffed at the notion that the writers went into a direction of a sentient AI that wants to destroy everyone... an outdated and stupid trope I hoped to NEVER see in Trek again... it was just badly written alltogether.

And besides, SF ships in the 24th century demonstrated internal defensive and offensive capabilities.... the writers simply forgot about them over time or just ignored them.

 

[fireproof78]

But it would be nice to actually SEE tech consistency in Trek.
Set up guidelines where each show in a given era should work with and work the story around that.

Wake we up when that happens.

 

[cooleddie74]

Spoiler: it won't.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

One episode of Disco did something far more interesting with the Qowat Milat than the entire season of PIC.

No it didn't. If they are all about absolute candor specifically because the Romulans are sneaky and secretive then they really serve little purpose in NiVar where they could just align with the Vulcans who are absolutely absolute candor merchants (yes Vulcans hide truth but so do Qowat Milat)
They were poor in PIC and even more crap now

 

[Nerys Myk]

Since now they can transfer souls into a robot, do you think they could transfer one to say, a doll?

That would be child's play.

 

[JoaquinSlowly]

To suggest that the Qowat Milat are somehow redundant to Romulan culture since rejoining with Vulcans as Ni’Var is ridiculous. In addition to the basic, apparent differences between the two, there is an important essential difference between the shared Vulcan and Qowat Milat practices of openness/directness.

Vulcans actively suppress their emotions, the Qowat Milat do not, they embrace them. Their introduction in Picard’s Absolute Candor saw both Elnor and Zani in touch with their feelings and expressing them to Picard and one another. The Qowat Milat are direct in many ways, including specifically about how they are feeling, the opposite of Vulcan custom.