Maybe calling species with less tech "lower life forms" is more part of the problem.
I'd say: treat all species equally, regardless of their tech level. Assume they are smart and wise enough to interact with you.
Spoilers Strange New Worlds 1x02 - "Children of The Comet"
- Thread starter Mudd
- Start date
I'd say: treat all species equally, regardless of their tech level. Assume they are smart and wise enough to interact with you.
Captain Lawrence H. Styles was given the most powerful and fastest ship in the fleet.
Does a man like that need vague guidelines or the iron clad word of god to keep his nose clean?
That goes double for Captain Rudolf Ransom.
I've always understood and "got" the idea about TPD preached in TNG. Do not interfere with the natural development. Because whi are "we" to say this species deserves to survive any any species that emerges after the ELE doesn't?
Ignore the Voth (please, let's) but say some alien species prevented the ELE of the dinosaurs or going further back even The Great Dying both would stop the development of humans. Who are the aliens (and our crew) to stop one race from being over another. This as why I've always seen "Dear Doctor" as more in the gray than ad seeing Phlox and Archer as wrong.
That said, it seems like it times TNG/MT series were a bit too strict and preachy with it. It also shouldn't be an absolute.
In like how it was treated in "Pen Pals" where they kind of talked it over to decide on a course of action rather than adhering to a strict doctrine.
What Pike does in the first episode, and Picard in Who Watches the Watchers, works well. Where they realize they've made the impact so now it's just to make sure they impacted it well. (Rather than generating a false theology or devastating weapons technology.)
Picard/TNG in that episode with the dying race and Worf's adopted brother? Kinda ugly. That one where Kirk reads the US Constitution to aliens and tells them to adopt it? :tugs at collar:
Bashir gives some alien race a vaccine for a pandemic? Fine.
The Prime Suggestion is how I think of it. Sit, talk, figure out what's the best course of action and the least long-term impact.
I think our first forray into nuclear energy wasn't exactly super-smart, either. Glass houses and stones and such.
"General Order Maybe".
Sometimes intervention brings itself on. Do enough drugs and alcohol and your friends will make the right decision for you whether or not you want it.
How DARE they interfere with my destiny??
But that was not a pandemic, or that was not only a pandemic, that was sentencing.
As soon as the Dominion noticed the plague had been lifted, they had no choice but to exterminate the Teplans and Exterminate Bashir and wherever Bashir comes from, and then on to the other hundred planets the Dominion had dropped an identical plague over the last 12 thousand years, to make the plague worse, or harder to cure or destroy those planets out right.
Talk about unforeseen consequences.
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Well pike actually did survive the accident. He was in a wheel chair and could no longer speak except for beeps of yes or no from his wheel chair gizmo. He goes on to live a life of illusion with Vina. So he never died in the original show.
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I have never watched one episode of intervention.
But I do know that interventions don't work unless the intervenee wants to change and that doesn't happen until after they hit rock bottom.
My take is that the PD was never about not saving people from natural disasters. It was more about avoiding political/social/economic/military interference where we try to mold a civilization into our image. It was basically a metaphor for the interference the US has done and continues to do in the domestic affairs of other countries, like during the Cold War (when TOS was on the air) where we meddled in elections to try to make countries more pro-US or when we supplied weapons to Afghanistan in the 80's to help them defeat the Soviets only to see those weapons eventually fall into the hands of terrorist groups that would attack the US like Al Queda. So the idea is to stay out of the domestic affairs of countries because we don't know what the unintended consequences will be. We think we are making the countries "better" but we could be making them worse or more hostile. And we are violating their sovereignty and their right to self-determination. So for me, Kirk reading the US Constitution to aliens and trying to get them to adopt it is a HUGE PD violation. Giving a vaccine to aliens who are suffering in a pandemic is not a violation of the PD.
My feelings exactly.
WWIII was such a boner, that the Vulcans didn't let man out of the solar system for a century, because they were ashamed to let other people know that we were their friends.
Vulcans were always overbearing, though.
What a simply lovely episode. It hits so many of the right notes, and is (IMHO) a slight step up from the pilot. I credit this to being primarily written by Henry Alonso Myers rather than Akiva Goldsman. As I've said before, I am a huge fan of The Magicians, which had some of best character writing (and an amazing mixture of humor and pathos) and I looked forward to seeing what he could do in the Trekverse. My anticipation, it turns out, was not without cause. The dialogue here just comes across as more mature, more naturalistic, and...more human...than in the pilot.
Otherwise, the two episodes are pretty similar. We have a stock TOS trope - in this case, investigate a mysterious artifact of an elder race. In a very real way, the core of the plot here is also analogous to Discovery Season 4 (must make first contact with a race with a weird language in order to save millions) though the stakes are much more appropriate to an hour of episodic TV, and everything is edited down to the minimum needed in order to tell the story (I appreciate the lack of plot bloat). I also appreciate that not everything is answered at the end of the episode - one of my favorite elements of TOS which the later series somehow forgot about was the air of mystery - that there was a big galaxy filled with weird and inexplicable events. This felt like a taste of that returning.
Of course, as with the pilot, the plot is secondary, because this is really about character - in this case, Uhura, in her first real focus since TAS's The Loralei Signal. I am grateful they chose to focus on one of the supporting cast rather than doing the obvious thing and following up a Pike pilot with a Spock or Una episode. She has a coherent arc, from someone with deep misgivings about her role in Starfleet - and deep insecurity about her lack of experience as a cadet - into someone much more confident regarding her skills and her future. I love Celia Rose Gooding's portrayal of Uhura - she absolutely nails the TOS character (unlike Zoe Saldana, who honestly just came across as an attractive black woman playing another role). Honestly though this story is a bit heartbreaking considering we know Uhura is going to be stuck in essentially her current role for 34 years (thankfully PIC established she finally gets a captaincy some time after TUC, but still). The story also made use of both Uhura's facility for languages and her love of music (it also helps that Celia Rose Gooding actually had a background in musicals, meaning she's an excellent singer herself).
There are secondary threads through this episode as well, and all of them were well done. We get a little bit of a continuing arc regarding Pike's trauma at the foreknowledge of his death. I like the level of close friendship without any sexual tension between Pike and Una, and I love she's a good enough friend to him to try and convince him to consider other options. The last shot of the episode, with Pike looking at the cadets (currently children) whose lives he will save in 10 years came damn close to making be bawl. Spock acting as Uhura's sounding board gave him the opportunity to give several well-written speeches, of varying levels of effectiveness within the episode, but all of them showcasing Spock's earnestness combined with his own still-growing nature. He got a little bit of an arc when it came to understanding humor, which was...cute. We also get a little introduction to Hemmer in the first act, and Ortegas gets a tiny bit more to do here.
I did have a handful of nits to pick with this episode however. One of them was the use of La'an - or rather the lack of use. Look, she got heavy focus last week - I was not expecting her to be prominent this time around. But she went on the away mission with Spock, Uhura, and Sam Kirk and did...nothing. She did absolutely nothing. She made a couple of technobabble comments, and noted she couldn't sing. They should have just left her on the bridge TBH - three people is enough for an away mission, and I found her hanging staring at them just weirdly distracting. The other issue is that I think the third-act solution that Spock came up with seemed to come out of nowhere, and partially undercut the story's focus on Uhura. I suppose it's not realistic that a cadet would save everyone alone, but I was hoping that there would actually be communication between the comet and the Enterprise. Ahh well.
Still, damn near close to perfect.
Otherwise, the two episodes are pretty similar. We have a stock TOS trope - in this case, investigate a mysterious artifact of an elder race. In a very real way, the core of the plot here is also analogous to Discovery Season 4 (must make first contact with a race with a weird language in order to save millions) though the stakes are much more appropriate to an hour of episodic TV, and everything is edited down to the minimum needed in order to tell the story (I appreciate the lack of plot bloat). I also appreciate that not everything is answered at the end of the episode - one of my favorite elements of TOS which the later series somehow forgot about was the air of mystery - that there was a big galaxy filled with weird and inexplicable events. This felt like a taste of that returning.
Of course, as with the pilot, the plot is secondary, because this is really about character - in this case, Uhura, in her first real focus since TAS's The Loralei Signal. I am grateful they chose to focus on one of the supporting cast rather than doing the obvious thing and following up a Pike pilot with a Spock or Una episode. She has a coherent arc, from someone with deep misgivings about her role in Starfleet - and deep insecurity about her lack of experience as a cadet - into someone much more confident regarding her skills and her future. I love Celia Rose Gooding's portrayal of Uhura - she absolutely nails the TOS character (unlike Zoe Saldana, who honestly just came across as an attractive black woman playing another role). Honestly though this story is a bit heartbreaking considering we know Uhura is going to be stuck in essentially her current role for 34 years (thankfully PIC established she finally gets a captaincy some time after TUC, but still). The story also made use of both Uhura's facility for languages and her love of music (it also helps that Celia Rose Gooding actually had a background in musicals, meaning she's an excellent singer herself).
There are secondary threads through this episode as well, and all of them were well done. We get a little bit of a continuing arc regarding Pike's trauma at the foreknowledge of his death. I like the level of close friendship without any sexual tension between Pike and Una, and I love she's a good enough friend to him to try and convince him to consider other options. The last shot of the episode, with Pike looking at the cadets (currently children) whose lives he will save in 10 years came damn close to making be bawl. Spock acting as Uhura's sounding board gave him the opportunity to give several well-written speeches, of varying levels of effectiveness within the episode, but all of them showcasing Spock's earnestness combined with his own still-growing nature. He got a little bit of an arc when it came to understanding humor, which was...cute. We also get a little introduction to Hemmer in the first act, and Ortegas gets a tiny bit more to do here.
I did have a handful of nits to pick with this episode however. One of them was the use of La'an - or rather the lack of use. Look, she got heavy focus last week - I was not expecting her to be prominent this time around. But she went on the away mission with Spock, Uhura, and Sam Kirk and did...nothing. She did absolutely nothing. She made a couple of technobabble comments, and noted she couldn't sing. They should have just left her on the bridge TBH - three people is enough for an away mission, and I found her hanging staring at them just weirdly distracting. The other issue is that I think the third-act solution that Spock came up with seemed to come out of nowhere, and partially undercut the story's focus on Uhura. I suppose it's not realistic that a cadet would save everyone alone, but I was hoping that there would actually be communication between the comet and the Enterprise. Ahh well.
Still, damn near close to perfect.
By the way, is it weird that we got a "last time on SNW" at the start of the ep since it is an episodic format? It does not seem really necessary. Or maybe they wanted to remind the audience about Pike's issue with his future death to help give context to this ep since it continued that character arc?
It's been a while since I've seen the Omega Glory, but that was a parallel earth who wrote its own US constitution centuries earlier. The real problem was that the natives of that world, descendants of the architects of that document were illiterate.
However... If the Universal translator is telepathic... Shouldn't it make illiterate people able to read? At least while they were under the umbrella of it's effect?
They should do the opposite.
"On the next exciting episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!"
How did the universal translator instantly translate the language of the Shepperds when they had never spoken before?1?!
The Shepherds are more advanced. Maybe their UT did the work.
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