Starfleet is the worse for her absence. Sometimes having some free spirits is a good thing for a hierarchical organization.
Unless I'm mistaken, the Breen Confederacy did not actually join the Dominion the way the Cardassian Union did, but merely signed a treaty of alliance with it.
I don't think the Prime Directive would require any such thing. When the Romulans were supplying the House of Duras during the Klingon Civil War, Starfleet's decision to expose Romulan aid was said to be consistent with the P.D. I think the P.D. almost certainly allows the Federation to fight against the invasion of sovereign worlds by foreign powers.
If AGIMUS, Peanut Hamper, and Badgey were to hijack some Texas-class ships and cause problems, I could see that feeding into the anti-synth hysteria that PIC S1 established swept the Federation in the 2380s.
It's an animated sitcom. You gotta give it some leeway to be cartoonish sometimes.
I mean, the Cerritos didn't completely lose power the way the Defiant did, so clearly it did receive the counter-measures against the Breen energy-dampening weapon. The Breen just kicked the Cerritos's ass because they're more powerful ships even with conventional weapons.
I don't think she's a terrible captain, but she's still got some personal insecurity to work on.
Not sure I agree.
First off... while Nuzé's report was clearly biased... it's not like anything she said was untrue. I could easily see two different people looking at what's happened aboard the Cerritos and coming to radically different conclusions about whether or not Freeman is a good captain. I don't think she's a bad captain, but I do think a reasonable person might think she is.
Secondly -- Nuzé is from the same network that the unnamed reporter who did the hit piece on Picard in 2399 was from, FNN (Federation News Network). So even if you think Nuzé's report was unfair, that's more an argument that FNN is awful, not that news services in general are awful.
Personally, I like to imagine that FNN's primary rival is the Federation News Service, the organization Jake worked for during the Dominion War, and that FNS has a sterling reputation for fairness and independence. Maybe FNN is their more sensationalist rival. Sort of a BBC News vs. SkyNews sort of thing.
We don't know that. For all we know, Sisko might have returned for the birth of his daughter, and then have spent the next few years periodically returning from the Celestial Temple to stay in his daughter's life.
I mean, I can see someone being pissed at Picard even if they don't blame him per se.
I think the episode suggests that Picard's decision could be seen as right or wrong by reasonable people and that neither side is 100% correct.
I mean, when your state knows that its decision to withhold assistance means an entire planet full of people are going to go through intense addiction withdrawal that has the potential to escalate into mass violence, and your state does not follow up by offering medical assistance and/or diplomatic mediation services... that's pretty damn shitty. Picard may have made the right decision not to enable the Ornarans to continue getting their drug, but it was absolutely wrong of the Federation not to follow up and offer medical aid. There's a strong chance that massive numbers of people died unnecessarily and an entire society traumatized.
Well, that's the point of Project Swing By. It's an exploratory program to investigate what was happening on worlds the Federation hadn't been in contact with for a while. Plus Starfleet's whole thing is that they go out and investigate things. The Federation is not a "mind your own business and never try to talk to the neighbors" society.
The idea that the Federation has no obligations to foreign societies seems pretty dubious to me. Particularly when it makes a decision that causes people to suffer.
On the other hand, there's a level of respect they seem to have for Picard but not for the Federation. Maybe their attitude is one I think is reasonable: "Yeah, Picard made the right call by not enabling our addiction, but the Federation fucked us over by condemning our entire society to dangerous withdrawal symptoms and mass violence without offering us medical assistance. We don't blame Picard for the Federation's failure to follow up, but a lot of our people died because the Federation didn't offer medical assistance. So, y'know, okay Picard, whatever, but fuck the Federation for letting us hang. You say you wanted us to stand on our own two feet? Well, we did. We got over our addiction, we solved our problems, we're standing on our own two feet. Now fuck you and get off our planet."
Exactly.
Well, we know that the Federation President in 2372 was Jaresh-Inyo of Grazer, and we know that by 2375 he was no longer President. Maybe whoever the Federation President is now is someone who wants to offer higher levels of foreign aid than whoever was President in 2364.
Oh, they were absolutely pissed at the Federation. Hence the, "Yeah, hi, listen I'm busy, gotta go" attitude. That's not how you treat a foreign culture that's trying to contact you whom you want a good relationship with.
I mean, sure, but it's not like Jennifer and Mariner are real people. Their relationship problems are decisions the writers make. I could imagine someone wishing that the writers had written Jennifer as believing Mariner.
Honestly, it bugged my little continuity obsessive side because we've previously seen that the Federation Starfleet uses "NX" as their registry prefix for experimental ships, which the Texas class obviously is. It also bugged me because the registry number that follows the "NX" was never reset before and always roughly followed whatever the registry numbers of that ship's era were -- the Excelsior was NX-2000 at a time when new ships were crossing from the late 1900s into the 2000s; the Defiant was NX-74205 at a time when new ships were five digits starting with 7; the USS Prometheus was NX-74913 at around the same era; the USS Protostar is NX-76884; the Osler is NX-75300; etc.
It's not a big deal, and we can rationalize it by saying that Starfleet decided that an entirely new kind of fully autonomous, possibly-sentient-A.I.-run vessel deserves its own kind of special registry, but I don't like it. Not the kind of thing I give a lot of weight to even if I don't like it, though.
