Well in that case, I hope that I did not just start a TrekBBS version of one!![]()
You bitch.This exact same thread already exists.
Merging
You bitch.
You are excused, sorry.Excuse me?
What!!!????You bitch.
At the risk of being accused of "whiteknighting," I have to respond here. Tim, that is a very juvenile response. What you said to Digits is way out of line. You need to apologize right now. Last I checked, you were an adult, and this sort of thing doesn't fly out here.You are excused, sorry.
Yup. Fixes many issues, and less consternation. Win-win, even if the era was the least of my concerns.Honestly, if it were up to me, Star Trek: Discovery would initially have been set in the early 25th Century. You can tell the same basic story of S1 without the 2250s setting -- Michael's parents could have been killed during the 2372-2373 Klingon-Federation War from DS9 S4-5, and T'Kuvma could be a Klingon fascist who seizes control and sunders the alliance. It would have avoided the continuity question of why Voyager was trapped in the Delta Quadrant when the Discovery could more or less teleport itself across the galaxy a hundred fifteen years earlier. I also personally think that the Sarek and Spock of DIS feel like very different characters from the Sarek and Spock of TOS, even though I did like the writing -- just letting them be different Vulcan characters with different names would solve that problem for me.
At first I liked that DS9 didn't cop out, because it would have been easy to have written Section 31 as a reactionary group that had been created out of the Dominion War and the Founder threat. But the fact that they write them as having always existed, and a foundational element of Starfleet's nature has been something that every writer after DS9 has used to either go: "see, Roddenberry's ideas about a Federation utopia are undermined because there was a secret police keeping it in place while people like Picard stood on their soap boxes" or they've made Section 31 into idiots the protagonists have to overcome to achieve their goals.
What made Section 31 compelling in DS9 is that there are moments where Sloan has a point, and Bashir's idealism is well-placed and admirable, but in the end naive.
For example, DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" pivots around the very real-world politics idea of whether Section 31 and Admiral Ross are right to install a Federation asset into a position of power by framing an honest Romulan woman who has been a fair and decent partner cooperating with the Federation.
You can argue with their methods, but Ross is absolutely right in believing that a "patriot" is going to make a decision based on what's best for her people, and not necessarily what's best for the Federation or the rest of the Alpha quadrant. With billions of people dying in the Dominion War, do you really want to take the chance that the Romulan Star Empire (i.e., a government that has never been trustworthy at any point in Trek canon) is not going to cut a favorable deal and turn on you if the opportunity occurred?
But that cuts directly against the Roddenberry ethos that humans should have "grown" to be better than that.
Let's be real for a moment, even without Disco showing a hunky-dory Federation right up until the moment of the Burn, you'd know while watching a 24th century or 25th century show that everything would turn out okay since we're not going to get a series where the Federation loses whatever war it's fighting or Earth gets destroyed or whatever.In some ways, it boxes in the 24th-25th century shows in trying to build tension for galaxy threatening events that are threats to the Federation, since you have a show that says the Federation was great till dilithium ran out and blew up.
While I understand the reasons so many people hate Section 31, I have to disagree. Having that ugly thorn in the Federation mostly-utopia is a compelling story-generator and source of moral conflict, and that’s why the franchise keeps coming back to it.Section 31.
Exactly, for a super secret organisation that operates in the shadows everyone and their dog seems to know about them.I just wish they did it more in moderation. It seems like a constant these days.
Exactly, for a super secret organisation that operates in the shadows everyone and their dog seems to know about them.
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