Yep. The Eugenics Wars were more than a century in the past and the surviving embryos from Cold Station 12 had been destroyed so Arik figured he'd try a different road to fame.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Yeah but how many familes have every generation in close to similar career paths and everyone a genius?
Not many but Star Trek is about exceptional people not average.
I was thinking of biological engineering and cybernetics as being significantly different tech trees, so to speak, but I do agree that there are similarities between the two fields.
Creating superior beings to improve humanity.
One of the Myriad Universes short stories starts with the premise that the Soong goal of improving humanity with robotics was achieved, and really, it was a better world than the prime one. Aging and disease were a thing of the past, manufactured intelligences were accepted as equals with organics, etc.
I remember that one,did not the Trek character Picard become an android?
I don't think so, but a member of the Enterprise crew, Dr. Quaice (Beverly Crusher's friend from "Remember Me") did upload his mind into an android body because his organic body was getting old with age.
It's probably easier when you're a member of a family with a pretty big history of genetic engineering... we might imagine that not only is every male Soong very similar physically because of some ancestral shenanigans, they're also somewhat similar mentally too.
In TNG: "The Game" Wesley says "only two people on board know enough about Data to do something like this... Commander La Forge and my mother". Previously we'd seen Dr Crusher being involved in rebuilding Lore, which seemed to involve more than just connecting his gross anatomy together the right way round. Clearly cybernetics have moved on a bit in the intervening three centuries and are much more "biological-like" than the primitive cybernetics we have today (cf. Picard's heart, Geordi's VISOR/eyes, etc).
Yes he did. Ridiculously.
And I agree, I am done with the Soongs! Are there no other people in the field of robotics in all of history?
Yes, taking the family back centuries is rather Black Adder, isn't it?
But Soong's ideas were supposedly so far outside any body of collected knowledge in all the Federation a) nobody believed him and b) afterwards nobody could reproduce his work. Like, not even kinda, apparently. If Data is an iPod nobody could even come up with a Zune. And all the best minds of the Federation still pretty much treated Data as magic.
At the time we learned about the good doctor we were told that he was ridiculed and shunned on his own merit. Turns out that he's from a centuries old dynasty of cranks and malcontents. All with his face and name. What are the women from the Soog family, not named Soong, up to? Someone in the 2090s probably hooked up with this guy named Daystrom. Or someone took the name Brahms.
I do think the Zefram Cochrane from the novel Federation is superior to the one from FC, but then James Cromwell's performance has endeared itself to me since 1996 and now it's hard to see anyone else who isn't the late Glenn Corbett or Cromwell in the role. FC's Cochrane isn't remotely how I'd have depicted him but it works better than it should.
Important lesson: If you're going to fly in the face of all of Star Trek history, be amazing. (See also Bush, Jess.)
The Romulans may have been right but things might have been different if they hadn't been so single-minded, intractable and violent. They forced the Soong synths hand and if they hadn't they may never have summoned the advanced synths. A lot of what we know is ancient and based on superstition.
Also under other circumstances, if those super synths were discovered in some other way, could they have been communicated with first?
I love that the writers added this interesting layer to the galaxy though. I want to know more.
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Maybe that's why Rainn Wilson's Harry Mudd works. Just different and sociopathic enough that I can still buy that it's Roger C. Carmel's character even though there are sinister differences.
I wouldn't classify First Contact as a bad movie, just that there are better stories elsewhere that cover the same general territory.
Yes he did. Ridiculously.
And I agree, I am done with the Soongs! Are there no other people in the field of robotics in all of history?
Ira Graves... but he was creepy as, even by Soong standards.
I agree that First Contact is overrated... it relies on "wow" and "novelty" factor a lot. It's not bad, it's just not great.
I think Insurrection is every bit as good a movie as First Contact, and possibly slightly better. I had an argument with someone on Reddit once about why they didn't like Insurrection and their response was "it's too much like a Next Generation episode". I agree, it's basically a feature-length TNG episode, but I absolutely do not see that as a problem. I like the humour, I like the setting, I like the villains, I like that it's stand-alone aside from some tiny and inconsequential fan-pleasing references. And I like that they went in a completely different direction and didn't just try "First Contact 2".
My opinions on Insurrection border on unkind.
Though I do love the Gilbert and Sullivan routine.
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