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Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x09 - "Terrarium"

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....wut?

These writers man, seriously.
At this point I am just waiting for the Borg to show up on SNW.
Kirk didn't go mano-a-mano with the Gorn on Cestus III. it was
KIRK: Our position.
DEPAUL: Two two seven nine pl, sir. Uncharted solar system at two four six six pm.
METRON [OC]: We have prepared a planet with a suitable atmosphere. You will be taken there, as will the Captain of the Gorn ship which you have been pursuing. There you will settle your dispute.
These fans, man. Seriously.
 
....wut?

These writers man, seriously.
At this point I am just waiting for the Borg to show up on SNW.
But how are they going to pull it off this time?

There's no "First Contact" situation.
I'm still 100% convinced that in DIS season 2, after the original red angel faith plotline fell flat, when Kurtzman & co. pivoted to the "Control"-time-travel-storyline - they absolutely planned this to be the origin story for the Borg, with Leland being the first assimilated.
And that they abandoned that at the last minute, because all of a sudden the return of Patrick Stewart & the series PIC started to materialize, and part of the pitch was to use the Borg there. Resulting in that weird non-ending of all the Control plotlines & set-ups.
 
I'm still 100% convinced that in DIS season 2, after the original red angel faith plotline fell flat, when Kurtzman & co. pivoted to the "Control"-time-travel-storyline - they absolutely planned this to be the origin story for the Borg, with Leland being the first assimilated.
And that they abandoned that at the last minute, because all of a sudden the return of Patrick Stewart & the series PIC started to materialize, and part of the pitch was to use the Borg there. Resulting in that weird non-ending of all the Control plotlines & set-ups.
Interesting theory, but any BTS rumors or talks with the writing staff to confirm that hypothesis?
 
Star Trek: Enemy Mine (or "The Return of Starbuck"). Got it. Well, to be fair "Arena" itself was a ripoff that Gene Coon had to immediately scramble to Frederic Brown for permission to use before airing, so all's fair I guess. The Gorn have been mired in unoriginality since 1966. At least they made this one less bitey.

Im shocked with all the talk of Enemy Mine that more people are not mentioning the OG crashed pilot buddies.
bsg31.jpg
See the post above :)
 
Still, I wish they hadn't done that episode on ENT, and it was really ridiculous to have the line - "We've stopped an invasion for what, 200 years?"
"We've merely postponed the invasion until....what? The 24th century?"

Yeah, it's on the nose. Like a cockroach crawling across a white rug. But it works. And I can't say that about most of the VOY Borg episodes and the PIC ones about Hugh and the Artifact just felt....well, not great or groundbreaking.
 
And even if it had been - so what? The two visiting Organians did the same thing to Archer's crew in "Observer Effect(ENT)" and half of Trekdom didn't have a meltdown over it.
Well, yeah, fans rolled their collective eyes at a lot of the hoop jumping and hand waving the producers use so they could indulge in the use of characters introduced as first contacts in later shows.

This ain't new.

Apparently there are a lot of sneaky aliens having quiet, un-named and memory erasing contacts with humans prior to previous "first" contacts. :rommie:
 
Vulcan First Contact really happens now in 1957-58, not 105 or so years later. It's just that Mestral wore a hat most of the time. :D
 
I'm still 100% convinced that in DIS season 2, after the original red angel faith plotline fell flat, when Kurtzman & co. pivoted to the "Control"-time-travel-storyline - they absolutely planned this to be the origin story for the Borg, with Leland being the first assimilated.
And that they abandoned that at the last minute, because all of a sudden the return of Patrick Stewart & the series PIC started to materialize, and part of the pitch was to use the Borg there. Resulting in that weird non-ending of all the Control plotlines & set-ups.
According to Jonathan Del Arco, Kurtzman et al were working on a Borg series centered on Hugh and Seven, but that changed when Patrick Stewart signed on. So I could see them wanting to do a Borg story on Disco, but as a means of launching a Borg series.
 
Well, yeah, fans rolled their collective eyes at a lot of the hoop jumping and hand waving the producers use so they could indulge in the use of characters introduced as first contacts in later shows.

This ain't new.

Apparently there are a lot of sneaky aliens having quiet, un-named and memory erasing contacts with humans prior to previous "first" contacts. :rommie:
That's been a part of UFO lore for decades now. Star Trek is Johnny Come Lately on this idea.

Kirk didn't go mano-a-mano with the Gorn on Cestus III. it was


These fans, man. Seriously.
Rather cynical, amiright?
 
Hell, many Trekkies forget that the Greek gods in the Trek universe were aliens who visited Earth and grew to enjoy the worship of the primitive humans of 5,000 years ago. Aliens have been a part of Earth history for millennia, we just don't officially acknowledge they're walking around on our own soil until April 2063.
 
And why would any starfleet shuttle not launch with some emergency rations, water, hand phasers, and so on? My corporate jet has more survival gear than her starfleet shuttle!
Did you miss the part where her emergency rations were damaged?
Based on all of her past experiences and knowledge of the Gorn, the only thing to do with a Gorn is shoot to kill. La’an had a fraction of a second to respond when she saw the Gorn, which could have been life or death for Ortegas. And, for all we know, the stun setting doesn’t work on Gorns.
La'an didn't even try to use the stun setting though.

What if Ortegas was suffering from some alien intoxication related to her environment and came at La'an in a hostile manner? La'an would have killed her friend and been fine with it?
 
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Did you miss the part where her emergency rations were damaged?

La'an didn't even try to use the stun setting though.
Why would she? In her experience every single Gorn has been an enemy that sees humans as food.
What if Ortegas was suffering from some alien intoxication related to her environment and came at La'an in a hostile manner? La'an would have killed her friend and been fine with it?
I've said it in an earlier post but I don't think switching from stun to kill takes a lot. La'an could definitely have had the phaser rifle set on stun by default but quickly switch it to kill and shot her intended target, in her mind an enemy Gorn ready to kill and eat them all.
 
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Did you miss the part where her emergency rations were damaged?

La'an didn't even try to use the stun setting though.

What if Ortegas was suffering from some alien intoxication related to her environment and came at La'an in a hostile manner? La'an would have killed her friend and been fine with it?
Why would she use a stun setting on a Gorn? They killed her entire family. They eat humans, including Ortegas. Half her hand was gone when she was rescued before. Ortegas also advocated for any means necessary to rescue crew members in the past. La’an gave the Gorn a Vulcan hello. I doubt Spock will have a problem with it. Ortegas shouldn’t once she has time to process it. Even the Gorn wouldn’t have a problem with it. The Gorn probably came out deliberately and provoked the phaser fire. She knew her future was bleak either way. This was quicker than dying of her infected wounds.
 
Why would she use a stun setting on a Gorn?
There's literally no reason not to. It depends how you read Starfleet, I suppose, but in my impression of Star Trek, a Starfleet officer should always act non-lethally unless literally no alternative is given. Stunning the Gorn versus killing it makes no difference to the mission, which is to retrieve Ortegas.

It's also insane to lethally shoot something that she vaguely thinks might be a Gorn when she has no idea where in space she is or what's going on on the planet, and thus what appears to be a Gorn could be literally any reptilian species (in the same way that Betazoids, Bajorans, Ilyrians, and Humans all look virtually identical, especially at a distance in low lighting and wearing face-obscuring clothing, as the Gorn was).

And even if the script does intend her to fatally shoot it because she IDs it as a Gorn, the portrayal on-screen just makes it appear that she had her phaser set to kill by default (on a rescue mission in the dark!) and fired instantly at a vague cloaked figure.
I've said it in an earlier post but I don't think switching from stun to kill takes a lot. La'an could definitely have had the phaser rifle set on by default but quickly switch it to kill and shot her intended target, in her mind an enemy Gorn ready to kill and eat them all.
I think a snag to this theory is that the entire security team had their rifles set to kill. La'an never gave an order to switch to kill (nor did Chong appear to be directed to act anything with the rifle prop that would suggest doing so), all three of them just fired simultaneously, all already set to kill.
 
There's literally no reason not to. It depends how you read Starfleet, I suppose, but in my impression of Star Trek, a Starfleet officer should always act non-lethally unless literally no alternative is given. Stunning the Gorn versus killing it makes no difference to the mission, which is to retrieve Ortegas.

It's also insane to lethally shoot something that she vaguely thinks might be a Gorn when she has no idea where in space she is or what's going on on the planet, and thus what appears to be a Gorn could be literally any reptilian species (in the same way that Betazoids, Bajorans, Ilyrians, and Humans all look virtually identical, especially at a distance in low lighting and wearing face-obscuring clothing, as the Gorn was).

And even if the script does intend her to fatally shoot it because she IDs it as a Gorn, the portrayal on-screen just makes it appear that she had her phaser set to kill by default (on a rescue mission in the dark!) and fired instantly at a vague cloaked figure.

I think a snag to this theory is that the entire security team had their rifles set to kill. La'an never gave an order to switch to kill (nor did Chong appear to be directed to act anything with the rifle prop that would suggest doing so), all three of them just fired simultaneously, all already set to kill.
I read them as a military organization that just finished one war and is on the verge of another. La’an is mounting a rescue operation in unseen, hostile territory with dangerous wildlife. She likely ordered them to set phasers to kill.
 
My bad. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Fair enough about katras. I don't know that I'd say it's treated as common knowledge, but I don't know that I would have ever categorized it as secretive. Given Vulcan is a founding member of the Federation, I can't really imagine major cultural aspects such as that being kept a secret. And IIRC, Sarek seemed to think Kirk was aware of his potentially having Spock's katra in TSFS. Kirk's ignorance of Vulcan culture is epic, it seems. But I could be misremembering.

Well, that's the thing. In TOS, stuff like mind melds and Pon Farr were treated as surprising brand new discoveries about the Vulcan people. Now with them being commonplace on prequel shows like SNW, now it just seems like Kirk & McCoy were either unusually thick or spectacularly forgetful.
I think it’s arguable in TOS that the Vulcans weren’t founding members and actually first encountered in the last fifty years of so. In the 70s fandom started leaning that way and then the following productions officially adopted the idea.

What’s also sort of funny is the idea of the founding members comes entirely from the aliens with speaking roles in “Journey to Babel” - I sometimes think about how if the copper little people or some of the other background aliens in that episode had a few lines in that episode they’d have been founding members as well. Since they obviously liked to eat, I wouldn’t be surprised if their culture ended up kind of hobbity.
 
Yes. When TOS Spock lost his temper, he was usually under some sort of mind control ("This Side of Paradise"), his internal biology was doing wacky things ("Amok Time"), or an alien was possessing his body ("Return to Tomorrow"), or time travel shenanigans that didn't make much sense because it was the third season ("All Our Yesterdays").
Spock's fighting skills also seemed to lessen in certain 3rd season episodes compared with Kirk's.
I thought most people here would get what I was saying without me having to write an entire dissertation about this, but I guess not. :rolleyes:
No need. Even the highest-quality in-depth explanations have often been been blasted for going too much in-depth. Less can be more, though ultimately it's up to the individual.
 
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