What is your opinion of season 3 as a whole?
- Thread starter Rahul
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This is another great example to prove the inconsistency.
- We have Q Junior, who matures rapidly in Voyager.
- We have Amanda Rogers, who gains her Q powers at age 18, behaves immaturely initially, matures rapidly, and is then tested by the continuum and found selfless.
- And we have Reiker, turned into a Q, behaves irresponsibly initially (consistent with Voyager), then by the end of the episode achieves maturity, realizing cosmic powers come with cosmic responsibilities and gives up his Q powers
If we remove Amanda Rogers from the above, we still have two examples of Q demonstrating responsibility with their new powers rapidly after acquiring them. If we ignore both Reiker and Rogers because they were both first human, then we are left only with the singular established lore precedent being the rapid maturation of Q junior.
We have many examples of Q being troublemakers (John De Lancie's Q, Quinn, Q Junior), but they are not portrayed as behaving like children for the first 8000 years of life. Not all Q are portrayed as troublemakers though (Judge Q).
The inconsistency arises from SNW's portrayal of an 8020 year old Q who behaves like a child, in direct contrast with the three above we are shown on screen to develop maturity very quickly.
Except we have one episode where he's conceived and another episode where he's played by deLancie's son. There's possible untold centuries between those 2 episodes in his timeline so I don't know where you have this idea he "matured rapidly" onscreen in Voyager came from.
If you live first and then gain Q powers, your natural common sense tempers it. If you have Q powers from birth, it takes a while to learn sense.
Trelane needed an advanced machine to help him harness and project his powers in TOS, so apparently even some of the Q need physical devices to assist in the development of their incredible abilities, at least during childhood and adolescence.
Sure that's possible, but it's head canon. This was not shown anywhere in the established on screen canon of trek.
On the topic of Trelane's machines, we also know that the Q apparently fought the El-Aurians to a stalemate from Picard, a species that aside from being long-lived and sensing temporal changes have no other Q-like abilities, indicating that at one point the Q were a lot weaker or have some weaknesses that the El-Aurians could exploit because everything before this revelation indicated the Q could genocide the El-Aurians if they wanted to (come to think of it, was that Borg assimilation of El-Auria in the 23rd century really just an unfortunate coincidence?)
Just because we haven't seen them in use Powers openly, doesn't mean the El-Alurians don't have them.
And my on-screen reference to back this up is the physical stance Guinan takes (specifically with her hands) when Q appears with Picard in 10 Forward in the TNG S2 episode Q-Who.
As the president of the "Yes the Gorn in SNW Mess Up Arena" fan club, what did "they" experience? Some weird thing that messed with their memories and reality? Welcome to Tuesday.
Really, Star Trek fans made a direct connection between Trelane and Q about six minutes into Encounter at Farpoint. Either in a more forgiving continuity way or in a Gene is recycling ideas in his first episode way. Why did Picard never say "Oh, you know, James Kirk encountered one of these"?
And really, if Spock can't figure out that they're seeing a Gorn again, what is the connection between Trelane and the really weird day he had when he thought he and Christine were getting married? Flashing lights? Hell, it could have been Ghosts of Illyria again.
I'm not crazy about the episode and I think it's a dumb way to draw a line between Q and Trelane (nice to hear De Lancie again). But it makes as much sense as anything else with these characters.
Been a while since I saw the episode (not a fave). Didn't that turn out to be a red herring that he doesn't actually need?
Or that they couldn't have had them once but lost them since (or maybe just Guinan lost her universe-altering powers).
He did tell Kirk that his mirror device wasn't the only means of instrumentality at his command, so maybe at that point in his adolescence he could manifest some powers without the machine and others required its assistance?
Probably just couldn't multitask very well. I mean at the same time he was keeping out a planet's toxic atmosphere, creating an Earth-like environment, and keeping the Enterprise from being able to scan the area.
So yeah he might have created a couple of devices to do one or more of those things without him having to worry about it or constantly concentrate to keep everything going.
I find it kind of baffling how something that was so obviously included as a humorous homage to both a decades old fan theory and a fan-favorite character is dissected to such an absurd degree, prodding it from every possible angle like it was some sort of super-serious attempt to retcon established Trek lore instead of the wink to long-time viewers that it actually was meant to be. And again, I say that as someone who thought the episode was super lame. It’s all over the place, but certainly not because of some harmless joke that maybe contradicts an episode or two from the fucking 90s.
lol - dismissal of trek canon on a trek forum has to be some form of blasphemy!
The dissection of the Q lore was a result of its use as a proxy against the broader criticism of the season's writing. I'm satisfied the point has been conceded. Its been fun
You’ll find that a great many people don’t give a rat’s ass about canon on here (while there’s also lot of people that do, obviously). It’s certainly a bit of a stereotype, but in my experience it’s not at all what a majority of Trek fans concern themselves with.lol - dismissal of trek canon on a trek forum has to be some form of blasphemy!
So the season sucked because they got some meaningless tidbids of canon wrong? Not even close.
You mean the same canon that includes James R. Kirk of the UESPA and the Earth ship Enterprise commanded by Kirk and his half-Vulcanian first officer? The same canon that was also reinterpreted multiple times in the Berman era (Romulan cloaks a century before Balance of Terror to name one infamous example)? The same canon that has two completely different versions of Trill appearance and biology? The same canon that showed Alliance ships with cloaks in Crossover, but then a few years later based an entire episode on the notion that cloaking tech didn't exist in the Mirror Universe? That canon? Is that the canon you're talking about here? If there's blasphemy involved, then it goes all the way back to the church. Truth be told, the canon for Star Trek is actually remarkably consistent for a shared continuity that has lasted almost 60 years with almost a thousand entries.lol - dismissal of trek canon on a trek forum has to be some form of blasphemy!
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Definitely. If my recollection is correct in the middle of the Q2 episode Q says he spent many years with his son while only a few minutes passed for Janeway so he could easily be thousands of years old in the episode, 8000 is certainly extremely young to a 4 billion year old entity.
YATI.lol - dismissal of trek canon on a trek forum has to be some form of blasphemy!
Star Trek is inconsistent. It's not so precious that it can't endure a minor inconsistency.
If we go to the transcript
This seems to imply Q has met Kirk. Hmmm, I wonder when that was.
Your dissections don't hold water, given you never watched the source material from TOS to begin with.lol - dismissal of trek canon on a trek forum has to be some form of blasphemy!
The dissection of the Q lore was a result of its use as a proxy against the broader criticism of the season's writing. I'm satisfied the point has been conceded. Its been fun
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