Discovery and "The Orville" Comparisons

You do realise the Klingons just declared war........? You think Sisko was immoral and questionable every time he blew up a Dominion ship? It was, in essence, THEIR ship...... As Spock would say: your logic is flawed.... and I think you know that.

 

I want to see the positive too...it’s why I keep watching. Mainly my feel is it’s not ‘bad’ but it’s differences are many, any, from a certain perspective (the bit where my five year old was looking forward to a new Star Trek to watch) the series has failed me. Whether, overall, in th story, characters like burnham can be redeemed in the narrative (its an obvious redemption arc, even the dialogue signposts it) is the question.
Fundamentally though it’s ‘darkness’ whether liked by people or disliked, does mark it out as separate.
Visually, it’s good link between ENT and TMP. (Hologram niggles I can sort of handwave...it’s not like they are anything like holodeck photonics as we saw in Ds9...the Klingons...will need a narrative explanation to work for me I think.)
Those events you see as showing it in a bad light did happen though, and it’s up to writers to dig that path back up from, or show the consequences. It’s narrative logic in most of Trek storytelling after all.

 

Yes. However, what happened in that episode is indeed, as discussed elsewhere, considered a war crime. Something the Federation just doesn’t do.

 

Idealists will get us all killed!
Idealism is fantastic on paper!
But the world is never a cleancut case!
The damn Klingons fired first!
Sneaky gets the job done!
Morals in war is not worth the while, there is only hard and harder choices!

 

Do you know what a war crime is?

 

That corpsebomb thing was brilliant.

 

Selling weapons to the Borg?

 

Blowing up the ship would have destroyed everyone on there including the corpses.

Attaching a bomb to a corpse to deliver said bomb to do exactly the same thing, destroying everyone including the corpses isn't a war crime, it's semantics.

there is a difference between booby-trapping a corpse to be found by, who knows who later and booby-trapping a corpse to destroy the very individuals within minutes of them attacking you.

 

Do you resort to only rhetorical questions when you're out of arguments? Lame.

 

Yes, it's what Ed Mercer commuted in the last episode of The Orville by wantonly killing civilian family members on the Krill ship.

[And there's plenty they could have done without doing that - disable the Quantum Drive, find a way to warn the Union so there is a Fleet there at the Colony. But no Ed Mercer decided everyone but the Krill children need to die.]

 

How dare the writers of DIS put characters into morally challenging scenarios where there's no easy solutions like having omnipotent gods interfere by forcing a cease fire?

 

And...how DARE they write with drama and entertainment in mind...where the decisions of the characters and associated outcomes aren't a given because those characters react with the same predictable moral superiority and steadfast righteousness every single time???

NOT MY STAR TREK!!! FOR SHAME!

 

How exactly did you end up a fan if what Star Trek is seems to offend you so much?

 

Nice try, but that's entirely supposition.

Even the children were referred to by their teacher as "trainees" - it's not established in the episode that there are civilians on the vessel.

If you want to play "you're another," you'll have to do better. And if the best defense you can muster for this tripe is to attack another TV show, Discovery's in pretty sad shape.

 

Is spy sabotage of a military target illegal according to the Geneva Convention?

 

There are no rules in war.

The victors decide what was right and wrong at the end.

Churchill said it best.
"History shall be kind to me for I intend to write it".

 

It can't possibly be lamer than excusing a war crime by saying "You do realise the Klingons just declared war........?" as if that bit of circular logic wraps everything up neatly in a bow. So, it's not a war crime because they were at war? Huh?

Either you only heard about what happened secondhand and didn't see the episode yourself or you are deliberately misrepresenting what happened in the episode to support your argument.

1) The Krill warhead was literally destroyed in the upper atmosphere of the target colony seconds from impact, so they didn't have the time or ability to pursue the alternatives you suggest. They would have been killed and/or captured and tortured first, and 100,000+ civilian colonists would be dead as a result.
2) They did actually consider alternatives before deciding on the "light bomb" as a last resort and only did so regretfully. Never was it considered a humorous undertaking to be mocked, it was the grim business of war.
3) They did all this while undercover in occasionally malfunctioning holographic overlays, amidst the traditions of an unfamiliar species almost getting them caught, and on a hostile military ship where they were ultimately being pursued by the enemy and had to fight there way around the ship.
4) They did make sure to humanely secure the only civilians they knew of on the ship, which were the children. Everyone else appears to be either a combatant (even the teacher wore a military uniform and was training the children for holy war) or part of the religious hierarchy/theocratic government which acted like political officers on totalitarian military ships, gave the military their broader marching orders (while command decision aboard ship remained in military hands), and carried out public mutilations of captured human corpses, so a legitimate military target.
5) If they hadn't have killed the crew they could not have secured the ship or their escape and their mission to retrieve the contents of the holy book would have failed, and again, 100,000+ Union civilians would be dead.
6) After the fact, Mercer is left to confront the fact that he probably just radicalized all the students against humans even more than they already were, though there really was no choice in the matter. So it was treated seriously and regretfully.

 

Hate watching Star Trek is a worldwide pastime. Where have you been all this time?

 

Looks like spying in general isn't a war crime. About all I could find on it in a few minutes. Mercer and Malloy, if captured, could be treated as domestic criminals.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule107_sectionb