General Trek Questions and Observations

Next year, as much time will have passed in Real Life as would've passed between "All Good Things" and the AGT Future. 25 years.

 

It's almost interesting TOS had umpteen episodes about Kirk destroying computers and androids because they would control lives and societies - which was a prominent, ignorance-based fear of 1960s-1970s American culture seen in numerous shows at the time...

Then comes 1987, TNG, and by 1988 it's saying they're the same if not better than people. Which isn't entirely untrue in some ways... Makes me wish that they had Guinan and Spock sparring off in a very special 90-minute episode instead of the squandered "Unification" 2-part story. Guinan would win, because we already know Spock admits that he would not want to serve under a computer despite its technical advantages. Or does that mean Guinan would lose, since Spock admitted he preferred a biological society than banks of machines the way Dr McCoy always ribs his Vulcan mind with? And did you know my spell-checker initially mistook "Spock" as "Spork"?

Now "The Measure of a Man" is an excellent episode, but along with being compelling, it's equally suave at sidestepping the most important issue, which Maddox pointed out fairly early on. Case in point: Guinan spends more time anthropomorphizing circuit boards over caring about real people who would die along with the lost materials used to build the ship in the first place. Not to mention, it's surprising the Federation never managed to make its own similar technology on its own given what else they could do. Even your phone's predictive writing feature (well, usually) could predict what you want better than any replicator after the same number of uses. But - was Soong an independent or non-Federation entity? His research was scoffed. But so was Dr. Daystrom's, a man who had to deal with bullying and maltreatment by others as a child because of his high IQ (in terms of namecalling and stealing his ideas).

Another take: Like the offspring of a speed- and crack-addicted Frankenstein monster with the Nomad robot... In real life, imagine if the Mars rover collided with a big alien spacecraft. Rover was created to collect soil samples and relay the data back home... imagine if it collided with some big goofy alien technological craft and it got reprogrammed to destroy and the predictive unit didn't figure things out fast enough, like how your phone's predictive text feature works? On a grander scale, the version of Nomad that Kirk destroyed was the ultimate in an example of "epic AI misunderstanding" and is, amusingly enough, very plausible if there are large AI-based spaceships roaming the galaxy and picking up strange robots on the street corner by the intergalactic highway and changing their programming after hitting on them...



But everyone oversimplifies everything all the time. Just like on Star Trek. And me, I do that incessantly and erroneously. After all, Nomad's special friend wasn't V'Ger!

 

They should refilm all the future sequences with new footage of fat Frakes, have Data wear a t-shirt saying “My Other Body is a B-4” and have the Enterprise-D as a bashed up saucer section with a completely different nacelle welded to the bottom.

 

Don't know if this has been asked and answered: Is the Excelsior's Captain Stiles in STIII supposed to be the same character who served on the Enterprise as a junior officer in the episode Balance of Terror? If so, where is it referenced?

 

The names are spelled different.

 

Sorry I'm not communicating right now. A dear friend of mine just passed away on June 5th. Long before this she has asked that me and my sister help her daughter (my friend also) and let her stay with us because there is no other family for her to turn to. I have been busy helping her with 'arrangements' for her Mom. I will try to come back asap and pick up from there. Until things are settled and done, Ensign Dannan, out.

 

My condolences.

 

Thank you, Lord Garth. Just happened to open and see this. Appreciate it.

 

Ice-breaker. Rura Penthe was a cold planet.

 

In all of the publicity stills for TMP that I've seen, Bones and Ilia are always pictured far apart, I'm noticing. Was DeForest unwelcoming to the newcomers, I'm wondering?

 

The phonetic sounds in Kirk's name are also in Picard's. I, R, & a K sound. Do you think they continued to associate those with a hard, virile type of name?

 

Picard is basically a French form of Pike.

 

It's surely doubtful that the actors choose where they stand in publicity shots.

Everything I've ever heard about DeForest indicates that he was a very decent and kindly man. I find it hard to believe he'd be unwelcoming of anybody.

 

Kirk, Kira, Crusher, Sisko, Picard, Pike, Riker, Decker, Spock, Chekov, Scott, Saavik. That's a lot of K sounds

 

Maybe there's a connection to George Eastman supposedly coming up with the name "Kodak" for the world's first consumer-model camera because it (1) had no meaning in any known language, and (2) had a lot of K sounds.

Or maybe it's simply because it's a rather common phoneme in English (common enough to have a lot of ways it can be spelled), that occurs in a lot of names.

 

I like to imagine that if TOS had gone a little longer, they'd have eventually used red font. Then they would've had all three colors in the credits.

 

Roddenberry liked those tough abrupt sounding k-sound names. I forget if there was any stated rationale for it, but they give off a sort of "decisive" impression. I like finding out that we can even connect Picard to that...

 

not on screen.

 

William T. Riker is just a mix of of Kirk and Decker, in name and character.