"Dead Stop" Questions.
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Oh those were not the Vegans I was looking for
I thought it was some future colony of vegans who force their vegetarian lifestyle on unsuspecting travellers at the end of a phaser gun
I guess you can argue that extremophiles would have separate storage compartments. A bigger issue in the station design is those roomy air ducts!
The covert nature of the abduction - making it look like death due to accident - suggests it wasn't a punishment (unless the alien designers believed that a punishment which was never perceived as such by the victim was nonetheless a punishment).
I didn't see the technology as self-aware enough to have a concept of punishment. It was just pragmatically filling a need.
@Christopher
No offense meant against your books (I haven't read them), my post was only intended to address the OP and the episode in general. As I very much liked this episode, I'm glad you selected it as one to expand upon.
No offense meant against your books (I haven't read them), my post was only intended to address the OP and the episode in general. As I very much liked this episode, I'm glad you selected it as one to expand upon.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I could also imagine it just playing dumb with its "your inquiry was not recognised" on perfectly simple questions, whereas it was smart enough to lure Mayweather to Launch bay with a credible (interactive) imitation of Archer, and replicating a body. (All the same, that could have been preprogrammed behaviour, too, but still).
Last edited:
Spoilers for my books:
I interpreted that more as evolved behavior. As I put it in Live by the Code, "Insects don’t decide to make themselves look like flowers to hide from predators. Spiders don’t design or engineer their elaborate webs. They just randomly mutate until they happen upon a modification that does something useful, and then modify it more and more until it gets more and more useful. They don’t need a driving will behind it, because it’s success or failure that determines what survives and what doesn’t. Evolution selects for solutions that work, which is why it so often looks the same as conscious planning. And if it operates long enough, it can produce some incredibly intricate results." Similarly, I portrayed the Ware as able to mindlessly adapt to optimize its performance and resource acquisition, and thus, over a long period of trial and error, it evolved this technique because it was effective. Taking people openly led potential customers to either stop using the Ware or to try to destroy it, so it proved more evolutionarily successful to take them in a way that nobody noticed.
After all, I always took "Dead Stop" as a satire on automated "customer service" voicemail systems that make it next to impossible for a customer to get any actual service. Not something deliberately designed to be malevolent, but a system that prioritizes the convenience and profits of the business over actual service to the customer and that therefore does more harm than good from the customer's point of view. It's the very mindlessness of those voicemail systems that makes them so impenetrable and counterproductive, and that's what I felt the episode was showing. It wasn't a self-aware entity that was the threat; rather, the threat came from the system's complete lack of awareness, the lack of any sentient oversight of its mindless operation. (Cf. Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where the real villain is not a person, but the impersonal system itself that creates problems outside of anyone's conscious control.)
There's also the fact that I needed to differentiate the Ware from the Borg as much as possible, since they have a lot in common. And the Borg Collective is self-aware and consciously acquisitive (even if the individual drones are not), so keeping the Ware as mindless as it appeared in the episode was the best way to keep it distinctive.
After all, I always took "Dead Stop" as a satire on automated "customer service" voicemail systems that make it next to impossible for a customer to get any actual service. Not something deliberately designed to be malevolent, but a system that prioritizes the convenience and profits of the business over actual service to the customer and that therefore does more harm than good from the customer's point of view. It's the very mindlessness of those voicemail systems that makes them so impenetrable and counterproductive, and that's what I felt the episode was showing. It wasn't a self-aware entity that was the threat; rather, the threat came from the system's complete lack of awareness, the lack of any sentient oversight of its mindless operation. (Cf. Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where the real villain is not a person, but the impersonal system itself that creates problems outside of anyone's conscious control.)
There's also the fact that I needed to differentiate the Ware from the Borg as much as possible, since they have a lot in common. And the Borg Collective is self-aware and consciously acquisitive (even if the individual drones are not), so keeping the Ware as mindless as it appeared in the episode was the best way to keep it distinctive.
Interesting. I have heard the fan theory that the Ware station was somehow connected to the Borg. Another theory I've heard was that it was of the same technology that the Tan Rue probe from "The Changeling" (TOS) was (due to both being able to effortlessly interface with alien tech (as Tan Rue merged with the 21st century Earth probe Nomad to create the dangerous Nomad from the episode).
It's also been pointed out that one of the station's victims is apparently a Vaadwaur (from "Dragon's Teeth" [VGR]). Bear in mind that the Vaadwaur are from the Delta Quadrant and went into stasis around the year 1492 and weren't revived until the year 2376. So, this incidental detail, if accurate really opens wide the possibilities that the Ware have been across the galaxy for eons, maybe even having pockets of stations/ships/whatever that survived the destruction in the Live by the Code book.
Agreed that not making the Ware a malicious AI entity interested in taking everything over (like Ultron, VIKI, Overmind, etc.) but a piece of programming gone out of control as time, type of usage, and simple bad luck was the better way to go.
There are fan theories linking any two vaguely similar things in Trek, even when the differences enormously outweigh the similarities -- like linking the Borg to V'Ger, or the Prophets to the Q. This is actually one of the more plausible instances, but fans have no trouble theorizing far less plausible connections, so I can't say I'm surprised.
I don't think it was advanced enough to be connected to Tan Ru. Not only was that a much more sophisticated AI, but it had weapons that could fit in a lunchbox but sterilize an entire planet. The Ware's technology is no more advanced than 24th-century Federation tech.
Yup. Its purpose is simply to provide services for customers, in exchange for payment in the resources that it needs to continue functioning. A perfectly normal business transaction. It just so happens that sometimes the resource it needs is a living brain. Whaddaya gonna do?
Or maybe the Vaadwaur themselves were descended from some other race that colonized multiple worlds, or maybe it's parallel evolution. Look at how many Trek aliens look like humans, whether by convergent evolution or alien transplantation. Why should humans be the only species that happens to? Who's to say the Preservers or someone like them didn't visit the Vaadwaur sometime?
Yeah, I'm not that much a fan of the theories myself (although I have a soft spot for the Ware/Tan Ru connection idea).
Good points. If I was to counter, I would point out that the final Nomad was a hybrid of Earth/alien tech, so who knows how it merged or what was part of the original specs for each, but an excellent point regarding the weapons (although would the Ware station's cyborging interface to turn people into memory banks be within TNG/DS9/VGR Federation tech?)
We also have the Mintakans (proto-Vulcans) ("Who Watches the Watchers" [TNG]) and Kirosans and Trill ("The Perfect Mate" [TNG] and DS9).
I'm not saying it had to be a Vaadwaur. It could have been an offshoot, a different species, or a random background alien we weren't supposed to notice was using Vaadwaur makeup. I was only commenting on the story-telling possibilities if the station was capable of traversing the entire galaxy.
Probably, since it doesn't seem that sophisticated. Given that the Ware's computers still seem pretty rigid in their programming even with sentient brains linked in, I figured they weren't using the brains for anything more than brute processing power for running the replicator and repair systems -- which is a terribly inefficient use of material, one more reason I didn't see it as a consciously designed practice.
For comparison, look at DS9: "Life Support," where Bashir keeps Bareil alive by implanting a cybernetic substitute for the dead parts of his brain. That's at least as sophisticated a brain-tech interface as the Ware had.
And Ornarans and Brekkians from TNG: "Symbiosis" look a lot like Bajorans. And the Talarians from "Suddenly Human" seem like a Klingon offshoot to me. And there are plenty of other lookalike background species that we weren't supposed to notice.
"The entire galaxy" is a much, much, much more immense place than most people realize. Sure, we've seen civilizations that can travel between quadrants, but that's not a well I prefer to go to more than necessary. And in the system I worked out, it wouldn't make sense for them to go that far afield to obtain "adjunct processors." They let ships come to them, or otherwise draw on relatively local resources. So if that was a Vaadwaur or related species, his ship presumably got to local space under its own power.
Or maybe the Voyager probe encountered the Tan Ru/Nomad probe. They mixed and V'Ger came about
