General Trek Questions and Observations
- Thread starter The Old Mixer
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Gowron in Apocalypse Rising: "As for you, you should have killed me when you had the chance. I promise you will not get another."
Yeah, about that.
Yeah, about that.
Just watched "Author, Author", and regarding the end... is it really a financially sound practice to put up a bunch of highly sophisticated holo-emitters in a dilithium mine, just so some unwanted (and rather temperamental) EMH's can swing pickaxes? Wouldn't a bunch of AI-controlled industrial machines with lasers and drills work better? And you either delete the EMH's or just offer them to people who need a cheap personal physician?
I explained away the torpedoes, the shuttles, the disappearing Borg baby, the Ocampa life cycle, and even "Threshold". But not even I can explain away this.
I explained away the torpedoes, the shuttles, the disappearing Borg baby, the Ocampa life cycle, and even "Threshold". But not even I can explain away this.
If the EMH Mark 1s were all forced to use pickaxes that speaks even less well of the Federation's policy towards quasi-sentient artificial intelligence.
I haven't seen that episode yet, but the whole concept sounds ridiculous top to bottom. If there's any chance that the AI you've created has become sapient then you don't enslave it and you definitely don't have it doing manual labour that would be better performed by a more specialised mining device. Didn't the Federation even watch Measure of a Man? Or The Quality of Life?
In "Collective", when Voyager acquired Icheb and the other Borg kids, they also secure a Borg infant who's never seen again. It's a simple matter to explain this inconsistency away, declare that the child was returned to her people off-camera. I even wrote the scene that should have happened to explain it, basically Janeway adds 10s to her final ship's log. And maybe a scene of a baby carrier being beamed out.
Those applied to robotic devices that had become sapient. A hologram is, in effect, a computer program. Given that a ship's computer is not sentient (otherwise, setting the autodestruct would be murder), it stands to reason that a program within that computer isn't, either.
The ethics of making a bunch of EMH's do labor in a mine is irrelevant, though. It's just an incredibly inefficient use of resources.
lt has always bothered me that Starfleet decided to simply just dismantle Lore and store him at the Daystrom Institute instead of just incinerating his body parts. He's too much of a danger to keep his body parts around. All it would take for him to come back to life is for some bad guy to break into the Daystrom Institute to get Lore's body parts and put him back together to turn him on.
But didn't Data take his emotion chip?
Yes, in "Descent, Part II," but Soong originally intended it to have been Data's. Lore pretended to be Data to get Soong to install it in him in "Brothers." The emotion chip wasn't a part designated to Lore, it was supposed to have been a part of Data all along.
Another thing I saw in AA. In Evil Janeway's lounge, she had a bunch of weapons, including a Bajoran phaser rifle (you also see one in "Indiscretion"). And... have you taken a close look at that gun? The shoulder stock on it goes the wrong way. I mean, as an energy weapon it's probably recoilless, but good luck trying to sight it in for a long shot.
Starfleet apparently didn't want (didn't trust?) the EMH's for medical work, but still had them on hand. Putting them into mining would have been a way of getting productive work out of something Starfleet had already paid for.
If they all had mobile emitters, yes. But to use them for dilithium mining, Starfleet had to put emitters in the mine. So they were basically using ultra-sophisticated holographic projection technology to do a job that could have been handled better by 300-year-old industrial mining equipment.
Honestly, the fact that Harry was never promoted is a symptom of either the showrunners' head-shaking incompetence, their deplorable sloppiness, or their puerile determination to punish an actor they didn't like by making his character look as ridiculous as possible. Or possibly, some combination of the three.
I don't see a motive for NuTrek to participate in what I consider to be a worse blunder than "Shades of Gray" (which was made under pressure), "These Are the Voyages" (a disastrously misguided attempt at fanservice), or even "Threshold" (no excuse for this effort, but it didn't continue for five years, and they didn't rub the audience's nose in it). If Harry returns, he will probably be in the position he was in "Endgame", "Online", and "The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway", a successful career officer with his own command. That or something similar.
I could see Harry remaining an ensign under one circumstance, and that's if he was brought back as a "Lower Decks" character. LD has already demonstrated that it's willing to inflict an undeserved demotion on a character as plot device, as seen with Boimler; if it does it once, it can do it twice.
More likely, what they say is meant to be said outside the context of Starfleet. It's their off the job opinions/conversation.
We don't know enough about dilithium mining to make that assessment. Perhaps mining dilithium is a very delicate operation and using normal machinery would destroy it. They mine dilithium manually on Rura Pente after all, which I think is our only other data point. Dilithum is valuable enough that I think the Klingons would use the most efficient method to collect it, and put their prisoners to work somewhere else if machines would be better for mining it.
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