It seems there is a reason for the visual reboot and the producers aren't being honest about it.
- Thread starter Smoked Salmon
- Start date
You're right, Qs are not Gods. They can die.
"Puny God".
He's a "real" god insofar as he was/is worshipped as one, but he's doesn't exist outside our minds/culture in the real world, and he's an alien in Trek's one. Actual believers in whatever god would take issue with both those points as they apply to the "realness" of their god.
And Dracula was Judas...oops, wrong franchise.
Yes, like I said, it doesn't get much more actual than that. With the possible exception of the evident existence of Christ in "Bread and Circuses," which I cited, AFAIK this is the closest Trek has come to having full-fledged deities exist in continuity.
I haven't seen anything in DISCO to make me think it will break that trend.
I think there's also a strong case to be made for that.
It's just that for some people, anything less than the inexplicably supernatural is a disqualification. I don't necessarily agree with that strict position, because part of the apparent paradox of discovery is revising one's preconceptions in the face of new evidence. Myself, I think it would be fair to regard the being Apollo as the "actual god" of history, upon encountering him as in TOS, even if he not actually be literally a god in the sense of also being of the inexplicably supernatural, and I would think it fair especially if (such) gods don't actually exist.
I mean, in that case, you wouldn't have anything else that could be actual gods except the beings earlier people thought were gods.
Gods can die. See Ragnarok.
FWIW, I don't think Christ "exists" in "Bread and Circuses." I didn't take the line at the end to mean that he goes through the same schtick on every planet in the universe in the same way but instead that their similar society developed a similar prophet to spread a similar code. Those space-Romans were real assholes and they needed Jesus.
That would make a lot more sense, but that's not really the way it played. I think this is probably one of those cases when in retrospect we squint so that it's like you're describing.
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I think that's the point @eschaton was getting at. There's no particular reason to object to beings in Trek who are extraordinarily powerful and/or worshipped by somebody (and even if there were, that ship sailed long ago), so long as they can be explained in a naturalistic way. The problem would be with any entity that's explicitly or unavoidably supernatural.
The actual reference in "Bread and Circuses" was only to "the son of god." It was a stupid reference in a stupid episode, for multiple reasons, not least the fact that they explicitly had the otherwise Roman culture speaking English, for no apparent reason other than to pull off the sun/son homophone at the end. Even as a kid I couldn't swallow the whole "parallel planet development" conceit. Notwithstanding that, however, lots of religions feature a deity in the role of the son of another deity, and it just makes sense to posit Kirk's subsequent musing about "Caesar and Christ" to be referring to analogous historical figures, not the exact same individuals.
There's only one God, ma'am
I think borderline unrealistic god-like entities with unlimited power would be widely accepted, and already is a Trek staple: The Q are borderline "real" gods with their powers, I don't like the "prophets" from DS9, but that's mostly because of the religious storylines, as a concept they fit quite well into Trek, and TOS had more than a few "gods" as well. What makes Trek unique is their attitude towards them: They never get treated as "real" gods, just as higher beings like any other as well.
What I DON'T want to see in Trek, under NO circumstances, are references that the "real" one true god exists, or the appereance of angels or the devil in their actual biblical version. E.g. show us that the Christian interpretation of the world is the "real" one. BSG did that, and it pretty much broke the show - despite the religious aspects being a central core concept of that show right from the beginning. Luckily that happened in the finale, so the series was already wrapping up.
Star Trek as a universe would be pretty much broken if they introduced the "real" god to that franchise. I don't assume its going to happen, but the hiring of so many writers of shitty Christian fundamentalist b-movies for the next season, and their promise of "science vs. religion" as the theme, don't give me much hope either - I expect some god-awful "or IS he real?" -dun dun DUN - winks to the audience, that will then forever be used by assholes on the Internet as the proof that even the Trek universe has the one true god in it.
What I DON'T want to see in Trek, under NO circumstances, are references that the "real" one true god exists, or the appereance of angels or the devil in their actual biblical version. E.g. show us that the Christian interpretation of the world is the "real" one. BSG did that, and it pretty much broke the show - despite the religious aspects being a central core concept of that show right from the beginning. Luckily that happened in the finale, so the series was already wrapping up.
Star Trek as a universe would be pretty much broken if they introduced the "real" god to that franchise. I don't assume its going to happen, but the hiring of so many writers of shitty Christian fundamentalist b-movies for the next season, and their promise of "science vs. religion" as the theme, don't give me much hope either - I expect some god-awful "or IS he real?" -dun dun DUN - winks to the audience, that will then forever be used by assholes on the Internet as the proof that even the Trek universe has the one true god in it.
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Then maybe for the sake of the audience, they could have just thrown That in to explain the bombs by putting a simple word before them in the script.. "Magnetic Bombs" would have been logical
Yes, this was what I was getting at. We have of course had some characters over the years who are explicitly people of faith - most famously Kira, but also Worf and Chakotay - whose faith has generally been explored as a complex aspect of their personality, not as some strawman to tear down. However, in general when Starfleet meets beings of awesome power who make the claim of divinity, the response is always skepticism, and the arc almost invariably deflates any of their grandiose claims by the end. The Prophets are perhaps the one exception - but they never claimed to be gods or wanted the worship of the Bajorans, and in many ways they appear to be much more limited in their powers than Q and other entities shown in Trek.
If DIS starts suggesting that maybe the mycelial network is God, and we find out spore Culber is "resurrected" from the afterlife, it will not only eye rolling, but nearly franchise breaking.
A group of t\he Bajoran "Prophets" did want and expect worship - they were the Pah Wraiths.
That's because he killed the rest.There's only one God, ma'am
And completely unnecessary, just like it was all the other times they dropped bombs in space in Star Wars (see The Empire Strikes Back).
Those bombs appeared as blobs of blue energy with unknown properties, not unlike photon torpedoes. The ones in TLJ looked like ordinary bombs.
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