And maybe he though that he could save the planet. We don't know what his original plan was. But all is needed that he thought that he could stabilise the star, none of the nonsense from the comic or STO is needed in any way or form.
Michael Chabon vs Trekkies
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
@Longinus @rfmcdpei
At this point it's now clear we're not arguing which fictional science is better than which fictional science (or which noncanon work overrides which noncanon work), but about our interpretations of the character of Spock. And I feel when he promises to save a planet, he means save the planet period, no fine print.
Your arguments involve attaching all sorts of fine print to Spock's words.
To be fair, all we know about the figure of 900 million is that this is the number of people who needed to be evacuated, as I argued below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromIn..._figure_of_900_million_evacuees_from_romulus/
For all we know, that might simply have been the number the Romulans could not move, say ust over 19 billion of the 20 billion.
The noncanon work not written in the timeline of Picard has nothing to say about that setting. The one written in that timeline does.
And you're not addressing the topic of Spock's character which I pointed out was paramount to my argument because...?
In fact, you're addressing topics I outright said in the post you quoted aren't actually relevant to the spirit of Star Trek. (canon/noncanon etc.)
At the end of the day, if Spock intended to buy the Romulans more time to evacuate he would have said so in the 2009 film. He said he promised to save the planet.
Any other interpretation of that line severely damages Spock's character by having him be an exact words Vulcan who at the end of the day says something different than what he means. And I'd rather not see that done to Nimoy's final performance honestly. That performance deserves better than that.
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Upthread, I had, when I pointed out that Spock was capable of ruthless moral calculus. Most famously, and more explicitly for you, he chose to suffer an agonizing death from radiation poisoning to spare the Enterprise destruction from the Genesis Effect. If he is willing to suffer so much himself, I would think him willing to risk suffering on Romulus if it meant many people might be saved. Certainly he has the moral credibility to do so!
You are the person who is bringing in STO, which describes a very different timeline from Picard. One might as well bring in Peter David's MU novella, in which Romulus was depopulated by a thalaron bomb, to say that bomb caused the supernova. Hey, it is a licensed work, right? No matter that it describes a different timeline, one with very different events.
We do not see Data alive in the body of B4, in Picard, while in STO Mars is not burning after it was destroyed by synths in 2385. STO, critically, describes a supernova that occurred with very little warning and had mysterious superluminal effects; Picard describes a supernova that occurred with years warning and had entirely predictable effects. It is not clear to me what STO actually has to say about the events of Picard.
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I mean, if you have a headcanon that is great. Lots of people have that. Even now, in 2020, fans of Diane Duane's Rihannsu novels still try to find ways to fit her worldbuilding into the gaps left by in the canon of televised work. It is just that you have no reasonable expectation that other people should share in your particular canon.
If STO will bring anything to the canon of televised Trek, I suspect it will be the idea that the supernova was artificial. Beyond this, I do not know that it will be tightly tied to that. We have seen multiple civilization with access to starkilling technologies, for instance. Even if it was the Iconians responsible in both STO and Picard, why might they not have decided to trigger a strange supernova of distant Hobus in STO but decided, in the main universe, to go after the Romulan homeworld's sun?
If STO will bring anything to the canon of televised Trek, I suspect it will be the idea that the supernova was artificial. Beyond this, I do not know that it will be tightly tied to that. We have seen multiple civilization with access to starkilling technologies, for instance. Even if it was the Iconians responsible in both STO and Picard, why might they not have decided to trigger a strange supernova of distant Hobus in STO but decided, in the main universe, to go after the Romulan homeworld's sun?
There's a massive difference between playing with your own life and playing gotcha on an entire planet. I'm surprised this has ti be explained
Who says that it was a case of gotcha? We have no reason to believe that Romulans were unaware of the consequences of Spock's red matter plan. They were quite plausibly desperate for any solution that he might offer, and Spock willing to do whatever he could.
Beyond this, Spock has shown himself someone actually able to make hard decisions, not least because he is unwilling to spare himself for his own sake.
We don't have the exact details of Spock's plan, but I have confidence that it was the best possible plan he (and probably anyone) was capable of coming up with, that the plan aimed to save as many Romulans as possible and that Spock was willing to sacrifice his own life to accomplish it.
Yeah. The one thing I think we can most plausibly guess is that he was deeply disappointed in both the Romulan state and the Federation for making his solution at all a viable one. In any other situation, this would have been a disaster. That things got to this point ...
If the two accounts of what happened leading up to the destruction of Romulus come into conflict and becomes a matter of which version is right (and I don't think it has), I'm going with the Picard version.
We could say, maybe, that the Romulan home system was a distant binary, and that Hobus was simply an overlooked star, lacking in habitable planets or any substantial settlements.
With the rewrite, Spock's original plan makes no real sense. If it was the Romulan star going nova, then there was no way to save Romulus in any form. After the star had been collapsed into a black hole, the remaining Romulans would've frozen to death in a few hours time.
Presumably the star was showing signs of imminent collapse identifiable to Romulan sensors.
Nothing in Picard says the star is in the Romulus system. All they've said is 'Romulan star', that could mean any star in their territory.
It was also induced artificially by a group of Romulans working with the Iconians (the Romulans were tricked into doing it).
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Hobus_System
Part of the explosion propagated through subspace to explain how it could reach other star systems so fast.
It was also induced artificially by a group of Romulans working with the Iconians (the Romulans were tricked into doing it).
https://sto.gamepedia.com/Hobus_System
I actually mentioned this in my reply to Chabon's #trekimponderables response. Nothing in Trek Canon confirms it's the Romulan sun other than a journalist who could have been generalizing. It really depends on if the rest of season 1 details definitively its the Romulan sun or not. We'll keep watching over the next months and soon find out.
If Season 1 is left vague regarding supernova details, the writers are now aware of the error regarding Spock's plan being rendered meaningless and can adjust course for season 2. Although that does mean throwing non-canon works like "Last Best Hope" under the shuttle so to speak, but hey, they're noncanon anyway.
Another workaround is technobabble where the black hole was not meant to destroy Romulus' sun, but just absorb its exploding matter and then somehow redirect the energy to stabilize the sun or something. But that will be some hefty technobabble the audience may not have the patience for.
We're kinda at a semantics point here. I would think Picard would've identified it as a "star in Romulan space/territory" if he wasn't directly referencing the home star of the Romulus system.
Picard was actually pretty lenient on that journalist before he had the meltdown. Thus he may not have bothered to correct her geography errors. He could have pointed out that he won't talk about his departure from Starfleet but he actually decided to answer her question.
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