Origin of Armus - Exiled Founder?

[Timo]

moving all sorts of objects and people around with the power of their mind

What other power could they use? Their physical form doesn't seem to have mass or substance to speak of; every time they move an object, they are really using a power alien to us.

I think someone as imaginative as yourself could come up with several other explanations for Laas's ability to do what he did without Telekinesis. Perhaps he just shapeshifted into a solar sail for most of his journey and that allowed him to pick up speed more and more in the inertia of space.

Laas is not a limited creature. He can turn into fog or fire; suggesting that he can't propel himself through space on the power of his mind is inconsistent and unnecessary.

Unless we categorically assume that Laas doesn't actually shapeshift and act, but merely creates the illusion of that in the minds of the observers. It may be that this is how Changelings work. But then again, it would also be a good explanation to how Armus works: like a Talosian (only better), he tells our heroes to throw their phasers into the tar pit, then tells Riker to dive in there, too, and in reality he's just a small, balding man behind the curtain and nothing he appears to do actually takes place physically...

Really, it's pretty hopeless to disprove that a creature of great powers would not be related to another creature of great powers: the powers themselves automatically enable the connection in all circumstances. The only "proof" comes from the dramatic undesirability of a connection: in a galaxy full of wonders, why should any wonder A be related to B? Well, if the story connecting them is good, why not?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NrobbieC]

Laas is not a limited creature. He can turn into fog or fire; suggesting that he can't propel himself through space on the power of his mind is inconsistent and unnecessary.

But he wasn't using his mind...

Besides there's no evidence Changelings can imitate telepathy and telekinesis only physical forms.

 

[Mr_Homn]

But it's a possible one if one so prefers, and takes a lot of effort to actually rule out.

Really, it's pretty hopeless to disprove that a creature of great powers would not be related to another creature of great powers...

It's very difficult to prove a negative. That doesn't mean the premise you are putting forth is not ridiculous.

It's very difficult to prove that Romulans don't have secret shape-shifting ability they just never mentioned or bothered to use.

It's very difficult to prove conclusively that Picard is not a hermaphrodite.

It's very difficult to prove that the Borg are not an offshoot of a secret Ferengi experiment.

But, with some powers of observation, and a little common sense, you can rule this stuff out.

 

[Dukhat]

I think the OP's idea that Armus and the Founders are one and the same solely because they both shape-shift, and the hoops through logic that people are spouting to try to justify this, is utterly silly, and indicative of so many fanwankish ideas of Trek's "Small Universe" syndrome. By that logic, the liquid metal Terminator in T2 must have been a Founder as well.

 

[NrobbieC]

By that logic, the liquid metal Terminator in T2 must have been a Founder as well.

So that's what happens when the Borg assimilate Changelings!

 

[Tiberius]

So you're saying the Founders and Laas and possibly Odo were capable of moving all sorts of objects and people around with the power of their minds, but over the course of seven seasons of DS9 it just... never came up? Right.

Maybe the race that dumped all their negativity onto him were telekinetic, and viewed it as a bad thing, so they dumped that on him too.

I don't think it takes much effort at all to disprove the theory, within reason. I've already done so multiple times in this thread. You just choose not to accept it.

I for one am not pushing it. I'm simply saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if such and such," and then trying to find a way to make it work. I'm certainly not proposing that he MUST be a founder.

 

[Mr_Homn]

I for one am not pushing it. I'm simply saying, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if such and such," and then trying to find a way to make it work. I'm certainly not proposing that he MUST be a founder.

They retcon our show, and we fall back. They propose nonsensical theories, and we fall back. Not again. Not this time. The line must be drawn here! Armus, no Founder! And I will make them pay for what they have done!

 

[Tiberius]

*Patpat* Calm down, Mr Homn. this is just a "what-if" thing. That's all.

 

[Mr_Homn]

*Patpat* Calm down, Mr Homn. this is just a "what-if" thing. That's all.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEKywn7fhVo[/yt]

 

[Dukhat]

By that logic, the liquid metal Terminator in T2 must have been a Founder as well.

So that's what happens when the Borg assimilate Changelings!

OK, even I will admit that that's a pretty good comeback

 

[chrinFinity]

First, arguments about good and evil are subjective. If the Founders cast off all their subjective evil in Armus, they may have kept some xenophobia and racism if they didn't have reason to consider those attributes evil.

Furthermore, it is not unreasonable that after hundreds or thousands of years, they got "re-evil."

Second, I feel the need to point out that Odo shapeshifts his comm-badge, and it works. Not that fancy a piece of tech, but it's odo-goo-tech nonetheless and it does work.

Third, Armus's telekinetic acts seem to consist of the following:

1. Ability to knock power offline on any ship that passes near Vagra II.
2. Ability to project an energy field obscuring sensors and scattering transporter beams.
3. Ability to kill Tasha by knocking her across the screen, from at least several feet away, "sucking the life right out of her" in the process.
4. Ability to slap visor off Geordi's face, again from several feet away.
5. Ability to disappear and reappear the visor in the sand
6. Ability to drag Riker through the sand and into the pit

Again, here I'm going to go with the notion that Armus is not a normal shapeshifter. He's not like one individual changeling ("the Ocean becomes the Drop"), nor is he like the entire Great Link ("the Drop becomes the Ocean"). He is more like a collection of unwanted residue that's occured as a byproduct of the Great Link purging itself of unwanted elements (maybe "the foamy crap that comes up in the surf").

The psychokinesis can be explained as a result of this. Consider:

1. Armus's origin is unique as described above. Could have left him with powers which are in some way concentrated and exceptional from what Founders normally have (such exceptional environmental manipulation capability that it comes off as telekinetic), and in other ways stunted and broken (can't really shapeshift worth a damn).

2. He has been abandoned for who knows how long, and was who-knows-how-old before that. With no ability to properly shapeshift, and nothing to do in all that time, one would think that's a lot of opportunity for meditation and gradually noticing one can tug at that rock yonder without actually making physical contact with it, exercising that capability over hundreds of years, reaching off of the only dead planet you know and watching for passing ships, etc. It is Star Trek.

3. Perhaps the Great Link does have the ability to see into space, knock ships out of orbit, slap the visor off Geordi's face if he were to beam down to visit them? They present as a giant pool of goo, but internally they were able to completely construct a solid living physical human body for Odo, and imprison him in it. That's pretty impressive. It's well established they can move themselves from planet to planet too, and I find it hard to believe they need to fly in Jem'Hadar attack ships to get there. Just because "one" changeling can't perform the abilities we saw Armus do doesn't mean a bunch of them together couldn't.

 

[chrinFinity]

Oh! I forgot he can also make Data point the dust buster at people. Unclear if that's by sheer force of moving his arms, or by remotely controlling the servos in Data's body somehow.

Same arguments still stand. I'm inclined to think Armus was a by-product left behind by the Great Link at some point in galactic history, for the reasons I've outlined previously.

 

[Timo]

1. Ability to knock power offline on any ship that passes near Vagra II.

Not Picard's ship, apparently...

So, as far as we know, the shuttle crash was but an accident. Armus just noticed that something smacked onto his planet, went to examine, and found victims to play with.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NrobbieC]

1. Ability to knock power offline on any ship that passes near Vagra II.

Not Picard's ship, apparently...

So, as far as we know, the shuttle crash was but an accident. Armus just noticed that something smacked onto his planet, went to examine, and found victims to play with.

The shuttle would've been much closer than the Enterprise.

 

[Timo]

Says who? The trouble began first; the shuttle got dangerously close to Vagra II only later. And then Picard got even closer, entering orbit around the planet, yet his ship was apparently perfectly immune to Armus.

The first we heard of trouble, the shuttle was traveling towards Picard's impulse-only ship and was estimated to arrive in an hour. The implication is that the shuttle was at warp, traveling between stars, or else there would be no point to this rendezvous: Picard would not have stopped to wait and dismantled his warp drive for repairs (which he specifically said he would do because he had arranged the meeting with the shuttle which would be arriving from somewhere else), he would have warped to meet the shuttle. So, the shuttle loses warp and crashes to the planet, but Picard can safely orbit. So Armus is unlikely to have had anything to do with the shuttle crash, either...

If he could crash shuttles and ships at a distance, wouldn't he have escaped the planet long ago? Troi's shuttle landed nearly intact; with a little practice, Armus could have captured intact spacecraft and flown away to terrorize new life and civilizations. Or even have revenge on his parents.

But he wasn't using his mind...

Umm, what? Of course he was. He was just making his mind operate an invisible force to create effects at distance without the use of constructed machinery in between, which is the very definition of telekinesis. It's not "levitating things using your brain as a muscle". The analogy to musculature lies elsewhere; the mind is operating it.

The only way you can argue he wasn't doing it with his mind would be to argue that he was doing it mindlessly, that is, using his mind without proper conscious control...

It's very difficult to prove a negative. That doesn't mean the premise you are putting forth is not ridiculous.

But I'm not putting forth anything. I'm simply stating that the specific objections put forth so far to debunk the original poster's premise are woefully insufficient and misguided.

That doesn't mean there would be any merit to the original premise, of course. Nor that it couldn't be debunked. It simply means that the proper arguments to debunk it would be "it's silly" or "there's no good story involved". Not "this powerful and versatile entity is subtly and superficially different from that other powerful and versatile entity, therefore they must be two different entities altogether".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NrobbieC]

But he wasn't using his mind...

Umm, what? Of course he was. He was just making his mind operate an invisible force to create effects at distance without the use of constructed machinery in between, which is the very definition of telekinesis. It's not "levitating things using your brain as a muscle". The analogy to musculature lies elsewhere; the mind is operating it.

Laas wasn't affecting anything at a distance. He became a creature which can swim through space, there's no telekinesis involved, and it's nothing new there was Junior in TNG. When Changelings mimic a thing they become it, he wasn't using telekinesis to imitate the being's properties they became his own. Short of using his own mind to move, in the same way we would walk I don't know what you're getting at.

 

[Timo]

Laas wasn't affecting anything at a distance. He became a creature which can swim through space

Which is the very same thing, as per Newton - or then it's something even more magical, and makes Laas the superior of Armus.

he wasn't using telekinesis to imitate the being's properties they became his own.

Indeed - telekinesis became his own property.

Making objects move without visible means is something both Laas and Armus do. If Laas isn't doing it with his mind, then neither is Armus. And it's of no consequence how "natural" or "understandable" the means of motion are: quite possibly, a tricorder might show how Laas is actually spitting out invisible gases or manipulating subspace fields, or Armus is using tractor beams or nanobots, but that would still be one and the same thing to the observer, and in no way a distinguishing feature between the two.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NrobbieC]

he wasn't using telekinesis to imitate the being's properties they became his own.

Indeed - telekinesis became his own property.

Making objects move without visible means is something both Laas and Armus do.

He wasn't making an object move, he was just moving. Armus could affect with no physical contact., ie killing Yar but Laas was just moving the way we've seen creatures do before.

Do you believe Junior is telekinetic?

 

[Timo]

Of course it is. Junior, like Laas in that guise, is a moving object, visibly unable to push off from anything physical. Which is the exact same thing as making LaForge's VISOR fly through the air.

Neither feat is particularly impressive, mind you. Our heroes are capable of that, and much more. The point is simply that the feats are equally unimpressive, and in no way serve to set Laas and Armus apart.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[NrobbieC]

Of course it is. Junior, like Laas in that guise, is a moving object, visibly unable to push off from anything physical. Which is the exact same thing as making LaForge's VISOR fly through the air.

"I can't explain it therefore magic" is your argument?

You can accept telepathic pointy-eared aliens, faster than light propulsion, shape-shifting goo people but an alien animal that can simply swim through space - that's got to be magic.