Pakleds: Cunning or stupid?

[retroenzo]

Samaritan Snare gives us the Pakleds. A race of aliens that Memory Alpha would have us believe were more cunning than they appeared.

Not sure I entirely buy that theory but even if they are spacefaring because of their ability to trick other people into repairing or giving them technology, I can't work out how they got into space in the first place! Any ideas?

 

[The Old Mixer]

Since, to my recollection, Pakleds only featured as more than background players in one Trek series...transporting to the forum for that series.

 

[retroenzo]

Since, to my recollection, Pakleds only featured as more than background players in one Trek series...transporting to the forum for that series.

No problem.

In fact, I almost posted this in this forum myself but the Bolian thread confused me so I posted it here instead.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Cunningly stupid.

They lack traditional intelligence. But they are smart enough to know that being perceived as stupid puts people off guard.

 

[Kevin Wolff]

It's best to do as little analysis as possible on those first 2 seasons. The best reference to the Pakleds was in S4 when Lore said he floated in space for 2 years (after Datalore) until a fortunate encounter with a Pakled ship. Lore is wearing their uniform and you have no doubt that he murdered them all. I pictured 4 Pakleds floating in space, 1 in his underwear.

 

[Timo]

My vote goes for "more cunning than the fox that was just appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University". After all, they had fooled Klingons into donating them parts for their ship!

Also, it doesn't seem as if the Klingons would have any truck with the scheme the Pakleds use here, that of taking a hostage and cowing his friends into inaction. So the implication is that the Pakled are cunning enough to have come up with at least two schemes, the one that worked on the Klingons, and then this one.

How would the scheme we saw have played out, though? With the Pakleds gaining their superior weapons and then destroying the E-D? Doesn't sound all that likely - becoming superior to the E-D would be too much for them to chew. With the Pakleds pulling a feint and escaping at high speed? I doubt they could command the required speed. Plus, what would have stopped them from doing so when the Crimson Forcefield was used against them? The same with them having a cloaking device or other such ace in their sleeve: why didn't they play that card?

Yet the Pakleds did seem to specifically choose the E-D as their victim. Proof of stupidity right there?

As for Lore's survival story, should we even believe that one? We know that the characteristic positronic signal of B-4 could be spotted across interstellar distances (probably a cunning Shinzon ploy), but nothing of the sort was ever true of Data. Why should it be true of Lore? And if Lore didn't have that sort of a signal, how could anybody spot him in space? Do Pakleds have sensors far superior to everybody else? Are there trillions or quintillions of Pakled ships, increasing their odds past the point of "ludicrously low"?

...Were the Pakleds following the past course of the E-D (freely available from UFP libraries everywhere) on a mission of vengeance, and for that reason flew past Lore? (But why follow the route past the old "Datalore" location when their target was speeding far ahead?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UnknownSample]

Cunning and stupid. You don't have to be brilliant to lie successfully. Certain predator animals are referred to as cunning, but try to teach one to read....

 

[Mojochi]

Being ruthless & deceptive doesn't mean they're intelligent, just opportunistic. IIRC, we don't know that they outsmarted other species, only that they possess tech from them, which could've been legitimately bartered. They are well known traders & smugglers. It was a trade ship that found Lore, & another that supplied Cardassians with vaccines in Preemptive Strike. What we know is that they got outsmarted by a fancy red light show. That's just dumb. I vote that they're only smart enough to know they need other people's stuff, & can manage to get it sometimes

 

[locutus101]

I'll tell you what the Packleds are, improbable, highly so. The first time these bozos meet the klingons, they'll be turn into dumb vapor.

 

[Kevin Wolff]

Do they still sing songs of the great Klingon Tribble and Pakled hunt?

 

[publiusr]

I wonder if facehuggers would turn them down...

 

[locutus101]

I wonder if facehuggers would turn them down...

In Alien, you mean?

 

[Christian Weston Chandler]

I haven't seen the episode in a long time, but I don't recall the Pakleds actually ever doing something profoundly stupid. They were extremely inarticulate, and in humans, a deficiency in verbal/conversational skills is very often a co-symptom of, or related to, other mental impairments. To put it very bluntly, if a human is very stupid, he'll be terrible at talking, and if somebody is terrible at talking (like, to the extent that the Pakleds are), it's a good if not necessarily certain bet that he's stupid in 'other ways', like mathematically.

Because of this, I think we tend to immediately assume the Pakleds were mentally impaired, but it's technically possible the entire species simply never evolved complex conversation, but that they are as smart as other races in non-linguistic ways. They seem to understand warp technology and so forth (the fact that they never invented it on their on own was attributed to laziness, I think?)

Is there any direct evidence that, just an example, the average Pakled would be worse at understanding the engineering schematics of a ship than the average human, or something of that nature? Like I said, I haven't seen the episode in years, so if the Pakleds are indeed depicted as stupid other than in the way they talk, then of course I'm wrong and you can ignore this post.

 

[Timo]

The stupidity would appear inherent in the fact that they were thwarted. That is, their apparent plan did not offer any apparent way to success.

As soon as we can invent a way in which their little scheme would have allowed them to escape with their loot (as they evidently had managed to do with Klingons and Jarada already), we can argue they were actually being pretty smart. But we have to invent that way since the writers didn't bother; and more specifically we have to invent a way that would have allowed for the escape - AND the exact reason this did not work after all, against Pakled expectation.

What do the writers give us? The Pakleds fell because they didn't realize LaForge wasn't really providing them with what they wanted. Once they found out their new weapons didn't work, they correctly realized they were outgunned and did the smart thing and surrendered. The heroes in turn were smart in pretending that the Crimson Forcefield, and not LaForge's duplicity, had thwarted the Pakled plan - now the pirates wouldn't execute LaForge immediately for his betrayal.

But how could you not be stupid if you trust your captive to do something you lack the technological knowledge to check on? You'd have to be the perfect judge of human psychology to compensate for that, and the Pakleds fail there (which in itself is not stupidity, just a very natural and expected shortcoming in skill).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

It's best to do as little analysis as possible on those first 2 seasons. The best reference to the Pakleds was in S4 when Lore said he floated in space for 2 years (after Datalore) until a fortunate encounter with a Pakled ship. Lore is wearing their uniform and you have no doubt that he murdered them all. I pictured 4 Pakleds floating in space, 1 in his underwear.

That's pretty much exactly what I always pictured. The Pakleds probably thought they struck gold finding a Soong type android floating in space. Just their "dumb" luck it was the evil one.

Reminds me of Red Dwarf:

RIMMER: ...and considering the ship was transporting
forty psychotic, half-crazed, mass-murdering, super-strong androids, we
thought it prudent to find out who the smeg was in there before we woke
them up.
KRYTEN: With respect, sir, they're not androids. They're simulants.
CAT: What's the difference?
KRYTEN: Well, the basic difference is that an android would never rip off
a human's head and spit down his neck.

 

[Paradise City]

From memory the episode is so poorly written that it sends mixed signals as to the exact scope of their intelligence. I presume they have poor innate language skills that the universal translator is accurately reflecting. They have both a cunning and gullibility that work in tandem and the Pakleds are self aware enough to use their halting style of speech to hoodwink people for their own purposes. Of course where the cunning of the Pakled ends and the mindboggling gullibility of the TNG crew begins in this episode is yet another debate. I think when Picard goes away he takes Riker's brain with him for some reason. And poor Troi has nothing more than a mascot role here to be shunted aside if she gets too uppity.

 

[publiusr]

Im just looking for things that make me go...