Questions About Two Episodes...

[Timo]

Quite so - but stories that include explanations and viewing instructions risk being tedious and childish.

It seems to me it would have been far easier to just go to some space-port and simply steal an advanced ship and technology. We know the Pakleds are capable of doing this

Even the Pakleds needed to steal personnel, and that proved to be their undoing. The Satarrans had a technique that worked better than kidnap-blackmail on the short term, and it appeared to pose very little risk to them even if (and when) it backfired.

Arguably, the Satarrans might have been in a better position had they provided the Enterprise with an escort - a fleet of destroyers capable of hitting the starship again with the amnesia weapon if things started to go awry. Alas, that would have revealed the sorry state of Satarran technology and shattered the illusion of the E-D being a Satarran vessel. And with time running out, it probably wouldn't have been possible to install a self-amnesia device aboard the E-D, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cyke101]

Quite so - but stories that include explanations and viewing instructions risk being tedious and childish.

As true as that may be, it would still probably go over better than MacDuff's plan!

 

[Timo]

It's not a bad plan as such - because the Satarrans could try it again at their leisure!

After all, the E-D has put a serious dent in the Lysian defenses, eliminating one warship and a large number of defense drones. The next hijacked vessel could already be on its way towards the Lysians, its Cardassian crew convinced that they absolutely need to deliver their main phaser cannon to within firing range of the orbital fortress. And if they fail, too, the next attack could comprise three Frenni freighters convinced of the necessity of ramming the fortress, which now has lost most of its defenses... Until eventually one hijacked Klingon shuttle will finish the war.

This unless the Satarrans only had one amnesia gun, or unless the Lysians managed (with more conventional means of persuasion) to get the Federation or some other outside party to quickly eliminate the Satarrans. After all, there doesn't appear to be a defense against the memory weapon - Starfleet shields did nothing against it, and nobody mentioned LaForge or Data devising a countertechnology afterwards.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

I always thought the Satarrran memory/computer wipe attack on the Enterprise and crew wasn't an actual "weapon" at all but that the Satarran who called itself "McDuff" had mental powers that could do the same thing and that was why they Satarrans could memory wipe even though they didn't have any decent weapons.

When I saw the episode, I too thought that the reason McDuff didn't make himself captain was that he didn't have the technical knowledge to pull it off.

Perhaps Satarran captains are like U.S. nuclear submarine captains. They are expected to know as much about the technical aspects of their boats as the chief engineer knows.

Someone did a really nice video on YouTube once that substituted Imperial TIE fighters for the Lysian weapons pods.