Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x06 - "The Sound of Thunder"

That's what makes powerful people especially dangerous.A lack of practical application over the information they are presented with, but unchecked ability to use it.

"You're a child. That's what makes you so fucking scary." -from Last King of Scottland (whoa.. Alec Newman and now James McAvoy. I need to rewatch Children of Dune now, Also, James McAvoy needs to have a role in the new Picard series)

 

I dunno. I feel like the writers should have - in general - spent some time studying what super-intelligent people were actually like rather than using them as a morality tale which may or may not have a basis in reality.

 

Writing from the standpoint of higher intelligence is extremely difficult to do. I can write about what it would be like to a flying species, even though I don't have wings. I can collect enough data points and talk to people who've gone hang gliding, etc, to get a pretty good approximation.

I can even talk to someone smarter than me and get a grasp of their thinking process, slightly. But some being more intelligent by an order of magnitude, one is almost just stuck having them be odd and inscrutable. Trek has always used higher beings as more of a morality tale. Kind of like the Greeks did with their gods (except for when, of course Trek literally uses Greek gods). They're powerful but have the same weaknesses and foibles as humans. I agree, it would be cool to see them break out of that mode. Maybe they will with Red angel. I doubt it.

 

A super late reply, but I only saw this couple of days ago. I wouldn't bother to post this late otherwise, but I want to say that I really, really hope that they return to this story later. As it is now, it feels woefully incomplete.

I had waited this story since the Saru Short Trek Episode, and whilst this was good, I still was a bit disappointed. The beginning was great. I loved the Kelpien drama on the planet, and Culber and Stamets bits were great, and good way to show that the death still mattered, it was not just a magical resurrection and all is forgotten. But the resolution of the story felt unsatisfactory. Dear Captain Pike, I think the spirit of the Prime Directive is to prevent this sort of colossal meddling, instead of prevent telling a bunch of abducted humans that the Earth made it. Whilst sure, the situation totally sucked, and Kirk would have done something too, Pike's attitude her really didn't jive with his stance on the New Eden. Also, how did they din't see the Ba'ul's reaction coming? The instant they started to talk forcibly pokemón evolving the Kelpiens I said, 'and the the Ba'ul will nuke them all.' If there hadn't been a literal deus ex machina, almost all Kelpiens would have been killed. And certainly they will still be, once the Discovery had departed. I would have expected some self reflection on a colossal fuck up of that magnitude.

Now, similar stories have happened is Star Trek before (though I can't remember one where genocide would be so imminent) and they were never addressed later, but this show is different. This is exactly the sort of situation they should use serialisation for; I liked the start of this story, but this was not a proper ending, I want a sequel, dammit!

(Also, I bet that somehow Burnamn is the Red Angel. I don't know how, but that was my intuition when I saw the Angel up close.)