Especially when they could've just brought grenades to solve the problem.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x03 - "Shuttle to Kenfori"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Yep. The original premise was that the Borg willingly chose to have cybernetic parts attached to their bodies (or at least were born and had them attached without their consent) and were a distinct humanoid species. In that regard, they were more sympathetic because this was their own culture. But then they retconnned the Borg into being just drones from other races.
1) So its fine to let Pike and M'Benga die because the Commanding Officer is a coward? I don't think, for example, that Kirk would let someone in his crew die because of a Commodore/Admiral being a prick. Starfleet Officers having to disobey idiot superiors isn't that rare, its just usually a guest star superior officer and not a main cast character. Hell Spock eventually risks the death penalty to help Pike, which by your logic should have ended with his execution despite the fact that he did end up helping Pike but disobeyed while doing it.
2) And they were wrong, and peoples lives were on the line. Again, a good Starfleet Officer is NOT a military officer, and they don't just mindlessly follow orders.
3) A Stafleet Officer doing something against the rules but being right is not a rare thing in Trek, and in any other case they'd get a pass because they were right. Thats the risk to them, if they succeed they're good if they fail they're in trouble.
4) If that one Klingon hadn't decided to go down in a blaze of glory then Ortegas plan wuld have been the only thing that could save Pike and M'Benga. Every second mattered, but Una was a coward. A good commanding officer would have said "screw the treaty", especially since the Klingons were visablly breaking it at that point.
Ortegas did the right thing, Una should be cort martialled for cowardice. All of your points are the kinds of things a bad Admiral would say in a Trek episode where they are the antagonist, if Kirk was in command of the Enterprise at this point he'd have gone with Ortegas plan immediately, been correct in doing so, and he'd give Ortegas the praise they deserve.
Also, if they had gone with Ortegas plan from the start and not wasted time on the cowardly route, Pike and M'Benga would have been saved a lot quicker. The delay did nothing but put them in mortal danger, in fact it calls back to the end of SNW season one where we see that Pike's cowardice during the events of the alt history Balance of Terror would have doomed the Federation. Some missions need commanding officers capable of being proactive and Una is completely incapable of that, she's a petty coward in this episode who punishes someone for doing the right thing because it hurt Una's ego to realize that she screwed up.
I've thought about it some more and, considering the absurdity of Una and the entire crew breaking the treaty to then reprimand Ortegas for disobeying orders, I'm thinking it's not so much that Ortegas disobeyed orders but that Una and the entire crew were concerned about Ortegas being unstable after the Gorn fight. Basically, Ortegas' insubordination was just an excuse for Una to put her through some retraining to straighten her up, something they've wanted to do to Ortegas for months but couldn't find a legitimate reason to. If Ortegas had been acting completely normally in the months leading up to this, Una probably would have let it slide.
Ortegas exhibited some of the traits here that we saw her display in the altered future in A Quality of Mercy.
Breaking a treaty stipulation doesn't mean suddenly the whole ship can just do what they want with no consequences.
Joseph M'Benga has entered the chat. And last I checked murder is far, far worse than turning the impulse down to 1/6 instead of 1/8
Link? I'd like to check where you did.
Up, not down.
Addressing the topic in general: I have to ask: Why not zombies? How are they inherently less interesting or "played out" than just some generic hostile aliens or technobabble about "rising polaron emissions" or "anaplasmic lifeforms"? Zombies at least have a certain visceral kick to them and provide some colorfully grisly visuals to spice up the episode.
(I confess: as a lifelong horror fan, I'm always bemused when folks complain that vampires or zombies are played out, but can't get enough of spaceships and androids. They've all been around been forever, pop culture wise.)
I actually wrote an essay not long ago, "Scare Trek," pointing out that TOS (like its immediate predecessors, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits) had a lot more horror in it than modern fans might like to admit. No surprise, considering that its writers included the likes of Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson, and so on, who had also written for shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Boris Karloff's Thriller. Heck, even Roddenberry indulged in horror occasionally, with "Spectre" and "Pretty Maids All in a Row," not to mention a creepy Have Gun Will Travel ep about a cursed man being pursued by a phantom tiger.
The way I see it, horror and SF have been joined at the hip since at least Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells.
(End of rant.)
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Yeah, especially when you remember the phasers from TOS with wide-angle settings, disintegration settings, and when you set it to overload you'd better throw it overhand farther than a grenade or you were going to DIE. Phasers in nu-Trek have been completely nerfed because so many of the plots wouldn't work with the power of TOS weaponry at hand.
Remember the references in The Omega Glory to captain Tracy killing hundreds or even thousands of Yangs attacking in human waves with just a hand phaser? The mutant zombies and nu-Gorn shouldn't even be considered real threats, all things considered.
Voyager had "Ashes to Ashes." The Kobali are reanimated corpses. What are the Kobali, if not zombies?
I think that taken to their logical conclusion, the Borg become hive-mind cylons from nu-BSG. Why screw around with messy organic parts when you can use morphing nanites, liquid crystals and metals to make bodies stronger than Data's? Think a beehive-networked race of T-1000's.
Was it ever established that you become a zombie if they bite you in this episode? Or was that just an assumption from Earth cliches about zombies that the Klingons somehow were familiar with, meaning that Rah's daughter vaporized her henchman once he was bitten for nothing
That's what I was thinking at the end of the episode. Number one rightfully admonished Ortega. Pike let M'Benga off scott free. He outright murdered that ambassador. Pike at first told him it was for tribunals to decide. He was pretty upset with M'Benga when he thought M'Benga started it. Now he's ok with it. This episode really stained two legacy characters. I can't think of anyone on Kirk's ship outright murdering someone and Kirk being OK with it in TOS.
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It's not that using zombies in Star Trek screws with my suspension of disbelief. And it's not that I think using zombies has become a cliche. It's that I don't think the zombies add anything interesting to the episode. They provide three action scenes, but pretty much anything could have done that, and they don't really utilize any of the horror/zombie tropes that could potentially come with using them.
I actually think sci-fi (and to a lesser extent fantasy) and horror are a bit antithetical to one another.
Horror thrives on the unknown and the psychological. In contrast, sci-fi and fantasy fans have expectations of consistent worldbuilding where everything is pretty much everything is logically consistent within the setting, and everything story-relevant will be eventually explained (depending upon your taste, you might actually like infodumps!). Of course you can mix the two. But sci-fi with horror elements invariably ends up being less scary than straight-up horror. And the longer the franchise goes on, the less scary the horror elements get.
To give a Star Trek example, the Borg were terrifying when initially conceived as this body horror collective consciousness. But the humanization of them over time - both due to Borg who get their individuality restored, as well as the overuse of the Borg Queen - removed all sense of menace. They became just another race within Star Trek, another set of bad guys (or victims, depending upon the story).
No, it was never established. In fact, I'm pretty sure M'Benga reassured Pike they couldn't actually be turned into zombies.
IIRC, he assured him that they wouldn't be turned by the airborne spores. A bite may well yield different results.
SOME modern fans.
Given the unauthorised and illegal nature of the mission everyone gets off very lightly.
Ortegas endangered the ship by counteracting her orders and forcing her idea to be used. Yes it worked, yes if things had gone differently it may have been the only way but then do the ends justify the means? Even if you forgive this, what's to say it wont happen again in a much worse situation? It's not just about punishing insubordination but preventing a problem from growing bigger. If she did this on an official mission she would be demoted possibly even court martialed so 2 weeks of seminars with HR is I think quite fair.
And with M'Benga and Pike there is more to consider after it ends. They both have to live with that knowledge. Living with secrets can erode trust and just be a ticking time bomb. I dont think this is the last we'll hear of it and I think this may end up being the reason M'Benga is not CMO after this mission and is demoted to side doctor.
Ortegas endangered the ship by counteracting her orders and forcing her idea to be used. Yes it worked, yes if things had gone differently it may have been the only way but then do the ends justify the means? Even if you forgive this, what's to say it wont happen again in a much worse situation? It's not just about punishing insubordination but preventing a problem from growing bigger. If she did this on an official mission she would be demoted possibly even court martialed so 2 weeks of seminars with HR is I think quite fair.
And with M'Benga and Pike there is more to consider after it ends. They both have to live with that knowledge. Living with secrets can erode trust and just be a ticking time bomb. I dont think this is the last we'll hear of it and I think this may end up being the reason M'Benga is not CMO after this mission and is demoted to side doctor.
Didn't Hugh mention assimilation back in I, Borg?
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