Why? Why did something have to go wrong? Why couldn't it just be, you know, given all the crap that Deanna had to go through to get her child couldn't it have been a normal affair, no danger and nothing going "dramatically" wrong as having anything go wrong is a cliché in itself.
Because fiction is about crisis, especially adventure fiction. Having an event go totally smoothly isn't a story, unless it's a comedy and you're subverting the expectation of something exciting happening. Had it been an uneventful birth, it would've probably come at the beginning of the book or even between books (much like the relatively understated and problem-free wedding of Picard and Crusher).
More importantly, it was an opportunity to resolve the residual tensions between Ree and Deanna in the wake of
Destiny, and an opportunity to explore Pahkwa-thanh culture and psychology as it pertains to parenting.
I'd say it isn't racist if those instincts put members of the crew at risk, nor is it about human assumptions. It's about the safety of the crew and ship.
Plenty of human "instincts" can put crewmembers at risk, like the instinct for aggression causing a crewmember to get into a fight, or the instinct for self-preservation causing a crewmember to panic and abandon his post at a critical moment. Every species has behaviors that can be potentially dangerous to others if they manifest in the wrong circumstances, but sapient beings are able to overcome their instincts or work around them. If you single out one species and say "You are intrinsically unsafe to be around simply because of what you are," then hell yes, that is profoundly racist.
Especially given that the circumstances that led this particular instinct to be problematical were an enormous fluke that would never be likely to happen again in a million years! Look at all the different things that had to come together for this to happen. Ree had to be psi-sensitive enough to come under Deanna's influence, even though he's nominally psi-null. He had to be in proximity to Deanna. It had to happen at a time when Deanna was feeling grief and guilt over her miscarriage, and immediately after she'd been counseling Tuvok and having her own emotions reinforced by his grief. It had to happen after an incident that had left Ree feeling guilty and insecure about his own worth as a caregiver. And it had to happen at a moment when the ship was in imminent danger. Without those half-dozen different things coming together at the exact same moment, Ree's parental instinct would never have been triggered. It's certainly not normal for Pahkwa-thanh parental instincts to be directed toward infants that aren't their own. You'd probably never have an unhatched Pahkwa-thanh egg on a Starfleet vessel anyway, so the instinct would never come into play.
So it's unfair in the extreme to paint this nurturing instinct as a threat, when it was only because of an incredibly unlikely concatenation of events that it manifested the way it did.
Did I say throw the book? No, I'm only talking about not treating the hearing over the incident like a formality of paperwork, as if its end result was a foregone conclusion. And anyone in Starfleet JAG Corps worth their stripes would have a field day with that argument, since the greatest apparent danger to mother and baby was Dr. Ree himself.
Bull. Ree might have been a potential danger to the mother, but his whole motivation was to protect the baby at all costs. The baby was the one entity that he would have never harmed under any circumstances. He would've unhesitatingly died to protect that child. In the mental state he was in, under Deanna's psionic suggestion, he was thinking and reacting as if it were
his own daughter.
This is the same instinct that we celebrate and praise when we see a human parent practicing it -- the unrelenting determination to protect their offspring at all costs, even if they have to kill or die to do it. If it had been Deanna threatening to shoot people that she thought posed a danger to her baby, no one would question the nobility of that motive. It would be understood that, even if she was misguided, she was driven by profound, selfless love. So I think there's a double standard being applied here.
My key point is not that there isn't precedent for Ree being cleared, nor am I saying that he shouldn't be eventually cleared-- I'm saying the proceedings surrounding it should be treated with gravity, and not be something that is only done to make Ree himself feel better and assuage his guilt.
Where in the world did I say that? I've gone through all my previous posts in this thread, and I see you reading that into my words, but I never said anything of the sort. In fact, I specifically said that the hearing was necessary because it had to be done formally and properly, that it would be wrong to dismiss the matter on a casual whim. I suppose I didn't convey the point strongly enough, but I never claimed that it was just done to make Ree "feel better."
I'm looking for an opinion here. I'm currently in the middle of book 2 for the Titan series but decided when Destiny came out I had to read that on release. I've also read A Singular Destiny now and am on book 3 of the VOY relaunch trying to catch up for all the series that will be continuing post-Destiny. I didn't realize that OATS would be released before Full Circle. I'm now debating whether it would be better to try and catch up on Titan first before moving on or whether I should continue on with the post-Destiny stuff and catch up as time allows. I don't really want to fall behind with the post-Destiny stories and i figure that most stuff that would be spoiled for me by doing this would already have occurred by reading Destiny. I'll most likely proceed with OATS but wondered whether anyone else had other opinions on this.
OaTS doesn't contain many references to pre-
Destiny events in the
Titan series, and those it does contain are just minor Easter eggs. And yes, any major developments in the earlier TTN novels that would be spoiled by OaTS have already been spoiled if you've read DES. So I see no harm in reading OaTS before you go back to the earlier ones.
