Was Charlie X a Q?

[Christopher]

^But it's just an assumption that all energy beings have magic telekinetic powers, simply because we've seen other energy beings that have them. But does that follow? Surely incorporeal life forms are as diverse as corporeal ones, and don't all have exactly the same abilities.

Consider the "Wisps" in Enterprise: "The Crossing." They were incorporeal, but they needed a starship to travel the galaxy. Similarly, the Sha Ka Ree "God" seemed to be some kind of energy being, but it also needed a starship. Also, the subspace beings from TNG: "Interface" were trapped inside a gas giant and needed a starship to free them.

Then there are various incorporeal entities that seem to need to possess corporeal hosts or objects in order to affect things physically, like Redjac, the "Beyond the Farthest Star" entity, or the cloud entities from "Lonely Among Us." And we've seen entities like the Koinonians from "The Bonding" and Isabella from "Imaginary Friend," beings that could simulate human form but couldn't just transform reality with the snap of their fingers.

So we have seen explicitly that incorporeal species come in many different categories, some far more limited in their powers than others, and that some of them are dependent on technology to some degree. So there's no basis for assuming that Trelane's species isn't dependent on technology as adults.

 

[Sybok Was Wrong]

I've been going back and watching a lot of the originals lately. That episode had some mad Twilight Zone going on, but Charlie seemed like he had Q powers. Not unlike True Q.

Charlie was not a Q. Trelane was not a Q.


Its a big universe with lots of strange aliens. It shrinks the universe too much to have everything connected. Its not very imaginative

The Star Wars Prequels connected just about everything/everyone and really shrunk that universe & that is less wondrous.

 

[FormerLurker]

I always understood it that the Sha Ka Ree 'God Beast' didn't need a starship to travel, but rather merely to get out of its confinement. I may be reading more into it than was there, but that's how I understood it.

 

[Melakon]

I don't understand the need to fit TOS characters into TNG explanations. Is Trelane a Q? Is Charlie X a Q? Are the Metrons a Q? Nobody ever asks if Q was a Trelane.

 

[Armored Saint]

The Thasians don't seem to be on the level of the Q. They actually have ships, for one thing...

And they weren't able to bring back the Antares and its crew. Kevin Uxbridge, the Douwd, wasn't either able to really revive the dead.

I don't understand the need to fit TOS characters into TNG explanations.

It's the same thing than criticizing Kirk about Prime Directive with TNG and post-TNG criteria. I like to see connections between TOS and subsequent material, but not when it turns suffocative.

Yes, Charlie X is a Q and a Trelane...not as species, but as characters: an immature being who's punished because he made bad things with his superpowers. Kevin Uxbridge's the opposite: he punished himself because he made horrible things after losing his strong self-control.

 

[Christopher]

I figure the reason TOS featured so many psychic and telekinetic beings is that it's a cheap special effect. It's easy to have actors pantomime being under the control of an invisible force, or to make something appear/disappear by stopping the camera for a moment. And godlike beings that can take images from our minds and reshape reality is a handy way to excuse using studio backlots or Western sets or historical-drama costumes in stories set on alien planets. Not to mention that it facilitates the old aliens-appearing-in-human-form trope, like Trelane, the Organians, the Q, or the Douwd (or, on a lesser level of power, Sylvia and Korob or the Kelvans).

 

[kirkfan]

I think he was an X Q...

 

[Spectral]

The Thasians don't seem to be on the level of the Q. They actually have ships, for one thing...

And they weren't able to bring back the Antares and its crew. Kevin Uxbridge, the Douwd, wasn't either able to really revive the dead.

I'm pretty happy with the explanations that he wasn't Q. But The Antares was actually destroyed by Charlie's machinations, no? I could be wrong, but I don't think even legitimate Q have the power to bring people back from the dead. I guess they could maybe by altering the history of time, but I don't remember any being straight-up resurrected.

 

[Christopher]

I could be wrong, but I don't think even legitimate Q have the power to bring people back from the dead. I guess they could maybe by altering the history of time, but I don't remember any being straight-up resurrected.

In "Hide and Q," Riker apparently brought Wesley back to life when he was given Q powers. And it was assumed he could've brought a dead colonist back to life, but he refused to because he'd promised Picard not to give into the temptation of his powers.

And some believe that Q brought Picard back to life in "Tapestry," though it was ambiguous whether it was Q or Beverly who saved him.

 

[kirkfan]

I could be wrong, but I don't think even legitimate Q have the power to bring people back from the dead. I guess they could maybe by altering the history of time, but I don't remember any being straight-up resurrected.

In "Hide and Q," Riker apparently brought Wesley back to life when he was given Q powers. And it was assumed he could've brought a dead colonist back to life, but he refused to because he'd promised Picard not to give into the temptation of his powers.

And some believe that Q brought Picard back to life in "Tapestry," though it was ambiguous whether it was Q or Beverly who saved him.

Or maybe it was a hallucination and Q was never actually involved.

 

[Christopher]

^Hence the ambiguity. If it was a hallucination, then it was Beverly who saved him.

 

[Spectral]

Even still, fixing up a broken body and bringing them back from a near death experience doesn't necessarily require special powers. Regular doctors can do that today. I think that's not quite the same as bringing back someone who's "all the way" dead and gone. I admit, I don't quite remember those details from Hide and Q that were mentioned and I also don't remember Q specifically saying it was beyond them, but Q definitely did seem to have a sense of final mortality.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The machine angle was just a red herring to keep us in suspense that he was really a god-baby. He even kept coming after his "machine" was "destroyed."

Wrong. When Kirk mentions smashing the mirror machine, Trelane replies, "And did you really think that was the only medium of instrumentality at my command?" In other words, he had a backup machine. "Instrumentality" means tools, not innate powers.

There is nothing in the episode to refute the idea that Trelane's powers were technological; it's just that we tend to assume they were intrinsic by comparison with the Organians, Q, and others. But that's letting our biases color our reading of the text.

Thanks, Christopher, but I already knew what "instrumentality" means.

Trelane was a child playing with what were to him animals. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume that his machine was anything but a toy. There's literally nothing in the episode that would lead one to believe that the adults of Trelane's species needed machines to do anything, especially given their appearance as disembodied lights and Spock's question at the end of whether the species was in fact one of pure mentality, if not super-beings. It's pretty short-sighted to judge the limitations of an entire species based on the accomplishments of one of its children.

 

[kirkfan]

^Hence the ambiguity. If it was a hallucination, then it was Beverly who saved him.

Or maybe he never was in any danger of dying. Forty years before a ginormous knife cut through his heart and that means death was immediate. still they were able to revive him and keep him alive, even though it must have taken quite a few minutes back then to beam his body to the appropriate place with the specialists and all. Why would Beverly forty years later be any less efficient than the doctors back then?

 

[Christopher]

^Again -- hence the ambiguity. Saying that he may not have been in danger at all only reinforces my point that we don't know whether Q saved him or not. The point is about Q, not Beverly. As I said, there are some people who believe that Q brought Picard back from the dead, and my point is that there are plenty of reasons to question that assumption.

 

[kirkfan]

^Again -- hence the ambiguity. Saying that he may not have been in danger at all only reinforces my point that we don't know whether Q saved him or not. The point is about Q, not Beverly. As I said, there are some people who believe that Q brought Picard back from the dead, and my point is that there are plenty of reasons to question that assumption.

I quite agree.

 

[blahblahyerdumb]

You don't know that since human bones were less preserved than animal bones. You nor scientists truly know how old the human species is. Everything from those big brains are from theories NOT FACTS.

Ugh. You sound just like a creationist. He didn't say humans were only a few thousand years old, he said human civilization was only a few thousand years old. And civilization isn't just bones, that's pottery, evidence of remains, burials, steel, and stone tools, trash middens, hearths, dwellings, art work, all that stuff some of which doesn't decay easily.

In math, logic or philosophy, you can prove stuff true or false. In science, you can only prove stuff is false. Everything else is "best guess based on evidence". Science is for lack of a better term, a faith based system. Just like religion. Only instead of basing its conclusions on only an ancient text and gut feelings about the wicked sky gods, science actually promotes and really is only concerned with a methodology for the exploration of conclusions based on observation. The faith part comes where the public has faith in scientists to follow the scientific method or peer review their colleagues to make sure the pursuit of knowledge is carried our responsibly. The only conclusions that science can EVER support are either A) something is definitely untrue or B) a certain idea looks like the best explanation we have for a particular observed phenomenon.

Without a time machine, no one knows how long humans have been around or how long they've been doing "stuff" (culture and civilization). Our knowledge of our origins are all based on chemical testing (carbon dating), and comparative archaeology, and our understanding of evolutionary biology. Whenever anyone says they "know" something science-y it goes without saying that that particular knowledge is based on theory which science freely admits can change at any time given new evidence or enhanced observations of existing evidence.

And for the record, lookup the word "fact". It's not synonymous with "truth". It's a statement that can be proven true or false. So someone finds evidence of the most primitive art ever found on earth, they can test the plant pigments and determine about how old they are using carbon dating. The decay of the isotopes is a "fact" because it can be demonstrated and repeated in a lab. Science interprets the rate of decay as relating to a specific number of years which is the guess. The age of the tool then becomes part of the fossil record that lends credence to previously postulated timelines for human civilization. (that's the best guess part that will never be a "fact" and will always be a theory because real science doesn't deal with facts). Anyone who lends any weight or credence to scientific exploration should know that science is a methodology leading to decreased uncertainty not a body of factual determinism. The conclusion here is that no scientist ever "knows" anything with 100% certainty except for the explanations that fail to explain a phenomenon.

Given that, we have been very successful in determining evidence of civilization (like towns or cities) 10,000 years ago and perhaps even as long as 20,000 years (best guess now is 12,000 years). We just haven't found anything like monoliths or domociles that suggest humans had much going on in the way of civ before that. Are they hiding? No. Are they just rare? No, we totally find buried people with stuff, it's just the stuff isn't very advanced and none of it suggests complex societies that developed later. And then the older we go back, the less advanced or more nonexistent evidence of "stuff" becomes which suggests a progression. So what's the latest best guess? We didn't have much in the way of "stuff" before 100,000 years ago and no cities before like 20k years ago.

Best. Guess. Ever.