“Pfft. They thought we couldn’t even speak English. Suckers!”Species 10-C are one of the best villains for how they so completely pulled the wool over everyone's eyes - the crew and the viewer alike.
They'll be back in the 42nd century to top their omega reserves again.
The bit that got me was the "we didn't realise there were any sentients in dat 'dere galaxy."
So, they did check - I mean, one assumes a non-genocidal, non-sociopathic race would take some precautions before bulldozing entire star systems.
The galaxy would be teeming with warp signatures, transwarp corridors and subspace signals that in no way could be interpreted as naturally occurring.
Their fallback appears to be that they were so exotic and different in their intelligence. While that might be the case, I don't buy - or understand - how they could register a vast array of technological markers and artificially produced signals and conclude "nope - no intelligence detected".
Were the tables reversed, Our Heroes would surely surmise intelligence from a technological footprint, even if the lifeform were exotic.
Almost like ethical decision making varies from species to species. "You humans claim to be advanced yet you still consume the flesh of animals."
I think this is the idea — we and our technologies are so different (and compared to their own technologies, so small) that they didn’t really get that those were technologies, or markers of sapient intelligence. At best, “anthills”. Only in this case, the ants came out to talk to them, shocking them into a change of perspective (as I’d like to pretend we would change ours, if ants suddenly came over and directly communicated with us). But we wouldn’t and don’t expect it, even though ants have complicated societies and build complicated structures. Likewise 10-Q re the Milky Way species.
(Yes, I know someone’s going to post a Phase IV thing…)
I mean, it's the same idea as the Whale Probe storyline, that only whales registered as the life forms it was programmed to look for.
It frustrates me that they think aliens can be so amazingly advanced yet entirely oblivious to other life forms.
Or V'ger never bothering to wipe the muck off it's name plate. Come on!
That's a Trek staple.
Staples are like zippers. Non-canon!
