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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    So... the Picard season three school of design is just copying old fanmade kitbashes? I guess it's better than season two's borrowing from Star Trek Online or season one's "fifty of the same minimum effort CG model" approach.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Expecting consistency from the characters in Discovery and Picard seems to be setting the bar far too high. That, of course, is another major problem with the whole Star Trek: Picard S3 setting introduced by the writers desperately trying to keep the fan-favorite characters they're ruining relevant to what we'll charitably call "the story". Both the season two closer "Farewell" and season three opener "The Next Generation" are set in 2401. Less than a year, and more likely just a few months, have passed between the encounter with Borg Queen Jurati that bookends season two and the distress signal that kicks off season three. Somehow, in that incredibly short span of time, [Seven of Nine/Annika Hansen] went from being a burned out vigilante operating on her own outside of Federation space to being not just a Starfleet officer but a Commander in the Command Division and First Officer of the USS Titan-A. It's doubtful she had ANY training, especially if she's been serving as XO aboard Shaw's ship long enough for them to have established an acrimonious-but-professional working relationship. Even if we assume her rise up the ranks would have been as meteoric as those of Starfleet's very finest, she's missing a solid decade of training and relevant experience that anyone else in her position would have. More realistically, we we took exemplary-but-not-flagship-command-exemplary officers like Kathryn Janeway as an example, she's missing more like 15-20 years of experience. Even if we assume that her time aboard Voyager counted as post-commission Starfleet service, she should still be an Ensign or at best a Lieutenant Junior Grade based on length of service. Command of a starship isn't a job you just show up for one day. It's the culmination of a decades-long career. (It's also rather odd that she's in the Command Division. "Borg people skills" being an oxymoron, she was a disastrously poor leader of any organized activity except when it came to managing the Borg children under her care. Her interests, and the knowledge she retained from her time as a Borg drone, would've made her a much better fit for the Science Division or Operations Division. She was always much more "at home" on Voyager in her astrometrics lab or main engineering.) Nepotism, it seems, is another little Human evil that is alive and well in the 25th century. Thinking more on it, it's probably excusable that Starfleet Command itself didn't consider that might happen. Seven is seemingly unique in that she doesn't regard her time as a Borg drone as the most horrific violation of the self imaginable. Any other ex-Borg except perhaps the now very dead Icheb would likely find being referred to by their former Borg designation horrendously offensive given that it is, for all intents and purposes, a "slave name" given to them by their tyrannical oppressor. Jean-Luc Picard and several ex-Borg seen on Voyager were very much of the opinion that assimilation was such a violation that it was better to be dead than a drone. Seven likewise probably wouldn't think much of using her Borg designation, since she was assimilated at such a young age, even though her insistence on using a Borg designation and occasional remarks about how the Borg way of doing things is better would potentially come off as offensive to people who'd suffered at the hands of the Borg. Where the ship's counselor is in all this... between Shaw and Seven, probably drinking heavily in the ship's bar. Can you imagine getting those two into a counseling session at the same time? Bickering beyond the wildest dreams of marriage counselors. The career path, naturally. Liam Shaw has been a Starfleet officer for at least 34 years given that he was a veteran of the Battle of Wolf 359. Given what he himself says about his service history, he's apparently a solid performer in the center seat. Someone who gets the job done without exposing his crew to unnecessary risk. He's not doing flagship work, flying into danger every alternate tuesday, but that's true for most of the fleet. Somebody's got to be doing the actual scientific research, disaster relief efforts, colony setup, and all the thousands of other comparatively more mundane tasks to keep the Federation going while the Enterprise is off getting shot at. Reg Barclay was already a Lieutenant Junior Grade when he joined the crew of the Enterprise-D, meaning he'd already been promoted once. Picard reads his service record in the episode he's introduced in ("Hollow Pursuits") and notes that Barclay had achieved satisfactory ratings from his previous commanding officers and his previous captain had spoken quite highly of him. That says more that Barclay's previous crews simply made allowances for his social anxiety so that he could perform his duties comfortably and it apparently worked well enough that it only became a problem when he was measured against the higher standards of the Federation flagship and the additional stress caused him to pursue escapist remedies. That, as I mention above, is likely a big part of their problem. Seven doesn't see herself as a victim of the Borg. Every other ex-Borg does, and the Federation as a whole views ex-Borg and Borg drones as victims, so Seven's insistence on using her Borg identity in public is bound to be upsetting to ex-Borg and other victims of the Borg. The Borg are mortal enemies to basically everybody. It's like flaunting a prison tattoo declaring membership in a hate group. To be fair, a lot of the stuff Picard and Riker got up to could fairly be described by that even by Picard and Riker themselves. They joke about it at Riker's wedding in Nemesis, with Picard referring to Data as a "tyrannical martinet" who will insist on following all those operational safety regulations that they spent the last decade-plus flouting. Shaw may be intended to be an arsehole... but he's an arsehole with a very sound, very logical point that the people he's scorning have themselves acknowledged in the past.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Is it, though? She was uncomfortable with using her original human name when the USS Voyager crew removed her from the Borg Collective and started removing her Borg implants. However, we saw that she went by, and thought of herself as, "Annika" in the titular virtual reality of the two-parter "Unimatrix Zero", went by her human name after being mind-wiped as a laborer on the Quarren homeworld, and was warming up to the use of her original human identity towards the end of Star Trek: Voyager. The first season of Star Trek: Picard implies that that continued, with her apparently using the name "Annika" in public life at least up to 2386 when Icheb died. (Regardless of the factuality of her remarks, her... admiration... for the Borg is unlikely to be well-received by basically anybody in the Alpha or Beta quadrants. By Federation standards, that'd be what TV Tropes calls "Admiring the Abomination".) She tried. Several times. Actually succeeded once as part of a botched attempt to steal a transwarp coil, before having second thoughts about it when the Borg Queen decided that maximum creepy was the best way to convince Seven to be voluntarily reassimilated. Failed another time because there were no Borg waiting at the Borg beacon she went to. Dunno. It seems unlikely that whatever Federation bureau or ministry is responsible for ID documents would object to numbers as a name, considering the Bynars are apparently either a Federation member or close ally and their entire species has numbers for names. Maybe she just expected that whatever Starfleet captain she ended up with would be as lenient towards her as Janeway was and got stuck with a hardass instead. "Stardust City Rag" seems to imply she's using her Borg designation as some kind psychological reaction to her trust being betrayed in a way that led to Icheb's death. (As noted above, there is evidence in Picard itself that she was using her birth name in public life after USS Voyager returned to Federation space.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Which is 100% more actual Starfleet behavior than practically anything we saw on Discovery or in the first two seasons of Picard. Admittedly, the Shaw-Seven situation raises an interesting (to me, anyway) question about the Alpha (and Beta) quadrant's relationship with ex-Borg. Back in Voyager, we didn't really think anything of Seven and the partially assimilated children she rescues in Voyager's sixth season retaining some Borg mannerisms and even making the occasional remark about all the ways the Borg do things better than Starfleet. USS Voyager was already kind of a ship full of weirdos that'd relaxed their standards somewhat in the expectation of having to work and live together for decades in order to get back to the Alpha quadrant, so everyone there just sort of took it in stride as "Seven being Seven". The Alpha and Beta quadrants haven't suffered quite as much as the Delta quadrant has under the hand of the Borg, but there are still a lot of people who lost friends and loved ones in the various Borg incursions and two major Borg attacks on Earth. Shaw's insistence on Seven using her legal (human) name instead of her chosen name on duty is clearly meant to reflect a certain politically-loaded issue we won't get into here... and while that works on an individual level with Seven specifically, it doesn't quite track on a macro level because the Borg were/are an existential threat to sentient life that's destroyed at least several thousand civilizations thus far. To that end, wouldn't Seven's vocal pride in being a Borg be at best insensitive and at worst massively offensive to pretty much everyone in the Alpha and Beta quadrants? (And likely quite a lot of the Delta quadrant too.) We're supposed to think of Liam Shaw as a jerk for insisting she use her birth name, but she's rubbing her affiliation with a Federation enemy in everyone's face... especially those who've lost friends, loved ones, and colleagues to them like Liam Shaw. (It's actually kind of amazing that Jean-Luc Picard regards her with such affection, considering his feelings on the Borg.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In all fairness to Captain Shaw, there are three mitigating factors in play there: The edge of Federation space is shockingly close to Earth in several different directions due to the close proximity of Klingon and Romulan space. (Demonstrated aptly in several previous titles, including Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Nemesis.) The Titan-A was REALLY humming... Seven states that they're off at Warp 9.99. The official warp formula breaks down into a log scale above Warp 9, but dialog from TNG puts that at around 8,760c and potentially as high as 9,000c. That's a light year per hour, plus or minus about two minutes. At that speed, the Romulan Neutral Zone's only about a day away from Earth. Shaw didn't really have a reason to believe that Seven would set a completely different course from what was ordered at the behest of two old fogeys who snuck aboard his ship under false pretenses. That'd be massively unprofessional behavior from someone nearly as starchy as him. It's not exactly unreasonable for him to be surprised by that, even if it's technically negligent of him to have not checked to ensure they were on the right course.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    And for quite a few centuries after that, if Discovery's third season is any indication. Or at least promoting them. Lower Decks offered an interesting take on the reason Starfleet's upper echelons seem to be so generously provisioned with Admirals of questionable character and/or sanity. Once an officer makes Commodore (or above), they're basically stuck as a pencil-pusher in a glorified sinecure unless they do something to distinguish themselves. The ones who continue the climb up the ranks are that good or a chosen obsession that's useful or timely, while the "insane Admiral" types are the ones whose ambitions don't work out. It seems likely that the brass making these questionable personnel assignments are the ones who didn't feel like trying after they got an office with a desk. Shaw seems like the kind of Captain who leaves nothing to chance if he can help it. He'll send down an away team, but armed and with comm channels open and an armed security team on hot standby in another transporter room just in case. Ironically, if he could just get along with her, he'd probably find Seven's ruthless pragmatism extremely helpful in that regard.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the sheer number and profusion of ways in which starships in Star Trek are inclined to violently explode when damaged, I can't imagine any starship captain wouldn't be profoundly upset that his ship is taking damage unnecessarily or avoidably. Shaw being a dick to Seven about insisting she use her original/legal name is one thing... but what blithering idiot at Starfleet Command decided to assign the only ex-Borg who's actually, vocally proud to have been a Borg to serve as executive officer to a captain who was one of the few survivors of the Wolf 359 massacre? That's tapdancing on the triggers for this poor schlub's PTSD. Literally any other ex-Borg except maybe Picard himself would probably have been fine... but Seven? The worst possible staffing decision. Having Picard around probably ain't helping matters either... given Shaw's feelings on the subject of Locutus of Borg. Now that's hardly fair. Strange New Worlds has wit, charm, style... it's actually fun and the crew of the Enterprise actually seem to be having fun together. Lower Decks is a bit full of itself trying to be Rick and Morty and all, but even that manages to find some genuine humor and fun among the firehose-like torrent of injokes. It's a galaxy apart from the miserable business of Picard and Discovery. Honestly, one of the things I like best about Captain Shaw is that he's not written as some old friend or protégé of Picard or Riker's and that he doesn't give Picard and Riker a pass on their bullsh*t. He doesn't launch into a Picard Speech about the value of honesty and respect, or go on a Jellico-esque rant about insubordination, he just returns the disrespect he's been shown in little ways like putting the retired stowaways in the most uncomfortable quarters he has instead of posh guest quarters and taking the occasional jab at the ego involved in doing what they attempted to do. He indulges them, but he makes sure they understand they're there under sufferance. He understands that Picard is a diplomat first and foremost, and needles him in ways calculated to annoy the piss out of a diplomat. The Borg do actually explain their reasoning to Picard after they abduct him but before they assimilate him in "The Best of Both Worlds". The Borg chose Picard because they concluded his position as captain of the Federation flagship and Starfleet's leading diplomat made him the perfect authority figure to cow the masses in the Federation's "authority-driven" society. One of the more entertaining takes I remember from the Star Trek novelverse was that the reason Starfleet didn't follow up on a lot of the Enterprise's discoveries in Kirk's era was that the reports were so outlandish and bizarre that there was a faction at Starfleet Command that sincerely believed Kirk was trolling them with fake reports. There's probably a replicator that dispenses only pepto-bismol, antacid tablets, and alcohol in whatever Starfleet Command conference room they use to discuss the latest antics of the USS Enterprise.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    This season's got a few mildly diverting offerings. Nothing mind-blowing, but it's a good crop of romcoms if nothing else. Tomo-chan is a Girl! is more or less your form letter "Tomboy loves childhood friend but worries he doesn't see her as a girl" romcom. It's taking no risks and pushing no envelopes, but it's still entertaining enough to be well worth a watch. The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a fairly conventional office comedy-slash-romcom but for the fact that somewhere around half of the cast are descended from various yokai and nobody seems to find that more than slightly odd. This one really loves the "opposites attract" gimmick, so the main duo are an emotional young man descended from a yuki-onna who struggles to control his ice powers when he gets excited and a very reserved young lady who both join the workforce at a nondescript Japanese corporation together. The satellite couples in the story are similar, a reserved young man and a bubbly kitsune girl, and a series young saleswoman and her downright bubbly part-phoenix guy friend. Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro! is into its second season and is still... itself. They've hit the point where Nagatoro might have an actual rival, but it's still a first class ticket on the tsundere express. Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun has hit the point where it's now just a full-blown shounen battle anime, which kinda sucks all the fun out of the premise. I still haven't finished Buddy Daddies because it's like having my eyes sandpapered... what an unpleasant "me too" knockoff of Spy x Family.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If this weren't Gundam, and therefore Too Big To Fail, I'd wonder if they'd have even bothered with Part II. I'm not sure I'm game for another twelve episodes of largely directionless story punctuated by the gaslighting and emotional abuse of a developmentally-delayed kid. Maybe it's just been a while since my last non-IBO Gundam series, but it feels like Suletta Mercury gets treated especially poorly for a Gundam protagonist and it's kind of hard to watch.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    True, though when they try that (e.g. Janeway) the writing tends to end up terribly uneven... even with far better writers than Star Trek currently has. IMO, while Captain Shaw is clearly meant to be an a-hole from the perspective of the main characters, he seems to mainly just be a "I run a tight ship" type who is irritated to hell and back by being browbeaten into Picard and Riker's rogue operation based on blatant lies and misdirection. I get the feeling he's probably a lot more pleasant when he's not smarting over being massively disrespected on his own ship. The one dickish trait he has that's seemingly not motivated by his dislike of Picard and Riker treating him poorly is insisting Seven use her legal name. Whether that's some lingering trauma from his being a Wolf 359 survivor like Ben Sisko or there's some Starfleet regulation requiring crew use their legal names in official duty remains to be seen. (It wouldn't be the first time Starfleet regs were mildly insensitive to the individual needs of certain minorities. Like how Bajorans weren't permitted to wear their earrings on duty without the ship's captain granting an exception to that part of the uniform code in TNG.) Given that Discovery and Picard have been something of a failed experiment, I kind of suspect they'll want to shift focus away from the characters and settings used in those shows to the better-received ones like Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy. Michelle Yeoh's Section 31 spinoff is probably dead, and I wager they'd probably reject an offer of a Titan spinoff with Jeri Ryan too for fear of shunning-by-association with Picard.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    He is hands down the most likeable character in Picard's third season, but given that his particular schtick is being an uptight and by-the-book captain he probably wouldn't make a very interesting protagonist. In a more lighthearted series like Strange New Worlds, he'd be more of an Arnold J. Rimmer.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Unpopular opinion, but as good as Aliens was as an action movie on its own merit it was a rubbish sequel to Alien. The Xenomorph in Alien was scary because it was this nearly invisible, inscrutable, untraceable, and seemingly unkillable threat that lurked among the crew of the Nostromo. It was so good at staying out of sight and hunting the crew opportunistically that it seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. That, combined with the lack of over-the-top generic horror movie reactions to it, lent its killing spree an air of subtle, claustrophobic, creeping horror that has seldom been equaled in modern horror movies. The characters were trapped, alone and afraid, with an unknown quantity that wanted to kill them but was in no hurry to close the deal. Aliens was a solid action movie, but IMO it kind of ruined the Xenomorph by having a bunch of them operating out in the open, giving them easily understood animalistic behaviors, and making them easy to kill. The Xenomorph wasn't a monster anymore, it was just a dangerous animal you could kill by running it over or shooting it and that sucked a lot of the mystique and horror out of it. If they're going to do an Alien TV series, we need something like Alien: Isolation not Alien: Covenant or Aliens. The Xenomorph is only scary when it's an unseen Implacable Thing that wants the characters dead but isn't about to let them see it coming. When it's running about in broad daylight striking poses so the audience can admire its CGI or the characters can Just Shoot It, it stops being scary. (And come to that, an Alien TV series needs characters who are competent and capable professionals. Even Aliens has shades of accidental comedy because of how arrogant Gorman's marines are and how quickly they get brought down, but it's nothing compared to Prometheus and Covenant where every single character displays such a breathtaking lack of interest in self-preservation that you end up rooting for the monster.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    "No-Win Scenario"... an apt description of the viewing experience. "There is a saboteur on this ship." "Keep it quiet."... he has a name, guys. Sir Patrick Stewart. He's been sabotaging this series from the moment he signed on. "Things are about to get a lot worse."... thanks for predicting the remainder of the show's run, Bev! "Dead in the water"... an apt description of the series, and really this entire hot take on Star Trek now that both this and Discovery are cancelled. "Noone's coming to rescue us, Will."... now that's hardly fair, Sir Patrick. Sonequa Martin-Green has been working hard to rescue you from your plummet to worst-rated Star Trek series of all time, admittedly by diving on that grenade herself.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh, no... please no. Just... no. This is not a thing that needs to exist. Ever. We do not need any further demonstration from Mr. Scott that he doesn't, and likely never did, understand what made Alien a classic of modern horror. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant have driven that point home with a vigor far in excess of what was strictly necessary or wise.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Also, given the recent news, can we now say that Disco is, in fact, dead?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Like the real/original Captain Georgiou and Captain Pike, he's one of the few characters on Star Trek: Discovery who seems to understand he's in a Star Trek series and what that means in terms of themes and tone.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The unfortunate implications of how she got pregnant... which, from what we know of how contraception works in later Trek, would require either negligent or deliberate malpractice on her part. The James T. Kirk Memorial Conference Room... so known for the large dartboard on the wall emblazoned with a portrait of the room's namesake.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Her. Poor Admiral Vance seems to be something approximating a decent, principled being. He's an arse for enabling her, and he had many far better options to command the Discovery than her, but Burnham is very much a Designated Hero. It won't be missed. Ironically, Picard's sudden reversal thanks to becoming the TNG cast reunion it promised it would never become has left Star Trek: Discovery as the worst-rated Star Trek series of all time by a substantial margin. Not all of them... but most. For instance, her saving the day by recapturing the USS Discovery after the Emerald Chain pirates take it over is 100% solving a problem she herself created. She wasn't responsible for "the Burn", though... so solving that incredibly stupid mystery and unintentionally securing a new source of dilithium for the Federation is one of her few genuine achievements despite being a confluence of multiple massive plot holes. The fact that the show has plot holes so large they comprise entire seasons is something Discovery will NEVER escape.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "Kirk was the problem." Somewhere, there's a boardroom of Starfleet admirals nodding along. Of all the scathing indictments of the series I've seen and read over the years, this one might be the closest I've seen to an honest-to-goodness sucker punch. I felt that one. "Other Me disgusts me" is 100% how a TNG-era Jean-Luc Picard would react to seeing this broken, self-obsessed relic that was once one of Starfleet's most principled officers. Much like Michael Burnham repeated (or presaged) the murderous xenophobic paranoia of the USS Phoenix's Captain Benjamin Maxwell in TNG "The Wounded", Jack Crusher here in Star Trek: Picard's third and (mercifully) final season is repeating the sins of Admiral Mark Jameson, who traded weapons to one faction on Mordan IV to secure the release of the hostages they'd taken, and then armed the opposition too to "balance the books". The end result of Jameson's gambit was 40 years of war that caused so much destruction that, once the dust settled, the Mordans tried to lure Jameson back so they could punish him for his crimes. Both he and Beverly do imply he's a trained medical practitioner at various points in "Seventeen Seconds". How much of that training is formal and how much of it was him being Beverly's nurse is open to interpretation. I doubt the writers thought that far ahead... if they had, they'd realize they'd make Beverly a borderline sex offender and Jack an even scummier person than they were going for. IMO, the likely explanation is that the various warlords probably don't have the resources to divert troops to exterminate refugees without compromising their front lines against other warlords. Weaponized disease is a means of attack that doesn't require diverting any soldiers long-term.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    In Star Trek IV, Kirk et. al. had a LOT of mitigating factors that prevented them from experiencing the full consequences of their actions... the biggest of which was probably not having just saved Earth, but having just saved the son of the hugely influential Ambassador Sarek. Burnham's various Karma Houdini moments never really end up making sense. There's really not a lot that could be called meritorious about using a weapon of mass destruction intended for a planetary genocide to force a regime change on Qo'nos which is propped up by "obey me or I will destroy us all". That it works at all is kind of outrageous. That the Chancellor that Burnham installs manages to hold onto power for any length of time is astonishing. Somehow, this is enough to convince the Federation president to not just pardon her for her earlier crimes of mutiny and assaulting a superior officer, but also to reinstate her commission AND award her a medal. Luckily, they never get a chance to put her on trial for visiting Talos IV. In season three she violates direct orders from both her Captain and the Starfleet Commander in Chief to go charging off on a rescue mission that results in Starfleet's only non-warp starship falling into enemy hands and nearly causes a second Burn... but she's rewarded for it with a promotion to Captain and command of the single most stratically-important starship in the fleet. Made worse by the fact that she'd been told just a few episodes earlier that she was unsuited for command precisely because she couldn't follow orders.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That one, I'm not sure we can explain. I'm not familiar with the specific model kit or decal sheet you're referring to, but as you noted Minmay left Earth in September 2012 aboard the SDF-2 Megaroad-01. It wouldn't be possible for her to hold a 2013 concert in Paris because she wasn't on Earth in 2013 and Paris suffered a catastrophic existence failure about three years before that point. Was that model kit or decal sheet released in 2013? Or for some special event? Master File only "adopted" a few of Hasegawa's unique kit designs as in-universe paintjobs, some are simply products meant for fan enjoyment not necessarily representative of an in-universe thing. I'd assume so... especially if there were a fair number of Japanese personnel assigned to that suspected base in Clavius crater. And that trend of doing gaudy redecos of secondhand Valkyries like we saw in Macross 7 had to come from SOMEWHERE. The Queen's Knights are a favorite of mine... not just because the paint scheme itself looks nice on the VF-25F, but because it's a subtle but very cute touch on Sheryl's part to ask for the MODEX numbers of the two VF-25Fs in her SMS bodyguard detail to match her and Alto's birthdays. (727 and 1123). I'd quite happily buy a matched set of Queens Knights VF-25Fs from Bandai Spirits to go with the rest of the Frontier stuff I've got.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Kosher shuttlecraft. Can't be used to haul ham and ham products.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If they liked it once, they'll love it thrice! Which is understandable. Goodness knows it was probably the single worst-enforced embargo in galactic history. Lampshaded in the same DS9 episode where the ban's repeal was mentioned with Admiral Ross joking that the ban's enforcement was so poor that he was probably the only one in his class at the Academy who hadn't tried the stuff before they repealed the ban. What's the alternate explanation for a cargo hold full of illegal weapons then? I can't imagine one that's less awful than what he's already proposing. Mind you, he's supposed to be a doctor. Part of the Hippocratic Oath is a vow to Do No Harm. That this is part of the Hippocratic Oath even in Star Trek comes up in multiple past shows. Selling arms to further a war is definitely, DEFINITELY a violation of "Do No Harm". Mind you, the warlords warring is what created those refugees in the first place. All he's doing by further arming the warlords is raising the body count, creating MORE refugees, and ensuring that whoever's left is exceptionally well-armed to come take out the refugees the hard way when someone wins and they return to the question of the refugees. Yes, we are. These are things that are acknowledged and explained in-story. Yes, they absolutely can do that. Why don't they? Because it's so stupidly dangerous that the Federation and other galactic powers banned it after several misadventures. We get to see several of the Federation's in TOS and TAS. There are also literal time cops from several different eras in future history who intervene to prevent alterations to the timeline. Janeway had several run-ins with members of the 29th century Federation's Temporal Integrity Commission and Archer got a LOT of gray hair from his dealings with the 31st century Federation Temporal Agency. Sisko got the business from his contemporary version, the Department of Temporal Investigations, after his unintended outing to the 23rd century. Apparently the Temporal Cold War was such a mess that the major galactic powers outright banned time travel even for benevolent and scientific purposes by the time of the 32nd century portions of Star Trek: Discovery. That's why the Federation had to cover up the origins of the USS Discovery with a retrofit and new registry... it was an illegal time traveler. This one was less explicable initially. Gene Roddenberry's position on the matter of cloaking devices was that sneaking about was unheroic, so the Federation simply didn't use cloaking devices even though they had captured several prior to the 24th century. In-universe, this was later explained that the cloaking devices came with their own set of significant drawbacks that the Federation had decided just weren't worth it. (For instance, being unable to use shields, weapons, active sensors, or higher warp speeds while cloaked.) Later justification was added in TNG with the Treaty of Algeron, where the Federation agreed not to use or develop its own cloaking technology in exchange for a number of major concessions from the Romulans. I'm not sure which incident you're specifically referring to, but I'm sure there are probably explanations for it provided. Prior to NuTrek, the staff were pretty good about closing plot holes of that nature.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Gene... had a lot of ideas that were not necessarily suited to television, both from a writing perspective and a general "the limits of good taste" perspective. One of his stranger and more problematic mandates after gaining full creative control over Star Trek with Star Trek: the Next Generation was that 24th century humans were simply too advanced and enlightened for interpersonal conflict. That caused a lot of writers and production crew to quit or get fired during the show's first two seasons, until Gene's failing health and mounting problems with the production led to him being ousted and Rick Berman taking his place for the third season. It's actually kind of amazing that their distrust and borderline sociopathy didn't get more of them killed in the series thus far. Somehow - by which I mean a directorial fiat - Michael Burnham's rogue actions never seem to have actual lasting negative consequences for her or anyone else... except at the very start where it's required to kickstart her "arc".
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure that argument tracks, to be honest. Beverly and Jack Crusher are allegedly running their little Doctors Without Space-Borders operation at the behest of the Mariposa Medical Group. I say "allegedly" because I doubt very much that a Federation medical aid organization like the Mariposas would condone the Crusher family's criminal activities. The Mariposas benefit from the Federation's post-scarcity replicator economy. They should not need to commit crimes to obtain the supplies they need. A potential explanation for why they would need to commit crimes to get supplies would be that, well, the open warrants for their arrest make it difficult to go near Federation systems anymore. Two problems with the flashback you're referring to: The Romulan ale that Jack Crusher used to bribe the Fenris Rangers probably isn't illegal. The Federation lifted the embargo on Romulan goods in 2375 (DS9: "Inter Enim Arma Silent Leges") and the USS Cerritos is transporting Romulan ale as goodwill gifts for the Karemma in 2381 (LD: "Hear All, Trust Nothing). Sarnia's outside Federation space too, so even if the ban were reinstated (it probably hasn't been, given that the Romulan Free State is said to have better relations with the Federation that the Star Empire) it still wouldn't apply there. Jack Crusher openly acknowledges that he is running guns to the warlords who spread the plague on that planet. He uses a portion of that shipment of illegal weapons to bribe the Fenris Rangers to let him pass, but his brilliant plan - which he shares with them - was to supply arms to multiple warlords in the hopes of making the fighting worse and increasing the death toll! He literally says his goal is to get more people killed because it's "bad guys killing bad guys". That's not a Robin Hood move... that's a complete monster move of a type normally reserved for the insane admiral du jour. Specifically, Mark Jameson from TNG S1E16 "Too Short a Season". It was Toby Russel who kills at least one person in the course of that episode by using them as test subjects for untrialed and unapproved treatments... and nearly gets Worf killed after convincing him to try a never-before-tested procedure to replace his entire spine. But it was Dr. Crusher who flat-out refused to respect the culture and customs of her Klingon patient and openly dismissed them as barbarism. It's Dr. Crusher they're lampooning there.
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