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What's the deal with Klingon painstiks? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by ummthatguy@lemmy.world to c/tenforward@lemmy.world
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Wait-a-minute Wednesday: To draw attention towards a situation or decision which bares further scrutiny.

For example: the crew of the Defiant not stopping Captain Sisko from committing acts of terrorism in order to prevent other atrocities being carried out by the Maquis.

So let's dig up the decidedly bone-head commands made by any characters throughout the Continuum, aside from the tried and true Tuvixian methodology. Or do, just provided there's a fresh/skewed take to be had.

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[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago

"What's the deal with Klingon pain sticks"

The Klingons are the race of insecure masculinity, so they sleep on sheet metal and eat bugs and when it's their birthday they taze each other. I think they made the actors drive to set in very large pickup trucks.

[-] Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Toxic insecure masculinity. They can't walk into a bar without getting into a fight, and can't introduce themselves without letting everyone know who their father is.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 22 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Everything about The Inner Light's probe is stupid:

• It is designed to transmit its information to one person, one time. This person could be an imbecile who is working for a salvage operation. The person could be evil. The person could die immediately after it happens and no one would ever know. It destroys itself after a one-time use, meaning that the information cannot be preserved by other people experiencing it and sharing what they found out.

• It shows one snapshot of a culture that is going to die out from one perspective on one place on the planet and gives no regard to the culture's obviously rich history. The planet also probably had more than one culture, although monoculture is a thing in Star Trek.

• It gives the person who is experiencing the lifetime no way to record what is going on as it happens.

• They could have at least added a summary text to the probe to let everyone else know what is going on.

• They could also have added any other information about their culture(s) in text. Anything. At all.

• They could have also included A BOOK INSTEAD OF A FUCKING FLUTE.

• It wasn't even a very interesting flute. It could have been ornately carved or something. Maybe even carvings of what the people who made those flutes looked like? Which reminds me-

• THEY COULD HAVE INCLUDED A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES.

The Pioneer plaque is a more useful transmitter of information about a species than that probe.

Beautiful episode in terms of a storyline but really stupid in terms of a plot device.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

This quote summarizes the Resikans’ entire rationale and their rebuttal to your argument. First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship). Secondly:

This is how they wanted to be remembered!

Not as some pile of artifacts and writings collecting dust in the back room of some museum — one dead civilization among countless others — but as living, breathing people. That’s what’s so profound about it! They reached across time and space and managed to get a single person to care and care very deeply about them.

Look at all the other artifacts Picard collected as an archaeologist. They’re important to him but for the wrong reason: they’re trophies of his intellectual curiosity. The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship).

Absolutely nothing in the episode suggested that.

This is how they wanted to be remembered!

They won't be remembered when Picard is dead. And what little he could write down was, again, about one snapshot of one culture on their planet at one point in what was probably at least thousands of years of history. When he dies, most of their history dies with them. He could write down what he remembered and that's it. Picard can't even show what they looked like accurately. Maybe he can make a realistic drawing- based on his faulty human memory. That's it.

So if that's how they want to be remembered, they're idiots.

The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.

That changes nothing about what I said about the probe being a stupid plot device and the fact that they could have added any sort of cultural information to their flute.

I think it's hard to believe that the civilization was able to build spacecraft that could transmit mental imagery that realistic but not be bothered etch images and text into a metal flute before their civilization went kablooey. Or absolutely anywhere on the probe.

Even Superman's parents included more than just him in the spacecraft.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

How many long-extinct human cultures do you care about like they’re your own family?

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

What difference does that make?

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

All the difference. We’re talking about the values of a people who knew they were dying. You called them idiots for wanting to be remembered by a person who actually cared about them. I think if you ask most people they’d rather be remembered by their loved ones than have their life recorded as a bunch of artifacts in a museum.

According to their values, their probe succeeded wildly in a way that nearly all other extinct cultures failed. The only other ones to come close were those aliens that hid their own humanoid DNA in the genetics of all the major civilizations. Even then, those aliens didn’t succeed at getting anyone to care about them the way Picard cared about the Resikans.

TLDR: no one cares about a bunch of crap people leave behind when they die. Go to an estate sale and see.

Edit: if you have a few hours to kill, watch this video. Then come back and continue the discussion.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I'm calling them idiots because they won't end up being remembered. Because Picard is not immortal.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They wanted one person to remember them. All the other extinct cultures had none!

Anyway, suppose they had made the probe infinitely reusable as long as you hooked it up to a power source. Then it would’ve turned into a Disney ride, totally cheapening the experience. Do you see what I’m getting at?

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

You're getting at the fact that the whole thing is a stupid plot device for a poignant episode and it makes no sense. "All the other extinct cultures had none" especially makes no sense considering the probe used itself on a guy who's hobby was learning about what extinct cultures left behind.

I'm sorry, nothing you have said makes the probe a better idea to memorialize a civilization than the carved plaque we put on the Pioneer probe. Because everyone can see the plaque and learn about us that way. And even if we had the same technology as the probe, we, and they, could do both.

I don't think you are getting the idea that a memorial space probe for an entire species that went extinct right after making the probe without a single piece of text on it is nonsense.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Did you watch the video I linked about nutmeg? We actually have real life examples of cultures going extinct in real time. The Bandanese people are witnessing the death of their own language as it happens. What upsets them the most is that their own children don’t speak their language. They could not care less about memorials to their language in some institute of language in the capital city.

That’s the whole genius of The Inner Light. They reached out across the vastness of space and time and taught Picard what it really meant to be a person living on their planet, in their culture. No stupid memorial plaque or other token could achieve that.

It’s not the piece of pottery that matters! It’s the people making it. Their lives and their experiences.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Nothing that you have said at any point justifies the lack of text and images. Languages die out because of a lack of text. Are you trying to say they didn’t invent writing but invented psychic space probes?

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Languages die when people stop speaking them. They cannot be revived from written records. People still study Latin today but it will forever be a dead language because the chain of speakers was broken. The same goes for culture, for which language is a part. You cannot preserve a culture after all of its native practitioners are gone.

What the Resikans did was to preserve their own culture by giving Picard a life on their planet. Through his experiences he became the last living member of their culture. The profound grief he shows and his reluctance to talk about it is exactly what we would expect from the last survivor of a dying culture.

Unfortunately, Picard has no way to preserve their culture because he cannot recreate their entire way of life. No amount of writings or other artifacts can do that.

This is what we see all over the world with indigenous cultures that are dying off. They cannot be saved by scientists studying them and writing everything down and cataloguing all the art they’ve made. Just as you can’t save a species from extinction using dissection and taxidermy.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Languages die when people stop speaking them. They cannot be revived from written records.

Uh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment#Notable_decipherers

But sure, we have no idea what cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs or Akkadian (and other cuneiform-script long-dead languages) or Linear B say. No idea at all. All those people who deciphered them after they were long dead, big liars.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Being able to decipher a language doesn’t mean the language is alive. It has to be spoken everyday by people who were taught by their parents, passed down as part of a whole culture.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Okay? This still doesn't justify a total lack of writing and pictures on their probe.

We put writing on probes not even intending them to be used in any sort of archaeological context. Just to help us put them together. Open up any piece of electronics- writing everywhere. Do they really not need any sort of instructions upon assembly?

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I think it’s fair to say that they didn’t value books, at least not at the time they built the probe. Their planet was dying and they had accepted that fact for many years. Kamin’s wife Helene even admonishes him for spending too much time with his books instead of living life with their family.

It’s completely and utterly realistic from an emotional perspective. It’s everything you’d expect from a people who knew they were dying. Their way of life, their traditions, their music, their celebrations: those are what mattered to them and they couldn’t be preserved authentically in books or pictures. That’s why they created the probe.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Why is it fair to say that? You have no idea how they felt about books just because one person didn’t like one other person spending too much time with their books. That’s a criticism real live humans have given to each other.

To accept all of your explanations, I have to accept a whole lot of things that are pure assumptions on your part and not actually demonstrated in the episode.

I think we all know that you can come up with extremely convoluted explanations for why stupid things in sci-fi aren’t actually stupid. They all involve adding all sorts of details. If those details were relevant, you shouldn’t have to make them up.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

She wasn’t just one person. She was a representative of her entire species. They make it clear at the end when everyone reverts to their youthful appearance. The life Picard lived as Kamin was in some sense a staging for Picard’s benefit, not a real life. Kamin may have been a real person who was married to Helene but Picard wouldn’t have mirrored exactly what he did with his life.

At any rate, I think you’re missing the point of Star Trek. The show has never been “hard sci fi”. It’s always been a show that uses a science fiction setting to tell human stories. Trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective is just silly. There’s a bit of science in the show but any time science gets in the way of the story they wave it away with some technobabble.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Again, you're making up things that aren't in the show and assuming things that aren't said.

At any rate, I think you’re missing the point of Star Trek. The show has never been “hard sci fi”. It’s always been a show that uses a science fiction setting to tell human stories. Trying to criticize it from a scientific perspective is just silly. There’s a bit of science in the show but any time science gets in the way of the story they wave it away with some technobabble.

I think you're missing the point that this was a "Wait-a-minute Wednesday" thread in a meme community and maybe you need to take this about a billion times less seriously than you're taking it.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I’d forgotten that long ago. I was just enjoying this back and forth with you!

[-] ummthatguy@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Been waiting to get that one out of your system for a bit, haven't ya? And entirely justified. Their culture doesn't deserve to be remembered if they think in such arbitrarily limited terms. No primer, no back-up, no alternatives.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Oh I rant about that episode all the time because everyone else is constantly gushing over it and the bad plot device annoyed me then and annoys me now. Absolutely a tour de force for Patrick Stewart, but it just gets to me every time.

Edit: Now I'm even more annoyed than I was before because there's a really easy way to fix it- the enterprise salvages all that is left of a much larger probe that is destroyed in some way or other and that is what gives Picard the experience. In other words, there were a lot of other memorials of their civilization, it's just that is the only one that survived. And then it dies because it was running out of power after being separated from the rest of the probe and burns out and can't be restored because Treknobabble. There. Fixed pretty much every problem.

[-] swab148@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago

Like the obelisks in Mass Effect?

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Never played it, I'm afraid.

[-] swab148@lemm.ee 4 points 3 days ago

Fantastic games!

[-] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 16 points 4 days ago

Letting a sentient species die from geological events to follow the prime directive violates the very spirit of the directive.

I get they don’t want to play god, but to see a light be avoidably extinguished by chance doesn’t feel like it celebrates life.

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Are we talking about "Into Darkness"?

I figure there, Kirk wasn't in trouble for saving the species, he was in trouble for revealing the Enterprise just to save one officer.

If we're not talking about "Into Darkness", then I've just illustrated how often Trek goes for this plot point, lol.

[-] Wolf314159@startrek.website 7 points 3 days ago

They're almost certainly talking about the TNG episode "Pen Pals" where data makes friends with a little girl whose planet is dying.

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Dear Doctor, too. You're allowed to interfere if they ask you to, and the Prime Directive hadn't even been made yet.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

Especially when the rest of the time it's, "fuck the Prime Directive, they're going to die!"

[-] sxan@midwest.social 12 points 4 days ago

Spock in Strange New Worlds does T'Pring exceedingly wrong, which - while justifying her later behavior in TOS - made me mad. That's not the Spock we knew and loved.

I don't know why every writer after Roddenberry had to make Spock such a slut. It's entirely against canon, and violates the very idea of Pon Farr, which - half-breed though he is, Spock is demonstrably susceptible to.

[-] Charapaso@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

Him not being the Spock we know is kind of the point though, right?

He was a little messier before he got himself together. His human side maybe is less bound by Pon Farr rules, and he's not yet the hyper competent officer we love in his later years.

He screws up and then that becomes a motivating reason to control himself is pretty compelling, to me at least. He did go a little buck wild helping out Pike in TOS, so he's certainly still got a wild streak in him.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago

Also, Spock is clearly not into Nurse Chappel in TOS despite her pining over him. That annoyed me in SNW. It's okay to have unrequited love in a story.

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I actually think they nailed it, in Strange New Worlds.

The plot in Strange New Worlds had been my head canon for decades, because of Majel Barret's performance as Nurse Chapel in TOS.

Once or twice, nurse chapel gives Spock "fuck me" eyes, and isn't bothered by his lack of reaction.

I always thought this was Majel Barret's way of intentionally implying a scandalous tumultuous past relationship that would never be approved on 1960s TV.

The fact that TOS Spock has virtually no reaction, other than obvious fondness for her, is largely due to Spock being TOS Spock.

I think a lot of folks assumed that Nurse Chapel was pining for the exotic aliens unrequited love - which I think is certainly part of Majels intent n in her performance.

But TOS Nurse Chapel is very emotionally intelligent. (Mainly to contrast Bones and Spock who are not.) Due to her high emotional intelligence, I was always inclined to believe that TOS Chapel probably knew what she was doing when she threw "we could still fuck (again?) sometime" eyes at Spock.

We all think she has no chance, but Nurse Chapel knows Spock better than we do.

And TOS Spock is incapable of acknowledging it, but probably still appreciates the gesture.

Edit: The SNW Spock and Chapel story makes me happy, because I think it's exactly what Majel Barret intended to imply, during filming of TOS. I agree it doesn't fit everyone else's creative vision, but it makes me happy that hers became official canon.

[-] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 4 days ago

I have to say that in Amok Time - she did way more than get back at him. She had him fight arguably his only friend to the death. T'Pring fulfilled the whole "hurt princess" trope to the letter. She wound up being the much less mature of the two (at least from Earth standards).

[-] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 3 days ago

Which is also not the same T'Pring from SNW.

Don't get me started on the Gorn.

[-] Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

So, in Tapestry. Picard takes a shot to the chest and he is about to die because it permanently damaged his fake heart. Q intercepts him from dying and gives a morality tale about playing it safe, Picard still gets stabbed by the Nausicans, still gets shot in the chest...and wakes up laughing perfectly alive.

So the only reason Picard is alive is because Q snap-fixed his artificial heart?

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

So the only reason Picard is alive is because Q snap-fixed his artificial heart?

I've always thought so. Q is quite fond of Picard. They have a strong one way bromance going. It's why Q won't leave him alone.

Of course, in Picard Season 2,

Major spoiler for Picard Season 2Q's entire grand scheme is, while perhaps also to fuck up history for fun, primarily to set the entire timeline to one where Picard doesn't suicide against the Borg.

So Q has canonically saved Picard's life twice. Possibly more, assuming that Q's "gift" to Picard of early knowledge of the Borg also resulted in saving Picard's life during other encounters.

[-] Thebeardedsinglemalt@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

Yeah I always envisioned Q as a bully and he keeps poking Picard because Q can always get a ride out of him. But in Tapestry Q saved Picard's life, while being a dick every step of the way.

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 7 points 3 days ago

Yeah. I mean, Q definitely is a bully. He has learned no healthy ways of interacting with anyone.

He's just a bully who also loves Picard.

[-] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 days ago

That's probably why Sisko punched Q

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 3 points 3 days ago

Lol. I'm going to point this out to my friends during our next rewatch. That's amazing.

this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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