With regards to number 2 I had often wondered just what the big deal was about returning someone to pre-Borg state. I think we can see the allegory of addiction coming into play in these scenarios as well. It’s much easier for someone to “kick” being a Borg if they’ve only spent a little bit in the collective. The longer you spend in the collective the more of a psychological impact it has and therefore the trauma makes reversion to the pre-Borg state more challenging at the individual level.

This is a question worth asking. As others have pointed out there sort of seems to be clear that the rules are the rules and business rules trump all other rules. The Rules of Acquisition tend to be the Ferengi Alliance’s highest law. It’s both a religious law and a practical one and I think therein is where the problem lies. You can’t make profit outside of the constrains of normal ethics because whatever makes profit is what is ethical to do.

This is why so many contradictory Rules exist in this system. War is good for business and peace is good for business, and neither of these are statements on what is “bad” for business. There’s nothing here that says not to do anything and I think in this way Ferengi ethics largely comes down to there’s no precept that says I shouldn’t do this and I was able to exchange doing it for profit so ultimately it serves a higher purpose.

And since it seems like there is a fair amount of legalize extortion that happens in Ferengi while it might be technically illegal to do slavery, it might be more profitable to do it and therefore on the whole you can come out with an ethical conclusion that is “good” especially if you’re some mid-level Ferengi in charge of making sure that slavery doesn’t happen and you’re able to take a little bit of a kickback.

I mean let’s be clear for most of Ferengi history women were not allowed to own property of any kind - including clothing and some of their business endeavors include poaching endangered animals and literally being slave traders. I mean - I don’t think there’s any indication that Ferengi society was anything more than hyper-capitalist dystopia as a juxtaposition of the Federation socialist utopia. That Rom and Quark are goofy and lovable I think speaks more to how bad every other Ferengi is operating outside of a Federation station.

From the Federation’s perspective the Ferengi are harmless and in this way they may be ethical enough to not warrant confrontation, but at the same time - the Federation does seem to stop them when they’re doing something like slave trading so I think we can imagine that for some people in the sphere of Ferengi influence they’re not so ethical.

I think this is a challenging one sense ostensibly we learn that Tellarites had generation ships before achieving warp capabilities and that these generation ships went at least as far as the Delta Quadrant. I don’t know that we can so safely assume that Jankom Pog is representative of Tellarites in the Federation.

that we shouldn’t take dates on the show literally other than as an indication of the general order in which things happened

I absolutely am fine with this take now, especially. Ultimately, what we are talking about is the narrative importance of the events. If we want to have episodes where the characters go to “today” today must continue to exist within the narrative. If the narrative says that the world was noticeably different in 1996 - move it to 2036. If we’re still going strong move it to 2056.

These changes don’t make as much difference in the narrative that was being told to begin with.

I don’t think that changes anything that was previous established. Picard established that Soong did illegal genetic experiments, but it does not stipulate that his experiments were illegal because of a prior genetic research ban. Soong later recovers the 1996 Khan Project file.

My take is that Romulan time agents went back in time to hide the Khan file. They perhaps moved Soong away from that avenue of research not knowing how the Confederation would play into it. In any case it didn’t work because Picard did his own time shenanigans pushing Soong to take more drastic measures.

In less than a year the Khan project has found a new home in Canada with new research partners. The Noonien-Singh Institute has Adam Soong’s fingerprints on it somewhere, but it’s unclear where. In any case whether there is a connection or not, Soong discovers the Khan project from 1996 in 2023. In SNW the Khan project has only just begun a year later and already has found its Khan.

I don’t think it’s the best season of Picard. I think, in fact, it was the worst if only because it did not fit narratively within the rest of the Picard series. It was essentially a soft reboot of the series letting most of the primary cast disappear and replacing them with the nostalgic cast for the finale.

I agree though, Lower Decks and Prodigy did it first and did it better than Picard because they stayed true to the ideals of Starfleet and the Federation and made this a main point of the series. Something that I think both animated shows do extremely well. Contrast this with Picard’s Starfleet and Federation - they are in this position because they are spies, torturers, and liars who engage in grave robbery and allow themselves to be constantly defeated at their own hand by hubris only to be saved not by Federation and Starfleet ideals, but by the opposite (as presented.)

I also think that this same phenomenon happens in TOS as well although to a much less noticable degree. While that crew was always depicted as a little more willing to bend the rules, the movies had them breaking all the rules with a smirk and I think part of that was just the desire to hammer into the same nostalgia that Picard 3 tries to do. Unfortunately, Picard 3 doesn’t give us original characters or original concepts and so it needs to be maintained through relationships to existing characters.

I think narratively it’s just a much more enjoyable to not have Odo shift shape onscreen, especially as it gives him the ability to overpower a lot of people. In the early episodes this needed to be shown so we could understand Odo’s character, but by the fourth season (both when he was a solid and not) we knew enough about the Changelings that we didn’t need to show this as frequently and had to figure out more creative ways to to get around Odo.

I suspect this isn’t covered for a variety of reasons, but what we do see shows an Earth steeped in nostalgia blending with technology that alleviates the overwhelming majority of material concerns. No one needs to worry about food, shelter, clothing, or profit. They work to better themselves for its own sake and they relax and stuff.

I think the message is that Earth is boring and humans, having created paradise, left it for knowledge of the stars. Civilian life is coffee and breakfast in the morning before dropping the kids off at school, plenty of time to pursue niche hobbies, and probably also time to pursue some career interest and education.

However, you raise an interesting point in that civilians from the perspective of Starfleet officers are even more out there. These are folks who often wanted to go even further than the rest of society wanted to go. Fringe people with eccentricities to un civilized to stay within the Federation. The intersection of these two kinds of civilians is what I would like to explore.

A happy family who have lived in paradise are suddenly Swiss Family Robinson or Lost in Space style thrust into deep space and must survive without the comforts of paradise would be an interesting way to tell the story of what it’s like to be a civilian in the Federation.

Whoa! Good catch. That timeline almost lines up exactly and it’s very possible that O’Brien was referring to Una. It could also be that O’Brien is indicating that sentiments have maybe changed somewhat in 100 years, something that we are lead to expect from SNW. And indeed Bashir is allowed to stay in Starfleet without even having to find a technical loophole and Richard’s punishment is considered harsh at 2 years. Given the future utopia that we’re dealing with and the historical significance of the crime I think what we’re seeing is that no one really does this anymore and so it’s not really an issue.

I really hate that Prodigy was unrewened because a courtroom episode of Prodigy where Dal gets the right to serve in Starfleet and the Starfleet ban on genetic augments is lifted would be a pretty cool.

I want to push back on the conversation between Jack and Bashir in “Statistical Probabilities” a little bit given additional context from Strange New Worlds “Ad Astra per Aspera.” I don’t think it’s fair to say that all augments are treated the same way. It’s unlikely I think, that even if Bashir were to have not lied to get into Starfleet he would have been prevented either by law or by policy of doing anything even remotely scientific - including medicine or other gene research.

However, I don’t think we can take Jack at his word that he would have been institutionalized in the same manner. If we believe that the genetically modified people we see from the Institute in Deep Space Nine weren’t driven mad by their perceived incarceration then we have to believe that side effects of the genetic modification process caused unexpected neurological abnormalities and personality disorders that we see typified by that group.

Dal, for instance, in Prodigy does not fear institutionalization in the Federation, but rather he fears he won’t be let into Starfleet. Presumably he may also be precluded from other career choices that he’s just not interested in, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that being an augment is criminal as much as it is laws have created a system whereby modified people, especially modified humans, are treated as second class citizens. This might even extend to people who have DNA sequencing done for legitimate medical reasons like Chakotay. I like to imagine Chakotay and Una and Bashir having similar experiences even though their circumstances were unique. The human willingness to look past reason and into bigotry doesn’t go away, but it’s focused on the genetically modified.

And it takes decades, centuries even, for the laws to change even a little bit and even longer for the people to accept those changes.

undefined> It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.

I’ll comment on this most important concluding statement with agreement. Ultimately, Discovery tried to do something different and did it fairly well. It’s downfall was in not being willing to take that kind of storytelling and really lean into it. Fans started talking, loudly, about changes that were made and as a result later seasons of Discovery become far more tempered. The Discovery of season 1 could have ended Season 2 by sending Burnham and Discovery to the future and introducing a whole new cast of main players in a whole new context. Instead of that, they responded to the valid criticisms of the weaker supporting characters who don’t seem to have much to do and as a result the show took a much more emotional turn. They haven’t abandoned these long arcs, but they’ve tried to tell that story in a more familiar way and in my opinion this was always Discovery’s downfall.