S01.E03: Ghost of Illyria

[cambridgeguy]

41 minutes ago, Colorado David said:

to learn from mistakes: Khan in said movie. "we are one big happy family..." then boom went the dynamite. all because he just behaved correctly and APPEARED non threatening. maybe being a bit thorough isn't such a bad thing.

That was Kirk's fault though.  Savaak even quoted the regulation about raising shields and he (and Spock) ignored her.

Starfleet doesn't shoot first but that doesn't mean you don't take precautions.  Unless you're talking about developing an effective form of armor for your officers.  No reason to do anything with that.

[Colorado David]

yep. kirk ignoring protocol. which is why i am preaching protocol with the UTMOST carefulness is the correct path, hence I want to know the history of everyone around me, beyond i beat the technology and my word of mouth on my past is absolutely fine. BS. deep a dark enough trained spy, he/she believes whatever you instruct him/her esp if you change their body chemistry.   verify the source on 3+ levels to determine "validity" otherwise it's not considered valid.  and verified thru? family history, contacts, non family history.  basic police work. but hey, hand over helmsperson who scans thru fine, lies on history fine, who cares? we're starfleet we trust everyone. cuz gosh darn it we need to get along.

[paigow]

[salaydouk]

6 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

Presumably, Una would have submitted to numerous physicals over the years that would be detailed enough/involved enough tests to tell that she wasn't a garden-variety human. Assuming for discussion's sake that she is at least 10 years into Starfleet to have gotten to the rank of commander, that is probably 10 annual physicals, physicals while she was in the Academy, plus physicals after certain away missions. This presumably is not her first time where there was a pandemic that she was strangely immune from.

To a certain extent, she could maybe hack the results to show herself as garden-variety human. Or maybe her bio-engineering is so sophisticated that she can fake seeming garden-variety when she is conscious of being scanned. 

Agree. I still think that there would still be something that would pop up in a physical, but perhaps you would have to look really hard to find it. Her bio-engineering might be so good someone would have to be suspicious of her to make him/her take a deeper dive. 

And I know you said for "discussion's sake" and Kirk making Captain at ~30... but normally in reality to make full Commander it takes just over 20 years if you are an Academy graduate and if this play on Una being Enlisted plays out, since La'an calls her Chief, then in reality it would have taken her even longer.  Since ST canon seems to skew the lines on promotion( ala Harry Kim was an ensign for 7 seasons which would never  happen) so who knows what they are actually going to set her age to, but she would have to have been fooling everyone for a _very_ long time.

[statsgirl]

What I really liked was that the Illyrians* modified themselves to survive on the new planets instead of terraforming and adapting the planets to themselves. It seems to me like a very advanced way to move out into the galaxy.

And then because Star Fleet couldn't deal with that, they took those modifications away in order to join, leading to them dying because they could no longer live on the planet. The irony in that does not pass unnoticed. It very  much reminds me of TOS which sought to expend the viewers' thought limitations.

 *I can't stop thinking of Twelfth Night. 

[Maverick]

 As much as I hate their introduction into Trek canon, presumably Section 31 should be on top of shit like this.  

[Llywela]

5 hours ago, salaydouk said:

And I know you said for "discussion's sake" and Kirk making Captain at ~30... but normally in reality to make full Commander it takes just over 20 years if you are an Academy graduate and if this play on Una being Enlisted plays out, since La'an calls her Chief, then in reality it would have taken her even longer.  Since ST canon seems to skew the lines on promotion( ala Harry Kim was an ensign for 7 seasons which would never  happen) so who knows what they are actually going to set her age to, but she would have to have been fooling everyone for a _very_ long time.

Rebecca Romijn is almost 50, and Trek often has actors playing older than their real age to sell the idea that people live longer and are generally fitter and healthier in the future, so...Una's probably had time!

[cambridgeguy]

14 hours ago, salaydouk said:

And I know you said for "discussion's sake" and Kirk making Captain at ~30... but normally in reality to make full Commander it takes just over 20 years if you are an Academy graduate and if this play on Una being Enlisted plays out, since La'an calls her Chief, then in reality it would have taken her even longer.  Since ST canon seems to skew the lines on promotion( ala Harry Kim was an ensign for 7 seasons which would never  happen) so who knows what they are actually going to set her age to, but she would have to have been fooling everyone for a _very_ long time.

Well, we all know that in ST the super special ones get to be fast tracked.  Burnham didn't even go to Starfleet Academy, but it didn't take her that long to be promoted to a commander and XO on the Shenzou. We didn't get to see the beginning, but Geordi went from a junior lieutenant to lieutenant commander in only a few years. 

[salaydouk]

2 hours ago, cambridgeguy said:

Well, we all know that in ST the super special ones get to be fast tracked.  Burnham didn't even go to Starfleet Academy, but it didn't take her that long to be promoted to a commander and XO on the Shenzou. We didn't get to see the beginning, but Geordi went from a junior lieutenant to lieutenant commander in only a few years. 

Agreed...

But as some showrunners love to remind all of us... what we see in a season is not necessary one calendar year. 🙃

[marinw]

Genreal comment not pertaining to any one episode: I am liking the uniforms on this show. They look futurey yet very practical. Was that Kyle wearing the minidress version?

Edited May 24, 2022 by marinw

[paigow]

2 hours ago, marinw said:

Was that Kyle wearing the minidress version?

As opposed to Indy 500 pit crew...

 

[Affogato]

On 5/23/2022 at 11:10 AM, paigow said:

TOS!McCoy verified a Klingon infiltrator / saboteur with his tiny salt shaker scanner [after a Tribble warning]... no elaborate Starfleet Medical testing required...

I think at the time the assumption was that change was cosmetic. Like putting a beanie on Spock. 

[PurpleTentacle]

Tackling the Federation's policy around genetic engineering is very interesting and would be a great political topic to explore. You could even revisit it from time to time over multiple seasons... If this wasn't a freaking prequel! I mean come on, we know nothing comes of this. Una's modifications will only come up when it's convenient and we are never going to get a generall discussion on the topic in the wider federation. Something you might have seen on TNG.

We know genetic engeering is still outlawed by the time DS9 comes around and there the Federation even has good reasons. More often than not it goes wrong and produces people with broken minds and/or bodies. Seems like nobody asked the Illyrian's for pointers. Apparently they had perfected it at least a hundred years prior. Bummer for all those broken people...

It would really be nice if we could properly explore these things, but the guys currently managing Star Trek are deathly allergic to set a proper Trek show in a time after Voyager (No picard is not proper Trek). So that's just not possible. So sad.

[PurpleTentacle]

On 5/21/2022 at 4:09 AM, salaydouk said:

• La'an was close enough to Una when they both had Radiation Poisoning and
• Una's body fought of the radiation poisoning it registered the "light disease" as well fought that too.
• And so La'an had "sympathy" immune reaction( chimeric antibodies) and they used her blood's antibodies to create the antidote. Nothing came from Una as she destroys her antibodies once the infection is killed off. 
• Which to me was a lot of mumbo jumbo handwaving not real way to get a cure to end the episode in under 5 mins. 

Yeah that was what medical professionals would call "utter bullshit".

On 5/21/2022 at 8:33 AM, CarpeFelis said:

Okay, not sure I understand this: so Dr. M’Benga can keep his daughter in the transporter buffer but has to materialize her periodically. So why couldn’t he materialize her while the medical transporter was being updated and then put her back when it was done? Of course then there’d be no plot.

And did the medical transporter not being updated somehow affect the other transporters? Because the ensign who was first to show symptoms had come through the regular transporter with the rest of the away team, not the medical transporter. So unless the medical transporter affected the others, the infection should have been filtered out in the first place. But again, then there’d be no plot. Damn my engineer brain for bugging me with this stuff.

I was thinking the same thing. That made no sense. Why would he not have just materialised her for the transporter to get updated and why would the medical transporter effects the normal transporter? Made no sense.

On 5/21/2022 at 7:41 PM, aemom said:

In theory, people die of certain diseases every day. There are likely rules about storing people in transporter buffers hoping that one day a cure will be found for whatever ails them.

But why? This is a post-scarcity society. Just build a bunch of transporter buffers to store people in. There is no reason for "people to die of certain siseases every day" in such a world.

On 5/21/2022 at 10:06 PM, Affogato said:

Transporters are immortality machines of sorts. I am always amazed more people don't break the rules. none of the people who die on away missions need to stay dead.

The canon of transporters is super inconsistent. But most of the time it's: they shoot your molecules through space and once those are gone, you are dead. So no immortality machine. Of course that doesn't make sense when it comes to transporter duplication, hence the inconsistent canon.

[Affogato]

8 hours ago, PurpleTentacle said:

".

I was thinking the same thing. That made no sense. Why would he not have just materialised her for the transporter to get updated and why would the medical transporter effects the normal transporter? Made no sense.

But why? This is a post-scarcity society. Just build a bunch of transporter buffers to store people in. There is no reason for "people to die of certain siseases every day" in such a world.

The canon of transporters is super inconsistent. But most of the time it's: they shoot your molecules through space and once those are gone, you are dead. So no immortality machine. Of course that doesn't make sense when it comes to transporter duplication, hence the inconsistent canon.

Now, my impression is they choose to clear the ram after a transport and there is a rare malfunction. M’Benga’s daughter supports this. They could keep the away team in the buffer. As i examine my belief I’m thinking transportation is a two part process. Dematerialize stop rematerialize. So you could rarely make a mistake and get two copies. The ram wasn’t cleared, so to speak. 

[tennisgurl]

Its too bad Doctor Bashir from DS9 isn't around yet, he and Una could really bond over being Starfleet officers hiding genetic modifications. I liked this episode, exploring genetic modification and how much the Federation fears it is an interesting topic. The idea of people genetically modifying themselves to live on new planets instead of modifying planets for them to live on is a really cool idea, its sad that the Federation apparently never heard them out and it cost some of them their lives. Its also too bad knowing that, even if Starfleet makes an exception for Una, in the future they will still be harsh on genetic modification, as we saw in DS9 when Bashir almost lost his job in Starfleet due to what his parents did to him as a kid. 

You would think that the Khan family would have thought about changing their names at some point down the line. 

On 5/20/2022 at 12:49 PM, millennium said:

How long before Brent Spiner shows up as a Soong?

Don't you put that evil on us!

[paigow]

6 hours ago, Affogato said:

So you could rarely make a mistake and get two copies. The ram wasn’t cleared, so to speak. 

TOS!Kirk & Riker had different experiences with transporter accidents. Riker was cloned accidentally - but not via malfunction - while Kirk was split into good & evil versions because a foreign substance interfered with the buffer. Beaming up during an ion storm is one way of getting into the Mirror! universe...

[Affogato]

On 5/27/2022 at 1:48 PM, paigow said:

TOS!Kirk & Riker had different experiences with transporter accidents. Riker was cloned accidentally - but not via malfunction - while Kirk was split into good & evil versions because a foreign substance interfered with the buffer. Beaming up during an ion storm is one way of getting into the Mirror! universe...

Sorry, I really haven't watched the Riker episode more than once and that a long time ago. I forget the details and probably shouldn't have gotten involved, what I was saying had nothing really to do with malfunctions.

All I was saying is that the transporter is an immortality machine. Also, considering the number of times we saw them struggling because of atmospheric issues and so on you would have to be stupid not to put in some kind of failsafe, if you could. Yes, I believe they probably didn't store them, or store them for long. 

I have never been sure that I believed that many people wouldn't use the technology as a safety net before they did something risky, including a undertaking a risky surgery, and why would you let promising and expensively trained Federation starfleet officers die because some radiation disrupted the transporter.

Have people changed that much?

[Chicago Redshirt]

On 5/26/2022 at 10:06 PM, PurpleTentacle said:

I was thinking the same thing. That made no sense. Why would he not have just materialised her for the transporter to get updated and why would the medical transporter effects the normal transporter? Made no sense.

But why? This is a post-scarcity society. Just build a bunch of transporter buffers to store people in. There is no reason for "people to die of certain siseases every day" in such a world.

The canon of transporters is super inconsistent. But most of the time it's: they shoot your molecules through space and once those are gone, you are dead. So no immortality machine. Of course that doesn't make sense when it comes to transporter duplication, hence the inconsistent canon.

My understanding of why he could not have materialized her for the transporter to be updated was twofold. First, there wasn't time for him to have done so. He had the medical transporter in whatever cycle it was as a background thing. That prevented the medical transporter's super-redundant, not-normally necessary biofilter from being used, which meant that the disease came on board. By the time he could have shut materialized his daughter, the virus was already on board. (I could be forgetting the notion about there being something after the fact the medical transporter going on line could have done).

The second thing is that he wanted to maintain the secret that he had been taking this unauthorized action of storing his daughter. Now doing so at the potential risk of the ship seems selfish but...

To the extent it's a post-scarcity society, it still doesn't mean all bets are off. There are still philosophical boundaries, and one of them may very well be: we don't want people to unnaturally prolong life to that extent or at a given cost.

Once you introduce the notion of biofilters and a pattern buffer to a transporter that can hold a person's data indefinitely, it seems to me that you can restore a pattern from a buffer backup whenever you want. You can create clones of you as of whenever your most recent transporter use was, either through simply telling the transporter "Reproduce X pattern from the buffer now" or deliberately recreating conditions similar to those that allowed one version of then-Lt. Riker to return to his ship via the transporter and one version to get bounced back to the surface of a planet. You also can remove toxins/viruses/whatever, You can de-age people as happened in one of the TNG episodes with Pulaski, Unnatural Selection. 

[Colorado David]

the whole transporter concept sports an entire box of questions, re what can and can't you do. it becomes headache making, the same way going back in time dilemma does. so i think the writers don't delve into it much. and i don't blame them.

[MissLucas]

13 hours ago, Colorado David said:

the whole transporter concept sports an entire box of questions, re what can and can't you do. it becomes headache making, the same way going back in time dilemma does. so i think the writers don't delve into it much. and i don't blame them.

The whole discussion makes a strong argument for Lieutenant Barclay's transporter phobia.

[ML89]

2 hours ago, MissLucas said:

The whole discussion makes a strong argument for Lieutenant Barclay's transporter phobia.

And Dr. McCoy...

[Ottis]

On 5/19/2022 at 3:20 PM, thuganomics85 said:

Ah, the old classic "mysterious disease is taking out the crew" storyline.  This time it's one that makes them attracted to light so everyone truly acts like "moths to a flame."  Only in this case it could easily lead to the ship getting destroyed.  Yeah, that's problematic to say the least!

This is even worse, and I'm hugely disappointed in this episode and what it means for this franchise. Great Trek is built on a few pillars. One is that we play by the rules, because that is what makes the Federation the good guys - though we push the boundaries. In this ep, Una revealed she had lied to everyone about her species, Pike refused to notify Starfleet once he knew and M'Benga was hiding his daughter in stasis, creating a weakness in the ship's systems. 

Basically, three key characters just proved that the rules don't apply to them. And they did it not in a spur-of-the-moment gut reaction, like Kirk, but in a methodical, premeditated way that clearly weighed their own needs above the rules. So what makes them the good guys, if they don't play by the rules they say they support (and enforce)?

A better way to handle this would have been for all of these things to have been reported, and solutions found that showed compassion and also consequences. But this series just fired a bright red flare that said it, and its characters, don't stand for anything. Oh, sometimes they do. But when it impacts them? Maybe, maybe not.

Disappointing. I thought this series had found the right tone for Star Trek. Clearly not.

[Ceindreadh]

I am loving this show so far and I am perfectly happy to suspend disbelief for a lot of things.

But you're telling me that the Enterprise with all its scanners and sensors couldn't give them enough advance warning about the ion storm so they could have gotten out of there without rushing?

[shrewd.buddha]

On 6/5/2022 at 4:13 PM, Ottis said:

Basically, three key characters just proved that the rules don't apply to them. And they did it not in a spur-of-the-moment gut reaction, like Kirk, but in a methodical, premeditated way that clearly weighed their own needs above the rules. So what makes them the good guys, if they don't play by the rules they say they support (and enforce)?

Yes, this is problematic.   And things were going so well...  I was enjoying this show much more than the other current Trek shows since it focuses on the crew members and has stand-alone episodes (for the most part).
I like Pike's "Cool Hand Luke" approach to captain-ing.  But this constant need for key crew members to go rogue and have secrets that threaten the ship and undermine Star Fleet protocols is BS.  And this episode had three significant instances. 
It is as if TPTB want to imply that Star Fleet is underserving of transparency, Draconian with its rules, too corrupt to be trusted - or all of the above.  Making the off-screen higher-ups the bad guys seems to be the lazy easy way to make characters seem daring and cool. 
 

Edited July 12, 2022 by shrewd.buddha

[Prevailing Wind]

On 7/12/2022 at 7:01 PM, shrewd.buddha said:

It is as if TPTB want to imply that Star Fleet is underserving of transparency, Draconian with its rules, too corrupt to be trusted - or all of the above.  Making the off-screen higher-ups the bad guys seems to be the lazy easy way to make characters seem daring and cool. 

But these problems may be addressed in future episodes. Not everything happens immediately.

The transporter upgrade happened when they were getting upgrades at "space dock" - The daughter was in the buffer at that time, in secret, so Doc did not allow the upgrade to the medical transporter. By the time this episode happens, all the transporters but one have the upgraded filters that would have revealed this disease.  It was the un-upgraded medical transporter that ultimately caused the problem by somehow blocking the new filters on ALL the transporters. Yeah, save my daughter but let the entire crew die. Yikes.

[marina to]

Who knew Ontario Place could look so apocalyptic? 

[Raja]

On 5/23/2022 at 3:54 PM, salaydouk said:

And I know you said for "discussion's sake" and Kirk making Captain at ~30... but normally in reality to make full Commander it takes just over 20 years if you are an Academy graduate and if this play on Una being Enlisted plays out, since La'an calls her Chief, then in reality it would have taken her even longer.  Since ST canon seems to skew the lines on promotion( ala Harry Kim was an ensign for 7 seasons which would never  happen) so who knows what they are actually going to set her age to, but she would have to have been fooling everyone for a _very_ long time.

I know I'm a year behind and perhaps the Trekkers have fully filled out a biography on her by now. But Chief, like Captain or Commander describes a rank and/or an operational position. It was either this episode or one of the previous ones that the engineer Hemmer called himself the chief. So being another character's "chief" of her unit in a previous assignment doesn't necessarily refer to "Chief Petty Officer" rank as chief/my boss might be retained, but you as that lower rank Chief Petty Officer now Commander as an informal address is generally not held over as someone rises in rank in earth services.

Now we have had politicians who like to be referred in the military rank rather than the higher government service rank like call me Colonel not Mr. Secretary but I don't think that is where they are going.

[John Potts]

If I was going to copy TNG, I definitely wouldn’t take “The Naked Now” as a template. And it seemed they ran out of time for the conclusion so they discovered the cure offscreen! And I guess Scottie read about M’Benga’s use of the teleporter to store a pattern? And did anyone else think that Number One's failure to report her symptoms was going to be because of the infection was altering her brain some way?

I get rather annoyed at Trek’s “no Genetic Meddling!” - because, really? So if somebody devised a retrovirus to cure people with Cystic Fibrosis, Starfleet would be all, "Sorry, sucks to be you!"? For a technologically advanced society, it seems unlikely that the memory of an event that took place centuries previously would keep it outlawed (it would be like the UK still banning the works of Thomas Paine because they inspired the American Revolution!)

On 5/21/2022 at 7:33 AM, CarpeFelis said:

so Dr. M’Benga can keep his daughter in the transporter buffer but has to materialize her periodically.

I don't think he has to, I think he just wants to see his daughter. And the sudden appearance of a child onboard would presumably raise a few questions, even for the famously inept Starfleet Security!