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Cake day: February 14th, 2024

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  • Oh, right, the Orions. For sure Gene put quite a bit of his prejudices into the races, which then got amplified by early Trek writers’ tendency towards mono-cultures, and I think all of Star Trek has had trouble trying to figure out how to fix it. Enterprise decided to just lean into the stereotypes hard though for some reason. The Ferengi were an anti-semetic caricature in TNG until the DS9 writers worked to expand their culture on screen and move away from some of Gene’s more troubling stereotypes. Hell, they had an entire arc where Rom and Leela worked to literally dismantle the existing Ferengi culture into something more aligned with Starfleet ideals. It took until Lower Decks, a 30-some odd minute cartoon, for them to do something similar with the Orions. So I guess the point of this ramble is that, while nothing is gonna change these old episodes, if you wanna see some positive progress for the Orions I would highly recommend watching LD if you haven’t already!








  • I really enjoy season 4 (except These Are The Voyages… lets not talk about that.) but I think it’s definitely fair to say that the sheer adrenaline ride that was season 3 slows down a bit after the Xindi threat is resolved. You end up with a lot of these standalone arcs that, like you said, are focused on building connections with existing Trek (the augment trilogy leading into Affliction/Divergence is a good example) or arcs designed to set up the founding of the UFP. It’s clear that they were also leading into the Romulan war which was only ever mentioned in passing in TOS. In that context I think the slightly slower tempo season 4 would have made an excellent breather between the two.





  • It’s fascinating seeing the responses to this from you all who obviously know a lot about philosophy. Coming at it from a layman’s perspective, and not really knowing who David Hume was, the science definitions bit was all I could really understand and I interpreted it the way that you say it could have been written. I’m now wondering if just placed my own preconceptions about the bits that I did understand onto the author without really considering the rest.


  • That’s fair. But the idea of approaching the universe from a standpoint of not being able to truly “know” is kind of the basis of all science isn’t it? We can have evidence of something, maybe even enough evidence to make reliable, repeatable predictions in the context of our infinitely short existences, but it will forever and always be transient knowledge. Nothing in the universe is static and unchanging forever.


  • Being that this is a Star Trek post I’ll just add this.

    Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Sir, our sensors are showing this to be the absence of everything. It is a void without matter or energy of any kind.”

    Commander Riker: “Yet this hole has a form, Data; it has height, width…”

    Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Perhaps. Perhaps not, Sir.”

    Captain Picard: “That’s hardly a scientific observation, Commander.”

    Lt. Cmdr. Data: “Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, “I do not know”. I do not know what that is, Sir.”