I just realized. They say they’re broadcasting to the entire quadrant - but which quadrant?

Chances are they’ll do something normal and boring like the Alpha Quadrant and create a bunch of canon confusion, but it would be kind of awesome if took place in the Gamma Quadrant and looked at life in the Dominion (or post-Dominion planets) after the war.

I had no idea what Posadism was until you mentioned it. Looking at it, I think elements of it are coincidentally in there, but I don’t think that’s totally what it’s trying to convey.

For one, Boseman, Montana definitely didn’t look that socialist, and yet Cochrane developed a warp drive; it was the new connections and widened view of the galaxy that facilitated the development of socialism. Sure, the Vulcans helped, but it was humans who had to change.

Also, I feel like “aliens helping in revolution” is sort of antithetical to the concept of the Prime Directive.

Overall, I think Star Trek is less about through ufologic socialism and more about peoples figuring out socialism for themselves; space and aliens are mostly just a plot device to explore.

I think it depends. Overall, I think most of Star Trek isn’t solarpunk, but the version of earth depicted in it very much is.

They did. Also, in the Guardian of Forever’s alternate timeline in season 3, mirror Burnham successfully kills Georgiou at the cost of her own life, upon which Georgiou is returned to the prime timeline.

I would say no. I mean, the treatment fits the universe (lots of people enslaving other people), but there isn’t even a subtle condemnation of this. In many ways, despite it tending to be a story about rebellion, Star Wars mostly tells a story with the status quo; especially in the original trilogy, there’s never really an “are we the good guys” moment. (I could be wrong - been ages since I watched anything Star Wars.)

Meanwhile, Star Trek is constantly examining itself, with Starfleet officers often “stop[ping] to debate the rights of a robot” or whether the self-respect of one Starfleet officer is worth the safety of the Alpha Quadrant. Even when they treat synths like crap, it’s usually depicted as being morally wrong.

This is a bit of a tangent, but this question makes me think about the evolution of Ood depictions in Doctor Who. Their first appearance was a bit weird about their enslavement, but they rectified that in later episodes.

P.S: I think this question is more suited for c/startrek than Daystrom Institute, as it’s more about comparing the themes of two franchises than any in-universe explanation.

I’m not sure that fits the frame narrative of it being a holodeck program, especially considering that the player using the program is assumed to be a human (in another one of these scenes, the program stops and Gowron rants about how he’s going to have to start teaching the Klingon way instead of the human way).

To be fair, the mirror universe in general, even in the DS9 era, is kind of Star Wars-y.

In general, though, it sometimes gets annoying when the franchises swap aesthetics, even back to V when they did bargain bin Mos Eisley (the bar in III was hilariously campy, though). Recently, I watched the first episode of a certain Star Wars series on a friend’s recommendation (I wouldn’t have otherwise), and at one point, I was like, “What the heck! This is supposed to be a rough pirate ship, but there’s so little weathering on the set that this could be a Federation starship!”

I agree with your positions about short seasons and brand new big bads.

However, I don’t think TNG, and classic Trek at large, have a future totally devoid of “the pains and pitfalls of present-day life”. For instance, Captain Maxwell blows up a bunch of Cardassian outposts, and there was that whole incident with the Pegasus and the cloaking device. These are clear instances showing in TNG’s world, we haven’t completely grown out of the darker parts of our nature.

I think the ideal of Star Trek is there is a future where we have overcome many of our problems, and when new (or old, sometimes) arise, we can work together to overcome them and improve ourselves.

In some ways, I think that Lower Decks embodies this extremely well. Because it’s supposed to be a comedy, it liberates the show from a lot of modern sci-fi conventions; this allows a largely utopian environment for our Federation characters where they’re free to help each other evolve far beyond the borderline insane sitcom archetypes they started the show as.

I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances - that “me” is gone and can’t do anything. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.

Our family actually has a bunch that an aunt sent once.

Was about to cite TNG Tech Manual as well - although that also said that holodeck characters’ bodies were replicated meat puppets, which I think they didn’t stick with.

That might me it - when I search older media, say The Andy Griffith show, sure enough there are a crap ton of plates.

It might be a sort of Venn diagram thing - Trek/Wars plates came at the dusk of the commemorative plate era, while the fans were more likely than others to buy collectibles like plates, making them seem unique from other fandoms.

I just realized another thing about April - assuming humans live 120 years on average in the Trek universe and April got turned roughly 20 in Counter/Clock, an elderly April could still be alive in the 2360s or 70s.

I would love that! Give the lost part of the Monster Maroon era (mid 2290s-2340s) some love.

The weird thing is April from SNW should canonically still be alive due to TAS:”Counter-clockwise Incident”.

TLDR: The Commission probably wouldn’t like it, and the Federation even more so. Even so, there are practical hurtles such as genetic diversity and whether medical knowledge of symbionts is advanced enough to keep a large population healthy and happy.

For one, a fundamental tenet of the ideology of the commission is to protect the well-being of the symbionts, sentient beings, from suffering abuse due to potential competition between Trill over a limited number of symbionts.

If we take the well-being argument further, cloning symbionts has many issues to their well-being. Cloning them would be indignant because it would reduce them to a commodity that every Trill should have rather than a sentient being that chooses a relationship.

Even if the idea got through the commission, I feel like the rest of the Federation might frown on this for those reasons in addition to another: I think there’s already a slight bias in Federation culture against the cloning process.

This can be seen in TNG:“Up The Long Ladder” (in addition to revealing that cloning on a large scale has negative implications, Riker is so mad about cloning he murders his own clone and Pulaski’s) and TNG:“Second Chances”/LD:“Kayshon, His Eyes Open” (Transporter cloning is seen as a suboptimal circumstance). This suggest culturally, the Federation finds cloning inconvenient at best and a violation at worst. This might be partially negated if the symbionts were to give consent, but it would still feel iffy to most planets

On another note, exact cloning symbiont genomes could have drastic consequences. For one, it would vastly reduce the genetic diversity of the symbionts; this means if there was say, 1 million Daxs with all the same DNA, there’s a higher chance that a virus could evolve that’s really good at spreading between Daxs, allowing the virus to spread in those Daxs and evolve, probably ultimately killing a lot of symbionts.

The above might be able to be averted if say, you sequenced the DNA of all the (willing) symbionts and generated distinct genome sequences by simulated breeding between symbionts (if they sexually reproduce) or maybe simulating mutations if they reproduce asexually. You could then synthesize the genome and grow a symbiont from it.

Even this better solution might prevent problems, though - what happens when symbionts have genetic defects? With symbionts being so rare, is the medical knowledge of them enough that a large population could be kept healthy?

I could see it your way. My main gripe is it feels like saying the left side of my brain went to heaven while the right side stayed on earth.

I guess in some ways, this part of the debate mirrors the confusion of Worf post-Jadza and just the overall nature of afterlives in general.

Why would a computer networking company have a say in the Jazdias’ fate? 🤣 Humor aside, I agreed with you. I’m planning on doing a Star Trek Adventures campaign (I did session 0 and we’re 1/3 of the way through the first mission), and one of my players is a joined Trill - something like your idea will probably be one of the ways I torture them, probably in addition to reuniting them with one of their past hosts’ now-elderly child.

That’s an interesting relationship with Enterprise - I’ve yet to really watch that series.

Star Trek’s been a family thing for me as well; my mom is a fan - she watched VOY:“Endgame” during its premiere 4 days after she got married. Star Trek was always playing in the house, so me and my siblings gravitated towards it.

Lower Decks was probably 2/3rds of my coping strategy for the death of my grandmother.

You’re right. I gotta be going where my heart will take me.

I need to give those a harder listen. I do like how the Prodigy theme combines cinematic and TAS vibes. Also, I like how SNW riffs on the TOS theme.

Also, my “call” is indeed a tongue-in-cheek way to say I hope that Westlake can continue in Star Trek. Admittedly, I probably should have communicated that in a more precise, less melodramatic mode.