TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

3693 readers

682 users here now

/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!

Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.

~ 1. No bigotry or fascism. This is a Star Trek community. Hating someone off of their race, culture, creed, sexuality, or identity is not remotely acceptable, neither is supporting people who actively want to kill those groups. Mistakes can happen but do your best to respect others.

~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.

~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.

~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.

~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.

~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.

~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon' and fuck over our artist friends.

Fun will now commence.

Sister Communities:

!startrek@lemmy.world

!memes@lemmy.world

!tumblr@lemmy.world

!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world

Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!

Honorary Badbitch:

@jawa21@startrek.website for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.

Creator Resources:

Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)

Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)

founded 10 months ago

MODERATORS

Stamets@lemmy.world

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world

negativenull@lemm.ee

The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world

The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website

negativenull@lemmy.world

189

I've got a spicy take, but desperately want to get it off my chest (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by Ashyr@sh.itjust.works to c/tenforward@lemmy.world

102 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My wife and I are rewatching The Next Generation and just finished Measure of a Man, the episode in season 2 in which Data’s personhood is legally debated and his life hangs in the balance.

I genuinely found this episode infuriating in its stupidity. It’s the first episode we skipped even a little bit. It was like nails on a chalkboard.

There is oodles of legal precedent that Data is a person. He was allowed to apply to Starfleet, graduated, became an officer and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander with all the responsibilities and privileges thereof.

Comparing him to a computer and the judge advocate general just shrugging and going to trial over it is completely idiotic. There are literal years and years of precedent that he’s an officer.

The problem is compounded because Picard can’t make the obvious legal argument and is therefore stuck philosophizing in a court room, which is all well and good, but it kind of comes down to whether or not Data has a soul? That’s not a legal argument.

The whole thing is so unbelievably ludicrous it just made me angrier and angrier. It wasn’t the high minded, humanistic future I’ve come to know and love, it was a kangaroo court where reason and precedent took a backseat to feeling and belief.

I genuinely hated it.

To my surprise, in looking it up, I discovered it’s considered one of the high water marks for the entire show. It feels like I’m taking crazy pills.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 3 points 5 days ago

There's still an important distinction: JMS likened Babylon 5 to a novel for television. It had a defined beginning, a middle, and an end, conceptualized that way from the start of development.

Yes, soap operas are serialized television, but totally open-ended. The producers of Dallas didn't plan for J.R. Ewing to get shot as part of the series arc; they didn't even plan him as a main character. A lot of soap operas have a very throw-it-against-the-wall feel. My grandmother was a Days of Our Lives watcher, and stuck it out even through the alien abduction storyline. Other people I know would stop watching for even years at a time, then come back and pick up whatever new storylines were then current.

I mean no disrespect to soap operas, as they give lots of people years of enjoyment. TNG itself was largely episodic, but had some soap opera elements, following evolving relationships among the crew which were carried through. But that's still not the novel-for-television concept.