Spoilers Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

[jian]

Nothing good ever happens on Risa unless it happens off-screen. Do we actually see the vacation? Time for disaster.

Part of what helps Star Trek really stand the test of time is how on point and current their social and political commentary was, and coming home last night and watching a Star Trek episode where a self-righteous moralizer starts scolding the socially (and sexually) liberal vacation goers to the point of actually threatening violence hit different, as the youths would say.

That said, the bad in this episode in particular:

Wow, these are two people who absolutely do not belong together, like obviously the attraction is there but he takes his tantrum that far and you think you can reconcile? You think that it's worth it? Don't get me wrong, the bit of backstory about why Worf is such a humorless stick in the mud compared to... literally every other Klingon was excellent, like it always felt weird about how he always considered himself to be an expert on all things Klingon when he genuinely seems like a terrible Klingon has always been an odd part of his character, and it's nice to see them exploring that more deeply here. But girl. You could do so much better. You don't need to fix him.

But seriously, Worf was so terrible for so long in that episode that we, as an audience, were owed getting to see him in the gold spandex bathing suit. You can't just hang that gun on the wall earlier in the episode and then fail to fire it. For this reason alone 1/10, many notes.

Yeah, it’s a terrible episode in a whole bunch of ways, not least the moralising on both sides. It’s a really bad start to the Worf-Jadzia relationship and thankfully it’s never that bad again. But Let He Who is Without Sin is easily my least favourite DS9 episode.

And yes, Worf is a terrible Klingon except by accident. Even by ruthlessly training to be a much better fighter than other Klingons, Worf is a terrible Klingon, since AFAICT no Klingon except maybe Martok does anything as boring and dishonourable as, you know, actually try hard to be good at something. But Worf lacks insight into how bad a Klingon he is and how Klingon culture is fundamentally hypocritical and rotten*, and needs Ezri of all people to point it out to him.

*Seriously, taken as read, Klingon culture is racist, sexist, ableist, imperialist, colonialist, brutal, intolerant, and obsessed with the appearance of honour in the way that many of the worst human cultures have been. It basically only exists to make humans feel superior. If it wasn’t for Worf and Martok, it would have no redeeming features whatsoever.

 

[pukunui]

Finally got around to watching “Visionary”. Good episode, but yeah, it’s pretty wild to think the OG O’Brien is dead and this guy is a replacement from 3.5 hours into the future!

 

[Willie the Duck]

Finally got around to watching “Visionary”. Good episode, but yeah, it’s pretty wild to think the OG O’Brien is dead and this guy is a replacement from 3.5 hours into the future!

Star Trek seems to be firmly wedded to the notion that you are your memories, personality, hopes&dreams, etc. and that an exact copy of you that happens to have your memories for all intents and purposes is you. From replacement O'brien to replacement Harry Kim to how transporters work to digital uploading of minds, they almost always seem to lean into the 'we're all just digital ink' sci fi framing (except Klingons and Native Americans, which apparently have souls and afterlives, at least until the episode about vision quests or Stovokor ends).

From a physics standpoint, there's certainly some perspectives that would support this. As you move through time, you kinda are just a being with all the memories, personality, and hopes&dreams of the person you once were, just with the (trivial) coincidence that most of your component particles happen to be the same ones that the previous 'you' had.

 

[payn]

Star Trek seems to be firmly wedded to the notion that you are your memories, personality, hopes&dreams, etc. and that an exact copy of you that happens to have your memories for all intents and purposes is you. From replacement O'brien to replacement Harry Kim to how transporters work to digital uploading of minds, they almost always seem to lean into the 'we're all just digital ink' sci fi framing (except Klingons and Native Americans, which apparently have souls and afterlives, at least until the episode about vision quests or Stovokor ends).

From a physics standpoint, there's certainly some perspectives that would support this. As you move through time, you kinda are just a being with all the memories, personality, and hopes&dreams of the person you once were, just with the (trivial) coincidence that most of your component particles happen to be the same ones that the previous 'you' had.

Well, Ryker wasn't exactly like that. Not Trek but the Sci-Fi noir series Counterpart actually tackled this very topic. Some physics experiment went wrong in Germany in the 70's creating a door way to parallel Earth universe. At that point, both were identical, but preceding from that point their paths diverged greatly. Some real good sci-fi if you havent seen it. A shame it only got a couple seasons.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Well, Ryker wasn't exactly like that. Not Trek but the Sci-Fi noir series Counterpart actually tackled this very topic. Some physics experiment went wrong in Germany in the 70's creating a door way to parallel Earth universe. At that point, both were identical, but preceding from that point their paths diverged greatly. Some real good sci-fi if you havent seen it. A shame it only got a couple seasons.

I'm not seeing the difference. At the point of divergence, they were both Riker, not just one or the other we deem to have been 'the real' one.

 

[payn]

I'm not seeing the difference. At the point of divergence, they were both Riker, not just one or the other we deem to have been 'the real' one.

I guess on what level? The differences between the Rykers started showing up pretty quickly and eventually it was even demonstrably different in a DS9 episode.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I guess on what level? The differences between the Rykers started showing up pretty quickly and eventually it was even demonstrably different in a DS9 episode.

But at the point when 'Thomas' Riker was reconstituted, the Federation considered them both to be William Thomas Riker, and the writers explicitly indicate that the differences in personality are that 'Thomas' is displaying the personality Riker had that many years ago. Later in DS9, he does display some behavior I'd consider rather un-Riker-like (joining the Maquis), but to me that always seemed to be communicated as something a younger Riker would have done, finding himself in a universe where there was another Riker with more prestigious accomplishments to which he'd always be compared.

That they diverge is to be expected and not outside of the scope of the premise I have put forth. The point is that they were both (from the viewpoint of the people in-universe, and apparently the writers) the person.

Side note: much like the handling of Tasha Yar/Sela, Thomas Riker is one of those plot points I think they could have handled better. There was plenty of opportunity to have used him again in TNG (it would have been great to have had him on the Southerland in Redemption II, for instance). I suspect the difficulty of playing two roles (when I think just one was hard on his back) probably prohibited Frakes from doing so. Still, it would have been nice if he'd been a re-occurring character on DS9 (maybe given him some nice extra cash between Gargoyles and Beyond Belief) instead of a one-off. Perhaps that would have been an issue, with him upstaging the DS9 cast (or eating into the budget).

 

[Ryujin]

Star Trek seems to be firmly wedded to the notion that you are your memories, personality, hopes&dreams, etc. and that an exact copy of you that happens to have your memories for all intents and purposes is you. From replacement O'brien to replacement Harry Kim to how transporters work to digital uploading of minds, they almost always seem to lean into the 'we're all just digital ink' sci fi framing (except Klingons and Native Americans, which apparently have souls and afterlives, at least until the episode about vision quests or Stovokor ends).

From a physics standpoint, there's certainly some perspectives that would support this. As you move through time, you kinda are just a being with all the memories, personality, and hopes&dreams of the person you once were, just with the (trivial) coincidence that most of your component particles happen to be the same ones that the previous 'you' had.

Not so much when it comes to earlier Star Trek and mechanical replacements, though Picard flipped that script. The TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" had Roger Korby replace his body with a synthetic and Kirk did his patented computer Jiu Jitsu on him.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Not so much when it comes to earlier Star Trek and mechanical replacements, though Picard flipped that script. The TOS episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" had Roger Korby replace his body with a synthetic and Kirk did his patented computer Jiu Jitsu on him.

I remember that one (note: I haven't seen ToS in since the 80s)! The guy's hand getting crushed in the door and revealing that he's a robot. Reading the wikipedia synopsis, yeah, definitely the polar opposite.

 

[overgeeked]

Star Trek seems to be firmly wedded to the notion that you are your memories, personality, hopes&dreams, etc. and that an exact copy of you that happens to have your memories for all intents and purposes is you. From replacement O'brien to replacement Harry Kim to how transporters work to digital uploading of minds, they almost always seem to lean into the 'we're all just digital ink' sci fi framing (except Klingons and Native Americans, which apparently have souls and afterlives, at least until the episode about vision quests or Stovokor ends).

From a physics standpoint, there's certainly some perspectives that would support this. As you move through time, you kinda are just a being with all the memories, personality, and hopes&dreams of the person you once were, just with the (trivial) coincidence that most of your component particles happen to be the same ones that the previous 'you' had.

That’s a whole other forum’s worth of discussion.