The M’Tara scenario in this episode was one of the most un-Trek like things I’ve ever seen. We ran around making her weaker and weaker - arguably killing her slowly. And then, without a second thought, we just let her die. I kept thinking to myself “this is Star Trek – thinly veiled or not - someone will have a crisis of conscience and attempt to save her”. But we don’t. We just stand there, basically congratulating ourselves. FOR MURDERING SOMEONE! She dies in front of her ‘family’ and at no point do we question whether it was the right thing to do. No question of whether this act made us as bad as them. No guilt. No remorse. No thought for the consequences. Quite the contrary – we pretty much give ourselves a pat on the back for it.
So why are our characters suddenly so damned stupid? Why didn’t we, or someone, stop and say “Hey, wait a moment – killing her won’t achieve anything beyond making her ‘family’ angry – is that really what we want?” Well, apparently it was. Because we’re stupid.
Yeah – sorry – this flat out ruined the episode for me. Fine, it was perhaps necessary, to the storyline, for her to die. That does not mean that we couldn’t have at least ATTEMPTED to save her. Hell, it might have given the Iconians something to think about
So much this, I felt this was a huge missed opportunity the more I think about this episode, Could have attempted to at least do something as she weakened completely, like tried to beam her out and say "Let's see if we can sustain her just enough with a weapons cell or something to nibble on, but not enough to be a threat etc". Or even diplomatically talking back to her and then the other Iconians in the cut scenes would have been better than nothing! Huge star trek spirit opportunity missed.
And another thing I really liked about M'Tara, as me and another friend playing time in a bottle agreed upon, is it was a really neat thing to see a sterotype that she broke when forgiving her harbinger that begged mercy, she actually was shown as not being without compassion! I was totally expecting a Darth Vader force choke parody there! All the more reason I felt we should have at least tried talking to her/them, even if it would have likely been fruitless, it would show we aren't just out to massacre any and all who oppose us to extinction.
I also disliked even the notion of possibly destroying an entire sphere, how many Heralds would die then, billions?! I hope that genocide never happens.
It was a really neat thing to see a sterotype that she broke when forgiving her harbinger that begged mercy, she actually was shown as not being without compassion!
I saw it differently. Perhaps because I have had to deal with people who are portrayed like the Iconians in real life (yuck). Chances are with a person like that, she saved the Harbinger simply cause it suited her needs and saved her effort in training a replacement, nothing more
If they wanted to be compassionate they wouldn't be going around INTENTIONALLY trying to stir up trouble in the first place over aeons across all the different species of the different quadrants. Unlike other such regimes (even in human history) we haven't seen any opposition from the inside so it does seem to be that all of the Iconians are in on the whole genocide of the galaxy's 'weak and pathetic'. Guess the writers are playing a simple 'them' vs 'us' campaign.
Don't care for this Us or Them line of thinking. I liked M'Tara, she seemed more reasonable than T'Ket. I was even willing to forgive that little issue with the Preservers. I don't remember any history of the Preservers showing up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, so it seemed like a family dispute.
Now T'Ket wants to kill all non Iconian life, and the previously moderate L'Miren is backing her up. We all just finished dealing with the two sided wrongness of the Vaadwaur vs Kobali. Now here I am again, with Genocide of all non Iconians, or Genocide of the Iconians. I know were are going to end up winning, but I would really like to see choices to not wipe them out.
It was a really neat thing to see a sterotype that she broke when forgiving her harbinger that begged mercy, she actually was shown as not being without compassion!
I saw it differently. Perhaps because I have had to deal with people who are portrayed like the Iconians in real life (yuck). Chances are with a person like that, she saved the Harbinger simply cause it suited her needs and saved her effort in training a replacement, nothing more
If they wanted to be compassionate they wouldn't be going around INTENTIONALLY trying to stir up trouble in the first place over aeons across all the different species of the different quadrants. Unlike other such regimes (even in human history) we haven't seen any opposition from the inside so it does seem to be that all of the Iconians are in on the whole genocide of the galaxy's 'weak and pathetic'. Guess the writers are playing a simple 'them' vs 'us' campaign.
some context..
they are immortal and everlasting, to them us mortals, are plentiful, live for a moment and are responsible for the near total destruction of their civilisation. over what, we really don't know.. we have stories and rumours.
we are human with years counted in decades, to us many insects may be interesting, some even beautiful, but we shed no tears for them and wipe out millions with pesticides on a regular basis.
T'Ket was the only 1 on a rampage, kind of goes hand in hand with being their warlord. M'Tara was all duty, which you would expect from their queen (or monarch if you prefer), and L'Miren the Savant (possibly the spiritual one or an intermediary) was the clear voice of reason, the one who seen us as something more than simple fleeting creatures 'insects'.
we haven't just killed their sister, we've killed their queen. L'Miren says 'she understands now.. kill them all' that shows she was definitely considering other options.. was! so how much have they been holding back, and why? M'Tara and L'Miren had been keeping T'Ket on a short leash.
if this isnt something we can rewind, or some kind of simulation, the only sensible conclusion to this story would be our total destru.....
- first of all, we shouldn't be able to enter in the sphere; when we are in the sphere, why it is empty?
- in the M'tara ship, same thing, this is empty. we can move everywhere without problems, where are the heralds?
- during the fight against M'Tara, why she comes back each time??? she knows that she is weak but she continues to fight!!!
- disable power sources for disabling M'tara: ridiculous.
- why we are still able to use the iconian consoles? Heralds are stupid enough for leaving their consoles without protection; no password, etc, and of course we speak fluently the iconian language. consoles shields lowered when we weaken M'tara; lol
a small team can move in a ship freely, and kill an half-god easily; nothing is weird??
and the klingons; hahahahaha; the clowns of the galaxy.
Well, it's nice to see that someone got to play the new episode; for me, it lived up to the "Broken" part of its name, as it gave me a CTD as soon as I tried to start it...
Expendables Fleet: Andrew - Bajoran Fed Engineer Ken'taura - Rom/Fed Scientist Gwyllim - Human Fed Delta Tac Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
Don't care for this Us or Them line of thinking. I liked M'Tara, she seemed more reasonable than T'Ket. I was even willing to forgive that little issue with the Preservers.
That "little issue with the Preservers"? You mean genocide. Not just hypothetical should-we-or-shouldn't-we genocide, but an actual fait accompli. And not only genocide of a species of comparatively insect-like status (like us), but of the species that created her own species. The Iconians were the "first children", as the Preserver told us. The Iconians owed their very existence to the Preservers, and M'Tara goes and wipes them out. And we were there to actually WATCH her personally commit that genocide first-hand! Oh, yeah, that showed M'Tara in the best possible light.
Poor widdle M'Tara, we should all feel so sorry for her! NOT!
I don't remember any history of the Preservers showing up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, so it seemed like a family dispute.
The Preservers didn't have to show up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, because the Iconians weren't wiped out. Unfortunately. Hence the current situation.
I will agree that the Idiot Ball was passed around pretty freely during this episode to all parties in this episode, though. Both sides volleyed it repeatedly.
Don't care for this Us or Them line of thinking. I liked M'Tara, she seemed more reasonable than T'Ket. I was even willing to forgive that little issue with the Preservers.
That "little issue with the Preservers"? You mean genocide. Not just hypothetical should-we-or-shouldn't-we genocide, but an actual fait accompli. And not only genocide of a species of comparatively insect-like status (like us), but of the species that created her own species. The Iconians were the "first children", as the Preserver told us. The Iconians owed their very existence to the Preservers, and M'Tara goes and wipes them out. And we were there to actually WATCH her personally commit that genocide first-hand! Oh, yeah, that showed M'Tara in the best possible light.
Poor widdle M'Tara, we should all feel so sorry for her! NOT!
I don't remember any history of the Preservers showing up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, so it seemed like a family dispute.
The Preservers didn't have to show up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, because the Iconians weren't wiped out. Unfortunately. Hence the current situation.
I will agree that the Idiot Ball was passed around pretty freely during this episode to all parties in this episode, though. Both sides volleyed it repeatedly.
M'Tara said she didn't have a choice in destroying the Preservers. She didn't say she "Will not" she said she "Can not". Why is that? We still don't know.
As for the Preservers being innocent in all this -- these are the same Preservers that told Thot Trel that the Preserver archive had no weapon technology. That it was a place of learning.
Then later it turns out they had pretty powerful disruptor and transphasic torpedo technology. So they lied to their children.
Does anyone else get Heralds spawning in the walls in the Command Center, making the part impossible to progress?
And just as I had posted this, the mission somehow allowed me to progress despite the Heralds in the wall...
First time I did this mission I had to go through the Iconian Flagship 3 times in order to complete it due to bugs. First time I had the stupid idea of planting mines under M"tara before triggering the cutscene. Yeah don't do that. If she blows the mines during the cutscene, she won't appear in actual gameplay.
Second time through I had to warp to Iconia to continue the mission. later a Herald spawned in the wall that later fell through the map. No way of reaching it. Had to restart again.
Finally third time's the charm and I didn't even care about the story anymore. My Fed simply gave her the finger in her dying moments.
Also, it's interesting hearing a Gorn mourn for the dead and his friend on the Stardancer.
Don't care for this Us or Them line of thinking. I liked M'Tara, she seemed more reasonable than T'Ket. I was even willing to forgive that little issue with the Preservers.
That "little issue with the Preservers"? You mean genocide. Not just hypothetical should-we-or-shouldn't-we genocide, but an actual fait accompli. And not only genocide of a species of comparatively insect-like status (like us), but of the species that created her own species. The Iconians were the "first children", as the Preserver told us. The Iconians owed their very existence to the Preservers, and M'Tara goes and wipes them out. And we were there to actually WATCH her personally commit that genocide first-hand! Oh, yeah, that showed M'Tara in the best possible light.
Poor widdle M'Tara, we should all feel so sorry for her! NOT!
I don't remember any history of the Preservers showing up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, so it seemed like a family dispute.
The Preservers didn't have to show up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, because the Iconians weren't wiped out. Unfortunately. Hence the current situation.
I will agree that the Idiot Ball was passed around pretty freely during this episode to all parties in this episode, though. Both sides volleyed it repeatedly.
M'Tara said she didn't have a choice in destroying the Preservers. She didn't say she "Will not" she said she "Can not". Why is that? We still don't know.
As for the Preservers being innocent in all this -- these are the same Preservers that told Thot Trel that the Preserver archive had no weapon technology. That it was a place of learning.
Then later it turns out they had pretty powerful disruptor and transphasic torpedo technology. So they lied to their children.
I pretty much agree 100%. My take on the Preserver's words to Thot Trel is "We have no weapons data here... that is stored in another archive that you can access from here". Wonderful world of Obfuscation. The Preservers always struck me as being rather manipulative, so their lying is not a surprise.
As far as M'Tara... Oh where to start? 200,000 years of vendetta has an effect on a being I suppose. But her action/scripting in this FE was horrific beyond words. It's like she got infected by Khaless memes or somethign. She **knows** she is losing "essence" (Kife essence is my take) by fighting. She comes back again and again, losing more essence each time. Answer? Pull back and send in a few dozen Heralds led by a Harbinger. The writing on this was really a TILT moment, which makes me wonder about the whole Holodeck concept...
My personal take on the three named Iconians? I think they were actual sisters, and what's more were linked somehow (Telepathically or maybe even a limited form of quantum entanglement), so yes, I felt rather sad for her. Also we turned L'Miren into a memeber of T'Ket's genocide faction. Bright move. Did House Pegh think this plan up?
I just hope that we get the chance to use the Krenim Timeshup and/or time travel to stop the genocidal madness, and maybe even restore M'Tara. I get the disturbing feeling that the "alliance of races" that attacked Iconia 200,000 years ago will end up being the current-day alliance...
"M'Tara is not my girlfriend, but I am her Significant Other" Hail M'Tara
Not going to mince words here. The preservers deserved to be killed by their first children, it's poetic justice for causing a situation and not intervening. As often as the lore talks about how other races resent the rule of the Iconians, it seems that Jealousy is always also spoken of. Even the Preserver states that as the first reason for the war.
Did the preservers try and diffuse the situation? If they did it certainly failed badly enough that some "Other" had to step in and make sure the Iconians were not wiped out.
M'Tara's rage should have been incandescent at the loss of her people. I'm more surprised the Iconians took so long to blow the preservers up. It could have been done quietly with no one really knowing about it. As it is, it was like watching Frankenstein get strangled by his monster. It's ugly, but the creator is more at fault than the monster.
The Preservers seemed extremely shady to me. I don't think it's coincidental that the Iconians rebuilt their forces in a Dyson Sphere located in the Andromeda galaxy.
Consider the Milky Way has the Galactic Barrier that destroys ships going in or out and prevents transmissions. Did the Preservers use the Milky Way as a kind of terrarium? We aren't free to leave the galaxy. We're either prisoners or pets. But the Iconians on the other hand managed to escape to the Andromeda Galaxy.
How could they do that while avoiding the Galactic Barrier? In my opinion...
A: Their technology is powerful enough to circumvent it.
B: The Galactic Barrier was created by the Preservers after the fall of the Iconian Empire to keep them out -- or to keep us apart like a parent telling their feuding children to stay on opposite sides of the room. Or... if we want to get even more sinister, we were fenced in the Milky Way like cattle, and now the Iconians have come to cull the herd.
The genocide of the Preservers is sad... but when you consider they had so many answers for us and refused to 'rejoin' with their children, opting to stay in their stasis tubes... what good were they to us? We offered them the chance to reintegrate themselves with their children and to see how far we've gotten. They offered us the opportunity to discover answers about who we are as Milky Way sentients, but then never followed through.
I don't know. They don't seem as wholesome and benign as they tried to pass themselves off as. Not only the weapon technology they kept hidden from us and willingly lied to us about. Why? They treated the Breen as equals to the rest of us. They don't care about our petty fights.
But they do seem secretive, and given M'Tara's remorse for destroying them ("Your death will bring me no joy.") and her apparent inability (not unwillingness) to stop their Genocide leads me to believe they were hiding a lot from their children and they weren't willing to tell us why.
I don't see where this anti-Preserver sentiment is coming from. As the storyline is laid out currently, we didn't find them until after finishing up with the Borg Arc. (Which, admittedly, leaves the Defteri battlezone as a loose end with no beginning point.) They haven't been around more than a few months, while the Federation and Empire have both been preoccupied with the Dyson Spheres in the meantime. They didn't do anything because they hadn't worked out how to best integrate into the wider galaxy yet.
I agree, the episode lacked a proper conversation with M'tara. We needed a chance to throw their actions back in their face.
"You set the Borg, Undine, and Elachi after us for no reason - you started this war. And your death here is justice for the Preservers. Why else would you provoke us this way if this wasn't what you wanted?"
I agree, the episode lacked a proper conversation with M'tara. We needed a chance to throw their actions back in their face.
"You set the Borg, Undine, and Elachi after us for no reason - you started this war. And your death here is justice for the Preservers. Why else would you provoke us this way if this wasn't what you wanted?"
I think Berat would say something close to that, though he might say, "IF I kill you, it will be justice..." suggesting that he could be convinced to change his mind.
My other toon, Alyosha, would have raised the same point but with more of a tone of simply wanting to know WHY. "How can you attack us merely for existing? How can you hold us accountable for things we didn't do?"
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
M'Tara said she didn't have a choice in destroying the Preservers. She didn't say she "Will not" she said she "Can not". Why is that? We still don't know.
As for the Preservers being innocent in all this -- these are the same Preservers that told Thot Trel that the Preserver archive had no weapon technology. That it was a place of learning.
Then later it turns out they had pretty powerful disruptor and transphasic torpedo technology. So they lied to their children.
M'Tara said she "could not." We don't have any evidence to confirm that anyone is forcing her to do so, and her campaign against us is proof enough of her intentions to me.
The weapons we gain in-game are referenced exactly nowhere in-story. To me, this is a case of gameplay-story segregation.
Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's, and yours.
The Preserver weapons I always felt were implied to be reverse engineered by the alliance. However I only read the info on them once and didn't like using them all that much.
Anyways, the only goody I might like from this current feature episode is the distress call. I'm wondering how long the cooldown is or better yet, if it's similar to the Nimbus Distress Call in that you can use it from your inventory. Hmm, thinking about it now, it'll probably share a cooldown... darn!
I don't think the Preservers are in any way shady.
But they provide still a potential conondrum. They seeded other worlds with life - but they seeded it with life like theirs! It could very well be the Preservers did - unwittingly possibly - ruin the chance for other forms of life by putting evolution on countless of worlds in a certain direction.
Maybe we would have a lot more "alien" creatures in the Milky Way if the Preservers just didn't interfere.
One could even spin a story of how the Preservers or Humanoids in general were distrusted in the Andromeda Galaxy because their seeding program destroyed incompatible ecosystems until the Preserver seeding machinery could be stopped.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
My two EC:
I don't believe that the Preservers are in any way responsible for the Iconians' actions. They aren't gods. After seeding a race, they most likely have no way of controlling or intervening in said race's affairs aside from force of arms, and they aren't portrayed as that kind of people. Remember, the Preserver that M'Tara kills makes no attempt to flee or defend himself, almost certainly (in my mind) because he knows nothing he can do will change what is about to happen, and he simply accepts his fate.
Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's, and yours.
Well if the Andromeda galaxy is outside the Galactic Barrier meant to keep 0 out, then it is highly likely that he is behind this...and why the Iconians Must kill the preservers, and cause all sorts of havoc. I guess the only real hole in that line of thinking comes from the idea that 0 would want vengeance on the Q....who are suspiciously absent. 0 might have even goaded the other races into attacking the Iconians, before showing up to "Save them" and give them the tools to get back at their aggressors...for a small price. The question I guess really pivots on how much of the Q stuff is considered canon to this setting.
Comments
So much this, I felt this was a huge missed opportunity the more I think about this episode, Could have attempted to at least do something as she weakened completely, like tried to beam her out and say "Let's see if we can sustain her just enough with a weapons cell or something to nibble on, but not enough to be a threat etc". Or even diplomatically talking back to her and then the other Iconians in the cut scenes would have been better than nothing! Huge star trek spirit opportunity missed.
I also disliked even the notion of possibly destroying an entire sphere, how many Heralds would die then, billions?! I hope that genocide never happens.
"Can't... stop... laughing. Must... play... the episode. Must... fight... Iconian... because.. I am.... the hero."
Serously. I was expecting at any moment that M'Tara would raise her hand to sky and scream: "I HAVE THE POWEEEER!"
I saw it differently. Perhaps because I have had to deal with people who are portrayed like the Iconians in real life (yuck). Chances are with a person like that, she saved the Harbinger simply cause it suited her needs and saved her effort in training a replacement, nothing more
If they wanted to be compassionate they wouldn't be going around INTENTIONALLY trying to stir up trouble in the first place over aeons across all the different species of the different quadrants. Unlike other such regimes (even in human history) we haven't seen any opposition from the inside so it does seem to be that all of the Iconians are in on the whole genocide of the galaxy's 'weak and pathetic'. Guess the writers are playing a simple 'them' vs 'us' campaign.
Now T'Ket wants to kill all non Iconian life, and the previously moderate L'Miren is backing her up. We all just finished dealing with the two sided wrongness of the Vaadwaur vs Kobali. Now here I am again, with Genocide of all non Iconians, or Genocide of the Iconians. I know were are going to end up winning, but I would really like to see choices to not wipe them out.
they are immortal and everlasting, to them us mortals, are plentiful, live for a moment and are responsible for the near total destruction of their civilisation. over what, we really don't know.. we have stories and rumours.
we are human with years counted in decades, to us many insects may be interesting, some even beautiful, but we shed no tears for them and wipe out millions with pesticides on a regular basis.
we haven't just killed their sister, we've killed their queen. L'Miren says 'she understands now.. kill them all' that shows she was definitely considering other options.. was! so how much have they been holding back, and why? M'Tara and L'Miren had been keeping T'Ket on a short leash.
if this isnt something we can rewind, or some kind of simulation, the only sensible conclusion to this story would be our total destru.....
- first of all, we shouldn't be able to enter in the sphere; when we are in the sphere, why it is empty?
- in the M'tara ship, same thing, this is empty. we can move everywhere without problems, where are the heralds?
- during the fight against M'Tara, why she comes back each time??? she knows that she is weak but she continues to fight!!!
- disable power sources for disabling M'tara: ridiculous.
- why we are still able to use the iconian consoles? Heralds are stupid enough for leaving their consoles without protection; no password, etc, and of course we speak fluently the iconian language. consoles shields lowered when we weaken M'tara; lol
a small team can move in a ship freely, and kill an half-god easily; nothing is weird??
and the klingons; hahahahaha; the clowns of the galaxy.
these FE are a joke, and not really funny.
Savik - Vulcan Fed Temporal Sci
Dahar Masters Fleet: Alphal'Fa - Alien KDF Engineer Qun'pau - Rom/KDF Engineer D'nesh - Orion KDF Scientist Ghen'khan - Liberated KDF Tac
Welcome to StarBug Online - to boldly Bug where no bug has been before!
STO player since November 2013
That "little issue with the Preservers"? You mean genocide. Not just hypothetical should-we-or-shouldn't-we genocide, but an actual fait accompli. And not only genocide of a species of comparatively insect-like status (like us), but of the species that created her own species. The Iconians were the "first children", as the Preserver told us. The Iconians owed their very existence to the Preservers, and M'Tara goes and wipes them out. And we were there to actually WATCH her personally commit that genocide first-hand! Oh, yeah, that showed M'Tara in the best possible light.
Poor widdle M'Tara, we should all feel so sorry for her! NOT!
The Preservers didn't have to show up to save the Iconians from being wiped out, because the Iconians weren't wiped out. Unfortunately. Hence the current situation.
I will agree that the Idiot Ball was passed around pretty freely during this episode to all parties in this episode, though. Both sides volleyed it repeatedly.
M'Tara said she didn't have a choice in destroying the Preservers. She didn't say she "Will not" she said she "Can not". Why is that? We still don't know.
As for the Preservers being innocent in all this -- these are the same Preservers that told Thot Trel that the Preserver archive had no weapon technology. That it was a place of learning.
Then later it turns out they had pretty powerful disruptor and transphasic torpedo technology. So they lied to their children.
First time I did this mission I had to go through the Iconian Flagship 3 times in order to complete it due to bugs. First time I had the stupid idea of planting mines under M"tara before triggering the cutscene. Yeah don't do that. If she blows the mines during the cutscene, she won't appear in actual gameplay.
Second time through I had to warp to Iconia to continue the mission. later a Herald spawned in the wall that later fell through the map. No way of reaching it. Had to restart again.
Finally third time's the charm and I didn't even care about the story anymore. My Fed simply gave her the finger in her dying moments.
Also, it's interesting hearing a Gorn mourn for the dead and his friend on the Stardancer.
Crocodile tears.
Where did you get that emote. I want it.....
I pretty much agree 100%. My take on the Preserver's words to Thot Trel is "We have no weapons data here... that is stored in another archive that you can access from here". Wonderful world of Obfuscation. The Preservers always struck me as being rather manipulative, so their lying is not a surprise.
As far as M'Tara... Oh where to start? 200,000 years of vendetta has an effect on a being I suppose. But her action/scripting in this FE was horrific beyond words. It's like she got infected by Khaless memes or somethign. She **knows** she is losing "essence" (Kife essence is my take) by fighting. She comes back again and again, losing more essence each time. Answer? Pull back and send in a few dozen Heralds led by a Harbinger. The writing on this was really a TILT moment, which makes me wonder about the whole Holodeck concept...
My personal take on the three named Iconians? I think they were actual sisters, and what's more were linked somehow (Telepathically or maybe even a limited form of quantum entanglement), so yes, I felt rather sad for her. Also we turned L'Miren into a memeber of T'Ket's genocide faction. Bright move. Did House Pegh think this plan up?
I just hope that we get the chance to use the Krenim Timeshup and/or time travel to stop the genocidal madness, and maybe even restore M'Tara. I get the disturbing feeling that the "alliance of races" that attacked Iconia 200,000 years ago will end up being the current-day alliance...
"M'Tara is not my girlfriend, but I am her Significant Other" Hail M'Tara
Did the preservers try and diffuse the situation? If they did it certainly failed badly enough that some "Other" had to step in and make sure the Iconians were not wiped out.
M'Tara's rage should have been incandescent at the loss of her people. I'm more surprised the Iconians took so long to blow the preservers up. It could have been done quietly with no one really knowing about it. As it is, it was like watching Frankenstein get strangled by his monster. It's ugly, but the creator is more at fault than the monster.
Consider the Milky Way has the Galactic Barrier that destroys ships going in or out and prevents transmissions. Did the Preservers use the Milky Way as a kind of terrarium? We aren't free to leave the galaxy. We're either prisoners or pets. But the Iconians on the other hand managed to escape to the Andromeda Galaxy.
How could they do that while avoiding the Galactic Barrier? In my opinion...
A: Their technology is powerful enough to circumvent it.
B: The Galactic Barrier was created by the Preservers after the fall of the Iconian Empire to keep them out -- or to keep us apart like a parent telling their feuding children to stay on opposite sides of the room. Or... if we want to get even more sinister, we were fenced in the Milky Way like cattle, and now the Iconians have come to cull the herd.
The genocide of the Preservers is sad... but when you consider they had so many answers for us and refused to 'rejoin' with their children, opting to stay in their stasis tubes... what good were they to us? We offered them the chance to reintegrate themselves with their children and to see how far we've gotten. They offered us the opportunity to discover answers about who we are as Milky Way sentients, but then never followed through.
I don't know. They don't seem as wholesome and benign as they tried to pass themselves off as. Not only the weapon technology they kept hidden from us and willingly lied to us about. Why? They treated the Breen as equals to the rest of us. They don't care about our petty fights.
But they do seem secretive, and given M'Tara's remorse for destroying them ("Your death will bring me no joy.") and her apparent inability (not unwillingness) to stop their Genocide leads me to believe they were hiding a lot from their children and they weren't willing to tell us why.
I agree, the episode lacked a proper conversation with M'tara. We needed a chance to throw their actions back in their face.
"You set the Borg, Undine, and Elachi after us for no reason - you started this war. And your death here is justice for the Preservers. Why else would you provoke us this way if this wasn't what you wanted?"
I think Berat would say something close to that, though he might say, "IF I kill you, it will be justice..." suggesting that he could be convinced to change his mind.
My other toon, Alyosha, would have raised the same point but with more of a tone of simply wanting to know WHY. "How can you attack us merely for existing? How can you hold us accountable for things we didn't do?"
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Mine dropped through the floor to a lower level preventing me from getting to them. Had to beam out and restart at the flagship level.
Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's, and yours.
I dare you to do better.
Anyways, the only goody I might like from this current feature episode is the distress call. I'm wondering how long the cooldown is or better yet, if it's similar to the Nimbus Distress Call in that you can use it from your inventory. Hmm, thinking about it now, it'll probably share a cooldown... darn!
But they provide still a potential conondrum. They seeded other worlds with life - but they seeded it with life like theirs! It could very well be the Preservers did - unwittingly possibly - ruin the chance for other forms of life by putting evolution on countless of worlds in a certain direction.
Maybe we would have a lot more "alien" creatures in the Milky Way if the Preservers just didn't interfere.
One could even spin a story of how the Preservers or Humanoids in general were distrusted in the Andromeda Galaxy because their seeding program destroyed incompatible ecosystems until the Preserver seeding machinery could be stopped.
I don't believe that the Preservers are in any way responsible for the Iconians' actions. They aren't gods. After seeding a race, they most likely have no way of controlling or intervening in said race's affairs aside from force of arms, and they aren't portrayed as that kind of people. Remember, the Preserver that M'Tara kills makes no attempt to flee or defend himself, almost certainly (in my mind) because he knows nothing he can do will change what is about to happen, and he simply accepts his fate.
Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mother's, and yours.
I dare you to do better.