Why do some episodes get expanded upon and not others?
The Kobali appeared in one episode of Voyager and an entire warzone was created, along with a number of episodes.
The same with the Vaadwaur...one episode of Voyager and multiple episodes of STO.
The Voth...again, one episode of Voyager. The Elachi did appear in Enterprise as well as The Next Generation, so there was more of them. The Tzenkethi were only ever mentioned in a single episode of DS9 (although I think it would have been terrific if instead of the Klingons, we saw the Tzenkethi war with the Federation instead).
Who makes the decision to build upon the plots of just one episode? Or is it decided by the rights? I know the reason that Tom Paris was created, was because they would have had to pay the creator of Nicholas Locarno rights.
The Vidians were a much larger part of Voyager with multiple episodes (and they're pretty terrifying stealing organs). I know that people knock it, but I do think Captain Proton offered a lot of fun things to do...a Satan's Robot kit module, like a Nomad Drone, Arachnia costume, Ray Gun weapons, etc.
Well all of the big baddies have been tackled...Borg, Iconians, and Dominion...think of how much smaller STO could very well be if they didn't take these stories and run with them.
The Vidiians...the phage may be cured by the 25th century, remember last time we really heard about them if I recall the Think Tank may have started working on a cure.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Why would the Iotians adopt Starfleet appearance and protocols? They did the Gangster Planet thing because they had a copy of Chicago Gangs of the 1920s that SS Horizon (IIRC) had accidentally left behind. Having McCoy's communicator, and thus the transtator, might well result in copying 23rd-century Federation technology, but for Starfleet the only examples they had were Kirk and Spock trying to act like locals and Bela's brief glimpse of the inside of the transporter room. Nobody gave them any manuals this time, unless Starfleet actually did send someone out once per local year to collect Kirk's cut of the action and somebody screwed up bigtime.
Rather, if Starfleet did leave them alone rather than following up on Kirk's first contact, one might expect their society to evolve along slightly different lines than it had before (as Kirk pointed out the waste of everybody jumping everybody instead of working together), developing communicators and phasers, and possibly beginning to work on spacecraft and transporters (although achieving spaceflight in a matter of two centuries based solely on the fact that you have learned spaceships exist implies a level of inventive genius that's almost frightening, akin to Italy developing manned heavier-than-air craft in the 1600s based off of da Vinci's drawings and moving on to Lunar colonies by the 1700s). One of the authors in this forum's fanfic area (I can't remember who, please forgive me - I think it was Starsword, but don't hold me to that) posited that they would develop into a sort of planetary mercenary protective service, similar in some ways to the Pinkertons in the days of steam engines, hiring themselves out to anyone who needs a paramilitary force that isn't beholden to one of the major interstellar governments.
Those communicators have the translators, but they also have limited sensors and memories so the Iotians could get at least a little more than just Okmyx's brief look at the transporter directly from them. And then there is the fact that the communicators are FTL communicators themselves, once the Iotians cracked the tech they would almost certainly build a "big ear" version to listen in on whatever they could of Federation communications, which would probably include electronic entertainment packets and whatnot that are being sent to ships and outer planets so they could in theory get a very good idea of what the Federation is like.
It is also theoretically possible they might draw some of the wrong conclusions from it for comic (or other schtick) effect, like the story in one of the anthology novels where someone concluded that superheroes must be real since the technology could produce the kind of power suits shown, and started working against the syndicated government as a superhero, and the Iotians called the Federation to come fix the mess.
Also, the Iotians don't just know that starships are possible, they have an example of the key technology itself to reverse engineer, something that Italy did not have from da Vinci's drawings (if it was detailed blueprints of the kittyhawk aircraft instead it might have been different, though even then the Italians of that time did not have the communication networks to take advantage of it very quickly. On the other hand, the Iotions do have that rapid collaboration ability with their telephone and radio tech, and as they unlock more and more of the subspace transtator technology that would keep getting better and better).
I'm not talking about things that can easily be hand-waved away. I'm talking about long-standing requests for things like sherlock holmes holo-deck missions, or the gangster planet someone mentioned earlier (where everyone looks human and Kirk and Spock were able to fit in) or dozens of other things that simply wouldn't work for non-Federation characters. Those are the kind of stories that will simply never be made due to the fact that all content has to work for all factions now.
The "gangster planet" wouldn't be that hard to do actually. When they left it in TOS, Bones forgot his communicator. And with how fast the Iotians are able to learn and adapt, by STO's time they should be in TOS era tech, flying around space in TOS era looking ships, and already know about aliens.
Any mission featuring them would likely have the Alliance investigating why they are getting old style Federation ship signals from that region of space, when no such ship should be in that area, leading us to discover the Iotians basically cosplaying TOS era Starfleet, and us having to try to fix their culture again.
Funny you should mention this - the novel 'The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard' actually does depict this. Picard (Captain of the USS Stargazer at the time), Jack Crusher and Walter Keel visit a bar on said planet and, as you say, the inhabitants were all wearing Starfleet uniforms, had adopted the Federation's principles, and were very welcoming of genuine Starfleet officers.
Depending on the direction of "Picard"...I wonder if we'll get past, present and future content based on the direction. I am so much more excited about that than anything more Discovery. Jean-Luc, Seven, Riker and Troi, Data possibly from B4...even the trailer and word-of-mouth are giving way to so many possibilities.
Why would the Iotians adopt Starfleet appearance and protocols? They did the Gangster Planet thing because they had a copy of Chicago Gangs of the 1920s that SS Horizon (IIRC) had accidentally left behind. Having McCoy's communicator, and thus the transtator, might well result in copying 23rd-century Federation technology, but for Starfleet the only examples they had were Kirk and Spock trying to act like locals and Bela's brief glimpse of the inside of the transporter room. Nobody gave them any manuals this time, unless Starfleet actually did send someone out once per local year to collect Kirk's cut of the action and somebody screwed up bigtime.
Rather, if Starfleet did leave them alone rather than following up on Kirk's first contact, one might expect their society to evolve along slightly different lines than it had before (as Kirk pointed out the waste of everybody jumping everybody instead of working together), developing communicators and phasers, and possibly beginning to work on spacecraft and transporters (although achieving spaceflight in a matter of two centuries based solely on the fact that you have learned spaceships exist implies a level of inventive genius that's almost frightening, akin to Italy developing manned heavier-than-air craft in the 1600s based off of da Vinci's drawings and moving on to Lunar colonies by the 1700s). One of the authors in this forum's fanfic area (I can't remember who, please forgive me - I think it was Starsword, but don't hold me to that) posited that they would develop into a sort of planetary mercenary protective service, similar in some ways to the Pinkertons in the days of steam engines, hiring themselves out to anyone who needs a paramilitary force that isn't beholden to one of the major interstellar governments.
Those communicators have the translators...
Not "translators", transtators - described as being basic to all Federation 23rd-century technology. So that might well give them communicators, phasers, transporters (since Bela actually went through one), and potentially duotronic computer systems and spaceflight (since they were able to derive the principles behind the Tommy gun and automobile from that book), but none of the cultural background they'd need to become slavish Starfleet imitators (even subspace broadcasts wouldn't do that, because entertainments always assume you possess certain background data to start with - war movies don't go into detail about military training or relative ranks, for instance).
I'm not talking about things that can easily be hand-waved away. I'm talking about long-standing requests for things like sherlock holmes holo-deck missions, or the gangster planet someone mentioned earlier (where everyone looks human and Kirk and Spock were able to fit in) or dozens of other things that simply wouldn't work for non-Federation characters. Those are the kind of stories that will simply never be made due to the fact that all content has to work for all factions now.
The "gangster planet" wouldn't be that hard to do actually. When they left it in TOS, Bones forgot his communicator. And with how fast the Iotians are able to learn and adapt, by STO's time they should be in TOS era tech, flying around space in TOS era looking ships, and already know about aliens.
Any mission featuring them would likely have the Alliance investigating why they are getting old style Federation ship signals from that region of space, when no such ship should be in that area, leading us to discover the Iotians basically cosplaying TOS era Starfleet, and us having to try to fix their culture again.
Funny you should mention this - the novel 'The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard' actually does depict this. Picard (Captain of the USS Stargazer at the time), Jack Crusher and Walter Keel visit a bar on said planet and, as you say, the inhabitants were all wearing Starfleet uniforms, had adopted the Federation's principles, and were very welcoming of genuine Starfleet officers.
Depending on the direction of "Picard"...I wonder if we'll get past, present and future content based on the direction. I am so much more excited about that than anything more Discovery. Jean-Luc, Seven, Riker and Troi, Data possibly from B4...even the trailer and word-of-mouth are giving way to so many possibilities.
True, Discovery started out in a very contentious fringe place as far as traditional Star Trek is concerned, and between all the shark jumping and damage control it feels rather unfocused even with the narrow serial format. The latest shark jump makes me (and a lot of other people apparently) less inclined to watch the show further. Picard looks like it will be a much better show than DSC at this point.
> @phoenixc#0738 said: > (Quote) > > True, Discovery started out in a very contentious fringe place as far as traditional Star Trek is concerned, and between all the shark jumping and damage control it feels rather unfocused even with the narrow serial format. The latest shark jump makes me (and a lot of other people apparently) less inclined to watch the show further. Picard looks like it will be a much better show than DSC at this point.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
>
> True, Discovery started out in a very contentious fringe place as far as traditional Star Trek is concerned, and between all the shark jumping and damage control it feels rather unfocused even with the narrow serial format. The latest shark jump makes me (and a lot of other people apparently) less inclined to watch the show further. Picard looks like it will be a much better show than DSC at this point.
Admittedly, it is not quite the primary definition because it does not have the "long running" element to it, but there can also be short term shark jumps as well (though there is probably another term for that kind of concept thrash as well that might be more applicable). Anyway, the term does get used often for abrupt, ham-handed overtweeking of a show, and for shows where each season seems more like a separate show that happens to have the same characters (or most of them anyway) in it instead of a natural progression of events from season to season.
In this case, it has elements of the secondary definition of the Firefly effect too, in the same way Voyager did in trashing most of the original concepts, but it goes too far beyond that to call it that since (among other things) the Firefly effect only describes that happening once instead of recurring relatively radical changes of direction and look or feel.
The fact that like most cable/streaming series nowadays it is a half-season length show does not do it any favors in this regard either since it tends to remove the opportunity for subtlety and proper foreshadowing since there is no "noise" from random event episodes to conceal them in.
Gamma quadrant potential has only been barely scratched as well. Sure, the Dominion and the Hur'q have been done but they are not the only ones in the whole quadrant. In fact, with all the damage the Dominion has taken of late it would be ripe for someone to rise up and challenge the Dominion or cause other havoc there.
In post-TOS Star Trek in general the trend has been towards thinking of it in terms of epic heroes who do everything of any noteworthyness in a given block of time and ignoring everything else that could be done at the same time by someone else, and STO has not been completely immune to it either.
All of the known GQ races. Those Jem'Hadar habitually went around loaded for bear, to a degree quite unreasonable if they were only needed to deal with the occasional rebellion; IMO that implies the existence of someone on the far side of Dominion space powerful enough to challenge them.
And remember that all the Voyager learned of the DQ was along the relatively narrow corridor of space they crossed. They weren't exploring the quadrant, they were trying to go home. There's room in the Delta Quadrant for an entire interstellar empire or three.
Interesting, how the Borg occupy three discontinuous regions on that map. It's in keeping with the use of transwarp hubs; they might not even know that much about the space between those regions, or care.
However, I can see lots of available space on that map, even if you grant some of those organizations (a term I use loosely in reference to the Kazon) the sprawl shown. That region where all the name-labels go, for instance; or the largish area spinward of the Borg and rimward of the Hirogen. Space is big, you know. Mind-bogglingly big. It may seem a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space! Listen...
Those flat maps are misleading, remember the galactic disk is thick enough that several empires could be stacked on top of each other rather easily. For that matter, just because a civilization claims a lot of territory does not mean that someone else could not have territory inside of those borders, just take a look at all the stuff Kirk's Enterprise ran into inside of Federation borders that no one knew was there.
Also, if figures from TNG about ship tracking are correct, Voyager could only see ships out to about ten parsecs around it so while they traveled a somewhat twisty path it was still a very narrow one as far as seeing what was out there for themselves and many of the civilizations they encountered were apparently prone to exaggeration at times. On top of that, they skipped across large parts of it using various drives and boosts and whatnot.
The reason they were dealing with the Kazon and whatnot for so long was that they only averaged about warp 6.2 between those large jumps (the difference between their cruising speed and the effective speed was presumably all the detours and stops they had to make along the way for various reasons), not that the locals had such incredibly huge territories. And add to that the fact that Federation sensors were better than those of the Kazon and most of the other races they encountered and those "solid" swaths of territory look more and more like swiss cheese with a lot of potential surprises inside just like the 23rd century Federation.
As for Gamma, the only things we really know from the shows is that the Bajoran wormhole leads into Dominion claimed space and they have the other civilizations within easy distance of it under their thumb. The Federation never got the chance to explore very far, and relying on what Weyoun says is foolish since he seems to have lied more often then he told the truth. Realistically, the Dominion seems to be too centralized to manage effectively the amount of territory Weyoun claimed they did for instance.
Or that on the other side of the claimed territory of Space China (to borrow and extend Moore's analogy) is a Space Soviet Union, with the power to oppose the Dominion and a philosophical structure that stands against reaching alliance with them. Perhaps they'd be friendlier to Federation society - then again, perhaps they'd be happier to bolster the waning power of the Romulan Star Empire...
This limitation would explain the fundamental change in Starfleet's mission between TOS and TNG. Whereas TOS's Starfleet was more focused on pushing the limits of explored space, TNG's Starfleet seemed to take a more diplomatic role, and the places it visited, even if they were newly explored, had closer distances to Earth then many places in TOS.
Also Federation space is gerrymandered to the point of having as many holes as swiss cheese.
This limitation would also apply to pretty much every hypothetical species in Trek as well. If "post warp" travel methods like Transwarp were commonplace, one would expect the Federation to have encountered a number of species with them in its exploration of 1/5 of the galaxy, same with the Dominion and their likely conquest of a similar region of space. Instead, these technologies are limited to pretty much just the Borg, Voth, Elachi, and Iconians, suggesting they are incredibly rare.
If it's every form of tech better than standard warp... Xindi had a form of subspace tunnel tech that was faster than a warp 5 starship but probably slower than warp 9. Arturis's race is the origin of the QSS tech used in STO. Janeway apparently got enough scans of the Dauntless to recreate the tech. The guys from Andromeda in TOS had a tech that was like conventional warp but fast enough to travel to the Milky Way from Andromeda in a few years.
If we did go to one of these other areas, and happened to find some big meany race there, we could just use our transwarp drives to leave, and they would be stuck trying to follow us the old fashioned way. They wouldn't be a problem for years, if not decades. The enemies we have faced so far have only been threats because they are either right next door to us, or had something like a convenient iconian gateway/dyson sphere lead to us.
Maybe a race with a way to create wormholes? We've seen races experiment with weird techs like that.
The Gamma and Delta Quadrant obviously hold plenty of potential for new aliens - as do the Alpha and Beta Quadrant, really.
I think the challenge for Cryptic is that they hesistate to introduce new species, they prefer to latch onto existing ones. The Deferi weren't that great. The Lukari worked a lot better, which I think is mostly because they are more interesting and more relatable thanks to the voice actress and writing for Kumaarke. Coincidentally, they also tied the Lukari species in with an existing person - Kal Dano, a character (or corpse? from ENT, who is apparently partially Lukari (which we didn't know from ENT, but we knew he wasn't a human. Whatever, in my personal head canon, one of my Captains is definitely trying to "work" together with Kumaarke toward making Kal Dano's ancestors happen.)
Of course, they could reveal that the hunters of Tosk, or the Wadi from "Move Along Home" have their own Empires that undergo a significant political shift in their own Empires. Both kinda seemed focused on sports and games, but maybe something forces them to abandon this lifestyle. Maybe the hunt for Tosk has gone out of style and Jem'hadar look like more interesting game now, or the Player of Games decided to move to Use of Weapons.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
While Kuumarke is likeable most of the time, she can also be a bit irritating, at least to me. She's gotten into the habit of pointing out the blatantly obvious, like following the waterfall after scanning during Adamant (Of Signs and Portents), one would think she thought we would just jump down the waterfall or something. Or during Melting Pot when she so happily tells you "Well done!" After you scan a receiver, as if you'd just learned to scan things.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes she just sounds a little condescending.
Post edited by echatty on
Now a LTS and loving it.
Just because you spend money on this game, it does not entitle you to be a jerk if things don't go your way.
I have come to the conclusion that I have a memory like Etch-A-Sketch. I shake my head and forget everything.
To me, Kuumarke, who is a Lukari, is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed character. Several of the ones we have encountered of that civilization tend to be curious and some are even more eccentric than herself, the scientists researching the bug cocoons with a cutscene akin to Starship Troopers. She is genuinely curious about the world around her, so she does not always take on a serious nature or it does not come naturally to her. Kuumarke is probably still developing in that department. Some don't like that, some do. I do not find her condescending at all. She also likes to congratulate the player when they accomplish an objective. Those are my two cents on that.
As for the OP, STO likes to dive into cultures described in one-off episodes to further explore these cultures as well, how they were affected by their encounters with the Federation, and to bring in antagonists into the game as well as other reasons.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
I think the challenge for Cryptic is that they hesistate to introduce new species, they prefer to latch onto existing ones. The Deferi weren't that great. The Lukari worked a lot better, which I think is mostly because they are more interesting and more relatable thanks to the voice actress and writing for Kumaarke.
The Deferi were written into the basement from the start. They're literally an entire people of "damsels in distress" due to their flawed view of "balance", as whenever they're getting attacked they will just not defend themselves. Whoever came up with their concept didn't understand that being neutral actually requires being very (pro-)active rather than completely passive about everything.
The Lukari on the other hand do not have that issue. They're curious and thus natural explorers, which makes them perfect ideologic partners for the federation. They're also good at stirring into the hornet's nest here and there due to their naive disregard of danger, which makes them handy for setting up missions. All in all they just feel more genuinely like actual characters than the deferi ever could.
Comments
Well all of the big baddies have been tackled...Borg, Iconians, and Dominion...think of how much smaller STO could very well be if they didn't take these stories and run with them.
The Vidiians...the phage may be cured by the 25th century, remember last time we really heard about them if I recall the Think Tank may have started working on a cure.
Those communicators have the translators, but they also have limited sensors and memories so the Iotians could get at least a little more than just Okmyx's brief look at the transporter directly from them. And then there is the fact that the communicators are FTL communicators themselves, once the Iotians cracked the tech they would almost certainly build a "big ear" version to listen in on whatever they could of Federation communications, which would probably include electronic entertainment packets and whatnot that are being sent to ships and outer planets so they could in theory get a very good idea of what the Federation is like.
It is also theoretically possible they might draw some of the wrong conclusions from it for comic (or other schtick) effect, like the story in one of the anthology novels where someone concluded that superheroes must be real since the technology could produce the kind of power suits shown, and started working against the syndicated government as a superhero, and the Iotians called the Federation to come fix the mess.
Also, the Iotians don't just know that starships are possible, they have an example of the key technology itself to reverse engineer, something that Italy did not have from da Vinci's drawings (if it was detailed blueprints of the kittyhawk aircraft instead it might have been different, though even then the Italians of that time did not have the communication networks to take advantage of it very quickly. On the other hand, the Iotions do have that rapid collaboration ability with their telephone and radio tech, and as they unlock more and more of the subspace transtator technology that would keep getting better and better).
Depending on the direction of "Picard"...I wonder if we'll get past, present and future content based on the direction. I am so much more excited about that than anything more Discovery. Jean-Luc, Seven, Riker and Troi, Data possibly from B4...even the trailer and word-of-mouth are giving way to so many possibilities.
True, Discovery started out in a very contentious fringe place as far as traditional Star Trek is concerned, and between all the shark jumping and damage control it feels rather unfocused even with the narrow serial format. The latest shark jump makes me (and a lot of other people apparently) less inclined to watch the show further. Picard looks like it will be a much better show than DSC at this point.
> (Quote)
>
> True, Discovery started out in a very contentious fringe place as far as traditional Star Trek is concerned, and between all the shark jumping and damage control it feels rather unfocused even with the narrow serial format. The latest shark jump makes me (and a lot of other people apparently) less inclined to watch the show further. Picard looks like it will be a much better show than DSC at this point.
That is not what "jumping the shark" means.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark
Jumping the Shark - TV Tropes
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Yes and no.
Admittedly, it is not quite the primary definition because it does not have the "long running" element to it, but there can also be short term shark jumps as well (though there is probably another term for that kind of concept thrash as well that might be more applicable). Anyway, the term does get used often for abrupt, ham-handed overtweeking of a show, and for shows where each season seems more like a separate show that happens to have the same characters (or most of them anyway) in it instead of a natural progression of events from season to season.
In this case, it has elements of the secondary definition of the Firefly effect too, in the same way Voyager did in trashing most of the original concepts, but it goes too far beyond that to call it that since (among other things) the Firefly effect only describes that happening once instead of recurring relatively radical changes of direction and look or feel.
The fact that like most cable/streaming series nowadays it is a half-season length show does not do it any favors in this regard either since it tends to remove the opportunity for subtlety and proper foreshadowing since there is no "noise" from random event episodes to conceal them in.
In post-TOS Star Trek in general the trend has been towards thinking of it in terms of epic heroes who do everything of any noteworthyness in a given block of time and ignoring everything else that could be done at the same time by someone else, and STO has not been completely immune to it either.
And remember that all the Voyager learned of the DQ was along the relatively narrow corridor of space they crossed. They weren't exploring the quadrant, they were trying to go home. There's room in the Delta Quadrant for an entire interstellar empire or three.
However, I can see lots of available space on that map, even if you grant some of those organizations (a term I use loosely in reference to the Kazon) the sprawl shown. That region where all the name-labels go, for instance; or the largish area spinward of the Borg and rimward of the Hirogen. Space is big, you know. Mind-bogglingly big. It may seem a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space! Listen...
Also, if figures from TNG about ship tracking are correct, Voyager could only see ships out to about ten parsecs around it so while they traveled a somewhat twisty path it was still a very narrow one as far as seeing what was out there for themselves and many of the civilizations they encountered were apparently prone to exaggeration at times. On top of that, they skipped across large parts of it using various drives and boosts and whatnot.
The reason they were dealing with the Kazon and whatnot for so long was that they only averaged about warp 6.2 between those large jumps (the difference between their cruising speed and the effective speed was presumably all the detours and stops they had to make along the way for various reasons), not that the locals had such incredibly huge territories. And add to that the fact that Federation sensors were better than those of the Kazon and most of the other races they encountered and those "solid" swaths of territory look more and more like swiss cheese with a lot of potential surprises inside just like the 23rd century Federation.
As for Gamma, the only things we really know from the shows is that the Bajoran wormhole leads into Dominion claimed space and they have the other civilizations within easy distance of it under their thumb. The Federation never got the chance to explore very far, and relying on what Weyoun says is foolish since he seems to have lied more often then he told the truth. Realistically, the Dominion seems to be too centralized to manage effectively the amount of territory Weyoun claimed they did for instance.
If it's every form of tech better than standard warp... Xindi had a form of subspace tunnel tech that was faster than a warp 5 starship but probably slower than warp 9. Arturis's race is the origin of the QSS tech used in STO. Janeway apparently got enough scans of the Dauntless to recreate the tech. The guys from Andromeda in TOS had a tech that was like conventional warp but fast enough to travel to the Milky Way from Andromeda in a few years.
Maybe a race with a way to create wormholes? We've seen races experiment with weird techs like that.
My character Tsin'xing
I think the challenge for Cryptic is that they hesistate to introduce new species, they prefer to latch onto existing ones. The Deferi weren't that great. The Lukari worked a lot better, which I think is mostly because they are more interesting and more relatable thanks to the voice actress and writing for Kumaarke. Coincidentally, they also tied the Lukari species in with an existing person - Kal Dano, a character (or corpse? from ENT, who is apparently partially Lukari (which we didn't know from ENT, but we knew he wasn't a human. Whatever, in my personal head canon, one of my Captains is definitely trying to "work" together with Kumaarke toward making Kal Dano's ancestors happen.)
Of course, they could reveal that the hunters of Tosk, or the Wadi from "Move Along Home" have their own Empires that undergo a significant political shift in their own Empires. Both kinda seemed focused on sports and games, but maybe something forces them to abandon this lifestyle. Maybe the hunt for Tosk has gone out of style and Jem'hadar look like more interesting game now, or the Player of Games decided to move to Use of Weapons.
Maybe it's just me, but sometimes she just sounds a little condescending.
As for the OP, STO likes to dive into cultures described in one-off episodes to further explore these cultures as well, how they were affected by their encounters with the Federation, and to bring in antagonists into the game as well as other reasons.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
The Deferi were written into the basement from the start. They're literally an entire people of "damsels in distress" due to their flawed view of "balance", as whenever they're getting attacked they will just not defend themselves. Whoever came up with their concept didn't understand that being neutral actually requires being very (pro-)active rather than completely passive about everything.
The Lukari on the other hand do not have that issue. They're curious and thus natural explorers, which makes them perfect ideologic partners for the federation. They're also good at stirring into the hornet's nest here and there due to their naive disregard of danger, which makes them handy for setting up missions. All in all they just feel more genuinely like actual characters than the deferi ever could.