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Short Trek The Trouble With Edward

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  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    reyan01 wrote: »
    azrael605 wrote: »
    Tribbles have been born pregnant since their first appearance.
    Which the episode contradicts, that's (one of) the main problems:
    "Captain: Can anyone tell me how they (the supposedly slow breeding tribbles) are breeding so quickly?
    Trill Sci Off: I analyzed a newborn tribble. They're born pregnant.
    *everyone looks at the idiot responsible for this mess who just smugly shrugs*
    Edward: Well, when you mix human DNA with tribble DNA, crazy stuff happens"

    Which means the show is saying before he injected one, they weren't a species born pregnant... and that they were slow breeders.
    Your science critiques do not take in to account that (A) Trek has never used accurate science except accidentally & (B) combining DNA from different species is a very common experiment for real life geneticists, like the people right now trying to unextinct Mammoths.
    I'm not criticizing the idea of mixing human DNA and tribble DNA by itself -even if I still think it's freaking stupid but I've seen worse in the franchise (which is no excuse, BTW)-, I'm criticizing the fact it violates the continuity in addition of being stupid.

    As Memory Alpha states (quote):

    The tribbles in this episode are referred to as "tribleustes ventricosus", while the scientific name for tribbles has previously been given as "polygeminus grex", making it another possibility that the specific type of tribbles seen in "The Trouble With Edward" are a different breed than the fast-reproducing ones seen in other episodes, and that it is only the ventricosus variety that originally reproduced slowly before being modified by Larkin.
    So let me get this straight.

    This is an episode about tribbles. So far, so good.

    And just for that specific episode, they create an entire new species of tribbles during a time period where tribbles are supposedly a mysterious species because in their introductory episode in TOS, most people don't know about their biology, including Dr McCoy, which is the main reason the episode's events happen.

    Yet, this mysterious species still manages to have a "sister species" that was never mentioned before, named after them, literally meaning "corpulent tribble" in Latin. This species just so happens to be the only species of tribbles that not only doesn't breed fast but is also incredibly fragile compared to the other ones ( "one fell off my desk the other day and it just died instantly") who were regularly stepped or sit on and just emitted "HEY!!" cooing.

    Then, in TAS, Cyrano Jones specifically tries to genetically alter tribbles so they don't breed like crazy, so apparently, the person most familiar with the species in the franchise isn't familiar with the one species that doesn't breed fast but also was involved in a severe incident about 12 years ago.

    But Edward just happens to be familiar with this even more mysterious species different from this other mysterious species he doesn't know about, because if he wanted his plan to work, all he needed was to pick a normal tribble, but he didn't and never mentioned it could be a possibility. No "there are other species of tribbles that can help us, but I don't have access to these" which would have solved this one issue with the episode (though that's far from the only issue in this episode).
    And all over the episode, everyone, including him, treats these tribbles like they were just discovered, since they discuss about their sentience, what they look beneath the fur, among other things.

    And what does this accomplish? Nothing! Nothing at all! They could have used normal tribbles and the results would have been the same regarding the rapidly-breeding situation.


    Here's how this episode could have worked without needing the creation of a new tribble species or the over-the-top comedy/stupidity, imho:

    Take a normal tribble, have Edward explain they breed very fast and they only require just tiny shares of food for that, so they could use a few amount of the ship supplies used to help the planet to have even more food.
    The captain shoots down the idea because, since she hasn't heard of tribbles before like many people and that she considers him weird, she thinks Edward is BSing her and that no species can do that. Plus, they need those supplies for the people on the planet.
    Edward still decides to show it's true and goes to feed one with the ship supplies. It works but he gets caught and while he's trying to explain himself and show the tribbles multiplying, everyone fails to see one of them has escaped their sight. As everyone sees now he's right, he's both reprimanded for disobeying an order, but since he was right, they go easy on him. No caricatural "conversation's over. -no. -yes. -no. -yes. -no. -yes." dialogue or anything.
    Then things go downhill obviously as the supplies compartment is now fully taken over by tribbles and someone has the brilliant idea to open it getting harmlessly buried under them. In the end, the supplies are ruined, there are tribbles everywhere (but nowhere near outgrowing the ship, obviously) and the captain is asked to beam down to give a good explanation for this disaster... accidentally bringing a tribble with her on the surface.
    Cue the summary of the following events and the questioning, except it's once again less caricatural and over-the-top but Larkin is here too and both are given a lesson because each of them was right and wrong about different things: Edward for disobeying orders and the captain for letting her prejudices towards his quirks make her believe he wasn't actually knowing his stuff.
    Both make amends and mention that it could have ended up worse, like having the planet overwhelmed or creating a diplomatic incident since the Klingon border is close, with Edward saying that'd be silly, they're invasive, but not that bad when you can keep food away from them, besides, the last thing they need is the Klingons declaring war on them over cooing furballs. And the short ends with a Klingon captain screaming in rage while being pelted with angry tribbles.
    #TASforSTO
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  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    valoreah wrote: »
    Your asking for an IP to make sense and follow canon as if it is some sort of hard gospel that has a history of not following its own canon.
    Actually...

    Well, yes. Yes, I'm asking for the IP to try and do some effort to make sense and follow canon now that it has decades of existence and is now an important and beloved sci-fi franchise worth millions, and not changing things for the sake of it when it has the option not to, especially if it's replacing simple but effective comedy with over-the-top comedy.

    And I'm not talking about intentional over-the-top comedy when the setting calls for it like Bride of Chaotica which was a pure delight to watch, the Magnificent Ferengi or most Q episodes.

    A quirky Barclay-like scientist not going along with the new captain, while Tribbles are involved and it all results in shenanigans and an overwhelmed ship, evacuations and a diplomatic incident would have worked very well without everything being exaggerated for the sake of it, and without introducing a new type of tribbles that will never be mentioned again (that is assuming it's not the origin of the tribbles we know, but apparently "they're not the same species").

    It didn't need a stereotypical man-child spreading rumors the captain is dumb who eventually learns nothing because he dies.
    It didn't need an overly long "conversation's over. -no. -yes. -no. -yes. -no. -yes."
    It didn't need a guy so clueless and stupid that when EVERY SINGLE other person on the ship evacuates in a hurry, he just stands there to go "hey, I was smart all along, nanananana!" before dying, and having his death played as a joke.
    It didn't need indestructible tribbles that can rip a ship apart and doom a planet in less than 2 weeks without needing any food.
    It didn't need to "maybe retcon the tribbles' breeding habits, maybe new species for no reason"
    It didn't need a commercial that had no punchline and no sense whatsoever, especially considering the rest of the episode. "Hey, remember this event where a man died, a ship was lost, a planet was evacuated, a diplomatic incident with the Klingons happened, all due to ever-reproducing furballs of doom? Let's make a commercial where a mother unleashes this threat during her kids' breakfast, a kid eats one, fur and all, and say it contains the DNA of the deceased guy! Why? Why not!"

    This is Star Trek, where even highly-comedic episodes at least have a plausible, genuine and usually serious reason behind the shenanigans, not Billy and Mandy's Adventures where continuity and logic are encouraged to take a break whenever they wish for the sake of funny situations.
    #TASforSTO
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,231 Arc User
    "Need" you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means....
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  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    "Need" you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means....
    ... Seriously?

    Need: To be required; to be necessary.
    Since the episode exists in its current state, then it required those things, therefore they were needed for its creation.
    #TASforSTO
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,231 Arc User
    right... but saying "it doesn't need..." over and over is quite different.
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  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    right... but saying "it doesn't need..." over and over is quite different.
    Then, why were those included in the episode when they could have been avoided?
    #TASforSTO
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  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    valoreah wrote: »
    Well, yes. Yes, I'm asking for the IP to try and do some effort to make sense and follow canon now that it has decades of existence

    It's never made sense or followed canon in those decades of existence. Why start now?

    Star Trek has made a lot of sense over the decades actually, especially for the fact that it is essentially a "shared universe" between different studios and divisions who often wanted different things (TMP and WoK were still an answer to Star Wars for instance, and they borrowed some ideas like the slow, both ships in the same frame, toe to toe slugfests instead of spread out fights in warp they used to do in TOS so they invented the phasers-using-warp-power thing to explain it for example). Or at least it has been up until the end of ENT anyway, and even that new disconnect can be explained easily enough by in-setting events.

    Kelvin is simply a totally different timeline with some common roots, and DSC has apparently been seriously warped by paradox from an unusually high number of temporal interventions in the series itself (which would include all of the Red Angel's actions including Burnham's "domino" off camera but referenced attempts), the Defiant grab near the end of ENT, and the Borg incursion in the First Contact movie.

    The idea that it all chaotic and makes no sense probably comes from people starting in the middle with TNG and continuing to see the various shows out of sequence which in turn makes context tricky. Recently someone was talking about the "no turns in warp" nonsense being an on and off again thing throughout Trek, when really the "no turns" only existed in one single episode of Voyager and nowhere else for instance. Roddenberry's strict "show, don't tell" policy in TOS probably does not help new viewers to understand what they are seeing so far outside of the '60s zeitgeist and cultural references either.

    A lot of long term fans who remember the show when it originally aired have even pointed out a lot places where it is very obvious that the Remastered producers did not always understand what they were seeing in the original episodes they worked on converting for instance, and in theory they should have had access to original documents that would have explained at least some parts of it.

    One of the easiest to illustrate examples of that lack of understanding is the Fesarius from "The Corbomite Maneuver". It is always described in the original scripts (as usual there were several rewrites) as looking like a fishbowl full of various-sized marbles without the bowl and that Balok's pilot ship did not launch from some hanger, it just emerged from the cluster of spheres (a more modern description would probably say something along the lines of "like a bee shape of spheres pushing its way out of a ball pit"), yet in the remastered version they took the '60s-production-tech prop (which was made from ping-pong balls cut in half and glued to a hemispherical opaque light shield with some lights behind it to produce the illusion of a ball of glowing spheres) literally and made a single-hull spherical ship covered in glowing domes instead of the clustership that prop was an attempt to portray.

    It was always a reasonable progression (though some parts stretched believability more than others) with only a very few inconsistencies that would have required something as drastic as paradox to resolve.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,231 Arc User
    right... but saying "it doesn't need..." over and over is quite different.
    Then, why were those included in the episode when they could have been avoided?
    It's fiction, why anything? Seriously, half of all fiction is just whatever random stuff the writer feels like putting into the story.
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  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    and DSC has apparently been seriously warped by paradox from an unusually high number of temporal interventions in the series itself (which would include all of the Red Angel's actions including Burnham's "domino" off camera but referenced attempts), the Defiant grab near the end of ENT, and the Borg incursion in the First Contact movie.
    I would disagree with this notion.

    Time travel in Star Trek has always worked out in the same way, in that nothing actually changes, or, if something is changed, the change results in a timeline that is set up to undo said change.
    -Going all the way back to TOS S1, In "The City on the Edge of Forever" the crew uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time, and accidentally change history to the point the Federation doesn't exist. However, since they used the Guardian to get there, and get back, they were protected from any changes in the timeline, and were thus able to go back and fix the problem.
    -In the TOS S2 episode "Assignment: Earth", the crew goes back to Earth as part of a historical research mission and ends up helping Gary Seven in preventing the destruction of humanity via nuclear war. Them going into the past and meddling in things they shouldn't have been a part of should have constituted a change in history, yet, had this "change" not occurred the future the Enterprise is from couldn't have existed. As Spock points out, they didn't actually change anything, and were, in fact, always supposed to be there.
    -This is also true in Star Trek IV. The crew go back in time to kidnap two whales to stop the Whale Probe from destroying Earth, since all the whales by that time were dead. While bringing the whales to the future should constitute a change in the timeline, we see nothing changed at all. One could argue Kirk stealing the whales figured into their extinction in the first place, creating a bootstrap paradox, or, since the whales were going to die anyways it doesn't matter. Either way, they "changed" history in a way no actual change occurred at all.
    -The same is true of the DS9 crew accidentally getting Gabriel Bell, the starter of the Bell Riots, killed, and Sisko taking his place(given that Sisko looked so much like Bell in the first place its hard to know if Bell ever really WAS the one who started it)
    -As well as in VOY when the timeship Aeon got sent back in time, and found by Henry Sterling, who went on to use it to start humanity's computer age. Another time travel incident that, in all other instances, would be considered a change, but in this case actually created the timeline in the first place.
    -Lets not also forget the time travel of the ENT-C, which was thrown through time into a false future where the Federation was in a losing war with the Klingons, only for it to get sent back to its correct point in time and "restore" the timeline.
    -The same is true of Annorax's attempts to change time in "Year of Hell". He spends ages "changing" time only for it to result in everything getting undone when the Annorax deletes itself, restoring time to what it was before. Annorax himself mentions its as if time itself was fighting against his attempts to change it(something to note for the next bit)
    -This applies even to the Kelvin timeline. In a line ultimately removed from the movie, but kept in the novel and comic versions, Prime Spock muses on the improbability of the Enterprise crew coming together in this new timeline, and suggests that time is attempting to correct the changes made by Nero. And, since the timeline "change" happens after Enterprise, that must mean Daniels is still canon, meaning, despite the "changes" the future turns out the same anyways.
    -Then OFC where have the First Contact paradox, where the Borg and the Enterprise go back in time and end up "altering" First Contact, but, as we later find out in Enterprise, this isn't actually an alteration to the timeline as the NX-Enterprise ends up getting used by the Borg, and the Borg end up sending the signal to the DQ that led the Borg to local space in the TNG era. Another "change" that just results in the timeline being the way it always actually was.


    By this same logic, since Star Trek Enterprise happened before Discovery, and we know Daniels came from the 31st century to help Archer in the Temporal Cold War, this means that all of the timelines created by the fight between Gabrielle Burnham and Control, where Control killed all life in the galaxy, were nothing more then endless false timelines that, like all other false timelines, served as nothing more then temporary stop gap timelines created as part of the path of time fixing itself, like it ultimately did with they managed to defeat Control and go back to the "normal" timeline.

    If Control actually won, then the resulting death of all life in the galaxy would prevent Daniels from existing, which would prevent him helping during the NX era, which means humanity would have been wiped out by the Xindi, which means the Federation could never exist to make Control, which means control couldn't exist to kill everything, which would create a paradox.

    Its impossible to actually change time in Star Trek's universe, you can only think you have when you really didn't.

    Even Future Janeway's actions in Endgame were explained away in the novels when Temporal Agents from her timeline attempted to go back in time and stop her, only to be stopped themselves by Temporal agents from further in the future who explained that Future Janeway's time travel was always part of the correct timeline to begin with, so let it go. Which means even future Janeway's timeline was just a fake timeline that existed only to undo itself.

    That is only part of how time travel is shown to work, it has also been shown (the best example being the episode "Parallels") that decisions produce alternates constantly. It is even possible that the majority of the time travel they did was not actually going back and forth on their own timeline, but rather travelling sideways or diagonally across timelines. Either way, the heroes got back to their home timeline by being able to fix whatever happened to either change things or at least appear to have done so from the heroes point of view.

    For that matter, the Kelvin timeline was either created by an intervention that was never fixed or it always existed on its own and Spock and the Narada simply travelled across to it via that wormhole. In fact, time in the Kelvin universe works differently so the "go back and fix it" schtick does not work there, which implies that it is not a simple branch like Spock assumed it was. Either way, they have already shown that the shows happen in a timeline that has is full of predestination paradoxes and so that leaves the door open for paradoxes to change them, at least from the heroes' points of view.
  • phoenixc#0738 phoenixc Member Posts: 5,459 Arc User
    reyan01 wrote: »

    This is Star Trek, where even highly-comedic episodes at least have a plausible, genuine and usually serious reason behind the shenanigans, not Billy and Mandy's Adventures where continuity and logic are encouraged to take a break whenever they wish for the sake of funny situations.

    Therein lay the problem though - this was supposed to be a lighthearted, comedic, episode. And it was, predictably, poorly received by many due to the overwhelming obsession with canon, over-analysing literally everything, and "how things should be".

    I really do wonder just how well received 'Lower Decks' (which WILL be "Billy & Mandy's Adventures" ) will be with this in mind.

    In other words they forgot their audience has a lot of science fiction fans in it. I doubt "Lower Decks" will generate much fuss unless they keep making references to it in the serious science fiction shows it is tied to since a lot of the hardcore science fiction fans that do that analysis and theorycrafting wouldn't watch it in the first place.
  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    edited November 2019
    reyan01 wrote: »

    This is Star Trek, where even highly-comedic episodes at least have a plausible, genuine and usually serious reason behind the shenanigans, not Billy and Mandy's Adventures where continuity and logic are encouraged to take a break whenever they wish for the sake of funny situations.

    Therein lay the problem though - this was supposed to be a lighthearted, comedic, episode. And it was, predictably, poorly received by many due to the overwhelming obsession with canon, over-analysing literally everything, and "how things should be".

    I really do wonder just how well received 'Lower Decks' (which WILL be "Billy & Mandy's Adventures" ) will be with this in mind.
    Yeah, no. Once again, the issue isn't with the fact it's a comedic episode but that it's so over-the-top and stupid for the sake of it.

    If Lower Decks follows its own formula and stick to it, I wouldn't mind, just like how I absolutely didn't mind and actually loved the original Teen Titans animated series that had its shares of both deadly seriousness and over-the-top comedy done right.

    But this kind of writing wouldn't fit in other typical DCAU series and movies like Justice League Unlimited or Assault on Arkham (the only true Suicide Squad movie, BTW).
    You're likely to see some 4th-wall-breaking stuff, over-the-top lines and faces that wouldn't look out of place in a anime in TT and it'd be more than fine because the series is built on that. In other DCAU series? Not a chance unless a certain all-powerful dwarf from another dimension played by Gilbert Gottfried is involved.

    So far Discovery has been so serious and only unintentionally over-the-top (thank you, dead-resurrecting mushroom realm, Control superpowers and S31 tech) and set in a somewhat realistic and serious setting like all Star Trek series. So having this episode show up out of nowhere is kind of a nasty surprise.

    But if they ever present Lower Decks as 100% canon and not a show-within-the-show in the Prime Timeline and then we see a human get a Connie saucer dropped on their face, only for them to come out looking like a pancake, say a punchline and they're back to normal in the next shot, I'm gonna grab my phone and call BS on that "100% canon" thing.
    #TASforSTO
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,231 Arc User
    reyan01 wrote: »

    This is Star Trek, where even highly-comedic episodes at least have a plausible, genuine and usually serious reason behind the shenanigans, not Billy and Mandy's Adventures where continuity and logic are encouraged to take a break whenever they wish for the sake of funny situations.
    Therein lay the problem though - this was supposed to be a lighthearted, comedic, episode. And it was, predictably, poorly received by many due to the overwhelming obsession with canon, over-analysing literally everything, and "how things should be".

    I really do wonder just how well received 'Lower Decks' (which WILL be "Billy & Mandy's Adventures" ) will be with this in mind.
    In other words they forgot their audience has a lot of science fiction fans in it. I doubt "Lower Decks" will generate much fuss unless they keep making references to it in the serious science fiction shows it is tied to since a lot of the hardcore science fiction fans that do that analysis and theorycrafting wouldn't watch it in the first place.
    not all sci-fi fans are obsessed with canon. Some just like cool stories. :p
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  • saurializardsaurializard Member Posts: 4,385 Arc User
    reyan01 wrote: »

    This is Star Trek, where even highly-comedic episodes at least have a plausible, genuine and usually serious reason behind the shenanigans, not Billy and Mandy's Adventures where continuity and logic are encouraged to take a break whenever they wish for the sake of funny situations.
    Therein lay the problem though - this was supposed to be a lighthearted, comedic, episode. And it was, predictably, poorly received by many due to the overwhelming obsession with canon, over-analysing literally everything, and "how things should be".

    I really do wonder just how well received 'Lower Decks' (which WILL be "Billy & Mandy's Adventures" ) will be with this in mind.
    In other words they forgot their audience has a lot of science fiction fans in it. I doubt "Lower Decks" will generate much fuss unless they keep making references to it in the serious science fiction shows it is tied to since a lot of the hardcore science fiction fans that do that analysis and theorycrafting wouldn't watch it in the first place.
    not all sci-fi fans are obsessed with canon. Some just like cool stories. :p
    Those two things aren't mutually-exclusive. In fact, those two things SHOULDN'T be mutually-exclusive when your franchise doesn't involve multiverses on a constant basis like DC and Marvel.
    #TASforSTO
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  • westx211westx211 Member Posts: 42,205 Arc User
    I know this is a bit late, but in reference to the line about Klingons joining the federation, Roddenberry when creating TNG wanted the klingons to have joined the federation, it was a major thing for him, but the studio wanted the klingons to remain somewhat antagonistic and seperate from the federation, so they basically told him to TRIBBLE off about it. I'd guess since I think the line from wesley was from season 1, that it was probably from before the studio brought the iron fist down.
    Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
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