majicwalrus
With regards to number 2 I had often wondered just what the big deal was about returning someone to pre-Borg state. I think we can see the allegory of addiction coming into play in these scenarios as well. It’s much easier for someone to “kick” being a Borg if they’ve only spent a little bit in the collective. The longer you spend in the collective the more of a psychological impact it has and therefore the trauma makes reversion to the pre-Borg state more challenging at the individual level.
This is a question worth asking. As others have pointed out there sort of seems to be clear that the rules are the rules and business rules trump all other rules. The Rules of Acquisition tend to be the Ferengi Alliance’s highest law. It’s both a religious law and a practical one and I think therein is where the problem lies. You can’t make profit outside of the constrains of normal ethics because whatever makes profit is what is ethical to do.
This is why so many contradictory Rules exist in this system. War is good for business and peace is good for business, and neither of these are statements on what is “bad” for business. There’s nothing here that says not to do anything and I think in this way Ferengi ethics largely comes down to there’s no precept that says I shouldn’t do this and I was able to exchange doing it for profit so ultimately it serves a higher purpose.
And since it seems like there is a fair amount of legalize extortion that happens in Ferengi while it might be technically illegal to do slavery, it might be more profitable to do it and therefore on the whole you can come out with an ethical conclusion that is “good” especially if you’re some mid-level Ferengi in charge of making sure that slavery doesn’t happen and you’re able to take a little bit of a kickback.
I mean let’s be clear for most of Ferengi history women were not allowed to own property of any kind - including clothing and some of their business endeavors include poaching endangered animals and literally being slave traders. I mean - I don’t think there’s any indication that Ferengi society was anything more than hyper-capitalist dystopia as a juxtaposition of the Federation socialist utopia. That Rom and Quark are goofy and lovable I think speaks more to how bad every other Ferengi is operating outside of a Federation station.
From the Federation’s perspective the Ferengi are harmless and in this way they may be ethical enough to not warrant confrontation, but at the same time - the Federation does seem to stop them when they’re doing something like slave trading so I think we can imagine that for some people in the sphere of Ferengi influence they’re not so ethical.
I think this is a challenging one sense ostensibly we learn that Tellarites had generation ships before achieving warp capabilities and that these generation ships went at least as far as the Delta Quadrant. I don’t know that we can so safely assume that Jankom Pog is representative of Tellarites in the Federation.
that we shouldn’t take dates on the show literally other than as an indication of the general order in which things happened
I absolutely am fine with this take now, especially. Ultimately, what we are talking about is the narrative importance of the events. If we want to have episodes where the characters go to “today” today must continue to exist within the narrative. If the narrative says that the world was noticeably different in 1996 - move it to 2036. If we’re still going strong move it to 2056.
These changes don’t make as much difference in the narrative that was being told to begin with.
I don’t think that changes anything that was previous established. Picard established that Soong did illegal genetic experiments, but it does not stipulate that his experiments were illegal because of a prior genetic research ban. Soong later recovers the 1996 Khan Project file.
My take is that Romulan time agents went back in time to hide the Khan file. They perhaps moved Soong away from that avenue of research not knowing how the Confederation would play into it. In any case it didn’t work because Picard did his own time shenanigans pushing Soong to take more drastic measures.
In less than a year the Khan project has found a new home in Canada with new research partners. The Noonien-Singh Institute has Adam Soong’s fingerprints on it somewhere, but it’s unclear where. In any case whether there is a connection or not, Soong discovers the Khan project from 1996 in 2023. In SNW the Khan project has only just begun a year later and already has found its Khan.
I thought it was a clever way to handle it, but it was… strange because it telegraphed it’s narrative purpose rather than keeping it as part of the narrative. But I mean - to be fair I can’t think of a better way to make it work than exactly what they did and I thought it kind of worked out well all things considered.
Tuvok is such an example as he is almost always referred to as Lieutenant and later he’s promoted to Lt. Cdr properly, but he wore Lt. Cdr. rank insignia for like maybe the first season without anyone really correcting it.
It’s true that Tilly was not ‘promoted’ to any rank and kept her rank simply being assigned a position, however, I think it’s weird for her to be the XO except that she was part of the principle cast and they needed to give her a reason to be part of the overarching narrative for each season.