Now, see, that's a legit reason. I disagree with it to an extent, but yeah, the way they handled it could have been a lot better.

In particular, the show was really, really eager to set up a lot of weird psychosexual drama between Ezri and Worf. The actors handled it well; Michael Dorn in particular is a better actor than most people give him credit for, and I actually think Nicole deBoer was a superior actor to Terry Farrel. But it was... well, it was underwritten, and that was just the beginning of it.

They were also wanted to fast-walk past the whole "joined trills have a powerful social taboo against inheriting their significant others for precisely the reason that it is really very unhealthy" thing they'd established earlier, which is just bad form.

>I mean to
>say, here you had a bright young thing who had her whole life ahead of
>her, and then, suddenly - before she ever actually appeared on screen!
>- she was basically forced to become someone else instead.

To be fair, I doubt they strapped her onto a table against her will. It's difficult to get a bead on Ezri Tigan, as the only unjoined Ezri we ever see is Mirror Ezri. But she seems like the kind of person who, when told that Dax was dying and needed to be placed into symbiosis immediately, would probably have volunteered instantly.

I have the whole series on my computer, actually, and queued up 7x02 again. They do kind of breeze by it, don't they? And it was clearly very traumatic; deBoer almost breaks into tears at one point when it all comes gushing out in front of Sisko.

That scene, by the way, was all I needed to know that Ezri was going to work out just fine in terms of strong characterization, if not being provided with strong materiel. deBoer manages to be this wonderful new person while at the same time having this indefinable sense of Dax-ness about her. In particular throughout season 7 was the way she'd alternate between Jadzia body language and Ezri body language.

>The Trill
>establishment, with the backing of Starfleet, essentially said
>to this young officer, your personhood is worth less than this
>critter's. Sucks to be you, kid.
>
>That's fucking creepy enough, but then the show, having set it up,
>kind of casually breezed past it. Oh, sure, there was some
>adjustment to do, but nobody ever seemed particularly willing
>(insofar as I can recall now - it's been a while) to look straight at
>how utterly wrong and unfair that was. It's a bit disgusting,
>frankly.

This is something that all of the Star Trek's except for (surprisingly) Enterprise tended to really sidestep a lot.

You mention in a previous thread, Ben, that you didn't want to get into the whole ancient "the Federation is actually evil" debate that's been around since you were in short pants. Without engaging that directly, I would like to note that the reason it exists in the first place is because the writing staff tended to eschew worldbuilding in favor of the dramatic needs of individual episodes. That's all well and good, but it had deeply unfortunate implications.

I mean, let's look at just the Trills. They're actually allowed to exile people from the homeworld and legally bar symbionts from being transplanted into a new host (which is effectively a death sentence) because they don't like who joined Trills decide to make out with. That's a shocking sentient rights violation, but apparently is not against Federation law. You've also got Lwaxana Troi's whole "the father of my late-in-life child wants to kidnap it and raise it without me" thing, which also had the color of law behind it. Then there's 1x08 ("Dax") where we find out that the Federation likes to sign unilateral extradition treaties with flyspeck powers that have histories of political instability and authoritarianism. Way to negotiate there, guys.

This is all, for the most part, ignorable on an individualized basis. Like I said, it's there to drive the plot, not to create a perfectly internally consistent universe. But after awhile you look at it in the aggregate and go "you know what? That's kind of creepy."

>Yeah, it's always struck me as a bit weird that so many genre settings
>focus on one aspect of what, logically, have to be much more
>complicated things. Planets in sci-fi, for instance, are almost
>always one thing. Canonical Vulcan is a desert, Kashyyyk is a jungle,
>and so forth.

See also: the Forest Moon of Endor. I've always felt the whole thing is kind of an outgrowth of the "this city is a planet" syndrome.

One of the reasons I always liked New Avalon, which is in fact the only real city on its pseudo-planet. (Sorry, Perth. You know it's true.) Sidesteps the whole thing very neatly.

>Now, don't get me wrong, there are worlds like this in the UF universe
>too - it's a time-honored genre tradition and I've stuck with it where
>I've inherited it; sometimes even made an inside joke out of it, as
>with Ice Planet Halloran V (which originally came from the
>MechWarrior game setting). But scientifically it just doesn't
>hold up to scrutiny. Sometimes I buck the trend - that's why the UF
>universe's version of Vulcan has a Snowy, Piney Arctic Region where
>the people are sort of cheerful Nordic types and don't get the desert
>asceticism practiced by mainstream Vulcans. :)

To be fair, I also get the impression that, in UF, Vulcan neurochemistry isn't such that they need powerful means of social control (the Way of Surak in the case of the Vulcans, their intensely authoritarian society that channels aggression and conflict in controllable ways in the case of the Romulans) in order to avoid simply running amock and murdering each other over tiny slights.

>Anyway, the point is, sci-fi civilizations are usually the same way,
>and that bugs me more than the monoplanet thing. Take the Predator
>aliens in the films of the same name. It's always seemed to me that
>those guys, if they really have an advanced technological
>civilization, cannot possibly all be these badass interstellar
>hunters. They have to have accountants and grade-school teachers and
>people whose job is to maintain the machines that screw the caps onto
>all the toothpaste tubes, or the hunters wouldn't have the
>infrastructure behind them to go to Los Angeles and shoot drug dealers
>for sport.

Tangent: the Halo universe, in its ancillary materiel (which I won't recommend unless you are a die-hard Halo fan, as it is extremely hit-and-miss) actually tackles this issue head-on. The Sangheili managed to luck into having all their technological infrastructure needs taken care of by a race of semi-sentient Engineers, which meant that everyone could stop, say, growing food and whatnot and everyone could just be a badass warrior or at least a noble aristocrat or some kind of holy person.

After the war ends and they don't have that anymore, their society undergoes some real problems as honor dictates that anyone in the prime of life who isn't a warrior is Doing It Wrong, but somebody has to grow the food and make the awesome laser-swords for them. The more intelligent among them realize that they had diverse cultural roles in the past and can have them again; the more reactionary think the right solution is to start enslaving other races to do the boring stuff for them. :)

> If every Klingon was an obsessive warrior type,
>they'd never have developed writing, let alone interstellar
>space travel.

A lot of people have tried to figure out how to square the Klingon circle, yeah. The most satisfying explanation for me is they have a similar social structure to that of various Germanic/Scandinavian peoples (your Angles, your Jutes, your Geats, etc) in the 500-1000 A.D era. Namely, everybody was expected to know how to fight; a prerequisite for social inclusion was owning a weapon and being moderately proficient in its use, so that when the jarl called out the fyrd you could do your bit. And occasionally you'd all pile into a longship and engage in a little opportunistic freebooting.

But there were very few actual professional full-time warriors. Everyone was a farmer or a herder or a blacksmith or a weaver. But they were also warriors at the same time. The best among them could do it full-time as huscarls, but that wasn't for everyone.

Obviously this doesn't map one-for-one onto Klingon culture as seen in the canon. The cultures I describe also had a rich tradition of peaceful trading and commerce and invented a lot of financial instruments still in use today, which isn't a big Klingon thing. But it gets pretty close, and is real helpful if you need a Klingon Scotty; his primary job is to stop the warp core from exploding, but he can also eviscerate you with his bat'leth.

The other explanation, if you want to go a more grimdark route, is that Klingon society is actually like Tokugawa Japan; there's a thin slice of warrior elite and everyone else is essentially a nonperson who the warrior elite pretend don't exist most of the time and who are completely irrelevant to their complex honor code.

-Merc
Keep Rat

No, I expect the coercion was a lot more internally justifiable to the people who engaged in it than that; but I also expect that it was still coercion, all the same.

>>The Trill
>>establishment, with the backing of Starfleet, essentially said
>>to this young officer, your personhood is worth less than this
>>critter's. Sucks to be you, kid.

Just to return to this for a moment - it ties into what's coming below - the "with the backing of Starfleet" part is the thing I have the biggest problem with. Some writers over the years have really enjoyed tying Starfleet up in its own ideals and then sort of quietly inviting the viewers to join them in laughing at how pathetically naïve and unpracticable they are. "Ha ha, accepting infinite diversity and engaging in across-the-board cultural relativism means you have to let people do horrible things to each other all the time! You didn't think that through, did you, Gene?"

That's some pretty blatant and distasteful rebellion against the show's principles. I mean, yeah, I'm sure Roddenberry's insistence on The Shiny Future grated on the people working for him at times - look how quickly they abandoned most of it after he died - but seriously, guys, low-hanging fruit. There's making a statement and then there's just being an asshole.

>You mention in a previous thread, Ben, that you didn't want to get
>into the whole ancient "the Federation is actually evil" debate
>that's been around since you were in short pants.

Well, no, because I don't buy it. I think the people who espouse that view are taking bad decisions made outside the story and using them as evidence of active malfeasance on the part of characters and institutions inside the story, which is either misunderstanding the difference between production and product or - generally more likely, I think - outright assholery. There's no point in engaging with those people; they're just trolling.

>I would like to note that the reason it exists in the
>first place is because the writing staff tended to eschew
>worldbuilding in favor of the dramatic needs of individual episodes.
>That's all well and good, but it had deeply unfortunate implications.

Yeah. Exactly.

(examples snipped for length)

>This is all, for the most part, ignorable on an individualized basis.
>Like I said, it's there to drive the plot, not to create a perfectly
>internally consistent universe. But after awhile you look at it in the
>aggregate and go "you know what? That's kind of creepy."

Another thing that the writers of the various Star Trek series leaned on way, way too often, particularly in the movies, TNG, and DS9, was the "criminally insane flag officer" thing. If someone added up how many Starfleet admirals turned out to be utter raving psychopaths who should have been identified as such and put away forever at about the age of 12, not allowed to rise to positions of almost absolute power within a uniformed service, in the course of those two TV series, I bet it would be more than a little bit shocking. It gives the organization an inescapable flavor of, if not corruption, at least startling incompetence.

Again, I don't think for a moment that's actually supposed to be the case, and so I get unprofitably riled up at people who take that position; it just evolved that way over years and years of careless writing and script editing. It's what happens when you get dozens and dozens of people writing episodes for a TV series without, in most cases, really even being aware of what the others are or have been up to. Ideally, there's a person called a script editor or head writer or (nowadays) showrunner whose job is to catch that shit, but the Star Trek franchise has (IMO) not been blessed with anybody who was any good at that since the late Gene Coon on the original series.

>To be fair, I also get the impression that, in UF, Vulcan
>neurochemistry isn't such that they need powerful means of social
>control (the Way of Surak in the case of the Vulcans, their intensely
>authoritarian society that channels aggression and conflict in
>controllable ways in the case of the Romulans) in order to avoid
>simply running amock and murdering each other over tiny slights.

Well, no, because that is such a catastrophic evolutionary disadvantage they would never have made it to sapience in the first place.

>The more
>intelligent among them realize that they had diverse cultural roles in
>the past and can have them again; the more reactionary think the right
>solution is to start enslaving other races to do the boring stuff for
>them. :)

"A krogan mechanic?"

"What? Somebody has to fix this stuff when the soldiers break it. We can't just kidnap quarians and make THEM do it. ... Any more."

>Obviously this doesn't map one-for-one onto Klingon culture as seen in
>the canon.

No, but then, "the canon" has all the problems we've already been discussing, about how nobody ever really seems to have sat down and properly thought through, well, anything.

All this is making me sound like I'm down on Star Trek. I'm really not. The original show, syndicated every weekday afternoon at 5 PM on WVII-TV Channel 7 out of Bangor, was my on-ramp to genre fandom. It's just that nowadays I appreciate it more for what it represents than what it is, if that makes any sense.

Here is a true story: When I was about ten, I decided that I required a velour shirt. In those days, of course, you couldn't just google "velour pullover" and have links to every conceivable manufacturer and retailer of such objects in the entire Western world delivered immediately to your visual cortex; particularly if you lived in the back of beyond like we did, it took some looking around. I must have pestered my poor mother about this matter for weeks, basically every weekday afternoon at about 6:02.

Eventually, finally, and with a level of difficulty that would strike the modern clothes consumer as frankly implausible, she acquired for me a virtually perfect example of the breed - a crewneck velour pullover without elasticated waist or wrist cuffs. It even had a black collar... and it was a beautiful, rich, deeply saturated shade of red.

And that's how I became a Starfleet engineer.

>it gets pretty close, and is real helpful if you need a Klingon
>Scotty; his primary job is to stop the warp core from
>exploding, but he can also eviscerate you with his bat'leth.
>
>The other explanation, if you want to go a more grimdark route, is
>that Klingon society is actually like Tokugawa Japan; there's a thin
>slice of warrior elite and everyone else is essentially a nonperson
>who the warrior elite pretend don't exist most of the time and who are
>completely irrelevant to their complex honor code.

On screen, I'm not sure they ever bothered looking at Klingon society in enough depth to tell which of the routes they took, but much of the supplementary material available for Star Trek takes the Tokugawa path. The Klingon Bird of Prey Haynes manual, for instance, notes that there are no escape pods provided for the engineering crew, because a) they're not warriors and b) if the ship blows up it's their own fault for not working hard enough anyway, so fuck 'em.

In UF, I'm gonna guess - actually, I don't have to guess - that they're a lot more like Norsemen. UF-Klingon "battle engineers" are actually highly respected individuals, because they can fight and they know all that really complicated mathy stuff. You want at least two when you decide it's time to go a-viking. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>For myself, I disliked the Ezri Dax character arc not because (as Merc
>cited in his post) She Wasn't Jadzia, I disliked it because the whole
>concept gave me the creeps, both in the way it was set up
>and in the way the show subsequently handled it. I mean to
>say, here you had a bright young thing who had her whole life ahead of
>her, and then, suddenly - before she ever actually appeared on screen!
>- she was basically forced to become someone else instead. The Trill
>establishment, with the backing of Starfleet, essentially said
>to this young officer, your personhood is worth less than this
>critter's. Sucks to be you, kid.

Wrong for the Federation they tried to portray in the shows, it does work well for the UF Starfleet of the 2400s. The UFP is getting pretty totalitarian and I can see the government doing that for it's own gains.

>Anyway, the point is, sci-fi civilizations are usually the same way,
>and that bugs me more than the monoplanet thing. Take the Predator
>aliens in the films of the same name. It's always seemed to me that
>those guys, if they really have an advanced technological
>civilization, cannot possibly all be these badass interstellar
>hunters. They have to have accountants and grade-school teachers and
>people whose job is to maintain the machines that screw the caps onto
>all the toothpaste tubes, or the hunters wouldn't have the
>infrastructure behind them to go to Los Angeles and shoot drug dealers
>for sport. It just doesn't make sense.

I always thought they were the ultra-rich of their society, taking safaris on the primitive planets for trophies to show off to their rich friends at the club back home.

Just my views, YMMV.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

Mm. When I re-read Prelude in A Minor the other day, I noticed something I had forgotten about. On their way to Jeraddo, Odo and Ezri get to talking about the likelihood that a Starfleet officer will find welcome in a place like DSM, given the school's various prominent links to Zetan culture, and Odo says he thinks she will, then remarks offhandedly, "Now, if you were a member of the Psi Corps... "

        Ezri shifted uncomfortably in her seat.  She well remembered
the day, during her application process to Starfleet Academy, when
she'd had to face the inquisition of the Psi Corps liaison to the
Admissions Board.  It hadn't been a pleasant experience; in fact, it
had left a bad taste in her mouth that lingered faintly to this day.
The whole experience had seemed so contrary to the ideals Starfleet
was supposed to represent that... 
        She pushed it out of her mind and said simply, "Well, I'm
not."

She never found out what that was about, but I suspect the Corps is very interested generally in the idea of a gribbly you can plug into somebody that turns them into somebody else.

>I always thought they were the ultra-rich of their society, taking
>safaris on the primitive planets for trophies to show off to their
>rich friends at the club back home.

Yeah, exactly. Meanwhile, back on their home planet, there are janitors and fry cooks and paramedics, and all sorts of other people who do not rip other lifeforms' spines out and self-destruct if captured.

I can understand why the people who create SF properties like Predator would rather the audience not think about that kind of thing - imposing that level of mundanity on the badass aliens' offscreen lives tends to mute their onscreen impressiveness somewhat - but I've always enjoyed that kind of thing. It's like I said in a UF-board thread a year or two back. We never see Commander Shepard doing laundry in the Mass Effect games, but I like to think she does sometimes. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Only in the first game. Let's be honest; in 2 and 3, you'd need a whip and a chair to stop Yeoman Chambers and Specialist Traynor from not only doing your laundry, but leaving a mint on your pillow. :)

(And in Kelly's case, the whip and chair would likely not be what you'd call a disincentive to that behavior.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

So I was just thinking about Swede and Starfleet Academy cadets not fitting their predetermined molds generally, and out of the blue I had the thought of her younger brother (a human, not another adopted Vulcan); within moments I had unwittingly constructed an entire mental narrative about him and his posse at the Academy which led, in turn, to another, more interesting character that might get made as a PC one of these days:

There were seven people called Dave in the Starfleet Academy Class of 2409: Maui Dave Keakaokalani from Hawai'i; Horta Dave from Janus VI; Tall and Short Daves Osborne; Shoeless Dave Jackson; Viking Dave Andersson (younger brother of Commander Olivia "Swede" Andersson); and Dave Okamura from Tokyo, whose parents were both Dominion War orphans raised on Earth and who inevitably found himself tagged "Klingon Dave", despite the fact that he doesn't even speak Klingon. One cannot go against the will of the majority in the United Federation of Daves, so Klingon Dave he remains.

--G.
They probably had a band. I leave it to your imagination what instrument Horta Dave played.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I don't know about instrument, but I'd guess his favorite genre is rock.

<rimshot>

A propos of nothing in particular, I wanted to ask (since I've been tooling around in STO myself and Have Plans): does anyone know if there's already a Battlecruiser Vengeance out there somewhere?

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

It wouldn't surprise me, though it might be accidental; it's a pretty obvious name for a Klingon warship, after all. Heck, there's a possible Battlecruiser Vengeance reference in TNG - the chancellor's flagship during the Klingon Civil War story arc was called the bortaS ("revenge").

My Klingon officer is presently trapped in a fault in the space-time continuumbugged mission, so she's still only level 8 and has her starter ship (the Tindalos; I like to think her crew refer to themselves as the Hounds of). I had the vague notion of her eventual D-7 being called the Vengeance, but then her name isn't Koth. Doing the full BV riff, with Commander Koth and the whole nine yards, might be worth it for the giggles.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My thoughts exactly. I'll be disappointed if someone beat both of us to it.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

And I guess either no one's done it or whatever uniqueness-check exists in STO is far more complicated than City of Heroes used to have, because last night it let me create Koth without a qualm. I didn't want to waste either "Vengeance" or "bortaS" on his first ship, so I haven't tried those yet; the ship-uniqueness checker may be more rigorous.

On a related topic, while searching for material on "Battlecruiser Vengeance" last night with Google, I came across a blog post which pointed out that there have been at least two Klingon warships named "bortaS" in "Star Trek" -- one in "Enterprise" and the other in, um, I think it was TNG. The author of the post suggests that they may have been under-the-table tributes to John M. Ford and The Final Reflection, and that bortaS may be to the Klingons, in-universe, what Enterprise is to Starfleet.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I don't think STO gives much of a shit about uniqueness, period. I can't think of an occasion on which it's refused me a name I selected, either for a character or for a ship.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, cool. In that case, I haven't deprived you of having the same fun I'm gearing up to have.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Like all Cryptic MMOs, it only enforces uniqueness in specific ways, AFAIK -- name per account (so no having two characters with the same name on the same account), ships per character.

Also, re: Battlecruiser Vengeance, the KDF set of three endgame ships, comparable to the Odyssey set, is the Bortasqu' (sic) set; Bortasqu', of course, meaning "fierce revenge." (I assume Gryph would know this, but not sure if Bob was aware.)

(I don't have a Bortasqu' variant myself; I do have my KDF captain in a C-store ship, but it's the Kar'Fi Battle Carrier, because I just love how outlandish it looks.)

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

I was not. Thanks!

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

De nada. :)

Also, there is a non-C-Store version of the ship, the Bortas Battle Cruiser (almost literally "Battlecruiser Vengeance"), but it requires being in a KDF fleet with a Tier V shipyard. Getting a Tier V shipyard is a seriously non-trivial task. (My Feddie fleet is at ... Tier III, I want to say? My KDF fleet -- which is the same players, just tend to be less active red-side -- is at Tier I. We've been focusing more on the dilithium mine of late, though, to get the discount.)

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

You're thinking of their band, the Shadowy Daves on a Shadowy Planet.

--G.
-><-
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

I revisited this today, having decided that Cosmonaut's life has just gotten entirely too complicated and I required a vector for experiencing the lowbie Starfleet engineer's life again. At first I was going to make Viking Dave Andersson, but during character generation I changed my mind and decided to go with Klingon Dave Okamura instead...

... and then made her a woman, because that's how I roll.

Her parents, who grew up in Tokyo themselves, really wanted their Earthborn daughter to fit in on their adopted homeworld right from the start. Unfortunately they may not quite have grasped the intricacies of human baby naming, since they called her David Krenn Okamura. Still, all is not lost; she may have been tagged "Klingon Dave" at the Academy, but now that she's graduated and has her own command, officers who didn't know her then don't have to know that that's what the initials in "K.D. Okamura" stand for.

Also, the triumphant return of Bob the Gorn. I should get some fresh pics.

You may be interested to know that all this is not simply recreational doofing around, either. There's some of that going on, naturally, but it's also research. Some of these characters will be turning up in other contexts later...

--G.
-><-
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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oho! I await, with bated breath even.

Maybe if I'll get bored I'll actually write up background-y stuff and post my STO characters. At least my Trill. But no guarantees.

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu

Huh. My Fed 'me' is supposed to be a Dimensionaly Displaced Me from City of Heroes, actually. Somehow, while its assumed most of the Legendaries wound up in the Champions 'universe' after the escape through that portal, somehow I wind up in STO. Sadly, there is no real way to represent any of that well in the game mechanics, so I just left the 'Offical Bio' as "He's from another dimension. Just where and what Neither he nor 'Fleet Intelligence is saying"

We have Moore to thank for Ezri's introduction and I think we all know that that man is not above absolutely traumatizing his own characters for "drama." What really makes no sense when one considers her being pushed into being Joined is that Starfleet was willing to let Jadzia die in an earlier episode in order to pull off a secret mission, to the point that it formally reprimanded Worf for saving his own wife, ensuring he'd never get a command of his own in Starfleet. So the Dax symbiont is so special that this young and unprepared Trill must be forced into Joining, but not special enough that Starfleet could look the other way when the previous host was in danger of dying behind enemy lines.

Thankfully she's getting somewhat of a break in the novelverse, though not without a bit more trauma, like breaking up with Bashir when both realize the relationship's due to remaining feelings about/from Jadzia. She got the standard Star Trek battlefield captaincy due to the Borg threat, putting her in command of a Vesta-class cruiser, and getting a peptalk from Worf to convince her she belongs in the Big Chair.

>Yeah, it's always struck me as a bit weird that so many genre settings
>focus on one aspect of what, logically, have to be much more
>complicated things. Planets in sci-fi, for instance, are almost
>always one thing. Canonical Vulcan is a desert, Kashyyyk is a jungle,
>and so forth. Now, the statistical sampling for real Earthlike
>exoplanets is admittedly small, but through logical
>extrapolation I rather doubt that full-sized inhabitable worlds are
>ever actually going to be monoclimatic like that. It just doesn't
>make sense.
>
>Now, don't get me wrong, there are worlds like this in the UF universe
>too - it's a time-honored genre tradition and I've stuck with it where
>I've inherited it; sometimes even made an inside joke out of it, as
>with Ice Planet Halloran V (which originally came from the
>MechWarrior game setting). But scientifically it just doesn't
>hold up to scrutiny. Sometimes I buck the trend - that's why the UF
>universe's version of Vulcan has a Snowy, Piney Arctic Region where
>the people are sort of cheerful Nordic types and don't get the desert
>asceticism practiced by mainstream Vulcans. :)

It does if one assumes that "Earth-like" is a very large band, where M(inshara)-class planet basically translates as "life-sustaining." We already know that there's all sorts of life on this planet that survives in biomes once judged as too inhospitable to sustaining any lifeforms, and it's speculated that life may exist on some of the worlds deemed "inhospitable" in our own solar system. And that's before we get into the idea of different biochemistries, left/right-handed amino acids, non-carbon-based life, and so forth.

I'll agree that it really comes down to lazy writers and tight TV budgets, but I'd argue that a single-biome planet isn't out of the realm of possibility.

>Anyway, the point is, sci-fi civilizations are usually the same way,
>and that bugs me more than the monoplanet thing. Take the Predator
>aliens in the films of the same name. It's always seemed to me that
>those guys, if they really have an advanced technological
>civilization, cannot possibly all be these badass interstellar
>hunters. They have to have accountants and grade-school teachers and
>people whose job is to maintain the machines that screw the caps onto
>all the toothpaste tubes, or the hunters wouldn't have the
>infrastructure behind them to go to Los Angeles and shoot drug dealers
>for sport. It just doesn't make sense.
>
>I realize the writers, particularly on a show like Star Trek,
>use that kind of thing as a shorthand for real-world stereotypes (TOS
>Klingons were Russians, the Ferengi are such excruciatingly cartoony
>cartoon Jews I'm vaguely amazed Paramount didn't get sued by the ADL,
>and so forth), but still, it's a bit preposterous if you extrapolate
>it some. If every Klingon was an obsessive warrior type,
>they'd never have developed writing, let alone interstellar
>space travel.

To be fair, there are at least some episodes that try to give some depth to the Klingon culture and show that it's not all just Space Vikings all the time. We've seen Klingon doctors and scientists scattered about, even seen Klingon lawyers. Part of Martok's backstory is that he comes from a rural, poor region of the homeworld that's mostly dedicated to farming. All indications are that these professions exist and people work them, it's just that the face of the Empire we normally see is the military, where people join up to find honor and glory in battle. If anything, you and Mercutio both are right, that Klingons started out as blatant Russian expies but slowly adopted characteristics of other cultures post-TOS. I'd argue that they also bear a resemblance to Japanese culture, with the heavy emphasis on honor in daily life, ritual suicide as a means of attaining honor after dishonorable events, the usage of military conquest to attain said honor, and the idea of the Emperor being a figurehead and the real power resting in the hands of the major clans/Houses.

Really, all the Trek cultures have been mishmashes of Earth cultures both present and past, though usually built around one "flaw" or another that Gene's vision of humanity post-TOS had "evolved" past. The Ferengi, at least in DS9, were treated as a jab at human greed and consumerism, to the point that the species defines itself by the acquisition of wealth. But they've also never had slavery, interstellar wars, or engaged in the sort of barbarism that humanity has in the past. To a Ferengi, war is an opportunity to sit on the sidelines and reap huge profits by selling weapons to both sides. The acquisition of wealth so defines them as a culture that they didn't invent warp drive, they bought it off another species.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

And, boy did THAT raise an interesting image. Beyond the general idea, which I do have to agree with, by the way, tooth-paste is only really interesting if you have something to PUT it on, like a BRUSH. Now, consider the mouth/muzzle of a predator...what would such a brush LOOK like?

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!
Severe mental gymnastics caused

Not too terribly different than a bog-standard human toothbrush, as anyone who has watched a vet at work can tell you. :)

Google has several images. The basic concept is the same, the dog toothbrushes (to use an example) are simply optimized for quick cleaning of squirmy muzzles as opposed to human ones where you can tell yourself to hold still, this is for your own good.

--sofaspud
--

One of the few worthy things to emerge from the wreckage of Enterprise is that Vulcan being mostly desert is the result of a nuclear war; before that, it had been as climactically diverse as Earth. I believe this idea showed up somewhere in the soft canon/non-canon novels first, but it was made explicit in Enterprise.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

"New-day greetings, Capital Wasteland. It is I, Sehlat Trio. Permit me to pose the following rhetorical query, listeners: Are you hungry for some 300-year-old plomik soup concentrate, or would you prefer some news?"

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That could be a truly glorious total conversion mod.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

Starring Tim Russ as the Voice of Mr. New Vulcana Regar.

"Stay logical, New Vulcana Regar."

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Probably the closest thing you'd get to that would be a guy like Wrex, who exchanges violence and bravado most of the time for deadpan snarking.

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CdrMike, Overwatch Reject