I actually prefer TNG’s settling down with a Poker game, and Picard joining in with a “I didn’t know why I didn’t do this before”. Mainly because it still feels like they’ve not left their time, whereas the camping scene could be anytime from the start of the second millennium.

The only way it could be better is if the show opened with a Poker game.

Cheap sets are a key to the charm of Star Trek. When it gets too CGI-ey you know they’re off base.

Arguably the same for special effects too. TOS is nice in that way, since it feels like the only show that doesn’t go overboard with the pyrotechnics.

Even TNG had support beams, explosions, and an entire welsh quarry rain down from the ceiling, and that just got a bit silly.

Hm, in theory, possibly, but not by doing Scotty’s method, since that was basically constantly redoing the transport over, and over internally, without actually materialising the pattern. DS9 has transport patterns moved into regular computer storage, but the requirements were considerable. 5 people required the combined computer storage capacity of the entire station.

If you can do that, it doesn’t seem impossible to copy the pattern itself using the computer, feed the copy right into the transporter, then materialise the copied pattern. As far as the transporter is concerned, you’re just transporting the same thing a whole bunch, loading the patterns into the buffer from a different device.

You would need more than just a transporter to achieve that, though.

She wasn’t reconstituted, the hair was used as a reference to tweak her pattern. They didn’t just print out a spare Pulaski, leaving the old one on the station.

Riker was split during the process, since the person doing the teleporter thing did an ill-advised/unprecedented thing and basically tried to transport them twice simultaneously, using two transport beams, and reintegrate the patterns later, so that the interference didn’t cause them to lose too much of him, and they had enough to use the pattern repair mechanisms to patch any gaps (more than 50% lost is generally considered unrecoverable).

Part of the interference resulted in one of the transport beams being echoed down to the planet surface, and the transporter presumably did its best to fill in the gaps so that they didn’t just get half a Riker, and they ended up with two whole Rikers instead.

If it was a simple clone -> store -> kill/replicate, Scotty wouldn’t have needed some whole convoluted song and dance to keep someone in the buffer for decades, and Franklin’d not have died.

The Second One. The supernatural parts remain the same (the Vulcans make a big deal out of that, and would have a fit if people were being killed), the exact same matter is moved, and people remain conscious during the process.

In Star Trek, cloning is a much more complex affair, needing to grow the clone and all. If the transporter just copied people, destroying the original, they could just use that instead.

In fairness, the clone being made is more from people abusing the “part of you is missing, so we’ll try and patch that up before putting you back together” function, and happened twice with extremely specific circumstances. You can’t just factory-print people with it.

Its strange to think that the game is nearly a decade old.

It doesn’t feel that long ago when you’d see a bunch of people playing with it and marvelling at the realism/newly added voice recognition features.

In Voyager, he’s shown to have pips. In fact, switching him over to Command mode shows a deliberate animation of pips showing up on hid collar.

However, it is possible that this is something that only applied on the Voyager thanks to their excsptional circumstances, and regular Starfleet doesn’t recognise it as a “proper” rank.

• Can a self-aware hologram hold rank or a non-com position in Starfleet?

Technically, yes, in practice, it would be a bit more complicated. A lot of the Federation still has issues around recognising the personhood of inorganics, and a good many of them would hold the early Voyager attitude of seeing him as a regular hologram/tool that the Voyager got too attached to, like the Enterprise did with their Data.

• If so, how would the Doctor attaib it?

The regular way, in theory. The ranking system technically doesn’t change depending on what species you are, other than some minor twiddling to account for your species’ characteristics.

It would be silly to expect a species who can’t speak to give verbal commands, for example, or give them a crew who is not receptive to telepathy.

In practice, there’s a lot more complications, like how the crew of the Sutherland nearly mutinied against Data because they believed him to be a dispassionate computer weighing lives at data points.

The Dr originally wasn’t autonomous, it could be argued he’s just part of the ship, but the holo emitter changed that.

There’s an argument to be made that that changed the moment he started to be established as a sapient individual of his own.

I’m amazed the Daystrom institute let him keep it, but since it’s apparently his, and that makes him autonomous, I would argue he’s just like Data (minus the permanent corporeality of course).

It bring future Federation technology bequeathed to him may help there too. The Federation likely doesn’t want to risk issues with the Time Police by confiscating and studying the emitter, so just let him keep it to do with as he wants.

There’s also an ethical argument that removing it would severely restrict his ability to move, given that Starfleet would have trouble furnishing him with a sufficient replacement.

I suppose there’s a question about ownership given his origins as a Starfleet asset, but since he can be replaced with a copy of the original program, there’s no real material loss in letting him leave the ship.

We also know from Prodigy that the Voyager was intended to be shelved for study, so it no longer being active might also be a good reason to allow the Doctor to roam about, instead of effectively trapping him on the inactive ship while Starfleet scientists pulled it apart and studied every crook and nanny.

Both. Though regular holograms would immediately dissipate on arrival, since they’re separated from the projectors maintaining the holomatter.

There have been many cases which The Doctor has become solid so other solid objects can no longer pass through them. If the object we are seeing being beamed is the mobile emitter, then is it necessary for them to be on a separate pad? I imagine the person accompanying The Doctor could just hold the emitter instead.

The Doctor needs to externally reconfigure himself through the computer control panel to change his tangibility, he can’t just do it on the fly.

Transporting him as if he was a human, rather than just the emitter probably helps Voyager’s crew remember that, instead of treating him as a piece of equipment.

It’s also unclear whether transporting just the emitter instead of the whole hologram might risk damaging his holomatrix, since you’d effectively be forcibly removing the emitter. He wasn’t designed around having a mobile emitter, or with the ability to be transported.

I think they’d be more likely to say homosexuality is illogical and repress it. Could make an interesting plot point.

The converse is that making a specific distinction based on sexuality like that is also illogical in what is supposedly the enlightened 24th century Federation.

They’re not the ancients of the 21st century, who would be so concerned with such primitive things.

Honestly, after Zora became sapient, it seems like a cruelty to have her just sit around in deep space.

In Calypso, this was less of an issue, because of the implication that Discovery became sapient after centuries of floating about, developing sapience as part of that time, but Zora would be sapient from the get-go, and leaving a sapient being adrift and alone for Millennia seems like fairly unethical.

Where’s the professional? Box plot?

Could also have been to make the difference more subtle, since they’re different parts of the same person, rather than being two separate people like the goatee counterparts are.

Gives him dark eyes, as opposed to the bright/spotlit eyes on good Kirk? So you can immediately tell there’s a difference between the two.

Idk why but my shitpost-ridden brain instantly went “wait… d-did they make Kirk hot?”

Depending on your taste/sexuality, they arguably do that most of the time. The man seems to have shirts made of tissue paper.

It also makes him stand out more. Where regular/good Kirk has a spotlight on his eyes (like Morticia Addams), Evil Kirk has darkened eyes instead.

Unless you’re on a California class, and someone diverts the auxiliary power.

There’s an argument to be made that an alternate timeline isn’t the same timeline, and therefore, the 24th century temporal prime directive would not apply. It may just be conventional application of the prime directive, as it applies to pre-warp civilisations. They’d likely try to get them back, and either give them the choices of keeping quiet, or having their memories of the future altered/erased, to avoid interfering with that iteration of Earth’s development.

If there is no way of them going back, then they would likely get the standard time-displacement reintegration package. The circumstances are close enough, and it would hardly be the first time ancient humans from over 3 centuries ago would crop up.

True, but that can be said of a lot of atrocities in Star Trek history. Some of which are necessary for the preservation of the Federation as we know it.

The Enterprise C incident, for example. The loss of the ship with all hands (presumably) helped prevent an escalation of the conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.

We also know that the Burn didn’t create issues wholesale. All it really did was exacerbate the existing dilithium shortage by dropping the number of ships, but the underlying problems were likely going to happen either way. The Chain had the advantage of the Courier network, while the Federation was still using warp-drive ships trundling along at low speeds.

The only notable thing that did happen is the loss of functioning ships, straining Federation resources further, and that N’var believed that their experimental stargate network caused the Burn, so they stopped developing it, but the former would have likely happened anyway, especially if the Federation was to get into conflict with the Chain.