Wait-a-minute Wednesday: To draw attention towards a situation or decision which bares further scrutiny.
For example: the crew of the Defiant not stopping Captain Sisko from committing acts of terrorism in order to prevent other atrocities being carried out by the Maquis.
So let’s dig up the decidedly bone-head commands made by any characters throughout the Continuum, aside from the tried and true Tuvixian methodology. Or do, just provided there’s a fresh/skewed take to be had.
Everything about The Inner Light’s probe is stupid:
• It is designed to transmit its information to one person, one time. This person could be an imbecile who is working for a salvage operation. The person could be evil. The person could die immediately after it happens and no one would ever know. It destroys itself after a one-time use, meaning that the information cannot be preserved by other people experiencing it and sharing what they found out.
• It shows one snapshot of a culture that is going to die out from one perspective on one place on the planet and gives no regard to the culture’s obviously rich history. The planet also probably had more than one culture, although monoculture is a thing in Star Trek.
• It gives the person who is experiencing the lifetime no way to record what is going on as it happens.
• They could have at least added a summary text to the probe to let everyone else know what is going on.
• They could also have added any other information about their culture(s) in text. Anything. At all.
• They could have also included A BOOK INSTEAD OF A FUCKING FLUTE.
• It wasn’t even a very interesting flute. It could have been ornately carved or something. Maybe even carvings of what the people who made those flutes looked like? Which reminds me-
• THEY COULD HAVE INCLUDED A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES.
The Pioneer plaque is a more useful transmitter of information about a species than that probe.
Beautiful episode in terms of a storyline but really stupid in terms of a plot device.
Been waiting to get that one out of your system for a bit, haven’t ya? And entirely justified. Their culture doesn’t deserve to be remembered if they think in such arbitrarily limited terms. No primer, no back-up, no alternatives.
Oh I rant about that episode all the time because everyone else is constantly gushing over it and the bad plot device annoyed me then and annoys me now. Absolutely a tour de force for Patrick Stewart, but it just gets to me every time.
Edit: Now I’m even more annoyed than I was before because there’s a really easy way to fix it- the enterprise salvages all that is left of a much larger probe that is destroyed in some way or other and that is what gives Picard the experience. In other words, there were a lot of other memorials of their civilization, it’s just that is the only one that survived. And then it dies because it was running out of power after being separated from the rest of the probe and burns out and can’t be restored because Treknobabble. There. Fixed pretty much every problem.
Like the obelisks in Mass Effect?
Never played it, I’m afraid.
Fantastic games!