That is so me sometimes.
“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
That is so me sometimes.
That might me it - when I search older media, say The Andy Griffith show, sure enough there are a crap ton of plates.
It might be a sort of Venn diagram thing - Trek/Wars plates came at the dusk of the commemorative plate era, while the fans were more likely than others to buy collectibles like plates, making them seem unique from other fandoms.
I just realized another thing about April - assuming humans live 120 years on average in the Trek universe and April got turned roughly 20 in Counter/Clock, an elderly April could still be alive in the 2360s or 70s.
I would love that! Give the lost part of the Monster Maroon era (mid 2290s-2340s) some love.
The weird thing is April from SNW should canonically still be alive due to TAS:”Counter-clockwise Incident”.
TLDR: The Commission probably wouldn’t like it, and the Federation even more so. Even so, there are practical hurtles such as genetic diversity and whether medical knowledge of symbionts is advanced enough to keep a large population healthy and happy.
For one, a fundamental tenet of the ideology of the commission is to protect the well-being of the symbionts, sentient beings, from suffering abuse due to potential competition between Trill over a limited number of symbionts.
If we take the well-being argument further, cloning symbionts has many issues to their well-being. Cloning them would be indignant because it would reduce them to a commodity that every Trill should have rather than a sentient being that chooses a relationship.
Even if the idea got through the commission, I feel like the rest of the Federation might frown on this for those reasons in addition to another: I think there’s already a slight bias in Federation culture against the cloning process.
This can be seen in TNG:“Up The Long Ladder” (in addition to revealing that cloning on a large scale has negative implications, Riker is so mad about cloning he murders his own clone and Pulaski’s) and TNG:“Second Chances”/LD:“Kayshon, His Eyes Open” (Transporter cloning is seen as a suboptimal circumstance). This suggest culturally, the Federation finds cloning inconvenient at best and a violation at worst. This might be partially negated if the symbionts were to give consent, but it would still feel iffy to most planets
On another note, exact cloning symbiont genomes could have drastic consequences. For one, it would vastly reduce the genetic diversity of the symbionts; this means if there was say, 1 million Daxs with all the same DNA, there’s a higher chance that a virus could evolve that’s really good at spreading between Daxs, allowing the virus to spread in those Daxs and evolve, probably ultimately killing a lot of symbionts.
The above might be able to be averted if say, you sequenced the DNA of all the (willing) symbionts and generated distinct genome sequences by simulated breeding between symbionts (if they sexually reproduce) or maybe simulating mutations if they reproduce asexually. You could then synthesize the genome and grow a symbiont from it.
Even this better solution might prevent problems, though - what happens when symbionts have genetic defects? With symbionts being so rare, is the medical knowledge of them enough that a large population could be kept healthy?
I could see it your way. My main gripe is it feels like saying the left side of my brain went to heaven while the right side stayed on earth.
I guess in some ways, this part of the debate mirrors the confusion of Worf post-Jadza and just the overall nature of afterlives in general.
Why would a computer networking company have a say in the Jazdias’ fate? 🤣 Humor aside, I agreed with you. I’m planning on doing a Star Trek Adventures campaign (I did session 0 and we’re 1/3 of the way through the first mission), and one of my players is a joined Trill - something like your idea will probably be one of the ways I torture them, probably in addition to reuniting them with one of their past hosts’ now-elderly child.
That’s an interesting relationship with Enterprise - I’ve yet to really watch that series.
Star Trek’s been a family thing for me as well; my mom is a fan - she watched VOY:“Endgame” during its premiere 4 days after she got married. Star Trek was always playing in the house, so me and my siblings gravitated towards it.
Lower Decks was probably 2/3rds of my coping strategy for the death of my grandmother.
You’re right. I gotta be going where my heart will take me.
I need to give those a harder listen. I do like how the Prodigy theme combines cinematic and TAS vibes. Also, I like how SNW riffs on the TOS theme.
Also, my “call” is indeed a tongue-in-cheek way to say I hope that Westlake can continue in Star Trek. Admittedly, I probably should have communicated that in a more precise, less melodramatic mode.
Oh no! You can’t break the laws of physics; O’Brien MUST suffer! Take it away before the universe suffers a subspace quasar tachyon inversion burst collapse to the hull or something. 😉
TNG: “Shades of Gray”, the really low-budget, terrible finale of season 2 where Riker has a virus that makes him relive memories turns the show into a clipshow.
But are you tough enough to watch the clip show?
What! Fairhaven is the best! Computer, delete the wife user! Just kidding. You’re entitled to your opinion.
But yeh, I get the hurt of the end of a series.
As for TNG rewatches, at this point I just go back to a favorite episode and start from there; it’s hard to sort good from bad in the early seasons.
Also, you can rip Blu-rays using a PC Blu-ray drive (which I acknowledge is increasingly hard to find - my PC doesn’t even have a 5.25" bay - I just have SATA cables dangling out for the drive, which I ripped from another machine).
Honestly, it’s a nice path to media ownership, although I don’t use it a lot.
According to Memory Alpha, 10 years because the ship was supposedly obsolete by then.
At least the OG 1701 got a good lifespan - it was no Miranda, but 40 years is great for an Enterprise.
The decommissioning of the A seemed a bit premature, though, considering it was a new ship that was relatively salvageable. Maybe its battle damage was just too much and that’s why it was given to the museum. Alternatively, the A was originally a different Constitution class undergoing a refit was was already quite old by Undiscovered country.
There’s a good chance the B lasted a long time too, though there’s no canon source to its demise, only that it’s not in the fleet museum.
The nice thing is the tape is all over YouTube, so you can watch all the campy clips of totally not Gowron.
There’s also a version done in Tabletop Simulator, though I have no clue if it’s any good.
I didn’t even immediately notice the photo was of the VHS board game. 🤣
JavaScript be like that sometimes…