Star Trek: Picard

Last minute of the episode zooms out and you find out the whole series was fake and thought up by Q because he was bored.

joz123 said:

Last minute of the episode zooms out and you find out the whole series was fake and thought up by Q because he was bored.

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it'll be a holodeck program by thomas riker wondering what could have been

j00t said:

it'll be a holodeck program by thomas riker wondering what could have been

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It's a holodeck program from Reg Barkley. There will be a gangbang at the end.

Maybe everyone is already dead on the Enterprise D saucer section.

The last scene shows nurses disconnecting Picard from the machines that have kept him alive these last few months, 35 years later. His last mission, to save the trapped souls on the Enterprise D and to lead them to the great beyond.

Cybsled said:

Kinda hard for him to do that, considering how season 2 ended lol

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Gary of Nerdrotic said they ret-con changes to a character in the final episode. I'm hoping it's Q.

If there are 3 cameos, then my presumption is Janeway and Tuvok are almost guarantees as two of them. Tuvok because they will want to show that real Tuvok is ok, and Janeway because they've been naming dropping her the entire damn season.

3rd cameo I am not 100% sure on. I think O'Brian would in theory be on Earth at this time and since I suspect transporters will be used to "cure" the changes, it would be fitting if they had O'Brian cameo to assist in that given his role on TNG. I think O'Brian would be more likely than Barclay for that reason.

Although I still hold out hope that Jeffrey Combs shows up as a Weyoun clone to help wrap up the Changeling stuff lol

Didn't someone post that Kirks body was at Daystrom?

We are going to get a Kirk, Picard, Janeway teamup.

j00t said:

it'll be a holodeck program by thomas riker wondering what could have been

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Enterprise fans just perma mad over that.

Chris said:

Didn't someone post that Kirks body was at Daystrom?

We are going to get a Kirk, Picard, Janeway teamup.

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Yes, would be very odd to show Kirk remains and nothing more of it.

Fixing Star Trek : Generations could have been a whole season by itself.

There are some serious implications for transporter eugenics introduced in this whole storyline.. I know the 'transporter accident' was overused to the point of being a trope in the franchise as a whole but good grief that whole technology is foundationally creepy as hell.

I mean realistically, transporters open up a whole metaphysical can of worms

1) Are you effectively killed everytime you transport, then what comes out the other end is just a copy that thinks it is you?
2) The show has shown transporter clones to be a thing (William vs Thomas Riker), which means in theory you could make multiple copies of anyone
3) The show has constantly used them to do things like undo premature aging, age people up, cure diseases, or even put people into effective stasis

Cybsled said:

I mean realistically, transporters open up a whole metaphysical can of worms

1) Are you effectively killed everytime you transport, then what comes out the other end is just a copy that thinks it is you?
2) The show has shown transporter clones to be a thing (William vs Thomas Riker), which means in theory you could make multiple copies of anyone
3) The show has constantly used them to do things like undo premature aging, age people up, cure diseases, or even put people into effective stasis

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An excerpt from This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch it" by David Wong

I stared out the window and said, “Do you ever get scared, Dr. Tennet?”

“Of course, but you know these sessions aren’t about me—”

“And besides, in your world, everything has some harmless explanation, right? It’s always bees. Even this thing with Franky. Your job will be, what, to go up to a bank of microphones and assure everybody that it’s all bees?”

“You feel like I was being dismissive of your fears. I apologize if so.”

“So does anything scare you, doctor? Anything irrational?”

“Of course. Here, I’ll volunteer my most embarrassing example. I feel like I owe it to you, to make up for the bee story. Are you a fan of science fiction?”

“I don’t know. My girlfriend is.”

“All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?”

“Yeah. The transporters.”

“Do you know how they work?”

“Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.”

“No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.”

“Sure.”

“That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.”

“Sure."

“So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this.

“Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.”

I stared at him.

“Why did you tell me that?”

He shrugged. “You asked.”

His face showed nothing. I thought of the Asian guy, casually disappearing into the magic burrito door, walking out somewhere else. And in that moment I almost asked Tennet what he knew, and who he was.

I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything.

To be clear, Transporters as murder xeroxes goes back decades - the Hyperion sequels deal with very similar territory.

Man in the middle attacks during that process though are far more novel.

There was a good episode of The Outer Limits reboot from the 90s that dealt with this. Humans are on good relations with this alien race that look like dinosaurs. The dinosaurs have a transporter of sorts. The way it works is covers your body in some material, it makes a scan of your body, transmits the signal to the destination platform, then once it confirms the signal successfully was received and the target was recreated there, it vaporizes the body on the send side. The alien race has a pretty strict ethical code on this that they call The Balance (essentially, there can only be 1 of anything being teleported) and to ignore it is considered unthinkable to them because it would have grave consequences if not followed.

So the human tech is getting ready to use the machine on some woman anthropologist and something goes wrong and there is no confirmation signal from the other end, so the alien aborts the vaporization process. Eventually they do get a confirmation that the signal did get through and the anthropologist was recreated on the other side, so the alien is adamant that they "balance". But the human now has massive ethical concerns because the alien is essentially telling him to murder the woman, which becomes harder because he starts to get to know her. Eventually the alien impresses upon him that this is really serious shit and if he ignores the balance requirement, there will be grave consequences. So eventually the human tech reluctantly airlocks the woman and she dies. Later on, the anthropologist lady comes back (her copy from the alien planet returning) and she recalls the tech from when she left and the tech pretends he doesn't remember her, but you can clearly tell he is fucked up by the whole experience.

I was recently discussing another Outer Limits episode from that 90s reboot (specifically the Quality of Mercy and Light Brigade). Really wish one of the streaming services would resume that series.

That show really did have some quality episodes, although usually the endings fell into two categories: really dark ending or hopeful ending. The dark endings are the ones that stick with you. Like that one where the aliens are coming to Earth so the Earth governments put 7 people or whatever into these hidden bunkers to act as deadman switches on a doomsday weapon to discourage the aliens from taking over the planet. Eventually all the bunkers except 1 fall (either due to malfunctions or the aliens finding them). Last dude is delirious because he has no water or food and is on borrowed time. His commanding officer appears on the screen and tells him they beat the aliens and to keep pressing the deadman switch until they can find a way to deactivate the weapon. Then it cuts to the commanding officer and it turns out the aliens are basically using his body as a puppet and the aliens are implied to have destroyed humanity.

Transporters killing people IS brought up in canon, though. Scotty says this exact thing and ONLY uses them himself in EXTREMELY dire circumstances. The irony, is that he happily transports others but outright refuses to use them himself. The others just handwave him off and call him crazy, but HE'S the one who knows how it works.