#Starfleet intelligence

[ussjoshuanorton]

[wordweava]

Well gosh, another chapter at last…

Finally posted chapter 20 of Living Arrows (my Trip/Malcom fic). Our pair get grilled by Starfleet Intelligence. Inexcusably long delay since last chapter, due my life having been a hellacious crap fest of late. Getting better now. Thanks aplenty to readers, as always. 💚

[roguetelepaths]

...so guess who's rewatching star trek discovery

[synelven]

why would someone make a star trek au of their own ocs lol that's so silly.

so agent west is now lieutenant commander west, starfleet intelligence, and dr vasilevsky is now dr vaskil, biotech researcher for the obsidian order (explanation below cut)

starfleet catches wind of suspicious activity around a remote moon that just so happens to be where dr vaskil is conducting her research. west is sent in undercover as a cardassian lab technician to gather information about what they are doing. however, dr vaskil is good at what she does and recognises that west has been surgically altered, so she kidnaps her and nonconsensually reverses the surgery. vaskil inevitably plants some sort of nefarious tech inside her during the surgery that west is unaware of, and does a villain monologue while she's strapped to the table. west manages to escape, but is stranded on the moon for the time being. a game of cat and mouse ensues where the roles are constantly switching. and of course so begins the fucked up psychosexual lesbian happenings

[djevildave]

The 1st episode of Shield Podulation is up on Spotify. We talk S3E9 of #StarTrek #Picard, Vox

[owedfavors]

things I think I deserve: tos-era threads in my au where starfleet never learns una's illyrian.

[joshuaalbert]

the shot with the titan breaking the tractor beam was fun I liked that

[writteninscarlet]

i'm just here following all the star trek blogs because... love. and then i'm like, oh i'll make wanda a verse and i'm like... she would just be a traveller. like join up? starfleet? if she didn't get her powers, she'd be a traveller, baby. explore the universe.

but yeah if she did join she'd be amongst the intelligence officers. she's not going out there and doing stupid shit, but if you need help gathering information she has contacts from many travels. good with a strategy. cool under pressure. is good.

[pitch-and-moan]

Kobayashi Maru

An AI-penned Star Trek prequel that's supposed to be focused on Kirk at the Starfleet Academy (sort of expanding on the time between Kirk meeting Pike and being accused of cheating by Spock.) Unfortunately without actors, the artificial intelligence scrambles for associated references to "Kobayashi" and "Maru" so the film ends up being six hours of a Japanese Scottish Fold cat jumping in and out of boxes in a simulation of a starship bridge.

[ussjoshuanorton]

We're always looking for new crew. Come check us out on discord and consider joining our game! We're a Starfleet Intelligence ship in 2416, set in a Prime AU (splitting from the Prime universe around the time of the Romulan Nova).

Join us on Discord, follow us on Mastodon, and check out our game site.

[vintagegeekculture]

Because she was an intentionally mysterious woman initially only seen in a single episode, and before she got an on-air backstory in the recent streaming series, Star Trek supplementary material developed contradictory information on who - or what - Number One, the female first executive officer of the Enterprise, was. To my count, she has four different, completely incompatible backstories in the comics and novels, and this is absolutely unique in Star Trek, which usually keeps it consistent.

Peter David, in his New Frontier novels, identified Number One as a long lived immortal human mutant (like Flint from the original series) named “Morgan Primus” who was an early genius in cybernetics and artificial intelligence, which is why the Enterprise computer has her voice. One of the names Morgan Primus assumed to hide her immortality was Morgan Lefler, and one of her daughters was Robin Lefler, Wesley Crusher’s love interest from the Next Generation Series played by Ashley Judd. Robin Lefler did not inherit her mutant ability to heal all injuries.

Alternatively, the DC Star Trek Comics of the early 1980s said that Number One was from an obscure planet of peaceful, open, friendly telepaths who resemble humans exactly, and that she was present at first contact with Starfleet. They explained that her blunt, direct, undiplomatic manner is due to her being from a telepathic culture that values total honesty. This would make her the first telepath on the Enterprise, with Spock and Arex coming later. Her planet was created before the Next Generation, but her species being a peaceful, open, telepathic race resembling Mediterranean humans who are not well known or commonly encountered in the original series era….well, that certainly sounds an awful lot like Betazoids to me. If this backstory is true, she may have been the first Betazoid seen on screen, in much the same way fans generally believe Trelane was either Q or a member of the Q Continuum.

D.C. Fontana’s only Star Trek novel, “Vulcan’s Glory,” was one of the earliest attempts to give the character a backstory, and was the most consequential long term. The first novel set in the era of the first Star Trek pilot with Captain Pike and a young Spock, "Vulcan's Glory" identified Number One as being an Illyrian, a race of human-like beings who specialize in species wide breeding programs and genetic improvement. This genetic superiority is why she was cool, intellectual, aloof, and a bit arrogant. Her nickname “Number One” came from the fact she was the supreme product of the hyper-competitive Illyrian system, and won at everything from academics to athletics. According to DC Fontana, her actual Illyrian name is impossible to pronounce, so when dealing with humans, she assumed the human name “Una Chin-Riley.” Una of course, being “Number One” in Greek.

As DC Fontana is such an important figure in Star Trek history and only actually wrote one Star Trek novel in her life, many future materials used the backstory established in “Vulcan’s Glory,” like the David Stern Pike-era novels of the 2010s....but more importantly, the Discovery and Strange New Worlds series, which canonized the “Una Chin-Reilly” name by using it on screen (I remember gasping when Pike called her Una in a Discovery episode, meaning they were going with the Fontana backstory, a detail that may not have been significant to the casual viewer). Since DC Fontana wrote “Vulcan’s Glory” in the 80s, a lot more information was learned about the role of genetic engineering in the Federation, however, and interesting things were done in that series to bring her in line with everything we’ve learned since in Deep Space 9 and Enterprise about augmentation and the society wide prejudice against it. For example, they established that the fact Number One was Illyrian was not public knowledge, but that she pretended to be human her entire life.

The one person who didn’t see fit to give her a backstory or even a real name was John "Johnny Redbeard" Byrne in his comic series about the Cage era Enterprise, who thought the mystery of the character was the most interesting thing about her, and he was deliberately cagey about any details. To Johnny Redbeard, she was just “Number One.” There was a running joke that every time someone says her actual name, or when we see her personnel file, it was blurred out, or somebody’s thumb was over it, and so on. It was rather like the running joke where Mr. Burns never remembers Homer Simpson's name. Johnny Redbeard loves mystery men and women who don't talk about their past, since that was the characterization he famously gave to Wolverine in his X-Men comics.

The one detail of Number One's past that is clear is that Number One in Byrne's comics is competent, mysterious, and has mystique, certainly, but she is completely human, without any powers. Byrne always got exasperated that his X-Men co-creator Chris Claremont added fantastical and far out details to the background of X-Men characters (like how Nightcrawler's girlfriend Amanda turned out to be a sorceress) because he felt "some people should just be allowed to be normal." Byrne always said his original idea for Wolverine's "true" backstory was that he was a Vietnam veteran in intelligence who volunteered for bionic experiments that wiped his memory, and disliked the idea he was immortal, and vetoed the very, very early Dave Cockrum idea Wolverine was an actual mutated wolverine who achieved sentience and a human shape (which early X-Men comics hint at). Byrne was reportedly enraged that they gave Moira MacTaggart a mutant power, as he saw her as just being a scrappy Scottish housekeeper.

Johnny Redbeard didn’t give Number One a past (other than to show she was on the Enterprise's shakedown cruise with Robert April as a rookie officer), but he did give her a future, as he showed an older Number One as a starship commander in the Kirk era (aging gracefully with a white tuft like Tongolele), and later, a flag officer in the Motion Picture era.

To what extent are these backstories compatible? Well, with what we currently know about Number One, that she hid her true species and status to avoid prejudice, it could be that some of the other versions were tall tales she spread to obscure her true origins. The John Byrne idea she served as an Ensign with Robert April in the Enterprise's very first mission hasn't been confirmed, but hasn't been denied, either. The Peter David "Morgan Primus" backstory is completely incompatible, but perhaps there are some elements to it that are true, like the idea that the early part of her career involved working as a computer engineer in artificial intelligence, which is why the computer has her voice.

[fictionadventurer]

Starfleet historian who has to run cultural sensitivity seminars for personnel who may one day encounter a time travel situation.

"People in the past are just as intelligent as you are. Brains didn't just come into existence when we invented the warp engine."

"No, we don't call pre-Federation humans 'primitive savages who haven't overcome their love of violence.' You've got no leg to stand on here. I saw how many Romulan ships you blew up on your last mission."

"Could we cut the condescension by about 50%? They don't understand quantum mechanics, but you don't know how to shoe a horse, so let's not get cocky."

"Please stop making sly hints about the future. It might be funny to you, but it's obnoxious, and if you say too much, you might not have a future to come back to."

[roguetelepaths]

The Federation didn't do that, Odo did that. The crew of DS9 had to steal the cure because the Federation wouldn't give it up.

I've seen several cases where people are like "what happens if we meet aliens, and then they see Independence Day or War of the Worlds?"

But nobody seems to think about what happens when the aliens see Star Trek.

The aliens are gonna see these shows made by a bunch of humans but they put putty on some of the humans to make them look like what we think aliens might look like, and we told stories about how those aliens would be our friends and we'd explore the universe with them and find more aliens and try to be friends with them too!

Yeah sometimes they'd be mean and we'd fight but we'd always try to avoid it and even if we fought we'd try to be friends later.

We basically created 900 episodes of a child's drawing of a stick figure of a human and a stick figure of a grey alien holding hands and "best friends" written in crayon.

[writergeekrhw]

When they were introduced in DS9, it was sort of ambiguous as to whether Section 31 was bigger than Sloan, or if he was just a single (potentially rogue) agent of Starfleet Intelligence. Later series' have taken the idea of Section 31 and run with it, but I personally always liked the idea that Sloan was largely working alone and outside of standard Starfleet Intelligence practices.

When coming up with the idea for the character/concept and the arc, was the intent for Section 31 to be more of a rogue faction, or were they always meant to be a real part of Starfleet Intelligence?

I always thought S31 was bigger than Sloan, but smaller than how it's appeared in later episodes. Not one guy, but not thousands of people. Maybe... dozens? A couple hundred tops. In my mind they're definitely a rogue faction and not an official part of Starfleet Intelligence.

[tossawary]

Watching a lot of "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" lately has me trying to articulate a personal rule of thumb for depicting competence. Very basically, if you want to convince me that characters and organizations are not incompetent, then they need backups.

So many of the episodes that we've been watching recently hinge too strongly on single points of failure. If this one element of a plan goes down, then everything collapses. Which is fine occasionally? Cascading failures from small mistakes happen. Shit gets weird sometimes. But the repeated absence of, like, more basic operating procedures like double-checks starts to get annoying fast if we the audience are meant to believe these people are very intelligent and good at their jobs.

After the first few times, Starfleet has got to stop beaming down away teams without a couple plans for what to do if the transporters and communications go down again. "But the chances of that happening on this routine mission are so low!" Don't care. Pick a nearby cave to hide from the ion storm in BEFORE you go. Beam down a little shelter pod with emergency supplies. Arrange a rendezvous with a shuttle. Check in every five minutes so that you know the instant you lose contact. Wear safety gear. Something! Anything!

Admittedly, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" do this sometimes, which is nice to see when it happens, but not consistently enough. These characters should regularly be considering the worst case scenarios! They should be estimating their margins of error! And sure, unavoidable accidents happen sometimes, human error is definitely a thing, and maybe the backup plans will ALSO fall through for drama's sake, but I would be reassured by the indication that these people at least tried to prepare for things going to shit while exploring the mysterious pit.

"The Clone Wars" show has so far (first half-dozen episodes) been a nightmare of logistics and protocol. Okay, so you let Anakin make a flight plan / attack plan and then... no one checked it over first? Who signed off on this? Anakin: "We're taking X shortcut!" Supposedly more senior character who is on the same mission: "What? Anakin, X shortcut is dangerous because of Y!" And it's just like, "So, you guys just didn't do an actual mission briefing first, huh? Even if it was agreed upon that X shortcut was still the best way, it sure would have been nice to warn the poor background characters about the danger of Y before flying out..."

Yes, characters and organizations making plans at all is the first step of depicting any degree of competence. But the NEXT step as a basic rule of thumb should be them anticipating what can and will go wrong, and what to do about it. After the second time something goes wrong in a very predictable, easily avoidable way and the characters act all shocked about it, it's like, "Yeah, no, this is on you now. Please start making some backup plans in advance."

[theabstruseone]

With the announcement of the new movie starring Michelle Yeoh, it seems I have to go on my Section 31 rant again.

Section 31 was only done well in Deep Space Nine because the writers of Deep Space Nine understood that SECTION 31 ARE THE BAD GUYS.

They were used as a foil for the grey morality of the show as a warning of "This is where you will go if you continue on this path". Section 31 was the logical endpoint of the show's themes of sacrificing your ethics, morality, and principles in a pragmatic "the ends justify the means" mentality in order to defend those ethics, morals, and principles.

Because you CAN'T.

If you compromise your ethics, morals, and principles in an attempt to defend those very same things, what exactly are you defending? Things you yourself tossed aside when they became inconvenient.

All three (yes, there were only three) episodes of DS9 centering on Section 31 featured Bashir resolving the conflict of that episode WITHOUT compromising his integrity as a citizen of the Federation and a Starfleet officer.

Up to and including preventing Section 31 from committing genocide. Yeah, remember that? When Section 31 infected Odo with a degenerative virus so that he would spread it to the Great Link and kill all of the Changelings? Then specifically stonewalled Bashir when he attempted to find a cure?

Section 31 is not just a tool for telling happy funtime spy stories in Star Trek. That organization is called Starfleet Intelligence and was already around long before DS9. Section 31 is an unauthorized unelected black ops group that functions outside any chain of command or authority that can place any checks on their use and abuse of power. You know, just like EVERY OTHER evil Starfleet officer in every other episode where some Admiral goes off the deep end and starts doing shady shit the Enterprise then has to stop.

Section 31 are the bad guys. They are not antiheroes. They are not just the darker side of Starfleet. They are not the people who must do the evil things that have to be done. They are just evil. Period.