#star trek dahj

[the-lavender-clown]

Random Star Trek thought that pops into my head every once in a while.

I have the biggest bone to pick with ST Picard! Now I did enjoy the show but I have a lot of critiques for it too. My biggest one by far is how they made it so that Deanna and therefore probably other Betazoids and telepathic/empathic species can’t sense android’s at all. Like the amount of episodes that recons is something else!!

Remember how Deanna wasn’t there for Datalore? Most likely because she would have been able to sense the difference between Data and Lore. But maybe there was a real life reason for that like scheduling or whatever. Ok fine, then what about the episode where Ira Graves possesses Data’s body? Deanna could feel his ego suppressing Data’s (confirming that to at least some extent she can sense Data as well even if his presence might be so weak sometimes she doesn’t pick it up due to his lack of humanoid emotions). Then the episode Offspring. When Lal went to Deanna to tell her what was happening and how scared she was Deanna didn’t even hesitate to believe her and although I can’t remember the exact words of the conversation I’m pretty sure she said something like “you are scared” and was deeply concerned for Lal.

In conclusion, Data totally has an ego no matter how weak/different it is and therefore so does every other android and Deanna should have been able to sense Soji.

[startrekwintergiftexchange]

The 2024 Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange is here!

Q: What is the Star Trek Winter Gift Exchange?

A: It’s a fanworks exchange for any fandom within the Star Trek universe, from The Original Series to Strange New Worlds!

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Q: How does it work?

A: When you sign up, you’ll provide three options of gift ideas you’d like to receive, as well as gifts you’re open to making. Once sign-ups close, the mod will send you the url of the person you’ll make a fanwork for and their requests. You’ll have the month of January to fulfill one of the requests. Make sure your ask box is open so the mod or your Secret Santa can contact you!

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Q: Do I have to make fanart/fanfic for the exchange?

A: Nope! All types of fanworks are welcome :) Fics, art, edits, fanvids, playlists, moodboards, podfics, among other things! As long as you’re creating it, it’s welcome.

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Q: What are the important dates I should know?

A: December 29, 11:59 pm CST: sign-ups close

January 1-3: You’ll be notified who your recipient is.

January 21-31: Post your gifts! Details here.

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Q: Sounds awesome! How do I sign up?

A: Fill out this form!

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Q: What if I only want to be a pinch hitter?

A: If you ONLY want to be a pinch hitter, fill out this form!

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If you have other questions, send an ask. And don’t forget to spread the word!

[startreklasirena]

S1E01: Remembrance

Four years ago today, I saw the first episode of this new tv show which would become my new obsession and utterly change my life.

To celebrate, I thought we could take some time this week to remember some of the things we enjoyed about this episode, or that stood out to us.

I'll get us started with one of the things I truly loved about Ep 1x01:

Dahj! Just... Dahj!

We only got her for one episode, and she was suffering for most of it, but I latched onto her character straight away and real hard.

I love that even with her very limited screen time, I still got the feeling she was a distinct character from Soji. Maybe a little looser, more flowing... (And yes, this perception is reinforced by the different hairstyles, which is another detail I adore!)

(Look at these two! You can tell who's who at a glance from the body language, even before you look at the hair!)

Her little student apartment in Boston with it's Tragic Abundance Of Vanilla deserves to have a whole bunch of fics set in it! And even though it's just a cover story, I love her excitement at getting into the Daystrom! Just imagine the thrill, angst, and chaos if she had gone there and ended up working with Agnes - and the two of them discovering the truth about her that way.

Also, I love that Dahj is immediately adopted by Picards entire household, from the Romulan housekeepers/bodyguards...

... to the Number One Goodest Boy.

(No wonder the mom AI told Soji that Dahj was thinking about getting a puppy. It may have been a lie in the moment but clearly fit Dahj's character well enough to be believable.)

And of course there's so, so much more to love about her. Dahj's journey of self-dscovery, however chaotic and short it ended up being, was a great jumping-off point for the series, and by the end of episode 1, I was hooked!

I still have so many fond feelings for Dahj and I really hope I'll find the time and brain space to write about her some time.

How about you? What are some things you remember fondly from this episode?

[pixiereblogs]

Pixie Recaps Picard | The Last Generation

[incorrectly-quoted-queers]

After Picard Season 3

Elnor: Welcome, brother

Jack Crusher: Where the fuck am I?

Wesley Crusher: The discarded-by-Picard-as-a-parental-figure club. We meet every Thursday

Jack Crusher: Discarded? But I'm not—

Data: Do not worry young Jack. It is the way of things. Like one might describe a life cycle

Meribor: We all keep each other company while he goes off on his next adventure

Elnor: You never know how long your journey with him will last, but it always ends

Wesley Crusher: Seems yours ended pretty quickly though

Dahj: Could've had worse. I got about a day

Jack Crusher: Just how many of you are there?!?

Soji: Oh buddy. You don't even know

[defconprime]

Isa Briones as Dahj and Soji.

[wingsofhcpe]

Thinking about Rios being Dad to Soji and Elnor, and possibly Dahj from that one au with @talvenhenki we bounced around the other day due to an edit post, and I want to cry because he'd be so hesitant at first but then he'd realise Soji and especially Elnor trust him without hesitation, and that would kinda drive him to try even harder to be good at it, such as:

Calling Elnor "hijo" and Soji "hija" (which is already canon!).

Teaching them to play football. Soji may or may not know some of the basics already, but Elnor definitely doesn't. It's all new for him and he's so excited, keeps kicking a ball around all the time and asking Rios if he's doing it right.

Bringing Soji her favourite snacks from the replicator, then hearing she developed a liking for real tomatoes while on Nepenthe and making sure La Sirena is always stocked with those.

Teaching them Spanish (especially swear words. Raffi and Picard are Not amused, but Seven totally approves).

Asking Elnor to teach him basic swordfighting skills as a bonding activity.

Play-wrestling with both of them. More often than not he ends up on the floor under them. (Raffi teases him about this, but honestly, what's a regular human guy to do against a Synth and a Qowat Milat? And Raffi can't prove that he'd let them win anyway!)

In the Dahj lives AU, he helps make a very traumatised and distrustful Dahj feel more at home onboard La Sirena. He's one of the first, if not the first, crewmembers that Dahj starts to trust.

He's also the only one (bar Elnor) who can easily tell the twins apart!

[biblioflyer]

Five Episodes Later: Reevaluating Picard

I started this rewatch to refresh my memory so that I could tackle the question of whether the fandom had judged Picard too harshly and if it was as dark and dystopian as was commonly accused.

Through that process I have discovered much that is praiseworthy, some implications that bother me, and more than a few questions that pivot on one’s own subjective response to particular cues about whether and when the protagonists are objectively correct or if there is far more room for them to be messy.

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

The Dystopia Question

Ultimately what I’ve found is that Season One is less of a deconstruction of core ideas about Star Trek, than a richer exploration of the premises of Voyager and Enterprise: what happens when decent people are caught in ambiguous situations and without the resources of an entire Federation behind them? 

The backdrop of the failure of the Romulan resettlement effort after the destruction of Utopia Planitia also has resulted in a schism of sorts in the fandom wherein most people are horrified and immediately saw fit to draw analogies to Brexit or the Trump administration, while a disturbing minority shrugged off the catastrophe as the Romulans getting what they had coming to them and have argued the Federation had no moral obligation to help the Romulans.

My own examination of the evidence has led me to feel that there is a strong case for a murky middleground. We could presume for instance that Admiral Clancy is a reactionary who is overstating the case for Starfleet minding its knitting and having too many domestic obligations.

On the other hand we could steelman her case with a very large body of evidence consisting of a vast number of instances where it falls to Starfleet to provide timely disaster relief and protection to the Federation’s vast and underserved frontiers. We need look no further than perhaps dozens of TNG plots to support the idea that an overextended Starfleet would come with a bodycount.

This certainly pushes back on the metanarrative of the Federation and the implication of limitless resources. Although that has always been exaggerated. There’s material abundance enough to provide everyone who doesn’t intentionally seek to rough it on a colony with a comfortable life, even if you’re a disgraced former attache to an embittered former hero turned recluse. What there isn’t enough of is whatever handwavium and skilled personnel are needed to snap one’s fingers and produce a new rescue fleet without depriving others of humanitarian relief and protection.

Again, that assumes we steelman Clancy. There is a lot of narrative weight pushing us to trust Picard’s assessment of the situation post-Mars: he is the hero after all. The hostile interview of the first episode was loaded with a lot of not so subtle triggers for humanitarian minded viewers that seem very intentionally designed to place them in the emotional space of that creeping dread that empathy is dead, having been replaced by an unapologetically narrower conception of who is deserving of respect, comfort, and even life.

However, I think that given Picard the character will spend the first five episodes questioning his own place in the narrative of his life and the lives of others, I think the Federation as a character is owed a serious examination of whether we should simply throw out everything else we have ever known about the society the first time someone is rude to a father figure to many of us. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Federation was actually in the right to leave the Romulans twisting in the wind. It wouldn’t be the first time a judgment on which many, which few, and what needs results in painful and potentially unvirtuous choices: just ask the Maquis. 

Radical Kindness in a Dark World

If I could sum up the theme of Picard the series, this would be it. In the very first episode Picard the character is moved from despair to man of action by the opportunity to help a troubled soul. 

This message is something I think that really got lost. The part of the audience that was offended by the callousness of the Interviewer and Clancy and the implication that to be risk averse and reluctant to risk being the frog in the story of the scorpion and the frog was already primed to be irked by this theme. 

I suspect that the element of the audience that felt itself keenly under threat by forces outside the Star Trek setting that the series was gesturing at may also have missed this theme in their annoyance at sci fi Paladin, Jean luc Picard, being portrayed as defeated, depressed, and content to marinade in luxurious misery.

Quite a few people seem to react poorly to being told that a minimum level of mercy extended to a known villain might be virtuous and a long term investment that might create conditions of real peace.

Nor does anyone like being accused of sequestering themselves in comfort and nursing their grief when direct and easy solutions to vast and pernicious problems don’t miraculously appear.

So in this way, Picard called out a lot of its potential audience practically in the first episode.

These are hard questions to grapple with and I don’t want to trivialize them. When do we risk our safety to take advantage of an opportunity to end a conflict, make an ally, or even to simply show mercy with no expectation of benefit? 

We can't know with certainty when we're playing the part of the frog in the parable of the scorpion and the frog after all. Read that again with different emphasis.

How harshly should we judge others or ourselves for not being able to imagine a better world or being unable to find the steps we could take to make it happen when the easy steps like voting, protesting, signing a petition, or threatening to resign fail?

If TNG primed us to expect simple answers, those aren’t found in Season One. There is a mostly self consistent moral clarity that mercy and kindness are praiseworthy but the show’s world building doesn’t support the idea that these are always going to lead to just outcomes. 

The people who adhere to these ideals are generally, in my opinion, the more fun hang but whether they’re always right or not according to the narrative is troublingly ambiguous at times.

I have a suspicion that part of what appeals to people about Season Three, aside from the fact it brought back beloved and relatively uncomplicated legacy characters and largely benched the characters invented for the show, is that the morality of the show is just generally way less ambiguous. Unless you’re taking Shaw seriously that is.

Notably, the show by the end of episode five does step on this message just a bit. The midpoint of the season leaves us weighing whether or not Seven executing a gangster notorious for chopping up liberated Borg is harm reduction or a reduction of her humanity. The implications of this I found rather uncomfortable for the way the bleaker side of the scale seemed to have a lot more narrative weight.

Character Housekeeping

I have largely not really discussed Jurati, Rios, Elnor, Soji, and Narek up to this point. The reasons for this are relatively straightforward. None of them have really done anything that I feel the need to explore more deeply. This is not necessarily a dismissal of the characters, if you adore them we are not enemies, I’m simply just less interested in them than other topics at this point in the season.

Rios is a fun character and I love his holograms….and that’s about it. Up to this point he is interesting in terms of his relationship to Picard and what it says about Picard that he can clock a troubled ex-Starfleet officer within a minute of meeting them and, like Raffi, Picard seems to be inexorably drawn to people he can try to remold in his image.

Elnor is himself not very interesting to me, I don’t dislike the character, but he seems to function mostly as a narrative device to illustrate Picard’s failings after Mars and his tendency to struggle with expressing authentic emotions rather than praising people in the modality of a performance evaluation. He is also, if I recall, rather underutilized and developed as his own person going forward. He is almost entirely muscle and comic relief in episode five instead of making any meaningful connections to any other characters.

Soji was originally interesting the first time I watched the series largely because of the mystery she represented but I know the ending already. The character herself doesn’t provoke any response from me. That doesn’t invalidate someone else’s experience and if someone wants to write up a comprehensive analysis of Soji’s identity crisis as a metaphor for dysphoria or whatever, have at it. That’s not really my wheelhouse though and I’m content to let the people for whom that is a passion project do it infinitely better than I ever could. 

I may revisit Soji later because I am still troubled by her and Dahj’s story due to being somewhat unconvinced that it was necessary to conceal their memories and identities from themselves. It's unclear to me if there was a plan in place to recover them and then permit their true selves to reemerge in a gentler, more compassionate way after their mission was complete.

I’m far more sympathetic to Jurati this time around because I think her performance of being deeply disturbed by the Admonition is well done, but like Soji, at this point in the narrative I just don’t see anything I really care to talk about in any greater depth aside from observing that Jurati is a good surrogate for a particular kind of fan. Her performance of being unmoored by Oh’s psychic shenanigans was strong, but on a meta level if you feel like Maddox’s death was largely for shock value and unnecessary “edge” then I’m moderately sympathetic to you.

Screw Narek and his affected mental distress and gaslighting and double dumbass on his weird sister. I still don’t know who thought the implied incest stuff was a good idea or if there’s just something I’m missing, but its incredibly distracting.

Unanswered Questions

What is Seven’s arc like for the rest of the season? I don’t actually remember. Oh I remember what she does, I just don’t remember how it feels and to what degree it moves her closer to the less rampagey version who seems to be clinging harder to her humanity in Season Three.

What was the Synth plan? As Agnes notes, Maddox got a little “secret planny” so does this mean that no one else was in the loop for the plan to send Soji and Dahj out to uncover the truth behind the attack on Mars and the subsequent Synth ban and thus Maddox’s death screwed everything up? Was there a plan to recover them and restore their identities without the need for the traumatic rediscovery of their true selves through crisis and stress?

After Seven decided to solve her own personal trolley problem through summary vaporization, where does that leave the default moral assumptions for Star Trek Picard? Is this still a show where what is good is what is just or is virtue a luxury and justice is liquidating a mass murderer who can’t be practically brought to justice?

Is everyone, both the characters and the fandom, right about the Federation? Has it been irredeemably debased? Or is Picard, the character right, and what’s needed is to find the right sort of appeal to conscience?

For more like this check out my other essays reevaluating Star Trek Picard and interrogating the widely held fandom criticism that Picard made the Federation into a Dystopia.

[curator-on-ao3]

Soji and Dahj and Laris and Tallinn all meet up for tea and it’s lovely.

[lurkiestvoid]

the biggest problem with waiting to get into stuff until loooong after it's peaked is that I have FEELINGS about a thing but NO ONE to throw them at

anyways I just finished Star Trek: Picard and I am simultaneously over- and underwhelmed. I loved seasons 1 and 2, I LOVED RaffixSeven, I LOVED Elnor and Agnes and Rios!! S3 was a good fan-service standalone show, as in it was nice seeing the original TNG cast back together and on their Enterprise, and if it had been a separate bit it would have been delicious, BUT it had NOTHING to do with the previous two seasons!! WHAT DID THEY DO TO QUEEN BORGATI, WHERE DID SHE GO, WHAT TF HAPPENED TO THAT ENTIRE PLOTLINE

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday @TheIsaBriones #isabriones #actress #singer #Soji #Sutra #Dahj #jana #kore #startrekpicard #takers #BrownSoupThing #lonelyboy #americancrimestory #hamilton #goosebumps #startrek57 @TrekMovie @TrekCore @StarTrek @StarTrekOnPPlus

[mylittleredgirl]

this is what the people want

nutrek writers b like 'if we dont find someone to oppress RIGHT NOW nobody is gonna watch star trek' which fr isnt the case bc if star trek: picard had been about picards life on the vineyard and literally did nothing but be a story about him making the most delicious wines and characters from other treks occasionally visiting him i would have watched the whole damn thing multiple times over

[defconprime]

Dahj

[star-trek-pop-quiz]

Star Trek POP-QUIZ #40

( 23 / 07 / 2024 )

Question 1. What kind of lab did Dr Leonard Mccoy find officers murdered by Khan? a. Agriculture b. Thermonics c. Meteorology d. None of the above, it was a surgical suite.

Question 2. TRUE OR FALSE Simon Pegg has played the role of Montgomery ''Scotty'' Scott for longer than James Doohan.

Question 3. Which of these two characters have not been seen as a holographic duplicate? a. Jake Sisko b. Hoshi Sato c. Ezri Dax d. Charles Tucker III

Bonus Question: What series are they from?

Question 4. What is the name of Soji Asha's ( fictional ) childhood doll? a. Dahj b. Kore c. Squoodgy d. Nepenthe

Bonus Question: How old is the doll?

Question 5. Fill-in Question! How many episodes were the Dominion mentioned in before their first appearance?

Bonus Question: Name the 3 main species of the Dominion?

Score: __/ 5 + 3 bonus ( Answers under cut )

Question 1. b. Thermonics

Question 2. FALSE. This is only true if you are only counting James Doohan playing Scotty in TOS and Simon Pegg in the Alternate Timeline Movies, counting all appearances, James Doohan has been playing him for much longer.

Question 3. a. Jake Sisko AND c. Ezri Dax

+ Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Question 4. c. Squoodgy

+ 37 months old.

Question 5. 3: "Rules of Acquisition", "Sanctuary", "Shadowplay"

+ The Founders, Vorta, and Jem'Hadar

[sophiaforevs]

All of this is good and true but also remember Dahj? The twin they killed off for no reason other than shock value to give us the "oh luckily this character had a heretofore unmentioned identical twin that is exactly the same in every way and we even get to use the same actress?" It really should have been a foreshadow of how awful the rest of the show would be handled.

I love Soji. We were ROBBED of her. She should've been in all 3 seasons.

LITERALLY she was the protagonist of season 1 and for good reason. I thought her narrative was really impactful and a fresh take on the 'android' concept... S1 of Star Trek: Picard repeatedly asks the audience “what happens when people are treated as things? As instruments? As vanity projects? ” and, for better or worse, it's a theme that is recurring in every storyline, from the Romulan refugees to the xBs to Raffi and Rios' backstories. Soji is the fulcrum of all this, the character that it is literally at center of the story because she embodies so many of those questions. I'll never forget the dialogue in “Broken Pieces” where Soji asks Dr Jurati if she can really see her as a person; I honestly think it's one of the best scenes in all of the more recent shows. Plus, she was such a cool character and Isa Briones really brought her to life in all her complex mixture of naivety and steely determination.

Unfortunately even s1 didn't exactly know what to do with her during the finale and the rest of the show was SO eager to get rid of her that I don't even know what to say about it beyond “it sucks so bad and it's a huge waste”. More than that, I can't believe we got even more anodyne Data content (after they put him to rest in s1!) instead of anything about Soji. I don't hate Data but can you say anything about him that hasn't already been said? Couldn't have we moved on like we were all too briefly promised? Soji brought such a cool perspective on the Trek androids, one that I personally found way more interesting than the old one, and we ended up seeing nothing of it.