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Supplemental
031
John & Ken’s Rocking New Year Q&A
This week, John and Ken field many questions from @ScottyBonner and a few other people.
– Why is the computer not listed as a co-host?
– When will we go back to the movies?
– What other podcasts should you listen to?
These questions and several others WILL BE ANSWERED!
Funny story about first exposure to Star Trek: as with John and Ken, Star Trek was something that was already there, and always on TV somewhere, when I was a wee lad. I watched reruns of it occasionally, but then I also watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Then 1979 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit, and, completely unaware of the show’s history or chronology…I thought TMP was meant to be the first adventure of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and company…as in…their origin story. (I was seven, I didn’t know any better.) I sort of shrugged off all the talk of Kirk having commanded the ship before, and the ship looking different, etc., and just enjoyed the movie. Of course, I also really, really dug The Black Hole, which came out at the same time. (I still do, actually.) No accounting for taste, right?
Good news is, the local station showing TOS put it on in the afternoons to cash in on the Trek buzz at the time, and somewhere between TMP and Wrath of Khan, it finally clicked: the movies are afterward. Years afterward. Heh. Oops. (Although you do have to admit that the color palette of the TMP uniforms resembles the Cage/Where No Man uniforms more than they resemble the rest of the series…)
Thanks for another great year of the show, John, Ken (and Rod). Also, a shout-out to my fellow denizens of one of the internet’s most thoughtful and polite comment sections, either here or on Facebook. That’s a huge part of the Mission Log experience for me – you’re almost missing the point if you don’t wade in and see the spread of opinions among the fans and how well they put their points across (and often how funny it is too).
Set course for 2017 and engage!
That was my question! My earliest memory of Trek was a McDonald’s Happy Meal w Trek “toy”. Plastic comicstrip viewer. Would watch on Sundays 430pm after MASH, which I hated because my Dad hated. Lol. CBS KFMB 8 in San Diego. I had some 45 records too. Just 1 or 2 I think. Thx for reading my question!!!
What is the thing on Scotty’s wall? Looks like a ménage a trios with a sword, a sextant, and the accelerator from a ’57 Skylark.
PS- Good podcast & HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
Picard wouldn’t have let a bunch of humans or humanoids be enslaved to parasites or a computer any more than Kirk would have.
I agree that TNG came into it’s own and became a better show in the third season. But going back recently and watching the early first season episodes I reallize how much I actually like a lot of those episodes as almost a different show. I would say that those early shows had an almost cinematic Star Trek feel and the design aspect- set- ligthing- etc of those early shows is something I sometimes miss now.
There is a specialness to the early episodes of both TOS and TNG because of Gene’s more direct involvement.
Ken, I have a question for you, and I hope it doesn’t come across as rude:
Why is it that you pronounce your name with a soft ‘e’ or ‘a’ sound, as in ‘can’?
I have lived in Nashville my entire life (29 years if that means anything) and never heard anyone pronounce the name that way.
I thought maybe you had kin (*rimshot*) from further up north.
I found the revelation that many listeners disagreed with Picard’s decision in “I Borg” kind of disturbing. Makes me wonder how many of them support Donald Trump.
– Loved the discussion around “I, Borg”. Killing them all is a horrible solution. That would be like killing everyone who has typhoid or something just because they may infect others.
Fairly certain those in favor of Borg Genocide would not have chosen that path while Locutus was around.
– I DO think that even Judie (who I love reading in the Facebook comments) would not seriously argue with “Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” as a *general truism*. However, due to some people’s backgrounds, they can sometimes be sensitive to certain things.
Masses of hungry people needing the food that Americans throw away on a daily basis is not “tyranny” of any kind. But big groups of ignorant nationalists who “need” ethnic cleansing in their country (for example) aren’t actually expressing a need. They just want a scapegoat for their unhappiness. But what they actually NEED in order to be happy and satisfied is compassion and love and generosity and tolerance. Those things will always be “the needs of the many” and will always outweigh anything else.
I don’t see how anyone could argue against that.
It’s why going back and saving Spock, in a way, wasn’t necessarily “the needs of the one outweighing the needs of the many”. Because everyone needed Spock. And everyone needed Kirk to have Spock.
Hi Guys – So here I am listening to and really enjoying this podcast while I’m laid up recovering in the hospital ( on a tablet that my kind brother bought for me as a Birthday gift ) and I find it “fascinatng” that after you guys discuss what would Gene think about Trump and then the needs of the many and then your support group the next subject you guys discueded was the Feeder’s of Val . For some reason – Ken’s comments / description of this group of people (& I mean no disrespect or offensive here ) brought to mind this question: Were the Feeders of Val Democrats?
I don’t think the parallel is quite that acute. The feeders of Vaal have no say in their situation or their destiny. Vaal isn’t part of a representative government: it’s simply the machine that exists in symbiosis with their needs. No one knows where Vaal came from or if there is a goal in mind other than protecting the feeders. All we really know for sure is that KIrk upset that balance.
The idea of the Borg is troublesome to me. We know they are unstoppable because the writers wanted to have the option of using them again in some future episode or film.
The Federation’s philosophy of non-interference, and the offer of mutually beneficial contact with potential new members seems to be unique in Star Trek’s Milky Way. Every other similarly sized political subdivision of the galaxy has achieved its territory by unashamed conquest. Same as the Borg. In “Mirror, Mirror,” we get a glimpse of how the Federation would work if it ran no differently from the Klingon Empire. Kirk and Mirror Spock agree that the mirror universe’s empire cannot endure and will inevitably be overthrown. Yet in “our” universe, the Klingon Empire endures to Picard’s time, far outlasting the dire prediction of its fate when Praxis exploded.(It begs the question, what is eluding the rulers of the Terran Empire that is NOT eluding the empires of “our” universe?)
The Borg, in particular, have assimilated countless civilizations throughout the galaxy, with only two known species successfully resisting them, one of them being the bipedal humanoids of the Alpha Quadrant. In First Contact, we learn that they do have time travel technology, and given their persistence, will use it again and again until they have assimilated all life for all time.
In Doctor Who, the fourth Doctor faced the same moral question with the Daleks, as Picard did with the Borg. Namely, I can wipe them all out, but that would make me as bad as they are. The Doctor spares them, which leads to the Time War, which ruined civilizations across the galaxy, including his own homeworld.
The real moral question is not “Do I want genocide of one species on my conscience?” but “Through my inaction, do I allow a genocidal species to destroy countless others?” And the real moral answer SEEMS to be “Of course not!”
The reason why I say SEEMS is because the monstrous crimes of the Daleks and the Borg erasing the natural progression of intelligent life all over the galaxy means an incalculable loss to everyone, for sure. But how can we be certain that in so doing they have not also prevented the rise of something much, much worse?
Hence, why the idea of the Borg is troublesome to me. WE see them as obliterators of freedom and individuality and other things we hold dear. But life often gives us bitter pills to swallow. What if all life MUST unite as one in order to survive an even greater threat in the deep future? The Borg are the only ones who have proven that they have the strength and the stubbornness to actually accomplish this.
That’s the trouble with evolution. You may not like the direction it is headed in. But consider the possibility that your dislike can be wrong.