O’Brien: Miracle Worker of DS9. The only thing he couldn’t fix was how the universe absolutely fucking hated him.
My favorite episodes of DS9 are definitely the ‘Watch the Irishman Suffer’ ones though.
“I don’t hate you, universe. I just hate what you made me do.”
“And hate the 84 ranks I cycled through over the course of 10 years.”
There is a subset of Chief Petty Officers and CPO adjacent people who are Trekkies, and for whom O’Brien’s rate and/or rank is… a fountain of disappointment.
Theres no money or pension involved in starfleet. The post scarcity space communism pretty much lets anyone do whatever they like.
Their rank/rate mainly have to do with authority, and it didn’t seem like the chief really cared about being in charge. He just cared about making things work.
He was a fine example of an engineers mindset, along with scotty/Geordi/etc. He was also a damn fine solider and tactician, but he didnt like it. He just wanted to keep things humming, and he did it well.
I was watching Rolling With Difficulty, and they had to pass through a portal that you can only enter if you’re genuinely despondent. So Dani, the ship’s engineer, imagines a world where everything is working and there’s nothing left to fix, and she immediately drops through the portal.
It’s hilarious because they were fighting a villain whose whole ideology is “entropy is inevitable, stop struggling to live”, and he keeps trying to tempt Dani to his side, and he just does not understand her as a person because every time he says “everything is going to rust and fall apart”, she says “great, then I’ll have more stuff to fix”.
Anyway Rolling With Difficulty is basically a Star Trek D&D campaign. They sail the astral sea between planes, seeking out strange new worlds.
That’s a pretty rad plot line. I’ll check the series out.
At least Lower Decks gave him the recognition he deserves by naming him “the most important man ever in Starfleet”.
I genuinely felt bad for him after all the bullshit the universe threw at him.
He wasn’t just a hero, he was a union man!
Ah, the transporter: the cause of, and solution to, many episodes’ problems.
People are justifiably creeped out by Barkley and his holodeck antics, but the transporter can sneaky clone people and nobody in that universe is suspicious about it.
Its not even a sneaky clone. They straight out copy, vaporize then buffer your ass in some computers chips. They then point your bits and bobs at an end point and slap the “CLONE THERE!” button.
They’re really casual with that word “buffer.” They admit that they always have a copy of you on file just in case. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but when the TNG crew were turned into kids, the transporter folks were like “hey, why don’t we just use the old bodies that we have saved in the buffer?”
Side note: if you can do that and retain your memories, by their rules haven’t they invented an immortality machine?
Side note: if you can do that and retain your memories, by their rules haven’t they invented an immortality machine?
Toss it on the pile with the Khan blood and the rest of the immortality methods we see once and then never hear of again.
Nah, it wouldn’t solve for cellular boredom
We’re sorry to bother you at a time like this, Dr. Crusher. We would have come earlier, but your husband wasn’t dead then.
Just for those who might not get the reference
Why was Leslie Nielsen never in any Trek? He and Scotty were friends and he would have been an amazing Q
Be honest, OP, did you come up with this independently, or is it based on my comment?
To be clear, that’s a genuine question. It’s not like borrowing a joke from Police Squad gives me any real claim to it.
I saved the meme ages ago, didn’t make it myself. Just saved the pic.
Is there a stated maximum range of the transporter anywhere in the lore?
Depends on the era but generally it’s about 30-40k kilometers
