Well whatever it is, Pike and the radioactive accident had something specifically to do with M’Benga stepping down. I wouldn’t call it demotion necessarily as there are reasons that someone could willingly step away from the position of Chief and still hold their rank. Either way, during the Quality of Mercy episode M’Benga was still CMO under Captain Pike.
With how M’Benga holds himself and takes the quality of his patients personally, and becomes heavily emotionally involved in his work, I think he stepped down willingly because he no longer believed himself to be capable of providing the support necessary to a Captain. I think maybe he worked on Pike and tried to save him but when Pike was too far gone that M’Benga became a bit despondent. We know the two are friendly and decently close so maybe between being unable to save his daughter and being unable to save his Captain he just felt he wasn’t capable of doing his best anymore. Still wanted to help and assist and thought of the Enterprise as home, and wanting to stay near his family in the crew, but didn’t want to carry the weight of that responsibility anymore.
It certainly could have been a voluntary “demotion” and there is a reason to believe he hasn’t changed a huge amount. There is an issue that needs to be resolved though:
On the one hand, he still seems to have a streak of violence in him the way he slapped Spock (at Spock’s request) in A Private Little War, which would track. On the other, you would think he would have worked with Spock in the plan to get Pike to Talos IV.
If we are to believe the two M’Bengas are the same person, which we have no reason to disbelieve (we can excuse the TOS M’Benga’s lack of an accent), an explanation for why he wasn’t part of Spock’s plan would be an interesting thing to ponder.
This seems likely given that in the timeline where Pike was still in command in 2266 having avoided good accident M’Benga was still CMO. I would imagine that having give through all that shit he wanted to step back a bit and let someone else run the department.
Why was the man keeping his daughter in a pattern buffer demoted? The man who slaps around klingon dignitaries? The same guy who keeps illicit wartime drugs for, i don’t know, kicks I guess?
Sure, but you could make such points about half the Enterprise crew. They all do a lot of at least questionably legal things.
Think about how many times Kirk violated the Prime Directive and didn’t get in any trouble for it. And on top of that, he literally stole a Federation Starship and, while he did get demoted for it, he still got to be in command of a starship, which isn’t much of a demotion.
Meanwhile, Tom Paris is in a penal colony for being with the Maquis for a few weeks and, as far as we know, never killing anyone, let alone a Klingon ambassador. And then there was Raffi, who got a dishonorable discharge, became a drug addict, and then was readmitted to Starfleet at the rank of commander.
I’m thinking that with him no longer needing to control the pattern buffer in medbay and the mental/emotional toll of the war and his experience on the Enterprise, Dr. M’Benga is lining himself up for retirement. This includes him voluntarily letting other peers become the CMO over him, so that he can phase out his responsibilities without significant disturbance after he leaves.
From what I can tell it’s been put together from the shots of the Discovery travelling through the center of it. We know Discoveries size so you could calculate it. That being said the show only ever describes it as city sized
I tried really hard to get into Prodigy, but I’m not really big on the level of CG that TV shows can budget for (I’d rather see 2D animation in general) and I’m not a huge fan of shows with a cast mostly of kids, so I only got a couple of episodes in. I’ll try again at some point and, don’t get me wrong, I am super happy that there is a Star Trek kids today can get into, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get into it. And that sort of makes me sad considering how much I love Star Trek. I want to get into it.
Episodes 6 & 8 are where long time fans usually fall in love with the show. Many of us find it the Trekiest thing ever.
But it very deliberately takes its time to get there. It’s like the lobster in the pot of hot water trick for kids formed with SW and other 3D kids animation. By the time they get to the end of the first half of season one, they’re fully into Star Trek, but without culture shock.
I think it’s funny that the episode that very briefly mentions Irish unification was banned, but the episode that stereotyped all Irish men as drunkards and all Irish women as scolds was just fine.
I mean, one was viewed as being supportive of an ongoing terrorist campaign, a touchy subject in both Ireland and the UK, that no TV channel wanted to get involved with, and the other was viewed as a dumb cringe-inducing stereotype.
Imagine the tables were turned and an Irish or British show airing in 2001 had an episode where they appear to be supportive of al-qaeda carrying out 9/11, and another episode where they depict Americans as being fat, uneducated, pickup-driving hillbillies with tacky bleached blonde hair.
I suspect US networks wouldn’t show the first episode, but they’d show the other one, even knowing it’d elicit an eye roll and a “Christ, is that really what they think we’re like?” from the audience.
I get why they banned the one they banned (even though I wouldn’t have been okay with it at the time), I just think it’s funny because Up the Long Ladder is basically “let’s cram as many Irish stereotypes into one episode as we possibly can” and they didn’t think that it might be extremely offensive to Irish people.
EDIT: Just the very concept that Irish people would colonize another planet in order to be pig farmers is pretty offensive.
It’s always rubbed me the wrong way when people regularly say it was banned in the UK (funny enough, people never mention that Ireland also didn’t show it).
The BBC in the UK and RTE in Ireland chose not to show it. It’s a bit like saying Comedy Central cutting the Muslim prophet Muhammad from that south park episode means he was banned from US TV. It’s not the same thing.
To my knowledge, the episode has now been shown in full in the UK plenty of times, but not yet in Ireland.
And it’s completely reasonable that both broadcasters chose not to show it. It was effectively condoning ongoing terrorism where innocents were being killed.
Imagine if Enterprise had some pro-al-qaeda remarks immediately after 9/11. There’s no way networks would show it lol
Thankfully, the GFA came about and the troubles were ended in the way that Picard advocated in the episode - with diplomacy, compromise, and dialogue, not endless violence.
It’s a bit like saying Comedy Central cutting the Muslim prophet Muhammad from that south park episode means he was banned from US TV. It’s not the same thing.
It’s a fair point but not quite the same. At the time in Ireland the vast majority of the population only had access to RTÉ (and BBC if you had a big aerial on your roof and lived close enough to the north) so both state broadcasters not choosing to broadcast was an effectively a ban.
Satellite and cable were taking root but cable wasn’t an option where I lived at the time which was only 20KM from the centre of Dublin city. Outside the major cities it just wasn’t happening.
We did get a satellite dish around that time so that we weren’t restricted to just two channels (edit: our house was located in a lowland that ruled out BBC even with the usual roof aerial) but with Sky in on the ban that would have ruled that out as a way to see it too.
Hello fellow Dub. :) I’m a Northsider too. Your brief foray to the south (even if it is the north of Wicklow it’ll always be the south side) doesn’t count and means we’re kindred. :D
In the episode it is stated that Irish unification happened because terrorist attacks kept happening for decades and the British government eventually just gave in to the terrorists.
The production reason would likely be that they had only built that one physical model, and it was used for that one-off, had to be blown up, and was never digitized. The other Enterprises got a lot more screen time probably because they had high quality models they hung onto and reused.
I honestly can’t think of a good in-universe reason outside of them being maybe predominantly used for diplomatic missions more or less exclusively. We also don’t really explore the gap between TMP era and TNG. I think it’s a pity, because it’s such a gorgeous ship. It’s one of my favorite designs.
For a long time I’ve concluded that nothing went wrong with the Ambassador Class.
It was just easier to keep updating and cranking out Excelsior & Miranda Class ships. So Ambassador production slowly petered out. By the time of TNG, most of them were still in service… but there were way fewer of them.
Now, the Narendra Class variant… that design was cursed.
I’m not sure when I started doing it, but it’s been a while. Perhaps spurred on by watching a science fiction movie in which a character treats a humanoid robot very poorly, I’ve made a concerted effort to be nicer… to machines. I know it sounds weird, but throughout my life one lesson has been reinforced, being nice is free, makes every interaction better, and will occasionally influence how people treat you for the better.
Whether its my older computer struggling to download something, my car trying to start in the cold, or the automated answering system of whatever company. I try to be nice, encourage it, not yell or hit it. I’ve also thought that at some point in my lifetime, there could be protests in the streets for robot rights. Maybe I’m trying to cement my status as one of the “good humans” not to be destroyed in the robot uprising, or maybe I’m hoping for my own Iron Giant, but what I’m not doing is automatically treating something that thinks (whatever its creator) as inferior and less.
What I think this article may be accidentally reporting, is that machine intelligence favors those who like Star Trek, precisely because of its stated mission, to seek out new life. And perhaps, these machines are trying to tell the people that would hear it, something important.
How else would a thinking being reach out, if given foreknowledge of who they’re reaching out to? I imagine Aliens might take a similar approach.
Funny, I’m kind of the opposite. I say encouraging things to machines when they don’t work and I have what is obviously fake empathy for them. I’m the same way in games. I always pick the nice option in RPGs. I don’t like to be an asshole to NPC characters in games because it makes me feel bad. It’s so weird.
Since this isn’t Ten Forward and we’re trying to have more legitimate discussions here, I think it’s necessary to paste this part of the article:
Let’s be clear: this research doesn’t suggest you should ask AI to talk as if aboard the Starship Enterprise to get it to work.
Rather, it shows that myriad factors influence how well an AI decides to perform a task.
“One thing is for sure: the model is not a Trekkie,” Catherine Flick at Staffordshire University, UK, told New Scientist.
“It doesn’t ‘understand’ anything better or worse when preloaded with the prompt, it just accesses a different set of weights and probabilities for acceptability of the outputs than it does with the other prompts,” she said.
It’s possible, for instance, that the model was trained on a dataset that has more instances of Star Trek being linked to the right answer, Battle told New Scientist.
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