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Wait-a-minute Wednesday: To draw attention towards a situation or decision which bares further scrutiny.
For example: the crew of the Defiant not stopping Captain Sisko from committing acts of terrorism in order to prevent other atrocities being carried out by the Maquis.
So let's dig up the decidedly bone-head commands made by any characters throughout the Continuum, aside from the tried and true Tuvixian methodology. Or do, just provided there's a fresh/skewed take to be had.
Everything about The Inner Light's probe is stupid:
• It is designed to transmit its information to one person, one time. This person could be an imbecile who is working for a salvage operation. The person could be evil. The person could die immediately after it happens and no one would ever know. It destroys itself after a one-time use, meaning that the information cannot be preserved by other people experiencing it and sharing what they found out.
• It shows one snapshot of a culture that is going to die out from one perspective on one place on the planet and gives no regard to the culture's obviously rich history. The planet also probably had more than one culture, although monoculture is a thing in Star Trek.
• It gives the person who is experiencing the lifetime no way to record what is going on as it happens.
• They could have at least added a summary text to the probe to let everyone else know what is going on.
• They could also have added any other information about their culture(s) in text. Anything. At all.
• They could have also included A BOOK INSTEAD OF A FUCKING FLUTE.
• It wasn't even a very interesting flute. It could have been ornately carved or something. Maybe even carvings of what the people who made those flutes looked like? Which reminds me-
• THEY COULD HAVE INCLUDED A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES.
The Pioneer plaque is a more useful transmitter of information about a species than that probe.
Beautiful episode in terms of a storyline but really stupid in terms of a plot device.
This quote summarizes the Resikans’ entire rationale and their rebuttal to your argument. First of all, I believe the probe was intelligent and it targeted Picard because he was a leader among his people (being captain of a starship). Secondly:
This is how they wanted to be remembered!
Not as some pile of artifacts and writings collecting dust in the back room of some museum — one dead civilization among countless others — but as living, breathing people. That’s what’s so profound about it! They reached across time and space and managed to get a single person to care and care very deeply about them.
Look at all the other artifacts Picard collected as an archaeologist. They’re important to him but for the wrong reason: they’re trophies of his intellectual curiosity. The Resikan flute is so far above that. It’s his most treasured possession because it stirs in him the memories of a people he truly loved.
Absolutely nothing in the episode suggested that.
They won't be remembered when Picard is dead. And what little he could write down was, again, about one snapshot of one culture on their planet at one point in what was probably at least thousands of years of history. When he dies, most of their history dies with them. He could write down what he remembered and that's it. Picard can't even show what they looked like accurately. Maybe he can make a realistic drawing- based on his faulty human memory. That's it.
So if that's how they want to be remembered, they're idiots.
That changes nothing about what I said about the probe being a stupid plot device and the fact that they could have added any sort of cultural information to their flute.
I think it's hard to believe that the civilization was able to build spacecraft that could transmit mental imagery that realistic but not be bothered etch images and text into a metal flute before their civilization went kablooey. Or absolutely anywhere on the probe.
Even Superman's parents included more than just him in the spacecraft.
Been waiting to get that one out of your system for a bit, haven't ya? And entirely justified. Their culture doesn't deserve to be remembered if they think in such arbitrarily limited terms. No primer, no back-up, no alternatives.
Oh I rant about that episode all the time because everyone else is constantly gushing over it and the bad plot device annoyed me then and annoys me now. Absolutely a tour de force for Patrick Stewart, but it just gets to me every time.
Edit: Now I'm even more annoyed than I was before because there's a really easy way to fix it- the enterprise salvages all that is left of a much larger probe that is destroyed in some way or other and that is what gives Picard the experience. In other words, there were a lot of other memorials of their civilization, it's just that is the only one that survived. And then it dies because it was running out of power after being separated from the rest of the probe and burns out and can't be restored because Treknobabble. There. Fixed pretty much every problem.
Like the obelisks in Mass Effect?
Never played it, I'm afraid.
Fantastic games!