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And it's stupid that nobody even raises it as an issue. Picard's entire objection to what Dougherty says is along the lines of "even if it's legal, it's wrong!" Nobody ever so much as suggests that the legal basis for it is absurd.

What makes that worse is that toward the end, the movie contrived to make Dougherty say, "Yeah, he was right."

Reading the link I posted earlier really is quite fascinating. There are several drafts of the story in multi-page detail, along with memos and letters reacting to them from the likes of Patrick Stewart. It's amazing how many hoops a story has to go through - one draft for example had Pillar delighted, Berman approving, the studio execs happy, everybody beaming - and then Stewart said he hated it, and that was the end of that, because Stewart is the star. At one point Berman had them drop the entire idea of a "fountain of youth" because he said "Stewart won't like a story that depicts Picard as being too old." When they actually mentioned it to Stewart months later he loved it, so it got written back in.

So much of what is there is there because somebody with power said "nah, that's too much politics, it's boring," or "these aliens need to have a special power or something that makes them more menacing."

Interesting read so far. Thank you for posting!

And altough I am only half-through I find it fascinating how much creativy impact Patrick Steward had . To be honest I agree whole-heartedly with all his points where he rips the story-outline apart. The only thing I liked about the very first draft was the end, Ian Mckellen against Patrick Stewart two years before X-Men.....ah well:)

Now since I am not sure what happened since I am not through yet, after the first two negative letters from Steward - with very valid criticism imho - they should have abondoned the story altogether and developed something new. Having a fountain of youth or not does not change the overall story that much imho which is still dull, uninteresting and boring.


On a side note, I find it hilarious how he is so absolutely against Romulans as villains considering Nemesis and StXI.

The biggest Pro-Baku issue I have so far, and I think the only one, is that they've been there since before he UFP was founded. So how does the UFP say it's theirs?

Other then that, fuck the Baku... 600 people of a race that will be inbred beyond repair in five generations vs the ability to heal billions! If they don't want to leave, I'd let them stay on the planet and start the process anyways.

Fuck the Bak'u.

Sorry, not seeing how one Bak'u life is worth about 10,000,000 of everyone else's. You ask them nicely to hand over the pretty magic particles and if they refuse you demonstrate that while the machine might take something away from the man, with enough machines the man alone is kitty litter.

The Baku may be extinct in five generations, but for them five generations is about as long as Human civilization has existed on Earth.

Sorry, not seeing how one Bak'u life is worth about 10,000,000 of everyone else's. You ask them nicely to hand over the pretty magic particles and if they refuse you demonstrate that while the machine might take something away from the man, with enough machines the man alone is kitty litter.

Very socialist of you.

They're hippies, and there's nothing conservatives hate more than hippies.

They're not just hippies, they're self serving self centered space elves... I'd rather just leave them to their soon to be deaths as it means you won't have to deal with them later.

They might not have been so pathetic if we'd been shown a sustainable, significant culture. Instead we see a village with a garden barely big enough to handle one lunch rush at Olive Garden, and only 600 people. Now I'll admit that since they're aliens their sustainable population COULD be much lower than humans but 600 total individuals would be pushing it for a complex sapient life form.

Still, when you start to weigh 600 lives vs. 6 billion it gets hard to say, "Yeah, they should be left alone while billions die." I know why it's 600, to give the holo-ship/10 defectors from the Enterprise make a difference thing work but the end result is you're talking so few people (most high schools have more students) that it gets hard to say that their idyllic life and eternal youth is worth defending over the lives of billions of other people. If you'd bulked them up to like 600,000 or 6 million it might have made it less cut and dry. As is the Enterprise crew are defending the lives of a few hundred hippies in a commune and sacrificing billions that could be saved to do it.

Go team Sona.

As a man who has lived on a farm... I can tell you that what they showed was a joke. No livestock, a field so small that they wouldn't be able to store enough food for one family through a winter. Its sad that no one thought "lets go look at a real farm" when they put this together.

Just to play devil's advocate:

Tyyr wrote:they should be left alone while billions die.

Exactly what part of your ass did you pull this out of? Not harvesting the planet's radiation wasn't killing anyone; perhaps it prevented that particular avenue of life extension, but those are only even remotely the same thing if you choose to ignore the facts in order to inject hyperbole into your argument.

No, no one was dying directly because the radiation wasn't being harvested. However people were dying who would have otherwise been saved had the radiation been harvested and used.

Not even that. People didn't get their 'Trek version of juvenat treatments because the radiation wasn't harvested. Those hypothetical people wouldn't have been saved from an untimely death - they just would lived unnaturally longer.

I am almost certain the Admiral mentions "lives being saved." Not to mention that we see the effects and they go beyond simply extending life. Geordi got his sight back.