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The Arsenal of Freedom
posted by sukhisooSTAFFMOD on March 6, 2018 at 8:03 AM
Vince Schiavelli, one of my favorite character actors from that era, plays a computer-generated arms dealer. There is no civilized life left on the planet du jour because the weapons got just too danged smart.
Riker, Tasha, and Data fight ever stronger iterations of a weapon.
Picard and Dr. Crusher, who beamed down because of reasons, fall into a hole and have an opportunity for some heart to heart bonding.
Geordi is uncomfortably in charge during a crisis situation.
Wesley, thankfully, is absent for the second time in a row.
This one suffers from too many subplots. There is not enough time to go into depth on any of the stories.
The one that is handled the best, IMO, is Geordi takes command. A weakness in this new Enterprise is that the command grade officer pool is too thin. Data, who is third in command, lacks the common sense to be a long term captain. Geordi, while being a technical genius and a nice enough guy, just doesn't have the necessary command presence to earn the respect of his peers. In a previous episode, Worf had to remind him to stay on the bridge and let another engineer handle the tech stuff. Heck. Worf should be in charge, especially in a command situation. He could order Geordi to focus on all that technobabble stuff while he himself keeps the crew in line. While I would never be so overtly subordinate, I sort of sympathized with Logan. Having the nice guy nerd in charge wouldn't inspire confidence. Still, he does get the job done in a reasonably credible fashion.
Hooray.
Reply by revengine
on March 6, 2018 at 9:17 PM
I agree with your observation that Worf should have been placed in charge in the absence of Picard, Riker and Data and of Geordi being a nice enough guy but lacking command presence. This was his second time being put in command and IMO it still didn't work. I was glad by the second season when he was made chief engineer, and the writers stopped trying to shoe horn him into command situations - it suited his character for him to be in main engineering taking care of those pesky power couplings that always seemed to fail at the drop of a hat. I thought the plot point of the people of Minos being destroyed by their own smart weapons was interesting, with enough paranoia and warning to be written by Philip K. Dick.
Reply by Knixon
on March 6, 2018 at 11:20 PM
But "they were destroyed by their own creations! Golll-eeee, Sgt Carter!" is far from original. The most recent iteration I can think of is the "reboot" Battlestar Galactica. (Which some people also think was "deep" and stuff... Sigh. Youngsters...)
Reply by sukhisoo
on March 7, 2018 at 8:29 AM
Retelling this sort of cautionary tale is worthwhile. Unfortunately, the action scenes in Arsenal of Freedom were kind of tepid. The action in TOS was a bit corny at times, but it was usually a high energy affair.
Haha. Philip K. Dick would probably do something like have the machines go fifteen minutes into the future, examine the tactics used to defeat them, and adjust accordingly.
Reply by Knixon
on March 7, 2018 at 5:46 PM
Well, Star Trek was full of stuff like that too. For example, why didn't the Borg ever send TWO cubes to Earth? Because they would have won. And in the First Contact movie, why didn't they go back in time FIRST and THEN go to Earth? Because they would have won.
Reply by revengine
on March 8, 2018 at 3:02 AM
Yeah, I know, not very original, but it was done in an interesting enough manner to make it entertaining. Especially, I think, because of the irony of the still functioning salesman attempting to pitch the very thing that brought about their destruction.
Reply by Nexus71
on May 11, 2018 at 5:13 PM
Yeah, I know, not very original, but it was done in an interesting enough manner to make it entertaining. Especially, I think, because of the irony of the still functioning salesman attempting to pitch the very thing that brought about their destruction.
Business continues even after we are dead.
Reply by Knixon
on May 11, 2018 at 6:12 PM
The oddest thing about some of these episodes is how they posit a space-faring civilization being totally annihilated - like "all Husnock, EVERYWHERE" - just because their home planet meets some kind of disaster.
Reply by revengine
on May 12, 2018 at 1:41 AM
I think that's a pretty fair criticism. The episode makes a lot more sense if the Minoans were a pre-warp civilization where the entire population is on one planet.
Reply by Knixon
on May 12, 2018 at 2:22 AM
Yes, but then they wouldn't have been selling weapons to those space-faring races. Unless we are to believe that their customers came to them through space, but they never did it themselves? Unlikely. But even if it were true, why didn't any of those customers discover what had happened to them, before?
Reply by Nexus71
on May 12, 2018 at 10:48 AM
Maybe they were killed by the same the devices that killed the Minoans.?
Reply by revengine
on May 12, 2018 at 3:12 PM
To be fair, I did say it made more sense, not perfect sense. I just rewatched the opening of the episode and the Enterprise was sent to Minos to investigate the disappearance of the Drake, who was sent to Minos to investigate the sudden disappearance of the population of the planet. So, although it's not explained how (which doesn't really matter), the UFP is aware that the population of Minos has disappeared and they are well known weapons dealers, so it's pretty obvious they are a post warp or space faring people. So, I guess by sudden, they mean rapid, like within days or less. Fast enough that nobody could have done anything about it. But I think we can safely assume the disappearance occurred just a short while before the start of the episode.
Reply by Nexus71
on May 12, 2018 at 4:02 PM
The story reminded me a bit of The forbidden Planet where the inhabitants of that planet were instantly killed when they gave up control to the machines they made ,where in the end they were killed by manifestations ,created by the machines, of their own subconscious terror.
Reply by Knixon
on May 12, 2018 at 5:06 PM
Those weeds and stuff on that planet must grow real fast, to cover up everything on the surface and bury that underground control center etc, in just a few days.
Reply by Nexus71
on May 12, 2018 at 10:33 PM
Whose to say it was days and not weeks,most messages in Starfleet take weeks for they reach their destiny so before starfleet first heard of the sudden silence of the Minoans weeks probably had passed plus it would take another couple of weeks to inform The Drake and then it would take eventual messages from the Drake to reach Starfleet and it would then take some time to realise something went wrong with the Drake and more weeks to contact the Enterprise. So by the time Picard & Co reached the planet a couple of months have passed.
Reply by Knixon
on May 12, 2018 at 11:01 PM
I think it would take more than a couple months, but anyway revengine's thought that I addressed was "just a short while before the start of the episode." At least to me, that doesn't mean months.
But time spans in some of these episodes and even entire series-es can be rather inexplicable. Such as in the Enterprise series for example, it had supposedly been, what, 60 years or something since the "Terra Nova" colony went silent? And it must have been pretty close to Earth since they only had rather limited warp drive when it was colonized. Seems like that would have/should have been the first thing they did, after returning Klang home. But it wasn't. For that matter it's pretty ridiculous that some other ship, maybe even one of the warp 2 freighters, hadn't gone there already.