I haven't seen the new Star Trek show, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. It's not that I wouldn't. I don't have Paramount+ because I don't have money coming in. Even if I did, I don't pay money to people eager to kiss the ass of fascists. I do pal around a lot in Star Trek communities.

One of the things I saw coming out of certain ends of 'the fandom' is this “It's impossible to have Jem'Hadar women. How do they have Jem'Hadar women?!” thing. Academy has had like six episodes or something so it's likely this question has already been answered.

It didn't really need to be, though.

Reading the text

As a long time Star Trek fan who has watched DS9 numerous times (and recently finished up another DS9 watch through), I saw Lura Thok (played by Gina Yashere) in some promotional graphics and thought “Oh, cool! Jem'Hadar!” I'm annoyed to say looking up her character's name gave me a slight spoiler but I'm not going to replicate that issue for you here.

In DS9, we're given hints over the course of several seasons that ultimately amount to this: the Founders didn't create the Vorta or the Jem'Hadar from scratch. They took some species that existed already and modified them to suit their purposes. The Jem'Hadar were created to be their soldiers and the Vorta were created to be administrators. According to Vorta legend, the Vorta had been tiny little critters we would likely assume were not fully sentient when they were what old SciFi might call “uplifted” by the Founders. Given how much the Founders lie, I'm not sure I would take that particularly seriously.

We don't have any information about where the Jem'Hadar originally came from but we have solid reasons to believe they weren't created from scratch. One example is in Hippocratic Oath where we discover that one Jem'Hadar was able to break his hold over the genetic addiction to ketracel-white. If the Founders had created the Jem'Hadar completely from scratch and completely controlled their breeding, it's unlikely that Goran'Agar would have been able to manage that. Other episodes reveal that the Jem'Hadar's genetic conditioning isn't as strong as the Founders believe (or purport to believe) it is.

The obvious answer

All of this speaks to the likelihood that the Jem'Hadar are another species that has been modified. It hints that Jem'Hadar women may actually still have been somewhat involved in the process of making new Jem'Hadar for the Gamma Quadrant at least. Even if the average Jem'Hadar warrior is completely unaware of that possibility.

That's stuff we can imagine while ignoring the end of DS9 but taking everything else in DS9 into account (without touching Picard or other properties).

Once we do take the end of DS9 into account, we have Odo leading the Founders and we have at least two species who have existed mainly to serve the Dominion which no longer exists. We see time and time again that Odo feels that wholesale slaughter is deeply evil. We also know how much he feels the Jem'Hadar should be able to choose their own destinies on an individual level.

Given that information, it's very likely that Odo would lead the Founders to restore the Jem'Hadar's independence and solve some of the dissatisfaction the Weyoun clones discussed about the Founders' tinkering with the Vorta genetic makeup.

Now, that last paragraph is a simple guess about what might have happened on the basis of my knowledge of the previous paragraphs and my knowledge of Odo as a character. There are certainly other ways that the creators of Starfleet Academy could have solved any issues — if I was to agree there were an issue to address.

One of several long roads

It's a SciFi show. There's any number of ways they could have solved it.

Goran'Agar could have stolen an orb and a shuttle and ridden it into the Celestial Temple and begged the Prophets to restore his people to what they were before the Founders messed with them. There could have been a big debate because What Was Before Can Never Be Again. Prophet Benjamin says that's true but every sentient being deserves a chance at a new start. Then the prophets coming up with some brand new way of being Jem'Hadar inspired and directed by the things that Goran'Agar has managed to make of himself since last we saw him.

Julian Bashir, international spy, could have taken over Section 31 through subterfuge. He could then repurposed their knowledge and capacities to create a retrovirus that would spread through the Jem'Hadar like a plague. The plague could remove their genetic propensity toward believing the Founders are gods and given them the ability for their bodies to synthesize what they need from food and restoring their ability to mate regularly.

The imagination is the limit.

The adventure's only getting started

With all that, we've still got people complaining because a Jem'Hadar woman showed up in a trailer and some promotional material for a show that hadn't yet come out. Complaints that, to my eye, seem to not reasonably engage with the information from shows we've theoretically already seen.

Now, I've got my own theories about why someone might want to do that. I wouldn't call those fan theories since I'm not a fan of what I think is going on. I won't impugn them by suggesting that they aren't actually fans of Star Trek. I will suggest that looking at the shows while paying a little more attention to the themes and subtext might be in order.

Now, how's the show? I still don't know. I hope it's the best Star Trek ever, though. It probably won't be but that won't necessarily be because it sucks. There's only one spot for “best.”

I hope I get to see it one day. I think the first time I heard people talking about wanting a Starfleet Academy show was sometime in the 90s. That wasn't an idea that really appealed to me at the time but there's no reason it can't be great. That's what I hope for it. That it's great. (I do also still hope that it's the best ever but, again, that's unlikely because of the way best works.)

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I've got two books out in the Vay Ideal series. It's a science fiction adventure series built around an eclectic assortment of travelers who find themselves running an independent ship. I'd love it if you'd check them out. While you can buy them on Amazon, the cover links will take you to a landing page which will let you choose any one of several other stores also.

#StarTrek #Essay #SciFi

Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay

It's interesting watching a technology that felt new to me (even though it was quite old at the time I was using it) suddenly get renewed attention.

I still remember the first cassette album I owned. I'm sure it wasn't literally the first cassette tape I owned and I'm not sure whether I bought it with my allowance or if it was a present. I would name drop it but it turns out not all the artists from my youth listening to CCM became queer affirming. Some of them became pretty rancid!

The album meant a lot to me at the time. It's hard to think of that album without hearing the slightly imperfect warble of the tape speeding up and down just slightly as it played in my headphones.

Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

Eventually, we got CDs. I only had two to start with. One was Moonlight Sonata. Legend has it that the 74 minute runtime of the redbook CD was chosen to allow Moonlight Sonata to fit on a single disc. As far as I know, this isn't true but it's a great story. The other was Rich Mullins's A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band. I still have that CD although I backed it up to FLAC when I backed up all my CDs over again.

Cassettes remained a part of my life for a little while. I used them to record songs of the radio. Particularly songs that would have been difficult for me to get albums of. Eventually, writable CDs became affordable enough to make my own mix CDs instead of mix tapes. Around that same time, I was getting into MP3 pretty heavily. The very first MP3 I ever heard was one I encoded myself. It took hours to encode that one song to 128Kbps and, when I played it on a 120Mhz Pentium Acer, I couldn't run any other software at the same time. It was so small, I carried that song on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Today, some pedant would tell me it was a 1.44MiB disk. I'd go pull one of my floppies from the protective case I store them in and offer them the use of my loupe to read the size on the label.

The last gasp of cassette tapes in my life was my four track recorder. Which only recorded two tracks at a time and required a special type of tape to really do its business.

Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay

A lot of ink has been spilled on why it is that people go for, say, vinyl long after it has passed its expiration date. The original releases of old music had better dynamic range (i.e. they haven't been compressed to hell and back) but tended not to have as much going on in the lower end. There may be something to that audiophile convention about analogue sound. Most professionally produced sound from the 80s onward was produced digitally at some point in the chain before it reached the listener.

To the extent that they may have a point, you'd have to listen to some really old recordings on some pretty old gear to know it for sure.

Why are folks reaching for the old stuff? I've heard it's because this stuff was the province of older siblings and cousins. Maybe there's some truth to that.

But maybe it's because there's 900 channels and nothing good on. I don't mean that literally in either direction. There are a lot more than 900 “channels” so to speak and plenty of the new stuff is really good. Maybe we have too many choices and too many distractions.

Image by blitzmaerker from Pixabay

I remember just listening to an album. I've always been me so I probably read a book or something while I was doing it but the activity was listening to the music.

Last year, I bought an inexpensive FLAC player. It can do more but, it's so convoluted to use, it's really best at playing an album or a playlist. Maybe it could hop on the internet for something other than syncing its clock. It says it does some streaming thing that makes my eyes glaze over whenever I think about figuring out what that means. It's a chore to get music onto it. Managing playlists for it requires either manually adding songs from the player one by one ... or reverse engineering their not-at-all-M3U file which still has the extension M3U.

It's not for everyone. It's barely for me. But it lets me listen to the music without too much messing with it. In fact, the more messing I have to do with it, the more tedious it is to deal with.

It's more inconvenient than popping a tape in and then turning it over when the side finishes. Unless, of course, you live in 2025 and you have to first find a tape player and then find or record a tape. And then you've got just one tape. Battery will need recharging on my little FLAC player before it runs out of music on the 256GB micro SD card I've half filled.

I still haven't just listened to an album in a while even with a good book.

I think I'll do that soon. I'll let you know how it goes.

#Personal #Essay #Nostalgia #Technology #Music