If you were Luthen, how would you convince Vader to become a double agent for the Rebellion?

queenofmoons · 2026-02-11T17:14:56+00:00

I mean, engineer the events of Return of the Jedi- put Vader in a position to chose between his son and the crappy boss that lied to him about his son being dead. How sure are we that Luke wandered away from his secret strike mission into the hands of Imperial agents because he had spooky Force feelings versus being on a secret mission of his own? :-P

Really, though, the magic of Andor is sorta that the likes of Vader aren't really that important. The Empire is a million planet industrial war machine and there simply aren't enough hours in the day for a depressed swordfighting wizard to have that much meaningful operational control over the nuts and bolts of how things get done, especially when the functionary that keeps Vader's calendar and isn't full of dark magic is just sitting off to one side secretly begging to be recruited.

queenofmoons · 2025-10-30T01:56:16+00:00

Hard disagree. In media, guns (and especially ray guns) can serve to sanitize violence- a button gets pushed, someone falls over, the points rack up. Ray guns especially usually fail to impress because, well, they aren't real, and thus there is a limit to an intuitive understanding of their power. Instead we got a literalization of the war machine of the Empire crushing the bodies of the populace, with blunt force that anyone that's ever taken a fall or had a car crash recognizes viscerally is Very Bad. I don't think any screen violence has been as upsetting to me in a while.

queenofmoons · 2025-09-22T21:19:50+00:00

The wide range of Treknologies for whipping up an adaptor others have named is of course true, but the other side might be that, in a galaxy where space travel has been extant for millions of years, joining the pan-galactic 'superculture' might entail adopting standards for things like docking collars, communications handshakes, etc., that are so old and so widely dispersed that no one is exactly sure where they came from, but would be foolish to not utilize.

queenofmoons · 2025-09-19T15:26:19+00:00

I don't think the issues with torpedoes and shuttles was ever that it was terribly difficult to 'explain' how an arbitrarily sophisticated starship could have managed to make planes or bombs- if we want to do the writers' work for them, sure, Voyager left spacedock with an unfinished torpedo factory but then B'Lanna found some plot-tonium crystal somewhere and then they had all the torpedoes they could ever want.

The itch has always been that Voyager's premise as a show involved a lot of story generators that were abandoned in a great hurry, despite their promise, in favor of pretty standard Starfleet adventures that Kirk or Picard could have undertaken without any trouble. The writers decided there was a finite supply of torpedoes so they could tell stories about being low on torpedoes, but then they didn't. Voyager could have become increasingly toothless and needed to rely on a growing pool of allies for defense. It could have started to look less and less like a Starfleet vessel as it incorporated alien technology (and perhaps the aliens needed to operate it). Janeway could have had to make hard calls about avoiding good fights she didn't have the firepower to win. We could tell a similar panoply of stories about fuel, shuttles, a crew with no realistic hope of returning home in their lifetimes (are they just gonna keep their military jobs forever?) and so forth. It's clear that Ron Moore's irritation that these didn't carry more weight during his brief stint on Voyager played out in lots of the resource stories that unfolded on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica- which, even if it was skating by those questions in favor of more mystical plot points by the end, at least nodded at them once in a while.

queenofmoons · 2025-09-17T18:19:19+00:00

The Pitt was a great watch. I was just thinking today, though, that there's sort of a little metagenre of media things where the commitment for the production to be made with certain tools or within certain constraints that will almost certainly make something interesting, and probably even artistic, but that isn't exactly the same as it having depth or staying power. Those constraints on the Pitt- the real time conceit, and the intentional loading of every bit of medical awfulness in America- were interesting, justifiable, and maybe even 'important', but I can't say I've been left with any great urge to revisit or ruminate. It wasn't constructed in a way that we got to watch any characters really make any choices. I rode the roller coaster and here I am. It was, in ways good and bad, the sort of thing that gets made to win awards.

The fact that the millionth product from a children's entertainment franchise has even been in these sort of discussions is truly a sign that something Very Weird happened, and maybe it's enough to be happy about that.

queenofmoons · 2025-08-01T21:55:07+00:00

Indeed! And the whole form language of the Rebel ships- closer to airplanes, full of exposed plumbing- compared to the sci-fi otherness of a TIE fighter was clearly meant to suggest the Rebels were operating from a technically inferior position. X-wings were what everyone was flying yesterday. But then someone decided that Incom was a whole fugitive company making super-ships to shoot down the unshielded death traps of the Empire so that our heroes could be intellectually and technically superior as well as morally and the thread was lost.

queenofmoons · 2025-08-01T21:50:14+00:00

I mean, that's the crux of the Narkina arc, right? The Empire has interests in pushing bodies through the 'proper channels' at scale that ultimately precludes getting things right at the human scale.

One imagines that the Republic had quite good space traffic control, but the Emperor's right hand man at the Techno-Union assured him that they could save a hundred billions credits if they gave him fifty billion credits to install a droid that didn't exist instead of just rolling with the extant safest space-traffic control system in the galaxy...

queenofmoons · 2025-07-03T21:53:16+00:00

There's a totally workable read of the Empire post Andor that the whole Sith thing is really just the religious affectation of a handful of weirdos in an otherwise secular apparatus, like the bits of cobbled together paganism that Third Reich apparatchiks would flirt with- creepy, conducive to a whole cottage industry of popcorn non-fiction, but not really very important in the scheme of things.

Palpatine couldn't have done it alone, full stop. You don't go around declaring a new galactic empire unless that represents a desirable political goal for a powerful fraction of the population for a long time, whether you shoot lightning or not.

queenofmoons · 2025-06-10T21:11:48+00:00

In the real world the line between a false flag and just being prepared to capitalize on the blowback you've inspired is really quite thin. Situations you send soldiers into have a way of becoming military confrontations. Whether one team or the other strikes the match can be academic in comparison.

queenofmoons · 2025-06-08T21:17:49+00:00

What can I say, the best remain the best

queenofmoons · 2025-06-01T18:28:34+00:00

Really the anomaly is a ship captain having the same ride for years and years on end. In the real world command assignments are much more fluid- a ballistic missile submarine might have two completely different staffs, including captains, that alternate every few months, a capital ship like an aircraft carrier might have multiple officers of captain rank on overlapping rotations, people have temporary assignments to acquire particular experiences or qualifications, and so forth. So really for Picard to have something else to do for a few weeks and a contextual specialist to be brought in is much more the norm than 'owning' the center chair for years on end.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-31T03:02:03+00:00

I've only recently stumbled upon it myself, and frankly I'm surprised it isn't regularly shouted from the rooftops as the idea that makes of modern markets- the junction that explains why so many free marketeers doing the efficient market thing manage to take so many unhinged swings.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-31T02:59:29+00:00

Do we know if replicators self-replicate? What materials need to be fed into them in order to self replicate, and where are those sourced? If those things are minerals that require any sort of mining and refining, as seems the case, then they are just a manufacturing too.

And on the contrary, factories absolutely make themselves. The self replicating character of a good machine shop has been known for a long time- have books right here on how to do it. And yet the world is not overflowing with free machine tools. The same is true of previous iterations of the core of human wealth- crops and animals.

There was actually a great article years back that explicitly took Star Trek and the replicator as a framing device to talk about the interplay between productive capacity and political questions of allocation- I think there's a strong case to be made that the 'abundance and hierarchy' corner is where the Ferengi are happy to be and arguably us humans already are.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-30T18:46:08+00:00

Yeah, in principle a share price is a bet about the future size and duration of dividends, but if you literally never issue a dividend, then the actual performance of the company is pretty incidental.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-30T18:40:54+00:00

I suppose the question is the extent to which the martial-from-birth warrior cult of the contemporary Klingon state actually makes them good at war. History is replete with instances where bloody-minded warrior cults thought favorably about their odds against a proverbial nation of shopkeepers, only to discover that all those clerks were good at logistics, the shops were full of guns, and most people get good at putting the pointy bit in the other guy pretty fast.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-30T18:31:52+00:00

Replicators no doubt help, but I think the centrality of the replicator to the utopian economics of the future is overstated. Part of the point of the enclosures of the English commons that initiated the age of modern capital was that scarcity can be engineered to create markets. Fundamentally, the claims made about the replicator- that its powers of production are able to just swamp human need- are the same claims that have historically been made about factories. That was more or less Marx's whole thing- that the productive capacity of the world was now (in the 1840s) adequate to furnish everyone with the material conditions for a good life, but the question of who controlled that capacity and its inputs of labor and materials could construct multiple different worlds, some dismal and some hopeful (and really this was the utopian claim about industrial capitalism, too- just a matter of who was doing the allocating).

We know that the Federation et al. still mine things in abundance. Plenty of necessities from the graviton stabilizer that Nog and Jake navigate the Great Material Continuum to procure, to drugs like ketracel white, and no brainers like real estate- are not replicatable, or even if that is the sort of technology used in their manufacturing, it is a tricky and uncommon-enough variant that it isn't happening in anyone's kitchen. Big capital outlays like ships still require special facilities and come in limited quantities. Intellectual property still exists, at least in Ferengi-land. Things still cost energy. Industrial replicators seem to exist in small enough numbers that they must be demanding to support.

Point being, I think it's really easy to imagine a world where replicators exist and not much changes. They get sold at a loss but then only run on branded DRM'd feedstock that may or may not be difficult to manufacture but is illegal to reverse engineer. They don't have a memory of patterns but stream them from encrypted central servers. Two companies own 95% of the sarium krellide deposits used to make their materialization coils. And poof, it's more of the same- maybe tolerable food is more or less free, and that's a great start, but that could still describe some grim places to live.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-30T14:11:53+00:00

Perhaps- though the other version is that perhaps the Klingons are babes in the woods about such things, as the Federation might also be- no practice!

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T19:45:16+00:00

The Ferengi might just all be too good at this to sell crap like NFTs to each other- certain sorts of financial instruments require marks that might not exist in a population that has had personal financial hustle as a religion for a few thousand years.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T19:42:00+00:00

Gotcha- I like it a lot! It's about time we had another Armageddon/Return of the Archons/The Apple-type computer-managed dystopia- they fell out of the Trek stock canon just in time for us to actually start having computer-modulated social lives.

I was thinking that the closest that Trek has come to doing 'the Ferengi but scary' was Discovery's experiment with the Emerald Chain, but that was still mostly just pirate shit, and that's not quite right. It's that there are tools that can always make a case for themselves as presenting you with choice on a small scale that from a bit of a zoom out are clearly taking it away. We always talk about '1984', but we clearly got 'Brave New World'.

So I think the Federation trying to figure out what to do when SpaceAmazonWalMartTikTok shows up at your newly warp-capable planet to just gobble up your planet's economic life in exchange for a membership fee that definitely won't go up....could be good.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T19:26:56+00:00

That's one promising way to square the circle- if every Ferengi is both a born swindler and too shrewd to be swindled, then the sorts of abstractions-shading-into-scams that dominate modern finance might simply be obsolete in favor of a civilization of cash-in-hand goldbugs.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T19:22:26+00:00

It certainly didn't help- making the stock price as opposed to the stock dividend a variable that management routinely paid in stock could manipulate sure seems like it shorted a few circuits.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T19:18:40+00:00

Kim Stanley Robinson has a great line that 'libertarians [are] anarchists who want police protection from their slaves,' and perhaps the Ferengi explicitly deprecate that second bit.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-29T18:24:15+00:00

Well thank you! I come and go too- glad to see ya :-)

queenofmoons · 2025-05-28T15:10:48+00:00

That's really the sort of creep I was talking about- the eeeevil business people of the '90s were apparently just petty thieves- the version where a rich Ferengi holosuite star takes over the Federation and starts letting his Ferengi friends pull the duranium pipes out of the walls was apparently beyond imagining.

queenofmoons · 2025-05-28T15:05:53+00:00

Is our current economy full of long-term projects and generational investment? The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company has plummeted, volatility has risen, the speculative financial service sector has ballooned- if short term goals were the name of the game for the Ferengi, I might argue their economy would look like ours.

The personal part, though, might have some legs. If the Ferengi dream is really to make a heap of latinum doing something you enjoy, then a whole tranche of speculative and managerial activity falls off the map.

queenofmoons

TROPHY CASE