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.
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
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.
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).
Absolutely nothing in the episode suggested that.
This is how they wanted to be remembered!
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.
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.
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.
How many long-extinct human cultures do you care about like they’re your own family?
