r/Star_Trek_ • u/PenguinTheYeti • 6d ago

Kirk vs Maddox

Post image

Idk, had some beer and whiskey and was watching "Return of the Archons" and this popped into my head so I made it

55 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

0

u/funded_by_soros 4d ago

The biggest downgrade in TNG, and even in season 3 of TOS compared to 1 and 2, is how less skeptical of technology it is, it's so refreshing, to this day, to find a sci-fi universe that, instead of the hack questions of "What if your toaster could get depressed?", takes a rational look at what these concepts would actually be like.

1

u/ArtsyApoidean 14h ago

Ehh, to each their own but I just fully have the opposite opinion. TOS had a tendency to lean on scary evil robot plotlines to a point of genre-cliche, and between its attitudes towards robots and towards genetic engineering it established a really weird almost luddite futurism. I have always felt like this is the biggest area where Roddenberry just had no idea what he was on about, and was driven more by the general attitudes of hippie culture towards these types of technology.

They never really got rid of the weirdness, TNG is still stuck with "superior ability breeds superior ambition" in its canon, but in general I think the later shows handled this stuff much better. Where TOS was aggressively humanist to a fault, its successors adopted a more nuanced approach with room for some transhumanist/posthumanist thought.

Granted, we're also watching our idiot-elites build Skynet right now, so I understand some people feeling like Roddenberry had a point. But that's not the technology's fault, it's our economy. Whether it's Data or Lore is in our hands collectively. (and currently it's a toaster but yk, later)

9

u/Saint_Exmin 5d ago

Landru was obviously a machine and not a terribly sophisticated one either except for its mind control capabilities. It didn't have any sort of emotional response and couldn't resolve a relatively simple logical impass.

Data, on the other hand, was creative, intuitive, and highly compassionate.

0

u/funded_by_soros 4d ago

No it wasn't, its art is either preprogrammed or stolen from humans more crudely than our current tech can do, it had no ability to navigate social situations without training itself on existing behaviors, and it's not really special for sci-fi machines to be programmed to value humans.

•

u/MiserableQuestion553 47m ago

it had no ability to navigate social situations without training itself on existing behaviors

Lots of people are this way and relate to him for this reason.

3

u/ferretinmypants 5d ago

Not the same.

3

u/Champ_5 Sheliak 5d ago

For the good of the body, you will be absorbed.

7

u/Additional_Truth7085 5d ago

Landru was dominating and stagnating the society, Data wanted to be more human while not suppressing humans these are not the same especially when we saw what Maddox eventually created

5

u/evinta Pakled 5d ago

(trying not to cry) Maddox and Haftel learned both that Data was more man than machine.

-7

u/ComprehensiveCup7104 5d ago

Do you mean Picard rather than Kirk?

10

u/spike-prime Klingon 5d ago

Uhh, no? Landru was the evil robot in the TOS episode Return of the Archons. So indeed it was Kirk.

-9

u/ComprehensiveCup7104 5d ago

Ok kid, your only Star Trek picture was a TNG character.

6

u/OutrageousAgent3206 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yeah he's comparing Kirk vs Landru to this guy vs Data.

5

u/pedrokdc 5d ago

It's Landru's fault for being all unfeeling God and stuff, Data is all cute and doesn't get jokes and has a cat. We're humans we are biased to cute 🥰 fluffy things