Star Trek

It’s a good episode and I would have liked to have seen further exploration of the ancient civilization. There’s this faulty idea in the first few seasons of TNG Trek that older tech is worse.

While I definitely agree on wishing for further exploration of this ancient culture, I don’t really agree that Trek, esp TNG, treated ancient tech as “worse”. Many times in Trek, we see leftover tech from ancient civilizations, and it’s almost always highly-advanced. even in the first season of TNG, the crew encounters remnants of the Tkon Federation, a civilization from 600,000 years ago whose powerful technology has trapped the Enterprise and a Ferengi ship in the orbit of a planetary outpost in TNG S01E05 - ”The Last Outpost”.

In the second season, we’re introduced to the Iconians, an ancient civilization that collapsed 200,000 years earlier, when the Enterprise discovers their homeworld, Iconia, in TNG S02E11 - ”Contagion". In addition to sending probes which infect the main computer of the Enterprise (and its sister ship the Yamato) with computer code so advanced, it completely rewrites it to calamitous effect. Iconians most notably created gateway technology, which they used to construct gateways which allowed them to move from one location to another - presumably over unlimited distances - instantly, simply by walking through one of these gateways. Although we got to see Iconian gateway again in DS9 S04E23 - ”To The Death”, I really wish we could have learned more about what sounded like a very interesting ancient civilization.

And, yeah, the whole thing about Geordi being an incel was creepy and sad.