TNG - The Masterpiece Society

[AllanO]

I suspect Conor is exaggerating the harm losing a couple dozen colonists leaving will do in an effort to persuade Picard to refuse them passage. He didn't seem overly alarmed when talking to Troi about it afterwards. They can breed new scientists, after all.

I mean it has been a long time since I saw the episode but I thought he came off as quietly exasperated and despairing rather than skittishly panicked. This could come down to bad acting the actor may have just been unable to convey the mood.

If he's not that worried then why would he try to prevent Picard from giving them passage he can just breed more. Is he worried about people leaving or not? He's worried enough to lie (apparently in an obvious way according to you) to Picard, but it is not actually an existential threat, this is a pretty narrow keyhole of worry he is in.

Note it is not clear that they can just breed more it is unclear what kind of development process residents of the place go through, but to me it seemed implied everyone was born and grew up at a normal human rate, no fully educated and functional quick grow adults churned out here. So it might take 20 years of maturation and educating the next generation to replace them. As I said way back in this thread one might say that makes no sense as the colony from the same era in Up the Long Ladder did have quick grow clones.

I mean I think your response illustrates a point, it is difficult to discuss this episode because as shown in this thread people have so widely different takes on what was portrayed in this episode either because of bad writing (Picard seems both to think the colony takes away what makes life worth living and lament its destruction), bad acting (how worried is Conor really?), bad world building (like discontinuity with similar backgrounds in the setting)

[CharlesPhipps]

My take on the subject is that the colonists are less a critique on eugenics and/or totalitarianism than planned communities. The implications are the society is perfectly planned down to the very last person. The colony needs a plumber, the coloney gets a plumber bred and so on. Everything is down to the last dot in terms of efficiency.

Which is an astoundingly stupid way of doing things.

Anyone here read COLD EQUATIONS? That was a famous science fiction story that reflected the idea that morons created the starship because they did so with no room for error.

I get the impression the issue with 33 people leaving the colony is that it's not going to collapse but breeding replacements is going to take about 20 years or so to get them all trained up and while the colony isn't going to FAIL as a result, it will certainly suffer for it. It will also require people going out of their comfort zone to fix their own damn toilet.

Which will expose, yes, you do not need to breed a super-plumber to do it.

Which means that the entire purpose of the colony is going to be exposed as bullshit.

[TGLS]

Anyone here read COLD EQUATIONS? That was a famous science fiction story that reflected the idea that morons created the starship because they did so with no room for error.

Really? I though the idiotic part was they built an emergency shuttle that was built with no safety margin (or at least a too small one), that also wasted mass on a hiding place.

A deeper analysis

[CharlesPhipps]

Anyone here read COLD EQUATIONS? That was a famous science fiction story that reflected the idea that morons created the starship because they did so with no room for error.

Really? I though the idiotic part was they built an emergency shuttle that was built with no safety margin (or at least a too small one), that also wasted mass on a hiding place.

A deeper analysis

Sadly, I think you made the same joke I did.

[TGLS]

Pretty much. There's like a dozen things that could be done to avoid the situation in the first place and all they do is put up a vague sign and say, "We tried!"

[Madner Kami]

Anyone here read COLD EQUATIONS? That was a famous science fiction story that reflected the idea that morons created the starship because they did so with no room for error.

Really? I though the idiotic part was they built an emergency shuttle that was built with no safety margin (or at least a too small one), that also wasted mass on a hiding place.

A deeper analysis

Sadly, I think you made the same joke I did.

Joke? That is exactly how companies are working nowadays. They optimize everything down to the smallest second, but waste no thought about what happens once things don't go as planned, with inevitable catastrophic consequences down the line, for either the company, the customers or the staff.

[CharlesPhipps]

Pretty much. There's like a dozen things that could be done to avoid the situation in the first place and all they do is put up a vague sign and say, "We tried!"

To be fair, I fully believe it's entirely possible because the past year and a half have taught me that stupidity is a renewable resource.

[AllanO]

Anyone here read COLD EQUATIONS? That was a famous science fiction story that reflected the idea that morons created the starship because they did so with no room for error.

I heard an audio drama version of it, once like 20 years ago.

Yeah the problem with a story where the technical limitations of the imagined scenario are front and centre is that the implications of the story they don't want you to think about (that this ship would have had basically no margin for error such that they should have been losing them all the time etc.) are also hard to avoid because there is not much else there to think about. I'd apparently give it more than a pass than you (I'm willing to grant the premise that the dilemma made sense) and I at least remember it like 20 years later, but I'm not sure how much it deserves to be a classic given how thin it is.

It is a tricky question what makes a plot hole so glaring it compromises suspension of disbelief or renders coherent interpretation of the story between different people impossible etc.

To be fair, I fully believe it's entirely possible because the past year and a half have taught me that stupidity is a renewable resource.

“Human genius has its limits, but stupidity does not.” I've always taken that to mean that even the best of us are capable of doing some boneheadedly stupid stuff from time to time.

[CharlesPhipps]

“Human genius has its limits, but stupidity does not.” I've always taken that to mean that even the best of us are capable of doing some boneheadedly stupid stuff from time to time.

In the Cold Equations and Masterpiece Society take, I take it that very often human society makes increasing shaves off of margins of error for whatever reason (money, arrogance), and these eventually will build until they explode and probably in a spectacular way.

As Firefly's recent Out of Gas episode shows, the part Mal was told by Kaylee to get replaced was nothing until it was everything.

So I believe it's more believable than a lot of people argue because, of course, no one ever thinks the mistake will happen until it does.

In the case of the Masterpiece people, they were also made by a bunch of THE VILLAGE-esque (M Night not Patrick McGoohan) utopians and they're not exactly rationale actors themselves.

[Senko]

That said I can definately see the appeal of going off somewhere and blowing up the door behind you just to not deal with humanity as a whole. The problem is when you do that you limit your ideas and development to what you can produce which is what happened here. The masterpiece society was perfect till the outside universe came knocking but they'd still lagged behind the rest of humanity in development. I think if more time had passed then relatively speaking it'd be like TNG star trek contacting our real world. The tech difference would be immense and growing larger the more time that passed with them drawing on technology and ideas from trillions of beings and different species with different mindsets and capabilities while we have only a few billion all nowadays with fairly homogenous mindsets. Sure theres some cultural variation nothing like you get comparing the federation to those binary speaking aliens in the original series.