Sex is not gender.
You mean fanon explanation. In Star Trek, if it didn’t show up on-screen, it’s not official
Not that I want to have this debate 
but like I said they choose a gender when among species with different sexes, we see three of Odo’s species on the show and two appear male and one female.
Well season 3 is the one with Explorers on. Which for my mind is about as preposterous as star trek gets.
But it’s also the first ep with that hot dabo girl
I can accept the idea that Odo’s a sentient form of a D&D Bag of Holding (although I strongly suspect the creators of the show scrambled to develop that explanation only after fans noted just how severely Odo was violating the principle of Conservation of Mass/Energy) - but I still want to know what powers him. And how Changlings ever developed a sense of separate identity apart from the Great Link in the first place. (Am I the only one who finds the Great Link strongly reminiscent of the intelligent ocean in the novel Solaris?). And how they reproduce. But hey, I’m a geek. 
Well Odo was sent out specifically to develop sentience and experience the outside world and then return and merge with the link, this is how it/they learn about the universe. We meet another of his species sent out for the same purpose, apparently one hundred were sent. The female was specifically a representative, the whole thing seemed like an ordeal for her.
I’m guessing there isn’t much individuality in the link, its a hive mind. They occasionally break off a piece when absolutely needed to interact with the universe. I think it was specifically said they reproduce asexually, but I’m not sure.
What I want to know is how the hell a sentient ocean that is loathe to send out pieces of itself managed to become a major galactic power with slaves and dominated worlds. I mean in the first place.
To be honest I find that the need to explain things like this with what is effectively psuedoscience is one of, if not the, biggest problems with Star Trek. Why does it need to be explained?
And I’m also a geek, so that’s got bugger all to do with it.
The better question is why the other changlings use the same half formed face that Odo has. Odo has it because he was never able to learn how to do them right, because he was only self-taught on shapeshifting. The rest of the Dominion changlings can mimic humanoids well enough to replace them for ifitration pruposes, but still use the half-formed “changling” face when dealing with the cast. I can understand how the leader female might use it to put Odo at ease when she deals with him, but she uses it when is is working with the Vorta, the Jem’hadar and the other Alpha quadrant Dominon allies.
Because Star Trek’s supposed to be science fiction, and science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) needs to feel plausible (which isn’t the same as saying it is actually scientifically accurate). It’s supposed to be a story set in the future, not in Never-Never Land. Seeing an alien that as depicted onscreen clearly violates the laws of physics destroys that sense that we’re watching something that could possibly exist some day.
Science Fiction doesn’t need everything to be explained. It is the obsessiveness of the fans that forced it. Try looking back at TOS and see how they handled it. Did they have a big explanation regarding how teleporters and warp drives worked or did they just accept it and get on with the story?
trawls out that line about sufficiently advanced science being indistinguishable from magic blah blah blah
Yes, they did have an explanation for how transporters and warp drives worked in the original series - and it’s a “scientificish” one. Warp drives and transporters feel like something that could exist someday, even though our current understanding of the laws of physics would seem to preclude them. They feel like technology, not magic.
Contrast that to Odo. Everyone who has ever crumpled up a piece of paper or stepped on a beer can has direct personal experience with the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy. We know that the crumpled paper weighs the same as the flat sheet, even if its volume is less. So when we see Quark set down a drinking glass and watch as the drinking glass suddenly expands into the size and apparent weight of an adult man, it’s jarring. How can Odo weigh as little as a drinking glass one moment, and as much as an adult male human in the next moment? Without some “scientificish” explanation of what happened to his mass, Odo comes off as an impossible being, not a merely alien one. And if the Star Trek universe doesn’t operate under our laws of physics, than what laws does it operate under? What’s next, Sisko whipping out a magic wand to cast a spell to defeat the Dominion?
Star Trek is presumably trying to be science fiction. Science fiction operates under very different rules than fantasy. Both science fiction and fantasy must keep from engendering a sense of disbelief in their audience, but they do that in different ways. Science fiction does that by feeling “scientificish.” Unlike (for example) the Horta in the original series, Odo doesn’t feel like an alien with a plausible alien biology that could really exist. That’s why he’s a problem (even though he’s a great character).
Well, the sentient ocean apparently had some very bad initial first contact experiences with Solids, which apparently gave it the necessary motivation. The Changling female tells us that in her first interaction with Odo (at the end of season two, I think). I guess it felt that hiding and playing dumb just wasn’t a safe enough alternative.
But those things are only “plausible” if you accept psuedoscience. Claptrap words thrown together to sound right (you have heard the story about how the writers would throw in <insert technical crap here> and leave that for someone else to write something that sounded plausible?). If in doubt, blame it on subspace. To me a transporter that also transports conciousness is no more plausible than a shapeshifter. Maybe even less so.
Well, they are traveling faster than light…
You may be right about transporters. Perhaps it is simply not physically possible.
Just like time travel is probably impossible.
History has certainly shown that sci-fi writers never get anything right.
Flying? Impossible!
Even worse, flying to the moon? Outrageous!
Deep see underwater ships? Could never happen!
Communication satellites?
The list goes on and the point is. Perhaps transporters and shapeshifters are physically impossible with the technology and knowledge we currently posses, but who knows what we will know in the future.
It’s “Science” fiction for a reason, because it does describe the possible future.
One can dream and some try to make their dreams come true. If the Wright brothers never tried to fly, we may never have taken to the skies.
The way robotics is developing, Isaac Asimov’s depiction of future is starting to look more likely.
Cloning is now fact and it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to clone a human being. So far, that hasn’t been done because of the political/social implications, but there is no denying that the technology is there. Who knows, maybe it has already happened. I think we will be hearing the big news that a human has been cloned withing years. Yes, within our lifetimes.
I guess it is the reason why we, or should I say I, get knit-picky on some of these episodes, because as it is science fiction, we want it to be as plausible as possible. Sure, it is out there, but one can dream.
Human flight was also once called pseudo-science, good thing that was ignored.
How about we retcon it? Like, Odo splits himself in two, part of him wrapping around/emulating the bar/table, and a small part of him becoming the glass. Or, Odo can become a vapor, and forms himself into the glass and the air around the glass.
I’m not the one saying things are impossible. I’m the one saying we don’t need explanations for everything, ESPECIALLY if the explanations deal with psuedoscience. For example the “if in doubt, it is subspace” way Star Trek deal with things.
Frankly, Star Trek isn’t hard science fiction, which is how some hear seem to want to take it.
It sounds to me we are on the same page then. You are being knit-picky about certain aspects just like I’m being knit-picky about a female shape shifter.
Isn’t it hypocritical then to criticize me and others for knit-picking when you are apparently doing the same?
And for the record, I tend to agree. Sometimes the problems are too often blamed on “subspace”. But then there wouldn’t be a story. And ultimately we are talking about good entertainment.
By the way, if you really want to complain about something, try artificial gravity. That has got to be some serious technology, yet we never see that go wrong. But that has more to do with production costs. I mean if gravity was more realistically depicted, the cost for each episode would probably be astronomical. And that goes for other sci-fi series and movies as well.
I liked the way Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 handled gravity in that book/movie.
No. The transporter, for example, supposedly works by scanning a person, recording the position of every atom in that person’s body, then converting the matter of the person’s body into energy and sending it to the end destination, where it is reconverted back into matter. That sounds perfectly plausible; you have to know something about quantum mechanics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to understand why the transporter could never work. Ditto the warp drive; it’s just a Very Fast and Very Advanced Engine. It only requires the viewer to believe that our current understanding of physics is incomplete, and that there is some way around the speed of light limitation that we currently don’t know about yet. The transporter and the warp drive are “scientificish” - they don’t require us to completely suspend our sense of disbelief, they just require us to believe that our current scientific understanding of the universe isn’t quite right. That’s not too hard to do, because we already know our current scientific understanding isn’t perfect.
Contrast that with Odo. Odo’s a living being, but one that apparently requires no energy input to run. Every living being I’ve ever encountered has needed energy to operate, so right away Odo’s like no living thing I’ve ever seen. And then we see Odo going from the size and weight of a glass of water to the size and weight of an adult man, more or less instantly. WHOA! I’ve never seen ANYTHING, living or nonliving, that can do that. “Where did his extra mass go?” is the very first thing that popped into my head when I first saw Odo transform radically, precisely because everyday experience tells us it had to go somewhere. Quark would notice if the water glass he was picking up weighed 150 lbs, and a 150 lb seagull couldn’t possibly fly. Ergo, he can’t weigh 150 lbs when he’s in those forms. But when he’s walking around in his human form, he moves in ways which imply he’s of a normal weight for his size (he doesn’t bounce when he walks, like the Apollo astronauts did on the moon, and he doesn’t fly halfway across the room when someone punches him, as you’d expect him to do if he was the equivalent of a humanoid balloon, extremely light for his size). So where did the weight go when he transforms?
Odo doesn’t merely defy our current scientific understanding of the universe; he defies our personal everyday experiences of it. That’s why he’s a problem, while the transporter isn’t.
What you’re describing is simply sloppy, lazy writing - and that was indeed a huge problem with Star Trek (in all its various incarnations). It’s one of the things that keeps science fiction fans from regarding the show as good science fiction. And Odo as we saw him on the show was just another example of that lazy writing. There’s nothing inherently implausible about a shapeshifter - but they way they portrayed Odo made it clear they didn’t care enough to think the concept through. An Odo who shapeshifted, but could only transform himself into objects roughly the same mass as his humanoid form would have been much more believable.
Didn’t Odo turn into fire at one point? The Changelings are basically magic, and pretty much all you can do is shrug and move on. Star Trek’s has always been pretty soft.