And Odin took his vengenace on Hod as well as Baldr, going so far as to rape the giantess Rind so as to beget Vali specifically for that purpose. (He needed an assassin unrelated to Baldr on his mother’s side, so he could not simply sire a child on his wife. Also Odin is, well, evil.)
Imagine if Q had gone wenching that decade rather than screwing around with Picard & Company. The Federation does not then encounter the Borg until the latter are knocking on the door of the Alpha Quadrant; Starfleet is still in its silly “we are not a military organization” thing made possible only because of so many years of peace with the Klingons and the Romulans being busy behind their borders. They get slaughtered.
It’s off topic, but do any of the Trek novels ever speculate what the Romulans were doing for so many years that led to the long "peace’ between them & the Federation?
I’ve always taken it that Guinan had acquired some specific anti-Q mojo. Hell, she may have even gotten it from the Suzie Plakson Q. It’s clear that Guinan and Delancie Q had already encountered one another and that she has interfered with him before, and that SP-Q can, at best, just barely stand JD-Q.
Yeah, I know, I’m ignoring my own adomition to disregard Voyager.
Agreed with most that Q is neither good nor evil, but a willful trickster. And I understand Picard not being able to play along; he was responsible for 1000+ lives on board. When Q shows up, Picard has no idea what “mischief” they’re all in for – and some crew deaths can be placed squarely on Q’s plate.
It’s fun for us to watch, but realistically, I can’t imagine someone living through Q’s pranks would be as amused by 'em. Well, except for those who saw Beverly turned into an Irish Setter.
The novels do tend to paint Q in a more negative light. Q-in-Law has Q deliberately screwing with two young lovers, and with his interference the plot nearly resembles Romeo and Juliet step for step. His motive, as he explains it, was to understand what it is to love and be loved, but he gets nasty enough that it’s probable he’s just full of spite and is using the ‘immortal trying to understand mortals’ line as an excuse.
The novels are essentially fanfic, though, so it’s difficult to say how much they should be relied on.
A truly evil immortal and omnipotent being would have been able to leave more permanent scars on the populace, not just on humanity but all races in the quadrant. Q could have set the Klingons and Romulans and the Ferrengi and the Federation and the Bajorans and the Cardassians all fighting one another in a six-way bloody battle for no discernable purpose. Q could have transformed them all into mice and had them devoured by wolves. Q could have exposed everyone to the one thing he or she feared most. A truly evil Q would have done these things and then gloated about it. So everyone would know who was to blame.
In general, however, Q left things almost exactly as he found them. While he did some evil things, it’s hard for me to say he’s an evil being at heart, because with his power and knowledge he could have done so much worse.
Did you miss the part where Odin rapes the giantess to beget the avenger?
And we still haven’t touched on the meanness in this tale. Part of Loki’s punishment involves his sons Narfi and Vali, the former of whom the Aesir turns into a wolf and sets upon the other. Once Narfi has killed VAli, the Aesir chase him off, then use the dead son’s entrails to bind Loki with, turning the guts to stone once Loki is bound. Then, of course, there is the snake with the acidic venom set to drip upon Loki’s face till Ragnarok.
And Thor kicked a dwarf into Baldr’s funeral pyre for no especial reason.
Do not annoy the Aesir. Do not go to the funeral of one of the Aesir. If you find yourself in a situation in which someone you are related to has annoyed the Aesir, commit suicide immediately.
Shockingly, that story is not in Colum’s The Children of Odin*.
Well the Aesir weren’t as bad as the Olympians (who, as we all know, were pure, unblinking, puppy-raping kitten-strangling hamster-barbecuing evil-- they weren’t all that nice; and Odin was vile enough to fit in quite well with Zeus and his villainous brood.
Thor, of course, rocks. He’s the god of the common man, not of kings & warriors. I’m willing to give him a pass because it was his brother’s funeral; I’m willing to bet the dwarf made an ill-timed joke.
I wasn’t arguing that Loki wasn’t guilty, just that, as far as the Aesir was concerned, Hod was equaly guilty of the original murder. But the Aesir were fairly bloodthirsty and not given to niceties. I’m sure after Loki was bound with his son’s intestines, Odin said, “Yo, Frey, go find Laufey and strip her naked and drop her into a pit filled with horny bears. I’d do it myself, but I need to consult the runes and make sure I haven’t overlooked anyone I could be taking vengeance upon.”
I think Q is Q. Neither generally good nor generally evil. That said, DeLancie Q is a bit juvenile & does some dangerous things, without being actively malicious.
In D&D terms, he’s chaotic neutral, with maximum power.
You have to understand (as much as humans can) the Q perspective. Here is a race of beings who can not just do anything, but can make anything have happened or will happen. They can pick and choose out of all possible different timelines all possible things. Pick any imaginable alternate universe, and the Q can make it so by an act of will. The Guardian of Forever is a child’s toy compared to what the Q can do.
Which inevitably leads to a certain degree of ennui. If you can make anything have happened, what should you do? From what we see in “All Good Things”, the Q want to see if there’s a version of history where some species transcends mere time and starts to see history from the outside, the way they do.
The Q Picard and company encounter is in charge of one part of this project. Q’s bullying and contradictory nature is probably due to his own internal conflicts: he’s a cynic who secretly wishes to be proven wrong. Part of the problem is that despite being hyperintelligent and having a vast intellectual knowledge of humans, Q doesn’t really understand humanity very well. He has a sort of cartoonish, cliched view of human society because he (initially) finds it hard to understand that what humans do seems important to them. The very concept of having to work within time with limited resources to achieve an outcome is alien to someone who can reorder reality with a wave of a hand.
Q is in some ways like Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, of whom it is said
ETA. I also suspect that Q quite simply has bad taste. He probably has the Q-Continum equivalent of pink flamingos on his lawn.
Q: “Simple: Change the gravitational constant of the universe.”
LaForge: “What?”
Q: “Change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the mass of the asteroid.”
LaForge: “Redefine gravity. And how the hell am I supposed to do that?”
Q: “You just DO it. GAHH! Where’s that doctor, anyway?”
Data: “Geordi is trying to say that changing the gravitational constant of the universe is beyond our capabilities.”
Q: “Well, then… never mind.”
