Clone wolly mammoths and use them for winding really high-tech clock springs.
I take your point. But the sense that I get from the show is the recorded history is much longer than ours. But perhaps I’m mis-remembering older episodes.
Plus there’s also a difference between piecing history together and having actual historical scribes chronicling the events in real time (or closer to real to real time.)
It’s hard to realize from our modern perspective, but Warner Bros. was actually quite progressive about that, for the time. It wasn’t too long before that that wolves were portrayed by dogs in furface, in the minstrel shows. Picture Sam Sheepdog, wearing cheap fake fangs, strumming an Acme banjo (with a neck made of dynamite, of course: Some things haven’t changed).
Except Han didn’t have Free Will in that exchange. He was dealing with a Jedi, who mind controlled him into taking a bad deal. Chewy, who fought in the Clone Wars alongside Ahsoka Tano and Yoda, knew exactly who they were dealing with and went along with it.
Chewy was also instrumental in their return to the Deathstar at the Battle of Yavin for that very reason.
I’m sure you’ve heard the fan theory that Chewie and R2-D2 are both actually top-level secret operatives for the Rebel Alliance, or something like.
I really don’t understand the term “fanwank”.
I always fanwanked it so that the “Kessel Run” was an event that was more series of tasks and maneuvers than distance traveled. He completed them in a short distance, though I guess this would better indicate maneuverability than speed. Then I discovered girls(I’m being literal here), and forgot all about it. Later I realized it was more fantasy than sci-fi, and came to dislike the whole shebang.
I’m sure I have a more current fanwank or 2 kicking around somewhere, if I can remember where i put it.
My weird fanwank - I didn’t like the claim in the Doctor Who TV movie (the 8th Doctor story) that the Doctor was “half human”; when the Meta-crisis Doctor was created at “Journey’s End” I arbitrarily decided that the 8th Doctor, while still in a state of post-regeneration confusion, had a premonition about the MCD which led to his mistaken statement about being half-human.
You know, in a few 4X conquer-the-galaxy computer games, it often makes sense to not immediately wipe weak out AI races, but rather contain them and have lots of skirmishes where you can capture ships and learn their technology…
The last twenty minutes or so of the most recent War of the Worlds is all in Tom Cruise’s head. He and his family die when captured by the Alien walker but he imagines an elaborate escape, unlikely family reunion and happy ending to the invasion.
i get that reference!
I think this has been mentioned here before, but…
The Jetsons and the Flinstones are contemporaries. The Flinstones and their ilk are neo-luddites who are tired of all the high tech shit that their world offers, so they have rebelled and choose to live like their primitive ancestors. But, since they aren’t the brightest people, they don’t know that they aren’t emulating their primitive ancestors. It’s like the Time machine in Idiocracy, or the museum of Old New York in Futurama.
All the “stone-age tech” is actually high tech. There are microprocessors in everything, with wireless communication, so the stone phone actually works just like a regular phone. The cities are far enough apart that the Flinstones don’t have to see the Jetson’s cloud cities. The Jetson-villes know about the Stone Age folk, but they just ignore them.
Now, this is contradicted in some episodes, but even Star Trek has such contradictions, as does every show. You just have to apocraphize those episodes.
I think the last third of Minority Report is also in Tom’s character’s head. He is still in prison, and will stay there.
I also think Mulder and Scully never escaped the mind altering fungus hole in the ground. They just imagined what they really wanted, and they died shortly after the end of the episode. (I won’t say that the rest of the show, the movies, and the crappy revival are all part of their drug-induced fantasy. It would explain the stupidity of some of the later stuff, but I’m not giving Chris Carter an easy out. That’s all on him.)
(I think the end of Brazil ruined a lot of stories for me!)
Balrogs do indeed have wings, but they’re vestigial and can’t support the beastie’s weight.
The Klingons’ appearance keeps changing because they’re different racial subgroups who periodically gain dominance over the others, and with it the opportunity to go out and fight (or cooperate with) alien races.
Tom Cruise’s character in Knight and Day is the same guy from the Mission: Impossible movies, but on a relatively brief psychotic break.
“In America, a hundred years is a long time. In Europe, a hundred miles is a long way.” - Mark Twain
My personal Star Trek fanwank, which I never tire of, is that due to Earth’s post-scarcity utopia 99.99% of all people are content to laze around watching holoporn.
Starfleet is regarded as a bunch of silly eccentrics who like to do dangerous stuff for no reason, like we regard people who climb Mt Everest.
And just like those climbers, it’s not taxes or the industrial might of the Federation that keeps Starfleet funded. It’s all self-funded. If you want to show up to Utopia Planitia shipyards and start working on building starships, they’ll accept the help, because they do it all themselves. And the reason they don’t just have ships with 5 guys running things from a computerized control room is that everyone joins Starfleet to explore the galaxy, so they have to add all those extraneous staterooms holding hundreds of people just to hold them.
Yes, it’s legit dangerous to wander around the galaxy filled with crazed aliens and negative space wedgies, just like it’s legit dangerous to climb Mt Everest. But they aren’t doing it because it’s a job, they’re doing it because it’s fun. Just like you can’t get paid to climb Mt Everest. I mean, how can you pay somebody to be a starship crewman, when back on Earth everything you could ever want comes out of a magic box? The only way you can pay them is by social status within the organization, which is why they have all the ranks and costumes and such.
Note: This really applies firmly only to the Next Gen time period, back in TOS Starfleet was still a legit thing and 99.99% of humanity hadn’t crawled up their own assholes yet. In TOS it’s only 80% of humanity.
This is almost my view. Balrog wings are huge, and would easily be large enough… if they were corporeal. But a balrog’s wings are composed entirely of shadow, and a corporeal being can’t exactly fly with shadow wings.
I like that one, except for one thing.
If there was a possibility of finding cybernetic beings living on the top of Mt Everest, and they didn’t know we lived down at lower altitudes, and now they want to come down the mountain and enslave the rest of us, well, we might not be so kind to mountain climbers.
In other words, you can be lost in your private holodeck, having a three-way with Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, completely ignoring the rest of the universe, but when the whale probe creators come by, they won’t care that you weren’t one of the Star Scouts. Someone might just have to reign those guys in.
If I recall correctly, the novelization of STTMP supports this theory pretty well.
I’d had no problem, at the time, with believing that the Doctor’s dad married a human (a maverick–like father, like son, eh?). But in light of what’s in the new series, I’ve revised it to the following:
Several millenia ago, a young Time Lady, a newlywed, was on a field research assignment on Earth (or perhaps on a secret Interventionist mission–another maverick!) . In danger of being found out, she had to chameleon-arch herself to disguise herself as a human.
Once she was out of danger, and a Time Lady again, she returned to her home planet and her beloved husband. But the young couple became anxious when they found out that she was pregnant–and had been when she used the chameleon arch. What if it had harmed the child in some way?
The geneticists did a full checkup and reassured the worried parents that the child remained fully Gallifreyan. There might be some problems with some of his regenerations, but nothing that couldn’t be helped. Also, some Terran physical traits might show up in some of his future incarnations, but they could deal with that. There was always a possibility that Terran traits might also show up in some of their son’s children or grandchildren, but…well, they could cross that bridge when they came to it, right?