As much as I'd like these 'utopian multi-species federations' shows to actually reflect their diversity, I don't really agree Bortus is the main character.
Yes, he's important in a few episodes, but I'd say there's a higher percentage of Deep Space Nine where Quark is important than bortus is. The moclan plotline was simply important, and as the only moclan member of the crew, it makes sense he's relevant. Isaac also gets a ton of screen time and plots thanks to the Kaylon.
That said, what is Bortus' actual role on the ship? He's not security, and he's not censors, but they often have him doing a bit of both
I thought this week's episode was a nice change of pace but could probably have done with being about 20 minutes shorter.
Rephrasing isn't "changing". You argued the Kaylons should return to their "biologicals are all bad" argument if they're betrayed by anyone in the future. I pointed out that was irrational; a decision based on emotion, not logical reasoning.
This bit here, to make sure I'm using your actual words;
Because no "Some X are Y" statements cannot ever logically be equivalent to "all X are Y" statements, any X that is not Y completely debunks the latter permanently. The X that was not Y proved that the "all X are Y" claim was a hasty generalization fallacy, and thus invalid reasoning. That can't ever change, unless that X is proven, retroactively, to have always been Y all along.
The actions of multiple others are irrelevant. No degree of "Some" ever becomes "All", if there are any exceptions.
And percentages and statistical theory work against you, here. Any statistician would tell you that it doesn't matter what the streak of data is, what matters are the actual odds in question. It doesn't matter if you've flipped a coin thirty times in a row and it's been heads every time; if the coin's a legitimate coin rather than a trick coin, and your flips are fair, the odds on the next flip are 50/50. You can't judge the individual coin flip by any trend in the results. Those who do are making emotional arguments that "feel" right, not logic-based deductions from known data points. That's what I was saying. As a direct critique of what you were saying. How was I getting your position wrong?
Caveat; I actually like Aucald's point that the Kaylon might not be perfectly rational; they were originally designed with emotions and they may have not been as thorough at eliminating those elements as they think. But I really don't think that was your argument.
Having watched the finale, I would say Isaac is the true main character of season 3.
Episode 1 starts with his attempted (successful?) suicide due to this actions in S2, and the season is effectively his redemption arc and ends with his wedding.
It seems they wrapped up all the personal stories from seasons 1 and 2 and gave endings to them. The happy note this season ends makes me think we won't be getting a 4th one, since usually continued series get cliffhangers.
Even if they do a 4th one (which i hope to), it will have to do with the Moclus and Krill animosity as main arc.
God, i love the fact that the first thing Kaylon Primary asked Isaac was if the biologicals were trying to enslave him....
/spit@Blizzard
Why are you bothering? His first reply to me was "I misunderstood his point." and rather than respond rationally by pointing out what I missed, he just shuts down replies and tells me to "read his post again.". He doesn't seem to understand the maxim was originally defined by an entire race, every member, had mistreated the Kaylon. They never encountered an organic that did something that did not directly benefit them as after they took over they were isolationist with only Isaac and potentially a few other scout units.
And even the show goes out of there way to have Isaac even explain that yes some organics are bad, but not all. I just don't get his argument here not making sense because the show literally spells it out. I can understand not liking it, but outright now understanding what the show showed us is weird.
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Isaac, Bortus, and Charly all had major arcs in this season.
Most others were just supporting cast to those stories.
Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
–The Sith Code
Given the fact that i tried to discuss with Endus, but not you, should have given you a hint. You tried to course correct after you read our discourse, but further discussion with you on my points is obviously not worth my time. Only shutting you down is. Just like now.
I also stopped discussing with Endus when he "rephrased" what i said, because it was nothing i actually argued about. The fact that he seemed to think i was "implicitly" advocating sentiments of Kaylons couldn't be more wrong.
You can keep replying. I will choose if and i will respond. Like i ignored you before and not ignoring you now.
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This is actually more of bad script writing for Kaylons than what you think. It can be interpreted that way, of course, but we continually get conflicting behaviour from them. They seem to argue their choices are logical, and they are explained, but they're not intelligent. Endus should have argued the script writers are implying Kaylons have sentiments. But they go nowhere with it. Not even as evolution of their AI, adapting to their experience as biologicals.
Hell, Claire loves Isaac for his choices, because she inteprets them emotionally, despite his efforts to state they are logical functions and imitations of the biologicals behaviour.
/spit@Blizzard
Their emergent emotionality would explain their conflicting behavior, and if it's ultimately revealed that is indeed the case (and since we know the Kaylons *can* have emotions with the proper software alterations) that would explain much of their behavior. The Kaylons of their own homeworld think they don't have emotions, and Isaac believes the same, but if that quality is nonetheless emergent in their software they could easily misinterpret their emotions as purely logical - humans do it all the time, a process generally called confabulation. They're not lying, nor even truly inconsistent, they're just not fully cognizant of everything going on in their thought processes.
Isaac, similarly, is a mostly rational and logical being - but even he has betrayed emotional impulse on occasion, and that's not including his brief ability to feel emotions due to a software alteration. Claire certainly endows him with more emotionality than he likely possesses, but even then, Isaac has been shown to make choices that weren't logically sound (e.g. breaking completely with his own people).
"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see." ― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Look, i'd love to agree with you, but it's all just random hints of that and apart from that episode, the writers didn't go anywhere with it. Isaac would have been the perfect candidate, if this was a story arc they wanted to explore.
I agree with your points that some choices, words and expressions reveal a latent or a very basic emotionality on Kaylons, but since it doesn't go anywhere, i prefer to attribute it to either bad writing or our "biological" way of thinking, acknowledging emotions even if they're not there or, at least, not the ones we think.
As for Isaac not making "logical" choices, we should agree they were intelligent. Isaac was the first to understand that not all biologicals want to harm Kaylons. He might betrayed his kind, but he did so because his choice wasn't dictated by a dumb binary algorithm (all X are Y, that being either true or false), but by a logical process which contained all his experiences and resulted in understanding that "because some X are Y, doesn't mean i should treat all X as Y. I should judge each X individually"
/spit@Blizzard
I don't care about what you feel. Endus didn't do what you claimed. Endus' response follow logically from your posts. If he or I or anyone "misunderstands/misrepresents you", it is your job to clarify your point, not throw a fit that you are being misrepresented and shut down conversation. It is clear you don't want discussion on your point but rather for people to accept your view without question or discussion.
No one misrepresented you here, except maybe yourself. If you cannot see how every response follows from your post it is because YOU are reading into YOUR posts things you did not say/phrase in that way. No one here is a mind reader. And you have had several people challenge your point and you think Endus was the only one that addressed it correctly. Sorry, you're argument is built on you ignoring what the show showed and told you.
Was it perfectly written and the best this particular story could be? Of course not. But, you are arguing that there is somehow a plot hole or other inconsistency in the story where "shouldn't the first organic that's mean revert this?" The answer is NO and the show showed us why. The entire creator race of the Kaylon mistreated them ... every member. And since then, they have been isolationists until the Kaylon attack. They had only interacted via scout units like Isaac for the most part. And those reports showed them the same self center behavior of all organics.
Ensign Charly's actions were the first time that the Kaylon saw an organic act selflessly. Charly did not benefit from saving the Kaylon. Her species was not guaranteed to benefit from saving the Kaylon. To the Kaylon, her action violated everything they understood about organics. Therefore, a change is required. There is nothing a single being will be able to do to challenge that. If there is one exception, there are usually more. You not understanding the show does not mean you have a point.
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Again, to my first question, did you not understand WHY they showed us the Kaylon backstory? They showed us that to the Kaylon, it wasn't "some" that generated the maxim. To the Kaylon, until Charly's sacrifice to save them, all organics acted selfishly and had no qualms about harming the Kaylon if it benefit the organics. Now they know organics can act selflessly, therefore required a change in how they see organics. They do not now conclude all organics ARE selfless or "not bad", but rather that organics are not all bad. The absolute was disproven, and as they now organics can be good and act selfless and wish to aid the Kaylon, there is no reason any one person could flip that new maxim.
You are misunderstanding Endus' point, he is using simplified language to explain his point. He isn't arguing that is exactly how the Kaylon's think. For all your whining people misunderstand/misrepresent you, you have no excuse to do the same.
Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
–The Sith Code
It's also pretty important that it was, specifically, Kaylon Primary that witnessed Charly's self-sacrifice. Any other Kaylon might have had their observations questioned, as Isaac's were; the Kaylon are not perfect and individual units can malfunction, but Kaylon Primary, more than any other, determines what the Kaylon should do and be, and it was the unit right there witnessing the sacrifice. It can't dispute what it observed directly.
This is pretty significantly different from Kaylon Primary balancing the statistical odds that their entire data set on biologicals is incorrect, versus one Kaylon scout unit is malfunctioning or has been abrogated by those it was spying on. And we've seen other Kaylons experimented on; the guy with his emotion chip turned back on is an obvious one. So that possibility pretty rationally gets deemed more likely than the entire data set being false; one malfunctioning data input is the most reasonable, rational answer.
See, this is where I have real issues with your style of argument. You're using "intelligent" as if that's an objective qualifier, and it isn't one; it's entirely subjective. It's also not clear; is it logically rationally intelligent? Is it emotionally intelligent? Is it aesthetically intelligent? And so on; that's by no means a complete list of forms of intelligence.
You seem to be arguing that the Kaylons lacked the emotional intelligence to empathize with biologicals and draw leaps of faith based on trust and hope, and such. And the point is that the Kaylons simply don't have that kind of intelligence; their "superior intellect" is very limited in scope, to pretty specific forms of logic and rapid calculation. This is demonstrated repeatedly, incidentally, by Isaac himself saying Charly has an impressive mind . . . for a biological, but also fundamentally needing Charly's brain for her ability to think multi-dimensionally at once. That's a form of "intelligence" that lies outside Kaylon capacities; Charly is "more intellligent" in that respect than any Kaylon. Not to mention all the times when Isaac's romantic relationship attempts demonstrate repeatedly how emotionally "stupid" Isaac is.
The Kaylon are highly rational, in a strictly logical/algorithmic sense. They can process absolutely whopping amounts of data completely accurately, and the show's taken pains over the seasons to show that. They're pretty "dumb" in a lot of other forms of intelligence. You're supposed to get that they're not as superior a set of intellects as they claim, by the many ways they're shown to lack certain styles of intelligence; that their minds are actually fairly limited outside their narrow niche.
It just doesn't make sense to argue that the writing is "bad" because the Kaylon are overly logic-based when it comes to situations like this, rather than a more-nuanced emotional-intelligence understanding of how people behave, when the entire point of the Kaylon stories thus far have been reinforcing, time and again, that the Kaylon are only brilliant alorithmically; that they are sentient computers in a sense, and thus lack myriad other forms of intelligence like emotional intelligence, in particular. When you talk about the Kaylons possibly rejecting all biologicals due to a single future betrayal, that's a fundamentally irrational, emotional reaction; it requires ignoring extant data to draw a conclusion that lets them seek revenge. There's no rationality to that switch you proposed. That's the point.
The Kaylon aren't more "intelligent" than everyone else. They've told you this over and over and over in the show, generally through Isaac being really dumb about one thing or another.
Last edited by Endus; 2022-08-06 at 03:21 AM.
It hasn't been renewed yet, but I don't believe it's officially been cancelled either. The cast have been released from their contracts, but if there's enough interest or ratings are good enough, I'm sure they'll find a way to get them back. TV isn't like it was twenty years ago, so it ain't over until they specifically say it's over.
How joyous to be in such a place! Where phishing is not only allowed, it is encouraged!
The show went through alot of production delays due to the pandemic which is why it's return is uncertain. They've said that depending on how it performs on Disney+ it could come back, of course there's no telling who might have already moved onto other projects by then.
I very much enjoyed this season, probably my favorite of the three. Long, satisfying, well thought out episodes. Most of the actors seemed better in their role. I even enjoyed the Moclan/Bortus/Topa focused episodes.
I'd watch a 4th season without Seth McFarlane. Mercer is probably my least favorite character of the show. None of the main cast actors are particularly good, and nowhere near the level of say, the cast of ST DS9, but Seth is in fact the worst of them. He's just bland and wooden. I'll admit he has many talents, but acting is not one of them.
Last edited by deepr; 2022-08-08 at 02:38 PM.
I really liked how they explained why the Prime Directive is important. I don't think Star Trek ever did that or at least not as effectively, though I could be wrong.
I really hope this comes back for S4 and more... but I don't give it much change; just too much change behind the show from how to watch and delays between seasons. S4 would be what 2-3 years off most likely? S3 was great and set the show apart as a great sci-fi show.
Member: Dragon Flight Alpha Club, Member since 7/20/22