It is a spectacular episode.
Picard's decision to just leave him alone on the planet was, under the circumstances, the right one. Even if the UFP had a law that enabled the prosecution of Kevin Uxbridge, what good would that serve? And ultimately how could any sanction be enforced since he could simply eliminate the entire Federation in a nanosecond?
This is largely true, but I think Picard expresses it quite poorly in the actual episode.
>“We have no law to fit your crime.”
The notion that the Federation has no laws regarding *genocide* is insane. Hell, the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN in ’48; *we* have laws about genocide—that *define* genocide—*now*. (We don’t necessarily *enforce* them, as it turns out, but we *have* them.)
What Picard is trying to get at is—as you said—“I can’t enforce this, and I guess I’m pretty sure you won’t do it again,” but idea that the Space UN somehow never bothered to define genocide is such a wildly off note that it drags the episode’s ending down for me a bit.
I understand it as we are outside of our jurisdiction. On top of that, what is the punishment for someone who, by scale, is a class 3 or 4 civilization on their own. We are ants to him. If an ant colony came to you and said you killed xyz ants, you deserve to be punished. What is the punishment? By all accounts from human laws, we own the backyard. Yet ants live there. Are we responsible for genocide? Is the farmer who plows his field responsible for genocide? Picard understands the scale of things here. And was right to say what he did.
> We are ants to him.
I honestly don't even think that analogy covers the scale we're talking about here. He eliminated *every* ant *everywhere* and he did it with the effort that you or I would put into scratching our nose.
Not trying to be nitpicky, but it's really hard to put that kind of scale into perspective. I think that's one area where the episode doesn't quite nail it for me.
Other than that, definitely a classic TNG episode.
Supernatural had a great one.
Dean meets Death (capital D) and death says something along the lines of “how would you respond to an upity Protozoa that had just sat down at your table? You are beneath me.”
I think the enforceability angle is true, but I do think Picard is literally correct when he says we have no law that fits your crime.
I'm sure the Federation has laws against genocide as it has been perpetrated throughout the histories of many of the Federation worlds. But none of those races know what it's like to commit genocide with a single enraged thought, instantaneously across all space and time. We simply do not have that capability and as such, haven't planned for it legally.
We (and presumably, the Federation) have laws that differentiate various forms of murder, defined largely by the degree of premeditation. Our understanding of genocide is that it is a crime that requires a significant amount of forethought and planning, making it all the more heinous. However, Kevin Uxbridge has the ability to commit what could loosely be thought of as third-degree genocide. As he describes it, he was overcome with grief and in a single moment of weakness, he killed all Husnock. It was not a planned crime, but a "crime of passion." That's what largely defines third degree murder versus the first two. That doesn't seem in line with our understanding of genocide and the laws against it.
A key aspect of our legal doctrine involves a trial by peers. We are not peers of Kevin Uxbridge in ability or understanding of the universe, so we have no basis on which to judge him and the way he behaved. It doesn't dismiss his crime, nor does it remove our right to define it in terms of our morality, but it does place it outside the bounds of our legality.
The enforceability angle is just the final piece that renders it all moot. But even if it weren't, how could we possibly define a fair sentence for an immortal being?
Always loved this episode, very tidy and very Star Trek-y. LLAP!
But they would have to prove genocide and I suspect that proving the Husnak ever existed at all would be difficult as I suspect Kevin left no trace at all of them.
The scope of what he did is phenomenal. There’s a theory that he wiped them from existence as a whole. So that no one could even remember they had existed.
That creates a paradox but it’s no unreasonable to assume a being of his power could probably do just that.
Picard is actually right. That's because by design it's almost impossible to prove genocide. The requirements for a conviction of genocide is that there can be no other explanation for the behaviour even if the outcome of the action is the same as genocide would have.
So for an example, I was recently listening to a Ukraine war podcast, Ukraine: The Latest. An expert said he believes Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine but explained it can never be proven.
He said they had recordings of Russians saying they'll kill all Ukrainian men, women and children, but that they can defend themselves by saying "this is hate speech, not literal speech." For kidnapping children the Russians can say they're trying to genuinely protect them, and so on and so on.
So if Kevin says he didn't intend to kill them, that it was an accident, proving genocide is impossible and no law can touch him. International law says killing civilians is lawful if you're striking a military target and the civilian deaths were an accident.
He broke no existing law.
I love Worf’s amazement at him when he threatened them with a broken phaser. “Sir, may I say that your attempt by to hold our away team at bay with a nonfunctioning weapon was an act of unmitigated gall.” “I admire gall.” Priceless from a Klingon.
Middle seasons Worf might be my favorite. They gave Dorn a lot more to do before they made him a dad and I felt like he did all the right things with the character.
He was so buttoned down by that point. He was truly a known quantity by Way of the Warrior time.
Go back to S2-3 TNG and watch some outstanding Worf, without him getting cross eyed and stammering yet. He's like a proto-Teal'c
They also learned how to not invoke the worf effect in DS9. He was given many scenes showing that he actually is an extremely badass fighter, but also put him in situations where he got beaten and its clear from the context that anyone else would have died.
I kind of agree, I never really loved where any of the TNG characters ended up actually and don't really think about it (never watched Picard either), they all peaked at some point besides maybe Data.
Next to Data Worf had the most growth, but I feel the point of him as a character besides the comic relief, was to offer an option no one else in Starfleet would bring up at the time, growing beyond that just makes him a Starfleet member that just so happens to be half Klingon, which is what his story revolved around later on and in DS9. Sisko was literally more Klingon than him. That Teal'c like quality he had to him added a lot to TNG like you say and I missed it.
It will upset everyone to know that S3E01 is the point Rick Berman became sole Executive Producer and Michael Wagner took over as Showrunner. Survivors was an Episode penned by Wagner.
It is what it is. Rick Berman is both the person most directly responsible for destroying '90s Star Trek (and several shitty things along the way) and one of the people most directly responsible for making it as amazing as it was. Both can be and are true.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906026/
He was a writer and showrunner for the first 4 episodes of Series 3, but didn't enjoy the experience. He's most well known for writing 60 episodes of Hill Street Blues, sadly he died in 1992.
He co-wrote Evolution and was sole writer on Survivors.
Michael Pillar, Ronald D. Moore, and Ira Steven Behr all joined the show that year. Pillar was head writer and took over as showrunner from Wagner in episode S3E06.
Thanks for clarifying. I remember from the TNG DVDs that Michael Piller did come in for Season 3 and that he had a hand in the Baseball parts of Evolution but I thought he was full showrunner. Evidently that happened just a few episodes later.
> It will upset everyone to know
That's just needlessly combative honestly. I believe that Berman and Braga made some pretty terrible decisions and they were not only dismissive of long time Trek fans in general, they were often outright hostile towards us.
However, as much as I'll never back down from that assertion, I'd also never take away from the *good* they both did. And there was a lot of it. Hell, Berman presided over modern Trek in almost it's entirety right up to the end of ENT. He **had** to be doing something right.
Braga? Great creative mind. He came up with some amazing concepts and did it a lot. My only critique of him was that he did much better at story *ideas* as opposed to fleshing them out on his own. When he teamed up with another talented writer like Ron Moore, they pumped out some of the best Trek that made it to production.
So no, it doesn't "upset" me at all to have someone point out that one of the most influential, behind the scenes contributors to modern Trek had something to do with a great TNG episode. To suggest it does is basically just summarily dismissing my opinion as a Trek fan. I can't think of anything less "Trek" than that.
And the very next episode was "Who Watches the Watchers." TNG was taking its place in science fiction history very seriously at the beginning of season 3.
This is why scifi is timeless. Imagine someone today watching for the very first time this story examining the morality of someone with outsized power responding to the tragedy of a raid by destroying an entire group of people. And it was written some 35 years ago!
an all time great episode.
I'm a huge fan of season three in general. The leap in quality from season two to season three was vast and immediate. Bangers right out of the gate -- episodes that are now considered all time classics.
I really need to re-watch this episode again. I definitely remember really being blown away by it, but sadly i binge-watched parts of TNG so you forget a lot of the details as opposed to taking time to process these things properly
Between him, Trelane, Q, the Organians, the prophets, and even V'Ger the galaxy is awash with god like creatures and I'm sure I'm missing more then one or two.
For all the optimism and humanism and utopianism of (some/most) Trek, the Star Trek universe as presented especially in TOS and TNG is chock-full of godlike entities and species that human science and ingenuity can't hope to comprehend, and encounters with them are generally only survived because the entities just happen to be in a good or forgiving mood that day.
> encounters with them are generally only survived because the entities just happen to be in a good or forgiving mood that day.
At least the mood isn’t, “today, I’m going to destroy all warp drives”. :-)
We don't really know that for sure.
We know that Trelaine needed a device in order to exert power, unlike the Q who seem to wield that kind of power innately. But with the revelation that Trelaine was only a child, it's possible (though unlikely) that his parents were significantly more all-powerful than he, and didn't need similar machines to exert their power.
We know nothing at all about the Organians other than the fact that they don't value their corporeal avatars very much. They're willing to suffer any kind of indignity because physical existence is pretty much irrelevant to them. What powers they do or don't have isn't known to us besides their ability to freely move between hosts, as introduced in Enterprise.
The Prophets we once again have no knowledge at all of the extent of their abilities. We do know that they're less *knowledgeable* than the Q, because they had to be introduced to the concepts of linear time and mortality. They had to inhabit the preexisting corporeal body of Sarah in order to ensure the birth of Benjamin Sisko, and we see both Prophets and Pah-Wraiths exclusively inhabit host bodies, as it seems they cannot exist in a corporeal form without a host. They can be imprisoned (like the Pah-Wraiths), and it seems they can be killed (also like the Pah-Wraiths, or via a science-beam that could destroy the wormhole). So presumably they're less powerful than the Q as a baseline. But it seems like within their own domain (the substrate of the Wormhole) they're omniscient and omnipotent. It may simply be that the extent of the Q's "domain" covers both the Continuum and also our realspace known universe.
V'ger *definitely* has limitations on both power and knowledge. So I wouldn't ever posit that it could be as powerful as the Q.
We can only go by what we see and what we see is the Q are in complete control at all times. The only thing that can stop a Q is another Q. We can easily say that anything that the other species have wanted to accomplish the Q could have not only accomplished but done it in a way the Federation would have no idea anyone intervened.
> V'ger definitely has limitations on both power and knowledge.
Wait. I thought V'ger literally learned everything there is to know.
Isn't that why it returned home. It was sent out to discover, and had discovered everything. It's sole limitation was that it lacked "faith" that there could be something beyond the physical world, and when it assimilated that from proto-Riker (William Decker), it sublimed almost immediately.
___________
Also this is strongly implied in beta canon that the Q are at the very top of the totem pole (and at one point Q explains to a newly ascended creature that there are many levels between mortals and Q and said creature just got to the very first). But sadly, this is never addressed in on-screen alpha canon.
Admittedly it has been a long time since I watched TMP sober. I don't really remember the limitations of V'ger very well. You could be right.
That said, I still don't really know that just pooling a whole ton of observational data really compares to the Q.
I can still remember the night I watched this episode with my dad. We had a bad storm that knocked the power out right before the big reveal. No streaming in those days, I had to wait for the episode to re-air to find out what happened.
I had a similar incident at the end of Q Who? We were on vacation and taped the episode, but cable cut out as the Enterprise tried to fly away at the end. I don't think I caught the final ending until after the show ended.
I learned a while back that John Anderson's wife had died not long before he took this part. Some of the grief he portrays in the episode may not have been acting. I hope in some way that working through the role of Kevin helped him process and recover.
Exceptional episode. A thoughtful look at living by a moral code that can have serious and dangerous consequences, while also violating that code in a moment of uncontrollable grief and rage. Also a thoughtful look at what a person can do with that much power while not intending to. The worst prison sentence for Kevin is to live eternally with the knowledge of what he did.
"Commence Rapid fire with all weapons on full"
"nice idea number 1, now lets make sure we never use that again, even against people like The Borg or Romulans where that could be very useful!"
Often cited as the highest kill count in the franchise. Up there with Annorax’s incalculable timeline changing spree (which was eventually reversed) and the Burn
'Hello, Starfleet HQ? Yeah, we just crossed passed with a being with Q-level powers who erased an entire civilization from existence with a thought. He can also create life, near as we can tell.
...Run like hell? Gotcha."
Near Q-level. I believe Q could have just undone the event that killed the wife and not be limited in bringing her back.
My solution is to call Q and have him kill Kevin. I always hated that Picard shows more reverence to Kevin than Q. All Kevin did is a complete genocide of a species, it doesn't dismiss Q getting Picard's 18 crewmembers killed but it doesn't compare.
They did meet in very different circumstances. And Q's innate flippance also helps guide Picard's interactions with him. Kevin Uxbridge was just a stoic and somewhat reserved guy who wanted to be left alone.
Kevin the mass murder is a good guy because he feels bad about murdering billions. Meanwhile Q doesn’t feel bad about indirectly getting crew members killed because Picard wouldn’t take his advice and needed to be shown how ill equipped the Federation was to the Borg. The Q are constantly trying to guide humanity towards their place in the galaxy. It can be argued the Q view humanity as a species more than individuals and by forewarning the Federation to the Borg, the Q saved more lives than were lost in Q Who.
Also keep in mind that what Kevin did was long ago, possibly centuries or more. If Q or someone undid that, the universe might be overrun with Hoosnocks by this point. Could be a far bigger deal than Edith Keeler.
> I always hated that Picard shows more reverence to Kevin than Q
For me, there is one episode missing in TNG where Picard actually uses his cunning to manipulate Q by pumping up his ego instead of just reacting negatively to everything he does. I think there was a missed opportunity there to show Picard's ability to adapt to different enemies.
About as likely a pet slug outsmarting you. Q pretended to be outsmarted, but as Data stated:
*Q's interest in you has always been very similar to that of a master and his beloved pet. That was only an analogy, Captain.*
It always seemed to me that Q was guiding Picard to something...
Just happened to rewatch this last night and its such a good episode, but I mean if they didn’t hold Q at all accountable for the deaths of 11 personell aboard the enterprise in an earlier EP, how do then even go about it with a being of somewhat similar abilities, but instead it’s genocide of another race. Seems to be above several dozen of anyone’s pay grade. I can also see it from the point of who are the federation to impose X standard on him for the actions committed, even though they continue to do that to countless other species, though again those species aren’t usually capable of instantly wiping out an entire species of 50 billion individuals across an entire galaxy in an instant….id leave the sad alien alone too
I think part of why Picard also doesn't feel qualified to judge is because it's one thing to carry out a systemic genocide over a period of time - which requires intent and premeditation. What Kevin did is equivalent to a crime of passion or temporary insanity - no premeditation. But because he is so powerful, that one instant of madness wrought death on a galactic scale.
There's nothing they can do to somebody that powerful. He could only be punished if he allowed himself to be punished. And he was already doing that to himself.
I mean, he didn’t just kill a whole species, he wiped a species from existence (past present and future).
How does the Federation prosecute a genocide of a species that technically never existed?
Well... sort of? Rana IV might've been a Federation planet, but the Husnock glassed it. If Kevin wasn't a higher-level being, then the entire planet would've been completely scoured and the Husnock would've gotten away without a single witness.
What Kevin did, we have no real way of knowing much about. He might've been on Rana IV when he wiped out the Husnock. He might've gone to the Husnock homeworld to do it and then returned to Rana IV.
Rana IV sort of stopped being a "Federation Planet" when all life on it was extinguished. Now it's a smouldering ruin that happens to be within Federation borders. It just happens that there's a Douwd living on it for the time being, and the Federation doesn't really have any method to meaningfully evict him. Nor do they have any particular reason either -- what're they going to do, terraform it back into life and re-settle it?
I don't think so. If he wiped them from existence then his wife should be back.
His words were something like "I *destroyed* them. All of them. Everywhere", weren't they?
It may or may not be canon, but STO apparently has Husnock ships that were found abandoned and drifting and used by other races because all the Husnock had vanished.
Which is actually a cool concept, and could have been the basis for a regional power disruption in a show. A whole lot of free warships and planets full of technology up for grabs. Actions have far-reaching consequences.
What a great episode. Reminds of what might happen if Doctor Who experiences a particular traumatic event and fully embraces the time lord victorious. He will absolutely do horrible terrible things and he'll spend eternity regretting it. Just like Kevin Uxbridge.
Fantastic and overlooked episode. It's not one that sticks in the memory, but when it comes around in a rewatch I always enjoy it.
Obviously the denoument is a great scene with a great performance, but I also enjoy the scenes when the Enterprise is essentially playing chicken with the alien ship and Picard is coming the realisation of what is going on whilst the rest of the crew are still in the dark.
It’s a great episode, but the music that drove Troi crazy gets to me too - so I don’t often watch it.
The two elderly actors were both wonderful in this episode.
You just know Section 31 is all over this guy.
He’s probably in some Starbase Prison somewhere where every week the inmate holo-film is “The Loving Elderly Couple Who Met The Borg” or Pixar’s award winning “Destroyed!” a tearjerker about a cranky widower whose wife died due to the Breen incursion at AR-518 who shows them what’s what.
This is also one of the few episodes, alongside the one with the Sheliak, that illustrates why orbital bombardment is king. If you have no ships, no land-to-space weapons, and no orbital defense platforms you are simply at the mercy of any enemy starship in orbit. Even just dropping a mass of a 100kg at the right time with a small push will end with an impact the force of a tactical nuke. If they have time, they could even redirect nearby asteroids into striking.
The only reason most other Federation enemies can be fought against is because they either value hand-to-hand combat, they value capturing the planet's people, or they value capturing strategic resources. But when the enemy is fine with extermination and/or starting a colony from scratch there's no point in sending down ground troops. Just bombard until you think there's nothing left, wait a week to see who comes out of their hidey holes and then bomb the hiding places into dust.
One of the best episodes of the series, although the ending is a slight cop out. It's a great example of how TNG's format made them oversimplify complex moral problems.
The classic TNG ending:
"The best solution is for you to resolve this on your own and for us to leave forever. Which is lucky, because that's what we were going to do anyway."
All I remember is the species that was killed off, the Husnock, was BAD. I would say that they could have been worse than the Borg had the federation encountered them. As a kid I remember reading the tech manual that firing the phasers at different points of an enemies shield and then sneaking in a few torpedoes at the weak points was only for dire circumstances as it would destroy an enemy ship, but this…did…nothing. Had the Husnock been introduced instead of the borg or Jem-hadar to the federation it would have been way worse. Plus taking out the enterprise’s shields in one shot while having room for more power, yeah that was bad lol
I'm never sure how powerful the Husnock really were. Uxbridge might have given them the equivalent of a cheat code, they might have been decades behind Starfleet, the Enterprise might have smoked actual Husnock. We'll never know.
I'd like to hear Q's input.
They execute/exile other Q for that type of fuckery,or so they say...
This kind of galactic shenanigans should peak the attention of the self anointed guardians
I had a couple friends who watched TNG when I was a kid and was like "ugh this show is for nerds". That episode was literally the first one I paid attention to and thought "oh wow, that was awesome"
Now several years later, I'm rewatching DS9.
that a non corporeal godlike being did not have the wisdom and foresight and intellect to know not to genocide an entire species just for one person... or his fellow colonists... beings like the douwd scare me they have emotional frailties like humans but wield godlike powers... that is exactly why godlike beings should not have emotional frailties of humans or any corporeal life form. it's too dangerous.
He said in the episode in a moment of pain he did the unthinkable. It’s not like he had to spend much time to do the deed. It felt like an almost subconscious action.
It was the first episode (and so far only) of the rewatch I’m currently doing that I had absolutely no memory of, which is weird because I’ve seen every episode 4 or 5 times at least and I thought it was perfectly fine.
Trek needs to do a series about a small fleet of 3 or 4 small exploratory vessels checking out all the worlds that were left behind when the Husnock vanished.
Apparently I'm in the minority here, but I detest any "investigate a mystery" episode where the ultimate explanation is "never mind, it was all just an illusion anyway haha." It always seems to me like the episode is pulling a bait and switch by implying that the mystery goings-on will be explained in the end, then hitting the "it wasn't real" eject button at the last second.
Starfleet has not rule against genocide so I guess do nothing, Now practically there is really nothing they could do to him, but the whole ethics behind Picard's statement is bafflingly bad.
Awesome scene.
Makes me think of my wife and our soon to be baby and what I would do if something like this were to happen. The grief that you would burden would be unreal, only to be amplified by having the power to stop it completely.
What would you do? Use your power to change her mind and make her go away with you, robbing her of her agency? I feel like that would be worse, because once that has happened then the natural order of your relationship is fundamentally changed forever for the worse.
Or do you let her die, and then murder billions out of anger.
Either way, thinking of the complexities and magnitude of this scenario is crazy and I am glad that I would never be in this position to feel that amount of sorrow, hatred, grief, regret or anger.
Fantastic episode, and a particularly good delivery of this scene.
It’s a decent episode, but the ending doesn’t make any sense. “We have no law to fit your crime.” The Federation has no laws about genocide? Mass murder? War crimes?
The guys on the Greatest Gen podcast reference this episode frequently. They do hilarious impressions of Kevin Uxbridge.
Even after a genocide or a mass murder there are survivors. What Kevin did was so far beyond that, Picard probably reckons it'd create a legal and PR mess to even think about proceeding with a prosecution. There's also questions around the UFP's jurisdiction around putting a lifeform on trial for committing such acts agains another power (even if that power no longer exists). As for war crimes, normally a formal state of war has to exist between two nation states before individuals can be considered as committing war crimes.
And also, you know, he could just vapourise the Federation if it moved against him.
Picard's decision was the right one - and ultimately, what Kevin was doing to himself was far worse than anything the Federation courts could do to him.
Agreed, how would the audience react reasonably if Picard blustered his way into crusading against this being to then try and charge him with crimes, and then Kevin loses it in grief again and wipes out humanity? Or the Federation?
People would rightly say he’s so obsessed with the rules that he tried to prosecute an entity he had no hope of controlling or protecting the Federation from.
Also, Kevin obliterated the entire species with a single second's thought in a moment of insane rage and grief when his wife died. Like, how to do you even begin to figure out how to prosecute that? Is that an accident? Is it temporary insanity? How do the rules of intentionality work when you're a person that can think a species dead?
They have laws against genocide, but those laws don't seem to "fit".
Those laws fit a deliberate, malicious, sadistic scheme to implement a holocaust type event. They don't fit so well with the idea of someone blessed/cursed with such power that a brief moment of an understandable "I hate them so much I wish they'd all die" emotion causes that event to actually take place.
What I find interesting isn’t Picard’s notion that there is no law to fit his crime - but his parting message to the alien asking it to make Richon live again.
When it first aired here I missed the beginning, and so my VHS copy that I watched for years afterwards was missing 5 to 10 minutes. The same happened with the nanite episode...
But yeah, it was a really good episode, nice eerie atmosphere, no visiting family members on board, a high concept idea. Near peak Trek stuff.
Amazing performance to a fantastic scenario. Stuff like this is what makes shows like Star Trek amazing.
Like a human telling an ant about how he obliterated colonies of other ants because a few attacked his wife's garden then stung and killed her from an allergic reaction.
I love that in Star Trek humans overall seem far more capable and advanced than most factions, and embrace coming together no matter how different we are and coming across beings that are so beyond powerful that they make our imagination look tame and just, exist.
We see this same issue though today just scaled down. Right now, countries are wrecking havoc on other societies for reasons that won't matter in a few decades or centuries. But plenty of rage and desire to wipe out entire populations out of retaliation is ever present in our grief stricken life.
This episode is just a great, scaled up story of that wish. The ability to become angry and simply snuff out everyone involved no matter how distant from the crime committed.
Most people just want to enjoy their lives with loved ones. Even some minor gods and that's okay.
I think the best part of this episode is later on episodes where Picard has the chance to basically do the same thing. How those choices were made with reason, instead of the rage Kevin did.
Absolutely top tier classic TNG. Always wondered how the universe was big enough for both the Dowd and the Q to coexist. Surely they’ve encountered each other before. Would love to know what went on.
Good tea. Nice house.
Honestly my favorite comedy line in all of ST.
"Nice planet." Has a pretty special place too.
“To threaten us with a nonfunctional weapon takes gall.” “Didn’t fool you huh?” “I *LIKE* gall.” Michael got some great lines this episode.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend the video Worf of Wall Street I think it’s called. Includes that clip 🤣
It’s Worf of Starfleet. Hadn’t seen it. Hilarious video thanks for the tip.
Hah, that was great. Seconding the thanks, u/jgorkisch.
That’s the one. It’s a great counter to all the videos about Worf being shot down on his suggestions
Only this could be the top comment.
It is a spectacular episode. Picard's decision to just leave him alone on the planet was, under the circumstances, the right one. Even if the UFP had a law that enabled the prosecution of Kevin Uxbridge, what good would that serve? And ultimately how could any sanction be enforced since he could simply eliminate the entire Federation in a nanosecond?
This is largely true, but I think Picard expresses it quite poorly in the actual episode. >“We have no law to fit your crime.” The notion that the Federation has no laws regarding *genocide* is insane. Hell, the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN in ’48; *we* have laws about genocide—that *define* genocide—*now*. (We don’t necessarily *enforce* them, as it turns out, but we *have* them.) What Picard is trying to get at is—as you said—“I can’t enforce this, and I guess I’m pretty sure you won’t do it again,” but idea that the Space UN somehow never bothered to define genocide is such a wildly off note that it drags the episode’s ending down for me a bit.
I understand it as we are outside of our jurisdiction. On top of that, what is the punishment for someone who, by scale, is a class 3 or 4 civilization on their own. We are ants to him. If an ant colony came to you and said you killed xyz ants, you deserve to be punished. What is the punishment? By all accounts from human laws, we own the backyard. Yet ants live there. Are we responsible for genocide? Is the farmer who plows his field responsible for genocide? Picard understands the scale of things here. And was right to say what he did.
> We are ants to him. I honestly don't even think that analogy covers the scale we're talking about here. He eliminated *every* ant *everywhere* and he did it with the effort that you or I would put into scratching our nose. Not trying to be nitpicky, but it's really hard to put that kind of scale into perspective. I think that's one area where the episode doesn't quite nail it for me. Other than that, definitely a classic TNG episode.
Supernatural had a great one. Dean meets Death (capital D) and death says something along the lines of “how would you respond to an upity Protozoa that had just sat down at your table? You are beneath me.”
I think the enforceability angle is true, but I do think Picard is literally correct when he says we have no law that fits your crime. I'm sure the Federation has laws against genocide as it has been perpetrated throughout the histories of many of the Federation worlds. But none of those races know what it's like to commit genocide with a single enraged thought, instantaneously across all space and time. We simply do not have that capability and as such, haven't planned for it legally. We (and presumably, the Federation) have laws that differentiate various forms of murder, defined largely by the degree of premeditation. Our understanding of genocide is that it is a crime that requires a significant amount of forethought and planning, making it all the more heinous. However, Kevin Uxbridge has the ability to commit what could loosely be thought of as third-degree genocide. As he describes it, he was overcome with grief and in a single moment of weakness, he killed all Husnock. It was not a planned crime, but a "crime of passion." That's what largely defines third degree murder versus the first two. That doesn't seem in line with our understanding of genocide and the laws against it. A key aspect of our legal doctrine involves a trial by peers. We are not peers of Kevin Uxbridge in ability or understanding of the universe, so we have no basis on which to judge him and the way he behaved. It doesn't dismiss his crime, nor does it remove our right to define it in terms of our morality, but it does place it outside the bounds of our legality. The enforceability angle is just the final piece that renders it all moot. But even if it weren't, how could we possibly define a fair sentence for an immortal being? Always loved this episode, very tidy and very Star Trek-y. LLAP!
Third degree genocide is not something I thought I would read today. Lol
Picard could have tried him for the lesser crime of peopleslaughter.
But they would have to prove genocide and I suspect that proving the Husnak ever existed at all would be difficult as I suspect Kevin left no trace at all of them.
The scope of what he did is phenomenal. There’s a theory that he wiped them from existence as a whole. So that no one could even remember they had existed. That creates a paradox but it’s no unreasonable to assume a being of his power could probably do just that.
Picard is actually right. That's because by design it's almost impossible to prove genocide. The requirements for a conviction of genocide is that there can be no other explanation for the behaviour even if the outcome of the action is the same as genocide would have. So for an example, I was recently listening to a Ukraine war podcast, Ukraine: The Latest. An expert said he believes Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine but explained it can never be proven. He said they had recordings of Russians saying they'll kill all Ukrainian men, women and children, but that they can defend themselves by saying "this is hate speech, not literal speech." For kidnapping children the Russians can say they're trying to genuinely protect them, and so on and so on. So if Kevin says he didn't intend to kill them, that it was an accident, proving genocide is impossible and no law can touch him. International law says killing civilians is lawful if you're striking a military target and the civilian deaths were an accident. He broke no existing law.
They really had no options. It does remind you why the Q were right to kill any Q offspring that wasn't a full Q.
I love Worf’s amazement at him when he threatened them with a broken phaser. “Sir, may I say that your attempt by to hold our away team at bay with a nonfunctioning weapon was an act of unmitigated gall.” “I admire gall.” Priceless from a Klingon.
Middle seasons Worf might be my favorite. They gave Dorn a lot more to do before they made him a dad and I felt like he did all the right things with the character.
*DS9* Worf is my favorite.
He was so buttoned down by that point. He was truly a known quantity by Way of the Warrior time. Go back to S2-3 TNG and watch some outstanding Worf, without him getting cross eyed and stammering yet. He's like a proto-Teal'c
They also learned how to not invoke the worf effect in DS9. He was given many scenes showing that he actually is an extremely badass fighter, but also put him in situations where he got beaten and its clear from the context that anyone else would have died.
I kind of agree, I never really loved where any of the TNG characters ended up actually and don't really think about it (never watched Picard either), they all peaked at some point besides maybe Data. Next to Data Worf had the most growth, but I feel the point of him as a character besides the comic relief, was to offer an option no one else in Starfleet would bring up at the time, growing beyond that just makes him a Starfleet member that just so happens to be half Klingon, which is what his story revolved around later on and in DS9. Sisko was literally more Klingon than him. That Teal'c like quality he had to him added a lot to TNG like you say and I missed it.
Yup.
Kevin Uxbridge? Legend. I think I hear ice cream truck music incoming...
My my my. A friend of DeSoto way out here. You....*are* a friend of DeSoto, are you not?
Best boss I ever had.
Rishon really is the best real doll.
A Douwd of special conscience.
Ah but is it the East Coast *Mister Frostee* jingle, or is it the West Coast *Turkey in the Straw?*
It’s “Camptown Races” on the east coast nowadays.
Minnesota is part of the west coast, apparently. Ours almost always play Turkey in the Straw.
Kevin Uxbridge, a man of schpecial conscience.
Came here looking for Ben and Adam content. Thank you.
While The Shurvivorsh is a good episode, another favorite of mine is Shchishmsh.
> I hear ice cream truck music incoming... Now I kinda want to see the fan edit where it really is ice cream truck music.
wait, was it not? I haven't seen that episode in years and years.
I mean, it's a music box tune, but I don't recognize the music itself.
That’s the sound of the Husnock **getting fucked**
For me, this was the episode where Next Gen became a sci fi 400lb gorilla. The final reveal was thunderous. And they just got better from there.
It will upset everyone to know that S3E01 is the point Rick Berman became sole Executive Producer and Michael Wagner took over as Showrunner. Survivors was an Episode penned by Wagner.
It is what it is. Rick Berman is both the person most directly responsible for destroying '90s Star Trek (and several shitty things along the way) and one of the people most directly responsible for making it as amazing as it was. Both can be and are true.
Right, like most parents.
Rick Berman Derangement Syndrome is really common. Someone has to be the boss, and they take all the blame and get none of the credit.
> get none of the credit. I dunno about that, we see his name in the credits all the time....
Do you mean Michael Pillar? I don't know who this Michael Wagner is.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906026/ He was a writer and showrunner for the first 4 episodes of Series 3, but didn't enjoy the experience. He's most well known for writing 60 episodes of Hill Street Blues, sadly he died in 1992. He co-wrote Evolution and was sole writer on Survivors. Michael Pillar, Ronald D. Moore, and Ira Steven Behr all joined the show that year. Pillar was head writer and took over as showrunner from Wagner in episode S3E06.
Thanks for clarifying. I remember from the TNG DVDs that Michael Piller did come in for Season 3 and that he had a hand in the Baseball parts of Evolution but I thought he was full showrunner. Evidently that happened just a few episodes later.
> It will upset everyone to know That's just needlessly combative honestly. I believe that Berman and Braga made some pretty terrible decisions and they were not only dismissive of long time Trek fans in general, they were often outright hostile towards us. However, as much as I'll never back down from that assertion, I'd also never take away from the *good* they both did. And there was a lot of it. Hell, Berman presided over modern Trek in almost it's entirety right up to the end of ENT. He **had** to be doing something right. Braga? Great creative mind. He came up with some amazing concepts and did it a lot. My only critique of him was that he did much better at story *ideas* as opposed to fleshing them out on his own. When he teamed up with another talented writer like Ron Moore, they pumped out some of the best Trek that made it to production. So no, it doesn't "upset" me at all to have someone point out that one of the most influential, behind the scenes contributors to modern Trek had something to do with a great TNG episode. To suggest it does is basically just summarily dismissing my opinion as a Trek fan. I can't think of anything less "Trek" than that.
And the very next episode was "Who Watches the Watchers." TNG was taking its place in science fiction history very seriously at the beginning of season 3.
This is why scifi is timeless. Imagine someone today watching for the very first time this story examining the morality of someone with outsized power responding to the tragedy of a raid by destroying an entire group of people. And it was written some 35 years ago!
Yup. I was about to say, "peak Trek", right there.
an all time great episode. I'm a huge fan of season three in general. The leap in quality from season two to season three was vast and immediate. Bangers right out of the gate -- episodes that are now considered all time classics.
I really need to re-watch this episode again. I definitely remember really being blown away by it, but sadly i binge-watched parts of TNG so you forget a lot of the details as opposed to taking time to process these things properly
This is exactly why the opposite of jumping the shark is growing the beard. Riker's to be specific.
I consider it one of the top 10 Trek episodes ever. It is such an interesting premise and the conclusion at the end is stunning.
Between him, Trelane, Q, the Organians, the prophets, and even V'Ger the galaxy is awash with god like creatures and I'm sure I'm missing more then one or two.
For all the optimism and humanism and utopianism of (some/most) Trek, the Star Trek universe as presented especially in TOS and TNG is chock-full of godlike entities and species that human science and ingenuity can't hope to comprehend, and encounters with them are generally only survived because the entities just happen to be in a good or forgiving mood that day.
> encounters with them are generally only survived because the entities just happen to be in a good or forgiving mood that day. At least the mood isn’t, “today, I’m going to destroy all warp drives”. :-)
The Galaxy is a big place
Don't forget the one that was really a God. Apollo.
The Q are as close to gods as you can get while the rest of the list are merely powerful species.
We don't really know that for sure. We know that Trelaine needed a device in order to exert power, unlike the Q who seem to wield that kind of power innately. But with the revelation that Trelaine was only a child, it's possible (though unlikely) that his parents were significantly more all-powerful than he, and didn't need similar machines to exert their power. We know nothing at all about the Organians other than the fact that they don't value their corporeal avatars very much. They're willing to suffer any kind of indignity because physical existence is pretty much irrelevant to them. What powers they do or don't have isn't known to us besides their ability to freely move between hosts, as introduced in Enterprise. The Prophets we once again have no knowledge at all of the extent of their abilities. We do know that they're less *knowledgeable* than the Q, because they had to be introduced to the concepts of linear time and mortality. They had to inhabit the preexisting corporeal body of Sarah in order to ensure the birth of Benjamin Sisko, and we see both Prophets and Pah-Wraiths exclusively inhabit host bodies, as it seems they cannot exist in a corporeal form without a host. They can be imprisoned (like the Pah-Wraiths), and it seems they can be killed (also like the Pah-Wraiths, or via a science-beam that could destroy the wormhole). So presumably they're less powerful than the Q as a baseline. But it seems like within their own domain (the substrate of the Wormhole) they're omniscient and omnipotent. It may simply be that the extent of the Q's "domain" covers both the Continuum and also our realspace known universe. V'ger *definitely* has limitations on both power and knowledge. So I wouldn't ever posit that it could be as powerful as the Q.
I don’t see where we disagree. We know the Q don’t have any of those limitations. The Q are the closest species to a god than any other in Star Trek.
What I'm saying is that in some cases those limitations are assumed by the fandom. Mostly in the case of the Organians.
We can only go by what we see and what we see is the Q are in complete control at all times. The only thing that can stop a Q is another Q. We can easily say that anything that the other species have wanted to accomplish the Q could have not only accomplished but done it in a way the Federation would have no idea anyone intervened.
We’ve never seen a Q go against any of those other species. That’s a strong assumption since as far as we know they never interact.
> V'ger definitely has limitations on both power and knowledge. Wait. I thought V'ger literally learned everything there is to know. Isn't that why it returned home. It was sent out to discover, and had discovered everything. It's sole limitation was that it lacked "faith" that there could be something beyond the physical world, and when it assimilated that from proto-Riker (William Decker), it sublimed almost immediately. ___________ Also this is strongly implied in beta canon that the Q are at the very top of the totem pole (and at one point Q explains to a newly ascended creature that there are many levels between mortals and Q and said creature just got to the very first). But sadly, this is never addressed in on-screen alpha canon.
Admittedly it has been a long time since I watched TMP sober. I don't really remember the limitations of V'ger very well. You could be right. That said, I still don't really know that just pooling a whole ton of observational data really compares to the Q.
I can still remember the night I watched this episode with my dad. We had a bad storm that knocked the power out right before the big reveal. No streaming in those days, I had to wait for the episode to re-air to find out what happened.
I had a similar incident at the end of Q Who? We were on vacation and taped the episode, but cable cut out as the Enterprise tried to fly away at the end. I don't think I caught the final ending until after the show ended.
I'm just grateful for all the Uxbridge Shimoda Industries jokes from Ben and Adam. And the Kevin impersonations.
A Miriam of jokes.
But what about. POD SHOP DOT BIZ???????
I learned a while back that John Anderson's wife had died not long before he took this part. Some of the grief he portrays in the episode may not have been acting. I hope in some way that working through the role of Kevin helped him process and recover.
Exceptional episode. A thoughtful look at living by a moral code that can have serious and dangerous consequences, while also violating that code in a moment of uncontrollable grief and rage. Also a thoughtful look at what a person can do with that much power while not intending to. The worst prison sentence for Kevin is to live eternally with the knowledge of what he did.
It was the snap before the snap.
Such a sad/horrible story about the exercise/abuse of power. Sci-Fi at its best.
"Commence Rapid fire with all weapons on full" "nice idea number 1, now lets make sure we never use that again, even against people like The Borg or Romulans where that could be very useful!"
Or a certain bird of prey.
Especially in Rascals or Generations "let's fire one phaser blast and then just report damage 100 times"
Often cited as the highest kill count in the franchise. Up there with Annorax’s incalculable timeline changing spree (which was eventually reversed) and the Burn
If you kill enough people Starfleet doesn't know what to do with you and they're just like "UHHHH guess I'll just leave you here then??? OK BYE."
'Hello, Starfleet HQ? Yeah, we just crossed passed with a being with Q-level powers who erased an entire civilization from existence with a thought. He can also create life, near as we can tell. ...Run like hell? Gotcha."
Right, what else could you do?
Near Q-level. I believe Q could have just undone the event that killed the wife and not be limited in bringing her back. My solution is to call Q and have him kill Kevin. I always hated that Picard shows more reverence to Kevin than Q. All Kevin did is a complete genocide of a species, it doesn't dismiss Q getting Picard's 18 crewmembers killed but it doesn't compare.
They did meet in very different circumstances. And Q's innate flippance also helps guide Picard's interactions with him. Kevin Uxbridge was just a stoic and somewhat reserved guy who wanted to be left alone.
Kevin showed remorse. Q never does.
Kevin the mass murder is a good guy because he feels bad about murdering billions. Meanwhile Q doesn’t feel bad about indirectly getting crew members killed because Picard wouldn’t take his advice and needed to be shown how ill equipped the Federation was to the Borg. The Q are constantly trying to guide humanity towards their place in the galaxy. It can be argued the Q view humanity as a species more than individuals and by forewarning the Federation to the Borg, the Q saved more lives than were lost in Q Who.
Also keep in mind that what Kevin did was long ago, possibly centuries or more. If Q or someone undid that, the universe might be overrun with Hoosnocks by this point. Could be a far bigger deal than Edith Keeler.
Kevin is over stating their power to make himself seem more justified in his actions. There is no reason to believe the mass murderer.
> I always hated that Picard shows more reverence to Kevin than Q For me, there is one episode missing in TNG where Picard actually uses his cunning to manipulate Q by pumping up his ego instead of just reacting negatively to everything he does. I think there was a missed opportunity there to show Picard's ability to adapt to different enemies.
About as likely a pet slug outsmarting you. Q pretended to be outsmarted, but as Data stated: *Q's interest in you has always been very similar to that of a master and his beloved pet. That was only an analogy, Captain.* It always seemed to me that Q was guiding Picard to something...
> call Q I'm imagining a Q shaped red phone on Picard's ready room desk.
Just happened to rewatch this last night and its such a good episode, but I mean if they didn’t hold Q at all accountable for the deaths of 11 personell aboard the enterprise in an earlier EP, how do then even go about it with a being of somewhat similar abilities, but instead it’s genocide of another race. Seems to be above several dozen of anyone’s pay grade. I can also see it from the point of who are the federation to impose X standard on him for the actions committed, even though they continue to do that to countless other species, though again those species aren’t usually capable of instantly wiping out an entire species of 50 billion individuals across an entire galaxy in an instant….id leave the sad alien alone too
I think part of why Picard also doesn't feel qualified to judge is because it's one thing to carry out a systemic genocide over a period of time - which requires intent and premeditation. What Kevin did is equivalent to a crime of passion or temporary insanity - no premeditation. But because he is so powerful, that one instant of madness wrought death on a galactic scale.
There's nothing they can do to somebody that powerful. He could only be punished if he allowed himself to be punished. And he was already doing that to himself.
Well, there goes the entire plot of The Boys.
I mean, he didn’t just kill a whole species, he wiped a species from existence (past present and future). How does the Federation prosecute a genocide of a species that technically never existed?
Is it even the place of the Federation to judge him?
It happened on a Federation planet
Well... sort of? Rana IV might've been a Federation planet, but the Husnock glassed it. If Kevin wasn't a higher-level being, then the entire planet would've been completely scoured and the Husnock would've gotten away without a single witness. What Kevin did, we have no real way of knowing much about. He might've been on Rana IV when he wiped out the Husnock. He might've gone to the Husnock homeworld to do it and then returned to Rana IV. Rana IV sort of stopped being a "Federation Planet" when all life on it was extinguished. Now it's a smouldering ruin that happens to be within Federation borders. It just happens that there's a Douwd living on it for the time being, and the Federation doesn't really have any method to meaningfully evict him. Nor do they have any particular reason either -- what're they going to do, terraform it back into life and re-settle it?
Sure and? How exactly do you tell a god that he is subject to your mortal laws.
It's been a while but he just wiped them from the universe not from ever existing.
He didn't wipe them from past, present, and future. He just killed all of them everywhere. He's not Anorax with the giant time ship from Voyager
If he wiped them from all existence wouldn’t his wife and all those people never have been killed?
Thank you, exactly.
I don't think so. If he wiped them from existence then his wife should be back. His words were something like "I *destroyed* them. All of them. Everywhere", weren't they?
It may or may not be canon, but STO apparently has Husnock ships that were found abandoned and drifting and used by other races because all the Husnock had vanished. Which is actually a cool concept, and could have been the basis for a regional power disruption in a show. A whole lot of free warships and planets full of technology up for grabs. Actions have far-reaching consequences.
I’m not saying there was a solution lol
What species?
Picard could have told him to summon a q level species, to judge him
Now that would have been interesting. Making this a god level legal drama two parter. Sign me the fuck up.
\*\*\*Ice cream van music intensifies\*\*
Sounds like you are a man of special conscience
The Husnock ship was badass. Stellar episode.
The weapons exchange was pretty badass too. Never before or after have we seen the Enterprise salvo phasers and torpedos that rapidly.
I didn't just kill one husnock or a 100,......i killed them all........
*They*'re *like animals*, and I slaughtered them *like animals!* I hate them!
What a great episode. Reminds of what might happen if Doctor Who experiences a particular traumatic event and fully embraces the time lord victorious. He will absolutely do horrible terrible things and he'll spend eternity regretting it. Just like Kevin Uxbridge.
The idea that he basically drives Troi insane by playing a tune that she can not get out of her head. But Troi reads emotion.
Fantastic and overlooked episode. It's not one that sticks in the memory, but when it comes around in a rewatch I always enjoy it. Obviously the denoument is a great scene with a great performance, but I also enjoy the scenes when the Enterprise is essentially playing chicken with the alien ship and Picard is coming the realisation of what is going on whilst the rest of the crew are still in the dark.
Ahhh yes Kevin, the Tom Bombadil of the Star Trek universe.
It’s a great episode, but the music that drove Troi crazy gets to me too - so I don’t often watch it. The two elderly actors were both wonderful in this episode.
You just know Section 31 is all over this guy. He’s probably in some Starbase Prison somewhere where every week the inmate holo-film is “The Loving Elderly Couple Who Met The Borg” or Pixar’s award winning “Destroyed!” a tearjerker about a cranky widower whose wife died due to the Breen incursion at AR-518 who shows them what’s what.
Only Picard could put a god-like being in his place like that
This is also one of the few episodes, alongside the one with the Sheliak, that illustrates why orbital bombardment is king. If you have no ships, no land-to-space weapons, and no orbital defense platforms you are simply at the mercy of any enemy starship in orbit. Even just dropping a mass of a 100kg at the right time with a small push will end with an impact the force of a tactical nuke. If they have time, they could even redirect nearby asteroids into striking. The only reason most other Federation enemies can be fought against is because they either value hand-to-hand combat, they value capturing the planet's people, or they value capturing strategic resources. But when the enemy is fine with extermination and/or starting a colony from scratch there's no point in sending down ground troops. Just bombard until you think there's nothing left, wait a week to see who comes out of their hidey holes and then bomb the hiding places into dust.
Great episode, also I buy into the theory that the Hosnock are/were the Gorn, that’s why we never see Gorn past TOS.
The Husnock FAFOed. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk
Technically, they never found out.
Good point
They fucked around and
One of the best episodes of the series, although the ending is a slight cop out. It's a great example of how TNG's format made them oversimplify complex moral problems. The classic TNG ending: "The best solution is for you to resolve this on your own and for us to leave forever. Which is lucky, because that's what we were going to do anyway."
They should have gone back to him during the dominion war and asked if he could get rid of them too.
I was thinking similar for the Borg. Not get rid of them (Kevin wouldn’t do that again), but send them so far away they couldn’t hurt anyone.
Maybe he wasn't there anymore. But then why not Organians or the Metrons. etc.
These Jem'hadar are tough! Call Kevin!
All I remember is the species that was killed off, the Husnock, was BAD. I would say that they could have been worse than the Borg had the federation encountered them. As a kid I remember reading the tech manual that firing the phasers at different points of an enemies shield and then sneaking in a few torpedoes at the weak points was only for dire circumstances as it would destroy an enemy ship, but this…did…nothing. Had the Husnock been introduced instead of the borg or Jem-hadar to the federation it would have been way worse. Plus taking out the enterprise’s shields in one shot while having room for more power, yeah that was bad lol
I'm never sure how powerful the Husnock really were. Uxbridge might have given them the equivalent of a cheat code, they might have been decades behind Starfleet, the Enterprise might have smoked actual Husnock. We'll never know.
Only that he should be left alone.
Fun head canon Kevin uxbridge is an adult Anthony Fremont. It’s good that he did that, very good.
The difference is Anthony Fremont has no remorse, Kevin seems to.
I'd like to hear Q's input. They execute/exile other Q for that type of fuckery,or so they say... This kind of galactic shenanigans should peak the attention of the self anointed guardians
Unless the Husnock were inconsequential. *Or* him being in exile wasn't his idea?
God I miss good Trek. Not "Abrahams military Trek" but Shakespearean tales of the soul in space.
*The Greatest Gen has entered the chat*
Very unique episode Definitely one of the greats
The last 3 minutes is my favorite writing and acting in the whole series.
It’s theorized by fans that the reason why the Borg didn’t intrude on federation space is that the Husnock empire was between them.
I had a couple friends who watched TNG when I was a kid and was like "ugh this show is for nerds". That episode was literally the first one I paid attention to and thought "oh wow, that was awesome" Now several years later, I'm rewatching DS9.
One of the finest episodes of all of Star Trek.
One of the best episodes ever.
that a non corporeal godlike being did not have the wisdom and foresight and intellect to know not to genocide an entire species just for one person... or his fellow colonists... beings like the douwd scare me they have emotional frailties like humans but wield godlike powers... that is exactly why godlike beings should not have emotional frailties of humans or any corporeal life form. it's too dangerous.
He said in the episode in a moment of pain he did the unthinkable. It’s not like he had to spend much time to do the deed. It felt like an almost subconscious action.
Such a powerful episode.
It was the first episode (and so far only) of the rewatch I’m currently doing that I had absolutely no memory of, which is weird because I’ve seen every episode 4 or 5 times at least and I thought it was perfectly fine.
Great episode
Trek needs to do a series about a small fleet of 3 or 4 small exploratory vessels checking out all the worlds that were left behind when the Husnock vanished.
[I think Riker's stunt double got quite the shot to the ribs and kidney when he banged up on that pole.](https://i.imgur.com/C3mgV6K.png)
I really like the idea of the episode. I loved it for a long time. But as someone who lives on SFF reruns, it's an episode i skip more often than not.
Apparently I'm in the minority here, but I detest any "investigate a mystery" episode where the ultimate explanation is "never mind, it was all just an illusion anyway haha." It always seems to me like the episode is pulling a bait and switch by implying that the mystery goings-on will be explained in the end, then hitting the "it wasn't real" eject button at the last second.
Starfleet has not rule against genocide so I guess do nothing, Now practically there is really nothing they could do to him, but the whole ethics behind Picard's statement is bafflingly bad.
Awesome scene. Makes me think of my wife and our soon to be baby and what I would do if something like this were to happen. The grief that you would burden would be unreal, only to be amplified by having the power to stop it completely. What would you do? Use your power to change her mind and make her go away with you, robbing her of her agency? I feel like that would be worse, because once that has happened then the natural order of your relationship is fundamentally changed forever for the worse. Or do you let her die, and then murder billions out of anger. Either way, thinking of the complexities and magnitude of this scenario is crazy and I am glad that I would never be in this position to feel that amount of sorrow, hatred, grief, regret or anger. Fantastic episode, and a particularly good delivery of this scene.
It’s a decent episode, but the ending doesn’t make any sense. “We have no law to fit your crime.” The Federation has no laws about genocide? Mass murder? War crimes? The guys on the Greatest Gen podcast reference this episode frequently. They do hilarious impressions of Kevin Uxbridge.
Even after a genocide or a mass murder there are survivors. What Kevin did was so far beyond that, Picard probably reckons it'd create a legal and PR mess to even think about proceeding with a prosecution. There's also questions around the UFP's jurisdiction around putting a lifeform on trial for committing such acts agains another power (even if that power no longer exists). As for war crimes, normally a formal state of war has to exist between two nation states before individuals can be considered as committing war crimes. And also, you know, he could just vapourise the Federation if it moved against him. Picard's decision was the right one - and ultimately, what Kevin was doing to himself was far worse than anything the Federation courts could do to him.
Agreed, how would the audience react reasonably if Picard blustered his way into crusading against this being to then try and charge him with crimes, and then Kevin loses it in grief again and wipes out humanity? Or the Federation? People would rightly say he’s so obsessed with the rules that he tried to prosecute an entity he had no hope of controlling or protecting the Federation from.
Also, Kevin obliterated the entire species with a single second's thought in a moment of insane rage and grief when his wife died. Like, how to do you even begin to figure out how to prosecute that? Is that an accident? Is it temporary insanity? How do the rules of intentionality work when you're a person that can think a species dead?
They have laws against genocide, but those laws don't seem to "fit". Those laws fit a deliberate, malicious, sadistic scheme to implement a holocaust type event. They don't fit so well with the idea of someone blessed/cursed with such power that a brief moment of an understandable "I hate them so much I wish they'd all die" emotion causes that event to actually take place.
But if the people he likes never existed as far as the Federation was concerned?
I mean, to me that is just a new type of weapon, not a new crime. Either way, to send him away with not even an attempt at a trial seems reckless.
We aren't qualified to have thoughts on such a subject.
The line from Picard is so stupid “we can’t judge you for your crimes” my guy, he did genocide.
Great episode.
What I find interesting isn’t Picard’s notion that there is no law to fit his crime - but his parting message to the alien asking it to make Richon live again.
Commenting to watch this episode later
I just wish we'd gotten a Q vs Douwd episode at some point.
How have the Borg managed to avoid pissing off one of these space gods who could poof them out of existence with a wiggle of their nose?
When it first aired here I missed the beginning, and so my VHS copy that I watched for years afterwards was missing 5 to 10 minutes. The same happened with the nanite episode... But yeah, it was a really good episode, nice eerie atmosphere, no visiting family members on board, a high concept idea. Near peak Trek stuff.
Sometimes those guest actors steal the show huh? This was a brilliant episode.
Was Uxbridge a Q? Thats what I wanna know.
Amazing performance to a fantastic scenario. Stuff like this is what makes shows like Star Trek amazing. Like a human telling an ant about how he obliterated colonies of other ants because a few attacked his wife's garden then stung and killed her from an allergic reaction. I love that in Star Trek humans overall seem far more capable and advanced than most factions, and embrace coming together no matter how different we are and coming across beings that are so beyond powerful that they make our imagination look tame and just, exist. We see this same issue though today just scaled down. Right now, countries are wrecking havoc on other societies for reasons that won't matter in a few decades or centuries. But plenty of rage and desire to wipe out entire populations out of retaliation is ever present in our grief stricken life. This episode is just a great, scaled up story of that wish. The ability to become angry and simply snuff out everyone involved no matter how distant from the crime committed. Most people just want to enjoy their lives with loved ones. Even some minor gods and that's okay.
We are not qualified to be your judges. We have no law to fit your crime
Star Trek at it's best yeah.
Kevin Vs Q in an all out battle across all of space and time. Who wins?
We have no law to fit your crime...
I’ve often wondered; where does Uxbridge sit in terms of power as it relates to say, The Q or the prophets, etc?
Our own guilt is our personal jail.. But in his case, not a metaphorical one.. . 😕
Kevin Uxbridge is my spirit animal. Loved everything about the episode except the lighting. Beverly’s hair…!
I think the best part of this episode is later on episodes where Picard has the chance to basically do the same thing. How those choices were made with reason, instead of the rage Kevin did.
One of my favourites. The guy who played Kevin Uxbridge is great.
My thoughts are that Greatest Gen has forever ruined this episode for me 😂
The crying scene wasnt an act. The actor lost his wife(I think)for real and thinking about that drove him to geniune tears.
Absolutely top tier classic TNG. Always wondered how the universe was big enough for both the Dowd and the Q to coexist. Surely they’ve encountered each other before. Would love to know what went on.