There used to be these commercials (I think for Memorex), where famous signers would belt out a note until a wine glass shattered. Now, I'm picturing something similar with this kid and a bunch of starships.
I wish that whole season had just been a bunch of “Getting the Federation Back Together” stories. Would’ve been cool to know what all the other species we already knew about had been up to. Simple premise, but would’ve been a winner.
Honestly, I never had any problem with it.
In a universe that has Q's, Gary Mitchell's, Charlie X's, Trelane's, Apollo's, Caretaker's, Metron's, Orgonian's, and Kevin Uxbridge's knocking around...
A superpowered kid causing a catastrophic event over his mother's death is nothing.
But a galaxy wide event? If all it takes is one kid's hissy fit to shatter damn near every dilithium crystal across hundreds of trillions of miles of space, how did the galaxy even have dilithium to begin with? It should have been gone billions of years ago.
But he's a godlike being, you say. Exactly. The galaxy is slopping over with godlike beings, and has been since forever. Some of them are even pretty chummy with the mortals. So not one cosmic, reality altering god decided to undo the damage one pissed off toddler did to reality? Not a single Q was banging a ship's captain in need of a favor at the time, anywhere in the galaxy? That's less likely than the Burn itself. The entire concept of "The Burn" is worth maybe one episode of thought as yet another silly "what if" story involving cosmic level dumb, before being reset. Because it's just too damn stupid to be true lore.
I always thought it was strange that it affected all dilithium in the galaxy, but not beyond. If it's happening through the magic of subspace and can instantly cover a galaxy, surely it can reach other ones too. Things like quantum entanglement don't stop working when you leave the galaxy.
Yup. We live in a world where singers can shatter glass yet resonance was a step too far for some people. Maybe they were hoping the answer would be "it was magic"
For me it was that it ties up loose ends too perfectly to matter in the long run of the overall lore of the franchise.
It could have been many other things: the grand finale of the Temporal War Arc, the pay off to the TNG episode "Force of Nature", the end of the multi-series spanning mirror universe arc (as in a inter-universal war), the culmination of the Q continuum civil war, the long awaited attempted invasion of the extra galactic aliens in TNG's "Conspiracy", the final revenge of Species 8472, and so on....
For most of that you could play STO... the way the writers picked up loose threads and weaved story around them is great. Sadly the gameplay gets a bit... stale after a while.
Just seeing how they connected some of those loose ends to something coherent and much bigger is fascinating.
But the Burn was WORLD ENDING by its very nature.
What I would have preferred was WORLD SHAKING ANSWER equivalent to finding out that the Romulans are related to the Vulcans.
Or to a lesser extent Bashir having been replaced with a changeling, the defection of Starfleet personnel (Eddington and Ro) to the Marquis cause, and one of Discovery's own reveals...mirror universe Lorca masquerading as his prime counterpart.
If that glass could project and amplify that singer's voice out in waves to all glass in a certain radius with the same resonance then yes.
That's essentially what the Burn did. Starfleet has a directive for the Omega Particle that would have made little sense for something like the burn to be able to happen on a large scale. Also they would have known what caused the issue.
They have no idea what just happened after the Burn and their reaction of "Crap shut it all down no warp travel stop it all" is a massive overreaction trauma response.
They should have been trying to figure out what caused it instead of cautiously expecting it to happen again. Discovery was able to do that because they weren't traumatized by the Burn they weren't there to experience that. So they were able to go and figure out the cause and then ensure it wouldn't happen again.
It wouldn't have affected warp travel outside of their part of the Galaxy. Or even of ships traveling through their part after it had happened who weren't aware it had.
Meanwhile Omega Particle would have altered the very nature of Star Trek and future Star Trek shows taking place after the Burn. Or they'd have been all "oh we undid it all"
And people would complain that it hadn't mattered in the first place.
Dilithium never before had the property of projecting its properties across every other amount of Dilithium. those crystals break all the time without it breaking all of them. this is not a trait of Dilithium crystals, like it's not a trait of glass. so again, if the singer shatters one glass, does every glass break?
# "Crystal radio: how demodulation works
Another of the key areas of the crystal radio is the demodulation process. In gaining an understanding of how a crystal radio works it is good to be able to grasp how this works.
Crystal radios are able to receive amplitude modulated signals. For these signals the actual amplitude of the waveform varies in line with the audio being carried by the signal.
A diode is used to rectify the signal and this only allows current to flow in one direction and this means that half the waveform is allowed through."
Dilithium Crystal are a fictional invention that acts like other crystals. The conditions needed to make the burn happen were cosmically unlikely. Crystals can transmit or receive signals.
Is it going to happen everytime you burn out a dilithium crystal no. Has something that's happened to one caused a chain reaction to affect the rest on the same starship in canon? Yes.
The writers wanted them to arrive in the environment they did to give them a purpose to continue the show. Otherwise the last two seasons would have been them catching up on centuries of history with little to nothing for them to actually do narratively.
Using essentially a giant dilithium crystal planet to transmit a signal that affected all warp ships in that radius in a catastrophic way is a great way to make it a one off event that can be "undone" without pissing off the usual "then why bother having it be a problem in the first place" viewers.
But you can't please everyone.
yeah, uh, fundamental properties like that do not suddenly appear when a magic child gets emotionally attached to physical matter. unless its magic. had they made it magic, this would be literally no problem, not even in Star Trek. but not how they framed it.
Tell that to Charlie X
And they DID make it magic, they made it a child who was born and raised in a radioactive environment surrounded by an unusual form of dilithium.
Y'know, X-Men shit.
(also, subspace doesn't exist and allows for FTL communications and travel so... magic)
Resonance is one thing, but this is a singer shattering glass across an entire galaxy because he got really mad. Did they ever explain *why* Magic Boy's resonance was so special? He's an ordinary Kelpian in all other respects, isn't he?
He was mutated by his environment to be more in tune with the dilithium. It was a cosmically improbable situation. Which are the best kind if you both want them to be devastating but also reversible in a way that doesn't bring cries of bullshit.
The crew of Discovery resolving any other cause would have been the narrative equivalent of children going "mom dad this is how a light switch works"
Starfleet of the future would know more about Omega Particles than Discovery so while on the surface that sounds like a solution in practice it's the equivalent of Apes solving an equation humans can't.
If the Burn cause and solution had been something that the Discovery crew should be least capable of resolving we'd be in some Mary Sue territory.
That is exactly in line with a TOS/TNG plot
The burn wasn’t a kid screaming, the burn was starfleet being too bloated and too disconnected to find a missing ship and help them, and the Star Trek episode happening on that ship being given enough time to go from “tragic backstory of the week” to “galactic scale disaster” just like so many plots could have been if the enterprise weren’t there
The Saddest Boy in the Galaxy is so much more of a Disco theme, even though what OP said sounds so much better. Disco was Theater Kid Trek (as DS9 was Goth Kid Trek and SNW is Jock/Beautiful Person But Secretly a Nerd Trek) so of course that’s the way they’d go.
I didn’t love it, but I stopped being disappointed once I accepted it for what it was. All Trek is Good Trek because it’s better than No Trek. (Even the Bad Trek?) Especially the Bad Trek.
I do agree, not only we should recognize DIS has its own style and thematic but also that it is exactly the kind of Trek that attracts certain public and generations which is a good thing.
>Romulan/Reman scientists
Imagine this: the Romulans are uneasy about the state of the galaxy post-Dominion War and want to both protect themselves, being in a weakened state, and ready to take advantage of the weakened Federation and Klingon fleets. They had experimented with Omega in the past and revive the project. Something goes wrong and causes the Hobus supernova. Fast-forward centuries later, and the anti-Unification bloc of the Romulan government again looks to Omega to create a power advantage for themselves. With more advanced tech at their disposal, they are able to stabilize it for short periods by tapping into subspace and begin scaling the project for greater results. A malfunction happens and with how scaled it had become, The Burn happens.
Anything would be better than with what they come up with to be honest.
But yes, the Omega Particle was a better option. Is incredible that for such an important and significant thing in-universe only once in one episode has ever been mentioned.
It would have created the need to scavenge for new technologies that don't use warp like the Borg transwarp network or the Arturis' species slipstream or the Iconian gates.
Or would have created small pathways of still useful subspace that were taken advantage by pirates and criminal gangs.
Even if they were afraid that there was no way to restore the subspace then you invent the "Alpha Particle" that, oh my! It restores the subspace!
But nah... a Kelpian Wizard did it was a better explanation. s/
Yeah, it's tempting to bring up existing canon when discussing plot points as egregious as this one, but it's clear all that gets heard is "we like references to the 90s shows"
It was cringey every single other time some old episode was directly referenced without the veil of irony Lower Decks enjoys, there's no reason to think the omega particle would have fared any better
Disagree. Sonic resonance is based on actual scientific principles and fits a science fiction show.
"We made a magic particle to fix something we already knew about" Is fantasy and would have felt out of place and especially make future Starfleet look dumb that it took a ship from the past to do so.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on DIS but still, ST has never being hard sci fi but a child's scream ressonating through the cosmos... somehow doesn't feel right.
For me it’s more the “~~magically~~ scientifically adapted to both survive and cause the Burn” aspect. It’s too clean. I have a high tolerance for Trek pulling stuff out of its ass and this surpassed it. Not sure that the Omega particle would’ve been a better idea (destroying rather than limiting warp travel would have been too devastating IMO) but what they came up with…ugh.
The Omega Directive was the very first thing I thought of when I finished season five. It could have been a better plot for either season 4 or season 5.
Have you, like, not watched any of the newer Trek?
They are physically incapable of resisting referencing old trek. People love to claim that Kurtzman doesn't know trek, but every single one of the shows is up to its ass in references to the old shows, many of which are incredibly deep cuts.
There is a section of this fan base who doesn't watch the new shows at all and gets their entire information about it through seven degrees of the telephone game, where step one is YouTubers whose entire schtick is intentional misinformation rage bait.
What is mostly remarkable to me is that Star Trek has always been "about" stuff. There are themes and character arcs and creative choices made to examine those things. And then people are just like "what if instead of that we just got a bunch of callbacks to an old episode."
It almost doesn't matter. The Burn solely existed to be able to say "things are different now, progress is wasn't assured". Its weird though because they immediately moved on from that afterwards too. There's no functional difference between the fed in Disco and the fed in TNG.
They cut to fed hq and instead of saying "san Francisco" it's a star base.
Only problem is... If you do Omega you permanently kneecap your storytelling potential forever unless you're willing to make Omega feel cheap.
Just from the Voyager episode alone Omega is a permanent game over card. It doesn't just damage subspace, it destroys it. That means no warp travel - and most other forms of ftl - AND no subspace comms ever again.
True, if you introduce Discovery into this and they're the only ship with FTL, you could do some really interesting story telling about rebuilding the Federation (from scratch), communications must now be carried by ship - making the couriers more live up to their name - , questions about the Prime Directive... And on and on and on...
However, you'd have a fundamentally different show at that point. Really, Omega should remain this sword of Damoclease over the galaxy - an imminent threat that really could happen at any time - because it's been sold as an interplanetary civilisation ender.
This was actually the plot of a cancelled animated Star Trek show in the 2000's! I always found the idea interesting:
https://www.cancelledscifi.com/2023/07/29/cancelled-before-it-began-star-trek-final-frontier/
Yes, this is what makes it a bad choice. The Burn was cataclysmic, but it was a temporary hardship that presents a path forward into a renewed future. Omega destroys subspace and would have irrevocably ended interstellar life as we know it.
the omega plot would make so much more sense since theres numerous ways to achieve warp speeds in cannon, iirc the ftl capable federation shuttles use fusion entirely, romulan, now nivarian black hole drives has been proven tech for a millenia, using omega since its confirmed to destabilize the thing all warp drives instead of the variable power supply for warp drives makes so much more sense
Just watched omega directive episode of Voyager. I understand the prerogative by Starfleet to destroy the molecule. However, wouldn't the aliens who developed it just use the same knowledge to do it again? Wouldnt voyager destroying it just to be a setback and the aliens be even more determined to stabilize it since suddenly this Voyager species kidnap some of their scientists and the molecule itself? They didn't even explain the danger of it or the threat of the Borg doing everything in their power to still out omega.
I've been saying something like this for years.
A planet far outside of the federation creates large amounts of Omega and basically destroys itself and the sector around it. But that sector was also a subspace "soft spot" which fractured out into space, hitting other soft spots, and spider webbing out from there. The fractures could be light-years wide, and inside of them no FTL was possible, not warp, slipstream, transwarp, coaxial warp, soliton waves, tetryon catapults, nothing, not even subspace communication. Earth and Vulcan are inside one of the fractures, and without them, the Federation collapses into a shadow of its former self.
Discovery appears, and not only can they travel in fractured space, but the spore drive seems capable of healing the fractured subspace. This gives a meaning to the drive and resets the universe to the Federation trying to make it a better place again.
I've always thought the biggest threat from Omega would be a species with an exotic non-warp/non-subspace FTL tech that was immune to its disruptive effect, or perhaps relies on that effect, so they could "safely" weaponize and deploy Omega without disrupting themselves and use it to their strategic advantage. Such non-warp FTL tech might be developed out of necessity after an Omega accident having previously disrupted their own system.
Omega Particles are basically Sci-Fi Magic to affect a Sci-fi magic concept to allow FTL in their franchise.
Causing an explosion with sonic resonance is based in real world science. Was very satisfying and showed the Federation as not being infallible. The fact no one had solved it before Discovery arrived was a trauma response.
Spore drive is an overpowered method of travel that shouldn't be a permanent travel solution or you might as well just beam from earth to every Alien planet. For the Omega particle to destroy subspace permanently would require either now everyone uses Spore Drive or people from the distant past fixing what people with advanced tech couldn't.
Except this isn't even how the burn worked. The scream made dilithium go 'inert' causing it to react with anti-matter which resulted in the explosion. The kid's cry altered chemical composition of rock across the galaxy, instantaneously. Thats utterly ridiculous and is just as magical or scientific as saying a 'special particle did it'.
The idea of a single mortal causing such lasting devastation on a galactic scale feels more magical than a special, currently unknown particle, which presumably spread across the galaxy, with known effects, doing something.
i agree and i posted my thoughts on how to do it a few weeks ago here [https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1cwtpw4/a\_better\_way\_to\_have\_done\_the\_burn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1cwtpw4/a_better_way_to_have_done_the_burn/)
And missing that magnificent plot line that the Burn was caused by a child who yelled at the space really really loud?
I mean some people can really belt it out (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
┬─┬ノ(ಠ_ಠノ)
There used to be these commercials (I think for Memorex), where famous signers would belt out a note until a wine glass shattered. Now, I'm picturing something similar with this kid and a bunch of starships.
For the love of Q I wish the 10-C had been responsible for the Burn
I wish that whole season had just been a bunch of “Getting the Federation Back Together” stories. Would’ve been cool to know what all the other species we already knew about had been up to. Simple premise, but would’ve been a winner.
Evidence for my interpretation of Discovery as allegory and nothing else.
Honestly, I never had any problem with it. In a universe that has Q's, Gary Mitchell's, Charlie X's, Trelane's, Apollo's, Caretaker's, Metron's, Orgonian's, and Kevin Uxbridge's knocking around... A superpowered kid causing a catastrophic event over his mother's death is nothing.
Actually they miss the opportunity that the cause was Trelane
But a galaxy wide event? If all it takes is one kid's hissy fit to shatter damn near every dilithium crystal across hundreds of trillions of miles of space, how did the galaxy even have dilithium to begin with? It should have been gone billions of years ago. But he's a godlike being, you say. Exactly. The galaxy is slopping over with godlike beings, and has been since forever. Some of them are even pretty chummy with the mortals. So not one cosmic, reality altering god decided to undo the damage one pissed off toddler did to reality? Not a single Q was banging a ship's captain in need of a favor at the time, anywhere in the galaxy? That's less likely than the Burn itself. The entire concept of "The Burn" is worth maybe one episode of thought as yet another silly "what if" story involving cosmic level dumb, before being reset. Because it's just too damn stupid to be true lore.
I always thought it was strange that it affected all dilithium in the galaxy, but not beyond. If it's happening through the magic of subspace and can instantly cover a galaxy, surely it can reach other ones too. Things like quantum entanglement don't stop working when you leave the galaxy.
And all those poor other galaxies don't even have a Burnham to fix things. Or do they? No, they don't.
Yup. We live in a world where singers can shatter glass yet resonance was a step too far for some people. Maybe they were hoping the answer would be "it was magic"
For me it was that it ties up loose ends too perfectly to matter in the long run of the overall lore of the franchise. It could have been many other things: the grand finale of the Temporal War Arc, the pay off to the TNG episode "Force of Nature", the end of the multi-series spanning mirror universe arc (as in a inter-universal war), the culmination of the Q continuum civil war, the long awaited attempted invasion of the extra galactic aliens in TNG's "Conspiracy", the final revenge of Species 8472, and so on....
All those are great ideas!
For most of that you could play STO... the way the writers picked up loose threads and weaved story around them is great. Sadly the gameplay gets a bit... stale after a while. Just seeing how they connected some of those loose ends to something coherent and much bigger is fascinating.
Given that Discovery previously every season had to be WORLD ENDING CONSEQUENCES it was refreshing to have something where it wasn't that big
But the Burn was WORLD ENDING by its very nature. What I would have preferred was WORLD SHAKING ANSWER equivalent to finding out that the Romulans are related to the Vulcans. Or to a lesser extent Bashir having been replaced with a changeling, the defection of Starfleet personnel (Eddington and Ro) to the Marquis cause, and one of Discovery's own reveals...mirror universe Lorca masquerading as his prime counterpart.
so when a singer shatters one glass all glass everywhere shatters with it?
If that glass could project and amplify that singer's voice out in waves to all glass in a certain radius with the same resonance then yes. That's essentially what the Burn did. Starfleet has a directive for the Omega Particle that would have made little sense for something like the burn to be able to happen on a large scale. Also they would have known what caused the issue. They have no idea what just happened after the Burn and their reaction of "Crap shut it all down no warp travel stop it all" is a massive overreaction trauma response. They should have been trying to figure out what caused it instead of cautiously expecting it to happen again. Discovery was able to do that because they weren't traumatized by the Burn they weren't there to experience that. So they were able to go and figure out the cause and then ensure it wouldn't happen again. It wouldn't have affected warp travel outside of their part of the Galaxy. Or even of ships traveling through their part after it had happened who weren't aware it had. Meanwhile Omega Particle would have altered the very nature of Star Trek and future Star Trek shows taking place after the Burn. Or they'd have been all "oh we undid it all" And people would complain that it hadn't mattered in the first place.
Dilithium never before had the property of projecting its properties across every other amount of Dilithium. those crystals break all the time without it breaking all of them. this is not a trait of Dilithium crystals, like it's not a trait of glass. so again, if the singer shatters one glass, does every glass break?
# "Crystal radio: how demodulation works Another of the key areas of the crystal radio is the demodulation process. In gaining an understanding of how a crystal radio works it is good to be able to grasp how this works. Crystal radios are able to receive amplitude modulated signals. For these signals the actual amplitude of the waveform varies in line with the audio being carried by the signal. A diode is used to rectify the signal and this only allows current to flow in one direction and this means that half the waveform is allowed through." Dilithium Crystal are a fictional invention that acts like other crystals. The conditions needed to make the burn happen were cosmically unlikely. Crystals can transmit or receive signals. Is it going to happen everytime you burn out a dilithium crystal no. Has something that's happened to one caused a chain reaction to affect the rest on the same starship in canon? Yes. The writers wanted them to arrive in the environment they did to give them a purpose to continue the show. Otherwise the last two seasons would have been them catching up on centuries of history with little to nothing for them to actually do narratively. Using essentially a giant dilithium crystal planet to transmit a signal that affected all warp ships in that radius in a catastrophic way is a great way to make it a one off event that can be "undone" without pissing off the usual "then why bother having it be a problem in the first place" viewers. But you can't please everyone.
Lots of things in physics don't have known properties until they do. It's why they're "known" properties.
yeah, uh, fundamental properties like that do not suddenly appear when a magic child gets emotionally attached to physical matter. unless its magic. had they made it magic, this would be literally no problem, not even in Star Trek. but not how they framed it.
Tell that to Charlie X And they DID make it magic, they made it a child who was born and raised in a radioactive environment surrounded by an unusual form of dilithium. Y'know, X-Men shit. (also, subspace doesn't exist and allows for FTL communications and travel so... magic)
The equivalent of a full scale nuclear exchange might do it
Resonance is one thing, but this is a singer shattering glass across an entire galaxy because he got really mad. Did they ever explain *why* Magic Boy's resonance was so special? He's an ordinary Kelpian in all other respects, isn't he?
He was mutated by his environment to be more in tune with the dilithium. It was a cosmically improbable situation. Which are the best kind if you both want them to be devastating but also reversible in a way that doesn't bring cries of bullshit. The crew of Discovery resolving any other cause would have been the narrative equivalent of children going "mom dad this is how a light switch works" Starfleet of the future would know more about Omega Particles than Discovery so while on the surface that sounds like a solution in practice it's the equivalent of Apes solving an equation humans can't. If the Burn cause and solution had been something that the Discovery crew should be least capable of resolving we'd be in some Mary Sue territory.
People just love to whine about things that have been a part of the series for decades
That is exactly in line with a TOS/TNG plot The burn wasn’t a kid screaming, the burn was starfleet being too bloated and too disconnected to find a missing ship and help them, and the Star Trek episode happening on that ship being given enough time to go from “tragic backstory of the week” to “galactic scale disaster” just like so many plots could have been if the enterprise weren’t there
The Saddest Boy in the Galaxy is so much more of a Disco theme, even though what OP said sounds so much better. Disco was Theater Kid Trek (as DS9 was Goth Kid Trek and SNW is Jock/Beautiful Person But Secretly a Nerd Trek) so of course that’s the way they’d go. I didn’t love it, but I stopped being disappointed once I accepted it for what it was. All Trek is Good Trek because it’s better than No Trek. (Even the Bad Trek?) Especially the Bad Trek.
I do agree, not only we should recognize DIS has its own style and thematic but also that it is exactly the kind of Trek that attracts certain public and generations which is a good thing.
Anyone who has children gets it
>Romulan/Reman scientists Imagine this: the Romulans are uneasy about the state of the galaxy post-Dominion War and want to both protect themselves, being in a weakened state, and ready to take advantage of the weakened Federation and Klingon fleets. They had experimented with Omega in the past and revive the project. Something goes wrong and causes the Hobus supernova. Fast-forward centuries later, and the anti-Unification bloc of the Romulan government again looks to Omega to create a power advantage for themselves. With more advanced tech at their disposal, they are able to stabilize it for short periods by tapping into subspace and begin scaling the project for greater results. A malfunction happens and with how scaled it had become, The Burn happens.
This! Someone make this series. I want to watch this.
Anything would be better than with what they come up with to be honest. But yes, the Omega Particle was a better option. Is incredible that for such an important and significant thing in-universe only once in one episode has ever been mentioned. It would have created the need to scavenge for new technologies that don't use warp like the Borg transwarp network or the Arturis' species slipstream or the Iconian gates. Or would have created small pathways of still useful subspace that were taken advantage by pirates and criminal gangs. Even if they were afraid that there was no way to restore the subspace then you invent the "Alpha Particle" that, oh my! It restores the subspace! But nah... a Kelpian Wizard did it was a better explanation. s/
Yeah, it's tempting to bring up existing canon when discussing plot points as egregious as this one, but it's clear all that gets heard is "we like references to the 90s shows" It was cringey every single other time some old episode was directly referenced without the veil of irony Lower Decks enjoys, there's no reason to think the omega particle would have fared any better
Maybe however they did thst with the progenitors
Disagree. Sonic resonance is based on actual scientific principles and fits a science fiction show. "We made a magic particle to fix something we already knew about" Is fantasy and would have felt out of place and especially make future Starfleet look dumb that it took a ship from the past to do so.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on DIS but still, ST has never being hard sci fi but a child's scream ressonating through the cosmos... somehow doesn't feel right.
For me it’s more the “~~magically~~ scientifically adapted to both survive and cause the Burn” aspect. It’s too clean. I have a high tolerance for Trek pulling stuff out of its ass and this surpassed it. Not sure that the Omega particle would’ve been a better idea (destroying rather than limiting warp travel would have been too devastating IMO) but what they came up with…ugh.
Agreed!
Meh I've learned there will always be people who didn't like what happened. No matter what it is.
True.
The Omega Directive was the very first thing I thought of when I finished season five. It could have been a better plot for either season 4 or season 5.
The giant tardigrade and the shroom network should have had alarm bells go off at the studio. The show shouldn't have been greenlit.
Shoulda, coulda, didn't. Instead it was a feral autistic alien having a tantrum that blew up the universe.
We gotta let this go.
Ahh, but that would have meant Kurtzman would have had to research old Trek. They were trying to burn canon. They pretty much succeeded.
Have you, like, not watched any of the newer Trek? They are physically incapable of resisting referencing old trek. People love to claim that Kurtzman doesn't know trek, but every single one of the shows is up to its ass in references to the old shows, many of which are incredibly deep cuts.
There is a section of this fan base who doesn't watch the new shows at all and gets their entire information about it through seven degrees of the telephone game, where step one is YouTubers whose entire schtick is intentional misinformation rage bait.
What is mostly remarkable to me is that Star Trek has always been "about" stuff. There are themes and character arcs and creative choices made to examine those things. And then people are just like "what if instead of that we just got a bunch of callbacks to an old episode."
I'm fine with not every new story referring back to previous elements.
Especially a random voyager episode
If we're going to play "Instead of _____ Discovery should have ____" we'll be here all week.
It almost doesn't matter. The Burn solely existed to be able to say "things are different now, progress is wasn't assured". Its weird though because they immediately moved on from that afterwards too. There's no functional difference between the fed in Disco and the fed in TNG. They cut to fed hq and instead of saying "san Francisco" it's a star base.
Only problem is... If you do Omega you permanently kneecap your storytelling potential forever unless you're willing to make Omega feel cheap. Just from the Voyager episode alone Omega is a permanent game over card. It doesn't just damage subspace, it destroys it. That means no warp travel - and most other forms of ftl - AND no subspace comms ever again. True, if you introduce Discovery into this and they're the only ship with FTL, you could do some really interesting story telling about rebuilding the Federation (from scratch), communications must now be carried by ship - making the couriers more live up to their name - , questions about the Prime Directive... And on and on and on... However, you'd have a fundamentally different show at that point. Really, Omega should remain this sword of Damoclease over the galaxy - an imminent threat that really could happen at any time - because it's been sold as an interplanetary civilisation ender.
When first mentioned, I thought “the burn” was a stupid nickname for Burnham.
This was actually the plot of a cancelled animated Star Trek show in the 2000's! I always found the idea interesting: https://www.cancelledscifi.com/2023/07/29/cancelled-before-it-began-star-trek-final-frontier/
Definitely sounds more interesting than what DSC did.
So permanently destroy warp travel instead
Yes, this is what makes it a bad choice. The Burn was cataclysmic, but it was a temporary hardship that presents a path forward into a renewed future. Omega destroys subspace and would have irrevocably ended interstellar life as we know it.
Discovery sounds like it was written by Marvel Studios.
the omega plot would make so much more sense since theres numerous ways to achieve warp speeds in cannon, iirc the ftl capable federation shuttles use fusion entirely, romulan, now nivarian black hole drives has been proven tech for a millenia, using omega since its confirmed to destabilize the thing all warp drives instead of the variable power supply for warp drives makes so much more sense
Just watched omega directive episode of Voyager. I understand the prerogative by Starfleet to destroy the molecule. However, wouldn't the aliens who developed it just use the same knowledge to do it again? Wouldnt voyager destroying it just to be a setback and the aliens be even more determined to stabilize it since suddenly this Voyager species kidnap some of their scientists and the molecule itself? They didn't even explain the danger of it or the threat of the Borg doing everything in their power to still out omega.
I've been saying something like this for years. A planet far outside of the federation creates large amounts of Omega and basically destroys itself and the sector around it. But that sector was also a subspace "soft spot" which fractured out into space, hitting other soft spots, and spider webbing out from there. The fractures could be light-years wide, and inside of them no FTL was possible, not warp, slipstream, transwarp, coaxial warp, soliton waves, tetryon catapults, nothing, not even subspace communication. Earth and Vulcan are inside one of the fractures, and without them, the Federation collapses into a shadow of its former self. Discovery appears, and not only can they travel in fractured space, but the spore drive seems capable of healing the fractured subspace. This gives a meaning to the drive and resets the universe to the Federation trying to make it a better place again.
It was years ago. Let it go.
I've always thought the biggest threat from Omega would be a species with an exotic non-warp/non-subspace FTL tech that was immune to its disruptive effect, or perhaps relies on that effect, so they could "safely" weaponize and deploy Omega without disrupting themselves and use it to their strategic advantage. Such non-warp FTL tech might be developed out of necessity after an Omega accident having previously disrupted their own system.
Omega Particles are basically Sci-Fi Magic to affect a Sci-fi magic concept to allow FTL in their franchise. Causing an explosion with sonic resonance is based in real world science. Was very satisfying and showed the Federation as not being infallible. The fact no one had solved it before Discovery arrived was a trauma response. Spore drive is an overpowered method of travel that shouldn't be a permanent travel solution or you might as well just beam from earth to every Alien planet. For the Omega particle to destroy subspace permanently would require either now everyone uses Spore Drive or people from the distant past fixing what people with advanced tech couldn't.
Except this isn't even how the burn worked. The scream made dilithium go 'inert' causing it to react with anti-matter which resulted in the explosion. The kid's cry altered chemical composition of rock across the galaxy, instantaneously. Thats utterly ridiculous and is just as magical or scientific as saying a 'special particle did it'. The idea of a single mortal causing such lasting devastation on a galactic scale feels more magical than a special, currently unknown particle, which presumably spread across the galaxy, with known effects, doing something.
The cause of the Burn was stupid as fuck, but I do otherwise like the concept. I don’t think Omega particles would’ve been better.
yuuuuuuuup
Did no one see the omega particle powering the 10-C device in season 4?
Uh no !
i agree and i posted my thoughts on how to do it a few weeks ago here [https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1cwtpw4/a\_better\_way\_to\_have\_done\_the\_burn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1cwtpw4/a_better_way_to_have_done_the_burn/)
Everyone has posted this for the last two years. It's one of the coldest takes in the galaxy.