Rodimus, Paradron, Cybertron, yadda yadda

[Onslaught Six]

For some reason, this computer skips when the scroll-bar appears next to the text-box.

I've had that happen on several computers; I don't know if it's just the forums or just the computers in general. I use Notepad when this happens.

The problem with episodes like Kremzeek is that that they are badly written attempts at humour. The good guys act in the moment, in ways that are only acceptable if you are a small child, know the script, and/or assume no consequences for anything....ever.

Yeah, Jazz and co are heals in this episode.

Dom
-and we complain about the Bayformers.....

And people wonder why I think G1 cartoon sucks.

[Shockwave]

It happens on my home computer, but not my work computer.

We don't wonder, we know it sucks. Yet I at least still enjoy it anyway.

[Mako Crab]

Besides being in it! I mean, the Autobots are the good guys, but like Dom says--that's not a license to be 'stupid.' If you're at war and there's an unidentified object jumping around in your headquarters, you shoot at it. No questions.

Whatever happened to, "Halt! Who goes there?" More to the point, besides Jazz being impatient and trigger happy, he and the other Autobots in the episode resort to lethal force as their first resort every time they encounter Kremzeek, and are properly punished each time. They never change their tactics or even consider other ways to deal with Kremzeek. Hey, how about that spray coating that protected the Autobots? Coat the inside of a box. Put Kremzeek in the box. Done. Or like Sparky said, beam him somewhere else. They did it once, why not a second time? Send him to space, another planet, Perceptor's lab. Whatever. The Autobots had lots of options but chose to use only one.

The problem with episodes like Kremzeek is that that they are badly written attempts at humour. The good guys act in the moment, in ways that are only acceptable if you are a small child, know the script, and/or assume no consequences for anything....ever.

Yeah, Jazz and co are heals in this episode.

All true, but one thing I'd like to discuss a bit. I always hear the excuse that Transformers is just a kids show, and thus we can't really expect high caliber writing. But by the same token, since it is a kids show it should matter when the "good guys" are shown doing morally ambiguous or just plain wrong things and then telling kids that it is these kinds of actions that make a character heroic. There's nothing heroic about killing Kremzeek. The Autobots never once entertained any option for dealing with Kremzeek aside from death.

[Dominic]

From a meta-level, this episode was the light hearted and funny episode. It is okay for the Autobots to go for the kill option because they are consistently destined to fail. Kremzeek is funny you see, as are killing and destruction. It is not that TF was a kids' show. The problem is that TF was a *bad* kids' show.


It is nor even that the Autobots made the decision to kill Kremzeek. It is, as Crab notes, that they made the decision without even giving serious consideration to other options.

I am not a big one for the sanctity of life about all. Hell, I will argue in favor of (carefully) targetted killings. But, "let's kill the imp" should not be the first option.

Is there a moral arguement for killing Kremzeek? Oh, hell yeah. But, none of the Autobots really made it.

On a related note, I find it amusing that an issue of the UK comic (which had far less need to be sanitized) written by Dan Abnett (who would go on to write *"Warhammer 40,000"* novels), has the Autobots acting more humanely in a similar situation.

When a pyrokinetic alien show up on Earth, they capture and relocate the critter to Mercury, after they discuss killing it.


Dom
-is trying to humanely capture and dispose of some apparently suicidal mice at the moment.

[Shockwave]

Dom's right, the episode was literally written to be the funny episode. David Wise actually says on the Rhino dvds that he just wanted to write an episode that was so chaotic that Prime wouldn't have time to come up with a plan. Seriously. That was it. That was the whole point of the entire episode. Personally, I hated this episode and not just for the reasons listed here (which really just give me more reason to hate it). And I'm pretty sure that the Paradron episode was another hippyfest courtesy of David Wise. Epic fail on both counts.

So to sum up the thread: The Borg have rights in spite of being galactic locusts, the Decepticons aren't nearly as bad as they seem and the Autobots are murderous assholes.

[Sparky Prime]

Hey, fuck those people. Look at any of the main characters; they never get Borg assimilated, do they? And why? Because they're not dumb enough to do that. If you're dumb enough to get assimilated by the Borg, then you were never going to do anything to begin with.

You don't know Star Trek very well do you? 5 main characters have been assimilated at one point or another. Picard, Janeway, Torres, Tuvok and Seven of Nine. And 3 of them did it on purpose as part of a plan to free the drones who were part of Unimatrix Zero.

And, the quickest way to stop the Borg from killing all of those nice people and aliens would be to wipe them out in one bloodless move. Kiling the Borg would not only prevent them from making future attacks, but it would let the Federation allocate resources to other projects that add value, rather than simply preserve it. (Security and military expenditures add jobs, but no not produce wealth or progress.)

The Borg don't kill, they assimilate. Those "nice people and aliens" are still very much alive, and deserve to be given the chance at being rescued from the Borg. I also don't think you're taking into account the real scope of what you're suggesting. You wouldn't just be killing the Borg, but thousands of worlds, with trillions of lives. For what? Just so the Federation can prevent future attacks and allocate resources to other projects? I'm sorry, but that's extremely short sighted compared to what they could get by actually freeing people from the control of the Borg, and give the Federation security. And again, "the economics of the future are somewhat different. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force" of peoples lives. "We work to better ourselves".

And, had the world decided to be done with Germany circa 1945, no reasonable person would have complained.

So you would condemn innocent people who didn't even have anything to do with the war to death because of the crimes of their countrymen? Somehow I think a lot of reasonable people would have a problem with that...

I didn't miss the point, I understood what you were saying, I was just saying it's a bad analogy. Which it is.

Well then you mistook it, because it wasn't an analogy. It's a simile, using "like" or "as" to compare two unlike things.

Whatever happened to, "Halt! Who goes there?" More to the point, besides Jazz being impatient and trigger happy, he and the other Autobots in the episode resort to lethal force as their first resort every time they encounter Kremzeek, and are properly punished each time. They never change their tactics or even consider other ways to deal with Kremzeek. Hey, how about that spray coating that protected the Autobots? Coat the inside of a box. Put Kremzeek in the box. Done. Or like Sparky said, beam him somewhere else. They did it once, why not a second time? Send him to space, another planet, Perceptor's lab. Whatever. The Autobots had lots of options but chose to use only one.

I agree. Even considering the Autobots are at war with the Decepticons, the logical thing would be to identify the unknown object before shooting at it. Suppose for example if it could have exploded if it had been shot? Being trigger happy wouldn't have been the right call. And given how little success the Autobots were having in trying to kill Kremzeek, it would have made sense for them to change tactics, either to at least contain it or sent it where it wouldn't do any harm.

[Dominic]

These are the same Autobots who, despite being at war with the Decepticons, just stuck the Stunticons in nice comfy cells in "Masquerade"....rather than doing the sensible thing and just feeding the Stunticons to the Dinobots or something.

The Borg don't kill, they assimilate. Those "nice people and aliens" are still very much alive, and deserve to be given the chance at being rescued from the Borg. I also don't think you're taking into account the real scope of what you're suggesting. You wouldn't just be killing the Borg, but thousands of worlds, with trillions of lives. For what? Just so the Federation can prevent future attacks and allocate resources to other projects? I'm sorry, but that's extremely short sighted compared to what they could get by actually freeing people from the control of the Borg, and give the Federation security. And again, "the economics of the future are somewhat different. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force" of peoples lives. "We work to better ourselves".

But, it still takes resources to better one's self.

The costs of saving that many prisoners/hostages/assimilated folk from the Borg, (to say nothing of re-intergrating them), would have been prohibitive. And, there is plenty of precedent for attacking one's enemy without regard for their hostages.

If it would be practical to save them, that would be one thing. But, doing so would cost more *Federation* lives. And, Picard would be obligated to preserve those. 7 of 9 was not quite human after she was released from the collective. In a real way, the little girl the Borg initially took was dead. The same could likely be said of the other lives and worlds the Borg claimed.



Nobody in their right mind would have complained publicly about attacking Germany. Many likely would have enjoyed the irony of looking away while the Germans got theirs.

Dom
-no, seriously, nobody would care.

[Shockwave]

I would point out that the Germans who currently live there and had nothing to do with it are still extremely sensitive about it to the point where Alternators Bumblebee was cancelled because Hasbro gave him a gun.

I think the one thing we all do seem to agree on is that Killing shouldn't be the FIRST option attempted in a given situation, right?

[138 Scourge]

So a couple thoughts on Kremzeek here..

Did the Autobots specifically ever say they'd never seen a Kremzeek before? If such things were around on Cybertron, then Jazz might have recognized it and thought "Ah, crap, a Kremzeek! Eff this!" and opened fire.

As for putting him down vs sending him elsewhere, Kremzeek ate energy, no? Like, he fed off the electricity in the things that he disrupted, didn't he? I'm just asking because if the Autobots had sent him somewhere like (bang zoom) the moon, then what's he gonna do? Sit there and go out of his tiny mind with boredom right before he starves to death. That sounds worse. Sure, he may not be expressly malicious, but in order to live he has to destroy everything he comes in contact with. That being the case, probably just putting him down is the kindest course of action.

Probably put too much thought into that today, but there it is.

[Sparky Prime]

But, it still takes resources to better one's self.

The great thing about Star Trek's future is they pretty much have unlimited resources.

The costs of saving that many prisoners/hostages/assimilated folk from the Borg, (to say nothing of re-intergrating them), would have been prohibitive. And, there is plenty of precedent for attacking one's enemy without regard for their hostages.

Prohibitive to who? Not all of the species assimilated by the Borg would have anyone to re-integrate with if their entire world was assimilated. Most of those assimilated worlds would likely just want rebuild their own civilizations if they were ever freed from the Borg.

But, doing so would cost more *Federation* lives. And, Picard would be obligated to preserve those.

That's not necessarily true. In fact, Janeway, Torres, and Tuvok were able to enact a plan that severed the Collective's control over all the Drones who were a part of Unimatrix Zero with no Federation casualties, even if they did temporarily have to be assimilated themselves. And again, being obligated to preserve Federation lives doesn't justify the murder of trillions of others.

7 of 9 was not quite human after she was released from the collective. In a real way, the little girl the Borg initially took was dead. The same could likely be said of the other lives and worlds the Borg claimed.

Seven was very young when she was assimilated which is why she didn't cope well with being separated from the Collective at first. She didn't have much of her own life experience to fall back on when she was liberated. But we've seen others who were adults when they were assimilated that don't have those problems and quite eagerly return to their normal lives. Certainly, many would need some sort of therapy to help them adjust but there would be plenty of people to help them through that.

Nobody in their right mind would have complained publicly about attacking Germany. Many likely would have enjoyed the irony of looking away while the Germans got theirs.

Dom
-no, seriously, nobody would care.

How can you even say something like that? You do realize there are war crimes set in place to prevent that exact sort of thing from happening right? People would most certainly care.