powers

Preface: For a hundred years now devotees of Sherlock Holmes have been playing the Great Game, a hermeneutical exercise based on the premise that the Holmes stories are not fiction but rather absolutely reliable historical records. Therefore any inconsistencies in the stories must have an explanation, however complex and recondite, that saves the appearances and sustains our confidence in Watson as faithful narrator. I think that’s the proper attitude to take when writing about the world of Star Trek. It’s certainly the most enjoyable attitude to take.

In “True Q” (ST:TNG 6.6) we meet a young woman named Amanda who, having grown up believing herself to be human, discovers that she is in fact a member of another race — Q, beings who live in an alternate universe or dimension known as the Q Continuum — and therefore “nearly omnipotent.” She is forced to decide whether she will live as a human, forswearing the use of her vast powers, or instead accept those powers and join Q, within which she will, it is said, learn the proper use of them.

Even as she is trying to decide, she sees that an away team from the Enterprise is threatened with death by explosion — a powerful device of some kind is getting out of control in a kinda handwavy fashion — as they visit a grossly polluted planet whose degraded atmosphere they are hoping to ameliorate. Amanda instinctively arrests the vaguely described runaway process and, while she’s at it, removes the pollutants from the entire planet, leaving it no longer a gritty brownish-orange but rather a freshly-scrubbed green and blue. Yes, she realizes, she is Q after all, and will go with her people to learn the proper exercise of her powers.

All the members of the race/species/whatever are called Q, unfortunately, so from now on the one representative whom we regularly see on ST:TNG — this guy:

— will be called Q, and the species will be called, imaginatively enough I think, the Queues.

Nearly omnipotent: I don’t believe the show ever tells us what the limits on the Queues’ powers actually are, but we do know that they aren’t omniscient — the things human beings do are often surprising to them, and at the outset of this episode they do not know whether Amanda is “true Q” or not — and they do not seem to be omnibenevolent. Q himself largely behaves in a way that humans think childish — though there are possible exceptions, typically involving an unexplained fascination with and even affection for Captain Picard; but this apparent generosity does not, as far as I can see, extend to anyone else. In any case, here he tests Amanda’s powers by causing the warp core of the Enterprise to go nova, as it were, to discover whether she can stop it. If she had not been able to, or had not tried, then everyone on the Enterprise would have died.

Q is a classic Trickster in that he is not obviously malicious but also does not seem to care how much damage he does to anyone else as he goes about his business or his play. Which raises the question: Is he in this sense representative of the Queues? He has gotten into trouble with the others in the past, once being stripped of all his powers and, temporarily as it turned out, demoted to mortal human status. But they send him to investigate who Amanda really is, so that indicates some level of trust. We know (from this very episode) that the Queues will destroy members of their collective who stray too far from its core values, so I think we can assume that Q is a fairly representative Queue. Within normal parameters anyway.

All of which raises another question: What, for the Queues, is the “proper exercise of their powers”? Because what Amanda just did to rescue a dying planet from the abuses of its apex species does not seem to be within the Queue remit. By this point we’ve seen Q a number of times, and he has never lifted one finger to reduce suffering. The best that can be said for him is that he often refrains from inflicting suffering he has threatened to inflict. If any other Queues behave differently, we don’t hear about it.

Why is that? The options:

Q is different than his colleagues, and not in a good way: there are Queues elsewhere in the universe limiting the damage that species as stupid and vicious as Homo sapiens are doing to their environments and fellow creatures. (One thing we don’t know is how many Queues there are: maybe they’re doing the best they can but stupidity and viciousness are so pervasive that they can’t keep up.)

Queues are as amoral and self-serving as Q typically appears: they simply don’t care about the suffering of lesser beings. In time Amanda will learn not to waste her time on things like that, and will learn to seek her own gratification, whatever that might be. Different strokes for different q-folks.

Queues are Daoists: they understand that actions, however benevolently intended, are likely to have unintended effects. For instance, to rescue people who have grossly polluted their own planet might lead other civilizations to believe that they too can serve their own appetites in the expectation that some Great Power will rescue them from the consequences. You never know. (Remember, we have seen that the Queues are not omniscient.) Therefore Amanda might be taught that her own actions, however generous in inspiration, are not wise: it is better to practice wuwei.

Choose your own adventure.