I do remember waiting for the formulaic “aha! Tricked you! You thought we were dumb moment” and then it was just like “nope, this is just the way they are”, was definite an interesting twist.

Was it just their verbal intelligence?

No. And this reminds me of the “meat proxies” we see now who are “smart” and “powerful” using Claude.

No, they really were (hilariously) dumb and simple. Of the top of my head I remember their capital was named “Big Strong City”, their “Red Alert” was “Red Alarm” (it’s funny in context) and they didn’t really understand that’s an emergency, and despite being corrected multiple times by the woman herself, they kept thinking captain Carol Freeman was captain Kathryn Janeway. For reference, one of them in black and the other is white.

The Pakleds weren’t as dumb as they pretended.

Yeah Lower Decks played on their stupidity. But everything about Lower Decks was an exaggerated form of cannon.

But the actual behaviour of the Pakleds was to mislead people into thinking they were harmless through playing on their own stupidity.

Now I’m not saying they were a smart race comparable to (for example) the Romulans. But they weren’t as stupid as they portrayed themselves.

Lower Decks is canon, not “a form” of it (exaggerated or otherwise) but just as canon as any other show, and it’s my opinion (of course you may disagree) that it enriches Star Trek’s lore. Yes, that means the Koala is canon (it even shows up in the intro on the Strange New Worlds crossover episode!), but when you think about it, that’s not any more silly than Q or the myriad other bizarre things on other Star Trek shows.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/q0udro/comment/hf...

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. They’re fictional shows so all that’s important is that we enjoy them in our own way, but I don’t think Lower Decks exaggerated how dumb the Pakleds are, I think it explored them so much because them being dumb made them a good comedic fit. When I watch the TNG episode and Lower Decks, I see consistency. More than comedy, Lower Decks has an immense respect and care for the lore.

That’s a very uncharitable reading of my comment when I literally said it was canon.

The “exaggerated” bit is clearly meant to highlight that Lower Decks is written to be a comedy first. So certain parts of canon are amped up for comedic effect.

The rest of your post seemed to imply that I was unimpressed with Lower Decks, and Star Trek in general, when it has comedy episodes. Nothing about my comment suggested that. I actually think Lower Decks (post season 1) was the strongest spin off in new Trek. And I even loved the SNW / LD crossover episode too.

I regret that you took my comment as negative, please believe that was not my intention. I tried to be exceedingly clear about what was opinion and that I think we’re fine to disagree as long as we’re enjoying ourselves.

There was certainly no implication directed at you¹. I don’t know you and wouldn’t assume your tastes. Rather, I was sharing my excitement at Lower Decks. I’m glad that you liked it too.

I wish you a nice Saturday.

¹ And it saddens me that these days so many people on HN constantly assume implications which aren’t there, and always negatively, instead of taking comments as they’re written and defaulting to assuming kindness.

No, they really were (hilariously) dumb and simple. Now let me list two examples that are just vocabulary.

Urk. Man, people like you really take the joy out of life. Here everyone else is, just having fun with harmless geekery, but something just compels you to be pedantic and wrong.

“Big Strong City” is not “just vocabulary”, it’s an example of how they think and what they value, what they give importance to. “Red Alarm” is vocabulary, but that was not the example (that was to situate people who have seen the show), the relevant bit is “they didn’t really understand that’s an emergency”. Mixing up two people is not vocabulary.

Now, was it worth it to poo poo on everyone’s fun just to try to show how smart you are and embarrass yourself in the process by revealing a lack of understanding of the subject matter?

Don’t be that kid at the party who’s always calling for attention and all of the adults secretly wish their parents hadn’t brought him along. Do better.

Ah yes, if you like Pakleds, you should really watch Lower Decks! Also if you like TNG, as it's set in the timeline just after TNG and has guest (voice) appearances from many TNG, DS9 and Voyager characters - though not Picard unfortunately (IIRC).

The Pakleds assembled a huge pile of technologies they didn't invent together into a powerful ship and social-engineered the Enterprise into giving them more valuable stuff to exploit.

This is Hacker News, replace "Pakleds" with "startup founder" and so long as it's profitable that's called being brilliant and innovative.