It's supposed to give you the question.

I understand that to some extent. However, I think if we focus on the Tosk episode a bit, I think the story would have both flowed better and been more satisfying if his purpose in life was revealed earlier and the protagonists had time to dwell on the issue and questions. I don't necessarily want answers, I mean, hell, I listen to fucking NPR Talk Radio for fun sometimes and answers they don't have and I dwell on my own inner conflicts about classism and materialism and spirituality and equality and I sure as fuck don't have answers. But taking the time to really dwell on the questions, to get the conversation ball rolling, adds so much to the satisfaction.

This comes to the fore in your frustration over the way O'Brien acted - he didn't meet your expectations.

The frustration comes not from the fact that he didn't meet my expectations. The frustration comes from that he acted unrealistically. If it was a civilian that met Tosk and did what O'Brien did, I wouldn't have been frustrated because shit, civilians do what they do and sometimes that means fighting the power and not regarding the bigger picture.

There's this unrealisticness that comes in a lot of the Sci-Fi episodes that I've seen. Like in OG Star Trek, Captain Kirk goes away on dangerous missions away from the ship. That's unrealistic. Grunts get to grunt and command gets to command because command is too valuable to risk losing. Star Trek, again, has what I understand to be non mission essential civilians on these ships that are gone for years at a time in dangerous territories full of unknown enemies and cosmic phenomena. I don't think I've ever heard a conversation from anyone to where society evolved where it's socially acceptable for groups of people to take risk like that in masses. I mean, they're not the space equivalent of homesteaders going to settle the west. They're a bunch of spouses and children along for a very dangerous ride.

If we were to talk in terms of more specifics. The very last episode I saw of DS9 was even more unrealistic to the point I thought all day about everything that was overlooked. It made the Tosk episode seem better in comparison. To narrow it down to just thing though, to avoid another rant, they found a woman who was on the other side of the wormhole for two years, the only known human to do so. To the Federation, that part of the galaxy is a massive question mark. There was no military debriefing to discover and record where she had been, who she had met, and what she had learned and there was no quarantine period to make sure she was in good health. I mean, yeah, Doctor Bashir did give her a check up to find out that she was in amazingly good health, but that was after she was already let on the station that has circulation air and population and water and all. Don't even get me started on Quark trying to bribe Odo so he could hold an illegal auction to sell off alien artifacts and the overlooking of the moral implications of selling cultural artifacts to a bunch of shady rich people to begin with.

I think the best analogy I can come up with so far is if the Brooklyn 99 team found a time bomb in their office, acknowledged it was there, and then left it as a central part of the plot without actually trying to figure out where it came from, how to get rid of it, or anything of the sort. That strange woman from the other side of the wormhole is like a time bomb not being addressed. It's unrealistic not because it takes place in outer space and not because there are aliens and wormholes and things of the like. It's unrealistic because to me, that's not how rational people operate.

So yeah, I'm still saying, if you're gonna bring up shit for the sake of exploration, explore it. I never said anything about answering it, because resolutions don't necessarily mean concrete answers. But in addition, I'm now also saying, explore things realistically.