Star Trek, The Next Generation featured a recurring guest character, "Q", an incorporeal, vastly superior, malevolent intellect who harassed and dogged the "Enterprise" crew through various episodes of calculated perversity, limited only by the constraints of other, more emotionally mature members of his species. ("Q" seems to be a character extension of the original Star Trek character of "Trevelyan" in the episode "The Squire of Gothos", who is revealed at the end of his tyranical torments of the Enterprise crew to be a mere infant member of his vastly superior, incorporeal species.) I criticize the idea of the "mischievous sprite",...