Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous
They had served together for many years; Kirk surely knew Sulu well enough that he could trust him.
Kirk's active career was much longer than the five years we saw in TOS. It would be pretty odd for him to have had less dealings with the likes of Cartwright than with Sulu. Things like ST:GEN show Kirk barely knows his former helmsman.
And Kirk has just been betrayed by somebody at least Spock trusted implicitly. It's not as if Kirk himself hasn't been betrayed that way: his lifelong friend Gary Mitchell once tried to kill him.
It's not a matter of Kirk finding people he can still trust - there are none. It's a matter of Kirk fighting paranoia rather than going paranoid himself. Sulu may be a traitor, but Kirk has to start somewhere.
I think that virus Tuvok had made up the whole "We'll go rescue Kirk and McCoy" bit from scratch. STVI states explicitly that it had been a month since Praxis exploded, yet Excelsior went on its abortive rescue mission two days later.
I'd think it more likely that the virus only made the exact timing go haywire. Not two days after Praxis, but more like two days or weeks after Gorkon's death.
Hell, Valtane probably didn't even die.
That would be consistent. The virus always made the victim imagine death; it sort of follows that the death would be imaginary. Everything else would be the brain trying to wrap random memories around the obligatory death in order to create a coherent narrative. And altering the flow of time would be a standard trick for the human brain, and supposedly the Vulcan one as well.
I wonder if it was secret, or if it just wasn't known to Enterprise becaues they'd been running silent in Klingon space.
There was quite an audience in the conference: not just Feds in blue sash speaking to Klingons in red and vice versa, but all sorts of seemingly random spectators representing whatever players in interstellar politics. Somewhat unlikely if this were just a hush-hush top-level negotiation between the leaders of the two fighting factions... But in line with the generally open UFP politics. The UFP President probably wanted the entire universe to hear in real time as he pontificated about the benefits of the Klingons agreeing to UFP aid.
I'd say "out of the loop" was Kirk's problem, and most of Starfleet was informed of the arrangements so that the logistics and security could be efficiently organized. However, both sides would also agree to keep security to a minimum, fearing that assassins would actually come from the ranks of the armed forces as had already happened once. (Which may be why Cartwright used an assassin that pretended to be part of the Klingon political delegation, rather than a secretive ninja or one of the security goons; the apparently unarmed delegates would be less closely monitored. Although visibly framing the Klingons for the deed was probably the more important factor there.)
Timo Saloniemi
