Alien possession is a pretty common trope in Trek appearing in Voyager, TNG, ENT, DS9, and TOS(though my memory is shaky on that one). I imagine in-universe it has happened to other crews who we don't follow on screen. So my question is this does the Federation have protocols or contingencies to handle this problem? Any tactics or techniques to handle this issue. Thoughts? Ideas?
Okay what tactics or protocols would you a genre conscious security planner implement to handle alien possession crises?
There's a General Order telling our heroes what to do if the entire crewdies of a disease. It's a drastic step: the ship is to be scuttled. We aren't aware of any other scenarios calling for the ship to be scuttled. It sometimes happens as a tactical ploy against hostile boarding, though. The skipper has great latitude on how to deal with such boarding, and for example "Rascals" shows scuttling is not mandatory and there are other measures such as lockups to be taken. We could deduce that possession scenarios warrant the same range of responses, up to scuttling if possession is widespread enough. The key difference here is that possession is likely to wreak havoc with the chain of command. In outright hostile boarding, it's simple to deal with a dead or incapacitated superior officer and the subsequent reassigning of scuttling authority to the next in line. It's more difficult to skip a skipper who may or may not be possessed. Another big problem is that a possessed key officer will typically be aware of the anti-possession procedure! The answer cannot be giving room to independent initiative, because that's the very thing a possession is trying to usurp. But a draconian solidification of the grip the top officers have on the ship is likely to backfire, too. Perhaps all we're left with is a "time out" protocol wherein the lowliest Crewman Fourth Rate can shut down and lock up at least some aspects of the starship, to be released only on the external authority of Starfleet Command? This still leaves an onboard Klingon spy capable of shutting down a ship's weapons just as she's trying to make an attack run on Ty'Gokor, but what other option is there? Timo Saloniemi
I don't know-but given the apparent frequency and number of these sort of attacks Starfleet(and other space faring organizations) should develop protocols to handle it.
What would be the protocol for those who can easily jump bodies? Just clamp down entire ship and send distress signal?
I would think after the parasitic beings scare of TNG's Conspiracy there must be some stuff on the books about how to deal with mass body snatching, & the standard protocols on how to handle it wouldn't be all that dissimilar from the kind of infiltration they dealt with during the Dominion War, with Founders impersonating people, except in this case they'd be the actual people being possessed
Just perform those mass 'magneton' scans from Cathexis on a regular basis, just to be sure (every 10 minutes or so). It leaves the crew disoriented for a short time, and so it might have the additional advantage of help explaining why some episodes don't have a whole lot of logic to them.