General Trek Questions and Observations

Considering how the think tank worked they deserved it. They were hardly benevolent in their actions by any meaning of the word.

 

Be careful what you start.

 

Random thought I had this morning: Instead of putting Kirk on trial in "Court Martial" they should have court martialed the Enterprise's UX designers instead. I mean really, having a button on the captain's armchair console that will eject the pod without warning is just a terrible idea. At the very least, pushing that button should initiate a countdown that would give anyone in the pod time to escape. It shouldn't rely on the captain coordinating when to sound the alert and when to eject the pod.

 

There was a similar thing in TNG where Picard orders Worf to draw all available power, even from life support and Worf hits one button. Don't press that by accident.

 

TV short cuts and a total disregard for operational doctrine. My question about Court Marital is why did the pod have to be manned to start with? The whole episode kinda crumbles away if you give it the critical eye. It has never been a favorite.

 

My thought: Worf and Kirk just pushed an override safety button. The computer is listening the whole time, so it is preparing what is ordered, but needs that button press for operational discipline.

 

But then the computer should have given Finney sufficient time to evacuate the pod rather than just jettisoned it immediately. Whether done by computer or human it's still a poor design.

 

Yeah the Enterprise D computer is like Cortana or Alexa always listening. But yet it has enough smarts to not activate via random conversations so that's interesting because wouldn't one have to control their speech to a greater extent to to not activate anything via the main computer?

 

Agreed. There's alot of questions with the computer's activities in "Court Martial" that aren't really answered even under the assumption that Finney was messing with it (or Kirk was, if he had been the guilty party). I would need to do a deep dive into the episode again.

Maybe, due to the Discovery era AI mishaps, they were dumbing down computers left and right and went a little too far on the Enterprise here.

 

A little backasswards as the 60s did not have AI to have mishaps with. TOS spitballed a hell of a lot on Computers. They were massive calculators IRL. Office suites did not exist. Even computers with video screens were rare. So anything you saw in Trek about computers was pulled whole cloth from what we hoped they could be.

Robert Heinlein wrote computers as intelligent in 1973 in Time Enough for Love. That was after TOS.

 

*Sigh* I miss the days when 'shipping couples just had a letter designation rather than these cutesy hybrid names.

As far as most pointless 'shipping fanfic I ever read, there was one where Jadzia Dax invented an experimental transwarp shuttle, went to the Delta Quadrant, just happened to run into Voyager, and only stayed long enough to have a quickie with Seven. No one seemed that interested in the transwarp shuttle, oddly enough.

Has anyone here read "Dark Passions"? It's basically a glorified smutty Mirror Universe fanfic with Seven hooking up with Intendant Kira. Shockingly, Pocket Books published it as a 2-book series. There's also a bit where Troi seduces Kira in order to get construction permits to build a casino on Betazed.

Confined to quarters? Oh, sure, take all the fun out of it!

Doesn't the translator automatically determine a lot of things? Like, in "Metamorphosis," it automatically knew that the non-corporeal entity was female and gave it an appropriate voice.

I'm a big Law & Order fan, so I enjoy "Court Martial" as Star Trek's entry in the courtroom drama genre. I'd certainly take it over "Rules of Engagement" or "Judgment." But not quite as iconic as "The Measure of a Man" or "The Drumhead" and not as fun as "A Matter of Perspective." ("You're a dead man, Apgar! A dead man!")

My bigger question about "Court Martial" is why is ejecting the pod so crucial that it has a dedicated button on the captain's chair? I mean, we never see him use it in any other episode. Never even slightly comes up, on this or any other show. You'd think that this would be controlled at one of the other stations if it's such an infrequently used thing.

 

That one may have been a headscratcher back in the 1960s. Today's audiences would be familiar with tornado hunting, where people risk life and limb to dive into the center of a horrid natural phenomenon in order to do last-minute preparation of a recording device that then gets jettisoned there while the people get the hell out of Dodge. And with infinitely reconfigurable user interfaces, certainly including buttons that can be repurposed and relabeled by pure software means. If it's up to Kirk to decide when enough is enough and whether to ruin the one chance to study the ion storm and flee, or to deploy and then flee, and he's too busy to talk even to Sulu, then he sure deserves the dedicated button that day!

My problem with "Court Martial" is the courtroom aspect of it. Sam Cogley achieves nothing at all, and yet the heroes treat him as if he at least helped save the day somehow...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Even worse than achieving nothing at all, most of what Cogley says is pure fluff that has almost nothing to do with the actual case.

 

You mean like...
COGLEY: I'd be delighted to, sir, now that I've got something human to talk about. Rights, sir, human rights. The Bible, the Code of Hammurabi and of Justinian, Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies, the Statutes of Alpha Three. Gentlemen, these documents all speak of rights. Rights of the accused to a trial by his peers, to be represented by counsel, the rights of cross-examination, but most importantly, the right to be confronted by the witnesses against him, a right to which my client has been denied.

To quote Carl Sandburg, “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

 

TOS wrote computers as intelligent in 1968 (The Ultimate Computer, which aired less than a month before 2001: A Space Odyssey). It's not much of an extrapolation to assume that the duotronic machines had a fraction of the intelligence of the multitronic machines. How much, we don't know, but Kirk and his ilk would likely kneecap it as much as possible. TOS also introduced us to the flirty computer 50 years before Calypso.

Of course, disregarding real life for a moment, we now know that TOS is ten years after Star Trek: Discovery, which had its slew of AI problems and solutions, and gives us more backstory to work off of and develop the history of TOS computing.

 

COURT MARTIAL: "Humans are inherently more important than machines."
THE MEASURE OF A MAN: "This machine has as much inherent value as a human."

 

I've read a similar quote, only the third option was "make an ad hominem attack."

 

If this shows two steps in a three step progression, step three is obvious.

 

Be glad you weren't a part of the shipping community in the Potterverse... we had names for ships. Harry/Ginny was Orange Crush, for instance. Harry/Ron was Best Mate. Neville/Hermione was Forget & Remember... there were hundreds of them, conventional and bizarre alike.

 

In the early 2000s somebody around here was a big proponent of a Crusher/Picard romance, and he would go on and on about "BonC," ad nauseum. It meant "Beverly on Jean-luC."

Kor