They're trying to keep that on the downlow. Whole mess of legal and regulation violations there.
Court Martial is really an odd episode
- Thread starter Gotham Central
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The Menagerie actually comes immediately after Court Martial by both production and stardate order (though not original broadcast order).
If you want to look at it really cynically, it's possible that Spock's actions in this episode help set up his escapade in The Menagerie.
Despite all the evidence pointing to Kirk's guilt, Spock assures the court that Kirk must be telling the truth and the evidence misleading, because he just knows his friend would never do what he stands accused of doing. Most Vulcans would call that an illogical sentiment, and it certainly doesn't impress the court.
In the very next episode, Kirk returns the sentiment, angrily dismissing all the evidence that Spock is lying because he refuses even to consider the possibility that his friend may be lying to him. (Oops.) This obstinance buys Spock the time he needs to kidnap Pike and steal the Enterprise. It's possible Kirk would have handled The Menagerie situation the same way regardless, but Spock doing it for him in Court Martial makes it almost impossible for Kirk not to do it for Spock the following week.
Is Spock planning ahead in Court Martial? Is he already manipulating Kirk? It seems possible.
Knight Templar
Commodore
If you want to be really cynical, one might suggest that Spock knew about Finneys faked death and computer sabotage all along and simply allowed Kirk to "dangle in the wind" so that Kirk would be especially indebted to him when he hatched his plot to kidnap Captain Pike.
In this case, Spocks "hunch" about the computer chess programs being corrupted wasn't a "hunch" at all but part of Spocks plan to spring Kirk.
Or.
It is possible that Spock already knew about Pikes accident (her certainly did, Mendez said "subspace had been buzzing about it for months") and was at a loss about how to get Pike to Talos but Finney's successful computer sabotage gave him the idea about how to pull it off.
No one called me on it, but apparently Cogley did say he never uses his own computer. So, I'm going to say he's lying. Lawyers need up-to-date information, and that wouldn't be printed in books.
I'll just stamp on Knight Templar's toes here with some of the answers... Sorry about that!
We can treat the ion pod as an automated probe, a device regularly used by our heroes to study weird phenomena. It just happens to be a probe that needs to be prepared just before launch, by a highly trained person from a very small pool of experts. And its "plates" cannot be prepared too long before launch (i.e. before entering the storm) or they will decay somehow. And, once prepared, the buoy will become a bomb (much like the seismic probes used in oceanography today), with both a "timer" and a "random" risk of detonation, so even in a relatively mild storm there's haste in deployment; in "rough seas", the pod absolutely has to be dumped, both in order to begin operations, and in order to reduce risk to the deploying ship.
Finney must have carefully planned for this thing. Ion storm encounters are apparently rare, so Finney would have just one chance to frame Kirk. A dozen simpler, faster ways would no doubt exist, so Finney must strongly believe that the ion pod schtick has the best chances of success. It makes sense, then, to consider the ion pod a serious risk to the ship, and to assume that Finney is one of the very few people qualified to tackle that risk (so he can be on top of the duty roster "at random"), but also that in normal circumstances the risk would not be directed specifically at Finney himself (so him being a casualty is clearly Kirk's fault, not the result of Finney's incompetence). An automated probe that gets launched with personnel still inside just because Kirk gets cold feet and mismanages a risk whose managing ought to be Finney's job... Now that's the perfect ruse!
It sounds plausible to me that the ship's top IT support person would be both vitally important, and virtually never seen outside his wizardly chambers.
It doesn't make sense IMHO to draw any comparisons between today's computers, and tomorrow's. The principles of computation are in flux today already, and "common sense" has absolutely nothing to do with how the capabilities and limitations of our hardware are set up. Today, we accept limitations that Jules Verne or even Alan Turing would declare utterly implausible. In the 2260s, a fundamental interconnectivity of computing things could be the price they pay for their desired features.
Considering they needed a special expert on the ship for the job, with the same rank as Spock's, it doesn't strike me as implausible that Spock would miss something Finney did. Especially if Finney hid his tracks carefully in the visual records department, but not so carefully in other places where Spock would not look.
A complete diagnostic of the computer isn't a plausible thing for Spock to do at that stage, either in terms of his capabilities or his motivation.
Agreed here that it was done purely for drama. Cogley probably specifically asked for the "white noise filter" to be constructed!
However, would you really trust ship's sensors when facing a master criminal whose demonstrated expertise lies in perverting the output of said sensors?
Our heroes would of course tell their suspects that the lie detectors were infallible. But they would know better themselves, so the SB 11 interrogators would not benefit from repeating that lie on Kirk or Spock or the other witnesses.
It probably helps that he stays concealed at Engineering! Being a computer wizard, he would have very good situational awareness, both on shipboard events and developments down below: he could eavesdrop on just about everything, and stay ahead of his hunters whether hiding or performing sabotage.
Timo Saloniemi
It's not as if the psychotricorder of "Wolf in the Fold" is ever exactly described as a lie detector, either. Rather, it is credited with the powers of giving the heroes a "detailed account" on what has happened to Scotty in the past twenty-four hours. Sounds like the device, if applied properly, would be able to recover and record Scotty's experiences and sensations somehow, playing back his memories. Hard to tell if that would help in determining whether those memories are truthful or not.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Excellent projection into the future, or an excellent loosening up of our ideas about future technology, that is. I don't even have to know anything about computers to understand it.
SPOCK: The Captain, myself, and the records officer.
And here we can probably hazard a guess that all three would have the necessary clearance to tamper with the records, but only Spock and Finney would be gifted computer wizards. Or even that only Kirk and Finney would have had the clearance, but Spock could have hacked the system thanks to his skill.
The idea that Kirk would be a computer genius on level with Spock isn't particularly well supported in TOS or the Shatner movies. Indeed, Kirk's frustration in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" could be used as proof that he isn't particularly gifted. Whether the Pine movies establish the "other" Kirk as a skilled manipulator of computers at a level beyond talking them to death remains to be seen.
Timo Saloniemi
The idea that Kirk would be a computer genius on level with Spock isn't particularly well supported in TOS or the Shatner movies. Indeed, Kirk's frustration in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" could be used as proof that he isn't particularly gifted. Whether the Pine movies establish the "other" Kirk as a skilled manipulator of computers at a level beyond talking them to death remains to be seen.
Timo Saloniemi
Well, he hacked the computer in the KM test.
Knight Templar
Commodore
In the novel "Koboyashir Maru" that gave the backgrounds about Kirk's, Chekov's, Sulu's, and Scotty's KM tests, Kirk had one of his Academy classmates do the computer reprogramming for him.
By the way, Scotty's KM test was far and away the most exciting.
He destroyed 17 Klingon cruisers (and was working on 15 more) when his ship was finally blown apart.
By the way, Scotty's KM test was far and away the most exciting.
He destroyed 17 Klingon cruisers (and was working on 15 more) when his ship was finally blown apart.
Knight Templar
Commodore
Personally I thought the thing about "only Spock, Kirk, and the records officer" could change the computer logs had more to do with them being the only ones who had the proper access codes rather than hacking ability.
^^^ That really makes a lot of sense. you don't want just anyone to be able to go in and alter logs except for high level officers.
I'll jump in, too...
The bit with the ion pod is really a plot device, a means by which Kirk causes the death of a crewman. It could have been the tube that Spock almost jettisons with Scotty in "That Which Survives", or some other Jefferies tube that was deadly, or out an airlock, or some other contrivance. Whatever shipboard tech situation that Kirk activates/orders that kills a crewman. That's all that the story needed, so I'll buy "ion pod".
How Spock missed the computer tampering and then only found it by playing chess? I'll guess Spock ran some Norton Antivirus checks and defrags and other levels of diagnostics. Finney covered his tracks well enough that standard tests wouldn't detect his tampering. The chess game scenario was a side-effect that Finney missed, a clue that tipped Spock off that something really was amiss and then he could figure out the rest.
The white sound device? Why not ship sensors? They wanted a separate device, independent of the compromised ship systems, for a valid reading.
The bit with the ion pod is really a plot device, a means by which Kirk causes the death of a crewman. It could have been the tube that Spock almost jettisons with Scotty in "That Which Survives", or some other Jefferies tube that was deadly, or out an airlock, or some other contrivance. Whatever shipboard tech situation that Kirk activates/orders that kills a crewman. That's all that the story needed, so I'll buy "ion pod".
How Spock missed the computer tampering and then only found it by playing chess? I'll guess Spock ran some Norton Antivirus checks and defrags and other levels of diagnostics. Finney covered his tracks well enough that standard tests wouldn't detect his tampering. The chess game scenario was a side-effect that Finney missed, a clue that tipped Spock off that something really was amiss and then he could figure out the rest.
The white sound device? Why not ship sensors? They wanted a separate device, independent of the compromised ship systems, for a valid reading.
I actually was not referring to the psychotricorder. In the briefing room Scott puts his hand on a pad and the computer is able to tell without fail whether he is lying or not.
The "psycho-tricorder", BTW, is another device that is mentioned in only one episode of Trek . . . and it figures that it was Robert Bloch who came up with the concept. Get it? PSYCHO-tricorder??
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