Maybe the Klingons don't bother investigating incidents, or even if they do ask a couple of crewmembers when missing crewman was last seen, they probably don't have the medical know-how to do a full autopsy to find out. If the station's computer told the Klingon captain that Crewman K'Splatt had wandered into a prohibited part of the ship during repairs, I would have thought that the reaction of the captain would have been more a case of 'idiot, he never could follow orders - his problem'.
Or, given how often fights probably break out on Klingon ships, maybe the station offered medical treatment to the loser in a fight and then claimed that the patient died in surgery. As for medical know-how, even Phlox would've been fooled if not for an enormous stroke of luck. If he hadn't recently inoculated Travis with a vaccine that coincidentally thrived on the type of energy that supposedly killed him, he never would've realized that the corpse wasn't really Travis.
I loved “Dead Stop”! It has a really nice atmosphere going on (like many of the second season Enterprise episodes – “The Seventh”, “Vanishing Point”, “The Crossing” and “Regeneration” come to mind) and was shot beautifully. As a big Twilight Zone fan I really enjoyed the ending, too. I also prefer episodes like this to be self-contained. Makes them all the more mysterious.
There were also a Cardassian and a Vaadwaur in there. Those are both species that would definitely sell some random person off in exchange for needed repairs. What I'd have liked to see is some explanation, any explanation at all, for the Vaadwaur being there when they've all been in stasis in the Delta Quadrant for 700 years by the time we see the station.
^The Vaadwaur traveled far and wide in their time. It's likely they had splinter populations that weren't on the homeworld at the time they went into stasis. Those populations could've migrated all over the galaxy in 700 years' time.
Rewatched this one a few days ago. While I liked the episode and the premise itself (a sterile all-white space station that offers a too-good-to-be-true-deal, and its darker side only becomes clear later), I always found it a bit implausible that such an advanced station would need humanoid brains to augment its computer processing capacity), which spoils it a bit for me. But, I really would have liked to know which race built it!
It showed that star fleet, was already aware of replication technology long before being able to reproduce it.
Well, when they see the device, and after someone offers the suggestion it could be a small-scale transporter, T'Pol says something like : I believe it's a molecular synthesiser of some kind. Similar to a protein resequencer, but far more advanced. Water, cold. I saw a similar device on a Tarkalean vessel.It was capable of replicating almost any inanimate object. Suggesting that either T'pol doesn't want Starfleet to know that Vulcan has such technology, or they really don't have it themselves, (or at the least it is still extremely rare).
Whoever said that Vulcans don't lie? We see them lie constantly, and when they don't lie, they dissemble, wording things in a deceptive way.
I see no reason to think that Vulcans had replicators themselves. After all, they were founding members of the Federation, and the Federation didn't have replicators until generations later. There's no reason to doubt that T'Pol was telling the truth, that she observed such a device in use by the Tarkaleans.
Me neither, I just wanted to cover all options, no matter how remote. As for the possibility of lying: why would they? They have been known to be secretive on some accounts, yes, but they've always maintained they had more advanced technology in some areas than humans did, but simply weren't prepared to disseminate that knowledge (yet) (like warp propulsion, more advanced sensors, etdc). So why would it be different in this case ?
Why? Fairness does not require pretending that obviously absurd options are on a par with sensible ones. That just undermines any concept of judgment or reason. Because you're talking about the Enterprise era and I'm talking about what we know from centuries later. Once the Vulcans co-founded the Federation, they shared their advanced technology with the other races -- as evidenced by the fact that Earth Starfleet in ENT didn't have the Vulcans' tractor beam technology, but the Federation Starfleet by TOS clearly does. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the Vulcans' secrecy continued after they became founding members of the Federation. Besides, by your own argument, T'Pol would've had no reason to attribute the tech to the Tarkaleans rather than just saying outright "Vulcans have this but you're not ready for it."
Why did she lie about the Vulcan ship being destroyed by an ion-storm (or something like that, I have a terrible memory for technobabble)? Anyway, T'Pol lied on occasion for reasons of her own, why not then?
^Again, the issue is not what we know about T'Pol, it's what we know about the Federation in the ensuing two centuries.
Because, when I wrote that post, I didn't consider it 'obviously absurd' that t'Pol would lie about it, just significantly less likely. If you'd asked me to put numbers on it then, I would have said something like 85 to 15 regarding her speaking the truth. In fact, I would still say about the same if I were only considering Enterprise material (due to the portrayal of Vulcans in that series), which I did at the time. But you are right that when also including material from 23rd and 24th century series, it becomes next to impossible to maintain that position. As for replicators, when did the Federation develop those ? Is there evidence for those devices being around during TOS ?