No - you were *incompetent*
- Thread starter Mojomoe
- Start date
It's pretty much a common theme for all of Trek, for obvious practical reasons, that aliens are only alien from the inside... So in compensation, we could assume that the innards are alien indeed. That's realism, or the best possible substitute for it in the circumstances.
Humans have learned to understand human anatomy in the functional sense only after thousands of years of trying and failing. Merely knowing which lump goes where does not help, when you mistake the brain for a cooling system or the liver for the nest of the soul.
So I can appreciate the difficulty of understanding alien anatomy from the functional point of view. McCoy could have cut open a dozen prisoners of war in the Mengele Memorial Hospital and still have trouble figuring out what to do when the yellow pouch above the pink pulsating thing is punctured by a phaser blast.
As already pointed out, this is not only consistent with his failure to understand Vulcan biology (despite obvious attempts), but with the later portrayal of medical ignorance in TNG and DS9. Perhaps we are seeing the effects of granting medical privacy to the aliens that agree to interact with the Federation? It would probably be a common prerequisite: "I'll deal with you weird space folks if you promise to forgo the abduction, obduction and anal probe thing."
Klingons would be an especially tough nut to crack in this respect, because they would simply refuse to see a doctor under any circumstances. Moreover, they would have no medical literature for the Federation to borrow or steal. Still, it would be nice if the species was also credited with extensively bioengineering itself. Sometimes there would be deformed crania or other setbacks, but most of the modifications would be internal and kept secret from the enemy - including the neighboring Houses! However, this card has not been played with the Klingons, and when it was played on the Suliban, this sort of set a precedent that makes the Klingon case improbable.
As for the Uhura thing... I really don't see how we could expect her to know Klingon, when her onscreen skills seem limited to opening the hailing frequencies. She's not an intelligence-gathering master spy and analyst - unless she also happens to be a pretty good actress. Which I also dispute.
Realistically speaking, knowing the language of thy enemy is not all that common in the real world. Never mind peoples separated by oceans: any German/French war of the past would run into a language barrier before running into the barbed wire. And such things can become a point of honor as well: it's virtually impossible to find a person with even rudimentary Russian skills in the Finnish or Swedish militaries that have been pitted against that nation for all of their written history.
(Random thought: Did Uhura have a Klingon dictionary? Or did she just have the collected works of Shakespeare in the original language, perhaps a gift from Gorkon?)
Timo Saloniemi
Humans have learned to understand human anatomy in the functional sense only after thousands of years of trying and failing. Merely knowing which lump goes where does not help, when you mistake the brain for a cooling system or the liver for the nest of the soul.
So I can appreciate the difficulty of understanding alien anatomy from the functional point of view. McCoy could have cut open a dozen prisoners of war in the Mengele Memorial Hospital and still have trouble figuring out what to do when the yellow pouch above the pink pulsating thing is punctured by a phaser blast.
As already pointed out, this is not only consistent with his failure to understand Vulcan biology (despite obvious attempts), but with the later portrayal of medical ignorance in TNG and DS9. Perhaps we are seeing the effects of granting medical privacy to the aliens that agree to interact with the Federation? It would probably be a common prerequisite: "I'll deal with you weird space folks if you promise to forgo the abduction, obduction and anal probe thing."
Klingons would be an especially tough nut to crack in this respect, because they would simply refuse to see a doctor under any circumstances. Moreover, they would have no medical literature for the Federation to borrow or steal. Still, it would be nice if the species was also credited with extensively bioengineering itself. Sometimes there would be deformed crania or other setbacks, but most of the modifications would be internal and kept secret from the enemy - including the neighboring Houses! However, this card has not been played with the Klingons, and when it was played on the Suliban, this sort of set a precedent that makes the Klingon case improbable.
As for the Uhura thing... I really don't see how we could expect her to know Klingon, when her onscreen skills seem limited to opening the hailing frequencies. She's not an intelligence-gathering master spy and analyst - unless she also happens to be a pretty good actress. Which I also dispute.
Realistically speaking, knowing the language of thy enemy is not all that common in the real world. Never mind peoples separated by oceans: any German/French war of the past would run into a language barrier before running into the barbed wire. And such things can become a point of honor as well: it's virtually impossible to find a person with even rudimentary Russian skills in the Finnish or Swedish militaries that have been pitted against that nation for all of their written history.
(Random thought: Did Uhura have a Klingon dictionary? Or did she just have the collected works of Shakespeare in the original language, perhaps a gift from Gorkon?)
Timo Saloniemi
The McCoy incompetence thing reminded me a bit of the Talosians claiming they could treat Vina after the ship crashed, but they'd never seen humans before so they didn't know how to reassemble her properly.
Dude, you're all tiny white humanoids with big bulgy heads. It should have been pretty damn obvious! 
Dude, you're all tiny white humanoids with big bulgy heads. It should have been pretty damn obvious! 
Cryton said:
The McCoy incompetence thing reminded me a bit of the Talosians claiming they could treat Vina after the ship crashed, but they'd never seen humans before so they didn't know how to reassemble her properly.
You'd also think they could've done a bit better job. I mean bones heal on their own and anyone reasonably competent should be able to figure out how they fit together.
But instead they hacked her together and somehow gave her a hump. They could've also ASKED her how to put her back together and tried again, or read her "dreams" to SEE how she was supposed to look.
Stupid Talosians.
To be fair though, we have seen that paper books are not all that unknown in Trek's time. Samuel Cogley had plenty of them in "Court Martial," and we usually saw Picard and other captains reading them. So while the same book would doubtless be available in a PADD, the reader might have a different preference (and in the case of the books used in TUC, perhaps that info wasn't in the computer).
Trekker4747 said:
Cryton said:
The McCoy incompetence thing reminded me a bit of the Talosians claiming they could treat Vina after the ship crashed, but they'd never seen humans before so they didn't know how to reassemble her properly.
You'd also think they could've done a bit better job. I mean bones heal on their own and anyone reasonably competent should be able to figure out how they fit together.
But instead they hacked her together and somehow gave her a hump. They could've also ASKED her how to put her back together and tried again, or read her "dreams" to SEE how she was supposed to look.
Stupid Talosians.
Sure, either she knew the words to, or it's in her subconscious because someone surely sang to her, "The footbone's connected to the leg bone. The leg bone's connected to the knee bone. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone. Dem bones. Dem bones. Dem dry bones. Oh, hear the word of the Lord." And so on up to the head bone.
...'course, there's always the possibility that when they gathered up all of the crew from the crash, the Talosians had... spare parts. I mean, even when you TRY to follow the instructions for, say, assembling a bookshelf, you always end up with, say, 3 bracket 'A's when it only calls for one.
Just imagine assmebling a bookshelf, without instructions, from a giant pile of other bookshelf parts that slammed into the surface of your planet at high speeds. Even with the "image" of what she's supposed to look like, that girl's damn lucky she doesn't have a bracket 'A' coming out her nose.
She's probably got like twelve miles of small intestine.
-Moe!
Just imagine assmebling a bookshelf, without instructions, from a giant pile of other bookshelf parts that slammed into the surface of your planet at high speeds. Even with the "image" of what she's supposed to look like, that girl's damn lucky she doesn't have a bracket 'A' coming out her nose.
She's probably got like twelve miles of small intestine.
-Moe!
Or maybe she'd just watched the episode of "The Simpsons..."Franklin said:
Trekker4747 said:
Cryton said:
The McCoy incompetence thing reminded me a bit of the Talosians claiming they could treat Vina after the ship crashed, but they'd never seen humans before so they didn't know how to reassemble her properly.
You'd also think they could've done a bit better job. I mean bones heal on their own and anyone reasonably competent should be able to figure out how they fit together.
But instead they hacked her together and somehow gave her a hump. They could've also ASKED her how to put her back together and tried again, or read her "dreams" to SEE how she was supposed to look.
Stupid Talosians.
Sure, either she knew the words to, or it's in her subconscious because someone surely sang to her, "The footbone's connected to the leg bone. The leg bone's connected to the knee bone. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone. Dem bones. Dem bones. Dem dry bones. Oh, hear the word of the Lord." And so on up to the head bone.
"The red thing's connected to my wristwatch..."
Arthur C. Clarke and his ghostwriters got some mileage out of this. There's a delightful short story where benevolent aliens try to "repair" a human astronaut based on his self-image and self-knowledge. And there's a plot point in the Rama series (I think the third part) where the leading scientific minds from a human crew stranded aboard the alien vessel struggle to describe to the alien caretakers what is edible to a human.
...Besides another human, of course. But they really, really don't want to bring that up.
No, I don't find the Vina thing problematic at all. The Talosians were self-confessed klutzes in all things technical, and Vina was never described as having advanced medical knowledge.
Timo Saloniemi
...Besides another human, of course. But they really, really don't want to bring that up.
No, I don't find the Vina thing problematic at all. The Talosians were self-confessed klutzes in all things technical, and Vina was never described as having advanced medical knowledge.
Timo Saloniemi
His anatomy or physiology (heart rate, body temperature), yes.
But being able to tell that somebody posing as a human is not human is rather different from being able to tell how this somebody is put together exactly. I mean, you could look under the skirt of a transvestite and exclaim "Hey, that's not a lady!", but that still wouldn't qualify you to perform life-saving surgery on him...
Timo Saloniemi
But being able to tell that somebody posing as a human is not human is rather different from being able to tell how this somebody is put together exactly. I mean, you could look under the skirt of a transvestite and exclaim "Hey, that's not a lady!", but that still wouldn't qualify you to perform life-saving surgery on him...
Timo Saloniemi
BP, heart rate, electrical energy, body temperature, breathing rate, metabolism, and redudant organs, all of which could be picked up by the tricorder, and who knows what else all could've told McCoy that he was a Klingon.
"Hey, this guy has twice the heart-rate of a human, just like Klingons do! And his BP is like that of a Klingon. Why... he must be a KLINGON!"
Still dosen't mean he could perform surgery on him.
Identifying something from observable data is completely different than working on it.
I wonded why the outpost officer didn't question the awkard, halting, clumbsy, and stilted way Uhura was talking.
Oh, and...
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