result in infections without some sort of extra help. These people would have a very weak immune system, given that they'd never been exposed to any diseases whatsoever.
That doesn't appear to be the case at all. The immune systems are superstrong and the Gideonites virtually immortal, that much is solidly established in the episode. And apparently only Kirk's superdisease stands a chance against the Gideonite defenses, or else these folks would have picked an easier victim.
Also, getting blood on you doesn't necessarily mean it gets into your bloodstream. That only happens if you have a cut or whatever through which the blood can enter your bloodstream.
But Kirk's profession is a violent one, and he often gets bloodied (certain sixties Hollywood conventions notwithstanding). If he were lethal to anybody coming to contact with his blood by whatever means, this would have been a major plot point: "I'm James T. Kirk, a starship commander, and a leper, the third thing actually being the most important fact about my person".
Plus, there is no need to keep him "active and interactive". The time needed for those things you are imagining would pass even if Kirk was taking a nap like he did in the medieval jail in the penultimate episode.
The need to keep him active would come from forcing the disease to get worse. The need to keep him interactive would come from maximizing the chances of an infection. Isolating and immobilizing Kirk would serve neither purpose.
Because there's nothing to indicate it, not to mention something to indicate otherwise (i.e., their admitted medical ineptitude).
Neither of those sounds like a drawback. "Nothing to indicate" applies to most things in Trek or other TV: we can take certain things for granted even if they aren't explicated (like you are trying to do when claiming, without support, that Gideonite immune systems "ought to be" weak). And medical ineptitude is the very thing that might make them resort to tactics and dosages that might otherwise surprise us.
I've already explained why the plan for Kirk to fall in love with the girl in the hopes that he would voluntarily stick around for her sake was absurd.
Which was wasted effort, as no such plan was required in the first place. Indeed, any mention of such a plan is Kirk's own vain fiction.
Not even close to approaching reality. There are, e.g., nearly 5 septillion (4,891,500,000,000,000,000,000,000) atoms in just a pound of iron. Just to get started on the task of building a clone of a complex structure which is a perfect copy down to the atomic and/or molecular level, you need to first map out the X,Y,Z coordinates of every atom and/or molecule. Do you think any computer is coming along any time soon which can store and process umpteen zillion bajillion katrillion discrete data points?
What nonsense is that? You don't have to arrange atoms in order to get perfect starship interiors -
that task is coarse work currently handled by carpenters. An object printer based on current technologies could manage that just fine.
Whether the replicators of TNG manage individual atoms is unspecified; they appear capable of it, but i.e. edible food might require relatively little of such precision and then lots of repetition.
Plenty of people who didn't want Kirk around at all got stuck with him
Which is basically the perfect proof for what I was saying: random factors don't work to the advantage of the people Kirk faces. A lot of deliberate effort must be involved to get Kirk to attend when he's needed, as there is only one Kirk in the universe (usually); a bit less effort is needed to keep him out, as there are plenty of non-Kirk options available.
No, classified information is not peanuts compared to a visit from a Captain who does plenty of ho-hum errands for Starfleet.
The latter requires far more under-the-counter dealings than the former. Gideonite spies could theoretically achieve the former without Starfleet help; Gideon could
never achieve the latter without such help (or at least the odds would be astronomically against it, and in that case the adventure happening at all is a sign of divine intervention).
No, they aren't officially "nuts", and they have no hangups about healthcare
Hodin goes on and on about their "love of life" with such religious fervor that he'd get a padded cell even at the Bible Belt. Their hangups about contraception are extremely explicit in the plot (and indeed the whole episode seems to have been written to comment on that real-world issue).
It's absolutely central to the story that Kirk is a voice of reason coming up against lack of reason on a weird planet. So the Gideonites being unreasonable and inhuman isn't even an argument; it's a foregone fact.
I've already established otherwise. "Like" is a comparative term, and things don't get compared to themselves.
Since they in fact do, you have only managed to establish how language actually works: it bows to no one authority - but does bow to the dictatorship of the majority.
Personal opinions are fine. When they contradict evidence, two paths can be chosen: ignoring evidence usually leads to loss of predictive value in the model. (It's just noteworthy that Star Trek, being a piece of fiction, doesn't necessarily work that way, as that universe doesn't feature any built-in causality other than that which is in the eye of the beholder.)
Timo Saloniemi
