The Real Kataan from "The Inner Light"

Rape is a forced/non-consensual sexual assault.

Even calling it mind-rape is a bit harsh, IMO.

 

Picard got detained for twenty minutes and got a lifetime inserted into his head.

Still a civilisation was preserved in memory anyways. That's no small thing.

 

But have we lost sight of what rape would be?
Is it rape if you went to your grandmother's house and she made you watch Gone With The Wind with her? Your other option being clean out the hen house or weed the garden?
Rape seems that 1. It needs to be of a sexual nature.
For example the episode where the mind reader guy actually does mind rape Troi.
2. It needs to be sexually or physically gratifying to the perpetrator. See the above example.
I just don't think that "rape" is a suitable word in description for them showing Picard their civilization.

 

We saw that only a few episodes earlier in Conundrum were and alien race was a century by the federation on a technology scale (ships, shields, weapons) but their "mind-hacking" skills were sufficient to interfere with the memories of the Enterprise crew and mess with the ship's computer.

 

Also, we can't rule out primitive folks getting a very specific technology from advanced space aliens who won't provide them with anything else. Earth supposedly got its computers from a time traveler...

That's a bit problematic. What makes it sexual there specifically? It happens between people of different genders, but that shouldn't be a factor at all (we don't want to exclude gay rape, say). And it takes the form of sexual activity in the ravaged mind of the victim, but that's just in her mind - we don't know what's going on in the perpetrator's mind. He's just extracting "life force" out of the victim after all. Is Dracula making sexual assault when in his great thirst sucking dry the fair maiden who for her part may have the Heaving Bosom Syndrome and all?

That's also problematic, even if only in certain special, marginal cases. Rape as a form of punishment may involve no "sexual" or "physical" gratification on the part of the perp, just the satisfaction of an evil job well done. "Hi, Boss, Bubba here - she's done, I bet he will make his payments in time from now on."

And then there's rape as a combat strategy, today often much more devastating than the use of assault rifles: one deed committed, one victim violated, yet perhaps dozens of lives ruined, and "sexual"/"physical" satisfaction not required (say, there are no Jem'Hadar women, but are their troopers perhaps men anyway, for this special type of assault?).

Timo Saloniemi

 

At its core, rape is sexual assault. Knifing someone in the liver can ruin them for life, have them pay thousands of dollars in medical treatments and be traumatic as hell but that doesn't make it rape.
If Troi is considered to have suffered "mind-rape", it's possibly because the writers wanted the violation of her to be a form of "telepathic sexual assault"
There are many forms of violent or traumatic encounters one can experience that aren't rape.

 

It could've been considered assault, but who you gonna charge with the crime?

They could've gotten hold of DTI and asked them to go back in time and investigate.

 

They could recreate the scene IaMD-style, and have the probe launch only to have it get shot down seconds afterward.

 

Or they kept technology focused to a specific purpose, allowing, among other things, to let their people to do other things.

What bugged me is possibly my taking the dialogue too literally of how the probe implants a whole species' memories into the head of just one person, then puts out a flute pez dispenser and then shuts off forevermore. If the species wanted to tell the universe of how it was, why stop at one person? Which then leads to bigger questions about how many flutes it's got tucked away, if not magically replicated. Which leads to questions of if they can replicate a music instrument, why not conjure up a shiny new star after whipping up the means to make a containment device to put around their local star... (energy requirements being too great, in the biggest twist of irony...)

 

Regardless of our interpretations, the fact is that the probe did shut down after meeting Picard. Was that meeting exceptional somehow, with a more standard meeting allowing the probe to proceed in its merry way to other targets? We can argue that the heroes were responsible for damaging the probe or triggering its self-destruct or lock-up functions, but would any other victim have behaved differently and less destructively?

It doesn't seem reasonable for the probe to meet with one victim, implant the dream and then move forward - the odds of finding a second victim would be dismally low. Better to stick with the first one, then. And in that case, the probe probably did feature a rewind/replay function, and further goodies to be discovered after closer study. The way to reach further victims would be to launch further probes; for all we know, tens if not hundreds of thousands were fired, considering there was a launch even at the butt-end-of-nowhere, zero-horse villagelet where Kamin the Ironweaver lived.

Timo Saloniemi