Star Trek: Attack of Shatner's Toupee Tribble

[IlyaP]

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

You have to be kind of disciplined about it, and have the mindset of not caring if you're going to finish an episode in that sitting or not. Doing that you can get through one of these mega-long shows relatively quickly, although it still took me the better part of two months.

I am in awe of and humbled by your ability to do this and not go "I really actually kinda feel like watching something else..."

There should be awards for stuff like this! 

[Jaxom 1974]

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

 

Also, Picard adds to the confusion by depicting a TOS-era Constitution-class exactly as it looked in TOS, not the SNW version of the ship.

Kinda lends a mote of ammunition to those who want Discovery and SNW to be some alternate timeline separate from the Prime, and even, the Kelvin...

[Werthead]

20 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Kinda lends a mote of ammunition to those who want Discovery and SNW to be some alternate timeline separate from the Prime, and even, the Kelvin...

Alternatively, there will be a refit that makes the exterior of the class look like it did in TOS. Not impossible, and the OG Enterprise underwent several configuration changes on the original show, let alone the mega-refit for the movies.

[Jaxom 1974]

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Alternatively, there will be a refit that makes the exterior of the class look like it did in TOS. Not impossible, and the OG Enterprise underwent several configuration changes on the original show, let alone the mega-refit for the movies.

Fair.

I mean, didn't Enterpise vaguely touch upon the idea that the Constitution Class interiors looked a bit retro to even the Enterprise NX-01 in the "Through the Mirror Darkly" episodes...? I may be mis-remembering that...

[Jaxom 1974]

Very solid, classic style, mirror-held-up-to-ourselves-today courtroom story with elements of all of the better ones from across the shows...

Mind you, the courtroom was odd...

[Corvinus85]

9 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Very solid, classic style, mirror-held-up-to-ourselves-today courtroom story with elements of all of the better ones from across the shows...

Mind you, the courtroom was odd...

Indeed it was a very solid episode. Why was the courtroom odd?

[Jaxom 1974]

2 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Indeed it was a very solid episode. Why was the courtroom odd?

It's shape? Granted no other courtroom episode across Trek has been held inside the home base of Starfleet JAG, so the courtrooms have been varied... but the giant well between the judges and the rest. You didn't think that was odd? 

(Talking shape of a room isn't a spoiler!)

[Corvinus85]

5 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

It's shape? Granted no other courtroom episode across Trek has been held inside the home base of Starfleet JAG, so the courtrooms have been varied... but the giant well between the judges and the rest. You didn't think that was odd? 

(Talking shape of a room isn't a spoiler!)

Only if they called it the Moon Door.  I didn't even pay attention to the décor that much. I briefly wondered where the jury was, then I remembered this is a military tribunal.

[Jaxom 1974]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

Only if they called it the Moon Door.  I didn't even pay attention to the décor that much. I briefly wondered where the jury was, then I remembered this is a military tribunal.

Sure. But some camera angles really emphasized the distance between the lawyers and the judges...which, I suppose, may have been a deliberate choice...

Moon Door. Heh. Nice.

Spoiler

As an aside, the determination of the Judge Advocate sitting in on this himself and seeming to really be after Pike...am I reading too much into it that it seemed like fodder for something else down the line...?

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Very solid, classic style, mirror-held-up-to-ourselves-today courtroom story with elements of all of the better ones from across the shows...

Mind you, the courtroom was odd...

And some actual clever lawyering.  I really liked seeing that.

(Though I liked it that last bit was more appropriately presented in a motion to dismiss… as opposed to closing arguments… and both the openings sounded like closing arguments to me)

Edited June 23, 2023 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Jaxom 1974]

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

And some actual clever lawyering.  I really liked seeing that.

Gonna spoiler the comment just in case...

Spoiler

So well that, even though in the back of me head, knowing that Una was still going to be on the Enterprise, and that the laws on argumentation wasn't going to be altered either, it was all done in such a way I really thought it was going to be a total vindication of her.  Yet, it really wasn't, was it? Which is, I think, well done too. In its way.

 

[Ran]

Yeah, solid episode that just feels very Star Trek, in the TOS/TNG mode. The jurisprudence is, as Scot says, a bit wonky, and the idea that

Spoiler

no one had explored the asylum angle until Neera decided to use it was a bit silly because surely that'd be the first thing Pike would have done when he'd learned that Number One was an Illyrian was to find some legal way to protect her? But still, good episode.

 

[Jaxom 1974]

43 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, solid episode that just feels very Star Trek, in the TOS/TNG mode. The jurisprudence is, as Scot says, a bit wonky, and the idea that

  Hide contents

no one had explored the asylum angle until Neera decided to use it was a bit silly because surely that'd be the first thing Pike would have done when he'd learned that Number One was an Illyrian was to find some legal way to protect her? But still, good episode.

 

Spoiler

I don't know that I'd go that far. The idea of using the asylum angle seemed like it was a moment when all those involved with the case were stunned that no-one had actually tried it. The part that seemed off, if anything, was that Una's friend almost seemed to be sitting on the idea from the get go...

 

[Lord Varys]

Bah, hated that episode, really hated it. Both for the Federation following kind of silly Americanized court procedures ... the future must be more sophisticated and cultered than that or my German snobism isn't worth anything (most published legal literature is or was one time in German).

(Sure enough ... stick a bit to TOS. But JAG? Really??? I guess the Federation also has a Senate and a House of Representatives, mid-term elections, a two party system, and a Supreme Court whose demented members serve for life because we are all Americans with pointy ears or something along those lines...)

But the really ugly thing is the case:

Spoiler

In what setting does it make sense that an interplanetary organization makes the fairy tale fears from the primitive middle ages of a single membership world one of their basic tenets? That is ridiculous in the extreme. Why would anyone give a fuck about Earth's Eugenics Wars? They also don't give a damn about the Tellarite Anarchist Crusades or the Andorian Fascist Purges (made those up). The Vulcans alone would ridicule mankind for their fear of augments. It is utterly irrational.

Yes, we have DS9 and Enterprise to consider, but that only set precedents for human augments, not non-human ones. Also not for species and societies and cultures where this fucking thing works. So if they have this story, they should have made it about other species being better suited to eugenics than humans ... and the Federation finally acknowledging at least this here.

Also, the lawyer blatantly telling La'an everything is right with her feels weird, too. If the Federation aren't total unscientific whackos then the fear of (badly designed) human augments is justified. But even that fear is weird since everybody in TOS actually seemed to admire Khan im 'Space Seed'.

And if La'an actually has Khan DNA ... how can she be in Starfleet? Her going off the deep end would be a real fear, not irrational projection on a fucking different species with different genes. If they had such strict rules she should have been like Khan's distant niece from a non-augmented sibling or something, not his actual biological descendant.

Basically this feels like a decent idea plotted very badly.

Granted, the episode is not bad, but the way it ia handled sucks hard.

Also laughed my ass off when Una went on about the diverse species serving in Starfleet. They are all fucking humans with a few token aliens. Always were, and likely always will be.

[RumHam]

The human-centric nature of the federation never made much sense, but it was always very much there. Mostly for budget reason I assume. Enterprise at least tries to adress why they became sort of the core of the federation: the other founding members more or less hated each other but got along with us charming humans. 

Spoiler

I thought the episode was good, the only thing I didn't like was the "I turned myself in" idea. Like that's a really weird way to turn yourself in. I can't even figure what the point of anonymously turning yourself in would be. 

Apparently Mount had a baby and was less available early in the season. I suspect that was part of the reasoning for this bottle episode where he didn't have to do much. 

[Lord Varys]

4 hours ago, RumHam said:

The human-centric nature of the federation never made much sense, but it was always very much there. Mostly for budget reason I assume. Enterprise at least tries to adress why they became sort of the core of the federation: the other founding members more or less hated each other but got along with us charming humans. 

Sure, the issue there is talking one thing, but showing another. Hammering home the silliness is showing human faces while Una goes on about multi-species diversity nobody ever saw. Just as with giving one species medieval pre-warp history and dumping the connected bigotry on an interplanetary organization. It is ridiculous. As convincing as antisemitism in medieval Japan.

The narrative they spun would have only worked if the Eugenics Wars were the cultural heritage of all the (early) Federation. But they are not. They belong to humanity only.

And having a fucking Vulcan push that bigotry is a diagrace, too. To them the anti-augment laws should be as illogical as they clearly are.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Lord Varys

[sifth]

I liked it a lot, but in terms of court episodes of Trek, it's much weaker than many of the others we got. It's much weaker than Rules of Engagement and much, much weaker than Measure of a Man and Death Wish.

As many of said before, the obvious legal loophole should have been used from the get go and not as some shocking twist no one thought of.

Also I know it's an allegory, for what's going on in the real world, but genetically engineering superhumans should very well be made illegal in the Trek Universe. The amount of danger that would cause if it became common place is just scary. It's honestly why I love Gundam Seed so much, because it shows what happens when you make genetically engineering people become common place and the chaos it would cause. 

[Werthead]

8 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Bah, hated that episode, really hated it. Both for the Federation following kind of silly Americanized court procedures ... the future must be more sophisticated and cultered than that or my German snobism isn't worth anything (most published legal literature is or was one time in German).

(Sure enough ... stick a bit to TOS. But JAG? Really??? I guess the Federation also has a Senate and a House of Representatives, mid-term elections, a two party system, and a Supreme Court whose demented members serve for life because we are all Americans with pointy ears or something along those lines...)

Also laughed my ass off when Una went on about the diverse species serving in Starfleet. They are all fucking humans with a few token aliens. Always were, and likely always will be.

This is something that Babylon 5 rightly got mocked for when it turned out that MedLab charged for patients and the Earth Alliance governmental structure was based almost entirely on the USA's. It's highly improbable that the rest of the human race would even remotely tolerate America's dysfunctional systems being imposed on them. It's more likely that healthcare would be free (at least to EA citizens, with some sort of direct charge or inter-governmental charge for aliens) and the EA government structure would draw on systems that worked more efficiently. Star Trek, to be fair, has deliberately stayed away from the innermost delvings of how the Federation works. Ron Moore indicated that they spent some time in Homefront/Paradise Lost exploring the relationship between the Federation and Earth as a member and how regions on Earth were administered, but it got too complicated and too much of a tangent so they rowed back hard on it.

As for the diverse ships thing, that wasn't the original plan. The ships were mostly supposed to be crewed by one species, so as not to complicate environmental/gravitational settings etc, and TOS notes that with the Enterprise being a mostly-human ship (and Spock serving on her because he found humans more tolerant of his half-Vulcan heritage than Vulcans of his half-human heritage, illogically) and the Intrepid being an all-Vulcan ship (with a human name, oddly). It was only with TAS that they mixed that up further with Arex and M'Ress, and TNG onwards had this idea of more aliens serving on ships or commanding them (like Vulcan Martok commanding the Saratoga at Wolf 359), but not that many compared to humans.

[Corvinus85]

9 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Bah, hated that episode, really hated it. Both for the Federation following kind of silly Americanized court procedures ... the future must be more sophisticated and cultered than that or my German snobism isn't worth anything (most published legal literature is or was one time in German).

(Sure enough ... stick a bit to TOS. But JAG? Really??? I guess the Federation also has a Senate and a House of Representatives, mid-term elections, a two party system, and a Supreme Court whose demented members serve for life because we are all Americans with pointy ears or something along those lines...)

But the really ugly thing is the case:

  Reveal hidden contents

In what setting does it make sense that an interplanetary organization makes the fairy tale fears from the primitive middle ages of a single membership world one of their basic tenets? That is ridiculous in the extreme. Why would anyone give a fuck about Earth's Eugenics Wars? They also don't give a damn about the Tellarite Anarchist Crusades or the Andorian Fascist Purges (made those up). The Vulcans alone would ridicule mankind for their fear of augments. It is utterly irrational.

Yes, we have DS9 and Enterprise to consider, but that only set precedents for human augments, not non-human ones. Also not for species and societies and cultures where this fucking thing works. So if they have this story, they should have made it about other species being better suited to eugenics than humans ... and the Federation finally acknowledging at least this here.

Also, the lawyer blatantly telling La'an everything is right with her feels weird, too. If the Federation aren't total unscientific whackos then the fear of (badly designed) human augments is justified. But even that fear is weird since everybody in TOS actually seemed to admire Khan im 'Space Seed'.

And if La'an actually has Khan DNA ... how can she be in Starfleet? Her going off the deep end would be a real fear, not irrational projection on a fucking different species with different genes. If they had such strict rules she should have been like Khan's distant niece from a non-augmented sibling or something, not his actual biological descendant.

Basically this feels like a decent idea plotted very badly.

Granted, the episode is not bad, but the way it ia handled sucks hard.

Also laughed my ass off when Una went on about the diverse species serving in Starfleet. They are all fucking humans with a few token aliens. Always were, and likely always will be.

Is the US military the only military in the world that has an internal law corps? Is court-martial not a thing in other countries? If that's the case, mock this episode to your heart's content. Otherwise, I feel you're being overly critical with this episode.

What we saw in this episode was a military tribunal. Una was judged by Starfleet, not the Federation. Sure, it got into civil matters, but it doesn't change what this was.

[Lord Varys]

42 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Is the US military the only military in the world that has an internal law corps? Is court-martial not a thing in other countries? If that's the case, mock this episode to your heart's content. Otherwise, I feel you're being overly critical with this episode.

What we saw in this episode was a military tribunal. Una was judged by Starfleet, not the Federation. Sure, it got into civil matters, but it doesn't change what this was.

Obviously I was joking there to a point. What I loathe is, frankly, American legal talk and, yes, also American-style legal practice in an allegedly inclusive international and interplanetary organization. That just sucks hard. It is unimaginative and lazy.