In the end a contract is only as valid as the enforcement behind it.

Between two people of the same nation, a court willing to say “Yeah that’s valid” and enforce it with the power of the state makes a contract quite powerful.

Between two entities that cannot agree on a means to arbitration, or have that means enforced on them, it’s basically only as valuable as their willingness to accept it.

“A contract is a contract is a contract… but only between Ferengi” might seem like a straight up dismissal of another’s species rights to be negotiated with, but its also a warning. If the Ferengi authorities don’t have the power and will to enforce your contract with a Klingon living in free space, then a contract lacks the enforcement clauses that make it absolute.

So how binding is it? As binding as the parties allow it to be.

Let’s imagine the baby Gorn start off the way you describe, a perpetual small hunter that also produces more offspring. As they age they get bigger and stronger before they finally die.

The adults who take care of their offspring have an advantage over adults who do not care for their offspring, and possibly even more over the babies who never become adults.

There is another selection barrier as well. If all you have are baby gorn, what happens when you run out of hosts? This can easily happen if the hosts are over-hunted. If baby gorn pop out and there are no hosts, and they die out in a few years or even months, that’s an evolutionary dead end. The ones which can last a long time until new hosts are available will eventually be selected for.

The problem with crowning The Voyage Home as the best Star trek movie is that the Enterprise is absent.

It’s not like you need the Enterprise for good Star Trek. Many of the best episodes have not really used the ship. But for a movie to be the pinnacle of Star Trek in fan reactions, the absence of the Enterprise is keenly felt.

If I was going to put any movie up against The Wrath of Khan it would be the Undiscovered Country. Everything I like about TWoK returns in The Undiscovered Country. An iconic and interesting antagonist? Check. A starship battle decided by clever outthinking of the enemy instead of a situation where the main character and antagonist end up in punching match? Also check. Kirk confronting his place in a world that keeps passing him by? Also check.

If I had to ask why does TWoK beat out TUC, and it only does by the narrowest of margins, it’s that TWoK has slightly more universal themes. The Undiscovered Country is about the end of the Cold War, and if you grew up in that time, it resonates strongly. Treating your old enemy with respect, moving past your old hate, these are things which landed much harder in the early 1990s than the early 2020s.

But growing old, life passing you by, old mistakes coming back to haunt you, the danger of revenge, all those stand out today as well as they did when the movie first aired.

TWoK aged better than the others, though not by much. Many of the other movies are very, very good. I personally rank TUC and TWoK almost even.

I do think TWoK has in my mind soured a little for the same reason that First Contact did. Its success ensured we’d get so many attempts to dip into the same well again. But that’s a very subjective issue, and one which it’s hard to really hold against TWoK.

They seem to be able to repair homogenous tissue extremely quickly, but complex micro-structures are much harder to produce. Nerves, lungs, all complex.

Heck even producing Romulan ribosomes was beyond them.

As a general rule, unless given an explicit explanation for discontinuity on screen, it should be the explanation of last resort.

The problem is that as an explanation it can be used for everything. Consider any shot production error that might happen. Actually let’s use one of my favorite TNG episodes for discontinuity: Parallels. In the final scene of Parallels, there is a continuity error, where a bow switches sides.

Does this mean we should perform an inception style deep dive and say perhaps Worf is still jumping universes? Could we use this to, in fact, explain ANY minor production error?

I mean we could. But that’s probably not what’s intended by the authors.

For example I am very much a fan of the idea that early in TNG’s run the Ferengi still valued gold and later on they do not, and this matches up with better and better replicator technology eventually being able to create gold at scale. But also, maybe it’s just temporal discontinuity.

Can we reconcile Picard’s relationship with his mother with what little we see from TNG and what we see in ST: Picard? This can be a fun exercise. But we can also say “Eh not the same Picard.”

The idea that Khan is destined to happen is a heads on explanation for the intractable problem of Star Trek is rerooting its history into our modern history. Star Trek is, after all, a vision of our future and that vision has changed from the 1960s. This is a change designed to add some meaning to the show.

On the other hand, if “time pushback” is used to explain anything and everything on the show, it runs the risk of becoming flat out meaningless.

So when would I consider it an acceptable explanation? Whenever it’s given as the explicit explanation, or maybe if there’s a very clear connection.

Yes it is indeed a copy of the modern system. I just expect Starfleet to be better. Traditionally messed up justice systems have been the domain of some Hat Planet.

But Starfleet looking less optimistic and rosy has been a general push for a while.

No change indeed. I had forgotten about that one.

And yet it still feels worse here. Two reasons for this, I think. First, they escalated to an even harsher penalty for failure to plead guilty, and second, because in terms of air date this is 56 years later and attitudes towards prosecutorial pressure to get a pleading has changed.

I know following real world legal proceedings in order to create a sense of realism is good TV, but I find it disappointing the federation still follows the templates of easy plea deals with serious punishments behind them if not taken.

Of course this is not an episode where Starfleet’s prosecutorial conduct is meant to look good. But it does make me wonder what the rest of the federation justice is like if the threat of a massive escalation in charges and sentencing is always on the table.

While it was played as a joke, the whole “was she hiding something” had me on first watch going “but everyone is hiding something, surely”

Spock was highlighting this with his trademark precision.

Ok but NuTrek gave us the glorious spatial distortion warp effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCCYWTAA2wQ

This is a nitpick but it kind of annoys me that they had Ortegas reverse the pitch and yaw of the ship instead of the roll and yaw.

On an atmospheric aircraft, you normally turn by rolling right or left, and then possibly pulling upward to tighten the turn. These controls do not make sense in space, but they are so ingrained to pilots that there are lots of debates on Space Sim forums about if your joystick should be mapped to roll or yaw.

And then Ortegas dodges the incoming array of torpedoes by rolling the Enterprise. She seems able to do so quickly. One of the only other times we see a ship engage in a deliberate roll and we get to see the pilot input controls is when the Enterprise-D is escaping the Dyson Sphere. Ensign Sariel Rager quietly and without orders taps in a command and the Enterprise-D (a much flatter ship than the Constitution class) rolls sideways to fit.

Whatever, the setup is that she’s a hot hand who wants custom controls, and the payoff is that she flies the Enterprise carefully and well. But it would have been nice to see the maneuver we saw on screen be the one that was set up.

As an aside, the ability to dodge a torpedo is also relatively rare in the show’s history, I am willing to assume that their adversaries didn’t really understand the ship or how to properly lock on weapons. The Enterprise’s current close-body shield configuration was likely instrumental in allowing the dodge, and probably a necessity to navigate an asteroid field.

Small correction: It should be too much money chasing too few goods.

Corrected! That slipped through in editing (I had originally started by describing deflation) and it fortunately does not change the central idea.

Except I doubt the first Ferengi to get their hands on replicators used them to mass produce goods. The first replicators were used to produce vast quantities of gold bars

I absolutely agree that this would happen if the first replicators the Ferengi got could actually produce gold. However I do not think all replicators are created equal. The most clear example of this is that the ability to synthesize a uniform is clearly shown in Star Trek: Discovery, but this predates the TOS series, where gold has been shown to have value.

I believe replicator technology followed a track from chemical synthesis (the Enterprise era protein sequencers) to full on assembly of anything reasonably simple that you have the atoms for, and then finally the ability to do full on nuclear alchemy and make elements. (And not just make the elements, but make them at an energy cost less than the cost of digging up natural elements from the ground.)

The only unpredictable part of the collapse was that they didn’t settle on dilithium crystals as a currency.

There are two reasons I think dilithium doesn’t make as good a currency as latinum. The first is that the value of dilithium was propped up by the fact that it is both rare and used up, and dilithium recrystallization was a known technology by the time of the collapse. This meant its value wasn’t very stable.

The second reason is that latinum, by virtue of being a liquid, can be easily split and combined. While its inconvenient to “make change with an eyedropper”, you can with a bit of work take a bar of latinum and break it down into slips and lose no value. But does dilithium dust retain the same value as a whole crystal? Most modern crystals do not have this property. For this reason, latinum was likely to win out.

Another third reason, pure speculation, is that Ferengi culture was already primed to think in terms of bars and slips due to gold, and thus gold pressed latinum was functionally the same. That might not seem as important to you or me - many of us now just treat money as a number in a computer somewhere - but remember that to the Ferengi these are religious totems. Symbology matters.

Jumping on your notes of Criminal Justice: In the episode “Ensign Ro” there was this throwaway line

RO: Well, if he’s sent to the stockade on Jaros Two, tell him to request a room in the east wing. The west wing gets awfully hot in the afternoons.

When I saw this as teen it did not really strongly register with me. Thinking about it now, though, with the real world context of prisoners dying in cells because of heat, I find it significantly more disturbing. The Federation has the power to control the weather. Energy is cheap enough to be free. They have cells which are uncomfortably hot.

I have noticed that even among the most liberal, high minded members of society on the topic of justice, or the most anarchist-lefty abolitionists of prison, certain crimes still stoke the fires of vengeance. Hurting children or engaging in treason still stokes some serious desire for vengeance, and I would not be surprised if a degree of discomfort as applied to punishment never goes away. The more the Federation faces attack or external threats, the more the public might be swayed to making the criminals “pay”