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.
In Star Trek Picard we see Raffi living at rock bottom for a while. She has no job after her discharge from Starfleet, and is clearly not doing as well. She describes her life as humiliation and rage.
And yet by modern standards she has a home, food, and power. Her drug usage isn't condoned but she's left largely alone to do it. By modern 21st century standards its a very soft landing.
Does it get worse than this? What is the worst possible economic outcome someone living on 24th Century Earth is likely to face.
The events of DS9: Past Tense imply that things aren't as bad as sanctuary districts and mass homelessness, but there's a lot of range between that and where Raffi landed. So what evidence do we have about how bad it can get?
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.
In DS9 Quark makes a throwaway line about the Great Monetary Collapse that happened during his early lifetime. He describes it as a period caused by "rampant inflation and currency devaluation."
This description might seem puzzling at first, because the Ferengi have always been shown to use hard currency. Hard currencies are generally deflationary currencies, with a fixed or at least limited supply and a growing (and hoarding) population. The only way a currency can rapidly inflate is to increase the supply of the currency, or alternately for there to be a shortage of things to buy.
In short, inflation requires too much money chasing too few goods.
I hypothesize here that the Ferengi experienced an economic collapse caused by replicator technology, specifically the point at which replicators became able to create gold. The Ferengi experienced this shock more severely than most other cultures, not only because they use hard currency, but also because they revere it.
What happens to an economy when replicators show up? The answer is not inflation. A replicator makes goods for cheap. If you can conjure up your Raktajino out of thin air and energy, the price of a Raktajino is going to plummet to the cost of that energy. As long as you are not on board a ship which needs to ration energy, cheap becomes functionally free.
This is the apparent engine behind the Federation's economy. In Federation space, everyone gets a protein resequencer, and there is no more hunger. Then later, everyone gets a more replicator, and clothing is free too. Every year a new advancement, and every advancement brings a new thing that the citizens can conjure up.
But the Ferengi do not think like that. If your religion is based on making a profit, you do not give away the source of free goods. The Ferengi likely had a small number of early entrepreneurs with a monopoly on replicators, setting their prices to what the market would bear.
Even under this system, the prices must fall. As long as the Ferengi compete, seek profits, and can produce goods indistinguishable from one another, prices must fall. Cartels can form to prop prices up, but a cartel only lasts until someone new gets a replicator. Sooner or later, everyone will get a replicator, and the Ferengi will have to find other ways to make a profit.
The shock of cheap goods can collapse economic sectors. Yet progress marches on. Where the Ferengi ran into problems wasn’t the production of goods, but of their reverence for hard currency.
The Ferengi relationship with currency is not like other cultures. At the start of TNG: The Outpost Ferengi did value gold, to a point of finding it offensive that the Federation officers would wear it brazenly.
Now Ferengi are not unique in finding value in gold. Everyone used to value gold. During TOS: Devil In The Dark, they were willing to risk the lives of workers despite deaths just to get access to the gold and platinum, and when they finally made peace with the Horta they were quite happy. Archer uses gold bars to negotiate with the Ferengi, who accept this even after it is made clear they are gold, not gold-pressed latinum.
But by the events of DS9: Who Mourns for Morn, a distraught Quark makes clear, gold is absolutely worthless. This is a radical change, but the evidence suggests it is not merely a continuity change.
We must then ask, when did gold become worthless? Quark does seem to value it only a few seasons earlier, in DS9: Little Green Men, but this happened when Quark was far in the past, and knew he was in the past.
The best example I can find of worthlessness comes from TNG: The Price. While some details are lost on-screen, the original script has some stage direction which I think is instructive.
> [Goss] turns the sack upside down and a pile of gold bars spills out across the tabletop.
> GOSS: I'll match anyone's best offer... and add the gold on top of it.
> He holds out his hands in a fait accomplit motion. Sits back in his chair, with a confident grin. Bhavani reacts, nonplussed. Picard EXITS...
So from the script it's clear, Goss thought gold was useful, and no one else in the room did.
We can then assume that at this point in time (2366) the Ferengi (or some subset of them) were behind in replicator technology, and it resulted in Goss making a fool of himself, bargaining with someone he valued, and no one else did.
This is a society on the brink of collapse. In fact the collapse may already be happening behind the scenes.
Why didn’t the Ferengi see this coming? I believe the Ferengi religion left them blind to the danger. Ferengi do not merely value gold as a good. In fact, they do not merely value it as a currency. The existence of the Blessed Exchequer paints an interesting picture of the Ferengi relationship with their currency. Every Ferengi believes that their afterlife is determined by their ability to make a profit. Thus, every gold bar held by a Ferengi is their spiritual salvation.
The destructiveness of a currency collapse cannot be understated. Quark comparing it to war trauma is played for laughs, but it was not funny to him. If he has any belief in the afterlife, it was was an existential threat to him.
Replicators didn't just crash the economy of the Ferengi. It threatened to damn their very souls.
In fact I would speculate there is a reason why the Ferengi use gold trappings around latinum. The shape, the weight, the feel of currency matters to them. Visiting the Nagus requires the paying of respects, literally. Pressing latinum into a metal was convenient. Pressing latinum into gold was an important symbolic transition.
Leaning into some apocryphal sources now, a little beautiful tidbit emerges. In DS9: Ferengi Love Songs we learn that the Grant Negus who preceded Zek, called Smeet, presided over one of the largest market slides in recent Ferengi history, and was assassinated in office. Thus he likely saw the effects of free gold. According to the Legends of the Ferengi, Smeet was credited with writing the 89th, 202nd, and 218th Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. The 218th rule, according the the DS9 Comic Baby on Board reads as follows:
Sometimes what you get free costs entirely too much.
I am admittedly basing this on The Next Phase, where Ro and Geordi stay phased without anything keeping them phased, and where Ro shoots Riker point blank in the head with a phased disruptor, and he feels nothing.
But now that you mention it, we would need to reconcile that, of course, with the fact that the Pegasus dropped back into normal phase when the cloak failed.
I had not considered a torpedo with an integrated rephase module. Maybe this could work (and there would be great value in a torpedo that phases back after passing through a shield bubble) but we don't commonly see torpedoes with deflector grids, cloaking devices, etc.
But I would concede there could be some interesting research here. However the Federation might decide not to advance it anyway as it's very clearly a treaty violation, whereas "ship that has good emissions controls and a finely tuned deflector grid" is not.
Agreed, but these were Borgified Federation ships using Federation tech. Presumably they assimilated the knowledge and history of how the Federation had defeated similar cloaking devices before.
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"
In the finale of Picard Season 3, the Titan, armed with a 100 year old cloaking device, manages to successfully evade detection by the Borg controlled fleet. This raises some questions. How on earth is it that the Titan was able to accomplish this with a seemingly obsolete cloaking device?
I postulate two things, the first is that what we call the cloaking device is merely one component in a whole system of invisibility, and the second is that StarFleet was certainly obeying the letter of the treaty (Pegasus and Section 31 aside) by not developing cloaking technology, but was, in reality, building ships ready to accept cloaking devices at a moment's notice.
What do we know about cloaking devices, and how are they defeated? The cloaking device ties into the ship’s deflector shield control (as per TOS: The Enterprise Incident) and it obtains invisibility in part by bending light around the ship (as per comparison to the Aldean planetary shield in TNG: The Bough Breaks and description from DISL Into the Forest I Go)
However, using the deflector shield to remain unobserved does not necessarily require a cloaking device. As per the opening of TOS: Assignment: Earth, the Enterprise was able to use its defector shield to remain unobserved to 20th century technology.
And there are countless examples of a cloaking device being imperfect. The most famous example is likely Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where a torpedo set to target ionized gas is able to trace down the location of a Bird of Prey, summarized as “The thing has to have a tailpipe.”
But that is not the only example. Detecting energy distortions, subspace radiation, high speed warp signatures from neutrino radiation, and looking for tetryon particles all worked as forms of passive detection. (I will not cover active detection mechanisms such as the tachyon net, as the Borg fleet never deployed them.)
To add to all this, the clocking device is very small. A device about the size and weight of a man can make a ship invisible.
Here I switch to speculation.
First, I suggest that the cloaking device is primarily a computer. It is not the thing which makes the ship invisible - you could plug it into a building and it would not work, unless it has its own projectors. It must be plugged into a ship with a deflector array, to enhance and perfect its ability to make the ship invisible.
Second, the quality of the ship is more important than the quality of the cloaking device. A cloaking device “merely” needs to look at all incoming radiation of all types, and calculate how to move it around the ship for total silence. But it cannot protect against a ship which emits radiation, leaks gas, etc. Thus, a ship designed with high quality shields and high quality emission control will be more stealthy.
Side speculation: The design decision to not use an antimatter core in the first Bird of Prey we see during TOS: Balance of Terror (their power is simple impulse only implies fusion) and the later TNG-era decision to use a forced singularity despite the downsides, may be rooted in the notion that the Romulans felt that emissions from antimatter annihilation were a liability. Selling the Klingons the cloak and not telling them about this problem seems entirely on brand for the Romulan Star Empire.
There is something of an exception here, the phased cloak. A ship out of phase would, presumably, emit radiation which is also out of phase. (Extrapolated from TNG: The Next Phase where Ro shoots Riker in the head and he does not notice.) The phased cloak represented an attempt to fix emission control on a completely new level. But the phased cloak had problems, and is is seemingly a dead end for the ability to fire while cloaked. Plus, research was a treaty violation.
So now we return to the Titan. We know that plugging a 100 year old cloaking device into the Titan produced an invisibility effect which worked admirably. StarFleet may have seemingly kept their commitment to not build ships with cloaking devices, but this was always a hand wave agreement. StarFleet was ready for the day when they needed invisible ships, and having ships ready to accept cloaking devices was seemingly an unspoken but very intentional design consideration.
When the Titan needed to be invisible, she was missing only one piece of the puzzle.