History Recap / StarTrekS1E20CourtMartial

* EasilyCondemned: Kirk easily ends up ConvictedByPublicOpinion for negligence leading to a crew member's death, despite his stellar reputation up to now. Only his True Companions insist he couldn't have done it. The supposedly dead crew member, Ben Finney, framed him by altering security footage as revenge for Kirk daring to mention a mistake he made that could have resulted in an entire ship blowing up with all hands.

* FamousFamousFictional: Cogley's list of famous declarations of rights -- the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, a Declaration of Rights from the Martian Colonies, and the Statutes of Alpha III.

* GoodOldWays, aka Technophobia: Kirk's "brilliant" defense counsel has access to all legal precedents from history catalogued on his computer system, but casts it all aside for....''books!'' Books which could be, and surely ''are'', ON that system, with the addition of indexing and annotation...[[note]]Apparently whoever wrote this assumed that computers in the future would have as extremely limited storage space as they did in the 1960s, so the books you would find on computer would be more like a summary or Reader's Digest condensed version.[[/note]]
* InformedAbility: Downplayed. Samuel T. Cogley is stated to be a good lawyer. In-episode, he does well enough until the video log by the computer, at which point it boils down to the point of 'the computer is never wrong', something he can't argue against with no reason to suspect otherwise. Once Spock gives him evidence that the computer ''is'' in error (indirectly), then he appeals to the court and succeeds, going on w/ some help to showcase the real truth of the matter. Not exactly brilliant, but he does show some chops.

* MildlyMilitary: Inverted. Finney complains that he should have been a captain, except for his "one mistake." IRL, that is all it takes to stall the career of a military officer, not only the mistakes he makes, but those over whom he has command (and responsibility). Although the show sometimes makes the claim Starfleet is not military (or is not merely military)

* RecycledSoundtrack: Several musical scores are reused in this episode, including some cues from "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E4TheNakedTime The Naked Time]]" by Alexander Courage, romantic themes by Joseph Mullendore from "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E13TheConscienceOfTheKing The Conscience of the King]]", used for Kirk and Areel Shaw, and music from "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E5TheEnemyWithin The Enemy Within]]" by Sol Kaplan, accompanying the fight between Kirk and Finney.

* SmartPeoplePlayChess: Spock discovers that the ship's computer was tampered with by playing it at chess several times. After he wins several games, he knows something is wrong. (His reasoning was that because ''he'' was the one who programmed the computer to play chess, it would be unlikely that he could manage anything better than a stalemate while playing against it.)[[note]]This works given that Spock is known to be a genius with computers and presumably ''can'' write a chess program that knows everything he knows about strategy and tactics and also does not make mistakes. Also helps having 23rd-century computers to use. Until the 1980s, it wasn't possible for computers to seriously challenge even a Master, let alone Grandmaster -- and writing the programs was a job for experts whether or not they themselves were very strong players. Of course by the 2010s anyone, even the greatest player alive, beating a chess computer ''at all'' without help from another computer just comes off as absurd.[[/note]]

* WritersCannotDoMath: On the Bridge, Kirk says they will be employing a sound amplification that will magnify all sounds aboard ship on the order of "''one'' to the fourth power"--which equals...'''one''' (and somehow the system ''only'' registers '''heartbeats''').

** Also averted. After half a season of "Space Central," "The Star Service," "The United Earth Space Probe Agency (UESPA)," and "The Space Fleet," ''Court Martial'' finally settles on the name of the service that Kirk and his crew belong to: '''Starfleet'''.[[note]]UESPA will turn up here and there in later franchise installments, to help retcon it's repeated mentioning in the first half of ''Trek TOS''[[/note]].

** Also averted. After half a season of "Space Central," "The Star Service," "The United Earth Space Probe Agency (UESPA)," and "The Space Fleet," ''Court Martia'' episode finally settles on the name of the service that Kirk and his crew belong to: '''Starfleet'''.[[note]]UESPA will turn up here and there in later franchise installments, to help retcon it's repeated mentioning in the first half of ''Trek TOS''[[/note]].