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The United Federation of Planets and Starfleet

    We only follow the Prime Directive when it means we get to kill people 

  • In Season 7's "Homeward", Picard refuses to help save the Boraalan civilization, even when the crew is easily capable of doing so unobtrusively. By refusing to violate the Prime Directive in this instance, he knowingly condemns them to death (although Worf's brother, it turns out, beamed them off just in time). But since when is Picard a shining example of strict adherence to the Prime Directive?! By the mid-fourth season, he'd already violated it nine times since taking command of the Enterprise (as Admiral Satie points out in "The Drumhead"). He was willing to break the Prime Directive to stop Wesley from being executed ("Justice"), let Worf off with just a reprimand for killing Duras ("Reunion"), and let his heart be softened by a little girl crying for help on a planet that's destroying itself ("Pen Pals"). To say nothing of the numerous (presumably) non-Federation planets the Enterprise has been instrumental in saving over the years. If ever there was a justifiable reason for breaking the Directive, it's here. What gives Picard the right to serve as judge, jury and executioner in this case?
    • Further to the intricate discussions of the Prime Directive elsewhere on these Headscratchers boards, I would add that this is one episode where the Prime Directive is supposed to seem difficult and unyielding. Strictly speaking Picard does not act as judge, jury or executioner — only as a bystander. Life on this planet would be destroyed even if nobody were around to see it, and the Prime Directive says not to interfere. As you point out, it's inconsistent, most obviously with 'Pen Pals', but I actually find it refreshing to see, for once, an instance when the crew don't decide to violate their most sacred vow, even when it seems extremely tempting to do so, and indeed, cruel not to.
    • What makes it worse is that that episode and Pen Pals makes it blatantly clear that Starfleet has forgotten the purpose of the Prime Directive, despite still mentioning: to protect pre-interstellar cultures. Forgotten, because where TOS made clear that the Starfleet of the period quite sensibly does not regard a culture ceasing to be as 'natural' or 'healthy' development, and in fact has standing orders for captains to interfere, if as discreetly as possible, should a culture be at risk of extermination, TNG's Starfleet apparently has explicit orders not to interfere even then. Now, to the outside observer, what seems most consistent with the spirit of the rule (as noted, in both periods stated to be the protection of other cultures): the TOS approach of mandating extinction-averting interference (see "The Paradise Syndrome") or the TNG approach of prohibiting the same?
    • It is perhaps worth noting one non-parallel between "Pen Pals" and "Homeward." In the former episode, it was ultimately within the Enterprise's power to completely avert this planetary catastrophe and return things to normal. This seemed to be wholly successful to the point that the planet will no longer need any intervention from Starfleet (which its pre-warp inhabitants never knew about to begin with) and will continue to develop naturally. In "Homeward," this is not the case at all; there is no indication that they can do anything to help the planet (admittedly, they never even seem to think about it). The only possible option is evacuation, which hardly seem possible to do while acting in accordance with the Prime Directive. The mere choice of selecting some people to live and others to die is playing God — more literally than in most cases (note that Nikolai lists the Boraalans' "rich spiritual life" as a basis for sparing them). Nikolai picks some people he likes, including a woman he impregnated (what the hell kind of anthropologist is this guy?), which is just the kind of patriarchal act by a "superior" civilization that the Prime Directive is designed to prevent. Then they dump this tiny group of people (too bad they couldn't afford more extras, because this bunch barely looks like enough people to qualify as a village, let alone the healthy gene pool needed to preserve a species) on a quickly-located alien planet where they will have no idea of whether or not a given plant is poisonous. And Nikolai, instead of being put on trial for his crimes (which include sabotaging the Enterprise!), is allowed to go native and stay with them, continuing to impersonate one of their species and further disrupting the "natural development" of their society in all kinds troubling ways, up to and including the introduction of human DNA into their microscopic gene pool! Let's just say that the letter and the spirit of the Prime Directive are both blown to smithereens in this awful episode, and there's plenty of guilt to spread around.
      • The Prime Directive is all kinds of idiotic anyway.
      • No, not at all. The colonial history of our planet would have been much less shameful and destructive had something similar been in place.
      • Of course if something similar to what we see in Star Trek had been put in place a large portion of the world's population would also still be dying of easily treated diseases and injuries. The problem with the Federation's Prime Directive is that it seems to have been turned from a basic 'don't unnecessarily interfere, don't decide their politics and don't repeat the mistakes of our ancestors' to 'don't interfere even when any possible consequence of interference is easily outweighed by the damage of not interfering'. Either from bad writing or from writers' zeal for the Federation it's gone from being a precaution to being absolute dogma to be followed no matter what the situation is (see Voyager episode Time and Again).
      • A large portion of the world's population is dying of easily treatable diseases. And considering that the percentage of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas killed by European diseases, especially smallpox, is now estimated in the neighborhood of 90%, you can see how easily the positive medical benefits of contact are outweighed by the negative. Whenever apologists for colonialism invoke medicine as a justification, there's an edge of "the primitives would never have developed any of this on their own were it not for the civilized Europeans showing them what to do" when it's easy to see that contact caused far more problems than it ever solved.
      • This is the worst kind of Noble Savage romanticism imaginable. So contacted people are poor? People living traditional, low-tech indigenous-style lifestyles die even faster and more brutally. Yeah colonialism sucked, but that's because it was one way - a particularly special bad way - of making contact. There are other ways, such as simple free sharing in a respectful forum of equal adults. Who cares whether a culture would have developed tech on their own? You have it now, they're dying now, and refusing to even offer to share it because it might shake up their existing social structures is just absolutely disgusting paternalism. Besides, by our own subjective standards of morality, any culture that depends on a high mortality rate for whatever reason, frankly deserves to have to justify itself to its children, when they discover their elders were subjecting them to a dangerous and difficult subsistence lifestyle without necessity.
      • I am not sure why it would necessarily be Noble Savage romanticism to acknowledge that colonialism was not beneficial to the colonized peoples in the long run, or how advocating "hands off" is any less patriarchal than seeing non-western peoples as primitive and backward, merely waiting for the helping hand of Mighty White. But I think we have wandered pretty far away from the original issue here — whether it is moral to force contact on a people with no knowledge of what the repercussions would be. Western colonial powers did not intentionally spread disease to peoples with no immunity to them (a few of those smallpox-infected blankets aside), but they did, and countless millions died. Likewise, it may seem like the most moral thing in the world to distribute medicines that fight infant mortality rate, but unless this is accompanied by an overall drop in birth rate, you can end up with a massive overpopulation problem and a society that cannot feed itself. Since it's impossible to predict every variable, it appears to me to make sense to err on the side of caution as a policy.
    • A major part of the Prime Directive is "not interfering in natural development". Now, a rule that's so often bent and broken is hard to defend, but let's look at it this way. In "Pen Pals" someone on the planet has found a way to communicate with someone off-planet by initiating the contact... that's what has drawn Starfleet's interest to them (via Data), thus the Enterprise involving itself is, in a way, part of the planet's natural development. However, in "Homeward", the only reason Starfleet is involved in the planet's development is because a member of Starfleet initiated the contact, thus his attempts to change things are contrary to their natural development. If Nikolai hadn't been involved, and at the last few minutes of their existence a Boraalan had been desperate enough to spontaneously invent a radio capable of sending a signal into orbit and broadcast "For God's sake someone help us!", the Enterprise probably would have been able to beam up all the Boraalans they could, since at that point the Boralaans' natural development would have led to them initiating contact and thus getting outsiders involved on their own terms.
    • The Prime Directive is inexplicably linked to a given civilization's possession of FTL spaceflight. The Federation is often shown meddling quite openly in the affairs of planets less advanced than them. In the episode "First Contact", the Enterprise is working on preparing for first contact with the Malcorians, a species that was just about to test their first warp-capable starship, and who are as yet unaware that other sentient races exist in the universe! The Enterprise frequently participates in diplomatic affairs with non-Federation planets that are generally at a lower level of technology than them. So there is a certain elitism threshold here. If a civilization is above that threshold then the Federation will readily assist against potential extinction events (as in the episode "Deja Q") such a moon falling out of its orbit. If the civilization does not possess warp drive then they are effectively screwed under the terms of the Prime Directive. It is a highly arbitrary determinant of when to render aid and when not to.
    • It is also worth noting that, as shown in the episode "Angel One", the Federation apparently sometimes waives the Prime Directive in the case of pre-warp civilizations such as the titular planet, which was described as having "20th Century technology". Why? Because it was Class M and located strategically close to the Romulan Neutral Zone. The mission to the planet was noted as being delicate because it was explicitly stated in the episode that they were seen as being a candidate for Federation membership, despite having a rather closed culture and not being anywhere near having warp capability! Not that this is the first time. In the TOS episode "Errand of Mercy", Kirk was fully-prepared to offer technology to the seemingly pre-industrial Organians because their planet was strategically-placed relative to the Federation-Klingon border. It would appear that the Prime Directive's importance is measured relative to the needs of the Federation, and that the Federation will ignore it if, for example, the threat in question is aimed at them, rather than the planet they would normally argue would be negatively impacted by violating the Prime Directive.
    • Also some of the examples given kind of fall in the “gray area” of the Prime Directive, for example, Worf killing Duras can be interpreted as still something internally Klingon as Worf is a Klingon himself, while in "Justice" in theory the Federation was involved because one of their citizens was under trial and someone could argue that the Primer Directive do not apply if Federation’s citizens are directly involved as, then, it’s no longer an internal issue.
    • When does Picard ever say that killing Duras is a violation of the PD? In any case, Worf is a Klingon. It's an example of one Klingon killing another. No outside interference. The problem was that Starfleet officers aren't supposed to kill for revenge.
    • If Starfleet's concern for the PD is to not interfere with the development of other other species, then they should just stay home. Simply traveling through space moving random asteroids and comets out of the way has lasting consequences (see Voyager's Year of Hell). As described above, Starfleet has violated or invoked the PD when it politically suited them. In "Symbiosis" the ship answers the distress call from what appears to be a pre-warp civilization and saves them and their ship. Picard was about to manufacture and give them spare parts to fix their ships until it suddenly became a morality issue and claimed the PD tied his hands. Given how he uses the PD later in the series, the episode should have started with "Sir, distress call." "Do they have warp engines on their ship?" "No sir." "Let them burn."
    • Even with warp civilizations, Starfleet plays politics with the PD. Gowron asked for military assistance per the terms of their alliance against the Duras faction in "Redemption." Starfleet tried to claim it was an internal problem and the PD was in play here. It had to be spelled out to them that this is the Duras family we're talking about here with known Romulan ties.

    Practicing starship combat? When was the last time we fought anyone? 

  • In "Peak Performance", Riker says to the Zakdorn strategist, Kolrami, regarding the combat drill: "I think it's a waste of time to test our combat skills— it's a minor province in the make-up of a starship captain." Picard's also insistent that Starfleet is not a military organization. While I admire Picard and Riker's idealism, those statements are coming dangerously close to naïveté. By this point in the series (late second season), the Enterprise has already been in several combat situations ("Encounter at Farpoint", "The Last Outpost", "The Battle", "The Arsenal of Freedom", "A Matter of Honor", "Samaritan Snare", and most notably "Q Who"— and those are just the examples I noticed at first glance). In fact, they admit that the only reason they agreed to this drill was because of the Borg encounter in the latter episode. They've also separated the saucer twice. If starship combat's such a "minor province" for a starship captain, how come the Enterprise fights so much? (My guess? Picard and Riker simply don't like certain Zakdorn racial traits, and are reacting negatively to Kolrami on that basis).
    • I suspect that they resent having this simulation forced on them by Starfleet as much as anything — it is an affront to their professionalism. The very fact that they have amassed a good amount of field combat experience should make the war game irrelevant.
      • Kolrami states something to the effect of "how you fare in a mismatch is what interests Starfleet." This may be a bit of a Hand Wave, but it makes it clear that there is some purpose to this exercise, even if it is a bit mysterious.
      • That's hardly a Hand Wave. The events of Samaritan Snare proved that the Enterprise crew needs to learn to not underestimate less technologically advanced ships. In real life the US Navy staged a war game with a Swedish diesel-electric submarine versus a carrier battle group. Despite being vastly outnumbered and out-teched, the Swedish sub managed to "sink" a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. It's as much an exercise for the crew on the Constellation-class as it is for the Enterprise.
      • It certainly is a Hand Wave insofar as this explanation is not provided by the episode itself, but by you. Convincing, though.
      • It's easily implied in the same discussion - they explicitly bring up the Borg, who were openly superior to the Enterprise. Trying to see how well a weaker opponent can take down a more powerful opponent is a wise tactic when they know that there is a stronger opponent out there willing to come after them.
      • Pretty much every decent military, law enforcement agency and rescue agency has regular drills and exercises. The idea is to test your methods without the risk of getting people killed. Considering how poorly Starfleet seems to handle some emergencies it seems more like the organization is simultaneously too bureaucratic and too casual.
      • We see it rarely enough, but the Enterprise does run preparedness drills (we see this in "Lower Decks").
    • Military veterans will testify that whenever a war game comes up, probably about 90% of those involved go into it whining about what a waste of time it is. Once the game starts, then they get serious about it.
    • This was further broken by the retconned introduction of the Cardassians in later seasons and the war that the Federation had apparently only just recently fought against them resulting in the treaty exchanging planets that triggered the Maquis revolt. Thus viewers who have seen later seasons or watched reruns out of order might wonder what the heck Picard and Riker are talking about, since the Federation had been at war not that long ago.
    • Oh, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reveals that The Federation recently fought another off-screen war against the Tzenkethi.

     What Measure is a Cardassian? 

  • In "The Wounded", the Enterprise is allegedly "trying everything in its power" to reach Captain Maxwell and the Starship Phoenix before it can destroy the lives of any more Cardassian citizens. Never mind for now that Picard refuses to give the Cardassians the ship's transponder code so they can track its precise location. When the Phoenix is bearing down on a Cardassian warship and a freighter, Picard assents to giving the Cardassians the Phoenix's prefix code to disable the shields, but alas, even unshielded, the Cardassians are no match for Maxwell. Picard then orders an increase in speed to Warp 9— from the Enterprise's previous speed of WARP 4! Why in the world was he previously flying at below the recommended cruising speed?! Is he really trying his hardest to preserve the peace?! And then when they actually find him and bring him aboard the Enterprise, rather than place him under arrest they let him return to the Phoenix with orders to accompany the Enterprise back to a starbase— and of course Maxwell takes off. This episode had a hurricane of bad decisions by Picard.
    • I find the speed of Enterprise constantly problematic. Obviously, you don't want to run your engines ragged, but on more occasions then I can count Picard lets the Enterprise waddle along like it's a cruise ship, no matter the circumstances. Hey, Captain? Why are you pissing around at Warp 2 (Ten times the speed of light) when you could be traveling at Warp 9 (One thousand, five hundred and sixteen times the speed of light)? At the former, you'll travel a light year in five weeks; at the latter, six hours. Do you just like taking the scenic route?
      • They did an episode about how warp drive was destroying the fabric of the universe. Picard says that higher warp speeds are restricted to vital missions. That doesn't explain why he's going around at warp 4 in 'The Wounded' but does explain why they generally stick to low speeds a lot of the time.
      • At the end of "The Chase," the Enterprise needs to pause and conduct repairs related to overuse of the propulsion system. So there are consequences to going around at high warp all the time. That being said, the ship's speeds often appear arbitrary.
      • Hasn't it been established that Enterprise's cruising speed is either warp factor five or six? If I'm correct in believing it has, then not only is Picard going slower than the situation requires, but he's wasting resources while he's doing it.
  • Speaking about The Wounded, how the crap could Data, our resident super-intelligent android, let slip that the Federation can read Cardassian transponder codes? He gave away a important tactical advantage and what was probably classified information.
    • That seemed to fall under Picard's earlier statement of how Macet was hearing everything Picard was hearing, nothing edited nothing withheld. It also worked diplomatically as a "We know more than you realize" moment so the Cardassians would be more hesitant to break the peace - what other bits of intelligence did Starfleet know?

     Starfleet Human Resources 
  • This is a very minor quibble, but in the episode Lower Decks, there is an opening for a night watch operations manager. Riker, Troy, and at one point Worf spend much of the episode trying to decide who to award the position to. There's one person conspicuously missing from these deliberations though: Data. Why is he, the department head, given so little input into the decision?
    • This is an awfully good point that had never occurred to me before. One of the things that's so much fun about that episode is that it gives us a peek at how our regulars behave as superior officers, but Data doesn't figure; what's it like to work under him?
    • Data probably was the one who gave Riker et al the list of promotion candidates in the first place. As the head of Operations, Data's job would be to oversee such things as crew evaluation reports. Thus, he would get those reports first and then, after carefully analyzing the reports along with other information like service records and promotion availability/criteria, would forward to Riker and the others a list of the crew who were able to be promoted (factoring in considerations like time in service, awards, reprimands, etc), and qualifications for the position that they would be promoted to.
    • This may just be something they decided at some point during Data's service on the Enterprise: he handles the purely logical aspects, like whose record meets the strict technical definition of being suitable for the position, contacts them to find out if they're interested in the position, arranges all the profiles, and then turns things over to the other department heads at that point. Being unemotional and often unversed in matters of personality conflicts and whatnot, Data quite logically doesn't involve himself in the part of the process that is more subjective, such as "Does her behavior indicate she'd be good in the position?", "Is he humble enough to not let this go to his head?", "Is she good with people?", "Does he really deserve it?"
    • Riker is shown in multiple episodes as being explicitly in charge of staffing decisions, while Picard seems to be in charge of deciding who gets on the ship. One example being in Chain Of Command when Riker gets ordered to swap the watch rotations from 3 to 4. That's something Data could do in about 5 minutes but it's not his job. I would also note that crew evaluations aren't the same thing as deciding on promotions and assignments so while Data would still be doing crew evals on his department, he wouldn't neccessarily be deciding who gets promotions, he would likely only be submitting evaluations and reccomendations that may or may not be followed depending on the "needs of the service".

     Why is the Enterprise such a big deal? 
  • When other officers talk about the greatest ship, it's the federation but is there that much of a difference between one and another. I presume the Enterprise is great because it's had the most enormous missions. Space is so enormous that no one ship really can do the important stuff. If a humongous crisis comes up in federation space, isn't it far easier to send the nearest ship anyway?
    • In real terms, the Enterprise isn't all that important. Its one Galaxy-class among many. The difference is in the onlooker: from the Mary Rose of Henry VIII's day, to the Titanic (even before it sank), to the Yorktown in WW2, sometimes we just ascribe a level of romanticism to big ships that we really don't to anything else.
    • There were initially only twelve Galaxy-class starships built (with half of those initially having only the spaceframes built for later completion) and at least one (the Yamato) was lost very early in its career. While more must have been build by the time of the Dominion War (the DS9 episode "Sacrifice of Angels" had 10 Galaxys visible in a single fleet), one would expect the original 6 to garner the most fame (at the time of their building, they were the most technologically advanced and powerful ever built by the Federation), barring extraordinary feats by the later ships during the war. And Enterprise-D has the additional point in its favor of inherenting the "Enterprise" name, arguably the most exalted in Starfleet history.
    • It's the Flagship of the Federation Starfleet. It's famous for the same reason that any ship named HMS Ark Royal or Queen Elizabeth is famous in the Royal Navy. The Enterprise carries a cultural & historic value beyond it's technlogicaly value (which is also significant since it's Class is the newest, largest, most advanced ship in the fleet).

    Do not interfere with my children below! 
  • What in the world is the Enterprise crew doing even going to the Edo world in "Justice"? Surely the Edo haven't discovered warp drive. And after their initial survey team comes back, and they realize there's a whole lotta lovemaking going down down there, they bring down Wesley to determine if it's an ideal place for children?! Really?!
    • As for the first part of your question, this is a good example of Early-Installment Weirdness since the criteria for making first contact are not yet set. If one were inclined to give this awful, awful episode some breaks (and who would?), one might rationalize that just because this society does not possess warp drive does not mean they're not aware of it, and that perhaps they have been visited by warp capable species in the past, which would explain their lack of interest in the transporter.
    • As for the second part, that's especially intriguing. I wonder if it's a trace of the largely lost Roddenberry view of the future as a haven of free love and relaxed sexual mores (he is reputed to have envisioned the future earth as a world of nudists!). Not thinking twice about exposing Wesley and even younger children to a planet of polyamorous nymphomaniacs may be a reflection of that.
      • Considering Roddenberry was known behind the scenes for banging any hot young starlet he could get his hands on (including Nichelle Nichols), his envisioning a future of free love and nudity was probably less philosophy and more fetish appeal for him.
      • There's no reason why both can't be true, is there?
    • Warp drive isn't the sole criterion for making contact with a civilization. If the Edo had developed subspace communication they would have found signs of extra-terrestrial life soon enough. Alternately, some other alien race stumbled across the Edo and give them some technology, thereby negating the "cultural contamination" rule of the Prime Directive.
      • The same point was made three posts up. The point to make, I suppose, is that it's not like the episode actually says this. The Edo definitely don't seem to react like they're encountering aliens for the first time, but they're so badly written and acted that it's hard to know for sure.
      • Just because Starfleet has a Prime Directive doesn't mean the rest of the galaxy does. Maybe they hitched a ride to Earth and said "hey we're cool guys come meet us".
    • Even in the best case scenario, it's frankly bizarre that the Federation's first contact with this species is so blasé. No ceremonies, no ambassadors, no dress uniforms... just "Hey, mind if we play in your parks and gawk at your women?"

    Silly Rabbit, Starfleet is for Kids! 
  • More serious question: why is it that, the ship is packed with civilian dependents of the crew? In the real world, when you go on a naval vessel, you don't have the crew's children underfoot. They're back on land, at home, writing cheerful letters to Daddy and/or Mommy who's in the Navy. Starfleet is a military organization, the Federation's analog of the US Navy and US Marine Corps. Granted, they are oriented more towards exploration than combat most of the time. But look at how often the Enterprise, in all incarnations, gets shot up. Exploring the galaxy is apparently every bit as dangerous as a combat patrol during the Second World War. So why have all the wives and children underfoot? Looking at it from the perspective of other spacefaring races, the fact that the Federation's favored way of making first contact is by having a gigantic military vessel that's bristling with death-rays take up "standard orbit" (whatever that may be) around the planet and say "Hey you primitive screw-heads, WAZZUP?" cannot possibly be lost on any objective observer, annoying rug-rats in the Jefferies Tubes notwithstanding; it's not exactly subtle. Did anyone keep any tally of how many of red-shirted ensigns died on board the Enterprise during TNG, out of its total crew? If the Enterprise were a military base, it'd be what the US military calls a "hardship post," which means, no civilian dependents allowed because it's on a constant war footing.
    • Did anyone keep any tally of how many of red-shirted ensigns died on board the Enterprise during TNG, out of its total crew? Well... there's Haskell ("Where Silence Has Lease"), Dern ("Genesis"), Monroe ("Disaster", she was a Lt), Singh ("The Lonely Among Us", gold shirt), Van Mayer ("In Theory", gold shirt), two security guards ("Heart of Glory"), Aster ("The Bonding", blue shirt), Fang-lee ("Ethics", unseen), Kwan ("Eye of the Beholder", gold shirt), Brooks ("The Loss", unseen), Yar ("Skin of Evil"), Corelki, Frankin and 1 other guard ("Descent"), plus the larger numbers of offscreen redshirts, such as in "Q Who" and "Best of Both Worlds" against the Borg, 8 to the Bersailles III firestorms ("Lessons"), and 3 to the Ansata terrorists ("The High Ground"), and those are just off the top of my head. Probably still not as many as Kirk, who as far as I remember lost around a quarter of his crews worth during TOS.
    • Answer: It was Gene's idea. He always maintained that Starfleet really wasn't a military organization, and that it was unreasonable to force the crew to leave their families for years at a time. As you note, this idea just doesn't work in a series where the ship is in danger almost every week. That's why the writers quietly reversed course on this one after TNG ended — there are no kids on the Enterprise-E or other Starfleet ships we've seen since.
      • More to the point, the Galaxy class starships weren't supposed to be in danger every week. (As noted in "Yesterday's Enterprise", "this is supposed to be a ship of peace.") The ship class was meant for diplomatic missions and the odd exploration or scientific run. The fact that the Enterprise kept running into more disaster than expected was just bad luck. (This still doesn't explain why they knowingly went into battle more than once without leaving the saucer section behind with all the civilians.)
      • Maybe because when you're going into battle you don't want to leave half your weapons behind? It would make sense that they'd offload the civilians at a starbase or something, but no sense at all that they'd be expected to face 100% of a warbird or Cardassian cruiser with 50% of their own firepower.
      • Actually, according to Worf's dialogue in Heart of Glory, the Enterprise is a more effective warship when it is separated from the saucer section.
      • Budget restraints, pure and simple.
      • But they already had Stock Footage of the saucer separation, a throwaway line and two seconds of film would have covered it.
      • Are you going to separate your battle and saucer sections when you have Romulans after you on every side? It's no good separating the saucer if the battle has already caught you off guard.
      • The effects weren't the expensive part; the expensive part was rebuilding the Battle Bridge in the warp section (which was actually a set from the Star Trek movies).
      • Also, Picard stated in a novel that he never liked the idea of leaving the saucer section stranded (it has no warp capability) while going off to fight a threat that was presumably dangerous enough to justify the saucer separating in the first place. As the saucer would likely be easy pickings for whatever took out the much more powerful battle section, the logic holds up.
      • One would think that any sane parent would want to get their kids off the ship after the the first dozen times they all nearly died. It doesn't really matter that it wasn't supposed to be dangerous, since it demonstrably was dangerous.
      • I could never watch a Star Trek Shake on The Next Generation without thinking about how the children on board are being horribly traumatized by having their home violently buffeted at least once a week. Imagine what the ship's parents and teachers have to deal with every time the red alert klaxon sounds.
      • Oh man, and a Star Trek Shake when there could easily be very young children about? I may never look at that the same way again...
      • You don't have to think. Star Trek: Generations, which featured one of the largest Star Trek shakes in the franchise, graphically depicted kids screaming as everything was falling on top of them.
      • A bridge is demonstrably dangerous (can collapse). Scissors are demonstrably dangerous (can stab). Living in earthquake country/ tornado country/ hurricane country is demonstrably dangerous. Do people abandon such things? No. Just when the danger is present.
      • The difference is that those things only occasionally actually endanger people. A better example would be a bridge that kept collapsing over and over again, with a few people on the bridge killed and the rest narrowly escaping each time, but parents continuing to drive over it with their kids.
      • Perhaps it's a legacy of the "generation ship" mindset. Earth may have largely bypassed the need for such vessels, between early use of hibernation a la "Space Seed" and the later invention of warp drive, but many Federation species could've established their first colonies using sub-light ships and multi-generation crews. Knowing that vessels crewed by families have successfully explored and settled upon new worlds may give Starfleet's planners a more tolerant (or romanticized?) perspective on the issue.
      • Bafflingly, the kids living on the Enterprise were directly threatened at least twice in the first season alone: first in "Justice", in which Wesley falls into a lawn ornament while playing Frisbee with some kids on an alien planet, the punishment for which was apparently execution; and again in "When the Bough Breaks", in which an alien race kidnaps several kids from the Enterprise. One would think that after these encounters, many of the parents would be of a mind to get back to Earth as quickly as possible and leave the kiddies with Grandma and Grandpa. (Granted, however, much of this was taking place around the same time that much of Starfleet command was being infiltrated by mind-controlling worms, so perhaps Earth was not perceived as particularly safe either.)
      • Maybe some did. We wouldn't have heard about it, since Wesley was the only kid on the regular cast.
      • In second season "Where Silence Has No Lease" Picard and Riker set the Enterprise to self destruct in 20 minutes. They avoid it in the end, but you can imagine all the traumatized parents and kids as they awaited their doom... for 20 minutes.
    • Answer 2: The original premise of TNG was that the Enterprise was a long-range exploratory vessel which was expected to go 20 years between refits. The crew brought their families on board because a) Twenty years without seeing your kids is a bit much, and b) they were raising the crew that would fly the ship back in time for its refit. This premise was quickly forgotten, unfortunately, and the crew ended up just dootzing around local space instead of actually going "where no man has gone before" (except by accident, of course).
      • It still doesn't work in light of historical explorers, whose crews would do their years-long cruises without refit and didn't take children on board precisely because they had no idea what they would deal with. And given what happened to Magellan (set sail with five ships and 270 men to try and circumnavigate the globe, without actively searching anything interesting and possibly dangerous like the Enterprise does. Four years later, one ship with 18 men completes the mission, and Magellan wasn't one of the survivors) and other explorers, it strikes me as wise to not embark children on that ship.
    • Answer 3: From an in-universe perspective, too many different political interests getting in the way of designing the ship (see The Pentagon Wars for a Real Life example of what I mean). An efficient design (like that of the Constitutions) would have meant having the Galaxy-class explorer as the best warship of that size with the addition of state-of-the-art sensors (comparable to the most recent dedicated scouts), a capable but non excessive stellar cartography department, some laboratories to examine the most likely phenomenons and samples they were likely to encounter and a large number of non-replicable spare parts, all of it done with efficient use of space, no unnecessary personnel (if we stretch it we could justify Guinan for the morale value, but not many more) and the most reliable systems available. What they got instead was a ship with the firepower and shields she was supposed to have but subpar shields, excessively extensive labs, extremely inefficient use of space (see the command bridge, the large luxury suites for the crews and the entire decks with no specific purpose for some examples), little to no non-replicable spare parts, tons of unnecessary personnel (including the children. This one was openly criticized by Picard himself), and infamously unreliable systems (the holodeck's tendency to malfunction, the transporters' biofilters regularly failing to detect and isolate new pathogens, the tendency of the warp core to blow up at the first hit and inability to throw it out when necessary, and the complete lack of redundancy in the safeties). I hope the responsible were thrown in a penal camp after the Yamato exploded...
    • It strikes me that the Enterprise may be one of the most advanced (if not THE most advanced) starship out there but it really hasn't been designed with all out battle in mind. Look at how easily the shields are knocked down by REAL battle-ships like Birds of Prey. It pushes more importance into other types of technology (Stellar Cartography, for example, does anyone actually know what the heck that's good for, except for predicting how galaxies will look in two million years time?) Sure it has huge weapons, photon torpedoes and phasers and the like, but it's still not exactly... designed with war in mind, I mean look at it. Does that really look like a warship? (Compare the Enterprise D to the Enterprise E, which was better outfitted for battle, to clarify what a star ship that was really designed for big battles looks like).
      • With regards to Stellar Cartography, the position of every object in the universe is constantly shifting with respect to every other object in the universe, so navigational charts need to be constantly updated. It makes sense that the Enterprise would have a department for it.
    • Uh, guys? The Enterprise-D was one of the (at the time) brand new Galaxy-class starships. It was designed to carry families along as the crew explored the galaxy. Clearly, the concept made sense at the time; when the Galaxy-class ships were first commissioned, the Federation wasn't actively at war with anything.
      • Except the Cardassians...
      • Galaxy-class ships weren't the only ones to carry family. Sisko served on the USS Saratoga, and his wife and son lived on the ship too.
      • Speaking of, why in the name of all that's holy would Starfleet allow civilians (including the XO's wife & kid) aboard vessels that they knew for a fact were going into battle?!?
      • Even worse: This was a Miranda-class starship, aka Starfleet's cannon fodder and a ship that was never designed with families in mind (it was originally designed in the late 23rd century).
      • Starfleet does not do cannon fodder. True, it's a smaller class, but probably could hold its own in a fight against anything but the Borg. And the design may be old, but I expect any new ones built had the latest technology, and the old ones underwent refits as needed.
    • I think it's a canon statement that the Galaxy class is the most successful starship class in Starfleet history. Still doesn't explain why it's that heavily armed or armored for a diplomatic/explorer vessel. Heck, it can match a Warbird, and that ship is twice in size.
      • Let's not forget the future refit, the "Galaxy-X". That thing one-shotted fully shielded Negh'Vars!
      • It's supposed to be a jack-of-all trades. Capable of fighting a battle, but not necessarily a match for a Warbird. But at the same time, it's capable of being a diplomatic ship, medical relief ship, ambassadorial ship, etc.
      • Jack of all trades, nothing. It's the ultimate Military Mashup Machine. The guns of a warship. The speed and sensors of a scout. The living and medical quarters of a hospital ship. The diplomatic facilities of a civilian cruise ship...
      • The original reason for the Enterprise-D carrying entire families was because it wasn't a warship. True, it was heavily armed and shielded, but it was fitted for *exploration*. All early Galaxy-class ships were fitted with science suites up the wazoo, giving all the crew the comforts of a hotel in space over a battleship, and it was just easier to bring families along, and Stellar Cartography is used as a navigational aide. However, after the Borg and eventually the Dominion, the Galaxy-class ship went through a major overhaul, adding extra armor and more powerful shields, as well as two extra type X phaser arrays onto the nacelles, removing the science stations, and cutting the crew down from 1,012 to 400.
      • It might be a canon statement, but it's a pretty silly one. These were ships designed to last 100 years or more, but a third of the initial run was lost in the first 10. And not even in wartime - Yamato was done in by a computer virus, and Enterprise was shot down by an antique!
      • Half. The Odyssey was rammed in the deflector dish by a Dominion raider a few months before the Enterprise's destruction.
      • Historically speaking, explorers were fully equipped ships of war that also embarked scientists and their equipment (with the cartographic part usually done by the military crew, as they were equipped for that on their own). And in fact the Galaxy-class explorers are fitted as warships even before the Dominion War (in "Conundrum" the amnesiac crew concludes the Enterprise is, in their own word, a battleship upon taking a look to the ship's characteristics). My guess is that there were too many different political interests plaguing the ship, with the end result being a ship with not enough necessary equipment (more powerful shields and non-replicable spare parts, to name two), too much non-necessary equipment (excessive labs, for example, given the existence of dedicated science ships), bad use of the space (excessively large bridge and crew quarters and entire unused decks), and children on board, with some corners cut in the wrong places (the excessively volatile warp core is the first one that comes to mind). One good thing that came from the encounter with the Borg and the Dominion War was that those interests were wiped out, resulting in overhauled Galaxies that are better equipped for all their missions, including combat.
    • Also, for the record, sixty people died on the Enterprise D in all of its seven years. That works out to slightly under nine people per year.
      • While far lower than what everyone (myself included) expected...it still made me laugh.
      Picard: Congratulations everyone! Only 8 deaths this years! A new record! Diplomacy and discussing trade embargoes has never been safer!
      Conversation from the episode "Q Who" in which 18 crew members were abducted from the Enterprise and presumably assimilated by the here-to-fore unknown Borg threat:
      Capt. Picard: I understand what you've done here, Q. But I think the lesson could have been learned without the loss of 18 members of my crew.
      Q: If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous - with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid...
      • nearly a third of those were in one episode, "Q Who", so outside of that episode it's more like 6 deaths per year.
      • Am I the only one that read that in the voice of Stewart's character in American Dad!?
      • On the other hand, another Galaxy-class starship (the Yamato) was lost with all hands in Season 2...
      • Sixty people seems low, extremely low, and the link is 404 now. Think about "Genesis"... a population of 1000+ people in confined spaces, all de-evolved into various half-animal monsters, many of which are dangerous predators, some of which require specific environments that don't normally exist in a starship, and we only see one dead crew member? The episode doesn't give a number, but I don't see any way that was resolved without hundred of deaths. And what about the episode where the Borg tractor-beamed a section of hull away? That single incident killed, what, around 20 crew members?
      • Just think about how traumatized the kids were after Genesis, or when they all suffered hallucinations due to the alien telepathy in Night Terrors.
    • There are a lot of valid points here overall, but it seems like the Federation in general has far more risk-tolerant attitudes than late-20th/early 21st century America. Just look at the general reaction to things kids get into that have nothing to do with hostile activity. Also, my impression was always that the Galaxy class was the first to carry families not because it was a particularly non-combat-adapted ship, but because it was big enough to carry all those extra people in comfort and without taxing its supplies. Starfleet seems to be fond of making its "first rate" ships extremely multi-role; both the Constitution and Galaxy are seen doing diplomatic, combat, and exploration missions, as well as carrying high-priority cargoes. As is repeatedly cited on other matters, this reflects nineteenth-century fleets far more than modern navies. In addition, the Galaxy is not really that bad a battleship—the Bird-of-Prey in Generations was only able to take down the Enterprise by using a bug in Geordi's VISOR to read the shield frequencies. It does have two problems, but they are more design oversights than intentional compromises. First, it is a big target—its shape is rather "fat", not really presenting a small profile from any angle. Second, while it is very well-armed, its firing arcs are not designed to concentrate fire in any one direction; it cannot easily throw a large weight of fire forward or "fire a broadside".
      • Those design flaws seem to be reflective of the type of combat the Federation was expecting the ship to face - namely, single threats as opposed to whole fleets. TNG starts with the Federation at peace with the Klingons, the Romulans not having appeared for decades, no knowledge of the Borg and the Ferengi being an unknown species. It really does seem like the product of the need for a peacetime general-use ship more than any attempt to create a true vessel of war.
      • Yeah, we're far less risk tolerant in the early days of the 21st Century than we were even in the Mid-1980s. So what made sense to put on TV then doesn't precisely map to what we consider acceptable now. As to the ship shapes, that was probably intentional. The Federation wants to make peaceful contacts, to spread peace and acceptance. So something big obvious and friendly looking is going to be much more valuable in fulfilling that mission than something that looks like a warship. Park an obvious warship over someone's planet and they are liable to take offense. Whether you approve of the mission goals is up to you, but the Enterprise and Galaxy class design is well suited to that mission goal.
      • The 19th-century comparison also holds if you consider the difference in length of voyages compared to those of a 20th/21st-century navy. Given the distances in space travel, it would be reasonable to suppose that a cruise might last for years, not months. Also, Starfleet's role in protecting the frontier makes a starship somewhat similar to U.S. Army outposts in the American West, where it was considered dangerous but not unthinkable for soldiers' families to accompany them.
      • Except that even in the 18th and early 19th centuries they weren't so blasé about the risks, because even then the only 'kids' they allowed on board were cabin-boys and powder-monkeys, ie, crew members.
      • Speaking of risk tolerance, I just watched Time Squared. In the episode, Picard kills a future with a phaser he pulled from a cabinet near the control console. So, wait...this ship with children has unlocked cabinets full of guns?
      • Future guns that can probably tell when the person holding them is an authorized adult member of the crew. Other episodes show that phasers won't even fire in certain civilian-heavy areas like Ten Forward unless there's a Red Alert going on or something.
    • Memory Alpha has the answer:
      Regarding the presence of families on starships, Ronald D. Moore commented "Perhaps [still] on some Galaxy-class ships, but I think this was an experiment that failed." (AOL chat, 1997) "I think that the "family friendly" starship notion was an interesting idea, but one that didn't pan out. There was always something awkward about Picard ordering the ship into battle situations with kiddies running through the corridors. And no matter how much lip service we paid to the "our families are part of our strength" concept, it never seemed very smart or very logical to bring the spouse and kids along when you're facing down the Borg, or guarding the Neutral Zone, or plunging the ship into uncharted spatial anomalies." (AOL chat, 1997)
      • Even if having families on board the ship is justified, then why do they even allow children in the stardrive section? Each time they have to separate, there's an evacuation sequence, showing families and children scurrying to get to the saucer. Shouldn't the stardrive section be off limits to everyone except necessary personnel so when they separate the saucer they can do it much quicker?
      • Yes that one does seem like Fridge Logic to me as well, as it is implied that most of the non military amenities (holodecks, ten forward, etc.. ) are located in the saucer. As for the saucer, if memory serves there was a statement by Word of God that saucer separation was originally going to be a regular thing, but was ultimately reduced to limited use for the same reason the show staff came up with the transporters, not because it was too expensive to show the saucer separating (stock footage and all) regularly, but would have taken too much TIME out of the story to show and would have unnecessarily disrupted the flow of the story.
      • About the size and shape of the Enterprise and other Starfleet ships, all interstellar spaceships in the Star Trek universe have near flawless targeting systems and all weapons reach their targets instantaneously, so designing a spaceship to be able to dodge, otherwise avoid attacks, or "fire at broadside" is largely pointless, which is also the reason we never see either ship moving about during a battle.
    • There's an amusing bit in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's "The Jem'hadar" where Dax suggests to Captain Keogh of the Galaxy-class U.S.S. Odyssey that they offload non-essential personnel (read: families) before heading through the wormhole. A bit of a Take That! at TNG, where they never seemed to do that.
  • A plot point in Peak Performance seems to indicate that Picard is actively trying to kill the children onboard; or at the very least Wesley—and who could blame him. In the preparation for a battle drill, Wesley gets an idea to improve the starship Hathaway's odds against Enterprise by enabling her to jump to warp for a split-second. All of the antimatter had previously been removed from the surplus Hathaway, but Wesley works around this by beaming an experiment involving antimatter that he had been working on from the Enterprise. So. . .Wesley's not only allowed to play with antimatter, but he's allowed to do so without close supervision? I don't care how smart he is, he's still a freaking student! Who the hell gives kids access to weapons-of-mass-destruction?
    • We did see at least one other starship with children on board... the Saratoga, destroyed on Wolf 359 by the Borg. Sisko's wife and son were on board, and this was in a combat situation.
    • Am I the only one that finds it rather bemusing that most of this section is horrified head-shaking at the thought of poor little chilluns being brought within even a light-year of possible danger, but wraps up with "KILL THE TEENAGE BOY! HE ANNOYS ME!"?
      • OP here, and while I did take a cheap shot a Wesley, I was trying to make a different point. Antimatter is beyond volatile. All you would have to do to get yourself and everyone in the vicinity vaporized is to allow it to come into contact with other matter. A matter/antimatter reaction creates the most efficient release of energy possible. How many teenagers can you think of that can be trusted to always handle it with the care and delicacy required?
      • Some people in the modern age trust their children to handle gasoline, because they feel those children are old enough and responsible enough to handle it with the proper precautions. Someone from a previous era would probably have found the idea of children handling a "beyond volatile" substance like gasoline horrifying. Antimatter is Nightmare Fuel to you because we currently have no way of containing it even if we had some... to people in the time TNG is set in, antimatter containment is positively routine.
      • Lethal computer glitches also seem to be positively routine, and unlike on Earth one mistake with antimatter will destroy the ship and all aboard
      • Of course, two episodes later, in Evolution, another one of Wesley's unsupervised science projects gains sentience, corrupts Enterprise's computers, tries to murder a man, and nearly destroys the ship...so, maybe they should at least check in occasionally to make sure he isn't lighting matches near that gasoline.
    • My wonder is; is it really a space ship that dangerous for the 24th century standards? We see space stations and colonies suffering similar treats that the Enterprise, entire colonies wipe out, and so on, seems like living outside the Solar System is dangerous anyway. Also not every episode were about the Enterprise about to be destroyed, a big chunk of episodes deal with treats that never endangered the people inside the ship, only crewmen who left (like Wesley in Justice).
      • Indeed, how many kids would have been killed in say, the Husnock attack on Rana IV, or on Omicron Theta or any of the other worlds stripped by the Crystalline Entity, Setlik III and the Cardassians, or Jurot IV or Ivor Prime that were hit by the Borg? Plus all those places decimated in one way or another in TOS? At least a starship can run away from stuff like that.
      • This is sort of like cherry-picking examples of children killed in natural disasters or wars as evidence that the entire planet Earth is inhospitable to children... clearly, most Federation worlds are safe the vast majority of the time.
      • And most Federation starships are probably safe the vast majority of the time, you're just watching the one the main characters are on.
    • Living within the Solar System isn't safe. Earth has come under direct threat at least four times. Twice with the Borg, the whale probe from Star Trek IV, and V'Ger from The Motion Picture. Possibly even more. At least on the Enterprise (or any other starship) you can be proactive in sorting the problem. Planet side you just have to sit and wait and hope Starfleet makes it in time to bail you out.
      • And the Breen.

    Enlightened, Utopian Society... Minus the Captains 
  • Before he was assimilated and Psychologically Damaged or whatever, it seems like Picard was the only human who actually ever measured up to the Federation ideals of humanity. Aside from a blind spot regarding the Borg, Picard was a moral superman (especially compared to Kirk, who was sexist; Sisko, who committed countless crimes against the Romulans, Maquis, etc. to serve his own needs; Janeway, who made too many moral compromises to count). Where are all the other really good people?
    • Kirk was a product of his time (the 60s), Sisko was a product of Deep Space Nine's Black-and-Gray Morality (he didn't do this things for his "own ends" - Eddington was a dangerous criminal, and the Romulans being in the war did save billions of lives) and Janeway was a product of being in a difficult situation. What makes Picard different? He was the only one written with Gene's utopia specifically in mind, on a show with a bigger budget and less Executive Meddling than the Original Series. Picard is Star Trek, as envisaged by its creator.
      • Eddington was a dangerous criminal, but the episode made it fairly clear that Sisko was gunning for him for very personal reasons. Besides which, for all his claims of moral superiority, there was basically nothing that Eddington did that Sisko wasn't willing to stoop to, and further. If the Maquis had been recognized as a legitimate organization rather than a terrorist group, Sisko would have been brought up on war crimes along with Eddington.
      • Eddington out and out SAYS that Sisko made it personal and it's pretty clear that Eddington's betrayal was something that Sisko wasn't going to forgive or forget.
      • And at what point did Eddington, or the Maquis, ever set out to endanger the Federation? It's quite clear in the series that Eddington meant everything he said about he and the Maquis having no quarrel with Sisko or with the Federation, but simply wanting the freedom to go their own way, especially after they'd already renounced their Federation citizenship en masse in order to avoid being forcibly resettled when their planets were ceded to the Cardassian Union. The treaty making that concession also stipulated that the Cardassians would respect the autonomy of the Federation exiles, and the Maquis-Cardassian war started when it became clear that that Cardassian promise was worth about as much as...well, as a Cardassian promise. It was only after Dukat brought Sisko and the Federation into that war that the Maquis began targeting Federation assets — and I've yet to hear anyone offer much of an explanation as to why the Federation was fighting on the side of its current enemy, against people who until very recently had been Federation citizens themselves.
      • I'll give you a short list off the top of my head: Mr. Eddington Sabotaged a joint Bajoran/Federation starbase that had a significant civilian population, assaulted that base's second officer and illegally assumed command, stole Federation equipment that was intended for humanitarian relief, once again assaulted a superior officer, sabotaged a Federation starship, fired on same while it had no deflector shields or ability to defend itself, sent a false distress signal with the intent of firing on yet another Federation starship, left that ship and its crew adrift and defenseless, engaged in piracy by attacking merchant vessels to steal their cargo, used that cargo to manufacture chemical weapons, poisoned the biosphere of a foreign planet in a demilitarized zone to displace that entire planet's civilian population, fired on an unarmed civilian ship carrying refugees from the planet he poisoned with chemical weapons, and endangered the already uneasy peace between the United Federation of Planets and the Cardassian Union. I think by any measure, Mr. Eddington was a dangerous criminal who needed to be stopped.
      • Because the Maquis former colonists were endangering many millions/billion with their attitudes. If you think about it the Cardassians did honor their promise. They treated the Maquis as an individual group, not members of the Federation running around in their territory, which would have theoretically violated whatever treaties they had and started up hostilities.
      • That's not much of an explanation. The Maquis were endangering the Federation by defending themselves against Cardassian treaty violations, because the Cardassians chose not to take the view that the Federation was at fault? Which choice, incidentally, doesn't do anything to exonerate the Cardassian abrogation of their treaty obligations to the Maquis; in light of that, it's hard to believe they upheld the Federation treaty out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than the recognition that open war against the Federation would cost them dearly and be of uncertain outcome.
        One might argue (and I think Sisko did once argue) the realpolitik justification that it was necessary to try to prevent an alliance between the Dominion and the Cardassian Union, and that the mostly-successful Maquis resistance left the Union little other option than to sign a treaty with the Dominion; but the Maquis resistance, however successful, amounted to little more than a pinprick compared to the all-out Klingon invasion which at that time was rolling up whole Cardassian star systems and whatever else lay between Gowron's fleets and Cardassia Prime. If the Union needed a powerful ally against anything, it was the existential threat they faced from the Klingons, not the guerrilla warfare they forced upon the Maquis — not that this would likely be news to Sisko, who not long before had worked alongside Dukat to rescue, by their very fingernails, the entire Cardassian governing council from a Klingon attack intended to capture or kill them en masse.
      • Oh, and speaking of the Maquis — has it occurred to anyone else that, as with Israeli settlements in Gaza, the establishment of these Federation colonies in contested territory might have been a political maneuver against Cardassia in the first place? Perhaps some high Starfleet admiral in early-mid-TNG days, some time before the first Cardassian war, had the rather cold-blooded thought of putting some Innocent Bystanders in harm's way to see what happened; either on the one hand the territory would be de-facto ceded to the Federation, or on the other hand the Federation would get a bloody shirt to wave, a handily manufactured casus belli in the run-up to what may well have been a widely unpopular conflict driven as much by political intrigue within Starfleet as by any genuine cause of opposition between the two involved parties.
        Of course, as we all know, the first Federation-Cardassian conflict ended with a compromise treaty in which concessions were made by both sides, a result regarded by contemporary political observers as deeply unsatisfying to both parties. In such a situation, perhaps it seemed politically necessary to abandon the civilians who had colonized contested planets to strengthen the Federation's pre-war claim; while this may seem a stunningly cynical allegation against the supposedly idealistic and morally enlightened Federation, it is perhaps not so shocking in light of the fact that the Federation eventually chose to carry out exactly such an abandonment. It's also not such a shocking claim in light of Starfleet's established willingness to callously throw non-combatants into deadly danger — even the Great Picard blithely dragged a shipfull of families including minor children into armed standoffs, booby traps, spatial anomalies, temporal vortices, skirmishes just shy of outright warfare with the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Borg — hell, at one point everybody on the whole ship was horribly mutated into a monstrously twisted amalgam of human and animal features like something out of H. P. Lovecraft's nightmares, and what's that going to do to a ten-year-old? And it still took years before anyone got the idea that maybe having your kids with you on a combat posting, or a posting that could suddenly become a combat posting at any instant, isn't such a great thing after all!
        And of course that's all just speculation, or at best circumstantial inference without a shred of unequivocal canon evidence to back it up, but it sure would do a great job of explaining how Sisko managed to get away with using massively, internationally illegal chemical weapons to depopulate a Maquis planet, without so much as a hiccup of indigestion from his chain of command. After all, by that point, Starfleet was deeply embroiled in a de-facto alliance with Cardassia against the Maquis, and while the Federation public seems endlessly tolerant of its government's misbehavior, it's possible even that infinitely flexible patience could be strained by a military partnership with a recent enemy against one's own recent fellow citizens. Once Sisko, at Dukat's urging, had put them into the situation, the political admirals would undoubtedly want nothing less than to see it turn into an ugly, deadly, drawn-out struggle, in the way guerrilla wars tend to do; there's little which can turn a polity against a war so quickly as that — and having all the facts about this little mess come out in the media, in such a hostile domestic political context, very likely could result in some of Starfleet Command's political weathervanes toppling off their high perches for good. Those same political admirals would naturally find nearly any result preferable to that one, hence Sisko's being given carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to put a quick, quiet end to the conflict — even extending to such hideous acts as using highly toxic engine waste to poison an inhabited planet's biosphere; let's not forget that Eddington used an agent specific to Cardassian physiology, while Sisko indiscriminately slaughtered an entire ecosystem — which, judging by the outcome, was entirely acceptable to Starfleet's high command, just so long as it didn't make the news.
        I think the next person who starts to tell me about the Federation's evolved sensibilities and Starfleet's high moral standards, I might just have to puke on their shoes.
      • Sisko's obvious pain at some of the moral choices he makes is as much an exploration of the Federation's ideals of humanity as Picard's constant adherence to them. I don't find it particularly negative, like the Black-and-Gray Morality page seems to suggest, but interesting and powerful.
      • Sorry, are we talking about the same Sisko here? The guy who feels himself in grave moral peril when he's had an extremely indirect hand in the false-flag murder of a Romulan senator with the result that the Romulans enter the war against the Dominion and make a decisive difference — the same guy who also uses outlawed chemical weapons to depopulate an entire human planet, without the slightest hint of a qualm from either him or his superiors in Starfleet? Even Kira had to ask him to confirm that order! And, yes, Eddington had used chemical weapons first in order to deny the Cardassians a disputed planet, but that's pretty much the backwards of exoneration for what Sisko did; in fact, it's the first Trek episode I ever saw where the plainly shown moral of the story was that the ends really do justify the means, with a hefty dose of "if they do it first, it's okay for us too". It's not the exploration of that theme with which I have a problem; it's the fact that Sisko's actions were presented in a totally uncritical light that sends not just him, but the whole show, shooting past the Moral Event Horizon in my eyes.
      • Both men committed the same crime: ethnically cleansing an entire planet using illegal chemical weapons. Eddington did so to free his people, Sisko did so because Eddington was making him look bad.
      • Its important to note that neither Eddington or Sisko used the sort of chemical weapons that killed on contact. Lines of dialogue make it very clear that their attack will simply make it impossible for Cardassians or humans to inhabit the affected worlds for several decades. Both populations have time to evacuate, and the Cardassians even are shown to be doing so—Eddington goes so far as to fire on one of the refugee ships as a distraction while he escapes. While its clear that both mens' actions are in fact crimes, these crimes are not on the order of mass murder.
    • I think you're falling into the pit of a certain trope with regards to the captains other than your favorite.
  • It only gets worse when one gets promoted out of captaincy! The Insane Admiral trope is so common in Starfleet that one would get the impression that it's actually part of the psych evaluation for the job! (Prerequisite 3, subsection 2: Must be able to make Betazoid counselor cower under furniture babbling about "darkness, terrible darkness..." simply by being in the same building or starship.).

    Somebody Get Worf a Chair! 
  • Why do the stations on the back of the bridge have no chairs? Poor Worf always had to stand. I mean everyone had chairs in the original series. The Enterprise-D was supposed to be a luxury ship that could accommodate people's children and yet they can't give everyone a seat?
    • Lack of chairs is nothing, lack of anything regarding a pop-up shield for the window ought to have been a hanging offense (which says nothing about the fact that the ship even 'has' windows, I mean it's not like the people have anything to look at).
    • Nothing to look at? What about the pretty nebulae and space phenomena they encounter on a weekly basis?
      • They're not glass windows, if that's what you mean. They're transparent aluminum alloy, one inch of which was equivalent to 6 inches of plexiglass. Pop-up shields would be a bit superfluous.
      • Not so much Applied Phlebotinum, some aluminum compounds are indeed transparent.
      • Actually, it's a "view screen", as in "a ginormous computer monitor". It's not a window, it recreates stuff that the sensor arrays (or probes, or relays, whatever) are scanning. Turn it off and all you'll get is black, or a recreation of a starfield.
      • On the bridge, that's true, but there are windows on the Enterprise. In an early season 1 episode Picard sends Geordi off to have a 'real' look at whatever phenomenon is outside, rather than just relying on the viewscreen.
    • Presumably he has to stand because his job requires him to be more mobile. As security officer he may have to move around or leave the bridge at any moment to deal with a security situation. On the other hand, Picard's whole job is to sit there and tell other people what to do. You don't need to stand up for that.
      • Which in turn raises the question of why the weapons officer should have anything to do with internal security anyway...
      • Presumably because they couldn't find anyone else to replace Yar.
      • It seems that technically the Security Chief and Tactical Officer are separate jobs, it just so happens that they usually are held by the same person.
      • Which is odd, when you think about it — the skill sets of the two are not identical, and either seems like a big enough job to occupy an officer's full attention.
      • It actually made more sense when Yar was on the show. She was in charge of tactical and security but she had Worf as her deputy. If she was busy doing tactical then Worf would take security, and vice versa. The problem only really arises when Yar left and Worf was promoted to chief of tactical and security with no deputy apparently assigned. The Doyleist explanation is, of course, that while as characters there should be enough work there wasn't enough work to justify a second regular actor. That was why Crosby left, after all, because she didn't feel there was enough for her to do. The writers just amalgamated both roles for convenience.
    • Even if it's assumed he'd be standing during an Alert, it's ridiculous that he didn't have a chair to occupy during routine bridge watches. Standing still for too long at a stretch will make a human light-headed — never a state you'd want your Tactical officer to be in — or even cause them to pass out, and Enterprise was built for a human crew, long before anyone knew a Klingon would occupy that spot.
  • He finally got one after 7 years, he sits down in Generations. Presumably the luxury of sitting at Tactical is reserved for Commanders...
  • Also, knowing Worf he would consider it an honor to stand while on duty, that's what warriors do, stand and fight.
    • Which doesn't explain the lack of a chair.
  • Actually, while it is true that the tactical station doesn't have a chair, all of the aft stations have fairly comfortable looking seats stored in alcoves underneath the control consoles, but for some reason, they were rarely used. Data can be seen sitting in one in this clip.
  • Especially ridiculous when one considers how much the ship shakes when it takes various kinds of hits, and the legendary exploding control consoles. The weapons officer is by far the person you most need to be at their position focusing on their job during a battle situation. You do not need them clinging desperately to the tasteful, handle-free, faux wood decor trying not to go hurtling across the bridge. Although, given that everything is viewed on display screens anyway, it has also never been clear as to why the bridge is not located deep inside the ship somewhere instead of being the topmost deck, nor why the weapons controls need to face the main viewer.
    • We have to remember two things. One is that taking hits and shaking is not the norm, even on the Enterprise (Starfleet's most exciting ship) but tasks involving free movement are. So there is the tradeoff of having to cling on tightly during Klingon attacks versus not having free movement on the bridge. The second thing, especially as relates to the bridge being on top of the ship and not inside, is that Starfleet ships are most pointedly not warships. In fact Starfleet seems to go out of its way to hammer home their ships are mobile diplomatic and science facilities that only occasionally are meant to go into combat when all else has failed. Everything is designed to remind its captains and crew that they are not on a warship, and to show to possible first contact races that they are not warlike but come in peace. In that respect shoving the bridge right up top with a nice open structure is right inline with those principles. It is open and honest, and definitely not designed for war.
      • The tactical officer need to be no more free than any other bridge officer, unless you're talking about Worf filling dual roles, which is stupidity in itself.
      • The addition of a handrail to the bridge arch would be a trivial modification, but clear nobody wants to drill into the pretty wood. As for Federation starship designs, they have been at war often enough over the last couple of centuries that it can be safely assumed that putting the bridge right on top does little to sway truly hostile enemies. Also, the oft-forgotten Battle Bridge is deep inside the Drive Section of the Enterprise, making it clear that somebody did think about this. While it is understandable that a "friendly" design might be adopted on multi-purpose ships like the Galaxy and Nebula classes, it is interesting that it is also retained on dedicated warships like the Prometheus class.
      • Actually the Battle Bridge is only deep within the ship while the two parts are connected, it being located on Deck 7 or 8, which form the very top of the separated drive section. So even the warship drive section has an exposed bridge. D'oh.
      • In Yesterday's Enterprise, the alternate timeline's Enterprise-D actually was designed to be a warship, and that ship's bridge was far more utilitarian than the one we're used to. It's actually rather cool to see what the Galaxy-class would have looked like if it were a purely military craft: crowded corridors, ubiquitous PA announcements, and a Ten-Forward that's less of a bar, and more of a place for the crew to gather and eat the 24th century Starfleet equivalent of B-rations.
      • Which raises the separate question (also applicable to "Mirror, Mirror")... why would the exteriors of the ship look exactly the same when the interiors are so different?
      • The mirror ISS Enterprise didn't look the same as our USS Enterprise on the outside as that episode reused shots of the pilot version of the Enterprise for the mirror version, so it had nacelle spires, vents on the nacelle aft ends (as opposed to the balls), a larger deflector and slightly different bridge structure.
      • Because the dramatic impact of the episodes would be less if the ship looked completely different. Plus they would have to pay for new models. Seriously though, it is a very good question. The Galaxy class was a poor design for warship as compared to an exploration and diplomatic vessel. The huge saucer section presented a large target from almost any direction except along the ship's midline. The Romulans went for size as an intimidation tactic with the D'deridex class, although if you look at the ship it is mostly empty space between sections and a lot of the structure looks unused by crew (no windows). When the Federation did actually got around to building true warships like the Defiant and Prometheus classes they instead compacted the form factor and reduced the amount size of the ships, as opposed to making them bigger.

     You can't touch me! 
  • The Treaty of Algeron — 60 years old at the time of TNG — forbids the Federation from using or researching cloaking technology. In "The Pegasus", we discover that the Federation secretly broke that treaty by developing a cloaking device of its own, and got a generous slap on the wrist for having done so.

    But this wasn't just a cloak. It was a phasing cloak. It not only made the ship invisible, it allowed it to pass right through solid matter.

    So: Why has the Federation avoided phasing technology every bit as much as they've avoided cloaking technology? There's nothing in the Treaty of Algeron that would prohibit the Federation from developing a device that made a ship intangible but still kept it visible.
    • How do you know that there is nothing in the Treaty of Algeron that forbids such technology? Can you point us to the text of the treaty?
      • There was the episode where Ro and La Forge were phased out of normal existence (by a Romulan device, no less) - they were completely invisible to the Enterprise crew. The cloaking aspect may have been part and parcel of the phasing technology as light has a difficult time reflecting off of things it can't interact with.
      • How, exactly, do you both bring something out of phase with normal space and completely visible? I think we can pretty safely assume that the treaty legislates against what the device does, rather than what the device is. The Romulans would have known that they were committing themselves to a three-way Cold War-style arms race between themselves, the Klingon Empire, and the Federation over cloaking vs. sensor technology; and that there was no way to predict future breakthroughs in either field. Banning specific devices would be very short-sighted. The language of the treaty would probably be something like, "The United Federation of Planets shall make no attempts to develop or field technology that would render military equipment undetectable to sensing devices or invisible to the naked eye. Any attempt by the UFP to do so shall be considered an act of war."
      • Why wouldn't it be possible to take a ship out of phase but remain visible? In The Next Phase although nobody can see Geordi & Ro, they can see everyone just fine (however nonsensical that is). So clearly the "Out of Phase" technology does not necessarily mean they're invisible.
      • Probably the reason why Geordi and Ro became invisible and intangible it’s because when out of phase photons of light can’t touch them either, so it makes sense that while they do can see the other people and the rest of the ship (they are not affected by the effect and photons touch them normally) Geordi and Ro are both invisible and intangible. The real question is why aren’t they audible, after all, the waves of sound they produce by their vocal cords should still be functional, and if not, then they won’t be able to hear one another. And, scratch that, the real question is why they don’t fly around in space if they’re out of phase why they can still remain in the ship at all. So, again, it is impossible to make a ship intangible and visible at the same time, because visibility depends on physics, or put in another way, depends on the object be physical and able to be touch by light particles.

     These are not the transhumans you're looking for; we can go about our business 
  • As far into the franchise timeline as DS9's fifth season, the Federation is sending people to prison for performing genetic augmentation just to increase intelligence. But Unnatural Selection has a Starfleet-sanctioned station (one would presume based on the use of Starfleet vessels for resupply runs) dedicated to producing children with enhanced intelligence, physical prowess, resistance to disease - oh, and they're all telepaths and telekinetics. Now, granted, at the time the Enterprise crew were knee-deep in figuring out the whole mysterious premature aging thing, but still - how is this ridiculously casual revelation from the Darwin station staff not greeted with utter horror by the crew? A few hundred years ago a relatively normal band of genetically-engineered humans sent Earth careening into world war, the aftereffects of which are still felt in the 24th-century Federation. Now we find a group of literal super humans, and everyone's just, "Oh. Neat. So, about that aging virus..."
    • Well first of all, Unnatural Selection was a 2nd season TNG episode, while the DS9 episode where Bashir's father goes to prison for genetic engineering aired almost ten years later. I think it's safe to call Unnatural Selection a case of Early-Installment Weirdness, at least on the subject of genetic engineering. Second, just because it's illegal for civilians to get genetic enhancements doesn't mean the Federation can't conduct legitimate scientific experiments with it. This is Truth in Television. In the real world plutonium is illegal to own but it's still used in government-sanctioned scientific experiments. Mind you, that's not to say that Unnatural Selection doesn't have some huge and glaring faults. For one, they completely failed to address the fact that they were performing these experiments on children.
      • It wasn't just Early-Installment Weirdness, it was basically a recycled, unused script for a TOS episode with the names swapped. Basically it was written back when people thought less about these things and there wasn't a thriving nerd subculture dedicated to picking apart Star Trek episodes looking to Accentuate the Negative. If it helps, think of season two this way: there was a Negative Space Wedgie that caused the Timey-Wimey Ball to curve in on itself, and substitute the NCC-1701-D for the NCC-1701 or the NCC-1701-A. Thus "Unnatural Selection" actually took place involving Kirk's Enterprise and with McCoy in place of Pulaski, back in the previous century, once the weird temporal effect was resolved. So the events of "Unnatural Selection" might have actually led to the Federation's disdain for genetic manipulation in the 24th century proper. I know, I know, it's just a Wild Mass Guessing but it's as good an in-universe explanation as any for why that season was so off.

     We're an enlightened government! Just don't ask for specifics. 
  • Exactly what kind of government does the Federation have in Star Trek? The highest ranking civilians we tend to see are diplomats. Alpha Wiki and the Other Wiki mention a democratic government but in any of the shows have we ever heard about elections, political parties, candidates, legislative bodies or anything else that might suggest representative government?
    • Rarely enough. We meet several UFP presidents, but whether or not there are parties is never revealed. Jaresh-Inyo was the UFP President on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and we are later told that he left office, but not whether it was through resignation or being voted out. He is referred to as "legitimate elected," so presumably there are elections. The often-mentioned Federation council is seen a few times (like in Star Trek IV) but its composition is never quite explained. Part of the confusion seems to be that the writers vacillate between the Federation being modeled on the UN and on a modern nation-state, especially the USA (the fact that Jaresh-Inyo can place Earth itself under martial law suggests that Earth's relationship to the Federation may be more analogous to Washington D.C.'s to the USA than the USA's to the UN, for example).
      • I believe one of the DS9 crew (either Wolfe or Moore) said that they envisioned the Federation as analogous to the US before the Civil War, but with the individual 'states' (i.e. worlds) having greater autonomy, all managing their own internal affairs and having their own sovereign governments, while the Federation government deals with matters that affect the Federation as a whole, or disputes between member worlds.
    • There is more than a little disturbing evidence to suggest that whatever the Federation nominally claims to be, it is in actuality a stratocracy. Starfleet Command and command rank officers seem to exercise disproportionate levels of power, often encompassing governmental, judicial and diplomatic functions.
      • In the cases of Data (an android) and Julian Bashir (an Augment), the issue of their civil rights (and whether or not they really had any) was in both cases decided by Starfleet Judge Advocate Generals, not civilian courts. At least in Data's case it was strongly implied that had the JAG ruled against him there would have been no avenue for appeal.
      • Starfleet captains routinely act as diplomats, and handle negotiations with foreign powers. This is interesting because it is shown repeatedly that the Federation does have formal ambassadors (e.g. Sarek, Lwaxana Troi). But they mostly seem to handle diplomatic relations between Federation planets or with species that require very specialized skills (such as Lwaxana working with the exclusively telepathic Cairn). The captains, on the other hand, not only handle foreign relations, but also seem to have final say over whether or not a planet is suitable for Federation membership. While some Starfleet ships, such as the Enterprise-D are huge and have enormous crew complements, there are no full-time civilian diplomats or government representatives aboard (even though they do allow children and spouses of officers!).
      • Starfleet often seems to make decisions independently of the Federation President and Council, consults with them after the fact, or finds loopholes to circumvent their instructions in the rare cases where the civilian government is shown to take a proactive stance.
      • Section 31 may seem like an illegal conspiracy, but their very name refers to the section of the Starfleet Charter that justifies their existence. Generations worth of senior Starfleet officers, including Jonathan Archer (who would eventually become the Federation President), knew about their existence and either tolerated them or outright aided them.
    • Really this is just Law of Conservation of Detail at work here, as well as "never mention politics", even Star Trek Federation politics.
    • It would make perfect sense for the Federation diplomatic corps to have a field office on the Enterprise, but that would mean they'd do most of the talking rather than Picard.
    • The admiral in "Rapture," when listing tasks to be completed after Bajor is admitted to the Federation, notes that "Bajoran militia has to be absorbed into Starfleet." There's a bit of space here to wonder whether this is strictly vital and the militia will be formally disbanded, but it may mean that Federation worlds are prohibited from having military services of their own. Draw your own conclusions.

     Secessions, Civil Wars and Rape Gangs 
  • Tasha Yar came from the human colony world of Turkana IV, which had apparently seceded from the Federation, devolved into civil war and eventually anarchy becoming a classic 80's post-apocalyptic dystopia where rape gangs roamed around and residents lived in fear and terror of the "Alliance" and the "Coalition", two former political parties that had now become basically giant, high-tech, street gangs. Now, it has been shown in several cases, most notably in "The Masterpiece Society", that the Federation and Starfleet do not consider the Prime Directive to apply to human colonies, even if they are not actually a part of the Federation, or even are old, lost colonies that do not even know the Federation exists. Yet over the course of decades Starfleet never opted to undertake a serious military intervention on the planet, even knowing first-hand from Tasha what conditions were like for the people living there? In "The Masterpiece Society", a mere 23 citizens out of thousands from the Genome Colony demand transport off their planet, against the wishes of their government and in full knowledge that their departure will cause a social and genetic disruption in the carefully-planned colony. Picard makes it clear that he has no right to refuse a human's request for such refuge. Was Tasha seriously the only person that was unhappy with life on Turkana IV and wanted to leave? Or was Starfleet so averse to the prospect of armed conflict with the gangs that they were willing to just abandon any citizens of the colony that did not have the good fortune to make direct contact with a starship crew?
    • Tasha's colony seceded, meaning it was a colony that voted to leave the Federation. And it was made clear throughout the series that the Federation does not go where they are not wanted, most clearly spelled out in the episode "First Contact" where Picard and Durken (the leader of that episode's world of the week) have this discussion on Federation membership:
    Durken: And if my wishes should conflict with yours?
    Picard: There'll be no conflict.
    Durken: And if I should tell you to leave and never return to my world?
    Picard: We will leave and never return.
    • Pretty cold, but yes that is the way it is. They voted to remove themselves from Federation law and jurisdiction and if they can get a message off saying "help I want to leave" then a starship will pick them up, if not then that is their problem not the Federation's. If they chose to stay after the Federation withdrawal then they chose a path that had a lot of pain in it, but it was their choice to make. Until the colony unites and votes to re-apply for Federation membership, it is really on its own.
    • The Malcorians from "First Contact" are not a valid comparison because they are not humans, not Federation members and technically not yet an interstellar civilization. Thus they are covered under the Prime Directive. Turkana IV, on the other hand, is a human colony planet, not an alien civilization. As shown in various episodes, for example "Up the Long Ladder" and "The Masterpiece Society", Starfleet is perfectly willing to behave unilaterally towards human colonies should they deem it appropriate. In "The Masterpiece Society", Picard also asserts that he is obligated to defend the rights of individual humans, even in defiance of their governments. This makes for something of a Broken Aesop, because inhabitants of a ruined world like Turkana IV may not have access to communications such that they can call for help. But in the previous case of the planet Mariposa in "Up the Long Ladder", the Enterprise did not wait to be contacted. Upon learning of the colony's existence they immediately went to investigate, learned of the clones' reproduction problem and imposed a solution on them. There was nothing obliging Picard to dump the Bringloidi on Mariposa. He could have transported them on to some other colony. Instead he shamelessly used them to resolve a secondary problem with a colony whose cultural paradigm he disapproved of. This seems more of a case of Starfleet just not wanting to get it's hands dirty, and that they will intervene in the affairs of human colonies so long as no significant degree of violent conflict is required.
      • That is not accurate. In "Up The Long Ladder" Picard laid out the benefits of uniting those colonies to the leaders of both of them. While he definitely actively promoted that solution, he didn't force them. When they had concerns, Picard addressed those concerns and explained how the positives would outweigh the negatives and then the leaders of both groups willingly gave their assent. If they had stuck to their guns then Picard would have had to haul the Irish colonists off somewhere else. Yes, Picard wanted rid of them as they were really annoying and, yes, he was really ticked off at the clones, but no he did not force either of them to accept any solution. In the case of contact, the Irish colonists were sending out an active distress call and with the problems they had, Picard checked up on the other colony to ensure they weren't suffering too.
      • Actually, it is accurate. He and the rest of the command staff hatched the plan to dump the Bringloidi onto the Mariposans entirely amongst themselves, almost cackling with amusement and fully acknowledging that, as Riker put it "It may have to be a shotgun wedding"! Also important to note: there are tens of billions of humans spread out across numerous worlds in the 24th Century. But nobody on the Enterprise even suggests sending out a general inquiry to the Federation at large of whether just a handful would be willing to be cloned. Picard simply asserts that Riker's distaste for the concept would be universal (the gods of Trek would get back at Riker for this later on) as if the opinion of the people in the conference room was equivalent to asking all of humanity (and they say the Borg have a collective mentality?)!
      • Also as SF Debris pointed out, Picard and co just laugh off the fact that the Mariposians are disgusted by the concept of normal physical sex in a you'll find out how fantastic it is after the fact kind of way. If enough of the Mariposian women actually decide that they don't enjoy sex after experiencing it with a drunken Irish farmer, then this colony will once again fall in on itself. What are they going to do if she refuses? Force her? Make her carry a baby that she doesn't want? For all of its problems it is situations like this that the Prime Directive was invented for. I've long held the theory that the end result of this scenario is that the Mariposians would probably end up locking the Bringloidi up after a while and cloning them regardless.
      • Except that, ironically, the Prime Directive does not apply to the descendants of humans from Earth (stated outright in "The Masterpiece Society"), even if they have been out of contact for centuries. Which is why the Enterprise crew felt free to meddle without any compromises here. Heck, Pulaski goes so far as to intimidate the Prime Minister of Mariposa by stating that if they don't accept the Bringloidi then the Federation will happily claim their planet, conveniently already developed complete with cities, in a few generations when they die off! The simple fact that they are humans removes the issue of "cultural contamination" and is treated as giving Starfleet the right to completely overhaul the Mariposan's societal paradigm rather than even consider any other option. Again, Picard asserts with confidence (and without asking) that nobody will volunteer to be cloned. Thus his personal disapproval of Mariposan culture gets free reign, especially since the Prime Directive is not an obstacle for a change. But yeah, how this experiment in social engineering turns out never is revealed.
    • I would surmise there was some big political issue in the 2350s that caused the Federation to not come to the aid of all its colonies. Turkana IV broke away from the Federation at roughly the same time as the Cardassian Wars, whose unsatisfying resolution ultimately led to the Maquis. The Klingons would have gone to war with the Federation had the Enterprise C not been destroyed fighting Romulans at Narendra III in 2344, so the tensions might have been high with both of those powers too. The Galaxy-class won't be built until the 2360s, so Starfleet was lacking the muscle it needed to respond to these threats. It could be that the Federation had so much on its plate that Turkana IV wasn't a high enough priority to merit a timely intervention. Basically, "As long as there isn't an interstellar war or alien invasion, sort it out yourselves." By the time the quadrant had stabilized somewhat the two factions on Turkana were too heavily entrenched for Starfleet to do anything about it without a lot of people getting killed.
  • I think some people forget what the Prime Directive really it’s about; it prevents interfering with the natural development of an alien race. That’s why it doesn’t apply to human colonies, the interference was already done when they left Earth, the Federation’s intervention it not illegal because they are human. People tend to think that the intervention is something like if Russia attacks Georgia then the US can’t intervene, when is more like if there is a tribe living in the Amazonian jungle that beheads people for infidelity they can’t intervene.

    With that in mind, then why to choose some colonies to intervene and some not, probably more an issue of resources, it’s not the same to take a few dozens of unhappy settlers in a mostly pacific world than to intervene in what it’s basically a war zone suffering probably many casualties in a very expensive process.
    • That's all very well and good, but "natural" is an undefined term and pretty much always aligns with the user's preconceptions. Besides, what "interference" is present in humans leaving Earth of their own volition?
    • And yet the Prime Directive still applies to the interstellar governments of various non-Federation members like the Klingons and Cardassians. There's no "colonies don't count as natural so we're allowed to interfere everwhere that's not Qo'noS or Cardassia Prime" rule. The only times we see the Federation interfering with the Klingon and Cardassian empires without their premission is when they're actively at war with the Federation, which presumably voids the Prime Directive restrctions. For that matter, Romulus is technically a lost Vulcan colony (and thus would fall under Federation jurisdiction by the same their that lost Earth colonies do) and yet their empire treated as a completely valid independent government.

     What is the normal, planned First Contact procedure? 
  • In the episode First Contact we see what happens when something goes wrong: Picard and Troi beam into a senior government member's office and ask her to introduce them to her leader. But there is an impression that normally they would do it differently once they had completed their investigation into her world's culture. Would they have beamed into Durken's office instead? Show themselves clearly to the entire planet by coming into orbit and publicly announcing their presence? Contact the government by subspace radio? Or is how they did it in the episode exactly how they would have done it a few weeks later, and they're just accelerating the process?
    • IIRC Picard does mention that they reach out to the leaders of the scientific community first, as they're more likely to react with an open mind. We've seen hints of the intense surveillance that the Federation conducts prior to first contact, so I'd imagine that they put a lot of effort into finding the best candidate to approach. I'd be curious to know if, under normal circumstances, they quietly extract their covert teams and equipment before they make contact to avoid the sort of hostile situation in this episode if the natives react poorly.
    • It depends on what series and what season. In TOS, it was simply a matter of Kirk grabbing Spock, a few red shirts and beaming straight down to the planet of the week to poke around with little concern about how the locals would react to aliens. In the early seasons of TNG, the same rule seemed to apply. For example, the Federation had apparently made contact with the planet Angel One, which had a roughly 20th Century level of technology, more than 60 years before the Enterprise-D showed up for another visit! Indeed, TNG started off on this note, the Bandi from "Encounter at Farpoint" were definitely not spacefaring and actually came across as rather primitive once you discount the alien they forced to turn into a starbase. Yet the Federation was more than willing to have a starbase on their planet. Later seasons of TNG would tighten up the rules of first contact quite a bit.
    • My guess is they would've hailed the first warp-capable Malcorian ship with a "Hi, welcome to interstellar space! Can we get you anything?" sort of message. A conversation between nerds in space, eager to learn about each other, before the complicated political realities set in. This would then reach the leadership through normal channels, and the contacting ship would give the local leadership the time they need to compose a dignified response.
    • Interestingly, in Star Trek: First Contact, all that humanity had to do was test a warp drive in near-Earth space in order to attract a Vulcan survey ship that had been passing through the solar system (the Vulcans later regretted this little slip-up). The Phoenix, with about as much cabin space as a sedan, was by no means equipped for a long-distance flight. Just a quick jaunt to prove that the warp drive actually worked. This is in stark contrast to the Malcorians' prototype starship, which Minister Yale explicitly stated was intended for an expedition to a nearby star system. It can be inferred that the Malcorians had already conducted test flights similar to that of the Phoenix, as this is probably what attracted the Federation's attention to their species. Humanity, as usual, was a special case in that they received first contact under what were apparently much looser protocols observed by the Vulcans at the time (or at least the Vulcan commander of that survey ship).
      • Well, do remember that at the time the Federation doesn't even exist yet, much less the Prime Directive.
      • Which only serves to invalidate the constantly repeated, almost religious, mantra that "interference always does more harm than good". Star Trek: First Contact flagrantly (and hypocritically) said the exact opposite. First contact with the Vulcans helped end decades of war and led to the creation of United Earth, and eventually the Federation itself. The film makes it clear that had first contact not happened, then everything positive in the 24th Century Federation, including the Federation itself, would never have come about.
      • One of the most dogmatic statements in Trek with the fewest on-screen examples to back it up. Pretty much the only clear cut example is the TOS episode where the alien planet devolved into a 1930s Chicago mob analog.

     Captain’s pets, senior officers, poker night and mourning 
  • Naturally, the casting will dictate some interactions and it was already like that in TOS. That’s why Scotty could resurrect contrary to other Nomad’s victims or Chekov could make almost all jobs in Journey to Babel. In my opinion, these kind of oddities are sometime bigger in TNG. The main characters are sometime on a parallel circuit, not only Wesley the underage helmsman. Being a senior officer means to be a main character.
    • Worf and Geordi are both initially Lieutenant junior grade serving to the bridge who are quickly appointed chief of departments that they weren’t even members of. Instead of giving Tasha’s job to one of her fellow tactical officer, Picard chooses Worf. The engineering section is full of working engineers, but a helmsman is their new boss.
    • It was initially planned the Enterprise-D would not need any engineering room. It probably explains why the chief engineers in season 1 are underused in comparison to Geordi.
    • In Insurrection and First Contact, Lieutenant Daniels seems to be the security chief of the Enterprise-E. Why is he not even present at senior officers meeting? Is Picard always waiting for a Worf’s comeback? Worf’s not filling in empty chair, contrary to Spock in the Motion Picture and Chekov in The Wrath of Khan.
    • The Enterprise-D is an exploration starship, but its science department is quite under involved. When Data was believed dead, he’s replaced by Worf, who seems to have the usual scientific background of a Starfleet officer but not the one to lead the science department. Data is the science officer. His position has simply been renamed for cosmetic reasons: the white make-up didn’t fit well with the blue uniform.
      • Worf replaces Data as head of Operations, not as Chief Science Officer. Operations is basically the coordination of all the departments and various ship's functions, and Worf would be qualified by dint of managing the security department. They were probably deciding on a new CSO behind the scenes but it never came up since it wasn't relevant to the episode.
    • Are the main characters all too shy to befriend their other crew mates except O’Brien and Ro? It’s not so frequent to see an “outsider” at their poker night.
    • Ensign Haskell is pronounced dead as quick as he appears on screen and is killed by Nagilum. If we replace him by Geordi, Troi or Riker, we can be sure that Pulaski will spend ten hours in the sickbay to reanimate the victim. Picard and the others are shocked because it was a gratuitous death, but not by the lost of a comrade who used to serve on the bridge.
    • The 18 victims are dead because none of them is a main character. Otherwise, Picard is for the next ten hours on his knee and imploring Q to bring them back.
  • There really needs to be a trope about this! I've seen this in a handful of other shows, (Lost and Once Upon A Time come to mind), where everything bad and dramatic happens to the main cast, and the main cast is upset about that, but when ten people are eaten by the Monster of the Week... crickets. Especially when the main cast is supposed to be a part of a much larger group.
    • Sort of a Redshirt mated with Nominal Importance, with a dash of Protagonist-Centered Morality and A Million Is a Statistic mixed in.
      • Probably also some of The Main Characters Do Everything - when the main characters are doing something, it matters. When the redshirts are at work, it's a delaying action at best, and, going back to no outsiders in their orbits is the fact that it's (production-wise) cheaper to have the main characters interact with one another (meaning paying the people who are paid whether they have a major role or not) over the random character who only appears as needed, even if they should be a character who the main cast member would interact with regularly (for example, Tasha should have had a second in command in security, an assistant chief, who took over when she died, but, since Worf was already in the main cast and didn't have a clearly defined role, he ended up with the job instead).

     Betazed, the Federation's own planetary Cougar Town, and other little-known civilizations 
  • Creating opportunities for characters (especially Data and Troi) to act as Mr. Exposition is obviously a major writer goal. But "Manhunt" raises a significant question. The "Phase" experienced by middle-aged Betazoid females (which quadruples their sex drive...or more) seems like something that would be even more widely known than Vulcan pon farr. Especially since it would make Betazed as big of a tourist destination as Risa! But the fact that Picard was unaware of this suggested Starfleet Academy does not provide much in the way of education about the sociological and biological quirks of Federation member worlds and species. Perhaps they are expected to learn about them the same way they do non-Federation alien cultures?
    • I dunno about Betazoids, but Vulcans are known to be intensely private about pon farr. They super don't want to talk about it even amongst themselves, let alone to outsiders.
    • Riker learned about the Phase because Deanna told him back when they were just dating. Betazoids in general seem to be a lot more candid than Vulcans, probably because their telepathy works across long distances so secrets can only be kept in their culture if everyone conspires to keep the secret.

     Betazoids and their powers 
  • Does anyone in the Federation or Starfleet have a problem with a species that can casually read minds and emotions? Does no one have any privacy concerns?
    • Considering how rare Betazoid Starfleet personnel appear to be, it may be that they do. It is an interesting point that Betazoids are potentially of tremendous use. For example, they can detect cloaked ships by homing in on the thoughts of those aboard. Yet, for some reason, Deanna is the only (half-)Betazoid serving on the Enterprise (D or E), and she is generally limited to being The Empath. Now, we know that on Trek The Main Characters Do Everything, and they did not want her (already weak) character Overshadowed by Awesome. Which she would most certainly be if there were any true telepaths aboard. Noticeably, they never show Deanna mind speaking to anyone on the crew who might be able to hear her, such as any of the Vulcans we have seen. One episode of Voyager established that they had a Betazoid crew member (besides the mind blind Lon Suder). But she was never mentioned before or after, and there were plenty of times when Janeway could have used a better telepath than Tuvok or Kes! Given how little real privacy there is on a starship (the Master Computer basically knows where you are, what you eat, what entertainments you enjoy and can even hypothetically eavesdrop on you via the ship's communication system), it says a lot about the fact that telepaths are such a rarity and that Starfleet does not appear to be actively recruiting Betazoids.
      • Voyager initially had two Betazoids on the crew; Stadi (killed in "Caretaker") and Jurot (the blue shirt seen in "Counterpoint") yet in "Dragon's Teeth", Janeway bemoaned the lack of a Betazoid! Same as that female Vulcan that appeared in one episode, who could have helped both Tuvok and Vorik through their Pon Farrs but didn't and who wasn't there in "Counterpoint" when all the telepaths were being hidden.
      • Betazoids in Starfleet do seems to be pretty common and well established; per "The First Duty," one was an Academy superintendent in Picard's time (some four decades past). That implies that Betazoids have been involved in Starfleet for more than a half century — plenty of time to cultivate applications for their powers.
      • And yet, nobody seems to have done so. Although Section 31 might be employing them for espionage and interrogation behind the scenes. Starfleet does not appear to have any formal protocols in place for the application of telepathy to missions. Individuals seem to decide whether or not their own powers are relevant to any given situation.
      • On the Enteprise-D specifically, there weren't any full Betazoids who could use their telepathy in such ways not just because they'd overshadow Deanna Troi, but in fact Troi had specifically been made half-Betazoid because the writers thought telepathy was too powerful an ability for the heroes to have constant access to it. Since other starships that aren't on-camera don't need every adventure to fill 44 minutes of air time, there's no problem if they've got a full Betazoid onboard who can figure out the bad guy of the week's plans from the very start.

    A captain's first duty is to his ship 
  • The episode "Thine Own Self" has Troi taking an engineering test to get her qualified as captain, except it turns out it's not engineering and just to see whether she could order someone to their death to save the ship. Good message and all, but why not just use the escape pods and abandon ship?
    • Geordi actually tells us exactly why that's not an option:
    La Forge: We've just lost contact with everything above deck twenty-one, including the Bridge.
    (Moments later)
    La Forge: Commander, the neodyne relay isn't holding. Ten seconds to containment failure!

    So part of the problem is that there's a chance that at least 20 decks—that's the entire saucer section, where the majority of the crew, including the civilians and children are housed—might not even hear the order to abandon ship. Then there's time frame; I don't know how long it takes to evacuate a Galaxy-class starship, but with 1,014 people aboard the Enterprise, it's safe to say that 10 seconds will not be nearly enough time.

     What was plan "B"? 
  • In "Sarek", the Legarans' insistence on meeting with a specific ambassador (Sarek, as per the title) at a specific time nearly leads to a diplomatic failure when Sarek comes down with Vulcan Alzheimer's, jeopardizing his ability to perform the negotiations. What if something worse had happened? What if Sarek had died before the conference? What if the Enterprise had been attacked by Romulans and been destroyed, severely damaged, or just delayed for a day or two? Would the Legarans have thrown away diplomatic relations with The Federation simply because one bit of bad fortune messed up their hyper-exacting demands?
    • Maybe? Not exactly relevant, though, is it?
    • Sarek stresses that the Legarans will deal only with him. If we take him at his word, this might be an unusual situation where the one man really is the lynchpin and all the effort goes down the tubes if anything happens to him.
    • The Legarans attitude seems to fall into the ""Ass" in Ambassador" trope, being the kind who demand everything and offer nothing, while still expecting the other party to believe that this is all fair and equitable. So... There probably WAS no Plan B. Given their special needs, the ooze pool in specific, they probably don't particularly need anything from the more humanoid-form oriented Federation, and can afford to remain in isolation while the next Ambassador spend a good century building a rapport with them. Basically, the negotiations are happening on their whims, and the Federation, being the society that basically wants everyone in the galaxy to join (as Eddington points out in DS9, there's practically a seat reserved for the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians on the Federation Council, just WAITING for them to take it), would stand there and accept it.

     Sparse medical staffing 
  • In TOS it was Dr McCoy, Nurse Chapel and a few random extras as needed for sickbay. TNG has Dr Crusher and another few nurses for a ship of 1000. DS9, again, 1 Starfleet doctor, a few Bajoran medical staff. Voyager left space dock with what was said to be 1 doctor and 1 nurse, who were both killed early, replaced by the EMH an either Kes or Tom Paris. When Picard needs his artificial heart replaced, the medical starbase he went to needed Dr Pulaski rushed there to assist as their own staff proved to be underqualified, since they apparently had 3 doctors on call. Why so few staff(besides the real world answer of "casting")? Real hospitals do not operate on such low staffing for even the 50-100 beds they may have and aside from being woefully understaffed for daily needs, any emergency is going to be a huge problem. Is Starfleet Medical really in such bad shape they can't assign the needed medical staff to starships or bases? And even when the EMH program rolled out, ONE per ship? They had the means to staff starships with more than enough active holograms yet only ever seemed to have one, then people cried about "bedside manner" and the program barely went anywhere.

Other Civilizations

The Borg Collective

    The Borg Hate M.C. Escher 
  • They were going to wipe out the Borg with an impossible shape?
    • With a Reality-Breaking Paradox. The shape was necessary because the Borg would normally recognize such a mathematical error and cut it off. The image was specifically designed to trick their eyepiece processors into trying to analyze it without ever catching the paradox, which would cause it to keep getting booted up to higher and higher levels of the collective and eventually crash the whole network. It wouldn't have worked, though - Hugh's individuality had a similar effect (as Picard speculated it would), but it only hit the cube that picked him up.
    • We saw two other species try similar plans on Voyager. Each managed to take out one cube, but it got no further than that because the Collective realized something was screwed up on those ships and cut them off from the Collective.
      • Which also presumably happened when Hugh's individuality affected the group he was returned to.
  • The Borg have assimilated thousands of worlds and taken their knowledge and technology. None of them had discovered optical illusions yet when assimilated?
  • How come they believed this would work when it seemed to have no effect on Data, who helped come up with the picture in the first place? Data doesn't even have any biological components like a human brain that may help the Borg cope with the paradoxical image, yet he is unaffected. You think that Starfleet would realize that if something doesn't Logic Bomb an android, it probably won't Logic Bomb a race of cyborgs.
    • I believe the explanation given was that they would upload the image directly into Hugh's optic implant, making the Borg believe that he'd actually seen the impossible object in reality, which would cause the desired Logic Bomb.
    • Data knows that it's a trap, so he can either not waste time analyzing it (he knows it doesn't exist, therefore it holds no lasting interest for honest analysis), or if it has some kind of infectious property, sandbox his visual centers in advance and delete the memory or something. The Borg don't know this.
  • Related question: Why was this shape never brought up as a potential method of attack in later encounters with the Borg? It wouldn't have to even solve anything, just spend 30 seconds of screen time to bring it up, send it with no effect and then have Data or other science person theorize the Borg may have since assimilated technology which led them to alter their visual processors and render the shape ineffective.
    • Because it wouldn't have worked? Firstly, as a semi-AI race the Borg probably have to have a much better understanding of computer security than Starfleet (who are pretty consistently shown to be absolutely, stunningly incompetent in this respect), and would never have let it out of the initial safe testing environment: if it kills the first drone, you tweak the second one and keep sending them in because you have more, not let it infect the entire network. Secondly, Hugh and the individuality experiment demonstrate that the Borg do indeed cut off dangerous networks rather than let them spread, although still not as promptly as they really should (maybe whole ships are just that cheap?).
      • Considering the Borg Queen blew up whole vessels in "Unimatrix Zero" because she couldn't hear one or two of the Borg who were on board (at least one cube of 64000 drones and a sphere of 11000, and that was just what we saw on screen), purely to threaten Janeway... Yeah. It seems whole ships ARE that cheap to the Borg.

    And should we call them "the Lorg?"... 
  • What do you suppose became of the Borg under Lore's leadership after they were liberated? Is the Federation under moral obligation to protect them, having liberated them twice over at this point? At the end of "Descent, Part II," the Enterprise seems to leave them to their own devices, despite having created them, however unintentionally. Would the Collective make it a priority to re-assimilate them (they live in close proximity to a transwarp corridor, so one assumes they could do so easily) or would it not bother to expend resources in such a way? Are the "Lorg" actually capable of reproduction — what are their long-term prospects for survival (especially since they don't have access to space travel any longer, now that their ship has been destroyed)? Their planet is 65 light years away (more or less) from Federation research station on Ohniaka III, so it's not massively remote.
    • There's no indication the Borg ever care about disconnected/"faulty" drones. They were cut off from the network in the first place because the Borg feared the individuality would spread, they're not going to risk reassimilating them and having the same thing happened. Also the most logical conclusion is that the colony probably asked to be left alone... they were still trying to figure out who they were outside of the Collective and Lore, they probably didn't want Starfleet futzing with them. And Starfleet tends to leave colonies (since that's effectively what it was) alone if they directly ask to be left alone... well, usually.
    • Star Trek: Picard reveals that Hugh has shed most of his implants and become a Federation citizen. It's possible that other members of the group did the same, or something similar.

The Ferengi Alliance

    Wacky Ferengi Misogyny 
  • What reason would the Ferengi culture have to oppress females? A society of rampant capitalists, and they're wasting time (and losing MONEY) by effectively cutting their customer base in half? Ferengi women with equal rights would be free to make money, and more importantly spend money.
    • The women can spend money. Just not on fashion. And they can't make any.
    • Its probably the opression only applies to the upper/middle class females. Remember most of Ferengi society live in horrific poverty, and the Ferengi like it that way. The dirt poor women probably wear clothes and slave right alongside the dirt poor men. "We don't want to end the exploitation, we want to become the exploiters!"
    • removes competitors
      • But it also removes potential investors and buyers. The average wage slave Ferengi could be worried about competition, but the rich ones should be pushing for equality since it'll let them target more people and make more money. To be fair, this ended up happening in Deep Space Nine with Nilva, but even he had to have the simple logic spelled out by Quark.
      • Remember, though, that the Ferengi aren't the only participants in the economy. If you divide everyone into sharks and suckers, the Ferengi obviously expect themselves to be the sharks and everyone else to be the suckers. From that perspective, removing the women from the equation makes sense, as it's cutting the number of competing sharks in half. Anyway, since when does bigotry have to make sense? Back in the early 20th century, many white business owners would have sooner spit in the face of a black customer than make money from them.
    • I suppose the most honest answer is that the Ferengi are straw men. A clever and observant critique of capitalism does not play out through them — just crass obviousness. One might as well ask why they prohibit unions. Unions can be as profitable and as manipulative and exploitative as corporations. However, as far as the sexism goes, one might rationalize that the Ferengi aren't as good capitalists as they think they are. Perhaps the oppression of women pre-existed the rise of mercantile behavior in Ferengi society, and values never quite "caught up."
      • This is the most likely explanation. The Ferengi love making money above all else but that doesn't mean they don't have other cultural baggage aside from it. Their culture is shown essentially "catching up" in DS9 anyway... when the Grand Nagus falls in love with Quark's mother because of her business acumen and personality, he begins pretty quickly repealing all sorts of the laws that restrict females from participation in Ferengi society. He even appoints Rom his successor instead of Quark, because he wants Rom's kind and caring approach (while still caring about profit) to shape the next generation of Ferengi.
    • Ferengi males are in charge of the rules, and benefit from them (they can get more for less from slaves than from customers), so barring the females revolting, they're not going to change them. Also, while the details are vague, Quark (Deep Space Nine) rants more than once about how primitive Ferengi society was better than primitive human society. Perhaps some of the Rules of Acquisition helped relieve some of the "pressure" that caused wars back on Earth, so when Ferengi compares histories, they come to the conclusion that the rules have been good for them so far, ignoring that they may not be good at this point of time, and some of them weren't any good to begin with.
    • We have many examples in Real Life of cultures that were extremely capitalistic and also sexist, like post Industrial Revolution era Britain and the US where women could not vote or own property. Maybe not to the cartoony extremes of the Ferengi, but machismo with capitalism had coexisted. You can also ask the same about; how come all those rich Gulf monarchies that love money so much still require women to cover up and do not drive a car. There's a reason why Feminism is generally seen as left-wing.

The Klingon Empire

    Klingon/Romulan "Empire", Yeah Right! 
  • Empires: Isn't it weird how the Romulan and Klingon empires seem to consist exclusively of Romulans and Klingons? I mean all we ever see of these "Empires" are their own ships crewed by their members of their own race. We never see planets under their control or members of other races in their ranks, even as slaves. You would think that an empire that has been so long established would have integrated its subjects somewhat better by now. And considering how long these respective empires are supposed to have been in power, you would also assume that some other races would be willing members, and thus allowed to serve with them. Or at the very least we could have seen the Federation encounter non - Klingon or Romulan ships crewed by people who were no less members of one of the empires. Vulcans are in the Federation and they have their own ships. Which brings me to another point: Are the federation style ships specifically earth ships? If the Vulcans have their own style of ship design and their own fleet, one would assume that other Federation members do as well. This would explain why all the Federation ships we see seem to be exclusively crewed by humans. With Federation headquarters and Starfleet Academy located on earth, and the ships crewed by humans, one would assume that the only reason other races are ever seen is some kind of affirmative action program. Maybe all the other races don't really give a damn about the Federation, and just humor the silly humans, while we keep telling ourselves we're the greatest.
    • There are two points here. Firstly, the Klingon and Romulan Empires (and the Cardassian Union, for that matter) don't actually consist of several races under one banner. They are made up of dozens of planets they have colonized. In some cases there may have been intelligent sentients already there, but none of those three groups sound like the kind of people who'd be interested in peaceful cooperation. There are some references to conquered peoples in the Expanded Universe, but that's about it. Also, all the ships we see in the series are military vessels - even if there are subject peoples, it's entirely possible they are not permitted to join the military. As for the second point, it seems that, overwhelmingly, humans are the main volunteers for Starfleet. After all, there is no conscription or social obligation to serve, and it is probable that many or even most member civilizations contribute in some other way than by volunteering their teenagers for the military. There's also mention in at least one episode of an all-Vulcan crew. Perhaps most ships have a predominance of one species, and we only see the human ones.
      • This actually makes sense as an official policy. Preferences for all the environmental factors a ship would have to simulate - gravity, atmosphere ratios, temperature, humidity, brightness, etc. - would vary widely from species to species. So they have human-friendly ships, or vulcan-friendly ships, and the "token" minorities seen in the predominantly human ships are those who have chosen to cross over.
    • Worf mentions that if the Klingon Empire has truly returned to their old ways that they will land troops on Cardassia and neutralize the ruling government. Given that info it seems that the Klingons HAVE invaded other worlds, but at best the populations are slave workers or even complete nonentities in the Klingon government/military/culture and their world is squeezed for natural resources. Remans apparently featured in some measure during the Dominion War according to Shinzon's backstory possibly in some way similar to all-Vulcan crews in Starfleet, so it's entirely possible subjugate races DO exist even in the military, they just are never integrated with the ruling species. Given TOS had the Federation flagship with just 1/2 an alien on the entire crew, the other species might be behind the times, but not entirely without precedence (and for being authoritarian dictatorships being a mere 100 years behind the utopian Fed ain't entirely terrible).
      • Maybe I was naïve, but I interpreted Worf’s words as if the Klingon Empire has invaded and conquered other peoples, but they eventually freed their worlds, even when keeping the word “Empire”, something like the British Empire when it started to release all its colonies. Probably maintaining a certain political influence, like the British Commonwealth, but that’s a WMG. In any case, both TOS and ENT do show the Klingons as conquerors and having some subject races or intending to conquering someone (Kirk implied that to the Organians before he knew they were god-like aliens).
    • The aforementioned ship would be theUSS Intrepid, and it's the same class as the original Enterprise.
    • DS9 establishes a 24th century Starfleet Vessel with an all-Vulcan crew, the USS T'Kumbra, and the Starship Hera's crew consisted of mostly Vulcans, despite having a human captain.
    • We don't know if the non-Starfleet Vulcan ship(s) are actually ships operating under the banner of the government of Vulcan, or ships that happened to be owned and operated by private or corporate interests on Vulcan. We do see a few human ships that are privately owned—freighters, transports, the like—so it's not impossible that the Vulcan Science Academy or what have you simply send out their own ships sometimes to study things that the Federation hasn't gotten around to yet.
    • Classic Klingons were civilized, swarthy Humanoids. Movie and Net Gen Klingons are Rubber-Forehead Aliens savages. Science and Technology are not part of modern Klingon culture. The civilized, swarthy Klingons built all the space-ships and then the Rubber-heads genocided them. tlc
      • The movie Klingons weren't savages, except maybe the younger one in ST V. But everyone in that movie acted like a dick. The problem with that theory (and yes, I know you mean it in jest) is that we saw three swarthy Klingons TURN INTO rubber-headed Klingons. And, while TOS Klingons tend to be fondly remembered as more civilized than their successors, we often saw them fighting very, very dirty, in "Errand of Mercy," "A Private Little War," "The Trouble with Tribbles," and "The Savage Curtain." The rubber-heads usually don't resort to tricks like poison, proxy wars, and ventriloquism, and when they do they tend to be uneasy with behaviors which the TOS Klingons took in stride.
      • Its probably just a case of different centuries = different outlooks. The ST:ENT era Klingons came off like selfish thugs, honestly. The TOS-era Klingons were living under a fascist military dictatorship. After the Khitomer accords, Klingon culture probably turned to a romanticized idea of their ancient warrior traditions, probably as a way to deal with the fact that they made peace with the Federation rather than conquered them. You can't expect a civilization to stay static. (these aren't the Kree, after all)
      • TOS Klingons, MORE civilized? According to The Other Wiki, Klingons were conceived as brutish, scheming, and murderous, without any redeeming characteristics, and it wasn't until the first movie that the Klingons are 'evolved' *cough*retconned*cough* into the rubber forehead aliens with a defined language, writing and culture.
      • Fridge Brilliance: The TOS Klingons weren't necessarily more "civilized" (for a certain value of "civilized"), but they were definitely less restrained by honor than their successors. Because they'd been stripped of their proper head-ridges by that engineered virus from Enterprise, they might've believed their honor already sullied beyond redemption by their deformities, so they might as well use every dirty trick in the book. The TOS movies' Klingons hadn't been affected by the virus, and acted more honorably than the ones on the show; by TNG, the virus has been cured, so the former smooth-heads are able to rejoin society and regain honor, thereafter looking and acting like the rubber-foreheads.
      • Between the Klingons first appearances in TOS and their appearances in TNG, they'd had their original home world devastated in ST VI and a massive, humiliating defeat at the hands of the Romulans at Khitomer, leading to their decline as an empire and their forging an alliance with the Federation, which probably ended their territorial expansion. This lead to a period of stagnation in the Empire, leading the people to look backward and make a big deal about their past glories — so scheming, conniving, bullying modern Klingons now pretend to be just like their ancient warrior ancestors, like a bunch of right wing nationalists in, say, Sweden, might latch on to the identity of the Vikings. I mean, aside from Worf and Martok, no Klingons on any series actually practiced what they preached.
      • What about K'Ehleyr, Kurn, Kor, Koloth, Kang? They all seem very practicing Klingons to me. I sometimes wonder were the idea of "Other than Worf, Klingons do not act as Klingons" come from.
      • K'Ehleyr (Half-Klingon) is the LEAST practicing Klingon in any series. She is EXPLICITELY disdainful of "Klingon nonsense". Kor, Koloth, and Kang behaved in TOS behaved like TOS Klingons, but by DS9 were all respected,legendary heros. Expectation and maturity likely influenced their behavior a great deal. Kurn is an odd example. In many ways he conflicts with Worf's pure ideology, but taken on his own behaves much more like an ideal Klingon than most others.
    • Deep Space Nine sorts this out a little with the conflict between Kor and Martok. Kor, and the other TOS Klingons represented an era when aristocratic blood was paramount to prestige within the Empire. Martok and presumably other TNG/Deep Space Nine era Klingons represented a time when more common-born warriors had ascended to positions of power within the Empire (Martok was a common soldier who rose from the ranks and gained his own house after being rejected as an officer candidate by Kor). The difference between the TOS Klingons and the TNG/Deep Space Nine ones is likely a difference of class within Klingon culture.
    • THANK you! Huge problem, yes. The Federation has 150 members or something like that and a bunch of prewarp civilizations living within its territory. The Alpha Quadrant seems more or less evenly divided among the Federation, Romulans, Cardassians, and Klingons. (For simplicity's sake let's forget the Ferengi and Breen and one-off species like the Tzenkethi and Son'a for now.) The other three are not ENTIRELY one-species: The Klingons had a few races they'd enslaved in TOS and ENT, but only a handful. The Romulans had the Remans, and the Cardassians had the Bajorans for a while. Still, they've got nothing to resemble the diversity of the Federation. Here are some explanations, but every one is hugely problematic:
      • All four powers have the same number of M-Class planets in their territory, more or less, but for some stupid reasons, the ancient humanoids—who knew nothing of how the Quadrant would be divided politically billions of years later—seeded eventual Federation space much more heavily. There would be no reason for them to do so, though.
      • That's assuming each species territory is the same size and contains the same number of Class-M worlds. There is no evidence that either supposition is correct.
      • They all have the same number of M-Class planets and they all had roughly the same number of planets seeded, but for some reason planets in the Federation proved to be much more hospitable to evolving humanoid life than the others. That's going to require a damned big [[handwave]].
      • All these speculations are base on the idea that the Federation’s space is both uniform to the other four and that the Federation apparently has always existed. The original Federation had FOUR members; Earth, Vulcan, Andoria and Tellar, they have 150 members centuries later and it’s unlikely that all the members are located around the same area.
      • Klingon, Romulan, and Cardassian space all used to be as diverse as Federation space, but the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians all went on a rampaging genocide and eradicated life on every world they wanted to colonize. But, while all three species did their turns as bad guys, they all wound up as good guys. So our good guys are more evil than the Borg, much more evil than the Dominion, and much, much more evil than the Mirror Universe Terrans? Great. . . .
      • Your sense of scale is absolutely ludicrously off, there, as to the Borg at the very least. Besides a truly epic simplification of the concept of "good guys" and "bad guys".
    • If you want to blame an entire species for what their ancestors did in the past, sure.
      • Perhaps the T Kon, Iconians, or Hur'q races razed Romulan and Klingon space well before. Maybe the reason Federation space has so many populated planets is because that's where the Preservers deposited the beings they tried to save.
      • The Federation has many more M-Class planets than the other three, either because its territory is much more vast or because habitable systems are much more tightly clustered. Either way, that gives the Feds exponentially more resources to draw on than any of their neighbors. They'd be a Quadrant-striding superpower. The problem is that they deal with the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians as equals—and I don't mean they're benevolent in time of peace, I mean that when each of those powers wants to fight the Federation they come off every bit as strong as the Federation itself. If this is the solution, the Federation is every bit as great a power in the Alpha Quadrant as the Dominion is in the Gamma Quadrant, meaning that the fraction of the Jem'Hadar fleet the Founders sent to Cardassia before the wormhole got cut off would get swatted aside like a fly by Starfleet. Instead, even with the Klingons' help, the Federation was barely keeping its head above water, and when they learned that Damar had figured out how to bring the main Jem'Hadar fleet through, they were puckering their assholes in terror.
      • First, from where do you take the idea that the Federation is at the same level than the Klingon Empire? We have seen in at least two occasions that the Klingon Empire can kick the Federation’s ass, one in the parallel universe when the Khitomer Accords never happened and Tasha Yar didn’t died, Picard says explicitly that the Federation is losing the war, and then in Deep Space Nine when the Federation and the Klingon are in war, when it’s clear that the Federation is in a precarious situation. If the Klingon didn’t suffer from the destruction of their moon and some other political and economical changes, they wouldn’t made peace with the Federation. Regarding the Romulans and the Cardassians, yes the Federation seems to be more powerful, especially with the Klingon’s aid (let’s not forget that the Klingon were also enemies of both Romulans and Cardassians making even easier the alliance with the Feds).

        Besides that, we should remember that even when the Federation is the combination of more than a hundred worlds, most of this worlds are very peaceful and not really a military treat to anyone if they won’t be members. Probably the four founding members; Humans, Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites, could be powers in their own right, but what about the Betazoids or the Bolians or the Benzites? Clearly most of the Federation member’s are something like the “third world” of the Galaxy joining the Federation for protection, especially from the big bad powers around, a little bit like the Non-Aligned Countries Movement.
      • Just during the voyages of the starship(s) Enterprise, the Federation alone has stumbled across numerous planets populated by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens so powerful that even though their worlds nominally lay within portions of the star charts that are labelled as "The United Federation of Planets" there is no way in hell that the Federation can tell them what to do. Just the opposite, both the Federation and the Klingon Empire got told to stop fighting and go to their rooms by the Organians just as one example. Is there any reason to assume that the Klingon and Romulan Empires, or the Cardassian Union for that matter, do not likewise have huge chunks of "their" space occupied by excessively powerful species that really do not care what names are put on the star charts of the lesser species so long as said species remember to keep their noses out of the affairs of the higher beings?
      • The Cardassians specifically appear to not be quite equals to the Federation. They frequently lose engagements to Fed ships (Maquis ships in TNG, the Phoenix taking out a Cardassian warship pretty handily, the Defiant under Thomas Riker). Given Starfleet had fought at least two other major engagements with hostiles (Tzenkethi, and...) and the general drive for peace in the TNG era, relative parity with the Cardassians seems more of divided disinterest more than actual military/political parity.
      • Now I can easily believe that the people who ran the Federation in the first few TNG seasons were such shrinking violets that they could be bested by rivals a fraction of their size, but after the first Borg invasion, the Romulans meddling in the Klingon Civil War, the barely-averted war with Cardassia, the border war with the Klingons, the second Borg invasion, and the Cardassians getting in bed with the Founders, the Federation began throwing around its weight a bit more each time. By the time the war with the Dominion got hot, they were clearly going balls to the wall, yet they were still facing challenges that would only come up if they were just one power among many in their quadrant, no stronger or weaker than the others.
      • This ignores the fifth option of just forcing the subject races to stay on their own planets.
      • Earth, Vulcan, Betazed and K'tari are specifically stated to be Fed members. We assume the other races are Fed members. Suppose Cardassi genocided the Booleans? All the Booleans we see are Fed citizens. Suppose the Booleans we see are refugees who escaped to Fed planets and took citizenship? Suppose Boolean home World is a poisoned desert that Fed ceded to Cardassi? If there be canon that Boolea is a member state of the Fed then apply this system to some other alien species.
      • Maybe. That could be somewhat consistent with what we saw of the Cardassians on Bajor, and of the Remans, whom the Federation had never encountered before Nemesis. But, while that's not as bad as genocide, it's still pretty nasty coming from aliens who are often portrayed in a positive light. Does good old Martok seem like the sort who would keep zillions of people locked up in astronomical ghettoes?
      • Also, how is it that the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians are so much stronger than all their neighbors that they're able to dominate them utterly while still being international great powers? In the pre-Federation days as portrayed on Enterprise, the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites might have hated one another enough so that each would have happily conquered and subjugated the others, but none of them were able to because the others were strong enough to keep them from doing so. So either our corner of the Alpha Quadrant produced many species intelligent enough to become Class II civilizations able to expand to other solar systems, but the other neighborhoods only produced one apiece, which is hardly any more likely than Options 1 and 2. Or else the species on these other planets are intelligent enough to develop advanced societies, but their home worlds are too resource-poor to allow them to do so. If that's the case, the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians are ruling some very economically unimpressive empires. It might not even be worth attempting imperial adventures in these resource-poor planets at all. It would be somewhat comparable to China 110 years ago, when all sorts of imperial powers were biting off spheres of influence, but no one bothered with the resource-poor provinces in the interior like Shaanxi.
      • It's clear from ST:Enterprise that the Vulcans COULD have in fact taken over their region of space, they were just not motivated to do so. Humanity to that point could not have resisted a militant Vulcan, the Tellarites were somewhat more capable but freely admitted that Andorians (currently engaged in hostilities) outclassed them in direct combat, and the Central Command Vulcans were perfectly confident in their belief that they could eliminate the Andorians as a threat. The entirety of the Fed is basically based on the fact the dominant species of the region (the Vulcans) were not expansionistic, which seems to be very rare. In fact, between that and their impression on a war ravaged Earth, that might be the central difference explaining the existence of the Fed Utopia and many other sci-fi operas.
      • The Humans were the more powerful force in Federation territory. Remember, once the Federation gets started, only the Vulcans are shown as being a serious power of those three, and most Federation ships have an all-Human crew. The flagship of the Federation had no non-humans onboard except for Spock, who was a half-human, half-Vulcan who disavowed his Vulcan heritage.
      • The TNG episode 'The Empath' dealt with a who was subject to the Klingon Empire's rule.
      • Option two above isn't as far-fetched as it may seem. All manner of astronomical phenomena can impact the habitability of regions of planets (park yourself within thirty light-years of a supernova and see what happens; if the Earth were, that would mean that at the very least the ozone layer would be toast, and that doesn't bode well for life), and then there's the fact that clustering (here, clustering of worlds that happened to favor/disfavor the existence of life) does not preclude randomness.
    • 'Nother option: the Federation is dozens of times larger than any of the other powers in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants. The Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians aren't actually that much larger than the Ferengi and other one-shot races, but because they have strong military cultures they're vastly overpowered for their size; in contrast, because the Federation has a pacifist culture, Starfleet is vastly underpowered for its size. The Federation government is also clearly much looser than the Empires - even the full member worlds aren't really very homogenized, and colonies can go for years without official government contact judging by early TNG - so it probably doesn't have nearly as high a per-capita budget compared to the tightly-managed states around it. A lot of its military power might even be locked down as individual worlds' planetary defense forces (we know that Vulcan still has an independent one, for instance).
    • Perhaps there are numerous species who used to live in Klingon, Cardassian, and/or Romulan territory but escaped to what is now Federation territory instead of letting themselves be conquered.
    • The Federation's treaty to not develop cloaking devices (or install Klingon cloaking devices) in their ships is a massive, massive strategic weakness on their part. They only have two methods of detecting cloaked ships, one involving being within torpedo range (and already knowing the cloaked ship is nearby), and another requiring the cloak ship to pass through "tripwires" that their sensors could easily detect. Frankly, if there were a war, the Romulans could do a ton of damage with basically no risk. Of course, this doesn't explain why the Cardassians were considered such a threat, since they do not have cloaking technology.
      • A Romulan Captain, a person in the know, seemed pretty confident that entering Federation space undetected was IMPOSSIBLE. While hit and runs along the border or the rare super spy efforts might breach borders, it seems any large scale invasion depending on cloak is apparently impossible and those few methods are actually very effective.
  • There is one other possibility that you're all side-stepping. Starfleet's General Order One, better known as the Prime Directive. The Federation is huge in size, but there are all these little worlds that they allow to develop, peacefully, with duck blinds and so on, and they even set aside planets for those people to colonize and mine. The Klingons don't have that rule. Remember that whole bit about a boy being a man when he can wield a knife? It's the same thing to them. They don't believe in the need for a fight to be what the Federation would call fair - remember Organia (Errand of Mercy), Friday's Child, or A Private Little War? Klingons overwhelm primitive societies, use the planets, and colonize. By contrast, the Federation is made up of a group of relatively equal planets, defended fiercely by a fleet of starships from outside aggressors. That's the reason the Federation is on equal footing, despite politically being huge. They claim space that they then blockade and put under Prime Directive controls. The Klingons and the Romulans would never waste time like that. Neither would the Cardies.
  • Guys, you're missing another option. It's not like these groups are the ONLY powers in the galaxy. They're just AS powerful as the Federation. It's just that the Federation is the ONLY power that advocates peaceful cooperation.
    • They're probably not the only power, but certainly the biggest. The Ferengi aren't conquerors, for example; commerce is definitely a form of cooperation.
  • From Friday's Child: "Their (Klingons) empire is made up of conquered worlds." We just never see the others.
  • Maybe a far-fetched comparison but, let’s say that the Federation is like the European Union and the Klingons like Russia and I guess the Romulans can be China. Why? Well the Federation seems to be a parliamentary system (the president is elected by the Council that is like a parliament) and their policy is very similar to the EU; members retaining a lot of internal autonomy but with a somewhat central government that establish certain regulations, as for example no member of the EU can have death penalty, as similar no member of the Federation can have a caste system (according to Sisko), and so on, they also are more based on democracy, human rights and peaceful cooperation (yes the EU sometimes is hypocritical about it, but also is the Federation). So, even when the EU has some very powerful members that are powers on their own, like Germany and France (the Federation’s equivalents to Earth and Vulcan), but the question is; if the EU and Russia go to war, can the EU really stands a chance? Or what about a war with China? They’ll be even at best. So kind of the problem is to think that the Federation is the United States, it is not, it is more like the European Union of the Galaxy. So we can see how in real life one single country like the USA, Russia and China can defeat relatively easily a group of countries just because they have more military power at hand, so the whole debate is wether the Klingon and the Romulans, alone, can be a match for 150 planets; well yes, can Russia win over the whole African Union? Well, probably.
  • The problem with this question is that comes with the assumption that live in the Galaxy will be equally scattered throughout all systems. That all regions of the Galaxy with equal number of M class planets would have live in them. But that is an assumption, and not a scientific one. Scientists believe that, in the same way we have the “Goldilocks” area in a solar system, the same apply for the Galaxy and that certain regions of the Galaxy would be to hostile for live to appear there. Thus, the Klingon and Romulan empires might very well be located in areas were life is uncommon and they had all those empty planets to colonized, whilst the Federation (and I guess the Dominion) were located in the areas were inhabited planets are plethoric. Also, Romulans are not native to their system, they could very well actively choose a region of space that had very few inhabited worlds in it.
  • It's entirely plausible that militaristic empires simply wouldn't trust the members of conquered species in their miliatries at any level other than perhaps basic foot soldiers, or at least would require a lot of proof an individual member of a conquered species' loyalty to the empire before promoting them into the officer ranks. And we don't see a lot of foot soldiers in Star Trek. Similarly, we don't see that much of the goings-on at Klingon and Romulan colony worlds, or of Cardassian conquests other than flashbacks of occupied Bajor. We see very little even of Qo'nos, Romulus and Cardassia Prime themselves even, other than their respective capital cities. So our first-hand knowledge of what things are like in each empire are very limited.

    Klingons winning in "Yesterday's Enterprise" 
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) made after "Yesterday's Enterprise" (1990), established that after the moon Praxis explodes over the Klingon homeworld Qo'noS, it cause an ecological disaster that the Klingon Empire can not afford to fix and seek outside help from the United Federation of Planets. Basically the Klingon Empire is going to go bankrupt and unable to properly function without Starfleet helping them. Yet somehow in the alternate timeline a Klingon-Federation war has the Federation on the verge of defeat within six months of the Enterprise-C reappearing. Shouldn't it be the other way around with the Klingon empire being weakened by the Praxis disaster and being at war with the only government willing to help you fix things after the disaster?
    • The real-world explanation is of course that the Praxis disaster had not yet been "invented" when "Yesterday's Enterprise" rolled about. But in both timelines, the setback must have been relatively brief because the Empire was back to something like full strength within decades. There's some pretty iffy continuity where Klingon-Federation relations are concerned, especially since peace seems to have been achieved two separate times (2293 with the Khitomer Accords and again some 50 years later after Narendra III) — possible, but one wonders what soured relations in the interim, as well as just how the goodwill towards the Federation helping after Praxis got squandered.
    • Part of the reason for Praxis's destruction seeming to be a death knell for the Klingon Empire without Federation assistance is that this was the Klingon homeworld's moon that was destroyed - between cleaning the atmosphere from any drift from the presumably toxic and radioactive fallout of the moon's destruction, the presumable orbital drift the sudden shift in lunar mass, and the inevitable debris showers, the estimates Spock cites detail the potential of a planet that was central to the Klingon Empire's war machine and military might. As an example, if the United States suffered an attack that impacted one of our major hubs - not just Washington DC, but New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago - while it wouldn't be a mortal blow to the nation, it would seriously cripple all industries that are dependent on those centers. Perhaps after Praxis, the Klingon military has decentralized itself, no longer as dependent on the direct orders of those on Qo'nos, building up similar holdings elsewhere in the Empire (such as the planet Ty'Gokor, established in DS9, where a major award ceremony takes place), leading to a stronger military force in the fifty-ish years it takes for the war from "Yesterday's Enterprise" to start, now that they aren't at risk of being wiped out in a singular disaster.
    • As established through Star Trek: Discovery (which is also retroactive canon to "Yesterday's Enterprise," but...), the Klingons seem to just objectively have a better military might than the Federation, to the point of being almost on Earth's doorstep at the point the war shown in Discovery's first season concluded, and with fifty plus years to build their military, while the Federation charts nebulae and catalogues every mote of dust in scanner range, the Klingons were far more combat ready, better able to take the Federation by complete surprise.
    • It should be remembered that the Federation and the Klingon Empire were not at war at the momento of the Undiscovered Country events. They were in a Cold War after the truce of the Organian Treaty. Thus, their rivalry was mainly economic which is costly to maintain if your ecosystem is destroyed. The Praxis moon accident was threatening their economy, not their military might. The Klingons from the beginning had the choice to go the other way around and actually started a total war against the Federation (some certainly wanted to) to take its resources and they might have won, thankfully they did the opposite. In this alternate timeline maybe Chang's plan to kill the more peace-oriented Chancellor and him taking power worked.

    Vorcha-doh-baghk, Kahless! 

  • In "Rightful Heir", Kahless reminds Worf of the vision he had of him when Worf was a child, in the caves of No'Mat. Worf had mentioned the vision to Data earlier that season in "Birthright, Part I", but didn't go into the same level of detail as Kahless did here. If this Kahless is actually a clone... how could he possibly know about Worf's vision?
    • Presumably the monks of Borath gave him that information along with all other programming they gave him (having in turn been told about it by Worf himself). After all, it was their decision to make Kahless appear to Worf (an interesting bit of political calculating in itself).

    K'mpec's murderer 

  • In "Reunion", Chancellor K'mpec died from being slowly poisoned over the course of several months. He believed that one of the two strongest challengers to leadership— Gowron or Duras— was his killer. The Son'chi ceremony was interrupted by a suicide bomb implanted in the forearm of one of Duras' men. Duras killed K'Ehleyr and died in disgrace at Worf's hands. But wait: It was never conclusively proven who actually killed K'mpec! In fact, the evidence points to Gowron; he was the one who angrily told K'Ehleyr that K'mpec had been stubborn and refused to listen. Just because Duras was guilty of something, it doesn't mean that Gowron was innocent! And indeed, Gowron is quite the shrewd manipulator; I wouldn't put it past him.
    • The evidence pointing in Duras's direction was that suicide bomb was of a Romulan make. But then, isn't it equally possible that Gowron, having heard the rumors of the House of Duras colluding with Romulans, planted it?
      • That's such a great point that I wonder if the question was left open intentionally. Worf killed Duras, which immediately ended the Rite of Succession, and with Picard's role as arbiter ended, the investigation became an internal Klingon matter. Starfleet's prime directive prevented Enterprise from interfering in any way, and Gowron could have the issue swept neatly under the rug as chancellor.
      • That would actually fit well with how much of a Machiavellian Jerkass Chancellor Gowron was portrayed as in DS9.
    • It was supposed to be Duras according to Word of God. They genuinely forgot they hadn't said it onscreen.

     Klingon/Federation Treaty? 

  • The introduction of the Federation's Great Offscreen War with the Cardassians was itself a Retcon of course. But it raises an interesting question about the fact that Federation and the Klingons were supposed to have a formal alliance at the time the war happened. Why weren't the Klingons, whose goal in life is to die in battle, practically shoving Starfleet out of the way in a desperate bid to fulfill the mutual-defense aspects of their alliance, and not coincidentally indulge in "glorious battle"? The generally pacifistic Federation might not have been overly-enthusiastic about fighting the war, but the Klingons would have been ecstatic about it! As it was there were already Klingons grumbling about having been at peace for too long. You would expect that they would have been tripping over each other in their rush to get to their warships when the opportunity for a just war defending a major ally came up! Was the Federation so soft-hearted even towards the Naziesque Cardassians that they did not want to unleash a horde of bloodthirsty Klingons on them?
    • There was the Betreka Nebula Incident, an 18 year Noodle Incident mentioned in DS9's "Way of the Warrior." We have no idea what happened or when, but it does imply that there was an extended period of hostility between the Klingon Empire and the Cardassian Union at some time prior to the TNG era. Since we know so little about both conflicts, you might even speculate that it was the Klingons who drug the Federation into their already in-progress fight with the Cardassian Union. Or even that the Cardassians attacked the Federation in hopes of disrupting any material support that the Federation might be sending to their Klingon allies. We just don't have enough information about the war for anything more than idle speculation.
    • For what I have been able to grasp from canonical dialogue, the Federation-Cardassian War was not really a "war" in the convensional sense but a border conflict. This is said several times in dialogue like when Quark said he "warn the Federation not to colonized so close to Cardassia" and similar topics, and of course the whole Maquis thing. For what I grasp, both the Federation and Cardassia were colonizing the same area of space, at some point the colonies started to mingled so much that there was no clear line where it was federal and where it was Cardassian space, thus conflict erupted. But this conflict is more in the line of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Northern Ireland conflict than the Iraqi War or any other convensional war. Thus, although the Klingon had an alliance with the Federation, and indeed there was a mention of a previous Klingon-Cardassian war (IIRC it lasted 20 years as per what Garak said) is likely that 1) The terms of the Fed-Klingon alliance only cover full total convensional wars. 2) One side only has the duty to help the other when the ally is the attacked and is defending itself, which would make a lot of sense from the Fed perspective otherwise would be drag into hundreds of potential conflicts the war-based Klingons start and in this case as is a border conflict there's no clear declaration of war and/or is not clear who started. 3) Klingons do not really see any honor in took part in a border conflict between colonies. 4) After 20 years of war with the Cardassians that we don't know how it ended they don't want to restart it. And 5) They did took part but is never shown canonically. That there are still open wounds between them is clear, in "The Chase" the Cardassian captain expresses open disgust to the idea of sharing ancestry with a Klingon showing that Cardassians really resent Klingons, maybe even more than how they resent Federals.

     Toral's Claim 

  • Why is Toral's claim to be Duras' successor a threat in the first place? Remember, Duras never gained leadership of the High Council in the first place; he and Gowron were considered the two strongest challengers to the position, and the way it worked was they were going to fight for it. This was rendered moot when Worf killed Duras. Everyone seems to think that if Toral's established as being Duras' son, which he is, he inherits the top job. Again, from his father who never had it. Seems like all he could accomplish, if Picard accepts his claim, is to be where his father was — dueling Gowron to the death. How'd his aunts think that would go? You'd think Gowron would be like, "Sure, let's fight." He'd kill the scrawny kid in two seconds, and that would be that. Duras' sisters try to influence Picard to validate Toral's claim, but it looks like he does them a favor by not setting up their puppet to die, so they can have a fight between fleets and armies instead.
    • It was indicative of the corruption on the Council. Because females could not be members of, much less lead, the Council during this time period their house had to put forward a male candidate for chancellor even if it was understood that Toral would be a figurehead. Remember that the Duras faction was also willing to ally with the Romulans. If Gowron had to fight Toral it would not be surprising if Gowron had an "accident" that Duras supporters on the Council would refuse to investigate. Basically, a civil war was going to happen regardless and Toral being a controllable puppet was seen as a feature not a bug by Lursa, B'Etor and their backers.
      • I get that the Duras family and their supporters would have happily cheated in a duel, but the writers seemed to think that the legal question is whether Toral goes straight to the throne without a duel, instead of inheriting his father's position as a contender. Like Duras won leadership and Picard has to decide whether it passes on to Toral. As I pointed out above, Duras never won leadership of the Council; he died before he could. And if Toral had died dueling Gowron, Lursa and B'Etor would have been shit out of luck with no puppet and them not able to be on the Council themselves.
      • Which is the point. This was never about a legitimate succession, merely the pretense of one. Lursa, B'Etor and their various Klingon and Romulan supporters, were never going to allow an honorable duel between Gowron and Toral. This is why they were arming for civil war. The matter of succession was going to be decided by warships, not a one-on-one fight. Toral merely needed enough of a hereditary claim as a contender for the chancellorship to serve as a figurehead for the House of Duras. Because absent a male candidate they had no claim. Picard (not a Klingon) of course dismisses Toral's candidacy on the logical basis that he was not an adult or a warrior. That a large chunk of the Council backed the House of Duras anyway was meant to show just how far from its ideals the Empire had fallen.
      • I don't think you're reading me here. Yes, the legal wrangling was just window dressing. They probably expected to fail in that area and fight it out in a civil war, which is what happened. But my point is, why was the legal wrangling about whether Toral would be the new leader instead of whether Toral had the right to fight a duel with Gowron for it? At that point, everyone was at least pretending that Klingon law mattered. It's like the writers didn't even watch "Reunion" and thought Picard's role was to choose K'mpec's successor, even though K'mpec specifically said it wasn't.
      • Picard's conflict was whether or not to interfere in internal Klingon politics. On the one hand, he knows that ruling in Toral's favor, while wouldn't be handing the throne to him, would almost certainly result in civil war. On the other hand, there's the prime directive, which applies to non-federation post-warp civilizations as well as pre-warp civilizations. Picard was faced with the question of, according to Klingon law, does Toral have a claim, and if he does, does Picard have the right to ignore Klingon law in order to prevent a civil war? Ignore Klingon law, or start a civil war.

    Klingons suck at assassinations 
  • The two assassination attempts on Worf's "Cha'Dich" in "Sins of the Father" were carried out with stunning incompetence. First of all, why are the assassins armed with knives instead of phasors? Second of all, after they stab Kurn, why do they leave without making sure Kurn is dead? There was no need for them to leave immediately. No one else was there, and Kurn couldn't fight back anymore or call for aid. Clearly that had plenty of time to make sure their target was dead before they ran away.

The Romulan Star Empire

    Sela 
  • That Sela is a contrived character goes without saying, but several aspects of the character deserve special comment: that she is a Commander of a whole fleet of warbirds despite only being 24 years old (despite being played by an actress well into her thirties), and that the Romulans trust such a position to someone who is half-human.
    • Let alone to someone whose human mother was executed!
      • I've always had the feel that Romulans were more of a Darwinian meritocracy than explicitly racist. Sela might have been seen as having the zeal of the converted, plus she was raised on Romulus all her life, so it's not as though she'd really be considered an outsider. There is another episode that features a fully human turncoat Starfleet officer that lived in the Romulan Empire for something like twenty years and rose to a pretty decent rank in the Romulan military before turning himself over to the Enterprise.
    • I have often wondered if the writers had further plans for Sela that never got off the drawing board. Considering the fanfare with which the character was introduced, she was used very rarely. Another thing I've never understood about Sela is Guinan's insistence to Picard that, since he sent Yar into the past, "then you are responsible for this whole situation." Um... why? Even setting aside that fact that it was different version of Picard, it was Yar's own decision to go into the past, and in any event Picard can hardly be held responsible for what her offspring is doing decades later. It seems like a classic moral false crisis.
      • Especially since it was actually Guinan herself that motivated Tasha to go into the past by telling her that she died a senseless death in the original timeline! Picard, not being aware of the changes in the timeline, would not have even known about Tasha'a fate. Guinan was the one with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. By the same token, Starfleet in general was unaware that there had been any captives taken from the Enterprise-C. Their belief that all hands were lost in the battle with the Romulans. So it is not as if Picard were negligent in any way that would place any kind of accountability for what happened on his shoulders. Now, Guinan herself on the other hand...
      • Perhaps Guinan meant that, to Picard it was his responsibility. It makes sense to me that Picard would see Sela as his responsibility; even if he didn't hold himself accountable for something he did in an alternate timeline, Tasha was under his command in both this time line and the other timeline. He might feel responsible for Sela just by virtue of her being Tasha's offspring, even disregarding the alternate timeline.
      • Guinan's line is: "You can't just dismiss this. If I'm right, then you are responsible for this whole situation." Like somehow his alternate universe version allowing Tasha to go into the past (not sending, though Guinan says she "think[s] you sent her there") makes him responsible for the Klingon civil war. It's not a matter of him feeling responsible. It's an accusation.
    • Simple answer: Sela's father is an extremely powerful member of the military. She proved she loved Daddy more than Mommy from a young age. He probably molded her in his own image and had anyone that said something disparaging about her mixed ancestry poisoned. Her father was powerful and politically connected, she was his darling, he conspired to get her placed in high position and she kept that position by being a cruel, callous bitch worthy of the rank. Makes perfect sense.
  • Before Star Trek: Nemesis, when all we knew about the movie was that it was going to involve Romulans, there was speculation that Sela would be either the Big Bad of that movie, or perform a Heel–Face Turn. Then, the movie came out, and Sela wasn't even alluded to.
    • IMDb trivia for Star Trek: Nemesis claims that including Sela was discussed but nixed; not sure if there's corroborating evidence for this. Could the Donatra character have been written for Sela?
      • Possible. As for Sela's current status, after the destruction of Romulus she used the confusion and the further conflict caused by the renewed Federation-Klingon hostilities to ascend to the head of the Tal Shiar and declare herself the Empress of the New Romulan Empire. She's currently trying to play the Federation and Klingons against each other even further as well as attempting to pressgang any unaffiliated Romulan she can and squash the New Romulan Republic. The original actress voices her (and some other clips) in Star Trek Online.
    • Maybe they just realized that Sela wasn't any better a character than Tasha.
  • How come she's a commander yet her Mook Lieutenant Movar is a general? Don't generals outrank commanders?
    • Maybe they don't in the Romulan military. The rank of "Captain" doesn't seem to exist among the Romulans, with commanding officers of warbirds all being ranked either Commander or Admiral. Meaning a Romulan Commander is at least equivalent in rank to a Starfleet or Klingon Captain. Perhaps the navy is so much more prestiguous than the army among Romulans that an army General is considered equal or lower in rank to a navy Commander. (A General in the Tal Shiar would be a completely different story, presumably.)

    Romulans Fail Invasion Planning Forever? 
  • In "Unification" there is subplot that Romulans have stolen the Vulcan vessel to carry invasion troops after false statement of reunification. Why, if reunification was successful, there would be Vulcan vessels on Romulus? I mean Starfleet could just ask Vulcans if they sent any vessel which would be a bit suspicious if they stated that they hadn't. Also what was the reason of saying Spock that reunification is false instead of just tricking him to the last moment - ok. it was spoiled but see next question? Also what is suspicious in that Romulan intelligence have top-secret informations even if it is 4 digits? Even if it was the time of meeting of second in command of Romulan Empire? I mean - if there was an important talk with vice-president/vice-prime minister (depending on country) I'm sure security would know every detail.
    • On another note, maybe if the Romulans stopped being such a totalitarian regime, they could spend a lot more resources in planning successful raids and invasions. You know, instead of trying to screw over and suppress their own population. Or executing a Xanatos Gambit on on of their top admirals to see just how loyal he is. Sure it's useful to find the truly loyal ones and/or get rid of the less loyal ones, but really, it wastes time and makes people paranoid.
    • I was more curious about how they were planning on taking over a whole planet with "over 2,000 troops." They might take a few cities with that, but holding them against Federation troops would be a nightmare.
      • They drop photon torpedoes from orbit until the planet surrenders, then the "2,000 troops" beam down to do the paperwork.
      • And then said 2,000 soldiers have the interesting job of holding the planet once the ships are gone.
      • I know this is a huge leap, but after I saw the episode for the first time, I wondered if the Romulans wanted to invade a core-world of the Federation to draw Starfleet resources away from another target.
      • I believe the 2,000 soldiers were special forces sent to cause sabotage and stage a rigged vote for secession from the Federation and unification with Romulus. That's the only way I can think of that 2,000 Romulans could conquer a whole planet.
      • Which would have just worked so well against 8,000,000,000 hyper-intelligent locals who know their planet and its infrastructure far better than the Romulans, and who are in every way their physical equals!
      • 2,000 of the Tal Shiar and Romulan armed forces' very best arrive and, in a complete surprise attack, beam into strategic locations across the planet. In minutes they've taken over the planetary defense net and taken key government and social figures hostage. They keep the population pacified by threatening to kill the important figures and detonate irreplaceable cultural landmarks, and keep the Federation from retaking the planet immediately with the defense net. Now, this likely wouldn't work for a long-term conquest and annexation of Vulcan into the Empire, but it would be enough for Romulus to demand some sort of concession from the Federation.
      • The idea of Vulcans responding to hostage-taking in the face a planetary annexation is ludicrous. Spock himself says in this episode "Since it is logical to conclude that you will kill us in any event, I choose not to cooperate." Spock is somewhat an idealized Vulcan, but most other Vulcan are depicted as coming fairly close to this ideal. Further, they can count on other Vulcans to also behave logically. In my mind the population of Vulcan would respond with immediate and overwhelming hostility towards a mere 2,000 troops, regardless of how well positioned they were.
The "bystander apathy" should not come into play in a logic motived culture. Technicians who happened to be near critical junctures would immediately disconnect the controls to any planetary defenses. Absolutely no one would provide any authorization codes to access secure facilities or systems. Romulan forces would be attacked in any situation where Vulcans outnumbered them two to one, or were armed in some way.
  • Given how Sela is taken completley by surprise when Spock reacts in this way, it seems that most Romulans simply have little understanding of how their Vulcan cousins think. Their highly emotional society just doesn't get how people who aren't driven by emotion will react.

    Equal-Rights Romulans? 
  • I seriously can't figure the Romulans out. They're xenophobic and treat everyone else as shoot-them-dead inferiors, and yet a human can live relatively peacefully with them for decades, with the only danger being that the Federation will charge you with treason if they catch you doing it.
    • Because they weren't completely evil in the TNG series. They were xenophobic and very distrusting, but the Federation wasn't exactly friendly towards the Romulans either. Given the history between the two sides, the whole thing is kind of understandable. Plus, it was shown from TNG onwards that the Romulans were actually very sensitive, emotional beings and cared deeply for one another — in fact, they were fairly similar to humans in numerous ways. They wouldn't kill him solely for being human.
    • The Romulans are (or were originally) a thinly-veiled allegory for Red China, just as the Klingons were originally a thinly-veiled allegory for Soviet Russia. One assumes that an American who defected to the Chinese government and was proven trustworthy would be treated relatively well. The same rationale probably applies to Human-Romulan defectors as well.
    • Besides, most of the Romulans the Federation deals with on a regular basis are military/government types. It seems to me that, if the government didn't kill or imprison a human outright, the reactions of your Average Joe Romulan on the street would vary as much as with any culture, from accepting to downright hostile. Civilians might be more accepting of strangers, once they got past the cultural bias that they've grown up with.
  • You mean DeSeve? He made me think of Joe Dresnok. The North Korean government is xenophobic and treats everyone else as shoot-to-kill inferiors, but they've apparently let Dresnok live among them in relative peace for almost fifty years.
    • Indeed, dictatorships usually place high value on defectors since they constitute a walking, talking endorsement of the superiority of their ways.

    Warbirds 
Throughout TNG's run it appeared that the Federation's Galaxy class, the Klingon Vor'cha class, the Romulan D'deridex class, and the Cardassian Galor class all appeared to be roughly equal in their capabilities, both in battle and in various non-combat roles. Starfleet makes mostly smaller ships, the Klingons have the birds-of-prey and the old TOS cruisers in service alongside the Vor'chas, and the Cardassians use a different ship some of the time. The Romulans, though, never use anything other than the Warbirds, not in TNG. In Deep Space Nine the only other Romulan ship we see is Vreenak's shuttle, and Nemesis and ST XI show the Romulans having graduated to something even badder. Do they have far more resources to put into shipbuilding than the others? Do they spend the resources on a few large ships instead of many small ones? (Unlikely; they always seem to have more ships in the area than Starfleet and th Klingons do, at least in TNG.) Did the other powers choose to make smaller, weaker ships than their resources allow?
  • In TNG, we saw a Romulan scout ship and a Romulan science ship (both modified from the same studio model).
  • Up until the 2009 film brings them down to normal, the (TNG-era) Romulans seem to be portrayed as the most powerful faction in the Alpha/Beta region. So yes, they probably just have the resources to build more and bigger ships than anyone else. In contrast, we know that Starfleet and the KDF do field underpowered and outdated warships, the one because they don't like war so much and the other because they don't have the money to afford a full fleet of modern vessels.
  • The Federation seems to keep ship spaceframe designs in use for a long time. For example, Excelsior and Miranda class ships still seem to be in use by Starfleet in the late 24th Century, most likely with an emphasis on internal upgrades. In the possible future 26th Century Battle of Procyon V five glimpsed in the ENT episode "Azati Prime", the Federation is fielding a fancy, super-advanced Enterprise, but also Nova and Prometheus class ships that date back to the 24th Century as well. Now, being a militaristic society with a bit more scientific emphasis than the Klingons, the Romulans may be prone to retire and scrap older vessels in order to maintain a more uniform fleet despite the huge expense involved. It should be noted that the Romulan D'deridex class ships are huge and scary looking. But their design seems to involve a vast amount of empty space (you could fit most Federation starships into the open area between it's sections) and they do not seem to significantly exceed the capabilities of the Galaxy class in any real way (they are in fact slower). The prototype Prometheus was able to destroy a warbird easily with its Multi Vector Assault Mode, which is probably why the Romulans tried to steal it.
    • The Prometheus was probably the biggest reason we never saw this model of Warbird again after Nemesis - there is no point continuing to field capital ships that can be blown up without effort by your biggest rivals. The Scimitar, despite being called a Reman Warbird, probably was just a design stolen from the Romulans and that it is in fact the next evolution. Shinzon may even have been lying as no matter how sympathetic you may be to the flaws of that film; the prospect that a bunch of uneducated miners could build a ship that can rival a Sovereign Class is just ridiculous.
      • It didn't rival the Sovereign-class, it outclassed Sovereigns in almost every way. To a ludicrous degree, in fact. It took a beating from three advanced battlecruisers without sustaining any significant damage, before utterly curb-stomping two Romulan warbirds. It had fire superiority over Enterprise by an insanely wide margin—and keep in mind that Starfleet's mandate for the Sovereign-class almost certainly contained the phrase, "capable of engaging and defeating Borg vessels"—and redundant deflector shields that remained active even while the ship was cloaked. Finally, while a D'deridex-class warbird was not capable of keeping up with a Galaxy-class starship (one that tried ended up damaging its engines so badly that it had no hope of returning to Romulan space), the Scimitar was able to overtake the Enterprise-E, which was even faster than her predecessor. There's no way that the Remans could have built that ship, in secret, right under the Romulan government's nose.
      • This is really Fridge Logic, but the Romulans probably used Reman slave laborers and raw materials from the planet to actually build the Scimitar. Given the Decadent Court that is the upper echelon of Romulan society, the ship's existence was probably being kept under tight wraps in order to prevent some Romulan faction like the Tal Shiar from doing what the Remans actually did do — steal it and use it to hold Romulus hostage. Because of their arrogant disdain for their slaves, they may have underestimated the Remans. Especially the fact that Shinzon's aid/mentor was a telepath, and probably stole all kinds of valuable information about the project from the minds of the Romulan overseers.

     The Manchurian Engineer 
  • In the episode "The Mind's Eye", the Romulans kidnap Geordi and make him a Manchurian Agent to sabotage Federation/Klingon relations. Their plan is making it look like the Enterprise is supplying rebels on a Klingon planet in civil war. Part of their plan, and a minor test to ensure Geordi's effectiveness, is killing Chief O'Brien. In Ten Forward. The most public area on the ship. Did they seriously think nothing might happen to Geordi afterwards? In fact, when Geordi went to Ten Forward as per the plan, Commander Riker was sitting in plain view! "Luckily", Geordi decides to "accidentally" spill a drink on O'Brien instead. The Romulan's Evil Plan may nearly have backfired because of this minor detail.
    • The first time it was just a simulation to ensure that Geordi would kill his friend on command, without hesitation. When it happens in real life, it looks like Geordi just happens to find himself in the same situation and feels compelled to do something, but doesn't know what. Spilling the drink just snaps him out of it. Or maybe the Romulans programmed him to spill the drink as a real-life test that wouldn't draw much attention, but would assure he was still under control.

     Romulan emails 
  • At the end of The Defector, the romulan admiral that was tricked by his government into defecting to the Federation writes a letter to his daughter. Data says that he must have known that there's no way the Federation can deliver the letter. I know the episode aired in 1990 and Internet wasn't still such a big thing, but existed since 1983 and computer-based communication existed already specially in the military. Obviously nowadays it will be weird as they just would have to send the daughter an email but even back then is a strange position. Is not a piece of paper they have to deliver.
    • That assumes that the Romulan government allows any sort of datalink between Romulan civilians and the Federation. Even in the internet age, it would be extremely difficult to deliver a private message to a specific individual in North Korea. That would be especially true if that individual happened to be an immediate family member of a high-value defector; because make no mistake, the Tal Shiar is watching that family like a hawk. They could try to deliver the message through an intermediary, perhaps. A third party with a friendlier relationship with the Romulan government might stand a better chance of getting the letter to Jarok's daughter, but I'm not sure that the Federation would be willing to even try. If it's detected — and again, if the Tal Shiar really is the fearsome, ruthlessly effective State Sec agency that it's made out to be, the message will be detected — there's no telling what the consequences for Jarok's daughter might be. A few years in a Hellhole Prison or a reeducation camp could be a best-case scenario for her if she’s caught receiving communications originating from inside the Federation. There would also potentially be fallout for the Federation, itself. If the Federation were caught trying to pass messages to Romulan citizens, the Empire's response could range anywhere from using the incident to give the Federation a diplomatic black eye, to outright declaring it casus belli.

Q and the Q Continuum

    What about those 18 people Q got killed? 
  • Over the course of the series, we're supposed to accept that the character Q softened from being the judgmental asshole of 'Encounter at Farpoint', to being more of a benevolent trickster god who's Vitriolic Best Buds with Picard and only engages in his shenanigans to teach the Enterprise crew a lesson in arrogance (which, granted, after the first season and a half, they needed desperately), and someone we're supposed to grow to love. There's just one problem: In 'Q Who', Q's actions led to 18 members of the Enterprise crew getting killed by the Borg, offscreen, and then never referred to again. We're just supposed to forget all this? Were those 18 lives really necessary just to make a point?
    • Well Q did say "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous - with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid..." By allowing those 18 to be killed, Q has, in fact, allowed Starfleet to learn about a mortal danger earlier than they would have naturally and has indirectly saved the Federation from assimilation.
    • You could make an argument that Picard is far more responsible for those deaths. He arrogantly asserted that they were ready to encounter anything, he decided to poke around rather than head back to Federation space immediately despite Guinan's warning, he didn't take the Borg threat as seriously as he should have at first despite Guinan's second warning, and his damned pride kept him from asking Q to send them back until it was already too late for those eighteen crew members.
      • Speaking of Guinan's warning: why was it so damn vague? She should know that "all I can tell you is you need to get out of here" is going to be treated as a challenge by the Starfleet crew. And even if they react the same way to being told "the invaders who nearly wiped out my species are here, there's no way you can stand up to them, and here's why" (totally plausible, especially given the point of the episode), at least they're not going in blind. She has nothing to gain by witholding the information from them - or, if she does, it's rendered moot by her telling them after the fact.
      • Pure speculation, but maybe the El-Aurians have their own societal variant of the Prime Directive - they're LISTENERS, but that doesn't mean that they will go about doing things for those they listen to for them. Some things can only be learned through experience, and the lesson learned for yourself is more valuabe than what you are taught by others. As a result, Guinan may not have been willing or able to share what she knows about this threat. After all, it's later established that Guinan and at least forty-six other El-Aurians were in Federation space for the better part of eighty years and only shared their awareness of the Borg in the form of legends, rumors, and myth, rather than direct warnings, even though their planet had been destroyed by the Borg.

    Give the Genie what it wants Jean-Luc 
  • In the episode Qpid, why didn't Picard get rid of Q by simply allowing it to repay its debt to him? I mean sure all of Q's suggestions were "immoral" to the stuck up curmudgeon, but he could've asked for things like insights into Borg technology, or maybe something like... say a diary from the Precursor civilization. It really seemed like Picard was wasting a serious opportunity for defense, or research.
    • Probably because he knew Q would mess it up, somehow. Even well-meaning, Q is prone to going overboard.
    • Q is probably the running candidate to star in the live-action "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" holonovel. Giving that omnipotent jackass an inch is on par with giving him a parsec.
    • SF Debris pointed out Picard should have just asked for something simple if he was so desperate to get rid of Q — like the best bottle of wine ever made, or to never have to go to the bathroom again. "Give Q what he wants, and he will kindly leave!"
      • Q being the drama queen he is, he probably would have balked at being asked for something simple and mundane, but all things considered it would have been worth asking. (Note I do not say it wouldn't have hurt to try. It might well have. But it probably wouldn't have been more problematic than having Q hanging around looking for an opportunity.)
      • Of course, even such a relatively simple request would give a being with the powers and scope of Q the opportunity to be a jerk. "Here you are, mon capitaine, the the best bottle of wine ever made. The name of the race that created it isn't pronounceable to beings of your particular biochemistry, but I assure you that of all the bottles of wine in all the cosmos, this one is the absolute finest. Note its delicate bouquet of turpentine and bromine. Observe the graceful sinking of its sulfur hexafluoride bubbles. Now drink it quickly before the benzene evaporates."
      • The point is, I think, that even Q being a jerk for a short time would be preferable to him hanging around making mischief.
      • If you're given a monkey's paw, don't try to placate it by making wishes. Just drop it in your least favorite neighbor's mailbox and walk away.
    • I've always liked to think that Picard, being a fan of ancient literature, is very familiar with JackassGenies and assumes that any favor that Q does for him will somehow bite him in the ass in an ironic way.
      • Indeed, this whole headscratcher is contingent on the concept that Q is not a jerk. And considering that whatever else he is, Q is definitely a jerk, the idea that Picard should just accept his seeming beneficence with nary a second thought begs the question of "I'm sorry, have you ever seen a Q episode before?"
    • The best option for Picard would probably be something that would stroke Q's ego — something like a complete map of the universe, or a database with the full text of every book ever written anywhere, or creating a true universal language, or a replicator pattern library with medicines to cure every known disease, or plans for device that can be dropped into planetary orbit and will expand to a fully functional Starbase ready for occupation. Sure, Q could screw with the request like any other, but it would mean giving up a terrific opportunity to show off — and Q loves showing off. (Of course, it would require Picard to swallow his pride and actually give Q a properly impressed and thankful response afterwards, which may be more impossible than all of those put together.)
  • Bear in mind that Q is not a literal genie and will not necessarily vanish after receiving X-number of wishes. If he feels that he is not being dealt with sincerely — that they're trying to fob him off — he might become even harder to deal with.

    What's With the Double Standard Q? 

  • What is it with the Q Continuum and the need to judge humanity? Do they ever show any interest in judging the Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans or any other species? Then why do they keep going after humans?
    • While Star Trek tends to vacillate wildly between Humans Are Bastards and Humans Are Good (mostly coming out for the latter), the common denominator is some version of Humans Are Special... in this case, especially worthy of notice, good or ill.
    • Maybe there are other Qs involved in judging those species, or maybe they just haven't gotten around to them yet. Or there aren't any Qs as interested in those species as Q is in humanity. Or they do set up "tests" for those species, they just don't do it in such a flashy way like Q does.
    • Let's be fair: We've never seen any indication that any Q aside from John DeLancie's Q has any interest in testing humanity. In any event, the (obviously non-canon) book trilogy Q Continuum may shed some light on the subject for us: The entity known as 0 first got Q into the "testing" thing with the Calamarian and the Tkon Empire. And during the battle between the Q Continuum and 0-and-Associates, Q saved his future wife from 0's attempt to throw a meteor at her by reflexively creating a wormhole right in front of her, causing the asteroid to hit Earth. Later, Q was given charge of fixing up the "miserable little planet" as punishment, which Picard finds a bit hard to believe, to put it mildly.
    • Same poster as above with an alternate theory. Maybe Q does test other species, but because the Star Trek series focuses on the Federation, we don't see these instances.
      • One can further speculate that, since the Q's method of dealing with humanity in "All Good Things" is set to utterly erase its existence using the anti-time anomaly, the species that fail the test will never be seen because they have similarly been "struck from the record."
    • The question really is why there are so many "grievously savage" races around if the punishment is extinction? Surely the Founders, Cardassians, Hirogen, the Douwd (based on the one that killed all 50 billion Husnock in retaliation for one of their ships killing his wife) and many others are more guilty of continuing to do the things humanity stopped doing hundreds of years before. I can't fathom why an omnipotent race would need time to "get around" to try all the other species in the galaxy. The best I can figure is that it was all made up by Q as an elaborate prank on humans.
      • The Q are omnipotent beings (or the next thing to it), so it stands to reason that their motivations may not be entirely clear to we mere mortals. In "Hide and Q," Q implies that humans are on some sort of evolutionary fast track and may some day even outdo the Q; perhaps the test is all the more important because of humanity has a vast potential that other races may not share (Humans Are Special, after all!).
    • Possibly it's not so much humans' capacity for savagery that Q has issues with, but the fact that we combine that capacity with the conviction that we're morally justified in what we do. The various villain races tend to be eminently practical about why they cause harm to other species, whereas humans have a dangerous tendency to make a moral crusade out of their current agenda, that makes compromise far more difficult.
      • There is plenty of evidence that the Q are not omnipotent they just claim to be. For example during the Voyager episode Q2 Q Snr tells Q Jr adamantly that you do not antagonize the Borg. Why? Unless or course the Borg have weapons capable of attacking beings as powerful as a Q - we do see in Q and the Grey that it is indeed possible to create weapons a human can wield that can mortally injure a Q. The same goes for other supremely powerful beings such as the Prophets, Douwd, or the Organians that, whilst the Q may or may not win, they would suffer a lot of casualties in the process. It's really not wise to risk confronting someone that can fight you on even terms no matter how much you may disagree with them.
      • The Borg canonically do not possess infinitely powerful weapons. Quite the opposite, they got their cubes handed to them by Species 8472, a purely biological species whose capabilities do not even approach those many other higher beings in the Trek universe. There is no evidence that the Borg have ever successfully assaulted or assimilated any race of Energy Beings, certainly not ones with Reality Warping powers. Indeed, they almost seem to have hit a technological plateau, where they have powerful capabilities, but are unable to impose assimilation on similarly advanced races. The Voth also occupy the Delta Quadrant for example, yet the Borg do not appear to have ever been able to assimilate them.
      • Another example comes from Encounter at Farpoint - Q freezing Ens Torres. Why freeze him immediately? Wouldn't a far more effective demonstration of omnipotence simply be to let him fire and be unable to stun Q THEN freeze Torres as punishment? Q demonstrates omniscience, but it still implies even he would be vulnerable to a stun blast. He even says to Picard that he wouldn't want to be rendered helpless amongst humans. Anyways, Q tells Riker humanity has the potential to even eclipse the Q, it's debatable whether or not the Continuum are acting to either help humanity advance, scope out a potential enemy/competitor, or are simply curious about a resourceful people. (or simply seeking a plaything to distract themselves from the boring emptiness of the desert road...)
      • The answer to this question, and any question along the lines of "Why did Q do A instead of B?", is quite simple: It's Q. He did it that way because he felt like it, and he doesn't need any other reason because he's friggin' Q.
      • If you really think the Borg can provide some plausible threat to the Q, recall that Q casually suggests changing the gravitational constant of the universe — basically remaking all reality on a whim.
      • Everything is impossible until it isn't. We've seen in Trek that you can create little pocket universes (happened to Crusher in Remember Me) so who is to say you cannot create some form of shielding to reality changes? In essence that is what the Krenim do in Voyager's "Year of Hell" to make their time weapon work. Combine the two and suddenly the Q are not so all powerful. Or what the heck, just evolve into a higher plane of existence like the Zalkonians are doing in TNG's Transfigurations which amounts to meeting the Q on an equal footing. Remember the Borg have unimaginable processing power to work on problems. Give them enough info on the Q, and there is a risk, no matter how small, that they might hit on a trick that works.
      • It's kind of fun to speculate about such things though it can easily pass over into fanwankery... after all, no episode has ever, EVER presented any credible threats to the Q except for other Q (or humans basically temporarily empowered by the Q, in "The Q and the Grey"). A statement like "The same goes for other supremely powerful beings such as the Prophets Douwd or the Organians that, whilst the Q may or may not win, they would suffer a lot of casualties in the process" is simply made with insufficient evidence — since no episode ever comes close to pitting such forces against each other, there's no basis for making such a proclamation. Thinking of such powerful, enigmatic and inscrutable beings in terms of "who would win in a fight?" like two random superheroes is simply not accepting the premise for what it is.... that these are enigmatic and inscrutable beings, beyond conventional comprehension.
      • Ah, but one episode does have Q angrily chastising his son not to provoke the Borg, and seeming quite sincere when he does it. Apparently not needlessly poking the Collective is one of the few rules he has. (And before someone brings up the fact that he did that in his second appearance: no he didn't. He didn't "provoke" the Borg, he just exposed the Enterprise to them, something that was going to happen very soon anyway, considering the Borg had already made ventures into the Neutral Zone.) But if Q leaves someone the fsk alone, you can bet he's got a good reason for it.
      • It's a giant leap from "don't provoke the Borg" to "Don't provoke the Borg because this might have directly negative consequences for the Collective," rather than it simply being poor form. After all — Q certainly had it within his power to stop humanity from existing by manipulating space-time. It should be a cinch to do the same with the Borg, just by preventing the circumstances of their origins.
      • For me it was pretty clear that what Q meant was: Do not provoke the Borg [because they can cause a massive massacre and engulf the entire Galaxy destroying all civilizations in it, except us] and not Do not provoke the Borg [because we are afraid of them]. It is clear that the Borg cannot do anything to the Q, but they are the second most powerful life form in the Galaxy. It will be the equivalent of having a garden with all sorts of insects and poking at the anthill of Brazilian fire ants.
      • Building on the above: we also know that the Q police their own (as in "Deja Q") — perhaps messing with the Borg is just the kind of thing that can bring about consequences, not from the Borg, but from other Q.

     Q, Jerkass Guardian of Humanity 

  • In "Q Who", Q did the Federation a back-handed favor. According to that episode, "Q Who" was the first contact with the Borg. However, it later turned out that the NX-01 Enterprise (Episode, "Regeneration") had met the Borg more than a century earlier, and even managed to signal to the Borg of that time about Earth's location. Captain Archer notes that it will take about 200 years for the Borg to receive the signal, or about the time of "The Best of Both Worlds". Q's little trick was to let the Federation know about the Borg before the invasion, giving them some time to prepare. Picard said as much at the end of "Q Who", not knowing that he had just met up with a Borg cube that was already on its way to slurp the Federation down like a milkshake. Or maybe Q was trying to protect Picard, knowing that without some forewarning, nobody on the Enterprise-D would be able to rescue the Captain.
    • Or maybe there is a connection between the outposts that disappeared during the episode the Neutral Zone and the Borg, like they mention in this episode.
    • It's pretty thin. Remember, Earth at the time is a planet of little consequence, whose biggest achievement to date is building a starship capable of warp 5. Of all the civilizations in the galaxy, why should the Borg look at this one that's far away from the region of space they control and decide, "We need to assimilate them now"? There are a couple other reasons they might already have been on their way. One is the signal the Borg tried to send to their brethren in the past during the events of Star Trek: First Contact. They might have succeeded, but it leaves open the question of why it took them three centuries to show up after that. Also, remember that the Hansens were assimilated along with whatever they knew about the Federation eighteen years before Seven of Nine was liberated from the collective, about nine years before the Enterprise first encountered the Borg.
    • The Borg that sent the signal back in Archer's time were the same Borg who were in Star Trek: First Contact. They knew the potential of Earth and humans. The Borg from the movie traveled back to post-WWIII before warp drive was even invented to assimilate Earth. They clearly found us interesting regardless of our tech level.
    • Could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Borg had scouted the Federation/Romulan Neutral Zone, making off with entire outposts and presumably assimilating both people and tech. They may have chewed on that and, based on the "inferior" rating applied to humans, decided humanity/Starfleet wasn't worth the trouble. Then a cube runs into the Q-propelled Enterprise, rather distant from Federation territory. Humans look tastier based on their warp capability - how efficient is Starfleet's warp drive? The Borg scan the ship, access the computer, sample the crew, and try to run down the Enterprise to figure out how they accomplished this marvel - if the Borg weren't specifically interested, they would have just ignored the Enterprise. The nail in the coffin, however, comes when they pursue the Enterprise - threatening the ship to provoke it to demonstrate its capabilities, and Q spins the Enterprise out of range. Borg are now VERY interested, they want whatever engine the Enterprise has which apparently defies analysis - the computer wouldn't have any record and the warp core is unremarkable. Humanity is given a dose of cold water AND now has to actively deal with the Borg threat. Especially if the Q avoid the Borg, then the Borg may be unable to conceive of the idea that the Enterprise itself wasn't the engine.

Other

     Blockading open space with 23 ships 
  • In Redemption II, Picard leads a blockade against a Romulan convoy with 23 ships...in open space? Seriously? 23 ships is enough to blockade a point in open space? Why can't the Romulans just go around it? Their ships are invisible while cloaked, and being in space gives them the ability to travel in any direction. How much extra travel time would diverting their course to go around the 23-ship net add onto their trip? A few hours? Certainly they could spare that.
    • Nope, they couldn't.
    • They even mention in the episode that 23 ships is almost a laughable contribution, but apparently they were spaced far enough apart in a particular part of space that it made just enough distance.
    • The best handwave I can offer is that we are never given the range of how large an area the blockade is spread across or how far each ship's tachyon field encompasses. Even that still offers A LOT of room to maneuver around of course, but... It's SOMETHING.

    Here's a conundrum for you 
  • Keiran MacDuff has to be the world's worst villain. Never mind the fact that if the Satarrans had the ability to wipe the memories of the computer and crew (including Data) and insert one of their own among the crew, it makes you wonder why they needed the Enterprise at all. (Which Riker is kind enough to lampshade for us at the end). But MacDuff could have given himself any position aboard the ship. Why did he deliberately make himself first officer and not captain?! For that matter, what was stopping him from replacing the entire Enterprise crew with his fellow Satarrans?
    • Because he wouldn't have the first idea of how to *run* the ship. All he had time for prior to the scan was a basic idea of weapon complement and functionality and uploading his dossier into the computer, he would have no idea how the crew operated - which the memory wipe conveniently left behind in the crew. If he had tried to command the ship, Picard and the others would have quickly relieved him of command, attributing his behavior to an acute case of whatever wiped their minds - Captain's incapacitated, who's next on the chain of command? By being first officer, he could suggest and advise Picard, have complete access to the ship, act as liaison to the crew under the guise of reducing work for Picard - keeping the big man free to handle the BIG concerns, and delegate any actual job requirements to Riker, who did them anyways. It would give him time to familiarize himself with the crew and starship and, if necessary, incite a mutiny to get what he needed. Basically, he was the power behind the throne.
      • Great point, I'd never thought of that one before.
      • It's convenient that the first officer on TNG seems to have relatively few actual job duties.
      • That is pretty much the idea of any second-in-command position in any kind of field; they're there to take over if for whatever reason the person above them isn't there to perform those duties.
      • Riker has a lot of job duties, it's just that most of them besides leading away missions and acting as backup Captain don't come up a lot in the more memorable episodes (which are generally more memorable because they're action-packed). Most of his references to the paperwork-and-interviews aspects to his jobs are throwaway lines in the buildup or quiet parts of episodes so people tend not to remember them.
      • The XO is responsible for keeping the ship running smoothly, sweating the little details that are beneath the captain. He has a ton of shit to do besides waiting until he's needed for away missions or taking command.
      • Also, considering the various minor details that everyone remembered despite the amnesia, MacDuff probably reasoned that trying to explicitly take over Picard's role as captain would have raised too many subtle questions among the crew by the time they established the chain of command. As previously observed, Riker had relatively 'generic' duties, and MacDuff arguably bore a slight resemblance to Riker in his human guise; it may have just been easier for him to assume Riker's position in the command structure and be reasonably sure that he'd 'edited' the memories enough for everyone to misidentify him as Riker if they analysed everything more closely.
    • As for why he needed the Enterprise, maybe his race had powerful mind technologies, but not a lot of resources (so could only mind control a few enemies) and basically nothing in the way of conventional weapons to match their enemies.
    • The episode would make a lot more sense if MacDuff were not a Satarran at all, but a solo renegade mercenary from a more advanced species who was hired by the Satarrans. This would explain both his advanced technology and his limited resources. Unfortunately, that explanation doesn't appear on screen.
  • WM Ging here, but maybe it's as simple as the Satarrans' mind control technology not working on their enemy species (who's name escapes me for the moment) for whatever reason. As for having Satarrans take over the Enterprise and use it themselves, that would likely take weeks, months or even years of work studying it in order for their much more technologically primitive society than the Feds to not only run the ship, but not blow it up trying to. The Satarrans may not have had the time for it, either because they were on the verge of losing or because they realized that stealing the Federation's Flagship would have brought the full force of the Federation down on them pretty quickly.

    Spot oddities (Spottities?) 
  • Even if we ignore the obvious points of strangeness related to Data's feline friend (he/she switched genders in the seventh season, changed appearances from a longhair to a shorthair (yeah, the first cat is not explicitly identified as Spot)), certain other questions nag about her (let's go with "her") pregnancy. In turn:
    • Data does not know who the father is, but plans to run a DNA analysis of the kittens once they're born. With all of the fancy technology at his disposal, can this really not be done in utero?
      • Possibly, but it may be a process that takes longer and is more intensive than he wants to get into. He's got a lot of projects he works on, kitten paternity might have low priority. And even if it's a 0.1% chance higher that the kittens could be hurt by testing in utero, why take the chance when it can be done so easily once they're born? It's not like Spot needs to get a child support payment lawsuit rolling as fast as possible.
      • The tests may not be equally easy to use. A DNA test on a sample from a kitten probably only requires a standard tricorder with the right software, since a test like that is within the normal parameters for an Away Team. An in utero paternity test would probably require sickbay, and Dr. Crusher might not take kindly to Data recalibrating her obstetric scanners for Felis catus just to satisfy his curiosity.
      • It probably wouldn't be done in sickbay. Between Enterprise's mission of exploring strange new worlds (including, presumably, their fauna), the semi-canonical Cetacean Ops, and the pets belonging to other crew members, Enterprise probably has at least one veterinarian on board. Failing that, though, Data probably has some sway in the exobiology lab, which would be equipped to study lifeforms in utero. Best guess wold probably be an inherent risk to the feti, or that Data would consider it a misuse of ship's resources.
    • The idea that Spot can regularly get out of Data's quarters without his knowledge really tests suspension of disbelief. My cat has never gotten out of my apartment once, and I don't live on a starship.
      • Expanded Universe says it's not just Spot that can do this, but all cats. And your apartment probably doesn't have an automatic opening door, which is the running theory on how cats manage to get out... they've figured out some way of jumping, pressing, or moving that tricks the door into thinking a person is there wanting to go out.
      • Wow, so all cats on the flagship of the Federation can exit their quarters more or less at will and then meet up for furtive mating rituals multiple times (Data says Spot has gotten out on "several" occasions), and that's supposed to make things better! Security aboard the Enterprise has never been too impressive, but this is a new low! Another indication of how an old-fashioned lock and key works better than what they have in the 24th century!
      • Most of the public spaces aboard Enterprise are child-safe by design. Cat-safe isn't that much further a stretch, what with all the automatic doors and smoothly paneled surfaces and such. There's no overriding reason, aside from convenience and decorum, why every cat aboard should not have an implanted RFID chip which the computer can track, and a corresponding list of permissible places. Maybe Spot doesn't have to open the door to Data's quarters, because Data's told the computer to open the door for her if she wants to come in or go out. We see a variety of corridor lounges in the early seasons, and it's reasonable to assume they still exist despite not being shown as often later on. Maybe cats like to use them every bit as much as people do. If Jonesy in Alien could deal with a space tractor-trailer and a deadly xenomorph, why shouldn't Spot and her fellows be able to cope with a space battleship-slash-luxury resort?
      • How many Negative Space Wedgies has the Enterprise endured? At least a couple of them have involved a door, floor, or bulkhead phasing out of reality and somebody falling through. The ship's computer has had to be rebooted a few times, and any one of them could have messed with the motion sensors on the doors.
      • Data says, in this episode, "Spot has escaped from my quarters on several occasions" — "escaped." He does not let her leave the quarters on her own.
      • Jonesy probably acts as a mouser on the Nostromo, and besides, it's more like a cat wandering a warehouse than a cat in a crowded office building. I'd just love to see a scene where an Enterprise crew member is rushing to a key post during a ship wide crisis... only to trip over one of the cats that apparently wander the halls with impunity.
      • Knowing cats is very likely that they figure how to jump, stretch or in general move in such a way to trick the computer into thinking is a humanoid form that needs to go out. Of course this can be fix by ordering the computer not to open the door for any reason unless a direct verbal command from the owner of the room comes from, but this would required owners of the room to constantly be ordering the computer to open the door and in the Star Trek universe seems to be such an habit to just walk around and expect the door to open by themselves that probably most cat owners are not willing to do it. That or maybe is impossible for security reasons to order the computer not to open a door unless commanded by the room's owner (why would someones not want a visitor to be able to get out as he/she pleases unless something murky is in place? think for example what if you invite a woman to your room, why won't you want her to be able to leave whenever she pleases?). In fact, IIRC we have even seen on screen that when someone is imprisoned in their rooms and not the brig two guards are positioned in the doors normally. Probably the security chief can order whether the computer to not open the door unless comanded or create a force field on the door but that's kind of too hard just to keep a cat inside, and as mentioned before is not like is a big deal either.
    • Data did not spay his cat. Bob Barker would not approve.
      • I'm sure Data is heartbroken at the disapproval of his centuries-dead idol Bob Barker. But also he may have intended to actually breed Spot at some point, so why spay her? It's just that she took matters into her own... paws.
      • Data does like the idea of procreation and presumably doesn't want to limit or dictate Spot's life choices when it comes to having children. If it was season one there would probably be a whole speech about how humanity has evolved past the ancient barbarism of *checks notes* neutering animals.
    • He says there are twelve male cats on the board, implying that any one of them may be the father. So does he mean that there are twelve un-neutered cats on the Enterprise? Why on earth? Is somebody running a kitty mill?
    • It seems likely that the other cats on board are simply pets for other crew members. If they can bring kids, why not cats? As for Spot changing gender, well...Maybe Data's nickname used to be Lennie?
      • The fact of there being other cats on-board is no mystery; the fact of them being unfixed and potentially interacting, though...
      • It's very likely there are fixed cats, just twelve aren't, some owners opt to not fix their pets for various reasons and some may have been adopted while on-board the Enterprise, I don't know about you, but I don't imagine the Enterprise has an on-board Veterinarian who could do such procedures and it would be unlikely the crew who have male cats would go out of their way to find a Vet when they land.
      • They do. She's called Dr. Crusher. We see Crusher at one point doing medical checks on Spot as she would anyone else on board. And besides, in the world of 24th century medicine, would caring for a cat really be that much different and/or harder than dealing with any of the myriad of humanoid and sometimes non-humanoid aliens the Enterprise runs into each week?
      • Or most people just assume that their pets can't really get out of their quarters, being unaware of cats' apparently unique ability to work the doors, so they don't bother. Or they don't figure that an extra few kittens or whatnot are really all that big of a deal in a post-scarcity society.
      • Possibly by the 24th century dogs and cats don't need to be spayed or neutered - there might be a simple and reversible way of preventing them breeding until a more convenient time. Data might well be aware that there are twelve male cats aboard; there's no reason he should know which of them are currently capable of reproducing at that particular moment.
      • If you thought the tribble infestation was bad, wait until they're mobile and even more cute...

     "Darmok": Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk? 
  • How exactly is the Tamarian language supposed to work? Okay, so they express everything through metaphor and historical allusion, and the universal translator can't understand it because it lacks the historical context to parse the allusion. Good so far. Except that they obviously have a syntax capable of expressing things without allusion, because they have words like "and," "at," etc. (Or whatever words or syntax they're using, which the UT is translating only partially, leaving the proper nouns intact.) How do they teach history to children so that the children will understand the allusions, and why don't they speak to Picard in the same way as soon as it becomes clear he's having trouble understanding them? If I said to you, "Hey, we're like Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk," and you gave me a blank look, I'd say, "Oh, they were two enemies who became friends a long time ago." Why can't they do that with Picard? And at the end of the episode, it's decided that "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel" will be the new "word" in their language for "successful first contact" or something, right? But when that shipfull of Tamarians goes home, how do they explain what this new word means to everyone else when everyone else doesn't know what went down? It's frustratingly circular.
    • Good, good question. I'll hazard a guess that the Tamarians, amongst themselves, have some kind of inefficient "memory transfer", and that their entire oral language is just a faster 'shorthand' that uses concepts already transferred much earlier through telepathy, or pheromones, or sharing nerve cells, or whatever.
    • SF Debris (yes him again) bent over backwards in an attempt to explain this; ranging from limited telepathy, to the more simpler, their written language is more straight forward. Of course that just raises the question as to why they didn't just send Starfleet a letter. Link.
    • It seems amazing that such a language could ever evolve. Some things just need to happen in a certain way in real life and one of those is language that not only has a common frame of reference but one that allows the distribution of thoughts and ideas in an efficient and timely way. Imagine pre-internet an American trying to understand what a Japanese man means by Emperor Euraku at Mimana. In any normal language it would take five seconds to explain that it was a rebellion on the Korean peninsula in 463. Using the Tamarian way however it would take an unfeasibly long time to try and find some kind of reference that one could draw from. And that's before we get into things like: what weapons were used? How long did it last? How many deaths were there? What was the infrastructure like? What was the medical care like? Were there any unforeseen complications? what were the lasting implications of the conflict? etc. This is perhaps the most inefficient way to communicate imaginable and even with some kind of telepathic link or simpler written language (none of which is even remotely hinted at) it is ridiculous that a warp capable species couldn't adapt their way of speaking to meet the needs of the rest of the galaxy.
    • Actually something similar happens in Real Life; the Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche Indians in Chile; its grammar is very alien and one single word can only be translated as entire phrases in English or Spanish, and those phrases can only be an approximate because the language is heavily influenced by the Mapuche lore and mythology. Or take the piraha tribe in Amazonia for example, they have no math, they can’t count more than three, the concept is to foreign for them because they instead of numbers only have words for “many” and “few”. They also have no names for colors, only words for “dark” and “light”, this has make very difficult for them to learn other languages. So the TNG example may be too exaggerated but is clearly not at all implausible, we have similar situations in real life.
    • I can think of two possibilities: the Tamarians have some sort of ancestral memory that makes it easier to quickly gather this bank of metaphors, or that already contains this bank; or, the Tamarians have a culture and lifestyle much more oriented towards literature, theatre, music, etc. so that children learn basic concepts early on by personally seeing or immersing themselves in the cultural references they use to communicate.
    • Or there could be a biological reason. Perhaps Tamarians have a larval stage that looks, and sounds, entirely different from the adults. The larvae, by virtue of having incompatible mouth structures, would speak a completely separate dialect that doesn't depend on historical analogies and Shout-Out usage to convey information. During their larval stage, they would speak one language among themselves and learn the basics of their culture's heritage from older larvae, while listening to adult Tamarians using words they can't, themselves, replicate. Eventually they'd be fully versed in the meanings of adult-speech analogies, because the near-adults would explain the references. By the time they pupate (or whatever) and emerge as mature adults - complete with the right kind of mouths to speak words like "Darmok" - they'll have already learned their parents' language, even if they need a few weeks' practice with unfamiliar lips and tongues to pronounce it.
    • How such a language develops and endures is one problem, how it even starts is a completely different one. In order to get "Darmok and Jelad on the Ocean," you first need to invent those five individual words. All of their words have to have a beginning in order to tell the original story from which the phrase is derived. If our entire verbal language was reciting Shakespeare sonnets, our old friend Will still needed to figure out how to speak, read, and write English himself before stringing these words together into a complete different set of sentences and contexts from what he learned in school which we'd now be using as our primary language. Did the Tamarian captain's parents teach him his name by repeating a morality tale to him as a toddler over and over and somehow he picked the right individual word from it that was his name?
  • One theory put forward is that their language is merely spouting memes to get their point across.
    • A recent Doctor Who episode implies the human race's language gets reduced to emojis.

     Picard and Dathon, in danger, needlessly 
  • 'Darmok' is a beautiful story. One thing has always been confusing though: The Tamarians put their captain and Picard together in the "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" cooperation situation intentionally, where they were both in danger of being killed by the Beast, just in the hopes of being able to communicate. Is this how they normally say hi to new people, by putting them in mortal danger? How do the Tamarians not come off as [Jerkass]es here? Or was the whole thing just a training simulator and the Beast a hologram? And even if it was, how would Picard and the Enterprise crew know this in the end? By all rights, they should be royally pissed that they put their captain in harm's way (or appeared to) just to try to make friends. Could they not have beamed them into a situation where they'd have to work together to solve a non-lethal problem?
    • They surely could have, but the fact that they didn't seems significant. The Tamarians' motivations are not fully knowable, but we can guess that, from their perspective, the tests needs to be one of life and death to be meaningful. These stories from their history that structure their language are more than just stories to them: they need to be reenacted. In a sense, it's not so different from "Liaisons," in which the aliens also wreck havoc on Picard because of a radically different sense of what constitutes a fair test.
    • Necessity is the mother of invention. When you're on a time limit it tends to speed things up.
    • It is mentioned that there had been several failed attempts at communication between the Federation and the Tamarians. The Tamarian captain and first officer seem to be having an argument over the captain's suggestion of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Presumably, the captain was frustrated at the inability to make proper contact, and decided to take drastic measures to force communication. His first officer was skeptical, but ultimately follows the wishes and ensures the captain's plan follows through. It was an act of desperation and frustration, not standard handshake procedure.
      • The Tamarian captain risked his life in order to get to that moment of necessity. By the time Data and Troi figured out that two words in that sentence came from the same planet, Picard was trading supplies and stories with the Tamarian.

     The "ancestors" of humanoid life 
  • In the season 6 episode "The Chase" the woman speaking says that they made the program using DNA so that their species would be remembered,... but she made no mention of what her species was called. It would be a hell of a lot easier to remember them if you knew how to refer to them.
    • I should think the first humanoid species in the galaxy should be memorable no matter what. Let's call them "the Firstborn" in homage to Arthur C. Clarke.
    • There's an annoyng tendency to name everything, in a similar way how the EU named the cool sounding Species 8742 "the Undine", despite making no sense that a species without a mouth as we understand it could grasp the pronunciation of the words "un-di-ne". The name Species 8742 give to themselves is impossible to translate (other shows have the same problem, how do people in Babylon 5 know the pak’ma’ra call themselves like that if they have no way to pronounce it?). The same applies here. Do they had a specific name for themselves? Considering that they were the only sentient beings probably not. Is their name even pronounceable? How do they know that their future descendants would have mouths that allow them to pronounce such name? What if were the Gorn or the Breen who have Starfish Languages the ones that found them? (and yes, I assume the Gorn and the Breen are also descendants as they are humanoids, I assume only some species like the Tholians and of course the extradimensional Species 8742 are not their descendants).

     The Starfleet skirt 
  • What is the in-universe reason as to why we never see any guys in dresses after season 1? The very existence of that uniform skirt would imply that there is no longer any social stigma towards it and yet no man ever wears one in a casual off-duty situation ever again. The rush by the producers to lose a piece of clothing that looks stupid to our twentieth century eyes has created a plot hole; and thinking about it, if the taboo around dresses has vanished, then logically male make-up should no longer be that controversial either.
    • None was ever given. Much like the fact that Deanna initially wore this same outfit in "Encounter At Farpoint", complete with the blue coloration indicating that she was a Science/Medical officer and collar pips indicating her rank, only to switch to Future Spandex civilian clothes without anyone commenting on the change. Obviously, the meta reasons were that the sensibilities of the late-1980's were not receptive men wearing "skirts" (although "kilts" are increasingly popular circa 2015), while Deanna was Ms. Fanservice for the show and they wanted her in clothes that showcased her buxom body better than the uniforms did, skirt or no skirt. You will notice that females in general also abandoned the skirt, and subsequently wore the same unisex jumpsuit as male characters. This is actually Hilarious in Hindsight, because a mere two episodes later in "The Naked Now", Tasha Yar (affected by the polywater) remarked that Deanna always wore "such beautiful clothes off-duty", without noting that Deanna was dressing like an aerobics instructor while on-duty! The Starfleet Skirt, for both genders, just seemed to quietly get phased out.
    • It was not a skirt, just a ceremonial/dress uniform coat, somewhat similar to the Victorian-era frock coat or Indian sherwani (only shorter). (Although it did look a bit like skirt, and The Other Wiki even calls it "robe-like coat".) They were occasionally seen later during the series, during some ceremonial occasions (e.g. Chief O'Brien's wedding ceremony), and appeared even in some DS9 and Voyager episodes.
      • Oops, sorry - my mistake. There really was something like unisex-minidress (i.e. worn without trousers) in early episodes of the season one.
      • Troi wasn't the only one to wear the skirt uniform in "Encounter at Farpoint". In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit right at the end of the episode, you'll see Yar at tactical, in one. I can see why she never used it again, wearing a skirt doesn't exactly scream "authoritative security chief who will shoot you if you misbehave" does it?
      • The point still remains, why couldn't guys wear dresses when out of uniform? I guess it was a bridge too far in the late '80s/early '90s.
    • The Doylist answer is that the "skant," along with most early TNG costumes, looked horrible and was thrown away as soon as it was realized how bad it looked. Watsonian? Not sure, but could have been a new regulation coming down that, you know, upon reflection, skirts on active duty personnel on a quasi-military ship-of-the-potential-line is probably not the best idea.

     The J'naii and gender 
  • Okay, granted, "The Outcast" is widely recognized as a Very Special Episode that ended up with a Broken Aesop. But the Aesop stuff aside, there are unanswered questions about the J'naii society, and how their discriminatory attitudes even work. Among humans, there are two genders (and a small minority of intersex individuals). Concepts like "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are thus defined in terms of anatomical biology. The genders of the participants in a romantic and/or sexual relationship defining whether or not some cultural transgression has taken place.
    • The J'naii are all supposedly the same gender physically, with Bizarre Alien Reproduction in which both participants effectively perform identical roles in the sexual act. This much makes sense, since if they all have the same anatomy, including reproductive organs, then there can be no asymmetry to the sexual act.
    • However, there is apparently a sub-culture among the J'naii who identify as having a gender along the male/female paradigm followed by many other humanoid species. This is an apparent metaphor for homosexuality, as opposed to transgenderism, inasmuch as these J'naii, such as Soren, do not apparently have any anatomical differences that would have been noticed by others long before they reached adulthood. Nor does Soren express an explicit desire to have any kind of surgical or genetic modification in order to give "her" a gender comparable to a human, although she does express interest in Riker and wonders if their anatomy would be sexually-compatible.
    • So, how is this sub-culture even identified in J'naii society? Absent anatomical differences, how would anyone even know that a J'naii couple consists of one individual that self-identifies as female and another as male? In humans this determination is made based on anatomy. Unless a J'naii were some kind of evolutionary throwback that had physical gender traits there would be no way to tell them apart from any other J'naii, and they could just as easily claim that their relationship is based on "shared interests" as much as anything else.
    • Just to make all of this even more complicated, many alien species in Star Trek from the TNG era onward often embrace unisex fashion. Romulans and Cardassians are both good examples where their species has two genders, but both genders seem to wear very similar attire and have similar hairstyles. Humans and Human Aliens are far more prone to follow present-day real world expectations of significant gender differences in appearance. Otherwise, a female Romulan hasn't looked much different from a male one since the "The Enterprise Incident"! So in this regard the J'naii simply seem to be sharing a trend in personal appearance that some species that do have gender also follow as well.
    • Hence Soren's entire predicament becomes rather perplexing. "She" does not seem to be seeking gender assignment surgery. Nor does "she" appear to want to raid Troi's wardrobe. Thus, her interest in Riker, and the J'naii's revulsion to it, could just as easily be chalked up to Fantastic Racism as to discrimination based on sexuality. Other than a self-identification as a "female", Soren doesn't appear to want to be stereotypically "feminine" as humans would define it. And since the J'naii are all one gender anatomically how exactly would one define an "alternative sexuality" if everyone has the same reproductive organs?
    • Perhaps the J'naii episode is easier to understand if you look at it as a moral on individuality versus collectivism rather than one involving gender. The J'naii were so eager to have a society lacking any and all forms of discrimination that they did away even with gender... not biological sex, but gender. Thus yes, some J'naii could possibly be physically male and physically female, but are socially engineered to refuse to acknowledge themselves as actually different from other J'naii, because different is bad, we all have to be the same. Thus it has nothing to do with Soren's gender, really, so much as her desire to express an aspect of her individuality (the fact that she is female) that has caused the reaction.
    • Just to add to the above, this society did once have two sexes. The general social concept now is that it's "primitive". I definitely think this is more representative to transgenderism than homosexuality. As said above, this was about individuality. In this case, she identified as female. Of course, to the audience you have a character played by a woman with a female identity and it's naturally easy to accept that she should be allowed to identify herself as a woman. Her society however believes that she should identify herself as the neither male/neither female biological sex which they see her as being (and which biologically she is). It's just like how any transgender person can look to those around them as one sex (which physically they are) but have a different gender identity. Even if they don't seek to change how they dress or to have surgery, they may just want to be able to openly acknowledge who they are.

     Another Gender Issue 
  • In "The Perfect Mate", if Kamala becomes the fulfillment of the fantasy of any man she's around, what happens if she's in the company of a gay guy, does she turn into a man?
    • Maybe she becomes the perfect "fag hag."
      • In all honesty, probably this. If she becomes the ideal female for any man she's with, with a gay man she'd probably become the ideal female friend, with no threat of her ever pressuring him sexually or falling in love with him.
    • Most empathic metamorphs are male, with female ones being very rare (and valuable). Make of that what you will...
      • One would imagine they'd have checked his gender preference first. Anyway, IIRC, there's no physical transformation involved, she just takes on the personality the guy most wants.
    • Presumably a gay or asexual man could still have an ideal concept of a woman — it would just be one that isn't sexual. If the guy has very conservative ideas about gender roles, perhaps she would become very fulfilled by domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning.
      • Or she'd become the image of the perfect fantasy Mom, or an idealized daughter, sister, or grandmother. Sex isn't the only basis for someone being the ideal female to love and be loved by, after all.
      • This has a human parallel in Geisha- The primary concept is that the geisha takes on the role of a non-specific archetypical female figure for a client. Sex appeal or Courtly Love-style pseudo-romance can be a secondary facet of the experience, depending on both client and geisha, but the core concept is that the geisha is a living archetype who can be anything from a refined hostess, to an elegant performer, to a patient and supportive listener, to a witty and competent opponent for a game of skill, as the situation requires.

     Armus (Or, Why You Should Dispose Of Your Evil Black Slime Properly) 
  • In "Skin Of Evil," the villain-of-the-week, Armus, is a by-product of a species of "dazzling, perfect beings" cleansing themselves of all that's "evil." Fine, whatever. Once shed of him, they pretty much dump him on some remote planet to spend eternity in isolation. Baffling though, these "perfect beings" don't even bother to take the most basic measures to insure no innocent people will blunder across him and end up at his mercy. Even if we assume they didn't want to get their hands dirty destroying him (which probably would've been the best thing for all concerned), they should've at least had the decency to warn everyone else in the galaxy to steer clear of that star system. Hell, It's Captain Picard and the Federation who finally do what the "perfect ones" should've done in the first place and put the planet under quarantine; after a valued member of the Enterprise crew is killed by this oil slick with an attitude.
    • Is it said how long has been since he was left there? No technology can survive millions of years, even the Federation's beacon warning other ships of the danger on the planet will someday be gone. On the other hand the source that the beings where perfect was Armus itself which can be a Unreliable Narrator, we as an audience don't really know what happened, Armus can be just lying or maybe is crazy at that point.
      • I never said anything about the "perfect ones" relying solely on beacons and buoys, anyone with any sense would tell you that's insufficient. I said they should've done everything in their power to warn others to stay away from that planet; have their ambassadors pass that information on to as many people as would listen. At least if someone willfully ignores the warning, then that's on them. Plus, it also would've been better for all concern that they euthanize Armus rather than just leave him lying around at the ass-end of space. Hell, I even got the impression that Armus himself wishes they had just killed him and got it over with.
      • I might be wrong cause I saw the episode long ago, but IIRC there's no indication of how long time passed and judging by the state of the planet (with almost no remains of civilization) I personally was under the impression that the perfect ones abandoned the planet millions of years in the past, so, again, any warning or diplomatic endeavor was lost.
    • Maybe they truly ascended to a higher plane of being and left all such concerns behind (so much the worse for everyone else).
    • If they ascended millions of years in the past, as appears to be the case, that part of the galaxy may not have had so many spacefaring civilizations as it does in the late-24th Century. Many of those that did exist were likewise ascending (e.g. the Organians, the Metrons, etc.) and in no danger from Armus. The planet was not particularly desirable real estate, so they may have assumed that nobody would ever bother with it.

     Angel One 
  • In Angel One we are introduced to a race of aliens who are basically identical to humans with the exception of the fact that the females are larger and more aggressive than the males and thus we have a matriarchy instead of the patriarchy that (YMMV) has existed throughout our history. But realistically you would have to change a lot more than just physical strength to bring about such a change. Even today, that are countries with maternal mortality rates of 1,000 deaths for every 100,000 live births. That's about a 1% chance of dying each birth. That figure would skyrocket if women lived the same kind of rough and violent lives that men had to endure for for the majority of history - you certainly couldn't fight an ancient-style battle with the statistical levels of dismemberment, disease and inadequate food, water and shelter and remain at peak childbearing health. And even if we ignore the stats and say that the Angel One women have safer pregnancies than humans, we run into a second problem as for pretty much the entirety of human existence our lives were so nasty, violent, brutish and short that we would have risked extinction if women didn't spend a great deal of their adult lives doing nothing but being pregnant. Unless you are going to go the Mister Seahorse route (which would mean that Riker was about to have the shock of his life when he bedded Beata as they couldn't possibly have similar genitals), Angel One would have had to be an absolute paradise free of armed conflict and dangerous animals when their people first evolved to have had a world where its men nested and its pregnant women went out hunting and fought with other tribes (because that ultimately is the most logical reason for the strength difference between men and women). In my opinion, such a premise actually sounds as if it would have led to an equal society not an oppressive one, with the otherwise physically stronger women being routinely forced to have the weaker men take on their responsibilities and look after them whilst in this far more vulnerable state.
    • Your interpretation is possible of one way a society with stronger women could developed. The issue is that, as you point out, by necessity the episode doesn't work with an "exact swap" between the sexes as was proposed unless you do go the Mister Seahorse route. There are species on Earth where the female is physically stronger (the angler fish being the classic example) but for it to make evolutionary sense the idea of the sex which carries the children being vulnerable for the amount of time that human women are while pregnant wouldn't be sensible if their mate was much weaker and unable to act as a protector, suggesting that some Bizarre Alien Biology could be in play (maybe they have babies much quicker than humans or maybe other women of their species have a natural compulsion to protect pregnant women). In either case, there are practical possibilities which may simply not have been touched on in the episode which could make it work for the women to be the dominant gender. I think the whole idea of the episode was that it was supposed to have a pro-feminism message by reversing the gender roles in this society, exaggerating them somewhat and then arguing that having the masculine sex (in this case actually the women) dominating the feminine sex (in this case actually the men) was wrong (intentionally reversing the roles so that people who might not see an issue if it were a society of men dominating women question it). Unfortunately I think a lot of people take it the other way as having an antifeminist message because they think the women represent feminist groups (I read somewhere that the writers later tried to argue this episode was about apartheid but this seemed suspiciously to have been done after it was poorly received). In either case, by trying to make the parallel more "exact" they couldn't exactly go too much into the detail around ways that the characters' biology would need to be different to humans.
    • This is a very interesting discussion. It's certainly not the case that matriarchies are a priori impossible (though the historical record of them is scant, to be certain); they would require substantial social factors to counterbalance the biological factors that make them unlikely. "Angel One" basically just gives us a patriarchy with the p scratched off and replaced with an m, rather than doing the work of imagining what a matriarchy might actually be like. In other word, it's poor science fiction (as well as just poor in general...).
    • It should also be noted that, while they are Human Aliens, they are obviously not identical to Humans given their inverted sexual dimorphism. They may have faced different evolutionary pressures than Humans on Earth. Not all animal species operate under the model of the male as the protector and provider. For example, despite their regal appearance, male lions are generally very lazy and lionesses do more than males to provide for and protect their young (including from males that will kill the young of other males). Perhaps the females of Angel One evolved to be larger and stronger because their males were not good providers or protectors?
    • But on that point, for all that is terrible about "Angel One," I've never fully understood the antipathy towards Riker's decision to don indigenous garb to meet with Beata. After all, it's clearly not protocol, but a good-faith decision he makes because he thinks it will help with the negotiations (or help him get laid, I guess, but that's another issue). The fact that the outfit is dopey to our eyes and to those of his female colleagues is sort of immaterial if it helps him in his job.
    • Because it was fairly blatant that his main goal was to get laid, as it was already established that any serious diplomacy would have be female-led. Since the women of Angel One openly discriminate against males, especially their own, dressing up like a native male actually lowers Riker's social status. Plus, there are just the negative implications of conducting "diplomacy" by sex and what expectations this could place on other officers. If you flipped the gender roles back again, would it really be seen as appropriate for Troi or Yar to seduce a male head of government in the name of "diplomacy"? Especially if they had to wear sexy (or sexier in Deanna's case) outfits?
      • It is hardly unprecedented in fiction for a female character to foreground her sexuality to pursue her goals; is it something that you are prepared to wholeheartedly label as "inappropriate"? But to return to the main subject, Riker's choice of apparel, one could also construe it as a sort of power play: that he can voluntarily lower his status, as you put it, but retain his authority. Recall that Beata assessed a male in a position of power as a sort of intriguing novelty. Riker is trying to play that to his advantage. Best choice? Maybe not, but it's scarcely the silliest thing in this episode.
      • What happens in other fiction is irrelevant to the discussion, all that matters is what is true to THIS universe. And in this universe that is not what Federation officers do. Note how Seven and Troi despite wearing catsuits with cleavage and padded chests never get sexually harassed? They never once think to themselves huh, maybe I will make him uncomfortable to get what I want. It does not happen because in the world of Star Trek humans are meant to have evolved past worrying about being groped by a lecherous guy or having to get your boobs out to get ahead. All that matters is your brains and words. That is one of the reasons why whenever anyone tries to darken up Star Trek it is always met with such resistance because this utopian ideal is a source of great hope for many and even more so in the wake of events such as Harvey Weinstein showing us just how far from this ideal we are in real life.
      • I'd like to draw your attention to "Unification," in which Riker appoints Troi (with her approval) to work with the Zakdorn shipyard bureaucrat in hopes that it will move the process along. He says, "He probably figures that we don't get to see a lot of handsome women out this way and someone like you might get a little more cooperation from me. He's probably right." A minor example, perhaps, but it shows that even in the 24th century, even in Starfleet, a woman like Troi is at least somewhat prepared to leverage her sex appeal to grease the wheels a little. And if you honestly think characters don't notice when people are attractive of Star Trek, then I most seriously wonder what show you've been watching.
      • Your Troi example is a good one, but I think you misunderstood what I wrote. Its not that people don't notice sexy women, because they obviously do, its that it no longer matters. You wouldn't get a Harvey Weinstein in Starfleet because men no longer act like that. You wouldn't get someone blaming what she was wearing after a rape because it no longer matters. Put it this way: if a woman turned up for work in Seven's catsuit in real life, you think that she could go a day without a single dodgy comment or risking a single grope? Its not happening. There is a question on the Voyager headscratchers as to why she wears that outfit; well, that is one reason. It's because she can.
      • But by your logic, wouldn't the ploy with the Zakdornian not work? Getting a bit off track here, because the connection to "Angel One" feels scant. I would tend to agree with your points about sexual conduct in Starfleet, but at issue here is Starfleet officers dealing with people external to Starfleet.
      • How would those high standards of gender equality and security hold up if Riker got kudos for a diplomatic success achieved by wearing a sexy outfit and banging a planetary head of government? How would that impact other Starfleet officers, of any gender, who maybe don't feel like prostituting themselves to complete strangers for a diplomatic win? Would Riker have adopted the same tactics if Beata were elderly, or if the society in question had a male leader? It really comes across mostly as Beata being a hot, tall, fit, blonde woman and Riker using "diplomacy" as an excuse to get some score.
      • I think it's pretty self-evident that Riker would not unleash the seduction tactic on a woman who did not look like Beata, and that it's partially about his pleasure. Does that invalidate the tactic entirely? I'm not sure I follow why "Riker does this" should translate to "other officers would be compelled to do it," because the episode makes the point that dressing in the outfit is his own initiative.
      • Consider the episode "Man of the People", where an alien diplomat's success is based on the fact the he empathically dumps his negative emotions into various women. He justified it on the grounds that it made him a more effective diplomat and he had many successes as a direct result of it. But does that make it something that others with the necessary psychic ability should also do? Would it be moral or ethical? Or was he self-serving because it advanced his personal career success and others of his people would never consider doing it, even for the same reasons?
      • I'm pretty sure "Man of the People" does not even particularly float the idea that he's anything but completely unethical and sociopathic. Not sure I see the link to the matter at hand, honestly. Could you spell it out more clearly?

     Benzite priorities 
  • In "A Matter of Honor," when the crew discover the substance eating the hull, Mendon explains that he noticed it ages ago when he ran a scan on the Klingon ship. When questioned why he didn't alert them, he explains that among the Benzite, no-one brings a problem to their superiors unless they have done a full analysis and can offer a solution. Which is fine, cultural differences and all, but... what does a Benzite do if they've discovered an unknown problem with the warp-core that will cause it to explode? Not bother to mention it until the thing detonates right in their face? How did this race ever manage to get into survive to become a space-faring species without being destroyed by some massive industrial accident?!
    • Would it be too outlandish to suspect that perhaps in the 23rd Century, the Klingons may have had some Benzite slaves working at Praxis...
    • Possibly Mendon was very slightly exaggerating, and Benzites are willing to forgo a full analysis and finding a solution if the problem seems immediate and terminal, they just have exaggerated standards for 'immediate' and 'terminal' in space-faring situations. There is also that they apparently can explain what they've found before the full analysis and solution if asked, Benzite superiors might also have the cultural difference of often asking the people under them if they've found anything at no prompting at all.
    • Presumably, in a situation where inevitable disaster is imminent, informing one's superiors and evacuating the ship is the proper and obvious solution to be offered. The Benzite in "A Matter Of Honor" presumably thought the potential trouble wasn't immediate enough for that.

    "Could we have been more destructive than utter annihilation?" 
  • So in "The Masterpiece Society", the Enterprise saves a human colony from a stellar core fragment — a colony that's been sealed off from the rest of the galaxy for 200 years and inhabited by people whose lives and futures have been predetermined. Well, once the crisis has been averted, several of the inhabitants decide that they don't want to stay cooped up in the biosphere and leave on the Enterprise, leading to a debate on how much this will damage the colony. At the end, Picard muses that his crew may have been as dangerous to the colony as that core fragment.
    Really, Jean-Luc? More destructive than total annihilation? After all, that what would've happened to the colony if the Enterprise hadn't intervened, considering that they didn't have the resources to save themselves. And something else to consider: that colony was never in any Federation records. If the Enterprise hadn't been passing through, nobody would've known that these people existed. Not only would they have been destroyed, they would've been essentially erased from history, as if they'd never existed. How could the Enterprise have been any more destructive than that?
    • Certainly it's not as obvious a comparison, but Picard is looking at it from a societal standpoint - the colony was designed so that everyone there had a purpose and a role, and now they were taking some of the colonists away, effectively removing pillars of that community and society. What if they'd taken away someone who was responsible for a vital role in their society? They've now left gaps, gaps that could easily give way and destroy the community. The stellar fragment was destructive to the colony in a physical sense. The appearance of the Enterprise was destructive on a social one. Both have been known to destroy civilizations.

     Guinan in "Night Terrors" 
In "Night Terrors", it is said that the only ones not suffering from "dream deprivation" were Troi (because she was still dreaming) and Data (because he's an android and doesn't need to sleep, let alone dream). However, Guinan seems fine. She's focused, doesn't seem paranoid, and she lacks the "out-of-it" look that the other dream-deprived people had. What's with that?
  • There's a lot of questions out there about Guinan. Certainly "Q Who" implies that she's some highly powerful entity masquerading as humanoid, but other times (like in "Time's Arrow" she seems physically vulnerable).

     Parallels 
  • In the last universe Worf visits, the crew of the Enterprise managed to stop the Borg, but were unable to save Captain Picard. Since the main timeline crew were only able to stop the Borg when a rescued Picard gave Data a hint as to how to shut the Borg down, one has to wonder how they managed it without him?
    • Far more likely that when the Borg cube exploded, Picard did not survive getting disconnected from them.

     Thine Own Self 
  • Why didn't Deanna have Geordi put on protective clothing before entering the crawlspace? It's not specified, but perhaps there wasn't time. This may have been deliberate. There are several references to The Wrath of Khan and specifically to the Kobayashi Maru test in this episode. Troi asks if her test is about "ability to handle a no-win situation". Riker says it isn't, but adds "my first responsibility is to the ship", giving her the answer; to order Geordi to do the same thing Spock did, even if she didn't specifically think of his sacrifice (centuries ago, but no doubt legendary).
    • Her first attempt shows the ship damage cascading to destruction in mere seconds, Troi probably knows they have no time to do that.
  • Troi has sat on the bridge of the Enterprise for years and has discussed the requirements of command with multiple people in the crew. She should know already that being in command includes weighing up risk, making difficult decisions and putting the safety of the ship first when required. But it takes multiple attempts at the exam and Riker letting the solution slip by accident before she figures it out in the exam itself.
    • Deanna knew that making the hard decisions was part of being in command. The reason she failed the test 3 times was because she was looking at it the wrong way. She thought it was a test of her technical knowledge. Riker's hint only made her realize the real nature of the test.
  • A counsellor can just take the Bridge Officer's Exam, just like that? You'd think she'd have to at least go through some courses leading up to one of those. Based on the various tests Riker explains she passed, it may have been that Troi had been quietly preparing before she even spoke to Crusher about wanting to take it.
    • Another explanation could be those are refreshers of what officers learn at the academy, and that they are mere window dressing for the only 'real' test, showing you can send people to die in order to save your ship.
  • It also begs the question of why Starfleet even has a specific "Bridge Officer's Exam" that takes place in an ad hoc fashion whenever an officer wants to start taking watches, that can be taken multiple times and is not given by a disinterested third party, but instead by a member of their own ship.
    • As we've seen in numerous occasions, in Starfleet rank is paramount in situations where there are no orders\roles allocated by superiors. Why aren't all officer cadets put through this simulation during their time at the Academy if they can be expected to take command at any moment in an emergency? Risking individual crew members to protect the ship is a constant element of damage control training in ocean navies, in space it would be just as paramount.

Medicine, Psychology, and/or Worst Aid

     As an expert I say you should try expressing your homicidal tendencies? 
  • Is Troi a real counselor? In Descent Data admits to her that the only emotion he has felt in the episode is anger and pleasure at killing an enemy. Please note that in this episode Data lifted a Borg off the ground by its throat and snapped its neck. So what does Troi do with a physically powerful android that has access to the entire ship? She encourages him to explore his anger.
    • Maybe the "With a stress ball" was implied?
    • I think she was recommending he try constructive means to understand the emotion and integrate it, rather than retreat and hide it until he freaks out.
    • A real counselor WOULD encourage him to experience the emotion that he knew he had experienced, with 'in a neutral and controlled environment' implied. Obviously, she wasn't encouraging him to go out and kill crew members just to explore his anger, but she rightly points out that a) he had been trying without success to elicit other emotional reactions and ignoring the one that he actually HAD been experiencing, and b) emotions themselves are not positive or negative, it's the way we react to them. Especially in Data's case, it seems reasonable to want to make sure that he can, as the above Troper points out, understand and integrate it into himself, rather than lash out unexpectedly or, as we see in Star Trek: Generations with his newfound fear, lose his control in the middle of a dangerous situation and get others hurt. Data was already using the holodeck to explore those other emotional reactions, she simply suggested he use it to explore the one he knew he'd experienced.
    • One supposes that part of being a counselor is sometimes "not insulting your patient", thus yeah, Troi doesn't really need to tell Data "Explore your anger. Oh, but don't snap my neck. Or any crew members' necks." Troi knows Data, she knows that even if he's not exactly Three Laws compliant he isn't a cruel or psychotic individual, and will explore the concept of anger in a way that will be as safe as possible for others. All this leaving aside that "Find an outlet for your anger" is something therapists actually do tell their patients, which is basically what Troi's telling Data... it's just that he'll need to find out if he can feel anger before he finds an outlet for it.
    • Yes, but given the (literally) unique circumstances, Troi really ought to have told Data to report back to her immediately whenever he felt any further emotions. On VOY the Doctor was barely willing to let people leave sick bay without medical monitors attached to them! Troi has a habit of releasing her patients back into the wild so that she can check up on them periodically like casual experiments. It was much the same as in "Suddenly Human", where she foists Jono onto Picard, the officer least qualified to actually manage a teenager boy, and her only subsequent involvement was to order Picard to stick it out. That one led to Picard getting stabbed while in bed! In retrospect it's amazing he didn't demote Troi and assign her to a similarly thankless task that she would have equally hated!
    Picard: Counselor, we'll be taking on a group of Klingon cadets. I'm assigning you to oversee them and show them every aspect of working on a Starfleet ship.
    Troi: But isn't this something that would be better suited to Worf?
    Picard: Absolutely! Just like that Jono situation would have been. But nevertheless, I am assigning you because I think it will be good for your personal development and educational for them. Qapla', Counselor!
    • She never said that though, she told him to explore his hanger. She wanted him to get something to eat.

     Just cut off his leg! 
  • In Shades of Gray, Riker gets poisoned on a survey mission of an uncharted planet. After examining the wound, Dr. Pulaski finds out that the poison has infected the nerves in the leg (which prevents her from operating to remove the poison) and if they do not discover a cure soon, the wound will reach his brain and kill him. So, why doesn't she just amputate the leg? It's been a standard medical procedure for years that if you can't remove the poison (usually due to not knowing the correct cure to use), by removing the limb, you save the patient. So since Pulaski had no idea what the correct cure was, she should have just amputate Riker's leg before the poison got anywhere near his spine. Also considering in the run of the show, we barely saw Riker out of uniform, they could have easily given him a prosthetic leg and we never see it.
    • Because it's a bad episode, written because of a writer's strike, and that would have required more imagination and daring than I give the second-season TNG writers credit for possessing. (Also, it was written with almost no budget, hence the "clip show"). Even in the episode where Worf is paralyzed, dies, comes back to life and learns slowly how to walk again, he's all better next week and it's never, ever mentioned again. And that was much later in the series, when the writing was better. TNG, as good as it was, didn't take nearly the kinds of interesting chances that DS9 would, later, which is one reason I like the latter series better.
    • A simple throwaway line that the poison had already gotten past the leg would have solved the issue, but they didn't for no apparent reason. Also, having Riker with a prosthetic for the rest of the series wouldn't even have been necessary, maybe for the episode, but since 24th century medical technology apparently has the ability to saw off limbs and reattach them fairly easily, (hell, we can do it right now, but with some uncertainty still in it) they could have just cut off the leg, killed the virus, reattached it, done. Riker goes about his business and doesn't have a torturous nightmare.
    • And really, you'd think growing new limbs would be something they could do. Stem cell research might be decades away from making it happen, but it's likely to be possible within the next century, let alone three centuries.
    • Nog can tell you that growing new limbs is pretty easy. Just a few "phantom pain" issues to work out.

     Barclay's Protomorphosis and Hermaphroditism Syndrome 
  • In "Genesis," main engineering is full of spider webs and we learn that Barclay is transforming into a spider. It is certainly implied that he was doing the spinning, but (mostly, at least) only female spiders spin webs. Perhaps this might not be true of the ancient spider that Barclay is becoming, but it's fun to speculate. Another thing for Troi to deal with afterwards, perhaps.
    • Mmm. And the syndrome seems to have made Spot pregnant, too, when I was always under the impression that Spot was a guy.
      • Nice theory, but Spot's mysterious gender change happened a bit earlier, in "Forces of Nature."
      • Lets be fair nothing about this disease makes sense to anyone who has any knowledge of genetics whatsoever. Frankly temporarily changing sex is pretty sane compared to mammals containing the dormant DNA of reptiles.
      • Or becoming spiders, I’m not a scientist but I think we don’t have any spider ancestor. At least reptiles and mammals have common ancestors.
      • We do have reptile ancestors, though that's waaaaaay back, over 200 million years ago. It's incredibly implausible that enough DNA from back then exists in a cat's genome to turn it into an iguana. And no, we have no direct relationship to spiders. The writers really failed hard at biology on this one.
      • All life on Earth is related (as far as we know) - the problem here is more about what would be the last common ancestor of arachnids (phylum Arthropoda) and mammals (phylum Chordata) - and it would for sure look like nothing of the both. Then again, the evolution in general seems to be working in mysterious ways in the Star Trek verse....
      • I get the feeling that the idea with the virus that they either felt they didn't have time to explain or was too far above the audience's head (in their perception) was that it was tapping into those few shared genes and causing rapid activation of them and then evolution of traits based on that, so that the crew were becoming things sort of like those animals and creatures but not exactly. Barclay became a spider because the genes that wound up being shared with a spider due to that common ancestor activated, and via not-quite-evolution-mutation they turned him into something spider-like but that certainly wouldn't have been any actual species of arachnid we're familiar with. Sort of more like FEV from Fallout, it was causing mutations and "rapid evolution", just based on traits that actually looked like reverse evolution.

    The infallible autopsy 
  • In "Suspicions", Crusher's Ferengi scientist friend supposedly commits suicide, but obviously that's not true. Crusher wants to do an autopsy to prove it, but that would be against his family's wishes. She does it anyway, and finds nothing. Why did she ever resort to that in the first place? Did she forget about all the super-advanced medical equipment that can provide hyper-detailed imaging of the entire body and its internal structure? It's not like she needs a direct look at his organs. We've seen sensors identify scarring from surgical procedures on bone tissue. Are dead people impervious to sensors or something?
    • Could be that she took samples of things like skin, blood, and other fluids/tissues from his body to perform tests on. Running tests on a piece of the body would be more conclusive than mere scans, since the tests could break down the tissue and detect things like chemicals or other abnormalities.
    • Even in Star Trek the scanners aren't omniscient. They can tell if you have a broken bone, a malignant mass, elevated blood pressure, etc., but certain things may still require cutting the body open, at the very least to scan it from close up rather than through a lot of layers of flesh. They sometimes can do scans that even go down to the molecular level, but this is always portrayed as a very long, very computer-intensive process... which Crusher couldn't do because she didn't have the time and she didn't want to tip anyone off that she was doing it.
    • According to Dr. Bashir in DS9's The Passenger, yeah, tricorders do kind of suck at scanning dead people.
    • Would be the same Bashir tricorder that determined a man was phaser'd to death after his body was cremated by plasma?
    • More general inconsistencies in technology and methods in the show, I suppose. It was also a bit of early installment weirdness, since the episode implied the Ferengi had a very sacred ritual involving death and handling of bodies, whereas DS9 simply said their bodies are freeze dried into a powder and sold off in containers, meaning that an autopsy on a body would not matter one way or the other to anyone.
      • I like the potential that different Ferengi have different death rituals; it turns them from the profit-at-any-cost-and-we-hate-our-women monoculture that they would develop over on Deep Space Nine into a race with layers. Flanderization is unfortunately Trek's biggest weakness.
      • Also, y'know, the vacuum desiccation process is sacred to the Ferengi. Quark makes it pretty clear that it's an important part of their spirituality, affecting how they enter the afterlife; it's also a massive part of their legacy. Just because it seems tacky to us doesn't mean it's not sacred to them. It may be that they feel that an autopsy in some way interferes with the value of the desiccated remains... that means you're interfering with the departed's chances of getting into Ferengi Heaven.
    • No, actually, it makes sense that an autopsy would upset the Ferengi; it means potentially less flesh to chop off and sell as souvenirs. Maximize the profit!

     So...We're Not Going to Talk About the Crewmen We Just Killed? 
  • In “Cause and Effect,” Enterprise depressurizes its main shuttlebay as an emergency means of maneuvering to avoid a collision. We’ve never seen the main shuttlebay on-screen, but it is, by all accounts, huge—and that must be true, because jettisoning the atmosphere in that facility was enough to propel a huge starship a significant distance in a very short amount of time. One question’s been bugging me, however, and I think the episode intentionally avoided alluding to it: were there people in there, and what happened to them if there were?
    • Presumably if there had been people in there, they could have transported them out on the quick. Since we don't hear anyone give the order to do so, we are left to presume that it happened to be unoccupied at the time... we hope.
    • This is what being a Red Shirt is all about! Seriously, the Enterprise-D is so heavily automated that Data can basically run the entire ship in a pinch! The thousand or so extra crew members are mostly just sacrificial lambs waiting to be offered to the Gods of Negative Space Wedgies! If Janeway hadn't been stuck with a non-replaceable skeleton crew she'd have been blowing them out of the shuttle bay for kicks on a regular basis!
      • Several episodes of Voyager have strongly indicated that most of the crew of a 24th century starship are there to maintain it. Whenever the ship gets abandoned for some reason, it seemingly begins to fall apart almost immediately.
      • Voyager was dispatched on a Maquis hunting expedition. Thus, it did not have the full complement of scientific and support personnel a ship like Enterprise has. It was intended to hunt down the Val Jean and then return to base. Getting dragged to the Delta Quadrant was not in the mission plan. Enterprise has more crew performing a wider range of tasks.
    • The ship was in deep space at the time, nowhere near any planets or anything, just going from one system to another. It's likely that in such a situation all three shuttlebays would be on standby, empty and locked, because there would be no need for the shuttles to actually be doing anything.
      • On the other hand, they knew that there was a good chance that they were flying into situation that could destroy the ship. They could have easily decided it would be prudent to keep their shuttles on hot standby for a potential evacuation.
    • Isn't this implicitly explained by Picard initially choosing Data's option over Riker's? Riker immediately thinks of an option with a high risk of killing people in the cargo bay. Moments later, Data suggests the tractor-beam. Picard, being more experienced than Riker, immediately sees the flaw in Riker's plan and so chooses Data's. But as it turned out, Riker's plan was the necessary plan, possibly killing several crewman to save the ship.
      • Uh, not really. Picard just seemed to think the tractor beam was more likely to work. And it would have if Data had cut "Captain, I suggest we use the tractor beam to alter the other ship's trajectory" down to, "Sir, suggest using the tractor beam on the other ship," and said it quickly instead of ponderously.
    • Perhaps handled by standard protocol - in event of main power failure, immediately evacuate external access areas until environment forcefields can be assured or survival gear is worn.
    • Data spends a few seconds typing on his console and announcing what he’s doing before the shuttle bay doors open. Presumably he was sounding the decompression alarm and giving people a few precious seconds to get out of the bay or to some kind of designated shelter area. I’ve been in the main shuttle bay on a virtual recreation of the Enterprise and the places where crew are most likely to be working, when the bay is not in use, are right by doors and those that aren’t are near shuttles that could be used to take shelter in. Alternatively as soon as Riker suggested decompressing the bay someone warned them, which gives them a good half a minute to evacuate.
    • Yes, there were, which is why everyone's horrified and after that episode Data is never seen again.

     Clone of a clone of a clone of a clone... 
  • So, the Mariposans... What I don't understand is what made them think that cloning clones was a good idea? Why not just make clones purely from the original humans instead of cloning from the last clone? Is there some flaw in their cloning process that makes it only possible to get a certain number of clones from a particular donor instead of the literally billions they should have been able to get? In fact, fiction in general seems to have this sort of thing happen a lot.
    • As far as I can remember the Mariposians do not have warp travel capability and all of the original members of the expedition are dead. They had no choice but to clone the clones.
    • No, I mean why don't they just clone from the original five? Since the human body possesses billions of cells most of which could be used to clone from unless they have the most inefficient cloning technology ever they should've been capable of getting literally billions of viable clones out of a single person, and then billions more out of the resulting clones.
    • It would depend on how their cloning technology works. From the look of things, they were fast-growing the clones directly to adulthood. This would make sense. The original five survivors would not have been able to care for lots of kids. The accelerated growth may be a factor in their genetic deterioration. Likewise, they might not have not retained the necessary technology to preserve the cells of the original templates at the time. Contrary to popular belief, cellular material does break down when frozen. This is why science-fiction technology is necessary to do the Human Popsicle thing. Depending on what equipment survived the crash, they may not have had certain technology for the first few generations, and by the time they had started to advance again they had become culturally inclined to produce "offspring" by taking samples from one generation and using it to make the next. When the problems became chronic, it was too late and they no longer had any viable cell samples from the founding generation left.
    • Yeah, but preserving the original cells wouldn't be necessary. The problem is that after many generations of copies, errors would have set in, and the errors would be passed on to the next generation with more to be added on. Eventually, there would be too many errors to make viable babies. BUT this presumes the errors can't be corrected. Genetic engineering is a thing in the 24th century. Even if the Mariposans don't have it, the Federation does, and while using it to enhance a kid's abilities is strictly verboten, I wouldn't think they'd have a problem with just correcting damage. So you just need a blueprint that shows what the clones' DNA would look like without errors. Like a complete genetic scan kept on file from the original five Mariposans.
      • Incidentally, it's implied in TNG: "Genesis," and confirmed in DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" that genetic engineering is allowed in the Federation to treat genetic diseases and defects. Presumably, that means using it to stabilize or correct the Mariposan's genetic drift would be legal.

     No specialists, no second opinions 
Even in Kirk's time, the one doctor on board was a master of all trades. No specialists are ever mentioned in Starfleet Medical. Even with the excuse that the equipment can do all the hard work it would be unlikely that every medical staff is versed in every specialty on top of general practice. Not to mention that tests are rarely second guesses, re-run or a second opinion sought... because equipment can fail, doctors can misinterpret(symptoms, even in groups, can be common for multiple illnesses), not to mention the trillions of unknown diseases likely out there.
  • "Ethics" introduced Dr. Toby Russell, a neurologist brought in to help find a way to get Worf walking again. It appears that advancements in science and technology have expanded what general practitioners are capable of, but specialists still necessary for certain tough-to-treat conditions.
  • There's also the balance between an out-of-universe explanation of The Main Characters Do Everything (the actor portraying the ship's Chief Medical Officer is the one drawing a regular's paycheck, so they appear instead of any particular specialist) and there ARE references to other doctors on the Enterprise - Doctor Selar appeared in The Schizoid Man, and there were references to her throughout the series, as well as a Doctor Hill in Remember Me. There IS a medical staff on board, presumably with their own specialties. The CMO takes point, but this doesn't discount the rest of the people operating alongside them.

Negative Space Wedgie/Timey-Wimey Ball of the Week

     Temporal Anomaly Goes Up, Temporal Anomaly Goes Down 
  • In "All Good Things", if the anomaly is some sort of backwards-traveling collision between time and anti-time, why does the future Enterprise need to go back to the Devron system to see it form ~10 minutes later when they can't see it the first time? Wouldn't this magical backwards growing anomaly be bigger when they first got there than when it had only just formed?
    • The best explanation is that is travels backwards *and* forward through time and they initially got there when it was still too small to be seen then when the Futureprise came back it had grown to a detectable size.
    • I always thought the anomaly was observed as increasing in size in all three time periods, despite the fact that it's actually growing backwards in time, partly because we can't observe it properly with our limited senses. That may be why they couldn't see the anomaly at first, because it hadn't "started" yet.
    • I like to think of it as Q and the Continuum including an allowance for the 'limited' linear human at the center of this - Picard can only experience time in one direction without outside intervention, so he had to have the 'future' timeline progressing, which meant that the further forward in time it progressed, the less capable he'd be of 'solving' the test, with the anomaly only increasing in reverse. It's one thing for the test to have a challenge to it, pushing Picard to question his reality and what he believes to be true of the universe. It's another to demand that he achieve the goal by doing something literally impossible for a member of a species that only experiences linear time.

     He doesn't go on the away mission, but they still meet anyway 
  • In Time's Arrow, we learn Guinan came aboard the Enterprise in the first place because she met Picard in Earth's past. However, in Yesterday's Enterprise, in the alternate timeline the Enterprise-D gets shot at by the Klingons to the point of destruction (yes, the worst we saw was the bridge going up in flames, but it's implied the ship was about to be blown up) and it's unlikely anyone would have survived that (and if they did, the Klingons would either have taken them prisoner or killed them). So if Time's Arrow never happened in that timeline, why would Guinan come on board the Enterprise to meet Picard in the first place (aside from the real world reason that they hadn't made Time's Arrow yet)? Or maybe I'm just assuming too much.
    • In a season 2 episode, Wesley asks Guinan about her past, mentioning one rumor that she previously knew the Captain. She responds that she didn't know the Captain until she came onboard, though whether that's misdirection or the truth is debatable. At the time it could be taken to mean that Guinan simply came onboard the ship as a bartender or other support staff and it simply happened to be Picard in command. They obviously had some sort of chemistry, based on how Guinan described their relationship to Riker in The Best of Both Worlds.
    • That is a seriously interesting question. It's hard to get one's head around these temporal mechanics questions, but is it possible that Guinan met the Picard from the uninterrupted/corrected timeline that includes "Time's Arrow" even in the "Yesterday's Enterprise" timeline, since their divergence point of those timelines was 2344 and thus left the 19th century untouched?
    • Perhaps one of the strange abilities the El-Aurians are implied to have is ripple-effect-proof memory.
      • Or, my personal theory, due to her ties to the Nexus (yes, yes, retroactive canon, shush), Guinan is sort of an anomaly herself, and so the altered timeline created by the disturbance warped around her because she was already there as the change rippled outward - it honestly seems unlikely that a warship Enterprise would have a civilian bartender, especially given the difference of Ten Forward - the bright, stark lighting, the fact that the standard "order" seemed to be rations... Everything about the altered Enterprise design is geared towards war, combat, stripped down amenities rather than civilian luxuries and scientific exploration, and yet this Ten Forward has a civilian bartender?
    • Times Arrow wasn't when they first met. Oh, this was when they technically met; but Picard had no idea about the events of this mission until years after she first came on board. They must have encountered each other for a second time - and for the timeline to work in both universes it would have been on the Stargazer in my opinion. Klingon War Picard was incredibly gruff compared to his Prime Counterpart but nevertheless I just can't imagine him refusing to help a woman in need. After he helped her out they both went their separate ways until she was either coincidentally assigned to the Enterprise or she deliberately sought him out to complete the time loop (although both are not mutually exclusive).
    • Well depending on your Head Canon, the big messy Timey-Wimey Ball, and coupled with more Alternate Universe's you can shake a stick at. The second (first?) time Quinan could have met was in Star Trek: Picard in the far distant future of 2024, thanks to the meddling of Q.

     Radiation on the Sutherland 
  • In "Redemption" Data orders the Sutherland's phasers to be brought on-line. His first officer, Hobson, objects that this will flood three decks with radiation and accuses Data throwing people's lives away. The rest of the episode makes no mention of people having died. It seems to me that if they had, Data himself would have said it when submitting himself for disciplinary action later, but he instead focuses on his having broken orders from Picard. I remember being confused by this plot point when first watching this episode as a child, and it was just as confusing on re-watch recently. So, what's the deal here? Did Data actually kill people in this episode? It seems to me that whether he did or didn't significantly changes both the morality of his actions and the justification of Hobson's objections. And why didn't the episode bother specifying either way? Was it just bad writing, something carelessly dropped during editing, or was it left ambiguous on purpose?
    • We see in Counselor Troi's bridge exam that part of being a commanding officer in Starfleet is the right to sacrifice crewmen for the greater good. If that was deemed to be the case here, then not only would Data be fine, but in Starfleet's eyes, Hobson was in the wrong. I agree that it should have been mentioned though and honestly it seems to me something that may have been added as an afterthought given how irrelevant it is.
    • It's not well telegraphed, but I think we're meant to infer that Data believes there's a very good chance that the Sutherland is about to find herself in one hell of a firefight with the Romulans. With the rest of the fleet moving away, Data absolutely needs what are simultaneously the ship's primary anti-spacecraft, and primary point defense weapons ready at a moment's notice, or he might not be able to get anyone out alive. Data's a living calculator, so he's probably run the odds and determined that he's safeguarding more lives than he's endangering by arming phasers. It's also likely that Hobson is using a bit of hyperbole to make his point. He doesn't expect the radiation to literally kill everyone on those decks, but he's understandably appalled at the notion of those crew members getting a huge dose of radiation—which, remember, is still dangerous, but with proper medical care, seems to be pretty treatable in the Trek universe.
    • No, Data did not kill anyone on the Sutherland. He merely took a calculated risk that one of his subordinates disagreed with.
     How do you know he's the last of his clan? 
Back to "The Vengeance Factor." Yuti seems confident that her "mission" will be over once Chorgon is dead. What if he has kids? Wouldn't any offspring he has also be members of the Lornak clan? The guy is clearly old enough to have hooked up with a gatherer woman and made some babies. Plus he's their leader, there are plenty of women in the universe who would relish the idea of being the boss's wife.
  • One assumes that after all this time, Yuta has worked out these details. Who's the say that he isn't personally infertile, or that he had children who've died? We also don't know much about kinship systems — perhaps bastards wouldn't apply to Yuta's revenge scheme or clan membership passed matrilineally (although the focus on DNA might suggest otherwise).
     Just who were the Tralestas anyway? 
One more for "The Vengeance Factor." We know little about the Tralesta clan outside of Yuta herself, and one lone survivor on a mission of vengeance is hardly a big enough sample size for us to decide whether or not we care about them getting massacred by the Lornak clan. What creed did the Tralestas live by? What were individual members like? What started their blood feud with the Lornaks?

    Not Curious about Worf and Troi? 
  • In that episode with the giant face in space, the face was curious about Data because he was an android, and Pulaski because she was a woman... so how come he didn't care about Worf (who, being a Klingon, has three lungs and two livers) and Troi (who's also a woman, and she has a part-Betazoid brain?)

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