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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heck even producing Romulan ribosomes was beyond them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No change indeed. I had forgotten about that one.

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

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

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

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

Spock was highlighting this with his trademark precision.

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

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

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

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