Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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It really helps writing legal drama to be able to write laws. Boy howdy, that sure makes it easy to win a case.
I enjoyed this episode very much. Genuinely. I liked most of the writing, I liked the message, I liked the A and B plot and how they connected. I liked thinking about how absolutely exasperated Federation brass must be all the time with all the illegal shit their captains are all constantly pulling. I really enjoyed the new character. All of it put a smile on my face.
But I also think it has a serious lack of vision for the judicial system of the Federation, which is a recurring theme. Episodes like The Drumhead manage to get around it by having the trial be a pop-up affair on the ship. That implies there is something irregular going on in the process, even if they don't quite justify it. It at least helps me suspend some disbelief.
It would've been nicer if they'd built on this case in the background over a few episodes/longer timeline, with trials and appeals going on, if just for painting an image of a Federation that fundamentally has due process and rule of law. It could've been a nice recurring continuity, that there are characters getting deposed and subpoenas being sent out throughout a bunch of other drama. That this case was won a legal technicality... it should've been an issue for a higher-level appeals court. Contradictory laws and deciding how to apply the Articles of the Federation to resolve the issue and all that.
It is also actually insane that Captain Batel was not recused from that case.
Are we to believe that hundreds of years into the future, trials do not have a discovery process before a trial? That matters of fact, like who reported her or whether the captain was aware, wouldn't be known until testimony on the stand? It makes my eye twitch, that kind of legal drama cliche still appears in modern TV shows. This could've been a great opportunity to not just flesh out the history of banning genetic modification, but also to flesh out the legal systems. Maybe offer up explanations for how the federation can always seem to have such overtly-contradictory laws and ideals, and why their ball-of-mud legal framework ended up that way.
It's not even the first time they've had clear conflicts of interest in a trial for dramatic effect. In The Measure of a Man, a judge who happened to be Picard's former lover press-ganged Data's friend and colleague Riker into representing Maddox's case against Data - multiple conflicts that surely should not have been permitted!