Strange New Worlds season 2 - SPOILERS

[Ruin Explorer]

The entire premise for the trial is fatally flawed. I get that Khan and the others were mean and nasty dudes. They didn't have access to anywhere close to the level of technology the federation has. The federation has a much greater understanding of genetics and would know that the result doesn't have to be super aggressive people. Especially since they have an entire race of modified people who aren't trying to rule the universe. Additionally, Earth may be the capitol of the Federation, but they can't keep the others from voting however they wish, and this is an Earth issue.

Nothing about it makes sense.

Whilst I don't think the bolded bit is necessarily true - indeed I believe there's some implication at some point that it's not - I don't think the idea is that all genetically modified people are inherently aggressive.

Rather that once you start genetically modifying people, particularly to make them "superior" to others, you go down a cultural road that nigh-inevitably results in every possible ill, up to and including apocalyptic war.* This would also explain why Starfleet is particularly against letting in genetically modified individuals. It represents the elite of the Federation in many ways, and by denying people who cheat the system an advantage in getting into the elite, you're doing two things:

1) Significantly lessening the motivation to genetically modify people.

2) Preventing a culture from slowly growing where the elite seeks the "superior" and genetically modified people gradually come to dominate the organisation, which would seem perhaps inevitable otherwise.

Suddenly introducing the Illyrians to try and argue the opposite case could have been an interesting development. Unfortunately if that's what they want, SNW's approach has been 100% unserious even by Trek standards, just mindlessly displaying them as "fine" and "just like anyone else", which offers no serious space for discussion. For example, modifying people to survive an otherwise-inhospitable environment is an interesting concept (and an old one), rarely explored, and potentially challenges the idea of modifying for "superiority" (though they should probably have had the lawyer need a smaller breather thing like a Benzite to show she wasn't "better", just different - otherwise it is the same problem), but SNW just mentioned it and moved on, seemingly not realizing the import.

As such, the level of unseriousness with which they've treated the issue and inability to develop any kind of coherent argument apart from an emotion-based one of "being mean to people is bad!" (well duh!) means that I sincerely hope this is the last we hear of this subject from SNW.

(Also never addressed, aside from Illyrians, only humans and Klingons ever seem to have done genetic modification, and it seems to have gone very badly for both - though perhaps I'm forgetting some deep Trek lore - which suggests even the logical Vulcans, aggressive Romulans, greedy Ferengi and so on, all think it's an obviously bad idea.)

* = Solid evidence for my theory is that the Federation clearly only cares about "first gen" modifications - no-one gives Noonien-Singh stress or legal trouble even though she probably inherited their modifications (which do potentially include modifications to make them better or more aggressive combatants).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

A system where one entity wants to deprive a given individual (or party) of liberty (or demand extraordinary actions, payments, etc. of them) is inherently adversarial for the defendant's part, absent a future of utterly selfless beings. The degree to which we officially tolerate adversarial behavior in the system is legislatable, but you can't legislate human nature, which makes any such process intrinsically adversarial. A system that denies that fact seems more likely to be problematic than one that embraces it. Not tolerating adversarial behavior in court proceedings has historically been more often tied to oppressing defendants in the name of "justice" than any sort of disinterested pursuit of truth, because when the intrinsically adversarial parties are the state and an individual, the apparati of justice operated by said state inherently favor the state.

This is such a hilariously narrow-minded and ahistorical viewpoint that demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge of legal history around the world that it's staggering, given how many big words are used. I don't think this is the thread to discuss it in detail, though.

I will say that almost every legal point they had was one that depicted a legal system INFERIOR (in terms of justice-seeking and fairness) to even ones that existed in the 20th century, in say, England and Wales.

At the very least a Star Trek era justice system should show some very basic improvements like throwing out clunky libertarian ideas long-abandoned by most justice systems, like "fruit of the poison tree", because all they do is promote unjust results, in practice. In theory they keep the power of the state in check (not really relevant to a utopian state) - America's criminal justice system is prima facie evidence that that not only doesn't work, given the vast number of illegal searches, legal workarounds even parallel construction and so on, but may actively achieve the opposite goal. Another example of something no Trek-era justice system should allow was the retributive addition of charges - adding two sedition charges after a plea deal wasn't accepted. Also, plea deals, don't even get me started on those - I think even the US is increasingly realizing that they're something that completely warps the justice system, allowing favouritism (letting people plead to wildly lesser charges if they're white enough and liked/rich enough), but also allowing brutal manipulation and encouraging overcharging when defendants are not favoured. They're not remotely required to operate a justice system either - rather they're something that emerges from the carceral state trying to deal with the vast numbers of people it is trying to criminalize.

Also kind of wondering about this lie-detector deal - we've never seen that since in any Trek trial episode, have we? Presumably it was a brief historical aberration.

 

[Ryujin]

They would likely find the hubris of eugenics equally repugnant. Two strikes.

Eugenics does not produce "infinite" diversity. It produces only that diversity imagined by the eugenicist.

My point, exactly. Such people tend to move toward only one "ideal" that they envision, which is far from diverse.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

This is such a hilariously narrow-minded and ahistorical viewpoint that demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge of legal history around the world that it's staggering, given how many big words are used. I don't think this is the thread to discuss it in detail, though.

Well I do have a MA in History, a J.D., and an LL.M. in international and comparative law, so you'll forgive me if I am more confident in my own sense of law writ large through history than people summarily dismissing me on the internet. But I am quite happy to not discuss it in more detail.

 

[Ryujin]

Also kind of wondering about this lie-detector deal - we've never seen that since in any Trek trial episode, have we? Presumably it was a brief historical aberration.

You mean the pad the witness's hand was placed on during testimony? It was in TOS episode "Court Martial" in which Kirk was tried for the death of Commander Finny.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The lie detector, in exactly the form it appears in SNW, first appeared in Menagerie, then again in Court Marshal and the "Jack the Ripper" episode that I can't remember the name of. Possibly others.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It might be worth mentioning that at the time Space Seed was filmed, "Eugenics" meant selective breeding, not genetic engineering. Something that was still widely practiced by a surprisingly large number of western counties at the time, and well into the 1980s. Generally, by the forced sterilisation of people believed to be of below average intelligence.

It was retconned into genetic engineering later, probably around the time of Wrath of Khan, although I don't think that movie made it explicit.

 

[Ryujin]

The lie detector, in exactly the form it appears in SNW, first appeared in Menagerie, then again in Court Marshal and the "Jack the Ripper" episode that I can't remember the name of. Possibly others.

It was in "Wolf in the Fold" (the Jack the Ripper episode). It wasn't in "Menagerie."

 

[MarkB]

It was retconned into genetic engineering later, probably around the time of Wrath of Khan, although I don't think that movie made it explicit.

It was. I believe Chekov describes Khan as "a product of late tventieth-century genetic engineering."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The lie detector, in exactly the form it appears in SNW, first appeared in Menagerie, then again in Court Marshal and the "Jack the Ripper" episode that I can't remember the name of. Possibly others.

Interesting! I'd apparently completely blocked it from my mind, though I've only seen most TOS episodes once.