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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9053840" data-attributes="member: 18">S2 E2Jesus wept that was outstandingly bad.Easily the dumbest episode of Star Trek since the worst dregs of ENT! Far stupider than Discovery ever got. A genuinely awful stinker of an episode. Not fine. Not okay. Not passable. Terrible and embarrassing.The performances - apart from Rebecca Romjin, who remains the worst actor on the show - were great. The dialogue, apart from the speeches, was generally extremely good. The sets and the look of the show remain top-tier.But good bloody god, what an absolute trashfire of episode.It feel flat on its face for two factors, mainly:1) The legal drama aspects were written by someone with a "Smug 15-year-old who watched a lot of Law & Order"'s level of grasp on how laws and courts work, and even what laws and courts are.It was physically painful stuff. Like, in She Hulk, the courtroom scenes were bad, and made She Hulk look like an incredibly bad and lazy lawyer who didn't even do the basic minimum, but this was utter toss even compared to that. Just every idiotic idea you can think of.Like Fruit of the Poison Tree - okay, no, absolutely not. That isn't a legal doctrine anywhere sane follows, sorry USA, but it ain't. As I understand, even most US courts have an absolute array of ways around it, too, to the point where it almost never kicks in. All courts will have laws around the admissability of evidence, but the idea that a MILITARY COURT (for god's sake) in a quasi-utopian society would follow this primitive doctrine which promotes unjust results and technicalities is just utterly childish thinking - also US-centric in the worst way possible, because whoever wrote that clearly had no idea that nowhere else operates that way (again, laws on admissibility vary, but that particular approach is quite distinctive).Then like I don't even know where to start with the courtroom scenes. It was like a bad parody. Pretty much everywhere where an objection made sense, they just ignored it - they didn't even rule on it. The worst bit was the ludicrous bit where Prosecution Vulcan is like, giving a bloody speech about how Captain Pike was probably guilty - the objection to that was like 10000% valid, and he should have been told to shut up immediately, especially in again, a MILITARY COURT, which tend not to tolerate shenanigans.Finally it had the killer problem, the real IQ-reducer, brain-cell-killer of treating the law like it's a magic spell.They got to make up a law. Instead of making up one that made sense and was relevant, they made up one that obviously completely unrelated to the case, except thematically, then acted like this was going to literally magically convince three supposed hard-nosed Starfleet judges. Who gives a two shakes of a lamb's tail is she was "granted asylum". That might matter to the sedition charges*, but it sure as hell wouldn't matter to any of the other charges. It sure was hell wouldn't keep her in Starfleet. Getting asylum doesn't mean you get to keep military rank, I mean what in god's name?!Mind-breakingly stupid. Absolutely on par with the dumbest techno-babble scenes in Trek history, and the dumbest "moral argument" episodes in Trek history - I'm specifically thinking of the "Nah genocide is cool actually" episode of Enterprise.And also absolutely DIAF in a fire for suggesting laws aren't a mirror of society, but rather a beacon of justice. That's a truly horrific thing to say in an era when laws protecting minorities are being eroded, and laws designed explicitly to harm them are being constructed. And particularly idiotic in the context of the episode. If she'd said it was the job of the COURT to be a beacon of justice - and I rewound to check I hadn't misheard or misunderstood, but she says "Laws", that'd be one thing - yet the entire reason this is happening is because that IS NOT TRUE for god's sake ARHGHHGSejkHDFLKJSDHKJFGBHSKDJFHbkdjsbnvcak\jdcbgkhjilfvcba ksn mvcba.* = The "Oh we'll just add these sedition charges now the plea bargain is out" thing without any actual legal reasoning or discussion was grotesque and implausible. I thought this was supposed to be a quasi-utopian society? That'd be pushing it, legally, in most modern societies today. Even some military courts would be troubled by it. It's the sort of thing that happens at the deeply corrupt state-court level in the US because some elected prosecutor (another pure barbarian idea - what next, trial by combat?) needs to get some good publicity.2) All the attempts to justify genetic modification were genuinely gross and unconvincing in the extreme.It's a cultural practice so it's immune to criticism or the laws of the land? No. Uh-uh. Female Genital Mutilation is a "cultural practice". Executing women because they're embarrassing men in some way is often a "cultural practice". 90% of the stuff the defense lawyer complained (slavery, apartheid, caste systems, etc.) about was a "cultural practice" that got made illegal. I could go on. "Cultural practices" which are clearly problematic are perfectly fine to be made illegal. One huge question here that went unasked is would Number One modify her own children? If so why? If she would those sedition charges are suddenly looking a whole lot more justifiable.And we got the "genetics aren't destiny" speech, which was pretty idiotic, because if genetics weren't at least in part destiny, then why would anyone be bothering to modify them? Hmmm? Let alone building an entire society around modifying them and elaborate justifications for doing so! Plus if we have Noonien-Singh just happily believe that it removes one of the more interesting conflicts with her character - perhaps the only interesting conflict.I could go on, but that was absolute drivel of the worst kind - pernicious, misguided, magical-thinking drivel which takes a serious and nuanced issue and just applies Legal Magic (TM) to make it go poof and vanish.I mean, it 100% is when it does. A great example is Better Call Saul.Obviously in a show like this you cut it down - but that's what montages are for!(As an aside, let me just suggest that, whilst it doesn't really apply here as much, the general level to which the US' justice systems/courts are misrepresented in US media is an actual societal problem, that influences how people think and how people vote, so flip attitudes that it's fine to completely lie about how the law works are perhaps more telling than we wish.)These writers probably have no idea what legal research, discovery, or briefs are though, given that the entire episode hinged on a law unrelated to the case being used to magically hypnotize the judges.Oh yeah and the whole "I didn't tell anyone I turned myself in". Why not? This was never explained and makes absolutely zero sense. Turning yourself in would give a lot of potential cause for leniency or deciding not to charge someone.One more implausible bit of stupidity - "They arrested my friend and his parents". No, they did not. We already established that merely being genetically modified isn't a crime in the Federation - it's lying about it that is, or doing it to someone. So why are we pretending that a child would be arrested on this supposed Federation planet? I can tell you why - the writers are stupid and didn't think it through, because they were so desperately trying to imply the "terrible persecution" Oona suffered - which, by her own account, she basically didn't suffer, except in the sense of watching it happen to others, because she totally passed, and had so little suspicion that her family were apparently able to go to the un-augmented city.No, not for a military court, and again, the entire legal doctrine only exists in US courts and is surrounded by a multitude of exceptions even then. Also I noted, it strongly promotes unjust outcomes in favour of limiting the power of the state - hardly appropriate to the "Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism" of the Federation - it's basically a far-out libertarian doctrine that might be appropriate for the Klingons or Andorians or someone - EDIT or especially the Ferengi - it's one of the most Ferengi legal approaches possible!</blockquote>

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