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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9042666" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Though you can argue that he still learns that lesson anyway. He gets Spock back, but in the same film the Klingons kill his son, something that haunts him for quite a while thereafter.I think Justice League shows us an excellent example of how you do that. Namely, you make other sacrifices, ones that you can live with, even if you dislike them. Specifically, when taking down the turbo-fascist Justice Lords, they have to resolve an antinomy: they need to be able to defeat their opponents, but those opponents are fully willing to kill, and the League can't cross that line (it is, after all, one of the things that ensures they aren't the Lords and never will be.) They do so by taking a third option that is also a sacrifice, but a very different one; they recruit Lex Luthor, offering him a full pardon if he will turn his prodigious abilities to taking down the Justice Lords. Given the position he's in (some comics even feature him finally being sentenced to death for his many crimes, after a long legal wild goose chase), accepting that pardon is a good deal for him. And it's a good deal for the League, as they get to keep their morals intact and still overcome the Lords. But it required cooperating with Lex Luthor, and not only that, setting him free to whatever new mischief he might get up to.But as the gods of the copybook headings spake, "Better the devil you know."The (extremely) unwise choice which almost every candidate makes at the start of the Kobayashi Maru scenario is responding to a distress call inside the Romulan Neutral Zone. AKA, the place established by treaty which defines ANY entry into it by a military ship as an act of war. Hence why I mentioned that I like the responses from Sulu and Calhoun--they both actually do do something that would plausibly break the no-win scenario. IIRC the system didn't know how to handle Calhoun's "blow up the ship" tactic, which resulted in an unorthox "not exactly winning...but not exactly losing either" end-state, but for Sulu, a mutiny occurs--which is not an unreasonable response to a captain choosing to ignore an apparently sincere distress call, even one from the Neutral Zone. The simulation itself is designed to play on the expected virtues of anyone who makes it far enough to actually be considered for command. In other words, it is already pre-tailored, expecting prospective captains to make an unwise choice that will lead to their downfall.</blockquote>

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