What’s up, my know-it-alls. Welcome to another Know-It-All Files, where Mr. Know-It-All scours the internet searching for your questions. Whether it’s Reddit or Quora or right here in the comments section on YouTube, I answer your questions about Star Trek, about Doctor Who, whatever it is, and I put them into a single show. This is the Star Trek edition.
The Ferengi Alliance Is Kind of Like the Mob
First question: what is the Ferengi Alliance in Star Trek?
It’s almost their version of the Federation. Internally there are many corporations and the like that operate on Ferenginar or anywhere within Ferengi space. Conglomerates, if you will. They’ve created an alliance. It’s almost a version of an interstellar confederation. A guild, if you will.
The reason they exist is, one, they enforce all the Rules of Acquisition that we know and love so much. The Rules of Acquisition are the rules by which Ferengi rule and occupy their lives. It’s the Ferengi version of law. If it’s not covered in the Rules of Acquisition, it’s wide open territory and you can do whatever you want. But where something does have to do with the Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Alliance are the ones who enforce it.
Also, let’s say the Klingon home world, the actual Klingon government, needs help or wants to do something, and it’s more than one group within the Ferengi Alliance can handle. The Alliance gets involved and makes sure it’s parsed out correctly between all the different subgroups. They obviously get their cut. I don’t want to call them the mob, but they’re kind of like the mob.
The one thing I think is interesting to remember is that for us, a trade federation of sorts makes you ask what kind of government that even is. Remember, the way we do things is the way we do things. That isn’t necessarily the way other species will do it. Their interpretations might be different. We may call it socialism, Marxism, whatever you want to call it, heck, fascism in some cases. But on another world, that may be established as their normal, their right way of doing things. So you always have to be very open to the fact that other cultures have different viewpoints and different perspectives on things like that.
Why the Transporter Can’t Just Roll You Back
Next question: why does Star Trek have a med bay? It seems that if the transporter breaks you down and rebuilds you on the surface of a planet, it could save a healthy template of you and just roll you back to a previous version if you’re injured.
Well, that’s terrifying.
There was an episode with Dr. Julian Bashir where he had to hold some people’s patterns in the buffer. Now, a lot of people want to compare this to the episode with Scotty. Well, Scotty was able to do it, blah blah. Scotty’s ship had crashed on the Dyson Sphere, and he hot-wired the ship to the Dyson Sphere’s power source, which was in essence a controlled star. An artificial star. He wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Then you go to the Bashir episode, and if you remember, that took the whole sum of the power from the entire station to make that happen.
Aside from that, it’s terrifying to think about the possibility of transporter cloning, because transporter cloning is totally a thing. It’s one of those things where you sit here and go, this technology could totally be used for this if it’s not controlled right. And nobody in the galaxy uses transporter technology like this to essentially create unlimited soldiers.
You could’ve created the clones from the Clone Wars. Literally been like, all right, we’re going to take a pattern of you, Jango Fett, we’re going to transport you, and then we’re just going to keep generating it. You mentally know this is going to happen, so each of your clones coming out will know it too. You’re the original. All of them understand they’re being brought in as soldiers. They can live, they can whatever else, but they’re soldiers. And that’s it. Then it’s just zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, cranking out Jango Fett soldiers. It would’ve saved some time too, because they wouldn’t have had to train them or teach them or nothing.
So you run into a whole lot of ethical issues when you think about doing something like that. Think about this also: why aren’t you transporting somebody for the sake of harvesting their organs? Not harvesting life for profit. I mean, I have cancer, or I have something you can’t medically fix, so then what do we do, just keep cloning you? I don’t know. It’s weird. It feels weird.
Spock and the Kolinahr
Next question: why did Spock leave Starfleet, go back to Vulcan and commit to the Kolinahr? What was the catalyst?
I feel like catalyst is the wrong word. Retirement, in a word, is what I think it boils down to. He was done. He’d been on a five-year mission, if not a little longer. The five-year mission was just the one he was on with Kirk, I believe, and there was obviously the time before that, when he served with Pike. So he had been in Starfleet for a good number of years. Having reached the end of that particular journey, I think he just wanted to take a break, man, and go live a life and do some stuff.
Not to mention it gave him an opportunity to immerse himself in his culture. He had already explored the boundaries of human understanding in space. Why not now explore the mind? Go inward and explore that. That’s my feeling and my thought process on it. And then once there was something bigger to explore, the V’Ger situation and all that stuff, why wouldn’t he come back and say, I’m here to do this too, and help?
He wasn’t kicked out or run out or anything like that. He was at the end of that particular journey in his career. Military people who serve two, three, four terms, who almost make it a career or do have it as a career, retire because you just get tired. You want to do something different, so you move on. And later on they get reactivated or whatever else. That happens in real life. So it’s not unheard of as a thought process, especially for a very logical Vulcan who’s like, all right, well, I did this, now I want to do that.
Could Data Have Been a Doctor?
Next question: could Data have performed the work of a Starfleet medical officer? Why or why not? Hat tip to Reddit for that one.
Yeah, of course. The same way he got into doing what he did. I believe it was probably more logical for him to have been in operations, because of the efficiency of who he is. However, comma, if the internal workings of the human body had been his thing, here’s what you have to remember about Data. He consumed the information faster and more efficiently than humans or humanoids would, but he still consumed it the same way. Reading reports, going to classes, learning through teachers, talking logically through things. He went through the learning process and that’s how he learned the information.
He absolutely could’ve done the same thing here. Gone to medical, learned all the various things, and been excellent at it. So yes, he absolutely could’ve done the job of a medical officer and gone into the medical profession just like anybody.
What Happened to the Bird-of-Prey in the Bay
Next question: what did Starfleet do with the Klingon Bird-of-Prey after it crashed into the bay in Star Trek IV?
I want to say it was in Star Trek VI. There were scenes that were removed, whether they were unfilmed or deleted or whatever else. The premise was that the crew is retired or retiring. They weren’t actively serving, though they were still active. So the rounding up of them was supposed to be a much more involved thing.
One of the scenes you have is Scotty with a group of cadets. They’re having them crawl through this thing, clearly having trouble, not able to understand or decipher much because it’s Klingon and their engineering’s upside down or whatever else. Their engineering reads right to left, who knows. The ship was hard to decipher.
So they did talk about it. Obviously it’s not canon, because it wasn’t filmed, but they were going to address it. So I like to believe in my head that as long as somebody creating Star Trek meant it to be a thing, it’s a thing.
I know the reason they didn’t do it. Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig didn’t like how their characters were going to be portrayed, as being bored and hating life and the whole bit. They got so much pushback that they just dropped the whole set of sequences, which gave the movie brevity anyway. So instead of getting any of that stuff building up to it, you go right to Kirk being like, why are we here, what’s going on.
The Scene That Hit Me in the Feels
Next question: which Star Trek scene hit you in the feels?
There’s an episode of The Next Generation, season five, episode 21, The Perfect Mate, with Famke Janssen. Famke Janssen is obviously best known for playing Jean Grey. She also played a Bond villain at one point.
She plays this character who is an emotional chameleon. She’s able to mirror whoever she’s with, but once she bonds to the person, her mate, she’ll forever be that. She’s being given as a gift, a wife, whatever, from one species to another to formalize a treaty of some kind. They don’t know this when they’re transporting her, because she’s in a cryotube. Through this and that, power, whatever, she ends up being released, and she gets to spend time with Picard.
When she spends time with Picard, she falls in love with him and bonds with him. And she tells them, don’t worry, it’s okay. She’ll still be able to serve him well, because she’s still an empathic telepath. She can still read thoughts. She can be what they need her to be. But she’s like, I’d still like Shakespeare, and I’m like, oh.
And you see Picard. It’s that road not traveled. He’s going to miss a thing. It hurt my heart and my soul. That’s the one that really hit me in the feels the hardest.
Why It Looks So Easy to Steal a Shuttlecraft
Last question: on Star Trek’s Federation ships, why does it seem so easy for people to steal shuttlecraft?
I don’t know that it’s easy to steal shuttlecraft. Let’s go out of universe first, to the production reason, and the best way I can explain it is with a story. Gene Roddenberry was given a script. I believe it was the script for The Galileo Seven. There were like six pages of them getting clearances, getting the codes, setting the whole thing up, basically tons of nautical-style clearing it for this and that and the whole bit. And Gene Roddenberry literally was like, yeah, we’re going to take those pages, I’m going to rip them, throw them in the air, and we’re going to say they got on the shuttlecraft and they went down to the planet. He turned six pages into one action line on a page, because the story required brevity.
So the production reason is story. The story’s got to move along quicker than this. We can’t sit here and have all this nonsense, or there’ll never be a point in the plot to anything.
In universe, I think all that stuff you’re talking about happens. You have to have codes, you have to have the whole nine yards. But I also believe it’s very much the equivalent of getting into someone’s car, pulling the visor down, and there’s the keys. Everybody knows how to fly the shuttles, just like you know how to drive a car. You may not be a pilot per se, meaning you can’t fly it effectively or well, but you could. I’m not a race car driver. I’m not a NASCAR driver. But I absolutely know how to drive a car. Same thing.
There’s any number of in-universe reasons they’ve kind of sort of alluded to. One of them is that a shuttlecraft aboard a ship is considered a secured vessel, and you don’t actually set those kinds of parameters unless you’re leaving it somewhere else. You go down to a planet, you’re going to leave it, so you obviously take the keys with you, or you set the alarm, or whatever else. I think that’s more the reason.
There you go. Now you know, and if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
I’d love to hear your version of the feels question: what thing from Star Trek messed you up like that? And instead of me going to Quora and Reddit, send me your own questions about Star Trek, Doctor Who, whatever fandom you are. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
