Daily Trek: TOS 1x14, "Court Martial" — I'm talking about rights!
Daily Trek: TOS 1x14, "Court Martial" — I'm talking about rights!
I hate it when Star Trek tries to do Perry Mason, with one exception. And the exception is not "The Measure of a Man."
Synopsis
An officer dies in an ion storm, and computer records show that Kirk caused his death through negligence. The man is the ship's records officer, Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney. This sends Kirk to a court martial, and an old flame is the prosecutor.
The prosecution's evidence hinges on this wacky control panel, where the only three usable buttons are yellow alert, red alert, and kill a guy. Video from the bridge shows Kirk sending Finney into a pod, signaling yellow alert, telling Finney to stand by to leave the pod, then ejecting the pod into the ion storm.
Years ago, Kirk and Finney were ensigns on the Republic. Finney left the engines in a dangerous state, then Kirk came on shift and logged the mistake. This put a black mark on Finney's career. The prosecutor latches onto a theory that Kirk reflected Finney's resentment back at him, and somehow that... caused Kirk to be negligent?
Spock decides that the computers are mechanically sound—in modern terms, this would mean, he can't find any hardware faults. It takes him until the end of the trial to realize that he should check for software faults. It was a different time, I guess.
Spock discovers that he can beat the computer at chess, which he doesn't think should be possible. This finally makes everyone consider the possibility that the computer's memory banks have been tampered with. They discover through a preposterous experiment that Finney faked his own death to get revenge on Kirk via court martial.
Commentary
Apparently the Federation has done away with the requirement that all evidence to be presented at court be made available to all parties prior to trial. And that evidence be subject to judicial review. And also that both sides have time to investigate the events in question prior to trial.
If we peel away all the Perry Mason shit, we're left with a drastically undeveloped theme: the dangers of having computers as arbiters of truth.
Now it was the 60s, so the extent to which computers would become unstable nightmares wasn't on many people's radars. Most of the contemporary criticism of computers was that they would be excessively perfect, and thereby erase the humanity from humanity.
They couldn't have known that computing would become dominated by asshole capitalists and mediocre technicians. Even The Book about how computing systems become byzantine and nigh-unusable wasn't published until 1975.
The thing that's contemptible about this episode is, the resolution sidesteps the question. It was forgery all along. Forgery doesn't require computers, and if it weren't falsified video logs in a computer system, it could just as easily be airbrushed photos or imitated signatures or replica wax seals or whatever else.
If you're curious about the only good trial in Star Trek, it's The Undiscovered Country. It's a farce because it's supposed to be a farce. This episode, unfortunately, takes itself seriously.
Edit: I'll clarify, I love "The Drumhead." I just don't think of it as a court episode. This may seem like splitting hairs, but I think there are important differences between it and the overtly legalistic stuff like this episode and "Dax."
I don't think this is a good episode, but it is fun! Finney is played so over-the-top and extreme in this episode that it's hard to remember anything else. The plot has always felt a bit muddled, but then Spock comes in with his "I'm super awesome at chess" shtick, and the episode sort of drops everything and changes gears from slow to crazy.
I never caught that the prosecution's case makes no sense. Was he negligent or malicious?
It's interesting that TNG did their own version of the captain and prosecution being former lovers in The Measure of a Man, to better effect. It feels, again, like the problem with this episode is too many good elements with not enough deep exploration.
I guess you can say Drumhead is not a court case; it's just an inquest.
It was actually way more perverse in "The Measure of a Man," since the old flame was the judge, and Riker was the prosecutor. I guess Starfleet JAG has some real staffing problems.
One thing about the original series is, they don't have A/B plot structuring. By and large, every episode is about one thing, and the result is that a lot of episodes really drag on. "The Galileo Seven" was particularly guilty of this since, how much can you really say about how you can't command a starship on logic alone?
This episode suffers the same structural problem: "Welp, we've got forty-five minutes to kill. Better have the lawyer who should've been in a seersucker suit go on a long, tedious rant."
I went back and rewatched "The Drumhead" as a palate cleanser, and it was even more obvious how different it is. It isn't even an inquest... One of my criticisms of "Court Martial" is how indifferent everyone seems to be to standards and reliability of evidence, so it's a good thing they found incontrovertible evidence clearing Kirk. "The Drumhead" is what happens when you don't care about the reliability or credibility of evidence.
And god what a spectacular villain.