Warp That Aesop / Star Trek

aka: Star Trek The Original Series

• General:
  • Racism is bad, that is unless exhibited by a main character. Then it's just a cute character quirk!
  • Parents (fathers especially) are assholes.
  • The best way to show off your strong independent women characters is to put them in increasingly demeaning situations and revealing outfits.
  • The Prime Directive says that you shouldn't get involved in other aliens' business, so clearly that means you should let those aliens be subjected to rights-abusing, authoritative dictatorships and/or planet-wide extinction!
  • The captain is always right, even when they're objectively not.
  • The current technology level is always the best one. When a computer threatens our crew's jobs, that is a Job-Stealing Robot. But if anyone suggests that society has gone too far or is mean to one of the robots we like, then they are an Evil Luddite. Technological progression is reserved for the gaps between series!
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The main reason to support space exploration is the chance to make first contact with a Green-Skinned Space Babe.
  • The Federation has moved beyond prejudice, you green-blooded, pointy-eared freak! And tell that backstabbing Klingon savage that goes for him, too.
  • Don't bother creating specialist teams and equipment for ground combat, just use 4 of the ship's highest-ranking officers! Or 3 and an ensign.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Some people are just better than everyone else, and should be given free rein.
  • Being gifted will make people resent you and forget your more humanizing moments. It’s much better to just hide your gifts and be unhelpful so you don’t make someone else feel bad.
  • Your second in command doesn't have to be competent if he is handsome.
    • Your second in command doesn't have to be competent or handsome if you tell everyone that he is. Repeatedly.
  • Summary execution is OK. In The Measure Of A Man, Data was declared to have the full rights of a sentient being. This would mean their deactivation of Lore amounted to murder. Granted he was evil, but he didn't exactly get a trial (and the death penalty wasn't applied anywhere else in the Federation...).
    • On the other hand, Data, being a culture of One (or, rather, Two...and then One again), is free to exercise his own justice against Lore, as Worf did against Duras. He may still get a stern rebuke from Picard, though.
  • Legal personhood can be determined by military tribunal using a small number of officers. These officers need not have any relevant expertise, either, you can just grab the three who are closest when the issue arises. Civil courts need not be involved in matters of civil rights.
  • Putting an android you found in someone's basement, with completely unknown programming, who doesn't think like or understand humans, into a command position in a vital military organization always leads to win.
  • Cultural Contamination must be prevented at all cost, even if the civilization goes extinct through easily averted natural disasters. Every culture must develop along their own path.
  • Why give your captain a straight answer to a simple query about what's happening with your away team, when a vague and smartass-y one might be wittier? For instance, if your captain asks, "What is it, Number One? What are you seeing?", you answer: "Trouble." And using video communication, so that the captain can see what's going on for himself, would be a complete waste of resources.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: On the frontiers, you can do whatever the hell you want because You Did What You Had To Do, even if you didn't really have to do it.
  • A commander of a strategically important outpost who regularly spirals into strange obsessions and is mentally influenced by alien gods is to be left in command.
  • Genetically engineered people have no rights.
  • If you're a Klingon, or live with one, you can hack anyone to death, beat your spouse, or have drunken brawls in public every night because it's "part of their culture".
  • "Field of Fire": Racial profiling works.
    • If there's a murderer on the loose, don't put the seasoned lawman who's had years of experience solving crimes on the case; instead, send the ditzy, incompetent counselor who is suffering from multiple personality disorder and who only got her job because two of her past selves were friends with the boss. And if the case stresses her to the point of nearly stabbing someone with a bar knife, trust her judgment when she says she doesn't need a break from the case. Never ask her what methods she's been using to solve it, either.
  • The best way to defend a critical planetary outpost is with the badly outfitted crew from a starship. When the crew start getting slaughtered by the enemy's most elite ground troops, the best way to reinforce them is to send the crew of your most important space station.
  • When any mission requires use of the starship attached to the station, it's okay for all of the highest ranking officers to leave, including:
    • The station commander, who as Emmissary To The Prophets is a major religious figure to the Bajorans.
    • The station's 2nd officer, who is a Bajoran liaison officer, not a member of Starfleet and whose primary military experience is running a small resistance cell fighting in asymmetrical ground warfare and not starship combat.
    • The station's chief science officer, who is the 3rd in command of the Station.
    • The station's chief medical officer.
    • The station's security chief who isn't a member of Starfleet but is a member of the primary antagonist species,
    • The strategic operations fleet liaison officer.
    • And the chief engineer who is also your senior NCO.
    • A single accident involving Deep Space Nine's attached Starship at the wrong time could have wiped out the entire command structure of the Station, massively set back relations between the Federation and Bajor and left an Engineering or Medical specialist Lieutenant to take charge until Starfleet sent someone new to take over.
  • If you're nice and caring enough, you can change torturers into good guys with the force of your love.
  • If your child is struggling in school, especially during their first or second year of school, genetically modify them. It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand what’s happening to them or it’s illegal, it’s better than them living with a disability or at least getting help from regular therapy.
  • Anyone who worked for a dictatorship is automatically evil and deserves to be punished. Wait... They didn't actually have a government job and didn't commit any atrocities in their lifetime? Well... They're still evil!
• Star Trek: Voyager: Despite there being no one to support the rules, you should follow them even when it makes life worse for everybody.
  • You should ignore the above when you can justify it with a flimsy reason, even when it makes life worse for everybody.
  • Principles are only for people who are being watched.
    • Whatever principles you do have should be blindly followed even if they're wrong. Don't question the Prime Fucking Directive! (Even if it gets your crew, half of whom don't even follow it, killed.)
    • We're better than these colonialist, imperialist, war-mongering, capitalist, nuke-happy savages we're trotting around the galaxy to look down our noses on. We'll remind everyone of that fact EVERY FUCKING EPISODE.
    • Inversely, when Starfleet protocol is inconvenient, then you can justify trespassing by calling the holders of a territory "a bunch of bullies" and even proceed to engage in battle with your pursuers.
  • Dating the producer gets your character the most focus and character development. Also, the hottest chick in the cast must wear skintight spandex and six-inch heels all the time no matter how impractical (a lesson carried over to Enterprise)
  • Consistency is for peons. If you're the captain, you can decide whether or not you're going to uphold the Prime Directive that day based on whatever whim takes you, and no one will dare call you on it.
    • And if they do, you can (and should) just shout them down.
  • If your Captain locks herself in her quarters for months at a time, that's just an indication of what a great leader she is.
  • It's okay to leave a young Ensign stuck in their greenhorn rank even as other crewmen (some of whom betrayed or never even joined Starfleet) are demoted and promoted instead, even as they do excellent work in tough situations, on a ship that lost a large amount of Starfleet qualified officers in a major accident, even when doing so would cause no major command structure issues if they were promoted to Lieutenant.
  • Don't worry about making mistakes in your life, you can always correct the future to your tastes with some Time Travel.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Commanding a starship will cause even the most likable of people to have outbreaks of jackassery and periodically grab hold of the Idiot Ball.
  • Just imagine what it does to someone like Archer.
  • If a sentient species is being driven to extinction by an easily curable disease, just leave them to their fate. It's just evolution in action.
  • Use drugs! They'll make you more interesting.
  • Having sex with someone you're counseling through the grief of a loved one is perfectly ethical, and will lead to a long-term relationship. Or conversely, accept a counseling role with someone that you're sexually attracted to to begin with, whichever comes first.
  • There's nothing remotely illogical about being brazenly condescending towards a less-advanced civilization while you're trying to maintain healthy relations. Or leaving people to die because their medical condition was caused by a mostly harmless (and potentially useful) activity your society disapproves of for no particular reason.
• Star Trek: Picard
  • Season One: Be sure to get rid of oppressed minorities before they can summon godlike allies to exterminate all life in the galaxy.
  • Season Two: Butterfly effects usually sort themselves out. If you're ever back in time, just do whatever.
    • Getting assimilated by the Borg will make you cool and sexy.
    • Locking your wife in a room doesn't count as abuse if she's mentally ill.
  • Season Three: If an ex-lover ever summons you on a covert mission with strict instructions to Trust No One, be sure to tell your best friend about it at a very public location. Also, best not to take your hot, competent, loyal Romulan ex-spy girlfriend with you, because it's not like she has useful skills.
    • It's okay to ghost your best friend and on-again, off-again lover of thirty years after you become pregnant with his child because you think his lifestyle is too dangerous, and then to immediately set out on a lifestyle so dangerous that your son has a rap sheet as long as your arm by the time he turns 20. Don't check in on your lover with his "dangerous" lifestyle after he's retired to a vineyard. Be sure to ghost everyone else in your friend group too!
    • If you have a deep-seated, trauma-induced hatred of a particular group, you should absolutely select a member of that group as your first officer as a sort of immersion therapy! Be sure to deadname her and treat her like crap until you get over yourself.
    • It doesn't matter if you're a smug little mummy's boy with no post-secondary education and no qualifications; it doesn't even matter if you get hundreds of thousands of people killed through your own stupidity; you can still get a job on the bridge of the Federation flagship within a year through the Power of Nepotism.
    • Screw stun settings! Just kill people. It looks cooler!
    • If you're experiencing a Borg invasion, definitely don't contact a friendly, rival Borg Queen to ask for help. Don't even acknowledge her existence! Better to try to take on the entire fleet with a forty-year-old museum piece.
    • Relationships with surrogate children and found family are meaningless. Emotional fulfilment only comes with having a biological son, even if you've only known him for, like, two days.
• The 2009 film: It's OK to manipulate people into being friends if it was important in a now-defunct universe.
  • And fathers exert absolutely no influence by raising children. If you take a great hero, go back to shortly after his birth and kill his father leaving him a half-orphan, he will grow up to be exactly the same hero he was in the original timeline. (This could certainly happen in real life, but it's still kind of an uncomfortable message).
    • Except with more lens flare.