Cyrano Jones
- Thread starter Lt. Tyler
- Start date
Demoted to red shirt and sent on every dangerous landing mission.
I don't understand exactly what you're asking. Are you asking us to weigh in on the punishment he did receive, cleaning up the Tribbles on K-7? Or are you asking us to come up with some other punishment for him?
He would have spent longer in the penal system. He knew he was better off where he was.
I think the punishment he got fit the crime.
He caused the mess, why shouldn't he have cleaned it up? It was only unfortunate that he didn't have to deal with this kind of agglomeration of the critters.
http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x05/moretribblesmoretrouble_287.jpg
http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x05/moretribblesmoretrouble_287.jpg
But the penal system of TOS cures people of specific crimes; if the cure works, there's no punitive jail time involved. Jones could have been in and out in two weeks - it appears Mudd was, both before and after his first appearance...
There's no punitive element to the treatment of criminals in the actual justice system of TOS, according to "Dagger of the Mind" or "Conscience of the King" or "Whom Gods Destroy". So when Kirk imposes an obvious punishment on Jones, isn't Kirk actually booking up a holiday in a criminal asylum for himself?
The TNG era seems to retain the system, the "jail time" for smuggling and attempted genocide being the same six months or so. This would go against the principles of today's system where freedom-deprivation torture is meted out in appropriate relation to the crime, but can be interpreted to fit the system where the doctors just need a bit of incarceration for their patient in order to apply the cure.
That's probably how Kirk gets around the issue: he isn't punishing, or even accusing Jones of any crimes, but merely politely asking the guy to make good. It's just that we don't know why Jones should say yes. Is he so afraid of brainwashing? McCoy and Noel, experts in the field, were convinced there was no harm involved in that - is the ignorant Average Jones of a different opinion, no matter how baseless such a fear is?
And why isn't McCoy arguing against Kirk's (and, more relevantly, Spock's!) sadistic actions here, when he's so obviously a great believer in the sort of therapy that Dr. Adams practiced before he went cuckoo?
Timo Saloniemi
Put him in the Agony Booth from 'Mirror, Mirror'.
Not so. Spock specifically told Jones that the penalty for transporting dangerous animals was twenty years in a penal institution. He went on to say it would take Jones Nineteen years, and several months and days(I don't remember the exact number) to clean up the station. Jones, of course, chose the latter.
Cyrano Jones: Years?(with one of the most dogeared, dejected expressions ever)
Huh? Mudd wasn't released after "Mudd's Women." He escaped custody. There's an entire exchange between Mudd and Kirk in "I, Mudd" that explains what happened to him in between episodes:KIRK: All right, Harry, explain. How did you get here? We left you in custody after that affair on the Rigel mining planet.
MUDD: Yes, well, I organised a technical information service bringing modern industrial techniques to backward planets, making available certain valuable patents to struggling young civilisations throughout the galaxy.
KIRK: Did you pay royalties to the owners of those patents?
MUDD: Well, actually, Kirk, as a defender of the free enterprise system, I found myself in a rather ambiguous conflict as a matter of principle.
SPOCK: He did not pay royalties.
MUDD: Knowledge, sir, should be free to all.
KIRK: Who caught you?
MUDD: That, sir, is an outrageous assumption.
KIRK: Yes. Who caught you?
MUDD: I sold the Denebians all the rights to a Vulcan fuel synthesiser.
KIRK: And the Denebians contacted the Vulcans.
MUDD: How'd you know?
KIRK: That's what I would have done.
MUDD: It's typical police mentality. They've got no sense of humour. They arrested me.
MCCOY: Oh, I find that shocking.
MUDD: Worse than that. Do know what the penalty for fraud is on Deneb Five?
SPOCK: The guilty party has his choice. Death by electrocution, death by gas, death by phaser, death by hanging.
MUDD: The key word in your entire peroration, Mister Spock, was, death. Barbarians. Well, of course, I left.
KIRK: He broke jail.
MUDD: I borrowed transportation.
KIRK: He stole a spaceship.
MUDD: The patrol reacted in a hostile manner.
KIRK: They fired at him.
MUDD: They've no respect for private property. They damaged the bloody spaceship. Well, I got away, but I couldn't navigate, so I wandered out through unmapped space, and here I found Mudd.
Dr Noel seemed convinced that the procedures of Dr Adams were over the counter and his equipment nothing special - and Kirk's experience with Adams-style facilities suggested his techniques were already well established (he had been at it for twenty years, after all).
Combine this with the fact that the neural neutralizer chair remains in legal use in "Whom Gods Destroy" (even if villains put it to misuse there, too), and that Mudd in "Mudd's Women" had a criminal record that read he had received psychiatric treatment for relatively petty offenses including transport of stolen goods and use of counterfeit currency - and it no longer is a case of "conflating", but of "continuity"...
Ah, no - the dialogue doesn't state that. The dialogue states that Mudd was left in custody, and then proceeded with the further crimes he describes. So the step of how he departed custody is left open, and the briefness of that suggests he just got further therapy (the effectiveness of which on this twisted mind was "disputed" in his criminal record, but at least he never repeated a specific crime!).
What happens later is that he performs those further crimes, gets caught again, and this time it's not the benevolent UFP system but the barbaric Denebian one. So then he escapes - breaks jail, steals, and gets shot at.
It is against this background that the concept of "punishment" appears utterly inconsistent, and the idea of imprisonment for twenty years particularly outdated. If a crime is considered that severe, then surely the criminal is considered deserving of psychiatric treatment, and if that doesn't work, it's not twenty years but life on Elba II.
Timo Saloniemi
Well if David Gerrold's "More Tribbles More Troubles" (TAS)
is considered cannon (for this thread)- then perhaps in hindsight, another penalty was in order.
Looking at that ep, did anyone else want to know what that glommer was actually trying to do to the huge tribble? ewwww.
I think some time in the fields in Sherman's planet would have worked wonders.
As for the Station clean up- some sort of mass tribble hibernation/storage in cryo/transporter warehouse stasis chamber would have worked fine. There are a Hundreds of Billions of people in the Federation, right? I'm sure Amazon fulfillment can handle shipping.
is considered cannon (for this thread)- then perhaps in hindsight, another penalty was in order.
Looking at that ep, did anyone else want to know what that glommer was actually trying to do to the huge tribble? ewwww.
I think some time in the fields in Sherman's planet would have worked wonders.
As for the Station clean up- some sort of mass tribble hibernation/storage in cryo/transporter warehouse stasis chamber would have worked fine. There are a Hundreds of Billions of people in the Federation, right? I'm sure Amazon fulfillment can handle shipping.
What was the glommer doing to the huge tribble? If memory serves, run very far away from it at high speed.
And Mudd committed the other crimes for the purpose of escaping custody.
And Mudd committed the other crimes for the purpose of escaping custody.
Sure, Dr. Noel knew about the "basic" version of the equipment but not, I don't believe, did she have any idea of the permutations that Adams had so assiduously wrought with it. If he wasn't concerned with the possible exposure of his work, why was it so important for him to recover Van Gelder? As for Kirk, while as stated he was familiar with other facilities, I think that if he had observed the odd behavior clearly visible at Tantalus, he wouldn't have been so sanguine about the "time tested" techniques used or the personnel wielding them.
I'm pretty sure that the version seen in Whom Gods Destroy was the standard edition, simply used at an intensity on Kirk and Cory that almost certainly would not be permitted within its usual operating parameters. While obviously extremely painful, exquisitely is I think how Garth described it, there wasn't any evidence that it had the same mind draining effect that Adams' pride and joy did.
Finally, the simple description that Mudd had received psychiatric treatment in no way implies that he got time in the chair. To paraphrase Trelane, there were no doubt many types of instrumentalities at the command and use by contemporary psychiatry. Mudd may have well only experienced their version of talk therapy, medications, or other less drastic forms of treatment than the neural neutralizer, that even in its less malign form, seemed to be reserved for individuals with rather more serious diagnoses.
Let's not confuse two things. Dr. Adams was a scientist and therapist of good reputation who had achieved verifiable results and apparently kept getting lots of government resources as the result. It's just that he used those resources for evil in his futile quest to cure the incurables. During those twenty years of a brilliant career, there was some point at which he stepped over the line and apparently never stepped back. And anything done beyond that point would require murder or worse to cover.
However, most of what he did at Tantalus still passed muster, as we saw the muster passing, in many a pleasant derriere shot...
Noel said that Adams' chair was a novelty of sorts in using a standoff, beam-based method for neural neutralizing; Earth had only experimented with that method (the beam), for the already existing practice (of neutralizing).
So what Adams did was more familiar and acceptable than what he was doing it with. He just went further than he should have, apparently because he wanted to be an even bigger hero.
Yup, the timeline doesn't allow for that one - but it does allow for neural neutralizing, if that's what it took to (try and) cure Mudd. Although we have no reason to think that this is the only arrow in their quiver. But we do have reason to think that what you get for crimes in the UFP is therapy, as there's no other response in evidence. Save for Spock's utterly implausible "twenty years for import limitations violation".
Not according to his own words. He was "left in custody", and Kirk wonders how he got to the android planet. Mudd explains that he committed a series of crimes, and the Denebians caught him, after which he escaped gruesome death penalty by stealing a ship, which is how he finally crashed onto the android planet. This necessarily describes two separate cycles of crime, punishment and release from custody, as the first time around it was not the Denebians that caught him, but Kirk.
Since his means of leaving UFP custody (the one into which Kirk delivered him) are not described, not even through sarcastic commentary from Kirk and Spock, it appears he didn't need to break jail that time around. So he simply got a super-short sentence, which is in keeping with the "all criminals are ill and there's a pill for that" approach - or then was found not guilty and released ASAP, which is in keeping with his resourceful rascal nature. But one would still expect sarcasm from the heroes in the latter case.
Timo Saloniemi
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