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.”