Leave it to engineers to hold a sneaking admiration for the infamous. In "Space Seed" Scotty admits such feelings to his fellow officers regarding the tyrant superman Khan. (One can only wonder what the death of his nephew - if not the double near death of his crew - did to influence this regard.)

My personal example of this sort goes to Dr. Richard Daystrom, star of the classic episode "The Ultimate Computer." Prize-winning genius designer of NCC-1701's computers, he built the platform from which Majel speaks. (TOS is well known for its strong performances, and the fantastic physical presence of master thespian William Marshall commands every scene he attends. "Blacula" is just not your normal nerd type!)

No question that Spock's computers work effectively and satisfactorily. Daystrom suffered from subsequent anguish though, and tried to exceed his earlier accomplishment by building an artificial mind to largely replace the starship crew. So eager to actually produce a solution, he ignored the underlying question - was it really needed? What was so broken that it needed fixing? He had found ... "a new approach." But was it necessary?

This new system, digital duplicate of his own unstable wetware, soon became almost entirely responsible for the deaths - for the murders - of several hundred starship personnel. ("Your mighty starships...!" Yeah, nobody's gonna laugh up the boy wonder now!)

There's something of a "peer review" obviously missing in the M5 disaster, not only among the rows of fools that should have anticipated its predilection for failure but also among the idiots in charge at Starfleet that thought replacing the captain was such a good one in the first place. I mean really, couldn't you test it on an unarmed freighter first?

Because somewhere in the reasoning - the engrams - the connection got lost between "men must not die in space" and "full power phaser attacks against unprepared starships kill many men." Today we might note a similar danger of losing the difference between "we're all in this together" and "you're either with us or against us." The empire of Khan Noonien Singh encompassed nearly a quarter of our world. The hegemony of current empire could grow to include all that and the rest too. Some might even draw a comparable conclusion about the planet's recent lurch towards repression and tyranny.

Freedom is our vision - it is our "worship word." Has it somehow been shown to be broken in the homeland, in dire need of a fix of security? Not every new approach guarantees a good answer.