It wasn’t a lie, though, because there was no intent to deceive. The trill just views this as normal. They saw no more reason to “reveal” how their biology works than a human might feel the need to disclose that they’ll wrinkle and weaken with age.
Realistically spacefaring races would probably find ways of sorting these things out before getting involved, but that’s how it was presented in the episode.
The trill just views this as normal. They saw no more reason to “reveal” how their biology works than a human might feel the need to disclose that they’ll wrinkle and weaken with age.
if you visited a planet where everyone is in their 20s and never age, i am pretty sure you would feel obligated to point the fact you will age and wrinkle to someone before you marry them.
and it is not like the trills are delusional and have no idea how different they are from other non-joined species.
Been too long since I saw the episode. Skimming the transcript, this is the quote I remembered:
It never occurred to me. This is what I am. Did you ever tell me that you are only a single being? Of course not. That was normal to you.
And since Beverly gives no real pushback to that, I kind of assumed that was a fair justification: that the Trill as they existed in this episode simply hasn’t had enough contact with other humanoids to know they were different.
But skimming the rest of the transcript, you’re right. Odan doesn’t correct anyone who refers to his previous work as that of his father. He clearly understands this difference and purposefully hides it.
Feel like that makes the episode less interesting. And especially worse retrospectively if we apply the obvious trans metaphor…
one of the defining attributes of startrek is inconsistency… in some cases, they didn’t even try, but it is hard to be consistent across multiple different shows even if you do try. and in this case it also did not help this was introduction of the concept (of trills as joint species) and all the lore we now take for granted was created later in ds9.
It wasn’t a lie, though, because there was no intent to deceive. The trill just views this as normal. They saw no more reason to “reveal” how their biology works than a human might feel the need to disclose that they’ll wrinkle and weaken with age.
Realistically spacefaring races would probably find ways of sorting these things out before getting involved, but that’s how it was presented in the episode.
if you visited a planet where everyone is in their 20s and never age, i am pretty sure you would feel obligated to point the fact you will age and wrinkle to someone before you marry them.
and it is not like the trills are delusional and have no idea how different they are from other non-joined species.
Been too long since I saw the episode. Skimming the transcript, this is the quote I remembered:
And since Beverly gives no real pushback to that, I kind of assumed that was a fair justification: that the Trill as they existed in this episode simply hasn’t had enough contact with other humanoids to know they were different.
But skimming the rest of the transcript, you’re right. Odan doesn’t correct anyone who refers to his previous work as that of his father. He clearly understands this difference and purposefully hides it.
Feel like that makes the episode less interesting. And especially worse retrospectively if we apply the obvious trans metaphor…
one of the defining attributes of startrek is inconsistency… in some cases, they didn’t even try, but it is hard to be consistent across multiple different shows even if you do try. and in this case it also did not help this was introduction of the concept (of trills as joint species) and all the lore we now take for granted was created later in ds9.