Ex Post Facto

And the clincher to all this, the real damning piece of evidence, is an eyewitness identification... by a dog! A DOG!

It's an incredible combination of clues that are outright stupid with ones that just leave us completely in the dark and completely unengaged.

There's also one of my pet peeves. The line : "Smoking is a bad habit. My species gave it up centuries ago when we finally got it into our heads it was killing us." Really? Seriously, every single last human alive made that collective decision, did they? What an incredible world the future is, where every single person alive thinks exactly the same way about every substantive issue. I get that Star Trek writers want to show a future where tastes have changed, and that's fine. Things DO go out of fashion, things do die out and recede into history. For example, I have no problem with the way Trek depicts baseball as dying out, because the way they tell it, the game simply declined in popularity until the leagues folded, and finally nobody played any more. But they did switch to new games - Parrises squares for example (which, despite the fact that it kills players quite regularly, including small children, "we" remain perfectly fine with). One only needs to look at history to see that games do go in and out of fashion. And yet such things do tend to survive, on a small basis, just as Baseball survives on a small basis in the future with the Niners and other small teams. But so often the slide into this smug "well, we decided that..." trope. It creates this mental image that the whole of humanity gets together once a year and decides which hobbies and interests people can enjoy. "Well to summarise then, humanity has given up on the colour red. We've decided that our favourite colour is blue. Also, we like Mexican food and Wednesday is our favourite day of the week. And, we all vote Democrat."