Daystrom Institute

3454 readers

38 users here now

Welcome to Daystrom Institute!

Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.

Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.

Rules

1. Explain your reasoning

All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.

2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.

This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.

3. Be diplomatic.

Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.

4. Assume good faith.

Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”

5. Tag spoilers.

Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.

6. Stay on-topic.

Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.

Episode Guides

The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What exactly was the "security clearance" that La'an needed to run James Kirk through in Subspace Rhapsody? (startrek.website)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise at the beginning of the episode, La'an is in the transporter room to receive him. Her actual motives for being there are... complicated, but she claims to be there so she "can run a security clearance on [Kirk]." Allegedly this is "just standard operating procedure", which Commander Chin-Riley does not question.

To the best of my knowledge, we've never seen a security officer carry out this "standard operating procedure" before, nor do we actually see it done here. further, Kirk is a reasonably respected Starfleet officer who has been on the Enterprise before (and quite recently). It seems unlikely that he represents a reasonable security risk. Are we meant to interpret this as La'an digging through the regulations for an outdated excuse to be present for Kirk's arrival, or is this a legitimate precaution that we should expect is routinely taken quietly and off-screen? If the later, what could actually be going on that requires the physical presence of the security clearance and can't be accomplished by a simple scan?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Well she was obviously making an excuse to be there and everyone in the room knew it. Id guess the security clearance was something like manually verifying his identity and registering him with the computer as part of the command staff. This would normally be the sort of boring paperwork the computer or a lower level security person does off screen, but she wanted an excuse to be there and the clearance was technically something she was responsible for.