Star Trek

Sorry, I'm kinda mad right now. I typed up a long intro, and then my computer freaked out, so now my message is deleted. I'll come back when I cool off a bit and willing to re-type it. Again, sory about this.

  We're still far away from the Star Trek computers.

Okay, so in the episode, McCoy said that when tribbles eat, they give birth. I naturally assumed that the opposite has the opposite affect. I thought the whole episode they were trying to figure out how to stop them from giving birth without killing the tribbles. Nope. At the end, McCy figures out what everybody else already knows. Isn't that odd?

McCoy: Jim, I think I've got it. All we've got to do is quit feeding them. We quit feeding them, they stop breeding!

Kirk: Now he tells me....

Yeah, I caught that. McCoy basically solved it earlier in the episode:

McCoy: Do you know what you get if you ffed a Tribble too much?

Kirk: A fat Tribble.

McCoy: No. You get a whole bunch of hungry little Tribbles.

Right there it was pretty obvious what the solution was. Kirk's next line should have been "Well, Bones, all I can suggest....is you stop feeding them! But, if they'd just stopped there, then you wouldn't have had one of my favorite episodes. There were several things like this in TOS. I've had to learn to look past it and just watch the show.

This has ALWAYS bothered me!- althought this remains one of my absolute favorite TOS episodes.

There is another solution, however: McCoy said that if one were to feed a tribble too much, THEN the tribble would breed. Perhaps during the course of the episode he was trying to figure how little food it would take before the tribble could eat without reproducing. His ultimate conclusion, then, was that no matter the amount of food, the tribbles would just keep giving birth.

If you look at it that way, then maybe it wasn't a mistake in the script after all.

Why must they keep reproducing? Is it possible to neuter a Tribble?

If they could find it's reproductive organs, maybe they could... but if I recall, there was difficulty in even finding the head of the critter let alone everything else. 

That is a good way to look at it! I don't guess I had thought of it that way.

Where are the tiny baby tribbles!!

Remember the line "They are born pregnant." There is no way to neuter a tribble.