Is it? Bones says that the way to keep the tribbles from reproducing is to stop feeding them. It doesn’t sound fatal.
Good point. I’d forgotten about that line. Seems odd an animal could survive indefinitely without food, but xenomorphs are stranger than fact. Makes one wonder how / why they do die in their natural state.
As with most treknobabble, it sounds superficially plausible, but any serious thought about the implications of an animal like a tribble on whatever ecosystem it came from make it clear that’s a non-viable situation. Or one very different from everything we know about earthly ecosystems.
Tribbles are basically super-rodents or super-insects, the fastest breeding herbivores that are the next step up in the food chain from plants. Presumably in their natural habitat they’re relentlessly preyed upon by carnivores and parasitoids that keep their numbers down; it’s not like tribbles can run, hide or fight back. (Seriously, tribbles are so non-challenging a prey that they are almost little more than protein-rich plants).
If there are naturally occurring predators on Iota Geminorum IV, why did the Klingons go to the trouble of genetically engineering glommers?
Maybe they didn’t want to go anywhere near the Tribble planet.
Maybe genetic engineering is cheap and easy whereas sending starships halfway across the galaxy is expensive in their society?
A real bottle episode would be one where all the crew have vanished for, well … plot reasons and the principal cast are wandering around the empty sets.
’The Empath’ always struck me as a bottle show.
This was pretty much the plot of the TNG episode “Remember Me,” and the TOS episode “The Mark of Gideon.” Though, both had guest stars, and/or did use a few extra sets.
Then ABC aired that episode without having aired the first episode where the flashbacks come from.
OK good point.
Inside No 9 came about because the writers did exactly that for an episode of a series. They said they enjoyed the discipline so much that they went on to write the one-offs of the series. So these were bottle episodes purely in the sense of limited location(s) and actually not for the money-saving point of a bottle episode in a series. So not bottle episodes at all in the financial sense, which is the most important reason for writing one. As you say, pretty much the exact opposite, I have to agree.