The wrap-up conversation was about the tribbles on the Enterprise. The tribbles on the starbase were entirely the responsibility of Cyrano Jones.
re: Tribbles - you should all watch the trek short - ‘The Trouble with Edward’.
See the famous staircase scene in Gone With the Wind.
Perhaps True Love is just a variation on Stockholm Syndrome?
Some non-trivial fraction of men would certainly wish it were so.
To me, the Khan/McGiver thing looked like a standard male predator, manipulating his victim.
Kirk probably should not have let her go to Ceti Alpha, but by that time, she had already committed mutiny, and possibly treason.
My headcanon has always been that Tribbles are basically giant single-celled microbes. Their “hair” is cilia that allows for respiration, locomotion, and consuption, and they reproduce via horizontal gene transfer and budding. Behaviorally, they’re the same as their smaller cousins, only reacting to basic stimuli like warmth, food, and Klingons.
One problem with this is Bones explaining that they’re “Born pregnant” but it’s fairly easy to wave away as Bones’ folksy way of saying “Tribbles can bud offspring immediately, and in fact tribble buds will themselves already be budding if food is plentiful enough.”
Gentlemen, you can’t stay here, this is the Transporter Room!
That gagh that Riker was eating was already bite-sized, more or less. Eating a live tribble seems problematic; it’s more than a mouthful, and fuzzy. Seems like they’d need to be fileted before eating, or at least plucked.
McCoy says at the end of the episode that you can stop tribbles from reproducing if you stop feeding them. That’s why I thought they’d be a good food source on Klingon ships. Keep some tribbles in a very secure vault on their ship. When you pass a planet, beam up some vegetation into the vault. The tribbles happily chow down and a few days later they’ve got fresh meat for the whole crew.
It’s like grazing and slaughtering cattle, but with no labor or overhead.
Yeah. Maybe in that sense it hasn’t aged all that much.
You just put a small slit in the bottom and pop it inside out into your mouth. Then you flip it back around and send it to the taxidermist to make into pillow stuffing.
Tribble haggis?
If you mean this one, you’re not alone.
General Hospital’s Genie Francis Won’t ‘Defend’ Laura’s Rape Scene (people.com)
OTOH, to be fair, Stockholm Syndrome is a term coined by the media, and science remains divided on its legitimacy.
Stockholm syndrome - Wikipedia
The tribble episode on The Animated Series revolved around a tribble predator that the Klingons found, so something likes to eat them. IIRC, it came from Gerrold’s script submitted but never aired on TOS season 3. (Source is Mission Log.)
I remember that, it was a spiderish looking thing.