Look what I finally got you guys!
Now I can finally introduce my wife to the original series, the animatied series and the two original cast movies she’s not yet seen! Yay!
We’re just about to wrap up the first season but better late than never, jump on in!
Why is the whole crew in Blackface?
They are Democrats running for state office in Virginia. It may be a Commonwealth requirement, IDK. Shantner, anyway. I think Nimoy was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time.
THEY’RE SILHOUETTES YOU RACIST.
It looks more like glitterface anyhow. I’m sure we’ll hear from those of the Meyer Vampire persuasion about how inappropriate that is soon enough.
Is this appropriate?
Not til season three!
Absolutely not! Those fights are not up to Starfleet regulations.
BTW, B, I am really amped that you are jumping on this train too.
Having finished the drafts of City on the Edge of Forever and now its many afterwords, I want to throw out one last item and then I’ll let it lie. Harlan mentions up front that the accusation that he had written Scotty dealing drugs was a spurious accusation - Scotty never appeared in an of the drafts. Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana support this in their notations in the afterword, Scotty never appeared in Harlan’s version at all (in his versions, Janice Rand occupies the spot that Scotty would take in the final version). It’s one of those embellishments that’s grown with the telling over the years, possibly Roddenberry’s own invention.
Mmmm, I love velour pants worn so that you can tell if a guy is circumcised or not
Maybe not one of Bill Theiss’s proudest accomplishments
To be fair he was truly a master of gauze and double sided tape.
Let’s move the timeline forward folks, this week it’s Operation: Annihilate! In which Kirk must contemplate Exterminatus! In the grim darkness of the future, there is only Star Trek! OK, I’m done.
I was drawing a total blank on this episode up until a certain point, and you can probably guess what that is. I had forgotten about the encroaching space madness on planet Deneva, and the failed attempt to rescue the ship that had set its controls for the heart of the sun. But then they finally reach the planet and we find the cause of all these problems:
Oh yeah, these little bags of puke*. It’s hard to take them seriously when they flit across the screen like weird little Halloween decoration bats, but then they land on Spock and inject their tentacles that take over your whole body! It’s neither here nor there really, but the revelation that Spock had little tentacles winding throughout his entire nervous system made me think of Hyperion, and the priest’s tale about the cruciform. I wonder if Dan Simmons was a fan of this episode?
Anyway, it gets all serious and Spock gets worse and then he gets better and then everyone decides nothing can be done for anyone so let’s just kill the whole planet. As usual only Kirk thinks this might be a bad idea and they get the bright (ha!) idea to turn the lights on really high, which kills the aliens and conveniently, also the parasites they inject into people. Yay, everyone wins!
I like this episode for the most part, but the wrap-up strikes me as a little too tidy. It’s all set up with massive stakes and potentially high consequences but in the end there are none. Even after McCoy blinds Spock in his haste to kill the parasite, it’s all rolled back when we find out oh yeah, Vulcans have another eyelid, like a cat. I don’t hate the ending, it just feels very anticlimactic to me, and I find it affects my opinion of the entire episode a little adversely. Definitely a step down from last week’s episode.
And with that, we have reached the end of season one of the original series of Star Trek! We’re pretty much 1/3 of the way through our little excursion. I’m pondering whether we should take a break here, catch our breath, ready ourselves before diving back into season two. I’m open to opinions on that, it’s everyone’s ballgame after all.
*Not even kidding! From Wikipedia for this episode: " The neural parasites were created by prop designer Wah Chang from bags of fake vomit."
I watched the rest of this episode last night. I really liked Kor, and the introduction of the Klingons. They’re contrasted with the Federation being a democracy versus the Klingon Empire which rules by force. The Organians can even see into the future and tell them that despite their initial wars, the Klingons and humans will eventually become friends. You can already see the seeds of this as Kor and Kirk have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the Organians. When Kirk is disguised as an Organian, Kor immediately takes a liking to Kirk as one of the only people there without a smug smile on his face. Someone who doesn’t like being ruled! My kind of guy!
Anyway, a decent episode. Certainly the Klingons seem a lot more interesting to me than the stupid Romulans who were introduced in that earlier boring episode.
Thoughtcrime
Fixed it for everyone.
I will give that Romulan episode another try at some point, just so that I can be sure the reason I dislike it isn’t the fact that I slept through some of it. Then maybe you guys will stop giving me side-eye.
Maybe after Season 3 is over.
I should be able to catch up to everyone else this weekend. Sorry about being behind again.