These Are The Voyages-Star Trek TOS Remastered and Reconsidered

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1019

There were a few things that bothered me a bit. Apparently in the future, women will still get married and give up on their careers, as witnessed with the bridge conversation between Kirk and Bones. Not just as an exception, but as the rule, even in Starfleet.

And in this female officer, we kind of see an example of someone who is willing to do just that. She’s more than happy to live on this paradise and lovingly live with Apollo forever. She has to be ordered by Kirk before she stands up for herself as an expert, a scientist, and an independent woman.

And yeah, the line from Kirk about one god being sufficient was interesting. I hadn’t thought of anyone on the Enterprise being religious before, but maybe they are all lightly religious in some way?

I thought the exchange between Uhura and Spock was lightly flirtatious again, like in the pilot.

I agree with you on the overall episode feeling like a second take on Squire of Gothos and Space Seed. Still, it was interesting to see Scotty be so insubordinate. And for Kirk’s self-sacrificing plan to fail.

Despite @Tin_Wisdom’s warning, we got to see Checkov and Sulu at the helm again together. And we found out Checkov is only 22! They both had pretty big roles in this episode. Checkov got to be on the away team, and Sulu got to try all the ways to escape the Hand of the gods.

I really miss the days when the episode finished and you were immediately told who wrote this episode, like in Season 1. I guess writers aren’t as prominent in Season 2.

1020

Not at all, as I mentioned in the first episode, writer credits are at the top of the episode now, right after the title.

1021

I remember. I’ve just never seen it at the top of the episode. I just disagree with you that it’s a better billing than what they were doing before. In Season 1, I felt like the director and writer being shown right after you’re done watching the episode was absolutely the best billing those two credits could have gotten. You’re just done watching, you love the episode or you hate it, and you immediately see the name right there for who to credit/blame for the episode.

1022

This episode made me realize that Dan Simmons wrote an entire two-volume epic on the same theme, i.e. advanced beings using technology to live their lives as Greek gods. I wonder if he even remembered this episode while he was writing it?

1023

Oh? Is that what Illum and its sequel are about? That still sits unread on my bookshelf, the victim of me switching to digital readers around the time that I bought it.

1024

That is an element of the plot, yes. Sorry if I spoiled it for you!

1025

Heh, that’s okay. I’m actually more likely to read it now. The back of the book made it sound like an attempt to write a greek epic, which sounded boring to me.

1026

It’s really very good. The ideas in it are…big. There’s nothing to my mind mundane about any of the plot(s) or characters.

1027

There’s a scene in Ilium, about a robot getting an optimistic feeling, that is one of my favorite pieces of sci-fi writing. I guess it’s subjective.

In any case, Ilium and Olympos are the “last good Simmons” to me personally. I have not cared for his later work. His early work however is often mind-blowingly fantastic.

1028

According to the bibliography on his website, he’s only done two books after Olympos: The Terror and Drood. So he either stopped writing, or stopped updating his website. Likely the latter. Maybe he doesn’t like his later books either.

1029

My personal feelings about Simmons is that he’s got a reverse-square quality thing going on with his work. His first books in a series are generally fantastic, but they degrade quickly as the series continues.

So - for example - Hyperion was absolutely magnificent, the second book was disappointing, and by the fourth book that universe had disappeared into a sinkhole of awful so terrible that not even prose can escape.

I liked Illium, but found Olympos to be tedious.

1030

On the other hand, The Terror and Drood are both good books.

And there are others not listed on the web site. E.g. The Abominable and The Fifth Heart.

1031

That’s just, like your opinion, man.

And The Terror was great. I have a feeling I started Drood, but either stalled out or forgot about it.

1032

I’m a big fan of Drood. But I may be the only one!

1033

“My congratulations, Captain. A dazzling display of logic.”
“You didn’t think I had it in me, did you?”
“… No, sir.”

Hey folks, a new week calls for a new episode and this time it’s “Changeling.” This is another one I didn’t recognize immediately, I had forgotten that this opens with the Enterprise entering a star system and being immediately attacked by an unknown and overwhelming force. But at the point they beam the Nomad over, I immediately recognized that little space probe. And it’s funny Dalek-like voice.

This is a straightforward little episode, with direct and immediate stakes. And I liked it quite a lot, the crew immediate deduce that they have a little murderous robot on their hands and as soon as it figures out they aren’t exactly who they say they are, will probably incur its wrath. I guess Roddenberry must have really liked the episode too, since he more or less remade it as Star Trek The Motion Picture. The details differ, but in both cases you’ve got a probe sent out into space where it encounters, and merges with, an alien entity, becoming something greater and more inquisitive in the process.

I either remembered or could immediately see where the central logical flaw was that would be Nomad’s undoing, and I don’t mind that this was telegraphed. It allowed the highly powerful and intelligent entity to carry its own doom within itself, just waiting to be pointed out. Sure, kind of silly chance that Kirk’s name happened to be so similar to the initial creator’s, but I can deal with that.

Of course we also get to see Uhura’s singing soothing the savage beast, or at least until she gets her brain wiped for her efforts due to being a “mass of contradictions”, or as Spock says “she’s a woman, whaddayagonnado”. Her reeducation is a little disturbing to me, watching Nurse Chapel read first-grade books with her. I guess her basic personality wasn’t wiped in the process? I’m a little confused about what even happened there.

But like I said, even if the details are a bit sketchy, I always enjoy when the Enterprise finds something strange and new and then blows it up, I mean figures out a way deal with it.

1034

I enjoyed it a lot too. I loved the stakes early on where they’re being fired upon. The incoming fire is coming at Warp 15. (I’ll have you explain the Warp scale to me one of these days). So they can’t outrun it. They can just put more power to the shield and survive 4 hits, and get destroyed on the 5th. And so they survive 4 hits, but then Kirk happens to mention his name, which coincidentally happens to be what stops the probe.

The stakes are quite high since the probe has already murdered 4 billion people in this system. I mean, wow. I know they will probably never mention it again, but this is a massive catastrophe.

I like that this is the 3rd or 4th episode now that implies that the Enterprise has on board whole teams of people that are just scientists waiting to work on something. We never got this in other Trek shows. Of course, in this Trek show they never show these teams, but I do like the idea that there’s teams down in the bowls of the enterprise who are working on problems like this, like the crew at NASA who was trying to get Apollo 13 back in one piece.

They also have teams of people working on getting the phaser banks ready, in case they need to make a withdrawal. Or teams prepping Photon torpedoes. And of course the girls who serve drinks to the bridge, and maybe they serve drinks to everyone in the science teams who are trying to interpret the signals coming from Nomad.

I do love it when they show Uhura singing. That’s again something you don’t see in other Treks. On Voyager, there’s no crew member who just breaks out in song and everyone just sits on the bridge and enjoys the song as it washes over them. Sulu and Scotty looked quite content with Uhura singing on the bridge.

1035

One of the things that original flavor Trek does really well, I think, is portray that space is dangerous. These people are out on the edge of known space, exploring, and they’re out there without a safety net. If I were Captain Kirk, I’d probably be a constant raw nerve, wondering where the next threat to my ship was coming from.

I contrast this with TNG, for example, where space feels much tamer, much calmer. Not that there were no dangers or unknowns out there, but usually it felt like they had time to pause and think things through. With the older Trek it seemed like any hesitation was courting disaster. As @rock8man mentions, we know that Nomad has wiped out an entire system, killed billions, and quite a few red shirts just while he was onboard. Any false step could get them all killed. But at the same time, it’s their responsibility to study and learn. I could sympathize with Spock’s mentioning that destroying Nomad was a waste, they probably could have learned a lot from it. But of course they would just as likely have been casually wiped out too.

1036

One thing they could learn from Nomad is how to bring people back to life. He killed Scotty and brought him back after they taught him human physiology.

1037

I’m glad they didn’t. One of the sci-fi things I enjoy about TOS over TNG onward is that technology doesn’t function as magic, and resolve plots or situations (replicators as magical) on a regular basis. If used, it’s always beyond our understanding, and somewhat ominous, dovetailing with @divedivedive’s excellent discussion above regarding mankind being out on the edge and it feeling like it’s the edge.

1038

Retraining Uhura was a serious speed bump for me, even as a 10 year old. I understood the huge amount of knowledge and cross connections that would be necessary. I figured it would take at least a decade of real time to get her up to speed. And what if she decided that she didn’t want to go into communications this time? It never felt right.