Speaking of crossovers, the man Kirk recommended for the command of the refitted Enterprise, before assuming command in STTMP was Matt Decker’s son.
Back to “the Doomsday Machine” this performance and scene really blows me away every time. The log recording gives us a glimpse of Decker before the tragedy.
“Don’t you think I know that!? There was! But not anymore!”
I can sort of describe the machine, just from memory: it looks like a sort of long cone/cornucopia thing made of crumpled tin-foil, with a kaliedoscope down the middle.
The episode’s last 19 minutes were great. I finished up last night, and found the whole thing very satisfying. Like I said, this felt like a feature film script.
I did miss Uhura in this episode. White Uhura was competent and did her job as ordered, but real Uhura is so much more expressive when following those orders.
I also missed Chekov. I wonder if he would have been more defiant towards the Commodore taking control of the ship?
Dr. McCoy, when told by Kirk to transport over to the Enterprise and take the Commodore to sick bay and give him a thorough check, instead chose to run to the bridge when he saw the Enterprise was in Red Alert, and the Commodore tagged along. I very much doubt McCoy’s proper place during a red alert is on the bridge. He should have carried out his orders and gone to sick bay, and we wouldn’t have had the crisis on the bridge. Stupid Bones and his damnable curiousity!
I found it odd that she wasn’t present on the bridge too. That’s her seat, dammit! But maybe she was still getting re-educated from when she had her brain wiped a couple episodes back.
Ha! That was my first thought too.
It’s going to be tough for me to get through this week’s episode. When the ghosts started appearing and one of them said “Caaaaaaaaptaaaaain Kiiiiiiiiiiirk”, I had this uncontrollable urge to turn it off. I resisted for a while. But then the Styrofoam looking “cliffs” and the fog at their feet made it all look so cheap and amateurish, I couldn’t resist turning it off anymore.
I’ll try again tonight, I suppose. Maybe I need to start the episode and then hide the batteries in the controller from myself.
This episode suffers from the same believability problem so many ‘shore party’ ones do. Over the course of the series we learn that the chain of command on the Enterprise is Kirk > Spock > Scott. I’m not certain, but I believe it is also implied at some point that Sulu is 4th. So this episode features first, that #3 and #4 in the chain of command are sent on a shore party with only one other crewman; and when the shore party is lost, #1 and #2 are sent to find them, along with the senior medical officer on the ship for good measure. I guess you have to offer some dramatic license, but it’s facially silly.
It’s DeSalle in this one, right?
Ah, the 12-year old chain of command geek debates…
IIRC, it was a halloween episode.
Spock: There are ancient Earth legends about wizards and their familiars.
McCoy: Familiars?
Spock: Demons in animal form sent by Satan to serve the wizard.
Kirk: Superstition.
Spock: I do not create the legend, Captain. I merely report it.
As the others have begun the discussion, let’s get going on this week’s episode, Catspaw! I’ll begin by saying that historically, I’ve never been a big fan of the whole “planet of the [theme]” thing, whether that theme is Nazis, gangsters or ancient Greek gods. It always seemed like a letdown, like filler between more epic and interesting episodes - you know, like last week’s “Doomsday Machine”. But in this case, we do get a pretty interesting and kind of fun episode.
For one thing, it’s at least not as dumb a concept as “aliens find a book about Halloween and decide to build their culture around it”. In this case, the aliens have powers of the mind, and in their attempt to probe the Enterprise’s conscious minds instead tap the subconscious and access the primal fears of the crew. Now they’re a little bit silly, what with apparitions of witches and black cats and such, but you can at least see how they got from point A to point B.
For another, there is an interesting power dynamic between Korob and Sylvia that I didn’t really pick up on so long ago. And the idea that Sylvia, experiencing physical and emotional stimulation that she has never experienced before and going a little mad, does make sense as motivation. And while Kirk does express one of those typical seduction of the alien things, he recognizes that his only shot may be to overwhelm her with the sensation that she is seeking. It may be a stretch to call it clever but, as I mentioned, it does at least make sense to the story.
A few things I have to call out as pretty strong elements - first, really impressive face plant fall from the actor playing Jackson after beaming back onboard the Enterprise. That looked like it could have really hurt. Also, I think the cat actor did a pretty good job. OK, they were probably just luring it around the set with toys and treats, but at least it did hit its marks. Last - the episode was written by Robert Bloch, who is a legend of horror and science fiction writing. It’s a return engagement for him, as he had previously written “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” which as I recall we all thought was pretty decent.
Agreed. Hands down.
Also. I offer you a drinking game. Every time you notice that Shatner’s boots or shoe heals are at least an inch taller then Spock and the others. Drink hard. :)
“Well, opinions?”
“I think we’re in a lot of trouble.”
“That’s a great help, Mister Chekov. Bones?”
“I think Mister Chekov’s right. We are in a lot of trouble.”
“Spock - and if you say we’re in a lot of trouble …”
“We are.”
Greetings again from the future, let’s go around with a new episode of Star Trek! This week it’s “I, Mudd.” I seem to recall from the season one episode “Mudd’s Women” that most people aren’t a big fan of Harry Mudd. But I kind of like him - he makes a good foil for Kirk, and stands as more or less a direct opposite of Kirk. They aren’t enemies, exactly, though they frequently find themselves standing against each other, but more out of the fact that their goals are pretty much in direct opposition.
This episode is a trifle, really. The stakes aren’t all that high - the androids that take over the Enterprise don’t want to rule the galaxy or destroy all humans, they just want to help us keep our worst tendencies in check. It actually makes a kind of sense, as Spock points out - imagine everyone had their own personal butler/maid that would not only provide to your every need but also monitor your actions, keep you from causing to much harm to yourself and others. Yet, as Kirk points out, a gilded cage is still a cage, and preventing humanity from learning from its mistakes will also stifle humanity’s growth.
But the episode is pretty goofy too. It’s yet another trope of introducing illogic to a closed, “perfect” computer to bring it to a complete standstill. Watching Kirk and the gang dance and mug before the robots is kind of embarrassing. I get the point of it, I just don’t particularly want to see it again.
Also, Harry’s ultimate fate seems a little cruel and harsh. Five hundred robots programmed to nag him like the wife he left behind? Captain Kirk really doesn’t like it when you try to take his ship away from him, I guess.
The way the android took over the Enterprise at the start of the show reminded me of the TNG episode where Data locks everyone out and takes over the Enterprise. I didn’t know that this had been done before. The seriousness of the beginning of the episode was undercut a little bit by knowing the name of the episode was “I, Mudd”. Just because of the name, I figured it was Mudd bringing them to him.
Overall I was enjoying the episode until they got to the phase of the show where they’re doing illogical things to mess with the androids. I got tired of that pretty fast and just wanted it to be over. So the last 20 minutes or so were a drag for me. It’s a shame, because otherwise the show had a promising start.
“How do you fight a thing like that?”
“Maybe you’re a soldier so often that you forget you’re also trained to be a diplomat.”
Hello everyone, let’s keep moving forward with this week’s episode, Metamorphosis. Personally, I find this week’s episode to be a strange one, and a little ethically shaky. The crew ends up stranded with an improbably young Zefram Cochrane, all at the mercy of The Companion. Who, it’s worth pointing out, has good intentions, or at least lacks bad intentions, if you can overlook the inherent selfishness of stranding five people for the rest of their lives on an asteroid. But it’s mainly the climax that troubles me, the metamorphosis of the title - though I think it’s less a metamorphosis, a changing of one thing into another, than a strange melding of two life forms into one.
I think the script is a bit clumsy in how it maneuvers the pieces into a place where the melding seems inevitable, possibly even desirable. The Companion is told by Kirk that it can’t experience love without being human - which the Companion seems to take as a dare - and Hedford is looking at imminent death, not to mention a deathbed regret that she has never experienced love. Well that seems awfully convenient, doesn’t it? If only those two crazy beings could get their heads together and figure something out!
So we’re left with a tidy wrapping up of an emotionally messy situation. And there’s a moment - just a moment - where I think the episode might try to pull off something bold. Cochrane meets the new combined Companion/Hedford and … he recoils from her/it. She realizes that he’s frightened by the new combination, and she fears his rejection. And given Cochrane’s strong reaction to earlier discovering that the Companion is actually female, it seems possibly that he may turn his back on her. But no, he falls for her feminine charms and stays with her. Aww, that’s cute. Yeah, I know, it was the 60s and that kind of downer ending wasn’t in vogue yet. But it feels like it might have been a more emotionally honest ending, even if it’s a total drag.
So, a middling episode to me. I didn’t hate it, but I can’t love it mainly because it seemed like an ending in search of a plot setup. But I do always love to see Scotty at the helm of the Enterprise, so it gets points for that.
“Well what do you know? I finally got the last word.”
OK folks, let’s keep things moving and (hopefully) get some discussion going around this week’s episode “Journey to Babel”. I’m a big fan of this episode, for a number of reasons. Mainly because it feels like it really opens up the scope of the series, and the members of the Federation. We meet the Tellarites and the Andorians for the first time. The Andorians, while they never have as much prominence as Vulcans, Romulans or Klingons, do take on additional prominence in other series as well as this one.
Speaking of Tellarites, as a young boy I always kind of mashed up Star Trek and Star Wars a little bit. I mean, I knew they were separate things, but I always thought they kind of shared a universe in a way. And part of that reason was because of a certain similarity that you could occasionally see in some of the characters:
OK, the resemblance isn’t exactly uncanny, but it made sense to me as a kid. Anyway, Wikipedia notes that the actor had difficulty seeing through those eye holes, so he was constantly looking down at everyone. Which lended to his belligerent arrogance, a happy accident.
We also see the return of Mark Lenard as Spock’s father, Sarek. Lenard had appeared previously in my favorite episode, Balance of Terror, as a Romulan commander. I wonder if sharp-eyed viewers first seeing this episode were thinking if he was acting as a Romulan spy?
As always, I have a place in my heart for McCoy, and I love to see him get a chance to shine. He manages to save Sarek and Kirk while the ship is taking a beating from an Orion pirate, and as mentioned in the opening quote, gets the last word in the episode.
As mentioned before, I lived overseas during TOS and as a result did not see episodes in the original broadcast order. I have a distinct recollection of seeing Mark Lenard in ‘Balance of Terror’ and thinking oh shit, Spock’s father is on that ship!.
It’s a good episode, one of my favorites too.
D’oh! I forgot all about this show when my CBS All Access expired. I’ll track it down in Hulu this week and catch up. Thank @divedivedive for keeping us on track.
I don’t remember this as being one of my favorites, but when I rewatched I found it quite compelling, even though it had a light-hearted feel throughout. I thought Spock’s decision to let his father die rather than give up command while the ship was under attack was justified and convincingly portrayed. The part that didn’t quite work for me was Spock’s mother; you would think that someone who had chosen to spend their life on Vulcan among Vulcans would have a better appreciation for Spock’s decision.
