These Are The Voyages-Star Trek TOS Remastered and Reconsidered

Sometimes Star Trek characters seem to go - a bit far, maybe, to my tastes in order to present their mental states. Like I felt the grizzled, shifty-eyed portrayal of Commodore Decker a few weeks ago was just a bit much, I felt that Spock’s mother may have pushed the anger at Spock’s decision a bit far. But I can accept a certain amount of mental agony over having a potential cure for her husband at hand and her son declining it because of duty. It’s a very, you know, human reaction.

All right, who’s ready for some classic Trek? Because this week we’ve got ‘Friday’s Child’, a fairly decent chance for the crew to romp around in the southern California wilderness. I didn’t have high hopes for this one when it started, I had concerns that it was going to turn into just another variation on “Errand of Mercy” with the Klingons and Federation continuing their proxy war through more primitive civilizations. And it kind of does, but at least fleshes out the civilization of these Mongol hordes a bit, even gives McCoy a chance to be a dad, kind of.

I liked the B plot a bit with Scotty and the crew chasing phantom distress signals before finally getting sick of the whole business and ignoring them. But I tend to lean toward the whole space exploration bit over watching actors pretend to get crushed by Styrofoam rocks. I’m weird that way. Anyway, curious if anyone else had any thoughts about this one? I’m guessing this will be a fairly low discussion episode.

One more thing, a programming note: I will be out of town next week attending a class and won’t be able to watch or write up notes for a new episode. It’s totally fine with me if you guys want to move on to the next episode without me, or we can take a break for a week. I’ll leave it up to all of you.

It’s interesting to me to watch this episode, and get a sort of sequel to Star Trek: First Contact (the worst Star Trek movie). So Zefram Cochrane, after making first contact with the Vulcans, presumable goes on to live on Alpha Centauri, and then goes exploring again and disappears and then Kirk and the crew encounter him here 150 years later.

The other thing I liked about the episode is the sudden turn by the sick lady they were carrying. As she lay there dying, she laments never having loved and been loved. I know it was mostly to advance the plot into that metamorphosis, but it seemed like a genuine touching moment to me consistent with what we knew of her at the beginning of the episode.

Overall I liked this episode quite a bit.

I admit I’m getting a little gray, but radiation will do that to you.

All right folks, back from our short vacation and time to talk a little Trek. This week’s episode is “The Deadly Years”, in which everyone gets really old and really cranky really fast. I don’t have too much to say about the episode, it’s a fairly standard one where the crew gets themselves into a fix, spends a while figuring out what they’ll do to get out of it and complain a bit, and then wraps it all up. I did like the ending much more than the setup, with the crew being maneuvered into the Neutral Zone by the inexperienced commodore. The callbacks both to earlier in this episode with the broken code 2 and to the earlier episode “The Corbomite Maneuver” were fun little touches. But I’d probably rank this a middling effort overall. Not bad, just a little standard.

Chekhov screaming like a third grade cheerleader scared by a spider was worth the price of admission.

The thought did cross my mind, like “dude, you are a Starfleet officer, have a little dignity. Also, is this the first dead body you’ve ever seen?”

They never had rotten.com in the ST universe

It’s nice that one little shot can fix aging and all the ills (dementia, arthritis, greying hair, loss of skin tone) that come with it. There might be a market for that, if Bones chooses to take it commercial.

That’s up there with the ending of Total Recall for me, with Arnold suffering from prolonged exposure to vacuum, his eyes literally exploding out of his head, and then he just gets better. Science!

It was creepier that way, so I think it was a success for Paul Verhoeven!

“I hope I’m not disturbing you, doctor.”
“Interrupting another autopsy report is no disturbance, Mr. Spock, it’s a relief.”
“I need your advice.”
“Then, I need a drink.”

Another week has rolled around so let’s watch another episode of Star Trek! This week’s is “Obsession” and I’m going to lay my cards on the table: this is a pretty seriously great little episode. I have no recollection of seeing this one before, and had the pleasure of not knowing where anything was going to go. I guess the title of the episode is the biggest clue, with Kirk taking his turn playing Ahab (Trek seems to really love this little trope) and chasing his own gaseous white whale.

The first half of the episode sets up a pretty interesting little drama - Kirk has discovered an entity that he believes wiped out half the crew of the ship he had been stationed on years ago, and takes steps to destroy this entity. But doing so means he is keeping the Enterprise from rendezvous to take medical supplies to a planet badly in need of them. Every moment Kirk spends chasing the creature means potential loss of life of those needing the medicine. I like the way it’s played, everyone has a valid point and presents the case reasonably, Kirk gets a little on-edge thinking that everyone is second guessing him but when the time comes for Spock and McCoy to consider placing a medical complaint against him, everyone at least presents their case and can understand the disagreement.

The second half, or maybe last third, is the chase of the creature. This gets a bit more formulaic and therefore a bit less interesting for me. The creature entering the ship through the open vent and cycling through the ventilation system seemed a little bit silly to me, but at least makes sense giving its gaseous nature. The ultimate resolution of the conflict seemed a bit scorched earth to me, but I guess given that the creature was both deadly and very mobile and also possibly splitting into multiple “babies”, there wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter.

But overall, I really liked it. I may cool a bit in my opinion over time but I’d go so far as to call this one a minor classic. Most of the players get a turn in the spotlight (I think only Sulu was really overlooked) and play off each other nicely. There’s an early conflict with Kirk’s decisiveness that can border on, well, obsession, that kind of plays a bit on the “evil Kirk” from way back in “The Enemy Within.” And Spock and McCoy do come around to Kirk’s point of view once they recognize that oh yeah, there is actually an entity and ok, maybe it’s up to no good. Thumbs up from me!

I must admit that I’m a little bummed at the lack of discussion around this episode, like I mentioned I enjoyed Obsession quite a bit, more than I expected to. So I’ll just talk a bit more about it myself.

There’s a little bit toward the end that I really liked, kind of a small moment. The gaseous entity has left for space and is moving away from the Enterprise, which gives chase. They end up moving at warp 8, a considerable speed and one that the Enterprise can’t maintain. Scotty complains that they will actually explode if they don’t give up pursuit, and you can see the struggle that Kirk goes through. One might even consider Kirk to just damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead - but no, he stands down. He considers that there may actually be too high a price to pay for continuing the chase. Now of course that’s not the end of it, and the being does turn and attack the Enterprise, but for a moment we see Kirk decide that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

It reminded me of the Star Trek video game released back around the time Star Trek Into Darkness came out. Now I’ll say first off that this is not a very good game. And, if you’re the kind of person who is bothered by this sort of thing (you know who you are) it does take place in the Kelvin timeline. But there’s a nice little bit where that Kirk is in much the same situation - pursuing a Gorn ship that has stolen a device that’s capable of creating wormholes at will. In fact, the Gorn ship is escaping through one of these wormholes and Kirk is following. But Spock, McCoy and the others prevail on Kirk to consider that the ship is badly damaged from the fight preceding this chase, and there is a damaged starbase nearby also attacked by the Gorn that needs their help. And Kirk stands down. It’s another little moment, but I liked it.

Please use English, I don’t understand what you are saying.

Regarding Obsession, its definitely a favorite of mine. Sure, Kirk is ultimately correct, but his motivation and self-blame at (in his mind) causing his Captain’s death, a man who he idolized, as well as half the Farragut’s crew, are out of balance. And are really played well, in an subplot that echoes back to Decker in The Doomsday Machine. I wouldn’t call this a top tier episode, but it certainly is top second-tier.

The performances are fantastic all the way around as well.

Sorry, I’m behind, and currently without any streaming service that has Star Trek. I’ll catch up once I’m back on the wagon.

I’m of two minds about this, and my only negatives about the episode, if I were to call them negatives, are that The Doomsday Machine was only a few episodes back and already did the whole Moby Dick thing. Now having seen them completely it’s clear that the two work as an interesting counterpoint where Kirk is given the chance to go off the deep end (which he doesn’t take) and follow his own white whale to his doom.

Something else occurred to me while watching this episode - does original Trek have the highest body count of all the Treks? I mentioned a while back that one thing I always liked about the original series was that it always emphasized the dangers that starship captains and crew face on a constant basis. It seems like nearly every planet they visit costs them a crewmember or two. Going into this whole revisit of the series I was curious how the “red shirt” trope would hold up and it’s looking like it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

I’m not calling out anyone individually. Life happens, I fully recognize. I just hoped a couple folks would get things going, and I’m prepared to get out and push if I have to.

TOS:

Hmmmm…Constellation - Destroyed Crew.

Exeter, Valiant…spoilers, won’t talk.

M5…spoiler, won’t talk.

Farragut, when Kirk was a Lieutenant, 1/2 crew killed.

TNG: Meetings in plush conference rooms.

The winner for danger is?

And to clarify, I’m excluding things like The Dominion War and the like, where clearly a lot of people died but this was mostly off camera. I’m thinking of people and crew being killed, even if they are redshirts we’ve never seen before.

I’ve not watched TOS, but I will say there is a fair amount of deaths even aside the Dominion War. Such as in Empok Nor, where there is a salvage mission where 4/6 of the crew die. The amount of on screen deaths is fairly significant, even if only rarely happening to a named character.

However it may be unfair to do a direct body count, due to the number of seasons. But even just based on reading your episode recaps, it seems DS-9 is on par with the rate. Having just watched Waltz, where the entire crew of the Honshu, save 12 people, are killed it doesn’t shy away from danger.

You’re forgetting Wolf 359.

But even saying that, that episode, and its ilk are outliers. Even the Dominion War (I am a DS9 fan) is a “let’s have a war” season.

The bottom line is that the every-day TOS universe is just plain deadlier. It feels like a frontier. Heck, of the Constitution Class Starships, the Enterprise is the only one that made it back. That says something.

Combined with no magic replicators, colonies, worlds and civilizations too far apart to support one another, or communicate in crisis situations, etc., its just more of a Frontier vibe. Hence danger and death are more prevalent.

In TNG they made a conscious decision to have a more mature, settled Federation, and there is less exploration of the unknown. The natural second-level effect of this is a less dangerous “universe” fictionally speaking.

DS9 made a conscious attempt to move back into a frontier in space sort of vibe. One of the reasons I prefer it to TNG.