“Where No Man Has Gone Before”
Written by Samuel A. Peeples
Directed by James Goldstone
Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 6149-02
Original air date: September 22, 1966
Stardate: 1312.4
Captain’s log: The Enterprise, en route to the edge of the galaxy, encounters a distress call from the S.S. Valiant, which has been missing for two hundred years. Captain James Kirk and Lieutenant Commander Spock are playing a game of three-dimensional chess, which is interrupted by a call from the bridge. They’ve found the source of the distress call: a small object, only a meter in diameter, which they beam aboard to discover that it’s an old-style beacon that could be ejected when the ship was in trouble. Given how damaged it is when Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott beams it aboard, Spock hypothesizes that the ship was destroyed.
Scotty transmits the data to Spock’s computer and Kirk orders the ship to alert status. Kirk, Spock, and Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell take a turbolift to the bridge, and Mitchell also summons department heads to the bridge as they approach the edge of the galaxy. While Kirk gets reports from Scotty, Dr. Mark Piper, Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, and the new ship’s psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, Spock gets something from the Valiant memory banks. The ship was buffeted about and shot out of the galaxy. The ship came back into the galaxy and the captain was frantically seeking out information in the computer banks about extra-sensory perception—and then the captain gave the order to destroy his own ship.
The fate of the Valiant just makes Kirk more determined to leave the galaxy—other ships need to know what they’re facing.
As they leave the galaxy, they come across a force field of some kind. Sensors don’t read anything, but it’s definitely there. They make contact with the field and then the power starts to drain from the Enterprise. Then consoles start exploding. Kirk orders them to go back, but both Mitchell and Dehner are zapped. Spock takes over the helm and gets them out. They’re on battery power, and nine people have been killed. Dehner is groggy, and Mitchell’s eyes have gone silver.
Oddly, the nine people who were killed had higher than normal ESP ratings—Dehner also has a high rating, and Mitchell’s was higher than anyone’s.
Kirk visits Mitchell in sickbay. He seems normal, except for the eyes, but he also describes the philosophers Hume and Spinoza as “childish.” Mitchell is also reading faster and faster. However, Piper finds nothing physically wrong with him. Dehner talks to him, and Mitchell actually changes the lifesign readings on his biobed—Mitchell himself is surprised by it. Dehner also discovers that Mitchell not only reads fast, he remembers everything he’s read. She grabs a tape (!) and picks a page at random, and he quotes the love poem on that page.
Lieutenant Lee Kelso comes to visit him, and the visit is friendly at first, but then Mitchell warns him that the points are burned out on the impulse packs. After Kelso thumphers and departs, Mitchell tells Dehner that he saw the image of the points in Kelso’s mind, but Kelso himself didn’t notice their condition.
Later, there’s a briefing, with Kirk, Spock, Kelso, Scotty, Piper, Sulu, and Dehner, in which Kelso announces that Mitchell was right about the impulse pack. In addition, Scotty reports that Mitchell has been telekinetically manipulating the bridge controls, and Dehner also reveals his trick with the biobed. Sulu says that Mitchell’s powers are increasing geometrically.
After Kirk ends the meeting, Spock makes his recommendations: that they go to Delta Vega, an automated lithium-cracking station that may have parts they can cannibalize to fix the engines; and that they either strand Mitchell there or kill him outright. Kirk isn’t thrilled about any of this—if they can’t adapt the station’s parts, they’ll be stuck there as they lack the power to blast back out of orbit, and the station only gets ore haulers once every twenty years, so Mitchell will be stuck alone—but he gives the order to set course there.
As they achieve orbit, Kirk, Spock, and Dehner visit Mitchell in sickbay. He knows what they’re planning, and he almost stops them, but they manage to subdue and sedate him. They put him in a cell on the station. (Why an automated station has a cell is left as an exercise for the viewer.) Mitchell tries to walk back some of things he said (like squashing them like insects), but he isn’t very convincing. He reminds everyone that he keeps getting stronger. Kelso, having supervised a full repair of the Enterprise engines, has put together a destruct switch to destroy the station (and Mitchell) if needs be. Unfortunately, Kirk mentions this in front of Mitchell, who then kills Kelso, stuns Kirk and Spock, and deactivates the force field. He leaves Dehner alone—mostly because she now has silver eyes, too.
Piper revives Kirk, reporting that Mitchell and Dehner went off into the hills. Kirk orders Piper to revive Spock after he leaves with a phaser rifle, and orders them to beam back to the Enterprise. If Kirk doesn’t come back in twelve hours, they’re to warp away and recommend that the planet be bombarded with neutron radiation.
Mitchell and Dehner create vegetation and water out of nothing. When Kirk seeks them out, Mitchell sends Dehner to talk to him—to see how “unimportant they are.” Kirk tries to convince her to hang onto her humanity. When a grinning Mitchell shows up, he’s unaffected by the phaser rifle’s power. Then he creates a grave for Kirk and is about to start a rockslide, but Dehner tries to get him to stop.
Even as Mitchell toys with Kirk, Kirk tries to get her to see what he’s turned into. Mitchell and Dehner wind up fighting by zapping each other with electricity. Dehner weakens him enough so that Kirk and Mitchell can have a proper fistfight, one in which Kirk’s shirt is torn in a manly manner.
But Kirk can’t quite deliver the killing blow, hesitating just long enough for Mitchell to get his mojo back. Kirk manages to get him into the grave for a second, allowing him to use the phaser rifle to cause the rockslide Mitchell had almost started, burying him alive.
Dehner dies after apologizing for letting the power go to her head. Kirk asks for beam-out, and notes in his log that Dehner and Mitchell died in the line of duty.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity?: We never actually see the engine room, and the only parts that are replaced when Kelso supervises the repairs are on the bridge, which somehow restores warp drive. Specifics of how this stuff is accomplished is danced around. Spock also refers to activating the “sensor beam” to scan the barrier.
Speaking of the barrier, it’s a ribbon of purple light, which begs the question of why the Enterprise didn’t go over or under it. (The 2007 remastering fixed this issue, making the barrier more three-dimensional.) The notion that it’s visible but undetectable by sensors makes little sense, since humans have been observing stuff outside the galaxy for decades, and we wouldn’t see anything beyond the Milky Way if there was this big purple oval surrounding it. (It would’ve worked if it was the other way around, visible only on sensors but not to the naked eye, but if it wasn’t visible, we couldn’t see it on our TV screens.)
Fascinating: Spock is firmly established as an alien, though not what species. Dehner says people from his planet don’t have feelings “like we do,” and later he himself says that he doesn’t have feelings and is only governed by logic, thus setting the tone for the character going forward. He also comes across as mostly alien, with just one human in the woodpile, referring to “an ancestor of mine” who married a human female. (This can be retconned, given that “Journey to Babel” revealed that Spock and Sarek hadn’t spoken in two decades, to Spock downplaying who it was exactly who married the human…)
Also we get more shouty Spock! During the entire trip through the galactic barrier, he bellows at the top of his lungs, calling for deflectors to be raised and for a damage report loud enough to rattle the viewscreen. My favorite, though, is the reversal of the stereotypes the characters have embodied over the years: Kirk is the calm one, quietly asking, “Any radiation, anything?” and Spock screaming, “NEGATIVE!” so loud you want to give him a valium or something.
I’m a doctor not an escalator: Piper creates no impression whatsoever. He just looks and acts like an old white guy, without any personality.
Ahead warp one, aye: Sulu makes his first appearance, but he’s the ship’s physicist, a position never seen or mentioned ever again. The position apparently mostly requires that you explain simple mathematical concepts with even simpler metaphors in briefings with your captain. Flight control seems to be handled by Mitchell.
Hailing frequencies open: Alden is sitting at communications, although the one and only time communications are used, it’s Mitchell who does it, opening up intership.
I cannot change the laws of physics!: Scotty runs engineering, though Kelso is the one who seems to be in charge of damage control after the Enterprise gets its ass kicked by the barrier.
Go put on a red shirt: Twelve casualties in this one, nine of whom are never even named or identified or seen or mourned.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Mitchell has a reputation as a flirt, at the very least. Dehner makes a comment about it when they’re introduced, Mitchell holds Smith’s hand when they traverse the barrier, and Mitchell comments to Kirk when he says Dehner will be assigned to observe him, “A hundred women on the ship and that’s the best you can do?”
Mitchell spread the love, though, revealing to Kirk that the “blond lab tech” that the captain almost married at the Academy was a setup by Mitchell himself.
Channel open. “Have I ever mentioned you play an irritating game of chess, Mr. Spock?”
“Irritating? Ah, yes, one of your Earth emotions.”
Kirk and Spock playing 3D chess.
Welcome aboard: This episode marks the first appearance of recurring regulars James Doohan and George Takei as Scotty and Sulu, respectively, while Paul Carr plays Kelso, Paul Fix plays Piper, Lloyd Hanes plays Alden, and Andrea Dromm plays Smith. Fix, Hanes, and Dromm were replaced by DeForest Kelley (whom Gene Roddenberry wanted in the part of the ship’s doctor from the beginning), Nichelle Nichols, and Grace Lee Whitney in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”
But the big guests are Gary Lockwood (best known as Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey) as Mitchell and Sally Kellerman (best known as Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the movie version of MASH) as Dehner.
Trivial matters: The galactic barrier will be seen again twice in “By Any Other Name” and “Is There in Truth no Beauty?”
Kirk’s fake grave is labelled as “James R. Kirk,” while future episodes have “T” as his middle initial, eventually established as standing for “Tiberius” in the animated episode “Bem.” Two different explanations have been provided by tie-in fiction: Peter David had this episode take place in an alternate timeline in which his middle initial was R in the novel Q-Squared, while Michael Jan Friedman made it a running gag between Mitchell and Kirk in the My Brother’s Keeper trilogy, with Kirk joking that his middle name was something beginning with “R” (starting with “racquetball”) so that the gravestone was a private joke between friends.
The My Brother’s Keeper trilogy—which was a detailed chronicle of the Kirk-Mitchell friendship prior to this episode—is also one of several novels that show Sulu making the change from physicist to helmsman after this episode, though both Enterprise: The First Adventure by Vonda N. McIntyre and the comic book Star Trek Annual #1 by Mike W. Barr, David Ross, & Bob Smith—which each told the story of Kirk’s first mission as captain of the Enterprise—had Sulu at the helm prior to this episode. Both stories had Leonard McCoy as the chief medical officer for Kirk’s first mission, with the character going on leave and Piper being only a temporary replacement for this episode, and both stories had Uhura at communications as well.
Q-Squared also postulates that the galactic barrier was actually the essence of Q, and he was trying to recorporealize himself through humans, but it only worked on those with high ESP, and was only partially successful, making them crazy. The Q-Continuum trilogy by Greg Cox postulates that the barrier was created by the Q-Continuum to trap a powerful being known only as “0” outside the galaxy.
The novel Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno and the first novella in the Mere Anarchy miniseries, Things Fall Apart by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, are among the few pieces of tie-in fiction to take place prior to this episode, done with the express purpose of spotlighting Mitchell, Alden, Kelso, and (in the former) Dehner.
The first Vanguard novel, Harbinger by David Mack, takes place immediately after this episode, as the Enterprise encounters Starbase 47, a.k.a. Vanguard, while on the way home from Delta Vega.
“Nightingale Woman” by Tarbolde of the Canopus Planet is referenced several times on Deep Space Nine.
More is learned about the fate of the Valiant by the U.S.S. Stargazer, on the mission during which Jean-Luc Picard becomes her captain, in the novel The Valiant by Michael Jan Friedman.
Allegedly, Andrea Dromm was cast by Gene Roddenberry for the virtually nonexistent part of Yeoman Smith (whose only line was to correct Kirk’s misremembering of her name) in order to score with her. He allegedly failed.
As in “The Cage,” Starfleet’s uniforms only include gold for command and operations and blue for sciences. Though he’s the communications officer and relief helmsman, Alden wears blue. This is the only episode of the series in which Spock wears gold rather than blue. Red will be added in “The Corbomite Maneuver” for security and operations, and Scotty will wear that color moving forward.
It’s unclear who Kirk’s first officer is. Both Spock and Mitchell perform the duties one would expect of a first officer at different times in the episode (Mitchell summoning department heads to the bridge, Spock culling damage control reports and such), and Spock is in command gold rather than science blue (though he’s only verbally identified as Kirk’s science officer). Some tie-in fiction has postulated that it was Spock, others that it was Mitchell. Probably one is first officer and one is second officer, but who’s who is not at all obvious.
While this episode was aired third—because it was too exposition-heavy to air first, supposedly—Roddenberry did take a copy to the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland and showed it to a room of 500 people on 4 September 1966.
The planet name Delta Vega is reused in the 2009 Star Trek, though it can’t possibly be the same planet, given its location proximate to Vulcan.
When the character of Carol Marcus was introduced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there was much fan speculation that she was the “blond lab tech” that Mitchell steered toward Kirk at the Academy, and whom Kirk almost married.
To boldly go: “Morals are for men, not gods.” I’ve always had a soft spot for this episode, partly because there’s something about the look and feel of the Enterprise in this episode (and also “The Cage”) that I actually preferred to the look the series would adopt going forward. I liked the ribbed turtleneck uniforms better than the ones we got, I like that the women actually got to wear pants, and something about the visual design was more appealing to me than the more Technicolor one we got after this.
While the mid-1960s executives at NBC no doubt found this more acceptable than “The Cage” because it had a climactic fistfight and a big-ass rockslide and William Shatner rolling around and getting his shirt torn, the main reason why this episode works better than its predecessor is the much more relaxed atmosphere aboard the Enterprise. It’s nothing huge, but these are hundreds of people trapped in a tin can together for months on end. If they’re headed out to the edge of the galaxy, it means they’re very far from home, which is a plot point as their only possible port of call is a planet that’s only visited every two decades.
As a result, we have Kirk and Spock having a friendly game of chess filled with banter, followed by the amusing conversation about the game among the pair of them and Mitchell in the turbolift. We have Mitchell and Smith holding hands. And we have evidence of comfortable friendships between Kirk and Spock, Mitchell and Kelso, Kelso and Scotty, Kirk and Scotty (look at Shatner’s friendly grin at Scotty’s assurance that all is well in engineering when the department heads report), and, of course, Kirk and Mitchell, whose friendship goes back a decade and a half.
That makes what happens later all the more devastating. Little things like Mitchell’s hand-holding of the yeoman and his reminisces with Kirk about their Academy days and his banter with Kelso makes his transformation into a megalomaniac have much more of an emotional consequence.
Spock plays devil’s advocate, his alien lack of emotion providing a perspective that Kirk, with his fifteen years of friendship blinding him, and Dehner, with her scientific curiosity doing the same, can’t provide.
The theme of humanity corrupted by such power will continue to be a theme in Roddenberry-era Trek, from “Charlie X” to TNG’s “Hide and Q,” not to mention all the powerful beings who will sit arrogantly in judgment of humans in various episodes from “Errand of Mercy” to “Arena” to “Who Mourns for Adonais” to the Q-Continuum in the various spinoffs to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Dehner isn’t wrong that a mutated human can be a good thing, but the evolution is a gradual process and the speed at which Mitchell becomes so powerful is more than any human can handle. And in the end, the only reason Kirk is able to stop him is because Dehner was able to hold onto her humanity long enough to slow Mitchell down.
The conundrum at the heart of the episode is shown by two lines of dialogue. Mitchell says that compassion and command are a fool’s mixture—which is not an invalid point—but Kirk counters later that a god needs compassion—also a valid point, though the religious landscape is filled with gods who wouldn’t know compassion if it bit them on their deific butts. Kirk is reluctant to do what Spock recommends because Mitchell is his friend. Kelso pays the ultimate price for that hesitation, and that’s why Kirk insists on going it alone in the end. Where is the line between command and compassion? Kirk refers to several crew members by their first names throughout, and Spock even is familiar with Kirk in the briefing room. It’s one of the dilemmas of ship command that Trek will also delve into repeatedly, and it gets a strong workout here…
Honestly, my issues with the episode are mostly minor: Piper is a cipher, and would be replaced by someone far more interesting, the notion of a big purple barrier around the galaxy that nobody noticed before remains hilariously ludicrous, and Delta Vega would need to be practically on top of the barrier (in astronomical terms) in order for the Enterprise to get there in as little a couple of days at sublight speeds, which makes the lack of knowledge about the big purple barrier surrounding the galaxy even more ludicrous, since the people who built the lithium-cracking station probably would’ve noticed it.
But the big issue is that we’re supposed to believe that being buried in rocks would stop whatever it was that Gary Mitchell had turned into. Hardly.
Still, this was a good start to what we’d be getting for three years in live action, two years in animation, and bunches of movies. A worthy beginning…
Warp factor rating: 7
Next week: “The Corbomite Maneuver”
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next two out-of-town public appearances will be at (Re)Generation Who in Hunt Valley, Maryland (along with Doctors Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and, via Skype, Tom Baker, as well as dozens of other Who actors and writers) at the end of March and at Treklanta in Atlanta, Georgia (along with actors Jason Carter, Anne Lockhart, and Sean Kenney, as well as dozens of fan film folk and artists and musicians and performers and such) at the end of April.
I feel like we should run a “CAPTION THIS!” contest for that shot of Dehner, Scotty, Piper, and Sulu……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Dr. Piper: “Hey, I’m an old guy. I can fart whenever I feel like it!”
No wonder he gets reassigned after this mission.
I agree about the design elements in these first two episodes, especially looking at the Bridge (but also the uniforms). While the color splash-to-come undoubtedly made people with color TVs feel good at the time, today it’s just too much. I like the Bridge in “The Cage” and the uniforms in “Where No Man…” better.
“The theme of humanity corrupted by such power will continue to be a theme in Roddenberry-era Trek…”
== “The Nth Degree” comes to my mind.
Scotty: “He’s going to embarrass us in front of the lass!”
Sulu: “I know. Say something, quickly!”
Dehner: “No intelligent life to my left…let me see if there’s any to my right!”
I love that shot of Dehner, Scotty, Piper, and Sulu. Piper looks drunk, and Scotty and Sulu look like their exchanging looks about him, like they can’t wait for his retirement in a week or two.
He looks really drunk there.
You forgot one piece of trivia: Deneb IV, which was host for Kirk and Mitchell’s shore leave. It was also known as the planet that happened to be where Farpoint Station was located.
When the character of Carol Marcus was introduced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there was much fan speculation that she was the “blond lab tech” that Mitchell steered toward Kirk at the Academy, and whom Kirk almost married.
Speculation or not, it’s worth pointing out that Samuel Peeples did some uncredited work on Wrath of Khan, before Nick Meyer took over. Who’s to know he didn’t think of the second pilot’s backstory when he worked on that character (assuming he did)?
When I think about this pilot, I can’t help but remember Kirk’s ridiculous acrobatics. When he notices the possessed Mitchell, instead of opening fire, he makes a rather elaborate move before repositioning himself to fire. By then, Mitchell could have fried him.
It’s a decent pilot. Despite the redshirts at the beginning, it feels more consequential than the other episodes. Losing Kelso felt like losing a real major character, because he was so well developed and charismatic, with a strong friendship to Mitchell. Paul Carr played him well.
Otherwise, I do have some problems with the exposition, most notably Spock’s chess line at the beginning. But the conflict between him and Kirk feels real. Shatner conveys the guilt of murdering his friend pretty well.
As for geography, I always wondered where exactly this edge of the galaxy was located: Alpha or Beta Quadrant? It obviously can’t be the Delta Quadrant, given how long it took for Voyager to return home, and it can’t be the Gamma Quadrant for the same reason. I’m assuming it’s closer to Earth. More plausible than Sybok’s Shakaree at the center of the galaxy, at least….
Actually there are three uniform colors; command gold, science/medical blue, and a tan worn by Scott, Mitchell, and Kelso.
I’m a big fan of this episode. I always liked when Mitchell is “looking” at Spock and Kirk when they are watching him from the bridge. Creepy…
There was a movie a few years ago (perhaps even a decade) where Mitchell didn’t die here. I don’t remember much about it but it had Uhura, Ryker and Tupok in it, as well as someone else who got “superpowers” during ToS I believe. I’ll have to look it up real quick for anyone who wasn’t aware of it.
It … wasn’t terrible, but I think it was pretty l0w-budget (and almost seemed like a well-done fanfic)
Update: Star Trek: Of Gods and Men
This is my second favorite episode after “The Squire of Gothos”, where I assume you will also mention and talk about “Q-Squared, which happens to be my favorite Trek novel.
You bring up a good point that I’ve always thought, and even debated with my parents when I was young and watching this show in syndication between episodes of Next Gen – the fact that it seems very improbable that Gary Mitchell would have been stopped by that small rock slide, and he should have come back and been a recurring villain.
I really had hoped that, since Trek 2 (Into Darkness) was obviously going to be a rehash of TOS material, they had retold this story, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Mitchell. Alas, we got a half-assed Khan story.
I agree completely, Keith. This is one of my favorite episodes. I, too, prefer the uniforms and the set design that the two pilots had; the Enterprise just felt more like a space navy ship here and in “The Cage”. I savored seeing “THE WOMEN!” in pants here, as we wouldn’t see it again (or the monochromatic colors for the uniforms) until Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Also, I thought Scott, Mitchell and Kelso wore a sort of reddish-tan uniform top, being operations. At least, that’s how it always looks to me.
What a great story. The rest of the series wouldn’t really have a story of this scale or consequence going forward. Mitchell, Kelso, and Dehner each leave their mark, with just one episode. Almost makes me wish we could have had them for one or two more episodes; that would have made the events of this one all the more devastating and impactful. Its one of those episodes I know verbatim, and never get tired of rewatching.
One of the things I like about this episode is the fact that, fistfight notwithstanding, Kirk essentially saves the day by talking. He gets Dehner to come around, and then she does the actual fighting. Kirk only has to deliver the final blow, and he almost messses that up too because he simply can’t kill his friend.
Very nice writing.
Thanks for mentioning “The Q Continuum” trilogy, which are still probably my best selling Trek books.
One nitpick: I don’t remember any all-powerful beings judging humanity in “Whom Gods Destroy,” which is the one about the lunatics taking over the asylum. Did you mean “Who Mourns for Adonais?” by any chance?
Great write-up, Keith! I think you hit the nail on the head by stressing how comfortable the crew seems with each other as a big reason this episode works. Lockwood gives us some of the most naturalistic acting we’ll see on TOS for sometime. (How many other TOS characters actually say “Yeah” before “Way to Eden,” after all?) I have often wished Mitchell could have stuck around for a while before this episode happened. No doubt, were TOS a modern serialized drama, he’d die mid-season or something.
As for Mitchell and the rockslide: I have not rewatched the episode yet, but doesn’t Kirk start the rockslide when Mitchell is in one of his “depowered” phases? At least, that’s how I’ve made sense of it in my head all these years…
I have to admit, much as I love “The Cage” and much as “The Menagerie” is my favorite episode, “Where No Man” is clearly the better pilot.
It had never hit me that Yeoman Smith had only the one line. Sure enough.
The planet name Delta Vega is reused in the 2009 Star Trek, though it can’t possibly be the same planet, given its location proximate to Vulcan.
I don’t defend the JJverse at all costs, but I don’t suppose saying, “But it is an alternate universe…” works here? (Or is it “just” an alternate timeline? Can you have one without the other?)
Whoops – I also meant to give kudos to Alexander Courage for his score for both this and “The Cage.” We don’t get the familiar Trek theme this time around, and it’s not as musically diverse as his “Cage” score, but we get a sustained, Twilight Zone-esque atmosphere throughout, puncutated by some strong action sequences (my high school best friend and I liked to use that 2-second “sting” “Hit that Button” in conversation whenever possible).
@14: It’s an alternate timeline that only split from the Prime timeline in 2238 with Nero’s appearance from the future. Everything that happened before 2238 should be exactly the same in both universes.
Easier explanation is it’s just a different Delta Vega.
It’s a pretty effective pilot, but Keith is right that it has some credibility issues. It doesn’t have much of a sense of scale, treating the galaxy as rather small. If the Valiant was sent out centuries before, at lower warp speeds, how did it get to the edge of the galaxy so long before the Enterprise did? There’s a bit in their log about a cosmic storm sweeping them out that way, but a thousand light-years at warp? That’s no mere storm, that’s tantamount to what happened to Voyager.
Also, the edge of the galaxy is as undefinable as the edge of a cloud of mist. There is no cutoff point between “Here be stars” and “Here be no stars.” It just gradually thins out over hundreds or thousands of light-years. And there are several different components of the galaxy that all have their own progressively more distant “edges” — the thin disk, the thick disk, the stellar halo, the dark-matter halo. It would take decades or centuries at warp speeds to truly travel beyond anything that would count as part of our galaxy.
And even if we accept the conceit that the galaxy had a definable edge, what were they expecting to do on the other side? Wander around in empty space? The nearest globular cluster would be years away at warp. It couldn’t have been just to do astronomy, since we can already see tons of stuff outside the galaxy; after all, there’s nothing in the way. The only parts of space we have trouble seeing are those deep within the galaxy or on its other side, occluded by all the intervening stars and gas.
So really, nothing about the ship’s mission here makes one damn bit of sense.
Oh, and the bit about the impulse points “decaying to lead” is an interesting anachronism, because that implies they were made of uranium and that the impulse engines were nuclear fission reactors. Modern Trek assumes they’re powered by deuterium fusion, the opposite nuclear reaction.
One thing I think a lot of people misunderstand is the scene where Spock suggests killing Mitchell as an alternative to stranding him. People tend to say, “Man, Spock was more hardcore back then, recommending that they kill a guy!” But he wasn’t recommending that. He was recommending that they strand him on Delta Vega. And when Kirk balked at that, Spock pointed out that the alternative was even worse.
@6/Eduardo: Think 3-dimensionally. The rim of the galaxy would be decades away, but the nearest face of the galactic disk is only about a thousand light-years away, which is no more than a year’s distance at typical warp speeds (as defined in the later shows, though only about half a day’s journey per “That Which Survives”).
@10/Dante: You’re right. There are three uniform colors in this pilot: greenish-gold, beige, and blue. Scotty, Mitchell, and Kelso are in the beige, while Kirk, Spock, and Smith are in the greenish-gold. But the beige is so close to the gold that a lot of people can’t tell them apart. Which is probably part of the reason they switched to more vivid colors in the series.
Again a very strong pilot, but this is the second time in two episodes the theme “absolute power corrupts absolutely” appears and it’s going to reappear again and again. The silver contact lenses are simple but effective and Lockwood’s body language is also convincing. It’s also interesting that the icy Dehner is in the end the compassionate one while Mitchell becomes a bastard pretty early on. In fact he comes for me across as a slightly arrogant cad from the first minute and it’s not surprising that he succumbs to temptation so easily.
The episode pretty nonchalantly states ESP as fact which is quite problematic for a SF series. Also this essentially gives the proceedings a certain randomness despite his supposedly escalating powers because we never really know what Mitchell can do at which point. The ending with the stone tomb being the most glaringly insufficient solution though one notices that Mitchell is hit by the tombstone before the huge stone seals the grave. I also hope the forcefield at Delta Vega is going around the whole room through the walls otherwise I find it unlikely that Mitchell won’t try his luck with them. However Keith is wrong about Kirk unwisely telling Mitchell about the destruct button, Kirk says in the episode that Mitchell probably knows anyway. On the other hand running with a useless gun after Mitchell and giving an order to wait 12 (!!!) hours in orbit sounds like a sure recipe for the ship being controlled by Mitchell by then. I like however that he basically wins by convincing Dehner which only makes the fistfight possible.
Again Roddenberry’s high opinion of women comes through in full force. The yeoman nedds her hands to be held … by Mitchell during a critical situation!!! And Dehner was written on his insistence as the quote “women professionals do tend to overcompensate” cliche.
I always thought the teaser being rather strange, Spock absurdly reacts as if he didn’t know what irritating means not to mention the stupid “you can win at chess with unpredictable super moves” cliche. And then I totally don’t get it why at the end of the teaser the music roars up when the buoy begins to blink when transmitting. In the German dub Scotty says that the buoy is to be taken with suspicion instead of just “It’s transmitting, sir.” It makes no sense obviously, but it’s apparently an attempt to somehow support the strangely dramatic music and the also rather strange alert command by Kirk.
There’s also a design flaw that creeps up again and again in some of the earlier episodes, using contemporary looking machines for a distant future, here Spock’s very unimpressive cable headphone.
@16 – does that mean that Kirk’s father is the reason we get JJ!Kirk instead of “with Lt Kirk, you think or you sink”?
Watching in syndication, this episode was jarring out of order.
@11: You’re right about the solving the situation while talking. Kirk here hows that he will fight if necessary, but does everything he can to avoid it.
@18 :”you can win at chess with unpredictable super moves cliche”
This episode was produced three decades before Kasparov’s match against Deep Blue. The thing about chess is that it is in fact so complex that intuition and experience will almost always get you to the best move long before raw calculation will. And was this really a cliche at the time, or did it become so in the decades since?
ESP as fact is not inherently problematic for science fiction. The terminology is dated, but look at Babylon 5’s PsiCorps for an example of where the tradition works well.
@18: I agree that Mitchell had a mean streak right from the start, and that may be the reason why he became such a monster whereas Dehner remained a decent person. Probably not the intended interpretation, but it works.
ESP in SF was quite common when I was reading a lot of SF, back in the 1970s. I remember learning words like “telekinesis” or “precognition” from reading SF novels.
@17
There’s only one logical explanation for what they were going to do on the other side of the barrier. Take a selfie with the galaxy in the background. “Send to Earth Command… wish you were here. Stop. LOL. Stop. Regards, James R. Kirk.”
@20/lerris: Not just in syndication — in original broadcast order, “Where No Man” was third, between “Charlie X” and “The Naked Time.” And in fact, from about the ’80s onward, the syndication packages were in production order, so this episode actually came first. Though if you saw “Turnabout Intruder” one day and “Where No Man” the next, the transition would still be kind of jarring.
@21/Jana: Yeah, there was a time when research into psychic phenomena was taken more or less seriously, before we learned that it was all pretty much fraudulent. Scientists were trained to base conclusions on observed evidence, but they couldn’t cope with deliberate attempts to fool the senses, so it took magicians like James Randi to expose the frauds that scientists had been fooled by. Although there was also a lot of incredibly shoddy methodology in much of the psychic research that was done in the ’60s and ’70s — failure to design proper double blind experiments or make sure the test subject couldn’t see the cards reflected in the experimenter’s glasses, things like that. And Zener cards are an intrinsically bad experimental design, because there are only five of them, so the odds of guessing a high percentage of them correctly are far higher than if they’d used a standard deck of cards.
Anyway, the point is that in the past, it was seen as at least possible that there was some scientific legitimacy to psychic phenomena, and so a fair amount of science fiction treated telepathy and other psi powers as realistic possibilities. (Anne McCaffrey, for instance, genuinely believed they were real, and considered all her books to be science fiction rather than fantasy even when they included things like using psychic powers to teleport through time.) Given the time period when ST came along, it’s no surprise that it treated psi powers as a plausible scientific phenomenon.
Plus there’s the fact that psi powers allow for inexpensive special effects. It’s easy for an actor to pantomime being mind-controlled or telekinetically manipulated by another actor, or to do a camera dissolve or cut to show a godlike being materializing a Kaferian apple tree or a gravestone or whatever. That’s probably why TOS relied so heavily on psi powers as a plot device.
@21. Yeah. I agree. I think there were hints that Mitchell was kinda an asshole from the start. We’ve all known that one friend, the one who is kinda fun to be around because they are always doing something that is pushing boundaries and creating situations that gets the old adrenaline going, but is not actually that nice a person when you hang around them one-on-one because they never switch off that little desire to poke and prod for a reaction. Mitchell was a pre-internet, internet-troll. That was my reading of his character anyway. You could easily see how that could spiral dangerously. I mean imagine some of those gamergaters with absolute power?
I’m fine with ESP, it is a well worked genre staple; even if we just grandfather it in it is fine. Besides in the Trek universe mental powers are a thing you have to accept. Virtually every planet has them in some way. Hey, how did touch-telepath Spock not get zapped by the energy barrier? Was his shoutyness enough to terrify even psychoactive forces of nature?
@24: Of course, they hadn’t yet decided to make Spock telepathic, so it didn’t come up. I think that got started in “Dagger of the Mind” — McCoy was supposed to hypnotize Van Gelder to get information, but the network was nervous about showing hypnosis on-camera or something, so they decided to invent a magic alien power for Spock and have him do it.
In-universe, we could assume that the effect only works on human brains and not Vulcan ones. Although DC Comics did a story where the Romulans were using the Barrier to create psi-powered soldiers, and it didn’t address the Spock discrepancy.
@krad: Didn’t some of the later Shatner novels also deal with the galactic barrier and the consequences of it being breached? I seem to remember a couple of them in the sequence where it was established that the barrier had been put in place by (whatever they called the first race which supposedly seeded humans, Klingons, Romulans, et al., which Picard and his archaeology mentor had researched back in the day, as established in TNG) to keep out some other race. This other race was able to enter the galaxy after the Enterprise breached the barrier and began to take it over, until eventually Kirk’s son by Teilani was somehow able to oust them and restore the barrier.
My favorite explanation for the Barrier was in Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, which rejected the idea that it surrouned the entire galaxy and explained it simply as the wave front from a really intense extragalactic supernova, just happening to overlap the portion of the galactic edge that the Enterprise crossed. Which, to me, makes far more sense than jumping to the conclusion that it surrounds the entire galaxy. I mean, the galaxy is ginormous, and they only crossed the edge in one place. Okay, two places, counting “By Any Other Name,” but both relatively proximate to the Federation, which occupies a teensy fragment of the galaxy’s volume.
Conversely, we’ve seen a number of extragalactic entities that got in without any evident trouble, like Sylvia and Korob, the Doomsday Machine, the makers of Mudd’s androids, the giant space amoeba, and the cosmic cloud from TAS: “One of Our Planets is Missing.” Which seems to show that the Barrier doesn’t surround the entire galaxy, that passage is only difficult along a portion of its edge. Another reason why Duane’s explanation makes more sense than “Some cosmic being shrink-wrapped the whole galaxy for our protection.”
Not much to say that hasn’t already been said. I just want to say that having a triple-layer scleral shell in your eye is quite possibly the worst thing I can imagine. I know Lockwood was in misery the whole time, and could hardly see (hence the head tilt) – I don’t know how Kellerman got through it. The effect is cool, but the eyes still make me shudder every time I see this episode.
@19 – “does that mean that Kirk’s father is the reason we get JJ!Kirk instead of ‘with Lt Kirk, you think or you sink’?”
I think it means that the whole “alternate timeline” excuse for the NuTrek reboot simply doesn’t hold water.
It’s a total reboot. And having the script refer to “alternate timelines” does not change that fact.
@23 – “Though if you saw ‘Turnabout Intruder’ one day and ‘Where No Man’ the next, the transition would still be kind of jarring.”
Not to mention the fact that “Turnabout Intruder” is just terrible as a series finale (I know it was not intended as a ‘finale’, but still…)
That’s one of the reasons I perfer viewing the episodes by stardate order. That way you get “All Our Yesterdays” (SD 5943) after “Turnabout Intruder” (SD 5928). This order is especially satisfying when viewing the remastered version: The remastered scene of the Sarpeidon sun going nova is just perfect as the final scene of all TOS.
This episode also leads into one of my favorite weird comic books of my youth, Star Trek/X-men.
@29: Stardate order – That has got to be the coolest viewing tip for TOS I’ve ever heard!
@31: In that case, it also includes episodes from The Animated Series, which I believe overlapped with some of the third season episodes, in terms of Stardate order.
@32: Actually, if you go by stardate order, TAS: “The Magicks of Megas-tu” is the very first episode!
One note on the uniforms. For this episode the symbols on the insignia badges are reversed from what is usual. The interlaced circles are worn by engineering and support crew while the jagged coil is used for sciences. Though Yeoman Smith is wearing the coil symbol despite being a gold shirt which should have the elongated star.
One thing that has bothered me about Mitchell they kind of charaterize him as being almost possessed rather than corrupted by the power. The couple of times his eyes go back to normal, he acts confused as if his original personality was back in control was not responsible for what his powered up self was saying.
The orginal broadcast order seems awfully bizarre. Aside from not airing this first just on principle, what were they thinking having it directly follow “Charlie X”?
@10, 17: I recall reading somewhere that part of the reason for the more vivid colours was due to the fact that they were more easily distinguishable on black and white television sets, which were still very common at the time.
For those interested in the episodes in stardate order, I found this after an Internet search:
http://startreklist.blogspot.com/2011/04/list-of-all-star-trek-episodes-sorted.html
The “Timeline” in the front of the classic Star Trek Concordance (the reference book with the nifty paper wheel index thingy inside the front cover) gives the TOS and TAS episodes in stardate order, although the episode guide lists them in broadcast order.
@32: That would really be an interesting viewing experience!
But we’ll need an in-universe explanation for why we’ve never seen Arex or M’Ress on the bridge in TOS Season 3. Maybe they’re always working on the night shift ;-)
Loved that paper wheel on the cover of the Concordance.
By the way, for anyone who isn’t aware, there’s a fun comic called “Planet of Hats” that crams entire TOS episodes into a few panels. It’s the artist’s personal project to learn cartooning, and some of them are quite clever. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” can be seen here.
@36: Only one problem with that list. It assumes the movies have unknown Stardates, when in fact we all pretty much all of them minus Insurrection and the Abrams films.
The Motion Picture is set around stardate 7000+
II, III, IV and V are all set around the 8000+ era
VI is set on 9521.6
Generations takes place during DS9’s 3rd season (48000)
First Contact takes place during DS9 season 5 (50000)
Nemesis takes place around stardate 56000+
The other problem with adopting a Stardate order revolves around Tasha Yar. She’s still alive several episodes after her death!
@8 That’s because Of Gods and Men WAS a well-done fan fic!!!!!
I’ve never understood the purpose of stardates. I guess it’s just something to sound futuristic. Kirk or Picard might as well say “It’s Thursday,” which would be equally meaningless to the story.
Stardates: Their purpose is to record the time.
We do this using a mixture of Egyptian/Babylonian weeks, Egyptian/Roman months and Christian years, all largely based on astronomical facts about our home planet (length of a month, length of a year). Surely the entire galaxy wouldn’t adopt this system, so someone would need to invent a new one. I assume they call it “stardates” to underline that it isn’t based on the features of any one planet.
@44
Yeah, that’s all good, but I’m referring to their purpose in the story. When you get down to it, stardates are as important to the narrative as when Joe Friday would open an episode of Dragnet with a weather report. “It was warm in Los Angeles…” Really? Nice to know, Joe.
Or let me put it this way: whenever there’s that rare episode when the stardate isn’t given, do you miss it?
No, I don’t stardates to enjoy a story. But the log entries need stardates (or any other dates, they just happen to be stardates) to sound like log entries. And sometimes the stories need log entries to give us some background information.
Regarding Spock and his two alternatives to Kirk (maroon or kill Mitchell), knowing Spock and his logic I cannot imagine how he could consider marooning Mitchell as a viable solution. Killing him, as cruel a suggestion as it is, is the only logical solution and even Mitchell himself says that Kirk is a fool for not taking that advice.
A marooned Mitchell would get more powerful. If he can create flowers out of nothing, he would eventually become powerful enough to create a ship out of nothing and escape in it. Or if that is beyond him, he could telekinetically hijack a ship, bring it to Delta Vega and escape in it.
Having given my nitpick, I have something more substantial to say about WNMHGB. Dehner says a mutated superior being could be a wonderful thing. Well, I have a feeling a lot of us watch WNMHGB and say, “By golly, if it were me I’d use the power for niceness instead of evil. Heck, if I can create flowers I can create anything. Nobody needs to go hungry ever again. Hey, Cardassia! If you’re running out of natural resources don’t occpy Bajor. Just tell me what you need! And I can stop wars before they start just by giving each side everything they want! Yes, it would be different if I had the power.”
But would it really? That’s the question this episode makes me ask myself.
@39 MeredithP –Thanks so much for the plug for Planet of Hats! I did not know about it, and it’s great. I now plan to read the appropriate PoH comic every week after reading Keith’s blogpost. And to send all my Star Trek-loving friends and relations to Planet of Hats (and to tell them it’s funnier after reading Keith’s rewatch, of course!).
@44/Jana and 45/Patches: The real purpose of stardates was to convey no meaningful temporal information of any kind. Originally, the producers wanted to be vague about when TOS took place. The original series pitch document read:
After all, science fiction is notoriously bad at predicting the rate of technological progress — overestimating the time it will take to achieve some technologies (like handheld computer/communication devices or treatments/prosthetics for people with severe physical or neurological impairments) and underestimating the time to achieve others (like manned missions to Saturn or cryogenic hibernation). So Roddenberry and Herb Solow didn’t initially want to lock down the series’ timeframe, so they invented a timekeeping system that was just a bunch of meaningless numbers, placeholders that gave the impression of being a chronological system but didn’t actually convey any useful dating information to the audience.
Of course, the time frame did get more specific as the show went on, but we can cover that in due course.
Interesting. That was pretty smart, maybe they should have kept it that way.
But I think Patches’ point was that he (she?) doesn’t see the need for any temporal information, meaningful or otherwise.
@50: I think you’re right, though — there needs to be something in a log entry that seems like a date, because that’s part of how log entries work. I always found the use of “supplemental” in log entries to be kind of awkward, especially when it was used in the first log entry in an episode.
I still love the style of that old-school phaser rifle.
Wasn’t Sulu a botanist in “Charlie X”? It seems like he had a couple of jobs before switching to helmsperson then.
@14, 16, 29: I like the view the new films to be a total reboot. It may be their intention to say it’s simply an alternate timeline, but there are so many differences from the continuity we know that are NOT explained by the time incursion–Kirk and Pike being radically different in age, the “stardates” being Earth years (even in the “unaltered” history that future Spock came from), Kirk’s father’s ship prior to the time incursion being big enough to hold a billion shuttles that the crew uses for escape rather than the escape pods, etc… so I just look at it as a total reboot than just having a bunch of continuity errors (which certainly occurs in the various series’).
I’ve often thought that things like the Galactic Barrier, and other things we see on the Main Viewscreen, were computer overlays making things visible that might otherwise be invisible – in fact, “sensors” kind of points to this – “Sensors reports no life signs, Captain” is a lot shorter than “The atmospheric spectrograph detects no significant free oxygen, reflectance analysis shows no signs of chlorophyll or its known analogs, and no detectable excess of radiation in any bandwidth can be found. There is no evidence that life as we know it exists on the planet.” There’s probably an entire suite of “sensors” of various types, and a computer that analyses and summarizes them, noting any anomylous readings or relationships between readings. In the case of the barrier, the computer may not have been detecting the barrier itself, but side effects of the barrier – much as we don’t actually detect black holes themselves, but the accretion disks around them. Obviously, Kirk would know that there’s something out there to be detected, since the computer is overlaying it on the screen – but what he actually needs to know is what is causing the effects, not the effects themselves, so a reply that the sensors cannot detect the barrier would be completely valid – if you can’t detect it, you can’t determine what it is – all you can do is guess from the side effects. The side effects however may simply be something that is often seen in other cases, and therefore their effects are well understood – but usually, the cause is visible. Something like the doctor reporting to someone who has a fever that they can’t find anything wrong with them – the “other than the fever” is often left out, as it’s a simple to detect effect of disease, but a common symptom of hundreds, and therefore is of limited use in diagnosis by itself.
crzydroid: Sulu’s interest in botany was as a hobbyist, it was never his official function on the ship — and it was “The Man Trap,” not “Charlie X,” that showed that interest. (And in “The Naked Time” he was into fencing and in “Shore Leave” he was an antique firearms collector.) But he was the guy who flew the ship in every episode but this one. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22, Patches
I actually laughed our loud!
“There’s only one logical explanation for what they were going to do on the other side of the barrier. Take a selfie with the galaxy in the background. “Send to Earth Command… wish you were here. Stop. LOL. Stop. Regards, James R. Kirk.”
Greg (belatedly): Yes, I meant “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Derp. It’s now fixed. And you’re welcome. :)
Don S (also belatedly): I deliberately did not count “The Nth Degree,” as the Cytherians were not arrogant or nasty or high-handed, just weird and funny-looking.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I watched TOS in stardate order last year. It worked out great, but required a lot of changing of Blu-Ray discs.
It solves the Chekov-Khan problem because Catspaw comes before Space Seed.
The only modifications I made were to assume that the two animated episodes with odd dates (Magicks of Megas-tu and BEM) actually took place roughly around their production order.
@51
Does there really need to be a stardate or any sort of date spoken in a log entry? We don’t need to type in the date when writing an email; it’s automatically stamped there when we send it. Same thing with saving a file—any file. The date is recorded by the computer.
Of course, they couldn’t have predicted this in 1966, but it would seem a bit redundant for future series to give a stardate, in my opinion. Unless the captain is moonlighting as a DJ, there’s not much point in telling us it’s the top of the hour… uh… point two.
@53/crzydroid: As for the discrepancies between the Abramsverse and what came before, they’re no greater than the discrepancies between TOS and TAS, TOS and the movies, TOS and TNG, early TNG and later TNG, etc. Every new iteration of Trek has been a new interpretation by different creators, and thus has interpreted the universe in different ways. Not to mention the contradictions within each single series. (Does Kirk report to UESPA or Starfleet? Can Data use contractions or not?) If you treated every discontinuity as insurmountable, then Star Trek would fragment into well over half a dozen separate realities.
Every time a new incarnation of ST comes along, there are people who dwell on the inconsistencies as evidence for excluding it from the same reality as what came before. Back in the ’80s, there were people insisting that TMP and TWOK weren’t “real” Star Trek, and when TNG came along, it was years before the TOS audience generally came around to accept it as part of the same reality (although, to be fair, for the first couple of years it wasn’t really trying to be, but was more of a soft reboot, Roddenberry’s attempt to update the basics of the universe). Ten or fifteen years ago, many fans refused to accept that Enterprise was in the same continuity as TOS, using the same kind of continuity discrepancies as their justification. But eventually we learn to gloss over the inconsistencies and convince ourselves that these clashing interpretations represent a consistent universe, even though they really don’t.
As for your specific points, Kirk is exactly the age he should be, and Pike being played by an older actor is no worse a continuity error than Zefram Cochrane being played by an older actor in First Contact. There have been multiple contradictory stardate schemes in past Trek productions; nobody’s ever figured out a way to reconcile TOS stardates with TNG stardates. And ship sizes in ST have been problematical in the past; for instance, the Galileo is bigger on the inside than the outside, and the Delta Flyer couldn’t possibly fit in Voyager‘s shuttlebay. So it’s a double standard to gloss over those discrepancies in earlier works but call them dealbreakers in the most recent work.
Roddenberry himself liked to suggest that ST was just a fictionalized, imperfect account of some deeper Platonic reality. When TMP came out, he insisted that Klingons had always had bumpy foreheads, but TOS hadn’t had the budget to show it. And his TMP novelization presented TOS as an inaccurate dramatization, with TMP being closer to the truth. And he had the same intentions with TNG, considering large swaths of TOS and the movies to be apocryphal or inaccurate. If we look at things Roddenberry’s way, then the discrepancies between different series and movies and episodes just become differences in interpretation by various different dramatizers, rather than differences in the underlying reality they’re attempting to approximate.
That said, I think they probably would’ve been better off if they had made the new movies a wholesale reboot, which would’ve been more creatively liberating. But that’s not what they did.
Future episodes (at least in TOS) don’t mention it. Tiberius came up during the post-show convention circuit.
@61: Yes, Kirk’s middle initial is often mentioned in TOS, although we don’t learn what it stands for until “BEM.” It’s first spoken by Harry Mudd in “Mudd’s Women,” saying he expects to get the better of “a gentleman named James T.–” and then gets interrupted. “James T. Kirk” is first spoken by Spock in “The Conscience of the King.” Then “Kirk, James T.” is mentioned in “Court-Martial.” By the back half of season one, Kirk is frequently introducing himself as James T. Kirk.
@krad I believe the thing we get from this episode that wasn’t in The Cage: we actually get to care about the characters, something I couldn’t in that first pilot. And I had forgotten (or never noticed) that the women got to wear pants!
@60 Chris: Thank you for calling out those that fixate on the little inconsistencies solely to leave out the parts of Trek they don’t like.
@58/Theo16: Brilliant way to get Chekov aboard in time for Khan! (Although that particular problem has never bothered me. There’s plenty of crew members we don’t see on a weekly basis, and they never flat-out say, do they, that Chekov is new aboard as of season 2, do they?)
I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet the theory that TOS stardates are relative? i.e., it could be stardate 1234.5 on Alpha Centauri while it’s stardate 5432.1 on Sha Ka Ree? It doesn’t make them make any more sense, of course, but it would account (if one really wanted it to) for things like, as Christopher points out, “Magicks of Megas-Tu” supposedly preceding “The Cage.”
I always enjoyed the fannish stardate system, just using the real date in stardate format — I’m writing this on stardate 1503.12. Of course, that does introduce two digits after the decimal, which never happens in TOS. (I believe.)
On more substantial matters, @63/lordmagnusen, you’re right. The major characters feel more real all around in this pilot. Except for, of course, poor Yeoman Smith. Maybe she and Colt eventually ended up serving together as a high-powered captain and executive officer!
@64 The problem with a “relative” system for stardates is that it renders them completely meaningless for the viewer.
My favorite theory, which I’ve seen on some fan site (I don’t remember which one). is the idea that stardates have “timezones” which differ only in the 10’s digit of the date.
So SD 5110 at point A could be equivalent to SD 5120 at point B. But SD 5432.1 at point A would still be definitely later than SD 1234.5 at point B.
This actually solves a surprising amount of stardate inconsistencies (such as the fact the different episodes sometimes have overlapping stardate ranges), while still preserving some of their choronological meaning.
Of-course, this theory won’t solve extreme inconsistencies, such as the Magicks of Megas-Tu problem, but I’d rather classify such extremes as a continuity error than sacrifice a fan-friendly stardate system which holds pretty well 95% of the time.
@65 “The problem with a “relative” system for stardates is that it renders them completely meaningless for the viewer.”
That’s the original point made by Patches in 43 and 45. Stardates are basically meaningless technobabble with little bearing on the episode.
Tangentially related, I love that the criminals/cases on “The Blacklist” are not in any particular order. Granted, that show is far more serialized than any Trek, but the writers were still wise enough to intentionally keep the total vague and to jump around. Never once have I thought that the episodes should be watched “in order” any more than I think watching Star Trek in Stardate order would really add much to the plot, ending with “All Our Yesterdays” notwithstanding.
@64/bibliomike: No, Chekov was never said to be new. TOS was full of crewmember who suddenly appeared out of nowhere without explanation. And there were 430 people aboard, so just because somebody got rotated onto the bridge crew, that doesn’t mean they weren’t there earlier.
DC Comics’s Who’s Who in Star Trek, written by Allan Asherman, posited that Chekov had been posted in engineering at the time of “Space Seed” (perhaps based on how Riley was promoted from engineering to the bridge in “Conscience of the King”) and had led the resistance to Khan’s takeover of the engine room, which was why Khan remembered him. I incorporated that idea into the novel continuity in Ex Machina.
As for stardates being relative, that goes all the way back to Gene Roddenberry’s explanation for the fans who wrote in to complain about stardate order during the show’s original run, which he discussed in The Making of Star Trek in 1968. Quoting from p. 198 of that book (but not using the all-caps format of Roddenberry’s passages):
Which is basically invoking the idea of non-simultaneity and relativistic time dilation. It really wouldn’t be possible to synchronize measures of time between different star systems or ships moving at different relativistic velocities. Although warp drive wouldn’t experience time dilation, but I don’t think that was really figured out until 1994. It’s a handwave, but one somewhat based in actual physics.
Still, the show itself never really honored this principle, and characters talked about the time intervals between events as if they were constants — Spock served under Pike for 11 years, four months, five days, Kirk hadn’t seen an old flame in X years and “an odd number of days,” etc.
@65/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: As rowanblaze says, stardates are supposed to be meaningless to the viewer. The whole point is to keep the chronology vague enough to give the writers flexibility. In TOS, it was at least initially about not locking down the century. Later on, it was more about being flexible about time intervals between episodes. If they wanted to do a story about the anniversary of a certain event, or to say that Molly O’Brien was X years old, or whatever, they didn’t want to be too locked down by exact date intervals between episodes. So stardates were deliberately semi-random, with just enough progression to give the impression of forward motion in time, without being specific about just how much time had elapsed.
The “time zone” theory is interesting, but it might make more sense in the TOS era if it were the first digit that changed. That could explain something like, say, “Shore Leave” on SD 3025.3 being followed by “The Squire of Gothos” on SD 2124.5.
@64/bibliomike: No, Chekov was never said to be new
@67: Are you sure? I seem to recall a scene where Chekov tried to defend his sloppy work to a nameless superior officer by claiming he was new at the ship.
I can’t recall from which episode, though. It’s been 20 years since I’ve last seen it.
@68: You may be thinking of the bit from “Catspaw” where DeSalle (the guest star who took over the bridge when the male leads were away, since heaven forbid Uhura should take the conn) suggested that Chekov might need help recalibrating the sensors, and Chekov said, “I can do it, sir. I’m not that green.”
So yeah, he admits that he’s relatively inexperienced, but not a complete novice or a first-timer. Which is consistent with him being aboard for several months at that point, or having been in engineering and recently transferred to sciences. But he never says he’s new to the ship.
After all, these episodes weren’t aired in order. “Catspaw” was the first Chekov episode produced, but the seventh aired in the season. They couldn’t know in advance what order the episodes would be broadcast in, so it would’ve been unwise to have him state he was on his first assignment.
@69: That’s the one! The “Halloween” episode with the cat, which I hated. Definitely one of the more jarring episodes. I also recall Chekov’s bizarre wig.
@65/Omicron… : I don’t really have a targ in this fight, I just thought Roddenberry’s “explanation” ought to be in the mix of conversation somewhere. I like your theory of stardate limited relativity (so to speak).
*My* real stardate bugaboo is that, in TNG-era, the first digit being “4” to denote 24th century (per the TNG writers’ bible) had no choice but to roll over, odometer-like, to a “5” after stardate 49999.9, even though were were still in the 24th century. I know, it was just a formula for writers to use, but I liked the consistency.
@67/Christopher: Right. There are any number of explanations. I liked yours in “Ex Machina.” Also, the McIntyre novel Keith mentions in his review, “Enterprise: The First Adventure,” includes, if memory serves, a brief bit where Kirk goes onto the bridge during the night shift and finds Chekov on duty, meeting him for the first time. Frankly, though, my personal favorite theory for how Khan recognized Chekov is that, hey, after all, Kirk gave him complete access to the ship’s library files. And Chekov would of course recognize Khan, as any of his 429 shipmates would.
@70/Eduardo: I just read an old, circa 1976 interview with Koenig where he said birds could have nested in that wig. :)
Another thing to keep in mind regarding whether or not Chekov was new to the ship was the fact that, in The Deadly Years, Chekov grinned knowingly when Kirk pulled the Corbomite bluff, which strongly suggested he was on-board when it was used the first time.
Or maybe Sulu had told him about it.
@71: Shatner and Chris Kreski quoted that Koenig line when they did the season 2 section of his Star Trek Memories book, published back in 1993.
@71/Bibliomike: That “4 represents the 24th century” thing was never meant to apply in-universe. The same paragraph also said that the subsequent “1” represented the first season of the show. So that passage was speaking from the writers’ perspective, what the numbers meant to the people making the show, rather than indicating what they were supposed to mean to the fictional characters within the show.
On Khan recognizing Chekov, William Rotsler’s Star Trek II Biographies posited that Khan had just happened to memorize the entire Starfleet personnel roster while he was reading up on the 23rd century in sickbay. I always found that a ridiculous explanation myself. It’s much simpler just to assume that Chekov was onboard but not yet in the bridge crew. And I have a hard time believing he would’ve had as intense a fear reaction to “Botany Bay? Botany Bay?!!” if he hadn’t had some more direct encounter with Khan than just hearing about him from his crewmates.
Re: Khan recognizing Chekov: I heard somewhere that Walter Koenig’s theory was that, back in Space Seed, Chekov had cut in front of Khan to use the men’s room. I’ve always been partial to that explanation myself.
@74/Eduardo: Oh, yes, so they did! I was re-reading “The Best of Trek” and found it in there, but you’re right. I knew it sounded familiar. Thanks!
@75/Christopher: I know. I still thought it should have, though. But the Great Bird didn’t ask my opinion. ;) That’s a really good point you make about the intensity of Chekov’s reaction to the name “Botany Bay.”
@76/Lsana: Yes. Just the sort of thing a green young ensign might do, too!
This is my second episode of the series and I love all the goofy moves that Shatner makes. It’s interesting to compare it to what we deem as good-quality television today.
@71 There’s no “fight” as far as I’m concerned.
There may be stuff about Star Trek which I deem important enough to enter a heated debate over, but stardates isn’t one of them.
Each to his own.
At any rate, the “SD 50000” issue is an excellent example for why I – presonally – don’t mix the decisions of the creative staff with in-universe logic.
And this goes to Roddenberry’s “explanation” of stardates as well. He may have intended for stardates to be “meaningless”, but that isn’t what actually happened on the show. So at the risk of sounding
blasphemous, I prefer the canon evidence on screen on the mere words of The Great Bird.
The simple fact is that ordering all TOS epsiodes in stardate order (I’ve never really cared for the animated series) actually makes more sense – plotwise – then viewing them in production order. Even though it does jumble the order quite abit.
Whether this was by accident or by unconscious design, I do not know. Either way, in my view, there is sufficient canon evidence to refute the notion of “stardates are meaningless to the viewer”. But if you disagree, that’s cool.
@67 Is there any reason for us to assume that Shore Leave didn’t occur after The Squire of Gothos?
@79: I don’t agree that stardate order makes more sense of anything. It jumbles TAS with TOS, which is a problem because there are changes to the sets between the two — the TAS bridge gains a second exit to the left of the main viewscreen, and the TAS engine room is rearranged with the main monitor console moved from the front alcove to a position adjacent to the rear grille, with a clear vertical column added to the middle of the room. It puts “The City on the Edge of Forever” immediately after “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” two time-travel stories in a row, which is a bit much of a coincidence. It puts “This Side of Paradise” right after “Amok Time,” which ruins the impact of Spock’s surprising turn to emotionality by putting it right after his bout with pon farr. And it puts “Mudd’s Passion” just seven episodes after “I, Mudd,” which doesn’t leave enough time for his escape from the android planet and his escapades on Illyria VI and Sirius IX.
And it doesn’t do anything to correct the production-order problem of having “Court-martial” immediately followed by “The Menagerie,” two consecutive visits to Starbase 11 with different commanders. Airdate order is the only one that avoids that issue, though that’s the only positive thing I have to say about airdate order.
@80: Ooh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. The different commanders on back-to-back Starbase 11 visits bugged me no end when I first watched the series. (My local station was using production order.) I eventually told myself that, since Stone wears red and Mendez wears gold, they were commodores in command of different divisions of the base. :) (Or, maybe, since Stone was a redshirt, he met most redshirts’ inevitable fate in between the two episodes…!)
Or maybe “Court Martial” convinced Stone that he should go ahead and retire, and so he did, letting Mendez take the job! (I think the TOS Pike novel “Burning Dreams” actually suggests something like this, doesn’t it? Been a while since I read it.)
Saavik @48 – You’re quite welcome! I originally heard about it from Keith a few months ago, actually, so I’m just passing it on now that we’re on the TOS rewatch.
Bibliomike @71 – “I don’t have a targ in this fight” – I’m howling with laughter. :D
As for infighting and disappointment among Trek fans, David Gerrold posted about it yesterday – worth a look.
As for infighting and disappointment among Trek fans, David Gerrold posted about it yesterday – worth a look.
@83: Gerrold’s absolutely right. Star Trek is about understanding, respect and cooperation. Fans who trash people who worked on these shows are betraying that principle.
This should be spread around because it’s a deserved kick in the nuts for all those people who spend their time bashing and insulting hard-working filmmakers like Abrams, Brannon Braga, Fred Freiberger, several of the actors, and even Roddenberry himself.
@82/3: Mostly a good piece from Gerrold, though he kind of contradicts his own position when he puts down all post-TOS Trek in paragraphs 6ff. Aside from that, though, I’ve had much the same thoughts. Too many people today see fandom as an excuse to hate, complain, and condemn. So much fandom today is kneejerk negativity and hostility and bullying, and that’s missing the point. To quote a blog post of mine from last year, “Fandom is supposed to be about enjoying stuff and being excited by stuff. Fandom is love, and love should be optimistic. Even when you’ve been burned by love in the past, even when you’re afraid to take a chance on love again, it’s still important to let it give you hope.”
@82/Meredith: We reach, sister. :)
@84/Christopher: Good words about fandom (now I’m hearing David Marcus in my head: “Good words! That’s where ideas begin…”)
Great episode. I wish that Mitchell would have been around for a while. Its not like Sulu’s deskmate was ever really defined until season 2.
Krad, I don’t suppose you could let us know the next episode you’ll be reviewing. I’m watching these on Netflix and they have them in aire date order.
@86: Here’s a list of TOS episodes in production order:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series#Episode_list
“The Corbomite Maneuver” is next.
Christopher @84 – Love your blog post. Very well said, thanks for drawing our attention to it.
@87 Thanks Christopher.
Side question to no one in particular, is there anyone doing or planning on doing a Classic Doctor Who rewatch? Hulu has a crapton of those episodes.
@84 “Mostly a good piece from Gerrold, though he kind of contradicts his own position when he puts down all post-TOS Trek in paragraphs 6ff.”
I don’t think he contradicts his own position. There is a different between writing criticism and “being an asshole”.
I do, however, find his claim strange. If anything, TNG has taken the “we should all get along” to much farther extremes than TOS. Perhaps he was refering to DS9? Or the JJ Abrams movies?
Well, at least when it comes to Abrams-Trek, I wholeheartedly agree with Gerrold. I have no grudge against those who enjoy those films, but really… these films have absolutely nothing to do with what Star Trek used to be about. Gone is the spirit of Star Trek, the notion of IDIC, the bright outlook for the future. I’m sorry, but there is no way anybody would be able to convince me that embracing IDIC means trekkies have to shut up when the very ideals of their beloved franchise are being trampled on.
Of-course, we still need to be careful not to cross the line between harsh criticism and intolerant hate. Hate – no. Speaking up – yes.
I think he was referring primarily to the Abrams films. Even Voyager at its worst stood for at least some Trekkian ideals. Enterprise certainly did.
Of course, it should be noted Gerrold was forced out of TNG early on. However, I don’t think he would dismiss all Berman-era Trek over sour grapes. He had a bone to pick with Roddenberry’s attorney, Leonard Maizlish, certainly, but as far as I know he had nothing but respect for the Berman-led crew.
Given that Gerrold appeared in “Trials and Tribble-ations” as an extra, I don’t think he thinks too poorly of the post-Roddenberry folks who worked on the television spinoffs…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@90 Maybe Gerrold was also referring to the movies? There’s a villain in almost every movie, and very little space exploration or making friends.
Which is a real waste because the aliens and cosmic phenomena on a movie screen could be so cool.
@90/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: The thing is, though, how many Trek movies overall have been about making friends rather than fighting bad guys?
TMP was resolved by Decker joining with V’Ger.
TWOK involved fighting a vengeance-crazed madman, who blew himself up at the end.
TSFS involved fighting Klingons, with Kirk kicking their leader into a chasm.
TVH was resolved by letting the whales talk to the probe.
TFF was resolved by shooting torpedoes at the fake God guy, although there was a truce with the Klingons involved.
TUC was about making peace with the Klingons, but also involved blowing up or shooting the conspirators trying to sabotage the peace.
GEN was resolved by blowing up a ship full of Klingons, and then blowing up a guy who just wanted to reunite with his wife.
FC was about fighting the Borg and was resolved by melting their Queen’s flesh and stomping on her mechanical brain parts.
INS involved making friends with the Ba’ku, but also blowing up or shooting their Son’a enemies.
NEM involved improving a fragile peace with the Romulans, but also blowing up Picard’s clone and kicking his Viceroy into a bottomless shaft.
So, yeah, a few of the original-universe movies involved peacemaking, but usually alongside a lot of fighting and shooting. And several of them, including the two best-regarded ones, are pretty much strictly about fighting villains. So that isn’t something new with the Abrams movies. A lot of the criticisms I hear about those movies are really things that are true of most Trek movies, and are really about the differences between TV and movies, their respective advantages and limitations and emphases, than about the difference between the Prime and Abrams continuities. Movies in general are not the best medium for Star Trek.
So I don’t think that Gerrold was speaking exclusively of the Abrams films, and if he was, then it wasn’t a fair criticism. And if he was speaking of all post-TOS Trek, which is what it sounded like to me, then it was an even more unfair generalization.
@94 Christopher: Thorough as always, so I guess you’re right about movies not being the best medium.
I still think a space exploration movie would be great. But I guess it won’t happen.
I still think a space exploration movie would be great. But I guess it won’t happen.
@95: That’s pretty much what we got with The Motion Picture, which I adored. Alas, I feel general movie audiences don’t have the necessary attention span to endure such a journey.
@96: Yes, I know. But we never got another one.
@96/Eduardo and @97/Jana: I think, for all its faults (and they are many), Star Trek V was another “space exploration movie,” outer as well as inner space. It’s not my favorite Trek film, but it’s better than most people, fans included, give it credit for. But that’s for another time, I guess.
And while the JJ films aren’t my favorites, either, I think Star Trek 2009 does make some attempt to portray a bright, shiny Star Trek future. (Lens flares, if nothing else!) Pike describes the Federation as a “peace-keeping and humnitarian armada” (that line never parses quite right to me – he means Starfleet, surely, not the UFP – but the intent is clear). We see a diverse crew of humans and aliens working together as professionals to defend civilization. Kirk does offer assistance to Nero at the very end (even if the moment plays out a little less than full-hearted). It’s thin, but it’s there. When Spock resolves Into Darkness by pummeling Khan in the face, however, then we’ve gone off the rails.
@98/Bibliomike: Actually one thing I like about STID was that it recreated the Kirk-Spock dynamic Gene Coon used in “Arena” and “The Devil in the Dark” — Kirk’s first impulse is to want to destroy a threat, but Spock argues for a more peaceful response, and though Kirk rejects it at first, he ends up doing things Spock’s way when push comes to shove. So there was an attempt at an ethical statement there, one very much in the TOS spirit.
As for the climax, yes, Spock was overcome with rage, but the resolution didn’t come from killing the villain, it came from Uhura talking Spock down and convincing him not to kill, the same way he’d convinced Kirk not to kill. True, that ethical message was weakened considerably given that they only spared Khan for selfish reasons — to get his blood to heal Kirk — but at least they chose an ending that didn’t require the villain’s death, and that itself is a big step forward in the context of the culture of action movies. As I said before, the problems with Trek movies are due to the expectations of movies in general, and there’s a pervasive tradition that action movies end with the villains dying. Even Man of Steel ended with its hero killing the villain, for all the lip service it paid to morality. Not to mention Batman Begins and its deeply hypocritical “I don’t have to save you” ending. So while STID’s resolution — beating Khan to the brink of death and then sparing him for selfish reasons — doesn’t live up to the ethics of most TV Trek, it is a significant improvement on the usual bloodthirstiness of feature-film culture, and an improvement on the ending of the first movie. At least they’re trying.
Bibliomike: I didn’t think Kirk was being sincere when he offered assistance to Nero. I’d like it if you were right, though.
Oh, and you are probably right about space exploration in “Star Trek V”. I must admit I hardly remember it. Two things I do remember are “Vulcan princess” (seriously???) and “I need my pain” (yes!).
@99/Christopher: Yeah, I’ll grant you that about the STID dynamic. I wish that film had done a better job of showing us Kirk and Spock’s friendship, and not just telling us they are friends… but on the ethical question you mention, sure, that flies. And, yes, I overspoke by calling the fistfight “the resultion,” but I’m not convinced it represents any big movement forward for action movies, either. Maybe.
I’m not a hater of the JJ Trek films, really. (See my review of STID at the time, in which I argued against myself about it: http://thescifichristian.com/2013/05/star-trek-into-darkness-a-split-opinion-includes-spoilers/). I give ST09 a lot of credit for reviving the franchise. But the more I think about STID, the less I like it. So I appreciate your take on it.
@100-101/Jana: I think Kirk would have helped, but I think he also knew Nero wouldn’t accept, so it was really a foregone conclusion. I would have preferred Kirk and the Enterprise just left Nero to get swallowed up by the anomaly; that would be the consequences of Nero’s actions “getting him” in the end. I suppose one could argue they’re putting him out of his misery by blasting him to smithereens, but that’s not how it’s presented in context — it’s a moment of “boy, that felt good.” So, sigh.
Vulcan princesses don’t make much sense, but J.M Dillard did an admirable job fleshing out Sybok and his mother’s story in her STV novelization. I take Sybok as canonical, no questions asked – loved Luckinbill’s performance, and think the idea of a “renegade brother” (as Greg Cox alludes to Sybok in his latest TOS novel) is a fascinating one.
@102/Bibliomike: No, it’s not a big movement forward, but any resolution that doesn’t involve the “hero” killing the villain is an improvement on the norm for movies, and I’ll take what I can get.
As for Nero and the Narada, this came across poorly in the film, but the idea was that if the Narada had just fallen into the black hole, it could’ve come out at some other point in space and time and Nero could’ve tried again. So they were still a threat and destroying them was necessary to protect the timeline. But since that didn’t come across, the scene unfortunately played more as an act of vengeance. And I think the fans’ problems with that resolution were part of what drove the less-lethal ending of STID (although the prospect of bringing Khan back for a second go-around was probably a factor too).
As for Vulcans, they have a ton of rituals and cultural quirks that clash with their professed rationalism. They still allow fights to the death for their mates, for Pete’s sake! And we know from “Yesteryear” that they have family shrines “to honor our gods.” And we know they place a lot of importance on family lineage. So who’s to say they couldn’t have some kind of ceremonial monarchy still lingering from the old days? Is that any stranger than the United Kingdom still having a monarchy?
Regarding Vulcan monarchy: I agree that Vulcans have a lot of ritual and old customs, so yes, it wouldn’t be all that strange. I was mostly annoyed because it was announced as a throwaway line, making it sound like some weird fairytale or Star Wars reference.
My problem with STID was that the script fell flat, I never bought into the characters as written, as opposed to ST9, which made me like them from the getgo.
@105/lordmagnusen – the think that tipped it over the edge for me was that the Klingons were talked about as this big, mysterious threat lurking out there, when apparently, their home planet was only half a day’s travel at warp speed (taken from Kirk and Scotty’s conversation after Khan’s apprehension on Kronos where Scotty mentions having only been gone for a day)…
@106: True, the movie played fast and loose with time and distance, but it’s hardly the first — remember in ST V, how it took less than 20 minutes to get to the center of the galaxy? Or in ST VI, how Excelsior was outside of Klingon space but was affected by an explosion that happened around Qo’noS itself?
More and more, I find myself drawn to Gene Roddenberry’s preferred interpretation that what we see onscreen is just a dramatization of the “real” adventures of Starfleet, and some of the depictions of those events are less accurate than others. So it’s better to focus on the underlying essentials and not sweat the surface details. For instance, I choose to ignore the lines in ST V mentioning the center of the galaxy (there are only three of them within the span of less than half a minute) and assume Sha Ka Ree was someplace much closer to the Federation. And when we heard Scotty say he’d only been gone a day, maybe he actually said he’d been gone a week. Or maybe he was just using hyperbole.
@103: Thanks, Christopher. I have not gotten that nuance about the Nerada as a continued threat from any viewing of the film, and I’ve seen it probably six or seven times by now. (I really don’t hate it!)
And, yeah… maybe, like the UK, Vulcan is a constitutional monarchy. ;) (This is not a serious suggestion, but it makes me wish Best of Trek were still being published… I remember an ongoing debate about whether Vulcan was a patriarchy or a matriarchy, but never a suggestion it was a constutional monarchy!)
I had forgotten about the gods-honoring shrines in “Yesteryear.” Cool. Maybe they are manifestations/avatars of the Nome, the “All,” from the TMP novelization….?
@104/Jana: Your objection to the line is a good one. But it is a tantalizing phrase. Maybe some Vulcans do have princesses? A Vulcan colony somewhere? Maybe they’re elected like the royalty of Naboo in that other “Star” franchise? Maybe they’re “princesses” only in the context of a certain ritual, as you suggest? Fascinating….
@108/Bibliomike: Nome is actually a concept from TOS: “The Savage Curtain.”
@109/Christopher: This rewatch is going to dismantle all I thought I knew about Star Trek, bit by agonizing bit…! Please tell me Roddenberry at least references it in the TMP novel?
To quote a certain Starfleet admiral, “Damn! I must be going senile.”
@110/Bibliomike: Err, sorry, as far as I can tell, it’s not in that novel.
Although you’re not the only one who’s confused. I thought “Nome” was from “The Way to Eden.” I guess all those Vulcan spiritual/mystical concepts sort of blend together in our minds.
So, we see Kirk and Spock playing Spock’s game of choice in this episode. Next episode, we learn that Kirk prefers poker (or at least thinks in poker metaphors more often). Trek authors out there, are there any scenes of Spock and Kirk playing cards? (If memory serves, Spock plays cards in Barbara Hambly’s Ishmael – even right there on the cover – but not against Kirk.) From Memory Beta, it looks like Kirk played against Sarek (Sarek coined “Come to Poppa?” I’ll have to check Federation out); and Ambassador Spock and Admiral McCoy played the 1701-D crew… but no Kirk and Spock game of five-card stud?
Poker was more Riker’s thing, I think.
Pretty sure the only card game we saw Kirk play was fizzbin. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
67/CLB
“DC Comics’s Who’s Who in Star Trek, written by Allan Asherman, posited that Chekov had been posted in engineering at the time of “Space Seed” (perhaps based on how Riley was promoted from engineering to the bridge in “Conscience of the King”) and had led the resistance to Khan’s takeover of the engine room, which was why Khan remembered him. I incorporated that idea into the novel continuity in Ex Machina.”
HAH! I beat you to that, Christopher! (STAR TREK: UNTOLD VOYAGES #4, 1998).
Incidentally, I didn’t remember it from the WHO’S WHO. I thought I was just being brilliant. :-)
@115/Glenn: Well, technically, Allan Asherman beat us both to it.
Wow, it’s really exciting to see novelists and writers whose works I’ve enjoyed over the years in this comment thread. All of you take me back to the elementary through high school days when I would scour the library and used bookstores for Trek novels – especially anything with the names of D. Carey, D. Duane, M.W. Bonnano, P. David, J&G Reeves-Stevens, and V. McIntyre, who were always able to transport me completely into another world instead of just regurgitating yet another week’s worth of the Continuing (or Five-Year) Mission. You make me want to get back into reading Star Trek fiction again, which I haven’t done in about ten years. Actually, ChristopherLBennett, I think Ex Machina was one of the last things I read (and it was amazing). And then I lost almost all my Trek novels in a hurricane in 2008, and pretty much only repurchased some of my TOS books.
But y’all are making me love Star Trek again. Thanks for the rewatch, KRAD!
@117/TheOneGalen: Thanks! And ouch, sorry about losing the books.
@102/Bibliomike:
I’m not a hater of the Abrams films, either. “Star Trek” (2009) was, at the very least, an exciting sci fi film. And even STID is still a better film than the average action flick.
But this doesn’t change my opinion that these films are not really Star Trek. Not in spirit, anyway. You can dilute the message only so much, before it gets completely lost is the background noise.
And it isn’t just the violence. We’ve had plenty of violence in Trek before. But the thing is, it was always rooted in a deeper plot with a deeper lesson. Deep Space Nine is an excellent example of how this can be done successfully. It may have walked that thin line at times, but they’ve never crossed it.
JJ Abrams did cross that line, in more ways than one.
Let me put it another way:
For years I’ve been telling my family and friends how great Star Trek is. Not as a TV/film franchise, but as a source of real-life wisdom.
And now… Now, I don’t know what to tell them anymore.
@119/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: Well, as I’ve said before, you can’t really compare movies to TV, because a series where you get 2-2.5 hours every 2-4 years is bound to be more superficial than one where you get 15-18 hours of content (not counting commercials) per year. So we should compare the new movies strictly to the old movies in terms of their messages/themes. Let’s see:
TMP had a philosophical core about the search for the meaning of life.
TWOK was basically about aging and coping with mortality, more a personal theme than an ethical one.
TSFS was… well… about friendship, I guess.
TVH was Save the Whales.
TFF was another attempt at “the search for the Creator,” and it had a statement about the value of facing our pain.
TUC was an allegory about the end of the Cold War.
GEN was, again, basically about aging and mortality.
FC was… I really have no idea what it was about thematically. Don’t be Ahab? Don’t expect too much from your idols? Beware seductive cyborgs? Nothing really sticks out.
INS was basically “Journey’s End: The Movie,” with the same theme about the evils of forced relocation and the right to cultural autonomy.
NEM was a rumination on nature vs. nurture, on whether we blame our choices on fate and upbringing or take responsibility for improving ourselves. There was also something of a theme about whether we let our fear of mortality control our lives or accept mortality as part of what makes us human, although much of that was lost in editing.
So the majority of the original-universe movies have some thematic depth, but some of the most beloved ones, like TWOK and FC, don’t really have much of a message at all.
As for the new movies, the first’s theme is basically about living up to your potential, I guess. It’s similar to NEM in that it’s about whether you let your past traumas be an excuse to misbehave or make a choice to rise above them.
STID touches on several themes. There’s the perennial Trek theme of peace vs. war, of whether you choose to respond to threats with violence or make an attempt to find a smarter way. There’s a TUC-like allegory on xenophobic politics in the contemporary real world, the fear of another culture provoking self-defeating warmongering toward them. (Or, according to some allegations, an allegory for Orci’s 9/11 Truther beliefs.) And there’s a theme about learning humility and admitting one’s mistakes as a necessary step toward wisdom. (Which I think can also be read as an admission that they promoted Kirk too fast in the first movie.) Maybe it tried to include too many themes at once so that they weren’t as well-developed as they could be, but they were there.
So no, I can’t really agree that the new movies lack the kind of messages that the old ones had. And of course there are only two of them, versus ten of the old ones, so naturally they’re going to look a little sparse in comparison.
I used to think that GEN was about living in a dreamworld vs. living in reality, which felt very much like “classic Trek” to me. They ruined it by killing Soran instead of just subduing him (and giving him a talk about the merits of the real world :-)), but as Christopher pointed out earlier, that’s how films work.
@121/Jana: Good point.
@120/Christopher: So the majority of the original-universe movies have some thematic depth, but some of the most beloved ones, like TWOK and FC, don’t really have much of a message at all.
I’m not sure (and I’m not sure you’re saying this) that it’s a bad thing that TWOK and FC can’t be summed up in a concise thematic sentence. Accepting mortality may be more of a personal than an ethical theme, although I think “how we deal with death” ourselves can certainly have ramifications for other people (as Khan dealing with Marla’s death by wreaking vengeance on Kirk demonstrates). And FC could perhaps be summed up by some statement about “how we face the future” – will Zefram embrace his destiny, will Picard learn to let go of how the Borg hurt him so he can move forward…?
@123/Mike: As a side note, I have a problem with TWOK’s claim that Kirk has never faced death. After all, almost everyone he cares about in the TV show dies, and he himself expects to die several times.
It’s more that one of his characteristics is that he’s an optimist. He usually believes that things will turn out well even if they are looking really bad. This, plus the fact that he is resourceful, is the reason why he usually “doesn’t believe in a no-win scenario”.
Therefore when he says that he never accepted death but cheated death I don’t take this to mean he has some deep revelation, I take it to mean that he is feeling sad and helpless because Spock just died. He’ll get over it and be an optimist again (as we all know).
Not the intended reading, I know.
@124/Jana: Maybe not the intended reading, no, but an interesting one. I would defend TWOK by suggesting that Spock’s death is an order of magnitude different from any of the deaths Kirk has faced previously. No, of course, it’s not that Kirk didn’t care that his brother or sister-in-law or Edith Keeler died; but TWOK posits there is something about Spock falling to the Reaper (so it seems, definitively) hits and hurts him especially hard (which is why *my* beef with TWOK is that the “I feel young” end feels a little fast and forced; the opening of TSFS seems much more authentic).
I see and grant your point, though. In a way, Kirk’s “never having faced death” is perhaps one more example of TOS’ general lack of continuity, just writ large. It suits the film’s purposes for Kirk to have always been cavalier about death, and so he is. In my eyes, what salvages it is that it dovetails with Kirk’s concerns about growing old in the film; so I’ve always been willing to give it a pass! But of course everyone’s mileage may vary.
I’m very surprised to see the claim that First Contact doesn’t have a message.
First Contact was, among other things, about Picard learning to overcome his need-for-revenge. It made the very Trekkian point, that revenge and hate can destroy your very soul.
As for the Warth of Kahn: The strength of that film comes from having many messages rather than a single point. Other posters already mentioned the themes of growing old and facing death. To this I would add the moral that actions have consequences and that stupid actions result in bad consequences: Besides the obvious example of Kahn’s “revenge at all cost” attitude (which caused him to loose everything), we also have Kirk’s own mistake from Space Seed coming back to bite him in the a**. Marooning Kahn and his company on some planet and than completely forgetting about them was obviously a very bad idea.
So even though The Wrath of Kahn might seem to be – superficially – a simple “hero vs. villian” action film, it is much much more than that. It has an intelligent multi-faceted plot. It also benefited from some very fine acting. And most importantly: It encourages you think about the deeper issues (which is something that the Abrams movies completely fail to do).
@125/Mike: I agree with everything you write! And I think it fits nicely together with my reading – Spock’s death is the worst thing that has ever happened to him, and so he feels that he has never faced death before. It’s not true, but it’s how he feels at the time.
@126/OmicronThetaDeltaPhi: In my opinion, they really overdid that revenge topic. And than did it some more in the Abrams movies. Besides, Picard already overcame his need for revenge in I, Borg.
The idea that Kirk completely forgot about Khan (not Kahn) is one of the things that really annoy me about TWOK. We know that he writes reports. We know that he does log entries. There is an official hearing where he drops all charges. It’s inconceivable that he didn’t inform his superiors. The film doesn’t work without suspension of disbelief.
@126/Omicron…: we also have Kirk’s own mistake from Space Seed coming back to bite him in the a** – Indeeed! Greg Cox makes good use of this theme in his latest TOS novel, Foul Deeds Will Rise. Recommended reading, especially for fans of the characters as they were in the TOS movie era.
@127/Jana: I think (assuming the writers didn’t just do it for the expediency of a film plot <g>) First Contact could be “read” as showing us that overcoming the need for revenge was an ongoing struggle for Picard. As Robert warned him in “Family,” “This is going to stay with you a long time.” So, yes, Picard made some headway in “I, Borg” – but, perhaps just as Spock’s death was a crisis of a different order of magnitude for Kirk, so the Borg’s near-assimilation of Earth and destruction of the Federation’s future was a qualitatively different crisis than having the chance to use a single Borg drone against the collective. How many times in our own life have we thought we’re done with negative feelings toward someone, only to have them flare up again, later? I was skeptical of Picard’s characterization in FC at the time, but since then I’ve come to appreciate (or at least make my peace!) with it.
I don’t think we’re asked to believe Kirk “completely forgot about Khan” — “You still remember, Admiral!” — but I do think we’re asked to accept he and Starfleet believed that case was closed. I go back and forth over whether that flies for me. Yes, there were log entries (we heard them in “Space Seed,” obviously). But, at least originally, the premise of the show was that starship captains were semi-independent and semi-autonomous operators, dealing with needs as they arose as best they could out there on the wild and wooly final frontier. This aspect diminished as TOS went on, and was gone completely by the film era. It is hard to believe no one at Starfleet Command would have raised a red flag when the Reliant filed its flight path to the Ceti Alpha system… but I guess that’s no harder to suspend disbelief for than the idea that the Ceti Alpha name didn’t nag at Chekov from the start of the mission (I think Vonda McIntyre, in her novelization, shows Chekov being uneasy about the mission to “Alpha Ceti VI” and not knowing why — I guess the name was reversed in a first draft script?). I also think Greg Cox deals with this in To Reign in Hell, but his solution slips my mind at the moment.
@128/Mike: McIntyre changed Ceti Alpha to Alpha Ceti because that’s the correct Bayer designation of the actual star. Back then, writers of novelizations weren’t under as much pressure to copy the films exactly and were sometimes able to correct science, fact, or logic mistakes in a film (see: Isaac Asimov’s entire Fantastic Voyage novelization). Why the writers of “Space Seed” inverted the name in the first place is puzzling.
@128/Mike: You make a good point about FC. I actually liked the film, but I’ve grown tired of revenge plots since.
Which is why I don’t agree with OmicronThetaDeltaPhi that Kirk made a mistake in giving Khan and his lot a planet to settle. Here we have a guy who doesn’t do revenge, and that’s so grand. Also refreshing, compared to all the revenge stuff we got since.
I’ll assume that he did tell his superiors but the information got lost somewhere in Starfleet bureaucracy.
Would Chekov recognize the name Ceti Alpha? I agree that he was on board when the Enterprise first encountered Khan, but probably as a “Lower Decks” character, so he might know less than we do about the events in the first place. Plus, they visited so many planets, and any “Something Alpha” name probably wouldn’t be too memorable.
Remember, as Douglas Adams said, space is big. Really big. The destruction of Ceti Alpha VI probably put Ceti Alpha V on an orbital path that, at least part of the time, put it where VI used to be before it went boom. Either way, the Reliant thought it was VI, not V, because V would never have been listed as a lifeless planet in the first place (which was a criteria for the Genesis Project).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@131/krad: Sorry, that doesn’t cut it. Planets are always moving, and spend no more than a few moments at any given point in space. (For instance, it takes the Earth about seven minutes to traverse its own diameter.) So to find a planet, you need to know about six different orbital parameters like semimajor axis, velocity, inclination, etc. Even if they happened to see V exactly where VI should’ve been, and even if it somehow happened to be the exact same size and composition, they would’ve only had to wait a few minutes, a couple of hours tops, to determine that it was on the wrong orbital path.
Not to mention that they didn’t have blinders on. Space is really big, but it’s also really empty. Unless the whole system was immersed in a dense dust cloud, they would’ve been able to see all of its planets at once. And, as I’ve said before, their sensors should’ve picked up the visible light from the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI as soon as they crossed within 15 light-years of the system. And that’s assuming that there were no Federation ships or observatories in range with FTL sensors able to pick up the explosion as soon as it happened.
You know how they say warp engines operate at the speed of plot? Well, Starfleet sensors have the sensitivity of plot. Sometimes they can instantaneously detect events a hundred light-years away, and sometimes they can be completely blind to something that could be easily discerned by a person looking out a porthole with a halfway decent telescope.
@126: I agree with you on both movies.
@131/Keith: You’re right – I had forgotten that they thought they were on a different planet. It seems the records concerning Khan didn’t get lost after all, they just didn’t look them up.
@132/Christopher: OK, so it’s still a big plot hole, only a different one than I thought.
@129/Christopher – Thanks, I did not know that. Still – the wrong name was already on-screen canon. Continuity, continuity – be it the hobgoblin of little minds or not, when it comes to Trek, I like it! (Besides, maybe the Bayer designation got revised by the 23rd century, huh? Ever stop to think of that? And a lot of new stars got renamed “Rigel,” too.) :)
@130/JanaJansen “Which is why I don’t agree with OmicronThetaDeltaPhi that Kirk made a mistake in giving Khan and his lot a planet to settle. Here we have a guy who doesn’t do revenge, and that’s so grand. Also refreshing, compared to all the revenge stuff we got since.”
I actually agree with you.
Giving Khan’s group a planet to settle was a neat and creative solution.
But putting a group of superintelligent supermen on a planet and then forgetting all about them, is just plain stupid. An the fact that there is some dusty forgotten file about the incident, doesn’t make it any less stupid.
That was the mistake I was talking about. And it was refreshing to see that this bad decision by “the good guys” actually had long-term consequences.
As for the revenge-stuff in TWOK and FC, it didn’t bother me because:
1. Both films delt with many other topics as well.
2. Both films made the point of showing that revenge is a bad thing which should be overcome. So even if the topic itself may seem a bit anti-Trek, the manner in which it was handled is consistent with Roddenbery’s optimistic vision.
3. Both films were simply excellent films.
@136: I’m glad we agree about the most important aspect.
But as I’ve already said, I’m sure they wouldn’t have forgot about it. So,
1. there was no mistake (because they didn’t do that), and
2. the film is to blame for not coming up with an explanation.
But I’m fine with not blaming anyone and assuming that they had the data in their computer and didn’t look them up, or that some glitch destroyed them years ago, or whatever.
Out-of-universe, I consider it a plot hole. Which is also fine, we’ve seen worse in that department. I just wouldn’t see it as one of the film’s messages.
And yes, it’s a nice film. I liked the Genesis project stuff best.
See, changing orbital paths, seeing explosions light years away, lists of dead planets….
No one noticed “Hey, this solar system is missing a planet”
No one said “Hey, our stellar maps say this system has 6 planets, yet I only count 5”..
That really is a problem.
I’ve always figure the energy barrier is entirely psionic. It was going to be in front of the Enterprise no matter how they maneuvered because it was activated by the presence of living beings. Unmanned probes would have sailed right through and registered nothing.
Question: Is it the 2007 remaster that’s available on Netflix? Just curious, because when I was just watching this episode, I remember thinking that the special effect of the Enterprise flying through the galactic barrier thing looked better than I was expecting it to. (I think my actual thought was something along the lines of, “Huh, that doesn’t look half bad for 1966.”) At any rate, it held up better than I thought it would.
@140/Denise L.: Yes, it is.
This episode might be thought of as not – quite – Star Trek – yet. But if we think of it instead as a pre – Star Trek – movie, and compare it to other sf movies that were before Star Trek, then it is seems to me that it is fully the equal of Forbidden Planet for example.
Yeoman Smith gets to actually be a character from time to time in the remarkable fan series “Star Trek Continues”.
I figured that maybe the barrier might only become visible if it was encountered directly? Kind of like a force field or an alarm that would be triggered if it were touched?
The station’s cell-maybe the station wasn’t always automated, and had originally been part of a small colony that was abandoned after it was. Hence it has a leftover cell, or brig.
Lockwood is the best part of this episode IMO-he does a good job playing the role of an old friend and makes Kirk’s anguish over having to fight him more poignant. Spock’s yelling and other behavior (not to mention his appearance-those eyebrows) and the uniforms seem to be holdovers from “The Cage” aka “The Menagerie” which was meant to be the original series pilot.
I felt for Gary Mitchell too. If they were to do tv remake of the series today, I would make Gary’s “ghost” a recurring character. Kirk killed his body but his mind still exists. Q for TOS.
Time to revive this thread! I’ve been reading a lot of the different Star Trek rewatches over the last few months–it’s been great reading.Thanks, Keith!
My 10 year old has expressed an interest in watching TOS, and given our current house-bound situation, now seemed a good time to start. We started with this episode, and I spent a lot of time trying to lower his expectations about the special effects. So of course, one of the first things he said was “These effects are great!” I hadn’t realized that Netflix was showing the remastered episodes (and had forgotten that remastered episodes were a thing).
Liked the “stack of books with legs” line–definitely not the Kirk of collective memory!
I’ve always been with impressed with this episode in that it has the gravitas of a big production like a feature film: you’ve got major characters that are established members of the crew, not to mention, best friend of the captain, who kick the bucket here (Kelso and Mitchell); a major guest character in Dehmer; crew members who gain superpowers; passing through the galactic barrier no less; high stakes posed to the crew based on the danger; and extensive VFX work. This was a good pilot and a fun first look at a bunch of the main cast that we would come to know and love, including a Spock that was still shouty and characterization that was a bit off from how he would consistently be portrayed later on in the series.
@18/Lubitsch: I am in agreement. I always figured Mitchell had gotten a good knock on the head before he was buried in the grave.
I always interpreted the scene that his powers were immense, but his transformation was not yet complete and his body was still vulnerable to injury. If he was suffocating to death while unconscious, it’s reasonable to assume he couldn’t actively use his powers to save himself.
I’ve always really liked this episode and aside from the forgettable Dr. Piper performance, the acting was great throughout (Sulu’s grade 4 math lesson was not the fault of the acting).
I commented a couple comments back that I thought this was a good episode but one nit I have with it is that it seems the senior staff seem to fear the worst and be suspicious of Mitchell practically the moment he starts demonstrating his superpowers. Of course their fears will end up playing out as being justified but until anything bad actually happens, why suspect your friend and fellow officer is going to become “eee-vil!” “Hide & Q” on TNG seems to follow the main premise of this episode very closely except for there, Riker is able to recognize he’s been corrupted and become a total douche whereas Mitchell here can’t make that crucial breakthrough.
The whole galactic barrier thing isn’t scientifically accurate of course but it just sounds cool and makes for a nice visual!
It’s interesting seeing these earlier, subdued, fluffier versions of the uniforms but I do believe I prefer the subsequent made for Technicolor, more militaristic uniforms that would become the norm.
Missing Uhura and McCoy here.
It’s unfortunate Roddenberry couldn’t keep his original vision of having both the half-Vulcan and the female first officer, as well as having two prominent women in the main cast. But that was fate and the cast and characters that ended up “sticking” became iconic and celebrated.
Very interesting episode. I was especially intrigued by the character of Gary Mitchell. While he appeared to be a good friend and loyal officer to Kirk, Mitchell obviously had some resentment of the captain (which came out dramatically once he attained super-powers). I can understand why they got rid of the dull Dr. Piper, why keep Scotty and Sulu? What did they do to distinguish themselves in this episode? But I have to admit, it was fun to see an emotional, loud and ruthless early Spock.
RIP Sally Kellerman. She was lovely in this episode. The only other thing I’ve ever seen her in was Back to School being a child of the ’80’s. Eventually I’ll get around to watching MASH, the movie version.
Some details about Lockwood’s experience with the contact lenses here (including discussion of the head tilt that @28 mentioned)
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2009/01/tos-special-effects-silver-eyes.html
Does anyone else think Gary and Elizabeth’s eyes glowing eerily were inspired by the kids in Village of the Damned?
I suppose it’s possible, given that both are stories about people with dangerous psychic powers. But it’s hard to say for sure. The trope of glowing eyes representing malevolence or eldritch powers is probably much older, inspired by the scary glowing eyes of nocturnal predators, which would make it a trope at least as old as the invention of fire.
Director Wolf Rilla hated that idea because he felt it was a crude way of showing how evil the children were. But it was an idea forced upon him by the studio.
I’ve never been a fan of the glowing-eyes trope. The job of eyes is to take in light, not give it off. Could eyes that were emitting light even function as light receivers? And what would be the mechanism generating the glow?
Crudely effective or effectively crude?