“More Tribbles, More Troubles”
Written by David Gerrold
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 5
Production episode 22001
Original air date: October 6, 1973
Stardate: 5392.4
Captain’s log. The Enterprise is escorting two grain-carrying robot ships to Sherman’s Planet, which is suffering a famine. En route, they discover a Klingon ship, the I.K.S. Devisor under the command of Koloth, attacking a one-person scout ship belonging to Cyrano Jones. Kirk orders Scotty to beam the occupant of the scout ship on board.
The Devisor destroys the scout ship, but Scotty is able to rescue Jones, as well as a mess of tribbles. Koloth then fires a stasis field on the Enterprise and demands that Kirk turn Jones over. However, the Enterprise still has control of the robot ships, so Kirk orders Sulu to use them to ram the Devisor. The distraction is enough to get Koloth to release the Enterprise, and the use of the weapon has drained Koloth’s energy reserves, and so the Devisor veers off. Unfortunately, one of the robot ships is damaged beyond repair, and they have to overstuff the other ship and put the grain in Enterprise corridors and cargo bays in order to make the shipment.
Jones explains that he’s genetically engineered his tribbles so they don’t reproduce, and he also has a tribble predator called a glommer, which eats tribbles. That was how he was able to get the tribbles off of Deep Station K-7. He also sold some tribbles on a Klingon world, which is why Koloth was chasing him and accusing him of ecological sabotage.
Kirk also announces that he’s in violation of multiple statutes and confines him until the mission is over.
McCoy examines a tribble, and reports at a meeting with Kirk, Spock, and Scotty that these tribbles just get larger rather than reproduce. Spock reports that the Klingon weapon is effective offensively, but not so much defensively, as it drains a lot of power.
The Devisor re-powers up and sets course for the Enterprise. Kirk tries to distract Koloth by sending the robot ship in another direction, but Koloth is able to disable its propulsion.
The Enterprise and Devisor exchange fire. The grain containers break open and the tribbles start eating the grain. Koloth breaks off the attack, but now the Enterprise has to take the robot ship in tow. That’s a power drain the Enterprise can’t afford in a firefight, and sure enough, Koloth returns for another fight, forcing Kirk to cast the robot ship adrift.
This time Koloth uses the stasis weapon again, and the Enterprise is caught. So Kirk has Scotty beam all the tribbles over to the Devisor, which is a stalemate. Koloth then drops the other shoe: they want Jones because it turns out that he stole the glommer from the Klingons. They engineered it to be a tribble predator.
Kirk is more than happy to turn the glommer over, though Jones is reluctant. McCoy then reveals that the fat tribbles are actually colony creatures made up of tons of smaller tribbles. He gives them an injection that will break them down into their component smaller tribbles and also reduce their metabolic rate so they’ll be as harmless as Jones thought they’d be.
Of course, the Klingons don’t know that, and the tribbles on their ship are too large for the glommer to eat. So Koloth orders Korax to fire on them, at which point they turn into a huge pile of small tribbles, to Koloth’s chagrin.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Klingons genetically engineered a tribble predator, which is just like them. They also have developed a weapon that incapacitates the enemy, but leaves you too de-powered to get any enjoyment out of that.
Fascinating. Spock determines that the Klingon stasis weapon isn’t practical because of its power requirements.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy determines that Jones’s genetic engineering work was slipshod, but figures out a way to fix it with a simple injection. Because he’s just that awesome.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu gets to fly the ship and fire phasers during the firefights with Koloth.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura is the one who hits on the notion of controlling the robot ships to get Koloth off their backs.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty grumbles a lot when trying to beam Jones aboard and he’s really not happy to see tribbles again.
Go put on a red shirt. The security guard in the transporter room whom Kirk asks to secure the room once tribbles show up on board is modeled after writer David Gerrold.
Channel open. “Tribbles are well known for their proclivities in multiplication.”
“And they breed fast, too!”
Spock describing tribbles and Jones failing his saving throw versus linguistic comprehension.
Welcome aboard. Stanley Adams is the second actor (after Mark Lenard in “Yesteryear“) to reprise his role from the live-action series, having previously played Jones in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Nichelle Nichols and George Takei play Uhura and Sulu, respectively, while James Doohan provides the voices of Scotty and Koloth. It’s unclear who is the voice of Korax—for years, there was a rumor that David Gerrold voiced him, but Gerrold himself has denied this. Doohan is often credited, but it doesn’t really sound like him. It’s probably one of the other Filmation regulars who did various voices for their shows.
Trivial matters: Obviously, this is a sequel to “The Trouble with Tribbles,” also written by David Gerrold. He’d originally pitched this for the third season, but Fred Freiberger hated “Tribbles” and passed on it. D.C. Fontana contacted Gerrold when the animated series was in development and told him to rework his sequel for the half-hour animated format.
One of the cuts from the original sequel pitch was the glommer being a human predator as well as a tribble one, as they didn’t want to show it eating people on a kids show.
The grain being taken to Sherman’s Planet is quintotriticale, because we needed something more awesome than quadrotriticale, I guess?
Koloth’s ship is named the I.K.S. Devisor here. His ship was identified as the I.K.S. Gr’oth in DS9‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” but that seeming inconsistency was covered in “A Bad Day for Koloth” by David DeLee in Strange New Worlds 9, in which the Gr’oth had to be scuttled because of the tribble infestation provided by Scotty when he beamed the tribbles over to Koloth’s ship in “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
Hal Sutherland is color blind, which is why a lot of things turned out pink in this series, but the most egregious example are the tribbles, which are all the same bright pink, and the Klingon uniforms, which are a more pale pink.
The glommer is mentioned again in the novels Pawns and Symbols by Majliss Larson and Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, the latter establishing that they were created by a Klingon geneticist named Nej.
To boldly go. “That tin-plated overbearing excuse for a starship captain did it again!” This is a fun little sequel, though a few of the beats are a bit too repetitive. I mean, the tribbles get all over the ship, though less entertainingly than they did the first time, they fall all over Kirk, they’re beamed to Koloth’s ship at the end, and there’s a twist that changes the tenor of the story, in this case that Jones stole the glommer.
Filmation’s rather static animation doesn’t do the tribbles any favors, as their movements are a bit more awkward than they were in live action, and you don’t get the same sense that they’re everywhere that you did in the live-action predecessor. Also the episode just isn’t as funny. Gerrold’s dialogue works not because the characters tell jokes, but because of wordplay and dialogue exchanges, and the timing is just off for everyone because it’s damn near impossible to do that type of wordplay properly in animation, especially with actors not used to the medium.
Also, as little as I liked Koloth as played by William Campbell, the actor’s presence is severely missed here, as James Doohan doesn’t convey any of Campbell’s oily charm, reducing him to an overly simplistic antagonist.
Having said that, the plot moves nicely, the stasis weapon is a nifty little concept, and Kirk’s aggravation at being stuck with Jones is surprisingly well conveyed.
Warp factor rating: 6
Next year: “The Survivor”
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest release is the Super City Cops novella Avenging Amethyst, from which you can read an excerpt right here on this site. This is the first of three novellas about police in a city filled with costumed heroes and villains published by Bastei Entertainment. Full information, including the cover, promo copy, ordering links, and another excerpt can be found on Keith’s blog. The next two novellas, Undercover Blues and Secret Identities, will be released in January and February.
Well, this episode was a hit with my 9-year-old daughter, to whom I’m introducing Trek. So it still plays well with the target audience. She thought Kirk shoving the huge tribble out of the command chair was hysterical.
I’d love to see a Mirror Universe story about tribbles sometime. I bet the little buggers are terrifying in the dimension of the Terran Empire. They’d still breed fast, but they’d have teeth — rows and rows of biting, bloody teeth!
Anybody know why returning voice actors — Lenard, Adams, Carmel — don’t get screen credit for their work? Is it just because the credits screens had to be “set in stone” (or cels)?
This is a surprisingly unimaginative sequel. Couldn’t Gerrold find a scenario that doesn’t contain tribbles AND Cyrano Jones AND Klingons AND Koloth AND Sherman’s Planet AND whatever-triticale? Some of the dialogue was reasonably funny, but all in all, I didn’t enjoy it much. And how can genetic engineering turn tribbles into “tribble colonies”?
@1/Mike: Oh no, species aren’t different in the Mirror Universe, or Mirror Spock would have bigger teeth too.
Good idea to keep the original target audience in mind. This was way cooler than anything else on Saturday morning TV at the time, except possibly for Johnny Quest (which was originally a prime time show anyway). I was somewhat disappointed when I later got to see the original series, young me didn’t think they were as good.
@2/Jana – Ha! Maybe Mirror Cyrano Jones was a mad scientist who genetically modified the tribbles to be hellish nightmares with fur. ;)
I’m not a big fan of this episode. It’s interesting how much more of a space-battle story it is than I recalled, but that’s the only thing that makes it different from the original. The contrivance of having almost exactly the same situation as “The Trouble With Tribbles” strains disbelief to the breaking point. I mean, I could accept that Cyrano Jones was still dealing tribbles. I could accept that he would happen to be chased by Koloth, because it stands to reason that the same ship and crew would patrol the same part of space. But to have it happen at the exact same time that the Enterprise was delivering a shipment of a new triticale variant to Sherman’s Planet? That’s just too great a coincidence.
It’s also a bit too much of a sequel, too dependent on the assumption that the viewers are familiar with the original episode. The Act I climax relies entirely on the viewers understanding who Cyrano Jones is and what tribbles are. Sure, the dialogue at the top of Act II clarifies that for the kids and novice viewers who didn’t see the original, but that’s after those viewers have just sat through a commercial break wondering what the heck a tribble and a Cyrano Jones are and why the heck they should care.
Perhaps because this was the first episode produced, there are also some egregious animation errors that are probably funnier than the scripted jokes. When Cyrano comes to the bridge, the cel of the turbolift doors is too far to the right — and in the next shot, Kirk has the turbolift behind him while he’s supposedly addressing Jones directly, and Jones isn’t there. There’s a shot of Uhura where you can see the right-hand edge of the background painting of her station, with the colors fading out toward the side. There’s a shot in the second battle where the beam effect of the stasis weapon is seen even though Spock then says they didn’t use it. There’s a shot in the latter scene of Koloth on the viewscreen where he’s suddenly on the bridge in front of the viewscreen for one shot. And in the scene where Spock asks Kirk if he’s going to sit down, Kirk is standing next to his empty command chair just a couple of shots before we see that the reason he’s standing is because of a giant tribble in his chair.
But what gets me the most are the glaring plot holes. If the stasis weapon freezes the transporter the first time, how is Kirk then able to beam the tribbles over to the Klingon ship the second time the stasis weapon is used? That’s a humongous plot hole. And how is it an effective threat if he beams the tribbles over before making his demands? That’s not how a threat works. If he’s already done his worst, he has no more leverage. Not to mention that McCoy’s medical scanner must be pretty lame if it can’t tell the difference between a fat tribble and a colony of tribbles until it’s plot-convenient.
I’m willing to forgive the pink tribbles, though, since it might be a side effect of Jones’s slapdash genetic engineering. By the way, this is the first use of the term “genetic engineering” in Star Trek, beating The Wrath of Khan to the punch by nine years.
By the way, Koloth’s ship is unnamed in the episode dialogue. The name Devisor comes from the Star Trek Concordance and the Alan Dean Foster adaptation, so I assume it was named in the script. But canonically, its name is unknown, so there was no reason it couldn’t have been the Gr’oth (or that Gr’oth couldn’t be the Klingon word for Devisor). As for “IKS,” that wasn’t coined until DS9.
Just so y’all know, next week we’ll be doing something a little different to close out this 50th annivesary year for both Star Trek and Batman, with four Rewatch Extras from Monday to Thursday — items that tie into Trek or Batman or, in one case, both.
That’s why it says “The Survivor” will be next year — the regular rewatching will be back the first week of January 2017.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@6/krad: “…items that tie into Trek or Batman or, in one case, both.”
I think I have an idea what the “both” might be. Maybe a certain unsold TV pilot?
Not gonna lie. I always found the purring, cooing, born pregnant, fuzzy, yet appendage-less and faceless hamsters that are tribbles to be mildly revolting, the idea of man-sized ball-colonies of them is utterly terrifying.
Like Shub-Niggurath/Cthulu-esque terrifying.
I think the “ecological sabotage,” was a stab at being slightly educational. Even so, Cyrano ranks barely above Mudd in my list of recurring trek side-characters I actually like. (Mudd is more or less rock bottom most of the time. He never rises above Cyrano, but other people infest the bottom rungs of the ladder between them, or sink lower than Mudd, depending on what episode I have last watched.)
Koloth said that the glommer was an artificial creature designed to be a tribble predator, that the one Jones stole was the prototype, and they need it to make others.
But the glommer is not the only tribble predator. In “The Trouble With Tribbles”, Spock blamed Jones for removing the tribbles from their “natural predator-filled environment” and as a result “their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factor.”
This could, of course, be explained any number of ways; for example, the tribbles’ natural predators could be unable to survive away from their own planet, or at any rate unable to survive on a Klingon planet. And a half hour episode would not allow enough time to explain why an artificially created predator was necessary.
I don’t believe Alan Dean Foster addressed this in his adaptation either.
Maybe the grain is quintotritikale? I know, kale is not a grain…
richf: Or Spock could’ve been wrong. He was speculating in “Tribbles,” and Spock was, occasionally, wrong. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is a classic example of diminishing returns. This episode brings nothing new to the Tribble concept. A boring sequel that pretty much rehashes the original work. The animation is partly to blame, but I don’t think any of the jokes work. The reason that episode worked so well is because Kirk refused to take Nilz Baris seriously. The comedy came from Kirk’s reactions (try doing that in this particular animated format with reused character poses).
The Tribbles represented the “ship in danger” aspect of the plot. If that’s not rehashing…. And the less said about Koloth in this one, the better. A waste of character. Stanley Adams isn’t bad, but I feel he’s underused.
The original Tribbles episode was a whimsical, innocent and playful adventure. This animated entry had none of those aspects. As it’s been said, it’s a boring ship-to-ship combat plot with zero tension. That’s not the way to do a proper sequel. I’d argue this could have been given a Devil in the Dark treatment, making protecting the Tribbles an ecological cause.
If anything, it took them over 20 years to recreate the feeling of the original episode. It wasn’t until DS9’s homage that they were able to properly do it justice. Worf’s deadpan account of the Klingon war against the Tribbles alone is miles ahead of this episode.
@10/richf: Remember the song about the old lady who swallowed a fly? If tribbles are prolific breeders because of the harsh environment they evolved in, it stands to reason that other species on their planet would be as well. Okay, generally a predator’s population size has to be significantly smaller than that of their prey so that they don’t run out of food — for a warm-blooded predator, it’s maybe a 20-to-1 ratio, IIRC — but still, a predator species only 1/20 as prolific as tribbles would still be a rather frightening prospect, especially if introduced into an environment with nothing to prey on it. So it makes sense that the Klingons would prefer to engineer their own predator species whose reproduction they could control.
Also, as Eduardo notes, we know from DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” that the Klingons sent an armada to hunt down the tribbles’ homeworld and obliterate it entirely once they found it. If this episode is set before that, then they haven’t found its homeworld yet and have no access to its predator species; if it’s set after that, then the tribbles’ natural predators are extinct along with everything else on the planet.
In addition to the plot holes already noted – how does Koloth get away with so many offensive actions without the Organians doing something? Do you have to go file a formal complaint with them?
@15/Dan Blum: I remain convinced that the Organians were never intended to be the activists that many fans assumed they were. “Errand of Mercy” established repeatedly that the Organians loathed any contact with corporeal beings and only intervened with reluctance to get the noisy kids off their lawn. After all, the episode was written in an era when continuity between episodes was almost unheard of, and thus it was written with the assumption that this would be the only time the Organians would ever be seen, so that a reason for their lack of subsequent involvement was seeded in the episode itself. So as long as Starfleet and the Klingons stay away from Organia itself, the Organians probably wouldn’t bother to get involved in their conflicts. Maybe they would’ve intervened if another actual war had broken out, given the risk that it might affect Organia again, but as long as it’s just minor skirmishes like this, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome their disgust at having any contact with corporeal species.
Dan Blum: The Klingons committed several acts that were in violation of the Organian Peace Treaty, in “A Private Little War,” in “Elaan of Troyius,” here…. There’s no evidence, none, to suggest that the Organians ever enforced the treaty themselves, and (as Christopher just pointed out) plenty of evidence in the episode itself that the Organians would never dream of doing so.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yes, a lot of this is a rehash of story beats from “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and the thing about the giant tribbles somehow breaking down into little tribbles is just weird, but there are a few things I remember fondly about this episode. One is Kirk pushing successively bigger tribbles out of his chair, and then finally giving up, which gives me and @1/Mike’s daughter a giggle. (She may outgrow it; I never will. :) And the idea of using the robot ships to threaten the Klingons and force them to break off their attack is clever.
But I particularly like the “ecological sabotage” element, and not just for the message (but okay, for that, too.) I like that even the Klingons are depicted as accepting the need to manage the ecologies of the worlds they control and I like the twist that Jones is the real villain here, for depriving the Klingons of the tool they created to do what they need to do. If this had been done as a live-action TOS episode, there would have been an opportunity to portray the Klingons sympathetically and help move toward the more nuanced depiction of them we get from TNG onward.
But I guess at this point I have moved from the episode as we see it to the one that only exists in my head….
@5/Christopher – but that’s after those viewers have just sat through a commercial break wondering what the heck a tribble and a Cyrano Jones are and why the heck they should care.
Assuming the dialogue accomplished that — keeping them wondering during a commercial break — then didn’t it do its job as an end-of-act hook?
A sequel to an episode that didn’t need a sequel, at least not this one. It always bothered me that Scotty managed to get rid of all the tribbles on the Enterprise but left K-7 to deal with millions of dead and decaying tribbles with one man to clean them up, not to mention all the live ones that didn’t eat the poisoned grain. And this episode says that Jones still hasn’t cleaned up K-7:
KIRK: Jones, how did you get away from Space Station K7? You were supposed to clean up all the tribbles there.
JONES: Oh, well, I managed a short parole. I found some help. This is a tribble predator. It’s called a glommer.
Now, unless Jones stole the glommer, cleaned up K-7 and then encountered the Klingons, K-7 is still infested. And he somehow managed to find the time to genetically modify the tribbles into colony creatures.
It just doesn’t work. Sure, it’s supposed to be a fun episode but it just comes across as unnecessary the way it’s presented. It was originally pitched as a TOS episode and D.C. Fontana asked Gerrold to cut it down to a half hour. Apparently, story logic was one of the first things he cut.
And finally, there’s noting here that really takes advantage of the animation medium. Sure, it would have been some work to make the larger tribbles and to make the models of the robot freighters but nothing that would be impossible in a live action episode.
Speaking of the robot freighters, they are the first Starfleet ships we ever see that isn’t a Constitution class. That’s worth half a point at least.
1.5 out of 5
@19/Mike: “Assuming the dialogue accomplished that — keeping them wondering during a commercial break — then didn’t it do its job as an end-of-act hook?”
No, because it wasn’t a hook that depended on mystery. The way it was written and played was as a hook that depended on familiarity, that was meant to evoke an “Oh, no, here we go again” reaction.
After all, the purpose of an act-out hook is to create tension or suspense. Just saying “It’s Cyrano Jones and he has tribbles” is only a suspenseful fade-out moment if you already know what tribbles are and why it’s bad to have them on board. If you never saw the original episode, then it’s just a meaningless bit of information. Leaving the audience wondering “Uh-oh, what’s going to happen now?” is good. Leaving them wondering “So what? Why should I care?” is not good.
@20/kkozoriz: I have always taken Jones’s line to mean that he found the glommer on his “short parole” and then used it to clean up K-7, which is why he’s free now. After all, the term “short parole” wouldn’t apply if he’d just run away permanently. And if he’d just run away and abandoned his task, he would’ve had no need to acquire a tribble predator as “help” for the task. The point of the exchange is that Jones is explaining to Kirk that the glommer let him clean up K-7 far faster than expected, which is why he’s no longer there. Otherwise, mentioning the glommer at that point would’ve been a non sequitur.
@10, @12, something had to keep the tribbles in check in their natural environment, or else they would have eaten themselves into extinction long ago. Maybe instead of a transportable predator, it was some other environmental factor. But there had to be something.
21. ChristopherLBennett – But that makes it even more ridiculous. So he gets his “short parole”, finds the glommer and steals it, cleans up K-7, sells some tribbles on a Klingon planet and THEN encounters Kor? And how could one glommer dispose of millions of tribbles? After all, there were a million in just that one storage compartment. We know that they were all over the station. And why would they allow him to leave in the first place?
And why don’t the Klingons use two or three ships when they use the stasis device? One ship immobilizes you and the others pound you. Sending one ship out with it is silly. And it’s more of the “Technology we’ll never see again because it didn’t work in this particular situation” syndrome.
None of the story makes sense.
@23/kkozoriz: Hmm… you raise some fair questions. Thinking about it, though, we don’t actually know how much time passed between Jones selling the tribbles on the Klingon planet and Koloth tracking him down. There’s no evidence that it was immediate. Indeed, it seems more likely that a fair amount of time passed between them, enough for the tribble infestation on the Klingon planet to become a major enough problem to prompt Koloth to violate the border. So maybe Jones got that brief parole on humanitarian grounds — maybe he had some kind of tracking anklet or the equivalent to make sure he came back — whereupon he went to the Klingon planet, sold some tribbles, somehow found out about the glommer and somehow stole it (granted, there’s a pretty huge hole in the reasoning chain there — how does a fat, aging trader manage to steal an important prototype from the Klingons?), then went back and used it to clean up K7, then went on about his business and came onto Koloth’s radar. Okay, it doesn’t actually hold together all that well, but I suspect it’s what Gerrold intended, at least.
As for why Koloth didn’t have backup ships with him, maybe his pursuit of Jones was unplanned — he happened on an opportunity and seized it before he had time to call for support. As for why they just abandoned the tech rather than following your suggestion, that seems like a matter of Klingon psychology — they’d rather eliminate a weakness than accept it and adapt to it. They don’t tolerate any weakness (see the Sixth Precept of The Klingon Art of War), and any captain who had to render his own ship helpless and depend on other captains to help him would suffer a serious loss of face.
Well, unless Jones went back into Klingon space, Koloth was lurking around in Federation space.
KIRK: Why were the Klingons chasing you, Jones?
JONES: How should I know? Klingons have notoriously bad tempers.
SPOCK: That may be true, but they rarely enter Federation space and fire on Federation vessels without reason.
So now Jones get parole, somehow finds out about the glommer, goes to a Klingon planet, steals it, returns to K-7 and cleans it up, creates genetically modified tribbles, goes back into Klingon space where he attracts the attention of Koloth and then runs back to the Federation where he encounters the Enterprise.
Also, Sherman’s planet has had time to replace the quadrotriticale and suffer crop failure.
It’s been a busy year or two. Or, it’s just silly.
It’s not just a Klingon thing. The Federation has ignored the health benefits of the spore plants on Omicron Ceti III for example. Trek is full of technology that shows up once and is never mentioned again.
@25/kkozoriz: Remember, Jones didn’t know the planet he’d sold tribbles on had belonged to the Klingons. Well, at least he claimed that, and considered it a plausible thing to claim. Either way, it suggests that we’re talking about a frontier region where national borders and political affiliations are unclear, where many worlds are unclaimed or independent. And a trader like Jones, who operates in legally gray areas at best, would probably consider political borders fairly porous anyway.
Certainly there are plenty of things about this episode that don’t make sense. But Cyrano Jones operating on the fringes between UFP and Klingon space, and not much caring which side of the border he’s on, seems plausible to me.
But the point isn’t that he didn‘t know it was a Klingon planet. He had to get sprung from K-7, travel to wherever the glommer was created, travel back to K-7, get rid of all the tribbles, figure out how to prevent the tribbles from breeding (Who knew he was such a good genetic engineer? ), travel to the planet where he sold the tribbles (regardless of if he knew that it was Klingon or not) and then get chased by Koloth to his encounter with the Enterprise. And considering that the Organian treaty is specifically mentioned, you’d think that the Klingon border would be conspicuously marked on navigation charts. After all, during the cold war, it was highly unlikely that you’d fly from western Europe to Russia by accident. Mathias Rust did it in 1987 but his was a deliberate act. The Klingons don’t strike me as the sort that would allow people from the Federation to freely cross the border and yet Jones not only did so but landed on a planet that was controlled by the Klingons but he sold tribbles and managed to leave before the Klingons knew he was there?
Comparing this with Bem, coming up later, it appears that Gerrold was thinking a lot about colony creatures and just grafted the idea onto this script (how would the tribbles in the middle of the colony breathe or eat?).
Plausible isn’t a word I’d use with the episode. It’s just silly and shouldn’t be thought of as more than that.
@25/kkozoriz: “The Federation has ignored the health benefits of the spore plants on Omicron Ceti III for example.” – Hey, we don’t know that. Perhaps there’s a science team right now examining the spores and trying to recreate their health effects. Perhaps they even established a health spa on the planet, although I doubt it. Being mind-controlled by alien spores is a pretty big side effect, and most people would be deterred by the Berthold rays too.
@27/kkozoriz: “Who knew he was such a good genetic engineer?” – I imagine that he bought a genetic engineering kit for children and screwed up exactly because he wasn’t a good genetic engineer.
As for the Klingon border, I agree with Christopher that there obviously are many solar systems that are unclaimed or independent. Just look at all the encounters between the Enterprise and the Klingons in the second and third season. It isn’t like 20th century Europe with its established nations and borders and common history. A better historical analogue would be the Earth’s oceans in the 18th century.
But yeah, the episode is silly and implausible all the same.
@28/Jana: I always assumed Jones paid someone to do the genetic engineering for him, but went with some cheap back-alley quack instead of a more costly reputable service.
And you’re right about the borders. People today assume that nations always have clear, straight-line borders between them, but that’s really a fairly recent thing historically, now that nations have explored and claimed pretty much all the available territories, and now that we have the transportation technology allowing a claimed territory to be directly and routinely controlled. Historically, nations often had a lot of unclaimed or at least undeveloped territory between their respective borders, and how much actual control a state had over its claimed territory was inversely proportional to how close it was to the center of civilization. Historically, most frontiers have been areas where boundaries (political, cultural, economic, moral, etc.) were vaguely defined and difficult to enforce, and where the inhabitants of the frontier tended to have a flexible relationship with such boundaries. That’s the context in which something like 23rd-century Star Trek needs to be understood, because it’s based on examples of that paradigm such as the American West and the 18th-century British Navy’s explorations.
But that’s assuming that the writers actually put a whole lot of thought into the concept of a neutral zone. When they came up with the concept of the Romulan neutral zone, did they think that it was a globe that totally enveloped the Romulans or was it just a border? Neither, it was just something that would allow them to show that the Romulans were the bad guys for crossing it and attacking the Federation. Same goes for the Klingon neutral zone and, if it’s actually a different one, the Organian zone. (FASA had two different zones, separated by the Orions. One side was under the watchful eye of the Organians, the other was not).
The Klingon neutral zone in Into Darkness actually ran right though the Klingons home system and was so narrow that you could see Q’Onos with the naked eye from Federation space.
It’s not like TPTB actually sat down and defined the zone and how such a thing would work. If, as in Into Darkness, the zone is on;y a few thousand kilometers across, then that’s what it is. If another story needs it to be big enough to hold multiple star systems, then that’s what is is as well. The way that Gerrold sees to approach it is that everything between the two powers fell into the neutral zone. There is no “mushy middle”. It’s either Fed, Klingon or up for grabs in the zone.
That’s the problem with taking a show like TOS and retrofitting it into a serialized setting where epeisode must follow from one to the next. TOS, with few exceptions, didn’t have continuity from one episode to the next. And when they did, they often contradicted themselves. (Did Sam Kirk have one son or three? Peter gets all the stores and the other two, if they even existed, barely rate a mention).
@30/kkozoriz: I don’t think that there is a Klingon neutral zone.
@31/Jana: You’re right. The only neutral zone ever established in TOS or TAS was the Romulan one. The idea of a neutral zone between the Federation and the Klingons is never mentioned anywhere in Trek canon except The Search for Spock and The Undiscovered Country. Personally I always considered that an error on the filmmakers’ parts, because it’s not like every border between hostile powers is automatically a neutral zone. A neutral or demilitarized zone is something that two nations have to formally agree to establish by treaty. Sure, it’s possible that the UFP could’ve negotiated a neutral zone with the Klingons as well as with the Romulans, but it’s not a given, and it was never posited in TOS or TAS.
I include the first 6 movies as part of TOS/TAS. The Klingon neutral zone is clearly spoken of in TUC and insinuated in TWOK even though Gamma Hydra had previously been mentioned as close to Romulan space. Unlike hristopher, I don’t believe that the filmmakers made a mistake. It’s just another layer added onto what had come before. Perhaps the Klingons and Romulans had a war or skirmish and the region near Gamma Hydra changed hands. It’s not a mistake, it’s just a different interpretation. Similar to how the portrayal of the Klingons in TOS, TNG and The Final Reflection are just different ways of looking at their culture. It’s not as if we’re dealing with facts after all. It’s all made up. Heck, even Koloth is radically different in personality between The Trouble with Tribbles while Kang is still quite similar. Sure, there’s a century between them but Koloth might as well have been a different person.
@33/kkozoriz: The point is, you were criticizing David Gerrold’s writing of an episode from 1973 by referring to a concept that wasn’t added to the Trek universe until 1984, which makes no sense if your intent is to say that the writer was somehow incorrect or ignorant at the time. The idea that there are a lot of unclaimed worlds along the frontier and that a traveler could land on a Klingon-claimed planet without realizing it is perfectly plausible within the assumptions of the TOS/TAS universe at the time it was created. Previously to this, we’d seen the UFP and the Klingons competing for control of unaligned worlds like Organia, Capella, and Neural — not to mention Sherman’s Planet itself. It should be obvious that there’s a lot of territory that neither side has firm control over.
I wasn’t criticizing Gerrold. I was simply mentioning how it appeared that he was looking at it. For all we know Capella, Neural and the others were in the neutral zone. Organia doesn’t count because the zone didn’t exist until after the episode it appeared in. Now, it’s entirely possible that another zone did exist at that time. See the map I posed above and imagine that the zone on the left side isn’t there.
The point is that AFTER the establishment of the zone,it should be pretty much impossible to not know you’re on a Klingon planet. After all, it’s specifically mentioned as belonging to the empire, not a neutral plant near their space. What you’re proposing is like having the Korean neutral zone (the source of the popularity of the term) but neither country actually touches the zone and there’s various non-alligned countries between the two Koreas and the neutral zone.
Go ahead, “accidentally” fly into North Korea from South Korea and see if nobody notices until you’ve landed, made off with some top security research and headed back home.
It’s just Gerrold’s interpretation of the Organian Treaty. We know that other people see it differently.
Why can’t it just be that where the two regions touch, there’s a neutral/demilitarized zone between them, but where the regions have more space between them, there’s unclaimed space where people can wander freely?
The Federation had only been expanding for a couple of hundred years or so, there are always planets that just haven’t been reached yet. It stands to reason that not all of space has been claimed by one larger political entity or the other. If you imagine, for simplicity’s sake, that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are ball-shaped, and if we assume that they do touch, then there’s one small region where there’s a disc-shaped border between them. Like two soap bubbles that touch and create a flat wall between them. Consider that the location of a necessary neutral zone.
But there is a ton more space around the balls that is unclaimed by either party. But both are trying to expand, so sometimes there will be, um, disagreements over who gets control of that world. Each ball changes shape as it gains new worlds and regions… but unless it grows enough in that particular offshoot to actually come into contact with the other ball, then there’s no need for a demilitarized zone. It’s just expansion into open space.
@36/tankgirl: You’re exactly right. That’s the other reason it’s naive to assume that territory in space works like territory on 20th/21st-century Earth — both because space is so vast that it would take forever to assert and enforce territorial claims over every bit of it, and simply because it exists in three dimensions instead of two. It makes no sense to assume that every system must be in either Federation or Klingon space, because TOS gave us dozens of worlds that were in unclaimed or uncharted space. There’s obviously a lot of the galaxy that no interstellar power controls, and no doubt plenty of worlds would be near the borders of UFP and Klingon space without being inside either one. The “Klingon planet” Jones talked about could’ve been a world in unclaimed space that had been colonized by Klingons.
Unlikely it was colonized by the Klingons. More likely conquered. After all, if it were colonized by Klingons, wouldn’t the people on it be Klingons? Is Jones really so dim that he doesn’t know what Klingons look like, even though he’s operating right on their border?
And if it’s colonized or conquered, it’s part of the empire. It’s not like Klingons are big on the whole “We’re going off to crate our own independent colony”. Sure, you can try but expect an invasion force on your doorstep in the near future. “Sure you were independent. Now we’ve conquered you. Al nice and legal and above board.”
We also know that the Klingons homeworld is less than a weeks travel from Earth. Whatever the border, it’s going to be pretty close to Earth as well. Capella, from Fridays Child is unclaimed and it’s only 13 parsecs from here. Roughly 40 light years. Considering we know that the Federation has been as far as Rigel (~800 lightyears) and Deneb (~2,500 lightyears), both the Klingon homeworld and Capella are extraordinarily close. It’s like if Moscow was located in Virginia.
Given the nature of space and of interstellar travel, to an extent it doesn’t even make sense to imagine the Federation or the Klingon Empire or any other entity as a single, contiguous, well, blob, for lack of a better word — they’re more like archipelagos of tiny, tiny islands floating in an infinitely large sea; and it’s distinctly possible that at times and in places those archipelagos may interpenetrate each other.
@39/hoopmanjh: Absolutely. The idea of interstellar territories as continuous blobs is ridiculous. Your archipelago analogy is a good one.
Except in the case of someone like the Klingons. They’re hardly the sort to allow someone a foothold within striking distance of their planets. Besides, when we see maps on the shows, they show contiguous blobs with defined borders.
As Uhura said “This isn’t reality, this is fantasy”
The screenshot at the top of this post is the moment that made my wife insist she needs a giant pink non-reproducing Tribble for our house.
It’s her first time watching the Animated Series, BTW – it’s been fun seeing her reactions. :)
Meredith, here.
Even though I personally don’t like David Gerrold for certain reasons (I.e. he and I had some artistic differences in the past concerning both Star Trek and Logan’s Run) – this is not a bad episode. As a matter of fact, it’s a cool sequel.
I actually like this episode, and I can echo Mike in saying that my 7-year-old daughter enjoyed it quite a bit too. She loved when all the tribbles exploded out of the big one. I actually think it was a fun twist to have the tribbles growing larger, instead of growing in number. I also enjoyed seeing so many shots of the ktinga/d7 cruiser. In spite of any plot holes, episodes like this one really feel like an extension of the original show. They sort of feel like “bonus” episodes, if you know what I mean. And I guess I never thought too hard about trying to poke holes in the plots of these shows. I just sorta go with the flow, at least on TOS and TAS episodes. Maybe repeat viewing leads one to notice flaws more?
Regarding the Klingon Neutral Zone, I think the concept was introduced into Trek in 1975 with Franz Joseph’s Technical Manual. Despite not being “canon” and not being referenced on screen until TWOK and TUC, the work was heavily influential among fans, to the point where the idea of a “Klingon Neutral Zone” was easily taken at face value whenever it was suggested by any adaptation.
I used to think (before I understood better the difference between canon and non-canon material) that the writers made an error having entering the Zone be a violation of treaty, as that was a trait particular to the Romulan Neutral Zone. Joseph described the Klingon Neutral Zone as based on the peace treaty established by the Oreganians, where vessels could enter freely but could not fight. At the time, I presumed that the Oreganians had stopped enforcing it, and that it had evolved into a treaty zone more similar to the Romulan version. There is a lot of EU material that presumes an unexplained withdrawal of Oreganian influence, that allows the more obviously hostile stance the Federation and the Klingons have during the movie era.
But, I had always suspected that the writing was influenced by the use of Klingon ships during Romulan Neutral Zone incursions occuring in TOS. Cross the Neutral Zone, get attacked by Klingon Ships. Nuances like how the forbdden border was around the Romulan Empire and that it was Romulans crewing the Klingon-designed ships in those TOS scenes seemed like details that could be easily lost in production, much like Khan never having been shown to meet Chekov.
It’s only since coming here that I ever heard the theory that it was actually the Romulan Neutral Zone in the Kobayashi Maru test, based on the mention of Gamma Hydra. I like it–it seems perfectly plausible that the Klingons might lure a Starfleet vessel into the Romulan Neutral Zone in order to ambush them. If the Romulans complained, they could keep them distracted with the scandal of the Federation ship having violated treaty. Heck, they could claim to be defending the border as a gesture of solidarity, and use it to create or strengthen an alliance.
I have zero inkling that the writers thought it out this far, but as an explanation that reconciled what was shown I think it works well.
Oh, this is a lovely one! I adore the idea of growing tribbles; just the thing to make them both cuter and an even worse nuisance! Bravo!
The only thing that bothers me is how the Klingons and tribbles aren’t nearly hostile enough to one another. The Klingons seem merely annoyed by the tribbles while the tribbles don’t react at all to the Klingons.