“The Slaver Weapon”
Written by Larry Niven
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 14
Production episode 22011
Original air date: December 15, 1973
Stardate: 4187.3
Captain’s log. Spock, Sulu, and Uhura are on the shuttlecraft Copernicus, delivering a Slaver stasis box that was recently discovered by Kzinti archaeologists to Starbase 25. Whatever is inside the stasis box has been perfectly preserved for as long as it’s been in existence—and the Slavers conquered the entire galaxy billions of years earlier, and when they were wiped out, life had to evolve in the galaxy from scratch. The stasis boxes that have been found are the only source of information they have about that long-ago time.
The stasis box starts to glow, which indicates that there’s another stasis box in the nearby star system of Beta Lyrae. Spock orders Sulu to change course to the system, since the only thing that detects a stasis box is another stasis box.
The Copernicus lands on an icy planet. Just as the landing party detects the location of the stasis box, they are ambushed by a party of Kzinti and taken prisoner.
The Kzinti are only willing to deal directly with Sulu, as Spock is a vegetarian, for whom the Kzinti have no respect, and Uhura is a woman. Kzinti females are little more than dumb animals, and Spock instructs Uhura to play to that notion, so her being unnoticed might be turned to their advantage.
They’re interrogated by Chuft Captain, who commands this stolen police vessel, Traitor’s Claw. They’re privateers—or, at least, they claim to be. In truth, they’re covert operatives for the Kzinti government, trying to find weapons they can use to fight another war against the Federation. The stasis box on this world was empty, but they used it as a lure to draw the Copernicus there so they could get their hands on the box in their possession.
Chuft Captain opens the box, which contains a picture of a Slaver, a piece of raw meat, and a weapon of some sort. The meat turns out to be poisonous, but the weapon has several settings that change the shape of the object. At least one setting is a telescope, another is a laser, and another is a rocket that sends Chuft Captain careening about the landscape. Uhura is able to escape the web that has the landing party trapped, but the Kzinti gun her down.
Another setting is an energy absorber, though somehow it doesn’t affect their life-support belts. It does deactivate the web they’re trapped in, however, and the trio make a run for it, going off in all directions. Spock attacks Chuft Captain and takes the weapon. But Uhura is, once again, gunned down.
Now Chuft Captain has Uhura as a hostage, but Spock has the weapon. Spock also dishonored Chuft Captain—he’s a plant eater, and he attacked Chuft Captain and didn’t kill him. That’s a shame that will keep him from calling for reinforcements.
Chuft Captain offers Spock combat—basically a rematch—but they refuse. Sulu and Spock continue to test the weapon, and they find a setting that causes such severe damage as to affect the weather. The subsequent windstorm knocks them unconscious and allows them to be captured again.
The Kzinti finds another setting which allows an AI within the weapon to communicate with them. The computer voice asks for several codewords, which of course, the Kzinti don’t know. When Chuft Captain asks for the high-energy beam setting that Sulu used earlier, the computer provides a setting which changes to a configuration that is not the same as what Sulu found earlier. Spock deduces that the weapon believes it has fallen into enemy hands and has gone to the self-destruct setting. Sure enough, when Chuft Captain tests it, it blows up, killing all the Kzinti. Inside the police web, the landing party is protected.
They re-board the Copernicus and head back on course, since they still have two (now empty) stasis boxes and a picture of a Slaver to deliver to Starbase 25.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? One stasis box that was found in the past had a flying belt that was the basis of artificial gravity technology. Another had a bomb in it that went off as soon as the box was opened—because of that, Starfleet automatically gets jurisdiction of all stasis boxes that are found, and they can only be opened by specialists.
Fascinating. Spock uses the Kzinti cultural prejudices against them, in particular making sure to attack Chuft Captain and leave him alive to shame him, thus keeping him from calling in reinforcements.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu speaks for the landing party to the Kzinti, as they won’t talk to an herbivore or a woman. He figures out that the crew of Traitor’s Claw are truly government operatives posing as privateers who can be disavowed. He also theorizes that the weapon is one of spycraft rather than that of a soldier, and his logic actually impresses Spock.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura is not thrilled at the notion of having to pretend to be stupid. Then again, she also tries to escape twice and both times get shot and recaptured…
Channel open.
“They think very little of you.”
“Wrong. They don’t think much of you.”
–Chuft Captain’s reaction to Spock refusing a rematch, and Uhura setting him straight.
Welcome aboard. James Doohan does the voices of some of the various Kzinti—he’s definitely Chuft Captain and his second, and he might be the telepath. Majel Barrett is the voice of the slaver weapon’s computer, and George Takei and Nichelle Nichols are the voices of Sulu and Uhura.
Trivial matters: Larry Niven adapted his short story “The Soft Weapon” into this episode, which is part of his “Known Space” oeuvre, including the popular Man-Kzin Wars anthology series. D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry specifically recruited him to write an episode for the animated series, encouraged by them to adapt one of his “Known Space” short stories.
This is the first Star Trek screen story since the introduction of the character that does not feature Kirk. The next one will be “Encounter at Farpoint,” the premiere of TNG in 1987.
Vulcans being vegetarians was established in “All Our Yesterdays,” thus making Spock an amusing analogue for Nessus, the character in the story who is also a pacifist and an herbivore, though Nessus is manic-depressive and insane.
Sulu’s affinity for weapons was established in “Shore Leave” when he geeked out over an old pistol.
This is the only appearance of the Kzinti in the Star Trek universe on screen, and they’re never mentioned again (though they were mentioned in “The Infinite Vulcan” and seen in “The Time Trap” prior to this), mostly to avoid copyright issues. The Kzinti do appear in the game Star Fleet Battles (that game’s odd partial license included the animated series, although the Kzinti in the game vary from the Kzinti of this episode in some aspects), and also appeared in a run of the Star Trek comic strip that was co-authored by Niven and Sharman DiVono in 1982. Niven did open the Kzinti to other authors in his Man-Kzin Wars anthologies, of which there have been fourteen as of this writing.
The main difference between how the Kzinti are described in Niven’s prose and how they’re portrayed visually here is the lack of stripes, as apparently stripes would be too expensive to animate, and so they are monochrome.
To boldly go. “He makes me taste yellow root munched between flat teeth!” I absolutely adore this episode, and consider it to be one of the finest Trek episodes extant. Part of that is because it keeps things simple, just the three people on the shuttlecraft—and those three are not Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. What’s more, Larry Niven does an excellent job of making use of what we already know about Spock (that he’s a pacifist and a vegetarian) and Sulu (he’s a weapons collector).
And in the Kzinti we have a fascinating alien culture with cultural mores that are a sensible extrapolation of a feline species. I particularly like the telepath who is revolted by the images he receives of eating plants in Sulu and Spock’s heads.
On top of that, we have the Slavers and the stasis boxes, both nifty science fictional concepts.
I could live without the sexism—one thing that is not a sensible extrapolation of a feline species is the notion of women as dumb animals, plus Uhura is basically useless in the episode—and in truth the telepath doesn’t actually serve much of a plot function. And there’s a bit too much of our heroes being captured, freed, and captured again.
But I like the intelligent conversations among the landing party about history and archaeology and the doping out of the weapon. I like the way Spock tries to play the Kzinti, and only partially succeeds (for starters, Chuft Captain knows that Uhura is intelligent, and so Spock’s hope that they won’t notice her turns out to be a forlorn one). And I like the fact that this story actually works perfectly in the half-hour format. Too many of the animated episodes either have too little or too much story for the running time, but this one is just right.
Once again, Star Trek proves that hiring science fiction authors to write science fiction stories will give you quality work—viz., “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Amok Time,” “The Doomsday Machine,” and this.
Warp factor rating: 9
Next week: “The Eye of the Beholder”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at the first-ever HELIOsphere convention in Tarrytown, New York this weekend, alongside guests of honor David Gerrold, Jacqueline Carey, and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, among many others. Saturday will be the launch party for Baker Street Irregulars, the alternate Sherlock Holmes anthology that Keith has a story in; fellow contributors Gerrold, Austin Farmer, and Hildy Silverman, and co-editor Michael A. Ventrella will also be there. Keith’s full schedule can be found here.
Is there a Kzin on the Elysian Council during The Time Trap? If you look at the picture, he’s right between the Klingon and the Andorian.
http://www.tor.com/2017/02/21/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-the-time-trap/
I love this episode, but I’m biased because I’m a big Niven fan.
I agree that the story fits the half-hour format perfectly. I also enjoyed that it’s another episode about a shuttlecraft crew after The Galileo Seven and Metamorphosis, this time without involving the Enterprise at all. (Come to think of it, the Enterprise scenes in Metamorphosis didn’t really add anything to the story.) And as much as I like Kirk and McCoy, it’s nice to have a story about Uhura and Sulu for a change.
Still, I must admit that I didn’t like it much. For one thing, it feels like a sales event. “Look at our amazing multifunctional weapon! There’s this setting… and this… and this… and in this setting, it cooks coffee and casts your horoscope!” And then in the thrilling climax, the fearsome galactic conquerors push the wrong button. Our guys don’t win the day because they’re smart or because they’re kind but because their antagonists are stupid. It’s also a rather nasty ending, and Spock et al. don’t seem to be even remotely sorry for the Kzinti.
Uhura is pretty snarky in this episode. I’m not sure if this is in character for her. She did make fun of Spock and Charlie in Charlie X, and her “Sorry, neither” in The Naked Time was also quite witty, but the tone was different.
On a side note, Vulcan vegetarianism is already implied in The City on the Edge of Forever when Kirk buys “assorted vegetables” for Spock and sausage for himself.
The Kzinti may not have appeared in any other Trek movies or books, but they were (and possibly still are?) included in the Trek board game Star Fleet Battles and its various subsequent incarnations.
According to Memory Alpha, Niven originally pitched a story that he would eventually turn into “The Borderland of Sol”, but with Outsiders being the ones taking the ships. I guess that makes Kirk Bey Schaeffer and Spock Carlos Wu. The producers thought it was too science heavy and not suitable for Saturday morning. Roddenberry suggested an adaptation of “The Soft Weapon”.
I think the Kzinti also appear in Starfleet Battles. It’s not canonical and it’s been decades since I played it, but I seem to remember them there.
Imagine poor Alan Dean Foster having to write the adaptation of this episode. How do you not wind up cribbing from the original story, even if only unconsciously?
One of the best of TAS, right up there with Yesteryear. Good pacing, characterization. Nifty aliens that actually think and act in an alien manner. And no Kirk to be seen. Nothing against the captain but it’s nice to see that his crew can actually be the heroes without him. However, Uhura does get the short end of the stick. She does get some good shots in at the Kzinti but really, captured twice? And after bragging how well she used to run. (And why do Sulu and Spock get nifty, action running poses and Uhura looks like she’s simply walking quickly?).
The Kzinti are a great addition to the Trek universe and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see them again. R|umours are that they might have shown up on Enterprise it it had gotten one more season. Would have been cool to see them there.
9/10
5. DemetriosX – ADF wrote a framing story, changing the origins of the first box so it was found on a different planet and Spcok, Sulu and Uhura have to recover it. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is on it’s way to an important briefing at a nearby starbase but they also run into problems. The second half of the book is a new story that ties in with the stories in the beginning of the book. As usual, ADF does a great job fleshing out the 22 minutes cartoons.
The Kzin were definitely in Starfleet Battles. I should know since I wrote one of the Battle Forces for them in Captain’s Log 12 (my sole writing credit of any kind). IIRC, there were a couple of passing references to the Kzin in the novels, but no story or major plot point devoted to them.
This is a weird one. Usually, when a writer adapts an existing story to a new series, they change the story to fit the series — see, for instance, TNG’s “Tin Man,” loosely adapted by its authors from their original SF novel Tin Woodman, with the whole backstory and characters radically changed and names reassigned. But Niven did the opposite — he changed the parameters of the series to fit the existing story. “The Slaver Weapon” is not so much a Star Trek episode as a dramatization of “The Soft Weapon” with three Trek characters acting out the roles of Nessus and Jason and Anne-Marie Papandreou. It follows the plot of the original novelette almost verbatim, with only a bit of streamlining. The stasis box was found on Kzin rather than bought from the Outsiders. The weapon is attributed to the Slavers rather than the Tnuctipun slaves who led the revolt against them (a far more logical origin for a spy weapon). And the number of items in the box and the number of settings on the weapon are reduced a bit. Otherwise, it’s the exact same story.
And adapting it to the Trek milieu creates a number of problems. For one thing, saying the box originated on Kzin is bizarre, because it means that Chuft-Captain has a legitimate claim to the box. It’s his people’s property by right, and Starfleet basically committed artifact theft by taking it from them. I find that troubling. (Maybe that’s why Alan Dean Foster gave it a different origin, an archaeological dig on Gruyakin Six.) For another, there’s the aforementioned contradiction of the power absorber not affecting the life support belts (the original characters had spacesuits). Relatedly, Sulu recognizes the “police web” as a familiar device, but we’ve never seen the technology in the Trek universe before or since. And while it’s a clever idea to plug Spock into the Nessus role, the dialogue doesn’t quite fit Spock. One, Vulcans aren’t herbivores (i.e. evolutionarily adapted to eating only plants), but omnivores who choose a vegetarian lifestyle. It’s not quite the same. Two, Spock is not a pacifist. He couldn’t be a Starfleet officer if he were, so it wouldn’t make sense for the Kzinti to see him as one. And because we’ve seen Spock fight many times before, the moment where he kicks Chuft-Captain isn’t remotely as startling a moment as when Nessus does it in the original.
Also, the episode doesn’t fit the Trek continuity retroactively, because later productions disregarded it. There’s no way to fit four Man-Kzin Wars into modern Trek history prior to 2070. (The original story was set in the 27th century or so.)
I also don’t think it makes a particularly good Trek story on its own merits, particularly not a TAS story. It doesn’t really have anything to say — no thematic or philosophical subtext. It’s just a problem-solving exercise and a battle of wits against an enemy. It’s unique in TAS and rare in Filmation’s ouevre in that it ends with the villains being killed outright rather than reasoned with or outwitted. Despite being fairly action-heavy, it’s incredibly talky; the first act is largely one long monologue by Spock to fill in the backstory, which I find a rather clumsy way to write a TV script. It also has a really weak and awkward ending. Even aside from the questionable taste of laughing about the deaths of one’s enemies, that last exchange about Kzinti superstitions isn’t even funny. In my past viewings, I’ve been so concerned about comparing it to “The Soft Weapon” and contemplating its continuity issues relative to Trek that I haven’t really thought about it as an episode per se, and I realize it’s got more problems in that regard than I thought.
It’s also got a lot of animation errors, like the configuration of the weapon being inconsistent from shot to shot, and the force-field outlines not matching the characters. Also the initial shots of Beta Lyrae through the shuttle window are totally wrong, looking more like a spiral galaxy, although the subsequent shot as the shuttle flies past it is fairly accurate. It also annoys me that Filmation used their stock “run like a girl” animation cycle for Uhura (I remember seeing the same run cycle in other shows of theirs, e.g. for Ginger and Mary Ann in The New Adventures of Gilligan), which isn’t very consistent with her claim of being a record-setting sprinter.
It is nice to get a Sulu-centric episode, and one that gives Uhura a fair amount to do, even if she’s mostly relegated to damsel in distress. It’s also neat that the episode has no Caucasian characters in it at all (technically, since Spock is half-Vulcan and has greenish-yellow skin).
Voice-wise, the Kzin who reports on the meat being poisonous sounds like Lou Scheimer, though I’m not certain. All the others seem to be Doohan, and the weapon computer is apparently Barrett.
Alan Dean Foster’s adaptation of the episode is pretty unusual too. The last four of his Star Trek Logs adapted one episode each followed by an original sequel story making up roughly the last 2/3, but Log Ten goes even farther. Only 3 of its 16 chapters adapt the episode, and it includes three new stories framing the adaptation — the story of how the threesome came into possession of the stasis box before the episode; a plot about what was going on back on the Enterprise during the episode (which was basically about M’Ress going into heat/pon farr); and a followup plot in which Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and Uhura got their minds swapped in a transporter accident.
With thanks to David Weingart, hoopmanjh, and Charles Rosenberg here, and Allyn Gibson on Facebook, I’ve adjusted the Trivial Matter that discusses the lack of Kzinti in the rest of the Trek universe to address their appearances in Star Fleet Battles and also in a run of the Trek comic strip co-written by Larry Niven in 1982.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@3: You basically just described the plot of Arsenal of Freedom :)
I did like this episode, but it was weird seeing this shoehorned into the ST continuity.
@10/critter42: Like I said, though, it isn’t really in ST continuity. Except for the three main characters, their shuttlecraft and tech, and a couple of references to Starfleet and the Federation, everything in this episode is from Known Space continuity — the Slavers, the billion-year-old war, stasis boxes, the Kzinti and their wars with humanity, etc. Niven didn’t shoehorn this story into Trek, he shoehorned Spock, Sulu, and Uhura into Known Space.
@8/Christopher: Oh, I had assumed that calling Spock a “pacifistic herbivore” was supposed to show us that the Kzinti are somewhat stupid and thus foreshadow the climactic fatal accident. This probably shows that I haven’t read the original story.
@10/critter42: Ha! Well, I like “The Arsenal of Freedom” much better than this episode.
Another thought I just had is that the episode has an unusually bleak backstory for Star Trek. “The Slavers and all their subjects were exterminated in the war that followed. Intelligent life had to evolve all over again.” We’ve seen civilisations obliterated before, but not on this scale. Then there’s the fact that “the Kzinti fought four wars with humankind”, the last of which ended with a treaty that doesn’t allow them any weapons at all. That sounds uncomfortably like humiliating a defeated enemy, and that’s usually a sure recipe for another war. The events of the episode bear this out. It would have been wiser to try to establish relationships with the Kzinti and thus keep an eye on them and help them to adopt a new lifestyle at the same time.
And now I’m imagining an alternate universe where Niven wrote a multi-episode ST:TAS adaptation of Ringworld.
@12/Jana: Good point about the Kzinti. It ties into the feeling I had watching it yesterday, that the whole premise was meant for a less idealistic universe than Trek — pure military brinksmanship and hostility, kill or be killed, no hint of any attempt at peacemaking or diplomacy or reconciliation. Known Space wasn’t a completely dark universe — we did see a human and a kzin become friends in Ringworld — but it had more of a cynical streak and more touches of dystopianism here and there than Trek did.
I can imagine a more Trek/Filmation-style ending to this episode: The Kzinti bring the captives out with them to test the weapon, so they’re all imperiled by the self-destruct, and Sulu and Spock urgently reason with Chuft-Captain and tell him, rather than each other, why they’re convinced the weapon is going to blow up. The Telepath chimes in that they’re telling the truth. Chuft-Captain hurls the weapon away at the last moment, they’re all saved, and C-C’s honor debt compels him to let them go. The closing dialogue is about the hope that this act of mercy and understanding may have opened the door to peace negotiations with the Kzinti.
Never saw this episode, but from the picture above I thought it was a Star Trek / Beauty and the Beast crossover. :)
14. ChristopherLBennett – “The Kzinti bring the captives out with them to test the weapon, so they’re all imperiled by the self-destruct, and Sulu and Spock urgently reason with Chuft-Captain and tell him, rather than each other, why they’re convinced the weapon is going to blow up. The Telepath chimes in that they’re telling the truth. Chuft-Captain hurls the weapon away at the last moment, they’re all saved, and C-C’s honor debt compels him to let them go. The closing dialogue is about the hope that this act of mercy and understanding may have opened the door to peace negotiations with the Kzinti.”
By your reasoning, we never would have gotten DS9’s In the Pale Moonlight, one of the best episodes of Trek ever. Instead, Sisko would have saved the Romulan at the last minute and convinced him that it was in everyone’s best interests to unite against the Dominion.
Similarly, it wouldn’t have been Odo who ended the war, it would have been Starfleet simply convincing the Founders that the war was wrong and that everyone should live together peacefully.
Sure, it sounds great but would ultimately be less realistic.
The Kzinit are aliens and think differently that humans do. That proves to be their undoing since they don’t really understand theie captives. They underestimate Uhura, wrongly imagine Spock to be a pacifist and a herbivore and Telepath is repulsed by Sulu thinking of vegetables. They are destroyed by their own ignorance. And sometimes, that’s what happens in the real world too. Not every story has a happy ending.
Nothing in the episode made me think that it was happening in some sort or strange Known Space/Trek mash up. The Slavers existed billions of years ago so there’s no reason to expect that we’d have heard of them before. The tech, such as the police web, is nifty and not out of place in the Federation. As far as the energy absorption of the weapon only affecting the police web and not the life support belts, it also didn’t affect the ship. The lights stayed on. Similarly, in Beyond the Farthest Star, the pod ship drained energy from the phasers and communicators but not the life support belts. Just because a particular tech affects one type of energy doesn’t mean that it hast to affect them all. In neither case were the people drained of energy either. Does that make it wrong?
Heck, Diane Duane adapted her own TOS story The Wounded Sky into a TNG episode, Where No One Has Gone Before. That doesn’t make one more or less a Trek story. And let’s not forget that D. C. Fontana had no problem with Niven’s adaptation, other than the pink Kzinti ship for which she apologized. If she felt that it didn’t fit, it wouldn’t have been made. And Roddenberry himself was the one who suggested that Niven adapt The Soft Weapon.
And adapting it to the Trek milieu creates a number of problems. For one thing, saying the box originated on Kzin is bizarre, because it means that Chuft-Captain has a legitimate claim to the box. It’s his people’s property by right, and Starfleet basically committed artifact theft by taking it from them.
@8/Christopher: Pretty much the episode’s major inconsistency in a nutshell. It removes any reason for the Kzin to be hostile or adversarial.
This is definitely an interesting, if different episode, but it’s definitely a flawed one. The one benefit we get from Niven sticking so close to his story is that we don’t get Kirk for a week. Uhura is wasted however, and the plot doesn’t do the trio any favors by repeating the same action beats over and over again. I used to complain that many TAS episodes were too short for the amount of plot required. This one felt drawn-out.
Ironically, I had just seen an X-Files episode called Redux before watching this one. That episode had an unpleasant amount of voiceover narration by both Mulder and Scully. Both were literally describing their onscreen actions and repeating their motivations ad nauseam. There’s a reason Star Trek uses the Captain’s log. To keep the information dump to a concise minimum. Spock’s opening monologue breaks that rule.
Christopher and Eduardo: It’s not bizarre at all. The Federation and the Kzinti have a treaty. Spock says that Starfleet automatically takes possession of any stasis box so it can be opened safely. Chuft Captain is posing as a privateer operating outside the law and the treaty, though he’s truly a covert operative for the Kzinti government chafing under the treaty with the Federation and wanting the goodies inside the stasis box that legally they have to turn over. So they turn it over like they’re supposed to, but send Chuft Captain and his plausible deniability to stop the shuttle.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@18/krad: Yeah, and I’m sure the British Empire had legal excuses for all the priceless cultural heritage they plundered from other cultures and stuck in their museums back home. That doesn’t make it any less an act of cultural imperialism and racial condescension, and it casts the Federation in a pretty ugly light. It also ties into Jana‘s point about the harshness of the punitive measures imposed on Kzinti civilization — they aren’t allowed weapons and they aren’t even allowed to keep their own archaeological treasures. It’s the kind of high-handed treatment that’s only going to make them more resentful and provoke just this kind of violence. I never even noticed it until maybe last year, but the fact that the stasis box was found on Kzin to begin with makes the Federation look unsympathetic and tyrannical here. In “The Soft Weapon,” the kzinti (lower-case as a species name in Known Space) were clearly the aggressors; Nessus got his stasis box from the Outsiders and the kzinti were trying to steal it. In this version, it feels like the Kzinti have been robbed of the fruits of their own archaeological labors and are entitled in fighting back against oppression.
The Kzinti fought four wars against Earth. They were the agressors. It’s not the same as the British Empire moving into India and elsewhere and imposing their will and taking their treasures. And a Slaver stasis box isn’t a Kzinti cultural treasure. It’s been there since before the Kzinti even existed.
And it’s not Like the Federation hasn’t acted in a high minded sort before. Eminiar VII ring any bells? Ignore explicit warnings to stay out. Beam down against the wishes of the Eminians. Ignore Eminian law when they’re declared casualties of war. Threaten to kill everyone on the planet. Yeah, the Federation gave up the moral high ground a long time ago.
18/krad: The problem with the treaty is that it doesn’t make much sense. Why would the Federation have any claim to opening a stasis box that wasn’t even located in Federation space? If a box were to be located in Romulan or Cardassian territory, they would have the rightful claim to the box, same as the Kzinti. Plus, why is Starfleet the only organization that is capable of opening the box safely? Are other powers too incompetent to do the job properly?
Add the convoluted privateer angle, and the whole thing feels like a plot device designed to generate conflict.
@21/Eduardo: Rather, my problem with the treaty — and Jana‘s, I think — is that it’s out of character for the Federation as portrayed in the rest of the franchise. It’s too harshly punitive and unforgiving for a society that prides itself on peace and diplomacy, too imperialistic for a society whose highest law is respecting the self-determination of other cultures. As Jana points out, it’s also stupid — the Federation should remember history and understand that cracking down so harshly on a foe is only going to make them more determined to fight back.
And as I said, it wasn’t part of the original story — well, the no-weapons part was, but not the stasis box part. There, the stasis box wasn’t taken from the kzinti, it was bought from a neutral race. So tacking on this throwaway line about Starfleet taking possession of a box found on Kzin opens up a whole new can of worms that doesn’t really serve a story purpose and adds some pretty nasty implications for no good reason. It’s so unnecessary. Why not just say Federation archaeologists found the box on a remote planet, as in the Foster adaptation?
@22/Christopher: I understood the imperialism angle pretty well, and I agree on the issue. There’s no reason for the Federation to act like this, and it would have felt even more out of character had this story taken place in the TNG era.
Treaties and international laws don’t cease to become binding just because you don’t happen to approve of them. If they did, there would be no such thing as treaties and international laws. At some point the Kzinti agreed to hand this thing over. Now they want to steal it back. That is all we need to know.
BTW – The historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in The Causes of War that he did a statistical survey of peace treaties, and treaties with harsh terms led to much longer peaces than treaties with mild terms. The Cause of War, he concluded, was a belief by both sides than they will win. If it is obvious that one side is more powerful than the other, that is not likely. The more equal they look, the more likely war is.
Destroying your attackers armed forces and preventing them from replacing them is therefore a lot more likely to give you a peaceful neighbour than being nice to the people you just drove off.
@24/ad: I’m not talking about whether it makes sense in-universe. I’m criticizing it as a story choice, saying it was a bad idea to put in the episode because it paints the Federation in a negative way that’s inconsistent with its usual portrayal.
Look — there are three versions of this story: “The Soft Weapon,” “The Slaver Weapon,” and Foster’s Star Trek Log Ten. The original novelette says the stasis box was purchased from the Outsiders — that’s fine. The protagonists came into possession of it in a straightforward, ethical way that creates no complications or ambiguities. There, the kzinti are unambiguously the bad guys, trying to steal a box they have no claim to. The Foster version says the box was unearthed from the ruins of a dead civilization on Gruyakin Six — also fine, no controversy or tricky ethics. But the aired episode tosses in the throwaway bit about the Kzinti finding the box and Starfleet taking it from them, and that raises all sorts of ethical questions that play no role in the episode but make the story seem troubling if you think through the implications. Surely you can see why I like that least among the three versions. It mars the story by making it harder to root for the heroes, and there’s absolutely no reason for it to be in the story in the first place, since it isn’t part of the other two versions. So it’s a flaw in the concept of the episode, an addition that did more harm than good.
25. ChristopherLBennett – Nowhere in the story does Niven say that the box was taken from the Kzin. You’re creating facts that are not stated in the episode.
“The Enterprise shuttlecraft Copernicus is en route to Starbase Two Five with an important cargo. A Slaver stasis box discovered by archaeologists on the planet Kzin.”
It doesn’t even say that ti was discovered by Kzinti archaeologists and it certanly doesn’t say that the Federation took it from them, presumably under threat or by force, from the way you’re presenting it.
Since we know that there is a treaty between the patriarchy and the Federation, why is it so hard to believe that something like this would be covered by it?
This idea that the Federation is always on the right side. That they don’t do things that are strictly in their own self interest. I just don’t get where it comes from. There’s numerous examples of Starfleet and the Federation violating other people’s systems, interfering in their affairs and so on. And that’s not taking all the later series into account either. The Federation in TOS/TAS isn’t the 23rd century equivalent of the Boy Scouts.
The Known Space kzin were too aggressive to be negotiated with, at least at first; they wanted to kill and eat/ enslave other races. Being high minded would not be respected, it would be perceived as weakness. Note that the first treaties among equals were broken by kzinti attacks.
@27/sps49: But nonetheless, the Known Space version of the story did not have the stasis box come from Kzin in the first place. That’s what’s at issue here — that it didn’t need to be in any version of the story and introduced an unnecessary ethical complication. In “The Soft Weapon,” in Star Trek Log Ten, the Kzinti are unambiguously the bad guys trying to steal something that isn’t theirs. But the episode’s slapdash revelation that it came from their planet in the first place makes it harder to see their actions as unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a rightful claim to their own archaeological treasures? Why shouldn’t they feel the Federation has unjustly stolen from them? It’s a detail that makes the Kzinti’s cause sympathetic, even though that clearly is not what Niven intended, because he still ruthlessly killed them off at the end.
Wow, that’s a lot of comments since I last looked.
I guess people like Star Trek for different reasons – adventure tales, a fictional universe with lots of alien races, cool spaceships. But one of the things Star Trek is famous for is its humanitarianism, its preference for nonviolent solutions, its “let’s help” attitude. That’s what I love the most. (Well, that and the characters.) And there isn’t any of that in this episode.
Just compare the Star Trek episode “Arena” with Fredric Brown’s short story of the same name. The short story makes clear that the alien enemies are cruel and sadistic (I think the alien antagonist tortures a lizard for fun or something like that), and the happy ending consists in the total annihilation of their race. The Gorn in the Star Trek episode aren’t sadistic, but they are overly aggressive – they destroy the outpost instead of asking them to leave first. The solution is to try to negotiate with them anyway.
This episode is not like Gene Coon’s “Arena”. This episode is like that short story. I would have loved the alternative ending suggested by Christopher in comment #14. I would have settled for an ending where the Kzinti do destroy themselves, but the main characters feel sorry for them and regret what they had to do. What we get instead is just nasty, and doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me.
As for alien species who are extraordinarily aggressive and violent by nature, Star Trek already has one of those. They’re called Vulcans.
@16/kkozoriz: “Not every story has a happy ending.” – I agree. The problem is that the Kzinti killing themselves is treated as a happy ending. That’s the huge difference between this episode and, say, “Balance of Terror”.
@22/Christopher: “Rather, my problem with the treaty — and Jana‘s, I think — is that it’s out of character for the Federation as portrayed in the rest of the franchise.” – Yep. That and the fact that the writers seem to approve of it.
@24/ad: “Destroying your attackers armed forces and preventing them from replacing them” is all very well, but the problem, from a purely practical point of view, is that the second part isn’t easy. Forbidding them to have weapons is not enough. You have to keep them under constant surveillance to make sure that they don’t arm themselves again, and that’s difficult enough on one planet. On a galactic scale, it’s unfeasible. I can think of several ways to achieve a lasting peace:
– There’s the solution from “Balance of Terror” – confine your enemies and build a lot of outposts to monitor them at all times. Obviously that wasn’t done here.
– Commit genocide. Effective, but morally reprehensible.
– After destroying their armed forces, give them a new perspective. Forgive them and integrate them into your international or interplanetary society as good as you can. I’m from Germany. This is how my country was treated after 1945. Again, I can see no indication in this episode that anything like that was attempted here. The characters don’t even treat the Kzinti with any kind of respect, they’re downright dismissive (“You haven’t learned a thing since.”)
… Wait, the last war was two hundred years ago? And the Kzinti have kept the treaty for all this time? That’s totally unrealistic.
29. JanaJansen – “The characters don’t even treat the Kzinti with any kind of respect, they’re downright dismissive (“You haven’t learned a thing since.”)”
And if the Kzinti haven’t learned a thing in all this time, why should they be treated as anything other than a hostile power? If Germany after WW II had remained as they were during the Nazi era, I don’t imagine that the Allied powers would have reacted as they did. Germany did make a concerted effort to become a better place. The Kzinti, not so much.
It appears that there’s something different about the Kzinti situation as compared to the Romulans. It’s likely that the Federation has surrounded the Kzinti as opposed to simply sharing a border with them. The Kzinti may be treated more as a protectorate. The Federation takes responsibility for some things while leaving some others to the Kzinti. Police ships, for example. It’s likely that Starfleet would be responsible for the protection of the Kzinti world or worlds while they Kzinti take care of their internal matters themselves.
In regards to the stasis box, it may be procedure under the treaty for Starfleet to open the box and remove anything that is deemed dangerous. Anything else would be returned to the Kzinti to do with as they see fit. In this case, the weapon would be removed but the picture of the Slaver and the meat sample would be given back.
We would seem to have a situation like what happened with Japan after the war, where they were strictly limited to a defensive military. In Japan’s case, they have shown that they’re no longer agressive. The same can’t be said for the Kzinti so they remain under tight restrictions.
The Kzinti may have kept the treaty for two hundred years because they cannot do otherwise. It would be like a Monaco declaring war on France. It’s possible to do so but it would end very badly and very quickly for them.
@30/kkozoriz: My point is that the Federation should have offered the Kzinti an alternative to being a hostile power a long time ago. If they’re still a protectorate after two hundred years, something is seriously wrong. And declaring war isn’t the only thing a weaker people can do against a stronger one; there’s also guerrilla warfare.
@31/Jana: Exactly. Look at Bajor as a “protectorate” of Cardassia. The more we deconstruct the unexamined assumptions underlying this episode, the harder it is to see the Federation as the good guys in this situation.
Which is just one more reason why I don’t see this as a Star Trek episode, but as a Known Space pilot episode with Trek characters transposed into it.
31. JanaJansen – How do we know that they haven’t? And how do we know that there haven’t been changes in status over the past two hundred years, this being simply the current status? We don’t. What we do have is a snapshot of what the situation is at the time of the episode.
32. ChristopherLBennett – The situation between Kzin and Bajor are not comparable. Not unless you believe that Bajor declared war on Cardassia four separate times.
Or do you believe that the Evora from Insurrection had declared war on the Federation? They were specifically called a protectorate.
I can imagine a Kzin that’s a protectorate because they have shown that they cannot be trusted with military weaponry. That’s why they are limited to weaker, “police vessels”. Would you suggest that the Kzin be allowed to build up militarily over and over again?
“Hey, I know, let’s let the Kzinti build up their military so we can fight a new war with them ever ten years or so. Over and over and over again.”
Sounds good to me!”
Or, the Federation could simply declare the Kzin worlds as off limits and imply destroy any vessel that tries to leave Kzinti space.
Or, they could disarm them militarily, allow them minimally armed police vessels (They only have a crew of five after all. How powerful can they be?) and allow them to travel freely while Starfleet protects the Kzinti from outside attack.
Which one sounds most enlightened when dealing with a species that is still hostile? Lock them up and let their resentment build to the boiling point or allow them to interact with other races while limiting their ability to do harm?
I can imagine the scene where Spock and Sulu discover the total conversion beam. After blowing up the mountain, Sulu exclaims “We can’t let them have that!” and off to the side, Christopher says “Yes you can. As a matter of fact, you must return it to them and apologize for taking it in the first place.”
Ah, yes! This is the episode that answers the question, “How many times can the term ‘stasis box’ can be uttered over the course of a single half hour?”
:-)
@34/Glenn: Eighteen times, apparently — but all in the first half of the episode, and all but one in the first four scenes.
The trivia master speaks!
By the way, I am enjoying the rewatch (and watching TAS mostly for the first time) WAY more than I expected. I blame KRAD and Bennett!
Although I grew up in a deli district which used to be a staple of Jewish families, I am not familiar with all the terms.
That said, I must politely and respectfully ask:
@3 JanaJansen: Is a “sausage” the same as baloney/bologna? (Which ALSO I never understood; “baloney” is actually the synonym for “nonsense” and should never be used to describe meat.)
Not meaning to criticize; just trying to contribute by my knowledge of TOS when relating to TAS.
@36/Lou Israel: Make food not war! (Of course, by eating their enemies, the Kzinti can do both at the same time.)
I’m not a native speaker of English and had to look it up. According to Wikipedia, baloney/bologna is a special kind of sausage. In Germany, it’s called “Fleischwurst” (literal translation: “meat sausage” – is that any better than “nonsense sausage”?) and is considered typical children’s food.
Bologna is a kind of sausage, usually made with pork and beef, but it’s generally sliced into cold cuts and used as a sandwich meat. I think maybe “baloney” came to be slang for nonsense or lies because it’s a “fake,” processed substitute for a pure meat like ham, though the dictionary says it might have been influenced by “blarney” (deceptive smooth talk, after the Blarney Stone in Ireland).
Baloney may have been influenced by blarney, but I suspect the fact that American pronunciation makes the first syllable very close to “bull” is a greater factor. That puts baloney on a euphemistic level with “shoot” and “darn”.
@39/DemetriosX: Ahh, good point. I can see that. “Aww, what a load of bull–” (notices children present) “…llloney.”
@38/Christopher: Oh, I think I understand the confusion now. Is sausage no longer called sausage when it’s sliced and put on bread? I didn’t know that.
“Baloney”, or “Bologna sausage” is the American version of the wonderful “Mortadella”, a sausage originally made in, yes, Bologna Italy. (I wonder if a bit of anti-Italian racism maybe influenced the “baloney”=”nonsense”.)
JanaJensen, remember that English is in large part the result of a Norman man-at-arms getting together with a Saxon barmaid. And it has frequently mugged other languages for spare vocabulary.
@41/Jana: I think it’s just that when a type of sausage has a specific name, we tend to use the specific name and drop the “sausage” part. For instance, pepperoni is a kind of sausage, but I’ve never heard it called “pepperoni sausage.” Ditto with salami, of which pepperoni is a subset (something I never knew until I looked it up just now). Although it varies depending on the kind. We do say “Italian sausage” and “Vienna sausage,” for instance, but there are plenty of kinds of sausage that we just refer to by their specific names, including most German sausages, e.g. bratwurst, braunschweiger, etc. Then there are frankfurters, also known as franks, wieners, or hot dogs. I think “hot dog” technically means a frankfurter/wiener in a bun, but we tend to use it to mean just the sausage itself as well.
You might be confused that I used “wiener” and “Vienna sausage” to mean different things, but in America, “Vienna sausage” refers specifically to these little flat-ended mini-wiener things that are mass-produced and sold in cans of seven, packed together in a sort of gelatinous liquid or sometimes sauce, and not always easy to get out of the can intact. In my youth, they were one of the staple sandwich meats in my family (sliced lengthwise and laid out side by side on the bread, which wasn’t very structurally stable for a sandwich), and we called them “meat sticks.” In retrospect, they were kind of nasty.
I love you guys. I wake up on a Friday morning to discover a bunch of new comments on a Larry Niven-written Star Trek episode, and what is it discussing? The minutiae of processed meat products!
(This isn’t a complaint or a rebuke, mind you. I really do love it.)
wiredog: it wouldn’t surprise me if anti-Italian sentiment influenced the use of “bologna”/”baloney” as a derogatory phrase. People tend not to realize just how looked down upon and discriminated against Italian immigrants were in this country for a very long time.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, descendant of Italian immigrants
CLB @@@@@ 43 – I don’t recall ever eating Vienna sausages when I was growing up. In our house, bologna was the cheap meat of choice. However, when my son (now 5) was first starting to eat solid meats, we fed him Vienna sausages (usually only one at a time, and always cut into appropriately sized bites). They looked wholly unappetizing to me, and as you said, I could never get one (at least the first in the can) out intact. All this to say, I was shaking my head and chuckling while reading the last paragraph of your post.
@krad: On another note, are you going to rewatch the TOS films?
I’m not much of sausage fan, but this discussion is making me hungry. I’ve had bologna sandwich for breakfast this morning, and I’d sure go for another one right about now.
MaGnUs: that’s the plan…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Good, we can keep this party going on for a bit more.
Although I am thrilled that I helped spark a discussion of meats (and KRAD knows that Italians and Jews are very closely related and often eat each other’s foods), it occurs to me that from what I am reading, my question to Jana and the group has not been answered.
Is bologna the SAME as sausage?
For that matter, what is the difference between sausages, hot dogs, frankfurters and wieners, if any?
(And in case my rabbi is reading this, of course we refer to BEEF sausages, CHICKEN bacon, and TURKEY bologna. You get the idea.)
@43/Christopher: That was quite educational – I had no idea that “bratwurst” can be used in English, nor that there is a kind of sausage called “Braunschweiger”. Apparently the term is much more common in the US than in Germany.
@48/krad: That’s great news!
@50/Lou: It has been answered in comments #37 and 38.
Jana @51: Americans got to know bratwurst through the large number of German immigrants in Wisconsin/Minnesota. Since they’re easy to grill, they became popular as pre-football game food and spread out from there. Braunschweiger is known in Germany as Braunschweiger Mettwurst. Given how many different varieties of Mettwurst there are, it’s probably pretty regional. If you’re not from around the greater Braunschweig/Hannover area, it probably gives way to whatever local Mettwurst is popular in your area.
@50/Lou: Sausage, in general, refers to any kind of food item made from ground meat, seasoning, and other ingredients in a casing. There are many kinds of sausage, a lot of which are named for their place of origin, e.g. Bologna sausage, Italian sausage, and so on. Frankfurters would be sausages from Frankfurt, Germany, and wieners would be from Wien/Vienna, Austria. Strictly speaking, frankfurters are pork sausages and wieners are a pork/beef variant, although Americans use the terms interchangeably. (We also have other varieties — I prefer turkey franks myself, and there are also all-beef ones, vegetarian ones, etc.) The term “hot dog” is believed to have originated among food-cart vendors in America, who also pioneered serving them in buns so they could be eaten by hand. Apparently “dog” was slang for “sausage” at the time, so it was basically a shorthand way of saying “hot sausage” (no doubt easier to write large on a sign). I always thought it might have had something to do with the resemblance to a dachshund, a breed often nicknamed “wiener dogs.”
Then, of course, there are various regional varieties of hot dog in different American cities. Here in Cincinnati, we have the coney, a hot dog topped in Cincinnati chili and usually cheese and chopped onions. It’s short for Coney Island, the amusement park in New York where I think chili dogs originated. There’s also the pretty good Chicago-style hot dog topped with all sorts of things — tomatoes, onions, relish, peppers, etc.
“A sausage” implies a casing, but bulk sausage is also a thing, especially for the breakfast type.
When I was in Austria, at one point we had sausages that were pretty much exactly like an American hot dog; except that although they served them with a bun, the bun wasn’t split. Instead of putting the sausage in the bun, you held the sausage in one hand, the bun in the other, and alternated bites.
@55/hoopmanjh: That’s odd, because the whole reason for the bun in the first place was so you could hold the hot dog without getting your hand burned/messy.
ChristopherLBennett@25
It occurs to me that the backstory of the stasis box might have been changed BECAUSE the change makes the situation more ambiguous.
@57/mikeda: Didn’t I cover that already? If it had been meant to make the situation more ambiguous, then that ambiguity would’ve been mentioned or acknowledged in some way, or something would’ve been done to make the Kzinti more sympathetic. But it wasn’t. Aside from two throwaway lines about the box being found on Kzin, the story unfolded exactly like the original and had exactly as hardcore an ending, the villains getting themselves killed and the protagonists just dispassionately letting it happen and treating it as a win. That’s what I’ve been saying — the change was pointless because it had no actual effect on the story. It’s such a throwaway detail that I didn’t even notice it until a year or two ago, and that’s after decades of familiarity with the episode. (Though that’s partly because I’m more familiar with the Foster version, since the show itself was hard to find before it came out on home video. So my perception of the episodes is shaped by how Foster told them, and that kept me from noticing this one very different detail).
“And let’s not forget that D. C. Fontana had no problem with Niven’s adaptation, other than the pink Kzinti ship for which she apologized.”
Wikipedia puts this up to colorblindness, in much the same fashion as “More Troubles, More Tribbles,” though in this case the blame is laid (whether properly or improperly, I don’t know) on Hal Sutherland himself.
One hesitates to be insensitive to the handicaps of others, but after two such incidents, one wouldn’t have to be the worst person in the world to suggest to the gentleman or gentlemen responsible that color animation might not necessarily be their true calling…
“This is the only appearance of the Kzinti in the Star Trek universe on screen, and they’re never mentioned again.”
Evidently, a great many people would enjoy seeing this remedied. After the release of Star Trek Beyond, my Facebook feed was full of enthusiastic fans (either unfamiliar with or forgetful of Star Trek: Enterprise), who were convinced that Idris Elba said “Kzinti” rather than “Xindi.”
@59/dwarzel: I’ve never seen what’s so objectionable about the Kzinti having pink spacesuits. The values we ascribe to colors are culturally learned, and can vary from culture to culture. Heck, a century ago, some American style guides defined pink as a “stronger color” associated with boys (since it was derived from red and thus more “passionate”), and blue as a “dainty color” appropriate for girls. Before the 20th century, there were no gender associations with either color, and it wasn’t until after 1945 that the gender polarity of blue and pink was inverted for unclear reasons. Heck, even as late as the 1970s, it wasn’t unheard of to see tough guys wearing pink shirts.
In the Kzinti’s case, maybe they like pink because it’s the color of raw meat. So they see it as a color associated with predation and killing, quite suitable for the spacesuit of a warrior. After all, pink is really just light red. (The ship is more of a lavender hue than pink, though.)
Are you sure braunschweiger is a sausage? I’ve never seen a sausage that you eat by scooping or slicing it out of the casing, and I’ve definitely never seen it fried or otherwise cooked before eating. It seems more similar to liver pudding or liver mush, which can also be sliced and eaten without cooking.
@61/Christopher: When I grew up in the 1970s, pink was far less common than it is today. I don’t think I owned a single piece of pink clothing. I also don’t think that it was used for girls’ toys all that much, with the exception of Barbie dolls. So perhaps the pink stuff in TAS looked normal back then.
On the other hand, I noticed during this rewatch that there are quite a few pink dresses in early TOS – in “Charlie X”, “The Squire of Gothos”, “Shore Leave”, and “Who Mourns For Adonais”.
@62/LMC: It’s a sausage. As DemetriosX points out in comment #52, it’s a kind of Mettwurst, and that’s how Mettwurst is usually eaten.
@63/Jana: What I read is that the “blue is for boy babies, pink is for girl babies” thing didn’t start to get pushed really heavily until the 1980s, when it became possible for expectant parents to learn the sex of their babies in advance and the makers of baby clothes and products started to capitalize on that. Before, when the sex of a baby came as a surprise, the products you’d buy in advance for newborn babies would have to be unisex. But once marketers had a predictable difference to work with, they took advantage of it to offer “specialized” options, including a strong emphasis on color-coding.
@64/Christopher: Oh, that makes sense. I’ve never thought of that.
I dislike colour-coding children. I used to dress my baby daughters in dark blue and white a lot, because they had dark blue eyes and dark hair. It looked good.
@65/Jana: Yeah… even aside from the fact that gender isn’t always binary or fixed, I don’t think it’s a good idea to indoctrinate boys and girls with the belief that they’re fundamentally separate or opposite entities, the way modern toy marketers and clothing marketers and the like tend to do far more than they did when I was young.
@66/Christopher: Yes!!
I’m sure I saw pink for girls and light blue for boys being pushed back in the 1960s. Obviously, not for things for newborns, but for most anything purchased after the baby was born. Purchasing too much before birth is chancy anyway because you don’t know how big the baby is going to be. Our baby was big and we returned all the clothes supposedly for 1-3 month olds unused.
Why would anyone care about the Kzinti ship being pink? They are aliens, after all. Why should they have any particular feeling about pink?
I found this website displaying toy catalogues from the 1950s and 60s. It’s pretty clear who gets the dolls and who gets the crane, but there’s very little colour coding.
@68/kktkktkkt: Yes, as I said, the girl/pink, boy/blue thing started after WWII, as an inexplicable reversal of the boy/pink, girl/blue thing that was often (though not universally) promoted in the early 20th century. It was around then; it just wasn’t as heavily and aggressively promoted by business and marketers until the ’80s. Same as with toys — when I was a kid in the ’70s, there were some toys that were aimed at boys and others aimed at girls, but there were plenty of toys that were promoted as toys that boys and girls could play with together, like Legos, say. But later, toy marketers started emphasizing gender-specificity in their products to the point that it became absolutely segregated — all toys had to be either just for boys or just for girls. It’s gotten so extreme that Cartoon Network actually had to cancel popular shows like Young Justice and Tower Prep because they were popular with girls and the network’s toy-company sponsors saw that as a bad thing, because they were only interested in marketing to boys. Plus there was the awful sexism of the Avatar: The Last Airbender toy line completely excluding its female characters even though they were consistently the most badass action heroes/villains in the show, and The Legend of Korra not managing to get a toy line at all because it had a female lead. It’s tragic how entrenched the sexism in the toy industry has gotten. And it’s got nothing to do with what kids actually want — it’s purely the creation of marketers’ desire to differentiate their products and target them to specific demographics.
Does all this discussion of myriad varieties of sausage have anything to do with the “fresh meat” found in the Slaver stasis box? It’s been decades since I’ve seen the episode but the memory of it stuck with me. Am I recalling correctly, that at some point after opening the box, Our Heroes speculated that the meat was actually prime-cut Slaver? Is it possible, then, the entire box was essentially a big “eff you” from those enslaved?
@72/Kevin Parker I suppose it could be product placement of a sort. As I recall the famous Oscar Mayer “B O L O G N A” song commercial ran a lot around that time period :-)
@72/Kevin Parker: As far as I can tell, there’s no discussion of the meat in any of the three versions beyond the fact that it’s still fresh after a billion years, is protoplasmic and poisonous, and in both prose versions is a cube wrapped in a plastic-like substance, rather than the pork chop-like thing seen in the episode.
But in “The Soft Weapon,” the box did indeed belong to the tnuctip, the slave species that led the revolt that destroyed the Slaver (Thrint) Empire. One of the few changes Niven made for Trek was to simplify it so that the weapon was attributed to the Slavers themselves.
This is one of the few TAS episodes that I loved. It’s my second favourite after “Yesteryear”.
This was a good episode. Come to think of it, I sought out Niven’s writing because of this episode. The premise is interesting and worth exploring, the aliens aren’t just humans in funny costumes, and the pacing is pretty good for a half hour show.
@76/kktkktkkt: I’d say the aliens are just like humans. They merely aren’t like contemporary Westerners. (Granted, that’s more than can be said for many Star Trek aliens.) For example, the whole thing about not taking a person seriously because he’s a vegetarian, or a herbivore, reminded me of the Pakistani soldiers in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children who are certain that they will win the war against India because meat-eaters are always superior to vegetarians.
Back to sausages, in the US they will call a specific kind of Mexican sausage for tacos and the like “chorizo”, while that is the generic word for sausage in Spanish (but it never applies to frankfurters, for example).
@70 – dwarzel: I was one of those people, although I wasn’t forgetful or unfamiliar with Enterprise, just very enthusiastic about Known Space.
@78/MaGnUs: That must be a different part of the US from mine, because I’ve never heard of a sausage taco. I’m not familiar with the term “chorizo” either.
Well, it’s a pretty big place. But I’ve seen it used in Mexican food places.
We also have the word “salchicha”, which is usually for stuff like wieners, maybe bratwursts, etc. Of course, usage varies across Spanish speaking places. In Uruguay and Argentina, unless otherwise specified, a chorizo is a sausage made of a mix of beef and pork; while I believe that in Mexico and Spain it’s usually pork, and it’s much spicier than what we call a chorizo here (we would call these spicier variants “chorizo colorado”, colorado being a word for red, because they’re redder due to the ingredientes).
Now I need a taco.
Since I first brought up the subject of the miscolored items in this episode, there’s been much wailing and rending of garments over pink being a perfectly normal color for a spacesuit and what kind of Neanderthal would think otherwise? I’d like to point out that I never for second suggested that it was not an acceptable color. The point is, there’s no way, at the time this cartoon was made, that any spacesuits, uniforms, ships, or Tribbles were meant to be pink. It was done by mistake, and all I was saying was that I found it odd that the coloring of animated cartoons was deemed a worthwhile pursuit for a person, or persons, who could not discern colors.
@ChristopherLBennett: Chorizo was pretty obscure in most of the country, I think, for a long time, but it’s pretty hip now. It shows up on a lot of the cooking and competition shows. For my part, I love the flavor, and if you, anyone you know, or anyone reading this, is a sausage aficionado, I insist you head to your local food mart and pick some up.
Fun Fact: I first heard of chorizo in the 1988 film Midnight Run, one of the best, funniest movies of the era (though it became such a template for later films that it may suffer from the Seinfeld is Unfunny trope). DeNiro and Grodin enter a diner in Amarillo where the breakfast special is chorizo, and the movie makes a point of having the waitress explain what it is for the benefit of the audience…
@82/dwarzel: I assume that the tribbles and the Klingon uniforms were supposed to look like their life action counterparts. So what colour were the Kzinti spacesuits meant to be, brown?
@82/dwarzel: I wasn’t questioning your real-world logic, I was just saying that, from an in-universe perspective, there could be a valid reason for Kzinti to have pink spacesuits. You may not have been ridiculing it, but a lot of people have over the years, seeing an incongruity in a warrior race wearing what they see as a “weak” or “effeminate” color. So I felt it was worth noting that that’s merely a cultural preconception, that even Americans less than a hundred years ago saw pink as a strong, passionate, manly color, so these viewpoints are subjective. It’s not that hard to imagine an alien civilization seeing pink as a color worthy of warriors, perhaps because it reminds them of raw meat. Perhaps it’s the color of their blood, or of the blood of some favorite prey species of theirs. (Klingon blood was purplish-pink in The Undiscovered Country, although TV Trek has portrayed it as red.)
I’ve seen it suggested in some prose works, though not onscreen, that Vulcans and Romulans should use green as a warning/alert color and red as a good/safe color, the reverse of our convention. We use red as a danger color because it represents blood, but Vulcan blood is green, so logically, they should see it the other way around.
I always thought we used Red/Green as warning/safe to be cruel to people with color vision impairment (1 in 20 men, 1 in 200 women) and keep them from all the cool jobs like jet pilots. As one of the unlucky 1 in 200 women, I always resent that in addition to having to beat sexism to try and get ahead, I also have to try and beat color vision impairment for cool jobs too. It is a double setback. Plus I could never get through the first section of the old Oddworld Abe’s Oddysee game due to that darn little bomb -three pixels wide- which you had to smack when it was flashing green not red and it was the exact same colour to me!!!!
Uh….Star Trek. These cat dudes have nice grey uniforms to me.
Wasn’t there a Trek novel which established that Klingons cannot see red and have black as an alert colour? I remember a scene of a Klingon civilian walking into a secure area on the Enterprise and being accused of sabotage or something? Which Trek novel was that? I think it was one of the hardback novels.
random22@86
The novel was “The Final Reflection”, one of the best Star Trek novels.
@86/random22 & 87/wiredog: That was actually the 1985 paperback novel Pawns and Symbols by Majliss Larson (here’s the relevant passage on Google Books). It asserted that Klingon color vision is based on different pigments than ours, so that Klingons couldn’t see red but could see ultraviolet colors (which they called amarklor and kalish). It wasn’t that they “used black as an alert color,” but that the warning sign on the dilithium storage chamber the Klingon entered was in red and black of equal intensity, so it looked solid black to him and he couldn’t read it.
But the novel’s claim about Klingons being unable to see red, while an interesting science-fictional concept in isolation, doesn’t really make sense in the larger Trek context, when you consider that ST:TMP had shown the Klingons’ bridge lighting as mostly red and their tactical display graphics as entirely red. And I think a lot of later movies and TV productions went with lighting Klingon bridges in red. (The same passage also claimed that Spock could see “patterns of magnetic force,” something never suggested anywhere else.)
Pawns and Symbols was always kind of an alternate take on things. It came out the year after John M. Ford’s seminal Klingon novel The Final Reflection, and just a month after Margaret Wander Bonanno’s Dwellers in the Crucible, which drew on both Ford’s Klingons and Diane Duane’s Romulans and thereby established the existence of a loose continuity tying many of the novels of the period together. And yet Pawns was a deep examination of an entirely different version of Klingon culture (from the perspective of a human woman who becomes Kang’s consort after Mara leaves him — yeah, it was an ’80s novel). It was interesting, but even from the time it came out, it felt like it was its own separate thing. Granted, at the time, any inter-novel continuity was still very loose and optional, but P&S just went so deep into Klingon culture, much like TFR had done before it, but in a completely incompatible way. And it came out so soon after the shared continuity was beginning to emerge that its incompatibility stood out.
@87 @88 Wiredog and CLB, thank you :)
ChristopherLBennett In the original draft of the script this was the setup
“First Officer’s log. Stardate______. The enterprise mean shuttle is in route to Starbase ____ with a Slaver stasis box.
This dubious treasure was found on Star Date_____ aboard the wreck of a kizinti warship thought to have been destroyed in the fourth Man-Kzin War.
It was Captain Kirk’s decision that the box should be returned immediately to Star Fleet Headquarters. The Enterprise could not be spared but the shuttle could.”
That might make it salvage which makes things a bit better.
Is it possible the treaty is something like Japan after WWII? For all intents and purposes they have a military but it’s called a police or defense force. Sounds a lot like what they tossed out in the episode.
Huh, this episode seems to be kinda love it or hate it. I personally didn’t like it that much, although I do like the Kzinti. I’d love to see more of them. I’m having a hard time seeing what the people that love the episode, like so much about it. Oh well, I do think it funny that someone’s 9 is another person’s 2. Kinda interesting.
@91/dakota_mike: “Oh well, I do think it funny that someone’s 9 is another person’s 2.”
It is, isn’t it? It has happened to me quite a few times. For example, krad gave a 1 to my favourite TNG seventh season episode “Emergence”. I guess he just isn’t into heartwarming surrealism (or trains).
Jana: I found nothing heartwarming about “Emergence,” and its surrealism was weak.
But I do like trains, actually………………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@93/krad: Things I found heartwarming: The Enterprise having a baby, Data’s quote from The Tempest, and Picard’s final speech. My daughter even remarked that it would have made a perfect series finale (but two weeks later, she was okay with “All Good Things”, too).
Oh well, different tastes. At least we both like trains :)
Trains are cool. *nods*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Is it possible the “Xindi” were supposed to be a copyright-friendly substitute for the “Kzinti”, in the role of a pre-Federation enemy of Earth?
Notwithstanding the proposal to bring on ACTUAL Kzinti in a hypothetical Enterprise season 5.
@96/tjareth: I doubt it, since none of the Xindi species are felinoid. Also because the old assumption that DS9’s Tzenkethi were named after the Kzinti was soundly debunked years ago.
Really (really, really) late to the party. Still enjoying the rewatch, working through all of KRAD’s after spotting the new Voyager one, and also starting my own re-watches due to Covid lockdown.
I too loved this episode at the time but would probably admit with hindsight much of that is down to seeing ‘Known Space’ stuff in Star Trek. Two of my favourite things, together!)
It has been confirmed that Riker referenced the Kzinti (not Xindi) in Picard, so there’s till hope if you want to see these felinoids in ‘real’ life.
In rereading the comments here, I see references to the old saw that the Kzinti ship and suits were pink because of Hal Sutherland being color blind. That’s been debunked by last year’s Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series. From p. 106:
Apparently Kaplan just felt that pink, purple, and green were good colors for kids’ shows, which is why the tribbles and Kzinti spacesuits were pink, Klingon uniforms were purple, etc.
It totally makes sense to have “weird” colors for alien species with different colors and sensory apparatus.
Reminds me of a Rogue Squadron book where each pilot had painted their X-Wing with their own designs. Wedge Antilles used the colors of his dead parent’s business, a Tatooine pilot painted his ship like a Krayt dragon, etc. And one of the non-human pilots had painted his… white. But man, if you could see in ultraviolet, it was a riot.
Vonda McIntyre did something similar in Enterprise: The First Adventure regarding how different species would see the colours on a poster.
And now we have a Kzinti ensign on Lower Decks. I just rewatched this episode with an eye towards how it could be made to fit to Trek continuity. Are the disparities really greater than those presented in Balance of Terror about Trek’s own (later established) history?
Obviously, some of the dialogue is, at the very least, inaccurate. Say Sulu misremember the dates in question and you can tweak the date a little and place contact with the Kzinti in the Enterprise era, perhaps between Terra Prime and These Are the Voyages. There are rumors, which I have no idea about the accuracy of, that the producers of the Enterprise planned to introduce the Kzinti into the 5th season of the show had it been renewed.
Perhaps a MACO focused affair, mostly separate from the happenings in Starfleet? The four wars thing is tough. Perhaps the Kzinti see war as something similar to a screen door and can’t decide whether they want in or out?
The Kzinti Telepath sounds unfortunately like Shaggy from “Scooby Doo”. “Like, zoinks, Chuft-Captain!”
@79 ChristopherLBennett:
I’m mildly surprised, since I’ve seen chorizo in Cincinnati groceries, including Kroger, for decades now.
@104/Steve Morrison: There’s a lot of stuff in the grocery store I’ve never tried. I’ve never been that adventurous about new foods.
Well late to the party on this one, but this make perfect sense in the Known Space setting and none whatsoever in the Star Trek setting, because one of the major elements of Known Space is that a considerable amount of human expansion and the first three wars between humans and kzinti happened before either species had FTL technology. The treaty has lasted this long because at the time The Soft Weapon is set, the kzin still don’t have FTL (or at least can’t make their own hyperdrives; Traitor’s Claw is equipped with a stolen one that the treaty prohibits them from legally having). So the Kzinti are still tooling around at relativistic speeds, and it takes decades for their ships to go anywhere. IIRC, nobody in Star Trek’s history ever went interstellar distances without a warp drive. Certainly nobody did it often.
@106/dalilllama: “IIRC, nobody in Star Trek’s history ever went interstellar distances without a warp drive.”
The Botany Bay did. Yonada did. The Charybdis from “The Royale” was meant to, but got interecepted. And it’s ambiguous whether the emigrants who left Vulcan to settle Romulus had warp drive or not; the Diane Duane version of their origin in the novels had them using sublight generation ships.
@107
So it’s the not often one; there are no multi-stellar polities that got that way at STL speeds, and absolutely no lengthy interstellar interactions between STL cultures. It’s just another reason this shouldn’t have been a Trek story, or should at least have been modified significantly more to fit the Trek history. E.g. it would have been very easy to sub in the Klingons as the honor-obsessed antagonists, and they already have a history with the Federation that would explain the conflict, and it would have erased basically all the continuity problems at the cost of modifying the dialogue a bit.