“The Enterprise Incident”
Written by D.C. Fontana
Directed by John Meredyth Lucas
Season 3, Episode 4
Production episode 60043-59
Original air date: September 27, 1968
Stardate: 5027.3
Captain’s log. Kirk is acting irrationally, being snappish with both Chekov and Spock and then ordering the ship to head for the Romulan Neutral Zone, in violation of treaty, and entirely on his own authority, as no order from Starfleet has come in that Uhura is aware of. They go through the Zone and into Romulan space. Three ships decloak: Romulan ships, albeit of Klingon design. The Enterprise is surrounded.
Sub-commander Tal contacts them, asking them to surrender or be destroyed, giving them an hour to comply. Kirk and Spock theorize that they would’ve just destroyed them right off normally, but they must want the ship.
Kirk holds a meeting. Their options are limited—and Spock points out that those limits are there because Kirk violated the border. McCoy—who has already recorded a medical log expressing concern about Kirk’s mental health—is outraged that Kirk did this without orders, prompting Kirk to dismiss him from the briefing.
Tal calls back. His commander wishes to meet with Kirk and Spock in person, and offers two Romulan officers as hostages. Kirk accepts, ordering Scotty to destroy the ship before letting the Romulans get their hands on it.
Kirk and Spock are escorted to the commander’s office, where she is sitting with her back to the door, and she turns around dramatically so 1960s audiences can gape at the notion of a woman in command of a fleet.
The commander talks to Kirk first, accusing him of espionage, and not buying Kirk’s bullshit story about instrument failure that led to their accidentally crossing the border. She then asks for Spock to come in and she is obviously taken with the first officer, telling Kirk that their common ancestry gives them a bond. Spock demurs initially, but eventually he admits that Kirk has been irrational and took the Enterprise over the border on his own initiative in an attempt to gain glory for himself.
Kirk is immediately arrested, and the commander contacts the Enterprise, stating that they don’t hold the crew responsible for Kirk’s acts. The commander also goes out of her way to make it clear that Spock’s testimony is what led her to this decision. She orders Scotty to let the fleet escort the Enterprise to Romulus to be processed and the crew will be released. Scotty’s response is to put their two hostages in the brig and inform the commander that he’ll destroy the ship before going anywhere with them.
The commander works Spock, playing on his superiority to humans as to why he should have his own ship and why he shouldn’t be taking orders from them. She makes all kinds of promises as to how he can thrive in Romulan space the way he can’t in Federation space.
Kirk is taken to the brig and he runs into the force field, badly injuring him. McCoy is asked to beam over (“I don’t make house calls,” he grumbles until he’s informed that it’s the captain). Meanwhile, the commander continues to hit all over Spock, inviting him to dinner and expressing hope that some day he’ll be able to walk down that forbidden corridor that only loyal Romulans are allowed to traverse.
They go to the brig, where McCoy diagnoses Kirk as depressed, exhausted, and generally a big ol’ mess. The commander declares Kirk no longer fit for command and Spock is now in command. Kirk calls Spock a traitor and jumps him, and Spock grabs his face. Kirk collapses, and Spock regretfully states that he instinctively used the Vulcan death grip. McCoy angrily retorts that his instincts are good and the captain is dead.
Kirk’s body is brought back to the ship, where we find out that Spock gave Kirk a nerve pinch that simulated death (there’s no such thing as the Vulcan death grip). Turns out Kirk and Spock were working under sealed orders from Starfleet. McCoy was read in in the brig, where he played along to get Kirk declared dead and shipped back to the Enterprise. Chapel is also read in when she helps revive Kirk—as is Scotty after McCoy performs elective surgery on Kirk’s ears to make him look Romulan.
The commander brings Spock to a cabin where Vulcan dishes are prepared for him. Spock declares the cuisine to be a powerful recruiting inducement, and the commander replies that they have other inducements as she passes him a drink. Wah-HEY!
After sharing a meal, the commander tells Spock that he will take a small Romulan boarding party onto the Enterprise and take command. Spock’s reply is to say that an hour from now would be just as well. She shares her first name with him by whispering it in his ear. He says it’s a beautiful name, incongruous from a soldier. She offers to change into something more appropriate, saying the soldier will disappear and be replaced by a woman. (Could’ve sworn she was already a woman…) While she changes, Spock contacts Kirk, who has already beamed aboard wearing the uniform of one of the hostages, and tells him where the cloak is.
Kirk heads to the forbidden corridor and beats up a guard, while Tal is informed that an unauthorized communication has originated from inside the ship. Tal interrupts Spock and the commander’s sweet passionate nookie-nookie to inform her that the unauthorized communication came from her quarters. Spock admits that it was him, holding up his communicator (they let him keep it????), and the commander has him bring Spock with her to safeguard the cloaking device.
However, Kirk has already made off with it, taking out another guard along the way, and beaming back to the ship. Kirk hands it off to Scotty to install onto the Enterprise. Kirk then heads to the bridge, where the crew is shocked to see him alive (and with pointed ears). He orders Chekov to isolate Spock’s bioreadings on the flagship so they can beam him back while Sulu sets a course for home.
The commander sends Tal back to the bridge to await her orders, and says that Spock will be executed as a state criminal after the charges are read into the record. Spock also demands the Right of Statement, which the commander grants. Spock explains that he was carrying out his duty as a Starfleet officer to maintain the security of the Federation, which was endangered by the cloaking device.
Chekov is able to eventually isolate Spock and beam him back—but the commander hears the transporter effect and wraps her arms around Spock, and so is beamed aboard with him.
Sulu legs it, and Tal gives chase. Scotty is having trouble installing the device, so Kirk tries to stall Tal by saying he has the commander prisoner. However, the commander orders Tal to destroy the ship anyhow, so that doesn’t work—but then Scotty manages to get it working in the nick of time, and the Enterprise makes its invisible escape.
The commander is brought to the brig, after she and Spock exchange dewey-eyed looks, and McCoy orders Kirk to sickbay to have his ears bobbed.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Kirk doesn’t actually inform Scotty that he has to install the cloaking device onto the Enterprise until he beams aboard with it. You really need to inform your engineers ahead of time when you want them to perform feats of awesomeness…
Fascinating. Spock plays the commander like a two-dollar banjo.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy is magnificently snotty throughout the episode, from “I don’t make house calls” to “Do you want to go through life looking like your first officer?”
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu tells Kirk that he’s set a course for Romulan space at the beginning, and flies the ship very damn fast at the end. That’s pretty much it for him, since the ship is sitting still mostly.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura takes precisely none of McCoy’s nonsense, ripping him a new one when he snarks about not making house calls by informing him that it’s the captain who needs medical attention.
It’s a Russian invention. Despite Vulcans and Romulans being very similar biologically, Chekov manages to find the Spock needle in the Romulan haystack. Because he’s just that awesome.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Despite having no prep time or schematics to work from, Scotty gets the cloaking device hooked up and working. Because he’s just that awesome.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Spock and the commander are all over each other talking in vomit-inducing innuendo throughout the episode…
Channel open. “Will you join me for dinner?”
“I am honored, Commander. Are the guards also invited?”
The commander hitting on Spock, and Spock making it clear that he’d rather be alone with her. Wah-HEY!
Welcome aboard. Joanne Linville captivated the viewership with her portrayal of the commander, while Jack Donner plays Tal. Donner will return on Enterprise as a Vulcan priest in “Home” and “Kir’Shara.”
Other Romulans are played by Richard Compton (last seen as Washburn in “The Doomsday Machine,” and who would later direct TNG‘s “Haven“), Richard Gentile, Mike Howden (last seen as Rowe in “I, Mudd“), and Gordon Coffey.
Plus we’ve got recurring regulars George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and Majel Barrett.
Trivial matters: D.C. Fontana’s inspiration for the episode was the Pueblo incident in early 1968.
This is the first episode to postulate an alliance between the Klingons and the Romulans, with the Romulans using Klingon ships. This was budgetary: the cash-starved third season spent good money on the Klingon models first seen in “Elaan of Troyius,” and dammit, they were gonna get their money’s worth…
Joanne Linville was apparently asked to reprise the role of the commander in TNG‘s “Face of the Enemy,” but she was unavailable.
Multiple works propose (mostly contradictory) fates and names for the commander following this episode. Among them: the novels The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, Dwellers in the Crucible by Margaret Wander Bonanno, My Enemy, My Ally and The Empty Chair by Diane Duane, Section 31: Cloak by S.D. Perry, and Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan’s Heart and the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy all by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz; and the comic books Star Trek Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment, co-written by Fontana & Derek Chester and Star Trek Unlimited #4 written by Dan Abnett & Ian Edginton. In addition, alternate timeline versions of the commander were seen in Killing Time by Della Van Hise and A Gutted World by your humble rewatcher (in Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions). Names she has been given include Thea, Di’on Charvon, and Liviana Charvanek.
McCoy will use the Romulan Right of Statement twice when captured by Romulans in the tie-in fiction in order to stall, in both The Romulan Way by Duane & Peter Morwood and the aforementioned Vulcan’s Forge.
When an experimental cloaking device is seen in TNG‘s “The Pegasus,” it greatly resembles the cloaking device seen in this episode.
Due to Spock’s continued popularity, “Spock’s Brain” and this episode were chosen as the first two episodes of the season to air.
To boldly go. “Why would you do this to me?” What a misbegotten disaster of an episode.
No, you didn’t stumble into the “Spock’s Brain” rewatch by mistake. Yes, I’m talking about “The Enterprise Incident,” which many people cite as one of the few bright spots of the third season, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why.
Most of the arguments I’ve heard point to the grand romance between Spock and the commander, but I don’t see a grand romance. Instead, I see a woman who somehow managed to attain the position of fleet commander in a major interstellar empire who nonetheless acts like a sixteen-year-old with her first crush going all woobly at the sound of Leonard Nimoy’s voice. I also see a Starfleet officer playing on that attraction and using it to further his ends—which is what he’s supposed to be doing, of course. It’s part of the assignment.
But what idiot came up with the assignment? Absolutely nothing in this episode makes sense, plot-wise. In fact, the entire story collapses like a house of cards right after the opening credits when Spock mentions that standard procedure for the Romulans would be to destroy the Enterprise for violating their space—which raises the question of what would have become of Starfleet’s sooper-seekrit mission to steal the cloak if the the Romulans had just blown up the invaders and gone on with their lives. The mission depended on the Enterprise being a good enough prize that they’d not blow her up right off—indeed, the commander says as much to Spock—but it’s still a huge risk to take.
Also the entire plan hinges on factors completely out of the crew’s control. They had to fake Kirk’s death on the Romulan flagship—but what if the commander had never invited the two of them over? For that matter, what if this major interstellar empire with space ships and such actually had, I dunno, surveillance in their cells, and they heard Kirk telling McCoy what the real plan was? What if—and McCoy actually brought this up in the episode—the Romulans decided to do an autopsy on the only-mostly-dead-not-all-dead Kirk? Chapel is aware that there’s no such thing as the Vulcan death grip, so why isn’t the commander also aware, especially since she seems to know so much about her “distant brothers,” the Vulcans? What if they’d actually taken Spock’s communicator away from him while he was on board the flagship?
This is your classic idiot plot, where everything that happens depends on someone acting like an idiot in order to make the story work. And the commander is a spectacular idiot, who at no point in the story actually behaves like the professional soldier she is professed to be, instead acting like a lovesick moron and getting her stupid ass captured. The first time we see a woman in charge of anything on Star Trek, and we get this doofus, who throws her entire career away because she thinks Spock is dreamy.
Warp factor rating: 1
Next week: “And the Children Shall Lead”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Balticon 50 in Baltimore this weekend. The Author Guest of Honor is George R.R. Martin, and several of Balticon’s previous 49 Author GoHs will be there as well. I’ll be doing readings, autographings, panels, workshops (including an in-depth seminar on the business of writing, which you can sign up for here), a launch party, and a Boogie Knights concert. His full schedule is here.
You rate it a 1? Really? Yes, it’s an idiot plot, but all the secret mission trickery and the novelty of seeing Kirk with pointed ears makes it at least a 3 or 4 in my opinion. And the Romulan commander going all weak in the knees for Spock is, let’s face it, the most honest audience surrogate ever produced. Who doesn’t love that guy? ;-)
Not to mention, that this would, uh, be a pretty blatant act of war?
Keith, the production didn’t spend any money on the Klingon ship model at all, it seems — they were so cash-strapped they couldn’t even afford to build it. According to Memory Alpha, the model-kit company AMT commissioned and paid Matt Jefferies to design it so that they could release a kit based on it, wanting a follow-up to their successful Enterprise kit. The filming model was actually one of AMT’s two master tooling models for their kits, which is why it has no interior lighting. AMT encouraged the show to use the model as much as possible to promote the kit. The battlecruiser actually made its world debut in the illustrations of the book The Making of Star Trek, which came out shortly before this episode aired. That book’s author “Stephen E. Whitfield” was actually Stephen Edward Poe, AMT’s account manager, who was involved in the creation process of the model.
I can’t disagree with you about the portrayal of the Commander. Like most professional women in TOS, she’s written as a stereotypical female who’s more ruled by her heart and her desire for love than by her head and her sense of duty and discipline. But for the time, having a woman in a position of power at all was remarkable, and that’s no doubt why so many fanfic and professional tie-in authors latched onto the character and brought her back (under many names). Although I think many of them were more drawn to the potential of what the Commander could have been than what she actually was, often making her a stronger and more effective character. Certainly Bonanno and Sherman & Shwartz showed her surviving these events and coming out stronger and wiser, even becoming an important figure in the Empire. Killing Time even made her the secret Praetor of a Romulan Empire that was inexplicably portrayed as male-dominated and sexist, unlike its portrayal elsewhere. (The Making of Star Trek‘s chapter on the villains described the Romulans as completely gender-egalitarian; it was the Klingons who were unrepentant misogynists.) And the infamous Marshak/Culbreath novels, which are often more kinky, slashy romance-novel in their sensibilities than science fiction, make Commander “Charvon” dominant in yet another way…
Anyway, I gather that D.C. Fontana was very unhappy with the rewrites that were done to her script. Certainly David Gerrold tore into it in his ’73 book The World of Star Trek, denouncing the unethical espionage mission of the Enterprise and wishing the characters had had more moral qualms about what they were ordered to do.
Despite the deficiencies in the writing, I think Joanne Linville did a good job with what she was given. The Commander is a strong presence, and in retrospect, she’s startlingly reminiscent of Kathryn Janeway.
This is the first of two episodes this season (the other being “Plato’s Stepchildren” to be scored by Alexander Courage, his first credited episode score since “The Naked Time,” although he did contribute some original library cues to the second season. And for the longest time, I was convinced that both third-season Courage scores were actually ghostwritten by Scott Huston, a Cincinnati composer and College-Conservatory of Music professor who’d been a friend and teacher of my father. Back in the ’80s, I heard through my father that Huston had ghostwritten something for Star Trek in 1968 or so, and a local newspaper article reported a few years later that he’d scored episodes credited to Courage, who was a former classmate of Huston’s. But when the complete boxed set of TOS scores came out, I brought this up on the TrekBBS thread that the set’s producers contributed to, and they found unambiguous evidence that Courage himself was their composer (and getting to hear them on the CD set makes their stylistic similarities to Courage’s earlier work clearer). So now I think that Huston probably just assisted Courage with the orchestrations on these two scores, pitching in as a friend to help him save time (much as Courage himself and Fred Steiner pitched in on Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture score), and either Huston later misremembered it as actually writing the scores himself, or my father and the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter misinterpreted his account.
Anyway, this isn’t one of my favorite TOS scores, but I’ve always liked the stirring bit of music accompanying the scene where Scotty defies the Romulans’ surrender order. And it’s interesting that the Commander’s theme is sort of a more romantic variant of Fred Steiner’s Romulan theme from “Balance of Terror” (which had since been reused by Steiner as the Mirror Universe theme and by George Duning as Henoch’s theme). It’s not the exact same melody, but it’s close enough to suggest direct influence.
Spock does have a gorgeous voice, but even so it’s a ridiculous plot line, such a shame as Joanne Linville has real presence.
It occurs to me that this episode is like something out of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. The Enterprise officers are running a long con on some enemy in order to filch some sort of advanced technology, in a way that hits a lot of the same plot-points as a typical episode in that series. Problem is, it’s not a good “fit” with the Star Trek universe since, as Keith points out, too much depends on the credulousness of characters who should know better.
Donut: I freely admit that my loathing for this episode is at least due in part to the fact that it’s actually generally well regarded, at least by third-season standards, and that probably knocked the rating down a bit. Besides, as I keep saying, the warp factor rating is the least important part. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The plot is admittedly pretty bad, but Leonard Nimoy makes this episode eminently watchable for me. No wonder all the girls went wild!
“It’s a Russian invention. Despite Vulcans and Romulans being very similar biologically, Chekov manages to find the Spock needle in the Romulan haystack. Because he’s just that awesome.”
1. Romulans and Vulcans are the same species. They haven’t been apart long enough for speciation to really take place. (less than 2000 years according to various sources) Or do you really want to argue that human populations on the North American continent who were isolated from Europe and Asia for thousands of years are no longer the same race?
2. Shouldn’t be *that* hard to find Spock on a ship full of full-blooded Romulans or Vulcans; he’s half-human and thats detectable on a scanner.
In her defence, Leonard Nimoy’s voice! I’d probably go wibbly if he’d asked me to do anything.
Although I hadn’t watched it in years, this was one of the episodes I had thought of as a bright spot in season 3, so I was looking forward to seeing it again. I had the opposite experience with it than I had with “Spectre of the Gun” and “Elaan of Troyius” – episodes that I had thought of as pretty bad yet found myself enjoying when I rewatched them. This time, I discovered that the episode did not live up to my memories, for many of the reasons Keith mentioned. While I don’t think it’s hopelessly wretched, it certainly isn’t as good an episode as I remembered. My wife did comment that the dress the commander changes into was “gorgeous,” so I suppose there’s that.
Next week’s episode is one I’ve truly been dreading having to rewatch. While I suppose I might react to it similarly to the way I reacted to “Spectre” and “Elaan,” I rather doubt it. Oh well.
I’m with Keith on this. Never understood why everyone is so in love with this episode. The plot has as many holes as any other five episodes combined, Romulans are required to act like complete and absolute idiots, and romance is vomit-inducing. Aother wtf moment is the device itself that is very conveniently compact and can be disabled and taken away by one person in short period of time and then installed on completely differently built ship. I find it even harder to believe than the romance part.
Still in terms of watchability romance is the worst part of the episode. I had to fast forward some of those scenes to go through the rewatch.
For me McCoy is the sole saving grace of this one. I’ll rate it as 1 but only because Spock’s Brain is still worse.
Ah, a guilty pleasure, just like “Elaan of Troyius”. Joanne Linville has such presence in this, there’s no doubt she’s in charge of this ship and this fleet. Krad, I can’t argue with anything you’ve said about this episode, but in season three, I’ll take any bright spot I can. And Linville is that bright spot here, despite the script. As CLB said, we latch on to her because of what Linville brings to the character, or what she could have been with a better script. If you ignore the Commander going all googly-eyed over Spock, it’s a far better experience. Hell, even in that dress, she still commands authority. But again, I can’t argue with your overall assessment of the episode. A potentially strong woman spaceship commander, TOS’s first and only, done in by a substandard script.
Besides, the truly awful “And the Children Shall Lead” is next, so I’ll go ahead and look on this one positively.
I always thought Romulans were by nature and culture very emotionally driven. Much as the logic-dominated Vulcan society has an element of weakness imbued by their rejection of emotion, so too does the Romulan society have a weakness in their overly enthusiastic embrace of emotion. It’s not a gender thing in this instance so much as a cultural thing more broadly. Beside, you get a sense of what got the commander her position when she orders Tal to destroy the ship with her on it. Throw in the likely possibility that much of her interaction with Spock was (initially) intended to draw an invaluable asset away from the Federation to the great benefit of the Romulans and I think she comes out looking a lot better than she otherwise gets credit for.
@6/krad: I’m actually surprised to hear that it is generally well-regarded. I thought it was seen as a flawed episode, I guess because I was thinking of David Gerrold’s tirade about it. Certainly the Commander was a fan-favorite character, but I figured that was about the character and the actress more than the surrounding story.
We like it because of Joanne Linville’s aura of command, and because both her uniform and the dress are rare examples of really nice fashion on this show. Too bad what happened to Romulan fashion in later generations.
And, you know, you have to take some sexism and plot nonsense as a given, and look for what is cool.
Not meant as a criticism, just a comment, but it’s hard to believe STAR TREK didn’t disappear into history like so many other shows after reading so many of these brutal reviews.
#16. MByerly
No doubt the execution of quite of few episodes falls short, but the concept of Star Trek is so strong, like Doctor Who, it would be strange if it wasn’t revived again and again.
In spite of loving the Romulans, I don’t like this episode. I’m with Keith. The commander is written as an effing MORON. “Oh, sweet fire and water, a hot Vulcan! It’s not at all suspicious that he’s amenable to a bit of nookie, no not at all. Let me slip into something more comfy so I can look even more stupid when I’m over on the Enterprise.”
I hope her death upon her return to Romulus was swift. I don’t count the various books as canon, so I’m free to dream, aren’t I? Heck, she’d have been better off staying on the Enterprise.
The dress however, was great, and Linville looked great in it and in the Romulan uniform, which is why I used both as or in my own avs.
But the commander? Jeez Louise, how the hell did you make commander, lady, if your decision-making was that poor? Was your father the Praetor or something?
@16/MByerly: The thing is, most other SFTV at the time, and for a while thereafter, was a lot worse. Star Trek raised the game beyond what any American genre show other than The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits had done before. And part of the reason the standards are so much higher today is because of the foundations Star Trek laid.
#8, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought if I were on the bridge, when Chekov talks about the similarities of Romulan and Vulcan physiology, to tell him “Scan for human DNA!” Spock would certainly be enough of a difference surely from a full Vulcan to tell the difference!
MByerley: One thing I’m realizing doing these rewatches in general and this rewatch in particular is that the original series was generally peaks and valleys — the quality episodes are really really good, but the poor episodes are really really bad……….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As others have said, the sheer fact of there being a woman in command was a Big Deal back in the day, and the fact that Linville plays her with an air of authority made her a kind of icon in my mind which shone above the muck of the silly/stupid/sexist elements in the script. As 13 Porphyrogenitus says, she does at least show some of the right stuff when she commands Tal to blow up the Enterprise with her on it.
Also, I really like the Diane Duane series beginning with My Enemy, My Ally, so that also means I have to thank this episode–and Linville’s acting–for giving us the character.
I must be the only one who thinks “The Romulan Commander” was trying to play Spock. She wanted the Enterprise intact, and her best chance was to convince Spock to go over. How many times did a female villain end up helping James Bond after some lovin’? I see this as her attempting the same thing in the other direction.
She could always blow up Kirk and co. if her wiles didn’t work on Spock.
It didn’t work out well for her. Why did she get beamed back with Spock? She may have seen in a flash the fate awaiting her on Romulus, althought I don’t see her being a cooperative defector.
The episode does not compare well with the USS Pueblo incident. And I have read Gerrold’s thoughts and disagree.
18. T’Bonz –
“I hope her death upon her return to Romulus was swift. I don’t count the various books as canon, so I’m free to dream, aren’t I? Heck, she’d have been better off staying on the Enterprise.”
Seeing as Enterprise showed us that Section 31 was active during this episode, I’d bet dollars to donuts that she never made it back to Romulus. She probably disappeared somewhere, perhaps during a staged “accident” on the ship that was supposed to be taking her home.
Another episode that shows us that the Federation is nowhere near as squeaky clean as people like to think. Just a couple of years ago we’re told that entry into the zone constitutes an act of war. Apparently not as we see here (and in other episodes), they talk about the dire consequences of their actions and nothing ever comes of it. In The Way to Eden, they even pass all the way through the zone and into Romulan space with nary a peep. And how often did the Romulans enter Federation space? Once. Someone is on the wrong side of the treaty and it doesn’t appear to be the folks with the pointy ears.
I don’t know where people get the idea that the Romulans have equality of the sexes (TMoST doesn’t count) since Linville is the first and only Romulan woman we see until well into TNG. There don’t appear to be any female crew members on her ship, making her even more remarkable. A good performance that rises above what she’s given to work with. Linville and Nimoy certainly have chemistry and wit would have been interesting to see what they’d do with something that was better written.
Imagine how Starfleet would have reacted if the roles were reversed, the Roms trying to steal some top secret Federation tech. Of course the Roms would be portrayed as untrustworthy and devious whereas in this episode Kirk & Spock are the heroes. It’s only “bad” when other people do it. We’re “good” so it’s ok. My Federation right or wrong, so to speak.
I agree with KRAD, it’s a 1.
“Killing Time by Della Van Hise”
Heh. I have a first edition of that one. Much prefer Diane Duane’s take on the Romulans.
You’d make a good war commander: “1” is clearly an exemplary punishment.
I still like it, for all that, and I imagine the ‘equality’ reading was easier in context: at the time, few people were showing women in command, and the Romulan commander compares favourably with Starfleet’s edict as given at the end of this season of Trek. And “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all” is such a good line I wonder if it was D.C. Fontana’s.
But you could always look at it another way.
Some years ago, my husband and I watched the whole series through on DVD at the same time I was reading a lot of P.G. Wodehouse. If anyone in Star Trek is the icily efficient Jeeves, obviously it’s Spock, and you’d expect a Wodehousian reading of the show to contrast him with all Kirk’s women who he never quite seems to marry because he prefers just driving around. But that’s not how he struck me in the two most Wodehousian episodes. In Amok Time it’s Spock who is clearly cast as the Vulcan Bertie Wooster, complete with fearsome Aunt T’Pau and a scheming fiancée who’s using him as a pawn to get someone else, all surrounded by conventions of social behaviour that feel like a bizarre trap. You see? If any Trek deserves to be played as Wodehouse, that was it – even if it’s weird that McCoy was Jeeves that week, finding a device to extract Bertie and cool his ardour into the bargain.
The Enterprise Incident is the more complexly plotted natural sequel, in which Kirk and Spock keep swapping the Bertie and the Jeeves parts: Aunt T’Pau has called in Bertie Spock to steal that silver cloaking device his uncle had had his eye on from that bounder Sir Watkyn Tomalak, which involves Bertie Kirk pretending to go mad (stereotypical Wooster mugging). And so Bertie Spock finds himself accidentally engaged to the Romulan Commander! Can Jeeves get him away from this rather fierce woman? And who’s left to play Jeeves?
Well, it’s funnier than the Cold War shenanigans.
@23, that’s how I saw it too. She didn’t go googly-eyed, she was trying to play Spock just like he was trying to play her, and I loved the sexual tension that added to it. I saw it as a strong woman trying to take what she wanted using all the weapons at her disposal. I like her characterization better in later books, but the way she started out was just fine.
I wonder what the reaction to this episode would have been had she been male, and Spock female, and they acted the same way? I can’t help but feel that no one would have raised a quibble, because they would automatically see a captain, like, say, Kirk, playing a woman like that.
@23/sps49: Oh, I think it was clear from the start that the Commander intended to play Spock, to seduce him to her side. But as it was written and played, she got too caught up in it and he ended up out-seducing her.
@27/Kate: In the original draft of the story outline, in fact, the Commander was male, though so was Spock, of course, so there was no romantic angle originally intended. The gender switch and the romance plot were added later, as discussed here.
But if the genders had been swapped, I doubt it would have played the same way, not in terms of the final outcome. Generally TOS showed the woman as the one who succumbed to the man, not the other way around (cf. Marla McGivers or Carolyn Palamas). And if a man did succumb to a woman (e.g. Nona or Elaan), he would come to his senses before it was too late. The power dynamic would routinely play out in the man’s favor. So if a male Romulan commander had been seduced by a female Starfleet officer, the beginning of the story would’ve probably played out much the same, but the outcome would’ve been different, with the female officer being too weak to avoid temptation and Kirk needing to give her a speech to remind her of her duty so she could redeem herself before it was too late.
“The Enterprise Incident” is a third-season bright spot because it brings back the Romulans. Before this, their only major appearance was in “Balance of Terror.” They may not have gotten the best portrayal in this episode, but they remained very compelling.
Still Alex Wilcock: Now I’m imagining Hugh Laurie as Kirk and Stephen Fry as Jeeves. *snorfle*
As for the commander playing Spock, I don’t buy it. If she was playing him, she did a supremely poor job of it. Her “What are you that you could do this to me?” when Spock reveals that he’s the source of the unauthorized communication and when they realize the cloaking device is gone is one of genuine shock and horror that Spock could even conceive of such a thing after what they’ve shared. If it is a con job, it’s the worst one in the history of the universe because she made herself the mark.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@30/krad: Yeah, and it’s also one of the oldest cliches in the book. Powerful female adversary tries to manipulate hero with feminine wiles, ends up falling in love with hero, and either fails in her plans as a result or outright renounces her allegiances and helps the hero foil her followers’ plans. Whereupon she either rides off into the sunset with the hero or gets arrested/dies, which generally depends on whether she’s blonde or brunette, respectively.
I’m of similar mindset on this one. I’d actually never even seen this episode at all until late last year, when I watched it for the first time, preparing for this rewatch. Therefore, I went in with high expectations, given how well people spoke of it. Talk about a bit of a letdown.
I’m not as harsh as Keith on this one, though. There are a couple of positives. Linville gives a pretty solid textured performance to what should have been a very one-note character. Plus, this is extremely well directed. John Meredyth Lucas keeps a tight focus on the action, never letting the pacing slow down, and Fontana still writes Spock scenes better than anyone else. That’s more than I could say than the likes of Plato’s Stepchildren and Elaan of Troyius.
I could overlook the plot contrivances. However, there’s no way I could overlook the Romulan commander and the way she reacts to this plot. I could see the potential, had they avoided the wounded betrayed girl interest route. I actually see TNG’s Face of the Enemy as an attempt to rectify this episode.
Someone mentioned the her keen sense of fashion. I’ll say this: her wardrobe is less dated by today’s standards than the ones used by Romulans during the TNG/DS9 era.
Still, I can’t help but remember Dax’s infatuation over Spock on DS9’s Tribbles episode. However, she’d never allow her emotional state to dictate her actions the way the Romulan commander did.
One thing that also bugs me is that they successfully stole a Romulan cloaking device, installed it on their own ship, and it was never brought up again!
I find it questionable enough that Starfleet would sanction such an assignment in the first place, but it there’s something that should have been revisited, it would be this. I assume TNG’s The Pegasus was their attempt at addressing the issue, while at the same time backpedaling the events of this episode thanks to the Treaty of Algeron. I also assume that are enough hardline elements in Starfleet who would support an arms race competition against the Romulans, and would be the ones maneuvering Kirk to accept this mission.
And in a way, we have this episode to thank when we see the Defiant cloaking on DS9.
@21/Krad: Even before the 3rd season, I’d noticed this trend. I’d also argue that TNG’s early seasons could also be defined by a series of very steep ups and downs, in which we’ve had truly great shows like 11001001 and really poor ones like Code of Honor.
It was really DS9 which was capable of producing a stretch of middle-of-the-road episodes without that much variation in quality. The way I see it, that’s a potential byproduct of doing stand-alone stories. If it were more of a continuous story arc, any shifts in quality would likely drag every other episode in judgemente, since character arcs and story events inform every single one of them.
@24–It doesn’t surprise me at all that people took equality of the sexes from this episode. We see Romulan crews in only two episodes of TOS: this one and “Balance of Terror”. One male commander, one female, and the female commander isn’t treated as an anomaly–indeed, her dialogue indicates that both Romulan men and women are warriors. Meantime, there’s “Turnabout Intruder” saying that Starfleet has no female captains, and one doesn’t show up until TVH, almost twenty years after TOS. So for a long time there, what the audience saw was that a Romulan woman could do something that a Federation woman wasn’t allowed to, and there were few enough appearances of Romulans (even taking TAS into account) that it wasn’t outweighed by the lack of other Romulan women. Both of those changed eventually, of course, but that initial impression had a long time to settle in.
@32/Eduardo: I figure the thing about cloaking technology is that it’s a constant arms race between stealth and detection. Once the enemy devises a way to penetrate the cloak, it’s useless until a new kind of cloak is invented — which is a handy way to explain all the inconsistencies in Trek about who has cloaking tech when. True, the Romulans couldn’t penetrate their own cloak here, but they invented the thing, so it stands to reason that they could’ve worked out a way to penetrate it before Starfleet could successfully reverse-engineer it. Which would’ve rendered the whole thing pretty much moot.
Still, I think there were some DC comics in the ’80s that assumed the Enterprise had cloaking capability as a result of this episode’s events.
@33/Greenygal: There’s also the fact that The Making of Star Trek explicitly stated that Romulans had full gender equality. It’s surprising how much people today have forgotten how influential that book was on early fandom. For instance, while this episode just said “Romulans now using Klingon design” without further explanation, it was TMoST that first explained it as the result of a Romulan-Klingon alliance, an idea that became accepted wisdom in fandom ever since. TMoST also established that Kirk was the youngest Starfleet captain ever, and publicized McCoy’s divorce backstory and the name of his daughter Joanna for the first time. And it’s probably the reason that “mind meld” became the preferred term for Spock’s mental power, even though the show only used that term twice, with “mind probe” being used three times and “mind touch,” “mind link,” and “mind fusion” also being used. The animated series never used “mind meld,” but it was the standard term in Bantam’s tie-in books by 1976 and was the exclusive term used in the movies starting with TMP. That’s probably because “mind-melding” was the term TMoST used for it (most likely because it was written around the same time as the scripts for “Spectre of the Gun” and “Elaan of Troyius,” the only two episodes to use the term). TMoST is also probably the primary source for the 23rd century as the time frame of the series, although the first work to reference that century explicitly was James Blish’s “Space Seed” adaptation which came out a few months earlier.
So it can’t be understated how important TMoST was to establishing a lot of fandom’s received wisdom beyond what was actually in the show itself.
@28/CLB: Out seducing might be putting it a bit too strong in my opinion. Spock confesses to her at the end that he is attracted to her. I like to think that it was his Vulcan training which enabled him to put his feeling aside and remain loyal to the mission. The Commander being Romulan couldn’t put her feeling aside so easily.
You also mention “And if a man did succumb to a woman (e.g. Nona or Elaan), he would come to his senses before it was too late.” I think that is do in part to the fact that woman almost invariably ended up seducing one of the regular, usually one of the big three. Being our heroes, there was no way the show was going to have them let us down and not redeem themselves. The only time I can think of one of the female regulars doing anything of this nature was when Uhura distracted evil Sulu in Mirror, Mirror. Maybe if they had had a male guest star get seduced sometimes we would have had a more balanced approach.
Overall I think they probably just should have used this particular plot device a lot less than they did.
6/krad: I freely admit that my loathing for this episode is at least due in part to the fact that it’s actually generally well regarded…
14/CLB: I’m actually surprised to hear that it is generally well-regarded.
For what it’s worth (perhaps not much), “The Enterprise Incident” is the highest-rated 3rd season episode on imdb, and the 9th highest-rated episode of all TOS (link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060028/eprate?ref_=tt_eps_rhs_sm). Based partly on that (and partly on other stuff I’d heard), I was certainly a bit let down when I recently watched this one on my first-time watch-through of TOS. It’s funny, two of the top three season 3 episodes according to imdb I did not care for very much at all (the other being “The Tholian Web”). My season 3 “bright spot” was “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” which it seems was not very well-regarded by the imdb voting community. To each his or her own, I suppose!
33. Greenygal
– “Meantime, there’s “Turnabout Intruder” saying that Starfleet has no female captains, and one doesn’t show up until TVH, almost twenty years after TOS.”
And when we do see a female Starfleet captain, what is she doing? Pleading for help instead of actually trying to do something about it like the male captain we see a bit later. (We’ll ignore the fact that solar sails don’t produce power). She just sits in her chair, calling for Starlet to rescue them, Imagine Kirk in the same situation and you’ll see why it just doesn’t work. Same sort of thing that made Harriman into a doofus just to make Kirk and his crew look good in Generations.
I don’t know why the Enterprise would keep the cloaking device; it was probably handed off to a ship that took it straight to Earth/ Vulcan/ wherever.
kkozoriz @24-
If Star Trek: Enterprise, the copy of a copy of Star Trek, says or shows anything about the original show, it is probably wrong.
The Neutral Zone- As far as we know, the Romulans committed the first violation, and they did it with guns blazing to probe whether the Federation is invadable. The USS Enterprise entered:
1) in pursuit of the attacking Romulan ship
2) Commodore Stocker (stupid, not dirty)
3) to steal a cloaking device
4) Hippie Hijack
These are the incursions we know of- were there more Romulans or other Starfleet vessels? Who knows? But of these, only 3) was initiated by the Federation government, and this was to obtain intelligence to reverse engineer/ learn to detect a destabilizing first strike enabler which had already been used by the Romulans. The Enterprise was lucky to survive all of these, and your determination of who is on the wrong side of the treaty isn’t in line with the stories presented.
As to how Starfleet would react in a reversal- well, the USSR/ Eastern Bloc did this to the West A LOT. Since Starfleet is very similar to the USA (c’mon, “United Systems Ship”?), we can look to history for that answer.
Lastly, Decatur’s quote is “Our country – In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong.” The blind patriotism in the frequent misquote is a sad thing.
@38/sps49: Sure, of course the Enterprise would hand over the cloaking device for study, but I think what Eduardo meant was that you’d expect Starfleet to have reverse-engineered the tech and installed it on all their ships. As I said, some tie-ins used to assume that was the case.
And the U.S.S. stands for “United Space Ship” or “United Star Ship,” depending on the episode. I assume it’s short for “United Federation of Planets Star Ship.” Still, yes, U.S.S. is a characteristically American ship prefix. UFPS would make more sense, but of course they settled on “U.S.S. Enterprise” some three years before they invented the Federation.
38. sps49 – “only 3) was initiated by the Federation government, and this was to obtain intelligence to reverse engineer/ learn to detect a destabilizing first strike enabler which had already been used by the Romulans.”
So, was Kruge in the right in going after Genesis, a perfect first strike weapon that turned all your enemies and their weapons into fruit trees and flower filled meadows? Even the co-creator of Genesis saw it’s military potential. Of course, people say, the Federation would never do that. So the Klingons should simply take the Feds at their word? Of course Kruge is painted as being totally in the wrong and the Federation as being totallyin the right.
Even when presented with the view of the Federation being a Homo Sapiens only club by the Klingons, Kirk and company refuse to even consider the possibility. They’re the “good” guys so that means that they’re pretty much above reproach.
That’s part of the reason that I’m so amused by people who disagree with the concept of Section 31. The Feds wouldn’t do something like that. Nonsense, they do it all the time. This episode could easily be turned into a story of Section 31 manipulating Starfleet Intelligence to order this mission. Or Errand of Mercy, trying to get the primitive Organians to fight the Klingons on the Federation’s behalf. Or A Taste of Armageddon imposing a Treaty Port on people who don’t want it and wanted nothing to do with outsiders. All of which Kirk went along with with token objections or none at all.
CLB @39- I remember the “Systems” from the Making of Star Trek book, but it has been a long while. I haven’t loaned out a book since :)
I have read very few tie-in novels; the first ones I read were not very good.
kkozoriz @40- I note you sidestep instead if disproving my prior refutation; I take that as a compliment.
Was Kruge sent by the Empire, or was he a lone wolf? Had the Federation already attacked anyone with Genesis? The rest of your “people say” and “painted as” and mischaracterizations and et cetera is too fuzzy for a response from me.
41. sps49 –
Of course the Federation hasn’t attacked anyone with Genesis yet. It was only at the first full on test. If the Klingons were developing such a device, should Starfleet wait until Earth is transformed into something more to the Klingons liking before doing something about it?
The Federation, like the other major powers, is going to be doing their darkest to keep their adversaries from gaining a technological advantage. Starfleet usually does it through assimilation, presenting themselves as simply interested in friendship while actually going there to teach the natives a lesson on how to act more like the Federation (i.e. late 20th century America).
Look at A Taste of Armageddon for an extreme example of this. Two planets in a system are having a dispute and put up a Code 710 warning to tell everyone else “We’ve got this. Don’t interfere”. So what does the Federation do? Send in a ship when they’re been told in no uncertain terms to say away all the while claiming that they’re there for peaceful purposes. Which, of course, is a load of hooey. They’re there to establish a Treaty Port come hell or high water. Now, a Treaty Port isn;t just a base for their ships to refuel and repair. It’s one established by a more powerful power to give them a degree of control over another, lesser, power.
The idea that the Federation is an absolutely benevolent organization isn’t borne out by the evidence.
@42: If we lived in the Trek universe, you’d definitely support the Maquis. Interesting viewpoint.
@39: That is a possibilty I’ve considered. Scotty obviously knew the installation process.
Of course, any and every kind of setback could have happened afterwards. For all we know, the cloaking device could have caused cancer to the crew, forcing them to abandon the idea (I believe that was one of the prevailing bizarre theories amongst fans back then for justifying the fact that starfleet vessels didn’t cloak). Or maybe there was a Federation debate and there was a consensus that Federation members didn’t believe in sneaking around their neighbors. That’s an idea I believe Rick Berman himself championed when Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe pitched the Defiant concept to him.
With the show cancelled in season 3, we never got to find out if this event could have had notable long-term consequences.
@43/Eduardo: As I’m sure I expressed before (probably in comments on “The Pegasus”), I think there’s a clear technical reason why Starfleet doesn’t use cloaks. We know that cloaking takes a lot of power, yet we also know that cloaked ships need to “run silent” and minimize energy leakage to avoid detection. So there’s a cycle of diminishing returns — the more power you use to cloak, the harder it is to stay cloaked. This must be why ships that use cloaks tend to be bare-bones, spartan military craft like Birds-of-Prey or the Defiant. A multifunction exploration/diplomatic vessel with plenty of science labs and sensors and luxurious quarters and dining and recreation facilities to support a crew of scientists over years-long missions would simply generate too much power to let it practically operate under cloak. Starfleet ships don’t cloak because it just doesn’t fit the mission profile of most Starfleet ships. It’s only feasible for a pure combat vessel, and the Defiant is the only one of those the Federation had before the Dominion War.
(Of course, the fact that Romulan D’deridex warbirds are these huge behemoth ships is hard to reconcile with the theory about cloaked ships needing to minimize power usage. But otherwise, it makes sense.)
Appearances are again not what they seem. This episode is fun on the surface, but man is it dumb. It’s not nearly as good as people think and yet it’s probably not a 1 either. I reserve a score like that for an episode that is physically difficult to watch, one that a person would struggle to sit through. The Enterprise Incident, on the other hand, proceeds apace and keeps viewers’ attention. It’s a strong 3 to light 4 in my book, a score not helped by the fact that the Romulans could have very easily destroyed the Enterprise as soon as it crossed the Neutral Zone and furthermore that it’s quite difficult to believe that Joanne Linville’s character would have risen to any position of authority in the Romulan Star Empire. Other commentators have pointed out that D.C. Fontana’s original script was heavily rewritten and that’s easy to see in light of the finished product.
Speaking of saving money on effects, the cloaking device appears to be Nomad’s head stuck on Sargon’s glow globe soul jar. Oh, the indignity!
I think the popularity of this episode is seeing the Romulans a bit more up close and personal.
One of the odd things that stuck in my head was the Commander’s square drinking glasses and apparently Tang based cocktail.
Despite, the in-universe concern about how tense relations between the Federation and the Romulans are, the events of this episode and “Balance of Terror” show neither side is much interested in prosecuting a war, because either incident should have triggered one.
Supposedly, the Romulans had been isolated from Vulcan for a couple of millennia, how much did the actually know about their parent culture and how much had faded into myth? Even a high ranking personage might believe a lot of misinformation about what the Vulcans are really capable of.
A military does not usually conduct an espionage operation so openly. Everyone is perfectly aware just what happened. At least in a similar spy caper story like “The Hunt for Red October” the USA had plausible deniability in the end about the final disposition of the Red October from the Soviets.
@46/Crusader75: You’re right about the cloaking device’s pedigree. Also, the console it’s plugged into was seen before as the Landru conversion console in “Return of the Archons” and Norman’s control station in “I, Mudd,” and will later be part of the Elba II control room in “Whom Gods Destroy” and Memory Alpha in “The Lights of Zetar.” And if you look at the recording device the Commander has Spock recite his confession into, the unit on top is one of the Enterprise gooseneck viewers used in the pilot episodes, minus the gooseneck. (Maybe the Romulans did swipe Starfleet technology after all…)
Everyone’s plan to rescue Han from Jabba in Return of the Jedi also depended on many factors out of their control–do you hate that, too? :P
I think one of the reasons for this episode’s popularity is that it’s one of the few episodes of TOS that’s actually about the state of interstellar relations in that setting–it has a sense of scope beyond the typical planet-of-the-week plot.
There are only a few episodes of TOS that (IMO) provide that sense of scope–“Errand of Mercy,” “Journey to Babel,” maybe two or three others–which makes that universe feel like a lived-in place with its own politics, and that kind of worldbuilding often outweighs any individual plot holes in the long run.
@48/Edgar: Star Wars was never meant to operate on the same level of plausibility as Star Trek. SW is an homage to the cheesy ’30s Flash Gordon serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter books, essentially, a lighthearted fantasy-adventure made for children of all ages. Star Trek, on the other hand, aspired to be a sophisticated adult drama told with character realism and credibility, a show as mature and plausible as Naked City or Gunsmoke or the other classy dramas of the day, and a deliberate contrast to the kid-oriented fancies of Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. So it’s perfectly fair to hold ST to a higher standard of credibility, because it was explicitly conceived with the goal of holding itself to that higher standard. If a show’s own writers’ bible actually opens with a 3-page lecture about how “believability of characters, their actions and reactions, is our greatest need” and how writers shouldn’t use science fiction as an excuse for writing characters unbelievably, I think we’re entitled to complain when it falls short of its own creators’ professed goals.
Oddly, to the best of my recollection, the novelization to The Undiscovered Country assumes the Enterprise has a cloak and there’s some discussion about whether they should cloak when trying to run past that Klingon listening post in the middle third of the story. So the idea persisted well into the TNG era. I can’t remember why the novel has them decide against it, but it might have been power usage. So the idea of the Enterprise/Federation having cloaking devices persisted for quite a bit.
And, to be fair, we don’t know that the original Enterprise or other Federation starships DIDN’T have a cloak in the movie era, do we? The Federation gave up the right to develop cloaking technology as part of the Treaty of Algeron. Maybe that was a preemptive measure, or maybe the Federation did use cloaks for a bit and the Romulans disliked it enough to make it part of a treaty provision (although what the UFP got in exchange has never been clear).
43. Eduardo Jencarelli
And apparently you’re General Melchett –
Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett: Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!
Captain Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies…
General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!
Seriously, is it really so wrong to expect the people with the most power, political and military, to actually live up to the ideals that they hold up to others? Ir is the Federation simply given a pass because the Romulans and Klingons are totally untrustworthy, at least according to Kirk? Rmember how he said in TWOK that “The Klingons don’t take prisoners”? And yet, the very first time we met a Klingon that’s exactly what they do. And Kirk and Spock were the ones that decided to play chicken with the Organians lives and were shocked, shocked I say, when Kor actually kept his word and did exactly what he said he would do.
You see, the bad guys on Trek are usually turned around at the end of the episode when they accept Federation (read Human/American) values and admit the error of their ways for being different. You’d almost think that they lived on a totally different planet and had their own customs, laws and morality. Who do they think they are?
The reason I really like Errand of Mercy is the fact that Kirk & company are the ones who learn something instead of being the cosmic Mary Worth (as David Gerrold called them) and bringing aliens into the Federation way of thinking. Enterprise could have had a lot more episodes like this except Archer usually learned his lesson primarily by being totally stupid to begin with. And, of course, Archer ended up forming the Federation pretty much single handedly in the end despite himself.
@50 Presumably the Federation not developing cloaks (on starships, since they use “holographic” duck-blinds in planet side survey missions, which seems like a classic example of retaining the ability to me) was a Romulan red line given their paranoia. Since the Federation is mostly about science they have mega powerful sensors on every ship as standard, so it probably isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Starfleet would be developing sensor tech anyway as part of its science mission, which means the Romulans (and Klingons) would always have to be racing to update their cloaks everytime there is a sensor advance, meaning the sensor/cloak arms race is always tilted in Starfleet’s favour.
The Romulans are always running to keep up with something their opponents would be doing whether the Romulans had cloaks or not. It is a huge waste of their resources, and they are happy to do it. Starfleet gets a relatively compliant Romulan empire with no extra effort and preserves their image as The Guys Who Do Not Sneak Around. Talk about a win-win.
@52/random22: Here’s the thing about holographic duck blinds vs. cloaks: The former only need to make something unseen in visible light, specifically whatever bands can be perceived by the species you’re observing (and we saw in Insurrection that they can be penetrated in infrared or other wavelengths). The latter needs to block all wavelengths. After all, it’s ridiculously easy to make a spaceship invisible in optical wavelengths: Just turn off the lights and engines. Space is big and dark, so generally anything in deep space that isn’t emitting light of its own would be virtually invisible anyway unless it occludes a background star. No, what you really need a magic cloaking device to block would be the ship’s infrared emissions, the blackbody radiation that every object inevitably gives off. Not to mention the radio leakage of its electronics, the high-energy particles emitted by its engines, the gamma rays that leak out of its antimatter reactor, the x-rays emitted by particles of space dust vaporizing against its hull at relativistic speeds, whatever.
So despite what it looks like on the screen, making a ship invisible to the human eye is the absolute least important aspect of cloaking technology. That kind of invisibility is easy in space. And a holographic cloak is just a matter of projecting the background image in front of the object, which is just a fancier version of a trick magicians have been doing with mirrors for centuries. (It always bugs me when sci-fi stories talk about “bending light” to make things invisible as if it were some amazing breakthrough. We bend light all the time with mirrors and lenses.) The reason spaceship cloaks are so advanced a technology is that it’s incredibly difficult, if not physically impossible, to block all emissions from a spaceship, especially the blackbody heat radiation and the engine exhaust.
There’s also the weird bit about “motion sensors” from “Balance of Terror.” It’s unclear how you could detect a ship’s motion in space by any means other than optical sensing, but perhaps they have some kind of supersensitive gravity-wave detectors, or there’s some arbitrary subspace handwave to explain it. The “Balance” cloaking device didn’t hide a ship from motion sensors, but every subsequent cloaking tech, starting here, has apparently foiled motion sensors. So there’s clearly some more advanced kind of concealment going on beyond invisibility.
@51: General who???
I was merely pointing out your viewpoint, not demeaning it. I actually sympathize with the Maquis cause, and the cause of anyone who has reason to feel threatened over unfair situations. I might question some of the methods, but I’m not really opposed to the principle of their plight. And I certainly don’t believe the Federation is automatically in the right on every situation. Even some of the characters acknowledge it from time to time.
54. Eduardo Jencarelli –
“General who???” Oh dear, you need to track down the classic British comedy Blackadder, specifically the fourth series called (appropriately) Blackadder goes Forth. Set in WW I, it’s brilliant. Just keep some kleenex handy for the final episode.
Our heroes may occasionally state that the Federation is in the wrong but they also claim that it’s the shining pinnacle that other cultures need to emulate. This is the group that went from protecting planets from natural disasters in The Paradise Syndrome to having to find a loophole to work around to do the same in Pen Pals.
They’ve also invaded other species space, often after being specifically told to keep out, in The Corbomite Maneuver, Spectre of the Gun and the previously mentioned A Taste of Armageddon. Add to that, the fact they’ve told us that a captain is willing to sacrifice his ship, his crew and his own life before viloating the PD and then they proceed to violate it with no repercussions wahtsoever. The Federation talks a good game but they really don’t practice what they preach, although they do enjoy telling other people how they should lead their lives.
Does the UFP do some good? Sure they do. Are they also two faced about their actions and motives? Yup, sure are again.
The point is, like General Melchett, They seem themselves as better than those that oppose them and see it as their duty to make everyone just as “enlightened” as the Federation. Azetbur hit very close to the mark:
AZETBUR: Inalien… If only you could hear yourselves? ‘Human rights.’ Why the very name is racist. The Federation is no more than a ‘homo sapiens’ only club.
It’s quite telling that there’s only one non-human on the Federation side of the dinner table and even he has a human parent. So, one half of a Vulcan is there to show just how open to other cultures the Federation is.
@51
There is a great meta out there about why Quark is this person’s favorite character. It boils down to the fact that he never gives up Ferengi values and decides human values are best. He remains Ferengi forever.
I second the recommendation of the Blackadder series, particularly the fourth, which is as strong an anti war satire as you’ll ever see.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
for laughs I always imagine that the commander whispers in Spock’s ear that her real name is James T. Kirk.
I’m glad to hear that the plot makes no sense – I used to think I was just too stupid to get it.
“The first time we see a woman in charge of anything on Star Trek” – well, we did see Edith Keeler who was in charge of a mission and Eleen who ended up as regent of a bunch of Capellans, but of course that’s not in the same league as a fleet commander.
As much as I agree with the assessment of the episode, I like it for two reasons – it’s great to see the Romulans again, and I like the commander for all the reasons already mentioned by other commenters. She really captured my imagination when I watched this for the first time as a twelve-year-old girl, and the fact that she wasn’t some interchangeable blonde contributed much to this. Despite her behaviour, she was a believable character to me. I guess I have to thank Joanne Linville for that. (I also liked her uniform. Much better than the black-and-white dress. It baffled me that she thought the change was an improvement.)
Spock does the job that Kirk did three times in the second season, namely, seducing a female enemy. Is that a bug or a feature?
I know that KRAD and many of you already know this, but if there are any young folks reading this who don’t understand what a Big Deal it was to show a woman commanding a spaceship//fleet in the 1960’s… take a look at Leah Schnelbach’s post on Sally Ride.
http://www.tor.com/2016/05/26/the-quiet-dedication-and-bravery-of-dr-sally-ride/
Note the questions members of the press had for her in the *1980’s*!! Does going to space make you cry? Will it harm your reproductive organs? Are you planning to have children?
@59/Jana: Let’s see, women in charge… Wouldn’t T’Pau and Elaan count? T’Pau was in charge of Spock’s wedding ceremony, and implicitly had considerably larger responsibilities in Vulcan society. And Elaan was a monarch, though one subject to the decisions of her council.
I think Miri and Jahn were sort of equally “in charge” of the Onlies, by virtue of being the eldest, and Miri was the more responsible one. Nancy Hedford was evidently in charge of the diplomatic mission to Epsilon Canaris III, though she was just an assistant commissioner. And I think a case can be made that Isis was probably in charge of Gary Seven, in some respects.
Coming up later (spoiler alert), we have female leaders like Kara for the Eymorgs, Natira for Yonada, and Deela for Scalos. Losira was in charge of the Kalandan outpost, though perhaps only by virtue of being the last survivor. And, ironically, Janice Lester is the leader of the Camus II expedition. So there are at least half a dozen women in charge of things in season 3, and the Commander is actually the second (both in production order and broadcast order).
As for Spock becoming more the romantic lead in season 3, that was symptomatic of his overall popularity, especially with female viewers. Nimoy got more fan mail than the rest of the cast put together (and was the only cast member to get Emmy nominations, which he got three years running), so the network was always pushing the producers to enlarge Spock’s role. When Roddenberry was in charge, he tried to make sure that Kirk stayed at least equal in prominence, but with Roddenberry’s influence diminished in season 3, there was less resistance to the network’s demand for more Spock-centric episodes.
@61/Christopher: Great list! Actually, I had thought of T’Pau and Elaan, but decided to limit myself to clear-cut examples. And I hadn’t thought of Miri as a leader, or of Isis as being in charge of Gary Seven.
Would you consider Nona or Miramanee as having a position of power?
Incidentally, I’ve been watching the first season of TNG with my daughter, and I was unpleasantly surprised how old-fashioned most of the female guest characters were portrayed there, compared to TOS two decades earlier. For example in We’ll Always Have Paris, they leave no doubt that Jenice Manheim isn’t part of the research team, whereas in The Man Trap, it’s implied that Nancy Crater was a co-worker (because shipments have dropped after her death).
“As for Spock becoming more the romantic lead in season 3, that was symptomatic of his overall popularity”: Yes, that’s kind of what I was trying to hint at. I remember being surprised to learn that Kirk had a reputation for flirting, because I had never considered that anything more than a 60s TV convention. So of course when Spock became more of a leading character, they did the same kind of stories with him, even though it made no sense given what had been established about Vulcans earlier.
@62/Jana: Nona was nominally the wife of the village chieftain, so she had no formal authority. Like women throughout history, she wielded informal power through the avenues available to her, including sexuality and skill with drugs or poisons.
As for Miramanee, she was in a position of influence as the priestess of the temple, but I think the medicine chief had more authority (given that she was required to marry him), and the Elder seemed to be the most influential figure in the community overall.
And yes, a lot of Kirk’s “womanizer” reputation is just the standard way that ’60s television leads were written. As womanizing goes, Kirk has nothing on Napoleon Solo or Jim West. As for Spock being out of character… well, I’ll probably have a lot to say about that when we get to “The Cloud Minders.” (And it just now struck me after 40 years what a weird title that is.)
@63/Christopher: I agree that the Elder was the leader of Miramanee’s people, but I’m not sure about the roles of priestess and medicine chief. What Salish says is: “Tribal priestess and medicine chief are always joined.” So, yes, she was required to marry him, but he was also required to marry her. Maybe they were equal in rank.
I assumed that Nona was a shaman too – isn’t that what “the local witch people” means? I thought that scene where she heals Kirk was supposed to be a shamanic trance. (Although at the same time it totally looks as if she’s having an orgasm, which is one of the things that irk me about that episode.)
@64/Jana: But a shaman isn’t a leader, more of a priest, spirit guide, and/or healer. More a McCoy than a Kirk. We’re talking about women who are “in charge” of things, and Tyree was the one in charge of the community that he and Nona resided in.
@65/Christopher: Oh yes, I agree, neither of them was in charge of their respective community. I just wondered if they could be considered women who wielded power due to their jobs – a bit like T’Pau who also performs a ritual, namely Spock’s wedding. Sorry if I didn’t express myself clearly.
Not that I’m particularly looking forward to it, but wasn’t And the Children Shall Lead supposed to be next?
Eduardo (and everyone): Sorry, but I had a very exhausting Memorial Day weekend, and it kinda pushed everything out of whack. I hope to have the rewatch of “Revenge Of The Big Green Fat Guy” (or whatever it’s called…. ;) ) tomorrow or Friday.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
No rush. It’s actually Spock’s Brain that I’m eager to revisit.
@56 – percysowner: Except Quark is already a pretty mild Ferengi, and does warm up to Federation values a lot over the course of the series.
70. lordmagnusen – As all good Trek aliens are supposed to. Their cultures may have one or two interesting things about it but none can hold a candle to the great Homo Sapiens Only Club.
I don’t think the series ever quite explored the full implications of the cloaking device. It is obviously a tremendous tactical advantage. Think of the number of times cloaked ships have snuck up on the Enterprise. Also, remember when our heros got the Klingons to take them to Romulus? Well, if you can do that, why not just beam down some explosive devices from your cloaked ship when you want to hit a planet?
Sure, there are some potential answers. Maybe all Alpha Quadrent powers perpetually shield their vital installations. And, as has been suggested above, it is reasonable to assume that there is an arms race between between cloaking and cloak detection technology, but I do not recall an episode which suggested that detection is routine or easy. Usually, it’s some kind of brilliant last minute jury-rig. Finally, assume that you are a Federation diplomat.. Would you not insist that the treaty allow the Federation to posess, say, ten cloaking devices? After all, how can you work on cloak detection technology without having a cloak to experiment on? That way, the Pegasus is legal and you can test it in Starfleet’s backyard instead of sneaking off to some obsure system. Anyway, more could have been done with this.
@72/Oldfan: One of the established rules of cloaking tech, going back to “Balance of Terror,” is that a cloaked ship needs to decloak before it can use other power-intensive systems like weapons, or even shields in some cases, so I assume that would go for transporters as well. (After all, a transporter beam is essentially an incredibly effective disintegrator ray. I often wonder why they never use the technology as a weapon by just leaving out the reintegration part.)
@73/christopherlbennett
Of course, in the movies we have seen ships which could fire weapons when cloaked- an extemely dangerous combination. I agree with you that the weapon implications of transporter technology have never been thought out, but I have a slightly different perspective. Look, in Unification a cloaked Klingon ship gets within transporter range of the capital of the Romulan Empire without being detected. Even if the have to decloak to transport, they could just as easily send bombs instead of people, and then recloak before planetary defenses can react. In fact, at the end of the second part of that episode, a Warbird decloaks to destroy the troop-laden trojan horse vulcan transport ships. Why not just put the troops on the Warbird, decloak over Vulcan, and beam them down? The series never gives us a satisfactory answer here (eg, “Admiral, planetary defense subspace sonar has detected a cloaked ship at the Mars defense perimeter.” “Thank you liutenent, relay coordinates to the fleet. Too bad the sonar doesn’t fit in starships.”)
@73
Well Starfleet and The Federation just don’t think along those lines, and would probably actively punish anyone who did. The various despot led races, Romulans, Cardassians, Section 31, Klingons etc.. Well they probably don’t want to give people ideas beyond vague “transporter accidents” which occur from time to time. You don’t hand potential superweapons to the masses, or if you do then you do your darndest to ensure that nobody actually realizes they have a superweapon in their hands. So it is probably taught in such a way that few people do realize it, fewer think about acting on it if they do, and the few who go beyond thinking about using it or blab about the possibility suffer their own “transporter malfunction” because despots have a sense of humour too.
@74: Well the episode “Face of the Enemy” states that the Federation’s borders are protected by an extensive gravitic sensor network that can detect cloaked ships. And that might explain why the Romulans needed to use uncloaked Vulcan ships in Unification. If they had just sent a cloaked Warbird across the border, the Federation sensor network would have detected it, but by having the Warbird travel alongside 3 uncloaked vessels Starfleet would assume the gravitic sensor readings they were getting were just for the 3 Vulcan transports and would miss the cloaked Warbird riding shotgun.)
I have followed all of your TOS rewatches and I finally joined Tor and decided to join the discussion. I found it interesting to compare my response to this episode now to how I perceived it as a kid. As a kid, I liked the espionage angle and found it thrilling. As an adult, I just about cried when I saw how profound the plot holes were. The aspect of this episode that consistently resonated with me is that it is a Spock-driven episode and I enjoyed seeing Spock interacting with the pretty Romulan lady.
Even though Spock is my favorite character and I like the guy, I could never understand the passion of the Spock groupies whose hearts skip a beat at the thought of an evening of three dimensional chess with him. That perspective was challenged recently when the missus, who absolutely loathes my penchant for fantasy and SF, happened upon me while watching a TOS episode and made some comment about how dreamy that guy with the pointy ears is. The fact that she shares Leonard Nimoy’s Ukrainian heritage doesn’t explain it all.
Thanks for the entertaining rewatches, krad. It makes me appreciate great Star Trek and allows me to tolerate the nearly unwatchable.
heartlanddoc: Thank you so much! And welcome!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
74. Oldfan – “Look, in Unification a cloaked Klingon ship gets within transporter range of the capital of the Romulan Empire without being detected. Even if the have to decloak to transport, they could just as easily send bombs instead of people, and then recloak before planetary defenses can react.”
Well, Picard and Data had to get down to the planet somehow and they later brought Spock up and then went back down again. Apparently Romulans don’t have good enough sensors or the Klingons didn’t have to decloak.
Not that I have any intimate knowledge of such, but for some reason, I always thought that you could transport off a cloaked vessel, but that you had to decloak before using any offensive or defensive systems. Don’t they transport on and off the cloaked Bird of Prey parked in Golden Gate Park in TVH?
I had seen this one before (it was one of the fan picks on the Captain’s Log Fan Collective). I can’t really disagree with anything KRAD said, but in general, I liked the episode quite a bit better than he did.
The first time I saw this episode, I hadn’t seen “Balance of Terror.” One thing that hit me watching it this time through, though, having now seen the earlier episode, was that it seemed like the fact that the Romulans had cloaking technology at all had caught the Federation, and this crew, completely by surprise (I understand that Kirk was on a mission specifically related to the cloaking device, so people knew, but it still plays as though this is a very new thing). Am I wrong in remembering that the Bird of Prey in “Balance of Terror,” seen by this crew two years earlier, was also capable of cloaking? It just seems like everyone is shocked that they can do it here, but they already saw it happen. It struck me as unusual that they treated it as newfangled technology here.
(By the way, I am beyond amused that my spell checker doesn’t recognize “Romulans,” but it does recognize “newfangled”)
@80/JamesP: Cloaking tech hasn’t been presented in a very consistent way onscreen, and that fits with my theory that there isn’t a single cloaking technology, but a succession of different ones as each new one eventually gets penetrated by new detection technology and is rendered obsolete as a result. And different methods have different weaknesses and limitations. The “Balance of Terror” cloak provided invisibility, but allowed the ship’s motion to be tracked somehow. The “Enterprise Incident” cloak apparently corrected that problem. The cloak in The Search for Spock has a visible ripple effect against the background, but the same ship’s cloak three in-story months later in The Voyage Home was completely invisible and ripple-free (perhaps Scotty and the Vulcans were able to improve on it). The cloak in The Undiscovered Country allowed firing while cloaked but was detectable by tracking engine exhaust; but the cloaks used in the 24th century still require decloaking to fire and can’t be tracked by exhaust, so apparently there was a tradeoff that had to be made there. And so on.
@81/CLB – Everything you said makes sense about the varying capabilities of cloaks through the years. It still seems, though, like everyone is all surprised that the Romulans have cloaking technology in this episode, the ability to make their ships appear invisible, when they had the same capability in “Balance of Terror.” Or was the surprise that they could completely sneak up on them when in BoT, they were somehow able to track them, even if they couldn’t see them?
@82/JamesP: What Spock said was, “I believe the Romulans have developed a cloaking device which renders our tracking sensors useless.” So yes, the surprise is that the cloaks are now immune to the “motion sensors” mentioned in “Balance of Terror.”
Ah, got it! Thanks!
All those changes also explain why the Federation had no real problem with signing away cloaking devices in canon too. They develop better sensors all the time for their science missions, the Romulans have to spend specific time and budget trying to defeat what Starfleet is doing on their own anyway. It is a very one sided arms race.
Despite all the holes in the plot which have been well-chronicled here, I couldn’t help being entertained by the Spock/Commander interplay and Shatner really being able to use that penchant for histrionics to good purpose. But again, those plot-holes. The Enterprise is sitting there, in blatant violation of a treaty and surrounded by 3 vessels at point-blank range and they can just beam around whenever they like? No one bothers to check to see if Spock has a communicator on him? Kirk finds the cloaking device, has no tools handy, but fortuitously the thing just slides out of it’s dock because apparently there’s no need to secure it? And then when they know Kirk has beamed back to the Enterprise with the cloaking device they just patiently sit around and wait for them to figure out how to install it because,after all, Spock’s not done with his “personal statement”? LOL. It’s just a TV show and there has to be some level of letting these kinds of glaring incongruities go to allow the plot to get to it’s conclusion, but geez… this one had so many “really?” moments that after awhile it became sport to look for them, which distracted from some truly great performances by the cast. That said, I was entertained, and that’s the most important criterion. Cannot agree on a 1 rating, not by a long shot. I’d give this a 5 or 6.
I personally agree with those folks here who admit this is a rather dumb episode but consider it to be a guilty pleasure. The romantic chemistry between Spock and the Romulan commander seemed quite compelling to me, and the way they used the cloaking device to evade capture by the Romulans was awesome to watch, for me at least. Maybe I am a sucker for corny drama, but this seemed pretty good to me in that department. The one thing that troubled me about the entire episode, however, is that suddenly instead of being the morally superior good guys, the Enterprise was on a mission to actually steal something. That, I think, is probably a unique circumstance for the series, and not in a totally good way. Any thoughts?
@97, I’m pretty sure the moral ambiguity of what the Enterprise is doing is intentional. What bothered me was after all this cloaking devices never became sop on Federation ships.
@87/DrCroland: The theft used to trouble me as a kid, but it doesn’t do so anymore. The Romulans tried to start a war with a sneak attack two years ago. They destroyed several Federation outposts. This could happen again anytime. If the Federation loses the ability to detect Romulan ships, it could mean war. Stealing a cloaking device, and doing it in such a manner that the Romulans know it, helps to preserve the peace in the Galaxy. And if I remember correctly, they did it without any loss of life on either side.
I’d say this episode makes the peaceful, idealistic Federation more believable. They employ espionage and theft if necessary, but they don’t retaliate when attacked, and they don’t use cloaking technology themselves, so the Romulans and Klingons can be certain that they won’t be attacked in turn.
@87/DrCroland: According to David Gerrold’s 1973 book The World of Star Trek, D.C. Fontana’s original proposal was more morally ambiguous, inspired by the recent “Pueblo Incident” in which a US Navy spy ship was captured by North Korea, but the network wouldn’t go for it and demanded something more straightforward. Gerrold denounced the episode as the worst compromise of Trek’s principles and one of the worst examples of its conceptual and moral erosion in the third season.
Anyway, the general stance of a lot of Cold War-era shows was that it’s not immoral if you do it to the bad guys in the name of democracy and world peace. That was pretty much the whole defining ethos of ST’s sister series at Desilu/Paramount, Mission: Impossible. That was basically a heist/con show inspired by the movie Topkapi (about a band of thieves committing an elaborate robbery), but there was no way the network at the time would’ve approved a show that invited the audience to root for criminals. So they were made spies instead, on deniable black-ops missions to sabotage the plans of dictators, terrorists, etc. who threatened world peace. They engaged in theft, kidnapping, extortion, fraud, sabotage, and all sorts of dirty tricks, and while they nominally weren’t authorized for assassination, they did frequently arrange to frame their marks for actions that would get them executed. But the moral ambiguity of what they were doing was virtually never addressed, because they were doing it for America and apple pie. (Which got a bit more problematical in the various episodes — and the entire last two seasons — in which they used the same dirty-tricks spy tactics against mobsters on US soil.)
@90/Christopher: “Gerrold denounced the episode as the worst compromise of Trek’s principles and one of the worst examples of its […] moral erosion in the third season.”
That’s weird. I miss Trek’s principles much more in “The Omega Glory” or “A Private Little War”. Concerning “moral erosion”, the third season is full of stories where they offer help or refuse to fight or kill, whereas the second season has all these episodes where they destroy the threats they meet.
@91/Jana: ” I miss Trek’s principles much more in “The Omega Glory” or “A Private Little War”. “
In TOG, Tracey was the one who threw out the UFP’s principles, and Kirk fought to defend them. And APLW, unlike TEI, acknowledged and confronted the moral ambiguity of the decision Kirk was forced into. It didn’t portray it as an unambiguous victory like the theft of the cloaking device, but was meant as more of a tragic ending, a failure to find a better way. That’s the kind of ending Gerrold wanted for TEI but didn’t get.
So, when dealing with a declared enemy with an expansionist policy and a super weapon that makes your side vulnerable what IS the better way?
@93 Fit a better scanning device to remove the superweapon’s advantage. Some sort of gas sensitive torpedo ought to do it.
Joking aside, that is why the Federation probably never seriously investigated cloaking devices for themselves. As well as making them look sketchy as all get out in diplomatic terms -the positive side of which the Federation prides itself on- they involve a huge amount of sunk cost in development and retrofitting vessels but all that can be undone by a single scanner upgrade. And Starfleet, as part of its scientific and exploration primary mission, is always developing new scanners and new scanning methods. Why should Starfleet bother fitting a device that undercuts one of the Federation’s primary policies, and also will be outpaced by its own development and research arm? It makes no sense.
@92/Christopher: On the other hand, both episodes portray war as a means to solve problems. And “A Private Little War” was supposed to justify the Vietnam War. As far as I am concerned, that’s pretty much Star Trek’s moral low point. I feel much more comfortable with this episode than with either one of them. But then, I’ve disagreed with David Gerrold before.
By the way, I’ve been looking for information about earlier versions of the story and found this. The article you linked to in comment #28 refers to it – apparently some of the details are wrong, but the summary of the first story outline seems to be mostly correct. I don’t find it more morally ambiguous that the aired episode. And it makes even less sense, because why would they expect the Romulans to attack when the Enterprise hasn’t even entered the Neutral Zone?
@94/random22: I assume that’s why they needed the cloaking device, to understand how it works and develop new scanners against it.
@93/princessroxana: Perhaps, if possession of this device really turned the Romulans into a serious threat, the Enterprise was just doing what had to be done. But it should be noted that the theft of one device would not make the Romulans lose their possession of the technology — presumably they had the blueprints and would just make more. So both sides would now have it. I am not sure what the implications of this would have been for another real-time confrontation, and somehow, to me at least, it makes the Federation look weak to their enemies if they need to resort to such tactics to catch up with them.
@94/random22: See comment #44 for my thoughts on why Starfleet doesn’t use cloaking devices.
@95/Jana: “On the other hand, both episodes portray war as a means to solve problems.”
How do they do that? “The Omega Glory” shows the villain, Tracey, using war to slaughter an enemy, and Kirk using inspiring words and democratic principles (and, yes, a patented Kirk fistfight) to convince them to find a less violent way. And “A Private Little War” absolutely does not say that the conflict between the Village and Hill People will solve the problem — merely that it’s the only way Kirk could see to avoid the destruction of the latter, even though it means an ongoing balance of terror from then on. It’s not solving the problem, it’s just holding it at bay indefinitely, like the Cold War quagmire it was an allegory for. The war is the problem, and Kirk can see no solution beyond perpetuating the problem. “Serpents for the Garden of Eden” is not heralding a triumphant victory, but acknowledging the permanent destruction of the Neuralese people’s innocence. It’s a tragic and ambiguous ending by design.
@96/DrCroland: “But it should be noted that the theft of one device would not make the Romulans lose their possession of the technology — presumably they had the blueprints and would just make more.”
I think they stole it to study it, in order to develop better sensors. Then the Romulans could make more, but the Federation could still detect their ships.
@97/Christopher: In “The Omega Glory”, “all these generations of Yangs fighting to regain their land” is treated as a romantic notion. And in “A Private Little War”, Kirk calls the war a solution, and he explicitly refers to the twentieth century – “The only solution is what happened back then. Balance of power.” Yes, it’s seen as tragic, but it’s still an advertisement for proxy wars.
@98/Jana: Certainly there’s an unfortunate racist underpinning to “The Omega Glory,” Yellow Peril meets Red Menace — there’s no denying that. But aside from that, I think there’s a difference between saying it’s legitimate to fight for freedom from oppression and saying that war is always a solution.
As for APLW, at least it acknowledged the ambiguity. Kirk believed that was the necessary way to keep Tyree’s people alive, but McCoy disagreed, and I’ve always believed it was intended to leave the question for the audience to debate and answer in their own minds, rather than simplistically saying Kirk’s actions were right like “The Enterprise Incident” did.
@98/JanaJansen: What you are saying is logical, yet somehow I continue to feel troubled by this episode for its ethical implications, much more so than the other episodes that have been mentioned here. The Enterprise seems to be resorting to actual piracy here, with the Federation’s blessing. This seems like the kind of behavior one would routinely expect from Klingons or Romulans, but from the Federation, well, one feels a bit disappointed.
@100/DrCroland: Technically they’re engaged in espionage, the theft of state secrets for the benefit of a rival state. It was out of character for Star Trek to show the crew engaged in something so amoral as espionage, but it would’ve fit right into a TV landscape that also included Mission: Impossible, The Man from UNCLE, The Avengers, I Spy, The Wild Wild West, The Saint, Danger Man, Get Smart, etc. Spy shows and movies in the ’60s rarely engaged with the prickly moral questions of the work, though I agree that Star Trek should have.
@101/ChristopherLBennett: I agree with your assessment.
@99/Christopher: “I think there’s a difference between saying it’s legitimate to fight for freedom from oppression and saying that war is always a solution.”
I agree. What I meant is this: Every war is a tragedy, even when it’s legitimate. Usually Star Trek acknowledges that. I can see it in “Balance of Terror”, in “Errand of Mercy”, in “The City on the Edge of Forever”. I can’t see it in “The Omega Glory”.
Totally, totally agree with your summation of this one. People go on and on about the TURNABOUT INTRUDER but this is the worst piece of misogynist trash that I have seen on ST. The portryal of the Romulan commander is so offensive. It seems women cannot be in command because their bodies would be the first to betray them.
@104/bk: Now, there’s an interesting question. Is it the height of misogyny to portray a woman in command who is treated with respect both by her people and her adversaries, but who is easily duped by a false declaration of love, or is it worse not to have women at all, or not to have any women in responsible positions, or to have the male heroes treat them with disdain?
Of course, what I really want is neither. But back in the 1970s, my eleven-year-old self hated the latter, and was fascinated with the Romulan commander and loved this episode because of her. I found her inspirational despite that stupid mistake of hers. After all, TV antagonists made stupid mistakes all the time, and nobody in the episode linked her mistake to her gender. Besides, seducing enemies of the opposite sex seemed like a pretty gender-neutral skill in stories.
By the way, D. C. Fontana was not happy with the way the commander was rewritten. I read it in an interview.
While watching most of this episode I preferred to interpret it as the Romulan Commander not being seduced, but rather she was assuming Spock was creating a lie that he believed she needed to hear, in order to get what he wanted: power and respect that was perhaps being denied to him in the Federation. As a person motivated by ambition, it would make sense that she would see others as being similarly motivated.
But then it got icky with that bit about “You underestimate yourself, Commander …”
A great moment though when after being transported to the Enterprise, the Romulan Commander says, “Destroy this Ship! I give you a direct command!”
@106/Keleborn: Hmm, was that icky? I thought Spock told her that lies and secrets aside, it was worthwhile knowing her. Something akin to the moment of mutual respect between Kirk and the other Romulan commander in “Balance of Terror”. It made sense to me, although the rest of the conversation (“It was your choice”, “It will be our secret”) didn’t.
I once read a fanfiction where it turned out that the Romulans actually tricked Kirk and Spock, by planting a rigged cloaking device on them.
@107/janajansen,
Yes, that was icky. That conversation made it impossible to sustain the much more sensible and likely ( to me ) interpretation that they were both just trying to get something off each other (being enemies after all), and implied that they had felt something real, beyond simple sexual attraction. Analogy: someone breaks into your home, you catch and detain them, and while waiting for police to arrive you have a conversation with them and fall in love. Afterwards you are shocked to discover they have stolen your jewelry!
(Edited to be a bit less snarky. It might also be better to describe more precisely my own emotional response instead of simply projecting it outward as “icky”, but that would require more of an effort than I’m willing to make right now.)
@108/Keleborn: I’m probably dense, but why does that conversation make it impossible to sustain your reading? When the commander tells Spock that all he got was the cloaking device, couldn’t this mean: “Are you really content with your position here? I offered you a much better job.”
Isn’t the earlier scene where she slaps him a bigger obstacle to your reading?
@109/janajansen,
That scene included the lines “I hope that you and I exchanged something more permanent” and “It will be our secret”.
Slapping him earlier could certainly be interpreted as a response to betrayal – probably the writer intended that – but it could also be interpreted as frustrated rage at having lost everything (which interpretation I was stubbornly clinging to). Why did she join Spock when she saw he was being transported? Inexplicable, I could only figure it was a glitch in service of creating drama. Surely it would not be because she was unwilling to leave him!
Fundamental to my interpretation is the premise that the Romulans are enemies, and not merely foreigners or people with another point of view. If they had met at a conference devoted to working out the Neutral Zone treaty, that might have been different – some situation where neither could expect to gain anything of military value from discovering feelings of friendship or even love for each other.
@110/Keleborn: I don’t think she wanted to join Spock, I think she wanted to prevent the beam-out.
The “secret” line baffles me in any interpretation. Surely we aren’t supposed to think that Spock has fallen in love with her? I take his earlier words to mean that he respected her and was impressed by her personality, that their encounter was meaningful to him despite the accompanying betrayal.
There’s also this: The Romulans are enemies, but unlike the Klingons, they are elusive and related to Vulcans. This is the first time we see a Vulcan and a Romulan meet. Perhaps it was also the first time for Spock. That alone would make the encounter special for him and give him something more valuable than a military secret. Seen this way, there’s a straight line leading from this episode to his work on Romulus a century later.
@111/Janajansen,
Perhaps the captive Romulan Commander also helped prepare the way for peace efforts, if she had been willing to divulge information about Romulan culture (not anything of military value), in the hope of fostering conviviality. She might have been willing to do this if her Federation captors had treated her with respect and refrained from trying to force or even “persuade” her to reveal information.
I wonder if she had killed herself like the previous Romulan Commander did, would this have been perceived as courageous and honorable, or just weak and despairing? In some ways it would take more courage to go on living – but there would be a risk of facing chemical interrogation.
Would Spock have visited her in her confinement? Would she ever have been freed?
I thought Kirk made a fine looking Romulan.
By the way, did the Romulan Commander have a name? And would we be able to pronounce it? :)
Keleborn: I listed all the names she’s been given in tie-in fiction in the Trivial Matters section of the rewatch.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Well, I decided to choose a name myself before consulting the Trivial Matters section, and what I came up with was Lola. Sort of a nice counterpart to Layla, don’t you think? :)
Wow, Krad, you really don’t like it when women are portrayed as silly dufuses. :)
@111/Jana: Nobody who has any knowledge of transporters, as the Commander surely did, would imagine she could prevent someone from beaming out just by grabbing onto them. The only possible outcome would be that she’d be beamed over with him and thereby captured. So it wasn’t a rational or calculating act on her part. She was written under the 1960s assumption that a woman would always follow her emotional impulses over her reason.
@113/krad: Looking at the Trivial Matters section, I see you didn’t specify which authors came up with which name for the Commander. “Di’on Charvon” was from Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath’s Phoenix novels; “Thea” was from Della Van Hise’s Killing Time; and “Liviana Charvanek” was from Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz’s Vulcan’s Forge etc.
I also remember a parody story in one of the Best of Trek fanzine-compilation books where it turned out that her secret name was Trampolina. Since the story was a spoof of the cliches and excesses of Trek fanfiction, I took that to imply that revealing the Commander’s secret name was a fairly common trope in fanfic, even if it only happened a few times in pro novels. (Although Marshak, Culbreath, and Van Hise were all fanfiction writers before they did pro novels.)
@115/CLB,
Can we assume that DC Fontana did not intend that? Do we know who is responsible for this aspect of the rewrite?
@115, it’s not just women who react emotionally and impulsively in Star Trek. Not by a long shot.
@118/roxana: Of course not, but the assumption of ’60s society (and for centuries before, if not millennia) was that, while men might sometimes fall short of masculine reason and give in to their impulses, women could be relied on to consistently follow their hearts over their minds.
@112/Keleborn: I like that.
@115/Christopher: Or perhaps the scene was written by someone who didn’t know much about transporters. Not all that unlikely, given Fontana’s story that the third season story editor once asked: “By the way, what does that transporter thing do again?”
@118/Roxana: Or generally in fiction. Or in real life.
@119/Christopher: Are you sure? One of my linguistics professors once claimed that women were always constructed as the opposite to men, and that during the Romantic era, when emotions were fashionable, many men complained that women were “cold”.
@120/JanaJansen,
“What does that transporter thing do again?”
Hilarious. Or possibly sad. Or maybe both.
By the way, I updated slightly my remark @108.
@120/Jana: Well, of course there are exceptions to everything, and fluctuations to everything. Nothing is fixed and unchanging for all time. But the notion that men are rational and women emotional has existed for a long time, to one degree or another — as far back as Ancient Greece at least. Although we’re talking here specifically about attitudes in the 1960s, of course.
105/ JanaJansen
Now that’s an interesting question that you pose. My answer is I would rather not have a woman shown in a position of power if she is made to act the way the Romulan commander does. Right from the moment she lays her eyes on Spock, it seems she loses all perspective. Let alone a professional, she doesn’t even act like a woman of her years but more like (as the review says) a love-lorn teenager, bending backwards (literally as well as figuratively) to get the man who somehow has caught her fancy. Her behaviour, actions, and (at times) body-language are so vomit-inducing. I am also surprised how she came to hold such a position of power.
And what about Romulan pride? The male Romulan Commander in BALANCE OF TERROR dies an honourable death but even this honour is denied to the woman. She appears in a flimsy dress in front of her subordinates and the bridge of Enterprise leaving nobody in any doubt what she and Spock were up to. Let alone honour, she is stripped of all dignity. What respect, I wonder, her crew would have for her now?
And I disagree with you. Gender has everything to do with it. If sub-commander Tal (and Jack Donner plays him regally) had been in command instead of her, things would not have been shown to work out this way. I agree that the actress playing the commander has a presence and therefore it is doubly tragic that she was shown to be so incompetent.
I sympathise with D.C Fontana’s frustration with the way things were finally shown. Anybody has more details as to what the original story-line was?
@122/Christopher: Yes, that’s true, although the focus may have been more on weakness and inferiority than on emotion. But I haven’t really read all that much about the subject.
@123/bk: I didn’t mean that gender had nothing to do with the way she was written, only that in-story, it wasn’t an issue. That’s important to me. For example, I did not get the impression that her crew, or her adversaries, had less respect for her after her capture, nor do I agree that she was “stripped of all dignity”. I find that she showed a lot of dignity in a bad situation.
I linked to an outline of the original storyline in comment #95. They tricked a male commander, there was no declaration of love, and Sarek was in it.
I read the Romulan commander’s actions very differently than you do. The sense I get of her is that she’s trying to turn Spock, to get him to defect to the Romulan side, and this would be a great coup for her. Not only would she gain an officer of Spock’s obvious quality, but she would gain his knowledge of Starfleet’s secrets. As the first officer of the Enterprise, Spock is privy to a lot — as this episode shows — that the average officer doesn’t know. The secrets he’s carrying are worth offering him a ship of his own, even if he’d been a dofus, which of course he isn’t.
So she’s trying to seduce Spock to turn him, even as he’s trying to seduce her to stall for time. Each of them is playing the other, and the fact that Spock succeeds where she fails does not mean that her efforts were poor or pathetic or that she was motivated solely by romantic/sexual desire. Stalling for time takes less time and less commitment than truly turning someone, so Spock has the advantage here.
I don’t think we actually know how much of the Romulan commander’s interest in Spock is ACTUALLY romantic and/or sexual and how much of that she’s feigning, in order to beguile him into betraying Kirk and Starfleet. She’s throwing everything she has at Spock, try to to get him — and his knowledge of Starfleet’s secrets — for her side. Have some flattery, have some great food, have a drink, have a captaincy, have me. If Spock had been a lesser person than he is — had he been less loyal to Kirk, less loyal to Starfleet, less loyal to his principles, then she might well have succeeded. Her campaign foundered on Spock’s integrity, but it may well have worked with, say, Chekov.
So I see her as a powerful character. Yeah, she loses, but not because she’s too dumb to realize that she’s being played; she, herself was playing just as hard.
And if you take THAT reading of the Romulan commander’s actions, this becomes a very different episode. Oh, it’s still pretty improbable, but that’s true of most caper stories and most thrillers; they’re supposed to rattle along so quickly that you don’t have time to think about how improbable it all is; dinging this episode for doing what caper stories do seems mean-spirited to me.
Besides, I think Spock’s stroking fingers with the Romulan commander is hotter than all the lip-mashing Kirk ever did with the Babe of the Week. :-)
@125/Corylea,
In alignment with this interpretation, we might interpret the Romulan Commander as finding the prospect of acquiring the Enterprise, and turning Spock, as itself vaguely erotic. So it wouldn’t have been too difficult for her to act as if she is “turned on”.
Hee! Interesting idea. It’s true that a lot of people find power sexy…
@126/Corylea That’s how I view the episode and the commander’s actions as well. Its clearly much more than just that she’s attracted to him. She’s trying to turn him. He’s a very valuable asset. We see similar events on modern spy shows like “Homeland.” Also, we can’t forget that the commander has probably never met an actual Vulcan before, and only heard stories about them. So that would instantly make Spock very interesting to her on many levels. She also doesn’t necessarily have enough respect or understanding of Vulcan philosophy to know that turning any Vulcan would be almost impossible. As an audience we know how unlikely Spock is to be turned, but the commander doesn’t know him like we do.
I really like Spock’s line of, “You underestimate yourself.” It shows a level of care for her on his part, and it also shows that her tactics to try and turn him weren’t completely ineffective. Maybe her pitch did appeal to him on some level.
Overall I think its a great episode. I acknowledge some of the plot holes or hand-waving necessary for the story to work, but I really found the episode entertaining from start to finish. The pacing was great, and things actually happened! The Romulan Commander was strong, sexy, compelling, and willing to own her mistakes. Also, isn’t it nuts that the Romulan uniforms are way better here than on TNG/DS9. They look really good here. Why did they have to change them?!
I never doubted that the Commander was seducing Spock in order to turn him. We had after all seen Kirk using his sexuality the same way in other episodes. Maybe she enjoyed her work and was a little bitter to find he had been playing her all along but she wasn’t motivated by wuv.
@46/Crusader75: “Speaking of saving money on effects, the cloaking device appears to be Nomad’s head stuck on Sargon’s glow globe soul jar.”
And speaking of saving money on costumes, am I the only one that noticed the Romulans are wearing the Enterprise’s bedsheets? Seriously, go back to any episode where you get to see Kirk’s bed. Now look at the Romulans.
I admit that it isn’t identical, but for the sake of poking fun at the costumes… isn’t the pattern of the fabric remarkably similar? (Well, I think so, anyway.)
I think that calls for another Wah-HEY!
Speaking of ‘cash starved’, the cloaking device was a retooled “Nomad”, from the Changeling episode. But the commander was kind of Milf-y hot. Spock should have ‘hit that’.
@132/Steve: Nomad’s head plus Sargon’s globe, put into the console that had been various things including Landru’s conversion station.
The Romulan commander is the best and most honest portrayal of a woman in the entire series. Not a surprise that DC Fontana wrote it. I love this episode and I wish Joanne Linville had been a regular actress on the show.
I know krad says the rating is always the least important part of the rewatch, but I still think a 1 is much too harsh. The episode itself actually reminds me of a high quality brick of swiss cheese. Plot holes galore, but entirely watchable.
Showing us a female in charge of not only a ship, but a small fleet, is impressive considering TOS‘s still largely sexist view on women. Even though the Romulan commander seemed terribly naive in the end, she was still a commanding presence throughout most of the episode. It’s too bad that Joanne Linville’s work is undermined by the script.
The script isn’t a total loss though, there’s some good world building here and #48/Edgar Governo makes a good point: “…it’s one of the few episodes of TOS that’s actually about the state of interstellar relations in that setting…”
There is one scene that confused me. When the Romulan officers are exchanged for Kirk and Spock, they beam over and seem shocked to be on the Enterprise‘s transporter platform. Weren’t they told that they were being exchanged? They also pull out their sidearms and Scotty just stands there looking tough and unconcerned…
@krad/Captain’s log:
Actually, doesn’t Kirk state that she will be taken to crew quarters and be confined there?
@44/CLB:
I wonder if that’s why the D’deridex-class is filled with so much negative space. It’s designed to look huge and intimidating, while generally having not much more actual mass than other powers’ ships of the line. Power efficiency for the cloaking device could have been a factor in its design too.
@63/CLB:
When I was younger, before I became a Star Trek fan, I’d occasionally catch a TOS episode here and there if I came across it. It seemed every episode I saw, Kirk was kissing someone. That gave me the erroneous impression that he did it in every episode! When I finally saw an episode where he didn’t, I was surprised. Looking over a list of TOS episodes, he actually only kisses someone in 21 of 79 episodes. It’s still a significant amount though, definitely in line with those TV days.
Wasn’t she playing Spock like a boss might use their power and position to get a subordinate to give up what she wants from him for her career. But also as it continues on she also respects him, until the ending dashes all of that? She isn’t just googly eyed because she is attracted to Spock. She is actually a layered and believable leader from a harsh empire in many ways.
Okay, why has nobody asked just WHY nobody knows anything about the Romulans. They had a war 100 years before, and nobody has bothered to listened in on their radio and TV in all that time? It was implied that the Romulans has spies in Starfleet, and thanks to a few Tribbles, we know the Klingons has spies in the Federation– so why doesn’t the Federation sneak a few guys into the Romulan Empire and learn more about them? I also find it hard to believe that the Vulcans were completely unaware of a large number of their people settling down not all that far away on Romulus. “Oh, they’re gone… Who cares?” Really? Okay, why has nobody asked just WHY nobody knows anything about the Romulans. They had a war 100 years before, and nobody has bothered to listened in on their radio and TV? It was implied that the Romulans has spies in Starfleet, and thanks to a few Tribbles, we know the Klingons has spies in the Federation– so why doesn’t the Federation sneak a few guys into the Romulan Empire and learn more about them? I also find it hard to believe that the Vulcans were completely unaware of a large number of their people settling down not all that far away on Romulus. “Oh, they’re gone… Who cares?” Really?
@137: “sorry about a typing problem. The browser I use really sucks (Firefox).
@137/Ron: “They had a war 100 years before, and nobody has bothered to listened in on their radio and TV in all that time?”
Star Trek: Picard and its tie-in materials establish that the Romulans are a deeply secretive and paranoid culture by default, cloaking everything they do in multiple layers of concealment and deception (with the Qowat Milat’s “Absolute Candor” philosophy being a counterreaction against that cultural norm). So it follows that they would routinely mask or encrypt their broadcasts to confound eavesdroppers.
Anyway, realistically, an advanced civilization probably wouldn’t have broadcasts that could be eavesdropped on from other star systems. Science popularizers often talk about how our old TV signals have spread to other stars, but we’ve already switched mainly to cable and tight-beamed satellite transmissions for mass media, so we don’t spill a lot of signal into space anymore, except for things like military radar. A tightly focused beam aimed directly at the receiving station is always going to be more effective and waste less energy than a wide broadcast that anyone can pick up. Logically, that would be true of subspace radio as well as conventional radio.
“I also find it hard to believe that the Vulcans were completely unaware of a large number of their people settling down not all that far away on Romulus.”
The Romulans left during the nuclear wars that nearly destroyed Vulcan civilization until Surak’s philosophy took hold. Vulcan needed nearly 1500 years to rebuild their civilization to the point where they could return to space. A lot of knowledge could’ve been lost in those wars and over the ensuing centuries.
And yet in ST09, Uhura not only speaks Romulan but all three dialects. Somehow Nero showing up made it a lot easier for the Federation to know about the Romulans,
@140/kkozoriz: Actually, I’d argue that J.J. Abrams and co. showing up made it a lot easier for the Federation to know about the Romulans.
Well, it’s entirely logical that Kelvin Starfleet would learn more about Romulans after the Narada attack. In Prime, the Romulans had been a non-issue for a century and there was little incentive to dig deeper. In Kelvin, a Starfleet vessel was destroyed by what appeared to be an impossibly advanced Romulan ship, which would’ve motivated the Federation to investigate the Romulans far more actively, to make diplomatic contact to demand an explanation, etc. And the Romulan government would’ve had no idea where the Narada came from and would’ve had an incentive to open a diplomatic dialogue and prove that it wasn’t their fault, in order to head off a war they hadn’t chosen and weren’t prepared for. Indeed, they’d probably be eager to get answers about this advanced mystery ship claiming to be theirs, and that would be an incentive to come out of isolation and engage with the powers that had encountered the Narada, i.e. the Federation and the Klingons.
So by 25 years later, when the bulk of the movie takes place, it stands to reason that Kelvin Starfleet would know roughly as much about the Romulans as Prime Starfleet did by 25 years after “Balance of Terror” (i.e. between ST V & VI).
If the neutral zone in the Kelvinverse was set up the same as the one in BOT, there really wasn’t a lot that Starfleet could do other than shouting over the fence. If the Romulans didn’t want to talk to them, they simply could ignore them. Unless Starfleet decides to get more hands on and sends ships across the zone looking for answers. Which, of course, would be considered an act of war.
One problem with that, Simon Pegg has said Nero’s incursion changed history in both temporal directions. So we cannot be 100% sure that history was the same before Nero showed up.
@143/kkozoriz: Everyone mistakenly attributes that to Simon Pegg, but it actually came from Michael and Denise Okuda in the revised ST Encyclopedia, which Pegg evidently got an advance look at, so he was able to mention it before the book came out. But the timing makes it clear that the passage in the book must have been written well before Pegg’s statement.
And the Okudas’ premise was only that some slight alterations might have occurred retroactively; it was their attempt to rationalize a few minor inconsistencies in the first two movies that were hard to reconcile (like the much more built-up San Francisco skyline), and to open a door for subsequent filmmakers to diverge the continuities even further if they so chose. Ironically, Beyond, which Pegg co-wrote, was the one film that had the fewest inconsistencies with Prime continuity, making the handwave unnecessary there.
Anyway, the handwave was never intended to say “All bets are off, everything is different.” I think fans are too quick to abuse it that way. The intention was that the timelines were still mostly similar, but the handwave could be used to rationalize whatever couldn’t be justified some other way. I see it as a last resort, something to be used judiciously when all else fails.
If there’s inconsistencies then there are differences and therefore the changes did go both ways on the timeline. Sure, they can be mostly the same but you’re trying to have it both ways by saying that the Federation suddenly had lots of contact with the Romulans, so much so that someone who is still a cadet could have learned all three dialects of the Romulan language. I doubt very much that the 23rd century version of Rosetta Stone made these languages available. If there was contact, it would most likely be of a very limited sort at the highest levels on both sides of the neutral zone.
And why should Neros appearance lead to things like starships being built on the ground in Iowa, replacement of viewscreens with windows, ships being built MUCH bigger? And that’s just in regards to the Enterprise. As you say, San Francisco looks nothing even similar to what we have seen before. And yet, somehow, it’s all supposed to have changed in the 20 years since Nero. The loss of one ship, The sacrifice of one officer, along with those lost in the initial attack and the disappearance of the Narada as Nero later showed up with it and it was not in Starfleet custody. Stuff like that should happen all the time,
Mr. Kim, we’re Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job. – Captain Janeway.
“If there’s inconsistencies then there are differences and therefore the changes did go both ways on the timeline.”
There are countless inconsistencies in any single Star Trek series and between different series. If we invoked an alternate timeline for every tiny discrepancy, we’d need thousands of them. That’s why we usually just suspend disbelief and ignore the discrepancies.
Have you watched the TBG episode Parallels?
And this line?
Captain, we’re receiving two hundred eighty five thousand hails.
We’ve already exceeded your thousands of timelines by a couple of orders of magnitude. And the ships were still coming.
So we saw an episode of WNMHGB with James R Kirk and later saw a bunch of adventures of James T Kirk. That doesn’t mean that James T Kirk didn’t have an adventure very, very close to WNMHGB. In Mirror Mirror, the crews were much the same yet there was an identical acid stain on McCoy’s workbench. He even pointed it out to is. So the people can be different, if not in persons but just in personality or morality, yet the adventures they have can still be very, very similar.
I have no problem assigning an inconsistency to an alternate universe while still being able to imagine that the crew I watched the week before is having a very similar adventure somewhere else. You, obviously do not. Which is fine because it’s all made up anyway. None of it matters except for the people that watch and enjoy it (for whatever reason) and for the people that own and create it (including episode writers, actors, producers, spin-off writers, artists and the like) because it makes them money. There’s no ONE way to watch it.
Parallel Universe are always good for big discrepancies that cannot be otherwise explained, which is all to the good, and also for taking care of the stuff that needs ejected from the Franchise as being a disgrace it it. Your Thresholds, your Dear Doctors, Profits and Lace, Counterclock Incidents, Homewards, Star Trek Vs, pretty much every S31 episode, Lower Decks and Discovery. They can safely be dumped in alternate dimension territory and move on.
Parallel universes are a plot device to be used when there’s a story reason for doing so. They’re not a handwave for explaining continuity errors or alterations. Kirstie Alley Saavik is not in a parallel universe from Robin Curtis Saavik. James R. Kirk is not in a parallel universe from James T. Kirk. Such discrepancies are in how the story is told, but we look beyond them and accept the fictitious conceit that they represent a continuous reality, because that’s what the narrative wants us to do. That’s what drives it — not the details, but the overall needs of the narrative. If the narrative needs them to be the same, they’re the same even if they’re presented to us differently. (Spock Prime recognizes Kelvin Kirk and Scott on sight, so they must look the same in-story even though they’re played by different actors.) So parallel universes should only be invoked when the narrative calls for it, when the difference is meant to be part of the story. Otherwise it’s mistaking an extradiegetic change for a diegetic one.
Fan theories about parallel universes aren’t, usually, meant to be taken seriously. It’s just a bit of fun to explain goofs and inconsistencies. I seem to remember one about Spot because the cat’s breed changes from episode to episode. Either that or it’s a Changeling infiltrating the Federation’s flagship!
See, fun.
@150/Benny: That’s just it, though — I don’t think it’s fun at all, because it’s a copout. The fun way to resolve a continuity discrepancy is to think of a clever way to reconcile it. Yelling “alternate timeline!” at the slightest discrepancy is just avoiding the creative challenge of thinking up a fix. It’s the lazy way out. And it’s wasteful, like buying a new car when you get a flat tire — it’s a far more radical response than the problem needs.
@151
Well, that’s a negative take. I don’t think you’re giving people enough credit. Sure, it can be lazy to quickly say “alternate timeline” and leave it there, but it doesn’t necessarily have to end there in the minds of the audience. Alternate universes can just as well be a way to consider how things might have happened and going down that rabbit hole (and have fun doing it). How different might have James R. Kirk’s life been? What’s the R stand for? Maybe it’s an alternate timeline. Or maybe it’s the same timeline and it’s a reference to a derisive nickname Kirk had at the academy. Either method inspires questions, and questions inspire creativity.
There’s no one way to think about these things, and trying to argue against it with the fandom is about as futile as herding Spots. Might as well let them have their fun. And who knows, thinking along alternate universe lines just might inspire that fan to become – da DA DUM! – a writer!
@151 – YOU don’t think it’s fun at all. YOU think it’s a copout. That doesn’t mean it’s a copout or not fun for anyone else. You think the fun this is to find a way to reconcile it. Fine, go for it. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else has to line up behind you.
By bringing up alternate universes, you open yourself to seeing the possibilities that may not exist when everything MUST be smushed together, held in place by duct tape, wishes and simply ignoring parts of the stories. It’s what works for me and, perhaps, others as well. That doesn’t make our version any more or less valid than yours because it’s all fiction. It’s all made up. None of it is real.
As far as it being lazy, you try keeping all the various versions straight in you head when you’re watching a new episode. It’s not work but it sure isn’t lazy.
So, how do you reconcile the turbolifts on Discovery? What exactly are we seeing there? Not expecting answer but it sure doesn’t seem to fit what we’ve seen of turboshafts before.
And I don’t think that every discrepancy means it’s an alternate universe. I have no problem imagining that there’s spotted Trills and bumpy headed ones existing side by side. The existence of one does not mean that the other cannot exist. Same with Andorians. And there’s Tellarites with three large fingers as well as those with humanlike hands. Is there a reason for them? Nope. Other than TPTB always want to make their mark on the series and sometimes that means making changes to the way things look for no reason other than it’s they way they think things should be.
So the Guardian of Forever can say “I was made to offer the past in this manner. I cannot change.” one time and yet, a few years later, can send you to an exact point in space and time and then, even later, appear as an old man in a bowler hat. Some people accept all three as the same thing. Others, choose to interpret it differently. What difference does it make in the grand scheme of things? Not a bit.
@151 – I was jusr rereading some of the other rewatch threads and came across this one from May 25, 2017 written by you:
“Star Trek fans have actually become kind of handicapped in the imagination compared to fans of other franchises, because all the different productions have pretended to be in a single shared universe. Most Marvel fans don’t scream bloody murder when the MCU movies and TV shows rejigger the stories to tell them differently than the comics did; most DC fans don’t complain about the Arrowverse, Gotham, and the DCEU movies being mutually incompatible realities that also change a ton from the comics. Some always do, of course, but most understand that the different stories are putting the concepts and tropes together in different ways and not trying to be mutually consistent. Star Trek today is not like that; even though every different TV and movie has retconned a ton of stuff, we still pretend it’s all one whole and elevate continuity above all else.”
So, what’s changed? Sounds to me like the Christopher from 2017 is on my side.
@154
2017 was an alternate timeline. ;-)
2020 was some kind of nightmare Alternate Reality
@156 – I wish it was an alternate reality In November my wife passed away after a heart attack and a battle with cancer and then a month later, my Dad died.
If ever there was a year when we needed a do over, 2020 was it.
kkozoriz: I’m so incredibly sorry for your losses. Agreed on the desire for a do-over of last year. :(
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@157
My deepest sympathies for your losses, kkozoriz. I lost my grandmother and two aunts to covid and my cousin to cancer last year. Such an awful 2020 for us all. A do-over needed indeed.
@159 & 159 – Thank you both for the kind words. When we’re surrounded by Covid, it was almost a relief that neither of them died from it while at the same time being devastated that it was from something else, if that makes any sense at all.
Seeing as the rest of my family is out west and I’m on the east coast, one of the biggest regrets is that in neither case was there a memorial service. Perhaps later this year something could be arranged but in the mean time, it feels unfinished somehow.
I assume people really liked the Romulan commander and Spock’s “romance” with her a whole lot because I can’t see why “The Enterprise Incident” would be held up as a classic. I like it better than the previous two episodes but that’s hardly an achievement. The commander believing in a Vulcan death grip immediately jumped out at me once it was established there’s no such thing, and when I think about it the plot can be described as “a woman in command no longer feels like a woman and yearns for romance the first chance she gets,” so maybe I should hate this as much as the last two. There’s a little bit about Spock also yearning to cut loose and find romance, but it’s just a tiny bit of the whole thing compared to how the commander’s portrayed.
I liked seeing the Romulans again though, so I guess there’s that.
@161/Fujimoto: When I watched this in the late 1970s, it wasn’t the romance I liked, it was the Romulan commander. It was wonderful to see a woman in command of a starship, and whatever her actions, the way Joanne Linville played her still made her a believable leader for me. It was rare and unprecedented and captured my imagination. Others must have had the same reaction, because she kept popping up in Star Trek novels by female writers for many years, and it was established early on that Romulans had gender equality.
Also, I liked seeing the Romulans – in my case, not again but for the first time.
Joanne Linville has passed away, at the age of ninety-three.
I re-watched this episode yesterday for the first time in years. KRAD, you are far too kind in giving this mess a Warp Factor Rating of 1. It deserves and Impulse Power Rating of 1/4.
I remembered I loved this episode when I was in school. Must’ve been because I was entranced with the idea of a female Romulan commander. Watching it now, I realize she’s not a very good commander. She lets herself be duped by Spock (btw, I hadn’t seen the epi in decades, so I misremembered and thought that Kirk was the one who seduced her.) The she gets herself captured by throwing herself on Spock while he’s being transported out. Really? She thought she could physically hold him down so he wouldn’t be beamed out?
Linville did do a great job though portraying a strong female commander.It’s just the script didn’t do her any favors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__0WAX1j-GY
A silly mistake this episode made that I never picked up on.
I have long disliked this episode because (a) I couldn’t fathom the Federation/Starfleet doing something so deceitful and underhanded; and (b) the love-seduction scenes between Spock and the lady Romulan commander were hard to stomach. But now I realize it was a fairly well made episode and was probably yet another allegory to Cold Wat politics and espionage. But I also wondered whatever became of the Romulan Commander? Given that she willingly let herself be captured (by embracing Spock as he as being beamed back tio Enterprise) and that she weas ultimately responsible for losing the cloaking device, I would imagine the highly militaristic Romulan Empire would punish her severely. But it was not clear if the Enterprise was going to return her to the Romulans or not. I think Kirk said she would be “dropped off” at some Federation planet.
@167 palash
“dropped off” was a euphemism. She was never seen again…
More seriously, she figured prominently in a couple of Trek novels I happened to like a lot, written way back when: The Price of the Phoenix, and The Fate of the Phoenix, both written by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this episode after watching it during a sick day from work. I’ve always really liked it in that my assumption is that Kirk and Spock know EXACTLY which fleet commander they’re going to run into if they cross the Neutral zone at the coordinates Kirk specifies. I’ve always surmised they have some intelligence that indicates the Commander of said fleet has a fascination with Vulcans and a penchant for carelessness. The Romulans might not know about personnel on Federation ships, but there’s no reason to believe that the Federation doesn’t know about which Romulan ships and commanders are patrolling the border. Given sufficient prep time, maybe they beamed propaganda toward that sector with talk about false Vulcan traits like “death grips.”
Also, it’s fun to see the dawning realization from the bridge crew that it was all an act and that Kirk really wasn’t bonkers
I just thought the episode was plain hilarious. Especially Kirk flipping out. His whole face changed a couple of shots after Spock declared that the captain was not sane. And the cheesy grin on Scotty’s face when he first saw Kirk with Romulan eyebrows. Also, when Kirk was supposed to be dead, he still had a look of pain on his face. This is actually one of my favorite 3rd-season episodes.
My biggest beef with this episode is that every episode after this, to this day, remembers only one line from this show: Vulcans cannot lie.
The can, they do. Spock does. It’s not just exaggeration. He lies. If I recall, in the Blish novelization, Spock expands on this by saying, “Of COURSE we can lie.”
Other than that, yeah, dumb plot, fun ep. It works for me.
This is an odd episode, because it almost feels like it belongs to an entirely different genre than most other episodes of the original series. Perhaps it’s that novelty that made me like it so much as a kid, overlooking its many plot conveniences, that and Joanne Linville’s terrific performance. I still enjoy watching it today, but that probably has more to do with nostalgia than merit. I do think the idea of the Commander and Spock as two enemies trying to out-seduce one another for reasons of state is a fun idea, but it would have been more interesting if Commander hadn’t lost the contest so quickly and completely.