“The Lorelei Signal”
Written by Margaret Armen
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 4
Production episode 22006
Original air date: September 29, 1973
Stardate: 5483.7
Captain’s log. The Enterprise is investigating a section of space in which many ships—Federation, Klingon, Romulan—have disappeared over the centuries. The Enterprise detects a signal from the Taurean system on the edge of the sector, one that sounds like a simple tone. The men on the bridge liken it to a summons, though Uhura doesn’t get that vibe from it at all.
As they approach, Uhura summons Chapel to the bridge to see if she sees how weird the men are acting. The men start experiencing audiovisual hallucinations, but Uhura and Chapel see and hear nothing except the signal. Kirk is concerned, but the men soon become completely distracted.
They arrive at Taurean II, and Kirk beams down with Spock, McCoy, and Carver, where they admire the architecture. On the Enterprise, Scotty waxes rhapsodic about the planet in the captain’s log. Meanwhile, Uhura is finding discrepancies in Spock’s readings.
On the planet, Kirk is very nonchalant about examining the planet, and then they come across a mess of women, led by a woman named Theela, who welcome the landing party and invite them to a feast. They control their technology via tones they sing.
All the men are captivated by the women and soon collapse from exhaustion. When they wake up, they’re all wearing odd headbands and they’re all noticeably older. They try to appeal to Theela to let them go back to their ship, but the women refuse, saying that the men are needed—and the landing party are all too weak to resist as the women toss them about.
Uhura and Chapel have female science teams run tests, and they determine that there is a beam coming from the planet that is enervating to humanoid males. Realizing the danger, Uhura immediately takes charge of the ship, posting female security guards on all transporters. Scotty is too busy singing Welsh ditties to really give a damn, so Uhura officially takes command of the Enterprise.
McCoy injects the landing party with a stimulant to help them fight the effects and they manage a prison break. When the women are nearby, the headbands glow, but they don’t when they’re separated—Spock hypothesizes that the women are sucking the life out of the men-folk. Since Spock is the strongest of them, he goes off to find the communicators so they can contact the Enterprise, while the other three hide in a giant urn. Before he collapses from his efforts, Spock manages to get a message to Uhura, who immediately beams down with Chapel and an all-female security team. They stun Theela and her helpers and find Spock, who urges Chapel to use ship’s power to block the signal to the planet.
Uhura questions Theela, who reveals that the planet was colonized by humanoids, but the planet itself drained the life out of the men—the women were immune and they learned to control certain parts of men’s minds. But while the men wither and die, the women are immortal, but sterile.
It starts raining, and the urn is starting to fill with water—Kirk, McCoy, and Carver will drown, but Uhura and her security team manage to destroy the urn with phasers and save them from drowning.
All attempts to revitalize the landing party fail, until Spock hits on using the transporter to rematerialize them with the patterns they had when they beamed down. This somehow works. Theela smashes the device they use to lure ships to the planet and Uhura promises to send an all-woman ship to take them to another world where they can live their lives without having to drain the life from unsuspecting people. No mention of criminal charges of kidnapping and murder is made for some odd reason.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The transporter shows the magical ability to restore someone from a previous pattern, a radically impressive use of the technology that should revolutionize medicine from that day forward. It won’t.
Fascinating. Spock is able to keep his mojo a bit better than Kirk, McCoy, or Carver, as he is longer lived and stronger. He also comes up with the crazy-ass plan to save the day.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy provides the landing party with a stimulant that enables them to escape, though it doesn’t give them enough to later climb out of the urn as it’s filling with rainwater.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura realizes right away something’s up, and takes all the right steps—getting Chapel to confirm her suspicions, not taking command until she’s verified what’s happening scientifically, and then kicking ass and taking names when she beams down.
It’s not clear why she needed Spock to tell her to send a security team down, though…
I cannot change the laws of physics! While in command of the ship, and under the influence of Theela and her gang, Scotty decides to start singing “Yr Hufen Melyn” (“The Yellow Cream”) by Eifion Wyn. It’s a Welsh ballad, which is surprising coming from the Scotsman, but whatever. It’s certainly grounds for being relieved of command, and at least it sounds nicer than “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” or “Heart of Oak” or “Maiden Wine.”
Go put on a red shirt. Carver is part of the landing party and wears red. It’s unclear whether or not he’s security or engineering. Meanwhile, Uhura beams down with a quartet of female security guards.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Spock and Chapel are close enough that Spock can communicate with her telepathically. Hubba.
Channel open. “You’re more handsome than ever.”
Uhura’s response to Kirk being restored to his normal age. The limitations of Filmation’s animation techniques mean we don’t actually see her drooling or waggling her eyebrows….
Welcome aboard. Nichelle Nichols provides four voices—including, strangely, the voice of the Enterprise computer, which is usually done by Majel Barrett, as well as Uhura, Theela’s second in command Dara, and Security Officer Davison. For her part, Barrett does Chapel and Theela. James Doohan plays Scotty, and also provides Carver’s one and only line.
Trivial matters: The title refers to the German legend of the Lorelei, who bewitched men and led them to their deaths.
Margaret Armen previously wrote “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome,” as well as the script for “The Cloud Minders.” She’ll be back to write “The Ambergris Element.”
This is the first time Uhura is seen to be in command of the Enterprise, and only the second time we’ve female members of the security team—the only other one being Tamura in “A Taste of Armageddon.”
Spock’s ability to get Chapel’s attention telepathically probably is a result of their sharing a brain in “Return to Tomorrow.”
In their reference work Star Trek 101, Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann awarded this episode with their “Spock’s Brain” award for worst episode of the series.
To boldly go. “Obstruct them!” I really want to like this episode. It finally puts Uhura in charge of the ship, something that should have happened back in “Catspaw,” if nowhere else, and it’s great fun to watch her kick ass and take names and do much of the work in saving the day. This couldn’t have happened in the live-action series, but the intervening years saw the rise of the “women’s lib” movement, the debut of Ms. magazine, and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by Congress. Plus nobody was paying any attention to a kids’ show…
Unfortunately, while Uhura is great in this, and Nichelle Nichols takes full advantage of the opportunity, the actual story is—well, about as good as you would expect from the writer of “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Paradise Syndrome,” and “The Cloud Minders.” To wit, dumber than a box of hair. The woman who ensorcells men is almost literally the oldest story in the book, and—unlike, say, the riff on it done by the other show I’m currently rewatching, which at least gave us Joan Collins—this adds nothing of interest to the legend. Theela and her minions make the Eymorgs of “Spock’s Brain” look like they belong in Mensa.
The stupidities pile up: if Theela and her women can just leave the planet, why haven’t they done so on any of the dozens of ships they’ve nabbed? Also—what happened to the women on those ships? For that matter, what happened to the ships? If the fancy device can find the landing party in the urn, why was Theela sending out search parties to find them earlier?
Of course, it’s still left to Spock to do all the heavy lifting. Yes, Uhura and Chapel are clever and proactive, but it still takes Spock to tell them to beam down a security team, and it’s Spock who comes up with the solution.
And holy crap that solution! The magical transporter fixes all the problems by setting it to reboot in safe mode from an earlier start date. Or whatever it is they do. The notion that the transporter can actually do this is at once amazing and revolting, and it makes no sense, none, that it wasn’t used for medical purposes more often. (They try to fig-leaf its lack of regular use by having Scotty say that either it’ll cure them or kill them, but c’mon. Just the fact that it can work means it should at least be researched for mass use…)
Yeah. I love Uhura in charge, I just wish it was in a good episode.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: “More Tribbles, More Troubles”
Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest release is the Super City Cops novella Avenging Amethyst, an excerpt of which can be found on this very site. It’s the first of three novellas about police in a city filled with costumed heroes and villains published by Bastei Entertainment. Full information, including the cover, promo copy, ordering links, and another excerpt can be found on Keith’s blog. The next two novellas, Undercover Blues and Secret Identities, will be released in January and February.
Instead, it will only be referenced as a possibility one more time, in TNG‘s “Unnatural Selection,” and never even considered again
And Rascals, I think (the technobabble might be slightly different, haven’t seen the ep in ten years).
Agreed on this episode. Good for the trivia question of “When was Uhura in charge of the Enterprise?” and nothing else.
Probably for the best that the events of TAS were basically forgotten. Logically, the Federation should be very interested in weaponizing the beam seen here, but that would just be too silly a concept to introduce into the franchise..
@1 Dunsel is correct. Thirty seconds into Rascals, I was yelling at the TV “Just run them through the transporter buffer like you did with Dr. Pulaski in Unnatural Selection!” Had I seen this episode at that point in time, I could have cited TWO references to ways to fix the problem. In the case of Rascals, it took a shipload of highly trained Starfleet officers 45 minutes of on-screen time to figure out what I was telling them from jump.
I was also going to mention Rascals, and I think there may have been a couple of others where they used an old pattern to fix a problem.
It’s great that Uhura got to be in charge, but it would be 20 years before another woman got the conn. I think we got to see Dr. Crusher handing over command at the end of her shift to inspire Troi to take command classes, but actually exercising command on-screen didn’t happen until Troi had the bridge when the ship was damaged and Picard got stuck in an elevator full of children.
Uhura in command is great, and it’s nice to learn that there are female security guards and female engineers on the Enterprise. But apart from that, I find this one worse than “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, and much worse than “The Paradise Syndrome” and “The Cloud Minders”, which I rather like despite their flaws. It’s the first time this actually feels like a kiddie show.
At least they keep varying the position of the bands put on our guys while they’re imprisoned in a goofy episode. Collars in “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, belts in “Spock’s Brain”, headbands now. What’s next?
Keith, Tamura was a yeoman although she behaved like a security guard.
Please tell me that there isn’t a Robert Bloch TAS episode too.
This episode does have a lot of problems. Okay, so you know starships disappear every 27 years in that sector, so your solution is… send another starship? You couldn’t send a probe? Or have more than one ship on hand to back up whichever ship got in trouble? This was tantamount to a suicide mission. Did Kirk tick somebody off back at Starfleet Command?
Also, the unexamined assumption about all those prior ships’ disappearance is that they all had predominantly male crews, otherwise they never would’ve been caught. I can buy that with the Klingons, but it shouldn’t be a given with the Federation or Romulans. (Not to mention, would gay men be affected? Would lesbian women?)
And if the women were so happy to give up this way of life, why didn’t they ask for help from the first crew that came their way? I could buy it that the draining had become an addiction, but it should’ve been harder for them to give it up.
Also, I always hate rapid-aging episodes, as I’ve mentioned in past rewatches. It’s never plausible that the skin would wrinkle and the hair would turn white in a matter of hours or days. At least their hair didn’t change color here. I also hate the idea of draining “life energy” causing people to age, as if we were all born with some predetermined reserve of life energy that we used up over our lives, rather than, you know, replenishing our energy daily by eating food. (I deeply hated it that Babylon 5, a show that had relatively good science in some respects, made a major ongoing plot point out of this idiotic premise.)
Then there’s Margaret Armen’s insistence on having aliens use names that are variants on terms from Earth. An optical-audio sensor called the opto-aud? Worse, the device that magnetically lured people was called the lura-mag in the script.
The Star Trek Concordance claimed that this episode took place on Taurus II, the same planet where the shuttle crashed in “The Galileo Seven,” even though it’s an unexplored sector and there’s no Murasaki 312 in sight. Obviously that doesn’t make sense. It helps that the dialogue only called it “the second planet in the Taurean system,” so it could be Taurean II as Keith says. (Or maybe Torian II?).
I don’t think that’s Doohan doing Carver’s voice. Carver is uncredited in the original Concordance, and his voice sounds like an actor who did various roles in other Filmation shows of the era, though I’m not sure who he is.
I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t believe Tamura was in security. She was addressed as Yeoman, which is a clerical position. She did do some fighting, but that was necessitated by the situation.
The reason the computer was voiced by Nichols instead of Barrett was probably because it was responding to Nurse Chapel. Frankly, Nichols was better at varying the sound of her voice than Barrett was.
As for why they didn’t use the transporter trick to heal injuries and disease and such, Spock did say the odds of success were nearly a hundred to one against, so it was a dangerous thing to attempt. And in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization, it restored their brains to the point before transport as well as their bodies, so they forgot everything that had happened on the planet. True, it’s implausible that the technique wasn’t refined later on, but that’s a shortcoming of TNG and its successors.
The recently released Star Trek 50th Anniversary Collection from La-La Land Records includes the reconstructed music tracks used in TAS, and the track called “Scanning (alternate mix)” is the version heard in the “audiovisual hallucinations” scene here, with the Vulcan mating drums and harp music hallucinated by Spock and Kirk overlaid on the standard cue. Sadly, the album does not include Doohan’s rendering of “Yr Hufen Melyn.”
@4/Jana: Interesting you should say this is the first episode that seems like a kiddie show, given the implied sexuality in its premise — a planet of gorgeous, irresistibly seductive women with plunging necklines, McCoy voicing his admiration of bodily functions, etc. Of course, maybe it’s the very tame execution of that theoretically sexy concept that makes it feel so juvenile by contrast. But while I was rewatching it, I did find myself wondering how a premise like this ever got approved for TAS in the first place.
@4/Jana – it’s nice to learn that there are female security guards and female engineers on the Enterprise.
Keith says we saw a female security guard in “A Taste of Armageddon,” but I thought Tamura was a captain’s yeoman, much like the late Yeoman Thompson in “By Any Other Name.” At any rate, we had seen a female engineer in TOS – Lieutenant Masters (albeit wearing blue rather than red).
This episode was trying for its time, I think, but comes up woefully short by today’s standards.
I remember watching this episode when it first came out in 1973. I totally agree with your review. Seeing Uhura get to be in charge and fully rising to the occasion is awesome, and I’m sorry this is the only time it ever happened. Everything else in the episode is awful. This is always the episode that pops into my mind whenever I hear anyone defend the quality of TAS. (Although, granted, a few of its episodes do rise to the level of TOS.)
This is probably just headcanon on my part, but back in 1973 when I first saw the show, it being the dawn of women’s equality, as you note, I took the episode to be saying that Enterprise was the first ship not to fall prey to the Taureans because it was the first ship to have women as part of the crew. Or, at least, enough women crewmembers to be able to take charge when the men go gaga. Yes, subsequent canon suggests otherwise, but in the pioneering days of 1973, it was easy to think of women on starships as a fairly recent innovation (less than 27 years ago, apparently.)
I’m surprised no one griped about the “drowning in the urn” thing which always rubbed me the wrong way. Aside from being an obvious plot contrivance to gin up excitement, how much rain would have had to fall to put grown men in danger of drowning? At a rough guess, I’d say twenty or thirty inches, minimum. The Taurean settlement should have been washed away in the flood. Or is Taurean II actually Ferenginar?
The first time I saw TNG’s “Unnatural Selection,” I thought, “I can’t believe out of everything in TAS, this is what they want to borrow?”
The less said about this one, the better. Sure, we finally get Uhura (or any woman for that matter) in command but it’s because there’s literally no men available. Not the best message there folks.
And what does she do once she’s in command? Immediately leave the ship to lead the landing party. Sure, that’s what Kirk would do but you didn’t even have time to get the seat warm before passing it off.
And it’s made all better by the magic transporter. Like many other Trek stories, this solution will be forgotten and never mentioned again.
I don’t share Krad’s feelings about Scotty singing a Welsh song. What’s wrong with having someone expand their cultural horizons? Must everyone only enjoy the music of their own ethnic group? Should Kirk only listen to musicians from Iowa such as The Everly Brothers?
2/10
By the way, this is the first episode so far where the show’s reuse of stock music cues felt like a problem to me. It’s not so much that the cues were reused as that some of them were used inappropriately, like that intense danger cue at the end of Act I when Theela — gasp — invites the men to a banquet! (Specifically the cue called “Intercept Course” on the new CD release, although the tracks were originally known only by catalog numbers.)
@7/metralic: Foster’s novelization clarifies the urn issue. For one thing, it was an exceptionally powerful storm. “It was a typical Taurean storm, but it would have appalled any terran weatherman.” Which means that the buildings were designed to withstand that sort of weather. For another thing, the men were weak and decrepit, barely able to stand, let alone tread water. The novelization also adds a heavy grid over the top of the urn, to keep them from being able to float on the surface.
If the transporter could do that you would have a cure for aging. All you would need is an old pattern of yourself saved.
@5/Christopher: If we take the transporter trick seriously, that means they let poor Galway in “The Deadly Years” die although they could have saved her.
Why does it feel like a kiddie show to me? I thought it was because of the cartoonish plot, but now I wonder if the reason may be that it reminds me of the Isle of Pleasure in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix.
@6/Mike: You’re right, I didn’t think of Masters!
@11/Jana: Well, according to Spock, the transporter trick would’ve killed the subject more than 99 times out of 100. The only reason Kirk, Spock, and McCoy survived is that they had hero immunity, and the only reason the redshirt survived is because he was on a Saturday morning cartoon. A live-action guest star on TOS wouldn’t have stood a chance.
I maintain that Tamura was in security because Kirk asked for a security team to beam down with them, and Tamura actually did security things when on the surface (guarding Mea 7 after they took her prisoner).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@13/krad: I take Kirk’s reference to bringing security people to mean the two male guards who were also there. After all, he didn’t include Spock in his statement to Fox, so it wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of the entire landing party. And bringing a yeoman along to record and assist would’ve been so routine for landing parties (at least in the first season when they had the budget for it) that it wouldn’t warrant a mention. There’s also the fact that she beams down with a tricorder, which wouldn’t make much sense for a security guard. Kirk had her guard Mea 3 because the two guards needed to change into the Eminian uniforms they’d stolen.
Besides, “yeoman” is a specific job title, not a rank. A yeoman does administrative and clerical work. The enlisted rating for a security specialist would be master-at-arms.
For what it’s worth, James Blish’s adaptation refers to “Yeoman Manning and two security guards,” with Manning being Tamura’s name in the script.
Doesn’t the transporter also restore the crew in these animated episodes?
“The Terratin Incident” (the shrinking episode)
“The Counter-Clock Incident” (the aging backwards episode)
Also I listened to Carver’s one line of dialogue several times and it sounded like Doohan to me……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I am a bit puzzled that McCoy is okay using the transporter this way, given how much he hates transporters. The vehemence with which he opposed transporters in TMP does not jive with this “welp, guess we have to reboot ourselves” opinion here. (Obviously he didn’t have much of a choice here, but he doesn’t pitch a tantrum, either.)
@12,
“Well, according to Spock, the transporter trick would’ve killed the subject more than 99 times out of 100.”
But you’ve got the pattern saved, so you can repeat the thing until it works.
@9 CLB: If the music cues were simply numbered, I wonder if someone along the way misread one or transposed some numbers, and then no one did any actual quality control on the soundtrack. A dyslexic soundtrack compiler would go along really well with the colorblind director.
@10 kjtherock: And after “Rascals” the Federation has virtual immortality at the cost of going through puberty every few decades.
@16/krad: I know the actor in question has a somewhat similar voice quality to Doohan, which is no doubt the reason for the confusion. But, as I said, I’m sure I’ve heard this particular voice in other Filmation shows from the era.
@18/ragnarredbeard: “But you’ve got the pattern saved, so you can repeat the thing until it works.”
No, you can’t, because the pattern is just the instructions for how to assemble the matter stream. As Scott said, a failure would scatter the matter stream across space. There’d be nothing left to repeat it on.
Now, TNG established that the transporter couldn’t permanently store a complete pattern of a person, because it didn’t have enough storage space. This makes sense, since a complete record of all the quantum information of every particle in a human body would require exactly as many particles to store, and even a starship computer is only so large and needs the storage space for other things. Also, it’s necessary to explain why transporters can’t clone people en masse or resurrect the dead or whatever. So TNG’s “Unnatural Selection” explained that the transporter merely stored a “trace,” a record of the subject’s genetic code, and Dr. Pulaski was cured by real-time editing of her pattern as she was beamed, superimposing the original genetic pattern onto the mutated form that was causing her rapid aging. So we can assume that something similar was done here — it wasn’t the complete patterns that were stored, just enough to provide a baseline for editing the matter streams and restoring them to health. That’s why they retained their memories in the actual episode, unlike in the Foster version where their brains were reset along with their bodies.
@19/DemetriosX: No, I don’t think the music choices here were in error. I can see why they were made, to some extent. The example I gave was at the end of an act, so it needed some kind of act-out sting, and all of the available act-out cues were pretty big and climactic. If anything, the problem was the writing — ending an act without any real climax or cliffhanger in the story, so that the music kind of had to compensate. So I’m not suggesting the cue was chosen in error — just that I wish there’d been more variety of options so that some more understated act-out cue could’ve been available.
Keith, one plot summary nitpick. I seem to recall that the men’s first collapse before waking up with the headbands was not due to exhaustion; it was because the women drugged them. McCoy said something like “That nectar — potent as Saurian Brandy.”
@9/Chris All that proves is that Alan Dean Foster is smarter than the people who made this episode. (I doubt this surprises anyone.) I would find his explanation more convincing if there were, you know, some evidence on screen, either that the urn has a grid on top (and why would it anyway?) or that the storm really was extreme by terrestrial standards. And why would a people accustomed to rainstorms of several feet of water at a time even put open urns outdoors in the first place? Do they breed mosquitoes as a hobby? (I know, I know. I am way overthinking this….)
But the very worst thing about this episode is its premise: women who enjoy eternal youth, beauty, and comfort…by ruthlessly sucking the very life essence out of every man they can get their hooks into. It’s like every nasty thing ever said about women by every woman-hating man ever, all squeezed together into one concentrated package of misogyny. Yuck.
@21/richf: McCoy said it was “probably that nectar,” but he jumped to that conclusion erroneously because he hadn’t yet realized that they were being drained by the women. Shortly thereafter, we saw the scene with the computer explaining that the probe signal itself was enervating to humanoid males, with the effect getting stronger with closer exposure. The headbands merely focused the effect and drained their energy faster. But they were “drugged” by the titular signal before they even reached the planet, so any actual sedative would’ve been redundant.
@22/Mark Painter: You have a point about the “siren” stereotype, but this episode was written by a woman. I think the idea was to contrast the stereotype of the women who use their seductiveness to sponge off men with the alternative offered by Uhura and Chapel as independent, assertive, go-getter women (up to a point), with the “sirens” being unhappy with their way of life and glad to find an alternative. Although, granted, what they seemed happiest about was the opportunity to have families and children like normal women. It was still the ’70s, after all.
@20/Christopher: What about TNG’s Lonely Among Us? (written by Fontana, for that matter)
As I recall, the transporter buffers were clearly capable of storing Picard’s pattern, which allowed Data to replicate the captain’s physical form without recollection of being possessed by the energy entity.
@22/Mark: “And why would a people accustomed to rainstorms of several feet of water at a time even put open urns outdoors in the first place?”
Perhaps they have a rainy season and a dry season and put urns outdoors during the rainy season to collect water.
“It’s like every nasty thing ever said about women by every woman-hating man ever, all squeezed together into one concentrated package of misogyny.”
Yep. That’s what makes this episode worse than the other Margaret Armen stories. Although it also has Uhura in command and female security guards… it’s an odd mixture.
@23/Christopher: “Although, granted, what they seemed happiest about was the opportunity to have families and children like normal women.”
That didn’t bother me. It felt normal to me that they would want that, after an eternity of looking only after themselves. It would annoy me if it was portrayed as an exclusively female trait – if the males in Star Trek were generally uninterested in children. But they aren’t. Kirk is overjoyed when Miramanee is pregnant, McCoy looks after the children in “And the Children Shall Lead”, later Kirk is interested in getting to know his son, and Sulu “made the time” to raise a daughter. Not this episode’s merit, but it creates an overall context where children are important to people of either sex. And it gets even better in DS9.
@24/Eduardo: “Lonely Among Us” was probably written before the rules of transporters had been firmly defined by Rick Sternbach & Michael Okuda in their roles as the show’s techical advisors. But the episode made a point of distinguishing between Picard’s “physical pattern” which stayed in the transporter buffer and his “energy pattern” which was beamed out into the cloud. So at most, only part of his total pattern was stored. In the context of what was later established, I interpret that as meaning that Picard’s actual particles were stored in the buffer (the matter stream, in later parlance) while the pattern defining how to put them together into a person was stored in the weird alien nebula as an “energy being.” So the transporter wasn’t actually storing all that data; it was literally uploaded to the cloud. (Ba-dum-bum.)
Granted, yes, he did forget what happened after being beamed off, so that retcon doesn’t entirely fit. But the idea that an entire pattern could be stored in the transporter for more than a few minutes was one that the show itself later abandoned. The only other time that was shown to happen was in “Relics,” and that was because of Scotty’s genius improvisation. (Basically he rigged the system to constantly dematerialize and rematerialize him, so that his data wasn’t stored in the system, just constantly in flux. A bucket can only store so much water, but a pipe segment of the same volume can pass an endless quantity of water through it.)
@26/Christopher: Well, for all intents and purposes, that is one plot convenient energy cloud.
@27/Eduardo: Ohh, just wait until we get to “The Practical Joker.”
krad, I honestly don’t get the obsession with the idea that Uhura should be in command versus others simply because of her prominence or responsibility, since that’s NOT how naval command have ever worked, in that rank ≠ command. The ability and responsibility to hold the conn and the responsibility of the captaincy of the vessel for the moment that the captain is away from the bridge (or appropriate site like the quarterdeck) is limited to specific individuals trained and certified (in naval registers) as deck officers. You often see officers of the rank of commander or captain who have other sorts of responsibilities who never get trained to be the “captain” of vessels (while many lieutenants might spend day shifts in engineering or the like but spend second shift as actual command).
Consider the actual process that Troi had to go through to be allowed to be allowed to hold the conn, despite already being of a rank above where we had seen officers like Sulu holding conns before. Likewise consider the turmoil over at least one commodore in the original series trying to claim rank over lower-ranked deck officers to take the captaincy despite not being qualified to actual run a ship.
That said, we see in this example a rare case the sort of emergency where Uhura likely does logical take temporary command, given that the existing command structure has been temporarily so completely gutted and the existing set of deck officers is likely missing (few of those in the security staff are likely to be running command operations in the way that navigators might be, given the parallel logistics system that Starfleet has them set up in).
(An amusing personal anecdote deals with how the US Navy considers many museum warships, even private ownership, as potentially recall-able and refitible under new Pearl Harbor moment; so, you have non-military museum curatorial staff like myself who have been actually trained as naval deck officers for the sake of keeping such ships in proper stasis. Technically, in case of emergency, I could probably legally pull rank on someone in Uhura’s capacity on a ship – although I certainly wouldn’t, since my knowledge of running a ship would be limited to historical and trivial knowledge instead of anything truly operational!)
I never thought rank = command. In fact, I never understood what the hell Scotty was doing in the chain of command, since the chief engineer isn’t a deck officer. It always made much more sense to me that Sulu would be third in command (as he was initially), not Scotty, even though Scotty was a grade rank higher, for precisely the reasons you state. (The spinoffs corrected this, as neither La Forge nor Torres were in the bridge chain of command.)
But Uhura is a deck officer, and early on we saw her take the navigation console on three separate occasions, so she knows other systems beyond her own communications console. It makes a shit-ton more sense for her to take command of the bridge than, say, the deputy chief engineer (DeSalle in “Catspaw”) or an extra with no lines (Leslie in “The Squire of Gothos”).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
CLB @@@@@ 9 (and Mark Painter @@@@@ 22) – The question I have about the urn is, if there happens to be a heavy mesh over the top, so as to prevent floating at the top, how did they get into the urn in the first place? How did Spock get out?
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with what KRAD and others have said. It was a memorable episode in that we got to see Uhura in charge (and kicking major butt while doing so), but otherwise, nothing to write home about.
@31/JamesP: Spock is stronger than the rest, so he was able to lift the grid; plus, when they first climbed in, all four of them were able to work together to move it. By the time of the storm, though, Spock was gone, and the other three had grown much weaker. Plus, if they’d been treading water inside the urn, they wouldn’t have had the leverage to lift it anyway.
I am trying to imagine Uhura’s scenes attached to a different story/threat of the week.
I’m also assuming that the coordinates to where Kirk and the others beamed down were wiped for some reason and that the planet was shielded in some way (so Uhura didn’t know where to send a security team) until Spock contacted the ship and they could zero in on the transmission. I am ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
And there were a bunch of pipes we didn’t see connected to the urn, drawing water from all over the place during the rainstorm. I don’t know why they would have a big urn in the middle of the place for that. There are other systems of storing water that are easier to construct and use. But, that’s what they went with.
It’s likely they were lying about being so happy to give up immortality, etc. It’s also likely Uhura suspected this. But, the Sirens have just lost big time and are trying to protect themselves. Uhura, on the other hand, has several hundred crew members the Sirens might still find a way to control/kill if she pushes for a confrontation. Accepting their story and getting out while the getting’s good, knowing they can send back ships with crews the Sirens can’t control, is a reasonable action.
@33/Ellen: It’s not that Uhura didn’t know where to send the team, it’s just that she didn’t have any clear indication that the landing party needed rescue until Spock called for it. There’s no shortage of Trek episodes where the acting commander up on the ship loses contact with the landing party and doesn’t immediately send a rescue team, so I don’t get why that would seem so strange here. When Uhura assigned the all-female teams to the transporter rooms, it wasn’t to beam them down — it was to keep male personnel from beaming down. With the situation on the surface undetermined, sending down additional personnel would’ve been reckless. Uhura explicitly said that nobody would beam down without her order. But when she got a clear request for rescue from the landing party, that naturally changed things.
@30/Krad: LaForge did become a Starship Captain though. At least on one possible future, according to Voyager’s Timeless.
CLB @@@@@ 31 – That makes sense. And to be honest, after my moment of Devil’s Advocate passed (basically immediately after I hit “Post”), the logic that Spock is stronger was apparent to me.
A question regarding the chain of command that is being raised again here for the umpteenth time (and I don’t want to go back to any of the other posts to see if this has been addressed): Is it assumed that people who are in the Command Track (gold shirts on TOS, red on the spinoffs) take the Bridge Officer’s Exam as a matter of course, likely part of their general curriculum at the Academy? And that those in the other Tracks have to take it separately in order to certify (as we saw Troi do in “Thine Own Self”)? Which would explain why Sulu would be next in line on TOS, and would imply that, among others, Dr. Crusher, Data, and Spock had, at some point or another in the course of their careers, taken the test as a standalone, much as we saw with Troi?
Finally, there are not words in my vocabulary to express my amusement of the fact that my spell checker didn’t ding “umpteenth.”
@35/Eduardo: Keith wasn’t saying that Geordi had never held a command post — after all, in the first season, he was the flight controller and did take the conn in “The Arsenal of Freedom,” with his whole subplot in that story being driven by the writers’ assumption at the time that he was on the command track. (And indeed he refused to turn over command to an engineer who outranked him.) I assume Keith meant that, once Geordi became chief engineer in season 2, he was no longer considered to be in the chain of command of the Enterprise because he was no longer a bridge officer. His future command was as an actual captain, not as a chief engineer temporarily holding the center seat, so it’s not the same situation at all. The question is about whether a chief engineer should be a command officer, not whether Geordi La Forge could ever be one. He could, just not while he was a chief engineer.
@37/Christopher: But it has to be assumed that in order for Geordi to become eligible for captain, he’d have to abandon his engineering career and go back to being a bridge duty officer in order to get back on the command track, therefore wearing the red uniform (much like Worf did on DS9). I assume that’s what happened in the years between ST: Nemesis and Voyager’s Timeless.
@38/Eduardo: Naturally, but the point is that nothing Keith said contradicts that, because he was talking about La Forge’s role in TNG specifically, as an example of whether chief engineers should be in the command track — not at some hypothetical future point, but while they are chief engineers.
@30/krad: Also recall that Uhura wore a gold uniform in one of the early first season episodes, so she was in the command group for some part of her career, before switching over to the support side.
@40/cosmotiger: I think that’s reading too much into a costuming inconsistency.
cosmotiger & Christopher: It’s not so much a costuming inconsistency as a costume change. After all, Uhura started as a command officer — which, honestly, made more sense. However, Nichelle Nichols looked better in red than she did in gold, so they changed it. Just in general, TOS wasn’t always consistent in terms of assigning colors, more interested in playing with the technicolor palate than in being sensible. (Viz., “Arena,” where the tactical specialists all wore different uniforms, when they all should’ve been in red, since tactical specialists would be assigned to security….)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I love the idea of Uhura in charge – and how well it presages the tough “you go in the closet” Uhura we see in Star Trek III. Every other thing about this episode is flat-out “Plato’s Stepchildren” awful. It’s not helped by the fact that Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols don’t have any help from any other actresses – credited or otherwise – in voicing everything from the Enterprise computer to the entirety of the female Enterprise crew to and ENTIRE PLANET of women. I agree with a previous poster who said that Nichols comes off better than Barrett does, but this is definitely an episode where the seams of the Animated Series don’t just show – they burst.
This episode should have been better. The story could have been given more thought, because plot-wise it makes excellent use of Uhura and Chapel. Fontana and Armen had good intentions and the willingness to set Kirk aside for an episode (helped in no small part by Shatner’s physical absence). But yeah, this should have been better than what’s essentially a mermaid story.
When I look at Uhura, I see both a competent professional officer, and also a woman who’s undeniably in touch with her emotions and feelings. Her response to having Kirk back is evident. I knew she had feelings for Spock long before the Abrams films. TOS gave a few hints of such. She didn’t have much chance to shine in either the show or the original films.
Naturally, I tend to think of small scenes such as the Mr. Adventure standoff on ST3. She’s an experienced officer who’s comfortable with retiring into a quiet post (before betraying the junior officer for Spock’s sake). Her brief romance with Scotty is worth a mention. Or the brief reference of her conducting a seminar in the academy. Presumably, she had a lot of stories to tell. On the other hand, as much as I’d like to have seen more of her in prominence, the continued focus on Kirk/Spock means she got to keep a certain amount of mystery.
Still, Nichols took advantage of what little material she had. We have Martin Luther King to thank for that.
Wow, the skirts seem even shorter in animation.
@23 – Chris: As you well know, being a woman does not except the writer from being a victim of the sexist mentality of her time.
@45/MaGnUs: Of course, but as I said, maybe Armen’s point was to contrast the strength of Uhura and Chapel against the negative stereotype that the Taurean women represented. Depicting a derogatory stereotype isn’t necessarily the same as endorsing it. Although none of us can really know what she was thinking unless she talked about it somewhere.
@45/MaGnUs: “Wow, the skirts seem even shorter in animation.”
The tights are missing.
@20 ChristopherLBennett How does ‘Realm of Fear’ fit into how the transporter works? In that episode several members of the crew of the Yosemite (thank you Wikipedia) are trapped in the transporter stream and are able to be rescued after Barkley realizes they are hanging around in there for quite a long time. It’s not recreating a body, but I don’t understand the rules of transporters enough to know how this fits in.
@48/percysowner: “How does ‘Realm of Fear’ fit into how the transporter works?”
Badly. Conceptually, it’s a very stupid episode. How can people be conscious and seemingly intact in a dematerialized state? The best way I can rationalize is in terms of quantum information theory. The quantum information about a thing essentially is that thing, more so than the particles that make it up; the idea behind quantum teleportation is that if you copy the information from one set of particles onto another, then the copy is literally the same entity as the original. And the way a transporter works (Sternbach-Okuda model) is that it encodes the information about an entity in an energy matrix in the transporter beam (the pattern) which is the guide for reassembling the dissociated particles (the matter stream) at the destination. So the pattern essentially is the subject, consciousness and all. (Which means that a transporter does not kill and clone a traveler, since the consciousness is preserved in the pattern and thus there’s continuity of self.) So perhaps a transporter pattern would retain conscious awareness within the beam, and would perceive itself as a physical being as Barclay did because the brain is still sensing the pattern of the body as if it were still physical.
This might also explain another absurd portrayal of transporter function: The scene in The Wrath of Khan where Saavik and Kirk were able to carry on a conversation while rematerializing.
Now, I think you’re mainly asking about the length of time the missing crew in “Realm of Fear” spends as patterns in the beam. Normally, per TNG tech rules, a transporter pattern in stasis would degrade after maybe 8 minutes. But Barclay has a handwave at the end about how “the residual energy from the plasma streamer” must have “amplified the charge in the buffer enough to keep your patterns from degrading.” Which is too pat an explanation, but it’s what we got.
This plot turned out to be a mess. On the other hand, it is amusing to close your eyes and try to figure out which character Nichelle is voicing. At least the Ambergris Element contributed an interesting planet, underwater exploration being something that they just couldn’t have done in the original series. This one just raises the question of why we don’t get to see Uhura and Chapel kick ass more often, and why every named male character on the ship had to be incapacitated for it to happen.
If TAS wanted to be clever, they could at least have named the planetary leader Circe.
Hot DAMN, but James Doohan had a beautiful singing voice!
A couple things:
First, though I’m sure we’ve seen it before (on the other nadir episodes, as Keith has reviewed them), this is the first time I’ve clicked the link to the Memory Alpha page for Star Trek 101. While I generally agree with the “Spock’s Brain” list, aside from the namesake episode, I personally don’t have the same negative reaction to “These are the Voyages…” as others. However, I recognize that the negative reaction is in place, and accept its place on the list. I do, though, have a hard time with the “Ten Essential Episodes” lists for TNG and DS9. While many of the episodes on all five of those lists are hard to argue with, I am surprised that “Darmok” and “The Visitor” were left off their respective lists. I’m honestly not sure which episodes I’d remove (probably “Relics” and “Crossover”). But that could just be my opinion.
Second, since I found another topically relevant reason to post again a couple months after the fact, I’d like to re-ask a question I posed above, but seems to have been overlooked to the benefit of other conversations at the time:
Regarding the chain of command issue that is being addressed again in this discussion (and I don’t want to go back to any of the other posts to see if this particular question has been addressed): Is it assumed that people who are in the Command Track (gold shirts on TOS, red on the spinoffs) take the Bridge Officer’s Exam as a matter of course, likely part of their general curriculum at the Academy, similar to the Kobayashi Maru? And that those in the other Tracks have to take it separately in order to certify (as we saw Troi do in “Thine Own Self”)? If so, this would explain why Sulu would be next in line on TOS, and would imply that, among others, Dr. Crusher, Data, and Spock had, at some point or another in the course of their careers, taken the test as a standalone, much as we saw with Troi, correct?
Actually, the idea of restoring someone to a previous state of existence with the pattern stored in the transporter is used to rescue Captain Picard in “Lonely Among Us” from TNG Season 1, as even this reviewer admits in his review of that episode: http://www.tor.com/2011/05/26/star-trek-the-next-generation-rewatch-qlonely-among-usq/
So I’m not sure what’s causing the reviewer’s amnesia here. In the TAS episode, they reintegrate the physical persons with their transporter patterns to restore them. In the TNG episode, they do the exact same thing, but they have even less of Picard’s physical presence (he’s become pure energy after beaming off the ship) to use, making that episode even more improbable. In any event, it’s inaccurate to say the procedure of curing someone by restoring him/her with the pattern stored in the transporter was never again attempted on Trek after this episode.
In light of Trek Fan’s comments, as well as others, I’ve adjusted the “Can’t we just reverse the polarity?” section a bit… :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
What, specifically, is sexist about wanting to raise a family? And in relation to this particular episode, why is it implausible that, after however many decades of their virtual imprisonment that they would want to settle down and have kids? You guys really floor me sometimes. I guess you’ve never met men who want kids?
Lots of problems with this episode, but that is not one of them.
@5; Did Kirk tick off somebody at Star Fleet Command? How about EVERYBODY at Star Fleet Command?
@56/Roxana: And that’s why they made him an admiral?
Sure, to get him out of the field and safely under thumb. I’m kidding btw, in case it isn’t obvious. Still James T. Kirk must have been a trying subordinate in many ways.
@58/Roxana: Have you read Christopher’s novel Forgotten History? “It looks like a reward for his years of service, and it keeps him out of trouble.”
No, I’ll have to look it up.
The idea of place of woimen well the men died off but the head of those women sure learned to use a phaser real fast
To the list of characters that Majel Barrett voiced, we must add Mr. Spock. When he returns from the urn, he activates the Opto-Aud with a high-pitched hum, and that sure isn’t Nimoy doing it.
@8, definitely Kirk should listen to only native Iowan music like the Everly Brothers. Imagine how well it would have improved “Star Trek Beyond”, to have all those alien drones exploding to the refrains of “Bye, bye, Love”!
“Hello, emptiness” *BOOM*
“I feel like I could die” *BOOM*
“Bye-bye, my love, good-bye” *BOOM*
Simply awful. Everything about this episode feels lazy, especially the voice acting. The sole amusement I had here is how much Theela and her cohorts look like they belong in an episode of Masters of the Universe or She-Ra: Princess of Power, and that’s a pretty limited aspect to find amusement in. I’m officially sick of Star Trek crews aging rapidly too. Least favorite episode of TAS so far.
Personally I got a kick out of the female crew saving the day but all the tropes are pretty old.