ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

If you're not a member of All Sci-Fi, registration is easy. Just use the registration password, which is —

gort



Attention members! If you've forgotten your password, just email me at Brucecook1@yahoo.com.
____________________________________________________________________

Bogmeister did a masterful job of research and analysis on the three TOS episodes below. He must have possessed a huge library of sci-fi magazines, because most of the jpegs he includes are scanned from the pages of his private collection!
____________________________________________________________________

TOS episode #9 - Balance of Terror

____________
__________Classic Star Trek: Balance of Terror


__________

BALANCE OF TERROR (1st season, episode #9)
Directed by Vincent McEveety / writer: Paul Schneider Like a Star @ heaven Air Date: 12/15/66



Now arrive...the Romulans. And they do not bring gifts. No, they bring war. War!

There's a lot of history in this episode. According to this one, Earth fought the Romulans 100 years earlier in a conflict now known as The Romulan Wars. After 5 years of ship-to-ship fighting (where neither side saw a visual of each other), a treaty was signed and a 'Neutral Zone' was established, a boundary between us and the Romulan Empire.

Now, in this episode, the treaty appears to be broken as our outposts, set up on asteroids, are attacked by a weapon of immense power. Yes, the Romulans are back, testing their new war toy, and we're in trouble. Kirk has some decisions to make, such as figuring out how to avoid a... hm, an interstellar war, maybe?




This was essentially a remake of the 1957 war film The Enemy Below, replacing destroyers & U-boats with starships.

What impressed me was that this episode didn't shy away from the grim aspects of war; the writers & actors weren't kidding around here, preparing for, potentially, another years-long conflict, such as the great scene of Kirk sitting down with his key officers for a war council. The buck stops with him and his decisions will have long-reaching ramifications.

Then begin the cat-and-mouse games in outer space between two starships; yet, which is the mouse?

There's also a subplot involving bigotry, showing that not all of today's poor attitudes have disappeared by the 23rd century. Again, this all resembles a World War II scenario, including the mistrust that many Americans felt back then towards Japanese-Americans. More, this issue of prejudice would be revisited less subtly in the 6th Star Trek film, The Undiscovered Country.






On the Romulan side, actor Mark Lenard makes his 1st appearance in the Trek universe as the Romulan commander. He's terrific in the role, not war-hungry as we might expect, the usual unexpected curves in Trek scripts.

Lenard returned in the 2nd season as a Vulcan, Spock's father, so he's quite versatile. He even played a brief role as a Klingon commander in the first Trek film, Star Trek the Motion Picture. We all have to give credit where credit is due: Lenard was the actor who set the tone in portraying Romulans, elderly Vulcans, and the new breed of Klingons! Quite a range.

He may have been one of those actor's actors — unheralded and not recognized much outside the Trek universe. The Romulans next appeared in the 3rd season episode The Enterprise Incident (not counting their ships' appearances). A fairly gripping, tense episode.

BoG's: 9/10



_______ Star Trek-Trailer TOS-season 1 episode 8


__________

Kirk: "I wish I were on a long sea voyage somewhere; not too much deck tennis, no frantic dancing – and no responsibility. Why me? I look around that bridge, I see the men waiting for me to make the next move. And Bones – what if I'm wrong?" (rising)

McCoy: "Captain..."

Kirk: "No, I don't really expect an answer."

McCoy: "But I've got one; something I seldom say to a... customer, Jim. In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And, in all the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that – and perhaps more – only one of each of us. . . . Don't destroy the one named 'Kirk'."

__________________ Kirk thinks he has problems?
The Romulan commander looks like he really regrets getting out of bed that stardate!



BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
____________________________________________________________________

TOS Miri - episode

___________________
___________________ Classic Star Trek: Miri


__________

MIRI (1st season; episode #12) Air Date: 10/27/66
Directed by Vincent McEveety / writer: Adrian Spies




We now reach one of the less stellar Star Trek episodes. The first season had a few clunkers in it and here is one.

To begin with, in another part of our galaxy, the Enterprise arrives at a planet which is an exact duplicate of Earth — "it seems impossible" Kirk says in his log; uh, yeah, a flat-out impossibility, unless they traveled to another dimension (a parallel), which they didn't.

It's bad enough when the crew encounter civilizations which are very similar to Earth's history (the Roman Empire in Bread and Circuses or the East-West conflict/nationals in The Omega Glory) so Roddenberry could make some social statement, but the planet in this one has the exact same continents as Earth! The odds are probably trillions to one against.

_Miri Star Trek Sci-Fi Channel Special Edition Extras


__________

Now, there is a mathematical theory that, if the universe is infinite, then it follows that such a duplicate of Earth must exist somewhere; but, even so, it would be far across the universe, in another galaxy, I would think.

From Wikipedia: Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Max Tegmark suggests that if space is sufficiently large and uniform, or infinite as some theories suggest, and if quantum theory is true such that there is only a finite number of configurations within a finite volume possible, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, then identical instances of the history of Earth's entire Hubble volume occur every so often, simply by chance.

Tegmark calculates that our nearest so-called doppelgänger, is 1010115 meters away from us (a double exponential function larger than a googolplex). Of course, in the film Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969), the other Earth was located just on the other side of the sun, and that was only a 'mirror' image of our planet, but I digress...



In Miri, on this 'other' Earth, in its version of the 1960s, an artificially-created plague wiped out all adults, leaving children who age only a month for every 100 years; so, this is when the divergence occurred, around 1965, from our Earth history.

When a child hits puberty, however, they age rapidly, looking briefly like a deformed human, and quickly die — this now resembles the plot of The Omega Man (1971).

That's the trade-off: hundreds of years of playtime, followed by an ugly, painful death. This begs another question: if no plague had occurred here, would this Earth's civilization have progressed to form its own Starfleet? Then the two Starfleets would run across each other and . . . ?

Now that might be an interesting story . . . but I digress again.




The set design was pretty good for a TV series, though I hear that they merely redressed sets from the Andy Griffith Show. Kirk.

Spock, McCoy, Yeoman Rand, and two red-shirts beam down into the middle of a dilapidated city. So, we are to assume they weren't able to detect the still-lethal virus in the air.
The landing party all contract the disease and are slated to die in a week, except Spock, who is a carrier and is stuck on the planet regardless. A bunch of these kids scamper amid the ruins and cause some trouble by stealing the communicators. Then they kidnap Rand.



We now come to the other reason I rate this episode so low: the damn kids! There are a couple of scenes with these brats which are nearly unwatchable for me. With many of the characters being juveniles, there's too much talking of "bonk-bonk on the head" and repetitive-style silly dialog which was designed for children to verbalize.



There's some tension but not much. Kirk & McCoy start to swipe at each other in frustration as the deadline looms. Rand has a panic attack. I'm wondering if there is a correlation between no fatalities occurring during a TOS story and the so-so episodes of the first season.

It's not very exciting overall.

This episode was also probably the closest that Kirk and Rand came to admitting that they had romantic feelings for each other. Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) was booted off the show soon after.

BoG's Score: 6 out of 10




These were early roles for Kim Darby, playing the title character, and Michael J. Pollard as the weird-looking main troublemaker with the strange name of Jahn.

She went on to True Grit in 1969 and he to Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. Darby was somewhat touching as the girl on the verge of womanhood, while Pollard . . .well, he applied some method acting, but he seemed anywhere from 15 to 35 years old in his scenes. I couldn't decide on which. One second he's saying stuff like "It's a foolie" or "Is this a good thing, Miri?" and, the next, he's planning the destruction of all 'grups' like some guerrilla general — be wary of the Lost Boys on other Earths!



Extra Trek Trivia: Further discrepancies are opened up in this episode since in episodes such as The Man Trap, it's established that the Enterprise's devices can pinpoint a lit match on the surface of a planet. And yet here they're unsure if anyone is left alive on the planet before beaming down.

Many of the numerous children in this episode were offspring of the cast and crew, including Grace Lee Whitney's two sons, the director's son, and the daughters of William Shatner and Gene Roddenberry.

__________________ Bonk Bonk on the Head


__________


______ Star Trek-Trailer TOS-season 1 episode 11


__________


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
____________________________________________________________________

Dagger of the Mind - episode #11

_________ Classic Star Trek: Dagger of the Mind

__________

DAGGER OF THE MIND (1st season; episode #11) Air Date: 11/03/66
Directed by Vincent McEveety / writer: Simon Wincelberg (as S.Bar-David)



This episode deals with the future of penal colonies and treatment of unstable criminals. Though supposedly such places are much better run in the 23rd century, Dr. McCoy obviously feels we are still far from Utopian with such 'cages' still in existence - but he doesn't offer better solutions. An escape from such a colony (Tantalus V) triggers a routine investigation by Kirk based on vague doubts by McCoy about how the famous Dr. Adams (James Gregory) runs the place. Once again, as in What Are Little Girls Are Made Of?, a starship captain enters the lion's den on his own, with no back-up, except for a female assistant (played by the gorgeous Marianna Hill).



_________________ Simon Van Gelder Tribute


__________



Unlike that other episode, What Are Little Girls Are Made Of?, where the famous Dr. Korby was driven to lunacy by extreme circumstances, no real explanation is given for Dr. Adams' sudden shift to mad experimentation. Early in the episode, it's established that he's a well-known benefactor in the field of penology and psychiatric medicine, accomplishing more in his lifetime than all of mankind previously in these fields.

Was he just fooling everyone up until now, hiding such extreme sadistic tendencies as he puts on display in this episode? He comes across as someone on a childish power trip by the 4th act, but there seems to be no motive for this supposedly great man to behave this way. For some reason, he likes to have new subjects placed in a little room and then activate a sinister device, the Neural Neutralizer, to directly attack the subject's mind. Psychiatry seems so... sinister in the future.




James Gregory is a fine actor and does what he can with a seemingly truncated role, but the one to watch again during this first season is Shatner as Kirk. He's the one who defends Adams while debating with McCoy, almost indicating a kind of hero worship for a man who has made great advances in his field. But once down in the underground colony, his detective instincts take over and Adams is now a target.

Kirk proves to be very adept at studying human behavior, more so than his expert assistant, and almost immediately something doesn't smell right to him. He's probably convinced when Adams attempts to avoid the room where the Neural Neutralizer is located — Adams is smooth, but against Kirk he has no chance.


ABOVE: Lethe, blank-eyed former inmate, named after a mythical river in Hades; those who drank the waters lose their memory



Also on hand is actor Morgan Woodward as Van Gelder, the one driven insane by the mind sapping device; to say his performance is intense is putting it mildly. I still get tensed up watching him struggle against the brainwashing he has endured. The actor showed up again in the role of a starship captain in the 2nd season's Omega Glory.

This episode will go down in history (or has already) as the first one with Spock using a Vulcan mind meld (on Van Gelder). It's a testament to Nimoy's acting ability that he infuses such mystique and focus into a scene which could have been sappy & trite.



There's also a great scene of Kirk going insane in the little torture room, his crazed laughter signaling the end of an act - it's kind of scary and the audience may think he's permanently damaged going into a commercial break, because we've already seen the loopy Van Gelder.

Otherwise, it's another one of those missions which wasn't really a mission, a case which may have been better suited to Starfleet's special investigations unit and is therefore a bit beneath someone who should be exploring the galaxy, looking for new lifeforms. After all this time, I still wonder why Kirk himself was down there, playing detective; was he really the only one on board qualified for this duty? For more insanity in the far future, see Whom Gods Destroy (in the 3rd season).

BoG's Score: 7 out of 10



Extra Trek Trivia: in the remastered new FX version of this episode, a new visualization (see above) of the entrance to the Tantalus V colony replaces the old one, which was a re-do of the station first seen in Where No Man Has Gone Before, the pilot episode. The title of this episode is from Macbeth, Act II, Scene 1, line 38 (see The Conscience of the King for more Shakespearean influence).

______ Star Trek-Trailer TOS-season 1 episode 10


__________

McCoy: "It's hard to believe that a man could die of loneliness."

Kirk: "Not when you've sat in that room."




BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)