It's Been A Long Time Since I Rock n' Rolled...

... I haven't updated this in forever, because I watched three episodes in a row while doing way more shots with Shatner than I should have, and wasn't together enough to post about it. I haven't decided if I'm going to re-watch those episodes, or just roll on and start season two, yet. Just thought I'd provide some closure, on the off-chance that someone was reading this. :)

Season 1 Episode 26 ('Errand of Mercy')

Another super-powered mentalist civilization, but this time, rather than looking like flamboyantly gay Roman gods when unmasked, they looked like normal Roman/Greek/whatever dudes when pretending, and like absolutely nothing when not putting on a show for regular humans.

In a time of uncertainty, with the Klingons threatening war, the Enterprise is sent to secure a strategically important planet before the Klingons can. Federation records suggest it is a backwards planet with very low levels of technology. Kirk and Spock beam down to offer them the fruits of Federation tech in exchange for resisting the Klingons, but while K&S are 'negotiating' the Klingon fleet arrives and establishes a military occupation of the planet.

The 'people' on the planet keep being all 'Stop being dicks to one another, we're not going to let anyone, Klingon or Federation, commit violence,' and Kirk keeps being all 'You guys are pussies; I am going to kill every Klingon in the galaxy to keep you safe, but you don't deserve it, because you have no spine!' The head of the Klingons is very Klingon-y.

In the end, the super-powered beings on the planet tell them all to go fuck themselves, because they are super-powered and can do that, and the Federation and the Klingons end up having to chill the fuck out.

This was the first ep I'd seen Klingons in, and it makes more sense than the Next Generation Klingons - I'd been wondering how some civilization of aliens completely unconnected to humanity managed to have homeworlds named Romulus and Remus and all. In this incarnation of Star Trek, the Klingons are basically just humans. There's no reason to believe they're not a splinter sect of humanity that has a warlike culture; basically, they look and act like some sort of analog to the Mongols, rather than being a different tree entirely from humanity, they're just different branches from the same trunk. I wonder why they changed that for the Next Generation?

Anyways, Kirk - while deploring war - is totally all about waging one, because the parties involved in the war have the right to make that decision for themselves, and that crux is the basic conflict around which the moral of the episode revolves. I found it annoyingly reminded me of an argument I continue to have with people who use ad-blocking software. Although at least Kirk seemed to have a moral leg to stand on; users of ad-blocking shit don't. And the stakes are a lot lower, so... bah, nevermind.

Good episode.

Random trivia: three shots of 100-proof root-beer flavored Smirnoff and 4 shots of 70-proof ginger infused Skyy. The Smirnoff is much tastier. Good times.

Season 1 Episode 25 ('The Devil In the Dark')

The Enterprise is sent to investigate a mining planet that's recently acquired a rather high mortality rate, in this one. It turns out a silicon-based lifeform is responsible. In a delightful turn of events, the Federation is able to make a deal with the thingy so it and its can live well, while the Feds can keep mining the shit they need.

There were a couple of things that stood out to me during this episode that I totally wanted to talk about but, to be honest, I've forgotten what they were. It was a solid ep, and it was nice that they were looking at non-carbon-based lifeforms (it may even have been amazing; it's hard for me to know exactly how cutting-edge this show was, coming at it 40 years later and having grown up on its offspring, but even now, you don't see a lot of TV rocking the non-carbon-based plot).

I think this may have been the first time I heard Bones say "I'm a doctor, now a(n) [x]" and that's a pretty significant milestone. The 'bad guy' was amazingly reminiscent of the dessert in that Monty Python ep that plays tennis with Scotland. It was nice that the plot resolved itself with advancing humanity and foreign-life-form finding a resolution that let both sides get what they wanted/needed.

I can't think of anything else to talk about.

Random trivia: 1 shot of Hendrick's gin, 1 shot of Clontarf, three shots of Elijah Craig 18-yr, one Schmirnoff (sp?) 100-proof root-beer & Pepsi Wild Cherry, three Canadian Club-plus-the-aforementioned-Pepsi-cherry, and three episodes watched on my Android phone rather than the computer. Honestly, after you get used to the screen-size (which takes like, a minute), it tends to be MORE engrossing. When I'm watching these on my PC, I find it really hard to not do other things, and keep getting side-tracked. Watching an ep on the phone, I'm just staring at the phone. It works out pretty well.

Season 1 Episode 25 ('A Taste of Paradise')

There are two tacks I could take, here: the dead horse of Cold-Warisms, and the fresh young foal of making-me-think. Let's do a plot summary, and then see if we can remember what the latter was. Cool?

The Enterprise is checking on a colony that should be dead, cuz' there's crazy bad-rays (these are like X-rays, only they kill you (X-rays probably do too, given enough of them, in which case, bad-rays are defined by there being enough of them)), only when they roll up (beam down) they discover that the colonists aren't just fine, they're in better health than they were when they left Earth four years previous. To the point that people with appendectomies now have fully functional appendixes.

This magic is due to a magic plant that spits out magic spores that absorb the bad-rays and make happy, perfect, tranquil, peaceful, blissful, hippy-tastic people. EVEN VULCANS! To be fair, while the transition to emotion-feeling awesomeness is pleasant for humans, it briefly hurts for Vulcans, apparently. So they are still better. Or worse.

Which is where the whole made-me-think thing comes in to play: Kirk has some amusing lines in this one, including a few that basically can be summarized as, "Wait, you're happy? What are you, fucking insane? We're not meant to be happy. You should be SUFFERING right now!" And on the face of it, that's kind of a dickish thing to say. Kirk basically states that he thinks his crewmen, and humans in general, should be confronted with struggle and hatred and misery and toil and sadness, and they're all crazy to prefer being immortal (presumably), in good health (definitely) and happy.

My gut reaction was to side with the converted: fuck you, guy, if you want to make everyone suffer. I mean, really, what's the harm? Isn't that what we're all working towards? Not being miserable, even being actively happy? That's a good thing.

And I still don't side with Kirk, but I started thinking about myself, and my own life, and in my own life, I'm doing SHOTS with Shatner. For a specific reason: I don't really see the point to life, and the shots (as well as, to a lesser but probably important extent, the Shatner) make it bearable while I'm trying to find some self-sustaining reason to keep breathing.

Part of the reason I am not dead is that pro-actively dying inevitably involves some pain, and is not entirely sure regardless of methods. I've forgotten where I was going with this, so I'm going to just forge ahead and come up with a NEW reaction to the falling apart of my faith in the purpose of life, I guess. That was an aside, though I did not put it in parentheses, so it may have been hard to tell.

Anyway, living is not innately rewarding, at least to me. So being happy thanks to some spore that made me perfectly healthy and perfectly happy would mostly be exactly like my life when I'm drunk, but would preclude hangovers and would also mean I had no reason to drink (because we drink for the same reason that we commit suicide or tell jokes: because doing so is more satisfying than not doing so).

Being completely happy means having no reason to do anything. And if you're completely happy because you worked for it and suffered to get there, well, that's an accomplishment. Cuz' it's hard as fuck, if me or Kim Kardashian are anything to go by (ironic? or straight? You be the judge...). That's probably a really satisfying place to be. But if you're just happy because of nothing... while it's nice for you, what was the point? You might as well just be dead. There was nothing there before, and there's nothing there now, you're just a thing. You're functional, not living.

So maybe Kirk is right, even if he IS an asshole. Either way, I'm drunk. And I think that's a positive thing.

Cold War-shit: I'm not going to go into it, I'm just going to note that this episode also had some Cold War tropes living large, and I want to know that in prose, because I am really amused by how many of these eps do, and I think I'm going to revisit that after I've watched the whole first season, and just tally up the ratio of 'any-age sci-fi' to 'totally written in the Cold War-era sci-fi' in the first season of Star Trek. Was that really all one sentence?

Random stats: 1 swig from the 100-proof root-beer vodka bottle, two shots of Canadian Club, two Canadian Club and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi drinks, two shots of Grant's scotch, and... possibly some more shit. Not a lot of food, I can tell you that much. Also, one never-spoken-of love-affair between Spock and a chick who later ended up hippy-spore-food, which was awesome. And a shit-ton of laundry done, tonight. Seriously, I did a lot of laundry. It's nice to have clean clothes n' sheets n' stuff, again. I did it about three days after I needed to do it.

Season 1 Episode 24 ('A Taste of Armageddon')

I have to be up in a few hours, so I don't have time for my usual ramble. This episode has the Enterprise couriering a diplomat to a planet, in order to open diplomatic relations with the civilization centered there, so that a treaty-port can be opened.

The basic premise is pretty similar to actual historical situations; they just Trekified the opening of Japan, kind of. Yay, gunboat diplomacy! Then they threw a further twist in there by having the Japan-analogue be five centuries into an endless interplanetary war governed by computers. The computers determine the number of casualties their virtual attacks would have had, if they'd been real, and then the citizens of the two warring planets who are deemed casualties by the computers report to suicide stations and off themselves.

Which was a fun concept. The moral of the story ends up being that nice, controlled, clean 'virtual wars' are way worse than real wars, because they can go on indefinitely and are not offensive enough to make peace desirable.

All in all, decent plot, fun scenery/set-design, decent actors in the guest-star spots, and a good time.

Random trivia: This is the second episode I've watched without drinking. I feel a bit guilty about that.

Season 1 Episode 23 ('SpaceSeed')

More of the same, in that it was an overdone sci-fi plot done as well or better as one would expect from a TV show in the 60s. Interesting in that it revolved around eugenics; I just heard a show on WRIR last week about the birth-control chick that ended up involving discussion of the eugenics movement in the early 19th century.

The Enterprise discovers a starship full of cold-sleep cats from the 1990s. They end up being ubermensch guys who were the result of a eugenics program that led to the last world war on earth. Fun stuff.

As all genetically superior beings must be, they are kind of douchebaggy and don't care about souls or people or any of the glorious things that we, as Americans/members of the Federation who aren't Vulcan, care about. So there's some fightin' and some disagreein' and in the end, they end up losing to us glorious soul-filled people who know what's what as far as important shit is concerned.

Yayness.

Random stats: Diet Mtn Dew with scotch, one, with ginger-infused vodka one, with reposado tequila two, with water one; straight reposado one, and straight scotch one. Amazingly, feel reasonably good NOW, after watching the ep, after feeling bad all day. The healing powers of alcohol are awesome in their might.

Season 1 Episode 22 ('Return of the Archons')

Okay, this episode began with Tsulu and O'Neill running around through some old-school lookin' streets in some old-school lookin' clothes. I didn't ever really get clear on what prompted their presence on this planet that was filled with hippy-dippy-dudes in 19th-century garb, but... well, they were on a planet filled with hippy-dippy-dudes in 19th-century garb. Go figure.

Tsulu gets zapped and O'Neill gets lost, so Shatner-et-al head down to figure out wtf is going on. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, in a lovely sort of way - almost reminds one of The Wicker Man. The planet is populated with Puritans who do nothing but tell one another how peaceful and tranquil and loving they all are, except for when 'The Festival' happens. 'The Festival' seems to be everyone running through the streets pawing at women, except for the women, who are getting pawed at.

OH! I have had the episode playing again, in the background while I type this, in the hopes that the Enterprise's presence on the planet would be explained, and I just missed it the first time because I was busy texting and doing shots. Turns out, that happened: They're researching the disappearance of another Federation ship, a century ago. That makes a lot of things make perfect sense, all of a sudden.

Anyways, basically, it's just another 'Machination and shit is impersonal and kills the souls of men. That which is perfect is the enemy of that which is human,' episode that reflects its Cold War origins in the same frustrating way that so many others do. For all of that, it's a good time, tho. There's partyin' down going down in the streets, some sardonic humor with Spock, Shatner looking like the spitting image of James Garner as Maverick and a 'supercomputer' that basically looks like it was crafted out of cardboard.

Good times.

Random statistics: 3 shots installing an XP VirtualBox so I can watch Netflix while running Linux, 2 shots during the actual episode, 40 text messages during the first ten minutes of the show (no, really, I counted), 5 slices of pizza, 2 operating systems running simultaneously on my machine, 1 hour or thereabouts of fucking about with installing XP on a virtual machine and updating it, and infinite satisfaction at getting the shit to work properly.

Season 1 Episode 21 ('Court Martial')

Two things, right off the bat, so I don't forget: a.) it is possible to be too civilized, and b.) there's nothing like Cold War-era pop culture to demonstrate that our drive to fight communism led us to do the bad things that we despised in our communist opponent. The latter might be a bit of a stretch; we'll get to that in a moment.

First, let's describe the episode: After an 'ion storm' - which lead to the death of a crew member - damages the Enterprise, they hit a base for repairs. Filing a report on the incident, it is discovered that the computer record disagrees with Kirk's version of events and suggests that Kirk either wilfully or negligently killed the poor crew member. The head poobah is all, "Look, you dumb fucker, smile, nod, take a fall, and we'll refrain from locking you up, and just give you a shit job on the ground on some planet somewhere." Kirk is, obviously, all "Fuck you guys. I didn't do anything wrong; it wasn't MY fault!"

And we get a courtroom drama, where Kirk - with the assistance of a brilliant legal mind who is old and curmudgeonly and doesn't like computers - attempts to prove he ain't done nothin' wrong, while his ex-gf (now a high-falutin' attorney in the prosecutor's office of the Federation JAG) is forced to go against the wishes of her heart and try to prove he's a total dick.

Somewhat predictable, in that I sort of guessed what the dillio was early on, discarded it as too cheesy, but kept coming back to it as the only possible reconciliation of the facts that would lead to a positive ending. But who gives a shit? Predictability is a plus, as far as TV-shows are concerned. I think. All the evidence points that way, anyways. It was a fun episode. There was some stuff I was curious about that wasn't resolved - Kirk apparently tells a bald-faced lie to get the one-up on a baddy, and that seems out of character for him, generally speaking, and I'd also just like to know what the object-of-that-lie's reaction was to the whole situation - but the important shit is resolved in that by the end of the episode, the status quo is restored, and Kirk is an awesome good guy who ain't done nothin' wrong.

Okay: too civilized? This is a throway thing I noticed, and not really important (even by the standards of this blog), but apparently, in the future... justice has abandoned the gavel for the dinner-bell. Specifically, that 'ding... ding...' thing that Jeeves-esque "Butlers of the Old School" do in super-old movies. It was absolutely ridiculous, watching the proceedings of this super-serious Tribunal get underway with this silly sound. Justice is not a pussy, and justice does not serve cucumber sandwiches. The Federation has obviously become "too politically correct" or something. THE REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!

Okay, they're not. Neither are the Democrats, but that's not important now, and don't call me Surely.

Re: the whole 'as bad as the thing we hate' half of the shit I wanted to talk about... I now want to talk about it less, because it just seems like an awful lot of effort, and I'm so over this blog-entry. I want to drink more.

But in short, the Federation are the good guys. And here in this magical future wonderland, they're supposed to be enlightened and full of win. Instead, they're trying to shitcan the greatest err... Naval?... mind to ever enlist in a service, because they believe in computers, not people. And they pre-judge court trials. And they care more about the perception of their branch of service than they do about justice. Like, you could probably change less than twenty words in this hour of television and have a plot that demonstrated the evils of Soviet Russia.

And while that was not, maybe, a thing that would leap out at someone who wasn't already sort of weirded out by the whole Cold-Warness of the whole show, so far, the tiny way in which it was true for Star Trek is really easy to find in reality. Virtually no one argues that the fact that the USSR tried/claimed-to-try to feed all of the hungry, educate all of the populace, ensure both employment and subsistence to all of the populace, and ensure growth as far as economic, physical, and spiritual well-being was concerned, was a bad thing.

Well, okay, the right-wing in the U.S. is now probably totally capable of seeing a government with those goals as a bad thing.

But anyways, during the 60s, none of that was why communism was presented as being bad: The Red Menace wasn't the a menace because it wanted to give people bread. It was a menace because it dehumanized people, was autocratic, was dishonest and hypocritical, and ruined the lives of good people.

And all of those criticisms can be applied to both Star Fleet in this episode, and McCarthyist politics. Also, PATRIOT Act, etc., I have no interest in talking about current-day politics on this blog, but if you want to draw parallels, you can make a case for 'em.

That is amusing.

Season 1 Episode 20 ('Tomorrow Is Yesterday')

Best episode yet! This one was totally fantastic! No greater-power-with-ESP douchebaggery, and there weren't any annoying characters or tropes, mostly.

That said, it was also probably the most ridiculous episode, from a technical point of view. Vive la ridiculousness!

I'm a little drunk, due to the shots, so I don't know if I'll be able to get in all I wanted to, with this textual synopsis, here. But I'm going to try. First off, thinking about this episode has me amused by how it contrasts with earlier episodes. This one is the first one to really just make no sense at all, from a physics-logic standpoint (I think; for the record, I'm not a physicist); partially, the earlier episodes avoided that conflict/hazard by being... not about science. Writing this makes me realize that while 'Star Trek' is considered the hard sci-fi god, and 'Star Wars' is considered the fantasy sci-fi god, there hasn't really been a lot of difference between them, in these early Star Trek episodes. There hasn't been a lot of hard science - at least from a plot standpoint - going on.

This episode of Star Trek, however, is rooted in actual science. Bad science, I think - for one thing, they refer to what I think is a black hole as a 'black star' - but still, the plot revolves not around fantastical beings but the concrete effects of physical actions. They get caught in a 'black star' and escaping it launches them backwards into time, where they have to deal with the actual effects of time travel, and - importantly - not just the drama of dealing with personalities.

I'm tempted to say "This! This is what science fiction should be!" but that would be a.) a little overly enthusiastic, and b.) diss space opera, so I won't. I do think this episode is the best representative so far of what Star Trek should be, or at least, is viewed as being. Personalities are neat, and I don't think 'hard' sci-fi is defined by a lack of personality; Robert A. Heinlein is probably my favorite author (Neal Stephenson is seriously fighting for the title, but I don't think either would really care), and his stories manage to be both 'hard' in their being grounded in actual science and also predominantly about people and personalities, not predominantly about physics.

But the preceding 19 episodes have been about as 'hard' as my cock while I'm thinking about your mom (so sorry for that, but after thinking it up, I couldn't not share it), and have been personality-driven in the way that soap operas are, not in the way that non-embarassing stories are. 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday' managed to give the semblance, at least, of being about actual science, not ESP or magic rays, and also do the Heinleinian thing of just looking at how that science would effect actual people in an actual circumstance.

I've spent an awful lot of time saying "This episode is not painful to watch," but that's basically what it boils down to. It was interesting people who were likable reacting to an interesting situation in an internally consistent universe. That hasn't really been the case, a lot of the time, to date.

Arggggghhhh! There was something else I wanted to mention, but I've forgotten what it was. That's just frustrating, dammit. Oh! I remembered! The time period! As I snickered at the show's usage of the term 'black star' I also was reminded of how amazingly old this show is. Not, like, ancient - I guess 'amazingly' was probably a bad term - but like... I dunno, it's a lot like thinking about Heinlein's stuff. It reads as good science fiction today. Like, after we went to the moon. After we have satellites in orbit giving us global communication at near real-time. After we have people living in space in a space station. The fact that it was conceived and produced before any of that was true... and still rings true, as a satisfying narrative... is amazing to me. That Heinlein wrote 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress' three years before we actually even landed on the moon is awesome. That this episode deals with time warps and black holes ('stars') and shit, before we'd landed on the moon, is less impressive but still impressive.

Less impressive? Let me tell you why: The resolution doesn't really make any sense. They put a bunch of people into a place where they already exist and rather than making both versions explode into pudding because they're occupying the same space, they just forget shit. I've read a lot of time-travel sci-fi in my day (well, at least a bit; I get annoyed by it, because it always tends to travel the same paths, so I actively avoid it, but I've still hit most of the high points as far as respected sci-fi with time travel goes, I think) and this episode's take on time travel issues is almost insulting in its lack of any real logic at all. No matter what Spock says.

So we're left with something of a paradox (apropos, considering the time-travel plot) in that this was the most satisfying and 'hard' sci-fi feeling episode to date, despite it being the first one I could argue with on the grounds of science and logic. Because for once, the crux of the plot didn't revolve around science-as-magic ridiculousness, but instead revolved around science-as-we-know(knew)-it.

Basic plot summary: The Enterprise gets warped back in time, to the 1960s, and beams aboard a historically important Earth-person of the 1960s. Getting back to the future without destroying it is the desired end-point. They get there by way of ridiculousness, but the ridiculousness is satisfying.

Random statistics: 1 50mL bottle of cherry (wild or black; I can't remember) Stolichnaya, 1 shot of Deep Run vodka straight, and 5 vodka tonics constructed of one part Deep Run to two parts Schweppes tonic water; WAY TOO LONG spent rambling about shit on this post, and VERY HAPPY about watching a Star Trek episode that was super-satisfying on all levels (even the ones it was disappointing on) after 19 episodes that fell short of what I expected from the most famous sci-fi series ever.

Season 1 Episode 19 ("Arena")

Great galloping gay gods of Greece! Not that the episode was particularly exciting, that's just what the superior beings in this one reminded me of. Well, Greek gods if they were Tinkerbells in disco-clothes. I'm being a bit obtuse, but it's more fun that way.

The Enterprise responds to an invitation from a famously-generous-host who runs an outpost only to discover the outpost has been destroyed by a previously unknown species of alien. They chase the aliens down, to kill them all so they'll know not to mess with Texas/humans. The aforementioned shimmery beings then seize control of both the Enterprise and the aliens - the "Gorn" - and insist that, since they were uncivilizedly bent on destroying one another, the only thing that they can do, in all of their civilized glory, is force the captains of the two ships to fight to the death, and kill whichever group's captain fails to win. Because that just makes sense, right?

You don't actually see them in corporeal form until the very end, after a series of the worst rubber-suit battles you've ever had the misfortune/good fortune to witness. Kirk eventually wins, after being an idiot for far too long and trying to find a phaser buried in the dirt, by constructing a primitive cannon (that looks more like a potato gun), and then refusing to finish off the alien.

Basically, just another episode that drives home how dickish superior beings can be. And also how hypocritical.

Random stats: Two Leinenkugel Sunset Wheats, too little sleep last night, and one battle that makes Godzilla's exploits look like the height of special effects, choreography, and pacing.

Season 1 Episode 18 ('The Squire of Gothos')

The title to this one sounds very Shakespearean. I meant to look it up and see if it was, but I never got around to that, and now I've started writing this, so I guess I will just leave it, for now.

I begin to tire of superior beings with 'technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic' or whatever that Arthur C. Clarke quote is. This is yet another of those episodes. I grumble a lot about the show repeating itself; maybe I'm being too hard on it. But these races of super-beings just seem so indistinguishable from one another. I guess it's sort of like the whole problem with trying to understand god's motives, to jesus-loving folks. If we are as ants, then we can't really see the differences between the beings who are as humans to us and the beings who are as apes to us, and the beings who are the little green men from Mars Attacks! to us. They're all just really big things that occasionally step on us.

That might work for religious people, but I think it falls apart for me, especially when it comes to TV shows, because they're written by people who are as people to us. So, upon further reflection in this silly digression, I declare it to just be lazy writing on the part of the Star Trek guys.

Anyways, the episode: The Enterprise finds a planet where none should be and - for once - declining to investigate, cranks up their sensors to pick up data while they fly by it, and heads off to do their important delivery mission (jesus, people complain about MMO fetch-quests - do they realize that that is apparently 90% of the genre-fiction that most MMOs are based on? What is the Lord of the Rings but one long delivery mission, I ask you?). Sadly, they find themselves unable to do so, because before Tsulu can plot their course away from the planet, he disappears. Then Kirk runs over to where he was, and he disappears too. Damned annoying, that.

Spock sends Bones (after declining to go himself, or let Scott go, because they are indispensable, which is pretty catty to Bones, really) and a presumably-senior security-person I was unfamiliar with down to the planet to investigate, which leads to a number of surprises, starting with the climate and culminating in a Napoleonic-era castle-type-thing furnished to the nines.

You could probably guess from the intro: it turns out that castle is populated by a dude who's totally super-powered and moreover, kinda megalomaniacal as so many of these superior beings are wont to be. The progression of the plot is fun, so I won't spoil it or anything, and it was basically a pretty decent episode, but it ends with a silly sci-fi cliche where painful-interactions-with-stupefyingly-powerful-races are concerned. All in all, a jolly good romp, but just a bit too old-hat to really be all that fun.

Random statistics: Three shots of Jim Beam Black, which contrary to popular opinion, I do not find to be superior to Jim Beam Normal, and not much else because I'm trying to do some other shit before I go to bed.

Season 1 Episode 17 ('The Galileo Seven')

The name of this episode kind of made me think of the West Memphis Three or the Birmingham Six, but it turns out to not be an episode about a prison planet - unlike an episode we just watched, amusingly. There are people trapped on a planet, tho.

The Enterprise is on the way to deliver 'medical supplies' to a planet with a plague (dude, that has to be the most common plot in all of sci-fi) but they stop to investigate a quasar or pulsar or some other -sar (I can't remember) that was a beautiful neon green. A shuttle crewed by Spock, Bones, Scotty, a chick, a black guy, and a couple of crackers, heads out to check it out.

The shuttle ends up stranded without contact with the Enterprise on a planet inhabited by 'giant' fuzzy-guys who throw spears and rocks and stuff. A cracker ends up dead, and Spock's callous obsession with logic leads to tempers flaring, so mostly, they bicker about how inhuman he is, and how they all want to make stupid emotional choices, for the majority of the episode. Meanwhile, some Federation muckity-muck is riding Shatner's ass, because he wants the Enterprise to abandon searching for their missing shuttle and get the med supplies delivered.

The day ends up being saved by a 'completely human emotional action' on the part of Spock. Yay! The episode ends with an incredibly forced thirty seconds or so of laughter on the bridge of the Enterprise, which was also a yay moment, in the same sarcastic tone of voice.

Good episode. Nary a Cold War trope in sight!

Random statistics: Three glasses of Tullamore Dew, one burrito from Alamo BBQ, two cringeworthy attempts to make normalish-sized dudes look ten feet tall, a bunch of very inaccurate spear-chucking, and a good time was had by all.

Season 1 Episode 16 ('Shore Leave')

Delightful episode. I thought it was going the way of earlier eps, but it ended up being exactly what I hoped it would be! Pleasant, no one is evil, hilarious, and good fun. It kind of peaked at the beginning, with McCoy's brief Alice-In-Wonderland-interlude, but it remained good fun throughout.

The Enterprise finds a planet devoid of life and considers letting everyone off the ship to hang out and chillax for a bit after their trying experiences of the past 15 episodes. Then McCoy sees a human-sized rabbit who's running late, and a blonde girl who's chasing after him, and they end up getting wary. There's a mixture of various fantastic things going on, with fighter pilots doing strafing runs and black knights threatening fair maidens, and when they kill McCoy, you think "Oh, shit, I guess it's a bunch douchebag over-powered mentalists trying to exterminate humanity again," but it ends up being not-that.

When the credits rolled, and I saw 'Written by Theodore Sturgeon,' it all made sense. I'm not super-familiar with his work but my brother wrote a thesis on the guy, and I think he was the real-life basis for Mr. Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, so it would make perfect sense that an episode he wrote would buck the banal trends and be a thoroughly fun experience. It would also make sense that it fit firmly within the pulp-sci-fi tropes that were well-established by the time of Star Trek, but I'd rather see a cliche well executed than anything outside of a new cliche being born (which innately involves solid execution).

Random stats: A week after my brother cancelled his NetFlix account before I found someone else I could piggyback off of for this blog, 3 shots of New Amsterdam gin that confusingly taste of chocolate, 1 big rush to get this typed so I can go watch X-files with my roommate, and 100% satisfaction at being able to continue this blog, after thinking I was going to have to let it die.

Season 1 Episode 15 ('Balance of Terror')

Hey, we got Romulans in this one! I was a little confused by that. They seemed indistinguishable from Vulcans? I'm probably just missing something, but as far as I could tell, Romulans were Vulcans in Flash-Gordon-level-kitschy costumes, with an obsession with war and a culture that was - totally inexplicably - based on ancient Rome.

That last bit bothers me, a bit. I mean, seriously? How did they end up being so influenced by Rome when they are a.) obviously not human, with the ears to prove it, and b.) have never been seen by humans. At least, I think that was what was said early on; I might have misheard and they just had never been seen by any currently-living humans, but the impression I got was that there had been a war that had been fought without any real communication/contact other than slaughter and had been finalized via visionless radio-transmissions when both sides had had enough.

Either way, it's weird. The episode actually started out with a wedding underway, which was annoyingly predictable. If you see a wedding going down that gets interrupted by bad shit, you can pretty much bank on the fact that bride or groom is not going to survive the episode; doesn't matter what show or even what genre. That's a trope of tropes, and it was followed to the letter in this 'un.

There was more anti-Spock racism, in this one. Bones seems to have pretty regular issues with Spock/Vulcans, but this was the first ep (as far as I can recall) that had another crewman being all dickish about Spock. It may have been suspicion of Spock personally, rather than all Vulcans; it seemed to revolve around Spock's study of the Romulans? I dunno.

In case you couldn't tell, I was doing other shit while I watched this, namely learning about SSH authentication n' stuff, so while I was paying 85% attention to what was going on in the show, the 15% of time I was reading or doing something on the other PC meant I occasionally missed important stuff. Still, I think I caught the gist of it, and enjoyed the episode.

After the serious Cold War vibe I've been getting from the show already, I'm wondering if the introduction of an enemy that is not communicated with and that exists behind an 'Iron Curtain' neutral zone, and has scary technology, is going to end up reinforcing that. I got a kind of Das Boot vibe from this episode specifically - it seemed very submarine-warfare, as far as the action goes, and it was also kind of about a cloaked/hidden attacker trying to get home, in a way. I haven't seen Das Boot in 17 or 18 years, but at least in a broad way, I'm pretty sure that comparison holds water. Pun totally intended. If not very good.

Random stats: 5 large shots of Boru vodka, 2 hour interregnum between watching the episode and writing about it (I forgot), 1 miserable-ass hangover from last night's multi-booze frenzy of rock shows, clubs, and television shows, and 0 desire to get that fucking drunk again tonight. As far as the episode goes, I can't think of anything interesting that I could throw a number on.

Season 1 Episode 14 ('The Conscience of the King')

I think this was probably my favorite episode, so far. It was also the least "hard sci-fi" episode so far, but I think that's just a coincidence. There's tons of hard sci-fi with decently human stories, just not a lot of it going on in these early episodes of Star Trek.

The Enterprise is informed of a miracle-food crafted by a former acquaintance of Kirk so they rush there, only to find that there a.) is no miracle food, and b.) the former acquaintance thinks that some Shakespearean actor is actually Hitler-in-hiding. Not actually "Hitler" per-se, but a guy who ordered half of a colony's population slaughtered so the other half could survive.

I don't want to be all spoilery, but the Hitler-guy is in fact the guy he's suspected of being. This episode was interesting because he was both burdened by his past, and also a bit unapologetic. The Hitlerization of his character is a bit incomplete; it's hard to tell if he was just a guy in a position of power who had to make a choice, and did make it, even though it sucked, or if he just a douchebag who killed a bunch of people he was predisposed to hate, when it was convenient. They at first suggest the latter, but his own statements suggest the former, and nobody really gainsays him.

Which was nice. I mean, not that the arbitrary killing of people is nice, but it's nice that it's sort of left up in the air. The only definitely wrong person in the whole thing is Hitler-guy's daughter. And blaming her for her wrongness is problematic. I'm not a big fan of grey-areas for their own sake, but this episode hit that sweet spot where we got the moral grey and still got closure. It was satisfying.

Random Statistics: 1 mini-bottle of cognac because I sell the shit now and I thought I should know about it, 2 PBRs at a Frank Turner show because my friend Fontaine is awesome, 200mL of Early Times whiskey because it was a long walk home, and some more Irish vodka (man, that sounds wrong) cuz' there was a Star Trek episode to watch. Yeah, that was just my booze and what I did with my night. I can't think of any other things to say, I'm kind of drunk.

Season 1 Episodes 12 & 13 ('The Menagerie', Pts. I & II)

After Captain Pike (from the pilot episode? You remember, right?) suffers a disfiguring accident rescuing cadets from a busted-up thingummy, Spock decides to kidnap him and take him back to the planet from the pilot, where he can live a peaceful life of illusion with full control of his limbs and a sexy face.

Decent episode, though, having already watched the pilot, the fact that this two-part episode was just a way to get some use out of that footage (you watch the entire thing; it's sort of an episode within an episode, explained away by saying that the inhabitants of the mentalist planet have taken over the viewscreens and are forcing them to see the whole story of what happened to Captain Pike on his first visit) for the broadcast run was a little annoying. There were maybe twenty minutes worth of new footage and new plot, out of the whole 100+ minutes.

All in all, though, it made for some entertaining television, showed Spock doing something that was against regulations which is important for his character development (even if he, possibly tongue-in-cheek, insists that he played it logically all along (a case could be made for that)), and gave some closure to the story of the one-off Captain-that-was.

Thinking too hard about it makes it kind of icky, though. For one thing, Captain Pike and chick-from-pilot, hereafter referred to as Vena because I'm not sure what her name was but I think that was close, both agreed in the pilot that she was too ugly to have any fun in the real world, so the mentalists gave her an illusory Captain Pike to pretend-populate-the-earth with.

Which is creepy in and of itself; I feel like a better course of action would have been for her to leave, and either get some plastic surgery, or just learn to live with being physically a little odd compared to the rest of the (human) chicks in the galaxy. Ugly bitches that DON'T crash-land on alien planets manage to get by in society - maybe they own a few more cats than is usual, but who wants to be usual?

But aside from that, which was already done, what happens now that the real Captain Pike is also on the planet? "Hey baby, now that I'm a disfigured parapalegic, you're good enough for me! Drop that zero-because-he's-imaginary and get with this used-to-be-a hero!" Or do they just never tell her, and live separate but equal lives of illusion? I feel like that wouldn't really work for the mentalists, because they'd like to have some human beings makin' with the fornication and giving them some human babies n' shit. So they're going to interact somehow.

Maybe it's a tightly maintained double-illusion, where she's kept thinking there's no change in her Pike while she unknowingly bangs his parapalegic, metal-entombed body, and he thinks she knows what's up and loves him for his mind? I feel like all of these outcomes are a.) relatively happy for the two people involved but b.) send a really bad message about, y'know, self-image, self-worth, truth, and acceptable compromise. Or maybe a really good one, I guess, depending on your moral stance. I don't think I'd consider any of them optimum, personally.

On the plus side, considering that the first episode began the annoying four or five episode run where every ep was about finding a powerful something, fearing it, and wanting to destroy it, this did at least wrap that up and turn it into a good thing, because they went to the 'villains' from episode one and ended up having them be saviors of a human or two.

Random stats: 2 episodes to show 1 episode of pre-taped content, 4 shots total because I watched the first half last night when I had to work early, and only started drinking for the second half, tonight, and [every time the black-haired chick was on the screen] times I was reminded of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Season 1 Episode 11 ('The Corbomite Maneuver')

I was trying to figure out why my mouse wasn't working properly in XFCE but was working properly in KDE for the first ten or fifteen minutes of this episode, so my eyes weren't on the screen so much, but it seemed like much ado about nothing, at first. They found a box with multicolored sides floating in space. First it came right for 'em, then it followed 'em around, and then they blew it up.

Also, there was a young guy who seemed to suck at his job, working next to Sulu. Bones thought that he sucked at his job so much that Shatner should not let him work, but Shatner had faith in him because he was young and impetuous. Guess how that worked out?

Anyway, it turns out that the weird multicolored box was sort of a 'space buoy' for another civilization, and by blowing it up, the Enterprise demonstrated that they deserve to die. They get ten minutes to make their peace with their gods. At this point, I 'called it' and I ended up right, which was not as satisfying as it would sound, as I just finished a book that I 'called' the same thing in, halfway through, and slogging through the book for the payoff was miserable, so it sort of reminded me of that and got me all out of sorts, when I was proven correct.

Random stuff (non-stats): More of Kirk bitching about having a female yeoman, more Irish vodka, more Natural Light because I have to work tomorrow, but - delightfully - NOT more 'all things that are not us and are powerful must be destroyed,' which was nice. For once.

Season 1 Episode 10 ('Dagger of the Mind')

Most notable feature of this episode: The Vulcan Mind Meld! This ep must've been where that all began. I failed to note the episode in which Spock first used the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, so I'm glad I remembered to mention this one. It's totally a milestone, right up there with the first ep to feature Bones, and the first ep to feature Scotty.

Scotty was not running the transporter, in this one. That made me kind of sad. I like his bad-toupee-and-bad-accent character very much.

The Enterprise is doing a mail-run to a penal colony for the criminally insane, and a 'prisoner' ends up escaping from the prison-planet to the Enterprise. The prisoner turns out to be former-administration on the penal colony, but even before anyone knows that, Bones can feel it in his gut that something ain't right. Kirk n' a femme fatale (who rises above her psychologist-socialist-devil-woman roots by the end of the episode) drop down to investigate, just to shut Bones up.

Can I just say that, so far, this show is about as pro-intellectual as the Tea Party? By which I mean that this show is way anti-intellectual. Smart guys are always bad. Even nominally smart guys, like doctors, are only right when they're getting 'hunches' or whatever, as the whole Bones-insists-something-is-wrong thing makes blatantly clear. Presumably that will change, but if anyone's thinking that this whole anti-intellectual streak in the Tea Party is something that is new to America, early Star Trek episodes will certainly rob them of that misconception.

Good episode, though. I think the series is starting to really find itself, despite the fact that it's still about as secular humanist as Mohammed.

Random stats: 1 Seagrams cherry-whiskey thing, because it was a dollar, 3 big-shots of Boru Irish vodka because the 750ml bottle was on sale (man! It's SO MUCH BETTER than Aristocrat... I know that's faint praise, but it's still true; this shit's decent), 2 defining Vulcanisms exhibited on the show so far, 4 episodes about mental shit (it seems like that number should be higher, but I just ran through the last 9 posts, and that's really it), and 10 episodes that hate Communists in one way or another.

Season 1 Episode 9 ('Miri')

CREEPY!

Really, it was. In a good way. Well, it reminded me vaguely of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies, anyways - is that good?

The Enterprise happens upon a planet that is a nearly exact replica of Earth. "Contemporary" Earth in quote-marks as large as the skies, since it's Earth in the '60s. This is amusing, because Star Trek is, mostly, timeless. It's the far future, and so it looks like the far future was supposed to look in the '60s, which is very close to what the far future looks like in the '00s. But the desolated post-apocalyptic Main Street that features in this episode looks like... the '60s. In the '60s, it would have looked like "today" but watching it now, it looks like twenty years before I was born. Kind of a neat mental weirdness.

Anyways, right, it's like Earth, and it's broadcasting a distress signal. Kirk, Bones, Spock, Blonde-Yeoman (is she someone I should know? She's in a ton of these early eps, so far, but I don't even know her name), and two nameless security guys teleport down. They note that the place looks like '60s Earth, then a wild blue-skinned creepy guy attacks them for no reason, after they mess with a rusted tricycle embedded in the wreckage.

Interesting thing: Despite the fact that everyone is armed with a phaser, they don't 'stun' the guy with a phaser, they beat the fuck out of him. To the point that Spock and Kirk hold him and punch him until he falls down. After Kirk had already beaten him to the ground a couple of times. That struck me as bizarre, considering how humane the Federation is in its current incarnations. I get that sometimes, you have to react instantly, but this is one guy, who is way less coordinated than the SIX guys beating him to a pulp. Seemed weird.

After they knock him to the ground that last time, he dies, and they're all "Shit, why did he die?" which is fair because, while they ganged up on him and punched him a lot, I'm pretty sure most people would have survived that. It turns out, there was some weird accident with an anti-aging vaccine a few centuries ago, and outside of poor-beaten-up-guy, there's no one left but some tricentenarian children.

Good episode. Though I may just be giving it too much credit because, at this point, any episode that isn't overtly ironically referencing the Iron Curtain and dissing feminism is something unique. Anyways, I enjoyed it. It was good, solid, hard sci-fi in that, while its scientific basis may not have been all that sound, it had a crux and it went with it, and it all got worked out in the end.

Random stats: 22 ounces of Legend Brown Ale, 1 Blue Moon, 2 Amstel Lights, and six Natural Lights, because I was at a killer show (Billy Joe Shaver was awesome! and Horsehead was, as always, pretty awesome...), 1 line sampled, 1 ridiculously old looking "child", 2 chicks who really want to bang some Captain Kirk, and I'm infinitely too late awake.

Season 1 Episode 8 ('What Are Little Girls Made Of?')

Back in the USSR! This one was another Cold War-story at its heart, with well intentioned true-believers attempting to turn us all into automatons to solve the eternal problems of the human condition, unable to comprehend that the freedom to do bad things is what makes us capable of greatness, etc., etc., and so on. Well done, though!

I should probably just get used to the fact that, generally speaking, the episodes with the titles that are most evocative of silly sex comedies are going to be the only ones that aren't silly sex comedies, I guess. Seeing the title to this one, I groaned, but it was solid and not so silly.

I would love to see some outtakes, though, for silly sex comedy reasons. The female android (spoiler alert! There are androids in this one!) must have fallen out of that top, at some point. And outside of her Dark Shadows hair, was absolutely gorgeous. Really, even with the hair, totally stunning. Reading that I found a female guest-star attractive can't possibly be interesting, so I suppose I should move on.

I BSOD'ed 3/4s of the way through this episode, and had to go through a big ole' rigamarole of rebooting once for shit to not work properly, and then rebooting again, to get back to where I'd left off, and I think I've forgotten a few of the things I wanted to mention, in the interregnum.

The basic plot: The Enterprise is delivering a nurse (is she the nurse character from a bunch of the previous episodes? I couldn't tell; certainly very similar looking, but man, half of these people look like everyone else in the show...) to her fiance, a 'medical archaeologist' who hasn't been heard from in years, and who two missions to find have failed to discover. Against all odds, he is there, only it turns out... he's discovered ancient alien technology for replicating people as androids, and he thinks it would be great for humanity if we replaced all the humans with robots.

I really enjoyed this one. I should probably just get used to the fact that, sadly, the things I was hoping for from Star Trek are just not going to happen most of the time, and most of the time I'm going to get cliched plots that are totally predictable to me because I've watched and read too much genre shit.

I wanted to see sci-fi quandaries examined, where it's not 'life and death' or 'the universe is on the line' or 'the ship is in danger' but just ethical and practical shit that can go in multiple ways and therefore isn't super predictable. This episode came closest so far to hitting that note, but as soon as I guessed that someone was a robot, all the pieces fell into place and it was impossible not to know exactly how it was all going to work out.

I think my expectations were too high. This is just a solid genre show, and since it was basically one of the first, a lot of the shit I find cliche now is probably shit that was groundbreaking, at the time. I'm gonna roll with it; I love cliched genre shit, it just wasn't what I was thinking I'd get with the most famous sci-fi TV show in the history of sci-fi.

Random stats: 6 vodka n' gingers, because I didn't want a repeat of last night's horrible heartburn/acid reflux situation, 2 Natty Lights because I wasn't done and was kind of sick of ginger ale, 1 absolutely beautiful female android with nicely noticeable nipples, 4 robots who hate illogical emotion, 1 Vulcan who is a little bothered by illogical emotion but doesn't seem to mind having to deal with it, and 8 episodes down, so I guess we're in this for the long haul.

Season 1 Episode 7 ('Mudd's Women')

Gah. Was actually a great episode but I am suffering from some super-painful-burning-agonizing-miserable heartburn/acid reflux and don't want to write about it as much as I want to curl up in a ball and pray for sleep to make it go away temporarily.

'Great episode' is probably overstatement, but it was a lot of fun, despite the whole agony-while-watching-it thing. It was misogynistic - in that it portrayed women as wanting to deceive men to get by, kinda - and anti-feminist - in that it portrayed women as wanting to serve men - but still seemed to kind of redeem itself by the end.

This show is definitely anti-Irish, tho. Between that off-key singer of a navigator-guy an ep or two ago, and this episode's Mr. Mudd's sleazy con-artistry, every time anyone is overtly Irish, they're bad, bad, bad. That's a shame. As a dude with a lot of love for the positive aspects of the stereotyped Irish, I find it a bit disappointing when they're all negatively stereotyped n' stuff.

Plot: Kirk risks the Enterprise to save the peoples on board an enemy vessel. Said peoples end up being an over-the-top Irish felon and three chicks who are so hot they are inexplicably hot (as per the plot, not necessarily my own opinion). It's a - you guessed it - race against time as Kirk tries to get the stuff to repair the Enterprise while the nefarious Celt tries to ruin that.

Technically, I guess you could probably label this one as another episode about gender relations and psychic powers, but the psychic powers are not from an ancient civilization, and the gender relations end up being less cliche than in the past, kind of, so it's far enough from that mold I got so sick of in the first four episodes that I didn't mind. That was a hell of a run-on sentence.

Random Stats: 1 strong drink consisting of Kraken rum and store-brand diet Sprite, 4 shots of Aristocrat vodka, 1 can of Natural Light because the heartburn got too hardcore to fuck with straight liquor, 3 women who sparkle when they take their meds, 1 ridiculous mustache with ridiculous accent to match, and 2 or 3 episodes where Spock totally fails at being emotionless but hides it well.

Season 1 Episode 6 ('The Enemy Within')

I can't think of anything particularly clever to say about this episode - which is probably, in fact, continuing a trend started in the first entry - but I suppose that also means I can't think of anything particularly damning.

An unfortunate transporter malfunction ends up creating two Captain Kirks and two Tiggies (well, sort of; it's a dog in an alien costume, I can only assume it's one of Tiggy's ancestors). Good Kirk/Bad Kirk and Good Badly-Costumed-Dog/Bad Badly-Costumed-Dog. Calling them good and evil kind of ruins the nuance that the episode is trying to make, despite the fact that the episode uses that terminology.

Bad Kirk tries to get it on - forcibly - with the yeoman that he's apparently had his eye on all along, as revealed in the previous episode. Good Kirk is too indecisive and compassionate to be much use. Good Dog is small, furry, and doesn't do much. Bad Dog is small, furry, and doesn't do much... from inside a cage because it's apparently very mean. It's a race against time to fix the problem with the transporter before Sulu and a couple of Guys freeze to death on the planet they were collecting samples or whatever from.

Bad Kirk was awesome to watch. Shatner gets a lot of shit for overacting, but he didn't seem like he was overacting in that role, even though - technically - overacting would have been called for, since it should have been more intense and insane and over-the-top than a non-bad-half-of-a-human would find possible. And I'm not saying that he underacted. He just kicked ass. And yelled convincingly.

I'm tempted to call this episode's attempt to reconcile the good and the bad aspects of man, and furthermore, demonstrate that the negative aspects are needed for 'leadership' and command, very Post-War in their sensibility. But I think that might just be me looking for some kind of social commentary where there isn't any, since this is the first episode to not really kick me in the head with its Cold War-sensibility. Still, it's a fun mental quandary that I certainly haven't been able to figure out yet, and I don't imagine anyone else has either, really, outside of just accepting the pragmatic compromise that behaving like a dick sometimes is an inevitable part of behaving decently all the time.

Random stats? Sure. 6 Natty Lights (3 from the last episode; you didn't think I was gonna call it a night after three shitty beers, did you?), 120 degrees below zero on poor Mr. Sulu's nipples, 2 Kirks, and 12-20 nipples on alien-costumed-dogs, depending.

Season 1 Episode 5 ('The Naked Time')

Reading this episode's title was a forehead-slapping "You've got to be KIDDING me," sort of moment, but it turned out that this episode was the game-changer I was waiting for. In that we didn't get a sex n' psychics plot, this time around. In point of fact, it's like it was written just for me: we got some sort of molecular change in water that made everyone on the Enterprise drunk.

And that's basically the plot; there's a 'We must save the Enterprise, it is in danger,' MacGuffin but the root of everything going on is that everyone's acting batshit crazy, and - amazingly - rather than going with the 'I want to get laid' thing that has driven the preceding four episodes, they went with romance, in the couple of instances where the drunkenness caused some feelings to be felt. Captain Kirk's transformation to infected was very abrupt, but also touching - the only love he's allowed is for his ship, and it's a hard life being captain, etc., so cliche, but also poignant.

Sulu, shirtless, attacking men with a rapier/foil was hilariously awesome.

It was nice that in this episode, the bad guy was not a deranged psychic stand-in for the Communist hordes but instead a non-sentient natural sort of thing that - while not really making any sense, I suspect, as far as actual hard science goes - didn't involve a fascist response in the face of superior powers.

'The Naked Time' was probably weaker than its predecessors, but it was also more satisfyingly similar to the concept of Star Trek that I have in my head. Also of note, they travel in time and make vague references to being able to go to any planet, at any time, now that they've proven the validity of the theory behind it. I wonder if that was the method they used for the 'Save the Whales' movie or the one where they go back to visit the inventor of the warp drive?

Random statistics: 3 cans of Natural Light because my stomach is getting sick of the rotgut vodka, 1 starship full of drunks, 2 regular characters swooning endearingly, and an uncountable number of sweaty palms.

Season 1 Episode 4 ('Where No Man Has Gone Before')

Optimistic secular humanism, this ain't.

This is the fourth episode in a row to center around psychotic psychics, and - you guessed it - also the fourth in a row to have secondary plot revolving around a dude trying to bang a chick. This is, I should note, the fourth episode. They're all so same-y. I am hoping that they are doing the opposite of running out of ideas, and just haven't had any yet. It has to branch out at some point, doesn't it?

I keep getting reminded of the Cold War vibe. The female half of the sexy-plot is a textbook 'Soviet spy,' in that she's blonde, kinda hot, stern, labeled-as-frigid, professional, and even a psychologist, which is one of those disciplines that's always had a socialist sort of taint in genre stuff.

And when shit goes down, she's not thinking of saving the Enterprise or of saving humanity, she's thinking of all the good that a master race that transcends humanity could do. Of course, because she's a girl, she also can't help getting emotionally attached, despite her best intentions, and bla bla bla cliche plot.

Basically, the crew of the Enterprise are the first (second!) people ever to venture outside of the galaxy, and immediately upon so-venturing, they get hit by some cool looking purple field that affects people who have pre-existing relatively strong ESP. Shit goes awry, in typical fashion.

Plus side: Scotty! Yay! That's not really a very convincing Scottish accent sometimes, is it? I don't care, it makes me happy. He's a lot thinner than I expected, though. And also, his hair still has color. Am I remembering totally incorrectly, or is he grey haired and a bit portly in most of the films?

Stats: 3 shots of Aristocrat vodka (hey, I have shit to do tomorrow!), 1 amazingly beautiful if entirely unconvincing matte painting of an automated mining base, 2 people on their way to being gods like C-Tec said, 4 episodes about sex and fearing superior minds.

Season 1 Episode 3 ('Charlie X')

Seriously? This one starts out with an adolescent awkwardly learning about how to deal with the opposite sex, and also involves supranatural mental powers wreaking havoc. Is that all this show was ever about? So far, we're three for three with episodes touching on sexuality, and also three for three with episodes that feature malevolent beings with strong powers of the mind/ESP.

I have always considered Gene Roddenberry to be someone who was all about, y'know, the more progressive aspects of sci-fi. Not sure why, that's just kind of the vibe I always got, when people spoke of him. I assumed that Star Trek was going to be basically a different hard sci-fi concept examined through the lens of optimist secular humanism, each ep. Instead, I'm getting a very Cold War paranoia-vibe as far as the nature of superior powers, and an obsession with intra-gender relations.

Which is fine, mind you. I've enjoyed all three eps. But it's really running counter to what I expected.

As far as this episode specifically goes, the guest-star gave a really solid performance, again, which was fun. In general, while it was totally in the realm of B-level stuff, it was also really well done. I'm a bit sad that Final Solutions have so far tended to be the only solutions achievable; once again, I could imagine an ending that was a little less pessimistic and drastic.

Watching Shatner be non-ironic is really cool. I don't think I've seen him act as an actor, instead of an actor being Shatner, ever. Even in my memory of the movies, there's always a certain awareness of himself as a cultural icon with a certain set of characteristics he has to play off of and against. So far, he hasn't exhibited that artificial sheen in these episodes. I am wondering if he took up that mantle after the original series ended, or if he's going to start that shit before it's done. I look forward to finding out.

Random tally: 3 episodes about sex n' ESP, 3 episodes with no Scotty, 8 2oz shots of Aristocrat vodka again, 1 hangover finally killed with the hair of the dog, an uncountable number of phasers dematerialized and then restored to existence with the help of ancient magical peoples, and a shit-ton of actors who look like they walked off of Gunsmoke and put on Star Fleet uniforms.

Season 1 Episode 2 ('The Man Trap')

Wow. They're all so young! In the pilot episode, it didn't really hit me, because a lot of the faces I knew weren't around, or at least weren't the characters I remembered. I didn't even really recognize Shatner - intellectually, I knew it was him, but he didn't get all Shatneresque until the last ten minutes of the episode.

George Takei, especially, just looks ridiculously young. To the point that, while Shatner made me think "Hey, Shatner's so young he doesn't even look like the Priceline guy," Takei/Sulu made me think of a guy who came up to my table at the gun show I worked last weekend. This random guy of some-kind-of-non-cracker-descent in his early 20s at best asked me if the QuickClot I was selling was the powder, or the bandage. I don't work gun-shows on the regular, I was just filling in for my dad who actually knows about the shit, so I looked at the package, and pointed out that the instructions on the back of the packaging indicated you used it like a bandage. He was all, "Yeah, you're right; when I was in Afghanistan we were using the powder, but they outlawed the powder and switched it to the bandage stuff."

And that was really weird cuz' this kid was ten years younger than me and talking about practical shit he'd experienced in a war-zone and it creeped me out, a bit. In that it made me feel SUPER ignorant, instead of just the regular ignorant I feel when I'm visiting dad at a gun show. Which is totally irrelevant to Star Trek, except Sulu being so young had the same "Jesus, they really are just kids, all the WWII crap I've read is way dead-on," sort of vibe to it.

Yeah, I'm a little drunk. Seven shots again, but this time with the 2oz shot-glass instead of the 1.5oz shot glass? Anyways...

... the episode! Outside of the weirdly jarring "Children at war" moment, the biggest thing to strike me was that this episode was ALSO all about the sexy. I joked in the last entry about how the Captain was all about some green bitches, in the pilot. At least, I thought I was joking. This episode was called "The Man Trap" and was about a creature that could become your wildest dreams, suck you in, and suck all of the salt out of you.

I had no idea how based in reality the stereotype of Captain Kirk as a sexy-man living the sexy-dream in sexy-space was. It's kind of hilarious. Are all of these episodes going to rock it like that? I'm looking forward to finding out. I started this thinking it'd be a bunch of hard sci-fi with the occasional Shatner-bangs-an-alien moment that created the stereotype; so far we're 2 for 2 on episodes revolving around male/female interaction. Word.

The 'husband' of the 'creature' did a really great job with his part. He gets the kudos for 'best actor in the episode.' Also, the 'husband' and the 'creature' were totally in the right, in the round-table discussion that happens towards the end. This episode ends in a tragedy that didn't have to happen, and oddly considers it a triumph. Solid plot, though. Bunch of familiar tropes used as well as one would expect from a low-budget network TV show.

Random tally: 7 big shots of Aristocrat Vodka, 2 episodes that are all about the sexy, 1 good actor, and one Nubian Prince that seemed 10 years ahead of his time. That guy was so 70s sex-symbol.

Season 1 Episode 1 (Pilot, 'The Cage')

Since I haven't really watched much Star Trek (probably ten or twenty eps of Next Generation, most of the original-series movies, and a few of the movies with the NextGen cast), I was a little surprised that I got chills when the opening theme music played. Not sure if I have a stronger connection to the series than I thought, or if it was just the three shots of Aristocrat making me feel like I was beginning an epic undertaking to go where so many had gone before.

As 'The Cage' got underway, I was disappointed to note that the pilot does not feature some of the characters I'm most familiar with, namely Captain James T. Kirk, Chekhov, Sulu, and Scotty. The guy playing Captain Pike was decent, if a bit... well, he just seemed like any ole' B-level actor from back in the day, really. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that I'd seen him in a dozen MST3K eps, or other TV shows.

The first thing this episode reminded me of was Seven Samurai, and not for any high-brow reasons related to plot or direction. See, the first thing I really noticed about Seven Samurai was that it seemed to involve a lot of shots grown mens' flabby asses. Captain Pike was wearing very tight pants, and the camera seemed to lovingly linger over his backside more than was appropriate, especially towards the beginning. When he plops down on his bed, and lounges in a pose that seemed more suited to Catwoman than a starship captain, I was unable to resist laughing out loud.

The plot was fun. A once mighty race, having destroyed the surface of its planet, has been forced to live underground for millenia. They have developed their brains to super-strength and are able to communicate telepathically, read minds, and even cast illusions over lesser minds. They capture Captain Pike, seemingly to perform experiments on him, and the plot thickens.

I don't want to just summarize episodes in this blog, because a.) that's not really all that fun, and b.) Wikipedia already exists. So I'm not going to. Notable stuff in this episode includes, in no particular order:

• The mind-reading captors can't read minds filled with "lesser emotions" which directly translates to "hate" in the episode. Like so much of the stuff even in this first episode, it's a concept I've encountered before in reading. It's fun contemplating what Star Trek created, and others ripped off, and what others created, and Star Trek ripped off.
• Wow. The rubber suits are pretty bad. Specifically, the rubber suits that form the costume of the green-abominable-snowman-looking-thing that is apparently another species the evil overlords have captured.
• Half naked green lady in the first episode! This show knew what it was about from the getty-up, apparently.
• There seemed to be a sexism sub-plot; I wonder if they'll work with that more, in the series-proper?
• The bulging veins of the evil overlords are great. Especially when they pulse to indicate that they are performing some task with their mental super-powers. While the rubber-suit thing was bad-bad, the main villains were sort of on the line between bad-good and decent.

Alright! The Enterprise escapes with the captain and all of its crew in-tact, the episode ends, humans rule!, and I can go to bed because I have an early day tomorrow.

Random Tally: 7 shots of Aristocrat Vodka, 63 minutes, 1 green girl, 1 giant Viking Mongol warrior, 3 candidates for Eve, and time enough for 8 hours of sleep.

Introduction

Inaugural post in a blog that I might not even bother with! Exciting!

This blog exists to document my experience combining alcohol with the original series of Star Trek. While I am an expert at drinking, I have much more limited experience with Star Trek. I'm more familiar with The Next Generation, and my knowledge of both comes mainly from randomly-caught late-night syndicated episodes over a decade ago. This is weird, because I've been a huge reader of sci-fi since I was a pre-teen. I just never watched much TV.

So, in essence, this is a quest to remedy my ignorance. Which is a laudable goal, right? And can only be improved upon with the inclusion of booze. Yay, booze!