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.