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.