Episode 27 ('The Alternative Factor')

Sort of topical, in that it revolves around an alternative universe composed of anti-matter. Tho I suppose which one was anti-matter would depend on which one's matter you were composed of. The science in this episode is a little super-ridiculous.

Examining things and doing science, as the Enterprise is wont to do, the universe 'winks out' for a bit. Which is apparently a technical term. They keep using it that way, anyways, and with the kind of gravitas that one would say 'nuclear holocaust,' so it must be, right?

Somehow related to the winking-out phenomenon is a dude and his crash-landed space craft. The dude's name is Lazarus. I keep looking for symbolism there, but I can't find any. Which is weird. Lazarus is one of those names that no one uses except for when they're being symbolic.

Anyway, I don't want to 'spoil the plot' but the science continues to be wacky, while maintaining internal cohesion, and in the end, the universe is saved from implosion by a Lazarus who willingly accedes to an eternity of struggle and pain to make it so. Sad when that happens.

The vibe, as far as the Enterprise goes, is almost more WW2 movie than Cold War, in this one, with Star Fleet command telling Shatner that he's on his own, and has to figure out the source of this 'winking out' that could very well be a precursor to invasion.

Good episode. Glad I finally got around to watching it again so I could write it up. Hopefully, we'll finish up with this first season shortly; I've already seen the rest of the episodes, as noted in the previous post, but I'm having to watch them again so I can actually like, remember them, as I ran through them all in one night a few weeks ago and didn't write 'em up when they were fresh in my then-addled head.

Random statistics: 2 Lazari, 4 shots, second time watching, 1 universe saved.

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.