A Continuation of an Epic
Finally, I return to my first viewing of Star Trek: The Original Series. I have, alas, not managed to locate the first episode, but I have found the second! And so, I embark...
Stardate 1312.9
Miniskirts: 1
:o The second woman seen is wearing *gasp* pants! 2 women total, 11-ish scenes with women in pants.
Slang
"She was nova, that one."
It goes boop boop beep... it must be Science!
-Oh man. A 200 year old distress beacon from another ship! Impossible! Didn't they expect to find other species out here? Isn't that part of why they went?
-45 seconds in and we've already been smacked with the "Spock has no emotions. He must be an alien~" card. Follow that up with him giving the unsavory choices of kill a guy or strand him on an uninhabited station hundreds of light-years from Earth, and he looks like more of a bizarre, possibly evil, guy than ever.
-The ship recorder has tapes! And oh lord, don't let it start transmitting, like you said you were going to have it do! All decks on the alert! It did what we asked!
-Oh good! ESP! Definitionally, "some people can sense future happenings." And the lovely female doctor has rated rather high in her tests, of course. Apparently contact with ESP gives one crystalline, glowing blue eyes? And god-like abilities? A far cry from our original definition... There seems to be no real logic to what you can and cannot do with ESP. One minute he's manipulating force fields, the next he's creating fully grown trees out of nothing in a habitat where they could never survive.
-A force field! Of... swirly, flat, purple light?
-I do love the shots of several deck officers with wrenches and pliers trying to replace burnt out boards on their control panels.
-Flipping through the typewriter/hand written screens of medical transcripts! Heehee!
Cinematography
-I can't decide if it's good or bad that as they're trying to figure out what the recorder has on it, they have Spock listening to it alone and reporting what he's hearing, instead of doing clips of what actually had been going on, or cutting to an explanation after they had reconstructed bits of tape or something.
-"It sounded like the captain giving an order to destroy his own ship." Draaamaaaatic muuuusic~ Cue everyone looking at Kirk like he just gave a similar order!
-Omg. The negative film zap with a little halo of drawn on white squiggles to indicate the sensitive lady doctor has been hit with some sort of ESP beam or something. I don't even. ffff And then another one's down! More more accurately, zapped, which causes him to stand up out of his chair and then collapse on the floor!
-Dramatic moment or not, it seems extremely silly for the invalid in bed to so easily grab and pull over a woman standing with a strong footing a full arm's length away.
-The fade in and out while the ESP guy strangles poor engineering tech #3 was a nice little piece of work, for the era, and succinctly managed what it was supposed to.
Star Trek firsts
-First sighting of the mysterious multi-level space chess! The pieces appear to have been cast/cut out of old beer bottles.
-They are leaving the galaxy for the first time! :o
Social Issues WARNING! Possible triggers in this section!
-Ha! Snarky lady doctor not above tactfully turning down an offer with just enough sting to be a deterrent! I like her! She's probably the enemy here. :| And what do you know, I'm correct. Though she gets to redeem herself in the end by saving Kirk in another one of his bone-headed attempts for glory.
-After the contact with the force field, all the free men are gathered around the downed woman, while the single other woman on the bridge is next to the downed man. But while two men stay huddled next to the woman at all times, as soon as Kirk touches the guy, the woman stands up and walks away. There are some really interesting and troubling (for me) implications about who is more important in this situation and for what reasons.
-According to this crew member, there are a little under 100 women on board the Enterprise.
-After spending what is implied to be less than 24 hours with the man, the female doc has supposedly fallen for this guy. Whether nor not that's supposed to be a side effect of the ESP attack, or if it's cause she's a lady and thus must have romantic feelings for this guy, I don't know, but it makes my skin itch.
Philosophy
-"Women professionals do tend to overcompensate." - female doc
-Apparently a love poem picked out at random from a large selection of book discs means that she has feelings for him.
-"A mutated, superior man could also be a wonderful thing! A new and better kind of human being!" - this must have hit harder when this originally aired. From a more modern perspective, it seems odd that so few people seem to be interested in this possibility. Especially as this crew is supposed to be very curious, given what they were hand chosen to do. Instead all the men simply sit and frown prodigiously at her in stony silence. Interesting to note is that she is also the only one among them with strong ESP capabilities.
-How poetic. Entombed in the trap he'd meant for Kirk. And both ESPers wind up dead or entombed. (How he stays entombed, heaven only knows.)
Sense
-One of the control panels sparks, and lights on fire, everything seems to be puffing smoke, and no one seems to be terribly upset about it all. Kirk calmly says to alert fire crews, and everyone sort of stays where they are, letting the panel burn merrily with what looks to be spilled oil on its surface.
-I-- what? One of the crew outright says to Kirk, "I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs." That feels totally contradictory to everything I've ever seen/heard about Kirk. "Watch out for Lieutenant Kirk! In his class, you either think or sink!" Apparently this guy aimed Kirk's first female conquest his way? A "little blonde lab technician"? I... what? "I outlined her whole campaign for her." says the crew member. To which Kirk replies, "I almost married her!" (and yet she gets no name)
-No sign of Uhura or Bones whatsoever.
-Why on earth does it seem like a good idea to go face down a pair of "evil" ESPers by yourself with only one weapon, Captain? Particularly since they've been shown to be able to hit you from a distance through a force field? I know this is supposed to be the Kirk-redeems-his-poor-choices-and-is-a-hero section, but at least wake Spock and take him with you. Bad policy to go alone, you dolt. And you're the captain!
Silliness
-I have to giggle at the uniforms in this episode. Someone went out and bought about 30 of the ugliest, tan, velour sweaters they could find, and then put gold ribbon on some cuffs. Good lord. With zippers down the neck/shoulder. They're barely color-coded by department. And some people seem to have been mis-labeled. Sulu is in blue, but most of the core bridge crew are in yellow. Engineering seems to be in some sort of weird half orange color, but there's one of them in Sulu's usual place and no sign of Uhura. The women don't seem to have any color coding yet at all. Ladies do get a soft, fuzzy, scarf-like neckline, instead of the horrible ribbed mock-turtleneck of the men's costumes, though.
-lololol Kirk can't steer his own ship. Spock pushes him out of the way to help him regain control.
~~~***~~~
This one gets very predictable very quickly. Within minutes of the opening push into plot, I knew which ones of them were going to fall prey to it, and what they were likely to do. I'm sure this struck home much more forcefully when this aired, and WWII had ended only two decades prior, but today it's feels very much like propaganda and plot not well thought through.
Stardate 1312.9
Miniskirts: 1
:o The second woman seen is wearing *gasp* pants! 2 women total, 11-ish scenes with women in pants.
Slang
"She was nova, that one."
It goes boop boop beep... it must be Science!
-Oh man. A 200 year old distress beacon from another ship! Impossible! Didn't they expect to find other species out here? Isn't that part of why they went?
-45 seconds in and we've already been smacked with the "Spock has no emotions. He must be an alien~" card. Follow that up with him giving the unsavory choices of kill a guy or strand him on an uninhabited station hundreds of light-years from Earth, and he looks like more of a bizarre, possibly evil, guy than ever.
-The ship recorder has tapes! And oh lord, don't let it start transmitting, like you said you were going to have it do! All decks on the alert! It did what we asked!
-Oh good! ESP! Definitionally, "some people can sense future happenings." And the lovely female doctor has rated rather high in her tests, of course. Apparently contact with ESP gives one crystalline, glowing blue eyes? And god-like abilities? A far cry from our original definition... There seems to be no real logic to what you can and cannot do with ESP. One minute he's manipulating force fields, the next he's creating fully grown trees out of nothing in a habitat where they could never survive.
-A force field! Of... swirly, flat, purple light?
-I do love the shots of several deck officers with wrenches and pliers trying to replace burnt out boards on their control panels.
-Flipping through the typewriter/hand written screens of medical transcripts! Heehee!
Cinematography
-I can't decide if it's good or bad that as they're trying to figure out what the recorder has on it, they have Spock listening to it alone and reporting what he's hearing, instead of doing clips of what actually had been going on, or cutting to an explanation after they had reconstructed bits of tape or something.
-"It sounded like the captain giving an order to destroy his own ship." Draaamaaaatic muuuusic~ Cue everyone looking at Kirk like he just gave a similar order!
-Omg. The negative film zap with a little halo of drawn on white squiggles to indicate the sensitive lady doctor has been hit with some sort of ESP beam or something. I don't even. ffff And then another one's down! More more accurately, zapped, which causes him to stand up out of his chair and then collapse on the floor!
-Dramatic moment or not, it seems extremely silly for the invalid in bed to so easily grab and pull over a woman standing with a strong footing a full arm's length away.
-The fade in and out while the ESP guy strangles poor engineering tech #3 was a nice little piece of work, for the era, and succinctly managed what it was supposed to.
Star Trek firsts
-First sighting of the mysterious multi-level space chess! The pieces appear to have been cast/cut out of old beer bottles.
-They are leaving the galaxy for the first time! :o
Social Issues WARNING! Possible triggers in this section!
-Ha! Snarky lady doctor not above tactfully turning down an offer with just enough sting to be a deterrent! I like her! She's probably the enemy here. :| And what do you know, I'm correct. Though she gets to redeem herself in the end by saving Kirk in another one of his bone-headed attempts for glory.
-After the contact with the force field, all the free men are gathered around the downed woman, while the single other woman on the bridge is next to the downed man. But while two men stay huddled next to the woman at all times, as soon as Kirk touches the guy, the woman stands up and walks away. There are some really interesting and troubling (for me) implications about who is more important in this situation and for what reasons.
-According to this crew member, there are a little under 100 women on board the Enterprise.
-After spending what is implied to be less than 24 hours with the man, the female doc has supposedly fallen for this guy. Whether nor not that's supposed to be a side effect of the ESP attack, or if it's cause she's a lady and thus must have romantic feelings for this guy, I don't know, but it makes my skin itch.
Philosophy
-"Women professionals do tend to overcompensate." - female doc
-Apparently a love poem picked out at random from a large selection of book discs means that she has feelings for him.
-"A mutated, superior man could also be a wonderful thing! A new and better kind of human being!" - this must have hit harder when this originally aired. From a more modern perspective, it seems odd that so few people seem to be interested in this possibility. Especially as this crew is supposed to be very curious, given what they were hand chosen to do. Instead all the men simply sit and frown prodigiously at her in stony silence. Interesting to note is that she is also the only one among them with strong ESP capabilities.
-How poetic. Entombed in the trap he'd meant for Kirk. And both ESPers wind up dead or entombed. (How he stays entombed, heaven only knows.)
Sense
-One of the control panels sparks, and lights on fire, everything seems to be puffing smoke, and no one seems to be terribly upset about it all. Kirk calmly says to alert fire crews, and everyone sort of stays where they are, letting the panel burn merrily with what looks to be spilled oil on its surface.
-I-- what? One of the crew outright says to Kirk, "I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs." That feels totally contradictory to everything I've ever seen/heard about Kirk. "Watch out for Lieutenant Kirk! In his class, you either think or sink!" Apparently this guy aimed Kirk's first female conquest his way? A "little blonde lab technician"? I... what? "I outlined her whole campaign for her." says the crew member. To which Kirk replies, "I almost married her!" (and yet she gets no name)
-No sign of Uhura or Bones whatsoever.
-Why on earth does it seem like a good idea to go face down a pair of "evil" ESPers by yourself with only one weapon, Captain? Particularly since they've been shown to be able to hit you from a distance through a force field? I know this is supposed to be the Kirk-redeems-his-poor-choices-and-is-a-hero section, but at least wake Spock and take him with you. Bad policy to go alone, you dolt. And you're the captain!
Silliness
-I have to giggle at the uniforms in this episode. Someone went out and bought about 30 of the ugliest, tan, velour sweaters they could find, and then put gold ribbon on some cuffs. Good lord. With zippers down the neck/shoulder. They're barely color-coded by department. And some people seem to have been mis-labeled. Sulu is in blue, but most of the core bridge crew are in yellow. Engineering seems to be in some sort of weird half orange color, but there's one of them in Sulu's usual place and no sign of Uhura. The women don't seem to have any color coding yet at all. Ladies do get a soft, fuzzy, scarf-like neckline, instead of the horrible ribbed mock-turtleneck of the men's costumes, though.
-lololol Kirk can't steer his own ship. Spock pushes him out of the way to help him regain control.
~~~***~~~
This one gets very predictable very quickly. Within minutes of the opening push into plot, I knew which ones of them were going to fall prey to it, and what they were likely to do. I'm sure this struck home much more forcefully when this aired, and WWII had ended only two decades prior, but today it's feels very much like propaganda and plot not well thought through.