Interesting discussion on What Are Little Girls Made Of from the Star Trek podcast that I listen to, they get into the nature of android cloning and whether it's still really you, as in transfer of conscience or just a machine with your background.
I need to post more often if I wanna share my thoughts cause I tend to forget but I rarely have enough time on my computer, anyway here's a couple of things I wanted to share:
- I forgot to ask this when I first watched Mudd's Women; in the elevator Mudd recognizes Spock as a half-Vulcan, yet it seems to me Spock looks exactly like all the Vulcans he meets in Amok Time, am I missing something?
- William Shatner's acting has significantly improved from Season 1 to Season 2.
- William Windom was pretty great in Doomsday Machine, it took me a few minutes before I recognized him from The Twilight Zone, really good actor and solid character.
On to the episodes, back on Barto's list:
The Doomsday Machine: Solid episode, enjoyed it through out and loved the Moby Dick vibe for Matt Decker, I'm looking to see if youtube has the original footage for the planet eater scenes, curious to see what 1960's technology had there. This episode could have been a movie easily, one thing I love about most of the Star Trek episodes I've seen so far is that they don't drag at all, like most TV shows these days do, on the contrary; it actually very often seems like they could have expanded on a bunch of things in the plot but didn't/couldn't because of time restraints or some other reason.
The scene where Decker takes over the Enterprise was a reminder for me that most -if not all- of these characters are military officers, I dunno why I thought they were a scientific team from a futuristic NASA-like organization.
It was interesting to see Captain Kirk getting down and dirty with some machine fixing on the Constellation, I believe this is the first time I've seen him do anything other than ask a lot of questions and give orders based on the answers he gets from his crew, feels like his only talent has been decision making so far.
Curious to see if there are more of the planet eater out there to show up in later episodes or shows.
Funny bit: As soon as Kirk asked Scotty to beam back and leave him to detonate the Constellation; Scotty is like "okay bye" hehe, didn't try to show any solidarity or sympathy to Kirk who could have easily died in this stunt, I'm thinking they couldn't waste time on more dialogue there.
The Changeling: Great episode, I enjoy episodes that take place entirely on the Enterprise, throughout the episode I wondered why Kirk couldn't just order the Nomad to self destruct as soon as it proved deadly, he eventually did that in some way but after what I thought was unnecessary mind gaming with the thing. Shatner gave his relatively best bit of acting on the series when he thought Scotty was killed.
Funny bit: I like that Uhura's memory has been wiped clean yet it would only take a week to re-educate her on everything she need to do her job again, kinda means that she's very easily replaceable 
The fact that they're all military officers explains to me how McCoy is always around even for matters that doesn't require a medical opinion, like they're get together in the conference room to discuss some danger or plan and he'd be there which used to seem odd to me.
Two great episodes. Windom really beat the shit out of that redshirt.
And it seems there's a lot of cross-training in the federation. On a couple of occasions Uhura takes over for Chekhov or Sulu when one of them flips out or something. Similarly, Chekhov is the junior science officer, taking over when Spock's not around. There's also a relatively unknown redshirt that gets put in charge of the ship a few times when Kirk, Spock and Scotty are all off doing something.
The Changeling is actually the 2nd of 3 or 4 instances where Kirk convinces a computer to destroy itself. He previously talked Landru into letting them blow it to bits.
As for the unremastered Doomsday, it's strictly static shots of the planet-killer being hit with phasers.
In TOS they were unable to shoot space sequences with more than one moving objects. If there were two ships they were static with the stars moving behind them. I thought they went a little overboard with the battle sequences in the new version of this, but the footage of the smashed up Constellation getting pummeled by asteroids definitely made up for it. And BTW, Memory-Alpha lists every change between the original and remastered versions, with pictures usually. If you haven't been already, you would do well to read the article for each episode after watching them.
Starfleet Command pretty much acts as the military wing of the federation, but because of Roddenberry's Utopian vision, they all considered themselves explorers first and foremost. I suspect most of the specialists had rudimentary military training, but pretty much along the lines of what Hawkeye and Trapper-John would have received as doctors serving in Korea. Once you get to TNG the lines become far more distinct. On the Galactic Princess there's a mix of starfleet personnel and civvies who are essentially modern astronauts.
- I forgot to ask this when I first watched Mudd's Women; in the elevator Mudd recognizes Spock as a half-Vulcan, yet it seems to me Spock looks exactly like all the Vulcans he meets in Amok Time, am I missing something?
Eh. Beats the shit out of me. As a salesman and scoundrel, it would certainly make sense for Mudd to be a fantastic judge of character. At the time, "you're part human, aren't you" would have made a helluva lot more sense.
Topic: Star Trek: The Next Threaderation (Read 257327 times)
