167: Star Trek TOS Season 1, “Errand of Mercy”

In this episode of Trek in Time, we’re talking about avoiding, avoiding war at all costs. That’s right. We’re talking about Star Trek season one, Errand of Mercy. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast.

So we’re talking about the original series and we’re talking about the 1960s. And who are we? Well, we’re two guys who were not alive in the 1960s, despite appearances. I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

So you have the tech, you have the writing, you’ve got Star Trek. Matt, how are you doing today? I think I know the answer to this.

I think you know the answer to this. It’s, uh, just after Thanksgiving here in the U. S. and, uh, before Thanksgiving, I went to Germany for a Undecided episode that I’m working on.

Came back and got COVID for the very first time. So my Thanksgiving was spent isolated from everybody in my bedroom. And this is the first day I’ve kind of ventured back out into a different room and a little before the recording, just a little bit behind the scenes to let you know how the magic

happens.

Yeah.

I, uh, I’m on Paxlovid, which is the drug that helps you like treat the disease as quickly as possible. And, uh, it’s like, it’s in a little packets of three pills you’re supposed to take twice a day. And I, Sean and I sat down to record and I was like, Oh, I forgot to take my Paxlovid, ran off, took my dose.

It was like, wait, did I already take this? And I looked in the garbage can and saw the previous pack and I was like, uh oh. And I counted through my packs and I was like, I just took two doses. And so we just spent 20 minutes pause while I called my doctor and it was like, is that okay? So I’m doing great right now, Sean.

How about you?

Yeah, I’m doing much better relatively. Uh, here we are at, as Matt just mentioned, the end of November. The first day of December as we record this and this has been an exhausting year and I’ve just had for the first time in a while because of the holiday, several days off and I have found myself decompressing in a way I didn’t anticipate where I’ve actually been sleeping really well.

And really long and waking up feeling refreshed and realizing that doesn’t happen normally. That’s not good. Yeah. So here’s a quick end of year message from Matt and me. Take care of yourselves, everybody. Yes. Take a moment. Count your paxlovid. Take a nap, embrace, embrace, uh, taking care of yourself. So as I mentioned, that’s right.

Don’t get, don’t go to Germany and get COVID. Do other things in Germany. Yeah. So as I mentioned, we’re going to be talking about Errand of Mercy. This was 26th in broadcast order, but 27th in shooting order. And those numbers tell me something interesting, Matt. Do you know what they tell me? What do they tell you, Sean?

We’re almost at the end of the first season of the original series. We’re almost a third of the way through this journey to revisit the original episodes. I’m looking forward to diving into season two, but before we get to that, of course, we have to get through the last couple of episodes here in season one.

Before we talk about this episode, we always like to revisit the comments you’ve left for us on our previous episodes. So Matt, what have you found for us in the mailbag this week?

A bunch. I had a hard time narrowing this down. We had one from Happy Flappy Farm. This is from the Devil in the Dark episode, which was our last one.

Happy Flappy Farm wrote, Devil in the Dark. I agree with Sean. This is one of my favorite episodes of the original Trek. I love how it highlights the essence of Spock, Scotty the Miracle Worker, Captain Kirk in his awesomeness, and Dr. McCoy who can heal anything. These characters are displaying the best of original Trek.

And here are a few loud thoughts. In the opening scene, six guys leave one guy to guard on his own after 50 people, minors, have died. Are you kidding me? What about the buddy system? Number two, how are these miners so clean? Question mark. Number three, the hoarder looks like Pizza the Hutt. Number four, Matt, if you wear a shirt with writing on it, please show it to us early on so we can concentrate on, on the conversation and not spend the first 15 minutes plus trying to catch the rest of what your t shirt says.

Great review guys. Thank you, happy. Yeah, my, my, my previous on the previous episode, the one I was wearing was, uh, I think it was like, um, it said, uh, trust me, I’ve been peer reviewed and it was a t shirt that I got because I signed up for, uh, I came up with the science where journals are published. Cause like for our episodes, we do research and I need to be able to download the PDFs and stuff.

I had to sign up for an account and pay money and all this stuff. And like, They sent, just in the mail, I got this t shirt and I was like, yeah, that’s a cool t shirt. So that’s the one I was wearing that he couldn’t, couldn’t quite make out. All right. So then we had one from Kindred’s Girl who wrote, this is the Star Trek episode that has struck, stuck in my mind the most.

I loved it when I saw it at age seven or eight and I still think it’s great. Seeing Spock reach across the divide between species and feel the Horta’s pain. And then he and Kirk and McCoy immediately start treating it like a person is so perfect. The bad special effects are so much easier for me to overlook than some of the plot elements we’ve seen in other episodes.

The casual sexism, Kirk sexing up the female he meets, the way all the female crew forget to put their pants on. That’s, yeah, that’s kind of a problem. Yeah. So five stars for me on this one. And then we had one from, uh, paleGhost, this is not necessarily specific to this episode. It’s more to us, Sean.

Uh, PaleGhost wrote, I randomly saw an episode of Enterprise, so I decided to go check out the older episodes of the podcast. You guys have come so far. Getting from there to here. Get it, Sean? Yep. Get it? Yeah. I didn’t realize. It’s been a long road. Yeah. That’s right. I did. Don’t make me laugh. I’ll start coughing.

I didn’t realize how much of the show was, has evolved because of my suggestions and insightful comments. Not to toot my own horn, but I started the red, I started the red alert, turned it into read alert and pretty sure I was the start of viewer feedback traditions. I’m so proud to have been a part of the journey with you guys.

Here’s to 10 more years. And then wrote, Oh yeah, we, would you use some of my subscription to put fly wings on Sean’s doorstopper? I love the idea of that. It’s like being Thanksgiving here in the U. S. I just wanted to read that and say thanks to everybody who watches the show. Oh, absolutely. Comments in whether you’re supporting us and throwing coins at our head or just reviewing us on like Apple podcasts.

It doesn’t matter. It’s like, yeah. This has been a crazy journey. Sean and I are doing this. It’s like a labor of love doing this show. Yeah, we, we just love it. It’s a passion project. So thank you to all of you for listening.

Yes, I, I echo that thanks. And like Matt just said, this is a labor of love. I wanted a reason to rewatch every episode of Star Trek in chronological order and somehow convince my brother that it was a good idea to do it together and then talk about it on a weekly basis and throw it up on the internet.

And the fact that anybody is just like, yeah, let’s do that. Appreciate everybody. It makes it so much fun. I love the comments and I love the idea of turning this doorstop. Yes, people, that is not something on your screen and to let everybody know how pervasive that problem is of people thinking this is something on their screen, it happens to me as we’re recording the episode, there are times where I’m like, should I reach up and clean that?

Oh my gosh. So. Okay, two more comments, these are quick. One from AJ Chan, who said, I hope you talk about the recent video by the Roddenberry Archive in O T O Y on Out of Time, and Sean and I are going to be recording an Out of Time after this, so if you do throw things at our head and you’re part of the Starfleet and you’re in the Academy, and you do get that, we will be talking about that amongst other things on that extra episode.

And then the last one, of course. Mark Loveless, coming in with wrong answers only for today’s episode, Errand of Mercy. The Amazon space delivery person named Mercy arrives in the enterprise with a package that needs to be signed for. However, since it is not in regular, in a regular Amazon box, but just a label on the box that clearly contained a rather awkward marital device for some alien species, no one is willing to sign for it. Mercy finally just leaves it in the mess hall in frustration. It turns out Spock ordered it thinking it was an exotic alien musical instrument and everyone has a good laugh.

Oh my God. I wish Lower Decks wasn’t ending because this would be.

An episode of Lower Decks. This absolutely would be. Oh, I bought something at that bazaar on that planet we just went to, and they’re supposed to be dropping it off. Can you sign for me? And everybody’s standing around looking at the thing and just going, oh my god, where does that go?

Well, Sean, what you and I need to do is, by the time we get to the end of doing this, where we’ve done every episode, we need to publish a book that’s just called Wrong answers only.

And it’s a Star Trek encyclopedia of all the episodes with just the wrong answers, what the episodes are about. There

you go. Proceeds will go to a good cause. I promise. Yes. Well, that noise in the background, that can mean only one thing. That’s right. That’s not a bug on the screen. It also means it’s the read alert, which means it’s time for Matt to read the Wikipedia description for this episode.

Bit of a cliffhanger of a Wikipedia

description this week. Take it away, Matt. Peace negotiations have collapsed between the Federation and the warlike Klingon Empire. The Enterprise is ordered to protect Organia, a peaceful planet located near the Klingon border. Kirk and Spock beam to the surface to warn the Organians about the Klingons, but a Klingon fleet soon arrives, forcing the Enterprise to abandon the duo on the planet.

The natives protect Kirk and Spock, the natives, oh boy, even as, even as Kor, the new Klingon governor orders mass executions of the Organian people. As both Federation and Klingon fleets converge above the planet, Kirk and Spock execute a daring raid on the Klingon headquarters in an effort to destabilize their control over the planet.

That was a lot.

That was a lot, and it also didn’t quite get to the end of the episode, so. No, it just kind of petered out. It’s just like then, then, shenanigans, dot, dot, dot, and they all died. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Directed by John Newland, written by Gene L. Coon. This is the second episode in a row that has been written by Mr.

Coon. And spoilers, it feels like it. The episode includes mainly William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. We don’t get much of anybody else. We get a few scant moments of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura and George Takei as Sulu in a moment where the command of the enterprise is passed to him. But after that, it’s pretty much just Spock and Kirk on the planet.

And the people that he meets on the planet include John Colicos as Commander Kor, John Abbott. David Hillary, Peter Brocco, Victor Lundin, George Sawaya, Walt Davis, Bobby Bass, Eddie Paskey, and Gary Combs. Side note about John Colicos, you would recognize him mainly as a mainstay of villainous sci fi characters.

Kor, of course, stands out for Star Trek fans, but for fans of Battlestar Galactica, yes. That is him. He is the original Lord Baltar from the 1970s TV series. And what was going on when this originally broadcast on March 23rd, 1967. Well, a newcomer to the number one hits on the hit parade. We’ve had a number of weeks where it’s been monkeys, monkeys, monkeys.

We’ve had the Buckinghams multiple times. And then suddenly a little known band pops out of nowhere with a number one hit called Penny Lane. That’s right. It’s the battles. No. Let me reread that. The beatless. No. I’m seeing now it’s pronounced Beatles, but it’s pretty misspelled if they’re referring to the insect.

Anyway, Matt, take it away.

Great. Thanks for that again, Matt. And in the movies, well, a return to a film once again. In the movies, the theaters would play films for weeks upon weeks, upon weeks, something that we’re not accustomed to anymore, where even a film that is considered a runaway success, Might leave theaters after only a month and a half, and then suddenly be on streaming services before you realized it was even out of the theaters.

Back in the sixties, a movie would be allowed to sit and earn its keep. And so here we have a return. We haven’t seen this at the number one slot for it feels like maybe. Eight or nine episodes, but suddenly out of nowhere. Yes, that’s right. It’s how to succeed in business without really trying. This is, as we talked about before, the 1967 romantic musical comedy drama film.

It’s covering every single base based on a 1961 stage musical of the same name. And it is a slapstick farcical comedy, which has resurrected the number one spot. And on television, we’ve been looking at the Nielsen ratings to compare shows that would have been running around the same time as Star Trek, comparing shows like Bonanza, which would have earned a 29 in the Nielsen’s to Star Trek’s 12 in its first season.

We’ve covered a lot of well known shows that have been rewatched and on things like Nick at Night and local syndication for decades, including Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, and the Lawrence Welk Show. And this week, We dip into an anthology series that would have been not a variety show, which is what I thought it would be when I first saw the name.

It’s the Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater. This anthology series would every week be introduced by Bob Hope. And then he may or may not have been in the episode. And the episodes would range in wild variety. From everything from horror, pseudo sci fi, and mystery, all the way to slapstick comedy and pieces that would have included both Mr.

Hope and his usual cavalcade of performers that might have been included, Bing Crosby, amongst other names. I found it fascinating that some of these episodes were written by Rod Serling. This is effectively a precursor to Twilight Zone. And there were other shows like There was an adaptation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Danesevich, which starred Jason Robards.

There was a Mickey Rooney project called the Seven Little Foys and the Osmond Brothers would occasionally appear on the show, Fred Astaire, Barry Chase, Groucho Marx in a play that he wrote called Time for Elizabeth. And the week that this episode of Star Trek broadcast, it would have starred a short film that starred, uh, Bob Hope as a

Person who is let out of a lunatic asylum and then goes about Los Angeles singing odes to the city. And that sounds loathsome to me, but what stood out the most to me was the astounding salary that Mr. Hope earned as a result of hosting and starring in the show. If he was in an episode, he would be paid $500, 000.

In current money, that would be the equivalent of 5 million. An episode. An episode. That’s for the ones he starred in. If he didn’t star in the episode and only hosted it, which would be going out on the stage and recording a welcome everybody to the Chrysler theater. Tonight’s episode is blah, blah, blah, and take it away.

And then he’d go home. He would be paid $25, 000, which is the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars for just showing up and saying, and away we go, he was earning pretty good bucks. And in the news, we see lots of stories that revolve around Vietnam and how well or not well that is going. The first story in the upper left hand column, the US will, and it seems to me that this headline is kind of quiet in what it’s not saying. The US will station B 52s in Thailand to raid Vietnam. Yes, we’re talking about an escalation of the war. We also see 900 of foe killed in a day. Westmoreland hails GIs, so there is an attempt to cast things as going well in a war that is also somehow escalating.

And on the right hand side, we see a little bit of a lighthearted set of photographs concerning a gentleman who used what looks like it might be a parked delivery truck bumper. Instead of walking through slush, he improvises a little bridge for himself. And the article that accompanied that was a, what I thought was a fairly funny Interview with a weatherman from the National Weather Service.

Basically the National Weather Service dropped the ball on this particular date. A 12 hour long snow storm came into New York City, dropping 10 inches of snow. Whereas the weather service had been saying that morning, yeah, this Rain is going to stop around noon and everybody was caught unprepared. And the next day, this day, the weather service head was interviewed saying, yeah, we got it wrong, but we only got it half wrong, which means we also got it half right.

Well, there you go. Got

to look for the silver lining, right? That’s right. So on we go now to our discussion of Errand of Mercy. We, as the synopsis covers it, makes it seem, um, like a lot of action shenanigans are going to be happening. And the episode does in fact have some action shenanigans, but it is much more of a talky and it ends with a much greater Deus Machina, Q like aspect than the synopsis would have hinted at. So I want to get a sense right out of the gate, Matt. Big picture, how did you feel about this one?

I feel like I’m a broken record each week of like, this one, I’ve seen a bunch of times. It’s lodged in my memory. I know it well. And I was kind of bored watching it. And I think it’s not because it’s a bad episode. It’s just because I was so familiar with it. And also, COVID, use that as an excuse here, but I was COVID brain watching this episode going kind of boring, felt like Homer a little bit, like going boring, even though in concept and the headiness of it and what they were grappling with is interesting.

I just, you know, there were some aspects that just made me kind of like raise an eyebrow like Spock. Um, here’s this warrior species that they keep talking about, the Klingons, and he is the most laid back, you know, villain, you know, mustache twirling, you know, Kor. It’s like his, it’s like, uh, we don’t really see him get spicy until the end of the episode.

It’s like, if they’re such a warmongering species, like, why are they so laid back? Like, he’s, he’s very like quiet evil, not in your face evil. Yeah. I thought that was a weird choice that they made back then for that. But

yeah, there is a, I think some of the stuff that stands out to me that’s most interesting about the episode are the background details that aren’t even meant to be a part of the episode itself, the making of, and what would be spawned as a result of, I think in some ways are more engaging.

in discussing the episode than the content of the episode itself. And about the content of the episode itself, I’ll just say this, like you, I remember this one very, very well, and it feels foundational to me. It does. Like it feels like a major piece of the foundation around adventures into the future, including coming across those that are so far beyond us That this, this is an episode about the advanced, sufficiently advanced technology comes across as magic.

From my childhood viewing of that, this one stands out as a foundational story. And we’ve had episodes before. We had the Squire of Kothos. Is the Squire a Q? Like, are these guys a Q? Is practically every other week a Q? You can make that argument that that is what’s going on here, but for me, the story itself, I’m watching it now.

I found myself really struck by It feels like you mentioned the villain in it is being compared and we can’t help but do this. We’ve got a filter in our head that says now in 2024 we’ve seen Klingons be a lot more dynamic. We’ve seen them do all sorts of, of things from, uh, Chewing the scenery evil to nuanced Shakespearean drama.

That’s the, you know, effectively what we’re accustomed to. And I was thinking back to the fact that we’ve seen the updating of the Klingons that was presented in, uh, Discovery, and we saw them in, uh, Stories that took place on in enterprise. And we’ve, we’ve gotten some of that up to this point. So seeing this kind of retrograde version is a bit of a, uh, you have to consciously remind yourself, Oh yeah, this is, this is the first, because that is also surprising to me here.

We are at the end of the first season. The Klingons are arguably the most well recognized non friendly version of a major Star Trek species. And this is the first introduction. And the introduction of them was largely budgetary. At this point, the show was an expensive show to produce, and it was deemed too expensive to have Romulans come back.

Because the sets, the costumes, the makeup, it all required a lot of work, which I think is funny considering we know where Klingon time to go. So by the time you get to Michael Dorn on a weekly basis, having to sit in a makeup chair for three hours just to get his head put on, uh, at this point they were like, what can we do?

So, you look at their costumes, they’re basically wearing mime outfits. They have those sashes across, which, if you look at them carefully, to me it looks like somebody took the fabric that looks like a woven, like, you’d use it for a tablecloth. Looks like somebody took a strip of that, frayed the edge, and then spray painted it gold.

Mm

hmm. Slap it on him. So probably five bucks for that part of the costume. You got the leotard outfit underneath, so that’s maybe ten bucks. And then what do you grab to give everybody that lovely Klingon bronze sheen? Yes, it’s just shoe polish. They literally shoe polish the actors up.

John Colicos, and I think this is, is really, really interesting. He helped originate the look of the Klingons. They were going to do something more. I don’t know, in my research, I couldn’t find out what they were hoping to do with the look of the Klingons. Might it have been something forehead ridges? I don’t know. But it was deemed too expensive.

Yet again, they were like, it’s too expensive. But John Colicos, in the screenplay, he noted that Gene L. Coon, in the description, described the Klingons, and unfortunately, this is some 1967 racism standing right up in a Star Trek script, described them only as Oriental. So they went with, what if I looked like Genghis Khan?

And so they leaned into the beard with the mustache. You mentioned literally mustache twirling. He’s got this Genghis Khan style mustache. So everything is modeled around what is effectively what a racist overtone of presenting these characters. It would obviously go on to evolve by the time you get to later evolutions of the Klingons.

And of course it would be in the movies that we would first see the Klingons with the forehead ridges. And then we would go on the next generation to see the writers intentionally steering the Klingon culture into something based loosely upon Japanese feudalism, where it would be houses and a sense of honor and that kind of sense of duty and family connection and The evolution of it is wonderful.

The original starting point, they didn’t, it wasn’t intentionally meant to be malignant, but it has that element to it, which I, which I found interesting. And

yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, going to what I said in the beginning, I disconnected myself from, okay, let’s pretend I’m 2024 Matt and I’ve never seen a Klingon before.

So, I can’t take what I know now and apply it to his performance and portrayal then. I still found it an odd choice for how he was portrayed because again, they’re described as a war like species. They’re described as being incredibly aggressive, which basically means, Like an alpha dog, you know, like a pack.

So it’s like, it’s going to be might as right. It’s going to be what it evolved into that we do know. But even back then, it’s like, why are they not being aggressive towards each other? Why is he not like puffed up and like trying to be more bravado? Why is he not like, it’s not even, it’s not even me saying 2024 Matt implying this.

It’s just like at the time. If I was told these are warlike species, they’re very aggressive, then fuck, then act aggressive. It’s like he was not acting aggressive. It was like he was acting like a cold, like, no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die. It was like this very like low key evil performance. And it was just really weird why they made that choice for this character that is described in a completely opposite way.

So for me, that was the disconnect. But even if you take that out of the equation, I thought it was a very It was interesting because of how they, um, you, you read through the news article for the time, the Vietnam War. It’s clearly on display in this episode, like,

yeah,

this is a super anti war message.

This is a, you guys need to talk diplomacy. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, this is not the way forward. It was a very clear message that was implied in this. Uh, but one of the complaints about Star Trek at large is like Star Wars versus Star Trek. Star Wars is swashbuckling and excitement and action and Star Trek is, hey, it’s a bunch of nerds in a room talking.

That’s

yeah, that’s this. And a little too on the nose for me. I didn’t find the ending satisfying on this rewatch because it’s so, there’s a kind of cartoonishness to the resolution because I, I found myself thinking I was looking at the In my memory for like, okay, what if this was a next generation episode?

Did they have a next generation episode like this, where it would have been a conflict is on the, is about to break out and a greater power comes in and says, no, no, no, no, no, this doesn’t happen. And would Picard have turned and said, you have no right to stop us from starting a war. And I found myself, like, the cartoonishness of the argument made by The two sides about their right to have a war.

I found myself thinking the ending, ending the very last scene where Kirk is like, I’m a little embarrassed. Like he has a moment where he then gets to go stand At the front of the ship looking at the screen really close and we’re given a full shot of Kirk and we’re supposed to see growth and I do, I get within the episode that we’re supposed to see the evolution of thinking, but the cartoonishness of that moment is a little hard to get past when it’s Kirk and Kirk shows up on the planet to effectively say, like, I know better than you.

And then when the tables are turned, it becomes petulant in a way that doesn’t strike me as very strong writing. And so for me, it took me out of it and it made the message so on the nose, it made the episode so clearly a preach downward of, When it comes, you’ve got to be diplomatic. You’ve got to talk.

You’ve got to figure out a better, better way. I understand that in the moment, and I wonder if this is what it was, in the moment, was there a growing sense of the ongoing nature of the Cold War, the proxy nature of Vietnam, the distaste for Vietnam? Was it growing to a point where people were starting to speak in In such brazen terms about it, out of a sense of, my God, why is, why can’t we slow this down?

Why can’t we stop this? I can’t help but wonder if that’s maybe what was going on in the background.

So, I’m stepping into hornet’s nest right now. Um, today’s politics, Sean, Uh, MAGA, mm, um, it feels like we’re in this exact position right now. And so I, I see what you’re getting at. I don’t necessarily disagree.

I think the writing was weak. It could have been done much better, more tactfully, more, far more sophisticated than what they did. But, at the end of the day, I think it was still done in a very accurate way in the sense of. When you’re in the moment and you’re kind of indoctrinated and you’re speaking from the point of view of, well, this is what, this is why we have to do this.

You’re completely blind to how flawed your logical argument is. And you’re just diluted into this very narrow way of thinking. And the whole point of the episode was Starfleet is locked into this very narrow way of thinking. The Klingons are, from their species, are very locked into this narrow way of thinking.

And it’s like, it feels like they both are arguing that this is inevitable, it has to happen. It’s the exact thing that’s happening right now in this world. And it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s, to me, this episode felt a little timeless of like, well, crap. We’re going through this right now in the world, um, and people are making arguments that they think are like so great and the argument they’re making, they don’t realize is actually arguing against their own point and they don’t recognize it.

So I completely understood why Kirk was saying what he was saying. In the argument with the Organians about like, no, we should be able to do this. And it was like when the Organians were like, do you not realize what you’re doing here? And he kind of went dar and had that moment of like, oh, crap. Um, I thought As, as ham fisted as it was, sadly, that’s kind of how humans work.

It’s how it, how it’s actually working. Like we’re seeing that today, like right now. And if you’d asked me this five, 10 years ago, I would have been right there with you and been like, yeah, that’s so stupid. It would never be like that. It’s like, no, I can tell you, Sean, I’ve, I’ve had arguments with people and conversations with people that are literally arguing against their own point and don’t recognize it at all.

And these are not dumb people. It’s just like. Wow, you have so drunk the Kool Aid into what you’re arguing, you have become incapable of stepping outside yourself, even for a brief second, to recognize that you’re not making a valid point. And one of the things I did like about it was at the very, very end, right before the credits, Kirk says, I’m embarrassed.

Yeah.

He says that to Spock. When he said that, I was like I feel like collectively the United States needs to have that I’m embarrassed kind of moment with ourselves right now. Um, it’s like, that’s, I thought was really well done of him just acknowledging openly to Spock of like, man, geez, I, I did, I’m better than this.

He was basically saying, I’m better than this. I should have known better than this. I’m embarrassed at how I behaved. This is just. So, uh, I like that they had that kind of like, kind of like a catharsis at the end of the episode. It acknowledged that how stupid it was. Um, but I do agree with you that it was not handled deftly.

It was not as handled and sophisticated as it could have been handled. But I think at the root of it. I think it was kind of spot on for,

for, yeah, I, I found myself though, by that time I was having difficulty, like if it, like I mentioned earlier in this recording, this feels like it was something written by Gene L.

Coon on the heels of something else by Gene L. Coon. And it feels tired. It feels, it feels a little lazy and short cutty. It feels like setting up a moment. Instead of setting up a story, the villainy of the Klingons is talked about, but not seen. The power of the Klingons is talked about, but not seen. Part of that is budgetary.

Uh, interesting little side note. It would be a while before we would see a Klingon ship because They hadn’t made a model. The Organians are, when you get to the end, if you spend a little bit too much time thinking about the logic of the episode, their motives and what they do don’t make a lot of sense at the beginning.

They’re this powerful, they don’t want there to be combat. Why do they play this way? They keep getting called sheep throughout the episode. Why are they play acting all of that at the beginning of the episode? What is that all about? It doesn’t make any sense. They are setting up a scenario where two opposing forces coming to their planet are going to do exactly what they don’t want because they’re not doing anything to demonstrate like, we don’t need you.

Yes. And you can go away. Like, they don’t like, Oh, we don’t want to be a part of your conflict. So get out of here. We’re super beings. Leave. Fine. Like, the Federation’s only goal is don’t let the Klingons have that planet. That would be the end of the episode. Starfleet shows up. We’re here to help. We don’t need your help.

We’re super powerful. Oh, sorry. Our mistake. We’re leaving. The moment the Klingons get there, the Klingons are like, you’re ours now. Nope. You’re out of here. Goodbye. Starfleet’s not gonna balk at that. So it’s a little bit of a The play acting sets up a scenario that doesn’t make sense if you look back on the episode.

It feels deus machina to me. It feels like you mentioned about Kor. I think it’s very interesting Kor’s place in Star Trek history is one of those things where I’m like that to me is cooler now than that episode. I like the fact that they introduced the Klingons. I like the fact they introduced Colicos as Kor.

He would go on to reprise this role. I don’t know if you remember these episodes Matt, but in Deep Space Nine, There are two episodes in which he reappears and they have one of those episodes. They have multiple original series actors who played Klingons come back and reprise their roles. I think that is really cool.

I think it’s really cool that Worf mentions Kor in his encounter with Kirk in one of the episodes. That is cool. Like the idea that they are honoring these actors and they are honoring what it means to Star Trek. I

think that’s important. I also like that in this episode at the end the Organians say Klingons and Starfleet are going to end up being fast friends.

I found myself like. And I’m like yes! I found myself boggling at that. I was

just like what a cool little like completely unintentional easter egg. I was like that is so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really neat. Um, as I mentioned before, one of the things about this that I find most interesting is that the Klingons were invented because the Romulans were too expensive.

They didn’t have a Klingon ship. So you, in the remastered version, they created the debris and the explosion after, at the beginning, they added in some CGI pieces that were recognizable as a Klingon ship, but originally that wouldn’t have been there. Uh, I also found it interesting, the Klingon language,

didn’t yet exist at this point. And a little fun fact. I don’t know if you’ve looked through the show notes, Matt, but do you know who invented the Klingon language? No, it would not be invented until the motion picture where somebody would come up with some guttural exchanges in order to present what a Klingon language might sound like.

And then a linguist took that as a jumping off point. And it did in fact, as we know, created the Klingon language and the Klingon language is a fully functioning language that you can actually learn. The person who created the original guttural sounds of the Klingon language. One James Doohan. That’s right.

Scotty really can do it all. That’s awesome. He also had a hand original in, uh, some of the original sounds of the Vulcan language, which I found interesting. So Matt, is there anything else you wanted to share about this episode before we jump off? No, I’m, I think we kind of covered it all. So next time we’re going to be talking about another episode from season one.

We’re talking about the city on the edge of forever. I’m looking forward to that one. But before we get to that chat. We of course invite you all to jump into the comments. Wrong answers only. What is City on the Edge of Forever all about? Jump into the comments also just with any questions or comments for us.

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