169: Star Trek TOS Season 1, “Operation–Annihilate!”

In this episode of Trek in Time, we’re going to talk about seeing the characters the way we remember them as they play a game of Operation. That’s right everybody, it’s Star Trek, Season 1, Operation Annihilate. And it is, believe it or not, the last episode of season one. That’s right.

29 in shooting order, 29 in broadcast order. And who am I? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time. This is of course, the podcast where we watch every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we also take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we are now wrapping up season one of the original series, which means we are in April of 1967.

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. Matt, how are you today?

Doing well, Sean. I know you’ve got a little bit of a cold and I’m getting over COVID and it’s just a good time of year.

Ringing out the year in fine, Ferrell fashion. That’s what we like to do around here. That’s right. Before we get into our discussion about this episode, Operation Annihilate, we always like to take a look at what you’ve had to say about our previous episodes. So Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?

Okay. I had a hard time picking comments for this one, because there were so many good ones. I had to narrow it down, but I did want to start off with, during, when we were talking about the, uh, City on the Edge of Forever, we made, one of us made a comment about, like, yeah, why did McCoy have a phaser that the guy just happened to, like, obliterate himself with?

Well, Old Trekkie commented, something else y’all didn’t touch on was McCoy’s defining moment, his interaction with Rodent, where he laments on how medicine is practiced in the past. Also, his phaser came from the transporter chief. The ship had been put on alert, everybody armed up, looking for McCoy, who is deemed to be potentially dangerous to either himself or others.

He being a paranoid delirium grabs the phaser for defense, but then that of course begs the question, why didn’t he use it on the landing party? Eh. Good question. What? Excellent observations. Yeah. Sitting on the Edge of Forever is the best piece of Star Trek writing that exists. As David Gerrold once pointed out, good drama requires a protagonist making a decision.

I thought that was a really good kind of correction for us of like, oh yeah, well, there’s an explanation why he had the phaser, but then why did he, he didn’t use it. Like what’s up with that?

Um, then, we had one from PaleGhost69 who wrote. In the episode, when we were talking, one of us said, the writing of this episode is so good to me, it makes every other episode look like shit. His response was, truest thing I’ve heard all year. This is my favorite episode of the original series as well.

It’s probably the reason Next Generation went through what it did, which I’m grateful for. And then he responded to his own comment, and congrats, you guys talking about this episode got my wife to watch it. Oh, very good. Well welcome aboard. And then we had one from Sam Higdon, who wrote, Hey guys, City is one of my favorite episodes of the original series.

It has a great mix of different genres in sci fi, romance, and comedy. But here is a little thing to have a good discussion about. City on the Edge of Forever is a great sci fi episode, but not a great Star Trek episode? Just a little thought experiment. Please don’t come at me in the comments. And I thought this was interesting.

It’s like It could be a not Star Trek episode. It’s, it’s, it feels Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I, I, I don’t It is a, yeah. I don’t know if I subscribe to the, it’s not a good Star Trek episode. And I’d be curious, like, to kind of throw out to you as well as to the listeners. Like, I’m pointing out this comment of like, interesting thought experiment.

It’s like, do you agree that this might not be a good Star Trek episode? It’s a great sci fi episode.

I think it lands in interesting territory in the same way that Galaxy Quest is considered one of the better Star Trek movies.

Yes.

Yeah. It’s like you can have the heart of something and not be that thing.

And I think that Galaxy Quest is doing it the other direction and the way that This commenter is pointing out the episode kind of rises above the context that it’s in. You could show this to somebody who doesn’t know Star Trek. And on a certain perspective, it is back to the future, writ large. It is not like, oh, my family will disappear.

It is the wrong side will win this massive war and history will be changed permanently. So yeah, I can see where they’re coming from.

Well then we also had wrong answers only, Sean. We had two good ones, and I couldn’t make up my mind, so I’m gonna do them both. The first one is from A. J. Chan. Operation A Nile 8, Commander Sisko leads a Starfleet task force in an operation to retake captured spa uh, recaptured space station. A. Nile 8. After the Dominion br brings down the minefield, he takes one ship into a wormhole and converses with the Prophets. He pleads with them to stop the Dominion fleet, but they refuse to deal with corporeal matters until he sings his

thong song ? No, I’m not super familiar with R&B, so I looked this up. And the artist, Sisko has a song called Thong Song. Yes, and I, when I looked it up, and I recommend everybody do this on YouTube. Just look up Deep Space Nine Thong Song. And there’s another Star Trek podcast, uh, that did this and they talked about it.

And it’s really funny where it’s that game that they play in Deep Space Nine. If everybody remembers the song in Deep Space Nine, it’s like that. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. And they’re singing this thing and doing the hopscotch through that level. Um, I like it when your booty go

dumps like a truck. What? What?

It’s, it’s very funny. I highly recommend you go to YouTube. Just search DSpace9 thong song, and you’ll have a good laugh. And then the other wrong answers only was from, of course, everybody’s favorite, Mark Loveless, who wrote plot of Operation Annihilate. Scotty has been using the time portal to go back in time to steal artifacts of interest from the past.

He steals a copy of the board game Operation, and a few, interesting that you just discussed this, nuclear mines. Due to some transport malfunction, a game called Operation Annihilate is created. Some of the crew play it on a peaceful planet, and let’s just say, it causes problems, including a time rip. What damage does the time rip cause?

Well, the creation of two television shows in the past, Tarzan, starring Ron Ely, and of course, TJ Hooker. Oddly, hilarity does not ensue. Three out of five stars. So, Mark, as usual, chef’s kiss, and uh, both of those, just fantastic,

love it. Yes, thank you everybody. That noise in the background, well that can only be one thing.

That is of course the read alert. It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description.

Matt, have at it. The Enterprise arrives on Deneva, the home of Captain Kirk’s brother, Sam, and his family, and discovers that the entire planet has been infested with large, amoeba like aliens who that have attacked and killed much of the human population.

One of these aliens attaches itself to Spock, who volunteers to become a subject in Dr. McCoy’s medical tests. McCoy and Kirk find a cure in time to save Spock, and the remainder of the Denevan population. Wow, there’s one sentence in there that’s doing a lot of work. There is. And there are a couple of aliens attaches itself to Spock, who volunteers to become a subject in Dr McCoy’s medical tests.

Whoa. A lot of work happening there.

Yeah, there’s a lot of work and it’s also a lot of work for a kind of indirect correctness. It doesn’t seem fully connected, Spock’s being infected and then his volunteering to be a part of the medical experiments. The medical experiments are a search for a cure. It doesn’t mention that.

So it’s like, he’s over there going like, so I’ve got this thing about tuberculosis I’m looking into. Are you interested? Or do Vulcans bleed? Let’s find out. Doctor, I’m in tremendous pain. This episode directed by Herschel Daughtery. Written by Stephen Carabatsos, Stephen Carabatsos, this would be the final script that he would be involved in writing on the show.

He had been involved in various productions prior to this, including having been asked to do a rewrite of City on the Edge of Forever. Which Roddenberry’s response was, it was like he took a chainsaw to the script. So they didn’t even use Any of his rewrite, and they went back to Harlan Ellison and said, can you rework this a bit?

And then he would leave the show, but he still was contracted to write an episode. So he would write this episode, and then it would be rewritten by Roddenberry and another writer who’d both retool it, and it eventually became this. He would go on to be involved in TV shows like Kojak and would be involved in writing a movie starring John Cusack in the 80s. And it’s one of Cusack’s very early, basically an excuse to put half naked, if not fully naked women on the screen. So, okay. So here we are with the main cast. We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, and James Doohan all making some, uh, getting some good screen time in this episode.

We also have Nichelle Nichols. And in support, we have Joan Swift as Kirk’s sister in law, Craig Hundley as the Young Nephew, Dave Armstrong, Maurishka as Yeoman Zara, Fred Carson, Jerry Catron, and Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Leslie, yet again. Lieutenant Leslie appears in many episodes in this first season as a gentleman in the background who apparently has a multitude of jobs.

Sometimes he’s security, sometimes he’s on the bridge, sometimes he’s an engineer. Wow. That Lieutenant Leslie, he can really do anything. The original broadcast date of this episode, April 13th, 1967. And Matt, I don’t need to tell you this. We are in a time warp. It’s like we fell into the time portal from our last episode, because yes, all the pop culture is going to be the same pop culture we’ve seen before.

We’re talking Happy Together by the Turtles as the number one song. Just a few bars, Matt. That was great. And in the movies, yes, Matt, one of your favorites, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Yet again, 1967 was, if nothing else, consistent. Yeah, it was. And on television, we’ve been talking about the Nielsen ratings trying to show a comparison between Star Trek, which earned on average a 12 in the Nielsen’s against programs like Bonanza, which earned a 29 at the number one spot. We’ve seen a lot of very familiar rerun shows that have been rebroadcast in syndication going Through the 1970s and onward to Nick at Night, shows like Get Smart, Dragnet, and Hogan’s Heroes.

And this week, it’s not a TV show, but similar to previous weeks where we’ve talked about channels that had broadcast of movies in certain nights. We have the ABC Sunday Night Movie. And this was a programming slot that began to be filled in, I believe it was 1962. It was on and off again for many, many years.

And a little interesting side note, the original incarnation of the ABC Sunday Night Movie, I thought this was fascinating for some reason they thought. You know what we could do? We can change how movies opening credits are shown. So they used to show the movie by opening with a teaser of the film, which probably was like a cobbled together trailer, and then it would go to a commercial, and then when it would come back, an announcer would say the title of the movie and the main actors.

And then the movie would start and ABC would superimpose the name of the screenwriter above the opening scene. And then they would put the opening credits at the end of the movie when it was all over.

Somebody somewhere must have been like, opening credits in movies are 90 seconds, 120 seconds that we can’t use. But if we cut that off and put it at the end. We can fit a commercial in there and get some more commercial sales. It had to be that. And then at a certain point, movies started putting it into their syndication rights, into the contracts of the syndication rights.

That it couldn’t be altered. So ABC eventually had to stop doing this. But I thought that was a really weird, like, anyway, a few weeks before this episode would broadcast in late March, March 26th, the ABC Sunday Night Movie would show the movie The Robe. This is a fictional, uh, Biblical tale about one of the Roman soldiers involved in the crucifixion of Christ getting a hold of his robe and eventually converting to Christianity.

And it was a very popular movie. How popular you might ask? Well, in its broadcast on that Sunday night, March 26th, it earned a 31 in the Nielsen’s. This tops the number one show of the year, which was Bonanza and clearly trumps Star Trek at it’s little mighty 12. So, that gives you a sense of how popular the Sunday Night Movie program was.

And in the early 70’s, and I remember this from our childhood, ABC was the network that bought for a number of years, the rights to rebroadcast the Bond films. And they began in 1972 with broadcasting of Goldfinger and they didn’t show them in production order at all. So it was like, they would just show them completely out of order.

But I remember when I was a kid, I remember dad being very excited to be able to watch a Bond movie broadcast on, on television. So that’s a little insight into Sean’s childhood. And in the news we see a lot of similar headlines that we’ve seen throughout 1966 1967 stuff about the economy, the concerns in 1967 that the economy seemed to have been a little bit flat from the previous year.

We also see that the U. S. wouldn’t renew its arms aid to, get this, India and Pakistan. Well, interesting choice to just openly arm both sides of a tense relationship in the global context. There was also a Profit!. That’s right. There was also a Chinese musician. Who was granted asylum, there was a Soviet Union promise to fund the UN and the sub headline there was, it will make a long awaited grant of unspecified size.

Hmm.

That’s helpful. It sounds a little bit like the Soviet Union at that point was going through with the recycling and figuring, well, let’s just grant this to the UN, but the headline that caught my eye and took center stage in the newspaper that day, 700 pupils flee burning Queens school in three minutes.

And it is the news story of a school, an elementary school in Astoria, Queens, which burned down in the same year that it was already slated to close. Because it was going to move to a new building that was being built right across the street. So, this is not a silver lining, but kind of a weird coincidence.

And the fire took the school down. And sadly, the story includes that an eight year old pupil admitted to having started the fire in an empty classroom playing with matches. But luckily, nobody was killed and the injuries were to a firefighter and a custodian who inhaled smoke. And now to our conversation about Operation Annihilate.

Matt, we’ve had a number of episodes this season that have been, for me, a, ooh, I love this one. And for you, a,

meh.

And I’m wondering if this one lands in the Same category, because for me, this one has a lot of moments that I really, really love. And I also find some of the major conceit of the episode fun to wrestle with, because to me, this has hints of, It kind of takes the trope of pod people and takes a hard right turn and turns it not into like, Oh, let me convince you that I’m still your friend.

This goes into a different terrain where it’s like the torturous aspect of pod people, which again is an interesting slant during an era of the cold war where the pod people metaphor is usually used to say like the ideology corrupts your thinking. And it turns you into an inhuman because you’re no longer acting the way you should be.

This is, oh, there’s a, a force of large scale thinking. They literally describe this as a giant space brain. So this kind of massive thing comes in and doesn’t so much change your thinking as just take away your ability to act freely through the fear of the unknown. And torture of pain. I found it to be a more, for lack of a better framing, materialist response to the communist fear, as opposed to an ideological one.

I found it really interesting to wrestle with that as a metaphor of the age. And I also found, uh, The episode, interesting in two regards. One for me, the nostalgia of it. I love some of the moments between the characters. I think that this, for me, is an episode where you really see it’s the end of the first season.

They know who all these people are. They’ve just had the tremendous success of City on the edge of forever. And now you have them telling a story about Kirk looking like he doesn’t want to lose his other brother. Spock. We have McCoy in a sequence of scenes where he makes a mistake. And the performance out of DeForest Kelly in this one, I think stands out and we get some nice moments of Scotty just like charmingly being on the right side of an action sequence that you wouldn’t expect him to come out on top of.

And I found myself laughing about the casting of Scotty in Strange New Worlds and thinking, boy, they really hit it out of the park with that guy. Cause that guy carries the same tone. As you know, our original Scotty here, uh, and I also found myself thinking about Strange New Worlds a lot in this one because we see the death of Kirk’s brother, who is of course a B character in Strange New Worlds.

So this is a character we’ve, we’re getting to see more of than we had ever seen in the original broadcasting, right down to the original broadcasting being it’s William Shatner in a mustache. As his brother, but of course we see so much more of this character in Strange New Worlds. So I found myself really kind of like having that nostalgic joy and the reframing retro impact of Strange New Worlds coming into it occasionally.

And there were a couple of moments where Spock’s actions and Uhura’s response to Spock, I was like, this is Being recolored as a result of Strange New Worlds and giving like background and like there was, I felt like there was a lot here that made me think about all the different incarnations of these characters that we’re seeing now.

Really, really enjoyed it on multiple levels for me. So, where do you land on all this? I just had quite a long spiel of just like, I really like this, and I always have, and I always will. And now you get to go at it and say like, eh, boring.

Okay. So let me just frame something really quick. Like I like that you called out, there’s trends in the 1960s of like the pod people that kind of like, Getting taken over, losing control.

It’s kind of that metaphor for the communist threat of collective thinking and all that kind of stuff. It’s been percolating in different episodes of this. It is here very strong in a very different way of doing it. My memories of this as a kid watching this, because I really haven’t seen this episode in probably 20 years.

Um, I enjoyed it. ’cause there’s a lot of action drama kind of moments that were kind of as, even as a kid kind of caught my attention. But as a kid, even then, I was like, those things flapping around those, uh, those amoebas, those failed baking attempts from the Great British Baking Show were laughable as a kid.

I was like, that looks stupid. It’s on a wire dangling across the, you know, it looked, it was dumb. Uh. Extra dumb now. I’m like watching like, oh man, so it’s so Doctor Who from the same era of like, wow, you guys were, you couldn’t pull it off, but you still tried. It’s like, it’s one of those, maybe you shouldn’t have done that.

But 2024 Matt watching this. Loved it. I loved it. You know, even with that goofiness of the Amoeba thing, I love this episode and I had forgotten so much of this and I forgot this was the episode where Sam dies. Yeah. And for me, I think part of the reason I may have loved this episode was because of Strange New Worlds, because we have been getting to know Sam as a person, and the relationship with Kirk, and that brotherly dynamic they have, and he’s kind of endearing, and you’re kind of getting to know him, and so it’s like, for a story that’s basically a horror story, The writing technique of like, you know, you have to show how dangerous this thing is to instill fear in the viewer, to understand the danger that your favorite characters are under.

They could have just made this any random, just like, you know, person on the planet that got killed. And it’s like, wow, this thing is dangerous. The fact that the writers were like, no, we need to make this like extra, like personal for Kirk. We’re going to just murder his brother’s family. You know, his sister in law and his brother and put his nephew in danger and we’re gonna make it super personal so that when something goes with Spock, he’s even more amped up.

It’s like, that to me was, they were going for the jugular in the storytelling. And for me, my memory of watching it before was like, uh, you know, you have that empathy of like, oh, that’s awful. He just lost his brother. But after seeing Sam in Strange New Worlds and getting to know his character and knowing I know he dies.

I couldn’t remember how. And then this episode happens and I’m like, oh damn, that is a brutal way to end this character. Like, just brutal. And so it’s like, it kind of hit me in a stronger way because of Stranger Worlds. And for that, I just like, I think that just made the, the, the danger of this episode and the brutalness of the, that the writers, like, went for the jugular, it just made it, like, to me, very impressive storytelling for how brutal they were to Kirk, just completely destroying his family.

And especially when the, when the sister in law dies on the bed. That last scream and gasp. Yeah, it was just like, oh my god. It was just like, I remember

that scream from my childhood. I remember that scream. Yeah, like I forgot. It’s impactful. It’s terrible because she dies in a way that you’re just like, horrific.

There’s nothing about this death that is kind other than the fact that it’s a release from torture and her, the performance of that actress. I was just like, Holy cow. She she’s really good for about two and a half minutes. And she is earning that paycheck. And she does a great job. I really, really liked her performance.

Before I go to my next point, I just wanna say I did love the fact that Strange New World gave Sam the mustache. Yeah. Just because Kirk had the mustache anyway, mu Shatner had the mustache brother on the floor. I like, I was like, that’s just something nice little nod that they gave him the mustache the entire time.

But for me, for this episode, the, the, the danger they set, making his his Kirk’s family and then stretching it into Spock. And the agony that Spock goes through is like, once again, the writing was, and the acting was fantastic here because Nimoy did a tremendous job conveying. He never felt like he was overacting to me, which was in 1960s acting, you tend to overact on camera.

Uh, it was just the technique at the time. He wasn’t, he was actually being very subtle in some of his like little head tits he would do in the episode of like, you could tell he, it’s like, he’s, he’s fighting with something. He’s not completely normal. He’s kind of fighting with it. Um, the thing that, that happened that really kind of just hit me was, it’s kind of fore, it’s foreshadowing what’s going to happen to his nephew.

And you don’t want a child going through that. And so the writers are continuing that, not only are you concerned for Spock, but it’s just reminding you as a viewer. This is about to happen to a child, this is about to happen to a child, this is about to happen to a child. So it’s like there’s this ticking time bomb behind it.

Even though Spock is managing to kind of get through it, you know the kid is not. And so the writing of this was so tight and the level of danger and fear never let up. It was unrelenting. And it just surprised me because I did not remember this. For my previous viewings, and to me this season, it just ended on two fantastic episodes.

Just bam, bam, back to back. It’s like they just were firing on all cylinders. Not just because they had the characters, they know the characters inside and out, and we got the McCoy ness of it all, we got the Spock ness of it all, we got the Kirk ness of it all. That was all there, but it was just for me, it was just really taut, tight, smart storytelling in a 45 minute package, carried,

that was greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah. And from my experience of this, we were watching this first season, that is absolutely not the case in most of the episodes. Most of the episodes are not greater than the sum of their parts. They’re about as good as the sum of their parts and maybe a little bit lower.

And these two, I think they were just like firing on all cylinders. This kind of reminded me of Next Generation where I like next generation, but when we got to best of both worlds, you know, like that’s when it was like, Oh, game on next generation just found their footing. And now they’re going to be fantastic almost every episode here on out where that’s what this feels like.

It feels like the show finally found its footing right at the end. It’s a shame it took them an entire season to get there, but they got there. I

really liked it. Yeah. They, they benefited from, you know, an era of television where you had a season to figure stuff out. Like if you made it to air and you had the support of producers and the network, you’d be given a shot as opposed to the current methodology, like Netflix, if you don’t get a certain number of hours binged the entire release of a season within, I think it’s a six week window, you’re done. And so if you don’t get that. Like, everybody who watched it watched all of it by a certain end date or you’re out. And that is, uh, why we end up with shows that are really terrific, but end up on, in the dustbin as a result. Um. It’s not a way. It’s not a way to do television.

No. It’s not. And it’s, you know, you mentioned the personal stakes of, of this episode. I found myself one of the moments where I was just like, holy cow, like the strange new world’s relationship where when Kirk first sees his brother is dead. And of course, I went back to, like, we’ve seen the brotherhood relationship.

We have the episode of Strange New Worlds where the two of them basically have their, almost every show that has siblings does this, the, how come you and I don’t both think that, like, how come you and I have a different relationship with our parents? We both think the other one’s the favorite. They have that kind of storyline.

It’s always done. But here we had that in Strange New Worlds where it’s like, you were more of, you were with the family, but you had more drive. And we know From this episode, what we see in the earlier one, where Sam has said of Jim, my brother has drive that most people don’t have. He is going to be a captain.

Like this is his destiny. And Sam doesn’t have that. So here we see the Sam who makes different choices than Jim, where we have in the past of Jim Kirk, the, there’s a woman with a baby on the way, but I’m not going to be a part of that family structure. I’m not going to be there. And because there’s a different path for me and Sam makes a different choice.

And so he’s with a family stationed on a planet where you could imagine Sam saying, like, I don’t want to, I can’t raise a family on a starship. I will take a posting where I’m doing research and can have my family. And the heartbreak of seeing that end in this way and seeing. And seeing it in Shatner, what I thought was a very good performance in him in that scene where he stands up.

And then I found myself like kind of getting caught by the fact that Spock comes over to console him and says, I can, I can imagine what you’re going through. And realizing in that moment, Spock knew Sam, so it’s this moment of like, Oh, he’s consoling the passing of a brother. And somebody he knew, and it took it up a notch yet again of Spock, like Spock is moving forward and in a very Vulcan lack of emotion in the performance, but like there’s a connection there that Spock is also acknowledging now because of the introduction of the earlier show.

I found that interesting. And for me, McCoy’s performance at the end with the. He’s made a mistake. They rushed the research. They rushed to figure out a cure because they were all just like, we got to get this done. We got to get it done. And they do it. And he’s made a mistake and in the time it took Kirk to growl at Bones and then leave the medbay and then get up to the bridge and then be communicating with him from his chair, his mind, his thinking around it has changed.

And he in that, he growls and leaves and forgives him by the time he gets to his seat and is contacting him and saying like, it’s not your fault. And DeForest Kelly’s performance in that moment, I’m just like. They’ve got a guy alone in a room with weird lighting. I like the lighting of the med bay in this episode.

In previous episodes, it looked just like a gray room. And now they’re doing all this mood lighting with those weird colors. And you get DeForest Kelly sitting there clearly on a set by himself, having to perform without a voice coming out of any box, just being told, okay, now emote that you are guilty of having blinded Spock and his performance in that moment.

I’m just like, he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t say a word. And on the bridge, you get Kirk on the other end going, bones, bones, like, like, please respond. I need to know you’re okay. And he doesn’t get it. And they end the call and such a great tense moment. And I feel like the math of, oh, stakes, personal stakes have to be inherent has finally been discovered. So you get Kirk falling in love with Edith Keillor and that makes the previous episode take off. And in this one, you get Kirk family passing, you get the nephew in danger, you get Spock in danger. And without saying it, Kirk’s entire performance is like, I’m not going to lose my nephew and my other brother, which I find so intensely powerful.

And it gives everybody an opportunity to basically say of Spock, what they think of him. So you get DeForest, you get bones, like don’t tell him he’s the best first officer in the

fleet. Don’t tell him he’s the best first officer in

the fleet. And I love that scene. And I love Spock and Scotty in the Transporter room.

He’s just like, I’m going down to the planet. He’s like, no, you’re not. They scuffle and Scotty comes out on top. And it’s just like, yeah. Like I thought I should hold him here until you come. Like at this point, the network has told the producers more Scotty because people like Scotty. So we get them in full effect here.

Uh, including some shenanigans on the planet that don’t make any sense. They take down the top three officers to, an away situation that they don’t know what’s going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they send down Kirk, Spock, and Scotty, those are your top three. And it’s like, okay, that doesn’t make any sense, but, well, there’s, they wanted Scotty on screen.

There’s

also a couple, there’s also, there’s also two other things to me that didn’t make sense and are kind of disappointing. One is the nerd, you know, like. When they discover this light and the amount of candle lumens that they’re doing and it’s like it’ll even cure people in dark enclosed rooms. It’s like, that’s not how light works.

Uh, but. You know, it’s not like we discovered that in 2024. We knew that in the 1960s. And the fact that that’s in there, it’s just like, to me, that was like lazy writing. It’s like, they could have come up with a solution.

Yeah.

It could, it could have been the radiation, not the light itself that did it. It’s like, but they, it was just stupid that they did that.

They’re better than that. The second thing was, I was really kind of surprised. Star Trek being Star Trek, every time they come across something or a creature or an alien that’s like booga booga, and they discover, oh, it’s actually very intelligent and we’re, gotta find a way to communicate with it. They didn’t do that here.

They didn’t even try to communicate with us, they didn’t even talk about, it’s actually a giant brain. Maybe we should try talking to this giant brain and say, hey yo, what’s up? But they never even did. And they never addressed it, they never even like glanced at it. It was just, we have to kill it. Let’s kill the giant brain.

And they killed the giant brain. And so for me it was kind of like, there was a dissonance there because it was out of character for what Star Trek is. And you could kind of do headcanon and say, well, Kirk was taking this personally and just wanted to wipe this thing out. But the fact they don’t even like address it, like at all, and the fact that Spock clearly can understand what it’s communicating to him, it’s because it’s forcing him to do things.

He knows what it wants. The fact that he didn’t even say, we can’t, he could have just said, we can’t communicate with it. There’s no, it’s like, it doesn’t even perceive us in that way. Right. And doesn’t care about us in that way. It’s like he could have just two sentences, bam, taken care of, we gotta kill it.

And the fact they didn’t even do that to me is like a massive misstep for the character of the show.

I think I, I, what I hear you saying is that you didn’t want them to do A scene involving communicating with the thing as much as you just wanted them to address, address that there was that gap. Just tip hat to it.

I feel like they thought they had that. It’s like the Horta. Everybody wants to kill the Horta. And Spock’s like, no, I gotta communicate with it. I gotta communicate with it. Hey, it’s actually intelligent and it’s trying to protect its young. It’s like Okay, you worked super hard to communicate with the something that looked like it was just out to kill everybody.

And yet, in this episode, you didn’t even try. And that’s what, to me, was just, there was a massive dissonance there. Um, again, it’s probably a little sloppy writing, because they wanted to tell the story that they wanted to tell and didn’t want to put logic in the way, uh. But it, it kind of seems to go against kind of like what would be the brand Bible of what Star Trek is supposed to be, and they even did it in their own season.

Why wouldn’t they even just acknowledge it? It just would have taken a sentence from Spock and they could have just kept and not changed anything else in the story.

Yeah. I feel like they thought that they basically set it up as it’s effectively genocidal. It’s wiped off planet after planet after planet, and I think that they expected that to be enough of a shorthand of this would be like trying to talk to a shark about not eating fish, but I completely agree with you.

It did deserve even a one off from Spock of saying like, I am effectively in touch with it. There is no consciousness here to talk to. It is nothing but instinct. It is nothing but replication. It is nothing but transferring from planet to planet. That is all it is. Like, I agree with you in that regard because The Horta is a good example.

I also think that to pull an example from a future story that hasn’t yet been told, but there are, there’s the V’ger story. There’s the, in this, I think it’s the second season, the Nomad story, which is effectively the V’ger story of a satellite that has been changed and is now dangerous, but there is the attempt to communicate with it.

And so the ultimate genetics of the show is one of, you’ll be surprised who we’ll try to talk to, but in this one, they don’t, they don’t do that. So in closing, I, I wonder viewers, listeners, what did you think about this episode? Is there anything about this that you think Matt and I missed out on? Is there anything about this that you think we had a bad call on?

And what do you think about the idea that this is kind of the pod people, anti communist horror that was very popular from the fifties through the sixties, kind of turned upside down, so that it’s not so much about the ideology taking over the people, but the people’s bodies being manipulated in ways that are beyond their control.

Jump into the comments. As always, the comments are a huge component of this program, and we look forward to reading what you have to say. Now upcoming, Matt and I are going to be taking a little bit of a break around the holidays, so you won’t see a new episode from us until 2025, but when that new episode drops, it will be, we’re done with season one, but in between season one and season two, and in between season two and season three, we’re going to drop a couple of our favorite of the animated series, just so that we bring in a little bit of what would eventually follow the original series before we head off into next generation.

So we’re going to be talking about two episodes in early 2025, the counterclock incident and the time trap and wrong answers only for one or both. Jump into the comments, let us know what these animated episodes are about and we will be visiting them in their full color glory in 2025. I also have a question both for Matt and for all of our viewers and listeners.

Matt, I don’t know if you’ve seen the trailer for Section 31. Yes, I have. Here’s my thought. Uh oh. Depending on what the stardate of that story is, and I am asking for help from our viewers and listeners, I have not yet been able to find online any information about when in Trek’s timeline the movie takes place.

But my assumption, It’s not a movie. It is a movie. It is streaming. It is a movie. It is a PG 13 movie. Yes. Oh, wow. So my question to people out there, if they can help us determine the stardate of when this takes place, my expectation is it will take place at some point between the end of Discovery and prior to the original series.

So my thinking is this. Yes. When the movie drops, viewers Listeners, Matt, I think we should incorporate that into our rewatch. Yes. So when it drops, we can watch it. And we will of course let you know when that is going to show up. And we will do an episode around section 31. And I find myself really looking forward to it.

I know that Michelle Yeoh was excited to return to the character. And having seen the trailer, it’s going to be interesting because it doesn’t look so much like Star Trek as it does Guardians of the Galaxy or Suicide Squad, but I got to admit, I’m kind of on board. So I’m looking forward to it. Yeah. It’s gonna be a very different Star Trek.

I’m looking forward to it too. So everybody jump into the comments, let us know what you think about that idea. If you want to find out more about my writing, please check out my website, seanferrell. com. You can also just look for my books directly at whatever website or bookstore you use, including your public library.

And thank you for your interest in looking for that, for any of my work. I know you’re taking a break in your main channel into the new year, but what do you have on the horizon when you do return? What are you going to be talking about?

Oh, there’s a bunch. Uh, we’re going to be talking about, I’m finally going to be releasing, hopefully at the end of January, my follow up to the Yoshino solid state battery kind of controversy that came out a number of months ago.

All the stuff I was digging into is done, pulling it together, so that should be coming out. And also I’m going to be at CES the beginning of January. So there’s going to be an episode about like the kind of top five things that I saw at CES that people might be interested in. So stay tuned for those.

As always jump into the comments to support us.

Also subscribing, liking, sharing with your friends. Those are easy ways for you to support us. And if you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime. show. Click the become a supporter button. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of talking about Dr. McCoy having really screwed up. Thanks everybody. Talk to you next time.