Matt and Sean talk about wrestling with big ideas on Saturday mornings in Star Trek: The Animated Series. Are Kirk and Spock as animated as they are in The Original Series?
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We’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. And currently we are between seasons one and two. Hello and welcome to our regular viewers and hello and welcome to anybody who’s dropping in for the first time. We normally don’t do a run through of the animated episodes of Star Trek, but we are putting a couple here and there that either relate to original series episodes or are some of our favorites in order to touch base with the animated series, which Matt and I are slightly of different minds on this. I consider the animated series a part of the original series. Matt looks at it and says, yeah, they made this for kids.
It was on Saturday mornings. Let’s leave it alone. But Matt is, uh, he, he has a soft spot for his older brother. So he lets me get away with putting a couple of these in here and there. And I keep referring to Matt and I keep referring to myself and I haven’t even told you who we are. Who are we? I’m Sean.
I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi. I wrote 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. How are you on this first recording of the year of our Lord, 2025?
I’m still getting back into the swing of things, Sean. I took two weeks off . Yeah. Like I’m kind of like, wait, how does this work again? How do I turn this thing on? How does this camera work? It’s like I’ve completely forgotten . Yeah. Everything. Yeah. So I’m kind of getting back into the swing of things. How about you?
I, you, you taking a break of any amount of time means that I am taking a break for the same amount of time because I’m not going to sit down and record our podcast by myself. On top of that, I took three weeks off from my day job. So I’ve been thinking recently about like, Oh, I have to return on Monday.
Oh, what’s that going to be like? I got an automatic notification from my calendar on Friday. Little pop up something I had put in my calendar to remind me to do at work. I have no idea when I put this in the calendar. I have no idea what it’s a reference to. It just says, send the letter. And I’m like, what letter to who?
Clearly at the time when I put this into my calendar at work, I was just like, this is important. I gotta remember to do this in early January. So I put in a reminder, and here we are in early January. And old man Ferrell is like, Huh? This could be some kind of like This could be some kind of like, what is it, the movie Looper, or like, you know, like Memento.
It could be some kind of thing of like, you sent yourself a message from the future of don’t forget to send the letter, and now everything kind of unravels from here. So it could be an exciting journey for you for the next week. Yeah, a year from now we’ll be recording our first episode of 2026, and it’ll just be fire and flames behind me, and I’ll just be like, you know what I remembered?
What that letter was supposed to do. I forgot to send that letter! As always, before we get into our conversation about the most recent episode that we’re going to watch, we’d like to talk about the previous episodes that we watched. Mainly, we’d like to visit the mailbag and see what you all have had to say about those episodes.
So Matt, what did you find from the past, i. e. 2024 for us this week? Well, there were some good comments from Operation Annihilate, uh, that we had. Uh, the first one was from PaleGhost69, referencing Star Trek Lower Decks, said, Don’t forget to talk about the Lower Decks lore drop. Discovery isn’t real Trek anymore.
It’s alternate timeline. I know this happens in the finale of the last season of Star Trek Lower Decks. And I’m right. I haven’t watched it yet. Like, I’m like right there. It’s like, I’m, I have one more episode to watch, but it’s the episode that’s, but, and working toward it. Yeah. I’ve already read some things about how it’s kind of like changed the timeline of how we should interpret these different plot lines that have happened in different TV shows and movies.
I’m very excited to watch it. Um, I watched a YouTube video that was kind of like railing on Star Trek about how nobody cares about Star Trek anymore. Um, which I thought was really kind of funny because that’s not the bubble I live in. There’s a lot of people that still love it in the bubble I live in, but it was just an interesting take of, I can’t wait to see how it kind of like gets rid of the J. J. Abrams kind of like plot line that kind of like forked out all these new shows and see if undoes everything. Um, so just a reminder for the two of us that once we both have gotten through Lower Decks, have you watched the whole season? I watched it? No. So when you do, if you do, I think you and I should spend a little time talking about it because it sounds like it’s going to have kind of a big impact.
A ripple effect. I love the fact that it’s the final episode. The show’s over now. I love the fact that it basically just drops a bomb and it walks away.
Next comment was from Dan Sims. I honestly don’t care where it lines up in the timeline. I say cover section 31, the movie, a week or so after it’s available on streaming for everyone to see. I thought that was an interesting take. I think we should probably do that as soon as it’s out. We should just watch it and then do an episode on it just right away, which also links back to the Lower Decks finale, which could kind of undo that movie in the first place, which is kind of funny.
There is an angle to take on all of that, which is Our fitting things in to talk about them within the context of a timeline, even if it’s multiple timelines is still fun, and what it does to our analysis moving forward is to say, now we’re talking about something that’s alternate timeline. As opposed to looking for things to line up perfectly.
But well, here’s, here’s my, here’s my take on this alternate timeline nonsense. Star Trek deals with alternate timelines all the time. Alternate universes. The mirror universe. It’s like, it’s doing this constantly and it’s done it for decades. And the act of the idea that, oh, Lower Decks just made Discovery and Alternate Timelines so it no longer matters anymore.
It’s like, no, that’s, All of Star Trek. It’s like the mirror universe is part of Star Trek. So it’s like, this is, it doesn’t like un Star Trek it. It’s like, it’s still part of the lore. It’s still part of the universe. It’s just, it just might be an alternate timeline of the universe. It doesn’t make it not canon.
It just makes it different. And I’m not suggesting they would ever do this, but it opens up for I’m absolutely, let me make very clear, I am not advocating for this at all, but some producer at some point saying, let’s use CGI, we’ll get a Leonard Nimoy Spock to meet Michael Burnham. Yeah. And so we’ll have this crossover and she will be like, you’re not Spock.
And he’s like, I never had a sister. And the two of them, like, that’s what it opens up. It’s no different than the Doctor Strange. Um, movie in which he goes into an alternate reality and meets the Fantastic Four and the actors portraying the Fantastic Four are not going to be the actors playing the Fantastic Four in the new movie.
It was an alternate timeline, so no different. It’s all part, it’s all part of the web of Star Trek. Yes. Then we had another comment from PaleGhost69, which is kind of a thought experiment here, which I thought was funny. Does anyone, does anyone else see the disconnect between anti communist themes and the fact that Star Trek is space communism?
And I thought that was an interesting. Statement, but I want to disagree with it, PaleGhost. Star Trek is not space communism, it’s space socialism. And there is a difference between socialism and communism. And communism is the, there is no private ownership of anything. The government structure owns everything and there’s no hierarchy of anything.
So it’s like, everything is just communal period. And that was like the Soviet Union kind of like, On top of everything. And the ultimate goal of communism is to like, um, not even have a real government. It’s like the social structure itself controls everything. The people own everything. Right. So, It’s, it’s, and socialism is different where socialism still has a government structure and government, it’s owns certain key industries like utilities, education, uh, things that are like public structure are owned by the government and the government has strictures, structures around everything, but private ownership is still allowed.
So you can still own property. You could still have a private company. That’s not a key infrastructure element. So like socialism is a little more open and doesn’t obliterate money. It doesn’t obliterate all this kind of stuff. So it’s like there’s a difference between the two. And so I would say Star Trek is not communism.
It’s socialism between the two. And I’m curious, Sean, what you, what you think about that? That is a, a tenant of Star Trek that went through a lot of There were different permutations of that stated in Star Trek at different stages. Effectively, early, early on, there is a statement of back when people cared about money, dot, dot, dot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was interpreted as money is gone. We no longer use money. And then, as you get through Next Generation, the writers put more nuance into it, and it continued to evolve through Deep Space Nine, where, I think especially in Deep Space Nine, where a big, big part of the show was the station was a hub of commerce.
And so it kind of raised this thing of like, okay, money doesn’t exist. And yet you have a place called like Quarks and you have Ferengi, whose entire reason for their social structure is the acquisition of wealth. And so it started to be like, well, how is this all working? And my understanding of where it ended up being. And this was something that didn’t fall into place for me. I continued to have a kind of like, how does this work until strangely just about 10 years ago when I learned about universal base income. And to me, that’s the tripping point. Like, Oh, that’s what this is. Star Trek, the Federation and Starfleet, I believe operates in a evolved capitalist structure, which has socialism roots and manifest through a kind of universal base income you will never want. You will never struggle to survive. You will be able to function so that if you are like Jake Sisko, you want to be a writer. So he goes through the process of becoming a writer and he lives, there’s that one episode where they show him getting older and older and he has lived as a successful author for decades, but they don’t show, well, how successful a writer is he like, it’s just this, that is the life he has chosen or the various times when they show the future or past of characters and show them in and out of Starfleet.
How do you do that? Oh, you do that when you don’t have to stay in a profession to survive. You can leave a profession and come back to that profession at will because the way the society is structured allows for that flexibility and that safety net underneath you. So I, I agree with you. It’s not communist, which as a younger viewer, I did struggle with, like, are they portraying a communism while being in a very clearly Western anti cold war program.
And it was always a sort of philosophical, um, grinding going on in my head of like, what are we watching? And then at a certain point, even as recently as 10 years ago, suddenly it clicked. And I was like, I, cause I learned about universal base income and I’m like, that’s what it is. That’s like a society that says you don’t need to suffer in order to survive, you will be taken care of in that way, and then aspirations beyond that become. Picard goes back home after, I was gonna say, he’s offered a job, he’s offered a different job. But not even that, his family owns a vineyard, it’s like, that wouldn’t happen in a communist structure, it’s like, ownership wouldn’t be allowed like that, his family has a family vineyard that they’ve had for generations, and so it’s like, and they make wine, and they probably sell it or barter with it. So it’s like, this is not communism. It’s, it’s something else. Some form of a socialist empire. And I think that what you brought up of the universal basic income, I think is the The missing thread of there’s a base level that everybody gets, so nobody’s starving, nobody’s without shelter, nobody’s without, they don’t need, it’s just, what do you want to do with your life?
And it’s opened up to do whatever you want. So it’s, and as, yeah, as that piece fell into place for me, yeah, it’s a utopia. And for me, when that piece fell into place, that became a huge component of, like, what are the dividing lines between Star Trek and Star Wars? And realizing like, oh, yeah, Star Wars is falling fully, and the, yeah, capitalism is it.
It just continues, and that’s why Star Wars has that edge to it, which is, there are people who are struggling. There are people for whom survival turns them into villains, or turns them into, uh, shaky moral ground. They’re like, they’re willing to steal, they’re willing to smuggle, they’re piracy, like all of that.
And that’s a different mode of thinking. And I feel like there’s an underpinning, as you mentioned, like the aspiration of Star Trek has always been one of utopia. So it ends up like, how do you get there? You don’t get there in the system that says some people will not be able to survive without hardship.
You turn it into this. And so I think that’s the difference. Thank you PaleGhost. You kind of got me when I read that comment. It’s like you got my wheels turning. I was like, oh, that’s an interesting question to raise. Um, so now we’re on to the wrong answers only. Mark comes through, Mark Loveless comes through again with two wrong answers for both the episodes we’re talking about today.
First one was plot of counter clock incident. The clock in the mess hall, the one that sits on the counter, which is smart by 1960s standards and can talk, all of a sudden is making random fart sounds, causing a lot of finger pointing and blaming, mainly Scotty getting blamed. It turns out it was an infected, it was infected by Romulan malware and was a listening device spying on the crew with the farting being a malware glitch. With everyone having to sheepishly apologize to Scotty, during the big heartfelt apology, Scotty lets out a huge fart as revenge. To which PaleGhost responded, sounds like a lot of hot air.
I really liked it. And continuing, continuing along this theme, plot of Time Trap. Continuing his revenge for being accused of too much farting, Scotty says he’s designed a mouse trap, but it also can trap time itself. According to Scotty, the best way to see this is to get down on the floor and look into it.
Every time someone does, they get sprayed with a gel that smells like alien fecal matter, much worse than humans. After getting in trouble, Scotty is told to, quote, get rid of the ass bomb, unquote. But as he is setting it down on the transporter, it explodes, covering him in the evil smelling gel. He has to wear the space suit so he’s not going to cause others to gag and puke for three weeks straight with this smell.
Kirk deems the punishment enough and simply just makes him do his regular work in that suit saying, now that’s a time trap and everyone laughs. So that, thank you, Mark, the, and then everyone laughs is almost too on the nose with how most of those, uh episodes would actually end. Oh, you darn kids. Get off of my lawn.
That noise you hear in the background. Yes, that can mean only one thing. It’s the read alert. It’s time for Matt to tackle not just the Wikipedia description, but the descriptions. That’s right. Two episodes, two tackles. Take it away, Matt. All right. The counterclock incident. Wow. This one’s short, Sean. It’s a sentence.
Yes, it is. An unusual spaceship pulls the Enterprise into a quote negative universe where time seems to flow backwards. And the time trap? While exploring the Delta Triangle, where many starships have disappeared, the USS Enterprise is attacked by several Klingon vessels. During the battle, they are caught in an ion storm.
The Enterprise and one Klingon battlecruiser are drawn into a space time vortex and end up in a timeless dimension. These two episodes, one from season one and one from season two of the two seasons for the animated series, The Time Trap was episode number 12. Counter Clock Incident was episode number six, which was the final episode of the total 22 episodes made.
Time Trap was directed by Hal Sutherland, written by Joyce Perry, and was originally aired on November 24th, 1973. Counter Clock Incident was directed by Bill Reed, written by John Culver, and 12th, 1974. The series Well, I like to say, as usual, we have blah, blah, blah, and I’m going to do it again because guess what?
Yes, as usual, when they made this show, they went and got the original crew. So we have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and George Takei. There is one major absence from the original series, but it’s from a character whom we haven’t seen. Matt, if you’re thinking about Chekhov, you’re not going to see him.
A little fun fact about the production of this series. There was interest in producing a Star Trek animated show while the original series was on the air. It was going to be, effectively, what the upcoming Starfleet Academy show is going to be. Really? Yeah. It was going to focus on completely unique characters, and they were going to be young, and it was going to be a young Vulcan.
And two humans who were friends and they were going to have Star Trek adventures and it was going to be much closer to educational television. Think early Doctor Who as opposed to, you know, full blown Star Trek. So it was going to have an educational aspect. It did not come together because as the program was being pitched, Paramount had purchased Desilu Studios.
That’s why as the seasons of the original series moved forward. The interest in sustaining the program dwindled. It was no longer Desilu Studios in control. It was Paramount and Paramount was looking for ways to cut corners. So they were cutting the budget of the original series until finally they reached a point where Roddenberry and Paramount were not on speaking terms and Roddenberry effectively was I’m done.
Even though it was during the third season. So during the third season of the original series, Roddenberry basically put his hands up and was like, do what you want. And energy behind making an animated series fell apart. After it was canceled and went to syndication, syndication put it in audiences
it brought in audiences in a way that the, the final season didn’t. Paramount effectively killed the show by putting it on the death slot, 10 o’clock on Friday nights. When it was canceled and went into syndication, it was now being put in as counter programming to the evening news. So it was on at six or seven in the evening.
Kids and families would watch it together and it started to build a huge fan base, very popular on college campuses. Conventions, conventions started picking up. And by the early seventies, there was a new idea of let’s resurrect the show. They looked into it with Paramount. Paramount figured the show would cost far too much to produce because they would have to rebuild all the sets and they would have to basically borrow the original model of the Enterprise back from the Smithsonian.
All of the costs would have been so prohibitive, Paramount figured, that they didn’t want to do it, and then somebody pitched the idea of what if we made an animated version. Roddenberry was on board with the idea and Roddenberry was very, very involved in the creation of this. In fact, the actual name of the program is Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.
Like that’s the original name of this animated series. So you end up with All the forces coming together. Roddenberry was thinking further down the road of, if I can build an animated show and sustain audience interest moving forward, then he could resurrect the actual TV show. And he had aspirations to do that in the mid 70s
in what would become effectively another Kirk program that would not happen but would eventually evolve into Next Generation. So here he is in the early 70s putting together this program and there’s the discussion around who do you get to voice the characters and thankfully somebody involved in it very quickly was like we get the original people.
They went and got Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, and James Doohan and Doohan was going to voice Sulu, as well, and Magel Roddenberry was going to voice Uhura. When they started the recording of the, of the, uh, dialogue, when Nimoy showed up and found out that Doohan and Roddenberry were doing these other voices, he refused to record, arguing that you can’t take their images.
And put them on a screen and have somebody else do the voice where they’re not getting paid anything. Yeah. And, he said, one of the big aspects of the show that was so important, and I absolutely loved Nimoy for this, was diversity. And you have taken two people who are not, uh White people out of the program and you’re having them voiced by a white actor and that’s not okay So they went and they got Takei and they got Nichols and they brought them in A couple of other interesting facts that I, I really, I really enjoy, Chekhov was left out.
Sadly, Walter Koenig didn’t find out until somebody at a convention, a fan, told him he wasn’t involved. And that kind of broke his heart. And he was very hurt by this. Roddenberry felt bad enough about that, that he and D. C. Fontana, we’ve talked about D. C. Fontana before, she’s the script advisor on this show.
She had a major hand in putting this animated series together. She wrote a couple of the episodes. We’ll be talking about one of the ones she wrote toward the end of season two. or season three of the original series. It’s, uh, yesteryear, which focuses on Spock. They felt bad, so they hired Koenig to write an episode.
So there is an episode of the animated series written by Walter Koenig that was well received enough that he was offered another writing gig, but he had so much difficulty with Roddenberry’s rewrite process that he didn’t want to try it again. But so, but I thought that was interesting. He was involved in that from a writing perspective, even though he wasn’t, uh, in the program itself.
The other aspect of this that I really, really enjoyed was one of the things that they did in this series that they did not do in the original series that Roddenberry wanted to do originally was Put a black woman in action sequences and show her in command. And that’s why Uhura, as a character in the animated series, actually does a lot more than she ever did in the original series.
She is shown in combat, she fires phasers, she takes command of the ship in one episode, in which the Ship is lured to a place where the men are put under the control of a planet of women that are effectively, it’s a story along the idea of the Siren Song. The men are taken and their energy is drained from them by this planet that is controlled by nefarious women.
And the women aboard the Enterprise need to control the ship in order to rescue the rest of the crew. Uhura is in command in that episode. When Nichelle Nichols saw these scripts. She was reported to have said, finally, she felt like her role in the original series was basically background, like a, like being a mural in the background, but she stayed on the show.
But now here in the animated episodes, she was given a position where she felt like her character was actually doing the things she hoped that she would do. I think that that is a fascinating aspect. These, I think, are the elements of the program that make it, for me, stand up as it’s, not on the same footing, but it’s an important aspect of Trek culture.
I think because they were able to do things in the animated show, in some cases, picking up on threads from earlier episodes, like the Spock episode, Yesteryear, which will focus so keenly on Spock’s childhood and introduce elements that were referenced in the original series but also picked up on in later storytelling.
Do more exciting things with characters like having Uhura show an action side that was never portrayed in the original series. Or doing things on a scale that would have been cost prohibitive. They have adventures in which the ship effectively will interact with spacecraft of enormous size or planets will be destroyed.
Things that special effects wise would have been prohibitive in the original series, but on the animated screen are much, much easier to produce. So I think that For me, those are elements that play a big part in why I appreciate the animated series as much as I do. And for anybody who’s listening or watching and wants to find out more, including a lot of the tidbits that I just shared, there is a
Youtube documentary effectively about this, which was a look back at the creation of the animated series. The link will be in the show notes below, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s about 30 minutes and it is from a Channel, which is called Totally, let me, Totally Awesome Films and their episode, Star Trek’s Animated Series, The Untold Story of Star Trek’s Bold Return to TV.
It’s about a 30 minute long look at the animated series, how it was put together and why it was put together the way it was. I think it’s an interesting 30 minutes. It’s well worth the watch, but as we move into discussing these two episodes in particular, I wanted to. Instead of overwhelming us with Dates from two different perspectives and looking at it from 1973 and looking at it from 1974, I’m just going to talk about 1974.
It gives us a nice jump forward in time. Matt, you don’t have to worry about singing along to The Turtles again. You’re not going to be singing along to The Monkees. You’re not going to, like, those songs and movies and TV shows that we were talking about last time. Those are in the past, man. You gotta give them up.
That was 1967. We’ve moved forward to 1974 now. So what was going on in 1974 when the second of these two episodes, the counterclock incident, was broadcast? Well, Matt, I don’t have to tell you that on that day in history, October 12th, 1974, you were just a wee babe. That’s right. You were just a tiny little baby.
So you didn’t watch this episode when it originally broadcast, but I’m sure you remember what song was playing on the radio as mom was taking care of you, changing your diaper. That’s right, you were singing along to I Honestly Love You by Olivia Newton John. Take it away, Matt. As always, knocked it out of the park.
At the movies, people were lining up to see the number one film, which was not a 1974 film, but a 1972 film, in re release. Cabaret was the number one film that week. In fact, it was two weeks in a row, the number one film. And Cabaret is of course, the 1972 musical, which is directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse from the screenplay by J. Presson Allen based on the stage musical. And it stars Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Grimm, Marissa Branson, and Joel Gray as the MC. And on television, we’re not going to do a comparison of the Nielsens. This was an animated show. We know who was watching animated shows at this point. This would have been Probably hardcore Trek fans tuning in on Saturday mornings, but largely it would have been kids.
So what was it up against? Well, Matt, I kind of had a full body nostalgia freak out when I looked at this list because I looked at this list and I was just like, Oh boy, it’s my childhood right there. I felt a little bit like suddenly these programs were going to appear On my television, as I looked at this list, I was like, are these on right now?
And of course, the reality is I could find them somewhere and watch them anytime I want, because that’s what 2025 is all about. Give me what I want when I want it. But 1974, we were getting up early, we were planting ourselves in front of the television, and we were watching programs like Johnny Quest, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?,
The Super Friends, Star Trek, the animated series is considered one of the top rated cartoons of 1974. Space Sentinels, which I do not remember. I don’t remember that at all. The Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Hour, which was, that was the capstone of the day. You’d get up at 6 AM, you’d plant yourself in front of the television and just about 11 o’clock as you were starting to get hungry for lunch, here’d come the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Hour and you’d get an hour of great WB cartoons.
H. R. Pufnstuff, which of course, lets you know you’re in the 1970s. If you weren’t high while watching this show, you weren’t watching it. And the last two programs, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, and Tarzan and the Super 7. I don’t remember these either. I think these were probably out of rotation by the time.
You’re skipping over the best one. That’s why I skipped it though, because you gotta, you gotta make a safe space for Land of the Lost. Sleestaks! Sleestaks, a family in a raft, they go over the edge of a waterfall, they end up in a prehistoric time zone where they seem to be absolutely happy to be living.
There’s never much, there’s always the like, how do we get home? But they’re also having a great time. It’s a little bit like the Brady Bunch in the past. Surrounded by dinosaurs and Sleestaks. And I recently saw a Sleestaks pop into my Instagram feed. Somebody that I follow on Instagram has a, what is effectively just a nostalgia channel.
And they will post images or little videos from things and say, if you remember this, then you have gray hair. If you remember this, then you have back pain. If you remember this, then your kids are in college, that sort of thing. And I was scrolling through Instagram the other day and a Sleestak appeared and it said, if you remember this, you remember it haunting your nightmares.
Yep. Yes. Yes. Yes. Anybody. Uh, in fact, I think Matt, we should probably pull an image or a video of a Sleestack from somewhere and include it in this episode so that people can see it if they choose to be that brave. But as a young boy watching television on a Saturday morning, Sleestacks could creep you out.
They were not the, they were an interesting choice for child’s programming, uh, especially when you compared it to the H.R. Puffnstuff stuff, sort of like Sesame Street, you know, here comes some people and they’ve got these friends that are these goofy characters. And here come the people in the costumes who are like, Hey kids.
But the Sleestaks would hiss and come out and just try and steal children. Yes. Creepy. Yes. Creepy stuff. But a great program. And in the news, 1974, we’ve jumped forward in time from 1967 to 1974. Guess what that means? Yes, the upper left hand headline in this day’s newspaper, two Nixon aides put cover up blame on ex president.
Hmm,
what are we talking about? Rhymes with schmattergate. I don’t know what that might be. Yes, the Watergate scandal had taken place. Nixon had already resigned by this point, and Erlichman and Haldeman were in the midst of throwing flames in his direction saying he was responsible for the fire. What a heady time and Matt, can you imagine what it would be like to have a government upheaval like this and chaos in the White House?
Can you even imagine what that would be like? I can’t. I can’t. Thank goodness. That’s all 50 years in the past. Hmm. Yes, I am being ironic. On now to our discussion about these two episodes. We are on the one hand, one of these episodes, the Time Trap. I chose it because it is actually a sequel. Did you pick up on the fact that it is a sequel on Time Trap?
Yes. Well, I had Commander Kor. Commander Kor. Exactly. Yeah. So we saw Commander Kor recently in the original series, in the episode in which they went to a planet where everybody seemed to be living in a kind of strange, passive, no need to worry about these Klingons, no need to worry about anything, we’re fine, we don’t need anybody’s help.
And then it turned out they were Q like, omnipotent beings. And Commander Kor was the Klingon in charge. And here he is back again. It is very discreetly referenced. And from a cartoon perspective, it is no different than the first time you watched a cartoon with Batman and the Joker appeared and he went, ah, my nemesis.
Batman. You didn’t need to see previous episodes to have somebody say, like, oh, I know why these two guys don’t get along. So when Commander Kor in this one, says, oh, my old nemesis Kirk, fine. It’s not even voiced by the same actor. So no direct, no direct lines here. This is not trying that hard to be a sequel.
It is trying to do something though, kind of heady with its premise. It’s a pocket universe where the Enterprise and the Klingon ship get pulled, and it’s effectively a Bermuda Triangle story. It’s like a Saragosso Sea of ships that are trapped, and they have been trapped in a pocket which is moving so slowly through time that these
various ships may in fact be centuries old from the original universe’s perspective, but here they are almost timeless. So these people have formed what is effectively a utopic existence. It does not go at all into how are they surviving. It in fact creates a kind of contradiction in its setup in that they are living this idyllic existence, but Kirk and the Klingon ship both discovered that their ships are dying and if they don’t leave they will die.
So how is anybody surviving there? But it’s kind of a heady episode from a, the utopic ideal and what these races, I mentioned before, the animated series could do things as long as it could be drawn. And there is a depiction of, I like the fact there is a Gorn in there. I don’t know if you picked up on it, Matt, but there’s an insectoid being that to me looked like a member of the Xindi.
Yes. From Enterprise. Yes. I saw that. I was like, I was like, is that related? Somebody in Enterprise’s production team go back to the animated series and other things and look for creatures that they could say like, well, this could be a member of the Xindi. That’s. Yeah. Like, I couldn’t help but think, like, I think that maybe that is, in fact, what happened.
There is an Orion slave girl, there is, like, they’ve got all of these, these people around this table. And I found myself thinking, this isn’t too far from what an original series episode might have done. But an original series episode would have blown up a B plot. In order to fill in time. And I couldn’t help but think it hinted a little bit at what that B plot might have been in the form of Kirk’s conversation with the Orion slave girl and her wish that she could somehow return while also staying.
She likes where she is. But she sees the passion of trying to return home as well. And I found myself thinking, like, they were, it’s almost like they took a 40 minute episode and pulled out the B plot from the middle of it and just stuck with the overarching, okay, we’re lost, now we gotta get home. And it didn’t feel all that far removed for me from what an original series would have done.
So how did you feel about, like, the big picture that I’ve talked about before, what the animated series felt like it could do, how it could push the Variety of visual impacts that the series could do. What did you think about some of those visuals? What did you think about the overall story as far as like, does it remind you of the original series or is this yet again, it’s been watered down too much and it just feels like you’re just watching colors on the screen.
It’s totally not just watching colors on the screen. I was talking about this with my wife cause my wife did not care to watch this, but she was half asleep on the couch while I watched these two episodes. And afterwards she asked me what I thought. And every time I watch an animated episode, like I do, I do not remember watching this as a kid.
So I have no nostalgia, like tie to this. I’m watching it, basically it’s the first time as an adult. These shows are so thin to me. And I think what you just said, is exactly why. It feels like a watered down. I mean, it’s astonishing how it feels like Star Trek. A hundred percent. Like it is like a lot of the same writers that worked on the original show worked on this.
So there’s a definite tie there. The types of things that they’re doing on the show are identical to what they did in the live action show. It feels like a continuation. Like we didn’t have the budget to keep going. So we just did some really cheap Hanna Barbera 12 frames per second animations in some kind of sweatshop.
And just like put it on TV. That’s what it feels like to me. And the biggest problem I have with every episode I watch on, there’s never much emotional tie to what you’re seeing. And the B plots of episodes typically are the emotional through line. of what’s happening a lot of times. And so when you remove that, you’re left with just pure plot, it is just pure plot.
There’s no emotional stakes. There’s nothing like that. It’s just like a thing A leads to thing B leads to thing C, and then the episode rolls and you’ve got the credits. And that’s what it’s like for me. Every single episode of this I’ve watched. And because of that, I know you’re not going to like this.
I hate the animated series. I really do not like it because I find it. Boring, because there’s, there’s not that emotional tie. I’m having to, as a viewer, bring my own emotional ties to it, because I know Kirk, I know Spock, I have to bring my own stuff to what I’m watching, and to me that is bad storytelling.
It’s like they should be providing that to me, and have that emotional through line. So for me, I’m not enjoying re watch, or watching, The animated series, as much as you are, you have that emotional nostalgia tie. I do not, but taking that and setting aside, it sounds like I’m just taking a big steaming pile on top of the show and I’m not because it is, it is a great, it is, it is incredible what they did because I’m watching it and I’m thinking, this is a weird show for kids because Star Trek, the live action show was Obsessively for adults, it was a drama, prime time, but yet it was accessible for children.
And then here’s a show, which is mainly, it’s for kids, Saturday morning cartoon, and yet they’re doing the same kind of storytelling that they did in the original drama, so they’re dealing with these heady, sci fi, crazy concepts. And it’s like, how, how are kids enjoying this. It’s like, how are little kids enjoying this?
Cause it’s going to be like so above what a typical kid is going to be interested in watching. So it’s, it’s, it’s this weird to meet disconnect. They’ve removed the emotion. They’re telling stories that are very much like the stories they would tell in a live action show. And it feels super Star Trek.
The acting is actually really good. So it’s like having Kirk and Nimoy, and they’re doing multiple voices and all that kind of stuff. I enjoy it from that aspect of it. The fact that this thing exists is interesting. It’s a Interesting anomaly or oddity to me that this thing exists and it was made and there’s how many episodes 20 something episodes like 22 episodes so it has it is it some people consider it the fourth season right because it is a full season of episodes yeah and it feels like that but because it’s watered down and the b plots are removed it just to me it’s boring It’s like, oh, A plot to B plot.
It feels like nobody has agency in what I’m saying. It feels like things are just happening because they’re happening. At the end of the episode, it was like, well, what did I get? Like, why did we go on that journey? It’s like, they ended up right where they began. So it’s like, why are we even going to the journey in the first place?
So there’s like, there’s like no growth to me. That comes out of it at the end. So I’m just finding them very kind of like, um, empty. Like, I’m just eating popcorn. And this is like, I keep eating popcorn, and there’s nothing there to fill me up. Um, so, I’m just finding them very empty. And this episode was 100 percent that.
Because, they end up with this pocket universe, they have to get their way out, oh, we have to work with Kor, are we going to work together, and yet for some stupid reason, these dumb Klingons, like the scorpion on the back of the thing crossing the river, it’s like, they’re going to blow up the Enterprise as they’re going through, it’s like, you need the Enterprise, what are you doing, this makes no sense, it’s making my head hurt as to why you’re doing what you’re doing, why wouldn’t you just wait until you get to their side and everybody’s safe, and then you turn around and you shoot them, it’s like, it’s like, if you want to take them out.
Wait till you see the other side and that would have been like more logical, all that kind of stuff. But the fact that they were trying to blow them up while they’re traveling back, it was just like, what? What, why? My favorite, my favorite part of that is that they’re trying to blow them up with what looks like a suppository.
It’s, it’s, and it’s presented as like, it’s like this capsule will do it. And then it’s just like, you’re going to get somebody to swallow a capsule. And then it’s, no, it’s just like hidden in a compartment in a, in a cupboard. And it’s, and it’s, and it’s, and the fact that it’s literally just looks like a cupboard that’s filled with computer equipment and, and it gets put there.
And I was just like. Okay, what would this have looked like if this had been evolved into an original series script, or if this had been evolved and this is not a big stretch, a next generation script, because there are episodes of the original series that got recycled for next generation. There is an episode of the animated series that was recycled.
for the original series. It is the episode where in the animated series, there’s an episode where the Enterprise comes upon an alien that is a, he presents himself and says like, I am the devil. Oh my God, Sean. And it turns out that this devil who is like you all need to be fearful of me is of a species that visited earth so long ago and then was misinterpreted as evil that they began to play that part of being the evil.
And it sets up the idea of, oh, this is the origin of The idea of Lucifer. The original pitch for that animated episode was, what if the Enterprise meets God? And that’s Star Trek 5. So you end up with an animated episode becoming effectively the pitches for two different major productions. One for a TV series, one for a movie.
So that’s what these episodes have as nuggets within them. And I started thinking about the thing about the suppository. I was like, okay, if this was a full blown episode, you would have had some kind of storyline around a detente between McCoy and the Klingon woman. You would have had it presented as she was showing openness and interest in him and he was reciprocating and he was starting to lower his barriers of like, you can’t trust Klingons.
And then it would turn out she was operating as an agent for Kor and gives a gift of some sort to McCoy and the explosive would be in the gift. Like you don’t have to dig very deep to get to what would the B plot be? In order to expand this and make it more interesting. And there you’ve got the emotional stakes that you were talking about because it could have a relationship.
I thought it was going to be the Orion girl and Kirk starting to have a thing and Kirk falling for her and she’s falling for him. And she’s kind of feeling torn about wanting to go back into the normal universe. And Kirk’s actually considering What if I did stay? This does feel like a wonderful place.
And it could be this whole kind of tension and love story and it’s like, and then when he leaves and leaves her behind, there could be that emotional tearing of like, he feels like he’s just lost somebody. And so it’s like, there’s again, emotional heartstrings that pull you through a story and leave an impact on you and it’s all done and yet it’s all gone and we’re just left with the plot.
I gotta, I gotta point out my favorite moment of this episode. Favorite moment. The people in the Pocket Universe radio to Kirk saying, Oh, they’re trying to get this through. They got a capsule and they’re going to commit sabotage. And then there’s this quick cut to Kirk, like close up and his head’s like this.
And he does a turn and goes, Sabotage? And the look on his face, it is so amazing. I had to back it up and watch it again, and all I could hear in the back of my head was the Beastie Boys going, Sabotage! As he’s doing this, taking a turn, with this awful look on his face. It is, it was so melodramatic, I just loved it.
Would you be able to make a super cut of the Beastie Boys intro, and then the moment that it goes to sabotage for the first time, just cut to Kirk saying that? You gotta put that together, man. That would be amazing. That’d be so good. You got to put that together. If you are able to do that, put it in right here.
Uh, yeah. The, one of the amusing things that comes out of this, this is film, filmation as the studio. Filmation was a master of the recycled content. Anybody, like, I think, I think the pinnacle of their production style, if you have any experience watching He Man and the Masters of the Universe, if you’ve seen one episode, you’ve literally seen every single animated sequence from every single episode.
He Man walking, He Man walking sideways, everybody walking with He Man, He Man rolling, He Man pulling up a sword. Like, all of those things were drawn once and reused a hundred times. That’s what they did here as well. So you end up with those moments where they know they need a shot of Kirk. So it’s a choice of, is it him in the chair?
Is it him standing? Is it him in profile? Or is it him turning his head? Those are the four options that they have. And they, unfortunately, chose sabotage? As opposed to Also, why did he have to say sabotage at all? I mean, they knew, they knew that it was coming, but it was, uh, I agree with you. It’s funny to think this was for kids and yet you and I just pitched two different B storylines that would have raised it to being a full blown original series episode.
Yep. And you’re left with, this was for kids? Because okay, like you said, you strip away the emotional impact. How do you keep kids interested? You’re left with what we have, which is lots of bright colors on the screen, lots of running around, trying to pull action out where you can. There’s multiple space battles here.
That don’t destroy anything because those are exciting to watch. There is a big explosion. There is people running because of the explosive. There is, I think, would have been the lead in for a B plot with McCoy, McCoy gets a weapon drawn on him and the Klingon tries to kill him. Like, that’s all action eye candy to keep kids watching the screen while the show is largely built upon recycled content with philosophical context.
It’s, they’re talking about utopia. Kirk keeps saying, I understand you’ve got an ideal utopia here and you don’t want to leave, but we want to go home. This is for kids.
With that in mind, let’s take a look now at the counterclock incident, which is doing very much the same thing. Very heady concept. I remember watching this episode when I was a kid and really like, oh my gosh, the idea of time moving backwards. And then as an adult, I write a book about a time traveler.
That’s right. Go figure. What’re you going to do? So in counterclock incident, we end up with the Enterprise, again, pulled right from the original series. This is something the original series would do all the time. Hey, there’s a mysterious ship. It seems to be doing something we don’t understand. Let’s go stop them because we think they’re in danger and they’re stupid and don’t know it.
I love that as a lead off for an episode about exploring space and just learning what other cultures are like. And like, we got to rescue people from themselves. They’re also saying, it’s going faster than anything we thought was possible. So clearly, this thing has a technology level that’s way beyond ours.
But they’re so stupid, we gotta go save them. It was like, wait, what?
Some of the, some of the laughing, laughable elements of this one include, if the enterprise goes fast enough, the buttons no longer work. Um. Can’t turn off that tractor beam because nothing is responding now. Like, why? Because we’re going too fast. Well, the other part of the fact that they are being pulled, so their engines aren’t doing it, but Scotty’s like, you’re burning out the engines.
How? Well, the other part, Sean, is push, push my glasses up here for a second. They’re doing their tractor beam and yet they’re so far behind the ship. That they still have like 45 seconds before they’re going to get incinerated. It’s like if you’re doing the tractor beam, you’d be like right on its butt.
And like basically be incinerated the same. You’re going warp factor 20. It’s like you blink and you’re up. You’re both dead. So it’s like, I don’t understand why there was like this difference in time between the two. I also like that it’s supposed to be That high a warp factor, and eventually in the, at one point, and I don’t know if this was something that was put into a book, is this even canon?
Did the producers and writers effectively never think about this, or did somebody hand wave it? At some point, I learned that the warp factor speeds were readjusted. So that the next generation ships are actually moving faster than what the original series would have considered top warp. So like the original series like warp factor 10, we can’t go faster than that.
And the later ships are actually moving much faster. So, there’s a little bit of like wishy washiness as like, what does any of that mean? It’s all techno babble. Here you have a ship that they’re saying is going warp factor, what do they say, like 22 or something like that? Yeah, it’s gone way faster than 20.
And they’re like, it’s moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen. Now, their sensors have a limited reach. So, they detect this ship and then spend a good three minutes talking about it. Yep. It would have gone past them and gone. Like, hey, out there on the horizon, is that a car driving at a hundred miles an hour?
I’ve never seen a car drive at a hundred miles an hour. At that speed, it’s, it’s gonna drive right into this brick wall. It, I, it would, like, how long can you talk about a ship that’s moving that much faster than light? It would have been more along the lines of, well, our sensors just picked something up that just whizzed by us, warp factor 30, and it’s like, it’s already gone.
What was it? We don’t know. It’s already gone. So it’s like, it’s like, that’s what it would have been like, but the fact that they had minutes to discuss it, 45 seconds to try to save themselves from being incinerated because their tractor beam clearly goes for light years. It’s like, what is happening? A lot of hand waving on the show.
Yeah, it’s a preposterous and goofy setup for this one, but then it, again, similar to the previous one where it’s got a kind of heady concept that for kids to wrap their head around. They get into this. Alternate universe, not to be confused with the alternate universe that Discovery apparently takes place in, where everything moves backwards, the sky is full of white, the stars are all black dots.
There’s a lot of principles here that tie into, and hold on for just a second, there’s questions within quantum mechanics that include, why does time flow the way it does? And there are elements of quantum mechanics that currently say it does simply because it does, because it could flow the other direction just as easily.
And there’s nothing stopping it from doing that, that we know of. So effectively, time flows the direction it does because it doesn’t flow the other way, although it could, for reasons that don’t have to happen for anything. It just could suddenly start going the other direction. It doesn’t because it doesn’t because we don’t know why it doesn’t.
Big heavy quantum mechanics concept, and here it’s depicted accurately, I think, in the form of the sky looks entirely white, the stars look black, then you get to the goofier elements. The ships move backwards, and the woman speaks backwards, even though she’s supposed to be speaking the same universal language that everybody speaks, apparently in both languages.
So you end up with some goofy parallelisms, you end up with some heady quantum mechanic concepts. We won’t even try to wrap our head around how could your child be older than you and your parent be younger. No, no, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna hand wave this, Sean. One of the notes I wrote down was when it cuts to like, This one scene where there’s a baby in the room and then it cuts to her newborn son, who’s this ancient old man who’s talking on the, uh, on the side of the room.
My question I wrote down was, I would not want to see that birth. Yeah. Spock very casually says, fascinating. People are born old and then age to be young. And full grown. And, and like, like, no. Bad touch. It was awful. What is happening? I mean, it presents all sorts of weird oogie stuff that like, they were just going with the visuals.
They were going like, that’s very clearly just like, this is goofy sci fi weirdness, as opposed to there’s a logic here. And again, they, they boil it all down to a very quick, like, oh, we’ll just, figure out a way home. It’s very similar to the time trap. We need to figure out a way home. But again, it dives into, they’re igniting a Nova in order to create the parallel doorway to the Nova in their universe.
And I find myself thinking, So, again, this would have made a great episode of the original series or Next Generation. The idea of slipping into something and realizing, oh, there’s a way out, but it’s only if we can actually recreate those circumstances like we’re in a lab. And again, there is this relationship where there’s a scientist character who it seems like would have been, well, if you’re going to have a B plot, it’s going to be, once again, Kirk falls in love or somebody falls in love with that scientist.
And you end up with that tension of what does this mean? How could we survive? What can we do here? What did you think about the concept of this one as opposed to the previous one? Did you prefer the utopia over the quantum mechanics weirdness or did you find yourself drawn more to this one? I found myself of the two, I thought the time trap was better.
Um, Mainly just because there’s so many hand waviness to the science of this. Like because we’re talking about this show where we’ve talked about it’s all plot. There’s no B plot. There’s no emotional ties and it’s just B plot. I’m left there sitting there going about the how do you give birth to a full grown human being this is like bizarrely weird that can’t work the going backwards what’s up with that wait why are they accelerating in their de aging if this is just our universe in reverse you’d be you’d and they kept talking about in real time it’s like well in real time you’d be aging backwards a day Over the course of a day, it’s like you would be aging at the same rate just in reverse.
But no, for the show, we have to have an acceleration so that there’s this time clock for like, they have to get out of here because they’re turning into babies. It was like, this makes no sense. The woman you’re talking to, she didn’t suddenly become an old granny on the other side and then get back to her normal age when she came back.
She just was the same age on both sides. So why are you suddenly aging? Like there were so many issues, around, they did these decisions just to create tension. And like, there’s no logic to anything that happens in this episode. So because of that, I think this episode’s awful. Um, horrendous, Sean, there’s, this is just a bad episode.
It’s like, there’s just, you’re left with nothing. The only thing that was interesting was what you brought up, which is Oh, this mirror universe, a literal mirror universe going backwards in time. That’s an interesting concept. And I could totally see that being a full fledged Star Trek episode with B plots and all that kind of stuff.
It ain’t this. Like, this one felt like, I don’t know, An intern wrote it or like they had, you know, they wrote down like what kind of things would be exciting for a kid to watch. Oh, well, what kind of tension do we need? Oh, they could be aging quicker. It’s like, but yeah, you’re contradicting the stuff that you just said early in the episode.
Like nothing makes any sense. It just feels like a fever dream this episode. It was just, it was just. I had, I had a hard time getting through this one. Yeah. I, I, I don’t disagree with you on any of that. It’s, it’s very difficult. And my writer brain can fill in all those gaps. Like I can fill in everything and say like, Oh, this, this could explain it, but it would be, again, I’d be adding quite a bit, which would be there’s your fullblown episode.
You, you can’t do what they did. And have it make sense. You can only do what they did if you add enough to turn it into a full hour long episode to be able to explain why everything is working the way it is. And there are things that I thought of which are like, oh you could say like, one thing they’ve established in Star Trek a number of different times is, The quantum vibrations of matter is different from universe to universe.
They know that. So it’s like, Oh, you’re not from this reality because your quantum vibrations are different. All you’d have to say is like, Oh, in this universe where things are moving backwards, the quantum vibrations of our physicality is trying to snap back to the opposite end. And as a result, Aging is accelerated.
It’s, we are snapping back so hard that we are not aging at a normal rate. We are going backwards at a faster rate. And what that’s going to do is effectively just like, we will just cease to be. Because we can’t exist here in this way. The scientist who had gone into the main universe could have told them that.
She could have been like, I had to leave because I was changing. I was not, I was able to sustain myself just long enough to get back, but I realized what was going on and here’s what it is. You would have moments like that, but unless you have that. This does come across as very much a fever dream, which adds to the element of fascinating that it’s for kids and that it did well.
The series did well on Saturday Morning Cartoons. It ended because Paramount decided like, oh, we don’t want to fund it anymore. It was, a cost saving measure. Not because it wasn’t being watched. It kept the fandom satisfied to the point where when the show was originally promoted, there was, before it even aired, a petition went around at a convention to get Paramount to stop production.
The fans were passing around a don’t do this to Star Trek, don’t turn it into a cartoon. And that at a following convention, they premiered the first full episode that had been completed and the fandom changed its mind upon seeing the opening shot where the Enterprise flies by. And once the fandom saw, oh, this is going to look like the original series, this isn’t going to be goofball.
This is going to look like the original series. They embraced it. So the series did what Roddenberry wanted it to do. Keep the fandom interested. Keep them on point. And it did things the original series couldn’t do. Two things that I didn’t mention in my earlier discussion about that. We don’t see them both, but there is a character who fills in occasionally for Uhura, who is actually voiced by, I believe, Nichelle Nichols.
Who is a cat woman, and her species is the same species as the doctor from Lower Decks. And another, the navigator, is a three armed and three legged alien who physically you could not have a human actor portraying. So, this show did things to keep adults committed, and yet here this concept of, as you mentioned, you get eye candy on the screen to keep the kids, you know, keep the kids entertained.
And I found myself thinking in this one, it’s not even doing that. This is kind of a heady concept without a whole lot of payoff. They talk about like, we’re flying too fast, but what does that look like? It looks like them and the ship just going, we’re going too fast. And then they end up in a place where everything’s reversed.
And then they try to get back. There’s not a whole lot here to grab a kid. In this episode, there’s also a heavy use of music to create the tension because of that. It’s like, we’re going too fast. And the music’s this tense music that’s like, I felt like five seconds of music on a loop. For like a minute and it was like, Oh God, please just stop this music.
Oh, it’s still going. Please stop the music. I want to get off this merry go round. Yeah. It’s pretty heavy jazz orchestra. And, uh, one of the things I do like about this, the animated series too, is that it takes the original series theme song and disco fies it. Yes, it does. I think it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like a jazzy version of the original series episode.
Yeah. We’re going through space. So listeners, viewers, where do you land on this? Are you with Matt? Should we stop this experiment of reviewing? What we’ve got planned is revisiting the animated series between seasons of the original series in this style, just two episodes. Should we abandon that effort?
Or should we limit it to just one more? Because there is one episode of the animated series that I consider one of the best Star Trek stories ever, which is Yesteryear. What do you all think? Jump into the comments. Let us know. I am willing to forego my interest in reviewing these episodes if everybody is like, yikes, these are hard to Digest.
So let us know in the comments. We always like to hear from you and we want to have the kinds of episodes and discussions that are engaging for you as well. So if everybody is in Matt’s camp and is like, yeah, yikes, what are we doing here? I’ll, I’ll happily change direction. Before we sign off matt, is there anything you wanted to let everybody know about?
What do you have coming up now that we are in 2025 and your end of year break is over? What’s coming up on your main channel? Oh man, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we queued up before vacation. It was what industry is doing to clean up their act. I got a chance to go to Mexico and Germany to visit some BMW plants, see what they’re doing.
Uh, there’s a whole video on that. That’s coming up around the time this episode comes out. As for me, you can always check out my books at SeanFerrell. com. Or you can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore or your public library. My books should be available everywhere. You can ask for them and they should be easily accessible from all of those places.
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