175: Star Trek TOS Season 2, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”

 In this episode of Trek in time, we’re talking about how everything is all Greek to us. That’s right. We’re talking about Star Trek, the original series, who mourns for, who mourns.

Keep going Sean. You got this. That’s right. We’re talking about Star Trek, the original series, who mourns for Adonis. A sentence that took more effort to get out than it should have. That’s right. This is the original series originally aired on September 22nd, 1967, episode number 33 in shooting order, but 31 in broadcast order.

It’s the second episode of the second season. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we’re talking about 1967. We’re talking about the original series and who are we?

I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids, and with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Farrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how is tech impacting your life today? It’s, it’s great, Sean.

I’m warm and toasty in my nice house, and I know you’re very cold with your heat pad and your, and your blanket. So you’re one of those people who needs heat . I mean, come on. What is this heat of what you talk about? What is this heat of what you talk about? The biggest downside we’ve just discovered of me being cold is not that I am cold, although this morning I would’ve said yes.

That’s the biggest downside. No, we’ve just discovered that the biggest downside is that I am covered with a blanket and I am sitting on a heating pad, and I think that combined with the nylon netting on the chair, in which upon I sit. Well, I keep building up static charges and they keep getting unleashed through these earphones into my computer.

And in sitting down to try to record this, we had recorded something different and then there was a pop in my ears and my camera stopped working and the audio stopped working to the point where I not only had to restart my computer, but unplug everything. And plug it back in because yes, we’ve discovered I am a human lightning rod.

That’s all the time we have today. Thank you for joining us. No, that’s not right. What was I doing? We’re going to talk about Star Trek. That’s right. That’s right. So we’re going to talk about Who mourns for Adonis? But before we get into that, we always like to revisit your comments in our previous episodes.

And Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week? I cannot wait because these are going to be comments about section 31. That’s right. The general theme, Sean, of the comments was. Woof. Yeah. We had comments from, like, from Dan Sims, who wrote, started strong, then just kept going downhill. Overall, I guess I had fun, but it sure wasn’t good.

To which, we had another one from Eric Dunn, who wrote, I couldn’t finish it, to be honest. Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s rough. And Jason Dumb, I think, had the best comment that kind of summarized the sentiment that everybody was kind of getting at. Modern producers of Trek always seemed to reveal their fundamental distaste for what makes the earlier shows good, chain of command, following the rules, doing science, logic, and all the boring stuff. All that is boring. The new Trek breaks all the rules, including the rule to tell a coherent sci fi story. Yeah. There were parts of the movie I did not totally hate, but what a train wreck. Now that last sentence, I agree completely.

It’s like. There were parts I had fun with. Yeah. Woof. Yeah. Not the easiest watch. No. But thank you everybody for joining us on it and for jumping to the comments. We always appreciate your thoughts, but Sean still got wrong answers only. Oh, of course. I forgot. We, we got two I wanted to read. A. J. Chan is throwing his hat in the ring this week.

Who mourns for Adonis, a Ferengi named Adonis decides to start a labor strike on a Federation space station far from Ferengnar. Earhart station. While the while the humans and federation citizens on the station rally behind Adonis, but the other ferengi conspire to assassinate him. Though and though a nausicaan stabs him in his heart Adonis sparks a revolution comprised of Hoo Mans for Adonis.

Oh, yes. Oh,

yes.

Oh, A.J? Chef’s kiss. Oh, that hurt more than the static shock into my ears. Oh, but then we also have one from Mark Loveless, who wrote this one. Plot for who mourns for Adonis. A new member of the crew joins Enterprise, Cal. The newest red shirt instantly becomes popular as all the males want to be his best friend and all the females and a few of the men want to sleep with him.

On the next away team expedition, Cal is called up to join the landing party despite numerous pleas from the female members of the landing party who, all state. But the red shirts seemed to get shot a lot. Cal and the rest of the landing party beam down. Not surprisingly, Cal is killed within 60 seconds of materializing.

Oh sure, some other plot stuff happens, but all everyone is thinking about is Cal. At the end of the episode on the bridge, even Scotty admits he misses Cal. He says, I may be straight, but seriously, Cal could have put a baby in me and I’d be thrilled. Sadly, the scene fades to black.

A parallel universe. It’s wild over

there. It’s

wild over there. Yes. Thank you everybody for those. As always, I’m dumbfounded, but, uh, entertained at the same time. Yep. That sound you hear in the background, and those flashing lights, no it’s not me getting another static shock, it is in fact the read alert.

It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Alright, the Enterprise is held captive within an energy field, which is controlled by an alien who claims to be the Greek god Apollo. Apollo commands Kirk to meet him on the planet’s surface. Bones, Chekov, Scotty, and Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas.

Palamas? Yes. Palamas. Accompany Kirk. You only have to say it once. Apol. I know. I like saying it a lot. Apollo demands the crew worship him as a God at his temple, captivating Carolyn and attacking Scotty when he disobeys. Spock finds a way to get through the energy field and helps Kirk to take down the temple that was its power source.

Awkwardly worded, but fairly succinct and on point. Who Mourns for Adonis? This is episode number two of season two, directed by Mark Daniels, written by Gilbert Ralston and Gene L. Kuhn, and guest appearances include Michael Forest as Apollo, Leslie Parrish as Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas, John Winston as Lieutenant Kyle, Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Leslie, William Blackburn and Roger Holloway also feature.

A little bit of a background on the director, Mark Daniels. I thought it was interesting to find out that he was hired to direct I love Lucy, not just a couple of episodes. He directed the first 38 episodes of I love Lucy. And then he left the series. He would say in 1977 that he left I Love Lucy not because he was unhappy and not because the other programs were more interesting to him.

It’s just that he didn’t realize at the time what he was leaving. Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, he said. But then we didn’t know we were creating history. We were just doing a show. He also was responsible for directing 15 episodes of the original series of Star Trek. He also has directed Mission Impossible, the original TV series, Alice, Hogan’s Heroes, and he won a Hugo for his episode of the original series, Menagerie, which is, of course, the two parter that was created out of the cage.

I also wanted to visit the writer of this episode, Gilbert Ralston, who has an interesting role to play in how creators are credited for their work. He was responsible for creating the show Wild Wild West, and you may all remember that the not super terrific or well received movie that was featuring Will Smith, when it came out, Ralston decided to sue the production company. Why would he do that? He didn’t actually own any of the rights to the show or program, despite the fact he had created it. The show creator came to him and in a normal television production standard said, I want to put together a show. I have an idea of combining a Western with something like a James Bond character.

Can you do that for me? Ralston created everything based on that premise, putting everything together, writing nine different versions of the pilot until finally everything was landed on. He created the setting post civil war. He created the main characters. He created some of the gimmicks and gadgets that these characters would use.

And he created the main characters entirely. And when he was done, he received none of the credit and never received royalties. He was in his 80s when he decided to sue the production company that was making the movie, saying he was owed royalties on his previous work. He would sadly die before the lawsuit was settled, but after his death, it was in fact settled and his heirs received millions of dollars in post in backdated royalties effectively.

This mirrors a creative process that existed in a lot of industries throughout the 20th century, including the comic book industry, pulp writers in publications of magazines and, uh, creators of novels that were set within existing universes like Star Trek and Star Wars. The ability for a corporation to hold a copyright and to cut out the original creators.

This is what happened to the creators of Superman and of Batman. Their families had to go to court later to try and get compensation for characters that were earning the corporation millions upon millions of dollars. I thought it was an interesting footnote regarding this episode that he was a person who at a certain point people started pushing back and taking these companies to court and changing the practice of how those rights are controlled and how a creator to this day, there are comic book writers like Alan Moore or Frank Miller, who will not work with major publishers because they created things that were taken from them.

And it’s interesting to see those people who existed in the fifties and sixties, who began to push back on that and hopefully creating a better change for creators in the future. Our original cast on the screen in this episode, well, we’ve got the whole gang. We’ve got William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Walter Koenig.

And correct me if I’m wrong, Matt, I think this feels like the first time that we get a couple of shots of the bridge, which literally includes all of them. Like, if this was, this was the first moment where I was like, Oh, there’s Chekhov sitting next to Zulu. There’s everybody at their stations and everybody gets a turn on screen.

A nice episode from that perspective. Only took two seasons. That only took two seasons. And, and, uh, you know, second episode broadcast in season two, I think they knew what they were trying to get to. So I think something like this may in fact have been pushed into the number two position for the season specifically because it did represent the entire crew in that way.

At the time of original broadcast, September 22nd, 1967, what were we singing along to? Well, Matt and I were not singing along to anything because we didn’t exist yet, but soon enough, Matt would be singing along to Ode to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. Take it away, Matt. He’s almost done, folks.

So good owed to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry, who was a singer who was kind of a trailblazer for a female singers. At the time, she was one of the first to produce and write her own material. It was not commonly seen at that point. And in an interesting twist, this song would inspire a movie that would be made in the 1970s. What I find most fascinating about all of that.

Is I’ve never heard this song and I’ve never heard of this singer. Yeah. Interesting how things like that can fall away and feel like they’re coming in from an alternate history. And at the movies, people were lining up to see in the heat of the night, which is a 1967 American mystery drama directed by Norman Jewson, produced by Walter Marsh, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. It’s the story of Virgil Tubbs played by Poitier, a black police detective from Philadelphia who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in a town in Mississippi. It was an inspiration for a TV show that would emerge in, I believe the 1980s and would star, uh, Carol O’Connor as the Steiger character.

And was a, at the time in 1967 was a very pointed depiction of the deep South and civil rights in a clash in a pursuit of justice. And on television, we try to take a look at the Nielsen’s because it gives us a good gauge. Star Trek in season two was earning less than a 12 in the Nielsen ratings. And we’ve looked at shows like the Andy Griffith show and the Lucy show.

Which were leaders of the pack. And this week, we’re going to take a look at a program that was earning a 25. 5 in the Nielsen’s. It was the number one show the previous year. So last season of Star Trek, we were talking about at the number one spot, and that would be the show gun smoke. Gun smoke was an American radio and television, Western drama created by Norman mcDonald, and writer John Meston. It’s centered on Dodge City, Kansas in the 1970s during the settlement of the American West. The central character is lawman Marshall Matt Dillon, played by William Conrad, in the radio and James Arness in the television series. The radio series ran from 1952. The television series would run into the 70s, which means all told they probably created more fictional history than actually existed in Kansas City at the time.

On now to what was in the headlines. On this day in 1967, I found this to be a upsetting and sobering headline story. I’m not going to be talking about Vietnam. I’m not talking about President Johnson. I’m not talking anything with the Cold War. I’m talking about the headline about the U. S. State Department’s Secretary of State who was getting married with the headline, Rusk’s daughter, 18, is wed to Negro.

1967. 1967. Not that long ago, and yet it feels It’s not that long ago. Yeah. It is so easy for us to think of things like this as deep past. And then you read a headline like that and you realize the past is not as buried as we wish it might be. On now to our discussion about this episode. Before we get into the plot and the depiction of what’s going on on the planet and what’s going on in the, in the ship and break it down from a character perspective and a plot perspective. I just wanted to give us both an opportunity to kind of like shake out our thoughts about the sexism in the episode because we’re going to talk about it and I would like to get our thoughts on it out in front.

Yeah, and then move on because I think it’s, it’s, it really is a central thing that kept occurring to me as I was watching the episode, how. The sexism, the show is trying to be progressive in so many ways and it’s still, and we’ve talked about this before, it’s still a product of its era and a product of its era reflecting back on the headline I just talked about, an era where progressive meant change and progressive meant learning to accept change. And yet you have a newspaper headline, the New York times pointing out that the daughter 18 is not even named. It is her father’s name and he is married and she is marrying a Negro. That is the takeaway from that headline.

That is such an a dated moment captured in that headline and I felt like something similar was happening here with this episode where this depiction of the drama and the tension kept getting its legs knocked out from underneath it because of the way they throughout the entire episode talked about the character of Karen Palamas. Who is supposed to be an accomplished officer in Starfleet and then immediately is wooed by the figure of Apollo and then reluctantly follows her duty all while people are saying, well, you know, someday she’ll meet the right guy and then she’ll leave the service and she can’t help herself because she’s smitten with this guy and she’s got to override her feelings.

And maybe she’ll do her duty, but if she doesn’t, we’re all stuck here and it’s constant looking down your nose at women and it’s not, they’re not looking down their nose at this woman. They’re not saying, like, oh, this is her pattern. This is her as a character. She is this type of person. It is just simply, well, this is women and I found it challenging to stay rooted in the story because it was so glaring.

And it’s unfortunate because I feel like the story here is one that Star Trek has told a number of different times and it usually is fairly engaging. And I find that this one in particular, without this, could have been a really neat depiction of this kind of story of, oh, we’ve gone into space and we end up meeting somebody who it turns out may have inspired the gods on Earth.

And I wanted to like the episode for that and then find myself constantly tripping over like, oof, they really like, they have a few moments where it’s clearly intended to be like lighthearted, give some comic relief, give Kirk an opportunity to say, well, I prefer not to think of it as losing an officer, but instead, Oh, wait a minute.

I’m just losing an officer. That was a funny line. Unfortunately, It was rooted in a bad attitude. So where did you land as you were watching this? Were you as distracted by all this as I was? Or did you have a different response? Let me scan through my notes of the episode because I keep notes as I’m watching these things.

Okay, I got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 bullets I wrote down. Every single one of them, Sean, has to do with sexism. I have no notes. No notes about anything else. It’s all about, I can’t believe he just said, She’ll find the right man and leave the service. Woof is what I wrote. And then I wrote, uh, what was it? Uh, Apollo, you seem wise for a woman.

Yeah. What the, what the what? Yeah. Huh? Her reaction, I wrote her reaction. Oh, it’s beautiful when he put the dress on her. Yeah. Really? You’re not freaking out? Like, what did you just do to my clothes? Yeah. Like, what just happened? She’s immediately like, oh, this is so pretty. It’s like, what? Yeah. What? And then one of my final notes was, There’s a point in the episode near the end where like the the whole God thing of like Influencing earth is kind of like it was interesting and I got pulled right back out of it again when?

She’s deciding that she has to basically turn against him and she and he it’s revealed To him to Apollo and he starts basically being the abusive boyfriend. Yeah, he does and shaming her look. I loved you. Look what you’ve done to me. See what you’ve done to me, He’s blaming her Yeah, the situation he made and it’s just like that gas lighting.

Yeah. What is they wrote this? They wrote that thinking what they were doing was good storytelling and what they were doing was basically showing like a future audience of Can you believe that’s how they actually used to think? Yeah. And it’s how some people continue to think that’s what’s that’s also upsetting.

But that’s what I brought up in the beginning when you showed the headline, which was holy crap, 1967. That was not that long ago. And just a reminder of the situation we’re in today with the current state of politics and what’s happening, it’s clear why it’s happening because we’re not that far removed from this.

It’s like, this is still permeating our culture, but it’s, it’s shocking to me for a show that was trying to be so progressive. It’s also very regressive in other ways. And they were just completely unaware of it. And this to me for this episode, I couldn’t get past it. Like, it’s like, if you just told me this episode is They come across an alien that was the inspiration for the Greek gods.

That’s a cool concept. But then after watching this episode, it’s like, that is such a footnote in this episode to me. It’s like, wow. Just wow. Yeah. So as I was watching it, we do this all the time in this podcast where we talk about the episode and we’re like, oh, it, you know, it maybe was a little clunky.

Maybe there’s something that could have changed or in the ones that we really don’t like, we’re like, oh, this was pretty hard to like. The writing here was really pretty bad. They could have gotten around this issue if they had done this or that other thing instead, maybe restructure. We rewrite it a little bit.

Other than the sexism I found huge sections of this really, really well done. And I found the stuff aboard the enterprise, particularly interesting. I, what did you think about the depiction of under Spock’s command, how they’re going through the process of trying to figure out how to get out of the sticky situation they’re in with what I love the image, a giant hand, just holding them in space.

Every time they showed that image, I was just like, come on, that’s really, really cool. That’s just the neat Gonzo. Like this is a kind of weird sci fi. That you don’t get a lot of now where now it, it feels like we’re in an era where even our, you know, they’re the varying levels of sci fi. You get the hard sci fi and then the high sci fi, which is sometimes referred to as like a fantasy sci fi, like star Wars, where it’s effectively, Oh, they’re running around with swords, effectively fighting monsters with swords or fighting each other.

And what could be gun battles in the old west. And it’s just happens to be spaceships and lasers and aliens, but this is a different thing entirely where it’s a kind of gonzo weirdo side sci fi not quite as deep into it as a doctor who would go, but kind of a mix one foot in a kind of like hard sci fi idealism.

Yeah. And a foot in, yeah, what about a, a weird image of just a hand holding onto a spaceship? This is like some weirdo imagery that they were just like, let’s make that happen because we can, and nobody’s ever seen it before. It’ll be eye catching. And keep audiences engaged. Yeah, I I agree with you on that.

It I was charmed by the hand, like, and I like the remastered version of it. It looked great. It was like this really cool hand, it’s like I love the fact that they were doing as the imagery and it’s like it could be cheesy. Yeah, but it works It’s like I thought it was very clever It makes me think of like everything everything everything everywhere all at once that movie that’s a sci fi movie, But it’s bonkers and it does weird stuff and you just accept it because that’s the tone and like for this it fit the tone. He’s in a Greek God.

Of course, it’d be some kind of like gigantic God hand holding it because he’s a yeah He thinks he’s a God so it’s like it totally fits the narrative of what they’re telling. So I’m glad they went there. I did enjoy that. I loved, I liked the actor who was doing it, even though I didn’t like half the things he was saying because of the sexist crap coming out of his mouth.

I thought he did a great job. I thought he was very compelling as that character and the portrayal of how would a, an alien who wants to be worshipped behave? Yeah. It worked. I thought, I thought he was, it was very compelling and very interesting. It was just, he just kept getting undercut because like he would drop a line.

Let’s talk about Apollo for just a moment. I liked the idea. That they didn’t go into a, let’s really explain how this could have worked. It was, no, we can’t figure out where his power is coming from. He’s humanoid enough, but McCoy never says he’s human. He just says he’s humanoid, meaning he’s got a corporeal body.

He has organs, but he’s got some strange organ that I can’t identify in his chest. So it’s like, all right, so he’s a life form. He’s got some source of power. And he’s from a people who apparently visited earth at some point in the past, inspiring these legends and these, the mythology of the Greek gods.

But other than that, they don’t try to make it make sense. The only thing that they need to do is have Kirk a couple of times say. What if, like, he’s just like, what if this is actually the guy, like, what if this is in fact true? And it’s interesting that it wraps up with a moment where Kirk says to Apollo, we don’t need you.

The one God is enough. There’s a, like a little subtle endorsement of, okay, we’re not putting religion away. We’re just putting mythology away. I found that this episode. I couldn’t help but think, we talked about like progressivism, the headline that was so jarring, the sexism of this. I feel like the show, though on a certain level, near the surface, thought it was talking about letting go of the old ways that no longer work.

This would have been at a point in time when the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. were launching rockets into space at very regular clips, there was a race to get to the moon. At this point you would have had, the moon shot was just a couple of years away. And I couldn’t help but hear in that line of, we’ve outgrown you, the idea of, not necessarily an embracing of counterculture, but an embracing of cultural shift and embracing of moving forward in an interesting way.

What did you think about what it was saying about humanity in a moment like that in 1967, where if that show is 1967 saying, what are we about? What did you hear in that moment of we’ve outgrown you? I was seeing the same thing. It’s like, uh, shedding your past a little bit, shedding these previous beliefs.

Like, like a child growing up, I guess, you know what I mean? Like, it’s like the United States is kind of coming into its own in the 60s and 70s. And it’s kind of the show saying we’re, we’re getting past all this old baggage. The future is here. It’s ours for the making. That’s kind of what I was taking away from it from that.

And I thought that was a interesting kind of nuance. But again, I don’t want to keep hammering on this. It’s just like. The show episode also kept undercutting itself. So it’s like, yeah, here’s this message that was like, oh, you’re trying to say this, but then you drop that one line and then, oh, you’re trying to say it all, but you say this other line.

And so it was like, it just kept undercutting a little bit, like, which I think is what makes this episode. It’s a little bit like you can’t fully assess history while you’re living it. And it’s like this moment of like. Yeah. Humanity is changing in all these ways and yet it’s depicted in this way that still carries such heavy baggage in an awkward way.

To go back to what you said about the actor playing Apollo, I really liked him as well. He was a fairly regular character actor on some TV shows during this era, but what I found most interesting is his, if you look at his filmography, it is huge for anime. And video games, he became a voice actor. He is, yeah, he’s still alive today.

And he has a filmography that includes a large number of anime and video game characters, which I thought was interesting. Also interesting was, uh, Leslie Parrish who played the aforementioned Lieutenant Palamas. She was, um, Matt, do you remember the episode of mystery science theater, the giant spider invasion?

Oh yeah. She’s the lady researcher. Yeah. What? She’s the lady researcher. What’s funny is I literally just watched that episode of mystery science theater last week. Uh, we rewatched it occasionally here in my home and I watched it with my partner and my son. And then here, while I was watching this episode this morning.

And as I was watching, I was like, there’s something about that lady. Like why do I know what she looks like a little older? I looked her up and she was in various movies and TV shows, you know, a few things here and there through the sixties and seventies, but then she was in the giant spider invasion, which I also thought was funny when that movie came out, it actually entered.

It was not well reviewed. I mean, you’ve seen the movie, it’s bad, but it entered the top 50 films for the year, it became a cult hit while it was in theaters. It reached a point where it’s probably like a film that kids would go see every couple of weeks. I can imagine like kids going into that, see that movie again and again, because it’s, there’s nothing in there that’s challenging for an audience from an adult perspective, but I can imagine kids going back to that movie to see it multiple times.

Yeah. But. What I thought was particularly funny is that after it was on Mystery Science Theater and it had a resurgence into interest. And the filmmaker was then going to sci fi conventions and doing appearances and there was an attempt at the time to bring about a musical version of the giant spider invasion. Oh, no.

Oh, no. If only that had come to pass. So, uh, Let’s visit now the ship itself. We have the crew responding to the dilemma of being held in space. And for me, this is the best part. On the surface, I like a lot of what’s going on with the, the attempts to figure out like, who is this guy? What are we going to do? I like Chekov quite a bit in this episode.

He gets a couple of one liners in where he’s just like being the kind of like charming Davy Jones ish monkey that they wanted him to be, they clearly introduced him to fill that gap. So here he is being a little sarcastic, winking at the captain, getting compliments from him. Scotty is unhinged. Scotty doesn’t behave at all like an officer should, but we’re supposed to believe that like, well, you put them in front of a beautiful woman and what is a man going to do?

So leaving all that behind on the ship itself, we get some really cool interactions between Sulu and Spock. We get to see Sulu has a friend pull up a little computer next to his station at one point, and they’ve got this second guy just sitting there doing stuff, helping him search the planet for the power source.

I loved that. I loved that. Yeah. There was a reference from McCoy to Kirk to say, I fear that Spock is rubbing off on Chekhov because Chekhov was being so logical in his analysis. And it’s this clear, like, this is a compliment. This is a positive thing is like this young guy here, he’s sounding a lot like Spock kind of like flash forward for me to when Chekhov is the science officer aboard the Reliant in Star Trek two.

Like. In my head, I’m just like, it’s really fascinating how all these things were tied up. Having said the word fascinating just now, I love that McCoy says in a word, fascinating. Spock’s not there. They write that into the show. It’s like McCoy is channeling Spock at various opportunities. Uhura trying to go into her computer station to basically jury rig a means of breaking through the force field.

And Spock comes down for one of the best but most awkwardly presented conversations in the episode. They look like they’re trying to climb inside a dollhouse.

There’s two huge faces in this little tiny opening, and her wig is pressing up against the top of the doohickeys that are supposed to be computer parts. But he gives the best line when she’s like a little defensive about like, this is hard to do. And I haven’t done anything like this in a long time, her reference to, I haven’t done this in a long time.

I flashed back immediately to strange new worlds to all the sequences of her being in the engineering section, the relationship she had with the engineer aboard that ship originally. Like I flashed back immediately to all of that. And then Spock says, I can’t think of anything, but anybody better to do this job than you and he leaves.

And then in a moment of, I think, losing track of what she was supposed to do, Nichelle Nichols looks directly at the camera. With this kind of like, huh, completely derails the scene, but I also found it incredibly charming. I was just like, I was just like, Oh, you go Nichelle. Like, like, yeah. Like, who better than you?

Who better than Uhura to do that? I loved it. So this is the second time in, in, I think it was the previous original series episode we reviewed the B plot to me. Yeah. Was more enjoyable than the A plot. Showing people being competent at their jobs is somehow a staple of Star Trek. Yes. And it really works.

Anytime you just show people like, well, I got here and here’s the report you wanted and I did a great job. And everybody’s just like, you did do a great job. High fives. And it’s just like, yeah! I’m like, I don’t need phasers, I don’t need Klingons, just give me people being competent at their work. Yeah!

This is the best TPS report I’ve ever seen. I’m totally down with that. I maybe that says something about the era we’re living in, but I’m celebrating people being competent at science. I know, but you, you, you, you did, you did raise something. I’m glad you brought up, which is strange new worlds continues to redefine how I’m interpreting some of these episodes.

It gives more depth to those scenes than they would have had watching it without that show. So this is one of those things I’m loving that Star Trek is revisiting that era and doing this stuff. It’s like, Oh, they’re doing a prequel. Oh, that’s boring. I’m glad they’re doing that because it’s like I’m having a blast with that show.

And then it’s really, it’s kind of changing and recontextualizing this show in a better way. It’s making this show deeper than it would have been originally. Because of moments like that between Spock and Uhura and we know that she’s this genius that could do engineering and worked in engineering and that line, which was would have had no, like, no real meaning.

It actually has real meaning now because of of the strange new worlds. So I love that. I even found myself at one point when Scotty gets a little bit of addressing down from Kirk flashing back to strange new worlds and their introduction of Scotty and strange new worlds is kind of like, he’s, he’s kind of a wild card.

The first time that they meet him, he’s living on that planet by himself. He’s creating force fields to keep himself safe from the Gorn. And he’s just kind of like, Oh yeah, I’ve been here for a while by myself. And that would be scarring. He would be a little unhinged in that moment. And I felt like the dressing down he received here.

I felt like, Oh, there’s, there’s Doohan letting out a little bit of that version of Scotty. And I’m like, Oh yeah, it reminded me of strange new world. So even that moment, which I was like, Oh, come on, Scotty. Like, why is this depiction of this chief engineer of a starship? It was just like, we got to go save her.

And I’m like, I’m like, everybody needs to come. This doesn’t, this isn’t great. But in that moment, I was also like, Oh yeah, it’s running me a little bit strangely of strange new worlds. So on the whole, I think it’s pretty clear, Matt and I look at this episode and say, Oh, if only they had not stepped in certain terrain, this could have been a fun ride.

But so the dot, dot, dot there is unfortunate. I, like I said, I found a lot here that I really wanted to like and do like, but it’s a hard watch given everything else that comes along with it. What did you all think? Jump into the comments and let us know and don’t forget to like and subscribe and share us with your friends.

Those are very easy ways for you to support the program. And when you’re jumping into the comments, don’t forget to drop in your wrong answers only. A summary of the next episode, which is going to be, I am very excited for, Amok Time. That’s right. We’re finally there, Matt. We get to hear the fight music.

Cannot wait. Yes. So before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you wanted to share with our viewers and listeners about what you have coming up on your main channel? I have quite a few different things. I’m not sure when they’re coming out, but like there’s, I visited a wind wind farm in Canada, there’s a video coming out about that, about seeing them get constructed, um, new technologies that are making us build better batteries that can be recycled more easily or work better.

So I have a video about stuff like that. So it’s, there’s a, there’s a bunch of stuff coming, just Just check it out. As for me, you can find my books wherever books are sold. You can also find them at your local public library. I look forward to hearing from anybody who checks them out and has any thoughts.

Please drop them in the comments. If you’d like to support the show, don’t forget leaving a review, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. And if you want to support us more directly, go to trekintime. show. Click the Become a Supporter button. It allows you to throw coins at our heads. It also makes you an ensign.

Which means you’ll be signed up for our out of time program, which is our spinoff program, which we talk about things that don’t fit within the confines of this program. We hope you’ll be interested in checking it out. Thank you so much, everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we’ll talk to you next time.