177: Star Trek TOS Season 2, “The Doomsday Machine”

 In this episode of Trek in time, we’re talking about Moby Dick. No, not the infamous drum solo, the big whale. That’s right, everybody. We’re talking about the doomsday machine. This is from Star Trek, the original series, which originally aired on October 20th, 1967. It’s episode number 35 and shooting order 35 and broadcast order sixth of the second season. Welcome everybody to Trek in time. This is of course, the podcast where we talk about all episodes of Trek in chronological stardate order. And yeah, we’re talking original series, but that doesn’t mean that’s where we started, Matt. Remember way back when, when we started this, how many years ago was that now?

It feels like 15 years ago. It’s it’s approximately three years ago, I believe. Um, maybe a little bit more. And we started with enterprise. We’ve been moving forward since, and now we’re in the second season, but I can’t believe that we’re already in the second season of the original series. This is where it all started.

And we’re also talking about 1967. We’re trying to talk about the show by presenting it with a little bit of context, what would the program have been like for audiences at the time of original broadcast? And who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi, write some stuff for kids. With me as always it’s my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact in our lives. And Matt, what is impacting your life today?

I mentioned this in our other podcast, but I’m getting a new EV. That’s the big news right now. I’m very excited about that.

But, uh, Other than that, things are good. How about yourself?

Things are pretty good. I have just recently, if there’s anybody in our audience who is a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, I have just started a new Kickstarter. I am creating effectively a zine. I’m, I’m approaching it almost like a subscription model.

The kickstarter will get you the main guide for this region I am creating. And then every month for about six months, I will be releasing a new issue, which will detail a new area of the map and the map will grow as a result over time. So I hope you’ll be interested in checking that out. We’ll have a link for that in the podcast description here on YouTube.

Before we get into our conversation about this episode, the doomsday machine, we’re always interested in seeing what you have to say about our previous episode. So Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?

There was a lot of talk on amock time of how much people love this episode. Yeah. Um, and there was a nice little thread here from Sam Higdon who kicked off by saying, Hey, great episode.

Amock time is a must see episode of the original series. I have a question. Do you guys think Romulans go through pon farr since Vulcans and Romulans are related? And before I could respond to that with my understanding, uh, Pale Ghost did. Pale Ghost responded, From my understanding, It has something to do with the emotional suppression.

They can only fight their biology for so long before something starts leaking out. Like, holding your bladder. Or if you’ve seen Orville, Moklin’s only having to pee once a year. Which isn’t a choice because they hold it so long, so interesting that Orville’s

being used to explain Star Trek, I think that’s

fantastic.

But that’s my understanding. I don’t know if you’ve, you know, something different, but I think that’s just my understanding

as well. It is, I believe the way that they refer to it is from that perspective of, we have a biological drive. Yeah, that is in conflict with how we conduct ourselves. And that’s why it’s a stripping away of that control.

That’s a stripping away of the suppression. So Romulans, I, you get the feeling that Romulans just do whatever they want, whenever they want. And that includes not so nice behavior. Very often we end up with many years from now, we’ll be talking about, uh, Tasha Yar’s daughter, who is the byproduct of a Romulan taking on Tasha Yar, probably not willingly to become the mother of a child.

So like, that’s not a pon farr thing. That’s a Romulan thing.

Yeah. And there was also a thread of comments that we saw around strange new worlds, like you and I talked about in the episode, uh, Dan Sims wrote these old episodes keep making me like strange new worlds even more. To which PaleGhost responded.

Even subspace Rhapsody? To which Dan Sims responded. There’s always an exception.

And then last week we had no Mark Loveless, you know, wrong answers only. And I heard from Mark and, uh, in a comment, and he also put a comment here saying, Oh, I did post a wrong answers only for last week. Apparently some of my wrong answers only are so wild the YouTube algorithm can’t handle it, stupid Borg algorithm.

Ending on that, his wrong answers only for the plot of Dooms of the Doomsday Machine. Something is wrong in the main toilet area in that someone keeps taking a dump all over the back of the toilet instead of the bowl. It is happening enough that the Lower Decks cleaning crew nicknames the stall in question The doomsday machine, the crew, the crew, the crew keeps complaining.

So McCoy goes in, collects a stool sample for analysis and determines it comes from a Vulcan and not a human. Spock is confronted by Kirk and McCoy who says that his toilet in his quarters is broken. Who says that his toilet in his quarters is broken. So he has been using the main crew toilet until it can be repaired.

After more questioning and investigation, the answer now seems obvious. As everyone who follows Star Trek knows, Vulcans have a high anus. And so human friendly toilets are not exactly lined up for easy waste catching and disposal. Spock elects to go on a liquid diet until his new toilet arrives, and everyone is relieved.

In later episodes, whenever a crew member says they are heading to the toilet, they call it the doomsday machine and look at Spock for a reaction and are thrilled if he does that eyebrow raise thing.

So I wish I could say thank you for that, Mark. I wish I could say thank you. Oh boy. That noise you hear in the background and those flashing lights you see on your screen.

That of course is the reed alert, which means it’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Matt, don’t blink, or you’ll miss this one.

It’s crazy short. After losing his entire crew to a planet eating alien machine from another galaxy, Commodore Matt Decker pulls rank on Kirk in order to play a game of cat and mouse with the mechanical adversary.

His efforts to destroy the menace place the Enterprise in grave danger. That’s actually A very good description.

That’s it in a nutshell. Season two, episode six, directed by Mark Daniels, written by Norman Spinrad, who is a, was a very prolific, prolific writer of sci fi in the sixties and seventies and onward into the eighties and nineties, uh, he is still alive to this day and, uh, hasn’t published anything in a while, but he is a.

He was a mainstay of my kiddom readership, so I’m familiar with his work and I’ve enjoyed his work. So I was happy to see his name pop up on the screen yet again for this episode that I’ve seen a hundred times. The guest stars include William Windom as Commodore Matt Decker and William Windom is one of those original that guys.

He was in everything. He’s in a ton of movies and television shows, and he’s always, always good. Also in the episode, Elizabeth Rogers as Lt. Palmer, filling in for Lt. Uhura. John Capage as Elliot. Eddie Paskey as Lt. Leslie. William Blackburn as Lt. Hadley. Richard Compton as Washburn. Tim Burns as Russ, Jerry Catron as Montgomery, and John Winston back again as Lieutenant Kyle.

Our regular crew, we have most of the original mainstays. We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan in a bunch of scenes doing a really great turn in this episode. We also have George Takei as Sulu. We do not see Walter Koenig, and we also don’t have Nichelle Nichols in the communications chair.

The time of original broadcast, October 20th, 1967. I know everybody is wondering what was Matt dancing along to? He was dancing along to nothing. He hadn’t been born yet. So settle down. But he eventually would. Learn the song, the letter by the box tops, Matt, take it away.

That’s right. The letter is a song written by Wayne Carson. It was first recorded by the box tops in 1967. It was the group’s first and most successful single reaching number one on the records in the United States and Canada. And as Matt just said, are we sure that we know what this song sounds like? I do not.

Maybe we can play five seconds of it in this episode, Matt. I leave that up to you and the editor. I don’t want to get hit with a copyright claim. I know, but, and at the movies, people were returning with, this is a movie we’ve talked about before it was number one, two weeks in a row. So previous episode that we talked about, it was the number one movie of the week at that time.

It’s Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in reflections in a golden eye. This was a taut drama that had to do with intimacy and homosexuality and took place on an army base and was a movie that I had not heard of, but I’m interested to see because these are two performers that, I mean, culturally, these are big names.

And so the idea that this is a movie that just somehow slipped past my radar, uh, it’s caught my eye. I wouldn’t say it’s caught my golden eye, but it has caught my eye. And on television, we always like to try and compare apples to apples. So we are looking at the Nielsen ratings and looking at the top programs.

Star Trek in its second season was getting somewhere in the 11 range on its average for the second season. It would. Started at a 12, it would go down to about a 10 and it’s third season. So here we are in the middle comparing that 11 to other shows that we’re getting in the high to mid twenties. So we’ve talked about things like the Andrew Griffith show, the Lucy show, Gomer Pyle, and this week we’re revisiting another program that we did talk about.

In the first season of the original series, that would be Bonanza. Bonanza is of course, the American Western television series that ran on NBC from September of 1959 till January of 1973, and it had 432 episodes total. It was the longest running Western and the second longest running Western series on American, It was the longest running network series for NBC.

It was the second longest American network behind Gunsmoke, and it continues to be aired in syndication to this day. And in the news, the point of Star Trek, of course, is emerging of science fiction with a kind of cultural exploration of what it means to, you know, be pursuing a utopian ideal of peace in the future.

And here we see a mishmash of what was going on in 1967. That includes some science tech, like Mariner 5 passing Venus and detecting magnetic traces. But also more importantly, I think is the number of articles here that are revolving around conflict, the ongoing turmoil in Vietnam and peace riots that were taking place here in New York city.

There was a protest at Brooklyn college. Students were arrested. There was a battle with the police. There is turmoil going on in the streets. We are months away at this point from the announcement by Lyndon Johnson that he would not seek re election, he was the president during a time of an unpopular war and civil rights strife on the streets, which created an era of feeling that he wasn’t going to win, so he stepped aside.

It would, of course, lead to the election of the first election of Richard Nixon in 1968. But at this point, the turmoil that’s evident on this newspaper. I think is something that we’re going to be chatting about in the episode, because the episode is very much about how do you, how do you get to your ultimate goals when your goals might be devastatingly harmful to those around you?

Is it worth pushing to the point of destruction in order to know you’re doing what you believe is right? On now to that discussion. First of all, Matt, I wanted to just get something that’s not about the original episode out of the way, which is. I’m watching these on paramount on the streaming app. Yeah.

It’s the remastered versions. Yes. And I love the remastered versions. I love this one in particular. That I would, that’s what I was like as I was watching it, I was just like, holy cow. This is so much better than the

original.

So cool. And I love watching the original series as originally presented. I do love the kind of Doctor Who ness of it all.

The 1960s, like, that’s clearly a cardboard box. That they’ve hung from a string and then filmed in front of a matte painting to make it look like it’s a massive structure on an alien planet. But now with the CGI being added in, and in this episode in particular, it did two things. First, you have multiple shots.

They reuse one of them a couple of times of the enterprise just zooming through space. And there was something about it that made it look a little bit more carefully done than other episodes where you see the enterprise zooming through space. I couldn’t help but wonder if in this one particular, they were like, we’re going to do an extra special job on this.

Cause there’s so much exterior stuff. So the model look a little bit, did a little bit more detailed. There was a little bit more. It didn’t look quite so toy like and shiny. It had a different look to it when it was zooming past the camera. But then there was also all the stuff with the constellation, the destruction to that ship.

The damage to it, the debris of the asteroid field, as they fly through the asteroid field, trying to like figure out what happened to these planets that have disappeared. And in particular, the space battles. Now, I love the fact that they did all of that and still said this planet killing device is still going to look like a cornucopia with a fire inside it.

I’m like perfectly fine with that. This is effectively, it’s a Moby Dick story. I say that at the beginning of this episode, this is you have a captain, he’s lost his entire crew and he’s like, I’m going to kill that thing. Because that’s what’s right. And it is a, it is an old model of storytelling. It is, it’s existed before Moby Dick.

Moby Dick has become the shorthand way of describing it. And we’ve seen it in other things. We’ve seen it in other Star Trek and we’re seeing it here. This is one though, that for me stands out as far head and shoulders above other episodes of original series Trek. As Amock time for different reasons, this one, for me, the otherness of it all, the fact that this is supposed to be a thing that comes from another galaxy, the fact that they’re just like, there’s nothing we can do.

We can’t defeat this thing. It presents all of that in a way that feels so epic and so much bigger than a TV show that I end up watching this one as if it’s the first time watching it. Every time I see it, I really, really love this episode. So that’s my kind of like big picture. Like I love the special effects, the updating.

I loved all of that. I wanted to get all of that out of the way at the beginning of the episode, the sequence where he’s where Kirk is watching the screen, he says, what the hell’s going on? And you see the enterprise zooming over the planet killer and shooting it and it’s making these turns and we don’t typically get those angles.

You typically don’t get spaceship battles from that distance and that angle in that way. So the fact that they managed to do that in 1967 and then update it in this way that makes it look really, really cool and sophisticated, really got my juices flying. So what did you think about all of that? All of the, the remastering, the space battles, the look and feel of it all.

So that we can then move on to like, okay, from a 1967 perspective, what’s going on

here? I’m going to back up for this a little bit, Sean. And you may appreciate this. Our mom is a sci fi geek. Love Star Trek. Our dad is the antithesis of that. And he always thought Star Trek was goofy, goofy, goofy shit. And they wanted nothing to do with it.

There were two episodes dad used to make fun of. All the time. The one with the Horta, the undulating carpet, as he called it a few times, and then the other one was this one that looked like the original special effects look like, uh, I can’t remember what he described it as, but for me it looks like a rolled up blunt.

You know what I mean? Like it looks like a gigantic doobie flying through space. Yeah. Space doobie. What is going on? Yeah. So even as a, so for me it looked

like a bugle. You know the bugle chips? Yes, a bugle. It looked like a bugle coming at you, but. Yeah. For me it was a blunt. Blunt. Not that I’m a big toker, but anyway, that’s the irony here.

People who don’t know you will think you’re saying like, Hey, it’s like a blunt, but I’m just like, that’s pretty funny because Matt doesn’t smoke.

Anyway. So for me, I love this episode. Just like how we talked about amock time, like pure star, that’s pure. When I think of Star Trek, the original series, it’s stuff like amock time and it is this one, but for me, this one was also colored because even as a Star Trek fan, I had a hard time watching the original undoctored one because the special effects are so bad.

Like they’re absolutely horrendous. Um, and they’re laughable, but the story that’s being told is fantastic. So you can kind of gloss over the crappy special effects because it’s a really interesting, engaging story. In watching this version of it, Sean, holy shit. Like all of my previous, like minor qualms about it are just gone.

And it’s like the special effects are so good. And yet they still feel very sixties, even though they’re modern interpretations of those 60’s special effects. So I just got a chef’s kiss to the team that did it because the space battles that we see in here are super engaging. The. Um, the cat and mouse with this gigantic thing are fantastic.

The chewing of scenery with Decker taking over the ship and being, you know, going after Moby Dick. It’s like all that stuff. Just like catnip. I’m eating it all up. It’s just, for me, it, this is one of the most exciting episodes of the original series. It’s just exciting. It’s like, there’s a lot of stuff happening.

Um, and to me, it’s like, I kind of look, look at this one and when I finished it, I was like, how was Star Trek not more popular? Do you know what I mean? At the time, because this kind of episode. Yeah. It was like exciting television. It’s like if they did more of this, I think it might have actually been even bigger.

Well, I think sadly for them

at this point, they were on Friday nights. I know. So they were on. They were in the wasteland. They were on the night that was going to be the, it was the beginning. They were already being put in a death knell position. And I think. They Yeah. And I think that, um, kind of big picture.

We also know from previous episodes, Desi Lu was kind of on the economic ropes. Yeah. The reason that Lucille Ball came back to television with the Lucy show was originally a, Hey, do one season of a show and it will put some money in the bank for us because we’re struggling. And it ended up turning into a multi season show for her.

But Desilu was sold at this point, and it was the beginning of nobody was in Trek’s corner. Trek maintained its momentum after a pilot that was seen as not enough because of Lucille Ball pushing for it in 1966. Here in 1967, I don’t think there’s a cheerleader in the same way. So it has an audience, but it’s being relegated to a Friday night being viewed as a kid’s program where episodes like this, I think you don’t need to be a kid to find it engaging and exciting and the stuff that’s going on, the genuine dramatic tension of having members of the crew who are trapped on a derelict ship while this thing is chasing them. And they keep upping the tension by having commander Decker for understandable reasons. That’s one of the things I want to talk about in this conversation is Decker’s motivation and his perspective on all of this. To me strikes me as a, it is absolutely understandable.

And the performance of this character, I find incredibly compelling. He is certain of himself as a commander in the way you could envision an older Kirk. At this point in 1967, you could watch this and there’s a certain amount of swagger to his performance that I believe that they were planting the idea as they kept saying, Spock says, I’m sorry about the loss of your friend, your old friend.

Like there’s a bit of an intimation here that this is kind of a mentor. A kind of archetype that Kirk fits within as well. So that Decker is a Kirk like, I’m going to do what I have to do. It’s I’m pulling out all the stops and I’m going to do the right thing for all the right reasons. But he’s doing things in a way that put everybody in danger.

And it’s that personal motivation that starts to creep in a little too much. And that’s big picture. What I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the idea of duty, the idea of obligation, but crossing that line into self destruction and mass destruction in the parlance of the, of the episode itself, where they keep saying like, this is a weapon of mass destruction that is all based on speculation.

It is all wild speculation when they call it a doomsday device, like they ultimately don’t know. And it’s Decker who points out, you don’t know if that is in fact what this is. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. We have to destroy it. And that’s at a point in time where the kind of newspaper headlines that we saw in that newspaper.

Everybody is pushing in every conceivable direction about what do you do about Vietnam? What do you do about civil rights? What do you do when the country seems to be turning on itself in the name of doing what’s right? Sound familiar? We’re kind of like resurrecting that. In our current political era, but at the time that was everywhere around and it’s the midst of the cold war, there wasn’t one headline on that newspaper that said Soviet Union developing weapon, but that’s in the background constantly.

Oh, it’s the undercurrent. 1960s. Yeah. So here we have an episode of a sci fi being marketed largely on a Friday night for kids sort of show in which they’re saying big picture, maybe we shouldn’t be building things that are intended to destroy the world because what if we lose control of them? And it puts somebody who is ultimately a heroic figure in Decker into the position of becoming the villain of the episode.

Because he’s dead set against that thing. Interesting tension there, interesting models of character there at work. How do you see those pieces lining up with, with everything that I just laid out?

I picked up on those two, the, my one complaint about the way they set it up though, it was kind of hamfisted.

It was kind of subtlety is not a vocabulary of this episode. It was so like, just on the face, like when Kirk is like, I believe that this is some kind of doomsday machine that they created for, it’s like, it’s like, what, what are you smoking, dude? It’s like, are you smoking the blunt that’s in space or do you have something in your, you know what I mean?

Like it’s so obvious what bell they’re ringing. Yeah. And what they’re trying to get at. Um, so for me, modern viewer, Matt is kind of like, Oh God, you guys could have been a little more subtle when you’re going about this, but at the same time, it doesn’t matter because then you have Decker literally coming.

I love that. I’m in my head thinking, wow. Wow. Guys, Kirk, like what you’re saying is like, wow. And then Decker comes out and goes, you don’t know that. And I was like, thank you, Decker. You’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking. So I just thought that was great that it was like the show felt like it was at times a step ahead of me as a viewer.

And I love it when shows do that, even though it was 1960s acting over the top, very melodramatic. I thought the basic structure of it and the way to put this stuff together was really well done.

What I know about Spinrad is I’m sure he put that in there for exactly that reason. I have a feeling that there was probably a note somewhere in an early draft that said, what if our audience members don’t get what this machine is?

Yeah. Put something in to explain it. And Spinrad is the kind of writer who’d be like, okay, I’ll give you the for dummies explanation as somebody speculating what it is. But then I’m also going to undermine that by having somebody else be like, you don’t know what this is. So you end up with, you can have that story.

I love that this is a, ultimately a story in which you can have the message be, we should be careful about what we do in the name of our security. Because what if we lose control of those very things and it can just be a monster there? Cause they’re doing a great job of just making this thing. It’s just like a giant whale that is just scooping out the krill.

And the krill happened to be billions of humanoids. So it’s like, it does a good job of both.

There are a couple aspects though, that I, I, I see your notes in the talk that we’re going to be talking about. So I’m going to be jumping in just like quick second that do drive me nuts with Decker. Specifically that are kind of hand wavy and as a viewer it pulled me out every time this happened. Like when Decker kills himself when he like steals the shuttle and he goes flies it right down the maw. He never states what he’s about to do. They never say like I’m gonna try to blow the shuttle up and hurt it from the inside.

There’s nothing like that it’s just he gets in the shuttle and flies it to the maw and it’s kind of like, What is he doing? Like, does he have a plan? It looks like they didn’t state it

clearly. He does. I believe he does. I believe he says like, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to fly this

right down its throat.

I know, but he never says I’m going to blow up. Like he doesn’t, you know what I mean? It’s like, it’s like, okay, you’re gonna fly down his throat and do what? It’s like, it was never clear to me as a viewer what he was going to do. But of course me being Star Trek geek, man, I know what’s going to happen.

Like shuttle has engines and stuff. Like he could just. Like the shell is gonna explode in a way that could cause damage, but it’s like at the time it’s not in the text of the show. It’s like subtext and it’s so not obvious that it kind of bothered me that it was like it looked like just a madman running in and killing himself without a clear objective.

And he had a clear objective and it was only after the fact that when they discovered that it had drained the power of the war machine and then it was like his death wasn’t for nothing. They actually said that. And so it’s kind of like it made it clear that he had an objective, but it wasn’t clear what his objective was.

And I thought it was a little too, it was way too subtle where other things in the episode were over the top. That I thought was way too subtle. And it’s like, I just wish they had dialed that one up a little bit while dialing other things down. The other aspect that I drove me nuts was the, in the space battles was every time they showed them attacking the space blunt, they were going at the glowing tip, the gigantic maw, and every time the maw would shoot the ray. It’s like this thing has one attack people. Yeah. It attacks from the front. So when you’re going to attack it, why are you going hundreds of miles in front of it to fly right at its ma where it’s going to attack you? It’s like, wouldn’t you come at it from the side or from behind and sneak up around it and do stuff from that?

the fringes where it can’t hurt you. I mean, that’s like space battle one on one like for idiots would know that. And so for me, it was kind of frustrating that every single time, whether it was Kirk doing it or Decker doing it or whoever, it’s like, they always like the special effects. It’s like, here they go.

And they’re going right at them on. It’s like, what, what do you, what, what is happening right now? It made, to me, that was incredibly frustrating that it was such a, I think an intelligent, tight, exciting episode. And then just dumb space battle stuff that kept happening.

It just kind of undercut some of the message for me and kind of pulled me out as a viewer because it was just such a broken logic that there was

hurting my brain. For Deckard I didn’t read the, I didn’t read that scene the same way you did. So I, I never stood out to me that anybody was unclear as to what he was doing.

It was, I took it as everybody knew he was trying to like go inside it and blow it up from the inside, but it was not going to do anything because that shuttlecraft wasn’t big enough. Um, That to me didn’t strike me as being jarring or, or incongruous. And as far as the maneuver, I think that there’s my, the way my brain interpreted their attacks, every time they showed that massive thing and they’re like, it’s miles long.

And then they’re showing it as they’re approaching it. It’s turning toward them with such speed, given its size, my brain interpreted that at a certain point of, they would love to be able to attack it from the rear, but it’s too nimble, it’s deceptively nimble for its size. So it’s like, by the time they’re getting into an angle of here’s our attack run.

It’s managed to turn itself yet again to be able to face them. That’s just how my brain interpreted all of it. So it’s just like, Oh yeah, they’re, they’re running away from it. And they kept saying it’s catching up to us. So by the time that they would be in like, okay, now we’re going to turn and fight.

Well, it’s already chasing them. And in those times where they’re coming in at the side, it’s very quickly going, uh, here you are. And I was just like, okay, they can’t, they’re just trying, but they can’t. So, but I do get exactly what you’re saying of like, okay, you’re like, what are you doing? And yeah, that’s jarring and that’s not great.

So either allowing the attack to follow a method that would actually make sense or to include some deeper explanation along the lines of like having Sulu say. This thing is so big. I can’t believe how nimble it is. It keeps turning to face us so quickly. I can’t get us a better attack angle could have like had something like that.

So you have the separation of Kirk and Scotty and a small repair team that go aboard the constellation and you have Spock and the main crew left behind with Decker who takes command, you can almost view those two as separate storylines. So which one do you want to talk about first? Do you want to talk about Deckard taking control or do you want to talk about Kirk and Scotty trying to resurrect a dead ship?

Let’s talk about Decker taking control for first, because there’s one thing I want to bring up about it that came to my mind as I was watching it. It reminded me of Michael Biehn from The Abyss. Yeah. His character that ends up getting the bends and is cutting his arm underneath the, uh, table to let the gas out.

Yeah. Um, and he’s Losing his mind. And so he’s doing what he thinks is right. And he basically becomes, you know, he’s going after his Moby Dick in a sense in that movie. So it’s like, there’s, there was parallels to me for that of like, this is what Decker is basically doing. He’s the Michael Biehn of this show.

Um, I, I thought that was really cool. I just, it’s, it, there’s just. him taking it over and the fact that he’s on this knife’s edge of he’s slightly losing his sanity, but he’s keeping it enough together that he can actually maintain control and take control of the ship. And if people are going to obey the rules, they have to follow them.

Even though everybody knows this guy’s not quite right, but they don’t have enough to knock him out of command. I thought that was.

I thought it was a very subtle performance, which is weird because it is also an over the top performance.

At the same time. Yes.

At the same time. It’s very Shatner, which is very of the era.

He’s playing with the memory cards of the, like he’s sitting there and he’s playing, he’s chewing on one at one point and just like, like, okay, I’m in control. I’m in control. And then when it’s like, Spock is going to talk to Kirk, he’s like down here. Like he can’t let go of the chair. The chair is important and you’re going to, it’s, I’m going to make it look like you’re doing what I want.

By saying, you’re going to have that conversation down here, that moment, like he is like the subtlety of the performance, the, the unshaven disheveled, like they find him, he’s catatonic. They have to wake him up to figure out what happened. You get this moment of like he’s moments. There are legitimate tears in the actor’s eyes as he is talking about his crew.

When he says, I left them on the third planet. And he’s like, there is no third planet. I know. Don’t you

think

I know that? Like absolutely losing it. And there’s spittle and there’s tears. And I’m just like, this guy brought his A game to this guest spot. I love the performance and I agree with you completely.

He’s walking that edge of everybody knows I’m unhinged, but McCoy hasn’t had an opportunity to do an examination yet. And I, that entire scene of him resting control from Spock and Spock’s response to it all is I, I love that sequence. Spock being cold and analytical and clear. Like I am urging you not to be an idiot.

Yes. Again and again, like I am strongly urging you not to do things that don’t make any sense. We have a safe path to, to do things that will help people. You are going to endanger us and hurt people unnecessarily. I strongly urge you, but also giving up until that moment when it’s

finding his point of attack.

Yeah. Finding the, McCoy also being. McCoy’s being the voice of the audience. We’d like, can’t you do something? He’s just like the way he’s yelling and losing his mind at Spock. I’ll do something. And you can tell Spock is basically like kind of looking at him in a way that’s like, I know, but got to choose my battles here.

Like it was this, that cold, analytical, over emotional, that triumvirate we always talk about, but Kirk him and. You know, Spock. So it’s like, I love that they had McCoy being the surrogate for us as the viewer.

And the last thing I want to talk about with Deckard, there’s two things I want to talk about with Decker.

Uh, one being I, when he gets supplanted, when Spock is directly ordered by Kirk, I love the sequence with Kirk saying like, on my personal authority, I am ordering you to take command from the Commodore and. He does it with the same cold response of like, you’ve been relieved and Decker flexes his muscle.

Like, I don’t recognize your authority. And all Spock has to do is say, like, do this to the security guards and the security guards step right up and they’re like, we’ll pull you out of that chair. Yeah. Like that sequence. I love that sequence. And I love that it’s followed by Decker than beating the crap out of a guy in a hallway.

I thought that that entire fight sequence was great. It was doing this whole fighting technique that looks weird. They’re doing this thing that like they’re both putting their hands up in a way. Like, like have they studied Klingon fighting techniques? Like this is an interesting fight because it’s better than the ones with Shatner.

The other thing about that fight scene that I really like is that sometimes in this show, they shortcut the fight. Like somebody just cold cocks somebody, or it’s like a punch, counterpunch, punch, you’re out. The classic Warf giving it to the chin and the person goes down like a bag of sand. This was a full drawn out.

You know, 60 to 90 second fight scene that was actually really well choreographed, really well fought. And I loved the red shirt holds his own and it was like doing some damage against Decker. And it’s like, I thought this was great that it’s like, they just didn’t make him like a patsy, easy to fall down, easy to fight.

It was like, no, this Decker really had to work it. Yeah. Decker had to work at it and

Decker had to do it. The starting maneuver is he punches the guy in the throat. So from that starting perspective, I was just like, this red shirt is going toe to toe with him and he’s just been punched in the throat. So yeah, and it has in all of Trek, one of my favorite moments when the red shirt gets him into the full Nelson

and

Deckard does this thing where he reaches out and pops him on the ears.

Like that poor red shirt, he earned his paycheck. It was just, that was a rough one. The other thing I wanted to mention about Deckard, this is really quick, but I think it’s really interesting, Matt, there’s a kind of Easter egg in, in a Trek story in the future. That connects to Decker, do you know what it is? Off hand? No?

It is not officially said anywhere in the text of any Star Trek program or movie, but people involved in Trek, mainly producers and writers have said in various places, they’ve said it at conventions and they’ve said it in print in Starlog magazine and in various Star Trek. com includes this in their biographies. Star Trek, the motion picture, you will remember, Oh yeah. The enterprise has a second captain who Kirk comes in and replaces. That captain is Willard Decker, the son of this Decker. Of Matt. Huh. Yes. So it is an interesting turn of events where in this story, Decker says, I am in command of your ship.

And in the motion picture, Kirk to Decker says, I am command of your ship. So interesting balancing there. That’s interesting. So meanwhile, dot, dot, dot aboard the constellation, aboard the constellation, you end up with a Kirk, Scotty, and like three guys, and they are trying to rebuild a ship that is dead in space.

And it is full of all sorts of miracle record moments, including literally saying, if you’re going to keep you, you worry about your miracles, I’ll worry about mine. Great line from kirk.

Yeah. Scotty’s like, Oh, like, yeah, we could cross wire the warp drive to the impulse, but it’s going to be like driving a bomb.

Um, and. Oh, I wish we had some phasers. Oh, you’ve got phasers. Like this, all those little turns of moments where the Scotty is like, you always get the idea that Scotty is doing things, not because somebody said they should do it just because he’s just like, well, if we want engines, we probably also want phasers.

Like, like he’s just out there just doing a thing because, well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? To also do that thing. Wouldn’t we also want this and Kirk eventually will always turn around and say like, gosh, I wish I had a thing. And Scotty’s like, Oh, you got it. Yeah. So all the back and forth between them, everything that they’re doing aboard the ship, and of course they’re using the same sets, like, but they managed to make it look like this ship is not in great shape.

And I love the auxiliary control room. There is one of the episodes of the animated series that we recently viewed and we didn’t even talk about it actually depicted the saucer separation for the original enterprise. That was a sequence in that animated episode. It would have been the first time that it would have been shown for audiences of Trek.

And I kind of love that because they were able to do the special effects in the animated show in a way that. Would have been harder to do here, but here we have the auxiliary control room. It’s never really stated what does this exist, but it’s like saucer separation would have been the reason why. So you’re seeing this little tiny control room.

They’ve got this little tiny screen. They’ve got this little tiny control console from which they can steer the ship. And they do a great job, I think, of making it seem like this ship is barely held together. It’s being held together almost by sheer willpower of the people on the ship and the struggle of getting it to move.

The fact that it, they don’t use the term inertial dampeners, but like that sequence where everybody’s throwing left and right and you get a great shot of Scotty holding onto that cage and the engine room so dramatically. It’s a great set of performances to show people in circumstances where it’s almost like a Poseidon adventure where.

Like, Oh, we’ve got to like crawl through the bowels of this thing in order to be able to get out alive while being the same sets. That’s very obviously, you know, they’re not doing, they didn’t build new sets to do anything. They just were like, turn down the lights real low, give Shatner a dramatic light camera, a light shaft on his face. So when he’s at the controls, he looks really dramatic. Turn the lights off in the engine room, take a couple of beams and just kind of like lean them in front of a doorway and it works. How did you feel about like the claustrophobic holding on by the fingernails sense of that ship and the outside shots showing major parts of the saucer section are gone. The nacelle is missing. The nacelle is nearly missing. Like all of that, like, how did you like feel about the confines of

that? Well, this is where it’s like, when I said to you before, like the special effects from the 1960s always pulled me out of this episode.

The interior never did because they did a great job of sets we already know and sets we’ve already seen, Hey, but it’s a shot from a different angle with different lighting. And suddenly Yeah. We feel like we’re in someplace new. Very well done. Like this was very, very well done. It felt like they were in a ship that was literally falling apart.

So it did, it did what they needed it to do. It was, it was, it was absolutely perfect for me. And for me as part of that, the Mr. Scott stuff. Could not be better like Scotty being Scotty being the miracle worker It just makes all of this B plot or a plot depending how you want to look at it, Yeah, so much better.

Pretty tightly wound.

Right Kirk is Kirk, but we’re seeing Scotty in a way we typically don’t see him like we’re seeing him do his magic Yeah to a certain extent. And it’s just so fun. It’s just so, he is such a great character and you can understand why he was so popular. Yeah. In the sixties. At this point they’re very clearly.

Why they started using him more. Yeah.

It’s, it’s, he’s great. At this point, they’re very clearly letting Scotty be Scotty because when, when he comes up and is just like, all right, click, I just rigged your detonation device. Hit this button 30 seconds later, like, so he’s pantomiming these things to his captain.

He’s just like to his captain. He’s just like, it’s like, it’s all going to go to hell. So you don’t want to be on this ship when that happens and best of luck. And it’s just a really like, he, he’s always just charming. And personable. And to go back to the strange new worlds of it all, yeah. Their casting of a guy who’s able to capture that same kind of, it’s not swagger, you’re not playing Kirk.

It’s just kind of like goofy optimism in a, in a weird sort of way, just like a reverence. I can figure it out.

Reverence to him. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I can figure that out. You give me 15 minutes and I’ll figure it out while being in a uniform. And it’s kind of like, he’s the scrappy do gooder who doesn’t look scrappy.

So it’s a neat, it’s a

neat character at this point. His performance in this episode also leads to one of my favorite scenes and lines in it. When he gets back to this enterprise, he’s going to try and he’s trying to fix the transporter and going into the Jeffrey’s tube and he’s doing all that stuff and the stuff he’s saying is fantastic, but it’s.

The fact that he is like, he knows if I screw this up, we lose Kirk. Kirk. Yeah. And so he like, he is on edge and so for a guy that’s that irreverent and doing all that kind of stuff, you can see that he is like stressed out, like trying to do this where it doesn’t work and he runs back in to try and do it again.

But when Kirk is over on the other ship, yeah, it’s one of the best line readings ever. Yeah. When Kirk is on the thing, he goes, gentlemen. Uh, beam me board like the way he says it is so funny. It’s like, yeah, it’s Shatner really is has good comic timing. Yeah. And we make fun of him for his overacting and the way he does these dramatic pauses, but like aligning them like that.

Nobody could have done that better. Nobody. Yeah. It’s like you and you talked

about the razor’s edge that Decker is on. The construction of that sequence is in, is clearly designed to be in opposition to Decker’s death sequence. Yes. We talked about like the subtlety of the Decker performance. I do argue that it is a subtle performance at times.

And then shoots to an 11 for a very particular reason, it shoots to an 11 during his death sequence so that you can see him in comparison to Kirk. Because he is intending to kill himself and flips out as he’s going into that maw to the point where he looks at one point, like the actor looks like he, without the crew and director knowing he was going to lift himself upward.

He starts to move out of the frame of the shot at one point and the camera has to kind of like catch up to him. That to me looked like a happy accident. Like the director was like, I didn’t know he was going to do that, but I love the look of it because he’s flipping out. He’s shaking his head and there’s spit and tears and all that stuff coming out.

I believe that that was performed in that way specifically, so that Shatner’s Kirk in the accidental going into the maw can look cool as a cucumber. And the biggest thing he’s doing is saying to the people on the other side of the communicator, gentlemen, I’d really like to be off this ship now, playing it off.

Super super cool. He is standing somewhat sideways as if like, well, the only protection I really have is my shoulder. And he’s, I don’t want to be on this ship and, but not showing it. And then as soon as he appears and Kyle is like, we got him. And Kyle is hoping to like, captain, I’m so glad you’re not dead.

And Kirk just looks at it and just runs out of the room. Doesn’t even give him a moment. The other side of it that I think is equally amusing as Kirk’s response. And it’s a lot more subtle because of the nature of the character, but as Scotty is in a Jeffrey’s tube surrounded by arcing electric currents and smoke and the noise of like, you hear things popping in the background, like, like vacuum tubes are somehow in that ship and they’re blowing up around him and he’s working, he’s got a little doohickey and he’s magnetizing it to the wall and he’s sticking a thing into another place and he’s like trying to rewire the stuff and Mr. Spock is saying suggestions over the communicator that are clearly not helpful in that moment. And he said, Mr. Scott, try inverting the phase coils. And it’s just like, the man’s doing what he can like stop, stop, stop, backseat driving, just leave the man alone and let him do his job. Cause in that moment I could almost hear from Scotty, like, like, Leave me alone, Commander.

I know what I’m doing. I know it has to be done. I’m in this tube. Leave me alone. But the, the Mr. Scott and this like, okay, they’re depicting that he is still Vulcan, but clearly in that moment, he is just like, yeah, Spock is losing it. Scotty’s losing it. Kirk is losing it, but none of them are showing it.

Yeah. One’s at command of the enterprise, one’s waiting for the beam and one’s trying to fix it. And it’s just such a nice depiction of the, like you said, the tension of this episode is beautifully rendered. So by the time you get to that moment of this is the last moment, if I don’t get off this ship in the next five seconds.

That’s it. Game over. And it doesn’t feel, as I was watching it, I was thinking, boy, it doesn’t feel contrived. It feels like we got here organically.

This is precisely why I love this episode. It’s like, it’s intelligently written and yes, there, I’ve nitpicked a couple of things, but it’s like, those are tiny nitpicks.

Like overall it’s like this, this episode is just a little thrill ride. It’s so much fun.

So listeners, viewers, we hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation about this, what I would call absolutely a plus episode, but if you disagree, we’d love to know why jump into the comments and let us know what you have to say about it.

Don’t forget wrong answers only next week, we’ll be talking about wolf in the fold. What is that episode about? And Mark, keep it PG 13 whenever possible before we sign off, Matt, do you have anything coming up on your main channel that you wanted to make sure our listeners and viewers knew about?

Uh, at the time that this comes out, I will have an episode about um, how we’re kind of solving renewables, biggest problems, common update video about like the latest advances that are happening around recyclability, wind turbines, recyclability and reuse and stuff like that. So it’s, it’s one of those big nitpicks that people say about sustainable tech. You can’t do this.

Well, this episode is going to be, eh, actually you can now.

As for me, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, I have a kickstarter going on. The link to that will be in the podcast notes. And if you want to check out my other books and other things I’ve written, please check out seanferrell. com or you can just go wherever your books are sold.

That includes everything from your big stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, all the way down to your local bookstore or public library. If you’d like to support the show, don’t forget that something as simple as liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends, leaving a comment. All of those are great ways to support us, and if you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime. show and click the Become a Supporter button there. It allows you to not only throw coins at our heads, but it will make you an ensign, which means you will be signed up for our spinoff show, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don’t fit within the confines of this program. We hope you’ll be interested in checking that out.

Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen, and we’ll talk to you next time.