182: Star Trek TOS Season 2, “The Deadly Years”

 In this episode of Trek In Time, we’re talking about how old people are useless. That’s right. The deadly years. Star Trek, the original series originally broadcast on December 8th, 1967, episode number 40, shooting order 41 in broadcast or 12th of the second season. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological star date order.

We’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. We’re talking about 1967, and who are we? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi, write some stuff for kids. And with me as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt Behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and it’s impact on our lives.

Matt, how are you today?

Doing really well. I don’t know about you, Sean, but I’m catching up on Andor actually I think you did say this, I’m rewatching all of season one of Andor in preparation of the new one. Yes. And my wife tapped out of, and or originally after the second episode, she was like, this is too boring, stupid, and checked out.

And I kept saying to her, this show’s one of the best shows on tv, one of the best shows on tv. So she refused to rewatch this first two episodes and she’s picked back up with me. And last night we watched three of the episodes. Mm-hmm. She was like, this is really good. Yeah. I’m like, yeah, I know this. I was telling you this really good show.

Yeah. So she’s loving it.

Yeah. I sat down with my son and watched, uh, the first three episodes and because I had been telling him this is one of the best Star Wars stories they’ve ever told, and I was looking forward to season two, he had never seen it and we watched all three back to back to back, and when it was over, he was just like, okay, when are we watching the next three?

So yeah. It is that good. As always, before we get into our conversation about the newest episode, we always like to look at what you’ve had to say about our previous episode. So what did you find in the mailbag this week, Matt?

We have a few good ones from Episode Mirror Mirror, which was the last one. Uh, a comment from, uh, Rebecca Terry wrote, this is one of my favorite episodes of the original series.

Spock’s evil twin is great. I also wish they had kept Marlene’s character. Yeah, the, I was curious. ’cause like I had mentioned, I did not, I do not like generally the Mere Mirror universe ’cause it’s so, I don’t know. I find it kind of hacky. But this one I actually enjoyed and I brought this up because it’s like, here’s an example of somebody who does, like the mirror mirror universe enjoys this episode, but it was a mixed bag.

We had people that were kind of like chiming in with comments like Happy Flappy Farm. That said, I am with Matt in that I cringe when I see the Mirror Mirror, the Mirror universe episodes. However, like Matt, I liked this one. It’s an interesting concept, but it’s overused in the later series. And now for that nonsense YouTube video, the one that you shared last time about the mm-hmm.

Which I watched, by the way. It’s rough. It’s wild though. It is so crazy. Yeah. Nobody talks. It’s just people talk, coming in and out of rooms, nobody, and then looking at, and people just looking, looking at each other.

The, the editing is it’s effect. Like I said, it’s effectively the truck trek version of too many cooks.

It

is, yes.

I

don’t know how much time it took to make that, but it’s incredible. It’s, it’s it’ss a labor of love. It’s, yeah. Yes, completely. And then we have a bunch of, I, I’m gonna spread them out over this episode in the next one. I’m not gonna do ’em all here, but there’s some really good. Wrong answers only.

Okay, so we’re gonna start on this episode with Marks, Mark Loveless, Plot of Deadly Years. McCoy’s ex-girlfriend from earlier in his career, nurse Tabitha, has reappeared. Convicted for multiple murders involving stabbing, McCoy helped get her convicted. Now released from the high security mental hospital slash planet for the insane as supposedly cured.

She’s here to apologize for death threats to McCoy. Known in the press as Nurse Stabitha at the time. Tabitha overhears the name Stabitha, between two whispering red shirts, and she proceeds to have one of those lights flashing, spinning camera, multicolored wrestling matches with herself in her head, except since the show was apparently short and needed filler.

So the scene goes on for six minutes with dramatic music. Stabitha is reborn, somehow has a knife and stabs a red shirt over and over for two minutes straight yelling. Take that Bones. Until Spock walks in and Vulcan nerve pinches her. As she is beamed off with security personnel while wearing a space straight jacket. Normal straight jacket. Just shiny. McCoy says, I thought my deadly years were behind me. Oh boy. Play the rim shot here.

Yeah. Yeah. I found myself like literally partway through that. I forgot what episode it was gonna be about. Yes.

I love, I love how long the journey was to get to the punchline in that.

So thank you, Mark. It’s like a Norm Thank you

McDonald story. Yes. So on we go to this week’s episode. That noise you hear in the background and those flashing lights, why? Yes, it is the read alert. It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away. Matt.

Strange radiation exposes the command crew of the enterprise to the effects of rapid aging.

A landing party of Chekov, Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and Lieutenant Galway divided into smaller teams to find the to find the planet Gamma Hydra Fours colonists. That’s a long sentence. Yes. Chekov enters a building and could have been better and is shocked. Yeah. Checkov enters a building and is shocked to see a dead man and calls others the, okay.

Okay. That did not deserve a sentence. Yeah. The landing party needs meets two other people who are old in appearance, but young in age. Bones concludes that the. The analysis and says the oth the two other people have only a few days to live because their body’s functions are aging about 30 years a day, the same thing begins to happen to the landing party upon getting back to the enterprise. Scotty, Bones, Spock, Kirk, and Galway start to get old, but Chekov does not. The aging inhibits the decision making abilities of Kirk, Captain Kirk and Spock. A Commodore, a Commodore Stocker. Yeah, stalker. A Commodore Stocker, not just Commodore Stocker. There’s so many Commodore stalkers.

There’s in Starling, there’s solely Commodore Stocker.

So, but they needed just ado of Stocker, so they got one of them there.

Okay, who is a passenger aboard the Enterprise takes command of the ship. He makes a bad decision taking the enterprise into the neutral zone and into a deadly attack by the Romulans.

From an idea Bones has about why Chekov was immune, Spock and Dr. Janet Wallace, who is also a passenger board, devise a vaccine containing adrenaline that Kirk readily tests. It works this description, so it works, and Kirk immediately resumes command to the enterprise and tricks the Romulans saving the Enterprise.

That is a rough description, Sean.

It certainly is. Season two episode 12, directed by Joseph Pevney, written by David Harmon. It is originally aired on December 8th, 1967. We have all of the original crew and as guest stars, we have Charles Drake as Commodore Stocker. He’s playing a Commodore Stocker by the way.

We have Carolyn Nelson as Yeoman Atkins, Sarah Marshall, can’t forget her as Dr. Janet Wallace. Laura Wood as Elaine Johnson. Felix Locker as Robert Johnson, the blues musician, Beverly Washburn as Lieutenant Arlene Galway. Roger Holloway as Lieutenant Lemley. Eddie Pasky again as Lieutenant Leslie and Frank DaVinci as Lieutenant Brent.

What was the world like at the time of original broadcast? December 8th, 1967? Well, yes, Matt, you were singing Daydream Believer by The Monkeys. Take it Away. Great. And in the movies. Why? Yes, people were lining up to see Gone With the Wind. A 30-year-old movie in the movie theaters making it the number one film for a solid six weeks.

We’ve talked about this one before. Guess what? We’re gonna talk about it again. And on television, as I’ve mentioned before, we have been trying to. 1966 and 1967, the top shows were roughly the same. So we talked about a lot of these programs during our coverage of season one of the original series. So I’ve been trying to dig a little deeper and find some of those other shows that we didn’t talk about previously.

Like this week, a show that earned a 20 in the Nielsen’s, making it the 24th most watched program in the US at the time, my three sons, my three sons was the American television sitcom that aired from September 29th, 1960 to April 13th, 1972. And I found this interesting. We in recent years have talked about the marvel of television shows getting canceled and then picked up by a different streamer or a different network, and we’ve been like, wow, that’s pretty crazy.

It used to happen all the time, apparently. ’cause this show originally aired. On ABC for its first five seasons, and then it switched to CBS for the other seven, and when it switched, it also switched to color. So it’s very likely that it switched because of color. So. This show focused on a widower, played by Fred McMurray, by the name of Steven Douglas as he raised his three sons.

And if you’re wondering, well, how could that possibly work out? Eventually the oldest son got married, moved out, left the show, and they replaced him with a new younger son. How does that happen when you have a widower? Well, of course you have the widow adopt a child. And here’s what I love about this, the actor who played the new youngest child was the younger brother who played the previously youngest child.

Oh

my gosh. And in the news, Cardinal Spellman had passed away recently. So the headline here is about services for Spellman’s funeral, but I also found it interesting from a couple of other angles. Along the right hand side of the newspaper is a Senate passing a budget bill.

Which restored a certain amount of aid that had been cut by the house version of the bill, adding 2.7, 2.7 billion to the budget that the house had passed. And I found myself thinking, wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Mm-hmm. And on the left hand column, a little story about how Paris was due to lift an arms ban on Iraq in a deal for oil.

And this caught my eye because I remembered during 2003 the US invasion of Iraq, how France was one of the nations that had pushed back so strongly against the US invasion and headlines at the time talked about France having, business concerns that if you removed the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein entirely, the contracts that they had with that government would become null and void.

And I found myself wondering, at what point did that all start? Well, little did I know. There you go. Star Trek would answer that question for me. On now to our discussion about this episode, which I mentioned at the beginning. The heart of this episode seems to be getting old sucks. Thanks for joining us.

We’ll talk to you next week. Did you, and I’m gonna answer this question for myself. Uh, did you find this as pointless? Seems like maybe too strong a word, but maybe it’s not. It’s not, yeah, it’s not this episode. What I found frustrating about this. It felt like they were at a certain point, so I’m trying to figure out the best way to describe what it felt like.

Self blind, like myopic to their own, what they were talking about. And I do feel like it’s of the era, which is of course the perspective that this podcast is taking, taking a look at the show and what was it saying about its own era? And where did the stories come out of that era? And I found myself thinking, while they’ve got such a pigeonholed version of what aging looks like, it is so completely removed from any kind of humanity.

And it is simply, it’s practically a horror story without it being horrible. It’s just banal. So you end up with major characters going through this aging process. I, to me, it’s not worth talking about the special effects, the makeup, none of that. Like it was 1967, like it’s, of course, look, the makeup is awful.

It’s not gonna look like it would look today. That’s like for me, that’s all just like, that’s fine, right? But what I found myself thinking was they didn’t even try to figure out a different nuance to what aging means other than, and this, it just kept getting hammered again and again and again. Aging makes you incompetent.

And I found myself, like there is an episode of the animated series and we’ve had this back and forth now a couple of times about like, do we talk about the animated series or not? And there’s an episode of the animated series in which the exact opposite premise takes place. The enterprise goes through something that de ages them.

That one is more sophisticated. That animated episode is more sophisticated than this one because that one actually takes a look at aging because you have in the ship, two elderly people who de-age to becoming middle aged, and it reawakens their sense of self and their desire to be, to be a part of the, the work of exploration.

So the episode ends with them saying, look, we’re not gonna retire the way we thought we were. We’re gonna keep pushing and, and trying to boldly go. So the animated episode has more traction in actual character content than this original episode, which I found fascinating. How did you, like, as you were watching it, did you wrestle with it in the same way I did with like, why is this, oh, Sean, the angle they’re taking.

Uh, the note I kept writing down multiple times was, what is the point, question mark. What is the point? Yeah. What is the point? This show had no point. That’s why it was like, literally, it’s a pointless episode. Yeah. Even the episodes we’ve watched where it’s kinda like, I’m like from a 21st century point of view, it’s kinda like this episode’s awful.

Yeah. But I understand why they did it this way. ’cause of the 19 something that was going on in the 1960s, 1970s. Yeah. This one, I couldn’t, I couldn’t put my finger on it at all. Like you just pointed out, it was making it look like, oh, old people are pointless. They don’t have a point. This reverse cocoon storyline could have had a very different uh, impact, like if you think about the episode from Next Generation where Picard the inner light, where he gets taken over by that satellite and lives an entire lifetime. Yeah. Where a huge portion of that is him as a very old man. Yeah. Looking at his family, thinking about how his life is gone with his kids.

Like he lives an entire life. He comes out of it a changed man. Yeah. There is a point a point. To the, the thing that he went through a journey for that character that we love this character. We’ve seen him go through this whole thing. It’s, it’s one of the best episodes of Star Trek, in my opinion. Full stop.

Yeah. That had a point. This had no point. And for me it was clear that this was rudderless Sean when they got to the stupid idiotic court scene. Mm-hmm. Okay. Here they are aging 30 years a day, which means these guys are gonna be dead in like two days. Yet somehow they live way beyond that. Yeah. Which kind of makes you feel like everything Kaleidoscope is gonna live to be.

Everything was just like

they, they changed things as it needed to be changed in the plot,

but they had said 30 years a day, which means they’re aging by the minute. Okay, so let’s go waste hours of our day instead of doing research to save these people. Yeah, let’s put him on trial to see if he’s competent as a captain, that’s where it was kinda like, that’s where I was writing again.

Again. What is the point of what we’re watching here? Yeah. It made zero sense as to what was happening. It was completely adrift. It had no point because it had no point. This episode should not exist. Yeah. I hated this episode with every fiber of my being and it makes me so angry because this show is so held up on like a pedestal.

Yeah. And it’s like I hold Next Generation up on a pestle, but I recognize season one and two are rough. Like Yeah, like this rough. Like some of them are like this bad, but I don’t understand why so many people This show was on for what, three seasons? Yep. And there’s a significant number of episodes, Sean, like this one, and I find it so frustrating.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting frustrated rewatching these episodes because some of these are just so unwatchable. I almost stopped watching this.

Yeah. I’m I’s how bad

I thought it was.

I’m not, I’m not in that same camp because I buy into the camp sometimes and, yeah. Yeah. Um, well, you’ve, you’ve got more nostalgia for some of these episodes than I do.

Yeah. I have a different, I have a different angle on some of it, just from an emotional, a nostalgic perspective, but in this case, this one did. I mean, it grated my writing like muscles. I was just like, I was like, from a writing perspective, I was just like, this is ugly. This is weak. The complete lack of chemistry between Dr Janet Wallace, played by Sarah Marshall, can’t forget her, and Kirk, it felt thrown in at the last minute, like there was supposed to be some sort of emotional resonance there. As he is aging, he just becomes angrier and turned off by the fact that she apparently is getting more attracted to him as he gets older and it’s revealed that she had just lost a partner who is a good deal older than her.

And I found myself thinking that’s, that’s the character dilemma, that like they could have done anything with an aging Kirk hitting a point where he, what if the point of this was not the trial, but was just each of those characters coming to terms with the fact that their mortality was rushing at them at the speed of light.

What if it was Kirk sitting in his quarters? Willfully giving up command and saying, I am not functioning the way I’m supposed to. And other people coming to him and asking for his thoughts and his guidance and him rejecting them because I don’t feel competent to do that anymore. And him sitting in his quarters by himself and when he’s visited by, let’s say McCoy, or Spock. He bemoans the fact that I always envisioned myself having a full life. But now I’m wondering if the life I built for myself on in this ship in this way was enough. Because when I eventually, if we get out of this and I eventually return to who I was, will I look toward this as enough? That would be an interesting episode.

That’s the inner life. Him weighing the measure of his life, the, the, the weight of his choices. Seeing himself as the prime figure on the ship, as his ultimate goal and forsaking everything else. And how might that have tied as a character trait to later stories that we know are coming. Star Trek two, the Wrath of Khan, where he’s just like, I stayed away.

Carol Marcus. I stayed away. Like this episode could have been an emotional touchpoint for that movie, and instead it is simply getting old, makes people incompetent. I just now looked up. How old was Gene Roddenberry when this episode aired? Take a guess. Fifties? 46. Okay. I think you have a bunch of young people.

Relatively young, making a story about aging and nobody stopping to say, what are we saying about aging? They saw it as let’s give them a different sort of disease of the week. We’ve had the episode where everybody acts drunk and Sulu’s running through the ship and trying to use a sword to stab people.

We’ve had like the the different types of lack of control. What if we use age in that way? That’ll be a sci-fi concept. But they didn’t stop what they were saying about aging. They didn’t think about that. I wanted to point out this little fact. In 1967, the average life expectancy in the United States was 70.5 years.

Ooh, the retirement age for Social security was 65. At this point, this is a society that is saying when you get to the point where you will retire from your job, you are probably very close to passing away. There’s no nuance, there’s no sophisticated thinking. There’s no shot at a. A story and I found it remarkable.

And then from a writing and a performance perspective, I felt like you can tell when the actors feel like the material isn’t there because the performance becomes weird. Shatner, the parody of Shatner that we always have in pop culture. I think is the Shatner that you see when he doesn’t believe in the material.

It’s here in full display and it’s here in full display. This version of Kirk, as he’s getting older, is cartoonishly bad. They all, for some reason, start licking their teeth. Yep. The everybody. Yep. Like the only one who doesn’t is Spock, and that’s because Nimoy probably was told or came up on his own, because Vulcans live so much longer, you can hold it together better.

Yeah. So Spock is just going about his stuff. But when you see Scotty for the first time with all that white hair, and it just looks like he just came from a rave, he just looks like he looks hung over. He just like slumps into the chair. He is got that weird dye job and he is just like, Ugh. And then McCoy.

As we’ve seen in other episodes, anytime McCoy has to get old, he becomes Foghorn Leghorn. He just like say, I say Just an old country doctor Rah, and I’m like, what Director stood there? I was just like, great. Like, yeah, it’s, I couldn’t help but think nobody here thought that this was worthwhile. You have the horror movie, moments of the young.

At least she’s not a red shirt. You have the Ensign who goes down to the planet with them and she’s the first to die. Strangely. Yeah. Yeah. Like why is she the first to die when she’s clearly the youngest? She’s like 20 nothing. And then she dies when she comes into the room and it’s a horror movie methodology, but it’s not shot enough like a horror movie to actually have impact.

That’s fearful. And there are moments earlier in the episode where they do use good horror movie methodology. Yeah. And I found myself thinking, what if they had leaned into the, we go down to the planet and we’re looking for the people who live there. And all we keep finding are cadavers, bodies, and sort of mummy like people.

What if it had been just a full blown, like go with a horror monster thing. Yeah. It’s not, might been more interesting. Aging.

Aging. It’s like you’re, you’re becoming mummified. Yeah. Like that would’ve

been Yeah. Mummified. Like you end up with a summy zombie state, you end up with like these figures lurking on the edge of the camp and they discover like, oh, those are the people.

Like, and then you end up with, with something that’s maybe not deep, but it’s at least engaging from a storytelling perspective.

That’s my problem rewatching the original series. It’s becoming super clear to me in this rewatch. I have seen these episodes before, but in this re particular rewatch of why the show was canceled, of why the show was put on Friday nights, it is wildly inconsistent.

It is at times written like a Saturday morning cartoon, at times acted like a Saturday morning cartoon. It comes across as something for kids at times, and then other episodes come across as episodes for adults. It was clear to me that the show didn’t have a steady hand in the creative direction. Yeah.

Like it should have, and we hold Roddenberry up because he created this amazing franchise. But I would argue he’s not the one that made it what it is. He’s the brainchild behind it. But I think other people made it better. Yeah. Because there were steadier hands at the reins later on where he was just wildly inconsistent and it comes across as like.

If they needed an episode that was cheaper or they needed to bang an episode out because yeah, they were falling behind ’cause they spent too much time on this episode and now they had to make up time. And so they were cutting corners, letting things go out because they just had to produce 26 episodes for a season and they couldn’t come up with some good storylines and well, that’s good enough.

Let’s just do it. That’s how it feels to me and it’s what makes me so angry because I’m a Star Trek fan. And then watching this, it’s like, whoa, how did this one ever get greenlit? Like. Who would’ve read, I would’ve read this script and been like, this is garbage. And I can imagine that Nimoy and, and Shatner and all the actors read it and we were probably like, oh man, this is, this is a dog like you, you know that they would recognize it at the time.

Yeah. So it’s, it’s just frustrating. Very frustrating.

Yeah. Yeah. It is frustrating. And it’s also a chicken or the egg because the network moved it to Fridays and cut its budget in half. So they had to do stuff like this when they moved it. Yeah. An episode like this where it’s effectively a bottle episode, you have a couple of scenes that are on the planet, but they don’t do a lot with that.

And then you end up, everything is on the ship and it’s just makeup cost. And so you end up with this and there are other episodes coming where they’re as limited in budgeting, but you can see that they cared more about it. And that goes back to what you were saying. When you have a show demonstrate its unevenness.

It’s not on a good path. Like making the best out of what you’ve got and hiding those rough edges Yeah. Is not something this show is able to do. And I think that is a major difference between the original series at this point, and the first couple of seasons of Next Generation. Next Generation did a better job of hiding the rough edges.

Yes. And when we were in it as a new show, the rough edges didn’t look nearly as rough. The rough edges only appeared when we got to season three and four. Yeah, and we were like, oh, this is like, it took a step up end of best of both worlds Part one. Suddenly you’re just like, what is happening here? Yeah.

And then you go back and watch some of the first episodes and you’re like, what is happening here? And yeah, and you don’t get that here. You get an inconsistency that actually made broadcast and you end up with this very uneven tone. So it makes it hard to to revisit this one and say anything other than woof.

So, so viewers, listeners, let us know in the comments, what did you think about this episode? Do you agree with Matt and me that this one is best skipped and forgotten? Or do you think there’s anything here worth revisiting? And I’m also curious, do you think the chicken or the egg came first? Was the show getting weaker as a result of the network moving it?

Or did the network recognize the show was getting weaker, so they moved it to Friday nights and cut the budget? Let us know in the comments. As always, your comments, your likes, your subscribes, you’re sharing with your friends. Those are very easy ways for you to support the podcast, and normally we do encourage you to jump in with wrong answers only into the comments.

Next week we’ll be watching I Mudd. However, I’m not gonna encourage you to do that this time unless you wanna do it for yourself. And if you do, go do it. But Matt and I right now are recording two episodes back to back, so your comments about I Mudd, they won’t appear next week, but we still would love to see them if you’d like to share them.

So thank you for that. As always, if you want to check out my books, you can go to my website, sean ferrell.com, and if you wanna check out Matt’s podcast and YouTube program Undecided with Matt Ferrell, don’t forget to look for that. And a follow up to that, we always have weekly Still To Be Determined, which is a podcast we do following up on Matt’s main channel. Don’t forget if you’d like to support this show, liking, subscribing, sharing with the friends. Those are the easy ways. The more direct way is to go to Trek in Time Show. Click the join button there. Not only do you get to throw coins at our heads, but you also become an Ensign, which means you’re subscribed to our spinoff show Out of Time.

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