Matt and Sean talk about a simple yet timely message, in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 7, “Day of the Dove.”
Chapters
- 00:00: Intro
- 02:34: Viewer feedback
- 04:48: Today’s episode
- 05:16: This time in history
- 09:56: Episode discussion
Support the show directly: https://trekintime.show/join/
Audio version of the podcast: https://www.trekintime.show
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TrekinTime
Get in touch: https://trekintime.show/contact/
Follow us on:
Mastodon – https://mastodon.social/@mattferrell
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/mattferrell.bsky.social
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/@undecidedtechnology
Transcript
Sean Ferrell: Today in Trek in Time, we’re talking about being prepared. We’ll get to that in a moment. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we’re watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We’re also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we are currently talking about the Original series, season three. So we’re talking about 1968. Not much happened in 1968, did it, Matt?
Matt Ferrell: No, nothing.
Sean Ferrell: No, no, no, no. We’ll get into that in a minute. But first, who am I? Well, I’m Sean Ferrell. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. And with me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how have you been this fine week?
Matt Ferrell: It’s doing great. Up until we were about to hit record on this episode. Sean. Oh, boy.
Sean Ferrell: Yes, we were about to hit record and talk about this episode when Matt had a realization he hadn’t watched this episode. I will not ride Matt very hard about this. Yes, it was an error. Nope, we adjusted. But I will not tease him about it. For one simple reason. Hours earlier, I locked myself out of my home. We’re the Ferrell Boys.
Matt Ferrell: It’s been a good day.
Sean Ferrell: We’re ready to go. And for anybody wondering, yes, I was not wearing shoes at the time. Do with that what you will. Anyway, we’re going to be talking today about Day of the Dove. This is the episode that was released on November 1, 1968. It is season three, episode seven. It is. We have a weird pattern going right now where it feels like we’re hopping forward and backward at the same time. This is the second. This is the 66th episode produced. The 62nd aired, the seventh of the third season. The previous episode that we talked about would be broadcast after this one. And the one that we talked about two weeks ago, I believe would be broadcast after that one. So we’re, like, doing this timey wimey. I don’t really get it, but Day of the Dove, directed by Marvin Chomsky, directed by Jerome Bixby and aired on November 1, 1968. Before we get into our conversation about this, we always like to visit the mailbag and see what you’ve had to say. So, Matt, what have you found for us in the mailbag this week?
Matt Ferrell: There’s a couple that I wanted to bring up. One of them from the Tholian Web was from Dan Sims, who wrote, because we were talking about the Oregon Trail, Sean, Oregon Trail. Sorry. The Oregon Trail was my first school computer memory. I saw a video from an intermediate teacher who showed it to the students and mentioned that one of them asked what a wagon wheel was after already knowing what a horse drawn wagon was and how cooked we are as a species and because them not putting two and two together like that was a very common occurrence.
Sean Ferrell: Sigh. Okay, I was going to say try describing a dial tone to somebody sometime.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, I know, yeah, episode of TV I was watching John that was from the early 2000s and somebody was in their kitchen talking on a phone with like an extra long cord to the wall. And I was like, show that to any kid today and they’ll be like, what the hell is that?
Sean Ferrell: Why is her phone on a leash? Yeah, yeah. Somebody posted on Bluesky recently an image I just found. This image had a flashback and now I can’t stop laughing. And it was an image from a cartoon. A little strangely shaped round figure wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat standing next to an ice tray with orange juice in it, with toothpicks in the orange juice and Saran Wrap over the top. And the number of people in the comments who are like, well, now I’ve got a hankering for a wagon wheel. Viewers of a certain age will know what we’re speaking of. Everybody else will think I just had some sort of miniature stroke. We’ll leave it at that and move forward. Next comment please.
Matt Ferrell: This is a wrong answers only, super short from Babarudra. The World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky. A lecture on Edmund Halley’s Hollow Earth theories at CPAC this year.
Sean Ferrell: There you go. Yes, sadly, yes. Thank you Babarudra. And now that alarm you hear, those lights you see, can mean only one thing. It’s time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. A rather short one, I believe this week. Matt, take it away.
Matt Ferrell: An alien energy based life form that feeds on negative emotions such as fear, anger and hatred, drives the crew of the Enterprise into brutal conflict with the Klingons.
Sean Ferrell: Doesn’t get more concise than that and actually pretty good when it comes down to it. Here we are, November 1, 1968. What was going on? Matt? Well, I. I don’t have to tell you what song you’re gonna have to sing. That’s right, it’s Hey Jude by the Beatles. Take it away, Matt. Good. And at the movies I don’t have to tell you what you’re lining up to see. Take it away, Matt. Yes, it was Funny Girl. And on television I don’t have to tell you what you’re sitting down to watch. Yes, it was the High Chaparral. That’s right, Matt. The High Chaparral.
Matt Ferrell: What is that?
Sean Ferrell: Well, Matt, funny you should ask. The High Chaparral was an American western action adventure drama television series that aired on NBC from 1967 to 1971. It was on at the 7:30 slot, so prime time started a little bit earlier for the networks at that point. So it starred Leif Erickson and Cameron Mitchell, and the series was created by David Dortort, who had previously created Bonanza. So they also got the theme song written by the composer and conductor who did the Bonanza theme song. And of course, the Bonanza theme song is. Let’s not call it. It’s not challenging. Let’s put it that way. When it comes down to it, it’s not the most challenging of songs. So the idea that you would go out and say to the High Chaparral team, like, we’re getting the same people behind Bonanza, and yet I’ve never ever heard of this show, I think is proof that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice. So from what I read online and what I could see, a lot of the actors were actors that you would recognize from other TV shows, a lot of people who had been in soap operas. And it feels to me like this was a program that has effectively been recreated in recent years, particularly on Paramount, where they have that new wave of Westerns that are all like Yellowstone and, you know, diving into family drama around land and control of land. High Chaparral focused on a rancher whose wife died, and he marries a much younger woman, and she becomes very enamored of helping him and protecting him in his defense of the homestead from, unfortunately, Apache Indians. So it was probably a very culturally insensitive program, but it lasted for four years and then disappeared on the wind. So maybe it’s just a rumor. Maybe I made the whole thing up. The High Chaparral. Has anybody out there actually seen one? I don’t know. And in the news November 1, 1968.
Did anything important happen, Matt? Well, funny you should ask. Attacks on North Vietnam halt today. Johnson says WIDER Talks begin November 6th. That’s right. They stopped bombing Vietnam on November 1st. You’re wondering why, Matt? Why would they stop doing that? Well, President Lyndon B. Johnson halted bombing operations against North Vietnam on November 1st prime to foster progress in the Paris peace talks. That sounds great, right? It was also just very shortly before the US election. So guess what he was doing? He was trying to help Hubert Humphrey. Did not work. Spoiler. It did not work. And the response and responding at the same time to the intense domestic anti war pressure. This is November 1, 1968. This. Those of you who’ve been following the show will remember that at the beginning of 1968 we were talking about the Tet offensive. So it had been a long year of problematic fighting and intense bombing from the US with very little to show for it. So Johnson was basically in a position of trying to help sway the electorate toward Humphrey. Spoiler. It would not work. Double spoiler. The war would continue for six more years. Triple spoiler. When Nixon is elected, the bombing will return, it will resume and it will spread, much of which is considered illegal according to the acts of war. And the US would conduct that bombing into Cambodia and Laos for years to come. It is a strangely timely headline and topic considering this episode, which has a very strong anti war, but also more than just anti war. I took this one, Matt, and I’m interested to see if you landed in the same terrain. Has a strangely prescient and very smart takedown of authoritarianism. Yeah, I found myself thinking like, wow, they really just kind of like hit the nail on the head. But the way they hit the nail on the head is again and again and again. And it feels like this episode.
I, I, is it strange that I felt bad for this episode? When Matt revealed to me earlier today that he had not watched the episode by mistake, he was like, my scheduling is out of whack and I normally watch the episode in this morning before we record. And somehow I completely forgot to do that. And we were like, well, should we do it now? Anyway, let’s, you know, you could watch it and then we could get it done. And Matt said, well, how long will it take us to record the episode? And I said, not long. Because at the end of the day, Matt, there’s not a lot of meat on this one. This one is all bone. It is hitting the, it’s hitting the head on the nail of the head. The head on the nail again and again and again. It has no deeper resonance. I don’t feel like it’s doing much to challenge anybody. It feels it might as well. The title of the episode might as well be Bottle episode. And I don’t disagree with the message and I kind of understand why it is as, let me just call it, kind of lazily done. It just feels like they were like, let’s just make an episode to put in to the schedule as Opposed to, let’s. Like, I’ve got a good story to tell. And I find myself watching this one and thinking, boy, everybody is really just kind of like, hitting their marks, getting it done. You got a lot of people wearing brown face, which is a really unfortunate, historic element of this episode. You’ve got Chekhov in a attempted rape scene, which is really problematic and unfortunate. But it’s all in the service of. They’re feeding us racist lies so that we will hate each other. They are manufacturing untruths so that we will hate each other. We are using weapons of war that are immoral, like rape and the brutality of war. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gun or a knife. If you’re standing close enough to just keep slicing up your opponent without purpose and without goal.
What are you doing? They want us to do this because they want to feed on our anger and our fear and our hatred. And here we are. I’m just like. I found myself watching this one and just kind of like, nodding and thinking, when is it gonna be over? So. Oh, really strange one to land on for you. When you said, oh, I forgot to watch it. I almost said, let’s talk about it anyway, I’ll take the bullet. You don’t need to watch it. But what, like, what did you take out of it? If anything other than what I’ve described? Because my experience of watching this was like, when I was a kid, I remember liking this. Now I’m like, I get the message. Good message to broadcast.
Matt Ferrell: Let me reframe the question you just asked me, because I don’t agree with the framing of the question. My take on this is definitely better than yours. I’ll say that I enjoyed this one better. I did not think, is it over yet? At once, at all. Like, I literally just finished watching it before we hit record. But there was never one moment where I was like, ah, this is dragging. Never felt like that. I don’t think it’s a good episode because it feels very Saturday morning cartoon. Like, I agree with you that it’s skin deep. Like, there’s no subtext here. They don’t even try. There’s no subtext. It’s on the face. They even say at one point where Spock saying, I apologize. You know, like, I felt a moment of racial bigotry. It’s the most distasteful. It was like. It was so surface level of racial bigotry is bad. You know, authoritarianism. All the stuff. All the stuff was just like, on the nose, on the Nose on the nose the entire time. But it. What. For me, that didn’t make it a bad episode. It was. There was enough. I don’t want to call it intrigue, but enough, like, of the mystery they were stringing along of like, how are they going to get out of it? How are they going to convince the Klingons to get on board that it kept me interested, watching. I wasn’t bored. I was enjoying what was happening to a certain extent. But this felt like I was watching. We tried watching the Animated Series at one point.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And it reminded me of watching that. It felt like a lesser than Star Trek because it was being so simplified. Which makes sense because they were in the Friday night purgatory. They seemed to be kind of dumbing down a lot of the episodes. So it still felt very Star Trek. I did like what they were doing with some of the characters because the hints they were dropping of the manipulation that was happening started with Chekhov, him getting a little more wound up than you’d expect Chekhov to get wound up. And then when McCoy’s losing his mind at, you know, Kirk.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Saying you gotta fix this, and he’s losing his mind. It’s like, of all the people here to basically be calling a war cry, it’s McCoy. I thought that was kind of a clever way to use a character like that to do it. And then, of course, Spock stuff, which is like, okay, now something’s definitely wrong. Cause even Spock’s getting in on the action. Right. So I thought there was some fun. They were playing with the dynamics of the characters that we know and love to start to drop these hints that there’s something else going on emotionally. Something’s charging this. It’s not just somebody turning a phaser into the sword. It’s. They’re also manipulating people’s emotions. So that aspect of it I was enjoying a little bit. So I’m definitely not as harsh on this one as you are. You clearly. It hit you in a way that clearly like, ah. So for me, as a kid, when I remember seeing this as a kid, I like this one as an adult. I think it’s okay. I think it’s fine. The only thing that was driving me nuts, Sean, and it’s a very personal thing. It’s gonna make sense to probably nobody watching this. I felt like I was having a migraine the entire time I was watching the episode. Cause every time they showed the little alien, it looks like the. I get migraines and I get a visual aura. And it Looks like the visual aura is floating around the ship. And I was like, oh, am I getting a migraine? Oh, no, it’s just the alien again.
Sean Ferrell: I have a feel that if you and I could swap brains for just a moment, we would realize we are saying exactly the same thing. I don’t think that. I don’t think we’re separated really in much of anything. I had the exact same thought. This feels like a Saturday morning cartoon. I like the message. I like. If anything, what I wanted was. I felt a little bit like this one treads water a bit. Where it could have expanded. I thought it would have been very interesting if. And of course, this is 21st century viewer looking at a 1960s show and saying, oh, in the 60 years since then, we’ve done all these interesting things with the Klingons. But we’ve seen things in other shows where they’ve said, like, the science clans of the Klingons are considered second tier. There’s a kind of caste system, and they have this kind of way of hierarchy that is very subtle to the outsider. And I felt like there was a little bit of a missed opportunity because they introduced the wife Klingon, and they’d never done that before. And then they didn’t really do much except make her a target of a sexual attack. And I thought, okay, they had her there for that. And that’s unfortunate because it. You know, it just is. So it boils it down in a way that just doesn’t serve her as a character. And there was an opportunity. I felt like, okay, you’re showing the humans being manipulated. The Klingons are also being manipulated. But it’s so hard to tell because everything the Klingons are doing is basically presented to us, the viewer, as. And the Klingons are just being Klingons. And it would have been interesting if there had been some sort of private communication between the husband and wife where one of them is doing effectively a McCoy and is playing up a. Like, we gotta go. We gotta wipe them out. And the other one is saying, like, that’s not. That’s not like you. You aren’t.
You aren’t normally that rash. And I thought it would have been interesting to have, you know, you have the Klingon leader, the. The cap. The commander of the Klingon vessel. Wouldn’t have been interesting if his wife had been becoming bloodthirsty. And he was just like, this is not you. You’re a woman of science. You don’t. You’ve never ever expressed this kind of Attitude.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: And. And have it. Have him. Show him being in a role, because at the end, it really is. Kirk makes his appeal to that commander, and that commander does respond in kind. And they do manage to then stand next to each other and have that moment of just like, you can’t manipulate us. We know better now. And wouldn’t it have been neat to have a couple of scenes where she is presented as pushing him to recognize we are not behaving normally in the same way that Kirk is recognizing on the other side? I thought a little bit of balance there would have provided a little bit more meat on the bone. I completely agree with what you’re saying about the nuance of Chekhov’s. The most fascinating thing that is in the show is the fact that Chekhov is running around saying, they killed my brother Peter, until Sulu says he’s an only child. Who the hell are you talking about? And I was like, that’s. Like, that’s cool. Like, that’s neat. And I like that. For me, it didn’t feel like there was enough of that. There wasn’t enough. Even though McCoy comes in and he’s, like, rattling the saber and he’s just like, you got to go kill him, because they’re monsters. And then Spock has his turn. I would have appreciated a little bit more of. Especially with Kirk being portrayed as he is somehow able to keep himself on just barely the right side of the line. And I found myself thinking, how fascinating would it have been if he had been saying things like, why do I keep seeing violent images in my imagination? Why do I keep thinking about people I’ve lost and wanting to blame the Klingons for it, especially considering we know Kirk’s future with the Klingons. This is an interesting episode from that perspective, too. So I was going to say about,
Matt Ferrell: like, the woman, Kang’s wife.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: I’m not gonna rewrite the episode. I mean, you’ve given some good suggestions that would’ve made the show way better. But I do wanna kind of push back a little bit. My comments around the acting in the episode. I think Shatner did a very good job in this episode. I don’t think he was. I think he was doing the best he could with what he was given. And there’s the scene where he’s finally kind of trying to grapple back control of himself. And as he’s thinking through what this thing and explaining it to Spock and McCoy and getting them on board to go, oh, you’re right, it is doing that. That whole scene I thought was really well done with the trio, but that the woman that was playing Kang’s wife, I’m not gonna blame her. Not gonna blame her. I’m gonna blame directing. So what we’re given with her, she is so placid. Every close up of her during that sequence, it’s like, it’s like the Mona Lisa. It’s like whatever you put next to it, it’s like, oh, she’s smiling. Oh, no, she’s angry, or no, she’s sad. It’s like, you can’t tell. She’s this enigma of like, wait, are you on board with what they’re doing? So as I’m watching that sequence, I’m like, oh, maybe she’s cheesing. It looks like she’s getting it. She’s getting it. And then he, she, she, Kirk goes to call Kang and she’s like, it’s a trap. And it was like, wait, what? What? What?
Sean Ferrell: You were just.
Matt Ferrell: Every closeup made me feel like she’s getting it. But it was. I realized after the fact it was like a montage where you can. You can change the emotional resonance of the same exact shot just by what you pair next to it. And so I imposed, oh, she’s getting it. Because all them are getting it. So clearly she’s getting it. But it was like the actress was doing nothing. She was just vacant. And then when they were on the the bridge and they’re continuing the conversation and he’s trying to get Kang on board and threatens to kill her, she’s still like placid and vacant. And then after Kang says, casualties of war, go ahead and kill her.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Only then does it like, oh, she’s clocked in. She gets it now. And it was because she was verbally saying it. So I don’t know if it was bad acting on her part or just bad directing or both, but it was not a rewrite of what the show was giving us. If she had just had a better performance and there was more of a dynamic of her slowly coming along and you could start to see her go from I don’t trust you to maybe I can trust them, then it would have been a stronger overall thread that they were pulling.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I had the exact same thoughts. When she jumps forward and yells, it’s a trap into the comm unit. It’s just like, where did that come from? Like, you were literally hearing everything that they said and did you think that they were play acting? It doesn’t make any sense within the context of the story from that point forward. If she was immediately like, you guys are awesome, and I agree with everything you just said, you could have had the exact same episode from that point forward. Her yelling at him through the comm didn’t affect anything. It was just a demonstration of, like, okay, is this bad writing or bad directing or bad acting or just all of it. And I land on the third option because I look at this and it just feels like they didn’t bother revising, they didn’t bother thinking things through. They were just putting together an episode because they had a slot to fill and they wanted to do as cheaply as possible. All these costumes already existed. All the sets already existed. They’re not pushing anything. And the migraine visual effect is just about the weakest visual effect they could possibly do. It looks. I did zero research to look this up, but it looks like a child’s pinwheel was filmed in a dark room. And they don’t do anything interesting with it. They make it shrink and they make it disappear at various times, but they’re not doing anything particular with it. And I found myself thinking, if you’ve seen clips of a Pink Floyd concert from the 1970s where they would use an overhead projector with oil, I found myself thinking, what if they had simply used something like that as a projector into corners of rooms so that light would look weird and warbly in a certain corner and make it very subtle so that you end up drawing out the fact that these characters look around and they’re like, wait a minute.
What is that? And then finally you see the shimmery thing moving on its own, as opposed to what they did because they let the cat out of the bag so early for the viewer. Like, if this episode was re-edited to remove the shimmering light, it would be a lot more intriguing. They go down to a planet, everybody’s been killed. We take them at their word. The reality is, I think there was never a colony there to begin with. That’s one of the things about, like, the mind alteration for this that’s not really well pushed forward. So it’s like they go to the planet, they think there’s a. The colony is gone. We take them at their word because these are our heroes. Then the Klingons show up. The Klingons are to blame. Yes, we agree with that, because that’s what we’re presented with. The episode gives us the lights right from the beginning so we know something weird is happening. How much more interesting would it have been if there’s no Lights. We’re given conflict, we’re given capture. We’re giving teleporter. We’re given them on the Enterprise, we’re given. Weird things start happening. Things. The Klingons are released somehow, weapons magically change. Nobody knows what’s going on. And then suddenly it’s like, oh, wait a minute. There’s this thing that’s been in the background of the episode all this time. It turns out it’s an alien entity that was on the planet. I’m like, that would be compelling. But this one is right out of the gate. Weird stuff is happening. It’s the light’s fault, and it just feels phoned in. From the very beginning, I found myself wishing there was more of a question mark over some of this stuff. And when the one thing that provided that question mark was the Chekhov, they killed my brother. Turning out to be, he doesn’t have a brother.
And I’m like, why couldn’t more of the episode have been like that? It reminds me of the episode of Next Generation where Geordi’s old teammates are disappearing one after another. They’re dying mysteriously one after another. And it goes through this whole sequence of him going into the holodeck and looking at the old recordings of the mission where they all had a weird experience and discovering there’s a shadow that doesn’t connect to anything. And the creepy as we get out, that is amazing. And it’s because it sets it all up as there’s something happening that’s not adding up. But we can’t really put our finger on it yet. We haven’t told the characters, haven’t figured it out, and we’re not telling you, the viewer, until the characters figure it out. And I wish this one had followed that model a little bit more because it just. I think by telling us right at the beginning, it’s a little bit like a Scooby Doo episode. We know that they’re going to pull the rubber mask off. And it was. It was the migraine lights the whole time trying to get a hold of Old Man Jenkins Farm.
So little disappointing.
Matt Ferrell: I was thinking of barbaric cartoons when I was watching this as well. It’s like, it felt like, you know where you see that same hallway go by over and over again.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah. It’s all in the hallways of the Enterprise. There’s just one hallway. They do a lot in that hallway in this way.
Matt Ferrell: Over and over again, over and over again.
Sean Ferrell: So I found myself frustrated because, like, the headline is they’re stopping the bombing in Vietnam and it was done for political gain. And then this episode is literally about manipulation of the public, using racism, hatred and misinformation in order to profit from the control of your population. And I was just like, how sad that that message in this episode wasn’t done with more craft, I think is what I was looking for more than anything else. But maybe that’s just me. Viewers, listeners, what do you think? Jump into the comments. As always, we want to hear what you have to say. This feels like it’s an abbreviated episode to me because, I mean, I guess it is. So jump into the comments. Let us know. Yeah, did you do you agree that this one is just feels a little on the nose and doesn’t provide much challenge? Or do you like this one for whatever reason you think it sends the perfect message in the perfect way or it’s got a lot of nostalgia for you? Let us know in the comments. We look forward to hearing from you. As always, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you’d like to support us more directly, go to trekintime.Show. Click the Join button there. It’ll allow you to throw coins at our heads and it will also sign you up as an Ensign, which means you’ll be signed up for our spin off 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 everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.