Matt and Sean talk about the never-ending battle for good storytelling in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 15, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”

Sean’s comic collection goes on sale July 3rd. Details here: https://www.whatnot.com/s/VMjS3uri

Chapters

  • 00:00: Intro
  • 00:53: Listener Feedback
  • 03:16: This Time in History
  • 09:58: Today’s Conversation

Transcript

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're going to be talking about whether anything is really ever completely black or white. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're taking a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We are happily making our way through the original series. In fact, we're right about at the halfway point. That's right, Matt. The movies are almost within reach. They're so close. They're right there. Today, we're going to be talking about the original series, season three, episode 15, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. This episode originally aired on January 10, 1969, so barely into the final year of its broadcast. It's a story by Gene L. Coon, teleplay by Oliver Crawford, and directed by Jud Taylor. Before we get into our conversation about this week's episode, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episode. So, Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?

Matt Ferrell: Well, from the last episode, which was that which survives, we had a comment from Happy Flappy Farm, who wrote, Seeing Dr. M’Benga was one of our favorite parts of this episode. The bickering between Scotty and Spock was distracting and the dialogue in general was lacking. It feels like the writers this season are less skilled than previous seasons. Yes, yes, I would agree with that. But at the same time, there's more episodes this season that are like the iconic Trek episodes I think of when I think of the original series, which is really weird. Then we had a comment from AJ Chan who wrote, wait, which witch survives? W I T C H? PaleGhost69 responded, no. Which witch is on third. What witch survived. Hat tip to both of you.

Sean Ferrell: Tip, yes. Third base, yes.

Matt Ferrell: And then Dan Sims wrote a comment about really enjoyed this episode and really missed you guys last week. We missed you too, Dan. Scheduling has been really, really weird with Sean traveling, me traveling, now me getting sick. There's been a whole bunch of stuff happening recently that's been kind of knocking us off. But finally, wrong answers only from Mark Loveless. Plot of Let that be your last battlefield. A new red shirt and a new lower deck person are looking for buried corbomites since they are being hazed by Sulu and Chekov, who find it hilarious. By some miracle, they find a time capsule from the 20th century which contains many weird items, including the board game Battlefield. After finding out that the hazing incident resulted in something being dug up as Sulu and Chekov let them know, they open the time capsule. Sulu and Chekov are stunned and wildly excited as the game Battlefield only now existed in crappy modern versions. But this was an original. The red shirt sees how excited they are, but is angry. So he takes out his phaser and zaps Battlefield into dust. One guess what the red shirt says, Mark. I'm going to guess it's let that be your last battlefield.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you, Mark. And thank you everybody for your comments. They really do entertain us and help drive the show forward. So those flashing lights you see, those klaxon sounds you hear. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle, you guessed it, the Wikipedia description.

Matt Ferrell: The Enterprise picks up the last two survivors of a war torn planet who are still committed to destroying each other aboard the ship.

Sean Ferrell: Very accurate. Not bad, not bad. So here we are halfway through season three and we finally made it into 1969. We were in 1969 last week as well, but this one feels like it's just by the skin of our teeth. What was the world like at the time of broadcast, January 10, 1969? Well, Matt, you were still listening to that grapevine. That's right. Marvin Gaye's I Heard it through the Grapevine was the number one song. Take it away, Matt. Why am I craving raisins? And in theaters? Well, Matt, one of the things I've enjoyed about this podcast is finding those things that seem to be from another dimension. And this week's number one film is just one of those things. Yes, number one film of the week, Candy, which according to the poster, I think the name of the film is Candy, but the poster has the tagline good grief, it's Candy. And I don't know if you've read the show notes to know what this is about. Do you have any sense or did you peek at the show notes? Okay, if you had to take a guess, like based on. You're a film buff, you're very knowledgeable. This is an era in 1969 that you have experience with as far as film going is concerned. If you were to look at this and just say like, what kind of movie do you think this is?

Matt Ferrell: It looks like it's trying to be Dr. Strangelove to me. Just from the poster, Like a zany comedy.

Sean Ferrell: Candy. Is it released in 1968? It must have been like a Christmas week release. It is a sex farce directed by Christian Marquand from a screenplay by Buck Henry. Buck Henry is responsible for one of my all time favorite movies. This is What's up Doc. Yeah, he wrote that. So I'm immediately, I'm intrigued. I'm like, okay, this is possibly something up my alley. It's based on a 1958 novel of the same name by Terry Southern and Mason Hovenberg. And the film satirizes pornographic stories through the adventures of its naive heroine, Candy Christian, played by Ewa Aulin. Never heard of Ewa Aulin. So I'm like, okay, did it work out? Well, did it work out, Matt? That's the question you should be asking for yourself. When you look at the movie poster, if you squint the right way, do you recognize any faces? Because the cast includes Ewa Aulin, as already mentioned, Charles Aznavour, a name I do not recognize. Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, John Astin, Elsa Martinelli, Sugar Ray Robinson, Anita Pallenberg and Florinda Bolkan. You mentioned zany comedy. You mentioned, like, this is a, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world style cast. This is based on a novel that had run from the 50s. This is Buck Henry. This is a cast that is just kind of a murderer's row. Marlon Brando in a sex farce comedy in the late 60s. This is just a couple of years removed from him doing Apocalypse Now.

Matt Ferrell: Woo.

Sean Ferrell: I find myself intrigued. So I have not yet gone to the Google machine to see if it is available anywhere on the YouTubes, but I will be looking and I will report back. And very, very briefly, because we have talked about TV of this era, I feel like in great detail, do you agree with me on that? That we have like really, really kind of like pulled apart the seams of the scheduling. So I'm going to rely on kind of a brief summary of 1969's top programming. And it's a lot of the shows that we've already talked about. So we won't dive too deeply into these from this point forward. As we finish out season three of the original series, we talked about last week, the number one show of 1969, Rowan and Martin's Laugh in, which is of course a progenitor of shows like Saturday Night live, the number two show for 1969 with a 25.9 rating. To put that in perspective with Trek, at this point, Star Trek is pulling in about a 10. It's. It's about a 10.8 compared to season one where it was getting a 12 and then it went down to 11.6 for season two. Now it's down at a 10.8. So here we are at a 25.9 with the number two show of 1969, Gunsmoke. Yes, that Gunsmoke. And in the news, just barely into 1969, we see some headlines regarding, well, here comes President Nixon. We wonder how that's going to turn out. No spoilers, please. But there is also a photograph with a headline, capitol hails history's boldest explorers. I will admit I saw that headline and I thought to myself, what could that be a reference to? And then I did the old palm to the forehead as I realized, yes, it was the crew of Apollo 8 returned to Earth and being saluted in Congress. This is, of course, this is the equivalent of what we've just had here with the return of the Artemis mission and everybody looking at these people and saying they went further than anybody's ever gone in our solar system before.

Hooray. And just yesterday, NASA announced the next four person crew for the next Artemis mission, Artemis 3, which will of course be testing out, going into space, detaching the lunar lander module and reconnecting before returning to Earth. So baby steps, baby steps, baby steps. We've gone through this before, but when did we do that? Yes, the late 60s. 1969. On now to our conversation about this week's episode. Let that be your last battlefield. I feel like, Matt, this is the one. There's a part of me that feels like, we did it, we finished the original series. Because this is the one I think we were both waiting for. Because how do you talk about the battle between the moon pies? How do you take the black and white cookie versus the moon pie and say it, only one can survive. What is it like when you take an Oreo cookie and separate it in half and then say, only one of you can be right? I find myself watching this one and thinking, okay, here we are, we're watching it now. This is happening and we're going to talk about it. And I think this may be our shortest episode of this podcast because I am going to lead off our conversation with this. There's really nothing wrong with this episode. It's just not enough material to be an episode. This felt to me like, wow, did they look for places to add padding? And wow, did they come up with some intriguing ways to pad. Some of my highlights from this episode include, oh, God, I wish I could recreate it. Maybe it can be recreated in editing, I don't know. But the klaxon, the zoom, I was like, I was like, I remember this from childhood. I remember it very clearly. And in every episode where the red alert has gone off. I thought, did I make that up in my head? Why do I like every time the red alert goes off, it's just like there's a klaxon. Sometimes they show the red light. Why do I remember a zoom, zoom, zoom.

Now here we are, this is where. And we got it more than once in this episode.

Matt Ferrell: So I'm like, okay, it was like four times. I think it was.

Sean Ferrell: There's a little bit of padding. That's a lot. A sequence which I laughingly cannot believe. Not only did they do it in this episode, they steal it almost whole cloth and recreate it in Next Generation when it's like, oh really? Watch me blow up my ship. And it is a five minute long sequence of I am going to give my code to the ship and then my first officer is going to give their code to the ship and then my second in command is going to give their code to the ship. Something that never happened before and never happens again. Whenever self destruct is utilized at any other point in the series and the exact same thing happened in the next gen. I'm looking forward to the next gen version, which is Picard giving his Picard Alpha 1 Alpha Beta, Beta 1 Alpha 00, Beta 1 Alpha. It goes on for so long. And in this one it's we get Kirk, we get Spock, we get Scotty. But unlike the next gen, this one has something that that did not have, which is. Can you guess what I'm going to refer to?

Matt Ferrell: I have no idea, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Intense dental zooms.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, the zoom, the zoom.

Sean Ferrell: Scotty, you got to stop.

Matt Ferrell: And Scotty's eyes.

Sean Ferrell: Scotty, you got to stop smoking. It's just like when you like Spock's eyes down to Spock's mouth. Scotty's eyes down to Scotty's mouth. Like, what were they thinking? What was going on through everybody's heads? It's just there's so much padding in this. Because I go back to my earlier statement, there's nothing wrong with this story as a premise. They just didn't write enough for there to be a story. It also feels thin in the form of the initial idea seems to be what if we had members of a Greek chorus show up on the ship? Because these are just archetypes and playing with the black and white or the white and black and looking very much like Matt and I grew up in a household with two people who were theater people and our father in particular had a collection of masks in his den from all sorts of cultures all over the world, and including masks that were representative of theater. And I look at this episode and I can't see anything other than the dramatis personae, smiling face, frowning face, and the idea behind, like they're two sides of the same coin. Like your idea can't stop at that.

Matt Ferrell: But it did.

Sean Ferrell: And it did. And it goes back to the comment that you raised at the beginning of this episode, which is the writing seems a little thin. And I think that they were at certain points just kind of. They probably at this point knew that the show was over. And somebody on the writing team, they're taking ideas from Gene L. Coon, who's executive producer on the show, and his name is at the top of a lot of these episodes now. And I think he had a napkin that had a bunch of ideas scribbled on it and he'd hand it off to the writers and the writers would write these things and they would go with it. Feels very first drafty. And this one has in particular a strange structure because if you follow the structure of the story, it reaches a conclusion multiple times before. Like you keep repeating the I'm going to take over your ship. And why do you do that? Because they had to get to that end. They had to get to the end where two people chase each other through a ship to get to the transporter to beam themselves down to be the last two people battling on a dead world, just so that that could be the end. And it's. This whole point is summarized. This is something you've said previously, Matt, and I didn't always agree with it a whole cloth. But this one I do like. This is an episode of the Animated series and a 20 minute episode, this would have been fine and I might even like it. But in a 40 minute episode where it seems like they're treading water and it's all for that final moment where there are some compelling images. In this one, they shoot that conversation that Spock overhears in an interesting way. I really like the sequence where the two men are chasing each other through the ship and they're superimposing images which are clearly from World War II, where it's like you're.

They're running through the ship and they're seeing in their memory, in their imagination, their world burning. And I'm like this. The message here is very on the nose, very clear, impossible to miss. But it's not a story.

Matt Ferrell: So let me tell you a short little story. This, as a kid, was an episode I loved but even then I knew that's kind of on the nose, but I still like it. Rewatching it now as an adult, I'm like, wow, that's really on the nose. But I kind of don't like it as much. But it's not that bad. I'm gonna be a little more forgiving than you again. I don't think there's anything wrong.

Sean Ferrell: They were new with it. It just right.

Matt Ferrell: But they're definitely padding. 100%. They were padding. Oh my God, were they padding? They were padding like I've never seen them pad before.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, they boldly padded where nobody padded before.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, they're bold five year mission. There was an effort in some of that padding I admired, even though it didn't execute well. And one of the sequences was the one you brought up of them threatening to detonate the ship to regain control of the ship, to basically prove to them we will kill ourselves rather than let you take the ship. And that whole sequence was like, oh my God, how many? Oh, they're gonna do Scotty now too. It wasn't just enough to have the first officer, now you gotta go to the chief engineer. There was a little bit of that going through my head, but at the same time it reminded me of a lot of films from this era which were to call them plotting would be polite. There was a different tone where you build tension and you ratchet it really slowly and you let it build and you let it build and you let it build. And that sequence, I saw them trying to do that with what they were doing. So they were trying to make it not feel like padding. They were trying to probably evoke some of that tension through the dramatic. All three of these guys are like, yes, it's not just the captain playing poker, it's everybody. And they kept coming to Sulu. They kept cutting to Uhura on the bridge. And you could see everybody's like, we're scared. But they were all like, we gotta

Sean Ferrell: do what we gotta do.

Matt Ferrell: Like, they're all showing that they're willing to die for the cause. And that I thought was really cool. I thought that was a really cool thing that we're evoking. It just was done in a clumsy way. It wasn't done as well as those movies I just referenced. It's kind of sad. It's like, okay, I can see what you're trying to do, but your abilities, it's like what you want is not what you can actually achieve. And it's kind of sad to see you kind of stumble a little bit. The on the nose nature of the racism is bad and hate is bad and like all that kind of stuff with the black and white and the white and black. Silly Greek tragedy. You're right. The Greek, like, you know, the mask thing 100%. But the message and the idea, I do agree, is a very Saturday morning cartoon presentation of this idea. But it's a good idea for them to tackle with. It was just done in a very kind of hacky. Yeah, just a hacky way. And you said your one of your favorite parts was the running sequence at the end. That was my least favorite part. I forgot about the running sequence. It is so damn goofy. So goofy. These two guys start chasing each other to the ship and what does the captain do? Let him do it. Yeah, like he doesn't. He says, he's just. He literally says, nah, let him go. Yeah, they want. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: He doesn't even try to stop them. And the whole sequence of them running takes for one forever.

Sean Ferrell: It's a form of padding.

Matt Ferrell: Yeah, they get, they get so winded so fast.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: It was like they talked in the beginning about how like the doctor says if like you are a fine specimen, if you hadn't been, we found you almost dead on the ship. You're one hell of a specimen. Basically saying this is like peak fitness, peak strength, peak everything. This is like a real specimen.

Sean Ferrell: It runs for 30 seconds.

Matt Ferrell: And they both of them run for 30 seconds and they're like winded. And I'm like, hey, Doc, I think you need to reevaluate your assumption before. And the second thing was, is I can't remember the character's name, but the one that was doing the chasing. Yeah, there's one clip. I don't know what he was doing, but he was running with T Rex arms. Yeah, he came around the corner and his arms were doing this as.

Sean Ferrell: He's called the Riddler from Batman. He is. And I've always loved Frank Gorshin because his performance as the Riddler. He was. If William Shatner had not become the stereotypical like, oh, this is our bad actor parody and we're going to do a Shatner. Gorshin is the stand in for that because Gorshin and Batman was just like everything was twisted and weird and everything was. And then there's a hint of that in this in particular in the running sequence. And there's a moment in the running sequence where There was a student film made by Steven Spielberg which included, like, this is one of those things where people in Hollywood began to talk about Steven Spielberg when he was just coming out of film school because word got out like the. There's this kid who's doing things already as a 22 year old that more seasoned directors aren't doing. And there was this student film that he did in which it included a sequence where the. A young woman is walking through. Down some stairs and across a sidewalk and down a street. And the camera rotates around her, keeping her in center frame. And it's always the same distance from her. And it is a very compelling, very well done shot. And you watch it and you're like, this is the 60s, early 70s. How did he accomplish a shot? When you look at filmmaking today and they've got rigs and they've got the whole. Everything's, you know, like a camera person kind of looks like RoboCop inside a rig that allows the camera to stay steady and keep it the same distance and all those sorts of things. And Spielberg, in an interview was asked a question about that shot, and he's like, I tied a rope around her waist and around my waist so that I could keep moving around her. And I always knew I was at the right distance. Simplicity.

The chase sequence in this, there's a moment where I would bet any amount of money Frank Gorshin is holding onto a rope.

Matt Ferrell: He is.

Sean Ferrell: You can see, you can see, you can see.

Matt Ferrell: There's. What his hand comes to shot.

Sean Ferrell: His hand is like.

Matt Ferrell: You can see the rope. And I was like, oh, my God, they're doing a rope for distance. So he stays a constant distance from the camera in.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I was like. And he just. And he really. And his hand is too in the middle. And then every other sequence, I think he's running like this so he can hide that he's doing this. I think it's. Yeah, like, why are you running with T. Rex? Why does he look like a kangaroo when he comes around that corner? Oh, I'm so tired and I'm having nightmare visions. It's very funny.

Matt Ferrell: The other thing about the chase sequence that was killing me, I was laughing out loud was Spock's running commentary.

Sean Ferrell: It was.

Matt Ferrell: Not only was the running sequence weird and too long, but Spock going, they just entered deck nine. Like, it's like, who cares, Spock? I don't need to. He just entered this room. I don't care. Spock, shut up. It's like, it's like, why is he narrating what they're doing when they keep showing us that, you know, like show in television and film. It's like, show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. And we got both. They were showing us. And then they had Spock going. So running down the hallway to room nine, it's like, okay, Spock, shut up. They just entered the transporter. I know Spock. I just watched him go in the transporter room.

Sean Ferrell: That reminded me of a bit from Seinfeld when Elaine has gotten into an office tiff with, played by Molly Shannon, the woman who walks without moving her arms. And oh, yeah, there's this tiff between the two of them. And Molly Shannon leaves a voicemail message on Elaine's phone which says, I will confront you in the kitchen area or the board room or the copy room. And Elaine hangs up the phone and says, what does she have a blueprint of the office? Like, she's just naming these things in order as they are in the hallway. Like that sequence reminded me of. Of that Elaine scene because, yeah, it's this running commentary. And as it was going on, I thought the logic of levels and where. Deck three, Room nine. Like, he's naming all these things. I'm like, if you listen to all of it, it doesn't make any logical sense because he seems to name rooms and levels out of order in a way that implies somebody's looping backward. There's a moment where somebody's on deck three and then they're on five and then they're back on three. And I'm like, there's no concern here. There's no. There's no overriding concern. There's just like, we're just making a TV show. Let's get it done. It feels a little without showing exhaustion. It feels tired. It feels like they're tired of making the show. And I agree with you completely. There are efforts to do things in new ways that I do find compelling. I did find the self destruct sequence a great scene from the perspective that you mentioned. You're showing Uhura, you're showing Chekov, you're showing Sulu. Chekov is sweating. Uhura has concern in her eyes. But nobody is saying, you can't kill me. Don't do this. Nobody is screaming, nobody is panicking. Everybody is just like, I want there to be a better result, but I'm ready to go if I have to. Yep.

The other thing that this episode is doing, and I think season three is doing it constantly, because at this point, season three, they're like, oh, we know who the fan favorites are. We know who our main people are. All the extras that we have been accustomed to seeing in hallways and stuff like that, we're seeing fewer and fewer of that and we're just seeing the main bridge crew almost constantly altogether. And I find it like, for me, this is the imprint in my brain of what the bridge looks like. And I found myself in this episode thinking about, yeah, when we were watching the first season and the second season, there were a lot of moments where I was kind of surprised to like, oh, Sulu wasn't in this one at all. Oh, Chekhov wasn't even part of the show yet. Oh, Scotty is only in the engineering room. Scotty is now on the bridge. On the bridge almost constantly. And he goes down and he'll come back up because Scotty was a fan favorite. Uhura's a fan favorite at this point. Nichelle Nichols had thought about leaving the show and was convinced by Martin Luther King Jr. No, it's too important. You're too important to the culture. You need to stay on that program. And she stayed and is on camera in ways that are different from the first two seasons. So, like, this is where that image comes from is these episodes, which I find fascinating in a way that you, that you pointed out. These episodes have a kind of exhaustion. It feels like there's not the same level of care going into them from a writing perspective. The actors are doing their best with very little. And yet some of the most iconic images, including are happening right now.

The battle between two guys in black and white face painting with an on the nose story where I could have summarized this entire episode without watching it because I remembered thematically what was important in it to such a degree that it's. The episode itself was almost superfluous. It's interesting that this is the season. This is the stage where real imagery and the iconic presentation of what Star Trek is is finally in front of us. And it's just I find myself in that position of what if they'd gotten a fourth season? You know, what if, what if, what if? Just one more season. What if they'd gotten to the point where they got the full five year mission? And I sadly find myself going through that with New Trek right now, considering we're in the midst of. Paramount has decided to tear itself apart and there's no what is happening with these shows that have a fandom that have, well, no, we've moved on. And what does that mean? And I find myself in a similar position of like, oh, how, how sad. You know, it's disappointing.

Is there anything else that you wanted to pull out in your commentary about this one?

Matt Ferrell: No. It's a thin episode. It is what it is. It's so on the nose.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah. So thank you to everybody for joining us in this conversation. If there's anything about this episode that you think we missed, please jump into the comments and let us know. And while you're there, don't forget Wrong answers only. Next week we'll be talking about Whom Gods Destroy. What is that one about? But wrong answers only, please. As always, liking commenting, subscribing, sharing with friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast and we do appreciate each and every one of those from all of you. But if you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the join button there. It allows you to throw coins at our heads and it also makes you an Ensign, which means you'll be signed up for our spin off show out of Time, which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. Usually it's other movies and TV shows that we are enjoying, usually with a horror or sci fi bent, sometimes both. So we hope you'll be interested checking that out. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.