Episode of the Week : What Are Little Girls Made Of?

I never had an issue with his outfit, I felt it built him up impressively. But I did notice it being much more colorful in HD. It's more muted on smeary VHS.

 

I would rank this one as a 6. Nothing spectacular (except of course Andrea)

 

Well, I can see that side now that you mention it. I'm just not happy with the outfit Ruk got.

I say there's no chance it was deliberate. My theory is that the prop maker used some primitive foam-spraying technique that didn't give him much control over the finished product. The faux stalactite ended up looking familiar entirely by accident.

I just can't explain why they went ahead and used it. It was awkward to hold and obviously had no heft, so it wasn't menacing. When the prop came in late and it was so ridiculous, the director should have improvised. I would have had Kirk glance around and pick up a crowbar. You can find them in most caves.

 

But I could definitely see them watching the dailies and noticing - in horror - what Kirk was holding. It was too late to reshoot, so they hoped no one would notice.

Much like the boulder Kirk dropped on the Gorn. Which was probably the same boulder Spock got pinned with on Taurus 2.

"It was left here by the old ones, the ones who made us, yes...."

 

This is not really a simplistic "robots are evil" story. There are actually some very advanced ideas presented in this story, ideas way beyond what the average viewer of the time could consider even remotely plausible.

Today we are talking of possible copying your mind and downloading it into an artificial construct. Corby's line of being able to transfer one's very soul into an android duplicate pretty much nails it. The android could think of himself and be near indistinguishable from human.

The evil part of the story is Corby thinking everyone should automatically want this. And he plans on secretly replacing people, supposedly without their consent.

The evil is not in what Corby can do---it actually could have positive applications---the evil is in how he plans to start doing it. But imagine if this option were available for someone like Christopher Pike who is otherwise doomed to a life entombed in a immobile shell---would he take the option?

 

Could have put him in just a loin cloth, I think Ted could have made it work.

 

Hmm, what IS the story behind the turntable replicator?

What prompted the production to opt for this rather than, oh, say, a pair of transparent tubes or upright slabs and using a lapse dissolve, maybe enhanced with a matted optical effect, of the "Play-Doh" figure turning into Kirk? Who actually suggested it?

If nothing else, it was certainly distinctive!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

That would be an interesting thing to know. From a contemporary Trek standpoint I could envision a device that could scan Kirk and replicate a duplicate. And from there copying and downloading the mind.

 

Solid 7

Sherry Jackson gets a 10

Ted Cassidy is a great Baddie

Always thought this episode looked somehow "different" to the rest, The Empath also strikes me the same way, something to do with the sets, the production design, just something I cant really put into words.

 

Yeah, Ted could have worked it. In the late 60s, he showed up as Tarzan in Storybook Squares, a Saturday kid's show version of Hollywood Squares, with celebrities as fictional characters.

 

Way before my time, but in the mid 1960's early fax machines would have one sheet of paper on a cylinder, it was placed in the fax machine and the cylinder would spin at high speed in front of the scanner for half a minute.

(THIS is how people did business?)

That might have been the inspiration for the device we see.

 

Possible but unlikely, I should think. A cylinder and a turntable are quite different. Maybe the turntable was used because it was relatively easy to build and looked both technological and magical.

There were places where I worked that still had those spinning-cylinder analog fax machines in the 1980s.

 

One gripe: the realism of the episode suffers a bit during the turntable sequence. The film speed-up is visually unconvincing. On top of that, the scene ignores the simplest laws of physics as they would have affected Kirk if he was really spun that fast.

You have to take it as poetic license in the visual narrative.

 

^ Artificial gravity and a inertial damping field? From Kirk's perspective the room was spinning, he was stationary.

 

Worst case of bed spins evar.

 

So, nevermind Dr. Soong's groundbreaking work on the positronic brain, all he needed to build Data was a paper-mache mannequin and a giant record player..

 

And some really big knobs.

 

I was watching this episode the other night, and almost failed to notice Ted Cassidy in the scene when Andrea was playing with her knobs.