"The Naked Now" James T. Kirk announcement

I'm watching "The Naked Now" episode on WGN America right now, and just watched the part where Picard & Riker read about Kirk's mission in the original "The Naked Time". I was wondering, when this episode originally aired (The Naked Now), did anyone get excited when Picard mentioned Kirk?

 

Well, I appreciated the way the name was dropped. "Kirk... Kirk? Ah, Kirk!" It's as if our favorite hero from the 23rd century wasn't a household name for his 24th century colleagues.

Timo Saloniemi

 

As I recall, a lot of fans and reviewers were upset by the name drop. These days, fandom gets so obsessive about continuity and consistency, but back then, the prevailing reaction was "What's the point of rehashing Star Trek unless they find a way to make it fresh and new?" There was a sentiment that the show needed to establish its own identity as something original rather than just more of the same, so having their first post-pilot episode be an out-and-out remake of a TOS episode, complete with a name-drop of Kirk's Enterprise, was widely seen as a misstep.

At least, that's what I remember reading in the audience reactions at the time. But then, as now, the people who object to something are more vocal than the people who approve of it. So maybe there were people who were excited by the reference. But consider the context. This was a time when the TOS crew was still around in the movies. It had only been a year or so since TVH, a very successful original-cast movie, and they were developing another movie. So it wasn't like the original cast had been gone for a long time or was expected to be going away anytime soon. So I don't think a thrill of excitement would be the most common reaction to a mention of Kirk. It was more like "Come on, we've got plenty of Kirk already, give us something new!"

 

Well obviously I never heard about a "name drop". What happened? Was there a line that was supposed to be in there that wasn't?

 

Name-dropping is when you throw out somebody's name in a bid for attention. Like somebody always bragging about how they met some sports star once, or somebody trying to use somebody's name to intimidate the maitre'd at a restaurant.

The problem with name-dropping in TV shows is they can walk a fine line between acknowledging the show's mythology, or just being patronizing (which this particular TNG ep. is a little bit guilty of).

 

^^^^They access the computer and read about the TOS episode The Naked Time.

Personally, I got a little kick out of it, but I do remember thinking it was too soon. I thought they shouldn't have done it until the 6 or 7 episode, or something like that.

 

Agreed it was too soon, but then you later run into the problem of the TNG crew running into similar situations that the TOS crew ran into, but nobody noticing the similarities. Even TOS had this problem: nobody in the crew noticed that The Motion Picture was a remake of The Changeling, and then in The Voyage Home yet another probe shows up to make trouble, and nobody notices the similarities.

Though there's the possibility that it also happens a bunch of times offscreen and the crew doesn't even notice anymore.

Spock: Jim, I'm detecting yet another deep space probe headed for Earth looking for it's creator, that's the third this month.

Kirk: -yawn- Alright, you know the routine: start the calculations for timewarp, get me my "Arguing with Computers" handbook, and somebody see if we have any hamdingers left, I'm famished.

 

^

 

Are we even going to get into the absolute shock and disbelief when they encounter another omniscient/omnipotent being? The running count on those has to be somewhere near a dozen.

 

I was always particularly frustrated by "Where Silence Has Lease," where they encounter an "area of blackness" that looks uncannily like the "zone of darkness" from "The Immunity Syndrome," but Data says, quite unambiguously, "There is no record of any Federation vessel encountering anything remotely like this."

 

I remember watching it and the line delivery was given in the manner of "some ship named Enterprise captained by someone named James T. Kirk, BFD". Gee, you have the ship in model form in the briefing room, no recognition/enthusiasm/interest?. In "Unification Part 2" Picard seemed all to familiar with Kirk, inconsistent.

 

Treating the TOS crew as "living legends" was one of the most enervating, pandering and annoying aspects of later Treks - another reason I like Abrams's reboot. Take 'em back to when no one knew who the hell they were.

 

Then they might as well have not bothered. If you are name-dropping as a nod to the previous show/fans (which presume they were trying to do in "Naked Now"), then you would want to do some homage (not "pandering"), just changing the delivery of the line to one of some subdued recognition would have sufficed. They are on the Enterprise-D, they would have likely been familiar on some level with past Enterprises, at least the basics, what decades they were in service, who were the CO's, etc.

 

At the time I enjoyed any and all references to the original crew, although I did think rehashing an entire episode was the slightest bit excessive.

I have to admit, while watching that episode last night it occurred to me that I could get results for "showering with your clothes on" in about three and a half seconds.

 

I guess we should be thankful that it was Data delivering lines like this. Our pedantic little tin man might have been thinking "The subspace flux here is in the megacochrane range, while the flux back in stardate 4307.5 was only 7.8x10^5 cochranes - that's such a huge difference. Now what synonyms for 'huge difference' do I have in store that I haven't used recently?"...

The E-D had quite a few ship models lying around. Why should Picard have been interested in the particulars of that aircraft carrier's past missions, or who the pilots of that space shuttle were on the atmospheric test flights? Why should he memorize the past skippers of the E-B?

I doubt anything of that sort is required reading for the COs of real-world naval vessels. The skipper of the frigate USS Clark might know who his ship was named after (no, not that Lewis-and-Clark Clark), but not all those people who commanded the ship's destroyer namesake in WWII, let alone which missions that ship performed. And that'd be only half a century before his time, not a full century.

How so? That episode comes much later, so Picard could have been reading up on the subject. Especially because the exploits of Kirk and his crew did touch Picard's own career somewhat in the intervening time. Hell, he even mind-melded with Spock's father!

I guess that by 2363, during "The Naked Now", Picard might have known all sorts of trivia about the history of ships named Stargazer. But at that time, he had only been the commander of a ship named Enterprise for a short time, probably with little advance warning.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Hell, look at the background props and models in the scenes for the early first Season of TNG. There's Constitution style ships, and Galileo type shuttlecraft in the background of breifing room scenes everywhere. Why? Paramount was paranoid older fans wouldn't see the connection between TOS and TNG and might tune out. (Yes, as an older TOS fan back then, I thought the practice ridiculous too, but that was stated as the reason for those background items in many an entertainment article regarding the show when it started).

 

OTOH, it would be a perfectly valid reason already that those were the only kinds of Star Trek props readily available: there wasn't a line of TNG products on the shelves yet...

Timo Saloniemi

 

You have to remember that part of TNG's "mission statement" per some of GRs comments was to in many ways "reboot" the Trek universe, which is why so many things got changed around (no credits, etc). Another part was that supposedly there would be virtually no "call backs" to TOS. Klingons and Romulans, for example, were not supposed to appear at all (thus the need for the Ferengi).

Now that didn't last long, in some ways, what with the writiers managing to get Worf approved and all, but TNG never lost the slightly "dismissive" tone towards TOS that it inherited from those early days. It DID tone down a bit over time, and thus we got eps like the reasonably respectful "Relics" (though they still treated Scotty horribly). "Unification" just made me want to slap the hell out of Picard for talking to Spock that way "this sort of cowboy diplomacy..."....

And don't get me started on the sneering dismissiveness of Janeway over in Voyager "The whole lot of them would be thrown out of Starfleet..."

The only show to give TOS the respect it deserved was DS9, really.

 

Yeah, I appreciated the name drop. What I didn't like was the graphic of a Constitution-refit starship boldly displayed on the "article" about the original incident. Nice lack of attention to detail there.

 

"Paramount" would not have been responsible for set-dressing decisions. It's not like the studio is a living being who went around supervising every single event on the set. It's a corporation with a whole hierarchy of employees handling different levels of responsibility. And I don't recall seeing any such claims in any articles at the time. More likely, it's just that the set decorators needed to find props and artwork that would be appropriate aboard a Starfleet vessel, and there wasn't much of that kind of material available yet besides existing TOS/movie model kits and props. It's the same reason they kept reusing the Reliant, Excelsior, and Grissom miniatures from the movies for Starfleet vessels a century later: because those were the only ones they had available.

Maybe it was intentional on Roddenberry's part. As I've pointed out elsewhere recently, the Roddenberry of the '80s was embarrassed by the crudeness of a lot of TOS and preferred to retcon it out of existence. For instance, when the Klingons were redesigned in TMP, he told fans to pretend that was how they'd "actually" looked all along, that what we saw in TOS was just a crude approximation of the reality. Maybe he told Okuda to use a refit Connie image because he preferred its more advanced look and wanted to pretend the Enterprise had always looked that way. (Not that I consider Matt Jefferies's Enterprise design to be crude in any way, mind you. But Roddenberry might have found it insufficiently advanced-looking.)