Problem I had with "By Any Other Name"

[T'Girl]

Knight Templar wrote:

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It was Kirk's half assed escape attempt that led directly to the killing of Thompson.

Sorry but you're wrong. It was Rojan's crushing of the Yeoman that "lead" to her death, following the escape attempt she was alive and well.

[Silvercrest]

Right! Escape attempts don't kill people (unless you step on a land mine)—
people kill people!

Err, maybe that should be, "Kelvans kill people!"

Except the point of the episode is that Kelvans are people by any other name, so therefore...

... never mind.

[foxhot]

Still wondering just how the Kelvans got THEIR human forms....probably not through their advanced belt-device technology.

[Grant]

Are there other 'happy endings' and 'forget the deaths' episodes?

In 'the Children Shall Lead' they beam two guys into space and don't even go back for their bodies or mention them at the end.

[Knight Templar]

I'm not saying that Rojan was not also responsible for the death of Thompson.

But IIRC, in time of war, if POWs attempt to escape and they in doing so assault one of their captors (as Kirk and Spock did) then the POWs are subject to reprisals.

Rojan's team was a preinvasion scout team for the Andromedans so to me that would fall under the "state of war" definition.

[Timo]

But IIRC, in time of war, if POWs attempt to escape and they in doing so assault one of their captors (as Kirk and Spock did) then the POWs are subject to reprisals.

On the other hand, if POWs do not attempt to escape, their own superiors charge them with dereliction of duty and whatnot, and quite possibly shoot them after liberation if the jailers haven't gotten around to it.

Rules of war are really meant to get people killed. There's no "nice" way out. And playing by the rules of the enemy seldom pays off.

Timo Saloniemi

[Greg Cox]

Grant wrote:

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Are there other 'happy endings' and 'forget the deaths' episodes?

In 'the Children Shall Lead' they beam two guys into space and don't even go back for their bodies or mention them at the end.

"The Apple" is probably the prime offender. Umpteen redshirts are killed brutally, but at the end Kirk is joking about the birds and the bees and teasing Spock about looking like Satan . . . .

[Myko]

Galileo Seven is the worst for me, there's like 40 seconds of laughter at a joke that's barely funny, after several crew members died. And it's probably the first occurance of this too.

[AtoZ]

Would it be safe to say, post Kelvin tune-up, that the Enterprise would be the fastest connie in SF at that point in time?

I cannot imagine Kirk having Scotty de-tune a quicker, more efficient Enterprise.

[Timo]

Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?

Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.

Timo Saloniemi

[Knight Templar]

Timo wrote:

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Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?

Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.

Timo Saloniemi

Good point. It is possible the Kelvans simply diverted all the power from the shields, weapons, and for that matter most of the life support (that is implied when they reduce the crew to the blocks).

Something completely impractical on a regular basis.

[Wingsley]

AtoZ wrote:

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Would it be safe to say, post Kelvin tune-up, that the Enterprise would be the fastest connie in SF at that point in time?

I cannot imagine Kirk having Scotty de-tune a quicker, more efficient Enterprise.

We don't know. It's conceivable that there's another Connie (or some Federation test-bed descendant of the NX-Alpha) out there, somewhere that either intentionally, or accidentally, achieved Warp 15 or better. Since the Enterprise has survived multiple incidents where the ship surged to double-digit warp factors that the crew had no control over ("The Changeling", "By Any Other Name", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "That Which Survives"), imagine what Federation researchers could do with a dedicated starship (or specifically-designed unmanned vessel) that they deliberately test out for high velocity...

Knight Templar wrote:

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I'm not saying that Rojan was not also responsible for the death of Thompson.

But IIRC, in time of war, if POWs attempt to escape and they in doing so assault one of their captors (as Kirk and Spock did) then the POWs are subject to reprisals.

Rojan's team was a preinvasion scout team for the Andromedans so to me that would fall under the "state of war" definition.

All of which assumes that the original Kelvan intent was hostile. Rojan may have already been suffering from human hubris when Kirk arrived to rescue him. It's possible the Kelvan ancestors were mean like Klingons or Romulans, or maybe the stories of Kelvan warrior heritage became exaggerated during the intergalactic journey. We may never know.

The matter of Yeoman Thompson's death, whether Rojan was delusional or not, was as much Kirk's responsibility as it was Rojan's. Kirk couldn't resist trying to escape (to where???), and Rojan was itching to make an example of one of Kirk's crew.

Timo wrote:

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Depends on how the extra speed was achieved. Perhaps it's just a matter of feeding more power to the warp coils - so once one would yank the portable Kelvan powerplant out of the loop, all the advantages would be lost?

Certainly it seems that the standard way to make the ship go faster than planned is to disengage the failsafes for doing so. It's not as if the drive itself would be incapable of warp 14 or whatever; it's just something that cannot be safely sustained, with the failure points relating to ship's structure (just as in the extreme case of "Threshold"!) but possibly also to the power arrangements.

Timo Saloniemi

That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

Maybe it's possible for any decently-designed warp-driven starship to be able to remain in flight for a multi-generational period without relief. And maybe the Kelvans had already adjusted the food syntheiszer-thingies to spit out those Chiklett-thingies to conserve power and nutrient resources. (Interesting that Kirk and his remaining "crew" were not forced to start adhereing to that same diet.) But if you look at the leap in engine power output (for sake of argument, Warp 8 is supposedly 512 cochranes; versus Warp 11 which is 1,331 cochranes) and then consider that the ship is expected to sustain this for three centuries, structural stress and other breakdown issues aside, that would be pretty amazing. Apparently, nobody is even slightly worried about the ship running out of fuel or otherwise breaking down in the intergalactic void. Remember, the Kelvans have only one ship to work with. If the Enterprise gives out on them, they are as good as dead.

But they go forward with their plan for the modifications to the Enterprise, no worries on anyone's part.

Myko wrote:

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Galileo Seven is the worst for me, there's like 40 seconds of laughter at a joke that's barely funny, after several crew members died. And it's probably the first occurance of this too.

I always took the final scene of "The Galileo Seven" as either cheesy or otherwise not up to the rest of the show. It's obviously very enjoyable to Kirk and his officers to corner Spock in his own over-wrought hubris. The characters had probably been waiting a long time to give Spock a ribbing like that. And maybe the characters would need something to laugh about after emerging from a crisis like that.

But if everyone was expected to behave by 20th century standards in that scene, Spock might've been brought up on negligence charges for the avoidable loss of Latimer and Gaetano. (Unless Spock's connections through his powerful father would have such a charge quashed.)

All that aside, the laughter scene at the end of "The Galileo Seven" was pure 1960's TV Velveeta, no doubt about it. I think it could've been written more effectively if the laughter sillyness had not been there, but instead Kirk had a final brief encounter with Ferris in which the commissioner expressed relief at the successful recovery of the shuttlecraft crew and getting underway to New Paris. It seems very odd that Ferris is prominent in the rest of the bridge scenes but he is suddenly nowhere to be found. That was even more ridiculous than the laughter.

[Timo]

It's conceivable that there's another Connie (or some Federation test-bed descendant of the NX-Alpha) out there, somewhere that either intentionally, or accidentally, achieved Warp 15 or better.

...That would then presuppose that the Enterprise in turn did even better in some unseen adventure, so that she would hold "speed records" as of ST3:TSfS. And not just speed records for the Constitution class, but universal ones which the Excelsior could fairly challenge.

That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

The Kelvans themselves had crossed the distance without refueling. For all we know, their massive mothership was powered by a larger version of the device they salvaged from their smaller survival craft, and the Enterprise more resembled the survival craft than the mothership in size - so the salvaged powerplant could perform much like originally designed, only now hooked into an alien propulsion system.

If the Kelvan gadget bypasses the whole fuel thing, the rest of the ship may remain largely unaltered, assuming the usual "structural failure" obstacle doesn't arise. But if the gadget also serves to strengthen the structural integrity fields (a likely component in TOS era starships already even if never mentioned), then Scotty's worries might be over. No need to worry about allocating power between keeping the ship going and keeping the ship from falling apart: there's plenty for both applications.

Of course, the Kelvans may have been making false assumptions, failing to consider that the spacecraft of the Milky Way cultures might be inferior to the ones of Andromeda, and unable to operate for a thousand years without pit stops. It's a natural mistake to make: the Milky Way has this extremely hostile barrier at the edge, a barrier apparently not found at Andromeda, so of course the natives are going to have durable ships that are capable of dealing with that!

It seems very odd that Ferris is prominent in the rest of the bridge scenes but he is suddenly nowhere to be found. That was even more ridiculous than the laughter.

Perhaps he went away to sulk when it turned out his doomsaying had not been prophetic after all?

Juvenile behavior at the climax of a hair-rising adventure doesn't sound too unrealistic to me. Military standards of stiff upper lips might have been relaxed a bit aboard this isolated starship on a multi-year assignment, and people on the edge might have learned to dull that edge with laughter so that they could keep on sitting on it year after year. For all we know, that's why they keep the lethal holodecks in TNG, too: if personnel aren't allowed to vent steam in juvenile ways, they'll find more "adult" ways to vent it, leading to suicide, homicide and perhaps navicide as well.

Timo Saloniemi

[blssdwlf]

Wingsley wrote:

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We don't know.

We sort of do. By ST3, the Enterprise herself still has standing speed records for the Excelsior to attempt to break.

Also, of calculable distance-times in interstellar space, Enterprise is almost twice as fast after "By Any Other Name" if you compare "Obsession" (pre-BAON) and "That Which Survives" (post-BAON).

Wingsley wrote:

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That's the one thing that perplexed me about this episode for a long time. How did the Kelvans expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for 300 years without relief? No tune-ups, no layovers, and no refueling; just Warp 11 (or better) for three centuries.

Or how did Kirk and the crew expect the Enterprise to run full-throttle, wide-open for thousands of years without relief? Remember that Kirk objected saying it would take too long, not that they would ever run out of fuel. And this is before they were aware of any Kelvin modifications. Later on Spock offered up a robot ship to send the message to the Andromeda galaxy. Even with Kelvin mods on the robot ship, it would have been expected to make the several hundred year journey. TOS does offer up that their power "regenerates" as mentioned in "The Mark of Gideon" and a couple of other episodes and as long as their regenerating mechanism works, they have unlimited fuel.

[Timo]

Remember that Kirk objected saying it would take too long, not that they would ever run out of fuel. And this is before they were aware of any Kelvan modifications.

We could chalk this up to there being many impossible things about the proposal, and Kirk shooting it down on basis of a randomly chosen one.

The same way we could say that a voyage to Sha-Ka-Ree is impossible for a dozen reasons, and Kirk quotes the Great Barrier rather than the distance because that nearby phenomenon is the first impossibility they will run into...

I'm sort of hesitant to accept the idea of Starfleet ships running on a fuel-less power system, even though we do lack references to things like refueling, tankers or fuel shortages (except when relating to impulse travel). Supposedly, antimatter fuel is involved, after all. And while antimatter isn't exactly a naturally occurring substance and indeed might need to be generated and re-generated, it would be a bit odd for the ship herself to be capable of doing that. If she can generate or re-generate antimatter at the rate the warp drive consumes it, why the need for antimatter in the first place? Why not hook up the generators directly to the warp engines?

Timo Saloniemi