Some "Court Martial" notes.

[trevanian]

TheThrasson wrote:

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For me, nothing beets a wrench lying around the engine room of the most advanced ship in Starfleet.

For me, nothing beats the little plastic (control rod?) thingies you can pull out of the consoles in the engine room of the most advanced ship in Starfleet and use to magically whale the crap out of a genetically engineered superman with five times your physical strength.

Must be plastic with a di-kironium core.

BTW, this is one of the funniest thread I've ever seen here, some very smart amusing answers. Sims, you're killing me, keep i up.

Kinda reminds me of the only kind of good payoff when accidentally clicking on a YAHOO NEWS story. You stumble through something 'written' by what I suppose is a professional, but it is only when you reach the COMMENTS section that you see some REAL writing.

Going by Finney and Merrick, it seems like you can be 90% of the way to starship captain and come a cropper. But then I guess you spend the rest of your life stuck on that moment of failure and go really bad. It's kind of like these guys would have benefitted from running into some wormhole aliens who would explain how these guys' existence 'is not linear.'

[scotpens]

Christopher wrote:

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After all, the laws of physics that make a wrench useful today -- leverage, torque, and the like -- will still be just as valid two hundred or two million years from now.

How do you think they tighten those self-sealing stem bolts?

[CorporalCaptain]

gottacook wrote:

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All these complaints and no one mentions "1 to the 4th power"?

Yeah, this is one of my favorite cringe-worthy lines.

For me the best part of the episode - Cogley's speech that ends act 3 (or is it 2?), about the injustice of Kirk not being able to confront his machine accuser - is surely relevant today in a way not seen in 1966.

I love this speech.

[Timo]

Yeah Kirk should have been discreet there, hell even Scotty gets horny sometimes

For me, nothing beets a wrench lying around the engine room of the most advanced ship in Starfleet.

It's "beats" and "wench", mind you.

Going by Finney and Merrick, it seems like you can be 90% of the way to starship captain and come a cropper.

Makes sense if there are only so many starships to choose from. 90% of the officers hit a ceiling one way or another, without necessarily a fault of their own. Some just bump their heads worse than others.

Timo Saloniemi

[ssosmcin]

Timo wrote:

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It's "beats" and "wench", mind you.

Nobody's gonna beat wenches on Kirk's watch!

[SchwEnt]

Josan wrote:

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I've always been amused by Kirk's voice-over near the end. "Beaten and sobbing, Finney told me where he had sabotaged the prime energy circuits."

It's not identified as a log entry but if it is I find it funny that beating the charges weren't enough for Kirk. He wanted a little extra humiliation on Finney's record for a final payback.

Perhaps Kirk means "beaten" in the sense that Finney was finally defeated in his scheme, beaten in his plotting, not physically beaten (although yeah, there were physical blows).

[SchwEnt]

...also, I still prefer the Ion Pod as the little one-man nub at the bottom of the sensor dome on the underside of the primary hull (as seen in Mandel's manual). I like it better than the pod location seen in the Remastered eps.

[CorporalCaptain]

SchwEnt wrote:

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...also, I still prefer the Ion Pod as the little one-man nub at the bottom of the sensor dome on the underside of the primary hull (as seen in Mandel's manual). I like it better than the pod location seen in the Remastered eps.

Well, it would be easier for Finney to hide in the secondary hull, assuming that's where sections 18Y through 23D on B deck are located, in or near Engineering, were the ion pod located on the secondary hull.

Before TOS-R, I imaged the pod being extended out from the secondary hull on a boom, say below the hull, and certainly not hidden behind the curvature of the hull. The scorch marks, evidently from jettisoning the old pod, kind of suggest that the TOS-R ion pod sits snug against the hull, and the location at the back is behind the hull's curvature. I wasn't thrilled with TOS-R's interpretation, either.

There's a picture at http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ion_pod.

[plynch]

I like this ep for the wordiness, the lines for actors to chew on, the connection to golden age TV. This seems like from the GR-rewriting-every-episode period.

[trevanian]

plynch wrote:

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This seems like from the GR-rewriting-every-episode period.

The Cogley stuff, yeah. But the Spock/McCoy stuff? Seems like Coon, pure Coon.

[plynch]

Agreed.

Just watched it. This is great entertainment. Nitpick all you want. And my 15-year-old daughter likes it too, so it's not just because it's what I grew up loving. Though I did.

By the way, I NEVER noticed the court members at the bar earlier, in 46 years of watching Star Trek.

[Robert Comsol]

plynch wrote:

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By the way, I NEVER noticed the court members at the bar earlier, in 46 years of watching Star Trek.

That was the result of a discussion with Timo (regarding how to interpret the starship status display early on in Stone's office) why there was even the necessity to bring other starship captains to the starbase for Kirk's trial. Obviously I wanted to look around in the Starbase Club if there hadn't been other starship captains there already - and spotted those guys that weren't supposed to be there, yet!

I had always thought that this promotional still of the Enterprise
clearly showed the location of the enigmatic ion pod at the bottom of the engineering hull.

Bob

P.S.
In ship's lingo "B deck" could just refer to the "Berth deck" (that would be where the crew quarters are located) or Main Deck 6 in the saucer at the stern of which you have the impulse deck and impulse engines - which Finney had sabotaged.

[Timo]

Well, it would be easier for Finney to hide in the secondary hull, assuming that's where sections 18Y through 23D on B deck are located, in or near Engineering, were the ion pod located on the secondary hull.

Plus, we have seen parts of the saucer section really crowded, both during alerts and normal operations, but the vicinity of the shuttlebay seems deserted as a rule - a great way for Finney to make his getaway.

The farther the ion pod is from the bridge, the more plausible also the relative inattention Kirk gives to the pod during the crisis, and the more natural the fact that a senior officer would need to be detached there even when Kirk himself literally has the functions at his fingertips.

Also, something that looks like a lightbulb certainly meets our expectations of what a "pod" might be in the TOS visual context...

Back in the sixties, the ion pod might have been a fairly odd McGuffin, probably akin to a crow's nest in the mainmast; the need to jettison it never made much dramatic sense. Today, we can readily associate it with the practice of tornado hunting, and interpret it as a device to be delivered in the very middle of the storm; jettisoning would then be an obvious part of the mission, indeed its very purpose, and the button for this would justifiably be right beneath Kirk's index finger. Whatever was being done with or to the pod prior to jettison would be secondary, mere preparations which Kirk would expect to be handled without delay by a man he trusted.

At some point between the first airing and the emergence of the treknobabble interpretation obsession I'm a prime victim of, the idea developed that the pod was a danger to the ship and for this reason had to be jettisoned. But nowhere in the episode do we find dialogue suggesting that the pod would pose a risk. All the angst is about the storm, and the changes in the storm that affect Kirk's choice of jettison moment. An "egg" to be laid by the ship at the best possible moment, a moment the CO has to choose by balancing scientific gain against the risk to the deploying ship, is an attractive interpretation there.

Timo Saloniemi

[ZapBrannigan]

Timo wrote:

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At some point between the first airing and the emergence of the treknobabble interpretation obsession I'm a prime victim of, the idea developed that the pod was a danger to the ship and for this reason had to be jettisoned. But nowhere in the episode do we find dialogue suggesting that the pod would pose a risk. All the angst is about the storm, and the changes in the storm that affect Kirk's choice of jettison moment. An "egg" to be laid by the ship at the best possible moment, a moment the CO has to choose by balancing scientific gain against the risk to the deploying ship, is an attractive interpretation there.

Timo Saloniemi

If it were just a matter of deploying the pod so it could send back scientific readings, then it would never be jettisoned until they knew for a fact the man was out of it.

But Kirk's testimony states that Finney was given fair warning that the jettison moment was approaching, then Kirk signaled a red alert, and very shortly thereafter pushed the button, without checking back to ensure Finney was in the clear. To me that means the safety of the ship was involved.

If Timo's reading is correct, then telemetry from a jettisoned pod must be massively important. Like save-the-ship important. So holding the pod in and of itself does not endanger the ship, but not getting telemetry from a free-flying pod does endanger the ship. That could be it after all.

[ZapBrannigan]

gottacook wrote:

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All these complaints and no one mentions "1 to the 4th power"?

I used to think that line was the height of innumeracy, but now realize that Kirk was not referring to the number 1 itself.

"One" simply referred to any given sound-level to be amplified. He should have said X to the 4th power, but when taken in context, he wasn't wrong.