Some of Captain Kirk's acts of stupidity

Not really. It wasn't a competition, and anyone who's ever been in a real fight will tell you that after the first few attempts at using martial arts training, if they don't work it devolves into brawling, until they fall down and wrestle. Then the grappling training can kick in, and may the best grappler win.

 

Kirk was jumped by a thug who had a knife and the avantage of surprise. For Kirk to survive, and knock that guy out, would in real life be an astounding achievement. It would be a Great Moment in Real Man History.

 

Well, as Shatner has said, Captain Kirk is almost perfect, while he himself, of course, is perfect.

So he could have done it by playing himself.

 

Key word: almost

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgtPb4-ou1A[/yt]

 

But neither was the emergency.

There would have been no benefit to hurrying: Kirk was to make a rendezvous to deliver that medicine to the next link in the chain that would end with the people in need. Two things are apparent from that setup, and rather dictated by each other: there was no option of him flying directly to the patients, and the next flight wouldn't depart any earlier even if Kirk hastened his own schedule.

So Kirk had three days to burn, and those were his to burn. It's not known whether he got proper scientific return out of it, but at least it created no delay or other downside for the people in need of the medicine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

If the mission is that critical then he needs to get to the rendezvous point asap and wait there for three days to ensure there is no delay.

 

From a practical standpoint, it seems impossible that a ship as useful, and as fast, as the Enterprise would ever be ordered to stop in the middle of no place and wait three days. It should run in the touchdown and nevermind the handoff.

 

But there was no delay, which goes to show he had an enormous safety margin.

Of course, we don't know the details of the rendezvous. But the very fact that the episode proceeds the way it does rules out some possibilities.

Could Kirk make a drop of the medicine ahead of schedule and then return to Murasaki? Only if the rendezvous point was secure in some sense - a planetary outpost or a space station, perhaps. It's easy to argue that this would not be the general case.

Kirk has three days to spare, and he has found a good use for them. Could he return to Murasaki later on? That should take more than the three days he has. And we know that in general, he is very busy. That Starfleet has allocated him these rare extra three days is both proof that the medical mission was important, and sufficient for allowing him to perform his other duties on the side.

Why is Kirk stopping at Murasaki in the first place? Apparently because this medical mission has forced him to take a rare shortcut, bringing his starship to Where No Man Has Gone Before. But Murasaki is an extremely visible phenomenon at a distance, so Starfleet probably always knew it was there. If Starfleet nevertheless has been unable to specifically send any ship to study it before, this shows that Kirk's rare and serendipitous visit is of great importance - possibly at least equally so to the medical mission.

Of course, we can question the validity of the scenario in many ways. But mainly this allows us to say that there never was any danger of delay to start with. The underlying feature of warp drive in other episodes is that the difference between dull cruising and dashing is not mere percentage points, like with today's ships, but orders of magnitude. If Kirk sees that warp six is not doing the trick, he can order the ship to move a hundred times faster. For a trip that would only have taken three days at the lower speed, this is no time and all and doesn't unduly strain the ship, so there is no great risk of losing the shipment to an engine failure.

Timo Saloniemi

 

A fight isn't a competition?

Anyhoo, the big problem with the Shatner Drop-Kick™ as applied in Journey to Babel (or more accurately, the Shatner Ass-Slam™) was that it immediately left Kirk himself open to attack. Watch the scene: He throws himself backward at Thelev, knocking the spy down with his butt, BUT, the result is that Kirk fell down on the floor with his back to his opponent, and seems momentarily stunned himself, giving Thelev time to get up and stab him. It was a dumb move. A right cross would have been more effective.

 

That was a poor choice. Good thing he didn't do that against the Gorn. SNAP!

 

He did try a right cross earlier on, and it didn't work too well...

We don't know what the heck he was trying this time around. All we know is that it failed; it appears that Kirk misses his target by a wide margin. So the argument becomes, would the move have been a good one if it had succeeded in achieving what was attempted?

What it looks like is a somewhat tired Kirk trying to stop the upright part of the fighting and turn it into a wrestling match on the floor. Perhaps he felt he had more body mass and better muscles, things that wouldn't help as long as the opponent could wave a knife. Falling down on the already crouching enemy would achieve what Kirk wanted, then: the "Andorian" would be splashed on the floor face down, an ideal position for wrestling the knife away from him.

But where would Kirk himself be? Nicely seated atop the bad guy? Probably not.

In any case, Kirk was losing. Both sides showed fatigue, but the "Andorian" still held the knife. And Kirk didn't appear to think he could outrun the assailant and reach safety; he may well have been right. Something had to change, and perhaps Kirk-Fu sounded like a good idea at the time.

(One wonders... Is there perhaps an Andorian weakness there that Kirk was trying to exploit - one that didn't work against fake Andorians?)

Timo Saloniemi