Pine isn't playing Shatner.
Operation Annihilate
- Thread starter Trekfan12
- Start date
IIRC, a draft storyline exists where a harsh ending makes the title more relevant: they don't find a magic cure, so Kirk has to take the terrible decision to destroy the planet to stop the infection spreading.
http://www.missionlogpodcast.com/discovereddocuments/029/
http://www.missionlogpodcast.com/discovereddocuments/029/
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Good thing there aren't 2 Shatners....we might have seen more episodes where 2 Kirks were involved in taking over the Enterprise, or conquering the universe, or changing bodies with female scientists, or....
In the Blish adaptation, they follow the infestation to its source, and destroy the planet.
Absolutely NOT true.
Looking at Memory Alpha, he seems to have had the first draft script; a halfway house between the utterly bleak outline, and the almost-all-ok ending of the shooting script.
As a sidenote, the outline includes the notion of a planet becoming a supernova, which doesn't really make sense (not enough mass, etc), but does feature in the near contemporary Doctor Who story The Tenth Planet. Suspect there was a suspect pop science article around at the time that influenced both.
Kirk destroyed a planet with life on it in "Obsession" but the script treated it as no big thing. Wiping out a human colony would be deal breaker, and apparently they would never have him do that. Meaning the General Order 24 in "A Taste of Armageddon" could only be a bluff.
Killing off an ecosystem without humanoids has never been seen as a big thing in Trek. Sisko did his version by destroying life on a planet, but it was "okay" because he knew, supposedly, that the whole humanoid population could hop in a ship and evacuate in mere minutes. Some people take longer just to wake up!
The silly thing is, Kirk had no reason to hurry. The creatures were no danger to anybody as far as he knew.
People already infected (to wit, the entire population of Deneva) were in no danger. Only attempts to resist would result in death, and who would resist with that knowledge and the pain disincentive? Only Sam Kirk of all the millions had done as much as try and contact the outside world!
Not that Kirk would have cared for the agony of the Denevans anyway. The cure he so hurriedly pushed forth was for killing the pancakes, not for helping or even sparing their hosts. That Spock survived at all seemed completely incidental...
And the infection spreading was of course a total non-issue. The pancakes were trying to spread by building starships, an endeavor of aeons rather than hours, and Kirk could shoot down the ships at his leisure anyway.
Timo Saloniemi
People already infected (to wit, the entire population of Deneva) were in no danger. Only attempts to resist would result in death, and who would resist with that knowledge and the pain disincentive? Only Sam Kirk of all the millions had done as much as try and contact the outside world!
Not that Kirk would have cared for the agony of the Denevans anyway. The cure he so hurriedly pushed forth was for killing the pancakes, not for helping or even sparing their hosts. That Spock survived at all seemed completely incidental...
And the infection spreading was of course a total non-issue. The pancakes were trying to spread by building starships, an endeavor of aeons rather than hours, and Kirk could shoot down the ships at his leisure anyway.
Timo Saloniemi
I never got the idea that the pain wasn't constant. I don't think it was removed as an incentive to work. The will was directly affected. Ship building would take aeons? They must have some ships already, and may have ship-building facilities, and the whole population working together could get it done faster than that.
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One small ship got away at least, and presumably it was on its way to the next system, before the pilot rebelled and flew into their sun.
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People died from these things, as Kirk's sister-in-law did. They probably have to go through a lot of people before they get any work out of them.
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One small ship got away at least, and presumably it was on its way to the next system, before the pilot rebelled and flew into their sun.
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People died from these things, as Kirk's sister-in-law did. They probably have to go through a lot of people before they get any work out of them.
What many people still seem to not get about the creatures is that they are a disease. They aren't like the Ceti Eels, but are more of a cancer if you will, out to grow itself until it no longer has any medium in which to do so. Only by spreading to system after system can it continue to follow its function, and the damage to intelligent beings in the process was far too high a price to pay for allowing them to continue to exist.
Nor do I. But clearly it was modulated as a (dis)incentive, and wasn't fatal for the obedient.
Kirk's hasty cure would not deal with the pain - Kirk refused any tests that would deal with the pain.
Why would it not? Ships are rare and precious things in the TOS universe. They are not trivially come by.
Clearly not, as nobody thinks such a threat exists yet.
The place has one active radio set. It interacts with the Federation less often than annually. I'm not sure it even has facilities for supplying existing ships.
It probably had those a century earlier, and the pancakes could make the locals resurrect the lost arts. But Kirk could build ships faster than the planet, considering Kirk was at liberty to reduce the shipbuilding pace to a flat zero with a few well-placed phaser shots. (And even if the pancakes tried to use human shields, they couldn't physically fit a significant percentage of the millions to positions needing shielding. Kirk was willing to accept 100% casualties, so 1% shouldn't matter to him much.)
Or then the ship had no interstellar capabilities and no value to the pancakes. Could a one-man ship be of use anyway? Do the things breed rapidly, or travel in great numbers in a compact form, or what? The dialogue more suggests a mass exodus along a linear path than a random spreading of tiny seeds in whichever direction.
And Kirk's haste isn't going to change that. Either the pancakes can be exorcised, or then every Denevan is dead already - there's no point in hurrying either way.
Timo Saloniemi
YesI take it you like The Alley?
JB
Not that I'd say no nowadays but I've never been a fan of hers back in the eighties as such!
JB
JB
A million people in torture level pain, many of whom are going to die from this "disease", that's as good a reason to hurry as you'll ever get. Killing the creatures stops the pain. It prevents more deaths.
They can't have any ships because they weren't expecting an attack? Oh, Starfleet. I meant private ships.
Except not - not a single soul was saved by Kirk hurrying.
Kirk wanted to see if the cure that was lethal to the pancakes would spare the lives of the hosts. Yet he failed to proceed with the cure until the news came in that the cure could be tweaked to actually spare the hosts from blindness as well. Absolutely nothing was won by testing Spock, then.
Had Kirk completed his hurrying, rushing to execution right after the faulty test, he would still have gained little, as all he knew at that point was that half-Vulcan supermen might survive the procedure while losing their eyesight. The proper way to hurry would have been to let the pancake bite Sulu and then test the death rays on him.
Timo Saloniemi
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