Rewatching Episodes: Obsession

You liked Steve Brookes that much, Mr.Beard?
JB

 

Surely that was The Doomsday Machine, a few episodes earlier?
JB

 

Well, JB, I thought he was good in the role and he doesn't speak with a hokey Russian accent like Chekov. Maybe they could have changed his name to Garrovicksky.

 

Not as lucky as Leslie. He was actually killed by the creature and somehow managed to come back to life in later episodes, unless it was his twin brother.

 

Trouble is sixties and seventies television was never made to be like that and you sort of just had to imagine that Garrovick and the other guest actors were still on board the ship even if you didn't see them again or ever, at least until the beginning of the next season!
JB

 

You can also briefly see Leslie alive and well walking past an open door on the Enterprise even though he was killed earlier in the episode.

 

...The special thing about this particular resurrection is, the episode carefully establishes that palefaced corpses lying on McCoy's slab aren't necessarily permanently dead. At least one is explicitly told to have survived and supposedly recovered; others might have as well, since no actual casualty figures were provided and nothing definitive was said about the status of, say, the Eddie Paskey character.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Wasn't there a filmed scene where they brought Leslie back to life but it was cut for time and the insanity of how to explain seeing the character back alive in the next few weeks?
JB

 

I love Obsession, it was the first TOS episode I ever saw

 

Obsession was a very scary episode I remember when seeing it as a child! That cloud and the scent of honey (which I've never liked) and then as it engulfs and smothers you it sucks out your blood!

JB

 

According to Memory Alpha, TOS actor Eddie Paskey says that a scene in the script called for a mystery potion to resurrect Mr. Leslie. Director Raplh Senensky confirms that the scene was not filmed though.

 

I think of this ep as representing the point at which the amazingness of an SF phenomenon took a back seat to the interpersonal drama on the ship, because they had already thrown so many amazing phenomena at us. This shift allowed Trek to keep going, and it was leaned on more and more in the later series. A killer honey-scented cloud is not all that interesting on its own.

 

Thing is which was the next episode in production that featured Eddie Paskey?
JB

 

That was his twin that died... Frank Leslie. The one who lived was Joe Leslie.

A piece of trivia for your viewing pleasure: Joe's middle name was Tiberius, just like Kirk's.

 

Doesn't he bring a blood-drained Leslie back to life off camera in this one too?

 

This has some outstanding scenes in it and so much character development that it feels like it's 90 minutes long (in a good way!). Also, Kirk & Garrovick's escape at the end still gets an edge-of-your-seat reaction from me, not as much as Kirk's escape from the Constellation, but close. Also a nice touch is the "The deflectors will not stop it, Captain. // That's impossible!!" piece of dialogue.

 

I love this episode right up to where the creature takes off into space a high warp speed?!?!?
Then it goes downhill fast for me. Never before heard of vents are left open and the creature gets in the ship. Spock tries to stop the creature with his hands. Simple reverse flow of the ventilation units can force the creature from the room.

Sure if you want to explain away all that nonsense you can, but it's just dumb writing. They had the planet set built-- just have Kirk battle the creature and his demons on the surface.

 

Yes, the Old Vent Into Space Trick. I didn't quite get that one either. Like a submarine that has a slide-open window on it.

 

Didn't the cloud creature enter the ship through either the exhaust or the disposal units? Can't remember but Kirk was in telepathic communication with the gaseous beast was he not!
JB

 

I think Scotty said he was working on the #2 Impulse Vent, or something like that.