TOS Rewatch

Something about this "does the Enterprise have more than one transporter room" question I can't get past is that anytime Kirk or anyone refers to the transporter room, they refer to it as just that, THE transporter room. Kirk says "get to the transporter room!" Kirk never says "get to transporter room 3!" It would make sense for there to be more than one, but I can't escape feeling from the dialogue that there was only meant to be one, and what shows up on screen is canon where schematics of the Enterprise may not be.

 

This mostly comes about since they had only one transporter room set, and may have been thinking at the time there was only one transporter room, even if executive producers and a few others knew better, so naturally it would come across that way in the dialogue. One might assume "the transporter room" either means "the closest transporter room" or "the transporter room we are currently operating this particular mission out of, so we needn't mention which one every time as it is understood which one we mean," or something similar to that.

I'm not sure you'll find too much TOS dialogue discussing bathroom facilities, either, so by that standard, it is not canon that TOS personnel need to go to the toilet, but you can be pretty sure those facilities are there throughout the ship. Even if they did put in some dialogue, they'd probably say, "I'm going to the bathroom," and not "I'm going to do number 2 in bathroom #18."

But when it comes to canon and dialogue, as long as the dialogue never actually says, "There is only one transporter room," not only do I feel we are free to assume otherwise, but like for many fictional universes, I think we are encouraged to share in it and explore it and speculate upon it. Just don't break the rules, or the established canon, and it's probably fine.

 

An alien crewmember with radically different physiology from humans might say, "I'm going to do number 18 in bathroom number 2"!

 

I've always thought that they only had the one transporter room as well, considering that's the only one they ever mention throughout the entire series!
JB

I think Helen Noel sort of grows on you over time, I never liked her looks as a teenager where as I did Yeoman Rand's, but these days to quote from professor Theodore Von Twosslehoffen in Laurel & Hardy's The Music Box (1932) "Why I'm nuts about her!"
JB

 

If you Google pictures of Marianna Hill, you can see she was really a striking beauty. That severe hairstyle she wore as Helen Noel didn't flatter her at all.

 

Perhaps, but with the proper bio-filters, there's really no need to reconstitute urine and fecal material when one rematerializes, so if you transport often enough, maybe they don't need bathrooms. Ewww.

Crewmembers regularly float from department to department to gain extra experience so they can fill in for a suddenly dead crewman in emergencies, so that's just something that occasionally happens with various people, and wearing the right uniform that day for the department is no big deal. But they may not even bother changing if they have to come back for a time to their regular department.

But the fact is, Vulcans have emotions - they just try to suppress and conceal them. This comes out more as the series goes on, not that I think "pride" in one's logic or other things Vulcan have is exactly free of emotion. And when you get right down to it, without the discipline of logic, Vulcans can be ome of the most murderous races you could ever find - maybe even worse than Klingons. Or better yet, comparable to Romulans, since they are closely related, Romulans having left Vulcan long ago before their society fell and they lost spaceflight for over a thousand years, IIRC.

I am forever wondering what they can barter with or use if they aren't using credits when dealing with non-Federation types, but I think these boys are closely enough associated with the Federation that they either use credits or can get them converted.

I think it was made pretty clear the crystals were hidden (perhaps even technologically masked from scanning) such that Kirk would never find a blessed crystal if he tried to use force. And he just didn't have a lot of time. So those free agents had the upper hand, and if they did let the ship go down, they wouldn't have been blamed - Kirk would have been.

The 60's were a different time, and Star Trek was pretty sexist, but if they didn't have a regular bevy of beauties, or the regular female crewmembers in ultra short mini skirts, it probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did. Ratings. What are you gonna do? And even today, they put some drop dead gorgeous women in skintight cat suits. Sex sells. I actually would have preferred keeping the slacks for the women crewmembers.

As for what a sad and lonely girl who has only known servitude with a bunch of slummity backwoodsmen, or brothers, even that guy was probably a step up - and he's soon to be rich beyond belief, don't forget, so I'm not too worried about Evie. And don't forget the apparent ease of plastic surgery in that era (assuming you have money or the military resources of a Starship).

Do you really think a finder's fee would offset the cost of space travel? Trek makes it look common and inexpensive looking, but I'm betting it isn't. Only the very rich - like dilithium miners, could afford it, and why should they settle for less than the best?

Mudd's Women




Read Full Review

Spoiler

So I'm probably just a pig, but I was not impressed at all by the "beauty" of Mudd's women. It's not like they didn't have even more beautiful women already running around in Trek, so was this the best they could do, and for roles that were supposed to be drop dead gorgeous? They're not ugly at all, but hardly breathtaking enough to get normal men to act like that - so I guess we must assume they looked even better than that, or some air-born pheromone was augmenting the men's attraction beyond what we could just see (and we might also assume Spock is immune to that chemical reaction, another green blooded advantage).

After an enhanced version of the ship chase into an asteroid field, enter Harry Mudd, an amusing character for this comical episode, and we'll see him once more in TOS and I think once in TAS, too. And he blathers on at one point about "James T. Kirk" so I guess they've settled on his middle name by this episode. Weird, they didn't just go with an "R" name since they already made the tombstone. Oh well. Mudd seemed to know a great deal about starship captains, too, like how they're "married" to their ships, Evie, and you'll see that the first time you come between him and his ship. So they reinforce that idea, too.

Side-By-Side Comparison


I love the frequent bemused expressions on Spock's face as other crewmen succumb to the feminine charms of Mudd's cargo. We learn of "Lithium" crystals - not dilithium yet, and certainly nothing of their quasi-temporal nature. They're just 300 times more valuable than their weight in diamonds, and each crystal is the size of one's fist, and they burnt out 4. Do the math! You even see a burnt out one - pretty cool.


*Sigh* I'm again convinced somebody, somewhere, is laboring under the delusion that when a spaceship runs out of fuel, it'd quickly drop out of orbit just like a plane running on empty would quickly crash. Maybe the orbits required for beaming are far lower into the atmosphere than I realize, but I doubt that's it. It is a new age of spaceflight and most don't really grasp such things yet, having so few examples, but somebody knew better - and yet . . . But then, without the urgency, it's just not as exciting, right? (Actually, I bet the transporter would no longer function after depleting their battery power beyond a certain point, so if they don't beam those crystals up before then, they're screwed.) Ahh, that's better.

The role of women in society is discussed, and as Trek helped elevate women a bit, despite clinging to some outdated notions here or there, I think this is an O.K. episode in some ways. It's not a serious science fiction one, but one with a message, nevertheless, and with some great performances. And Leslie appears again, though McCoy calls him "Connor" and he's an orderly or something. Eddie Paskey may be in 60 TOS episodes, but Lt. Leslie clearly is not.

Gene Dynarski plays his first of three Trek roles. I had NO idea this was the same guy.

Ben Childress - Mudd's Women
Krodock - The Mark Of Gideon
Commander Orfil Quinteros TNG – 11001001

Alas, despite some good stuff, and some great insight into Federation society, the whole placebo/drug thing having that profound an effect seems so badly contrived that I can't give it high marks. And for other reasons, too, I don't rate it that highly. I originally gave it 3 out of 10, so it rated amongst the lowest of all episodes, but the remastered special effects takes it up a notch to 4 out of 10.

 

I don't think that's the same thing. Pretty standard for tv not to discuss people going to the bathroom, but if there was more than one transporter, I think there'd be evidence for it.
I think the burden of proof is on proving there was more than one. Show me ONE example from TOS of anyone having to distinguish which transporter room they're going to.

 

We'll just agree to disagree about that.

 

I did look for it, but didn't find any yet. Most door/corridor signs I have since found say, "Transporter Section" to the right of the door, or in a corridor leading to that section, and never Transporter Room. But similarly, you can't show me where they ever explicitly, even ONCE, stated they only had one transporter room.

But I can show where it's stated as standard practice to have enough so they can beam the whole crew off in short order during emergencies (again, not in TOS dialogue, but behind the scenes stuff), and later in TNG and others, they pretty much confirm it. Otherwise you'd get exactly what another person said – you'd have to use the transporter nearly 80 times to get the whole crew off, and nobody has time for that during an abandon ship emergency.

Since neither of us has explicit TOS dialogue that proves it either way, however, we simply disagree on where the burden of proof should be. My POV is the need for more than one exists, the trend suggests they would have existed then just as they do later, and it seems common sense. Given that, unless there is an overwhelming reason not to have more than one, I'd say the burden of proof in on the person claiming there can only be one and it is impossible to have more than one since that seems the more extraordinary claim, and that's where the burden of proof lies - with the person making the more extraordinary claim.

But I'm fine if you want to agree to disagree on this point.

 

I think the Venus drug is supposed to have a pheromone-like effect on males, judging by this amusing bit of byplay between Kirk and McCoy:

KIRK: What is it? Is it that we're tired, and they're beautiful? They are incredibly beautiful.
MCCOY: Are they, Jim? Are they actually more lovely, pound for pound, measurement for measurement, than any other women you've known? Or is it that they just, well, act beautiful? No. Strike that, strike that.
KIRK: What are they?
MCCOY: You mean, are they alien illusions? That sort of thing?
KIRK: I asked you first.
MCCOY: No, an alien smart enough to pull this could also keep my medical scanner from going "bleep!"
KIRK: I don't follow you.
MCCOY: I don't either.

IMHO, Susan Denberg (Magda) was the best-looking of the three. She was an Austrian model who graced the pages of Playboy magazine as Miss August 1966. I assume she was given only a couple of brief lines of dialogue in "Mudd's Women" because of her thick accent and, shall we say, limited acting ability.

And no, you're not a pig.

 

But wouldn't that make it more similar to just masturbating or using a vibrator or something, since it's just a device and no one else is really involved? But give it feelings or make it intelligent, then you can make a case for cheating. Of course, other POVs abound.

Perhaps I'm wrong for thinking Kirk isn't always so perfect, but I get the impression he actually feels that way on some level - he just wouldn't ever express that Spock annoys him as culturally, it's more your failing to have a problem with things another person didn't choose than their problem. And if this is true, by bringing up those feelings during the duplication process, Kirk bypassed those safe guards and let those feelings rise to the surface where, well, you know. Good plan, at any rate. But it won't be the last time he calls Spock a half-breed.

Maybe she just realized since she could have feelings, and she was loyal to him, they could go hand-in-hand.

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Andrea (Sherry Jackson)

Read Full Review

Spoiler

Maybe a bit of a slip that Nurse Chapel is looking for her fiancé in this episode - in fact, that's why she joined Starfeet - but just a little while ago she's confessing her love for Spock (it would've been better if this episode aired before The Naked Time, and Christine developed feelings for Spock after she knew her fiancé was dead).

New outside shots - nice - exterior ship and planet shots, too, naturally. And, of course, one of the sexiest females in TOS (or maybe it's just that outfit).

Side-By-Side Comparison


Another cautionary tale of letting machines become too smart - but they clearly allow for no possibility of machines ever being on the same level as humans, which is a bit short sighted, IMO.

Wonderful performance by Majel Barrett as she coolly reacts to Andrea's presence there and the implications of her duties. We discover that Kirk has a brother and 3 nephews, but only one nephew makes the scene in a later episode when Kirk's brother dies. We might assume his other two nephews are either dead, or someplace else, since they never mention Peter reuniting with his siblings at some point.

This episode marks the first of the Red Shirt deaths in the series, starting with crewman Mathews. There were deaths before, but they weren't wearing red shirts.

Ruk (Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family) is fantastic - so formidable and creepy, lending the weight of time to his remembrances of "The Old Ones." And we'll hear his voice soon enough again in The Corbomite Maneuver.

I really liked this episode and gave it 6 out of 10. And, in general, the remastered special effects usually improve things, though not always, and IIRC there were sufficiently nice things to look at it in this one, so 6.5 out of 10 seems fair.

PhotoTrek

Spoiler

BONGGGGGGGGGGG!


You Rang?


Watch Him While I Attend To Other Matters.
And Put Him In A New Jump Suit.


You Look Familiar To Me.


Uuuuuuuuhhhhh.


I Know. Weren't You On That Show
That Was Just Like The Munsters?


More Complex Than The Munsters.
Much Superior.


Yeah. You Were Great On That Show.


Thank You. Yes, It Had Been So
Long Ago I Had Almost Forgotten.


Why Did They Ever Cancel It?


Low Ratings. Low Ratings Cancel
Out Even Quality Programming.


They Pulled Funds.
The Ones Who Paid Us.
Yes, It Is Still In My Memory Banks.


But A Truly High Quality Show Like TOS Wouldn't
Be Cancelled Just For Low Ratings, Would It?


THAT Was Our Mistake.
We Thought We Were All That, And The
Others . . . Were . . . Inferior. It Did Not Matter.
You Will Soon See That For Yourselves.


What Do You Mean?


Existence! Quality Does Not Guarantee . . . Existence.


Well, That Bites.


Tell Me About It.

 

Like I said, any time somebody says they are going to THE bathroom would mean just as much. The strength of THE there only suggests to me they only had one Transporter stage prop. The fact "it" seems to have been on different decks for different episodes is also suggestive to me. And yeah, TNG had 20 or more. But at 1000/20, that would mean they need about one transporter for every 50 people, so TOS would need about 8 of them for the same safety margins. If they were less safe, they might have 4, for example. Star Trek: Enterprise only had one, and it wasn't even in a room, but an alcove in a corridor, but it was highly experimental yet, so I wouldn't expect more than one there.
I'm not saying you can't hold that POV, but I was wondering why you felt it was important to assure they had only one. Is there a reason beyond lack of explicit mention they had more than one?

 

It's not important to specify what bathroom you're going to when you have to go. It might be critical to specify which transporter room to go to however. The ratios of transporter rooms to crewmen may not be relevant if the technology of Kirk's time simply precluded having more than one transporter room on his ship.

Come to think of it, I hear characters all the time talking about THE bridge, which apparently does not preclude there being more of them.

It's interesting, but in This Side of Paradise, we DO see the crew evacuate the ship, and we see a long line of crewmen waiting to beam down. We just don't know whether those particular crewmen are waiting for the only transporter.

It occurs to me too that more than one person can use a transporter pad. Maybe in the case of evacuation, more than one person at a time share a pad.

My reasoning is that I don't like to give credit for things unless it's proven. I think it needs to be proven that there was more than one transporter room before believing that there were.

 

It could be important which bathroom. But mostly, I think it's likely they know which one they are to use from context or SOP - like for evacuation, where your crew quarters are, or your duty station is, would determine which one you'd use in an emergency evacuation. There may even be a "main" transporter room they use 95% of the time, so unless otherwise specified, that's the one they're talking about it. Each one may have some specific use - like cargo, so that's the one if you know you're dealing with cargo. And I think it's wrong to invent the "in Kirk's time the technology precludes more than one TR" argument when you have less support in the dialogue for that than the other stuff, so if you need "proof" for more than one TR since you don't hear it in the dialogue, you shouldn't invent reasons you have even less proof for in the dialogue.

TNG nearly always says, "THE Bridge" but in fact they have more than one. They have a battle bridge. In TOS, they have auxiliary control.

True, but that was not an emergency. That is where I saw one of the signs, "Transporter Section" but the line wasn't proof since even with 8 TRs, each one would handle 50, and there were less than 50 people in that line.

Kirk said (Movie: TVH) doing that was dangerous. It was kind of cheesy when Gary Mitchell was unconscious, they lightly held him there with one hand until transport, and then let him go and he didn't fall over, IIRC. But you could see they didn't want to use one pad for two people there. The only time I can think when they probably deliberately did that was with both Kirks, and they wanted to put those guys together.

And the TR's seeming to be on different decks for different episodes, and the TR's looking different with different equipment in various episodes, doesn't impress you at all?

I wish I could find that "Transporter Room 3" sign, but the more I think about it, the more I suspect it was a "Turbo Lift 3" sign or just a false memory.

Anyway, the game I play with fictional universes is one can take liberties (make stuff up, invent reasons, etc.) as long as it doesn't violate something already established. And if it comes to pass some new Trek (movie or whatnot) accepts as canon something contrary to what you invented, you gotta accept what the IP owners did with their own property. Until then, however, I think we're fine thinking there's more than one TR, and add onto that behind the scene muckity mucks are saying things like:

Regarding multiple transporter rooms aboard the Enterprise, quoted from "The Making of Star Trek:

"There are eleven personnel and cargo transporter stations aboard the vessel. Four are the familiar main operational stations, two are cargo transporters, five are emergency personnel transporters which can handle twenty-two people each but involve a risk factor at such power loads and are limited to use in ship-abandoning emergencies."

Well, for me, after all that, you pretty much have to prove they only have one for me to believe it. Or for a story, you pretty much have to have a fantastic reason to need only one for your story. But when Scotty said a damaged circuit in engineering made it impossible to use the transporter, we already have a way to not have any transporters working for dramatic effect, no matter how many they have. And there are others ways, too, you can take those out for some story reasons. Too bad the same can't always be said in later Trek when they have fully functional transporters on Runabouts and Shuttlecrafts, and there's no decent reason why they couldn't use one of those if the ship's systems are out since they are independent systems.

 

There's also Scotty's line from "The Tholian Web": "It's jamming our transporter frequencies. I've only got three of them working, and I'm not sure of those. One of you has got to wait."

So each transporter pad has its own frequency, and you can't have more than one person on a pad (or presumably two people could wind up fused together).

Of course, this limitation was blatantly violated in "The Cloud Minders," when Kirk and Plasus materialize on a single transporter pad locked in mano a mano combat.

 

Her next role in Hammer's Frankenstein Created Woman made good use of her thick accent!
JB

 

That doesn't stop TV shows today, or then, for that matter. Characters have casual love interests who are stand-in dates for when they don't have anyone else to take somewhere, or are the female character in the episode where there are no women one-episode characters. She could also have been a sounding board/friend that advised Kirk on how women think and what to do from her unique perspective; being someone's personal assistant breeds that kind of friendship (and occasionally romance.)

You have to remember that she may have given up hope by that point, or at least had moments where she wondered if she would ever see him again. She found herself attracted to Spock because of a combination of loneliness and his own appealing qualities. Later, when she heard Roger had been found, she banished all thoughts of Spock from her mind, believing she could start again with Korby. After having that hope vanquished once and for all (disillusioned by his changes, and due to the fact that he was dead) she turned to Spock again, whom she knew from serving on the ship and had not been parted from. She knew who he was (as well as any woman could) and cared for him despite his occasional love interests - they never lasted.

 

Creepy? I never got that, or that Kirk was bordering on pedophilia or anything. He wasn't encouraging her - not toward bed, anyway, but toward cooperation, and yeah, Kirk uses people to get the mission done, or save his crew members, so he can be manipulative, but even here, I honestly think he had their best interests at heart. I doubt he'd sacrifice their lives to save his own or the landing party.

Miri






Read Full Review

Spoiler

Hundreds of light years from Earth, the Enterprise discovers an exact copy of the planet Earth. You needn't look any further for a better example of needless stupidity in the series than this. They never really need or use this fact for the core story or even mention it again, like it's same ol' same ol' stuff, so this practical impossibility goes unexplained here. Seems to me the author just wanted to "bring home" the message of the dangers of messing around with the natural order of things using bio-elements and the dangers of unleashing a plague on ourselves with germ warfare or genetic manipulation of people, etc., but he needn't have used an exact duplicate of Earth to do this at all, so it was stupid beyond belief (and numerous attempts at explaining it have cropped up, but none of them should have been necessary in the first place).

The re-mastered ship shots are nice (new and interesting angles in every episode, so I'll probably quit mentioning them for the most part, unless they're exceptional or important to the story, though you can almost be guaranteed, they're there). And Earth has more realistic cloud cover this time, though not as much as it should since I think they held back on this one to better show the familiar continents.

Side-By-Side Comparison


And it turns out there are only a few months' food remaining when the Enterprise shows up. After over 3 centuries of having enough food, guess this was another cosmic bit of luck, hitting that 3-month window just in the nick of time. Good preservation techniques, though, if canned food or whatever has been sitting on the shelves for 300 years. This is just another stupid mistake, and the natural food supply, whatever grows naturally, or whatever rats or other small animals the kids hunt and eat, should have already established some equilibrium for the local carrying capacity. Or maybe Spock's assessment was just wrong, and he erroneously dismissed many food sources that vegetarian Vulcan would never consider viable foodstuffs. Mmmmm, rat.

Wonderful performance by Miri (Kim Darby, who played Mattie Ross in True Grit 1969).


I don't know if you seen the remake, but IMO it is better than the original, so you should.


Kirk mentions no other Earth ships have been out this far, so maybe they've only reached a few hundred light years out from Earth proper by this point in time, or maybe just 100 light years in this particular direction.

I wasn't impressed at how the town looked - that is, it didn't appear to have been neglected for 3 centuries, but rather 3 decades, maybe. Despite being dilapidated, there wasn't 3 centuries of weathering and encroachment there.

Just as another Trek connections, we have Jeff Corey who plays Plasus later interact with Darby.


He doesn't really get his just deserts in The Cloud Minders, so instead, for your edification, Kim Darby (who played Miri) will show you what that might look like, plus you can see her in another role for comparison.


I'm sure a more modern remake of this episode would have a greater tendency toward a Lord of the Flies scenario for the kids, and maybe more dangerous games than hide and seek between the kids and the landing party. Modern stuff tends more toward dystopian societies than the more utopian ideal that Roddenberry was suggesting with Trek.

Never a favorite episode of mine as a kid, and certain elements of stupidity still stand out, but other than that, the story grew on me, and I like it more now - particularly some of the scenes, like McCoy taking the medicine that could be a beaker full of death. Always nice to get some deeper insight in the McCoy character.

I gave this episode only a 3 out of 10 before since it was filled with non-sense and improbable things, but with new special effects, and looking harder at the characters and less at the science, I'll revise that to a 4 out of 10. I'm just never thrilled to see this episode again, despite some great humor in it as a source of parody.