Production Order Group Viewing 2018

I think that's exactly what that means. We are to take it that for its entire existence to that point, Starfleet never had female bridge officers up until just recently before this episode took place so that the presence of Colt, Number One, and the other lady on the bridge are still new to Pike.

 

PIKE: Sorry, Number One. With little information on this planet, we'll have to leave the ship's most experienced officer here covering us.

Number One, the most experienced officer, rose to the rank of first officer without being on the bridge until relatively recently?

 

Well, maybe "new to Pike" is a relative term. Perhaps the line should have been written - with no judgment as to whether it should have been included in the first place - to show that Pike was resurrecting a longstanding grumble he'd expressed on prior occasions.

 

Women on the Bridge: There's another woman on the bridge, besides Number One, sitting near the station where the print-out out of the report about survivors on Talos IV is made. Making Pike's later line, in reference to Colt, about how he can't get used to having a woman on the bridge sound even stranger. The best possible defense I can come up with for it is, they're trying to be progressive just by having women on the bridge. As if, "times are a changin'" and Pike -- a stand-in for a "1950s" man -- has to get used to it.

Likeliest possibility is whoever did the extras casting for that scene just forgot about the dialog.

Transporter Technicians: They have clipboards on the consoles that one of them is writing on, as Pike and his Landing Party are about to beam down to Talos IV. I wonder if it's to make Transporters look like an involved process. It seems that way from how long the beaming takes. But also makes the beaming down seem more dramatic.

Correct. The producers and writers quickly discovered they couldn't continue doing this if they wanted to keep the action moving quickly.

 

I wonder if the paper was some kind of smart paper that digitally transferred data to the computer?

 

I'm the opposite. I grew up with the Star Trek Compendium, which used production order, so that's what's always seemed "right" to me. I believe all the syndicated airings I saw used production order, too.

 

I would have no way to know what order I saw it in. I watched Star Trek in syndication for years prior to TNG premiere. There was a long stretch of where I'd watch 3 episodes every Sunday on 3 channels within a 4 hour window.

I'd wager I've seen some form of Star Trek continually each year for over 40 years.

What was really shocking was discovering there were such things as syndication cuts. I know I saw scenes that were among those cuts. Turns out that the syndication cuts were at the discretion of the local network so they each made different cuts (or I was remembering episodes when they had fewer commercials to begin with).

 

Nimoy was probably joking. "Spock's leg injury story" reads like the log-line of a piece of fan fiction, not like any of the story springboards that Roddenberry and others actually prepared for the series.

 

I'm disappointed now.
It sounded for a moment like GR was really thinking ahead.

Now I go back to thinking it was unnecessarily distracting.

 

Another tall tale. But who lets facts get in the way of a good story? Not the Star Trek staff, apparently.

 

Well, yeah, but with some stuff (by no means all), it's fun to come up with a sensible in-universe explanation.

 

It was the same for me. I watched first watched TOS in syndication in the '90s and it was always Production Order. Even the VHS Tapes of the time were in Production Order. Then in 1998, Sci-Fi started showing episodes in Broadcast Order and, in 1999, the DVDs were released in Broadcast Order. Which always seemed weird.

I get that NBC wanted to air certain episodes in a certain order for certain reasons: i.e. start Season 1 with "The Man Trap" an episode that best fit their idea of TOS out of all the episodes completed at the time, and start Seasons 2 and 3 with big Spock episodes, but for someone watching today, I think Production Order makes more sense, since that's how you can view the natural progression of the series. "The Corbomite Manuever" has the feel of an early episode. Not just in the TOS sense but in the general sense. It has an "early episode of any series" type of vibe. So placing it in the middle seems odd. So does placing "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as the third episode. It belongs before the regular first season. Going from "The Man Trap" to "Charlie X" to WNMHGB is, again, something that feels odd. And not just because of the creative team still getting the hang of the series but, also, because of how different it is being a pilot.

 

For some reason the 1985-88 VHS videocassettes (released in 10 tape installments every three months) appeared in broadcast order, but the boxes were numbered in production order.

 

Oh, agreed in full. In early S1, airdate order makes no sense whatsoever. And imagine what it was like for people watching for the first time during the original run! (Maybe there are some here who can tell us.) No Internet to make sense of it all. Maybe TV Guide or newspapers explained WNMHGB a week in advance courtesy of NBC PR folks.

However, once we leave early S1, the airdate v. proddate difference becomes more nuanced by far, and I'm looking forward to examining it!

That’s right! I remember finding the numbering confusing. Thanks for reminding/clarifying.

 

“The Man Trap” was pretty much the only episode completed at the time. It wasn’t any kind of plan; SFX on episodes shot earlier were more complicated, thus finished later. They ran ‘em basically in the order they were finished. In fact, they were so late, they had to run WNMHGB in the third week, even though they didn’t want to run it that early. But literally nothing else was ready to run, so they did anyway.

 

My Columbia House video cassettes have 2 episodes each, except for 1 that has 3, and there is no order, unless you count random as an order. I got 1 every month for $19 and change back in the 90s.

 

At one point, my local station showed TOS at every night at midnight. Being in high school, my parents would give me shit if I stayed up that late on a school night, so I programmed the VCR to record it every night. That's how I ended up managing to catch every episode.

During the daytime, forget it. They were only showing TNG. Sometimes, they'd swap it out with TOS during the summer, but it wasn't for very long.

 

I remember those days. It was expensive. The complete series would cost $750 at that rate. Using an approximate base year of 1988 and adjusting for inflation, the Columbia House VHS set would cost about $1620 in today's money.

Even worse, Starlog magazine was selling the series on VHS for $14.95 per episode in 1985:
https://archive.org/stream/starlog_magazine-101/101#page/n9/mode/2up

Thus the complete series would cost $1181, which works out to $2794 in today's dollars. Getting the series via Starlog cost almost 51 times more than the complete Bluray set, and that's not counting the postage. When seen in that light, the Bluray box is a jaw-dropping bargain.

 

My station went in production order also, but in chunks that seemed to start at random. I got the Compendium in 1986 (20th anniversary edition) and started to get a handle on the seasons and what I hadn't seen. It seemed like every time I thought I was going to get to catch a "new" episode (always S3), they would change the timeslot and restart the order. I finally saw every episode in early 1988 IIRC. I suppose I could have done it with VHS releases earlier, but the first time I actually watched everything in order was around 1998 when the local station was showing two episodes at 1 or 2 a.m. and I taped them.

The Compendium I had did not have any list of broadcast order, so I looked at the airdates and hand-wrote order numbers on the master list in the back.

 

There were a few other episodes available - “The Man Trap” was NBC’s choice, since it was a planet show, and they wanted to show off the show’s strange new worlds - but, more or less this.