I enjoyed that part . . . made it seem more realistic. Honestly, folks - - S3 is not Discovery!!*
*Mudd episode, which was great, excepted
"The Cloud Minders"
- Thread starter Qonundrum
- Start date
I enjoyed that part . . . made it seem more realistic. Honestly, folks - - S3 is not Discovery!!*
*Mudd episode, which was great, excepted
Oh I completely agree, I always thought it was deliberate anyway! I was just trying to identify the earlier poster's point.
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This was the first episode I ever saw. I was four. It made a dramatic impression on me.
I think the sets are beautiful, and the Stratos transporter effect is spectacular.
My favorite moment is Kirk standing up for Vanna's rights when she is being tortured.
I think the sets are beautiful, and the Stratos transporter effect is spectacular.
My favorite moment is Kirk standing up for Vanna's rights when she is being tortured.
Don't read this the wrong way, but I thought the torture rays were cool when I first watched this episode.
I think they are effectively depicted as horrible, perhaps even "safe."
I don't know what to call it. He seemed unwilling or unmotivated to snap into character and invest in the acting. Like maybe he was a bit hungover...
I loved reading your ideas about aliens being involved. Here's my made-up story of how things came to be as they are in the episode:
Ardana has a harsher climate than Earth. Hunter-gatherer tribes live in caves more than primitive humans did. Most of the caves have low levels of zenite gas, as long as the zentie is undisturbed. The discovery of agriculture allows for more people to work on things other than food production and move into homes.
Eventually this leads to something like the Industrial Revolution. As on Earth the place where people developed industry (Guns, Germs, and Steel), came to dominate Ardana’s commerce. The people who lived in other places looked slightly different, and those slight differences were seen as race, even as inferior. They discovered anti-gravity technology and set up a massive project to build a city in the clouds. People seeking investors and government subsidies promoted how it would grow the economy and how that rising tide would lift all boats.
Unfortunately the project increases inequality. Stratos draws a skilled workforce, entrepreneurs, and foreign investment. It creates a lot of wealthy people who fund art and pure science. Stratos takes on a reputation for decadence. Meanwhile, on the planet, demand for agricultural goods decreases because they can buy food and food processor raw materials cheaply from other planets. Their export economy focuses on technology and extracted raw materials like zenite. This reduces the number of non-extration-related jobs, causing more people to be exposed to the gas. People in this situation feel like the success of Statos is built on the backs of the poor, but most of them get enough zenite exposure that it’s hard for them to push for political change. Most of the people working in these jobs have ancestors from the regions that didn’t industrialize first, so they share physical traits that makes them appear to racists as “a conglomerate of inferior species.”
This racism and Droxine’s decadence make Statos-dwellers villains. But I imagine it from the average Stratos residents’ perspective. Most of the people on the surface do some work in the mines and therefore have some mental retardation from the zenite. They’re often angry and illiterate. The Statos residents fund scholarships for qualified people on the surface, some of them focused on the most disadvantaged racial groups. They try not to discriminate against people with obvious Troglyte features or a Troglyte accent. But they don’t want the uneducated Troglyte element living near them. They’re not going to hand over more of their wealth to Troglytes because the Troglytes often squander the monies and resources they receive from relief organizations.
This is why the Stratos-dwellers are indignant when Kirk come barging in with facile solutions. Kirk and Spock say they should all have access to Stratos and opportunities for education and better jobs. “Solve our planet’s biggest social problem?” the Stratos residents think, “Gee why didn’t we think of that. We need Sherlock Holmes here to come tell us we have a problem with segregation and inequality.”
Kirk and Spock are right. They need to make some hard choices of some sort and not just accept their social problems as a fact of life. At time the villains in this show seem like flat racist jerks, but I try to imagine they're just wrong but not evil just to be evil.
Now viewing it as an adult, the whole thing seems incredibly kinky to me. They have her restrained in a skimpy dress with her chest jutting out. Droxine supposedly is supposed to be torn about the ethics of if abusing a prison to get information about a ticking bomb is justified, but it looks to me like she's on the road to being Parmen's wife from Plato's Stephchildren. Passers-by take note, and the extras don't give an indication as to the nature of their interest.
Kirk does the right thing and demands they stop the torture. Vanna slumps forward, maybe partially conscious after from the torure, still bound with hands behind her chest out. When we next see her she's a in a jail cell wearing an even more revealing outfit, something that would be hard to walk in without underwear showing. Maybe the guards treated her with respect, except for the torture, when they moved her to the cell. I don't know. But the whole thing seemed like the show producers taking every opportunity to put in as much kinkiness as they can get away with.
After writing this much, I cannot claim to be above it, but I think it takes away from the story. But I'm not sure I would want the kinkiness removed and put in some other genre of film that leaves less to the imagination. It's kind of cool that I watched them as a child and then see something completely different as an adult.
There's nothing kinky about torture.
Or guns. Both still feature prominently in kinkiness. Among, oh, all the other things in this universe, and then some.
My scenario for Stratos, Ardana, Troglytes and zenite: once upon a time, a bunch of colonists from Earth or other centerworld of humanlike folks settled on this planet, which was fine for farming and catered nicely for a colony. The place thrived and became nicely industrialized and all. And then it started mining zenite, which was key to advanced antigravity technologies; the opulent zenite barons built floating villas to flaunt their riches.
But then there was this botanical plague thing, and pretty much everything on the entire planet died - except for a region around the big mine, which was leaking zenite gas like mad and thus poisoned the plague. The rich fled to their floating houses, eventually converging into a single massive installation above the surviving patch of land. The poor stayed, and farmed what they could, both for direct sustenance and for the sustenance of the high and mighty, as income from mining work wouldn't yet keep them afloat, figuratively let alone literally.
That zenite stopped botanical plagues was a nice side effect that brought extra profit to the Stratosians. But they wanted to carefully regulate their production, in the fashion of oil barons, both to keep prices high and to maintain a monopoly on floating cities. Which meant the substance was seldom sold out in the unprocessed form that didn't provide floating but did stop plagues, and thus those facing botanical plight had to come to the source. But that was pretty much the only time they did, so Stratos wasn't at the focus of public attention much.
Then came Kirk. Just like many (although not too many) before him. And then he left. And the Stratosians and the Troglytes went on with their lives, even though now a slightly higher percentage of the latter was able to attain proper education and get higher-paying jobs.
Timo Saloniemi
My scenario for Stratos, Ardana, Troglytes and zenite: once upon a time, a bunch of colonists from Earth or other centerworld of humanlike folks settled on this planet, which was fine for farming and catered nicely for a colony. The place thrived and became nicely industrialized and all. And then it started mining zenite, which was key to advanced antigravity technologies; the opulent zenite barons built floating villas to flaunt their riches.
But then there was this botanical plague thing, and pretty much everything on the entire planet died - except for a region around the big mine, which was leaking zenite gas like mad and thus poisoned the plague. The rich fled to their floating houses, eventually converging into a single massive installation above the surviving patch of land. The poor stayed, and farmed what they could, both for direct sustenance and for the sustenance of the high and mighty, as income from mining work wouldn't yet keep them afloat, figuratively let alone literally.
That zenite stopped botanical plagues was a nice side effect that brought extra profit to the Stratosians. But they wanted to carefully regulate their production, in the fashion of oil barons, both to keep prices high and to maintain a monopoly on floating cities. Which meant the substance was seldom sold out in the unprocessed form that didn't provide floating but did stop plagues, and thus those facing botanical plight had to come to the source. But that was pretty much the only time they did, so Stratos wasn't at the focus of public attention much.
Then came Kirk. Just like many (although not too many) before him. And then he left. And the Stratosians and the Troglytes went on with their lives, even though now a slightly higher percentage of the latter was able to attain proper education and get higher-paying jobs.
Timo Saloniemi
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