50th Anniversary Rewatch Thread

I like Yarnak's hand gestures. They don't always make sense with what he's saying, but it makes him more alien.

 

Gamesters!

 

He might be thinking of "The Gamesters of Triskelion."

 

The three Arena episodes but what about any of the other shows with the crew fighting and being observed while the season two battle music goes wild about our ears?
JB

 

So the best people to play aliens are bad actors?

 

If we return to dueling over slights and insults, I’ll agree with you.

 

Oh, Gamesters.

 

Going by Carl Sandburg's biography, he was very much for abolition, which after all is what started the war, the South's reaction to the election of an abolitionist... but he didn't see them as equals either. He was against intermarrying. His solution for slavery was to send them all overseas someplace. Sure, now, there's ample evidence of equality, but it was harder to tell when most were restricted from learning.
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There was a meeting between him and freed black Union soldiers, where they overflowed with gratitude, and it really overwhelmed him, bringing tears to his eyes, Sandberg says.

 

C'mon.

 

Soz. I genuinely did not know that you could do that. Or how.

And still don't.

In my defence, I rarely post spoilers, season one is like 6 years old, this happens in the first few episodes, and show seems dreadful.

 

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Lincoln was not an abolitionist as it would be understood in 1860, that is the position that slavery be eradicated in all US territory and the formerly enslaved be made equal in every way to any other citizen. This was too radical for most Americans, North or South, at the time. Certainly too radical for a presidential candidate. Lincoln believed that slavery had been built in to the Constitution and a president could not change that. He and his party were firm, though, in their position that slavery not be extended into any new territory. That was enough for the secessionists.

Lincoln's advocacy of colonization was a sort of middle-ground position, which he later admitted had practical problems. But there was strong and even violent opposition to the idea of free blacks in many northern states, and candidates proposing even incremental and gradual abolition of slavery had to have some idea of what to do with the formerly enslaved people. Full integration and equality was just a non-starter at that time, as awful as it sounds today.

Yes, the war seems to have really changed Lincoln's opinions on race. The more he learned of African-American bravery and sacrifice in the war, the harder he found it to justify any notions of unequal treatment. Though his ideas on race seem quite unenlightened today, they were fairly progressive in his day. Maintaining a coalition to win the war was everything to him, and he was not always able to express publicly what he personally believed. It is clear, though, that he did not "despise" African-Americans. If we want an example of a president that did, we need look no further than Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson. The contrast between him and Lincoln could not be more clear.

 

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I guess you could argue that just as the Lincoln wasn't the real one but the one pictured in Kirk's mind, the Kahless wasn't the true one either but one also coming from the same source. So it's not surprising that he'd be less than flattering. Kahless talent for impersonation could be a common trait attributed by the humans of that time to all Klingons.

 

"Curtain" in the title comes from Roddenberry's original concept and refers to the theater. Here's what he said in his pitch outline (May 9, 1968):

"More than simply amusement, this alien form of theatre is the way in which the inhabitants of this planet get their knowledge, study other forms of life, educate their young, and decide what is usable and what is false in 'alien' philosophies such as represented by the group of 'actors' now on stage. The enormously advanced technology of this planet is a direct result of the increased wisdom of this strange form of theatre gives. What better faster way is there to learn? (Note -- one can actually make a good case that theatre could be the most efficient form of education cultural intercourse possible.)"

Btw, "Yarnek" was "the Playwright" in the initial pitch.

Yes.

 

Slight flaw in the logic there is that if Kirk knew about Kahless the Impressionist, he wouldn't have so easily fallen for the ruse.

This one's an episode of two halves, the first half with the mystery of Floating Space Abe and the Instantly Terraforming Planet starts of somewhat promising, it's not boring, it's got some nice bits of discussion on encountering new life forms and the logic of beaming down in an unknown and possibly trap like conditions, and then in the second half when the mystery is revealed and it turns into a stick throwing fight because some omnipotent rocks want a WWE fight to understand good and evil it falls completely apart.

It's nice how Kirk, Uhura and Lincoln talk about racism as being a thing of the past, but it would have been even nicer if then in the group of baddies the two not-white guys and a woman didn't just automatically follow the One White Guy as their default leader, but I guess a challenge for leadership is not something we could have expected from Kahless the Utterly Forgettable...

Apparently Mark Lenard was supposed to play Lincoln originally but couldn't due to scheduling conflicts.
It would have been even more confusing if he was to play Surak...

 

On a rewatch, I was surprised at how much of the episode takes place with Lincoln on the ship. That part of the episode is quite TNGesque.