WTF moments in TOS & TAS....

I think GO 24 is almost what Kirk had to do with Deneva. It's a little strange that they didn't mention the order number but then they quoted the wrong number in Turnabout Intruder, so maybe they erred on the side of caution. Those scripts were probably written at the same time.

I can't stop watching it, it's hypnotizing.

All hail the HypnoGorn!

 

That's basically what happened. The Eminians broadcast code seven ten in the teaser, which meant to approach the planet under no circumstances whatsoever. Kirk said that disregarding the code could provoke interplanetary war, so they knew full well going in that they were in a potentially dangerous situation. Fox ordered them in, because the Federation needed a port in that area.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Code_710

 

Aw. I always liked that, because it depicted the sudden thrusting together of two species with evolutionary adaptations to different environments.

 

I always loved TOS because of its stories despite the lack of technological progress in the 60ies. It was slower kind of storytelling. Most of the modern shows today are to swift and action loaded. TOS had the charme to surprise me sometimes.

 

Me,too. I thought it was brilliant. I hate when they make everything fast and unrealistically weightless now a days (get of my lawn!), I blame too much CG for that.

 

That's the "Poor communication kills" trope in action. If the Eminians explained WHY ships should stay away (y'all will get killed), WTH would any ever approach?

 

Yeah, except the Gorn is moving so slowly his "hits" would be like pushes. Force of impact is mass and velocity derived. For this "attack" to be believable he has to be grabbing, not trying to hit Kirk.

 

Smaller WTF moment but still makes me roll my eyes every time: Kirk doesn't even try to follow the rules in the final battle on Triskellion. Your entire ship is in danger dude!!! Don't count on the refs to not throw a flag in the last two minutes!

 

In TOS terms, the question is, why wouldn't they go in to fix things, given that the area is a hazard?

Fox and the Federation are hellbent to get the spaceport treaty MacGuffin. The premise is that the Federation's needs outweigh whatever little squabble or other issue might be going on locally, and the Enterprise is more than capable of dealing with whatever is going on there. Benevolent gunboat diplomacy is a cornerstone of TOS situations. "Oh they're warring in that little star cluster" isn't a reason to stay out in TOS like it might be in TNG.

I think "Armageddon" is lifting a bit (or more than a bit) from The Day the Earth Stood Still. The space cruisers in Day keep interstellar peace by threatening to annihilate any planet that might project war into space. That "crime" is exactly what is being committed in "Armageddon" in star cluster NGC 321, and Kirk played the "we'll annihilate you if you don't stop fighting" card. The Enterprise again (hi, Harlan Ellison!) are like the cops going into a crime-ridden neighborhood to straighten everything out, so that the city's delivery trucks and buses don't disappear if they happen to break down nearby. Kirk isn't going in to take over, so much as to fix things.

The Gorn isn't making a fist, and he's leading with the palm. It could easily be a grab attempt.

 

I don't think the Gorn costume could make a fist.

Back to Eminiar, if it and Vendikar are in the same system there's no reason any ship should need to go through it except to force contact on civilizations that don't want want it. Why? Here's a fun factoid about how big space is. If you have a 4K monitor and put a single pixel on the far left and imagine that pixel is the size of Pluto's orbit (about 80 AU, or 1 V'ger cloud), the nearest star, Proxima, would be ~3,278 pixels away, or way over on the other side of the screen. Alpha Centauri A & B would be ~3,316 pixels away, both fitting inside the same pixel with room to spare (being only about 11AU apart). Barnard's Star would not even appear because it's in a different direction at a distance of ~4,596 pixels. Assuming each star had a system of planets and objects roughly the size of ours out to the Kuiper belt, that's a whopping 3 pixels out of 8,294,400. Make that a cubical volume and the number of cubical pixels is 68,797,071,360,000 (68.8 trillion).

Now fly starships through that at random trajectories and see how likely it would be you'd get anywhere near any of those. Not only is the chance or need to go through any single pixel beyond unlikely, the threat within such a pixel is even more astronomically tiny, given Eminiar VI can't even hit the Enterprise when it orbits "out to maximum phaser range". Even assuming this is like 30 light seconds (which would be no orbit at all, being 23x as far as the Moon) the Eminian weapons can't even reach 1/1,364th of a pixel.

In short, they are no threat to anyone except people stupid enough to deliberately park right on top of them and say "shoot me".

As I said, it's a preposterous scenario as written.

 

"The Mark of Gideon". We're experiencing an extreme overpopulation crisis, so we're going to build a 1:1 replica USS Enterprise on the surface of our planet in the hopes that Kirk will pass along a disease to the single member of our species we're gonna trap with him.

 

Oh, absolutely, there are a great many scale issues in TOS. Noteworthy examples include "Where No Man..." and "Balance of Terror," when interstellar travel is posited to occur in a timely fashion at sublight.

But that's a completely different issue from the communications issue discussed earlier. Just because I'm going to defend that, it doesn't mean I'm going to defend this, even though scale issues are a common problem in TOS.

While not defending it, I do have to point out that it's actually not a question of how close to the star cluster ships go on their regular routes, but—as implied by the episode itself—whether occasionally ships get so crippled, by ion storms or whatever, that they can't make it to any other port in time before life support fails and everybody aboard dies anyway. [ed - It's implied by the episode, because Fox says the thousands of lives lost in the area in the past 20 years could have been saved if the Federation had had a port in the area ("quadrant").]

There weren't a huge number of deaths in the star cluster over the years compared to the Federation's population, just thousands of deaths as Kirk [ed - sorry, actually Fox, in the teaser] said, but perhaps, for example with war in the offing with the Klingons, planners foresaw that many more ships might need to pass through the general area really soon, increasing the chances that mission critical ships might need to make emergency repairs in the cluster because they can't make any other base in time. Or maybe the Federation wanted things in the area settled, lest it become contested.

That's the general idea, anyway, without reference to any particulars, such as a specific hard sci-fi star chart.

 

From TOS S2 - "The Trouble With Tribbles":
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/42.htm

^^^
"Bisexual" would imply TWO sexes - He (well the script Writer David Gerrold) should have said: "Asexual"...(Unless DeForest Kelly mis-spoke the line and no one caught it. )

 

It was certainly the incorrect term, but perhaps it was intended to mean that each tribble has both sets of sexual organs, allowing it to reproduce without mating?

 

IIRC Gerrold himself addressed this error in his book on the subject of his Flat Cats episode.

 

My last post of this subject (yeah, unless someone posts something too juicy to resist).

Facts: Thousands of lives lost over 20 years is not explained. A treaty port (i.e. military/police base?) will solve whatever the problem is in this region of space.

Supposition: Putting a port on a planet is like planting the flag = belongs to us. It doesn't sound like the problem is due to natural phenomena. Maybe the problem is with piracy? Maybe due a brewing conflict with another race? Both? Why the sudden need for urgency and damn their petty problems? It sounds like their system was about to be in a space grab with another race, probably the Klingons since the Federation is at war with them 3 episodes later (Errand of Mercy). Fox could not reveal the Klingon problem because it was still classified on how bad Federation-Klingon relations truly are (on the verge of breaking down) or what tactics the Federation are currently using to squeeze the Klingons (deny them the use of Class M planets as bases in the disputed area).

More Facts: opening Dialog from Errand of Mercy:

SPOCK: Captain, we've reached the designated position for scanning the coded directive tape.
KIRK: Good. (puts it into a decoder) We both guessed right. Negotiations with the Klingon Empire are on the verge of breaking down. Starfleet Command anticipates a surprise attack. We are to proceed to Organia and take whatever steps are necessary to prevent the Klingons from using it as a base.
SPOCK: Strategically sound. Organia is the only Class M planet in the disputed area, ideally located for use by either side.
...
UHURA: Automatic all-points relay from Starfleet Command, Captain, code one.
KIRK: Well, there it is. War. We didn't want it, but we've got it.
SPOCK: Curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.
KIRK: War or not, we've still got a job to do. Denying Organia to the Klingons.​

More Supposition: The coded directive (read Classified Information) shows that negotiations with Klingons are breaking down and war in imminent. Even Kirk and Spock were kept in the dark up to this point; he says, "We both guessed right" and Spock's first time look at the tactics, "Strategically sound..." This is information that was still classified during the Eminiar Seven mission. Now current orders: go to Organia and take whatever steps (Kirk has pretty reaching powers, again like with Eminiar Seven and Vendikar) to prevent it's use as a base to the Klingons. Organia is the only Class M planet in the disputed area. Good thing our heroes wrapped up the other two Class M planets in the disputed area, namely Eminiar Seven and Vendikar.

 

That was one of Spock's best moments. He shows his dignity, control, detachment. He shows what a Vulcan is.

 

At the end of "Turnabout Intruder" where Kirk asked Coleman to look after Lester.
Coleman was as guilty as Lester.
Does that mean prisons are mixed gender in the future?

 

Yes, and another issue with "Turnabout" is that Kirk would have a lot of explaining to do until Starfleet decided to buy into his seemingly-preposterous story about Janice Lester controlling his body. How much evidence is there, really? Does the ghostly, still-image body-switching effect show up on surveillance video? I doubt it. I think we were seeing it from the omniscient perspective, the one that can hear the music score.

If Lester and Coleman decided to lie their asses off and deny everything, Kirk would be holding the bag for ordering an execution, with only Spock's word about the mind-meld, and hearsay from McCoy and Scotty to back him up. And if Lester set the Camus II machine to self-destruct on a timer, there might be no hard evidence whatsoever.