Bright spots in dreary episodes

I’ll sit through Requiem for Methuselah just to get to “Forget”, and whenever I get to that line I invariably think “Wait, maybe this is a really brilliant episode and I’m missing something” so I’ll watch it again a few years later and it will bore me silly again until “Forget”. It’s like Spock is telling us to forget the episode is so boring and just remember that last line.

 

It’s like Bob Justman said about the 3rd season budget being so low that they were producing radio shows with lots of talk and very little action.

 

McCoy: "A child could do it!"
Yeah it's a dumb episode, but that's a cool moment and Kelley plays it just right.

 

"Requiem" has some real bright spots. The fembot-as-companion is an intriguing Twilight Zone concept ("The Lonely"), then there's Kirk inspecting the 3-footer as if it's the real Enterprise, which was mind-blowing for a model-building boy like myself at the time, and when Kirk confronts Rayna in the lab, there's a gorgeous medley of love themes from "Elaan of Troyius" and "The Empath." The music alone would make the episode for me.

I also enjoy McCoy's soliloquy to Spock about "the things love will drive a man to." I think it stands alongside his "Balance of Terror" speech ("In this galaxy...") as one of the best things ever written for McCoy. Honestly, the "forget" business is nice, but far from my favorite thing in the episode.

 

Agree with Zap. I don't find Requiem to be a "dreary" episode at all. It and AOY make a nice duology of episodes featuring the K/S/M trio down on the planet with very little else - naturally, the interior of the Enterprise is not shown in AOY at all. I'm not saying that I would have wanted the entire series to be like that, far from it, but these two episodes are nice acknowledgments of the K/S/M relationship and arguably two of the better McCoy eps in the series (even if the "I feel sorrier for you than I do for Jim" line is highly unfortunate).

 

If I recall correctly some of the early materials for the episode suggested he was a cadet on the planet.

EDIT: I checked the paperwork.

In the original 1966-04-16 story outline the idea was this...

Twenty five years ago, when Capt. James Kirk was a [10 year old] boy, his father - who headed up a research expedition on a planet colony,[sic] - was captured and executed by a group of revolutionaries led by a man named KODOS.​

But in memos the staff didn't want to make Kirk's backstory so dark, so suggested it be changed. By the time of the Yellow cover script (first one distributed to the crew and cast), in rev. 9/13/66, there's the following dialog from scene 20, which was trimmed from the final episode.

KIRK​

I’m deeply sorry, Martha.

MARTA​

It was different for you, Jim.
A young midshipman, no family
there…

KIRK​

I know. Tom’s parents were
there, two brothers…

MARTHA​

Twenty years and he still had
nightmares - I'd wake him and he'd
tell me he still heard the screams
of the innocent.

​

The latter is detailed on the Orion Press page about the episode (link).

He predicted the animated series.

 

Continuing my re-watch of the series, viewing them in backwards order. Gosh, it's a chore to get through some of these third-season episodes.

Last night was "The Mark of Gideon." As boring & cost-cutting as that episode was, I really liked Kirk's dialogue when the Gideon chamber was demanding he stay with them:

"No sir, not me. ... I do not offer my life for this purpose. I have many plans, and I have hopes other than death for Odona."

And Shatner delivered those lines well, too.

 

The eerie shots of the overpopulated mob outside the windows are genuinely spooky--and stayed with me, even if the whole fake Enterprise gimmick doesn't really hold up to analysis.

 

And many episodes of TNG.

I remember reading a thread years ago on this episode, and one of the posters suggested that they didn't build a physical duplicate of the Enterprise, but instead the whole thing was a type of holodeck. Which to me make much more sense.

My theory is that George and James were identical twins, the result of a single pregnancy. With George being born minutes before James.

And never letting James forget it.

 

How long has James Kirk been dying his grey hair?

 

Maybe the state didn't have the power to force birth control on the populace, so they were going to secretly infect that same populace?

 

Birth control wouldn't really address the instant situation with what the Gideons viewed as the needed speed. I gathered that they found themselves in the predicament after generations of no birth control.

P.S., I love that "many plans" line too.

 

Not the show's best episode, but it's definitely not worthy as "all-time series' nadir" either. Fontana's original teleplay did get mangled up - but various plot themes are still there. And I still prefer Season 3 Chekov being serious instead of a campy throwaway that his season 2 persona was. (In the future, people might look back and do self-mockery, but it'd be no different than you or I saying we ienwented invented the hippie culture when we weren't there or even part of it.)

Isn't it true that Charles Napier wrote those songs? The biggie in the rec room remains robust to this day. Loved the fan remix but the lyrics hold up really well... "man found out what he had to do... found he had to eat, found he had to drink, and a long time later he found he had to think." (Use "he" as an all-encompassing gender term, for the whole of the song, the net meaning really does not change for any human, surely?) I'd dare say the lyrics' meanings may have been lost since then, but it's neither here nor there. Very poetic and pretty much first rate FOR a song, IMHO.


(not in HD audio, sadly...)

 

Not be turn this political, but, sadly, there's a lot of that kind of thinking in the USA today.

 

George Samuel Kirk is so obviously much older than Jim!!! His hair is similar to Kirk's in The Deadly Years. Grey and slicked back so I'd say he's at least a decade or so older!
JB

 

The family resemblance was striking!

 

Just finished "Whom Gods Destroy." As schlocky and ham-fisted as that episode is -- some scenes that should be scary are instead laughable -- I was genuinely moved by Garth & Kirk's exchange at the end, after Garth has been given the medicine:

GARTH: Should I know you, sir?
KIRK: No, captain. No.

 

Agreed; that was excellent.