Oh Boy "This Side of Paradise" Had Funny Insults

I'm sorry but I was always cracking up laughing when Shatner hammed it up and started exclaiming at Spock: "You're an overgrown jackrabbit! You're elves with hyperactive thyroids! Your father was a computer and your mother was an encyclopedia, rotten to the core like the rest of your subhuman race! A Vulcan never lived who had an ounce of integrity! And you have the GALL to make love to that woman.....does she know what she's getting, Spock? A carcass full of memory banks who should be squatting on a mushroom??? Right next to the dog-faced boy!"

Or its second-funniest insults, between McCoy and Sandoval:

McCoy: What do you mean? I'm a doctor.
Sandoval: Not anymore, we don't need you as a doctor.
McCoy: Oh really?....Would you like to see how fast I can put you in the hospital?
Sandoval: I'm the leader of this colony and I will asssign you to whatever work I find suitable!
McCoy: Then you'd better make me a MECHANIC, so I can fix little tin gods like you!

Anyone else have a lot of laughing fits over it?

 

McCoy : That didn’t sound like Spock at all, Jim.
Kirk : No. I thought you said you might like him if he mellowed a little.
McCoy : I didn’t say that.
Kirk : You said that.
McCoy : Not exactly.

 

What made the scene so funny were the astonished looks on Kirk & McCoy's faces when they saw Spock laughing and playing around on a tree.

 

Spock : There’ll be no evacuation Jim, but perhaps we should go back and get you straightened out.

 

And Spock somehow made that statement seem oddly logical, in spite of the spore influence. Kirk did seem like kind of a party pooper with his hard-ass speech at the end: "We're meant to march to the beat of drums, to claw and struggle every inch of the way!" Something to that effect.

 

We once used those exchanges as Mad Libs. The one I remember we came up with was "Your father was a uvula, and your mother coughed up pterodactyls!"

 

For some reason, this exchange always made me laugh.

ELIAS: We've had no deaths here.
KIRK: What about your animals?
ELIAS: We're vegetarians.
KIRK: That doesn't answer my question, sir. Why did all your animals die?
ELIAS: Captain, you stress very unimportant matters.

 

I don't know about anything else, but Spock upside down, hanging from a tree insulted my intelligence more than anything.
Apart from Kirk's tirade to Spock, I hate this episode

 

Not my favorite episode either. Too much talk and not enough action. Blah, blah, blah....

 

I thought it was a great episode! Not when I was a youngster and the like but nowadays, I think it's what we all need! A few months on Omicron instead of a holiday!!! The spores weren't hostile and planning an invasion, they were just mellowing everyone out a tad!
JB

 

It's funny, back in the early '90s I was one of those tie-dyed Deadheads who followed the Grateful Dead all around the western US, while taking these tiny gel-caps of pure, lab-quality LSD-25. So I was in such mentally swirling, colorful, tripped-out acid bliss listening to the Dead's live, 340-speaker sound system, it was a little like being on the spores. I could certainly see the LSD parallel.

Interestingly, the Grateful Dead had some cultural commonalities with Star Trek: both formed in 1965 heavily influenced by the anti-war movement, and both had a cult following of millions of devoted fans who followed it for decades.

 

Not only that, but the spores regrew missing organs and conferred perfect health upon the user! Who of us couldn't benefit from a wild weekend there?

 

This is one of Kirk's worst command decisions to fight the spores! Imagine every one being happy, sitting under a tree and laughing together!!! Even the Federation's enemies like the Klingons and the Romulans!!! No fighting, no orders, just peace and contentment living on farms throughout the entire cosmos! Sounds like what humanity has always wanted and yet Kirk goes and destroys that dream!
JB

 

They tried to jump over the moon but forgot that reentry into the atmosphere without heat shielding isn't a good thing... or they thought they were Doctor Who (or the post-2005 variant where the Doctor falls down from the atmosphere and stands up to say something stupid immediately.)

Insert songs from Strawberry Alarm Clock other than "Incense and Peppermints" here since everyone knows that one... Like this one:



Those were the days...

 

Spores
Nice bit of Incredible String Band
And off we go

 

There are some interesting messages in the story, seeing the crew vamoose and mutiny to appease the magical mystery spores was rather nicely done, the exploration of Spock and his repression of emotion is very interesting (though I wonder if explored later in the season or season 2 would have made it even stronger), and some resolutions aren't exactly subtle... Though if the goal was to shake off the effects of the pufnstuffin' spores by riling emotion (which kills the spores), Kirk certainly found a way to do it.

 

But the spores weren't malevolent in any way and gave their hosts complete protection from Berthold rays!!! Plus you could regain that appendix or pair of tonsils you've been missing for years apart from the other issues like scarring on your lungs or maybe even a cure for cancer?
JB

 

But the crew of the Enterprise were apparently willing to leave the magnificent starship to eventually crash - possibly on top of their settlement.

So who would have defeated Nomad, "the Doomsday Machine", the giant space Amoeba, the space vampire cloud - and those are just menaces from the second season - to save billions of lives each time? it seems to me that deserting the Enterprise could be considered treason and mass murder.

Furthermore, life was far more comfortable aboard a climate controlled starship than on the surface of a planet with yucky weather. And they would have to farm to keep themselves alive which would be a lot of hard work.

And it would also be boring down on the planet.

Omicron Ceti III is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. So maybe Omicron Ceti III might become a vacation world, heath resort, and medical center where people could be cured while relaxing. And when someone is beamed up to a starship a bio filter would remove the spores from their system, or they would be briefly touched by an agonizer to create strong emotion to destroy the spores within.

And maybe retirement communities would be established on Omicron Ceti III. It is even possible that Scotty was going to retire on Norpin because that planet also had the spores.

And maybe it might be a good idea to seed the spores on Qo'noS, Romulus, Cardassia Prime, etc., though there would be considerable danger of them spreading to federation planets.

 

Man, I thought I was a party pooper!

 

I've been saying this for years.