The Omega Glory...

Oh, I agree that this could be done. It's just that relocating the patients is at odds with quarantine: even site-to-site transporting seems to involve a pit stop at the starship platform, as in "Cloud Minders". Even worse if the "they can't be everywhere" assumption fails and the patients need to be rapidly re-relocated!

But why would shipboard quarantine fail? Even if site-to-siteing to the ship's standard quarantine booth won't work, the transporter room itself can be declared a quarantine booth for as long as it takes to sterilize the place. And this shouldn't be all that time-consuming: we have seen how the crew's utterly lethal sidearms can be fired harmlessly against the ship's inner walls...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Which does not seem to be the case in A Piece Of The Action where a mob boss is beamed to another location whilst in the middle of a phone call - he's still holding his hands in the exact same position!

Kirk also asks to be beamed directly from the Rocket Base to Gary Seven's office at one point. In fairness there's no indication of if that involved a pit stop on the Transporter platform or not, but Kirk did specify "directly" so that has to count for something...

 

Many people seem to freeze during their first transporter experience...

...Including Plasus who made the pit stop, even though Scotty reported seeing him do a face anyway!

We see one pit stop; does the other go unseen because the camera looks the wrong way? Or are the processes distinct? DSC gives us more site-to-site that still leaves this bit ambiguous. All it tells us, again, is that it's not possible for the victim to step out during the putative stopover.

Timo Saloniemi

 

What do you think the first symptoms of the disease are? Dehydration? Do you think you suffer from terrible dehydration, before a final evaporation/transformation? It doesn't seem believeable if you crystalise gradually, and the Exeter's doctor appears to collapse before the final transformation/death... Thoughts?

 

You convert to crystal from the inside out. Once you're dead, you dehydrate until all tissue that can't/doesn't convert to crystal crumbles to dust.

 

So where does the water go? To the mycelial network, to be lapped up by water bears?

Timo Saloniemi

 

So your alive as your organs are crystallising? Sounds horrific! :O

 

It is, which is why seeing the end result in the teaser of "The Omega Glory"--and how audiences were led to imagine its process--is one of the most straight-up horror/mystery scenes in the franchise. 100% successful opening.

 

I completely agree! Sometimes simplicity works best. In fact, I tended to skip the opening, and watch straight from the planetside stuff when I was younger, as the whole imagery gave me the creeps!

 

Indeed. And it explains why the doctor cried out the way he did before he fell out of view. He could feel it happening, and was terrified, knowing what would soon come.

Yes, that opening was most effective.

 

Me too. I recall, though, being confused when McCoy told Kirk that the crew didn't leave but rather the disease had transformed their bodies into the white crystals, and this was treated as shocking. I thought that was obvious. Did Kirk think the crew had left after pouring white crystals into empty uniforms?

 

That has always been my reaction to McCoy's line. It must have made some kind of sense on paper, but as staged, not so much.

 

Without Dr.Carter's message the crew of the Enterprise might have been next!!! Seems odd that Kirk and his team had no idea where the crew may have gone to when we, the viewers knew but then again maybe it was done that way so that we knew 100% what was going on, some fans out there might have been a little slow on the uptake!
JB

 

Portrayed as an excellent doctor, McCoy's first thought should have been, "Oh Oh, we're in trouble" at first sight on the uniforms with white crystals in them. I guess he also was lulled into group think that since the medical tricorder sensors did not detect the pathogen, there was no commutable danger. Only with the warning from the taped message did it become known that they too were infected.

 

I understand, but watching a tv show requires suspension of disbelief that the characters themselves don't or can't have, so it's much easier to make such leaps for the viewer than the characters in the situation.

So if they found dead crewmen with two puncture marks in their necks and no blood in their bodies we can yell "Vampires!" while the characters really can't because there is no such thing as vampires. They saw the empty uniforms but to make the leap that all that was left of the crew was too much of a stretch without evidence to support that conclusion.

The best correlation I can think if is when Spock was reluctant to say the silicon nodules were Horta eggs even though he suspected right away. Bones even mocked his conclusion as impossible and a fantasy. But who didn't think Spock was 100% correct as soon as he mentioned it?

 

Also, why suspect a medical problem? Perhaps a bunch of aliens beamed aboard and fired their zapp guns, pulverizing the crew, then left. There isn't much point in jumping to conclusions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I don't remember the finished version too well, but IIRC in the 2nd pilot version of the script it's more clear that the Kohm town is the last one as the "savages" have taken over all the lands around them. I'll try to pull it out again and check...if for no other reason than to enjoy Roddenberry's totally weird alternate version of Spock.

 

I'd love to hear more about that!

I was aware that this was in the running as Pilot#2 but a different interpretation of Spock is completely new to me.

 

You've perhaps heard stories about early Spock absorbing energy through a plate in his stomach? Well...not quite but close! His dialog about it...riot!

 

Oh, that whacky Roddenberry!

How many breasts does he have?