Episodes you love until.....

There's just no way Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless would allow them to get away unscathed after humiliating him like that.

 

Sure, but I bet - like (impliedly) Scalos - the Platonians' planet was the subject of a Starfleet quarantine order after the Enterprise left. In fact, it makes you wonder how the Platonians got future supplies, etc.

 

Yup. Very Star Trekky. Mercy over vengeance. One can only be merciful if in the position to be vengeful. I know they're inconsistent with it, but to me it is the essential is-ness of original Trek. Moreso than space "babes" and fistfights as some have posited. Kirk and the Gorn. Understanding the Horta. Even making peace with the Kelvans.

It's like Star Trek's version of the Twilight Zone ending. Mercy, forebearance, grace. From a different era obviously.

 

The Platonians still had their powers. But they no longer had a slave to ridicule and torture and fetch them their drinks.
Still they could have fetched their drinks/ got food presumably by using their powers. Tey didn't need to bully Alexander - they just wanted to. Ughh.
Stay way from that planet everyone.
Against popular opinion I love this episode from beginning to end.

 

Was it ever made clear how far the Platonians powers could reach?

One day he would return with his giant mechanical spider.

 

Parmen caused a storm to manifest around the Enterprise and was able to prevent the ship from escaping the planet

 

That's orbit, a few thousand miles. If Starfleet quarantined the star system (traffic advisory) could the Platonians reach into interstellar space?

 

The Changeling...up until Spock mind melds with Nomad. Maybe if there was an organic component to the hybrid probe I could but it. After that you get the tired "Kirk defeats computer with logic" trope, and things get capped off with a "Uhura is all better" line of dialogue at the end. Still a good episode up till then though.

 

100% agree on Changeling. First half is top-notch and then as soon as they have it under control and believing that Kirk is the creator they just simply do stupid things until they almost get destroyed along with the Earth. And then we have the nonsensical Kirk double-talk computer nonsense

 

The one thing that always bothered me even at the start of TOS S2 - "The Changeling" is that during the attacks on the ship Spock states their shields deflected energy equivalent to 90 photon torpedoes. Then when Kirk fires a photon torpedo in response and Spock says, "No effect. Target absorbed full energy of our torpedo", Kirk is incredulous, claiming there must be damage to Spock's instruments, and asking, "What could absorb that much energy and survive?"

And what's worse when considering Kirk's response, The 1701 Shields repulsed four such attacks, meaning the ship with stood the equivalent of 360 photon torpedoes.

 

Yes. That is a near-total dialogue fail. The only thing I can make of it is that deflected, which the Enterprise did, is different than absorbed, which Nomad did.

 

Sadly, the dialogue fails there as well:

SPOCK: Temporarily, Captain. Our shields absorbed energy equivalent to ninety of our photon torpedoes.
...
SPOCK: No effect. Target absorbed full energy of our torpedo.​

 

Ah. Right. I didn't have the ability to check but I thought that indeed happened. Lame.

 

When it got past the writer and past the producers, the actors should have said something when they studied the script. Shatner and Nimoy had a lot of access and at least some influence when they wanted to use it. It's strange that nobody in the production called out this gaff.

 

Big deal. If Spock had used the word "deflected" rather than "absorbed" it would have been fine.
The real nonsense was that two probes one for sterilization and one for exploration could merge and become such a powerful entity contained within a tiny little package like that. That's far more of a gaff in the wording of how much energy the two adversaries absorbed in their brief battle.
Technical errors don't annoy me as much as logic errors by the characters. Nomad had destroyed billions-- entire solar systems and had planned on heading towards Earth and instead of finding a way to trick Nomad back into the transporter and disassembling it for good they instead waste time trying to find out its origin. Please. In fact they probably should have instead of beaming it onto the transporter pad they should have just beamed its atoms into space the same way they did with the red Jack entity and been done with the whole incident.

 

I assume that Nomad contained failsafe technology to prevent such transporter actions, possibly he could control his own energy/matter stream, so holding him in stasis or trying to disperse him would fail.

 

Precisely what the last 4 posts have been talking about.

The episode plays the "alien technology" card in order to account for the technological discrepancies. In addition, Spock does state that the alien machine was "a probe of great power" and that "somehow they merged, repaired each other, became one."
This narrative shorthand is deliberately vague and could be argued to be a bit lazy, but is not self contradictory in the same way as the gaff with the photon torpedoes.

As demonstrated several times in the episode, the Enterprise crew were powerless to affect Nomad - it outclassed their technology in every way!
Their only hope was to find out more about their opponent, in the hope that some weakness could be revealed.
Which ultimately, it was.

 

Also note that Nomad was used to area effect bolts...a bit more than the Romulan plasma weapon. Nomad might have focused his wife blast more narrowly. Enterprises shields got better from lessons learned from Balance Of Terror.

The bolts were likely what was used to sterilize planetary surfaces.

Remember, Enterprise survived Romulan weapons that shattered nickel/iron asteroids too.

It is all about concentration.

Hurricanes are the most powerful storms on Earth—tornadoes are the most violent.
A home can survive the hurricane easier though.

Then too, dense floodwaters moving a few miles per hour can shift homes off foundation—winds are less dense fluids, so need higher speeds...that kind of thing

 

With respect to "Balance Of Terror", The only reason the Enterprise survived the plasma bolt fired at it was because it warped away at the instant the boat was fired and managed to get nearly out of range as the weapon had a range limit.

Of course in later episodes with the Romulans, the 1701 is shown surviving multiple plasma bolt hits, so as per usual Star Trek is inconsistent here too.

 

It's easy to conflate the two. I thought my novella fit the parameter of the thread subject line but that may not have been the case.