Commodore Decker

"The Doomsday Machine" was always one of my favorite Episodes.

I remember being told that Commodore's in the Navy didn't like being confused with Commanders
who were two steps in rank below them. Apparently the abbreviations for both ranks were very similar
and it was a common occurrence.

Scott Kellogg

 

I´m not sure about the ins and outs of Decker being a Commodore, or why he´s a Commodore
But every time I see this Episode I can´t help but think what a complete dick the character is
Not happy with losing his crew and having his own ship disabled, old Deck decides, "Fuck this, I´m going to get Enterprise destroyed as well"
He´s a complete cock.

 

He's supposed to be an example of what can go wrong with an excellent Starship commander, under the worst possible circumstances.

I always assumed that Decker was a fine officer, before running into the planet killer.

 

I don't know, we enlisted can be snarky no matter what, For example COMMODORE - OR = COMMODE.

 

Sorry to snark. Also, I failed to make my point well. In case I wasn't clear, I meant that using grade concepts to describe officer ranks is incongruous, and adding the parenthetical is awkward. Just IMO of course. Maybe when I make Rear Admiral on this site some year I'll change my title to a guaranteed-to-amuse joke involving the lower half. Of something.

 

Perhaps in written form it is more awkward. I think in address and day to day practice, i.e. insignia, it is less so. A person in the service can read insignia far better than I and there is no real awkwardness. Which I think was what became the point of contention for "Commodores" historically (note: not the band). "Admiral" was seen as garnering more respect than commodore so there was the interest to demonstrate that rather than what it appeared on text.

That's just my interpretation. I could be way off.

 

That's fair. Not the band - love it.

 

I am not fluent in French but as I understand it, "contre" in contre-amiral is idiomatically more like "next to," as in a rank close to the rank of admiral. "Rear" as in the rear division would be "arrière." Certainly in Spanish "contra" applied to a division of the fleet could imply it was going in the opposite direction. But no matter the origin, getting Congress and the service to agree on introducing a completely new title which nobody would understand was, as I said, never going to happen. And to be honest, if it was a brand new title "rear admiral" would never be approved today, either.

Lieutenant (junior grade) has had a parenthetical for going on 140 years. No one thinks twice about it.

Yes that was it. In the 1800s the British navy was dominant, of course, and they considered commodore to be more of a senior captain, and everyone else followed suit. In the protocol of exchanging honors and courtesies in ports around the world the American commodores always came up short. After defeating the Spanish fleet, Congress figured the US should be like the British and boosted all the commodores up to rear admiral.

 

Late to the game on this... Wasn't there a documentary that mentioned William Windom wanted Decker to be played out differently, but for whatever reason they made him out as we saw on screen instead? (Windom nails the performance and the story narrative made the alleged script alterations a surprise.)

As a kid, the action was great. As an adult I've gone up and down on the story but there is some nuance, and - yeah - a commander showing emotion like that would suggest something BIG happened and that I really didn't pick up on for the longest time...

Kirk was right in pointing out Decker was on the right track, but didn't need to commit suicide to prove it. There is so much to the episode and it does hold up...

Maybe TOS got bored with picking "Captain" from the broken record player and used "Commodore" for more dramatic flair. Given the loss of the crew, would this have a larger impact on him when the planet killer came by and destroyed the planet? (The dialogue sells the horror more effectively than seeing silhouettes in a CG backdrop with a big laser beam slicing things up, complete with frying corpses -- eww. It'd look pretty, I guess, and would likely sell the horror too, but how they worded and acted it in 1967 packs its own punch.)

 

IIRC, it was something along the lines of, Windom either wasn't happy with, or didn't understand (or both) why he was asked to portray Decker as he did. It wasn't until much later that Windom realized it was an allusion to Captain Ahab (Decker=Ahab, Planet Killer=The whale), then he understood.

 

Since I never liked the moby dick story, I never liked this one either (gasp)... and felt windom was way over the top.....

 

Maybe you might like White as the Waves, by Alison Baird, better than Moby Dick.

 

Not even a Moby Dick...in spaaace?

 

"From space Hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last space breath at thee."

 

I just rewatched this, and Nimoy’s scenes with Windom are amazing. I hadn’t fully appreciated how great they are together.

 

Decker was envisioned as a Robert Ryan type, so casting Windom was a bit of a head-scratcher. The story didn't change that much over various drafts. The only major change was adding the whole "will pass through the most densely populated section of our galaxy" bit to make the thing a bigger threat than to just the two starships.

 

Which is one of the true weak points of the episode. Were it between the ships and the beast, all types of time limits would be possible, including ones best reflecting Decker's obsessive hurry. Now that interstellar hurry is added to the equation, nothing about it makes sense any longer. A beast a nearly destroyed starship can easily outrun doesn't gain in frightening powers by threatening to go to the next place; such an action would only give the ships a breather during which they could speed ahead and call for help and arrange for a barricade and whatnot.

The story needed to take place in the isolated depths of faraway space. Combining that with a threat to nearby major assets is a contradiction from which the plot really struggles to recover. How effective would Moby Dick have been if taking place within an afternoon's sailing of the port of Nantucket?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I dunno, I always felt a Planet Killer within reach of Planets to Kill upped the stakes somewhat.

If Moby Dick was a whale capable of eating whole towns, I wouldn't want it anywhere near Nantucket, nor anywhere else.