Hey, I never noticed that before....

if the scanner actually worked.

 

Ahhh, the old Fake Scanner On The Fake Starship Trick. That’s the second time Kirk has fallen for it.

 

Kirk is abusing hardware supposedly familiar to him in idiotic ways left and right there. The very last thing he does after touring his ship, chatting with Odona, and trying to hail Starfleet is take her out of warp! After which he's momentarily unsure whether he should feel a difference between warp and standstill or not...

He does have the common sense to distrust his main viewer and to go check on an actual porthole. But only after he hears those odd sounds. Which of course can't be for real - a zillion heartbeats would be drowned out by those zillion people shuffling, yawning and farting. Likewise, nothing Odona says makes any sense, either as the literal truth (in which case she, too, would have been hypnotized and/or drugged) or as purposeful lies. The one good conclusion to be drawn from this is that it's all a POV thing, an insight into the confused mind of Kirk, just like the grease lens is our insight into how the men see Mudd's Women.

Either the Gideonites want to maximize Kirk's confusion by applying all those eerie and absurd cues, visual and auditory - or Kirk is simply high as a kite from his artificially triggered illness or accompanying drugs, and is largely imagining the absurd things and Odona's likewise absurd responses to them.

Timo Saloniemi

 

It always bugged me that the one episode of Trek named after me is a stinker...

(no, my name's not "Mark"... or "of")

 

OK like a superfast 3D printer on a huge scale where everything worked - the turbolifts etc. I would have liked them not to have worked though. Wow the Gideons should have been able to sell that technology for say a new colony planet
The scanners and screen wouldn't have worked because if they did Kirk would have seen those people hanging outside

 

The seemingly simple solution, transport all the excess Gideonites to new Colony planets, was never brought up. But thinking about it, its not a long term solution. They would continue to procreate on the new planets and soon be in the same situation. Any world that invited some would eventually be overrun with humanoid tribbles. Not to mention that suitable colony planets are already in demand for everyone else as well.

 

Yes the problem would continue unless they used other forms of contraception which on exposure to other cultures might come about. The Gideonites were sophisticated people and there seemed to be no religious reasons for not using them.
And there solution killing off half the young people. Was that really a solution at all? The problem is still there. If Odona gets married then she's going to have what 10-20 children. I know people do that and thats their choice and good luck to them if thats what they want but I don't think supercute Odona is going to want that or any of the other young people. Actually it might be more like 30 - 40 kids because of all their recuperative powers.
Unless they kill off their own children I suppose

 

Yeah it's not particularly logical. Kirk suggests contraception and Hodin says its "against their very nature". Yet somehow this great reverence for life will allow people to volunteer to contract a fatal disease.

 

The Gideonites are fundamentalist extremists - don't expect them to make sense

 

Indeed, the whole episode seemed to be a scifi way of saying that religious obsessions about condoms or abortions or whatnot lead to disaster. The Gideonites were utterly inflexible there, highlghting how difficult it is to create a truly "pro-life" moral construct: they're dying because they love life. And then choose death as a solution to that dying...

Gideon certainly had something to sell - why else would the UFP obsess so much about securing the membership, blocking Spock all the way and no doubt actively selling Kirk to the locals for their little scheme, too? I doubt it would be the ability to create starship replicas; we can do that trivially today (making perfect 3D scans of an object is a triviality, even for a casual visitor with a handheld or concealed device), even if back in the 1960s it would have looked somewhat futuristic. Keeping that many people alive at the same time is impressive, though!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Colonies never diminish the home country's population. They only spread out the home country's culture to other territory.

 

I think what drew the Feds in was the Gideonites' ability to happily feed their population of a hundred billion people or so with relative ease. We know from Conscience Of The King that highly efficient foodstuffs are still in high demand in the 23rd century so this would be a natural draw.
However, the Federation was deceived...

If we assume that the references to the whole surface of the planet literally crammed with people was mere hyperbole (if there were really that many people crammed shoulder to shoulder on the surface then the government would just build tower blocks, or if that had already been done and the surface resembled Coruscant, I think somebody in orbit would have noticed) or propaganda to help control unrest in Gideon's population then where were all the people? Probably crammed into some high-density cities with high walls so that the rest of the planet's surface could be used to grow crops for them to eat. No magic food source, just a LOT of farmland to sustain people residing in appalling living conditions.

YMMV

 

Then again, we can see that our heroes can see. The surface of Gideon, that is. It's open to Mk I Eyeball scans, with only partial cloud cover!

No, it isn't covered in shoulder-to-shoulder people: that is apparently only to be found at the underground cities, or the few mountain or beach resorts. But it isn't covered in conventional high-production farmlands, either.

Possibly food is largely grown underground, too. Perhaps the surface conditions are generally hostile to it? Would that sort of tech be valuable to the UFP?

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's the SAME SET - so why shouldn't it work?

 

So, nice to meet you, "The".

 

What? Did your parents name you "Plato"?

 

Ya know, you try to remove everyone's opportunity to be a smartass, but they ALWAYS FIND A WAY.

 

OK what about that episode of Trek where the Enterprise was shrunk down and plopped onto a table. Never mind it somehow didn't tip over, but just because it's small that's one hell of a strong table wouldn't its mass still weigh the same?

 

You might appreciate Asimov's novelization of Fantastic Voyage.

 

...What reason do we even have to think that this was the Enterprise? Ardra made a much bigger Enterprise "disappear", too, only it was just smoke and mirrors. And projecting an Enterprise-shaped object on the table, complete with miniature action figures and all, shouldn't tax Flint's resources even that much.

Shrinking would be a neat trick, and it's accomplished for real in Trek twice. Neither time is informative: in the first, only people shrink, and they don't walk on anything that would break under the weight of a full-sized person, and in the second, a craft with gravity tech shrinks, and again the heroes who beam out of her don't walk on a structure of known strength.

Timo Saloniemi