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"Such men dare take what they want..."--Khan: Sexy or creepy?

Then the painting should've had a beard and turban.
The painting did have a turban but not the beard.

Ugh, right, that nonsense. Sorry I tend to ignore it when Star Trek does the "ancient/historical aliens" stuff.

I found the concept very interesting, of a human who is extremely long-lived due to some genetic quirk or whatever. The episode's writer Jerome Bixby was a respected writer and editor of science fiction and other genre stories since the 1950s. He would re-use the concept of the practically-immortal human in his screenplay "The Man From Earth," which was made into a low-budget independent movie in 2007, which won multiple awards. It had a lot of Trek actors in it, incidentally. The 2018 sequel "The Man From Earth: Holocene" can be ignored.

Kor
 
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Yeah, as I said.


Uh...no..And Da Vinci never went on to conquer most of the known world, or rule it or anything like that. He designed/created weapons but he never led armies or conquered lands himself. At least not that I know.
There is no possible mental acrobatics that would equate Da Vinci with Alexander the great.
Mental gymnastics?

It's a line from the script.

SPOCK: How many other names shall we call you?
FLINT: Solomon, Alexander, Lazarus, Methuselah, Merlin, Abramson. A hundred other names you do not know.
 
Mental gymnastics?

It's a line from the script.

I wrote above that I forgot about that other episode (because I tend to ignore stuff like that, all the ancient/historical aliens stuff is excluded from my headcanon)
I thought you were just trying to make one of those weird jokes you sometimes do. Like, I was seriously confused.
 
Marla on the Boarding party had a phaser.

You don't get to carry a phaser unless you're rated on a phaser. Maybe she was in Security, or more simply she wasn't allowed a posting on the ship until she had passed a weapons test.

It could have been a dummy phaser or had an empty power pack, since you don't get to go on an away mission without a gun, but you don't give a gun to some likely to shoot their own foot off.

She also painted a picture of Napoleon. Marla is into short dudes.

Lots of pictures of Gladiators. You know who is a gladiator, not a very good one, but he fought for Rome... McCoy. (Well all three of them really, but McCoy needs a little help finding a sure thing more than the other two.)
 
Maybe she was in Security, or more simply she wasn't allowed a posting on the ship until she had passed a weapons test
Realistically you'd think every person on the Enterprise should have at least some proficiency with a phaser, along with things such as first aid and stuff. It's a dangerous galaxy out there.
Though with McGivers you gotta wonder why she even wanted to be stationed on a ship, she seemed like she just wanted to sit in her quarters all day and paint pictures of historic "hotties" and was, irrc, pretty annoyed when Kirk inconvenienced her by placing her in the landing party.
I always had the impression she graduated somewhere near the bottom of her class (possibly due to her sexual fetish for historic warlords) and was just shoved onto a ship where her field of expertise is unlikely to be of importance.
Bottom line she is not the most flattering portrayal of women in TOS.
 

Interestingly these Screenshots also show that Khan also had fairly long hair for a human male appearing on TOS, which is likely meant to be a nod towards his Sikh heritage, and he doesn't have a beard in the painting, just a Turban.
So it's possible that either Sikh customs have changed in the Star Trek universe by the time of the Eugenics Wars or it was just Khan's personal look to go without a beard, both of which McGivers would likely have known, due to her "special interest"
The painting also looks pretty basic and is not finished, so it's definitely something she'd be able to create fairly quickly.
 
Interestingly these Screenshots also show that Khan also had fairly long hair for a human male appearing on TOS, which is likely meant to be a nod towards his Sikh heritage, and he doesn't have a beard in the painting, just a Turban.
So it's possible that either Sikh customs have changed in the Star Trek universe by the time of the Eugenics Wars or it was just Khan's personal look to go without a beard, both of which McGivers would likely have known, due to her "special interest"
The painting also looks pretty basic and is not finished, so it's definitely something she'd be able to create fairly quickly.

The red background looks like it represents all the blood that was spilt in Khan's name.
 
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Uh. Oh. What I meant was: their lowest percentile of graduates would put our early twenty-first century alumni to shame. Look forward to the academic standards of our nigh-utopian future!

As a Lieutenant you would think that she was a Star Fleet Academy Graduate.

As a specialist, a historian, you'd think that she was enlisted.

Starfleet Doctors go through 4 years of academy and 7 years of medical school, so their ranks are "real" and not just honorary.

But then if she had a PHD in History, they would have been calling her Doctor McIvers.

Sleep training.

Brain wiped Uhura got "everything" she needed to do her job and cope with life, in one night of sleep training.

Marla could have been a security officer that volunteered to have the skills of a historian imprinted onto her existing personality, just so she would get a bigger bedroom all to herself. The compulsive Close Encounters like painting might be a symptom of information bleed.
 
Interesting. I've always taken it as McGivers figuring out the truth before the rest of the crew.

Sure - - you might well be right. Unfortunately, that just makes K/S/Mc/S look even more incompetent. And as to Kirk in particular, the episode already does a pretty rigorous job of paving that path. (This is another one of those massive flaws in Space Seed that the relentlessly entertaining episode somehow, almost inexplicably, overcomes.)
 
Given that McGivers, Palamas, and Mulhall all wore red instead of blue, that suggests that anthropology/archaeology/history/astrobiology are not under the blue "sciences/medical" umbrella. Three instances is way too consistent to be a costuming fluke.

Astrobiology is more a fluke since we have biologists who do wear blue. On the other hand, at the time, study of extraterrestrial life was more commonly "exobiology" -- it may be that astrobiology deals with alien cultures than internal processes.

If we go with that, and don't try to assume some technical main job for these red-shirts, then rank is probably more indicative of education than time in service. Sort of like how doctors get commissioned as Majors in the army.

How's this for a fun: After "Miri", when the possibility of finding other Earths with Earth history, Kirk recquisitioned (or was assigned) an historian. One who proved singularly useless until "Space Seed" (and then remained pretty useless...)
Historian is thinky in blue.

Archeologist is practical in red.
:vulcan:

Here's how it works in real life. In college I majored in anthropology and minored in geography. There's a physical and cultural side to each of these. If you carry them forward into the Trek universe, it would seem that the physical anthropology would be considered a science (blue uniform) and the cultural would be considered... whatever they call the social sciences in 23rd century Starfleet. It's possible that Palamas' uniform was due to her primary expertise being the physical side of archaeology (speculating here, since I don't remember if we were ever told).

We know once or twice Uhura took to the nav console. Given early on we saw her wear gold it’s possible she was perhaps once in the command division and manned the nav and/or helm console. Then she switches permanently(?) to red and appears to be the lead communications officer, perhaps even being Chief of Communications although thats never actually established.
I don't see how Uhura could not have risen to be Chief Communications Officer, at some point.

As for her uniform switch, there are three possibilities:

1. Starfleet bureaucracy

2. Uhura, like Sulu (who once upon a time wore different uniforms), engaged in cross-training so she would have more skill sets and better chances for promotion

3. The ship's laundry was on the fritz those days and Uhura had to borrow a uniform from somebody; fortunately Kirk was understanding enough to overlook it

I found the concept very interesting, of a human who is extremely long-lived due to some genetic quirk or whatever. The episode's writer Jerome Bixby was a respected writer and editor of science fiction and other genre stories since the 1950s. He would re-use the concept of the practically-immortal human in his screenplay "The Man From Earth," which was made into a low-budget independent movie in 2007, which won multiple awards. It had a lot of Trek actors in it, incidentally. The 2018 sequel "The Man From Earth: Holocene" can be ignored.

Kor
My fanon says that "Requiem for Methusalah" is an accidental pre/sequel of the Highlander TV series - sans swordfight and Quickening as nobody else on the planet was Immortal.

Someone did write a series of Highlander/Star Trek crossover stories in which Richie wasn't killed, but lived on at least to the 23rd century and joined Starfleet. I haven't read them, though, so I have no idea if they're any good.
 
There's another movie or TV show that did the "Requium" thing with the man who'd been everyone the title of which is eluding me.
 
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:vulcan:

Here's how it works in real life. In college I majored in anthropology and minored in geography. There's a physical and cultural side to each of these. If you carry them forward into the Trek universe, it would seem that the physical anthropology would be considered a science (blue uniform) and the cultural would be considered... whatever they call the social sciences in 23rd century Starfleet. It's possible that Palamas' uniform was due to her primary expertise being the physical side of archaeology (speculating here, since I don't remember if we were ever told).


I don't see how Uhura could not have risen to be Chief Communications Officer, at some point.

As for her uniform switch, there are three possibilities:

1. Starfleet bureaucracy

2. Uhura, like Sulu (who once upon a time wore different uniforms), engaged in cross-training so she would have more skill sets and better chances for promotion

3. The ship's laundry was on the fritz those days and Uhura had to borrow a uniform from somebody; fortunately Kirk was understanding enough to overlook it


My fanon says that "Requiem for Methusalah" is an accidental pre/sequel of the Highlander TV series - sans swordfight and Quickening as nobody else on the planet was Immortal.

Someone did write a series of Highlander/Star Trek crossover stories in which Richie wasn't killed, but lived on at least to the 23rd century and joined Starfleet. I haven't read them, though, so I have no idea if they're any good.

I said "college" to make the bullshit I was extruding have some semblance of real-world equivalence. Starfleet Academy is a college and it is the college all these Star Fleet people went to. Real World equivalence: Westpoint Military Academy.

Your minor gives you points towards your degree, but your minor is not listed on your diploma.

Why would Starfleet be using unaccredited Historians?

Had a clever thought...

McIvers is an accredited "Art Historian" which is maybe as close as they could get to a historian Astronaut in those days. A shorter course than a doctorate in full history, especially if they only go after a masters. And then she does 4 years at Star fleet Academy, and skips being an ensign completely because she's a specialist.

Department of Temporal Affairs. There are your Historian Engineer Astronauts, which is a type of citizen soldier that 23rd century Starfleet Academy is not as yet knowing that they need to start making an abundance of.
 
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