Balance of Terror

Didn't Scotty say "merely impulse", though?

 

He said "...simple impulse."

 

Given that when the Enterprise D would sometime need additional speed Riker would order full impulse, it's reasonable to suppose that that the power of impulse engines can be fed into a warp drive. Looking at how far the outposts were apart, based on how fast the Enterprise's "blip" was moving on the map, it's difficult to see how the Romulan ship could attack the multiple outposts at slower than light speeds.

Impulse engines ... Yes
Warp engines ... Yes
M/AM reactors ... No

 

The impulse thing is a common mistake in Star Trek and science fiction. My impression is many people think that sublight speeds of thousands of miles per second are slow but still fast enough to move from one star system to another in a reasonable amount of time. The writers grossly understate the vastness of space.

 

^ It's a commonly quoted fact that the nearest star to our own sun, Proxima Centauri, is more than 4 light-years away. You'd think writers would have that drilled into their brains by now.

 

All those times Kirk ordered them on to their next assignment at warp one, I'd go, "What? Don't you want to get ther in your lifetime?!"

 

What impressed me most about this episode was the closing shot, Kirk walking through the corridors of his ship, resolved, willing to do anything to protect his ship. Even on multiple watchings I find this image very powerful.

 

Even if they had, they'd probably think a light-year is a measure of time.

 

Yes! I always liked that. The music plus the imagery was powerful indeed.

 

This never happens. Rather, in the episode "Conspiracy", Riker orders higher warp speed and LaForge responds with "Aye, full impulse". A bad joke from the famously bad jokester, perhaps?

It sounds as if it's actually us who're in error here. Nowhere in canon is it established or even suggested that warp 1 would be the speed of light. Quite to the contrary, it's clear from TOS and VOY at least that warp 1 is a credible interstellar speed, and so are warp 2 and warp 3. It's just that warp 5 seems to be the threshold "plot speed" where the ship can get from Important Planet A to Important Planet B in the required plot time of less than a day.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I agree. That was an extremely evocative sequence. He's prevented a war, saved the ship, consoled the young widow and now it's back to business. It could have been wildly overdone, but instead it was brisk and believable.

 

I bet he went and had a Miller.

 

Yep. One of my favorite endings. I wish they'd done more of these... the Captain walking about the decks, expressions of deep thought on his face.



There was another kind of "unfocused" segment I really liked. In "Squire of Gothos" when they've all returned to the ship and have put Gothos behind them, there's a moment where nothing is happening. Just routine ship operations. It was a nice, interesting "break". For a moment, it looked like the episode was over unusually early.

 

That's 'cause Kirk is DA MAN!

 

"Balance of Terror" is probably my favorite episode, and the whole military theme of the episode feels very authentic (aside from embracing the beautiful Yeoman). That's something about the first season that Trek's never really been able to capture since - that authentic military feeling of life onboard an isolated ship. It might feel cold to some, but as someone whose been in the Navy for 15 years and counting, it's very familiar, and oddly comforting to watch that first batch of episodes. It's easy to see that Trek was written by people whose experience with military life went beyond watching war movies. Early Kirk is pretty much the ideal CO.

On the flipside, I've been re-watching early TNG, and I see in Picard a lot of attributes that I've really disliked in some COs that I've had. I know that he improves later, but he comes off as a powerfully crappy captain in those early episodes. Like his dismissive and arrogant attitude towards Riker, his impatience with Data, wanting to either get with or get rid of Crusher, and so on.

 

I dunno, I mean after how everyone says that the TNG crowd were too perfect you're upset that Picard was acting clearly imperfect? It just makes it better that he DID get better.

One more thing I liked in this episode was how they managed to get an emotional tug at the heart over a trivial subplot of the married couple. I mean sure, you should've seen it coming since it's cliche for the happily married ones to get killed but the storytelling and acting actually make it a surprise when it happened. The widow's grief, Kirk doing his best to console her, it just really gets you.

 

Did the Dohlman make that mistake in Elaan of Troyius?

I suppose she could be talking about distance, but given the context...

 

Kirk should have said: "Ten light years? So... about 30 minutes!"

 

The dohlman wasn't exactly a scientist. She was pretty much the Elaasian equivalent of Paris Hilton. Nothing like a starship pilot like Han Solo making the same mistake.

 

(OTOH, putting it like that would make sense in the context. The Dohlman's education was going to last for as long as a trip from A to B did. She could well be arguing that the education stood no chance of success even if the trip were extended to an absurdly distant C.)

Timo Saloniemi