Oh, man, The Omega Clory, what a disaster that ep is. I can deal with parallel evolution, show, but don't ask me to believe parallel societies would both draft the same, word-for-word document. That's taking your metaphor and making a NOTaphor.
I *loved* 'This Side of Paradise'
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Not just the same document, but with the same farkin’ handwriting, for God’s sake. And the same farkin’ flag.
“The Omega Glory” was one of the three scripts G.R. peddled to NBC as choices for the requested second Trek pilot, and it underwent several tweaks and revisions before finally being filmed as a second-season episode. By the time it aired, the whole “parallel planet development” thing was already becoming a Star Trek cliché.
I don't mind the parallel development thing, but, and look, I am not a US citizen but I went to High School there and I am a big fan of the States, and I think the Constitution is a landmark document in human history. But the original Star Trek bible specifically mentioned nationalism as something that was eliminated in the Star Trek universe. Consequently, this episode felt very out of character for me, because it was just so damned patriotic that the last act of the episode pretty much threw out all sense and reason in service of saying how awesome the Constitution was. If they'd done that as a metaphor, great. But the way they did it just smelled of “The rat symbolizes obviousness," to quote the Simpsons.
The Writer's Guide also has a scene where a Naval ship captain wouldn't hug a lovely yeoman on his bridge, but it certainly happened in "Balance of Terror."
Well, to be fair, that scene wasn't on the bridge, it was in private with just Kirk and the bereaved fiancée in the chapel. Her rushing into the captain's arms for a comforting embrace did seem a bit unprofessional, but hell, it was the Sixties.
Back on topic, in the scene where Kirk gets “spored,” where did that plant on the bridge come from?
Ha! That's a really good point, when he starts his Captain's log there clearly ISN'T a plant right in front of him, but just before he gets infected it kind of 'pops up'. Maybe the plants WERE malicious, after all? Just like those dirty damned hippies trying to force LDS and free love on everyone in the sixties!
If you watch in Stardate Order, TSOP follows immediately after Amok Time, which makes this scene all the more powerful, IMO.
This particular trope kind of rubs me the wrong way. If somebody asks your name, what kind of answer is “You couldn’t pronounce it”? But I guess it beats:
Maybe the sound of it is a logic paradox that causes human brains to explode, and they are sick of humans who say: "No, I'm special, I can take it, tell me!"
To be sure, the episode doesn't dictate that the thousand-year lifespans be the direct result of the war. Rather, the natives might have had long lifespans to begin with, in addition to which some of them survived the germ warfare.
I guess that in Star Trek, it would be entirely expected for some traveler from Earth to visit Omega IV and start his or her own little dictatorship based on a perversion of a seemingly attractive (to an alien anyway) Earth model. John Gill style, ya know, just with a time machine instead of a spacecraft.
The answer that makes you foreign and mysterious and exotic and ah so attractive?
"Here's how my first name is spelled. Now try it. Ah, no. Less aspiration - and you have to pucker up your lips at the final 'o' and then leave them that way right till the end, so as not to let the vowel die. Just like that. Looks good... Very good."
Timo Saloniemi
Heh heh.
The querent has expressed a desire to hear the name, not to say it.
Q: Hey, Frank! Sing “New York, New York” for us!
A: You can’t carry a tune.
Non-sequitur. Norman, please coordinate.
I like to think that his real name was BOOM-BOOM SPOCKALOCKALOCKA BOOM and he was just embarrassed.
This is true, but importantly IRL such laws are often disregarded and disrespected - if something is that beneficial, people will go after it. People do their own risk/benefit analyses on the fly.
Consider that ol' Spocko, instead of risking the death penalty to take Pike to Talos IV, could have taken him to Omicron Ceti III instead.
Actually, it is on the bridge. As the first plasma torpedo is approaching the Enterprise, the ship is at full reverse trying to evade the thing, Yeoman Rand comes out and asks should they continue to record or eject the log, Kirk looks at her with a "Yeoman" that indicates he thinks they're all going to die, and then just as impact is about to occur, he pulls her close to him so that they can die in each other's arms...
Consider that ol' Spocko, instead of risking the death penalty to take Pike to Talos IV, could have taken him to Omicron Ceti III instead.
And ditto when McCoy is suffering from Xenopolycethemia...
Either that or they were semi-sentient and ambulatory, like triffids.
It's Hfuhruhurr, actually. You pronounce it exactly the way it's spelled.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0capZ5nDb0[/yt]
Obviously it was in on the surprise party!
But that's that thing about the spores though, how would these people know, whether or not, if they were actually happy? If say Leila were experiencing a perfectly normal amount of depression, under the influence of the spores, she wouldn't be aware of it. If she had damned good reason to be scared, nope happy as a clam.
Even if Leila had a legitimate cause to be happy, irrelevant, she going to be happy anyway. As I see it, this is the evil influence of the spores. This is why they're bad.
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Under the effects of the spores, Uhura didn't just become "happy," she damaged the Enterprise's ability to communicate over long distances. Why? Who or what told her to do this. Under the spores the entire crew beamed down. Not just a few "wandering" into the transporter room, everyone. They lined up to in the corridor to beam down. Why?
Were the spore doing more than just making everyone happy?
We could say the spores removed inhibitions, but then we'd have to assume everybody hated his or her job. Which probably isn't such a bad assumption...
We could say the spores made people susceptible to suggestion, but then we'd have to identify the source of suggestions. Then again, people down on the planet were constantly suggesting nice things to each other, ranging from mint juleps to personal relationships, and we didn't really hear of offers being turned down.
So perhaps it's a bit of both: people are reduced to a childlike state of existence where uninhibited suggestions get an enthusiastic reception, moderated by a tranquillizing effect of some sort. When lots of people gather together, such as on a starship, the result is herd behavior; when people get more sparsely distributed, herd behavior disappears, and people just start doing whatever they please.
The effect may be the strongest immediately after getting spored; later on, it gets diluted so that the people still care enough to get some farming done, and don't starve. Also, the desire to follow suggestions gets diluted more than the desire to make them, so the society doesn't get all wrapped around a personality cult and quickly develops a dislike for herd behavior, too.
...However, the spore plants seem awfully active. Why would they devote such massive evolutionary resources to the spore-firing action unless the results it has on the local and interstellar fauna were somehow beneficial to them?
Perhaps an important effect of the spores is to make the fauna avoid destroying the plants. Apparently, this isn't achieved by turning everybody into carnivores. Nor do spored people avoid the proximity of the plants. Perhaps the plants just found out, by evolutionary happenstance, that the best protection was to turn on some sort of a "happiness gene" in the fauna, evoking happiness directly relating to the plants: a creature on approach to a plant would decide that the thing it most desired was to see the plant happily continue its existence. The happiness of the beast itself, the happiness it would radiate to the rest of the universe, would be a mere side product.
Perhaps the plant would then also benefit from giving extra health to its friends and benefactors, so that those would act as a palace guard and keep other fauna (and flora) away, by virtue of being superior specimens, strong and healthy and able-bodied.
Or then the plants really had an agenda that goes beyond natural evolution. They might be akin to Larry Niven's Sunflowers: dumb biologically engineered weapons that no longer have masters around to defend, but survive to do their job nevertheless. Or they could be smart lifeforms that consciously bring about what I suggested above to happen by dumb natural instinct. In that case, they could also have further, more complicated agendas we did not yet witness.
Timo Saloniemi
We could say the spores made people susceptible to suggestion, but then we'd have to identify the source of suggestions. Then again, people down on the planet were constantly suggesting nice things to each other, ranging from mint juleps to personal relationships, and we didn't really hear of offers being turned down.
So perhaps it's a bit of both: people are reduced to a childlike state of existence where uninhibited suggestions get an enthusiastic reception, moderated by a tranquillizing effect of some sort. When lots of people gather together, such as on a starship, the result is herd behavior; when people get more sparsely distributed, herd behavior disappears, and people just start doing whatever they please.
The effect may be the strongest immediately after getting spored; later on, it gets diluted so that the people still care enough to get some farming done, and don't starve. Also, the desire to follow suggestions gets diluted more than the desire to make them, so the society doesn't get all wrapped around a personality cult and quickly develops a dislike for herd behavior, too.
...However, the spore plants seem awfully active. Why would they devote such massive evolutionary resources to the spore-firing action unless the results it has on the local and interstellar fauna were somehow beneficial to them?
Perhaps an important effect of the spores is to make the fauna avoid destroying the plants. Apparently, this isn't achieved by turning everybody into carnivores. Nor do spored people avoid the proximity of the plants. Perhaps the plants just found out, by evolutionary happenstance, that the best protection was to turn on some sort of a "happiness gene" in the fauna, evoking happiness directly relating to the plants: a creature on approach to a plant would decide that the thing it most desired was to see the plant happily continue its existence. The happiness of the beast itself, the happiness it would radiate to the rest of the universe, would be a mere side product.
Perhaps the plant would then also benefit from giving extra health to its friends and benefactors, so that those would act as a palace guard and keep other fauna (and flora) away, by virtue of being superior specimens, strong and healthy and able-bodied.
Or then the plants really had an agenda that goes beyond natural evolution. They might be akin to Larry Niven's Sunflowers: dumb biologically engineered weapons that no longer have masters around to defend, but survive to do their job nevertheless. Or they could be smart lifeforms that consciously bring about what I suggested above to happen by dumb natural instinct. In that case, they could also have further, more complicated agendas we did not yet witness.
Timo Saloniemi
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