Episode of the Week : Balance of Terror
- Thread starter Botany Bay
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Easy 10 from me.
Somebody voted 1. Seriously?!!! I know entertainment is personal opinion and all, but really, even if you hate TOS, surely you can appreciate the writing, acting, cinematography and direction are all top notch in this instalment? That's got to be worth a 3 or 4 at least?
Mind you, I find "The Inner Light" dull and lifeless, so what do I know?! Although, I'd still give it a 3.5.
Somebody voted 1. Seriously?!!! I know entertainment is personal opinion and all, but really, even if you hate TOS, surely you can appreciate the writing, acting, cinematography and direction are all top notch in this instalment? That's got to be worth a 3 or 4 at least?
Mind you, I find "The Inner Light" dull and lifeless, so what do I know?! Although, I'd still give it a 3.5.
See, that's what doesn't wash. You don't need fancy f/x. You just need Uhura at her console. Even simpler than what they did.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
But apparently not of interest to the creatives, who wanted a visual experience, and apparently decided to settle for the feeble visual joke we got with the print volumes.
then again, they may have seen how lame/inert the scene was in JEDI where the shuttle with the rebels semi-bluffs its way past a super star destroyer and figured if we can't have a cool visual, let's settle for a cheap laugh.
then again, they may have seen how lame/inert the scene was in JEDI where the shuttle with the rebels semi-bluffs its way past a super star destroyer and figured if we can't have a cool visual, let's settle for a cheap laugh.
I might be exaggerating, but Star Trek is all about naval battles. Almost everytime they tried to leave this central idea behind they didnt enmd with a blockbustes or successful episode. Compare TWOK. Those who have the DVD with the interview with the producer may recall how the franchise was disoriented after TMP and came Meyer kid and claimed SPACE BATTLES and rolling out the guns (torpedo scene) and ropes falling from the masts (wires from the ceiling) and the rest is history.
I think you are exaggerating quite a bit, because there were very few TOS episodes featuring "naval" battles, and some of the most highly regarded ("City on the Edge," "Amok Time," "Devil in the Dark," "Tribbles," "Mirror Mirror"...) have no ship-to-ship fighting at all.
I forgot to put in context: all that was to point out Balance of Terror is so good Star trek bacause it IS a naval battle.
Of course those eps are all excellent. I wasnt trying to say ALL episodes without battles are bad. But add to the list the Klingon episodes, Arena and the other Romulan episode, which were all about fighting.
Complementing: after so many episodes with NO naval battles (and TMP with all the weirdness), came Wrath of Khan and brought the only thing that was missing.
After that they fired phasers much more often.
You have this completely wrong. TOS has never been "all about naval battles." It was primarily adventure along with allegory and occasional ship combat.
The whole deal about TWOK correcting what was wrong with TMP is way overblown. The main beef folks had with TMP were lack in more familiar run-and-jump action as well as lack in character drama. Otherwise TMP was very much like TOS. But Meyer threw away everything in TMP to remake Trek more to his liking. TWOK is nowhere remotely as extreme as JJtrek, but it has a somewhat similar mindset.
One thing about TOS and later TNG is that there were a core group of people in place to keep Star Trek generally consistent within itself. It's why you could have differing stories like "Balance Of Terror" and "Shoreleave" and "The City On The Edge Of Forever" while keeping everything else the same. So the writers changed but the producers made it all work together.
But Meyer threw everything away from TMP which was completely unnecessary. He completely changed the uniforms when all that was needed was a tweaking of added colour. He rebooted to putting Kirk behind a desk and relegated the Enterprise to a training vessel when all he had to do was pick up where TMP left off. He could have told essentially the same story as TWOK told without making such drastic changes and everyone would have been happy. Instead of looking at TMP in carrying forward what worked and then add what seemed to be missing Meyer just scrapped it all. And in terms of success it has to be remembered that TMP has made far more money than TWOK.
But just as some think TMP oozes intelligence yet falls short in passion or energy it can be said TWOK oozes with energy but is seriously lacking in intelligence. In both cases a good rewrite could have fixed the shortcomings.
The fact that TWOK was popular is not evidence that everything that followed had to follow it to the letter. Star Trek was built on all kinds of stories rather than just one. But in some respects Trek on film has since been trying to follow the TWOK template.
And back to the "naval battle" issue. The absolute best Star Trek stories have rarely had anything to do with naval battles. And "Balance Of Terror" is good for far more than being about ship combat---that's only one element of it. It's good because of everything else in it and how it does that kind of story.
It's also why I think "Balance Of Terror" is a much better story than TWOK.
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trevanian
Rear Admiral
Actually the ship never fired its phasers again after TWOK -- only torpedoes (some of which carried about as much power as throwing a bowling ball out the airlock), much to my displeasure.
Which simply affirms yet again why I hold a generally low opinion of how TUC was put togrther.
I meant all kinds of pew pew, up to and including but not restricted to: phasers, photons, disruptors, perversions with the main deflector, tachyon pulses, by TOS and TNG on.
Hey, I liked that scene.
No, it has the inverse mindset.
TWOK isn't as strong or as intelligent as a space-duel story as "Balance of Terror" is -- though it certainly succeeds in building tension and drama through its action -- but Meyer at least knew enough at that time to successfully go back to the source material and play to its strengths. The character work from Kirk, Spock and Khan in TWOK logically develops each of their characters from the series, and TWOK is visibly an adaptation of a submarine duel story in much the same way that "Balance of Terror" adapts the destroyer-vs.-UBoat duel.
Consistency issues with TMP aside, TWOK's success lay in updating Trek's ability to adapt compelling drama from other genres, amp it up and synthesize it with strong character work: all of these precisely virtues that distinguished TOS originally. And this was why it became iconic in a similar way, while TMP -- which had less of those virtues despite its more purely science fiction-y premise -- did not.
The many subsequent attempts to ape TWOK were trying to turn it into a formula rather than recognize the virtues and authenticity of the underlying approach, which is why they failed. [Not of course that the approach was itself guarantee of quality, as Meyer's later efforts on TUC proved.] And JJTrek has none of this aspiration, indeed if anything it's almost a self-parody (Galaxy Quest minus the warmth and affection, despite the best efforts of the cast). The issue of visual continuity and uniforms and such is quite minor compared to the issue of underlying approach.
Thanks to Push the Button and Harvey for clearing up the Comets book mystery. 
I think Stiles was just saying that, having a racial extraction so similar to the Romulans, Spock must know a thing or two about them.
I think Stiles was just saying that, having a racial extraction so similar to the Romulans, Spock must know a thing or two about them.
I just finished watching Balance Of Terror.
Again, I think this is an almost perfect episode. Not just of trek, but TV in general.
While The Enemy Within and The Naked Time show Shatner's range, BoT shows
his subtly.
The last scene where Kirk is with Martine in the chapel he shows many layers of
emotion. After Martine leaves, he glances at the alter and shows real remorse.
As he is walking down the corridor, you can see him pulling himself together. Putting
on the air of command as he walks.
A very powerful performance at the end of an outstanding show.
Again, I think this is an almost perfect episode. Not just of trek, but TV in general.
While The Enemy Within and The Naked Time show Shatner's range, BoT shows
his subtly.
The last scene where Kirk is with Martine in the chapel he shows many layers of
emotion. After Martine leaves, he glances at the alter and shows real remorse.
As he is walking down the corridor, you can see him pulling himself together. Putting
on the air of command as he walks.
A very powerful performance at the end of an outstanding show.
^^^My sentiments exactly. That sequence was absolutely nailed.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
TMP made more money because it was an event film and everybody felt compelled to see it, even people who never liked trek to begin with (as in, nearly all of the attendees at the broadcast school I went to, who pretty much universally hated the thing as slow, talky, blah-in-look, etc.) And in terms of profit, TWOK totally trumps the other flicks, since it cost very little, PLUS it did that business while still carrying the stigma of being a trek movie, (which was considerable after TMP.)
A lot of the creative departures from TMP you are pinning on Meyer were already in place from Bennett, such as Kirk aging & behind a desk (first Sowards script had all that.) Picking up where TMP left off would have completely derailed the film's themes of aging and such, too. Without those underpinnings, TWOK would have worked a lot less successfully than it does.
And if you think the cast could have pulled off wearing TMP-style tunics for sequels ... well, Kelley could have, but weight issues would have showed a lot more unflatteringly on a lot of the other folk (Doohan would have been largely unfilmable in a TMP uniform by the point of TWOK, like some of the overweight actors who turn up in TNG, like the human defector to Romulus in some ep)
Stylistically I think Robert Sallin has an imprint on the film as well, largely a good one, though I'm thinking he may be to blame for the choice of DP and the crappy filmstock. But I'm thinking he may be responsible for the biggest visual improvement from TMP, the switch from rearprojected film loops on the screens to 24frame video, which brightened things and facilitated shooting and basically helped them escape the cart-before-the-horse insanity of basing exposure on the background set instead of the actors.
And not to put it all on Bennett/Sallin rather than Meyer, but my thought is that a lot of the step-away-from-TMP aspect came from the studio (hence absence of Goldsmith & Trumbull, guilt-by-associaton rather than guilt-by-ineptitude.)
Quotes from Sallin indicate Trumbull was rejected because of his involvement with BRAINSTORM, but Sallin privately must have realized that they were rejecting the whole vfx creative team that was then finishing BLADE RUNNER, which folks already knew looked spectacularly good. That again supports the notion that Paramount wanted ILM in a kind of partnership on their franchise shows, which has been a part of speculation on the film since CFQ ran its first double issue or earlier.
Even though there is no direct reference to TMP, it seems obvious that Spock is a new Spock, one that incorporates TMP growth (which I think was in Sowards' draft as a specific mention.) So the most important aspect of TMP IS carried through for TWOK.
Is it a stretch to place TMP with its aesthetics in the 70s (when did they start developing Phase II/TMP, 1976?) and TWOK with its more military bearing and maroon civil war-esque tunics in the conservative '80s?
Why would anyone in 1979 be off-put by the bland jumpsuit-y look? I mean that was the look then?
And the following films each took a different tack, not TWOK clones. Only in the TNG/JJ films do we start to get Kewl Bad Guy of the Week.
ANYway, my reason for writing - I like the way TWOK begins with a gap in time, the heroes older, the hero ship older. It really works with the theme. We knew it was 1982 and the people playing our heroes WERE in fact older. Might as well admit it in-univere and work it to the film's advantage.
Why would anyone in 1979 be off-put by the bland jumpsuit-y look? I mean that was the look then?
And the following films each took a different tack, not TWOK clones. Only in the TNG/JJ films do we start to get Kewl Bad Guy of the Week.
ANYway, my reason for writing - I like the way TWOK begins with a gap in time, the heroes older, the hero ship older. It really works with the theme. We knew it was 1982 and the people playing our heroes WERE in fact older. Might as well admit it in-univere and work it to the film's advantage.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
mid to late 77 for development on P2, after months of wholly discarded development for PLANET OF THE TITANS that seems ship/environment-related, with no costume work that I am aware of.
I know that for myself by 1977 I was not exactly loving the light blue leisure suit my folks had bought me the year before, and even though I was in high school, I started going to men's stores to buy real sport coats in real (i.e. camel, grey or dark blue) colors. There was plenty of grotesque non pastel colors in that decade as well; look at THE BRADY BUNCH if you don't believe me. I remember the 70s as being more burnt orange than anything else, and when I saw the first TMP pics in late 78, I couldn't believe TMP was going even wimpier than 1999 with the blahcostumes.
I think the costuming approach was behind the times a bit colorwise, but was based in part on the tech advisor and mostly on Wise's notion of having faces pop by having clothing and sets walls same color ... which works fine in ANDROMEDA STRAIN because there is some snap to the lighting, but fails miserably in TMP due to the low light mushiness and the diopters and the paint job on most sets (corridors look GOOD though.)
Fletcher said TWOK was much closer to his original take on how to do the costumes, but I've never seen any artwork indicating he drew a thing along those lines for TMP, even at the beginning of his tenure after Wise had Theiss replaced. (I infer that based on Fletcher saying he was doing what the director wanted designwise to avoid having happen to him what happened to his predecessor)
I know that for myself by 1977 I was not exactly loving the light blue leisure suit my folks had bought me the year before, and even though I was in high school, I started going to men's stores to buy real sport coats in real (i.e. camel, grey or dark blue) colors. There was plenty of grotesque non pastel colors in that decade as well; look at THE BRADY BUNCH if you don't believe me. I remember the 70s as being more burnt orange than anything else, and when I saw the first TMP pics in late 78, I couldn't believe TMP was going even wimpier than 1999 with the blahcostumes.
I think the costuming approach was behind the times a bit colorwise, but was based in part on the tech advisor and mostly on Wise's notion of having faces pop by having clothing and sets walls same color ... which works fine in ANDROMEDA STRAIN because there is some snap to the lighting, but fails miserably in TMP due to the low light mushiness and the diopters and the paint job on most sets (corridors look GOOD though.)
Fletcher said TWOK was much closer to his original take on how to do the costumes, but I've never seen any artwork indicating he drew a thing along those lines for TMP, even at the beginning of his tenure after Wise had Theiss replaced. (I infer that based on Fletcher saying he was doing what the director wanted designwise to avoid having happen to him what happened to his predecessor)
Kruge in TSFS looked a lot to me like an attempt at creating a Klingon antagonist with something like Khan's level of resonance and menace.
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