Quick discussion on the episode Court Martial.

While this episode seems decent enough and half feels like it could have been a reject from Parry Mason or some other court room script, I found it rather peculiar that the captain's chair would have such gigantic buttons that call for Yellow Alert, Red Alert....then Jettison Pod?

For plot convenience, plot device is convenient means for story telling. But...what is the importance of this pod? Why is it so dangerous that the captain need only have a one button commandment operation to eject it? This would be like having driver controls that Turn on head lights, operate wipers, self destruct engine...honk horn. Besides, I could have sworn that Alert status was a vocal command and not directly called at the captain's chair. This, in my opinion, takes a budget saving and decent episode into the realms of being absolutely stupid. At least, throw some plastic cover plates over those buttons so the next time that Jim rests his elbow too far off the arm rests, he isn't ordering a Yellow-ish Red Alert and littering space at the same time.

I repeat...what's so important about that pod that makes it necessary for one touch ejection? I mean, even the Warp Core ejection system wasn't so easily performed. And that was to keep the ship from blowing up in an overload. (Then again, it seems that their hand phasers could self destruct when the knob was moved too much. Dangerous equipment via idiot available designs, I suppose.)

 

My impression was that the pod was some kind of space lightening rod full of sensors which (for some reason predating the imagining of much of today's automation) had to be manned.

The big button was so we the viewers could easily make out what was going on long before 64" 4K UHD TV's.

 

Just a thought (maybe a crazy one) but could the pod could be the thing Scotty was in in "That Which Survives" which he kept telling Spock to eject?

 

It's pretty trivial for modern audiences to wrap their brains around what's going on here: the heroes have gone Tornado Hunting. Their job is to fly into this ion storm thing, deploy this ion pod there, and then get the hell out of Dodge before their ship gets torn to pieces.

Naturally, the act of jettisoning the ion pod would then be the most important thing on the starship, and warrant the Captain's index finger hovering over the dedicated button. Once the mission was over, the button could revert to Call For Coffee and Massage.

This skips or solves all the apparent plot problems pretty neatly. No, this mysterious one-off pod isn't a horrible bomb that will blow up the starship - it's merely the reason why the starship risks getting blown up. No, Kirk isn't making bad decisions for no good reason - he's performing an extremely time-critical job where he can't even chat with his bridge crew, let alone give a second warning to somebody prepping the ion pod, but has to rely on his own finger reflexes and judgement. And yes, under such circumstances, he could well make an error that costs the life of a fellow officer. And Finney's dastardly plan has high odds of succeeding, whereas without the dramatic Tornado Chase it wouldn't.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No, the access crawlway was the place where engineers had access to fuel line. The ion pod doesn't seem related to the engines in any way.

 

The controls Kirk has on his chair can be reset to be whatever they need to be, or the panel can be switched out with another depending on the mission at hand. Maybe it's standard practice/Kirk's practice in a situation like this to have him be the one to eject it; in case of just such a necessity, nobody else will have to have that decision on their heads.

 

They're called Expo Labels, "expo" being short for "exposition." Batman, a contemporary show, did this a lot. TV Tropes has a page on this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExpoLabel

Someone should edit the TV Tropes page to include Kirk's JETTISON POD button from "Court Martial" as an example.

 

"Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done, Jim: Control the jettisoning of an ion pod!"

 

...Apparently literally true, since if it were any more common, Starfleet wouldn't risk entire starships in the task. Ion storms would be a known quantity already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

"JETTISON BAT-POD"

Kor

 

That didn't bug me as much as the story dancing around the notion of a forged log entry until the very end where the possibility dawns on them, having written all the characters to be so dumb about it all. (not unlike the 1960s Doctor Who episode "The Ice Warriors" where everyone has no brain because the cliché computer does it all for them but at least in that story nobody was forging logs.)

But, yeah, one pod, one button, why does the Captain do it personally instead of having the big spring-loaded button in Engineering for Scotty to press - though that one is easy, sorta, in that Kirk is closer to seeing possible issues firsthand. I dunno, one would think the ship has sensors and the chief of engineering would be monitoring in his office since Engineering seems more relevant... but if the show were real then there'd be no show. And "Court Martial", despite these little nitpicks, is one of my favorites because of other details and handling of situations throughout the episode. There's much to like, so the nitpicks are easily forgivable.

 

Batman isn't exactly a typical example. It was parodying the use of bat names and explicit on-the-nose signage from the comic books, often redundantly labeling stuff they called out in dialog as part of the gag. Really apparent at the following link.

A COLLECTION OF BAT-LABELS
Collecting the explanatory labels on everything in the 1966-1968 Batman TV series.

 

I can most certainly see the idea of 'Function keys' that can be re-assigned per mission as a plausible reason for this situation. Would definitely explain the 'temporary label'er' style sticker strips next to the buttons. (Am trying to think back to that time when I was looking over the captain's chair and noting that control panel. Can't recall if it actually said anything at all.)

And, to think, we'll never have this type of situation, again. After all, in TNG style, everything becomes touch screen menus that can change on the fly.

 

Huh, that's right. Spock could just eliminate the bridge from the audio sweep. Maybe they were concerned that Finney could be hiding in a nook or behind the consoles, like a possum living in the walls.

 

And now I'm just imagining Spock threading a broom through one of those wicker panels under the consoles and wiggling it around and pounding the wall.

 

Fair enough; it's just the first example that popped into my head, maybe because it was so over the top with that.

 

Now I'm picturing him crouching behind the helm with nobody noticing.

For days.

 

Kirk's controls could be the same, really: those bits of text next to the buttons may well be graphics that change "on the fly", it's just that Kirk prefers a font that looks a bit like a sticker label.

The obvious in-universe point of the microphone device was to eliminate the heartbeats of everybody in the room one by one, for purely dramatic reasons. But that's also a practical way to do it: once eliminated, they stay eliminated, and can now wander everywhere in the ship without making it more difficult to track Finney.

How the device identifies a specific heartbeat is not described in detail. But clearly it doesn't mind changes in pulse or blood pressure, as it's obvious everybody would have his or hers slightly increase as the procedure proceeded...

Timo Saloniemi