If that is true, I hope the fake vomit ate their brain.Maybe the trekkies stole them over the years
50th Anniversary Rewatch Thread
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
It's worth noting that the production crew took the time and effort to schlep a camera up to the roof of one of the buildings to get this dramatic shot.
(It's also worth noting that apparently they still use incandescent floodlamps and electrical conduit in the 23rd century.)
(It's also worth noting that apparently they still use incandescent floodlamps and electrical conduit in the 23rd century.)
I like the scene where Kirk first finds his brother dead and McCoy and Spock's reaction. Perfect. Spock's look as he attempt's to offer words of comfort are wonderful. Then Kirk stops him before he gets too mushy(for a Vulcan) I thought that was handled well. These are Kirk's two best friends. They know what to say to him.
It is a difficult decision that Kirk may have had to make to stop the spread of these creatures. Kill all the inhabitants of the planet. Would that make Kirk like the Conscious of the King governor. He had to make a decision on the life and death of other people. Are these situations similar?
Finally, I agree in the sense of how wrong it was that McCoy got blamed for Spock going blind. Spock and Kirk agreed that Spock should not wear the protective goggles. McCoy was the last one to agree to that. I do like the scene at the end where Kirk tries to absolve McCoy of his feelings of guilt and responsibility and McCoy simply did not answer back. Only silence and Kirk saying "Bones!" Bones!" Good episode to end the first season.
It is a difficult decision that Kirk may have had to make to stop the spread of these creatures. Kill all the inhabitants of the planet. Would that make Kirk like the Conscious of the King governor. He had to make a decision on the life and death of other people. Are these situations similar?
Finally, I agree in the sense of how wrong it was that McCoy got blamed for Spock going blind. Spock and Kirk agreed that Spock should not wear the protective goggles. McCoy was the last one to agree to that. I do like the scene at the end where Kirk tries to absolve McCoy of his feelings of guilt and responsibility and McCoy simply did not answer back. Only silence and Kirk saying "Bones!" Bones!" Good episode to end the first season.
This week's other 50th anniversary viewings.
The American TV season will be ending for me with next week's Get Smart, though The Saint and The Avengers will be continuing a while longer. And I'll be catching up on the season's episodes of Batman and Tarzan into August.
The American TV season will be ending for me with next week's Get Smart, though The Saint and The Avengers will be continuing a while longer. And I'll be catching up on the season's episodes of Batman and Tarzan into August.
I loved this one as a kid. Chapel - the bio researcher - should have been given some more science dialogue though instead of just handing out slides for the less qualified old country doctor to examine.Yeah, it's impossible not to shout at the screen considering how many times McCoy says he's tried everything and the overlong scene of them all pondering "what does a star do" until Kirk notices a conveniently twinkling light...
As for the episode, a review could be summed up with: interesting premise, crappy execution.
Giant disassembled space brain is interesting in theory, but they don't really develop it in any way. It seems intelligent, yet no attempt to communicate with it was made. Its motivation is unclear, all we really know is it goes in a straight path(why, where are they going?) and destroys civilizations(why destroy them completely if the goal is to just move on?)
Kirk also speculates it came from another galaxy, which is based on absolutely nothing(how would it even get through the barrier if it did come from outside
By the way, does the title "Operation -- Annihilate!" refer to space brain annihilating civilizations, or to Kirk's possibly facing the decision to annihilate the entire planet to eradicate the threat?
Kirk's family dying seems a wholly unnecessary thread, because that basically went nowhere. Kirk seemed more concerned about Spock's short-lived blindness(I guess Geordi's visor technology hadn't been invented yet?) than his brother dying, episode even ending on a jokey note...
The whole Spock going blind was contrived and pointless as well, as was the discussion on possibly having to destroy Deneva... essentially every point that the episode raises is given the barest minimum of lip service before it's forgotten or reversed and instead an inordinate amount of time is spent in figuring out it's the light that kills them.
In trying to do too much, having a monster of the week, an emotional core and a moral dilemma, it ends up not doing enough on any of those fronts...
That's just a redundancy, they need some way to contact Batman in case the red phone doesn't work
She was very efficient though, the results got in really fast
I don't know how the inclusion of Kirk's brother needed to go anywhere other than where it did. Kirk's brother died... that's where it goes. If they'd spent air time proving to us he's to be cared about, by developing the character, showing us he's a nice guy, having him play with the kids, work on a hobby... that takes time away from developing the alienness, mystery, and threat. I don't need to be talked into valuing Sam's life, and Kirk's loss. I feel spared, because chances are Sam was a pretty dull guy.
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The motivation for the creatures spreading was standard-- survival and propagation. They just have a really unusual way of doing it.
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Kirk's realization that light was their weakness showed they had been taking a much more "dramatic" weakness for granted, and that's what people do, we assume what's benign for us is benign period. I like Kirk's being the one to fall back on basic logic, re-examining the most basic facts of the situation, as we expect Spock to do.
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Now being older, I appreciate the disturbing situation of their having been reckless with Spock, much more. I can see that McCoy as the doctor in charge would be expected to weigh medical dangers better than Kirk at least, and even Spock too. That's his job. It's a very uncomfortable time, and we just don't know what to think about this at first. McCoy may really be an irresponsible a-hole, or we have to consider that very briefly before letting him off the hook, long enough to make it interesting.
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It seems to me that we get some moments through season 1 in which we are being asked to consider that McCoy might be a flawed or irresponsible doctor. The first moment was in Man Trap, where he's reminiscing pleasantly about the old days with Nancy, with a man on the table next to him, who's just died. In Court Martial, he's drinking in the middle of the day in Sickbay. Interesting.
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The motivation for the creatures spreading was standard-- survival and propagation. They just have a really unusual way of doing it.
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Kirk's realization that light was their weakness showed they had been taking a much more "dramatic" weakness for granted, and that's what people do, we assume what's benign for us is benign period. I like Kirk's being the one to fall back on basic logic, re-examining the most basic facts of the situation, as we expect Spock to do.
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Now being older, I appreciate the disturbing situation of their having been reckless with Spock, much more. I can see that McCoy as the doctor in charge would be expected to weigh medical dangers better than Kirk at least, and even Spock too. That's his job. It's a very uncomfortable time, and we just don't know what to think about this at first. McCoy may really be an irresponsible a-hole, or we have to consider that very briefly before letting him off the hook, long enough to make it interesting.
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It seems to me that we get some moments through season 1 in which we are being asked to consider that McCoy might be a flawed or irresponsible doctor. The first moment was in Man Trap, where he's reminiscing pleasantly about the old days with Nancy, with a man on the table next to him, who's just died. In Court Martial, he's drinking in the middle of the day in Sickbay. Interesting.
How about in season 3's "The Tholian Web"? Scotty straight out asks for his permission to mix drugs (theragen derivative) with alcohol (Scotch)!
That's kind of my point.
It's just a cheap way to play up the threat, and an unnecessary one since Spock gets threatened as well, and he's a much more important version of "Kirk's brother" than mustache-Shatner is within this story anyway...
I'm not saying we had to have necessarily seen him alive and hanging out with Jim(though it certainly helps, last week when Edith died it was a powerful and emotional scene because we got to see them interact), Picard's brother died completely off screen in Generations, but he died so that they could go somewhere with it(even if how they went about it was very poorly done).
Here, that angle is completely wasted, Kirk's brother could have easily been any random dead person.
I guess, but it's still stupid science.
Bones says he went through "every kind of radiation", but light is radiation.
Presumably to test electromagnetic radiation, there's a machine that goes through the frequencies/wavelengths of the spectrum, so either that machine had to be set up to skip the middle bit by default for some reason(?) or McCoy had to actually tell it to skip ahead(??), which is stupid as hell either way.
Well, dodge, I just think you've massively exaggerated the size and importance of these flaws. You could end up demolishing all of Star Trek that way, bit by bit.
I cannot imagine that happening. Except we ARE on TrekBBS, of course.
Well that's exaggerating things a bit...
Obviously I love this show, otherwise I wouldn't be here 50 years later arguing it's minutiae, and when I do talk about what I see as flaws I always try to do so not from the position of "this is bad", but from the position of "this would have been better if..."
I'm also always happy to read differing opinions, even if I do still end up disagreeing with them. Besides, if we didn't occasionally argue about these tiny things, this thread wouldn't be much more than a check-in of who's seen the episode this week, and where would be the fun in that...
In case this needs to be said, my point was that these flaws are no greater than the ones which fill the other episodes too.
And I'm sure we'll get to those in turn.
'twas a bit weird not having a "new" episode on last night
Come to think of it, I believe this might have been the first time I've seen the show on a one-a-week basis. All the TV broadcasts I remember were several-weekly, and when I've done full rewatches on home media I usually watched it daily.
I haven't done a full rewatch in quite a while, so even though I basically remember all these episodes on account of watching them a bunch of times, they still managed to feel fresh and interesting(this being probably the overall best season of all Star Trek series certainly helped). Anyways, this was really fun for me, as was reading all your comments, it's gonna be a long wait till September 15th.
(How did they do reruns back in the day, by the way?)
Come to think of it, I believe this might have been the first time I've seen the show on a one-a-week basis. All the TV broadcasts I remember were several-weekly, and when I've done full rewatches on home media I usually watched it daily.
I haven't done a full rewatch in quite a while, so even though I basically remember all these episodes on account of watching them a bunch of times, they still managed to feel fresh and interesting(this being probably the overall best season of all Star Trek series certainly helped). Anyways, this was really fun for me, as was reading all your comments, it's gonna be a long wait till September 15th.
(How did they do reruns back in the day, by the way?)
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Summer rerun schedule on NBC:
Where No Man Has Gone Before - 4/20/67
The Naked Time - 4/27/67
Mudd's Women - 5/4/67
The Corbomite Maneuver - 5/11/67
The Menagerie, 1 - 5/18/67
The Menagerie, 2 - 5/25/67
Charlie X - 6/1/67
Shore Leave - 6/6/67
The Devil In The Dark - 6/15/67
The Squire Of Gothos - 6/22/67
Miri - 6/29/67
Arena - 7/6/67
Tomorrow Is Yesterday - 7/13/67
A Taste Of Armageddon - 7/20/67
Return Of The Archons - 7/27/67
Balance Of Terror - 8/3/67
This Side Of Paradise - 8/10/67
--preempted on 8/17
Space Seed - 8/24/67
The City On The Edge Of Forever - 8/31/67
--preempted on 9/7/67
Episodes NOT rerun that summer:
The Man Trap
The Enemy Within
What Are Little Girls Made Of (already had a rerun during prior Christmas week)
Dagger Of The Mind
Conscience Of The King
The Galileo Seven
Court Martial
Space Seed
Errand Of Mercy
The Alternative Factor
Operation: Annihilate!
Where No Man Has Gone Before - 4/20/67
The Naked Time - 4/27/67
Mudd's Women - 5/4/67
The Corbomite Maneuver - 5/11/67
The Menagerie, 1 - 5/18/67
The Menagerie, 2 - 5/25/67
Charlie X - 6/1/67
Shore Leave - 6/6/67
The Devil In The Dark - 6/15/67
The Squire Of Gothos - 6/22/67
Miri - 6/29/67
Arena - 7/6/67
Tomorrow Is Yesterday - 7/13/67
A Taste Of Armageddon - 7/20/67
Return Of The Archons - 7/27/67
Balance Of Terror - 8/3/67
This Side Of Paradise - 8/10/67
--preempted on 8/17
Space Seed - 8/24/67
The City On The Edge Of Forever - 8/31/67
--preempted on 9/7/67
Episodes NOT rerun that summer:
The Man Trap
The Enemy Within
What Are Little Girls Made Of (already had a rerun during prior Christmas week)
Dagger Of The Mind
Conscience Of The King
The Galileo Seven
Court Martial
Space Seed
Errand Of Mercy
The Alternative Factor
Operation: Annihilate!
If anyone's interested, I've moved the historical context posts to The Classic/Retro TV Thread...biweekly for the summer hiatus.
I'm sad that I missed out on this re-watch. My English is not good enough to write whole essays about episodes, but I like reading everybody's thoughts after I have watched an episode, especially as I don't know anybody offline who likes TOS.
And the historical context post is an added bonus.
And the historical context post is an added bonus.
It's not over yet, we're just hibernating for the summer, so there's plenty of time to catch up till season 2 starts.
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