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Balance of Terror - Are they phasers?

I always rationalized them as early "pulse" phasers, like the ones used by the Defiant or the pulse type phasers seen in Trek 09.

Nah, like I said, they're 'phasers acting a depth charges' (remember, BoT was a sub-chase homage). This job would be given to photon torpedoes for later episodes. From a continuity standpoint, we're supposed to write this off as an 'early episode mistake' along the lines of 'lithium crystals powering the ship' and just treat them like they were photon torpedoes all along.

From a 'canon' standpoint... er... oops? :)
 
...The unwelcome thing here is the presence of sub-hunting weapons aboard a ship whose builders didn't believe in submarines!

Of course, the entire concept of "BoT" is highly unwelcome nowadays, because it's the only episode in Trek history where our heroes don't believe in invisible enemies. That's pretty narrow-minded of scifi heroes, and more unexpected than the events of the ENT episode that turned "BoT" into an explicit continuity hiccup rather than an implicit one. If our heroes didn't disbelieve in invisibility, they'd have every reason to equip their ship with blanketing-fire weapons optimal for hunting down invisible foes!

Timo Saloniemi
 
They don't disbelieve an invisible ship, they've just never encountered one before. Spock hypothesizes rightly that it's possible but that they power cost is enormous. Furthermore, you don't need an invisible enemy to require area weapons, you just require enemies that are difficult to hit with pinpoint weapons.
 
I don't see anything really wrong with BoT other than some trying to invalidate it for revisionist retconning purposes. As far as the invisibility issue is concerned I think it's as simple as our heroes not having encountered a working example of the technology, not that they thought it was wholly impossible. Also it's well known around here that I completely ignore everything about ENT and consider it an alternate continuity so its bearing on TOS is nil in my view.
 
Even the cloaking device issue is workable, if you take into account that the cloaks of ENT's era were pretty easy to get around, apparently to the extent that the history texts don't make a big deal of the tech by the time of TOS, thus leading to Kirk and Spock's surprise at coming across a cloaked ship that wasn't so easy to detect.

Yes, ENT's writers screwed up with "Minefield", but the damage is not irreparable.
 
Well, I advise caution when the new Concordance comes out, because thirty-seven ENT episodes are included.
No offense intended, CRA, but the last issue of the Concordance I picked up was many years ago and I've little interest in picking up another. TOS, TAS and six films. What else could I possibly need as a TOS fan?
 
Well, first off, corrections of the errors in the previous editions, new fan art, hopefully a lot more information, not only from TOS directly, but from the other series and movies. What more do you need? :D
 
Although this is veering off topic, I think it's a perfectly reasonable interpretation to say that the events of ENT exist in an altered timeline. In fact, we've seen on-screen evidence of this. And this helps smooth out some of the continuity issues between TNG and Voyager as well.

Assume that TOS as documented in the episodes is the original, unchanged timeline. It holds all the way until First Contact. Then, due to the Borg, the Enterprise-E and its crew goes back in time to the point at which humans made first contact with aliens. The Enterprise crew gets actively involved with Cochrane and makes him aware of things he shouldn't have been aware of. The Borg sphere is destroyed above the Earth and pieces of it crash land and eventually produce Borg drones on Earth much earlier than any contact with the Borg was ever supposed to happen.

Thus, when we see the events depicted in Enterprise, we're seeing the altered timeline with events unfolding differently than they did before. Also, when we see Voyager's seasons involving Seven of Nine and we hear about Borg history, and contact between the Federation and the Borg that predates Q, Who?, we're also seeing that altered timeline, since those seasons of Voyager happen after First Contact.

To me, that all makes much more sense than trying to get all of the differences between TOS, TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise to all fit together.
 
Although this is veering off topic, I think it's a perfectly reasonable interpretation to say that the events of ENT exist in an altered timeline. In fact, we've seen on-screen evidence of this. And this helps smooth out some of the continuity issues between TNG and Voyager as well.

Assume that TOS as documented in the episodes is the original, unchanged timeline. It holds all the way until First Contact. Then, due to the Borg, the Enterprise-E and its crew goes back in time to the point at which humans made first contact with aliens. The Enterprise crew gets actively involved with Cochrane and makes him aware of things he shouldn't have been aware of. The Borg sphere is destroyed above the Earth and pieces of it crash land and eventually produce Borg drones on Earth much earlier than any contact with the Borg was ever supposed to happen.

Thus, when we see the events depicted in Enterprise, we're seeing the altered timeline with events unfolding differently than they did before. Also, when we see Voyager's seasons involving Seven of Nine and we hear about Borg history, and contact between the Federation and the Borg that predates Q, Who?, we're also seeing that altered timeline, since those seasons of Voyager happen after First Contact.

To me, that all makes much more sense than trying to get all of the differences between TOS, TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise to all fit together.

I tend to think the only major alteration would have been the name of the NX-01. Having been saved by the TNG crew may have created a soft spot in Cochrane's heart for the name, Enterprise. That said, the Borg were on ice until about half way through the series -- and couldn't have had much of a direct effect on the timeline until the point at which they were reactivated.

As for first contact with the Borg, for some reason the Borg were attracted to the Alpha Quadrant even before Q brought the Enterprise across the galaxy for an introduction. Commander Shelby in The Best Of Both Worlds notes that the colony on Jouret IV, which she confirmed to have been destroyed by the Borg, was destroyed in a matter identical to the lost outposts in The Neutral Zone.

In my view, Q was actually saving the Federation from annihilation, rather than precipitating events himself. As for why the Borg were lurking around at that time -- the events in Enterprise's Regeneration are as good an explanation as any, methinks.
 
An article up this week at The American Catholic mentioning
The moves and counter moves of both commanders are fascinating, and the episode is the best depiction on television of naval combat, albeit in outer space.
Favorite Star Trek Episode: Balance of Terror
Published Tuesday, September 27, 2011
No additional commentary (or comments yet) but an odd place for mentioning this episode.

also see this old 2007 thread:
Balance Of Terror was a WW2 Sub and Destroyer film in space
 
In the original broadcast version of the episode before anyone messed with it there was no sound to the phaser bursts. That is how we saw it on television in the '60s, '70s. '80s and '90s before they were remastered.

They started messing with things when the episodes were digitized for dvd. Then they just kept messing with it.

I don't believe that's true. I remember watching it on TV long before DVDs were invented and hearing the photon torpedo sound and wondering why they were calling them phasers. It wasn't the original broadcast but it was definitely during the 70's.
 
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