Balance of Terror- The Event that Made Captain Kirk's reputation

[Samuel]

It seems during and after the original series that Captain Kirk is widely considered one of the best if not the best starship commanders in not only Starfleet but the entire galaxy as well. When his identity is revealed in "Errand of Mercy" to the Klingons, Kor seems mightily impressed and expresses open admiration of him.

So it seems obvious that Kirks reputation was well established even before "Errand of Mercy". Now I know we assume there were missions of the Enterprise prior to the ones we saw in Season One and undoubtedly Kirk had notable successes before he took command of the Enterprise, but assuming that the most famous ones were what we saw onscreen and the episode events occurred pretty much in the order aired, in my opinion it was stopping the Romulan ship in "Balance of Terror" that made Kirks reputation.

Of the episodes in that general period, only "The Corbomite Manuever" had the potential to involve major galaxy altering changes (contact with a new major galactic power potentially).

But in "Balance of Terror" Captain Kirk leads the Enterprise in repelling a Romulan attack that

1) Has the advantage of surprise
2) Benefits from not one but two brand new technologies. The invisibility field (cloaking device) and the extremely powerful plasma weapon.
3) Kirk verifies (apparently given Spocks expression and explanation later) that the Romulans are related to the Vulcans
4) Kirk in fact not only obtains the first visual confirmation of the Romulan appearance but conducts a brief conversation with their commander. And I would suggest though not stated that the Enterprise probably beams aboard the body of the Romulan Centurion that floats in the debris field near the Enterprise early in the battle. In short Kirk not only stops the Romulan incursion but gathers more intelligence on the Romulans that was apparently collected during a major war with them.

And Kirk does all of this while suffering only modest damage to the Enterprise and the loss of only one crewman. Bad news for his fiancée of course. And he does this while avoiding violating the Neutral Zone.

Thoughts?

 

[Vger23]

I think the incident definitely helped build Kirk's reputation.

My assumption about Kor's reaction has always been more about the high profile nature of the constitution class starship then Kirks individual reputation itself. I felt as though the Klingons likely knew who the captains were of Starfleet's more high-profile ships, and he was pleasantly surprised to be in possession of one of them at the start of their war

 

[Timo]

I'd rather think the "BoT" incident never was revealed to the general public, or even to most of Starfleet for that matter. Too much would be at stake. And the episode itself suggests Starfleet never tells people about Romulans and their cloaks unless it absolutely has to - and even its own personnel apparently don't need to know, not even when assigned to the Romulan border.

Kirk was a soldier by reputation already before he became an explorer - that's how Garth sees him, and he seems to coyly agree. Quite possibly he became famous first, and got given the command of a starship as a consequence!

But I agree that Kor seems to admire Kirk's uniform more than the man inside it. The face-off with Kor may be what makes Kirk a household name, what with the associated event being very much a household one (the Organians made sure of that!), and quite contrary to Starfleet's wishes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TRON JA307020]

It seems during and after the original series that Captain Kirk is widely considered one of the best if not the best starship commanders in not only Starfleet but the entire galaxy as well. When his identity is revealed in "Errand of Mercy" to the Klingons, Kor seems mightily impressed and expresses open admiration of him.

So it seems obvious that Kirks reputation was well established even before "Errand of Mercy". Now I know we assume there were missions of the Enterprise prior to the ones we saw in Season One and undoubtedly Kirk had notable successes before he took command of the Enterprise, but assuming that the most famous ones were what we saw onscreen and the episode events occurred pretty much in the order aired, in my opinion it was stopping the Romulan ship in "Balance of Terror" that made Kirks reputation.

Of the episodes in that general period, only "The Corbomite Manuever" had the potential to involve major galaxy altering changes (contact with a new major galactic power potentially).

But in "Balance of Terror" Captain Kirk leads the Enterprise in repelling a Romulan attack that

1) Has the advantage of surprise
2) Benefits from not one but two brand new technologies. The invisibility field (cloaking device) and the extremely powerful plasma weapon.
3) Kirk verifies (apparently given Spocks expression and explanation later) that the Romulans are related to the Vulcans
4) Kirk in fact not only obtains the first visual confirmation of the Romulan appearance but conducts a brief conversation with their commander. And I would suggest though not stated that the Enterprise probably beams aboard the body of the Romulan Centurion that floats in the debris field near the Enterprise early in the battle. In short Kirk not only stops the Romulan incursion but gathers more intelligence on the Romulans that was apparently collected during a major war with them.

And Kirk does all of this while suffering only modest damage to the Enterprise and the loss of only one crewman. Bad news for his fiancée of course. And he does this while avoiding violating the Neutral Zone.

Thoughts?

I would put the doomsday machine up there. He rammed the constitution right down the machines throat and save billions in the process.

 

[Samuel]

I would put the doomsday machine up there. He rammed the constitution right down the machines throat and save billions in the process.

Oh yeah but I wanted to find events in the first season.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I would put the doomsday machine up there. He rammed the constitution right down the machines throat and save billions in the process.

Constellation.

 

[Pauln6]

In Court Martial, they read out his awards of valour I think. His reputation is likely built on those events.

 

[Commishsleer]

I'm thinking BOT establishes Kirk as a great military tactical commander where his actions in Doomsday Machine and with the Giant Amoeba thingy establishes as a clever commander against the odds but not against a thinking enemy.

 

[Herbert]

I liked it better with Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens

 

[Ronald Held]

IMO Kirk's reputation increased during the entire 5 year mission. Maybe any hype afterwards brought his ship back for the refit

 

[Timo]

...Does somebody know Kirk by reputation in the episodes?

Garth does, referring to Kirk's warrior past. But, say, the Romulan Commandress does not. She only recognizes Spock.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Samuel]

...Does somebody know Kirk by reputation in the episodes?

Garth does, referring to Kirk's warrior past. But, say, the Romulan Commandress does not. She only recognizes Spock.

Timo Saloniemi

Something worth noting. In "The Enterprise Incident" the Romulan Commander was pretty quick to accept Spocks testimony that Kirk had gone insane. Now, she was hot for Spock already so that undoubtedly shaped her thinking. But she also might've heard reports of how often Starfleets starship COs tended to go crazy. Tracy, Garth, to name just a couple off the top of my head. Even Decker wasn't operating with a full deck when he died.

 

[MAGolding]

have you ever heard of a movie called Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)?

Think about that title, and then think about the odds in each episode against Kirk and the Enterprise having any tomorrow..

In some episodes you might think they have a 90 percent chance of survival, in others a 10 percent chance of survival, and so on. And in a series of adventures the odds they will survive each and every adventure in the series of of adventures can be found by multiplying the odds in each episode. So if they have 0.90 probability of survival in one, 0.50 in another, 0.67 in a third, 0.01 in a forth, and 0.10 in a fifth adventure, the odds that they will survive all five adventures are 0.90 X 0.50 X 0.67 X 0.01 X 0.10 or 0.0003015.

Yes, like Spock, I am the kind of person who actually calculates what the "odds against tomorrow" are. And if there a universe-controlling god, or fate, or destiny, deciding who lives and who dies, they also do it by calculating the odds.

The odds that an adventure hero will survive a series of tens or hundreds of dangerous and exciting adventures are not zero. But they are close enough to zero that it doesn't matter.

Action heroes (and villains, and all other action characters) all die in their latest exciting and dangerous adventure. Or else they retire from adventures after just a few exciting and dangerous adventures.

If you are a fan of an action adventure series of movies that lasted for three or four movies, the hero's survival is very impressive and very improbable. And if you like the hero you can hope that he retires from adventures after the last movie in the series. Because otherwise he will be killed sooner or later, probably sooner, in an adventure not made into a movie.

But if an action hero has a series of tens or hundreds of exciting and dangerous adventures in a TV series, then the odds for his survival are extremely close to zero. Not 0.1, not 0.01, not 0.001, not 0.0001, but with very, very, very many zeroes after the decimal point. And if your favorite TV characters are a bunch of action heroes in several different TV shows then the odds that all of them will survive to the ends of their shows are much less.

But remember the concept of alternate universes constantly branching out, millions and billions and trillions and gazillions of new alternate universes branching off each day.

Except....

Imagine that a typical long lasting adventure TV series or other long lasting fictional adventure series involves the creators searching gazillions of alternate universes to select a few where the protagonists have exciting and dangerous adventures and survive them and make episodes about those adventures. And in most cases the protagonists only have one adventure exciting and dangerous enough to make an episode about in each alternate universe.

So if the exciting and dangerous adventure Kirk and the Enterprise crew face in the typical Star Trek episode is the only exciting and dangerous adventure they have in that particular alternate universe, their odds of surviving until they retire from Starfleet will be good. They will survive in the vast majority of alternate universes they live in.

Therefore I believe that most TV episodes in most of the early non serialized TV shows happen in alternate universes of their own.

Thus it seems unlikely that Kirk would be famed for Balance of Terror in more than a very few later episodes - perhaps none.

 

[gratone]

Kor does seem to know of Kirk's reputation ("... and I must confess to a certain admiration for you.").

 

[Commander Luskeen]

in the previous episode he discovered time travel. That seems more important

 

[johnnybear]

There is the Axanar peace mission which we don't really know much about only that it probably wasn't as peaceful as the title suggests! Although that could have been Captain Garth? There is also the Gorland uprising but that could have been settled with very little life lost compared to his Mirror Universe suppression! Apart from those encounters, we see most of Kirk's adventures on screen so his reputation must be built upon that although the Romulan incursion was probably kept from the masses but Kor might have learned of this later on with the Klingon/Romulan alliance?
JB

 

[Timo]

Do we really see most of Kirk's adventures onscreen? It is relatively seldom that the heroes would refer to their old onscreen adventures (this sort of continuity is the most common in the third season), and references to adventures we did NOT see are about half as common as mentions of onscreen ones. And interestingly, the unseen adventures seem to be what made Kirk's warrior reputation - Romulans at Tau Ceti, the soldier thing Garth refers to, the acts that earned Kor's admiration of our hero. Or is there an onscreen fight before "Errand of Mercy" that Starfleet would actually have been willing to make public, or the Klingons would have been in a position to spy on?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Samuel]

Well if you take various novels, comics, and other written adventures as canon (or whatever they call it) then James Kirk did indeed have a whole legion of adventures prior to the first season of TOS.

 

[Methuselah Flint]

the Romulan Commandress does not. She only recognizes Spock.

I think she knows of Kirk, but not Spock:

COMMANDER: I must admit some surprise on seeing you, Spock. We were not aware of Vulcans aboard the Enterprise.
SPOCK: Starfleet is not in the habit of informing Romulans of its ships' personnel.
COMMANDER: Quite so. Yet there are certain ships, certain officers, that are known to us.

During the latter part of this exchange she looks at Kirk. Also, the Sub Commander correctly identifies Kirk as the captain of the Enterprise early in Act I, and appears suprised to see Spock, exclaiming "Vulcan!".

 

[Marsden]

We don't know exact timing for many things, but Kirk was in command of the Enterprise for years before the series started.

Gary and Kirk knew each other 15 years, but Spock was on the Enterprise and worked with Gary for "years" so Gary and Kirk must have been there for years. That's what I'm basing my statement of years. At least two, maybe three or more.