My random re-watching continues with "The Changeling" from early season two.
Note that the original f/x are grainy, but are preferable to the new ones.
I do love the great camerawork and editing, which sells Nomad's ability to levitate rather well.
Nichelle Nichols does the "fried brain" scenes much better than what the story deserves. She sells the notion that if Nomad chose to read your brain, you'd be zombified instead of turned into half-baked scrambled eggs like Scotty and you don't want to be fried like that.
I like the idea that two entirely innocent probes collide in space, for similar yet different reasons, rebuild as a single unit, and end up destructive by accident. Given how the Enterprise coined the trope "galaxy hopping", it's amazing the ship hasn't rammed into any disused probes or other space flotsam ever while warping.
Though I still find it odd that the two ancient probes fixing each other created a new probe that could wipe out so much in so little time. "collect and sterilize soil samples", is Nomad also larger on the inside to take back home entire acres of de-crittered land?
Speaking of warping, Nomad fixes the engines to be more productive, winding up to do more than warp 10. Woohoo! After reading up on ship's schematics, of course. At one time in the story, Spock states there is little Nomad cannot do, in one of television's worst cop-out moments of all time that didn't involve a bottle of scotch or a screwdriver. Apparently, Nomad didn't read up on maximum hull stress based on propulsion so Kirk has to tell him that. Shame shame...
Tan Ru, "the other". Seriously. Sounds like a brand of shoe polish. Like the one used by the make-up artists for any of the six episodes involving Klingons. Anybody buy stock the same way few bought stock for typewriter correction fluid of the sort that this script was probably bathed in after a while? The episode feels so by-the-numbers but not offering anything to really get into, unlike "Doomsday Machine" and others: A big nasty mystery meat threat that wiped out other things gets introduced to crew, crew figures out way to defeat it, crew defeats it, make a joke at the end so everyone can laugh because TV can't be too dreary no matter how inappropriate the joke is in context to the storyline, watch next week promo, cue end credits (and not the TOS-R re-scored version either).
Scotty's death and revival was codswallop. Pure padding.
Because she was belting out a tune, Uhura gets her brain wiped by the Nomad probe (wasn't Nomad trying to read her brain using fdisk, not format with mkfs for pity's sake...) I will spare repeating Nomad's stupid comments about her mind vs Spock's, especially as Spock - by training and by species - is vastly different to begin with. Then again, Nomad claiming her mind is chaotic, doesn't understand Uhura did a better job at singing "Beyond Antares" and that she was a quick learner to be able to get back to collegiate level studies by episode's end (you know, less than one HOUR since there's no suggestion of elapsed time going on) and will be able to do her regular duties by a week later. In other words, more cod being fished by the writers and reeling in a boot.
Most people look at Nomad's big antenna. Why is Scotty the only one who looks at Nomad's flashy midsection? Nomad is not Lt Palamas, whom he was frothing over last week with pit-shaven Apollo wanting her to himself (yet they would all herd and share goats)... Didn't Scotty get fried last week as well? No, wait, he didn't die. Oh well. That's okay, it's not going to stop me from asking why his first name should have been Kenny instead.
The scene where Nomad kills the two guards-- no, not that one with the two where the invisible shield was placed too far out, that other one with the two where the invisible shield was too far out again-- wouldn't it have been neat if the animators doing the cel animation for its lasers did correct perspective when firing at the guard toward the back and right (from our viewing perspective) of the other?
How come Nomad is able to lock its circuits on Spock's mental wavelengths? Read minds, wipe them, sure. But remote control as well? Like Orac from Blake's 7, only cheesy. Worse, at least Blake's 7 didn't do anything as brainless fantasy as having an organic being mind meld with a computer via organic telepathy.
Spock is otherwise well used in this story, reminding Nomad about McCoy and Kirk's actions to prevent the blighted AI from releasing a plasma bolt and destroying the ship from the inside out. You know Nomad's shields could take it all night long. Nomad can do almost anything. Spock said so...
If Nomad beachballed into Sickbay to read up on Kirk, it believed Kirk was not the creator. Yet when Kirk confronts it later, Nomad still acts as if Kirk was the creator.
How come Nomad doesn't kill Chapel? Her bleached blonde beach wig alone killed the audience.
Kirk talking it to death was hysterical and is even more stereotyped TOS than "the hawt green Orion slave girl" ever was, since TOS has green girls go-go dancing only twice - with computers being nagged to death by Kirk for at least a dozen... Back to Nomad: Kirk did get repetitive, but had he remembered that Nomad injured but not killed Chapel and that Uhura was given the disk reformat instead of disk read command... or, of course, the useless bit of needing to be reminded about the ship hull's limitation... Nomad's "voice" becoming like Alvin the Chipmunk's as he wobbles disturbingly up and down made up for a generic template of an episode.
All in all, it's a cod episode. Too fishy in spots and boring while waiting for something to happen. If nothing else, having seen this one again, I now understand why the "two probes meet in the night, crash for a while, then go back to Earth to find stepdaddy to tell him they're engaged but want to touch him anyway" trope was re-used for TMP. TMP took the material a lot more seriously...
The saddest part is, as a kid, I thought this was the primo of all episodes...
Note that the original f/x are grainy, but are preferable to the new ones.
I do love the great camerawork and editing, which sells Nomad's ability to levitate rather well.
Nichelle Nichols does the "fried brain" scenes much better than what the story deserves. She sells the notion that if Nomad chose to read your brain, you'd be zombified instead of turned into half-baked scrambled eggs like Scotty and you don't want to be fried like that.
I like the idea that two entirely innocent probes collide in space, for similar yet different reasons, rebuild as a single unit, and end up destructive by accident. Given how the Enterprise coined the trope "galaxy hopping", it's amazing the ship hasn't rammed into any disused probes or other space flotsam ever while warping.
Though I still find it odd that the two ancient probes fixing each other created a new probe that could wipe out so much in so little time. "collect and sterilize soil samples", is Nomad also larger on the inside to take back home entire acres of de-crittered land?
Speaking of warping, Nomad fixes the engines to be more productive, winding up to do more than warp 10. Woohoo! After reading up on ship's schematics, of course. At one time in the story, Spock states there is little Nomad cannot do, in one of television's worst cop-out moments of all time that didn't involve a bottle of scotch or a screwdriver. Apparently, Nomad didn't read up on maximum hull stress based on propulsion so Kirk has to tell him that. Shame shame...
Tan Ru, "the other". Seriously. Sounds like a brand of shoe polish. Like the one used by the make-up artists for any of the six episodes involving Klingons. Anybody buy stock the same way few bought stock for typewriter correction fluid of the sort that this script was probably bathed in after a while? The episode feels so by-the-numbers but not offering anything to really get into, unlike "Doomsday Machine" and others: A big nasty mystery meat threat that wiped out other things gets introduced to crew, crew figures out way to defeat it, crew defeats it, make a joke at the end so everyone can laugh because TV can't be too dreary no matter how inappropriate the joke is in context to the storyline, watch next week promo, cue end credits (and not the TOS-R re-scored version either).
Scotty's death and revival was codswallop. Pure padding.
Because she was belting out a tune, Uhura gets her brain wiped by the Nomad probe (wasn't Nomad trying to read her brain using fdisk, not format with mkfs for pity's sake...) I will spare repeating Nomad's stupid comments about her mind vs Spock's, especially as Spock - by training and by species - is vastly different to begin with. Then again, Nomad claiming her mind is chaotic, doesn't understand Uhura did a better job at singing "Beyond Antares" and that she was a quick learner to be able to get back to collegiate level studies by episode's end (you know, less than one HOUR since there's no suggestion of elapsed time going on) and will be able to do her regular duties by a week later. In other words, more cod being fished by the writers and reeling in a boot.
Most people look at Nomad's big antenna. Why is Scotty the only one who looks at Nomad's flashy midsection? Nomad is not Lt Palamas, whom he was frothing over last week with pit-shaven Apollo wanting her to himself (yet they would all herd and share goats)... Didn't Scotty get fried last week as well? No, wait, he didn't die. Oh well. That's okay, it's not going to stop me from asking why his first name should have been Kenny instead.
The scene where Nomad kills the two guards-- no, not that one with the two where the invisible shield was placed too far out, that other one with the two where the invisible shield was too far out again-- wouldn't it have been neat if the animators doing the cel animation for its lasers did correct perspective when firing at the guard toward the back and right (from our viewing perspective) of the other?
How come Nomad is able to lock its circuits on Spock's mental wavelengths? Read minds, wipe them, sure. But remote control as well? Like Orac from Blake's 7, only cheesy. Worse, at least Blake's 7 didn't do anything as brainless fantasy as having an organic being mind meld with a computer via organic telepathy.
Spock is otherwise well used in this story, reminding Nomad about McCoy and Kirk's actions to prevent the blighted AI from releasing a plasma bolt and destroying the ship from the inside out. You know Nomad's shields could take it all night long. Nomad can do almost anything. Spock said so...
If Nomad beachballed into Sickbay to read up on Kirk, it believed Kirk was not the creator. Yet when Kirk confronts it later, Nomad still acts as if Kirk was the creator.
How come Nomad doesn't kill Chapel? Her bleached blonde beach wig alone killed the audience.
Kirk talking it to death was hysterical and is even more stereotyped TOS than "the hawt green Orion slave girl" ever was, since TOS has green girls go-go dancing only twice - with computers being nagged to death by Kirk for at least a dozen... Back to Nomad: Kirk did get repetitive, but had he remembered that Nomad injured but not killed Chapel and that Uhura was given the disk reformat instead of disk read command... or, of course, the useless bit of needing to be reminded about the ship hull's limitation... Nomad's "voice" becoming like Alvin the Chipmunk's as he wobbles disturbingly up and down made up for a generic template of an episode.
All in all, it's a cod episode. Too fishy in spots and boring while waiting for something to happen. If nothing else, having seen this one again, I now understand why the "two probes meet in the night, crash for a while, then go back to Earth to find stepdaddy to tell him they're engaged but want to touch him anyway" trope was re-used for TMP. TMP took the material a lot more seriously...
The saddest part is, as a kid, I thought this was the primo of all episodes...
