Comments on "A Private Little War" Remastered

[The Squire of Gothos]

Perhaps Kirk was aiming to let the Klingons know that aiding one side on similar planets against the other would be fruitless. Every new technology the Klingons smuggled in would be balanced by the Feds bringing one in themselves.

Or perhaps Kirk was bitter and wanted to go back and fight himself, and armed the Hill People out of a personal wish for wanting revenge for what happened to his friend.

 

[Timo]

Perhaps Kirk was aiming to let the Klingons know that aiding one side on similar planets against the other would be fruitless. Every new technology the Klingons smuggled in would be balanced by the Feds bringing one in themselves.

One wonders if the Klingons wouldn't actually take delight in such a development. If every planet contested between the two empires became a battlefield, the Federation credo of peaceful expansion would begin to sound awfully hollow, while the Klingon marketing angle of providing strong protection would become all the more attractive.

And if the Fed-sponsored side on some planet actually decisively won the war, that would be the perfect moment for the Klingons to come out and start crying about treaty violations. The sides backed by the Klingons would probably always be kept starved of resources so that they could not win decisive victories and would remain dependent on Klingon aid.

Doesn't mean Kirk couldn't have aimed for setting a precedent, of course. But what he aimed at might not have been achievable, or wouldn't have worked as a deterrent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

Doesn't mean Kirk couldn't have aimed for setting a precedent, of course. But what he aimed at might not have been achievable, or wouldn't have worked as a deterrent

Makes you wonder how much leeway Starfleet gives its Captains in the field.

Spock was happy for Federation diplomats to hold sway in "The Mark of Gideon" but both he and Kirk gave Mr Fox short thrift in "A Taste of Armageddon".

 

[Cyrus]

Thanks to the more clear image of the remastered version I noticed the green blood on Spock's uniform. I had seen the episode a few times before but never noticed that.

In the scene where McCoy hits one of the villagers with the steel rod in his hand, I think Deforest Kelly kind of messed up. When he swung the rod toward the villager it hit the rest of the rods next to the wall and knocked them over. I don't think it even hit the villager but he went down anyway.

 

[Sir Rhosis]

Maybe its only me, but I've always wondered if Kirk followed through on the order to beam down the rifles. He pauses, say the one hundred serpents line, then we cut to the end flyby. We never saw them beamed down and Kirk's manner always made me think he probably did not.

Just me, though.

Sir Rhosis

 

[cooleddie74]

Or maybe he beamed down SOME of them. Enough to equal the balance between the Hill People and Villagers. But not enough to allow too many to accidentally fall into one side or the other's hands and create an imbalance and superiority of arms.

 

[RAMA]

After a few decades of fighting, the hill people would be out of firearms again, due to wear and tear and lack of knowledge on proper maintenance and repair. So probably would the village people, although their more thorough Klingon training might make a difference.

Timo Saloniemi

That's assuming the people on the planet couldn't figure out how to continue to arm themselves. We don't really know what technological level they were at in a realistic sense. There appeared to be a smith in town and the Klingon already showed the hill people to make the weapons on their own and be self sufficient.

A blockade against that Klingons would have been well within the UFP's rights according to the Organian peace treaty. There was no reason to cause an escalation in the arms race on the planet surface.

RAMA

 

[cooleddie74]

After a few decades of fighting, the hill people would be out of firearms again, due to wear and tear and lack of knowledge on proper maintenance and repair. So probably would the village people, although their more thorough Klingon training might make a difference.

Timo Saloniemi

That's assuming the people on the planet couldn't figure out how to continue to arm themselves. We don't really know what technological level they were at in a realistic sense. There appeared to be a smith in town and the Klingon already showed the hill people to make the weapons on their own and be self sufficient.

A blockade against that Klingons would have been well within the UFP's rights according to the Organian peace treaty. There was no reason to cause an escalation in the arms race on the planet surface.

RAMA

And its possible the Klingons withdrew right after this incident once they discovered the Federation was now onto their scheme. Thus leaving behind JUST enough knowledge and equipment to let the Villagers progress on their own and continue forging their own arms.

 

[Timo]

That's assuming the people on the planet couldn't figure out how to continue to arm themselves. We don't really know what technological level they were at in a realistic sense. There appeared to be a smith in town and the Klingon already showed the hill people to make the weapons on their own and be self sufficient.

(Uh, just to nitpick a possible typo, weren't the hill people the folks on Kirk's side - without smiths or associated infrastructure?)

As a major plot point, our heroes discover the metallurgy of the villager flintlocks is way beyond what the culture should have. Now, perhaps the Klingons managed to teach the villagers how to make good steel. But more probably they did not, and the results would be consistent with Mao's Great Leap project: a cargo-cult approach to steelmaking, with only rudimentary quality control and not enough knowledge to bring the quality back up if deficiencies were found.

Good grade steel only emerged here on Earth after extensive manufacturing arrangements were in place (the occasional old master swordsmith being the rare exception that confirms the rule). The villagers don't seem to have mass transportation such as barges or railroads, so they wouldn't have access to distant raw materials but would have to use local sources regardless of quality. While I guess there are some odds for them being able to keep doing what the Klingons taught them for a generation or so, I wouldn't bet on them being able to keep it up past the retirement of the originally trained generation, a decade or two after the episode.

Ultimately, what Kirk did would have short-term, limited-scale repercussions - if only for the reason that the conflict we witness seems short-term and limited in scale. We are talking about small, isolated communities of just a couple of hundred people at some sort of clan warfare, without global implications because there doesn't seem to be any global infrastructure in place. Odds are, the Klingons only wanted a small foothold on the planet, and could never have hoped that their protegés would gain world dominance or anything like that. If anything, once the villagers grew too powerful for their local setting and tried to expand, people with bronze axes would hack them down by sheer superiority of numbers - unless the Klingons stayed, and taught the villagers how to properly conquer your neighbors and keep expanding.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[garakfan]

I always enjoyed this episode with a few reservations

1. Could they digitally change the Mugato to be less embarassing.

2. Those hill people blonde wigs !

3. OK, let me get this. Kirk visits the planet 14 years earlier, all the guys look exactly alike and from a distance so far he see a few tiny dots. From this he can identify Tyree ?

 

[cooleddie74]

I thought the original 1967 mugatu makeup was pretty damn good. The face is very aggressive and simian-like. Sure the pointy spines on its back are kinda rubbery and fakey but overall it could have been a thousand times worse.