It's left to the imagination how many people the Doomsday Machine or the blood-sucking cloud thing may have killed in their time. Could be in the trillions. Or more.
Dark moments in TOS...
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
When I first watched “The Doomsday Machine” I took it at face value: a massive and powerful weapon that consumes planets. What a terrifying idea.
But later I really started to think about it, particularly when thinking of the scale of the thing in comparison to the Enterprise.
Yeah, it’s huge compared to a starship…but compared to an actual planet the planet killer would be a rather tiny thing. It strikes me that it would take a very long time for it to chop up a planet completely and consume the whole thing.
It strikes me more likely that while the planet killer is indeed a weapon of destruction it is likely more a weapon of terror. It doesn’t have to cut up a whole planet into digestible chunks. It just has to chop chunks off the planet—that kind of devastation could be sufficient enough to make the planet uninhabitable and probably kill everything alive there. It then digests a few chunks for refueling and moves on to the next target.
This doesn’t make it any less frightening.
But later I really started to think about it, particularly when thinking of the scale of the thing in comparison to the Enterprise.
Yeah, it’s huge compared to a starship…but compared to an actual planet the planet killer would be a rather tiny thing. It strikes me that it would take a very long time for it to chop up a planet completely and consume the whole thing.
It strikes me more likely that while the planet killer is indeed a weapon of destruction it is likely more a weapon of terror. It doesn’t have to cut up a whole planet into digestible chunks. It just has to chop chunks off the planet—that kind of devastation could be sufficient enough to make the planet uninhabitable and probably kill everything alive there. It then digests a few chunks for refueling and moves on to the next target.
This doesn’t make it any less frightening.
The true scale of things is way outside of most people's thought process. Also, it just made the show work better to treat the galaxy like an ocean, and planets like little islands. Not just that you could reach exoplanets so easily, but that they were treated as small, simple places.
If you can beam down to a primitive village and negotiate with one guy for planetary mineral rights, surely an enormous planet killer could whack the place. It just makes sense.
Considering that a starship with sufficient shielding can survive blasts from the planer killer then it rather negates the idea the weapon can blast a planet apart with one or two shots along the same lines as the Star Wars Death Star. Unless it can put out a significantly bigger blast when attacking a planet.
That's a good, well-thought-out idea, but directly contradicted by the dialogue in the ep:
SULU: Sir, we're now within the limits of System L-370, but I can't seem to locate
SPOCK: Captain, sensors show this entire solar system has been destroyed. Nothing left but rubble and asteroids.
KIRK: But that's incredible. The star in this system is still intact. Only a nova could destroy like that.
SPOCK: Nonetheless, Captain, sensors show nothing but debris where we charted seven planets last year.
I think it's more likely that the weapon operates in some alien manner not entirely discernible to Starfleet instrumentation.
Which leads to my second conjecture: this thing can modulate the strength of its blasts. When attacking planets it can blow them apart leaving nothing but debris. When attacking ships it doesn't seem to be using full power.
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Visually…the beam itself is a cone.
Part of understanding what made Decker tick might be explained.
Where the beam came to a point explains not just how planets are sliced…but why Constellation was gouged.
He initially played it safe and held back…and the beam comes to a focus just there….thus why he gets Enterprise closer…and why it was less damaged.
He feels he doesn’t have to explain his orders, and maybe looks crazier than he is.
Part of understanding what made Decker tick might be explained.
Where the beam came to a point explains not just how planets are sliced…but why Constellation was gouged.
He initially played it safe and held back…and the beam comes to a focus just there….thus why he gets Enterprise closer…and why it was less damaged.
He feels he doesn’t have to explain his orders, and maybe looks crazier than he is.
That's some first class thinking right there. If Norman Spinrad had thought of it, the producers would have said "Forget it!" We don't want that much exposition.
But it doesn't contradict anything in the episode, and the geometry checks out. It's the same situation when you "laser" dry leaves with a magnifying glass. Ant-Man could survive by getting closer to the glass, inside the focal point.
It's fun that some 56 years later there can still be new ways of thinking about these episodes even if you've already thought about them 100 times.
