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Did Pike replace Garth as Fleet Captain?

"By Any Other Name" also mentions Eminiar VII, from "Taste of Armageddon." And "Turnabout Intruder" mentions Tholians, as well as Vians (from "The Empath"). And so on.

Not to mention all the effort they put into coming up with a coherent concept for how the ship's engines and power systems worked. (An effort that got taken to occasionally ludicrous extremes in the TNG era... but that's another story.) And, just in general, the effort to avoid having episodes contradict each other.

By way of contrast, western shows at the time (which were huge, and many Trek writers, cast, and crew had worked on them) were notoriously slapdash about continuity, to the point that even when they tried to inject a little "authenticity" by referencing bits of genuine history, they often did so with no regard for actual real-world chronology, jumping back and forth by years for the sake of a single story. Or take a more recent example, Detective John Munch, the "connective tissue" between Homicide and the Law & Order franchise... the writers over the years couldn't even keep straight whether he was born and raised in Baltimore or New York City.

I think a lot of contemporary viewers have an artificially and unjustifiably low view of original Star Trek, based on mistaken impressions and misinformation about what the show was actually like and how it was actually made. (And that's kind of odd, really, when you consider that it's probably one of the most well-documented productions in television history. People have no excuse!)
 
KIRK: We've got to figure this out and devise a defence against it. Is it possible that the rocks have life?
SULU: You remember on Janus Six, the silicon creatures
MCCOY: But our instruments recorded that. They were life forms. They registered as life forms.

That Which Survives referring back to Devil in the Dark.
 
Or take a more recent example, Detective John Munch, the "connective tissue" between Homicide and the Law & Order franchise... the writers over the years couldn't even keep straight whether he was born and raised in Baltimore or New York City.
Off-topic, I know, but I loooooove Homicide and I love Detective Munch. So please forgive me the digression.

I think the SVU writers making Munch a New York native was a conscious choice rather than a mistake. They likely wanted to make Munch more organic to the show, so they said that he was born & bred in New York and moved to Baltimore for a few years. But in Homicide, Munch was clearly a Baltimore native: Flashbacks showed him as a kid in Pikesville, he said that he took field trips to Fort McHenry as a kid, and his brother Bernard, the mortician, still lived in the city.

SVU kept that stuff as vague backstory, but they also had him say that he'd grew up on the Lower East Side and he'd come "back from Baltimore" when his marriage broke up. And his Uncle Andrew was also from New York. I guess they figured that was simpler. They also fudged his age to keep Belzer around for as long as possible (in real life, Munch would've faced mandatory retirement from the NYPD years sooner than the character did on the show). And I guess since Munch was a character on SVU for about twice as long as he was on Homicide, the latter show takes precedence in most people's minds.

But Law & Order has never been a particularly continuity-conscious franchise. They think nothing of bringing the same actors back as different characters on the same series (something Homicide never dreamed of), and L&O has always been much more plot-oriented than character-oriented. So I think they probably knew that they were contradicting Homicide, but they didn't particularly care. After all, HLOTS was never as popular as the L&O shows, and as Homicide was off the air for longer and longer (and not even on in syndication, cable, or streaming), I'd imagine that staying consistent with it, or even referring to it, became less and less of a priority.

...My personal theory? Munch is one with the Multiverse. The guy on SVU is just the Earth-2 Munch. ;)
 
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KIRK: We've got to figure this out and devise a defence against it. Is it possible that the rocks have life?
SULU: You remember on Janus Six, the silicon creatures
MCCOY: But our instruments recorded that. They were life forms. They registered as life forms.

That Which Survives referring back to Devil in the Dark.

Yeah, the internal references have always struck me as fantastic. I particularly like this one because Sulu wasn't even in DITD.
 
Maybe Sulu was in his quarters back on the ship like Chekov was down in engineering for the whole of the first season? :p
JB
 
I think this piece is a good example of the kind of praise I was talking about. It focuses more on the scientific side of things (no surprise given the publication)...

My mistake - I misinterpreted your post as referring to contemporaneous accounts of the series, not later work such as this (the article here is very good).

but if you've looked over the memos (and actually interviewed de Forest! cool!) you're no doubt aware how much time was devoted to minutiae of the show that went well beyond science, especially as the backstory started to accumulate.

The people at de Forest were invaluable. I presented a paper at an academic conference several years ago in which I classified the types of comments made into several categories and determined which comments were accepted. I will probably rewrite that for my blog at some point, though I think the original is floating around online.
 
"By Any Other Name" also mentions Eminiar VII, from "Taste of Armageddon." And "Turnabout Intruder" mentions Tholians, as well as Vians (from "The Empath"). And so on.
KIRK: We've got to figure this out and devise a defence against it. Is it possible that the rocks have life?
SULU: You remember on Janus Six, the silicon creatures
MCCOY: But our instruments recorded that. They were life forms. They registered as life forms.

That Which Survives referring back to Devil in the Dark.
I'd forgotten about these (small wonder, since they're mostly from the third season, which I hardly ever watch). But I was sure that someone else would chime in with a couple of references I'd either forgotten or wasn't aware of. I almost want to rewatch those episodes now! :techman:
 
I'd forgotten about these (small wonder, since they're mostly from the third season, which I hardly ever watch). But I was sure that someone else would chime in with a couple of references I'd either forgotten or wasn't aware of. I almost want to rewatch those episodes now! :techman:

JQ - the third season is highly overcriticized and severely underrated. You should rewatch! One bonus is because of the budget limitations, you get to see a TON of the Enterprise, and she was always one of my very favorite characters.

Maybe Sulu was in his quarters back on the ship like Chekov was down in engineering for the whole of the first season? :p
JB

Sure! No one standing on the Enterprise actually has any lines except the K/S/M trio in the final scene and Scotty when Kirk calls up looking for reactor pump parts. Sulu was probably off shift.
 
JQ - the third season is highly overcriticized and severely underrated. You should rewatch!
Thanks, P2, but I've watched the third season enough to know that I don't think much of it overall. For every cool thing they do (and there are a few), they do about three stupid things. So I don't really see myself changing my opinion at this late date.
 
Thanks, P2, but I've watched the third season enough to know that I don't think much of it overall. For every cool thing they do (and there are a few), they do about three stupid things. So I don't really see myself changing my opinion at this late date.

Well, you said you almost wanted to rewatch . . . so I thought I'd try :) Maybe after another few discussions. ;)
 
Whats wrong with "Tholian Web"? I never regret watching that episode.
Watch that if you have to do some Season 3 episode.
I like lots of S3. Some episodes from S3 are in my Top 10 (which really has about 20 eps in it)
 
^FWIW, when members on this forum rated all the episodes on a 1-10 scale a few years back, only five came out above average for the series:

The Tholian Web
Day of the Dove
The Enterprise Incident
All Our Yesterdays
The Paradise Syndrome

OTOH, six of the seven lowest, rated 5 or below, were S3. Which fits with my experience. I will watch S3 episodes, but a season watch-through is rare, and a bit of a chore.
 
Don't want to hijack, but we'e there any conditions or considerations attached to that poll, or was it just a what do you like most kind of thing?
 
^FWIW, when members on this forum rated all the episodes on a 1-10 scale a few years back, only five came out above average for the series:

The Tholian Web
Day of the Dove
The Enterprise Incident
All Our Yesterdays
The Paradise Syndrome

OTOH, six of the seven lowest, rated 5 or below, were S3. Which fits with my experience. I will watch S3 episodes, but a season watch-through is rare, and a bit of a chore.

I love Requiem, Let That be Your Last Battlefield, Whom Gods Destroy, Is there in Truth No Beauty, Wink of an Eye and most controversially Empath and Plato.
I'm OK with Elaan and Turnabout too.

Watching TOS is never a chore for me even the worst episode but I rarely do it to avoid learning the episodes off by heart
 
Day of The Dove is one of the outstanding episodes of season three and a good start to an understanding between the Klingons and the Federation!
JB
 
Don't want to hijack, but we'e there any conditions or considerations attached to that poll, or was it just a what do you like most kind of thing?

They were done one episode at a time in "Episode of the Week" threads started by @Botany Bay. People just voted 1 through 10 and posted comments. A lot of really good insightful posts in those threads, I enjoyed them a lot.

Watching TOS is never a chore for me even the worst episode but I rarely do it to avoid learning the episodes off by heart

Yeah, I wish I could say that but I usually think, I only have so much time, am I really going to spend an hour on "Children" or "Stepchildren" or "Turnabout"? And it's usually a no. It's funny because a lot of those S3 episodes took a long time for me to see, with the vagaries of my local station, and I was excited when I'd finally catch one. But even that nostalgia factor isn't enough for a good part of that season.
 
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