Episode of the Week : Requiem for Methuselah

[ZapBrannigan]

A dramatic device is causing this conflict: time is running out aboard the Enterprise, but Kirk finds himself in a separate environment where time is essentially standing still, in that Flint is immortal and in no hurry to do anything for us.

It makes a good setting for a story. If a real Navy captain shot pool and went dancing during an emergency, he'd be relieved of command when the ship got home. But Star Trek is a story.

 

[KevinGrem]

I'm still waiting on the concrete part.

Walk into the wilderness? Flint won't let them. And while he makes a perfectly valid point of the robot being faster at the task, it's clear that he's just plain refusing to cooperate, and there's no defying him and his superior firepower. Not directly, anyway - hence the dance with Rayna.

So, any ideas on how to Get Things Done without outmaneuvering Flint first?

Timo Saloniemi

Oh, so they should give up that easily and instead spend their time taking a vacation while their crew waits by dying of the plague? Not only is it inexplicable why they made no effort to achieve their mission, it's also TOTALLY out of character for Kirk. The reason Kirk is such a great captain is that he will do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in his power to save his ship and his crew. Kirk has, in the past, consistently outsmarted and overpowered apparently superior opponents in one way or another. It's inexplicable why he did absolutely NOTHING to achieve his mission.

The bottom line is, it's completely ridiculous that pretty much the ENTIRE episode had nothing to do with the real concern at hand. As I said, it opened great, and made me excited to see how they were going to battle against Flint to achieve their mission. And then, the action and thrill completely died, and we were left with nothing but an incredibly boring, meaningless, waste of time.

 

[Vandervecken]

The production model on the table was a cool visual, but its mass should have pulverized the table and sent the shit through the floor. But Flint's magic science probably teched the tech.

Well it didn't have to, just as you say, because of Flint's superior tech. For example, in Protector, Vandervecken (Brennan) has a chunk of neutronium in a stasis field and it generates about 8 million gs, which he manipulated any way he wants. How? I have no idea. I have no idea how the gravity of the thing works through a stasis field, either, and Niven's stasis fields really were close to perfect fields of non-time. But it did, and it could work for Flint, too.

Robert Forward's Cheela in Dragon's Egg and Starquake have a number of very sophisticated ways to control gravity. They're much better explained/fleshed out than Niven's, and are also a lot harder to explain, but hey, it's there.

An earlier poster compared this trick to what we saw in Catspaw, but there a miniature Enterprise was being used voodoo-like to heat up the real Enterprise (no doubt itself a metaphor for some sort of disruptor/heat beam attack, but anyway...). Here it IS the Enterprise made miniature. Pretty big difference, although similar visually.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

The 33-inch Enterprise could have been a hologram representing the actual ship, which was suspended in Flint's transporter pattern buffer.

 

[johnnybear]

Thing is why does a man like Flint who has lived for more than 7,000 years have all this super technology? People like us in this day and age and probably our ancestors were always dubious and not very good at new ways of doing things and equipments but then if that had been the case with Flint then he'd still be frustrated with the quill pen and the ink pot wouldn't he!
JB

 

[Timo]

Oh, so they should give up that easily and instead spend their time taking a vacation while their crew waits by dying of the plague?

So I'm still left waiting for any sort of a concrete suggestion...

Kirk did achieve his mission. And he achieved it through his actions - without them, his crew would have died of the disease. That the audience might not be clever enough to realize from the get-go that the strange actions would result in mission accomplished is not Kirk's fault. It may be the writers', but as said earlier, it usually isn't. Trek is all about the heroes outwitting the villains, not clubbing them to death with blunt instruments, and good drama involves the heroes also outwitting the audience there.

"Methuselah" features classic moments where Kirk even surprises his colleagues, who go by the book and therefore achieve nothing. That Kirk would dance with Rayna is similar to Spock playing chess with the computer in "Court Martial", a clever and heroic move we nevertheless cannot understand until it's explained to us. "Methuselah" just wastes an entire episode doing this, while in "Court Martial" it is a compact little gem in an otherwise lazily paced story.

The 33-inch Enterprise could have been a hologram representing the actual ship, which was suspended in Flint's transporter pattern buffer.

Or then Flint did the Ardra thing and merely put smoke and mirrors between the planetside heroes and their ship. In both "Devil's Due" and this ep, the camera shows the orbiting ship disappearing "for real" - but in the TNG episode, this is only because the ship is hidden behind a cloak. The same might be true here.

Thing is why does a man like Flint who has lived for more than 7,000 years have all this super technology? People like us in this day and age and probably our ancestors were always dubious and not very good at new ways of doing things and equipments but then if that had been the case with Flint then he'd still be frustrated with the quill pen and the ink pot wouldn't he!

I think this is something you would outgrow in 7,000 years. Our grandparents lived in a world where a single generation had a single type of environment around them. Their great-grandparents lived in one where a hundred generations could go without needing to confront a change. But our parents are living through major changes every decade, and surviving. Annual change might be the near-future norm, and generations would emerge that can cope despite having been born sixteen or thirty cycles earlier.

Flint's lifespan would expose him to the dozens-of-upheavals-per-generation pace simply through the generation being so darn long; he would in essence have experienced the 2010s back in 400 BC-through-AD 1200 already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I can't go looking for the link right now, but recent research has shown that the particular type of brain tissue associated with the ability to "learn new ways" is plentiful in children, but adults have less, and its quantity drops off dramatically past a certain age. That's why getting the hang of new technology gets a lot harder for the aged.

 

[Forbin]

I can't go looking for the link right now, but recent research has shown that the particular type of brain tissue associated with the ability to "learn new ways" is plentiful in children, but adults have less, and its quantity drops off dramatically past a certain age. That's why getting the hang of new technology gets a lot harder for the aged.

I'm fairly sure all of mine is gone.

 

[Vandervecken]

Or then Flint did the Ardra thing and merely put smoke and mirrors between the planetside heroes and their ship. In both "Devil's Due" and this ep, the camera shows the orbiting ship disappearing "for real" - but in the TNG episode, this is only because the ship is hidden behind a cloak. The same might be true here.

I think this is something you would outgrow in 7,000 years. Our grandparents lived in a world where a single generation had a single type of environment around them. Their great-grandparents lived in one where a hundred generations could go without needing to confront a change. But our parents are living through major changes every decade, and surviving. Annual change might be the near-future norm, and generations would emerge that can cope despite having been born sixteen or thirty cycles earlier.

Flint's lifespan would expose him to the dozens-of-upheavals-per-generation pace simply through the generation being so darn long; he would in essence have experienced the 2010s back in 400 BC-through-AD 1200 already.

Timo Saloniemi

Also, Flint is not just any immortal--he is a supergenius. His accomplishments didn't simply flow from age, if he was all those others. He was da Vinci, after all.

But although we might retroactively explain the Enterprise disappearing as a cloak, I really don't think that was what was intended Timo. I think we were supposed to say, "he shrank the whole friggin' Enterprise and put it on his dining room table!" Because Kirk sees (and we see) the bridge crew through the front of the model (what this says about the viewscreen, I don't know. Best to ignore that aspect, probably.)

And I'm inclined to believe his whole story, because McCoy confirms from "correlated"-with- earth-records tricorder readings that he (Flint) is aging on this planet and will die of old age. This suggests to me that McCoy was able to verify that some weird field effect of earth--as he explains--on Flint's biology was what kept him undying. Meaning that Flint's story IS verified, or as definitively as the Enterprise, Federation science, and Bones were capable of verifying it, which I think we have to settle for. By season 3 McCoy is a pretty wide/deep-thinking xenobiologist.


---
"The joys of love made her human, and the agonies of love destroyed her."


Spock's line about the joys and agonies of love was pretty out of charatcer for him, but in the staging of a play, was perfect--the outsider narrates the truth for all of us. For that reason I don't care how odd a comment it is for a Vulcan, it's beautiful, classic direction. And we might also argue, continuity-wise, that Spock was forever changed by the spores and the impact of the events in This Side of Paradise. I'd like to believe that. And the mind-melds he has done (Horta, NOMAD) are probably more than a little atypical, too, and might have altered him to some degree. But mostly I think Leila and the spores would have had the most lasting impacts, because Vulcans would have deveoped mechanisms for coping with mind-meld feedback issues.

 

[johnnybear]

Strange that Flint's death after being pierced by a lance in the pre history and that is the same way that immortals from The highlander franchise come to live forever, dying firstly and being reborn as it were! Was it a coincidence or was Gregory Widen a fan of Star Trek or even more so this episode?
JB