Episode of the Week : The Apple

[Jose Tyler]

I gave this episode a 6. Should it be a 4 or a 5 for a fairly cheesy episode? Yes. But I have to give it an extra point or two for the paradise with landmines quote and Kirk firing Scotty.

And I always laugh when Kirk orders "Formation L", whatever the heck that is...

 

[Timo]

the only reason they even have two sets of beam downs (i.e. 9 landing party members) is so they are enough red shirts to obliterate.

I thought it was because McCoy couldn't be bothered to beam down unless forced by an armed guard?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[AtoZ]

I never understood or liked the whole "you're fired, Scotty" nonsense. The yeoman was hot enough I supose but for me few if any highlight in this one. I gave it a 5 simply out of respect for it being Star Trek. Maybe they should have just phoned it in.

One interesting point - David Soul, Hutch from Starsky and Hutch makes an appearance. Another old favorite of mine.

 

[Push The Button]

I never understood or liked the whole "you're fired, Scotty" nonsense. The yeoman was hot enough I supose but for me few if any highlight in this one. I gave it a 5 simply out of respect for it being Star Trek. Maybe they should have just phoned it in.

One interesting point - David Soul, Hutch from Starsky and Hutch makes an appearance. Another old favorite of mine.

Warning: once seen, this can never be unseen!
Here is David Soul in all of his 1970's adult-contemporary, cheesy elevator music glory:
http://youtu.be/YY8APrYU2Gs

 

[Mudd]

The story premise and resolution are stupid.

This giant computer god has the ability to not only control the weather of an entire planet down to the level of precision-targeting lightning strikes, as well as pulling a spaceship out of orbit - yet it's entirely dependent upon its "followers" putting a couple of pounds of fresh fruit in its maw every couple of days as its main energy source.

WTF?

They feed it the exploding rocks. You can see them holding the rocks and picking them up from a stack on the side here: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x05hd/theapplehd0860.jpg. Looks like a woman is starting to lean over to get a rock from a stack on the other side. Spock commented earlier that the rocks would make a good power source.

Oh, okay.

This machine that controls the entire world and can drag starships out of space is completely dependent upon its followers feeding it some exploding rocks every couple of days.

Interrupt that, and it weakens critically within a few hours.

Whoa, that's way less stupid than fruit.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The story premise and resolution are stupid.

This giant computer god has the ability to not only control the weather of an entire planet down to the level of precision-targeting lightning strikes, as well as pulling a spaceship out of orbit - yet it's entirely dependent upon its "followers" putting a couple of pounds of fresh fruit in its maw every couple of days as its main energy source.

WTF?

They feed it the exploding rocks. You can see them holding the rocks and picking them up from a stack on the side here: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x05hd/theapplehd0860.jpg. Looks like a woman is starting to lean over to get a rock from a stack on the other side. Spock commented earlier that the rocks would make a good power source.

Oh, okay.

This machine that controls the entire world and can drag starships out of space is completely dependent upon its followers feeding it some exploding rocks every couple of days.

Interrupt that, and it weakens critically within a few hours.

Whoa, that's way less stupid than fruit.

No, it's totally not.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I love how, after Kirk clouts Akuta and makes him cry, Kirk says "we're not going to hurt you." I certainly wouldn't believe him.

Horny Chekov is amazing. The Enterprise is in danger of destruction, security guards are being killed left, right and center and ol' Pavel is only concerned about macking with a hot Yeoman.

This is by-the-numbers Trek. It's not interesting, it's not exciting, it's not even original in the context of the series. It was cheesy and corny when I was a kid in the early 70's and it still is today. The climax is, beat for beat identical to "Adonias" right down to the music. The epilog is too cute and obvious for words.

Lots of good points. To today's eye, Kirk punching meek Okuda in the face is even worse than the scene in "Miri" (a vastly better episode) where he hits the tricycle-loving Grup three times.

Chekov is way out of line. He's saying that if the Enterprise is destroyed and 400 of his shipmates get killed, "would it be so werry bad?" If Martha Landon had been written in Harsh Reality mode instead of '60s TV Romp, she would have gone cold and not been much interested in him after that.

Either way, if the Enterprise had then been destroyed and the landing party stranded, you can be very sure that Kirk would have gotten Martha, and Chekov would have ended up using a sharp stick to drill bore holes in blue melons.

 

[tafkats]

A formulaic, paint-by-numbers sort of episode with a somewhat silly plot and low production values, but nothing horrifically embarrassing. 4.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

One angle that I found missing, and which I really don't think was intended, but which might have made the story better if had been this way, would have been if Kirk and/or Spock had deduced that the set-up of the tribe keeping the god-machine alive was a cultural maturity test, designed to free the natives when they stopped worshiping the god. There would have had to have been some evidence of progress among the natives, even just slow progress, to make it plausible, though.

But any hint of that would have certainly improved the epilogue, say as part of Kirk's justification that they did the right thing in destroying Vaal. Spock could have voiced specific concern that their interference might have accelerated the natives' development too much, instead of having the schlock as we did of who gets to represent Satan, with Kirk adding that they'll take Spock's concerns into consideration as they help the natives get on track to survive on their own.

Adding that the god-machine represented a false god may have been necessary to help the discussion go down better to the general American audience and avoided the implication that religion is silly in general, which is something TOS always avoided.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

I give the episode a six--only for the ass-kicking yeoman--necessary to show that all Starfleet officers were trained in self defense, not just the men.

Too bad Uhura never had a moment like that.

The story premise and resolution are stupid.

This giant computer god has the ability to not only control the weather of an entire planet down to the level of precision-targeting lightning strikes, as well as pulling a spaceship out of orbit - yet it's entirely dependent upon its "followers" putting a couple of pounds of fresh fruit in its maw every couple of days as its main energy source.

WTF?

They feed it the exploding rocks. You can see them holding the rocks and picking them up from a stack on the side here: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x05hd/theapplehd0860.jpg. Looks like a woman is starting to lean over to get a rock from a stack on the other side. Spock commented earlier that the rocks would make a good power source.

Oh, okay.

This machine that controls the entire world and can drag starships out of space is completely dependent upon its followers feeding it some exploding rocks every couple of days.

Interrupt that, and it weakens critically within a few hours.

Whoa, that's way less stupid than fruit.

Did you buy any of it the first time you watched the episode?

 

[GNDN18]

Did you buy any of it the first time you watched the episode?

Yes, yes I did….

…Of course, I was five years old at the time, but still.

 

[Timo]

As regards the techno-plausibility, we should note that Kirk trying to starve Vaal by preventing the provision of rocks into its mouth need not have any effect.

Kirk first speculates that Vaal's energy supply might be tied to its feeding behavior. He asks Scotty to observe "the amount of energy expended against the ship". What Scotty soon reports is a steady decline. This is not what Kirk speculated at all - it has got nothing to do with the observed feeding behavior. Rather, it's consistent with the Enterprise being a respectable opponent in the tug-of-war: the decline has probably always been there, Scotty just hasn't been observing it from the start (since he didn't even know where and what Vaal was).

Scotty is then told to fire phasers at Vaal, and as the machine fights the phaser beams, there's further, steeper decline that allows the ship to win. This happens during feeding time, but surely that is completely coincidental, despite Kirk's speculation!

So, silly writers trying to write silly things, but to no avail - the events themselves are perfectly reasonable.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mudd]

As regards the techno-plausibility, we should note that Kirk trying to starve Vaal by preventing the provision of rocks into its mouth need not have any effect.
.
.
.
So, silly writers trying to write silly things, but to no avail - the events themselves are perfectly reasonable.

Unsalvageable; irredeemably stupid and implausible, sorry.

I give the episode a six--only for the ass-kicking yeoman--necessary to show that all Starfleet officers were trained in self defense, not just the men.

Too bad Uhura never had a moment like that.

They feed it the exploding rocks. You can see them holding the rocks and picking them up from a stack on the side here: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x05hd/theapplehd0860.jpg. Looks like a woman is starting to lean over to get a rock from a stack on the other side. Spock commented earlier that the rocks would make a good power source.

Oh, okay.

This machine that controls the entire world and can drag starships out of space is completely dependent upon its followers feeding it some exploding rocks every couple of days.

Interrupt that, and it weakens critically within a few hours.

Whoa, that's way less stupid than fruit.

Did you buy any of it the first time you watched the episode?

I was not as analytical about what was wrong the first few times I saw the show but this was certainly one I disliked and thought was all-around dumb when I first saw it on NBC.

In fact "The Apple" falls early in my original disenchantment with Trek. I didn't think much of "Who Mourns For Adonais" or "The Changeling" when they were first broadcast, and this one was way worse. After "Patterns Of Force" I pretty much gave up on it; I was at an age where socializing (read: girls) became more interesting that TV and Star Trek had gone kind of stupid.

I think I did see most of TOS in first run, picking up a number of them during summer re-runs. I only happened to catch what would be one of my favorites, "The Doomsday Machine," because it was on at a party. The only one I can remember for sure only seeing for the first time in syndication, though, was "Obsession."

 

[Timo]

Unsalvageable; irredeemably stupid and implausible, sorry.

Well, the heroes are. But that doesn't change the fact that the simple, straightforward and workable way to defeat a machine god is to fight its pull and then let it eat phaser beams! When given some proper forward targeting, Scotty did that and solved the problem of the week.

It's just that Kirk spent a lot of time coming up with ideas that were at best tangential to that straightforward solution...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mudd]

But that doesn't change the fact that the simple, straightforward and workable way to defeat a machine god is to fight its pull and then let it eat phaser beams!

Oh, bullshit. Have you given any thought to the energy resources that would be necessary to control planetary weather down to the level of calling up targeted lightning discharges on demand?

The Enterprise had one system or another running low on something or another every other damned week. Even by the extremely loose standards of continuity and plausibility established by TOS for the ship's capabilities it was outmatched here by orders of magnitude.

 

[Maurice]

I wouldn't have minded the rocks as a power source had Vaal's abilities been smaller. Some nuclear fuel or something like that would yield a lot more juice than fruit (pun intended), but certainly not on the scale we saw. It was dumb.

 

[Timo]

Oh, bullshit. Have you given any thought to the energy resources that would be necessary to control planetary weather down to the level of calling up targeted lightning discharges on demand?

And? It's just another drain on Vaal's resources, eminently something Vaal can't just shut down and forget about on a whim. It won't make it any easier for Vaal to shield its physical command center, quite the opposite.

Scotty can supposedly melt cities with those phasers, ever since "A Taste of Armageddon". It's just a matter of dwell time before he can collapse the defenses of what may amount to an entire planet but in practice is just a single shield bubble around a key facility. Apollo's temple, Vaal's snakehead, even Landru's mainframe should have fallen eventually, unless they actively fired back (as, again as per "Armageddon", maintaining shielding on the starship would in turn limit the ship's ability to go on the offensive).

The key issue here is that there isn't even demonstrable correlation between Vaal being denied those delicious rocks and Vaal suffering a drop of potency. There's unlikely to be causality there, then. A constant slight drain is observed regardless of "feeding", and a major drop results from those continent-glassing phasers bombarding Vaal, which is what we really should expect.

It's a somewhat separate issue that we should also expect Vaal to aim one of those lightning bolts upwards and incinerate the annoying starship, plain and simple. But again there's discontinuity between Kirk's wild tangents and Vaal's actual actions - and since Kirk doesn't speak Vaal, we may well assume that Vaal didn't really want to be all that aggressive against people who had not yet demonstrated they would be a respectable threat. It may have been genuinely puzzled at why killing those redshirts didn't stop Kirk's offensive yet, and was holding the ship until deciding how to proceed; too little, too late seems its modus operandi overall.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Alter Ego]

People die! Kirk has real doubts about his decisions; his internal conflict is deeper than in other episodes. Still some humor manages to creep in. Very kitschy cool special effects, and a great philosophical debate! Plus: cute babes! 7/10

 

[BillJ]

But that doesn't change the fact that the simple, straightforward and workable way to defeat a machine god is to fight its pull and then let it eat phaser beams!

Oh, bullshit. Have you given any thought to the energy resources that would be necessary to control planetary weather down to the level of calling up targeted lightning discharges on demand?

The Enterprise had one system or another running low on something or another every other damned week. Even by the extremely loose standards of continuity and plausibility established by TOS for the ship's capabilities it was outmatched here by orders of magnitude.

It really is about the characters. I enjoy "The Apple", but like most TOS episodes (most Star Trek franchise episodes) it falls apart on any kind of closer inspection.