Episodes nobody ever talks about

Operation:Annihilate has that scary feeling about it no matter how many times you see it! You know they're there hiding in that room but it still gets you when you hear them chirruping and squawking and then you see them and it's the old Eeekk!
JB

 

There are at least ten stinkers, at least
But Action and Patterns, for me, are quite ridiculous

 

Given the choice of watching these 2 TOS episodes or watching Jerry Springer....l'll pick "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!"

 

Both are competent and entertaining; I don't like Trek "comedy" eps. (One reason is because I like to laugh when it's a "comedy.") The Nazi one is the Nazi one, but they explain the parallel and . . . I don't know, it's decent. Neither will I watch for pleasure, but I'd put them in a broad middle tier.

But the question of what we don't talk about . . . That Which Survives. (My least fave ep, for being DULL. I realize I'm talking about it now. . .)

 

There are a few 3rd season episodes that are dull as a year old razor. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is one that *yawn*, can cure my *yawn* insomina.....ZzzzZzzzzZzzzzzzzzzzzz.

 

I beg to disagree, The self-destruct sequence was riveting.
How could you not like all the running?

I actually quite like this episode but can't believe the search took 30 000 years whatever. No matter how long lived you were I think anyone would have checked back in to home in that time.

 

Nice to see they're still using incandescent floodlights and electrical conduit in the 23rd century.

 

Battlefield is a half-hour concept stretched. Needs one more element in the story. Not sure what. A good ol' Berman-era B-plot like Scotty on a roll throwing darts or something.

 

Thank goodness we didn't get to see everything on their bodies that was bi-colored.

 

No one ever talks much about "That Which Survives". But I like how Kirk, Sulu, and McCoy have to protect each other from this mysterious woman's touch.

On the Enterprise, I love that the obstacle at the end was just Scotty's socket-wrench (that's what I'm going to call it) got stuck and was something just as simple as that. No technobabble. Just, "It's stuck!" That's just the way things happen sometimes.

Spock, though, was a complete Walking Talking Computer in this episode.

 

And that;s why I "hate" this episode.

Plus what the hell was going on when Scotty kept telling Spock to flush him out whatever when they only had 10 seconds to live anyway before they exploded. What did Scotty think they were going to do in the extra 2 seconds of life he was giving them?

 

The tube that Scotty played around in was cool, though.

 

Definitely. But thinking about it - it didn't look like it could be detached from the rest of the ship.

Could I make a confession here. Don't tell anybody. I don't want to lose my street cred here if I had any. I've been a Star Trek fan for may years and still wouldn't have any idea of where this tube would be.

In actual fact I'm not sure where engineering is (and don't care or I would have looked it up). To me the Enterprise consists of a saucer section where everyone lives. Theres the bottom section which I assume houses engineering and I've seen shuttles go in and out. They also fire weapons from that bottom but too and there's the struts that hold onto the two tube things which I have no idea what they do.

So the tube thing in this episode is I assume at the bottom section of the Enterprise and on the edge so they could blow it off the ship when necessary?

 

JB

 

I agree!

That is the thing that keeps this from being a great episode for me, still very good, but Spock is such a prick. I'm just going to assume that "The occipital area of my head seems to have impacted with the chair." really affected him. I mean even that answer when Uhura clearly meant "What happened to us?" sets the whole tone of his character for the episode, Man is he Stiff!

I also wonder how blowing Scotty out into space would help anyone. Maybe he thought he was causing the containment to fail faster being in there but I don't see how it would help, either.

 

If I were Scotty I would have punched Spock in the head. He was such a jerk.
This episode justified every mean thing that McCoy said about Spock. Luckily it never happened again. Kirk was a bit of a jerk on the planet too.
I think the writer was trying to be funny but didn't quite get it.

 

Tain't that the truth.

 

Uh huh. Kirk and Spock were both jerks in this episode, it was the writer's fault, and it's a big defect in the show.

Scotty wanting to be jettisoned to save the ship is a continuity error, or at least some cheating. First they said that nothing in the universe could prevent the antimatter reactor from exploding. Then they said it could be prevented if you stop up the fuel line. And then it seems you can prevent the explosion by jettisoning the service crawlway compartment out to space, which would take a section of the fuel line with it and shut down the reactor. So why did Scotty ever have to get into the crawlway in the first place? They could have jettisoned it right away, with no one inside.

My explanation is that Scotty was trying to prevent the explosion without crippling the ship. If you jettison that compartment to break the fuel line, the ship will coast to a stop and be stranded in interstellar space. There would be no way to restore the warp drive. A predicament like this actually happened in "The Paradise Syndrome", and we just have to assume the Enterprise puttered around Miramanee's solar system after the story ended, waiting for a space tug to arrive. They still have subspace radio, but it's a big deal for a capital ship to become helpless and need its nanny. Very embarrassing and very expensive.

I like that they spent the extra money and effort to build Scotty a new "service crawlway" set instead of just doing the obvious, which would be to use the existing Jefferies tube, with a simple hatch added to the opening. Trying to shut off the M-5 from the Jefferies tube in "The Ultimate Computer" was functionally the same kind of action that was required in "That Which Survives."