Thank you. Any idea what lawsuits in the industry he's referring to? Also sounds like he could self-publish today, if he wanted to. That was a little harder in the late 90s.
Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
- Thread starter Harvey
- Start date
It is probably the Twin Peaks case, where are the owners of the television show won a copyright infringement lawsuit against an independent publication that used too many specific plot details from the episodes to qualify as fair use, even though it was strictly a nonfiction work. Given the amount of details, dialogue quotes or miscellaneous specific references that would be covered in a Nitpickers book, I could see the publishers being concerned about potential liability, even if the two cases are ultimately not really the same at all. Here’s a brief discussion of that case:
“Not Fair Use: A company published a book entitled Welcome to Twin Peaks: A Complete Guide to Who’s Who and What’s What, containing direct quotations and paraphrases from the television show Twin Peaks, as well as detailed descriptions of plots, characters, and setting. Important factors: The amount of the material taken was substantial and the publication adversely affected the potential market for authorized books about the program. (Twin Peaks v. Publications Int’l, Ltd., 996 F.2d 1366 (2d Cir. 1993).)”
M
Edited to fix typos
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Plus I hear they ran it through their legal console first.
Did it make a cool sound like a high-pitched chicken clucking with an oscillating hum in an even higher register?
http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-alternative-factor-what-hell.html
It's taken three years (!), but my nearly book-length piece about "The Alternative Factor" and good old Cash Markman is now complete.
Many, many thanks to my co-writer, Kevin Koster, who really helped put the pieces together when it came to the shooting timeline.
It's taken three years (!), but my nearly book-length piece about "The Alternative Factor" and good old Cash Markman is now complete.
Many, many thanks to my co-writer, Kevin Koster, who really helped put the pieces together when it came to the shooting timeline.
Neat -- great to see it finished at last.
Is the indented passage about the D'Agosta memo supposed to be italicized?
Your collaborator mentions McGivers being in red despite being a historian. It's worth noting that the only other 23rd-century Starfleet historian we know of, Erickson in "Yesteryear," was also in red.
It's interesting that the engineering station was called a "lithium crystal charging station" in the script. I wonder when the decision to change it to "dilithium" was made. (That change was the only thing from the episode that had any lasting impact on the rest of the franchise, mercifully.)
Is the indented passage about the D'Agosta memo supposed to be italicized?
Your collaborator mentions McGivers being in red despite being a historian. It's worth noting that the only other 23rd-century Starfleet historian we know of, Erickson in "Yesteryear," was also in red.
It's interesting that the engineering station was called a "lithium crystal charging station" in the script. I wonder when the decision to change it to "dilithium" was made. (That change was the only thing from the episode that had any lasting impact on the rest of the franchise, mercifully.)
Wow!! What a fantastic read! How such a terrible episode could generate such a fascinating piece of analysis by you and Kevin is something to ponder. I really enjoyed all of the inside nuggets about TV production. Thanks so much for posting this.
Great article. Thanks Michael and Kevin.
Sir Rhosis
Sir Rhosis
THIS is the kind of history we need... not Cushman's ill-informed, poorly-researched and conclusion-jumping crap.
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I missed that in editing -- fixed. (I prepare these in Google Docs and then have to re-format them each time for Blogger. Despite both being Google products, they don't speak very well with each other. I'm surprised I didn't miss more things like this!)
Thank you! (And, boy, will I be okay if I don't see this episode again for a long while...)
It's interesting to learn that the engineering section featured in TAF was meant to be a (di)lithium charging station. Whereas "Mudd's Women" had already established that "lithium crystals" were something that channeled power ("The entire ship's power is feeding through one lithium crystal"), an interpretation that was also used in later episodes such as "Elaan of Troyius," TAF contrastingly portrayed the crystals as a power source, since Lazarus stole them to restore power to his ship. That always struck me as a contradiction. (And of course it goes hand in hand with TAF's treatment of antimatter as something extrauniversal that would destroy our universe if it reacted with matter, rather than as the main power source for the warp engines as "The Naked Time" had previously established.) But if that equipment was supposed to be charging the crystals, that implies that the crystals weren't the ultimate source of power, but more like batteries storing power generated by something else. To be sure, there's a major difference between channeling power and storing it, but I suppose it's possible that the same substance could be configured to do both. So that script heading makes the episode's portrayal of dilithium a bit less inconsistent, though it's still problematical.
Thanks, Harvey, for keeping these articles coming. You put so much time and effort into them, but damn, it shows and they're fantastic reads. Every time someone boosts one of the Cushman books, I send them a link to your site.
Such a great look into background of this episode. I find that the stuff Cushman omits from the memos is actually more interesting than the stuff he includes. Well done!
Such a great look into background of this episode. I find that the stuff Cushman omits from the memos is actually more interesting than the stuff he includes. Well done!
Yes, way more interesting, in this case. And it was about arguably the series' most boring episode!
I suppose we could postulate that historian isn’t McGivers’ or Erickson’s “day job” on the ship and they both happen to have other operations positions, only acting as historians as needed (which likely isn’t too often).
On that note, maybe Masters official position was chemist, but her specialty was dilithium, so worked in Engineering from time to time.
First off, that would be more likely if it happened only once than twice. Two examples is a small sample set, but the fact that 100% of known 23rd-century Starfleet historians are in red does suggest that that's the norm rather than the exception.
Second, as a holder of a history degree, I find it odd that people assume historians would be unimportant or rarely used aboard a starship. How the heck are you going to explore a new civilization adequately if you don't study its past as well as its present? How will you know how things got to be the way they are, what the context and meaning of certain things is, or how a relationship or conflict between two factions came to be and why? How can you judge how to handle a delicate interaction with an alien culture if you don't study the examples of similar cultural interactions over the course of history, or recognize an important cultural dynamic on an alien world if you don't compare it to similar patterns in your own history? If anything, it's implausible that we don't see historians called on more often. It's impossible to understand other cultures if you ignore their history, let alone your own.
Not to mention that, in Jonathan Archer's words, Starfleet officers are making history with every light-year. Somebody needs to write that history down. If so, that might explain why historians are in operations, because their everyday job would be along the lines of a clerical post -- documenting the ship's missions, organizing and annotating log entries and visual records, processing and cataloging documents or communications from alien worlds, etc.
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Agreed.
Especially on first contact missions they should have someone from the Enterprise filming, recording for legal and historical reasons. Perhaps yeomen would do this and "historians" would catalogue the information.
To me they should have yeomen recording every mission but perhaps they do subtly like in "Wink of an Eye" where they had recordings of the crewman's disappearance.
In a real situation I believe that the historical recordings would be of higher importance with Kirk/Spock/away mission commander more involved in this.
It's not exactly an assumption, since "Space Seed" outright shows and tells us that Marla McGivers doesn't have much to do aboard the Enterprise. Kirk says that she doesn't usually have much to do, and apparently he crosses paths with her so rarely that he can't even remember her name:
And McGivers obviously has enough time on her hands to do a lot of sketching and painting. So much so that she views the summons to be part of the boarding party of the Botany Bay as an intrusion rather than something to be excited about:
You make some logical arguments for how a historian could be useful, Christopher, but you can't really blame people for following the show's lead and believing that historians are rarely used aboard a Starship.
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