Why would they seed Romans and Cold War era humans? Their remit is
The Nazis are the result of cultural contamination by John Gill.
Last edited:
Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
- Thread starter Harvey
- Start date
In the Rise of the Federation novels, an ECS freighter dropped the US memorabilia with the Yangs, explaining the works’ good condition after a hundred years.
I think Nerys Myk is right, but it appears that Paul Allen has the “Trouble with Tribbles” filming model, which was another AMT kit — with lights!
Well, the Western Roman Empire fell a few centuries after Christianity came along. Maybe the Preservers saw that fall coming. Makes a hell of a lot more sense than Hodgkins' Law of Stupid Plot Handwaves.
I believe Memory Alpha is in error. The call sheet for "Bread and Circuses" lists Steele as one of the stunt slaves shown on the MVS in the teaser.
I appreciate Myko's clarification about Tom Steele. I had looked up material on the stuntman from that time, who is also featured with a listing at Memory Alpha. I thought about including it in our article but felt that I was going to over-complicate the story here. I'm not certain that the Tom Steele listed on the 11/21/66 PR is the same Tom Steele who did stunts and is pictured as having made an appearance in "Bread & Circuses" without credit. It's definitely possible. I do think that the Carey Foster listed on the PR is the young woman seen sitting at the table with Masters and her assistant. There is a Carey Foster listed at imdb with a handful of small, likely background, roles in productions around that time, usually playing an uncredited "girl" in a scene. And of course, that assumes that imdb listings are accurate, which is always a roll of the dice.
And I honestly don't know much about the people who would regularly work on the original series as BG - aside from one man named Roger Holloway, who worked as a standin and extra on the show. I only know him because my father worked with him a bunch of times in the 1970s and introduced him to me on set as an actor from Star Trek, telling me "He played Mr. Lemli". (I was cast as one of Roger's kids in a sci-fi comedy pilot called "Space Force", where they were doing a gag that alien families were being transported aboard that were completely identical. Roger's family unit of mom-dad-brother-sister was given Roger's look at the time - a mop of dark hair and a bushy 70s moustache - something that was applied to me, to the mom and to my "sister" for the shot.) I did meet a few of the regular SI's and BG from Next Gen when I worked on Voyager, but I haven't seen those guys in eons at this point.
What we do know from that PR is that a Tom Steele and a Carey Foster participated in scenework as speaking performers, but were never credited or included on any other paperwork that we can find. The PR is a bit odd on this, in that the listing for Foster looks directly connected to the BG section - there's one extra who was upgraded to SAG later in the morning and then dismissed when the rec room scene was done. The listing for Steele, is odd because it has a bizarre in time of 2:00, but the same outtime as Foster. I believe that in-time to be a typo and that Steele was in the same scene as Foster and released at the same time. The only other option would be for Steele to have been brought in during the afternoon, and for his dismissal time on the PR to be a typo, which frankly doesn't make any sense. So from what we have, I am inferring that both of them were in the deleted Rec Room scene between Spock and Lazarus - whatever it was they did has been lost - this was not part of the material scavenged by Roddenberry for his Lincoln Enterprises material and recently re-purposed with the "Roddenberry Vault" release.
It's not uncommon to see background players getting upgraded to speaking roles - but usually there's more of a record than what we see here. On various shows I have worked, whenever someone was bumped up to cast, they'd get a credit. The situation here is one where they were simply paid for the upgrade and that was it. That would not be the case with stunts, but there's nothing in the Rec Room that would call for stuntwork, particularly from a young woman sitting at one of the tables. I doubt the Concordance's take on this, for the same reason that you do.
The full story of what happened with these two upgrades is apparently lost to history now. The people involved are long gone from the business (and many from the planet itself), and the few survivors (including Robert Brown) are unlikely to remember who was upgraded to speaking roles on a day on TV shoot over 50 years ago. The best shot we have at this is the basic documentation - the callsheets and the PRs. And if I could get my hands on it, Bob Justman's production board - but even that board wouldn't note anything about extras being upgraded.
What made the research work here interesting was how much went wrong and how they were able to keep going and just shoot SOMETHING. The materials for many 3rd season episodes are readily available but are frankly not that interesting, simply because they just record fairly mundane days. (I might be interested in looking at what happened on "The Tholian Web", just because that one went off the tracks and wound up with its director, Ralph Senensky, being fired midway, but most of the 3rd season record is a sad routine, as discussed by many of the people who were there.)
What got me interested here was the realization of how wrong the THESE ARE THE VOYAGES timeline is. I'm not joking about Cushman getting this stuff upside down and backwards. And that was only one example. We could get into some really fun stuff about the producing deal they made with John Meredyth Lucas, which was also quite interesting, and even about how Lucas stepped in and covered for Ralph Senensky on Yom Kippur - something Cushman doesn't even include in his accounting of the relevant episode.
And I honestly don't know much about the people who would regularly work on the original series as BG - aside from one man named Roger Holloway, who worked as a standin and extra on the show. I only know him because my father worked with him a bunch of times in the 1970s and introduced him to me on set as an actor from Star Trek, telling me "He played Mr. Lemli". (I was cast as one of Roger's kids in a sci-fi comedy pilot called "Space Force", where they were doing a gag that alien families were being transported aboard that were completely identical. Roger's family unit of mom-dad-brother-sister was given Roger's look at the time - a mop of dark hair and a bushy 70s moustache - something that was applied to me, to the mom and to my "sister" for the shot.) I did meet a few of the regular SI's and BG from Next Gen when I worked on Voyager, but I haven't seen those guys in eons at this point.
What we do know from that PR is that a Tom Steele and a Carey Foster participated in scenework as speaking performers, but were never credited or included on any other paperwork that we can find. The PR is a bit odd on this, in that the listing for Foster looks directly connected to the BG section - there's one extra who was upgraded to SAG later in the morning and then dismissed when the rec room scene was done. The listing for Steele, is odd because it has a bizarre in time of 2:00, but the same outtime as Foster. I believe that in-time to be a typo and that Steele was in the same scene as Foster and released at the same time. The only other option would be for Steele to have been brought in during the afternoon, and for his dismissal time on the PR to be a typo, which frankly doesn't make any sense. So from what we have, I am inferring that both of them were in the deleted Rec Room scene between Spock and Lazarus - whatever it was they did has been lost - this was not part of the material scavenged by Roddenberry for his Lincoln Enterprises material and recently re-purposed with the "Roddenberry Vault" release.
It's not uncommon to see background players getting upgraded to speaking roles - but usually there's more of a record than what we see here. On various shows I have worked, whenever someone was bumped up to cast, they'd get a credit. The situation here is one where they were simply paid for the upgrade and that was it. That would not be the case with stunts, but there's nothing in the Rec Room that would call for stuntwork, particularly from a young woman sitting at one of the tables. I doubt the Concordance's take on this, for the same reason that you do.
The full story of what happened with these two upgrades is apparently lost to history now. The people involved are long gone from the business (and many from the planet itself), and the few survivors (including Robert Brown) are unlikely to remember who was upgraded to speaking roles on a day on TV shoot over 50 years ago. The best shot we have at this is the basic documentation - the callsheets and the PRs. And if I could get my hands on it, Bob Justman's production board - but even that board wouldn't note anything about extras being upgraded.
What made the research work here interesting was how much went wrong and how they were able to keep going and just shoot SOMETHING. The materials for many 3rd season episodes are readily available but are frankly not that interesting, simply because they just record fairly mundane days. (I might be interested in looking at what happened on "The Tholian Web", just because that one went off the tracks and wound up with its director, Ralph Senensky, being fired midway, but most of the 3rd season record is a sad routine, as discussed by many of the people who were there.)
What got me interested here was the realization of how wrong the THESE ARE THE VOYAGES timeline is. I'm not joking about Cushman getting this stuff upside down and backwards. And that was only one example. We could get into some really fun stuff about the producing deal they made with John Meredyth Lucas, which was also quite interesting, and even about how Lucas stepped in and covered for Ralph Senensky on Yom Kippur - something Cushman doesn't even include in his accounting of the relevant episode.
I was meaning that maybe the Preservers in their past may have had similar empires rise across their planet and may have unwittingly passed that gene along to the humans that they planted on many different worlds and yes, the Nazi regime of Melakon was caused by observer John Gill who thought that Nazism was the most practical form of government, without the nasty bits included of course! 
JB
JB
That's not what the Preservers do. They just pick up civilizations in danger of extinction from other planets and relocate them. The cultures of those societies existed before the relocation and do not come from the Preservers. You're confusing them with the ancient humanoids from "The Chase".I was meaning that maybe the Preservers in their past may have had similar empires rise across their planet and may have unwittingly passed that gene along to the humans that they planted on many different worlds and yes, the Nazi regime of Melakon was caused by observer John Gill who thought that Nazism was the most practical form of government, without the nasty bits included of course!
JB
I've always thought that if they did that with humans, it stands to reason they'd do it with other species too, so where are all the non-human duplicates? Well, I do tend to think that the Vians from "The Empath" may well have been the Preservers, since they were also trying to relocate an endangered population. But maybe some of those alien makeups that got reused on both DS9 and Voyager for races in different quadrants could be explained if one of them was transplanted. And it's occurred to me to wonder if the Talarians from "Suddenly Human" might be some kind of transplanted Klingon sub-race, since they're a warrior culture with bumpy foreheads.
Yeah, I read that and hoped some kind of reference to that instead of the "windsock dipped in cement" crap wouldn't end up in the book. What was I thinking?
Yay, Omega Glory! Thanks, Harvey!
It was a huge Joint, dipped in Superglue.Here are the image analysis Zap mentioned; seems likely this is actually what the doomsday was made from. The concrete/windsock story is BS
Ummm...what? It sounds like you're conflating the series premise with "The Omega Glory" 2nd pilot script. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding.
It's a question of how long it would reasonably take the events that led up to "Omega" to occur.
When "Omega" was originally conceived as an alternate pilot, no one had defined how far in the future Star Trek might be set. So it seemed possible that, all before the time of Star Trek, space travel could become advanced enough for colonists to leave Earth, get to some distant planet, settle in, build two competing nations there, fight a nuclear war, be blasted back to the Stone Age, and forget how to read English properly, but still retain a reverence for the U.S. Constitution. That would take a long time.
When the episode was shot however, it was pretty clear that the series was not set in the far distant future, but just 200 or 300 years from 1966. That makes it seem as if the Yangs and Combs were just native aliens whose ancestors had not come from Earth, but had somehow written their own duplicate of our Constitution by a flabbergasting coincidence that Kirk doesn't even find odd!
It's a huge loose thread in the story, and I really like Markonian's info about Rise of the Federation providing a decent explanation for all this: it's like "A Piece of the Action." The filmed episode should have included that, if only they could have thought of it in time.
What makes that clear? Given the various nuggets of Earth and Federation history, I've always been happier with the 700-900 year range.
If you showed someone from 1766 what happened in 1966 and then showed the same thing to someone from 1566 would they both be able to come up with 200 and 400 years respectively?
Space Seed and Tomorrow is Yesterday both nail it down to about 200 years in the future.
And then, later, Star Trek II...
It turns out that what the Preservers actually did was pick up a few groups from Hollywood studios before television died out as medium in 2040 and scattered them to various planets. That's why the Native Americans we see in "The Paradise Syndrome" are of the Hollywood Indian variety, why the Romans of "Bread and Circuses" have functioning TV studios, why the gangsters on Itoia in "A Piece of the Action" have functioning cars and machine guns, why the Yang and the Kohms in "The Omega Glory" have a copy of the Constitution, why the Nazis on Ekos in "Patterns of Force" hang out on a duplicate of the Paramount backlot, and why Miri's planet contained a near-perfect duplicate of Mayberry.
I've not yet gotten my hands on the pilot version of "The Omega Glory" but my recollection from all the internal docs on the show was that they really didn't want to pin down exactly when the show was set or the particulars of the history of Earth between 1966 and whenever the show was set. Obviously various episodes started to fill in some of that—inconsistently—so I don't know that we can say "the original idea was" for a lot of the show's backstory.
Last edited:
Nail might be a bit of an exaggeration.
Similar threads
