First Impressions of The Changeling...

[royalfan5]

1:Not really a comment on the episode, but the interface for playing the episodes on DVD really annoy me.
2:It seems to me that the Federation version of OSHA should have made them pad the railings around the bridge as much as they get jostled about. It seems like an injury waiting to happen.
3:Seems like they should have tried hailing sooner.
4: It seems like having a high strung guy like McCoy around NOMAD is a poor strategy.
5:Seems like we should have kept a better eye on NOMAD, no?
6: Nothing like a solid, "He's dead, Jim"
7: I wonder if they require every ship to have a Vulcan incase they need a mind-meld to save the ship.
8:Nothing like seeing a computer get outsmarted to brighten your day.
9:I enjoyed this episode, but I'm sure it was a lot cooler if you hadn't seen TMP multiple times already.

 

[indranee]

Your no. 7 makes me remember the fact that in the novelization of STTMP (written by none other than the Great Bird himself), Kirk mentions wanting to have a Vulcan as the science officer. Now, that could just be his Spock nostalgia working overtime or something along the lines of the necessity of having a Vulcan bridge officer. Maybe Starfleet wised up after Spock's extra service during the 2 five year missions.

 

[scotpens]

. . . I enjoyed this episode, but I'm sure it was a lot cooler if you hadn't seen TMP multiple times already.

Or, as it’s know to fans, Where Nomad Has Gone Before.

“The Changeling” is generally an entertaining episode if you overlook the usual batch of implausibilities. Nomad stops its attack on the Enterprise because “Captain James Kirk” coincidentally happens to sound like “Jackson Roykirk”? And it boggles the mind how the damaged Nomad managed to encounter an unmanned alien probe in thousands of light-years of interstellar space, let alone how the two machines repaired one another and merged into a super-powerful weapon capable of destroying all life on a planet.

One nice bit of continuity is Uhura singing a few bars of “Beyond Antares,” the song she sang to cheer up Lt. Riley in “The Conscience of the King.”

 

[T'Girl]

One nice bit of continuity is ...

Gary Mitchell put James R. Kirk on Kirk's tombstone, it would have been interesting if Roddenberry had made Kirk's official middle name Roy, it would have made Nomad's mistaking a James Roy Kirk with a Jackson Roykirk more understandable.

Personally, I've never been overly fond of "Tiberius." I mean come on, the patron god of rivers?

 

[indranee]

I thought it was sorta after the Roman emperor.

 

[GNDN]

Your no. 7 makes me remember the fact that in the novelization of STTMP (written by none other than the Great Bird himself), Kirk mentions wanting to have a Vulcan as the science officer.

It's in the film as well:

KIRK: We have to replace Commander Sonak. I'd still like a Vulcan there, if possible.
DECKER: None available, Captain.

 

[plynch]

I would want a Vulcan around. Shoot, I'd like to be one. My wife thinks I am one most of the time, already.

 

[poloronbeam]

I enjoyed "The Changelling" overall, but I think that it suffered from the second and third season tendency the crack some silly joke(s) after a horrendous event had occurred.

Nomad wiped out 4 BILLION people from a planet, and yet Kirk and company are "joking" about Nomad being his "son". Even as much as I liked "The Trouble With Tribbles", what did they think the Klingons were going to do to those Tribbles? It would be like beaming over a bunch of cats on a ship operated by a Canine race. They're going to be slaughtered, plain and simple.

Compare this with the tone of the first season ("THe Enenmy Within" nonwithstanding). For example, in "Balance of Terror", the end scene showed the effect on Kirk regarding weight of the events that had occurred, but also showing him to being forced to rise above it and adopt his "Captain" persona. No jokes were made because there was nothing funny about the events that has occurred. Also, let's not forget the "....What of Lazarus?" somber tone that Kirk had in the ending of "The Alternative Factor".

Don't get me wrong, the second season had some great shows, but I think that many of some of them had inappropriate endings for the events that and preceeded them.

Had "Space Seed" been produced during the second season, there probably been a joke at the end regarding those new engineering "beat down clubs" that Kirk used to whack on Khan in order to defeat him, thus diminishing the drama of that episode.

Just my two cents.

 

[Guartho]

My first thought anytime somebody mentions The Changeling:

SCOTT: Shields still holding, sir.
KIRK: Good.
SPOCK: Temporarily, Captain. Our shields absorbed energy equivalent to ninety of our photon torpedoes.
KIRK: Ninety?
SPOCK: I may add, the energy used repulsing this first attack reduced our shielding power twenty percent.
UHURA: First attack, sir?
KIRK: I think we can expect others, Lieutenant.
SPOCK: We can resist three more such attacks. The fourth will shatter our shields completely.

Followed promptly by:

KIRK: Ready photon torpedo number two, Mister Sulu.
SULU: Ready, sir.
KIRK: Fire.
SULU: Torpedo away. (a pause, then a flash) Direct hit.
SPOCK: No effect. Target absorbed full energy of our torpedo.
KIRK: Absorbed it? There must be damage to your instruments, Spock .
SPOCK: They are in good working order, Captain.
KIRK:But what could have absorbed that much energy and survived?

Oh I don't know, how about anything with shields at least 1/360th as good as yours?

Did John Meredyth Lucas hate Shatner and want to make Kirk look like a complete idiot or something?

 

[Timo]

Oh I don't know, how about anything with shields at least 1/360th as good as yours?

In a ship less than 1/3600th the size of yours? I don't think this is an issue at all. If there's a tech continuity problem there, it's an external one, suggesting that Kirk's ship can withstand something like 350 photon torpedo hits when similarly sized Klingon ships typically are knocked out of action with just a handful of those torpedoes.

On the issue of NOMAD merging with Tan Ru, I'd think that an interstellar sublight probe would have to have truly extensive self-repair and perhaps self-replication capabilities, making it trivial to recover from the collision (save for the tiny little complication that the recovery program got corrupted there, probably because two essentially similar probes were involved in mutual self-repairs). And the collision itself would make eminent sense, as sublight interstellar probes would also be equipped to autonomously home in on signs of intelligence...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jayrath]

My first impression? From the first reruns in 1970?

Fantastic!

We're all so jaded today. It's understandable. But you have to understand the wonder of it all when we first fans came to it.

 

[xortex]

One nice bit of continuity is ...

Gary Mitchell put James R. Kirk on Kirk's tombstone, it would have been interesting if Roddenberry had made Kirk's official middle name Roy, it would have made Nomad's mistaking a James Roy Kirk with a Jackson Roykirk more understandable.

Personally, I've never been overly fond of "Tiberius." I mean come on, the patron god of rivers?

You know, ironically or not, getting the middle initial wrong did show that in the midst of all the confusion, Gary Mitchell did get something wrong and was fallable as a god should not be. Coincidence? I think not.

 

[RAMA]

Changeling was one of the last episodes of TOS I remember seeing...somehow it fell through the cracks for years. I quite liked it and still do, despite being a lot more knowledgeable about AI these days. It's hard not to be annoyed with Kirk's attitude towards machines.

RAMA

 

[BillJ]

Changeling was one of the last episodes of TOS I remember seeing...somehow it fell through the cracks for years. I quite liked it and still do, despite being a lot more knowledgeable about AI these days. It's hard not to be annoyed with Kirk's attitude towards machines.

RAMA

Damn him for being against the sterilization of Earth!

 

[Warped9]

My first impression? From the first reruns in 1970?

Fantastic!

We're all so jaded today. It's understandable. But you have to understand the wonder of it all when we first fans came to it.

This is a very good point. Many of us can groan about the cliches of sci-fi on TV, but we should also remember than when TOS was new a lot of those cliches didn't yet exist.

 

[RAMA]

Changeling was one of the last episodes of TOS I remember seeing...somehow it fell through the cracks for years. I quite liked it and still do, despite being a lot more knowledgeable about AI these days. It's hard not to be annoyed with Kirk's attitude towards machines.

RAMA

Damn him for being against the sterilization of Earth!

The writing was 2 dimensional when it came to AI in TOS...so they basically wrote them into a corner and Kirk had to be militant with the results. The style was like 30s or 40s scifi literature rather than the modern views of SF circa 1966-69.

Now...it took TOS 13 years to get it right...the TMP shows how it should have been handled, and that machine had enough reasoning power (and my god they finally were willing to call a machine sentient and reasoning!!) to not want to destroy the Earth. A much more mature view of the situation, instead of "machine bad, must destroy" view of the 60s series. Its an important, fundamental shift in Trek...one that led to a Positronic android of a true Asimovian mold in STNG 8 years later, which brings Trek up to date.

 

[Maurice]

A total aside, but some years ago I had this realization that "The Changeling" could easily have been made as an episode of "Lost in Space", and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. Pretty much all the same beats could be there, the early space probe that mistakes the human leader for its creator, etc. Judy could have had her mind zapped, Don could have been killed (and resurrected) trying to save her. In fact, the weakest idea in the show, that Spock could mind-meld with a machine (let's leave TMP's living machine aside) would have worked in LIS's favor: the Robot could hook up a data cable and read Nomad's memory banks, recognize that there is "alien" code in there, and sum up what happened.

It's fun to imagine well-known scripts adapted to other shows.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The idea of telepathy working with machines annoyed me so thoroughly in this episode that I never got over it - and worked in a sort of "rebuttal" in the one chance I got.

 

[ToddPence]

A total aside, but some years ago I had this realization that "The Changeling" could easily have been made as an episode of "Lost in Space", and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. Pretty much all the same beats could be there, the early space probe that mistakes the human leader for its creator, etc. Judy could have had her mind zapped, Don could have been killed (and resurrected) trying to save her. In fact, the weakest idea in the show, that Spock could mind-meld with a machine (let's leave TMP's living machine aside) would have worked in LIS's favor: the Robot could hook up a data cable and read Nomad's memory banks, recognize that there is "alien" code in there, and sum up what happened.

It's fun to imagine well-known scripts adapted to other shows.

A couple of months after "Mirror, Mirror" aired, Lost in Space ran a show titled "The Anti Matter Man". This featured the Robinsons traveling into an alternate universe where there were evil duplicates of all of them. The evil Don West had a beard.

 

[scotpens]

The idea of telepathy working with machines annoyed me so thoroughly in this episode that I never got over it - and worked in a sort of "rebuttal" in the one chance I got.

In “The Devil in the Dark,” Spock mind-melded with the Horta, a silicon-based life form whose brain — or whatever Hortas have that’s analogous to a brain — must be utterly unlike the brain of any carbon-based creature. Is it that farfetched that Spock could mind-meld with a machine?