First Time Watch: Conscience of the King

The stupid things about BOT to me are that Romulan ships can only do sublight yet the Enterprise has trouble keeping up with it, the Spock making a noise thing - how does that work in space, I mean honestly did not one of the 430 people on board flush a toilet, close a cupboard in that time? I liked most other things about the episode that countracted its obvious flaws/

 

Spock didn't just make a sound on the bridge, he accidentally sent out a signal. It was a sensor beam or something.

 

Nope. the Enterprise was purposely matching the BOP's speed and course. When it needed to outpace the BOP—like the end run around the comet—it had no problem doing so.

As @ZapBrannigan said, it was a signal. It was the equivalent of accidentally turning on the radar for a few seconds on a modern ship.

 

Yeah that one was clear from the episode.
What is less clear is why the crew were tiptoeing around and speaking in whispers at the time. Plus look how carefully Spock closes his tricorder so as not to make a "clicking" noise!

 

Leaning too much into the sub battle aspect IMO. OTOH, if you shut off all your equipment and bob around the ocean doing a damage control drill, things get really quiet and voice volumes drop noticeably.

I suppose one could argue—weakly—that Spock had been using the device passively and he was being careful not to activate any scanning function of the tricorder.

 

The destroyer has to be faster than the sub, that's part of the rules!

 

This episode is kinda weird with that stuff tho. They kept painting Spock in a suspicious light and since he's the second lead, that's really a pointless plotline. "Accidentally" hitting the beacon, not being able to repair the phasers until exactly after the ship is hit, Vulcans and Romulans looking alike. Not all of it was made to give Stiles his racism plot, some of it goes by unremarked.

As for the sound in space part, they did speak in whispers in the last act, with Kirk even saying "work quietly" and his log mentioning they were playing a "silent waiting game."

This was really more of a metaphorical story than hard, accurate SF. They wanted to make a submarine adventure, so that's what they did. 16 years before Nicky Meyer did it.

 

Tiptjoeing to Kirk's chair, Spock whispers:
Captain, why are we being so quiet? Sound doesn't travel in space.
Kirk:
You know something Mr. Spock? You ask too many questions. Now go back to your station. Quietly.

Robert

 

That subplot is somewhat reminiscent of one in the movie Run Silent, Run Deep, where the new captain is suspect because he lost his last sub under questionable circumstances and has suddenly replaced the popular assigned captain. The crew can't do anything about that, of course, so they act out through pointed mistrust of the yeoman who came with him from his last boat. He's not suspected of collaboration with the enemy or anything like that, but he is singled out and called "kraut" for his German name.

It's not an exact parallel, but the idea of internal tension and mistrust is there.

 

As above…

KIRK
Yes, well gentlemen, the question still remains. Can we engage them with a reasonable possibility of victory?

SCOTT
No question. Their power is simple impulse.

KIRK
Meaning we can outrun them?

STILES
To be used in chasing them or retreating, sir?

 

The whispering is a bit silly, but I like the dramatic effect it has.

 

I agree that it is over the top but as I intimated at upthread: Ships are noisy places with the propulsion—and all the fans, pumps and other machinery—running and when you turn all that off, then ships become eerily quiet. People voice volumes natural drop under those circumstances. I doubt that was what was going through the show runners' minds but it kinda works as an in-universe explanation.

 

I've always said the same thing about Hamlet. The consensus among literary critics is that Hamlet was indecisive. My sense is that he wanted to make sure that he made the correct decision.

 

Long ago I rea a theory that Hamlet was too quick to act. The theory said that ghosts are not allowed by the theologies of most Christian denominations, so the ghost of Hamlet's father was probably not really a ghost. It was claimed that Hamlet's father's spirit would never be relased from purgatory to incite Hamlet to seek vengeance and committ murders. Therefore the ghost should have actually been a devil from Hell lying to Hamlet to trick to commit murder and go to Hell. According to that theory Hamlet should never have believed anything told him by an alleged ghost.

So that theory claims that Hamlet foolish made up his mind and acted when he should have been more suspicious about the ghost's laims and even slower to act than he was.

 

It's a reasonable theory.

 

So it was a race to the border and yet it took half an episode for the Enterprise to get ahead of the BOP. And they were all quiet and careful. Why the delay? Its would be like my son takes off on his roller skates and I using my car to outpace him to the shops. It would take 2 minutes. Now I've forgotten why the Enterprise was matching pace and hiding. Did they want to avoid the weapon or the incident? Obviously I need to see the episode again.

 

Aside: I looked Geritol -- Lawrence Welk used to have a huge sign hanging over his band on tv at one point. I know it treats anemia, but what the heck is in it to do so? It's like dark red, right -- is it bone marrow from the rendering plant or something?

Well, we would only care about Anglo-Catholicism for Shakespeare's day (the split with Rome being fairly recent and Elizabeth having found a middle way).

To say that ghosts "aren't allowed" is simplistic. Spiritism and consulting them is forbidden.

But what real people believed in 1602 as compared to official teachings . . . most commoners would have had no trouble with real ghosts.

 

The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined that ghosts are impossible.

 

We played a better version of the episode in a game of Star Fleet Battles once. We were using a system whereby there were people at the game board (navigators) and people in isolated rooms (captains). This way, fog of war was maintained.

I was captain of a destroyer escort, kind of a TOS Reliant, going against a Warbird (but I didn't know it). In SFB, Warbirds are completely sublight, moving at just one hex per turn! But the Warbird still won because all I knew was that there was this target that kept moving at seemingly warp speed (really, it was me zipping around relative to it) and shooting bolts of ridiculous energy, whereas I couldn't see to fire. I ended up running away.

As a result, we started a campaign whereby the Romulans did start their general war (though their "Pearl Harbor" against the Gorns went a lot less well...)

 

I developed a game that I called SFB RPG for use at conventions decades ago, and it was pretty successful. Never finished it, and even if I had there would be nothing I could have done with it without incurring the Wrath of Cole. It sounds similar, but somewhat more complex, than what you describe above. Each ship was run by a team of people, a bridge crew. During allocation the Captain gave orders/formulated plans for the turn; they were limited intentionally, so he could say, for instance "Arm phasers as possible" but not "Allocate 5 points of energy to phasers". He had to rely on his people to make good choice. The engineer allocated power during energy allocation and during the turn. The Navigator plotted a course and reported on the amount of power necessary to make it happen during allocation, then the Helm received what energy the Engineer could deliver and changed plans accordingly. The navigator ran shields, the Helm ran weapons.

The teams were at two separate tables. They were two GMs communicating by walkie talkie (today I would do it with cell phones, of course). I did games with fog of war, but it was using the intel rules, so the teams learned about their opponents as they approached or as capabilities were used.