Mind Meld Origins (from a Production Perspective)

[albion432]

tatiara7 has posted another in depth video. I thought the Star Trek community may find it of interest:

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For those who may not have seen the other video I posted from this channel, which is about the Phase II/TNG characters, here's a link to that video:

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there is also a third video on the channel. It's about foreshadowing techniques in Star Trek, but it starts out with the Wizard of Oz:

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[Qonundrum]

For decades I thought it was just Uhura... "trolling" him (for lack of better word) because he was emotionless. Oops. That's a great catch re: the mind meld's creation.

I forgot about Questor...

Foreshadowing... just saying what's about to happen. GSK-783 would not be picked up on as likely as "private channel" (with everyone on the bridge hearing, but that's another story.) Hitchcock was good, that's for sure! Foreshadowing can indeed add to narrative glue... too much can also take away the glue. Also, those who like baseball might enjoy the 5 minutes of yakkety yak before the boom-boom happens and jar those viewers.

But Edith and Kirk are two twits for not understanding what those shiny things on wheels are if everyone keeps honking them and not in a good way, especially in the same scene.

Anton Chekov was right as well - for plot narrative and especially time constraints, it's silly to put emphasis on something not used. On the flip side, showing something that's used but then is given a new attribute out of nowhere can be risky too (e.g. "Live and Let Die" where we get the scoop on the watch, which also becomes a circular saw out of nowhere. Which is brilliant since he's a spy but stupid since (a) it comes out of nowhere, given how much was told about it earlier and is such a cheat, and (b) Dr Kananga would have removed the watch from THE SPY to begin with.

The parallel between Pike's cabin and his cage cell is eerily good... starts out as blabby exposition that alone tells us this character's deeper personality... but then we get to see it and pays off in real time. It's almost spoonfeeding but yet, at least for Oz and The Cage, it remained engaging. It's also cool how a good pilot can foreshadow to-be-made episodes, sprinkling in ideas to remember for later on.

Still, "Cage" was intriguing but TOS as we know it was still more robust. And a pilot is still a lump of clay to be molded into a statue to be baked and glazed.

And now I'm off to go play with my pottery.

 

[alchemist]

The material at that first link, about the origins of the mind meld, is something else... and not in a good way. I stopped watching it after the author tried to pass a cut-away diagram of a Yokogawa Electric Corporation CSU-X1 spinning disk confocal scanning unit as a truth beam... and with no attribution.

 

[albion432]

The material at that first link, about the origins of the mind meld, is something else... and not in a good way. I stopped watching it after the author tried to pass a cut-away diagram of a Yokogawa Electric Corporation CSU-X1 spinning disk confocal scanning unit as a truth beam... and with no attribution.

Wow, good catch! Was the scanning unit something you already knew about, or did you have to do some digging to find out what it was? I could tell it wasn't from TOS, but had no idea where it was from. It didn't really bother me, but there's another image from the same website used later in the video. I did some digging of my own, and found a note in the video's description on its youtube page that does acknowledge the use of the images and their names. This raises a question though, does anyone know if they (likely Matt Jefferies) ever made any conceptual art for the truth beam? The video creator claims he couldn't find anything.

 

[alchemist]

Wow, good catch! Was the scanning unit something you already knew about, or did you have to do some digging to find out what it was? I could tell it wasn't from TOS, but had no idea where it was from. It didn't really bother me, but there's another image from the same website used later in the video. I did some digging of my own, and found a note in the video's description on its youtube page that does acknowledge the use of the images and their names. This raises a question though, does anyone know if they (likely Matt Jefferies) ever made any conceptual art for the truth beam? The video creator claims he couldn't find anything.

Thanks! One of my research areas is in optical spectroscopy so I recognized it.

I think the truth beam was jettisoned pretty early so I don't believe it ever got as far as Jefferies. There's a lot of conjecture in that video.

 

[albion432]

For decades I thought it was just Uhura... "trolling" him (for lack of better word) because he was emotionless. Oops. That's a great catch re: the mind meld's creation.

Until I watched this video, I thought that the line "his eyes would hypnotize" was more of Uhura teasing Spock, but it turns out that Roddenberry was using the lines Uhura "made up" to further the description of Spock and his Vulcan nature. The line became less meaningful after the Mind Meld was introduced, although Spock does seem to hypnotize that Omegan woman and gets her to activate the communicator in "The Omega Glory." Interesting that that episode was written early on in the series run, as a potential pilot episode.