Obsession Question

The creature's home planet has no blood on it. How could it evolve to need blood? It must be something that it does not need, but somehow it one day found out it was delicious when it encountered humans 11 years ago. Blood must be accidentally similar to something the creature evolved to consume.

 

It's maybe why I don't drink anymore JB

 

There are probably rivers, swamps and seas of hemoglobin-like and amino-acid-like substances just behind all the rocks in the set. The only time TOS showed water in a studio set was in a fountain ("Wink of an Eye") and a very piddling small one - I suspect water leaks were more catastrophic back then if they had extension cables plugged in all over the place or something, and there's no grassy backlot they're going to spraypaint red and apply a pink lens filter over to sell the effect of a thick alien atmosphere.

It bugs me more that Melllvar's special friend there can travel at warp speed without being inside a spaceship.

It bugs me even more that the Enterprise has vents leading directly outside the ship and there were no force fields in any part of the ship, never mind that in an emergency and if power went out then you would want a backup means to close the vents and doors beforehand - like a large capacitor to store enough energy and a sensor that triggers when main power goes out and starts the door close procedures at that point.

 

Then again, every spacecraft has vents leading directly outside - they are called walls.

Some of those are capable of holding against up to one atmosphere of pressure. If the creature exerts more, it pushes through, though. Not all vents need be armored against extreme penetrative force - but OTOH many would benefit from being permeable to some overpressure. And we learn that the creature can indeed push through stuff: the shields of the ship, or the jar holding the blood bait...

What concerns me more is that the piping that carries radioactive stuff inside the impulse engines connects directly, by design, to the cabin ventilation system. What is the functional need for this cross-connection? It sure comes in handy in this adventure, of course!

As for the "home" bit, it's iffy at best. If this creature is capable of star travel and of breeding, then there only existing a single individual at a single location is extremely unlikely. If and when it's a whole species, then the planetoid might be a preferred breeding (splitting!) grounds, and other individuals would come to breed/split at other times. But they would in all likelihood also find other planetoids to their liking. Perhaps Kirk, even if "tuned in" by his previous encounter somehow, misread the scent?

Perhaps breeding requires a blood feast (as with mosquitoes, say), and a breeding planetoid is defined by lacking one and thus offering maximal peace (as with all those birds that fly to the barren north to nest)? Might be an individual feasted and then bred eleven years prior to this episodend then one of its offspring feasted and withdrew to breed during the episode? To a dilettante like Kirk, all gaseous clouds would look alike anyway...

Such a short generation would probably imply trillions of individuals within the UFP alone. Perhaps few are as ill-equipped to deal with hunters (generally by hiding), and Kirk here downed an already wounded or otherwise disadvantaged individual?

The scent thing in general makes sense: if these individuals are ill defined, in having a fuzzy boundary, then Kirk might well have inhaled a certain percentage of the creature, and would be carrying bits of its consciousness within, the creature itself being little affected by this. But there might be a longing there, too, the cloud wanting to reabsorb what Kirk once inhaled. Perhaps that's what "home" meant? That soon the part within Kirk would be back home, thanks to the mother cloud's devious plan of luring the starship to empty space far away from help, then turning around and attacking - a course of action that makes no sense otherwise.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I think the writer, Art Wallace, had a sense of war movies that he wanted to convey here, because this is by far the most military episode of Star Trek. (Balance of Terror is at least a contender.) That shows up in the Garrovick intro, I think; I suspect Wallace had in mind an aircraft carrier or battleship in the USN or another force where the captain wouldn't know every crew member or even be informed of their posting aboard ship. (He doesn't know who Mulhall is either, and mangles McGivers' name at first.) Agreed that it stretches credulity a bit, though.

Awesome. Thanks. Now, like Saavik, I "have something new to think about." As a related aside, I don't think it's clear that Kirk was the only survivor on the Farragut (not that you implied that - just musing aloud, as it were).

Hmmm. Well, the planet is Class M or close, right? So perhaps the creature killed off all the inhabitants long ago, and like others have posited, can go for long stretches without feeding. Your points are good, though.

 

As the old expression goes, its eyes were bigger than its stomach. It thought it was hungry enough to eat the whole group, but found that it got full sooner than expected.

Kor

 

So perhaps it killed half the crew of the Farragut by somehow destroying the ship herself, meaning it only ever ate a handful of people, while those down on the planet survived and were picked up. The creature itself in turn fled from the planet, so there was no chance of a thorough analysis.

The episode is extremely ambiguous on that, but it does involve Spock saying the victims were "annihilated", which is an unlikely way for the stoic hero to describe the blood-sucking action. The starship blowing up would solve the discrepancy between the demonstrated meager appetite of the cloud and the high casualty numbers...

But where was Kirk? If his "phaser station" was down on the surface, how did his slow trigger finger doom the distant starship? If he was on the ship, how did he survive? The Peter David comic where Kirk playacts the events on an early holodeck features a scenario where the critter leaps up from the planet and destroys the ship while Kirk helplessly watches - but even in that comic, it's one of the scenarios that didn't actually happen.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Good theories but perhaps the prey of the cloud all died out on it's home soil long ago so it was forced to go out into space for food? Plus is it the only one? Or are there more out there? It was preparing to reproduce itself at the time of it's ultimate destruction so....
JB

 

Called bulkheads or hull, surely? And either way the moment a sealed area is exposed to a vacuum... the long-standing belief per the episode's dialogue is that some vents go to the outside of the ship and that is how the cloudy thing enters. The impulse engines' may have vents to go outside, sure, but regardless of that - what's going between the engine and the rest of the ship with absolutely no safeguards? That's a bit questionable, in a show that also lacks circuit breakers to (depending on episode) prevent explosions and rocks being flung onto the bridge during battles where each ship is speeding at warp 2... have to transfer from the sealed engine part into the habitable part. Why wouldn't the ship just (for lack of more technical term, but this is 60s Trek) osmosis itself through any old part of the hull and then through bulkheads and get around what amounts to several minutes of silly technobabble to cover up melodrama in the episode? (I'm sure it's possible there's a way to make a complex enough ventilation system that can safeguard all crew lives but allow a gas to glide on through with ease...)

Oh, flooding radiation waste into the ventilation system would also circulate around the entire ship and poison everyone. Perhaps lethally. Unless they're lined with enough lead that nobody on board is able to get at to lick but the bigger issue, considering it's the 1960s, still remains: The episode doesn't care too much to differentiate where the engine vents end and the habitable part begins and the episode has enough examples proving that. As if the sci-fi were thrown to the side to explore the human condition of obsession (hence the title drop), which was handled fairly marvelously overall.

 

Why "no safeguards"? Surely there were plenty. But if Scotty's team left a purging vent in a state that allowed, oh, ten bars of overpressure to flow the wrong way, this alone need not trigger any alarms when the ship flies through space and has minus one bar of pressure at that vent.

What is interesting here in the technobabble sense is that the ship can go to high warp without engaging her impulse engines; warp seems to be a completely separate system, rather than a doodad that allows impulse to do FTL. A system that's on more or less total shutdown would be even less likely to send out alarms about a vent that is doing harmless if somewhat nonstandard things...

Dialogue-wise, we don't need to assume that the radioactive fumes would enter the cabin ventilators the exact same way the vampire cloud did. The default assumption seems to be that the ventilation system is under control, and won't leak stuff where it shouldn't go - and that the system can efficiently and effectively purge cabins of contaminants, too, including vampire clouds and radioactive gases. Which may not be in line with today's ventilation tech, but need not be a problem for future tech.

Radioactive gases wouldn't need to be much of a danger to anybody, really. Kirk only tries to use them as an irritant to make the cloud back off - no lethal or even general health effects are suggested. In terms of real world physics, odds are that the radiation wouldn't penetrate even a piece of paper, nor leave fallout on surfaces if the gas itself is removed; nothing suggests otherwise as such. And in terms of Trek physics, an impulse engine ought to produce helium isotopes as its primary radioactive waste material - easily flushed, and with the harmless properties outlined above.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In Obsession all the internal vents were sealed shut, the only exception was the one in Garrovick's cabin (because he accidentally broke the control switch).
So while it sounds pretty terrifying to flush radioactive waste through the system, I agree with Timo that it would have remained contained there.

 

What about that garbage shoot that Kirk threw the overloaded phaser out of in "Conscience of the King". Was that automated? How hard is it to come backward through that path?

 

57 was no age to die for Stephen Brooks who was excellent in the role of David Garrovick! He was the type of character that you really wanted to stay on the ship somehow...
JB

 

They act as if there are open vents that the cloud can enter through, but no, it's a vacuum out there. That's a pressure leak.

 

If we apply TNG-era reasoning, the open vents and whatnot would be made airtight by force fields, which can selectively allow a given waste gas, only, to go out to space.

And the dialogue in "Obsession" made it clear that the creature can pass right through our shields, which are also force fields. So the open vents would keep life support air in by a force field, allow a waste gas to escape, and be wide open to the cloud creature coming in.

 

You mean it could be a hive mind flock of creatures, like gaseous starlings, on a rescue mission to locate and free its own captive away team? And maybe sucking hemoglobin is like drinking water or picking berries on a planet?

Or perhaps it's a crazed hemo-addict, looking for a fix.

Either way, the idea that the cloud is as obsessed with Kirk as he is with it is intriguing...

 

General comment about blood as a nutrient. It seems to me that we should view this nourishment as akin to one of our micro-nutrients as opposed to macro-nutrients. The idea that this thing gets its primary energy from blood can't make sense because it travels at warp speeds. How can a few tens of gallons of blood over 11 years sustain that energy expenditure? But if we think of it as an essential vitamin or mineral, it can make sense. Or, it could give a high/fix as Laura-C-C says, or maybe it just tastes good.

 

I've already suggested that the cloud might have feeding grounds outside of Federation space, Steve, that or they had been depleted over the years forcing the creature into other areas of space in which to feed!
JB

 

The problem I have is the energy expenditure needed for warp drive travel. I have no problem with the cloud traveling far for blood if it is not the primary source of energy. But, traveling far to eat and then traveling far to come back seems like it would leave the cloud with less energy than it started with. It would be like me swimming from California to Hawaii to get a sandwich, and then swimming back. But, if it is not the primary source of energy, then traveling far to get a treat or essential micronutrient, or waiting 11 years to get a treat makes more sense to me.

 

The creature was encountered in three separate star systems within easy reach of Starfleet during the course of this episode (including the backstory) - the unseen site of Captain Garrovick's death, the planet from the teaser and first hal of the episode, and finally the planet where the creature was destroyed. It appears to be at least as free to roam space as Starfleet starships are, then. OTOH, it's a small-time nuisance, a compact creature not eating much or apparently staying for long. It could be a more or less permanent presence all over the galaxy, then, too timid to visit worlds densely inhabited by clever humanoids and other Solids, but finding plenty of sustenance (or enjoyment or whatever) from assorted Class M planetoids.

Timo Saloniemi