Question about ESP and telepaths in TOS

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I guess it always seemed like when the Enterprise left, teams of experts would head to planets to pick up where the mission left off. Kirk's crew were the paramedics/ER docs - responding to the environment/situation they found themselves in - and the experts who came after were the surgeons/ongoing care specialists/research lab scientists - handling the long term issues and doing ongoing study. Not to say that Kirk's crew couldn't continue to be involved/study/write papers on what they uncovered, but the episodic nature of TOS didn't usually suggest/depict that they were - always off to a new adventure, which became the concern of the moment.

 

[Christopher]

I guess it always seemed like when the Enterprise left, teams of experts would head to planets to pick up where the mission left off. Kirk's crew were the paramedics/ER docs - responding to the environment/situation they found themselves in - and the experts who came after were the surgeons/ongoing care specialists/research lab scientists - handling the long term issues and doing ongoing study. Not to say that Kirk's crew couldn't continue to be involved/study/write papers on what they uncovered, but the episodic nature of TOS didn't usually suggest/depict that they were - always off to a new adventure, which became the concern of the moment.

In theory, yes. But what people tend to forget these days, because we have no frontiers on Earth anymore and have forgotten how they work, is that ships like the Enterprise were designed to function autonomously because they operated so far out in uncharted space that they were often the only game in town, and couldn't count on support from their home base. Heck, that was the original idea behind the Galaxy class in TNG, that it needed so many civilians and families aboard because it operated so far out on the frontier that it needed to be a completely self-sufficient community -- although TNG's own writers abandoned that as early as the second episode when it came to the rescue of another Starfleet vessel, and the third where it was on a medical relief mission to a Federation planet.

Of course, I've always thought this was hard to reconcile with the episodic-TV formula of having the ship move from planet to planet on a roughly weekly basis. Logically it would take years to get a decent survey of even a single planet. I always wanted to see a Trek series where the ship would spend a whole season at a given planet, exploring its various cultures and biomes and such, before moving on to the next. But since we're stuck with the one-episode-per-planet formula, the idea of other ships coming in later to do followup work does become necessary.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

DS9 got to do that, exploring the religion and culture of Bajor to a greater extent than would be possible in a single episode. And they managed to have episodes about societal issues (post-war, oppression, PTSD) and crazy phenomena (Prophets, Pah-wraiths, visions), all related to that.

If you want to show new strange things that don't all co-exist on one planet, because they can't (not easily) every episode, you have to be in motion.

Enterprise was often the only ship in the area at all, or who was sufficiently equipped to respond to a problem, but they weren't the sole Earth/Federation starship period. Which makes sense; if you put all your eggs in one starship, you're cooked. Meanwhile, other ships responding to other problems may have been the only ship available in their sectors.

 

[Christopher]

If you want to show new strange things that don't all co-exist on one planet, because they can't (not easily) every episode, you have to be in motion.

Yeah, but one realistically portrayed planet wouldn't have just one culture or environment on it, it'd have dozens. A lot of the episodes about unrealistically monolithic alien cultures-of-the-week could easily have been reworked to represent different nations and regions on a single planet, which would be more realistic. Particularly if they're preindustrial civilizations and different regions on the planet haven't come into contact yet. Even if they have contact and trade with each other, they could still be very distinct cultures with their own unrelated problems.

Enterprise was often the only ship in the area at all, or who was sufficiently equipped to respond to a problem, but they weren't the sole Earth/Federation starship period.

Of course, but the whole premise of the show was that the ship was able to handle situations where nobody else was available. Using "Oh, they'll just let someone else handle it" as a default position is rather missing the point -- although it's a point that a fair number of Trek writers have themselves missed, especially in the newer series. (Like SNW and the Section 31 movie bizarrely treating it as unusual for Starfleet ships to operate outside of Federation territory, even though that's literally what "explore strange new worlds" means.)

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

How many episodes made it clear that part of the story hinged on the strange new planet they visited being a separate planet from another, as opposed to being able to coexist with another episode's story?

Certainly "That Which Survives", it being revealed to be an artificial planet, though the same concept (ghostly dangerous hologram woman guarding the property) could have just as easily have taken place in a hidden cavern/bunker, or a crashed shipwreck.

 

[Christopher]

How many episodes made it clear that part of the story hinged on the strange new planet they visited being a separate planet from another, as opposed to being able to coexist with another episode's story?

Probably a lot of them, because of the tendency of SFTV writers to portray entire planets as monolithic places with less variety than a single large city in real life. The point is that it would've been easy enough to tell multiple stories on the same planet if the writers hadn't had that bad habit.

Roddenberry himself proposed setting more than one episode on the same planet. In his initial 1964 series pitch, as a budget-saving proposal, he wrote, "Where particularly advantageous set or location conditions occur, or where a particularly exciting "world" is created, STAR TREK may do three or four stories there." Given TOS's budgetary limitations, it's surprising they never actually did that, aside from reusing Starbase 11 in the consecutively filmed "Court Martial" and "The Menagerie."