Star Trek TOS Re-Watch

The Enterprise *did* have rigid decontamination protocols, if not containment. When Spock and Joe beamed back up they were both put though a decontamination scan in the transporter room as well as a full medical. Nothing untoward was detected. Decontamination failure is definitely the primary issue… perhaps Spock and Joey should have both gone to a dedicated decontamination chamber and rubbed antibacterial ‘gel’ in to each other whilst half naked instead? I thought that this technique was long abandoned by the time of TOS though… consigned to history?

The resulting issue is with the protocols followed (or not) when the contaminant/pathogen had been detected. There was no procedure in place to secure an outbreak. Kirk was in charge and not infected until the latter part of the episode so he would have been in the correct frame of mind to make good judgment and initiate proper procedures as per protocol. Maybe the situation was unprecedented though and Kirk simply did not know what to do? Especially if his staff were slowly being compromised and not following his orders…

 

Contamination and containment protocols is something I'm trained on yearly, even though there is minimal risk. On board a tightly controlled environment such as a starship should have at least that. But the landing party violated the first rule.

 

Yup, Joe should never have taken his glove off as per his training in the first place and this whole episodic malarkey would not have happened. A butterfly effect… easily rectified by time warp none the less. Did you know that this is (at the moment) Spock’s first foray in to time travel? He will do this several more times in the future until eventually it will seal his fate and create the JJ. Abrahams universe in which he ‘naturally’ dies? This could very well be the episode that creates that ‘sowed seed’ which will one day sprout in to that JJ-verse? Spock undoing the mistakes of Nero in a ‘time warp’…

 

One look at the suits Spock and Tormolen were wearing on the planet tells you everything you need to know what they thought about biohazards!

 

Perhaps Starfleet HR was getting too many complaints.

 

UPN probably didn’t get many complaints at the time though… even if HR was. The suits probably actively encouraged such scenes to increase the 19-30 male age viewership. This is why they also originally aired Voyager along with wrestling.

 

Save that, like this instance, it was not deliberate.

 

I was sceptical but so far the developing relationships between Spock, Chapel, and Uhura have been astonishingly consistent with their TOS portrayals (Peck is perhaps a bit more poker faced). It's only really the casual use of transporters that I fund annoying.

 

Well let’s take this one step further… was an alternate future/multiverse created as a result of this weeks episodes time warp? Or did the time warp actually ‘reset’ everything? Did it reset Joe’s death?

I think that a temporal investigation is in order…

 

I dunno. "Alternative Factor" always makes me laugh...

 

Intentional comedy....

 

One gets fedup with hacks constantly moving the goalposts and claiming, “This is the way it really was.” and, “This is the way it really looked like.”

Fuck that. If something is already established then claiming a change is what it was really supposed to be is nothing less than a reboot and totally divorced from what was previously established.

 

I didn't watch many 1960s medical dramas and can't say about their containment protocols.

I rmember that a comedy series set in a hospital, House Calls (1979-1982), had an episode, "A slight Case of Quarantine" 21 January 1980. where it was suspected that several persons might have been exposed to smallpox. And I remember that they were put in quarantine until they either showed symptoms or didn't.

And in that way the hospital seemed to be taking reasonably adequate precautions. So far, so good.

But why was it suspected that people in the hospital had been exposed to the deadly smallpox virus? This was after the great effort to exterminate the smallpox virus. The last confirmed case was in October, 1977 and smallpox was offically declared extinct on 9 December 1979 and 8 may 1980. When the epsisode was being written, live smallpox virus was aleady confined to a few research labs.

According to the episode, a littlle boy patient got bored and started wandering the hospital, spraying people with his water pistorl. And it was feared that he might have been in the lab with the smallpox and filled his water pistol with it.

So this hospital was apparently one of the few in the world, one out of many thousands, with a good enough reputation to be selected for smallpox research. and yet the researcher who went out for lunch or to the bathroom didnt lock away the virus before leaving the room, and didn't lock the door to the lab after leaving the room unattended? And the lab was in a corridor accessable for child pationts to wander in unacccompanied? No locked doors between the patients and the corridor leading to a sample worth untold millions to someone who could deliver it to terrorists?

So possibly the infection and quarantine protocols in TOS were standard for that era in TV. And considering the history of human slip ups, I regrettably say that such an obvious blunder might not be far fetched enough in real life to classify that episode as "science fiction".

 

The characters in "Naked Time" "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" were originally two separate people. Roddenberry rewrote the character in the latter episode to be Chapel, possibly because he wanted Majel Barrett to get the role.

 

I have always taken it that Chapel was in love with Corby and hoped to find him when he disappeared. In the interim she met Spock and found herself drawn to him, but didn’t act on it until the events in “The Naked Time.” When they found Corby and she learned he had actually been dead for many years her attention turned back toward Spock, yet she still kept it largely to herself and resisted pursuing him given she understood that he would or could never reciprocate her feelings.

 

I think it's a shame that they put no effort into marrying up the character threads. She had a complex back story with a raft of potential qualifications, and she was never once allowed to use them in any of the episodes. All her research is off camera and Bones gets the credit: she isn't even featured in Miri, and she isn't asked to join landing parties that deal with ancient alien ruins such as Paradise Syndrome or Turnabout Intruder. She is also never allowed to act or even express her opinion on her obvious professional intuition in And the Children Shall Lead or Turnabout Intruder. Very frustrating.

Even in production order her turnaround looks a bit abrupt. I have ben very impressed with the way SNW has weaved in a prior, quite organic, relationship between the two.

 

Chapel wasn't a running character in the first season. She was featured in "Naked Time" as a guest character (like Riley) and was a replacement for another character in "What Are Little Girls Made Of" (courtesy of Roddenberry). She wasn't featured again until the very last episode of the first season "Operation Annihilate!" It seems that the character of Chapel (and actress Majel Barrett) wasn't considered a full-fledged part of the show until the second season.

 

NBC didn’t like Majel in the role of Number One—they didn’t think she was strong enough to carry the role. They also disliked Roddenberry’s blatant nepotism in casting his known extramarital girlfriend in a prominent role of a show he was trying to sell them.

If another actress, not connected so intimately with Roddenberry, had been cast as Number One the character might have survived into the series.

Given NBC’s objection to Majel then Roddenberry still tried to sneak her into the show in some capacity.

 

Indeed. The biggest thing I have enjoyed about the prequel presentation of SNW is giving a little more color and life to even secondary cast from TOS.

Do I agree with all of it? Nope. But, I don't agree half the Trek films either in their interpretation of characters. I enjoy seeing a different take though than my fan assumptions would take me before.

 

Hey, MY Star Trek died with "The Counter-Clock Incident." All professionally produced Star Trek since 1979 has essentially been a longlasting, extended reboot to me, an often enjoyable reboot, but a little off in certain respects in comparison to Trek during its first decade of existence.

But our feelings about the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of subsequent sequel films and series are irrelevant.