"The Cloud Minders"

...The thing is, none of those solutions ought to be available to Stratos any more than Vulcan mind melds are.

That is, Stratosians are not telepaths. They would not hire outsiders for handling this internal matter of theirs. And while they have nifty tech, they aren't portrayed as having everybody's tech. Quite to the contrary, they seem to be isolationists in tech matters, too, not sharing their refined antigravity so that they would lose their perceived edge, but OTOH clearly not enjoying access to those doodads that effortlessly allow McCoy to solve Ardana's mysteries in ten minutes.

So the local solution is to use bright lights that make victims go AAAAARGH!, instead of potions that make them go... Well, whatever Kirk didn't want to force Dr Crater to go. Kirk disapproves, but this is not time time or place to offer better interrogation resources to Stratos for free.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I remember this episode mostly because of this brilliant piece of dialogue between Droxine and Spock:

Droxine: I have never before met a Vulcan
Spock: Nor I a work of art, madam.

That's so smooth!

 

I always thought Vulcans were private about the loss of logic associated with pon farr. I imagine that the seven year cycle was as widely known as the human monthly menstrual cycle. Details about when someone is having his cycle, how it caused an entire ship to divert from an important interstellar event, and if it led to ritual combat or something more vanilla are all private matters.

I imagine Captain Kirk knew Vulcans had a 7-year cycle, but never gave it much thought. He figured the Vulcans must handle it quite logically. It seems like Dr. McCoy knew a little more about the Vulcan cycle because he surmised Spock's problem. He probably didn't know about the level of madness or the possible ritual combat.

So it made sense to me that Droxine and Spock could use the cycle as a flirting point as long as they didn't get into details. It was a way for Droxine to imply she would be willing and to ask Spock if he would.

 

My understanding is one reason they kept the show on the air is Magnovox was using it in ads as a reason to upgrade to a color TV.

 

I love how Kirk says he'd been to Stratos once but didn't have time to look around. It gave the feel of Star Trek being a real universe, in which Kirk traveled to a distant place but didn't have a story there. He just travels a lot in Star Fleet. Maybe Stratos for them is like Bahrain is for me-- a distant place they don't know much about. I know it's an island nation. I wouldn't be shocked if I were in the navy to go there to pick up something and find out there's some kind of labor dispute where the work is done Saudi Arabia but the wealthy owners live in Bahrain. It made the show feel real to me, like it was part of a larger, real universe.

 

Agreed. Kirk saying he'd been to Ardana before was a really nice world-building touch.

 

I can't see Spock talking about anyone's menstrual cycle either.
Like Droxine I hope my 7-year cycle matches your menstrual cycle.
Maybe I'm old fashioned but if some guy asked me about my menstrual cycle I'd run away quickly.

 

But you'd kill him if he knew that you were really Servalan wouldn't you, Madame President?
JB

 

Although of course I don't know this Servalan myself.
I've heard of her intelligence and beauty and lets say efficient methods and if I were you I wouldn't attempt to cross her,
I've heard that she has had men killed for even having the presumption to talk to her let alone mention anything personal to her.

 

She, this lady we're talking about, was a cracker during the first series of B7 but then she had this annoying habit of shaving her head right down to the bone and twirling that non existent moustache as the baddest gal in the universe!
JB

 

She got better the shorter the hair was...

Is that true about Bahrain?

The "off" thing was Spock acting as if he's "flirting" at all, but also, Vulcans kept the whole story about reproduction secret. How, never mind. It was painful for him to talk about and he nearly didn't. I'm the 1000th person to point this out I'm sure, but I guess I have to. This episode has a lot of signs that they were near the end and things were getting a bit too loose. Like W Shatner not being fully there in his first scene on the Bridge.

 

The thing about Vulcan sex and reproduction being every seven years as such is that in Amok Time after all that trouble with Spock on board the Enterprise, he didn't get any and then returned to normal anyway!!! I'm thinking all he needed to do at the time was touch T'Pring to lessen the effects of the blood fever! I mean if he had to mate within a few hours or die why didn't he do that or perish? It must have been more to do with the ceremony and T'Pring rejecting him perhaps?
JB

 

I think a prevalent theory is that Vulcans have to mate OR go through the battle to the death to relieve Pon Farr. Spock did the latter.

 

Indeed, we never see anybody die from this "mate or die" contest. Or mate, for that matter.

Makes one ask whether this is simply Vulcan sex ed at its most dishonest.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Could be, Polta, could be!
JB

 

Outside of just looking cool ,I never understood the reason to have a floating city, the amount of energy and all the backup systems needed must have been staggering.

 

Hence the miners having to spend their lives digging in the caves to keep the city a floating!
JB

 

Floating islands cities and cities is an often used SF/fantasy trope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_cities_and_islands_in_fiction

 

Whether the floating system consumes energy or requires maintenance, or is based on something passive like magically floating zenite crystals, is not established. But gravity-manipulating technology in Trek is dirt cheap and reliable, with primitive 1990s Earth spacecraft and alien machines hundreds of thousands of years old being equally adept at maintaining it, seemingly indefinitely.

From the looks of it, Stratos floats because it can - the tech awes Kirk and Spock, which is the likely point for its existence.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Obviously Spock thinks that floating cities are very rare. Stratos might even be unique in known space. But Spock says nothing about the energy demands needed for Stratos.

Possibly the Troglodytes on the surface are not all miners. They may work in many different occupations to keep themselves and their masters fed and clothed and housed, etc., etc. And they may mine a lot of other minerals beside zenite, which as far as I know has only one use, to cure plant plagues.

But why do they say the zenite gas in the mines affects all the Troglodytes? Because they live in underground communities for reasons of efficiency and shelter from harsh surface conditions. Just as the great underground city of Moria (attached to mines) was called the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings, the underground community of the Troglodytes (attached to mines) is also called mines. And no doubt the atmosphere in the underground community is contaminated by zenite gas leaking from the zenite mines.

Anyway, the labor of the Troglodytes does a lot more than merely keep Stratos floating in the air.

One reason for Stratos to float could be to keep the city dwellers in and the Troglodytes out, and thus keep the society on Ardana "stratified".

But the main and original purpose was probably to keep away from the harsh conditions on the surface of Ardana.

Presumably Vanna meant that the Troglodytes were promised that they could live in the comfort of Stratos and commute to work on the surface and in the mines. Maybe even that they would live and work on Stratos.

This implies that MCCoy believes, accurately or not, the natives of Ardana all lived underground in what he loosely calls "mines", probably for protection against harsh surface conditions, long before Stratos was built.

I suspect that Ardana had a very small population and then most of the population was exterminated by alien conquerors, with a small number kept to work the mines. The aliens left Ardana and left some of their technology behind. Inspired by the alien antigravity technology, the Ardanans built Stratos and then the elite broke their promise and kept the troglodytes in the mines, according to Vanna's version. Or maybe the aliens built Stratos and the elite of Ardana simply moved into it and continued to oppress the rest as they had been oppressed by the aliens.

Or maybe the aliens moved the Ardanan elite into Stratos where they administered the mines for the aliens, and could live a good life as long as they could keep the Troglodytes working and the ore flowing, so that the quota would be ready when the aliens came to pick it up. And then for some reason the aliens stopped coming for the ore and the Ardanan elite gradually began to work for themselves.

There does seem to be a bit of chicken and egg situation here. If Ardanans can't escape from the dumbing down effects of zenite gas without living in Stratos, and if the Troglytes affected by the zenite gas could never have built Stratos, how could the ancestors of Plasus have built Stratos while being exposed to zenite gas before they lived on Stratos?

This seems like strong support for my theory that aliens built Stratos and the Ardanan elite later moved into Stratos without building it themselves.

Spock and McCoy agree that all the Ardanans, Stratos dwellers and Troglodytes alike, originated on the planet Ardana, and their viewpoint is likely to be fair and unbiased and based on scientific evidence.

But Plasus, the High Advisor to the Planet Council of Ardana, says:

So Plasus claims that the Troglytes are not the same species as the Stratos dwellers despite their obvious external similarities. And this is probably just some excuse that the Stratos dwellers have made up in an attempt to justify their treatment of the Troglytes.

But I suppose there is a chance that Plasus is correct. Perhaps the Troglytes are descended from aliens tricked into coming to work on Ardana with a false promise they would get to live in Stratos when it was finished.