The Cloud Minders

[Admiral James Kirk]

For the longest time my point of view when it came to Season Three episodes was "Season Three = Garbage" but since I've had Season Three on DVD for the last couple of years I've been able to revisit a lot of those so-called clunkers and really found some entertaining episodes.

I think The Cloud Minders is one of the best episodes of Season Three. It has the social commentary. The classic heroics. And an ethical connundrum for Spock. In short it's classic Star Trek.

Breaking down the elemnts I like:

Social commentary-wise it's a great tale about a labor dispute over unsafe working conditions. We had Plasmus the bottom-line minded management stooge who looked down on labor as nothing more than uneducated retards and regarded their safety as secondary to his own comfort. On the other hand you had the striking Trogyte Disruptors who were negotiating to receive a share of the profits that they've worked so hard to earn for the Stratosians.

Of course you have Kirk. The man who needs to buy the wares that the Trogyte's produce and is duty-bound to do anything to resolve the strike before it's too late. When Kirk realizes that not only are the Trogyte's being treated worse than a bloody tampon and tries to force Plasmus to see it he gets caught in red tape and has to take it upon himself to cut through it. And he does cut through that tape. Kirk style!

The heroics were grand with Kirk's kidnapping of Plasmus and the Disruptor Vanna in an attempt to show them the truth. That the gases in mines are limiting the Trogytes intellectual capabilities and that removed from it they are as capable as anyone else. It took Plasmus being forced down to their level to finally agree to Vanna and Kirk's terms. Well that and Kirk blackmailing him after Plasmus's attempt to kill Kirl.

Of course who could forget Spock and Droxine? Droxine was as close to a Vulcan as a non-Vulcan gets and Spock was clearly attracted to her on that level. But he was also repulsed by her attitudes towards the Trogytes. Societal prejudices passed down throughout the centuries. In the end Spock ends up teaching her to walk in the Trogyte's shoes and she is forever changed. And changing for the better is what Star Trek is about after all so her transformation was a satisfying one.

Beyond those basic elements I enjoyed Stratos the precursor to Star Wars's Cloud City. The concept of a city in the clouds has always been damned cool. Even with the primitive special effects it's cool. I can't wait to see this on Remastered.

I find that out of all of the third season episodes this one deserves a little immunity from all the 'Turd Season' crap that so much of the other episodes get. It's pretty damned good.

 

[pookha]

one thing i wondered about was this. were federation and starfleet personal getting paid off eact to keep secret how the miners were being treated.
the zenite was such a valuable resource a lot of unethical things could have been done to protect the supply.

 

[Timo]

There didn't seem to be any Starfleet presence at Ardana before Kirk arrived. Nor did we witness any Federation personnel other than the local government, which would not need bribes to stay quiet because the silence was for their own benefit.

However, I don't think there would be much risk of the secret of slave labor leaking out in the first place. After all, zenite wasn't a commodity that the Ardanans would regularly ship out - there is no evidence that a gram of zenite had ever left the planet before Kirk came to ask for some. The Troglytes apparently mined for the benefit of the Stratosians, not for export purposes.

Without major exports or imports, the Federation might not show much interest in Ardana. And while Stratos is said to be something of a local center of scholarly pursuits, nothing indicates that it would allow any outsiders, or converse much with the rest of the scholarly community.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[pookha]

ardana is a federation world and one would expect that there would have offial visits and inspections as part of their joining.

plasus..I assure you, gentlemen, you will get what you came for.
kirk.. I hope so. Ardana is a member of the Federation, and it is your council's responsibility that nothing interferes with its obligation to another member of the Federation.

within the episode itself we find out from spock that the zenite is indeed in high demand ..when bones tells of what exposure to raw zenite happens..

: Incredible. Zenite is shipped all over the galaxy wherever there is danger of plant bacteria. No side effects have ever been reported.

that right there tells me some type of bribes ect had to have occured if this stuff gets shipped and the side effects to the miners have not become known.


plus the ardana council was bothered about how all this would effect relations with the federation which implies there had been previous dealings with the federation,,


plasus

Further violence could create grave difficulties between Ardana and the Federation.

 

[Forbin]

The "turd season" stigma is a gross generalization. there are plenty of good/fun episodes in there. Enterprise Incident being one of the best.

 

[Shatmandu]

I enjoy the Spock voice-over montage/time killer.

The final script sounds like a first draft, like many third-season episodes. Like a high school production.

Joe, old

 

[Timo]

"Zenite is shipped all over the galaxy"

Whoops. I stand corrected. So the Stratosians would have some difficulty keeping their dirty little secret after all. Then again, who would suspect anything, from such affable and civilized people? The first assumption would be that the scholars divined the ore out of the rocks through superior science while sipping heavenly tea and eating cloudberry pudding.

Why did the Stratosians use manual labor in the mines? Too stingy to pay for the right automated equipment that would allow them to deport all the undesirables offworld or have them put down permanently? ...Okay, perhaps the Troglytes were mere repairmen to extensively automated mining gear, and had been shunned from the tea-and-crumpets society after their first, second or third foray into the smudgy underworld of machine repair. But Vanna says the thing she forces Kirk to do, chipping at rock with a silly handpick, is "the Troglyte way". Perhaps no repairman would retain his intellect long enough in those caverns to operate anything more advanced?

Another fuzzy issue in the half-baked plot is the origin of the species. In some ways it would be logical if the entire population were colonists, probably mostly humans (although the Troglytes are, according to the Stratosians, a "conglomerate of inferior species", Kirk later insists "they're all the same species"), perhaps straight from Earth - since it is a plot point that they use old Earth terminology! After all, the surface is "almost unendurable" and rather unlikely to be the origin of the people. Sure, McCoy also says that "those who live on Stratos and those who live below all originated on the planet", but that need only mean that none are first-generation colonists.

On the other hand, Plasus queries "And do your computers explain how my ancestors, who also dwelt in caverns, evolved sufficiently to erect Stratos while the Troglytes did not?"... Is he speaking of biological evolution from hominid to human(ish), or simply cultural evolution from primitive Earth colonist to refined, cloud-dwelling Stratosian scholar?

The timeline is vague at best. Vanna says that Stratos was built "centuries ago", but this allows for colonization in the 21st century, or long-lost expeditions from the 20th. Well, if we want to help the writer out of the "Troglyte is Troglodye abbreviated" plothole, without blaming it all on the mysteries of the Universal Translator.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Esteban]

Sorry, I can't agree that this is a good episode. Very Big Valley. Stupid fight at the end (even a third season Shatner should have been able to one-punch the 50 year-old Jeff Corey), stupid Spock love angle--and out of character--sloppy production values (Shatner's dubbed "what is the meaning of this attack" over his closed mouth at the beginning of Act I), bad, talky-walky between Plasus and Droxine, and my list goes on.

These were the kind of things that just didn't happen very often during the Roddenberry/Coon/Fontana episodes.

My biggest gripe against Frieberger has always been he seemed to have no feel or control for the scripts, and during the inevitable polishes, ground them down to nothing.

 

[DarthPipes]

I liked this episode too.

 

[Michael]

I actually like this episode, too. It may have the aforementioned flaws, but the story is quite compelling I think. I can only tell from a male perspective, but Droxine's dress is a plus, too.

And I always found the depiction of a city in the sky very original. Overall I think you can't take the third season episodes too seriously. But together with "The Enterprise Incident", "For The World Is Hollow ...", "The Empath", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and "All Our Yesterdays" you can say, that "The Cloud Minders" is one of the better episodes.

 

[UnknownSample]

I'm inbetween on this. There are interesting bits, and they could have built on these, but the execution was not good. So it depends what mood I'm in, whether I'm overly annoyed by flaws, or looking for the bright spots, the day I'm watching. Not that I get to see most of the episodes often.

The cloud city was a great image, and could have made a great statement about priveleged vs. poor. Spock getting romantic, that's just a sloppy mistake. It can be interestingly surreal, though, watching it happen, when you know for a fact that it can't.

It just occurred to me that this story is more Next Gen or DS9. Nothing awe-inspiring or other-worldly, except the image of the cloud city. This one is about politics. It's a more down-to-earth (sorry) practically-minded episode.

Interesting to see a Federation planet, and good point about Fed officials possibly being bought off. (That would really make it a DS9 episode.) I don't think these people could be humans. They all came out of the caves of that planet at some point.

Here is my position on awful season 3, and I'm right: This is one of those ideas that gets repeated often enough that people believe it, without realizing that many of the embarrassing episodes they think must be season 3 are actually season 2.

There are plenty of problematic episodes in both seasons. Even the "bad" ones have some good dialogue between main characters, or an interesting idea here or there... I think that's because of whoever was overseeing scripts made sure to fix them up as best he could.

Season three has plenty of really good ones. It's just that the "bad" ones have more glaring, overt flaws than season two's. The Apple, Triskelion, I forget what others, are stories some people point to as represnting how bad season 3 was, when they're season 2. I've noticed people making that mistake.

The bad ones in season two are bad in a more understated way. Maybe it was an especially bad day for me, but last time I saw "Friday's Child" I was startled at how empty and flat it seemed, plus the second appearance of a Klingon, and it had to be that guy. Redshirt stupidly kills someone on impulse, right?... and Kirk defends him.

I think about a third of season 3 is good, sometimes great. Tholian Web, Methuselah, All Our Yesterdays, Empath, Ent Incident, World is Hollow, Truth/Beauty... and I think season two had plenty of embarrassing moments, episodes resolved with "exciting" fistfights, and one vaguely parallel Earth after another, after another. The latter half of season two had them every third week, I noticed. Some are well done, but it's a gimmick they leaned on as a crutch until they just had to give it up, in season 3. Unfortunately, it was a necessary gimmick to get around the lack of inspired original SF ideas, and it worked, keeping the audience interested, and once they'd milked that dry, after season two, they had to stop using it. So they had no such crutch to lean on in season 3, and the lack of new ideas seems more glaring then.

They knew enough to bring back that crutch in a different form for Next Gen, by the way, with the holodeck, which served the same purpose, and yet was more believable. Piece of Action vs. Big Goodbye, for example.

 

[Admiral James Kirk]

UnknownSample said:
Spock getting romantic, that's just a sloppy mistake. It can be interestingly surreal, though, watching it happen, when you know for a fact that it can't.

I disagree. Just because Spock wasn't in heat doesn't mean he couldn't be drawn to a woman.

Does anyone really imagine that Ambassador Sarek was blue-balled a frothing at the mouth when he met and married Amanda? That was certainly not an arranged marriage.
I that their courtship consisted of Amanda showing Sarek why it would be logical for him to take her as his wife. Perhaps even why it was logical for him to love her.

This is the way I view Spock's relationship with Droxine. He was clearly drawn to her on an intellectual level and she him. It wasn't an animal love like with Zarabeth or a roll in the hay like in Leila. It was pure mathematics and chemisty. He didn't so much as cop a feel of one of her tin-foil covered tits. No their romance was like a programmer for his computer. It was sterile. It was robotic. And it was cute as hell.

 

[Michael]

I completely agree with you. Spock and Droxine had a kind of chemistry going on between of them. They were cute (Spock's unpopular internal monologue -- where he is thinking about Droxine -- adds to that cuteness). But I must say: I loved Spock/Zarabeth even more!

 

[Jbarney]

There didn't seem to be any Starfleet presence at Ardana before Kirk arrived. Nor did we witness any Federation personnel other than the local government, which would not need bribes to stay quiet because the silence was for their own benefit.

However, I don't think there would be much risk of the secret of slave labor leaking out in the first place. After all, zenite wasn't a commodity that the Ardanans would regularly ship out - there is no evidence that a gram of zenite had ever left the planet before Kirk came to ask for some. The Troglytes apparently mined for the benefit of the Stratosians, not for export purposes.

Without major exports or imports, the Federation might not show much interest in Ardana. And while Stratos is said to be something of a local center of scholarly pursuits, nothing indicates that it would allow any outsiders, or converse much with the rest of the scholarly community.

Timo Saloniemi

I just finished watching the episode, and for much of it I sat wondering how Ardana could be a UFP member. First, High Advisor Plasus seems to have the authority to order executions and permit torture. I know the UFP by laws would have to allow some self governing on the part of member worlds, but I find it hard to believe the executive branch on many UFP worlds have the powers Plasus enjoyed on Ardana.

Also, as has been brought up on this thread, I find it hard to believe the division of the society would gone unnoticed by other UFP members. Even if the mystery of the affects of the zienite were unknown, we are talking about an entire planet here. Others must have known that Ardana had an entire population of people that were considered less than citizens by those in Stratos. It wasn't like they hid their view of the troglytes from Kirk and Spock when they arrived.

Perhaps there are different levels of UFP membership?

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Doesn't Plasus specifically mention to Kirk the non-interference directive? That Ardana has a stratified society isn't a "dirty little secret". That's how their society operated and how they came into the UFP.

All the notions about a planet needing a unified government and meeting strict social requirements and levels of technological advancement (warp drive) is TNG. During ST, the UFP seems to be much more like the modern UN where the nature of a nation's government or the treatment of its citizens isn't a bar to admission. Now, the UFP's standards aren't likely so broad as to sanction the conditions seen today in the worst of UN members, but in the ST era, they don't seem to be overly rigid. No doubt that's borne out of political necessity, building an economic and military base to counter the Klingon and, to a lesser degree, Romulan threats. It's not unheard of in world history for nations to ally themselves with others seen as less savory for military or geo-political gain. Ardana has zenite the UFP needs, let them join. It's distasteful to be certain, but morally it's no worse than the TNG era alliance with the Klingon Empire which holds not just segments of a single world's population in servitude, but entire worlds (Krios, Martok's comment about Klingons not embracing other cultures but conquering them).

 

[Timo]

Let's remember that Kirk didn't originally think it was his business to free the Troglyte slaves at all. It was Plasus who brought up the idea that the Troglyte conflict might endanger the Ardana/UFP relationship; Kirk didn't imagine such an outcome. And Spock soon thereafter readily dictated a log where he described the local slavery, yet in no way indicated that the UFP should take any corrective action. To him, and apparently to the UFP, it sufficed that the records stated that Ardana was "a troubled planet of violent contrasts" and thus probably not a tourist attraction.

The UFP tolerates the Vulcans even though they practice ritual combat to death, so their values aren't exactly those currently listed in the UN charter or declaration of human rights... No doubt the 1960s-style human mores of our Earth heroes are also found barbaric and despicable by many other UFP members, yet the Federal government doesn't expunge Earth.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Chrisisall]

Droxine's dress is a plus, too.

OHHHHH yes.

Overall I think you can't take the third season episodes too seriously. But together with "The Enterprise Incident", "For The World Is Hollow ...", "The Empath", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and "All Our Yesterdays" you can say, that "The Cloud Minders" is one of the better episodes.

Don't forget "Spectre of The Gun."