The Enemy Within Question

[Ssosmcin]

In "Spock's Brain," when the landing party beams down to the glaciated planet surface, Kirk orders "Suit temperatures to 72" and they all fiddle with some unseen control at their waists.

This always bugged me, Kirk ordering them to set to a specific temperature. I mean, why should a guy who might find 72 degrees too warm be forced to set his suit to that level? God knows I sweat bullets if my wife turns the thermostat over 68.

Methinks one or two of the landing party guys just "fiddled" but didn't really obey.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I saw something on TV recently that might explain this... kind of.
Apparently coldness is not as lethal when the air is very dry.
What I watched on TV was a story about some scientists testing cold chambers for athletes to enhance their performances without doping. In the cold their blood vessels would reduce and they wouldn't need as much oxygen (correct me if I repeated this wrong).
The reason the people didn't freeze to death in the extreme cold chambers was that in the dry air the bodies would lose their heat very slowly..
So, I guess that's what saved Sulu.

 

[Gary7]

But the wind chill... you forgot about the wind chill.

 

[Markas]

They simply wanted to use the plot device of having the landing party stranded and in danger of death. The transporter had to be incapacitated in order to do this, but there were so many other things they could have done. I would assume that they had some kind of portable shelter available in storage on the Enterprise. They could have beamed it down. So...it would replicate. Whooptie doo. There would be two of them. Plop it down over a rock, light it up with a phaser and you have a warming shelter. That would have messed up the drama of getting to the landing party before they died.

It also wasn't all windy and freezing when they knew they couldn't get the landing party up. There should have been time to get a shuttle down there but ditto to the same reason above.

 

[GSchnitzer]

They simply wanted to use the plot device of having the landing party stranded and in danger of death. The transporter had to be incapacitated in order to do this, but there were so many other things they could have done. I would assume that they had some kind of portable shelter available in storage on the Enterprise. They could have beamed it down. So...it would replicate. Whooptie doo. There would be two of them. Plop it down over a rock, light it up with a phaser and you have a warming shelter. That would have messed up the drama of getting to the landing party before they died.

No, the transporter wasn't working at all through most of the episode. For a brief time it was duplicating things, but then the Evil Kirk shot a big hole in the system-wide ionizer unit and it stopped working altogether.

 

[Markas]

I meant that right after they beamed down the duplicate blankets, they could have sent something down right away unless Evil Kirk shot the ionizer unit right after the blanket beam-down.

It has been some years since I last saw that ep, so I am not sure about the timing exactly.

 

[Timo]

There should have been time

But that was more or less the point. The crisis down on the planet was escalating over time, because the temperature was dropping, from merely inconvenient to life-jeopardizing to utterly unsurvivable. It was also escalating because the mental abilities of the Kirks were decreasing. The fact that the transporter eventually died for good was just icing on that cake.

In the doubly escalating situation, the heroes always did too little for a given stage of escalation. They were a step or two behind all the way. Sure, they could have solved the crisis in an instant by acting strongly enough from the very beginning - but they initially had no reason to think that the crisis would get that bad.

It's a somewhat different argument that no amount of passive protection (log cabins, blankets) would have done any good in the final analysis. The night was unsurvivable: at minus 120 Celsius, you die, whether you huddle under blankets next to a chemical fire inside a cabin, or dance naked in the wind. And doing the latter might be the more pleasant way to die.

Minus 120 Farenheit is lethal as well, but in theory, a well insulated cabin might carry some of your party over the night. Assuming it was an Earth-length night.

Timo Saloniemi