That's what I always assumed. Seriously, I thought that was obvious!
On the gripping hand, in all seriousness, words like obviously probably get overused.
The implication of the "Greek Gods" being aliens
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That's what I always assumed. Seriously, I thought that was obvious!
On the gripping hand, in all seriousness, words like obviously probably get overused.
I always assumed/speculated an early version of the script didn’t mention Remus, and Matt Jeffries (or whomever did it in the art department) created the visual based on a draft that was revised.
Although, since it happens early in season 1, there’s early-installment weirdness and a lot of the elements of “Star Trek” aren’t present. Gene Coon wasn’t on the writing staff and an executive producer yet. So both Starfleet and the Federation didn’t exist as concepts (i.e., the reason they’re called “Earth Outposts” on the map). And how warp drive and impulse function wasn’t nailed down either.
For example, the episode implies the Romulan Warbird will be able to limp home to Romulus under impulse (meaning Romulus would sit ridiculously close to the Neutral Zone border, as close as the outposts), and the Romulan weapon is able to chase Federation starships from normal space to the Enterprise being at warp.
He might not have read the script.
A few things about the warp vs impulse debate in "Balance of Terror". From what's on screen:
We've discussed and debated this question before (maybe not as often as "Do they use money?" or "Are they a military?", but it's up there). Here's what I said about it in previous posts from over five years ago:
I think those guys got it exactly right. Their fanon explains everything.
1) It's explicitly established that Romulans have FTL (faster-than-light) technology. The plasma weapon is overtaking the Enterprise while she's trying to outrun it at emergency warp power. That itself doesn't mean that Romulans have FTL propulsion, warp or otherwise, but they their weaponry is FTL. That's explicit and canonical as of this episode.
2) While the Romulan ship looks vaguely like a Starship-class saucer, it has two nacelles attached to it that look more than vaguely like Starship-class warp nacelles.
3) The line about the Romulan ship having simple impulse power only is spoken by Scotty while the Romulan ship is cloaked. The Enterprise crew theorize that enormous amounts of power would be required for the invisibility screen.
We've discussed and debated this question before (maybe not as often as "Do they use money?" or "Are they a military?", but it's up there). Here's what I said about it in previous posts from over five years ago:
The Romulan Bird of Prey blueprints by McMaster, Mandel, Upton, Maynard, et al addressed the issue of impulse by having the power plant incapable of supporting the warp drive, plasma weapon, and invisibility cloak simultaneously.
"6. Power is provided by twin matter-antimatter generators. Because of the tremendous power requirements of the warp engines, invisibility cloak, and the plasma weapon, they cannot be used simultaneously. When the ship is invisible, it must move under impulse power. At warp speed the weapon can be fired without power accumulators. To fire full power it has to go sublight. It can slowly store power in accumlators while invisible but must become visible to fire. "
I think those guys got it exactly right. Their fanon explains everything.
I'm going to push back on the idea anyone considered Earth/Humanity to be imperialistic or aggressors. Star Trek was created by men who fought on the side of the US in WWII against a fascist aggressor. With the UN being not even 20 years old, the likelihood these creators were thinking more globally than locally is slim. It's much more likely they viewed the United Federation of Planets more like the United States, especially since the Klingons and Romulans were analogs for the Soviets and Communist China.
It's reasonable to conclude these men (and the few women) viewed the US as that shining city on a hill (as Reagan put it decades later). These red-blooded Americans would never consider the heroic crew of the Enterprise to be anything other than champions of truth, justice and the American (Earth/Federation) way. Imperialism, Facism, and war mongers are the evil antithesis of the USA and any creators that want to express otherwise won't be on the scene for at least another decade (the occasional outlier like Rod Serling notwithstanding).
TOS "The Apple"
KIRK: That's what we call freedom. You'll like it, a lot.
TOS "The Omega Glory"
KIRK: This was not written for chiefs. (general consternation) Hear me! Hear this! Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before or since. Tall words proudly saying We the People. That which you call Ee'd Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people! Down the centuries, you have slurred the meaning of the words, 'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.' These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!
CLOUD: The Kohms?
KIRK: They must apply to everyone or they mean nothing! Do you understand?
TOS "Balance of Terror"
SPOCK: Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, treacherous, and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth.
It's reasonable to conclude these men (and the few women) viewed the US as that shining city on a hill (as Reagan put it decades later). These red-blooded Americans would never consider the heroic crew of the Enterprise to be anything other than champions of truth, justice and the American (Earth/Federation) way. Imperialism, Facism, and war mongers are the evil antithesis of the USA and any creators that want to express otherwise won't be on the scene for at least another decade (the occasional outlier like Rod Serling notwithstanding).
TOS "The Apple"
KIRK: That's what we call freedom. You'll like it, a lot.
TOS "The Omega Glory"
KIRK: This was not written for chiefs. (general consternation) Hear me! Hear this! Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before or since. Tall words proudly saying We the People. That which you call Ee'd Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people! Down the centuries, you have slurred the meaning of the words, 'We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.' These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!
CLOUD: The Kohms?
KIRK: They must apply to everyone or they mean nothing! Do you understand?
TOS "Balance of Terror"
SPOCK: Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, treacherous, and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth.
That's what it is, not what it means.
No.
The scale of the map is not established. It's only the explicit mention of warp in the episode that suggests any scale at all, and IIRC the show never establishes what any warp speed meant. Absent that, it's all guesswork.
But you can have fun with math. It takes about 7 seconds for the blip representing the Enterprise to cross one square. For the sake of argument, if the grid spacing is, say, 1 AU, then the Enterprise would be traveling in excess of 71c, and that would make the two labeled bodies something like 140 million miles from one another, which is roughly Sun-Mars distance. Could well fit in one system.
Both names are there from the outline stage, so that's not it. However, I have some Linwood Dunn paperwork here from the episode, and the map—as drawn on graph paper—only identifies Romulus, but there are five dots inside the much more circular arc of the Zone, and 11 outposts are indicated. So no idea where ROMII comes from.
Anyway, sorry for being so off-topic.
That would make Romulus the name of the Star System, and Romulus II the habitable planet, like Earth is Sol III.
You forgot the word "maybe", because nothing about that map is terribly definitive.
The entire fuss over it is indeed overthinking. Star Trek was a show designed to entice viewers - as many as possible - and therefore not just science geeks/nerds like us, to watch, so that they could entice viewers to purchase laundry soap or cigarettes as seen in commercials.
The deal: We'll entertain you and you will buy our stuff.
To make viewers happy, it had to be widely appealing. Most audiences of the 1960s would have bored to tears by the show being very realistic. They're the same people who watched Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Bewitched and F Troop. Most people watched TV to be entertained and relaxed, unless a show was a bio or documentary or news perhaps. Few shows were as forward seeing as say, Twilight Show.
To make the networks happy, they needed advertisers and ratings, which meant viewers had to be happy. So you had to make the show palatable to the regular TV viewer for your best chance at getting those ratings.
To quibble over naming planets (obvious done for viewer familiarity) or try to explain away sexism as something else when it was obvious a (lamentable) attitude of the era in which Trek was made, is to be, well, to say it nicely, unrealistic and rather futile.
Star Trek was better than *most* sci-fi type shows of the era. But it still had to get ratings and earn its way, so it wasn't perfect.
And of course, fans today can't even agree of what Trek should be. Everyone has their own idea of the perfect Trek. Which would probably not be the most interesting Trek to anyone but that one fan's imagination, if we were honest.
Gene Coon was never an executive producer on Star Trek. Only Roddenberry was. Coon was a producer, but it appears he mostly focused on the scripts and left most of the production stuff to associate producer Justman.
My mistake. I know Coon is referred to as taking over as “showrunner” during the middle of the first season. In the modern era, that’s usually an executive producer level credit for a television series.
Neither can those in charge.
Not a mistake. You were, in all but the most technical sense, correct.
^^this
The best part is this: Did sci-fi as its own genre really exist back then? It had to have formed somewhere and, as with all things, some gravitating toward it more than others, then everything that snowballs from there. TOS was about appealing to the mass audience, as most shows were. Being more expensive, any Estimator would have to factor in ratings versus cost (remember the 1978 Battlestar Galactica having decent ratings, just not enough.) BSG wasn't made for a niche group of people, even if did develop a "cult following".
The funny part is the potential catch-22 in all this as audiences don't always agree on what makes a show unique, and - worse - if it should all be the same then what's the point of having different things for the sake of wider ideas and interests and even basic styles?
^^this
TOS was advertised as an adult sci-fi show as the genre, back then, was definitely aimed predominantly at kids. Twilight Zone too was aimed at introspection, often surprisingly with navel-gazing kept minimal (while still packing a decent twist), which is part of the charm. But definitely goes against the grain of entertainment, where people want to be told the premise and let the scripts and acting do the job for them. Which isn't bad but, for example, I could rewatch "The Bionic Woman" and enjoy the ride one time and then rewatch just to find everything that doesn't work within their world, since we all know that the laws of physics would turn Jaime (or Steve in his show) into a shredded, gooey blob if they jumped down from a 50' cliff. That reminds me to heat up some leftover beef stroganoff...
It's also why some people loved "Three's Company" while hating "All in the Family" (never mind the happenstance in how the early-70s loved the confrontational stuff but by the end of the decade it fizzled out and most people just wanted the silly fun.)
Back to Trek, it's also why "The Omega Glory" - a potential pilot - had so many American references, what with it being the middle of the cold war and all and just a handful of years from the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis that almost roasted everyone into marshmallows, inedible or otherwise, as a result. Cockroaches would probably think the pantry was just freshly filled, but they otherwise wouldn't care.
I liked "Lost in Space" as a kid, but as an adult it doesn't always hold up. But some episodes do as those somehow manage to appeal to more age groups, even if it's aimed at people who've never sat through sci-fi before and otherwise might not handle parallel universes or other concepts.
Hence "Space 1999"'s second season (which sorta did figure itself out in its second half, but there would be now third season to build upon.)
TOS too would be shaken up - with new incidental music, new writers, new ideas... along with some ideas reused... and with a cut budget requiring more "bottle episodes". "The Mark of Gideon" being the example taken to extremes in set reuse and without good explanation that neither general audience nor devoted fan would swallow, even if some ideas within the story helped elevate it...
Within the time in which it was made, TOS was pushing a LOT. Even "Mudd's Women" had to meld forward-thinking ideas.
It's a fun little catch-22. A show, generally made for wide audiences, captures a few. Of those few, some become invested/established/devoted/hardcore fans, some remain casual "Oh, it's on, okay", and others think "naff" and vamoose.
Eventually, the show wears thin on ideas or format and tweaks it to remain fresh. Established fans might balk. New ones might come in. Others becoming fans later on might not be able to stand the earlier stuff once that hits repeats. The show will still fizzle out regardless, assuming you don't cut the budget and put it in the worst possible timeslot ala TOS season 3 or - for another example - Doctor Who (seasons 23-26). The show then either fizzles into the eternal ether or is revived with a comeback special or outright sequel. Or prequel. Rinse and repeat. The longer the show goes on, the harder it is to appeal to all the groups of fans or casual tv gawkers, as well as keeping its format fresh, not to mention that "genre" was not quite new for tv in the 60s but sci-fi comparatively was - and generally, what it was had to be called "for kids", as TOS was advertised as being adult science fiction. Now we have Trek covering multiple age groups, multiple formats, from outright comedy to absolute soap opera to varying forms in the middle. Few franchises have done that and they've all got plot holes and other problems, it's impossible to get around those. Even 90s Trek ditched what 90s Trek created to stay fresh or explore new avenues, and when it worked it was pretty cool. Until you watch reruns and forgot why characters or attributes changed.
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