Tholian Web & Ralph Senensky

Does anyone have a breakdown of what scenes Ralph Senensky did and did not film?

 

He filmed the good ones.

 

Maybe he directed Walter Koenig in how to scream convincingly....uh, maybe not.

 

Looks convincing to me.

 

Did the brain distortion thing start with the youngest crew members first, or some other characteristic first? Spock, McCoy and Scotty seemed to be the least affected.

 

That's an intriguing thought. Sulu wasn't affected either, though. Scotty, of course, is always immune to everything, a pattern broken only once (well, twice) in the whole series.

 

Now there's a double entendre... Why was Ralph fired anyway? Apart from that bizarre double-take on the scream in "Tholian", his style for that episode and "IS There In Truth No Beauty" I thought were excellent?

Nice to see other people having fillings back there at young ages too.

Or brain chemistry, the same way an antidepressant can help one person but the same drug and quantity therein can worsen depression in another. What you said still explains a lot, and a lot better than the unspoken rule of television that states something like "those who resolve the problems are not to be affected as badly, if at all, for the sake of plot convenience, and must be main characters and never ever ever a guest star or extra unless another main character is unaffected". "Tholian" is always fun to watch and given 1960s television, or maybe I'm nuts, I just rolled with it...

 

...but he sounds like a drunken hyena.

 

In his blog, Ralph blames the delay in getting the space suits ready for his filming schedule. He had to readjust shooting and went partially over the limit of days, so the bean counters fired him.

 

From Memory Alpha:

The sickbay scenes were filmed on Ralph Senensky's second day, so, screaming Chekov looks like it was on his watch.

 

When you find yourself checking out Walter Koenig's dental work, it's time to lay off the Star Trek and maybe go for a walk or something. Anything.

 

From Ralph Senensky's interview in THE STAR TREK INTERVIEW BOOK (1988):

"Quite frankly, the good stuff is what I shot ... The nine millimeter (lens) footage with Leonard Nimoy was part of it, and I did all the stuff with the silver lame spacesuits."

 

With all respect to Mr. Senensky, I rather thought it was all well shot. I never felt like it was directed by two different people. It's a solid episode all around.

 

Those spacesuits weren't lame, they were different than the usual looking ones and better than the curtains that Spock and Tormolen wore in The Naked Time!
JB

 

Why does he call the suits lame? They were pretty good.

 

Oops. Somebody beat me to it. Lame' type material.

 

It's clearer when the accent mark can be put in: Lamé. Silver lamé is an absolute staple of sci-fi costumes, possibly because of the Mercury suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_Mark_IV

 

Those suits were laaaaaaaaame, brah!

 

Agreed they looked better, but the orange shower curtains were not spacesuits, they were cold weather gear (says so in the script).

 

And since they didn’t expect to find the scientists dead on PSI 2000, they weren’t supposed to be sealed either. So while Tormolen gets crap for taking off his glove, all he really thought he was doing was exposing his hand to cold air. He wasn’t breaking a seal on a containment suit or something.

Actually just being cold weather gear makes the guy seem a little less careless.