TVSins: Everything Wrong With "The Man Trap"

Most likely she got bored with retelling the stories the same way so the gradually morphed over time and snowballed. Rand's dialogue is also a bit spicy in the arboretum so it does look like it was the tone of the writing. I wish they'd done it a bit more often .

 

Stories always get more embellished over time, it's a well known fact that the tale alters with each telling by different people over time!
JB

 

I look forward to your results.

 

And the more time you spend on BBSes the more exclamation marks you use til they don't mean anything any more.

 

I look forward to reading what you uncover!

 

The story I recall reading (in Shatner's Memories book?) that may have morphed into this idea was simply that Nichols pulled a prank on Nimoy (in whar may or may not have been The Man Trap) where he gave her an order and she responded by starting to sing something like "Heeeeee loves me...", with Nimoy keeping a straight face and finishing the scene before everyonr collapsed in laughter. Firmly an outtake rather than anything that made it into an episode.

 

I like 'em!
JB

 

I finally started to watch this, I couldn't get through it.

Captains log in a Star Trek episode is a problem? Really? Then almost every thing else from camera angles to dialogue is just picked on without any logical reason. If this was supposed to be funny, it failed.

 

Seven warned them, but would they listen? No.

 

Narration is a big pet peeve for the CinemaSins channel. It's one of their running jokes.

 

In our solar system even the closest planets to each other never get closer than tens of millions of kilometers or miles to each other, which means they always appear as dimensionless dots of light in the sky. And it was generally believed that must be the case in other star systems.

But there are examples of recently discovered exoplanets much closer to each other than those in our solar system.

Kepler-70c orbits Kepler-70 only 0.0016 AU or 240,000 kilometers farther out than Kepler-70b.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes

And there are unconfirmed reports of a planet orbiting between the orbits of Kepler-70b and Kepler-70c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-70

Kepler-36b and Kepler-36c are separated by a larger absolute distance but smaller relative distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes

The planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system also orbit close to each other, and some of them are in the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1

Thus the idea that the large world in the sky is another planet which sometimes passes close to Vulcan is rather plausible.

Note that the scene in TMP has a smaller orb passing in front of the larger orb. This could be a moon of either Vulcan or the larger body. Since Spock said that Vulcan has no moon it would probably be a moon of the other body.

Since the smaller object is spherical it should probably be at least 200 miles in diameter. If the smaller object is not much more than that the larger object might be only about the size of Mars.

Of course it is common to photograph Earth's moon near the horizon with a telephoto lens and make it seem to have many times the apparent angular diameter that it actually does.

PS I have often interpreted the large object in Vulcan's sky as a large planet in the same orbit as Vulcan. Vulcan and the other astronomical body could be a double planet orbiting around their common center of gravity, or maybe that other astronomical body is many times as large as Vulcan and Vulcan is basically a moon of that other astronomical body. In either case that large astronomical body would not be a moon of Vulcan. Thus Spock would be accurate when he said "Vulcan has no moon".

I remember writing an imaginary dialog between Uhura and Spock where Uhura beams down to Vulcan and is shocked to see a large orb in the night sky and questions Spock about it, saying she could have come down with her current boyfriend to enjoy a moonlit night if Spock hadn't once lied to her about Vulcan having a moon. She soon regrets opening that can of worms.

 

For an episode that was never a favorite of mine, I've come to appreciate the comfortable-ness of it all. There's a coziness to it that's lacking in many of the other episodes.

Compare the warm interplay in "The Man Trap" between Spock and Uhura, Sulu and Rand, Kirk and McCoy, with the cold & sterile interactions in many of the third season shows.

It's always struck me as odd that Roddenberry could've had such a hand in producing "The Man Trap," where the characters are mostly three-dimensional and the dialogue is often inspired and the Enterprise is so homey -- then done an about-face and ordered the show more "military" and humorless by the time "Spock's Brain" rolled around. (Yeah, there's humor in that episode but it's largely unintentional.)

 

I thought Gene Coon put humor in, and for Year 3 Fred Freiberger took it out. Not sure.

 

That's no moon. It's a space station.

 

I think that's true, to a large extent. But depending on who you listen to, Roddenberry also steered the show to a more rigid tone.

It's mostly the warm interplay in "The Man Trap" that's appealing, to me. Most of the first season episodes have this atmosphere. I think they went overboard in season two with a sometimes sitcom-y feel to the show, then veered way off course in season three with episodes that felt ... cold.

 

Whether (or how much of) the mind-meld was Nimoy's idea, we can only speculate. According to TMOST and other sources, the scene was originally written to have Spock hypnotize Van Gelder. The network censors objected on the grounds that (A) Spock wasn't a qualified medical practitioner, and (B) you couldn't show the act of hypnosis because a viewer might accidentally get hypnotized! So the writer(s) came up with the Vulcan mind meld. There's even a line where Spock says, "This will not affect you, Doctor McCoy, only the person I touch. It is not hypnosis." That was for the censors.

 

I wonder if some people thought that what they were seeing on TV was "real" and that's why science fiction was held in such low regard at the time. Again, not by everyone but enough to be statistically significant. Enough to cause censors to worry people at home would be hypnotized. In the 80s they didn't want Sledge Hammer! to shot his gun directly at the camera so no one had a heart attack, so it wasn't just the 60s.

 

Could not agree more. The level of characterization is off the charts. The dialogue is interesting too. It's too bad in a way that more episodes didn't do stuff like this.

As far as the video is concerned? YouTubers gonna YouTube. Gotta come up with ideas for content somehow right?

 

As I said in post number 71 above:

So if the smaller object is a spherical space station only 10 miles white, the larger one could be a spherical space station only about 1,000 to 2,000 miles wide. Perfectly plausible.

 

You're supposed to say that it's too big to be a space station (and/or that you have a very bad feeling about this).