WTF moments in TOS...

We all like the unexpected, the cool thing that happens that we never anticipated yet in retrospect makes perfect sense. On the flip side are moments when something happens that makes no sense whatsoever. It can still be entertaining, but it still leaves you shaking your head thinking, "WTF were they thinking?"

It could b a scene, a moment, a plot element or even a whole episode.

One of the biggest WTF! moments in TOS is, of course, "A Piece Of The Action" in its entirety. It's a riot, but the whole premise is totally absurd.

Even if the Horizon left a book behind and the apparently mostly human inhabitants took many ideas from it I seriously doubt their entire culture would have been restructured to imitate one book. What about their original culture and those who didn't wish to change? The '20s era of gangsters didn't happen in a vacuum on Earth--it coexisted with society and cultures evolving for thousands of years. The same would have happened on Iotia.

And where were the law enforcement entities on the planet? Krako seemed to know what being arrested meant, only not in the context Kirk used the word.

The episode seems to imply that the whole planet is culturally contaminated, but I find that highly unlikely. Perhaps more credibly one of the larger populations on the planet has been affected yet even that shouldn't have been so uniformly contaminated as was suggested onscreen.

Again, it's a hilarious story, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever. At best it's just far too simplistic.

And yet this is a story idea that Roddenberry had as far back as when he was first developing the series.

 

The entire third season?

 

I wouldn't go that far to write off the entire season.

But another WTF is in "I. Mudd." Even if The androids had left the planet with Kirk and crew behind I seriously doubt that they could have overrun the Federation. Once the secret was out about what was happening there would likely have been an inevitable conflict.

 

Ok I will say it, I know we are all thinking it.

Spocks Brain 'nuff said

 

Of course it was part of the pitch to sell the show from the financial angle. Using existing costume and sets for alien cultures saves money. It and others of that type probably made the Network and Studio beancounters very happy. The creative types, not so much.

Kirks inner monolog in "Paradise Syndrome" always bugged me. Which is odd, since its not unlike a Captain's Log entry.

 

Specifically, "A Piece of the Action" was conceived as a way to make use of leftover The Untouchables props, costumes, and vehicles still sitting in the Desilu warehouse. So they started out with "We need to do a story about a gangster planet" and then did what they could to justify that conceit.

 

"Miri" -- remember they discovered this planet that was an exact replica of Earth hundreds of light years away. Then they never brought up this bizarre coincidence for the rest of the episode. The disease that killed adults was all well and good, but WTF?!?! you just found a copy of Earth. Shouldn't that be a big deal?

 

^^ Having Miri's planet an exact duplicate of Earth was extremely stupid.

"Spock's Brain" as a story is a good idea and very much decent science fiction materiel. My only real WTF moment for it is the airhead aspect of the females.

 

The "Miri" thing was apparently another instance where production logistics drove the plot. They couldn't build an alien cityscape, so they needed to use the Culver City backlot. And the duplicate Earth was an excuse to reuse recognizable props and costumes as well.

But the failure even to address the duplication after the first act was very sloppy. It's just "Hey, here's a huge cosmic mystery! Oh, wait, forget it, here's a story about a bunch of kids with skin problems."

 

I guess "Bread and Circuses" was the best Parallel Earth episode, at least when playing out the concept. Still, more than a few unanswered and unasked questions in that one.

 

Spock's montage and voice-over in "The One With the City in the Clouds" is odd.

Looks like time-killer.

Joe, killing time

 

I hated The Cloud Minders. Suddenly Spock is babbling about Pon Farr - "things no Vulcan ever speaks about" - with a woman he just met?

 

Chicks dig it.

 

Unless that's what their culture does. I mean, we don't even know if they look human, until they decide to...

It's not a plausible example of a cargo cult - but it is an enjoyable example of a truly alien society, one that completely reshapes itself (or at least the way it appears to visitors) as a hobby project. Can we really claim the "early industrial" culture that the Horizon originally found wasn't another such charade?

I sort of liked that, because it could also be read as "Here is a huge cosmic mystery, and we aren't such supermen that we could solve it in the forty-odd minutes we have - so we don't even try", which is a really rare moment of realism in scifi...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I guess the follow up team got that job. Maybe far into the 24th Century and beyond they're still trying to figure it out.

 

Abe Lincoln on the bridge of the Enterprise! I loved it, though.

 

Tomorrow is Yesterday. Beaming folks INTO THEMSELVES.
Even I can't technobabble my way out of THAT one.

 

Good call.

"Balance Of Terror." I freakin' LOVE this episode. But I have an issue with the Romulan plasma/energy bolt. If it's just a burst of energy rather than an actual torpedo then it's only traveling in a straight line rather than flying under some sort of guidance control as an actual mechanical projectile would. In that case then why worry about outrunning the bolt and just dodge out of its path?

 

To change direction in-warp would have halted foward momentum for the one hundred thousanth of a second needed for the bolt to catch up.

 

I've railed against this before. I understand completely the need to re-use existing sets and costumes, but you don't have to do it the way TOS did it with the parallel Earths and Earth-like planets. Sure, use your Mayberry backlot, but dress it up with some oddball items from other eras, and don't use contemporary costumes, but pull from the studio's clothes from other periods. Mix it up the right way and you've got an Earth-like planet that isn't that so literally Earth. I simple example would be just making the clock face in Return of the Archons have 10 hours or three hands, just "off" enough to not be what we're used to.