WTF moments in TOS...
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
You throw the switch to OFF.
Still their planet. No reason for a bunch of colonists to start staking claims and pushing out the "kids".
"THe natives"
You mean the few ramaining children who were about to die of starvation or the disease that the crew saved them from by coming along.
And the fact that that they clearly wanted/needed adult supervision.
And those "children" were hundreds of years old and pretty clever. No sign of starvation in the episode.
It's not their planet if they can't organize and run it in an orderly fashion. As it stands, they're basically just squatters.
Nah squatters are people who move in to other people property and take it as their own. (Like oh... I dunno, colonists?)
The natives need some guidance and aid not a bunch strangers looking for land.
The creators of the Planet Killer went through all the trouble to build it out of neutronium, gave it a cool pure anti-proton ("absolutely pure!") beam...yet you can destroy it by flying a bomb into it's mouth. WTF?
We're on a starship in which the captain's hand movements are being monitored at all times but it can't be determined whether or not a crewman exited the ion pod before it was jettisoned and in which the best way to determine whether or not there is an extra person on board is to evacuate the entire crew, shut off the engines (while in orbit with admirals on board), and listen for his heartbeat.
Oh, and the best way to test the computer for tampering is to challenge it to a few games of chess.
And what the hell is an ion pod, anyway? Just why did that thing have to be manned in order to study an ion storm and then subsequently jettisoned to save the ship?
I love Court Martial, but it didn't make a damn bit of sense.
Oh, and the best way to test the computer for tampering is to challenge it to a few games of chess.
And what the hell is an ion pod, anyway? Just why did that thing have to be manned in order to study an ion storm and then subsequently jettisoned to save the ship?
I love Court Martial, but it didn't make a damn bit of sense.
Exactly right. As I recall, the transporter was concocted for the same reason - to save the cost of filming a landing shuttle - the characters could be injected into the story quickly (and cheaply) and to heck with the science. That's low budget TV, I guess. Hey, they still turned out a pretty good product
It wasn't designed to be used ship to ship FYI.
They told you that? You must have spies aboard the Romulan ship.
Which is, umm, not ship-to-ship.
So they went on a mission to attack the outposts only carrying weapos that are useful against stationary targets?
Bad planning.
But hey, it was bad planning because they lost and died and failed the Preator. Yep you're right, they should have brought weapons for ship-to-ship battle because they sure enough bumped into a ship and got beat.
So true!!
What I never got was that the entire ship is filled with 'red alert' klaxons and lights, right?
And some folks would have been at least in the general area of the ship as the 'ion pod', right?
And when the pod is jettisoned' there must be some noise of sound or vibration right. They must use some kind of explosive system to blast the pod clear of the ship, right.
But nobody noticed if the 'jettisoning' of the pod actually was during the red alert????????
Didn't, the second the pod was jettisoned, rescuers rush to the scene to see if Finney had got out in time? Wouldn't he have some assistant nearby to at least to help relay info/back him up/provide first aid if he barely got out in time?
In other words WE KNOW Kirk jettisoned the pod during the red alert and immediately they began search so when they began the search wouldn't they notice if the lights were flashing and alarms sounding.
Couldn't they have brought the rescue folks to court to say, "Yeah the minute the pod was jettisoned we rushed to the scene and the lights we indeed showing red alert.
The alarms don't sound for yellow alert.
Finney's crazy plan i guess included a way to hide WHEN ANY evidence of the pod jettisoning was noticed and avoiding the rescue personel which all occurred, as we later found out, after it WAS red alert.
Finney WAS a genius who deserved a ship after-all---except he was as crazy a sh*t house rat--which kind of ruined the whole career thing.
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Actually, here story logic reinforces story logic. The pod would have to be in a remote location where nobody would interfere with Finney's plans of departing the pod and hiding in the engineering maze...
The remastered, re-effected version of the episode suggests that the pod was fired from the side of the shuttlebay area. Which only makes sense. Nobody ever goes there during alerts, as evidenced by the fact that our heroes and villains can pilfer shuttlecraft for their own use at will!
Probably not much of a factor when the ship is already groaning from the stresses of the storm...
Why? It was never suggested that the pod was a dangerous assignment as such. It only became fatal for Finney because Kirk supposedly didn't give him a final warning before jettisoning. The procedure would probably have been completely harmless otherwise.
Nothing indicates that there was such an immediate response to Finney's not reporting back from the pod. After all, remember how the REAL timeline went: Kirk commanded Red Alert in an orderly fashion, which should have been Finney's final warning to get out, but didn't give a verbal warning to accompany his button-pushing. Why? Probably because he was occupied with saving the ship from the storm. He wouldn't worry about Finney for a while, then.
As for the failure of the internal sensors to monitor Finney's actions, even when they monitored Kirk's... Aren't we forgetting that Finney's plot hinged on manipulating the internal sensor recordings? He could have concoted half a dozen plausible reasons for why the sensors near the ion pod "failed to work" during the storm. Hell, automation near the pod was apparently inherently out of order, since they needed a man in the loop in the first place!
OTOH, the fact that Kirk's button-fidgeting was monitored is at odds with the statement in the subsequent episode, "The Menagerie", where our heroes exclaim that visual records of such detail are not normally made aboard starships. Of course, they could merely refer to the idea that normal recordings are raw feed, whereas they were seeing a dramatically edited version with zoom-ins and the like. Which wouldn't be a factor in "Court Martial", because prosecution would naturally edit the recordings for the benefit of the court.
Hmm... My WTF moment? Perhaps I'm just too jaded with the whole 1960s aesthetics and storytelling conventions and the general implausibility of Star Trek, but I really can't point out any outstanding events of that nature. Although much of "Metamorphosis" falls in that category, as I could never fathom why nobody cares one iota about the dying woman - until she's possessed by a space monster and imprisoned in her own body, at which point everybody declares that this is a positive development!
Timo Saloniemi
No more cracks about THE BOOK!!
Lots of times it was just the semi-cheesy, clunky effects that got in the way. Decker's stolen shuttlecraft being pulled into the Doomsday machine looked almost as big
as the Enterprise/Constellation when they had their turns near the "maw" of that thing--it was not even close to being in scale!...even as a little kid that f/x shot made me do a double-take and give a little laugh. Classic.
Then there is the scene in an Enterprise corridor (in Day of The Dove, I think), were some large, red fire hydrant-looking thing or instrument that normally protrudes out of that wall at about thigh level clearly got broken off or knocked off--you can see it being propped-up by a brace that is clearly a piece of plywood... they didn't even bother to paint it.....
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Still, though, the kids may have lived alone on that planet, but they obviously cannot effectively govern it - and they don't even have a legal claim to it.
If, for example, robbers break into a family home and kill the parents, but leave the kids alive, does that mean the kids now own the house? No.
Same story here. If a colonization party arrives on Miri's planet, it will be *theirs*, not the kids'. Because a planet with no government, no apparatus of state, is effectively abandoned. It doesn't matter if there's a bunch of kids there.
I doubt the Federation will open the planet to colonization anytime soon. More than likely the planet will be held in trust until the kids can run the place themselves. Thats how the UFPs rolls.
But...if it's antimatter, don't you have to throw the switch to ON?You throw the switch to OFF.
It's all so confusing!!
But were they still kids? That's one of the things that always got me about the episode. if you had someone who was physically a fifteen years old, but had been alive over a hundred years, wouldn't that girl be intellectually an adult? Children on earth in adult situations for long enough can start to act like adults.
I missed it, but a friend of mine said one of the girls in the background was pregnant?
Good point - I agree. Shame we never saw it in their behaviour, then...
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