“Court Martial”
Written by Don M. Mankiewicz and Stephen W. Carabastos
Directed by Marc Daniels
Season 1, Episode 14
Production episode 6149-15
Original air date: February 2, 1967
Stardate: 2947.3
Captain’s log. Following a severe ion storm, which badly damaged the Enterprise and killed Lt. Commander Ben Finney, the ship goes to Starbase 11 for repairs. Kirk reports to Commodore Stone, signing a deposition. Spock beams down with a computer log just as Finney’s daughter Jame shows up accusing Kirk of murdering her father. Finney was an instructor at the Academy when Kirk was a midshipman, and they became close friends—Jame was named after him—but a black mark on his record slowed his promotion prospects. Kirk himself was responsible for reporting the lapse that led to the black mark in question: when they served together on Republic, Finney neglected to close a circuit.
Spock’s log shows a discrepancy: Kirk put in his deposition that he didn’t eject the pod until the ship went to red alert, but the log states that he ejected the pod while still at yellow alert. Stone confines Kirk to the base pending a review board.
Kirk and McCoy go to a bar on the base, which is being patronized by several people from Kirk’s Academy class. None of them are thrilled to see Kirk, as they blame him for Finney’s death the same way Jame does. Kirk leaves the bar, disgusted at the lack of support, leaving McCoy to talk to a woman who walks in in civilian clothes: Lieutenant Areel Shaw, who describes herself as an old friend of Kirk’s (nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more).
Stone starts the inquiry. They encountered an ion storm. Finney’s name was next up on the duty roster to report to the pod to take readings. When the storm grew worse, Kirk had to jettison the pod once the ship had to go to red alert—he gave Finney all the time he needed and more, but he didn’t leave the pod.
Stone turns the recorder off, and offers Kirk a deal: accept a ground assignment, and it all goes away. But Kirk refuses: he was there, and he knows he didn’t eject the pod too soon, and he refuses to sweep it under the rug. Stone reminds him that no starship captain has been court-martialed before, but Kirk insists on it.
Kirk meets Shaw for a drink in the bar. Shaw, who is a lawyer for the Judge Advocate General, is the prosecutor for his case—something she doesn’t reveal until after she tells Kirk what the prosecution’s strategy will be and urges him to get an attorney, preferably the one she recommends.
After risking her legal license by giving that advice, Kirk goes to his quarters to find the attorney in question: Samuel T. Cogley, who never uses a computer, preferring to use (a very large pile of) books. He feels that books give you a better understanding of the intent of those who wrote the laws. He is unclear on how that works, exactly.
The court martial starts, presided over by Stone, with a Starfleet administrator and two starship captains filling out the board. Kirk pleads not guilty to the charges of perjury and negligence, and Shaw calls Spock to the stand. He testifies that the computer could malfunction to account for this but that his mechanical survey of the computer shows no such malfunction. However, Spock believes it must be in error because he knows the captain and that Kirk would do no such thing.
Next is the Enterprise personnel officer, who testifies to Finney’s reprimand, and then McCoy, who testifies that it’s possible that Finney’s resentment of Kirk could be reciprocated by Kirk, possibly subconsciously.
Cogley doesn’t bother to cross examine any of them, instead calling Kirk to the stand. Kirk insists he took the proper steps in the proper order in order to keep the ship safe. Shaw then plays the bridge log. It shows that Kirk jettisoned the pod before calling for red alert. Even Cogley is starting to doubt Kirk’s memory of the event.
But then two things happen: Jame recants her blame and tries to convince Cogley to force Kirk to change his plea and take the ground assignment, and Spock beats the computer at chess five times. The first is an unusual change of heart for the daughter of a murder victim, and the latter is flat-out impossible if the computer’s working right.
Cogley puts forth a motion to adjourn to the Enterprise, because Kirk has been unable to face the primary witness against him: the ship’s computer. In the briefing room, Cogley questions Spock, who testifies to the chess snafu. Only three people aboard ship have the ability to alter the computer’s programming in such a way for that to happen—and also to, say, alter visual records. Those three are the captain (Kirk), the science officer (Spock), and the records officer (Finney). Kirk then testifies to the fact that he called for a Phase 1 search of Finney after jettisoning the pod, hoping that he left the pod but was too injured to report. Cogley points out that such a search presumes the target wishes to be found and isn’t deliberately hiding.
Kirk orders the ship to be evacuated, save for the members of the court (now reconvened on the bridge), Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Hansen, Uhura, and the transporter chief. Cogley also departs to fetch Jame, in the hopes that she’d get him to reveal himself if they couldn’t find him. Spock then activates a booster that will detect every sound being made on the ship, which hears the heartbeat of everyone on board. McCoy uses a white-noise device to blot out the sounds of everyone on the bridge, and then Spock cuts off the transporter room.
That leaves one heartbeat still going. Spock traces it to the engine room. Spock seals the deck and Kirk goes down to confront Finney himself. Finney is convinced that Kirk’s part of a grand conspiracy to keep him from getting his own command. He’s also deactivated the ship’s power—the orbit is decaying, sooner than expected. Kirk distracts him by telling him that Jame’s on board, and then they engage in fisticuffs until Kirk—shirt torn in a manly manner—is triumphant. Finney, broken and sobbing, tells Kirk where the sabotage was. Kirk yanks out some wires and Hansen and Uhura are able to pull the ship back into a standard orbit.
With no objection from the prosecution, Stone declares court to be dismissed. Kirk is exonerated, and Cogley then takes on Finney as a client. Shaw passes on a gift from Cogley to Kirk—a book—and from herself—she smooches him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? McCoy goes to a great deal of trouble to use a white-sound device (actually a microphone) to blot out the heartbeats of everyone on the bridge. Then Spock pushes three buttons to eliminate the heartbeat of the transporter chief from what they were hearing—so, uh, why couldn’t Spock just do the same thing for the bridge that he did for the transporter room????
Fascinating. Bitterly, Kirk tells Spock that maybe his next captain is someone Spock can beat at chess (we’ve seen Kirk beat Spock in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Charlie X“). This, somehow, inspires Spock to try playing chess against the computer to discover that it’s been tampered with, a leap in logic that the Hungarian judge gives a 9.5.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. Shaw asks McCoy whether or not a particular series of events is possible, based on his expertise in space psychology. It’s a functionally meaningless question, and I always preferred how James Blish put it in his adaptation in Star Trek 2: “You keep asking what’s possible. To the human mind almost anything is possible.”
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura gets to again operate the navigation console once power is returned and she helps put the ship back in orbit. She previously did so in “The Naked Time,” “The Man Trap,” and “Balance of Terror.”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. We get the latest Woman From Kirk’s Past (latest in a series, collect ’em all!), following the unnamed blonde lab tech mentioned in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and Noel in “Dagger of the Mind.” This time it’s Shaw, a Starfleet attorney who doesn’t recuse herself from Kirk’s court martial despite the conflict of interest in a former lover (whom she kisses when it’s over!) being the subject of the proceeding she’s prosecuting.
Channel open. “All of my old friends look like doctors. All of his look like you.”
McCoy bitching to Shaw about how Kirk gets all the girls.
Welcome aboard. The great Elisha Cook Jr. puts in a unique turn as Cogley, while Percy Rodriguez brings a quiet dignity to the role of Stone. Joan Marshall plays Shaw, Alice Rawlings plays Jame, and Captain Midnight himself, Richard Webb, puts his resonant voice to good use as Finney. Recurring regulars DeForest Kelley and Nichelle Nichols show up as McCoy and Uhura, while Hagan Beggs makes his first appearance as Hansen the helmsman—he’ll be back in both parts of “The Menagerie”—and Nancy Wong plays the Enterprise personnel officer. Winston DeLugo, Bart Conrad, William Meader, and Reginald Lal Singh play various folks we see on Starbase 11.
Trivial matters: This episode was originally commissioned by producer Gene L. Coon as a cheap single-set episode, and Don M. Mankiewicz gave him a court martial story, intending it to take place entirely in the courtroom. However, the final version of the script required several new sets to be built, not to mention a matte painting of Starbase 11.
Speaking of that matte painting, it was used for the cover of an issue of Galaxy magazine being read by Benny Russell in the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” and the cover story in that issue was “Court Martial” by Samuel T. Cogley.
This is the first episode to refer to the organization the main characters are part of as Starfleet and the top of the hierarchy being Starfleet Command. It’s also the first appearance of a starbase and our first commodore in Stone.
Stone is also the highest ranking African-American we’ll see in Starfleet in the series, and is an uncharacteristically color-blind bit of casting. (I should add that it’s uncharacteristic for late 1960s television in general. Trek itself actually had a good track record for such, including also Boma in last week’s “The Galileo Seven” and Daystrom in “The Ultimate Computer.”) Stone also appears in the novels Section 31: Cloak by S.D. Perry, Preserver by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and Vulcan! by Kathleen Sky, as well as the second issue of Marvel’s Star Trek Unlimited comic by Dan Abnett, Ian Edginton, Mark Buckingham, & Kev Sutherland.
Cogley will be used again in several works of tie-in fiction, most notably the novel The Case of the Colonist’s Corpse by Bob Ingersoll & Tony Isabella, a Perry Mason-style courtroom drama that went so far as to be designed and printed in the style of the old Erle Stanley Gardner novels (down to the red dye on the edges of the pages). Cogley also appeared in Crisis on Centaurus by Brad Ferguson and the Khan comic book miniseries from IDW by Mike Johnson, David Messina, Claudia Balboni, & Marina Castelvestro.
Cogley and Shaw appeared together as a married couple in the tenth through twelfth issues of DC’s second monthly Star Trek comic by Peter David, James W. Fry, & Arne Starr, where they both jointly defended Kirk during the movie era.
The incident that led to Finney’s reprimand was dramatized in Michael Jan Friedman’s Republic, part of the My Brother’s Keeper trilogy. Finney also appeared in Renegade by Gene DeWeese, which served as a sequel to this episode. His daughter Jame plays a large supporting role in the DC Star Trek graphic novel Debt of Honor by Chris Claremont, Adam Hughes, & Karl Story, as well as its sequel in Star Trek: The Next Generation Special #2 by Claremont, Chris Wozniak, & Jerome Moore.
One member of the court martial board was Captain Nensi Chandra; Chandra was also seen in the alternate timeline of the 2009 Star Trek, also sitting in judgment of Kirk, as part of the board that investigated Kirk’s cheating on the Kobayashi Maru scenario. Another member of that board was Lieutenant Alice Rawlings, named after the actor who played Jame.
In his adaptation for Star Trek 2, James Blish explained that the pod draws in radiation from the ion storm and that when it builds up enough to be dangerous to the ship, it has to be jettisoned, which is also when red alert is called for (though in the prose version, it’s red and double-red alert, which is probably from an earlier draft of the script).
This episode provides both Kirk’s and Spock’s serial numbers as well as the various citations and medals they’ve received, though we don’t get all of Kirk’s.
To boldly go. “I speak of rights!” One of the dangers of doing rewatches of shows you grew up watching, or at the very least haven’t watched in a very long time, is that you run the risk of your opinion changing. This also can happen when one views the episode with a more critical eye, knowing you have to write a blog post about it.
I actually have really good memories of this episode, from McCoy’s old-friends line to Elisha Cook Jr.’s charismatic performance as Cogley to Richard Webb’s magnificent voice as Finney.
But watching it in preparation for this rewatch made me realize that the episode really doesn’t make any sense—even less so than the usual television portrayal of courtroom procedure, which is usually dreadful. And unlike, say, the procedural screw-ups of TNG‘s “The Measure of a Man,” these factors do actually sink this episode into mediocrity.
Part of my problem is a personal bugaboo. Ever since I became the editor of a line of monthly Star Trek eBooks in 2000, a gig that lasted until the line came to an end in 2008, I’ve constantly had to deal with people who are never happier than when they’re dismissing eBooks as yucky and waxing rhapsodic about the awesomeness of codex books and how they need the tactile and olfactory qualities of a book. In fact, those folks would often cite Cogley as their patron saint.
I was raised by librarians, one of whom was a book preservation specialist. Some might think that this would give me a reverence for the codex book, but it totally doesn’t, because I know how incredibly fragile they are—and also how much space they take up. And the importance of libraries isn’t that they hold books, it’s that they hold information and knowledge, regardless of what form it takes.
And as a writer? I could give a damn what the medium by which the words I write are delivered. What matters to me is that they’re delivered. There’s nothing especially holy or unique about a codex book. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. It was the best way to deliver information in an easy-to-digest form for a long time, and it’s still a pretty damn good one. But the important thing is the words, not the delivery method.
Cogley’s argument that you can’t get the same feel for the law when you get it out of a computer that you can out of a book is utter, total, and complete nonsense, especially given that he cites works like the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the Code of Hammurabi—none of which were written in codex books. Such a format is just as bastardized a form of the Magna Carta as a computer would be, by Cogley’s argument.
Speaking of nonsense, that’s also how I’d categorize Cogley’s argument that Kirk has a right to face his “accuser,” the ship’s computer. A computer is a tool. Does someone on trial for murder today have the same right to confront the machine that did the DNA test that confirmed that his hand held the weapon that was used in the deed? Does someone on trial for assault have the right to confront the video camera that recorded the fight in question? Of course not—a computer, a DNA analyzer, a video camera, they’re all tools, not witnesses.
I’m also wondering what Cogley’s plan was. The defense rested before Spock ran in with his story about beating the computer at chess, which meant he was finished defending Kirk. The impassioned speech about humanity dying in the shadow of the machine came after he’d already given up. He was just gonna throw Kirk to the wolves, until Spock gave him the opportunity to pull a stupid rant out of his ass.
Also, holy crap, was that an absurdly Rube Goldberg-esque plan to isolate Finney on the ship. Yes, let’s just dump everyone off the ship, and then listen for heartbeats, and then use a badly disguised microphone to blot out the heartbeats of everyone on the bridge, and then let’s just get rid of the transporter room—and wait, why didn’t they just do that with the bridge? Or better yet, why didn’t they just, I dunno, use internal sensors or something?
And then a captain who is on trial for murder is allowed to just go off and indulge in a fistfight in the engine room. Why not just use some kind of sedative and pump it into the engine room? (Because then our hero can’t get into a fistfight where his shirt gets ripped.) For that matter, the captain’s lawyer is allowed to leave the ship in the midst of this?
Also, Shaw obviously had a relationship with Kirk—why is she allowed to prosecute him? Especially since she let Cogley get away with his nonsense (though Stone didn’t help by going along with it, too).
The backstory between Kirk and Finney is interesting, as is the use of Jame, and it’s cool to see the procedural elements of the actual court martial, including the acknowledgment of how difficult it is to command a starship and how easy it is to believe that one could go off the deep end. (We’ll see this again in “The Doomsday Machine” and “The Omega Glory,” among other places.) The scene between Stone and Kirk when Stone tries to convince Kirk to accept reassignment and Kirk sticks to his guns and insists on his day in court is an excellent one. But ultimately, this is a spectacularly dunderheaded episode.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: “The Menagerie”
Keith R.A. DeCandido usually puts something more interesting here.
FIRST COMMENT!!! WOOOHOOO!!!
Sorry for the adolescent outburst. I agree with you, krad, the “paper books are sacred” is ridiculous, in the 23rd century, or now… as is Picard’s brother living like he’s in the 19th century.
A book is a nifty object, and as an author, I was thrilled to see my work in print for the first time (and the second, and third, etc), but it’s still just a medium. The content is what’s important.
The mention of “red” and “double-red” alerts in the Blish adaptation makes me wonder: is this the first time yellow alert was used in a ST episode?
I always laughed at the overly complicated way they determined someone was hiding aboard : heartbeats ? Really !? Lol
Good episode though, even if the speeches were a little over the top.
On the subject of Areel recusing herself: This came up when I was researching the Stargazer court-martial for my novel The Buried Age. There was a similar situation there, Picard prosecuted by his current girlfriend Philippa Louvois. Turns out that in a military court, you don’t have the option to recuse yourself for a conflict of interest. If you’re assigned to prosecute your own lover, then those are your orders, and failing to live up to them is dereliction of duty. So this is not a problem.
The real conflict of interest here is with Commodore Stone. He both brings the charges against Kirk and sits on the board of judgment against him. That’s specifically forbidden in the U.S. military. After all, the person who actually makes the accusation is not unbiased in determining the truth of the accusation.
And yes, the climactic sequence is a procedural and conceptual mess. On top of everything else, add the ridiculous “decaying orbit” trope. I will never understand why TOS’s writers assumed an object needed to be under power to remain in orbit. What, did they think the Moon has engines? Orbit, by definition, is an unpowered trajectory. It’s falling sideways (or, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, throwing yourself at the ground and missing). Applying thrust changes an orbit. A ship without power won’t fall out of orbit, it’ll just stay in orbit indefinitely. If it’s in a low enough orbit, then atmospheric drag might decelerate it and cause its orbit to decay gradually over months or years, but not minutes.
There’s also that awkward bit of voiceover narration by Kirk, like a log entry but without the “Captain’s Log” preface. That bit was added to compensate for a scene they were unable to film, or had to cut out, or something like that. It doesn’t work very well — although it does reflect the original idea behind log entries, that the whole series was basically being narrated in retrospect.
Speaking of reflections of original ideas, note that the officers in the bar — who are clearly from other ships, since their attitudes toward Kirk would be insubordination otherwise — are wearing the same arrowhead insignia as the Enterprise crew. The same goes for a female Starbase 11 officer in “The Menagerie” next week. At the time, according to a production memo that was unearthed a while ago, the intention was that the arrowhead (or delta) insignia was meant to be for all starship-class vessels, not just the Enterprise. The different, hoof-shaped insignia used by the Antares in “Charlie X” was meant to represent the merchant marine. This idea was overshadowed later by the use of different starship insignia in “The Doomsday Machine” and “The Omega Glory,” something the Justman memo describes as a production error not to be repeated. And indeed, if you look really closely, the dead Defiant crewmembers in “The Tholian Web” have the arrowhead insignia on their uniforms — although ENT: “In a Mirror, Darkly” disregarded this and gave the Defiant a different insignia based on the Starfleet Command chevron (seen in yellow in the “racing stripes” on the side of the Enterprise and Galileo).
For decades, many fans ignored the evidence in “Court Martial,” “The Menagerie,” and “The Tholian Web” and assumed the arrowhead was unique to the Enterprise — leading to the idea that its fleetwide use from ST:TMP onward was something that had been done to honor the Enterprise specifically (which I think is a terrible idea, basically an insult to the crew of every other starship, and way too fannish). But subsequent productions have reinforced the idea that the arrowhead was always a general Starfleet insignia. Voyager: “Friendship One” used a sideways version of the arrowhead as the emblem of the United Earth Space Probe Agency in the 2060s, and Enterprise included teensy, almost unnoticeable arrowheads in the enlisted rating insignias (of the Earth Starfleet, which was eventually established to be a division of UESPA). Also, the 2009 movie established that the Kelvin used the arrowhead insignia at the moment the timelines diverged, meaning that it was in use in the Prime universe as of 2233.
In my Rise of the Federation novels, I’ve taken the position that the arrowhead is the UESPA emblem, and thus the insignia of the UESPA-administered Earth branch of Starfleet, whereas the insignias seen on other ships were originally the emblems of the other Federation founder worlds’ fleets. I figure that by the 23rd century, those separate administrations have evolved into organizational subdivisions of a more unified Starfleet, not necessarily aligned with their origin worlds any longer. So the different emblems aren’t for individual ships, but for subdivisions of the fleet. That explains how there can be different insignias on the one hand and the same insignia used by multiple crews on the other.
Much like a certain 1975-1976 sci-fi TV show, yeah.
At least Picard’s brother was an Society of Creative Anachronism type. He knew he was being a luddite. How did lawyer guy even find books? How did he learn to use them effectively? I spent my academic career looking up articles online. As a result, I’ve no idea how to efficiently search printed volumes of journals. I can’t see a 23rd century lawyer getting anywhere near print books during his education.
You’re right about the lawyer. But Picard’s brother, however luddite he might be, still makes no sense. Today’s Amish people are more technologically-inclined than he is.
As somebody explain in a book I read that was about Star Trek, Picard’s brother shouldn’t really have known about not having computers or any other tech, since he and his brother grew up in the 24th century, and their parents (presumably) grew up in the 23rd century, neither having experienced any era without tech like we are experiencing now in the early 21st century. The same should’ve also applied to Cogley as well. These two things and the line in Conscience Of The King uttered by Karidian/Kodos about technology making society sterile and inhuman (as well as the nonsense spewed by Severin in The Way To Eden)come off as false and silly now, especially from people living in the distant future.
“Shouldn’t have known?” Of course he could’ve known, because history books and museums are things that exist. There are all sorts of places where you can see re-enactments of traditional living, like Colonial Williamsburg. There are Renaissance fairs and Civil War re-enactment societies. There are plenty of people today who are nostalgic for supposedly simpler times, so naturally there’d be such people in the future as well.
It occurs to me that this one of the few times I’ve seen Elisha Cook Jr. in anything where his character hasn’t ended up arrested, in jail or dead before the final credits.
Call me someone who’s had a personal computer since the age of 11 or 12, instead of a child of the 60s, but the thing that still really confuses me about this episode is how changing video surveillance logs in any way affects the chess program.
At least this episode gave us the “butthat’snotthewayithappened” line for use in Cannibal! The Musical.
I still laugh every time I see that ‘Jettison Pod’ is one of the five buttons the Captain has on his chair. Two of which are unlabeled, to boot!
In the last three years or so I’ve read 144 Star Trek novels, to add to the 3000+ books of many genres and eras I’ve read since I moved to the adult section of the library 30 years ago; (I’m aware that adult literature has acquired a different meaning these days…) It’s a over used phrase on the Internet, but I have to say that Kathleen Sky’s Vulcan! is the worst book I’ve ever read. I’ve been informed that her other ST novel Death’s Angel is even worse – I saw a copy in a second hand book shop only last week, and was tempted for curiosities sake, but as they had piles of ‘Trek novels (and Star Wars novels, which I started reading at the same time) and as I was red lining my bank account I had to cherry pick the ones to fill holes in part sets in my book pile.
Which brings me on to Ebooks. There are many good and some great arguments to made in their favour, but second hand book shops are one of my great pleasures. There’s nothing to compare to a maze like shop piled high with paper books reaching to the ceiling, and the sense of anticipation as you enter – who know’s what you’ll find? I even like the smell. Ebooks are the sterile opposite of this hobby.
The episode itself I alway found fairly entertaining, but the plot just doesn’t bear scrutiny.
@6 I’m pretty sure there are members of the SCA who’d go full medieval if they didn’t need a day job, which could beat M Picard by a few centuries.
@10, Theoretically, I’d only find books I’ve already read. My phone easily holds every book by every author I like. :P
@8/crzydroid: Yes! Also, why would a chess program written by Spock necessarily be as good as chess as Spock is? Playing chess is one ability, writing chess software is something completely different.
Well, it’s still one of the nicest scene in the entire episode.
And: What was Finney’s plan anyway? Did he want to crash the Enterprise all along, or only destroy Kirk’s career and then… what? Start a new existence under an assumed name? Never see his daughter again?
I prefer reading physical books. That comes from better retention, which is likely due to nearly 30 years of reading before ebooks came into being.
Likewise, while doing my income tax course, I used my physical copy of the tax act throughout the course rather than the cross-referenced and indexed electronic version- simply because it was the book I was permitted to take into the exam, so I needed to learn to find things in it quickly.
For courtroom use, though, an electronic version of laws and case records would have to be indispensable to any real-world lawyer. But in the ’60s the writers had no conception of searching text by keyword and all the other fun stuff we take for granted.
Altering the visual log affected the chess program because they didn’t defragment the hard drive first?
A couple of things: I was vaguely bothered by the fact that, apparently, this entire planet was Starbase 11, or that was its name, or something. The Enterprise clearly was orbiting a planet, but naming it was too much trouble, I guess.
Also, I’m fairly certain I saw Uhura roll her eyes the last time the camera frames her, after the trial is over and Areel is about to leave the ship. Like, “Oh, this again.”
@9: Me too!
@krad: You do get to face your mechanical accusers in court. Get a speeding ticket, challenge the calibration. Dramatic speech optional, but encouraged.
Does someone on trial for murder today have the same right to confront the machine that did the DNA test that confirmed that his hand held the weapon that was used in the deed?
Interestingly, no, of course not–but the question whether the person has the right to confront the person who did the DNA test was only decided within the last decade and change. (Decided as a qualified “yes, the defendant does have that right,” in fact.) When I was in law school (2008-11), “testimonial” statements and the Sixth Amendment were hot issues. (See Crawford v. Washington and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts.)
We’ve never been clear on the sentience level of Federation starship computers (and the books actually muddy the waters even further; compare M5, Moira/Llarian in Spock’s World, and Morgan in the New Frontier series and come up with a consistent principle, I dare you), so while it’s not well explained or justified, the idea that the computer shouldn’t just have its record accepted without review makes more sense to me. Structured differently (and, as you said, timed differently), it would be a valid line of argument.
And I agree with lerris@13: the idea of not using a computer for legal research is roughly equivalent to demanding that Google’s programmers must use punchcards. Cogley’s way of thinking is so backwards that he should be…well, a judge. *grin*
Though it looks like they got actual law books for Cogley to use, as per that picture–bet they raided the legal department of NBC, because at the time they’d have a law library like that…
BrianDolan@16: It’s not quite that simple. See: http://lifehacker.com/eight-popular-ticket-and-traffic-law-myths-debunked-1708158201
Ironically, Trek’s first courtroom episode turned out to be as much of a misfire as DS9’s Rules of Engagement. Back when I first read the Blish adaptation for this in the 90’s, I was actually quite a fan of this particular story, eager to watch the filmed version.
Years later, when I got to see the actual episode, my expectations were beyond dashed. Talk about a complete letdown. Cogley is poorly written. Demonizing computers can’t possibly work as a line of defense.
Personally, I still prefer old-fashioned books myself, but I can definitely understand the appreciation for e-books, as well as the need to have alternate means of storing information. The problem with Cogley is that he’s really a technophobe stuck in the 1960’s, inserted in a fictional 23rd century. Even if there are still technophobes during Kirk’s era, it makes no sense. Assuming Cogley was born in the early 2200’s, he’d have grown up with plenty of 23rd century technology around him. Why would he suddenly embrace ancient methods, used 300 years prior? He’s a working lawyer, not an Amish.
There’s also one quibble I always had with this story with the daughter and her complete 180 regarding Kirk midway through the story. Now that felt artificially designed to keep the slow-moving story going.
But the biggest problem I have with the episode is that it doesn’t earn its ending. Why in the world would Finney remain aboard ship following the evacuation? If his purpose is to frame Kirk, he should have covered his tracks. Then again, all signs point to him having lost a bit of his marbles. Nevertheless, the fact the he remained onboard to be so easily found still bothers me than the method used.
The status of print books in STAR TREK has always been a bit uncertain. PIke had a bookshelf in his quarters and we’ve occasionally seen people reading hardcover copies of “A Tale of Two Cities” or whatever. Cogley may have taken things to the extreme, but it”s not like they’re unheard-of in the twenty-third century . .. or regarded as though they were clay tablets or whatever.
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@19/Eduardo: Yes, Cogley grew up in the 23rd century, but that’s a 23rd century with a lot of remote, isolated colonies, some of which might choose to adopt a more traditional way of living. After all, the frontier would attract a lot of people who want to get away from the norms of society and experiment with alternative customs or beliefs. And we see other signs of an anti-technology, back-to-nature movement here and there in TOS. The Omicron Ceti III colony in “This Side of Paradise” doesn’t appear to have any computers or high technology of any sort. And the space hippies in “The Way to Eden” express an anti-technology, anti-modernity philosophy.
So maybe Cogley grew up on a frontier planet whose people adopted a more traditional lifestyle.
Although if you think about it… up to this point, most of the computer interfaces we’d seen in TOS had been synthesized voices and blinking lights. The only instance I can think of where someone read literary text off a screen prior to this episode was in “Where No Man…” when Mitchell read “Nightingale Woman” on the computer screen. And it’s not like those big boxy monitors and the wall screens on the bridge were portable e-readers. So the working assumption of the writers of “Court Martial” may have been that print books were the only way in which text itself survived, the only way to actually read a book and search through it yourself rather than asking a computer questions and listening to a mechanical voice intoning responses.
RE: Codex books,
Well, I’ll plays old fogey here.I Find that hardcopy text is better for intensive reading/analysis.I’m in graduate school, and whenever I try to close-read an e-text, it just doesn’t work.I need a physical page, not something on a screen.I also find that proof-reading is easier with a physical text as well.Whenever I try to proof-read something on a screen, I find that I always miss something.
As for the episode, I think that the performances carry it through.Percy Rodriguez is, ahem, rock solid as Stone.And Elisha Cook jr is always good.I don’t think that I’ve ever seen him give a bad performance.I also like Shatner in this episode as well.You can sense his shock and outrage that Star Fleet would actually attempt to sweep murder under the rug.
My grade: 6
pen_pals: I knew my review would not be 100% popular. Honestly, I expected to like it more when I plunked the DVD in. But that was my response, and I stand by it. Sorry you don’t agree.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@22: Good point. I often tend to overlook the ‘Space Western’ aspect of the show (as Roddenberry once put it).
As for the absence of reading screens on the Enterprise, you could argue there was less need for a ship’s library back then. Most of the working functions were mission-oriented, rather than study-oriented. No one other than Spock did research, as far as I can tell. And the way I see it, the starfleet’s eventual evolution towards the Galaxy-class design would finally encourage and incorporate a more study-oriented design choice, allowing for both practical functions as well as room for academic resources within exploration starships.
@25/Eduardo: Roddenberry’s famous pitch was “Wagon Train to the stars,” but that doesn’t just mean “space Western.” Most people today don’t remember the show Wagon Train, so they hear it as “a wagon train to the stars,” i.e. a space Western in general. But he invoked Wagon Train for specific reasons, because it was a respected (and recent) adult drama and because it had a pseudo-anthology, guest-star-of-the-week format that he aspired to emulate. It’s the same kind of shorthand producers always use to pitch shows to executives, like “It’s The Fugitive with aliens!” or “It’s Seinfeld with superheroes!” or “It’s Veronica Mars with zombies!” He wasn’t just saying he wanted a Western in space, he was saying he wanted to do the same sort of storytelling that Wagon Train in particular was known for. The Western/frontier angle was surely part of it, but there was more to it than that.
As for the lack of reading off monitors, we did see it happen on occasion, as with Mitchell speed-reading in sickbay, or Scotty reading technical manuals on a rec-room screen. Those make it clear that the means did exist aboard the ship; my point is simply that the makers of the episodes didn’t always realize it. I’m talking about the mindset of the writers who created Samuel T. Cogley as a character, suggesting why they thought it would make a difference whether people relied on print books vs. computers.
Of all the common types of media upon which books are published, the electronic ones are by far the most fragile. A library preservationist was telling me that paper books can last hundreds of years, while DVDS, CDs, hard drives, tapes etc usually decay within a decade or two, and that’s being generous. Not to mention the electronic media goes obsolete well before that, making a constant data transfer necessary.
But despite my library of paper books, I still prefer electronic books even though they are a pain to preserve. They’re much more versatile while reading, and instead of a room in my house they take up two hard drives and part of my phone.
I strongly prefer print books to ebooks, but ebooks are very convenient when traveling or waiting in a doctor’s office. Plus – barring them falling apart or burning up, no one’s taking away the book you bought while it seems easier to lose an ebook – like when Amazon yanks them back.
This was an average episode. I liked it, with the strong exception of the HIDEOUS dress that poor Jame had to wear. All the other wimmens on the show get nice uniforms or sexy dresses but because she’s a teenager, she wears some hideous concoction that no real teenager, even one in the future, would wear. Did the fashion designer hate her or something? *grin*
I wince every time I see that outfit.
@28/TBonz: It seems to me that Jame’s outfit is a “futuristic” version of a sailor suit, which was long used as a common attire for young boys and girls (and is the basis of Japanese girls’ school uniforms to this day — cf. Sailor Moon). And of course, in the sixties, “futuristic” costuming meant metallic and/or translucent fabrics, though that’s a cliche ST usually avoided for human characters. Not saying it worked well, but I can see where the design was coming from.
At least there’s no question of these characters being functionally illiterate like their Star Wars counterparts. Here we have a certain type/number of people who don’t just read books, but actually appreciate them. IMO, it makes them seem more human.
#10: Actually, having read both books, I’d agree that Sky’s Vulcan! is one of the weakest Trek novels to see professional print…but I thought Death’s Angel was pretty good (specifically, it’s a far better murder mystery than, say, Lorrah’s The Vulcan Academy Murders). It comes in for some criticism as having a “Mary Sue” guest star, but I don’t think it’s any weaker on that score than the generally well-regarded Uhura’s Song, and Sky’s choice of murderer is not without controversy.
@etc, I think the writers of this version of Star Trek may have envisaged reading books on a static screen, and having the library computer answer specific queries with a vocal or printed answer, and that probably is inadequate compared to reading a good printed and cross-referenced hardbound set of law books, where you can flip back and forth, put in book marks, write margin notes, etc. Reading the original will put things in context much better than getting the computer to read you a flat emotionless answer. But, assuming the existence of a good cross-referenced, hyperlinked, and touch-screen enabled library, electronic would be the way to go except for pure nostalgia.
@etc, Finney couldn’t transport off the ship, he would have been spotted by any number of personnel. His plan was flawed from the beginning — he could hide for a while, and maybe get Kirk blamed and court-martialed, but he didn’t seems to have thought far enough ahead to how he was going to get off the ship and carry on some kind of life.
As pointed out by others, Cogley didn’t really want to cross-examine the computer, although it probably made for a dramatic moment in the ’60s when computers were just beginning to be a real thing that affected people’s daily lives. (I wonder when the first bank customer was told, “Sorry, the computer doesn’t have a record of your deposit.”) Cogley wanted to cross-examine a computer expert who could testify to the reliability of the record. That happens all the time today, there is an entire branch of forensic investigation dedicated to electronic devices (forensic computer examiner). If someone showed me an incriminating computer record, Facebook post, or email that I never wrote, the first thing I would want is an expert to look into where they record really came from. Same too with DNA; the PCR machine can’t testify but the technician who prepared the samples, ran the assay, and interpreted the results sure can. And they screw up more than most people are willing to admit.
Really the most telling thing about the ebook vs. paper book argument here is the fact that everyone here that’s using the unmodified term “book” is implicitly referring to the codex format. Back a couple thousand years ago, there was a nearly identical format argument between what was the better form of book, scroll or codex. I can just imagine there being plenty of people that preferred scrolls because, despite the improvements codices gave in terms of space or convenient, they just didn’t have the same experience that reading from a good scroll book did; I mean, it took about 400 years to convert in the West despite the fact that codices are inarguably better than scrolls in every conceivable fashion, so some people had to be boosting for them. :P
Granted, the advantages that ebooks have over codices aren’t nearly as all-encompasing as the advantages that codices had over scrolls, and scrolls didn’t really have any advantages over codices while codices have a number of advantages over ebooks (easier preservation being a big one, as mentioned previously), but it still shows how there’s not really much new under the sun. :P
Two other points…I think most of the Starbases on TOS were planetary rather than space stations, probably so they could re-use the optical effect of the Enterprise in orbit and just substitute a different matte painting of a planet. I wouldn’t expect the log to say “we are in orbit at Starbase 11 on Canopus IV” because that would be functionally redundant, like specifying “we’ve put in for supplies at Pearl Harbor Naval Station on the west side of Oahu.”
And, I think we have to assume that most of the time the Enterprise is in an unstable low altitude geostationary orbit. That’s pretty much the only way to reconcile the transporter’s supposed 40,000 km range with the observed capability of beaming repeatedly to the same location. So shutting down the power would cause an orbital decay, how fast it would be critical is beyond my math though.
@19/Eduardo: I don’t think Jame’s behaviour is unrealistic. Someone tells her her father is dead, and Kirk is to blame, so naturally she’s shocked and angry and blames him. Later she has some time to think and realizes that she knows Kirk and that she doesn’t really believe what she’s been told.
@31/Dianthus: Yes, it’s nice that people in Star Trek appreciate books, and not only types like Cogley, but normal people too – Kirk also has a couple of books in his cabin. Cogley is a bit extreme, but I guess it’s ok as a metaphor for his distrust of computers. The problem is that his attitude isn’t useful – he doesn’t save the day, Spock does, and exactly because he’s good with computers.
Oh, and that fistfight is so stupid. If Finney doesn’t tell Kirk where he sabotaged the ship after learning that his daughter is on board, why would he do so after being beaten in a fistfight? It could have been great drama if Kirk had resolved this situation by talking.
@9 Magentawolf I always got a kick out of that, too! It’s right up there with that box on Spock’s console that’s specifically configured to show the progress of the auto-destruct when it’s being set–even in other episodes all throughout the series, you can clearly see the boxes for sequences 1, 2 and 3 whenever they showed Spock’s console. I guess jettisoning the ion pod and blowing up the ship are THAT important, eh?
The only thing that excuses Lt. Shaw being assigned and helping Kirk before the trial is that the trial itself is so outrageously biased towards the Prosecution – speculating is good / bad; testimony about computers is ruled in, then ruled out when it’s helpful to Kirk – so all I can think of is that in the 23rd Century, to avoid long delays and retrials, every bias to one side is simply balanced by a following bias to the other.
I’m with Magentawolf on laughing at the Captain’s buttons. ‘Let me ring for a coffee – whoops! The “eject” button was right next to it, squeezed in with the auto-destruct!’ Never mind the debate between books and books; the real computer innovation that the programme-makers didn’t foresee was the ‘Undo’ button (which I suppose for the pod ejection would be a sort of bungee-jump). And I’m not sure these days whether the technophobia or all the flag-knitting makes me roll my eyes the more.
Much as I love to see an actor from The Maltese Falcon, I had an odd twinge of regret that the new CGI special edition didn’t replace Elisha Cook Jnr with Denny Crane…
For folks’ information, because I did “The Cage” so recently, I’m going to cover both parts of “The Menagerie” in one entry on Tuesday the 23rd, focusing primarily on the framing sequence. On the 30th, we’ll jump to “Shore Leave.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@.-@ CLBennett: Good to know (about not recusing oneself because of personal issues)! That makes certain plot devices in “Measure of a Man” stand up better, too.
@13, 23 and others: Sorry, KRAD, put me in the physical book camp, too. (Though, as a composer, I can understand your side of the argument: I wouldn’t care if listeners heard my music through mp3 streaming, CD, or live, though all three would be ideal!) The episode does seem uncharacteristically (for “Trek”) anti-technology.
“All of my old friends look like doctors. All of his look like you.” It took fifteen minutes for this to hit me, but boy does that line reek of the late 60’s. Curiously selective sexism: women can be lawyers, but not doctors? Of course, the writers of TMP redressed this somewhat (probably unintentionally) by having it be an adorable-in-an-irritating-uncle-way trait of McCoy’s, rather than a symptom of general social attitudes: “I hear Chapel’s an MD now. I’ll need a nurse, not a doctor who will argue every diagnosis with me!”
I actually don’t have a problem with Kirk’s chess line making Spock decide to test the computer. Overall, I like the episode in spite of its weak spots. I enjoy the dialogue in the courtroom scenes. I do feel that Finney’s bitterness toward Kirk could have been better set up, though; a bit too out of the blue.
I attribute that line McCoy said to Shaw as admiration of Kirk having had a lot of time for romance in his life despite the demands of his career, and also because McCoy was married for a long time before being in Starfleet.
Whenever I see Kirk yanking cables to undo what Finney did I think “He’s doing Scott’s job. He’s a captain, not an engineer.” Couldn’t Kirk have sent for Scott to fix Finney’s sabotage? Or more to the point, why did Kirk even send Scott off the ship?
@40/Don S.: I don’t think the episode is anti-technology. After all, it’s Spock who finds the solution, and only because of his skills with computers. If anything, it tells the audience not to trust blindly in everything done by computers. Now, I don’t know about the sixties (there probably weren’t many computers around), but I remember that in the eighties, “I was wondering too, but the computer said that” was quite a common phrase. In that context, telling people to be wary is a good idea.
@32/John C. Bunnell: I have to disagree emphatically about Death’s Angel vs. Uhura’s Song. As I mentioned before, the term “Mary Sue” wasn’t meant to refer to any female guest star who dominated a story, since guest-star-driven stories were a valid and common practice in the era of television in which Star Trek was created; rather, it was meant to refer to instances of that which were done poorly and in a cliched manner. Evan Wilson in Uhura’s Song may be too good to be true in some respects, but she’s a fun, intriguing, complex trickster character, the kind of guest star who deserves to steal the show, like Q without the superpowers. And she’s hardly the only impressive character in the story. Most of the main cast members, particularly Uhura and Spock, are given their chances to shine, and Evan’s presence serves as a catalyst, bringing out the best in them rather than marginalizing them. Evan is everything a true Mary Sue is not, because her central presence is earned and interesting and does not come at the expense of the rest of the cast.
But Death’s Angel‘s Elizabeth Schaeffer is a classic Mary Sue in every respect. She’s a caricature of a super-competent woman, asserted to be incredibly impressive and superior in ways that are never really proven by her portrayal. She’s inconsistently written — supposedly a very tough and aggressive woman who takes no guff from anyone, but having no problem with Kirk “romancing” her by condescending to her with baby talk and treating her like a helpless child. And as that example indicates, she only “shines” because the rest of the cast is written out of character. In fact, I consider Schaeffer to be one of the two most archetypal Mary Sues in all of professional Trek literature, the other being Sola Thane from Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s Triangle (another exaggerated superagent character that both Kirk and Spock instantly fall for and spend the whole book competing over — and she even “helps” Spock through his second pon farr, another major fanfic cliche).
Sorry for the double post — the endlessly awful Tor.com “upgrade” isn’t letting me edit posts this morning.
@35/StrongDreams: In fact, we never saw a starbase in TOS depicted as a space station. Whenever we saw a space station, it was called a space station. The only starbases we actually saw were planet-based. The new effects in the Remastered edition of “The Ultimate Computer” retconned the station there as “Starbase 6,” but in dialogue, it was only called “the space station.” I don’t think we ever saw a space station referred to canonically as a starbase until TNG, although some earlier novels and comics had probably featured space-station starbases.
And the 40,000-km range for transporters is from the TNG era. Its TOS era range was 16,000 miles (25,600 km) according to the writers’ bible. That is below the geosynchronous altitude for Earth (22,300 mi/35,800 km), so it’s true that a ship would have to be in a forced synchronous orbit to stay in transporter range. Still, that strikes me as being wasteful of power. Why not go into a lower orbit and release a string of transporter relay satellites evenly distributed around the orbital path? And of course, on a planet with faster rotation or lower gravity, the planetostationary orbital altitude could be within transporter range. For instance, the stationary orbital altitude for Mars is only 17,000 km, well within transporter range.
@37/DonRudolphII: I choose to assume that the labels are a reprogrammable digital display projected onto the black surface of the panel from within, like TNG-era Okudagrams. Presumably the buttons serve different functions at different times, and the labels change appropriately. It only looks like stickers applied on top of it because of the limits of 1960s TV production.
I’ve always thought that McCoy giving Kirk that copy of A Tale of Two Cities in the Wrath of Kahn was because Kirk had developed a taste for physical books after meeting Cogley.
@45/Robert: It was Spock who gave Kirk the book in TWOK. McCoy gave him reading glasses.
@46: Your are right of course about it being Spock. That’s what I get for posting right away without double checking my facts. I still feel that the gift was an indirect callback to this episode. I struck me as such when I first saw the movie back in ’82.
@34: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
Although this also reminds me of the new trend to put a “load more” button at the bottom of a page of archived entries on a website (I won’t name any particular sites >: |) instead of page number links. Even after you’re done clicking “load more” a bunch of times to find older entries, then you have them all on one big scroll page, so it’s like taking a step backwards from codex books to scrolls.
And in general regarding the book discussion, I get people saying they are more comfortable reading off a book than a computer screen (though honestly, I would put the Kindle (not Fire) somewhere in between there), but Cogley’s argument seems to be you get a better idea of the intent of the author, and not one based on preference or comfort. And that just seems to be bull.
@38:
Though I would argue they don’t necessarily need an “undo” button for something like this, but rater a confirmation button.
No matter where Cogley grew up, he ended up going to a Federation-recognized law school, which surely meant they used computers, and he works as a lawyer for Starfleet clients, in a starbase. No matter how much he prefers print books, he wouldn’t be able to work without using computers. How many professionals, no matter the field, can get away with that in today’s world?
On another note, where’s the guy who runs the “shirtless Kirk” count?
@25 – Eduardo: Of course other people did research on Kirk’s Enteprise. We get scientist crewmembers regularly, historians, botanists, etc.
@28 – Tbonz: Civilian attire in Star Trek has always been horrible.
@29 – sps49: Is there any need to say “screw you” to another poster?
Comment #29 deleted by moderator. While it’s fine to disagree with others, please do so in a more civil and polite manner if you would like to participate in these discussions in the future.
@44 wasteful of power…
Hmmm, well hydrogen for the impulse fusion engines is the cheapest most common element in the universe, and while antimatter is not cheap, it is incredibly energy-dense, so I expect the cost of holding an unstable orbit is not large in relative terms. On the other hand, transporter relay drones could be attacked or sabotaged by Klingons, Gorns, Romulans etc. leaving the crew even more stranded than usual.
@51/StrongDreams: I think if the Klingons or Romulans want to prevent a ship from beaming up a landing party, they’d be more likely to attack a) the ship or b) the landing party than they would be to attack the satellite relays in between. I mean, for us today, satellites are such a ubiquitous piece of infrastructure that we don’t even think about them much. If I were reinventing Star Trek today, I’d give the ship a whole complement of drones and support satellites and so forth that would be constantly in use. Go into orbit, release a whole swarm of CubeSat-type mini-satellites and even microchip-sized relays to surround a planet and give you sensor telemetry and communication for anywhere on the surface.
Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda actually did this — the ship was constantly surrounded by a swarm of drones as a support system, as well as having countless maintenance robots on board.
Heck, the Empire Strikes Back showed the Empire using probes to scout through a star system to look for where the Rebels were, and later on, the Season 3 TOS episode The Immunity Syndrome had the Enterprise use a probe to penetrate the giant space amoeba to get readings on it. And the SeaQuest had probes around it called WHSKERS on the SeaQuest DSV show.
@49: I was wondering where the shirt count was too! The posts were by scaredicat (who would appear to be a gal rather than a guy from the name on the profile). It looks like she’s had a lull in activity between April 21st and June 12th, so maybe she’s been busy. But I hope she comes back to keep up the count!
@52, exactly. But I don’t think Andromeda had transporters? The thing specifically about transporters is that they are so fragile, and the satellites can’t be shielded. You could have a cloaked Romulan match orbits with the transporter satellite, and as soon as a beam up was detected in progress, ram it or hit it with a kinetic weapon (a rock) and bye-bye bridge crew.
Generally, I like the idea of deploying small satellites as probes and as whiskers, it’s also a more plausible and practical cloaking technology. Just sit there with your active sensors off while your whiskers ping away with active sensors and broadcast the results on encrypted omnidirectional channels. Throw in a few unpredictable course changes, and your enemy will never know in real time where you are, unless they turn on their active FTL sensors and give away their own position.
But, I think we’re not in Federation anymore, Toto.
@27/Shellywb – You beat me to it. I don’t have a dog in the paper-vs-ebooks fight, but it’s most manifestly not true that codex books are oh so fragile. Physical books are really quite resilient, treated with a little common sense. I make my living working with rare books, and you’d be surprised how hardy books from centuries ago can be. We don’t even wear white gloves when handling them (because if you do, you lose tactile sensation of the pages and are more likely to tear them while turning them).
My big beef with this episode, which I haven’t seen mentioned yet (maybe I overlooked), is Stone’s more or less overt offer, at the episode’s beginning, to cover up the whole affair and make it go away, if Kirk will just play along. “Admit nothing. Say nothing. Let me bury the matter here and now. No starship captain has ever stood trial before, and I don’t want you to be the first… I’m thinking of the service. I won’t have it smeared.” What the heck is this? I know the series isn’t fully developed yet, and I know we’re not in the 24th century, but surely Starfleet has greater respect for the truth than this. Wesley’s “I’m with Starfleet, we don’t lie” in TNG is a little much, sure, but it has some basis in truth, right? Right? If Starfleet is the way Stone makes it out to be, if we had only this episode to go on, I’m not sure I’d want to sign up.
Regarding Ms. Sky’s Vulcan!, it is sure a weird one, as I wrote in a retro-review of both it andSpock Messiah! for any who might be interested.
@55/Mike: Yes, Starfleet doesn’t look good in this one. There’s Stone’s behaviour, and also Kirk’s former classmates prejudging him. I take it to mean that people are still people in the 23rd century, and becoming better is an ongoing struggle.
@53/crzydroid: Ah, the shirt count! Her last update was for “The Man Trap”, so that fits your observation. Which means that three torn shirts and two shirtless Kirks haven’t been counted yet.
What, 500 years from now … computers have advanced a bit from the 1960s … and yet:
SHAW: Mister Spock, as a First officer, you know a great deal about computers, don’t you?
SPOCK: I know all about them.
A little braggadocao … “all” about them?
@44 ChristopherLBennett That theory works for me!!!!!
It is interesting to read these reviews, and see the occasional references to James Blish’s ‘novelizations’ of the shows. We couldn’t pull in NBC on our aerial when I was a kid, so my first introduction to the episodes was Blish’s versions. And I have to say, the print versions were often much better, because he presented things in such a way that the less plausible aspects of the shows made more sense. So when I finally watched the episodes on TV, they seemed to me like a cruder version of what appeared in print.
@9 MagentaWolf – My friends and I got a kick out of that too. I wonder how many times a bleary-eyed Kirk accidentally ejected the pod early in the morning when he was trying to buzz a yeoman to bring him some coffee.
-Andy
@56/Jana – I’ll buy that. Might have been nice, though, to have Stone acknowledge that his initial plan would’ve been the wrong one (of course, Starfleet’s higher echelons don’t have a good track record on that, in any era, it seems): “I guess you were right all along, Kirk. Next time I won’t be so eager to dismiss the importance of the truth,” and so, and so forth. I would have preferred that kind of tag scene to kissy-time with Areel Shaw (I know, it was the 1960s, and I don’t get a vote).
@57/MikeC – As I think Spock says elsewhere in Trek, it’s not arrogant to admit the truth. I don’t know how high those computer expertise rankings go, but I bet there aren’t too many A-7s in the fleet, or anywhere. (I also grant that it would be logical to admit that one can never know “all” about any subject… and that, as Spock got older, he realized this. So chalk it up to more of his wonderfully consistent character growth over the franchise’s five decades!)
@53 – crzydroid: I bet it’s the horrible site redesign that has kept scaredicat away.
@55 – MikePoteet: You’re right, it doesn’t quite jive with Roddenberry’s “the Federation is all goody-two shoes” vision…
@59 – AlanBrown: For different reasons (we’re from South America), EduardoJencarelli and I are also in the “we read blish before seeing the actual episodes” camp. High five!
@61/Mike: I don’t think Stone ever changed his mind. Kirk turned out to be innocent, so Starfleet’s reputation is safe for now. I imagine that Stone is quite relieved, and will go on being concerned mostly about appearances. Why wouldn’t he? His attitude was never challenged except in the initial scene by Kirk, and that’s probably not enough.
@62/lordmagnusen: I’m not sure if Roddenberry wanted the Federation to be perfect back then. There are so many disagreeable diplomats and bureaucrats in TOS that it’s probably not by accident.
@63/Jana: Right. TOS showed an improved humanity — one that had overcome racial prejudice and war — but not a perfect humanity. We saw plenty of humanity’s imperfections in Gary Mitchell, Harry Mudd, Professor Crater, Lt. Stiles, Tristan Adams, Roger Korby, etc.
Jana, Chris, that is true at this early stage, but as the show progressed, I think Roddenberry fell in love with the idea of making them even more perfect… didn’t he object to “The City On The Edge Of Forever” featuring drug dealing among the Enterprise crew? And I believe I’ve read several reports of plot points he shot down on TNG, because it’d make the crew less than squeaky clean. Am I wrong?
@65/lordmagnusen: Those are true, but you’re conflating the Roddenberry of TOS with the very different Roddenberry of TNG. In the interval, he’d become much more a believer in his own hype about being a visionary philosopher (and his health and judgment had deteriorated as well), to the point that the TNG-era Roddenberry cared more about promoting his idealistic philosophy than he did about telling effective dramatic stories. That was not the case during TOS. He wanted an improved humanity, including one that was free of drug addiction — note that there was no smoking on TOS, which was quite radical for a TV show in the 1960s, when plenty of series were actually sponsored by tobacco companies — but not to the point that it undermined drama. In fact, I’d say that Roddenberry’s rewrite of “City on the Edge” made it more dramatically powerful, because the emotional stakes of McCoy himself being lost in time and endangering the future were much higher than the emotional stakes of some random guest villain filling that role.
Point taken, thanks.
@63/Jana and @66/Christopher – No, Stone didn’t change his mind. I think he should have. Being imperfect humanity is one thing. Being just shy of openly advocating institutional corruption is another. I bet Stone was a member of Section 31…
“note that there was no smoking on TOS” – True enough, but there were “No Smoking” signs in the transporter room in TWOK!
@68: There were “No Smoking” signs on the bridge simulator at the academy, but I don’t recall any in the transporter room.
@68/MikePoteet: I resist the tendency to assume Section 31 is behind every unethical thing the Federation ever did. Massive, sweeping conspiracies are a favorite of fiction, but they’re total nonsense, because the larger a conspiracy gets, the more inevitable its exposure. There would just be too many opportunities for someone to find the truth, too many people who might make a mistake or have a change of heart, too many lines of communication that could be intercepted. The only way Section 31 could plausibly have remained hidden for so long is by being small and doing as little as possible.
Besides, it’s small-universe syndrome. Trying to link every remotely similar thing to a single shared cause just makes the world tinier, less believable, and less interesting. Surely there are many different reasons people in Starfleet or the Federation could have for doing bad things.
As for TWOK, Nicholas Meyer couldn’t have been more opposite to Roddenberry. He’s always been aggressively anti-futurist, believing that the future will be no better than the present or the past, and his interests tend more toward the antiquarian. So he assumed people would still smoke in the future, he put the crew in Hornblower-cosplay uniforms, he had the photon torpedoes loaded manually, and in ST VI he had a galley on the ship instead of mechanized food preparation and had the crew search through codex books to translate Klingonese. Honestly, I’ve never understood why people think so well of his Trek movies, when his entire philosophy as a filmmaker is so antithetical to ST’s intrinsic optimism about the future. (Although Sam Cogley probably would’ve approved of at least some of his attitudes.)
I do see what you mean about Meyer’s idiosincracies… but I can’t help but still love TWOK! That said, I do not consider TWOK a good Star Trek episode example, it’s just a nice adventure movie featuring the characters from TOS.
Then again, most Star Trek movies are that.
Yeah, the fan outrage over JJ Abrams is hilarious given that Nicholas Meyer did the exact same thing: an outsider who didn’t necessarily match Gene Roddenberry’s vision, being brought in to kick-start the franchise when it got moribund (due to The Motion(less) Picture for Meyer, due to five years where all the franchise produced was Nemesis, Voyager, and Enterprise for Abrams). Nobody remembers this now, but Roddenberry spent a lot of time in 1982 going to conventions telling people not to support The Wrath of Khan because it wasn’t “real Star Trek.” After the movie came out and became a huge hit and made Paramount lots of money (because Meyer did it on the cheap), he stopped doing that. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
MikePoteet: Funny you should say that, as the Section 31 novel Cloak by S.D. Perry established that Kirk formed a cabal of officers trying to stop Section 31 shortly after “The Enterprise Incident,” and Stone was part of that cabal…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@70/Christopher: Thank you for the beautiful term “Hornblower-cosplay uniforms”! I like those uniforms better than the ones in TMP, mostly because they are more colourful, but they look too much like traditional military uniforms for my taste – especially too much like traditional uniforms from a time when there was a lot of actual exploration being done, but mixed with conquest and the building of empires. For Star Trek, that’s an unfortunate association.
On top of that, we get David Marcus’ anti-Starfleet speeches, even if they are unfounded – I mean, where did he get the idea in the first place? That even bothered me when I was fourteen years old and watched the film for the first time. Starfleet looks more like a traditional military organization in TWOK than ever before. The utopian aspect is also missing in this regard.
I was really glad when Starfleet went back to proper, colour-coded uniforms in the 24th century.
@73/Keith: That explains why they didn’t manage to stop them – Stone was a double agent.
@72/krad: Right, and there were people in ’82 writing letters to Starlog (the Internet BBS of its day) about how TMP and TWOK couldn’t possibly be set in the same universe as the original series because of all the continuity errors and differences in the way the characters and world were portrayed.
And of course, when TNG came along five years later, most of the original cast and a large contingent of TOS fans spent years dismissing it as not real Star Trek.
@72 – krad: The Motion(less) Picture, haha, I love that!!!
@76 – Chris: All those people forgot all about the continuity errors and such within TOS itself? :)
@77/lordmagnusen: Exactly. There are always people who will condemn the tiniest inconsistency or flaw in the newest incarnation of Trek as proof that its makers don’t understand “true” Trek or that it’s actually not set in the same reality, even as they forgive or ignore equally massive inconsistencies and flaws in the canon they do accept. A decade ago, they were doing it with Enterprise, and today I see the exact same kinds of complaints about the Abrams movies. And before that, they did it with TNG, with TWOK, with the animated series, even with the much-disliked third season of TOS.
Bottom line, there are always fans who reflexively reject the new and unfamiliar. They hate whatever the latest incarnation of Star Trek is because it’s different from what they’re used to. And though they claim that makes them defenders of the “true” Star Trek, to me it indicates that they’ve missed the entire point of a franchise that revolves around characters whose profession and passion is to seek out and celebrate that which is new, different, and surprising.
The same also goes for the recent shows (Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds [more so the three former than the latter.])
@73/krad: Ha! Haven’t read that novel, but good for Kirk. I grant that Section 31 “makes sense” as a narrative and world-building device — as someone said above, the price you pay for a “utopian” society — but I sure don’t like it, and am pretty bummed that it’s still hanging around in the JJ Trek reality. I tend to agree with what Ken Ray says from time to time on the “Mission Log” podcast, that if we can’t even imagine made-up societies where we’ve “made it” and gotten better without having to make those kind of moral compromises, then why bother? (I think he said this in connection with Star Trek VI, which is much the same situation – shadowy Starfleet cabals and whatnot. That’s one reason I really, really can’t stand that film.)
At any rate, I wasn’t seriously suggesting Stone was a member. But nice to know S.D. Perry apparently doesn’t think much of the character, either.
I know Nick Meyer doesn’t share Roddenberry’s view of the future, but at the end of the day, new “militaristic” uniforms and sets aside, TWOK got the characters right (I would contend). Did it get Starfleet right? Eh, I would say, more or less. David’s comment can be explained/explained away as his personal opinion, because we see nothing in the film that backs it up. By the time Reliant is coming, it’s Khan-controlled.
Where the films started getting Starfleet wrong was Star Trek III… but that’s a rant for some other time…
@79/MikePoteet: Personally, I don’t buy the “It’s a necessary price” argument at all. History shows that doing the wrong thing for the right reasons doesn’t actually work — because the damage done by the “wrong thing” persists and has consequences that come back to bite you. Like when the CIA overthrew Mossadeq in Iran in the name of protecting American interests and fighting communism, but thereby promoted a brutal shah and led to the Iranian Revolution that was the first major step in the militant radicalization of Islam and created one of our worst enemies in the region. Or when, some years later, they countered the Soviets in Afghanistan by training a guy named Osama bin Laden in guerrilla tactics. Whoops.
So I don’t accept that the occasional dirty tricks are necessary to build a better world. I think that’s just the self-serving excuse people use to justify dirty tricks, and that in reality, such tactics are a threat to that better world. Doing harm does not lead to doing good.
So I agree that it’s frustrating to see Section 31 marring the vision of a better future, but I can live with it because it’s usually portrayed as a problem rather than a solution. Even in the “morally gray” DS9, it was treated as an adversary more than a necessary evil. Its plan to exterminate the Founders was something the heroes fought against, and ultimately it was Odo’s act of compassion, not Section 31’s act of attempted genocide, that saved the Federation. In ENT: “Affliction”/”Divergence,” Section 31 was more part of the problem than the solution, its willingness to operate in the shadows leaving it vulnerable to manipulation by the Klingons. And in Into Darkness, S31’s warmongering was unambiguously wrong and almost led to an unnecessary war that the heroes acted to stop.
Maybe Stone’s behavior in this episode got him fired and replaced in the next?
@80, Christopher L Bennett,
Yeah, but it’s also very easy to find instances where people will defend the “necessary price” argument. Forming an alliance with Joseph Stalin* during WW2. Teaming-up with one monstrous dictator in order to defeat a still more monstrous dictator.Frankly, I really don’t see how the US and Britain could have fought the war without the aid of Stalin.
*Via Tim Snyder, a nice survey of some of Stalin’s major crimes:
The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died.
Of those who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in 1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate” prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. Tens of thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.3 million people died. The famine spread to Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass death.
In 1937, as his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. […..] [A]s in the early 1930s, the main victims were the peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. The highest Soviet authorities ordered 386,798 people shot in the “Kulak Operation” of 1937–1938. The other major “enemies” during these years were people belonging to national minorities who could be associated with states bordering the Soviet Union: some 247,157 Soviet citizens were killed by the NKVD in ethnic shooting actions.
In the largest of these, the “Polish Operation” that began in August 1937, 111,091 people accused of espionage for Poland were shot. In all, 682,691 people were killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made before we had access to Soviet sources. At the same time, we see that the motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.
@82/Trajan23: Granted, but at least that alliance was open and public, and the people behind the decision were answerable to their constituents. It wasn’t a secret, illegal alliance worked out in back rooms.
Indeed, your point doesn’t really conflict with mine. Working with Stalin may have defeated Hitler (and Japan, since it was the Soviet invasion, not the nuclear bombings, that really triggered Japan’s surrender), but it probably created more threats to American and global security in the long run, what with Stalin’s USSR seizing Eastern Europe after WWII and starting the Cold War. I’m not saying that dirty tricks or deals with the devil can’t succeed at achieving their immediate goals; I’m saying that they usually come with a high price, and that their long-term damage can outweigh any short-term “good” they bring.
@79/Mike: S.D. Perry doesn’t suggest that Stone is a member of Section 31, quite the opposite – Kirk includes Stone in a secret group to fight Section 31.
I don’t think that TWOK got Khan’s character right. The Khan from “Space Seed” was too intelligent and power-hungry to risk everything for revenge. Of course a lot of bad things happened to him, and people change over time, but I still don’t see him acting this way. But then, I don’t like revenge plots anyway.
@81/KieranOC: Stone’s behaviour can’t have gotten him fired, because nobody knows about it but Kirk, and I don’t think he would tell anybody.
Christopher: I agree with everything you say.
@83 Christopher L Bennett:
“Working with Stalin may have defeated Hitler (and Japan, since it was the Soviet invasion, not the nuclear bombings, that really triggered Japan’s surrender),”
There’s no “may” about it.WW2 in Europe was a struggle between Hitler and Stalin.The bulk of the Wehrmacht was deployed in the East fighting the Soviets.
“but it probably created more threats to American and global security in the long run, what with Stalin’s USSR seizing Eastern Europe after WWII and starting the Cold War.”
If the USA and UK hadn’t sided with Stalin, there was a good chance that Hitler would have defeated the USSR.The Consequences of a Nazi victory would have been catastrophic*.The Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost would have caused approx 80 million deaths.As bad as Stalin seizing control of Eastern Europe was**, it never came close to that level of barbarism.
And if the Soviets managed to win on their own, that would have meant a much larger Stalinist domain in Europe.It would have extended at least to the Rhine (i.e., all of Germany as opposed to only half).And it’s not hard to imagine it encompassing France as well.That would have been a frightening Cold War scenario.
“I’m not saying that dirty tricks or deals with the devil can’t succeed at achieving their immediate goals; I’m saying that they usually come with a high price, and that their long-term damage can outweigh any short-term “good” they bring.”
Sure, the alliance with the Stalinist devil carried a high price (consigning Eastern and much of Central Europe to Soviet rule), but it was better than the two probable alternatives:
Hitler Triumphing in the East and Implementing The Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost
Stalin seizing control of both Eastern and Western Europe
Sometimes the tough choice is the right choice.
*Once again, Timothy Snyder gives us a good idea of the full scope of the horror:
The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.
The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from lands annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered a first stage of Generalplan Ost implemented in eastern Poland: ten thousand Polish children were killed and a hundred thousand adults expelled. The Wehrmacht purposefully starved about one million people in the siege of Leningrad, and about a hundred thousand more in planned famines in Ukrainian cities. Some three million captured Soviet soldiers died of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were purposefully killed: as with the siege of Leningrad, the knowledge and intention to starve people to death was present. Had the Holocaust not taken place, this would be recalled as the worst war crime in modern history.
In the guise of anti-partisan actions, the Germans killed perhaps three quarters of a million people, about 350,000 in Belarus alone, and lower but comparable numbers in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Germans killed more than a hundred thousand Poles when suppressing the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Had the Holocaust not happened, these “reprisals” too would be regarded as some of the greatest war crimes in history. In fact they, like the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, are scarcely recalled at all beyond the countries directly concerned. German occupation policies killed non-Jewish civilians in other ways as well, for example by hard labor in prison camps. Again: these were chiefly people from Poland or the Soviet Union.
The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.
**Some figures on Stalin’s death toll in Eastern and Central Europe:
East Germany: Soviets killed around 65,000 people while consolidating their rule (1945-50).And the Soviets even used Buchenwald for a while:
After liberation, between 1945 and February 10, 1950, the camp was administered by the Soviet Union and served as Special Camp No. 2 of the NKVD.[39] It was part of a “special camps” network operating since 1945, formally integrated into the Gulag in 1948.[40][41] Another infamous “special camp” in Soviet occupied Germany was the former Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen (special camp No. 7).[42]
Between August 1945 and the dissolution on March 1, 1950, 28,455[43] prisoners, including 1,000 women, were held by the Soviet Union at Buchenwald. A total of 7,113 people died in Special Camp Number 2, according to the Soviet records.[43] They were buried in mass graves in the woods surrounding the camp. Their relatives did not receive any notification of their deaths. Prisoners comprised alleged opponents of Stalinism, and alleged members of the Nazi party or Nazi organization, others were imprisoned due to identity confusion and arbitrary arrests.[44][45] The NKVD would not allow any contact of prisoners with the outside world[46] and did not attempt to determine the guilt of any individual prisoner.[45]
On January 6, 1950, Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov ordered all special camps, including Buchenwald, to be handed over to the East German Ministry of Internal Affairs.[41]
@Christopher L Bennett,
And the Korean War was another exercise in moral compromise.The USA intervened to prevent a corrupt, brutal, right-wing dictatorship from being conquered by a corrupt, brutal, Communist dictatorship.Was it the right choice? I would say yes.Looking at South Korea today, it is a far better place to live than the Orwellian nightmare that is North Korea.Plus, a completely Communist Korean Peninsula would have made things quite dicey vis-a-vis Japan.
@79/Mike: I feel a little guilty about my earlier reply, because of course I know you were not talking about Khan. I agree that the film gets the characters of the Enterprise crew (mostly) right. I have problems with the Kobayashi Maru, though – the Kirk we’ve been watching for the last few weeks doesn’t strike me as someone who would cheat in a test.
@82,85/trajan23: I don’t think this example belongs with the others, because there was hardly a choice there. Germany and the UK were already at war when Germany invaded the USSR. Of course the British teamed up with the USSR afterwards. What else could they have done, fight them both?
Chris: I gotta agree with you regarding S31 and all related topics. I like them existing in Trek because of the narrative options they offer (if everything was actually utopian in the Federation, it wouldn’t be as fun to read/watch), and because they are always presented as problem-creators, not solutions.
Jana: I don’t know… I don’t really see it as CHEATING-cheating; just as finding a way to win. Not saying that he should have hacked every single simulation, but one that’s designed to make you lose?
Oh, I don’t mind that he did it – only, after having watched all these early episodes where he’s always so correct, it seems a bit out of character.
I don’t think it’s out of character. Kirk is always looking for a way out dangerous situations as a Captain, to save his crew, to save whoever is caught in the middle… so it stands to reason he would have done the best he could to find a solution to the KM test… and Kirk cadet is not the same person (in maturity terms, experience, etc) as Kirk captain.
Quoting Christopher @78:
Entirely true. I wonder if a new version of Trek on TV would make people like the Abrams stuff. (Speaking of Abrams, Quinto’s got the haircut again!)
Frankly, I have never had a problem with any incarnation of Trek, even Voyager, because it’s all Star Trek. There are good episodes and bad episodes, good movies and bad movies – but they’re all part of the franchise. It’s all the same world with the same underlying features and values. It all gives me the same sense of joy to watch it, even if sometimes that joy is tinged with “holy crap, this is bad.” (Looking at you, ST:TFF.) Likewise for the books – I’m reading a world I love, even if it’s not perfect. (*cough* Kathleen Sky *cough*)
On the Kobayashi Maru: In the novel The Kobayashi Maru by Julia Ecklar, which depicts the KM tests of Kirk, Sulu, Scotty, and Chekov, it’s established that Kirk considers the test itself to be unfair, “cheating” by arbitrarily changing its conditions to guarantee failure. So his reprogramming of the test was an act of protest. Although it’s ambiguous, because he wins by reprogramming the Klingons to respond with awe and terror to his very name and to back down as a result. There’s another version, “A Test of Character” by Kevin Lauderdale (in the anthology Strange New Worlds VII), where Kirk simply reprograms it to be a fair simulation, though his motivation for reprogramming it is pretty much the same.
@Meredith“My Newest Facebook Friend”P: Exactly. All Star Trek is Star Trek, and there is joy at watching/reading if you are a fan, although it sometimes comes with the “holy crap this is bad” undercurrent. :)
@chris: That’s just it. Kirk considering unfair is a perfect motivation for him to rig it. Or UNrig it.
@92/Christopher: OK, in that context it makes sense.
@91/MeredithP: I would very much like to agree with you, but “values” is exactly where my problem lies. Simply put, I want my film heroes to be nice people. They should care about the world and be able to behave themselves. Most people I know in real life are like that, and I expect no less from my fictional heroes. The people in ST2009 are not nice and behave really badly, and that ruins the film for me. I guess it’s new and unfamiliar, but that doesn’t help. Add “stupid revenge plot” to that, and you see why I dislike that film so much. I’ve never disliked any incarnation of Star Trek before. I found some of them less interesting than others, but this is the first one I can’t stand. And I fully expected to like it before.
Pairing both Meredith and Chris’s comments, I got the picture of a Star Trek away team beaming down to a strange, new world, with joy at being the first to explore it… only to have one of them wrinkle his/her noise and say “Holy crap, this place sucks.”
@Jana: I didn’t like the script for Into Darkness either, but I just look at the shiny, cool Star Treky things in it, and bear it. I know that eventually, there will be a Star Trek film or show that is to my liking, and by supporting Star Trek (even productions that are not my cup of tea), I make sure that there will be more ST… fertile ground for the ST stuff I DO like. :)
@95/lordmagnusen: Now, that reminds me of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “This is the first time I’ve actually stood on the surface of another planet… a whole alien world…! Pity it’s such a dump though.”
@96: Yes, I did like the shiny things, too… oh, and I liked McCoy. Maybe you’re right. Surely complaining doesn’t help any, because as Christopher pointed out, someone is always complaining anyway.
In any case, there are still good Star Trek novels being written.
Jana:
1) Hah, I was just reminded of a Star Wars RPG campaign I played in, we were a New Republic ship chasing an Imperial warlord through a VERY backwater sector, and while the characters were focused on their mission (and their own personal objectives), the players commented tongue-in-cheek to the GM how each planet was crappier than the last one. :)
2) Yes, McCoy is one of the shiney things. :) And you can complain… that’s not the same as bitching, as some fans do with everything they don’t like.
@87 JanaJansen:
“I don’t think this example belongs with the others, because there was hardly a choice there. Germany and the UK were already at war when Germany invaded the USSR.”
When the war started in 1939, Hitler and Stalin were on the same side.They split Poland between them.And, before Hitler turned on Stalin, the USSR also invaded and occupied the Baltic states : Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
Hence, until the German invasion of the USSR in June of 1941, Nazi Germany and the USSR were more or less acting in concert.From 1939 to 1941, the UK chose to ignore Stalin’s conquests.They knew that fighting both Hitler and Stalin would have been suicidal, although it would have been the morally “pure” choice.But they rejected the morally “pure” choice in favor of the realistic option.So, they ignored Stalin and only declared war on Germany.
“Of course the British teamed up with the USSR afterwards. What else could they have done, fight them both?”
From the invasion of Poland until June of 1941 (the period when Hitler and Stalin were, shall we say, co-aggressors), that would have been the “morally pure” thing to do.But the UK decided to opt for the realistic option, the morally tainted option.And, when Hitler invaded the USSR, Britain made another morally impure choice.Instead of just remaining neutral in terms of the war in the East, they decided to actively aid Stalin (as the USA did later on).As Churchill said:
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”
Tough choices had to be made, and Britain made them
@95/lordmagnusen: If that one dissenting guy is in a red shirt, then his dislike for the strange new world would be understandable… ;)
@98/lordmagnusen: OK, you convinced me – when the new film comes, I’m going to watch it. In an actual cinema. Because of shiny McCoy :-)
@99/trajan23: I know that. OK, so theoretically, the “morally pure”, but suicidal course of action would have been to fight them both. But it’s never sensible to be suicidal, and if we talk about nations and not about individuals, it’s not even morally right, because ordering people to die just so you can occupy the moral high ground is pretty lousy.
So the thing to do was to side with one of them against the other, and again, I don’t think they had much of a choice there. The Baltic states are far away from Britain. Germany was an immediate threat, the USSR wasn’t. The only choice they actually had was whether to go to war at all, something they tried to avoid for one year or so.
I guess they could have refrained from actively aiding the USSR. I honestly don’t know if that would have been reasonable, or even feasible. But that wasn’t my point anyway – my point was that Christopher originally rejected “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons”, and that this criterion just doesn’t apply here.
The problem with the first Abrams ST movie is that it is stupid that Kirk would go from ungraduated cadet to Captain of his own ship after one mission. In any realistic universe, he might have been made a 2LT (jump over Ensign, Starfleet doesn’t seem to have Middies) and transferred to another ship where he had never served in command.
The problems with the second Abrams movie are amply critiqued by the folks at HISHE.
It’s not that they “weren’t ST”, its that they were stupid.
The movie didn’t have five hours (and two more movies) showing Kirk eventually becoming a captain and everybody else becoming who we all know them to be, so they went with the option of showing a dire event forcing quick promotion through the ranks (as had happened during WWII and any other calamity.) Spending three (or four) movies showing Kirk and everybody else eventually becoming the crew we all know at the end of a third or fourth movie would’ve flopped miserably, and for what? The franchise needed new fans to keep it going, and that’s what it got with the Abramsverse movies-it can’t rely on old established fans forever, as those people eventually change interests or die. Said new fans need to be introduced to these characters and the set-up of Star Trek, and so we got the movies we got, even though older fans weren’t satisfied.
@Jana: Good. :)
@StrongDreams: Not any more stupid than Wesley serving as “acting Ensign” on the Alpha shift of one of the most important ships in Starfleet, where dozens if not hundreds of highly-qualified Ensigns and Lieutenants who busted their asses through four years of SF Academy and who knows what other duty postings to get there and actually do their job.
@103/104: Nor is it any more stupid than the same command crew staying together on the same ship (or its namesake) over the span of two decades or more. By ST V, there were three captains and four commanders on the same command crew, which makes no sense at all. There’s no point in promoting someone if it doesn’t entail giving them new responsibilities, and clearing the way for a more junior officer to take over their old responsibilities and gain experience that way.
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@84/Jana – Whoops! I misread and misunderstood Keith’s comment. Thanks for the correction. And no need to feel guilty about your Khan reply. I wasn’t talking about him, no, but I think the movie got him right, too, considering “15 years on this barren sandheap” had passed. If you disagree, that’s fine, but no guilt necessary!
As for whether TOS Kirk would cheat on the Kobayashi Maru: other commenters have addressed it, so I won’t pile on. I do like how the 09 film handled that (although thankfully the final edit doesn’t have him cheating via pillow talk with Galia; as the film stands, we can at least infer he had to do some thinking and computer hacking of his own, as would befit a “genius repeat offender”).
It hadn’t really struck me that the ST09 characters aren’t “nice people.” I can’t really refute it, but maybe that’s because I bought the premise that they are all way young and inexperienced. Which isn’t to say, of course, that young people can’t be nice… Hm. I’ll have to think on it. They’re all also under a lot of stress for most of the movie. I will agree they’re not professional (nor in STID). The TOS crew was always professional, and those who weren’t got smacked down for it (Bailey, Boma, Stiles…)
@80/Christopher – I think we’re on the same page. Maybe an episode or movie where S31 is exposed to the light of day and terminated would make me feel better (naive idealist that I am, or at least would like to be). So maybe I should like STID better than I do, because it basically ends with Kirk calling Starfleet back to the better angels of its nature. (Darn this rewatch, it’s making me rethink not only what I thought I knew about TOS, but now the JJverse films, too….!)
@103-105 That part does not really bother me as much as the 10 year ensigns like Kim, Sato and Mayweather. With Trek I just chalk it all up to military traditions and culture changing to reflect a society that is more focused on self-actualization than ambition. If you turn over too many of these rocks in Trek you have to consider things like what a fair advancement rate for species with different lifespans would be…Vulcans and species like the Ocampa would probably clash a bit.
In the JJ verse feels more like we are moving from a story to a myth. Kirk was just the guy we happened to follow in TOS. In JJ land he is a man with an unavoidable DESTINY. Full disclosure: I am in favor of enjoying the Abrams movies for what they are.
It bugs me more on the Stargate re-watch about Carter and Mitchell…people of the same rank have to coexist all the time and there are rules of the road for that. On US Aircraft Carriers the Captain, XO and CAG are all O-6/Captains (there is only one Captain though).
@106/pen_pals: “It may be true but I can reverse your argument : you would want people to reflexively accept and like any Star Trek incarnation for the sole reason it has Star Trek in its name ?”
That’s a straw man. I’m certainly not saying people can’t dislike individual Trek episodes or films for specific reasons. The point is that, for decades now, people have been condemning whatever the newest incarnation of Trek was for faults equivalent to those that they forgave or ignored in older versions of Trek. I saw it a decade ago with Enterprise and again with the Abrams films now: People denouncing them as “not real Trek” because they have continuity errors, as if no Trek production had ever had continuity errors before. And most of the faults people point out about the Abrams movies can be found in the earlier Trek movies as well, because Hollywood feature films in general have long been under pressure to be more lowbrow, simplistic, and action-heavy than TV shows.
I’m not even saying people aren’t free to dislike the new movies. I think they have a lot of flaws, although I think they have a lot in their favor as well. I’m just trying to put the matter in perspective, to acknowledge that there’s nothing new about Trek movies or episodes having flaws. It’s a human instinct to be more mistrusting of something new and unfamiliar than of something established and recognized. That’s why it’s important to be aware of that instinct and able to question it. That’s part of making an informed decision, regardless of which decision you ultimately make.
See, you’re saying these complaints are specific to the Abrams films, but what I’m saying is that I heard the exact same kinds of complaints leveled against Enterprise, and there’s documentation of the same complaints being leveled against TNG, TWOK, and every other new incarnation of Trek. And over time, people changed their minds. They learned to forgive the flaws, rationalize the inconsistencies, and appreciate the good parts. That process takes time, though. We won’t really have a good idea how well the Abrams films hold up for another ten or fifteen years.
(Although what often gets overlooked in these debates is that the Abrams films are among the most critically and financially successful Trek films of all time, with the ’09 film at the top of the list. To the general audience, they’re well-loved. It’s just a vocal minority that hates them. Of course, it’s not wrong to hold a minority opinion — I’m in the minority for disliking The Wrath of Khan — but it’s worth acknowledging that there’s already a multiplicity of opinions on these films.)
@107/MikePoteet: You’re right. Something that a lot of people don’t seem to get about the Abrams films is that they’re an origin story, set nearly a decade before TOS. The characters are supposed to be different than the versions we know: They’re younger, less experienced, more flawed. The films are about their journey to become the characters we know. Even Starfleet has some growing to do — the movies paint it as problematically hidebound in the first film, overly militaristic and cynical in the second, and these are things Starfleet needed to outgrow to become the more exploration-based service we should see in the third film.
@107 – Mike: TOS McCoy was professional? Making jokes about another crewmember’s species and culture ALL the time in front of anyone? (Yeah, I’m a broken record.)
To come back to the episode, the script went through multiple rewrites until it emerged as the rather pointless exercise it is. Most of the staff thought it was bad. The main problem is that it’s a bloody ordinary courtroom drama with the hero being accused of something he obviously never could have done. Star Trek has a pretty dreadful resume of doing crime stories throughout the decades and this is no different.
Mankiewicz’ remarks about computers which are quoted in Cushman’s book clearly show that he had no real grasp about their qualities and that’s why the episode was written as a silly diatribe against them.
As for the debates about true Star Trek, I think it’s fair to point out that every series tried and sometimes succeeded to create intelligent screenplays, there was some kind of intellectual ambition behind them though obviously not in every episode. The same goes for most of the films though Nemesis is already under the heavy influence of modern CGI blockbuster ideology.
The new films do not try to be anything but shallow. They are a string of CGI action sequences glued together by loose plots. There’s no ambition whatsoever to sincerely engage with any philosophical, political or other human issues. Obviously the pull of blockbuster dramaturgy (or better lack of it) is too strong for such a multi million investment, but I think it’s fair to say that this is Star Trek in name only. Lower budgeted films or a TV series on the other hand probably would easily connect to the old spirit. So I don’t think the problem is people being opposed to new things and only slowly adjusting, after all the franchise had passed through many hands before Abrams, it’s rather the cynical exploitation of a trademark which is off-putting.
@109/Christopher: It’s refreshing to meet someone who dislikes The Wrath of Khan. While I don’t dislike it – it has nice pacing and I like a lot of its bits (Saavik, the Genesis project, the Kobayashi Maru, Spock and McCoy giving birthday presents to Kirk…) I don’t think it’s good Star Trek, either. The first film that actually feels like Star Trek to me is The Search for Spock.
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@76ChristopherLBennett Very good point about folks saying “This can’t all be in the same universe.” And I’ll even give you the flip side of that coin–in Star Trek (2009) JJ straight-up shouted from the rafters “WE’RE IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” with the conversation Spock and Uhura had on the bridge, and we’ve got people saying “No, no, noooo!!!! It’s all the same universe and he (JJ) erased everything that’s ever been on screen before except for Enterprise.” I guess Lincoln was wrong–you can’t please some of the people ANY of the time!
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@115/pen_pals: On the bright side, young viewers who liked the Abrams movies might move on to one of the TV series and find that they like them even more.
My 15-year-old daughter watched ST09 first and thought it was fun. A couple of weeks later I showed her The Man Trap and The Devil in the Dark, and her reaction to that was: “But this is much better than Star Wars!”
Now we agree that the film was crap.
@113/pen_pals: Neither you nor anyone else gets to define “what Star Trek is supposed to be” for everyone. What it’s supposed to be is broad and inclusive, not an excuse for the kind of obnoxious gatekeeping that’s become so fashionable in fandom these days. As you yourself go on to say, the great thing about Trek is that different fans can enjoy different facets of it. It’s so broad and multifaceted that it can attract diverse audiences who wouldn’t normally like the same things. We should welcome that, not use it as an excuse for petty gatekeeping and arguments about whose Trek is more authentic.
And I’m particularly sick of the selfish, obnoxious insistence of Abrams-bashers to draw countless other conversations off-topic and pervert them into rehashes of the endlessly tired argument over the Abrams movies. It’s been years now. We all know the arguments. It’s time to let it go already. This is a thread about “Court-Martial,” for Pete’s sake.
@109/Chistopher – there’s documentation of the same complaints being leveled against TNG, TWOK, and every other new incarnation of Trek. Truth. I’ve recently been re-reading the Best of Trek volumes, and there are such objections even earlier, to TMP. And the animated series, for that matter. You can’t satisfy all the Trek fans all the time.
As for Starfleet being “problematically hidebound in the first film,” I just rewatched the movie this weekend, and the only evidence I see of this is that Pike thinks it’s so (his one line to Kirk in the bar, “That instinct to leap without looking, that was [your father’s] his nature, too. And in my opinion it’s something Starfleet has lost”). Being rotted from the inside out by a secret cabal in STID isn’t the same as being “problemtically hidebound.” Do you see other evidence in ST09 itself that Starfleet is an organization in decline?
But hear, hear when you say: “What it’s supposed to be is broad and inclusive, not an excuse for the kind of obnoxious gatekeeping that’s become so fashionable in fandom these days.” I’ve been guilty of it at times, but I try to be better. IDIC and all that.
@110/lordmangusen – Ok. Except McCoy. ;)
@116/Jana – Your story gives me hope. :)
@114 – DonRudolphII: Yeah, some people are just morons.
@115 – pen_pals: Don’t feel sad. Young viewers who are interested will find their way to other ST material, the same way many found their way to the shows from other ST movies. Those who only see a CGI action blockbuster don’t care if it’s got starships or fast cars, or swords and dragons… well, they’re not the kind of people who’d actually be into ST in the end.
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Whoops, my last comment was written without seeing some posted before it.
@116 – Jana: Your daughter is a smart one. :) My 10 year old loves TOS, TNG, and DS9… he’s seen all TOS movies and like them, and the Abrams films, but he didn’t really care that much for them, except the shiny ship battles. :)
@122/lordmagnusen: Sounds like a sensible ten-year-old boy!
We’re raising him right. :)
@121/pen_pals:
Careful, he won’t be humble for long if you do that! ;)
Hey folks! I’m behind the eight-ball on a nasty-ass deadline, so I’m afraid the rewatch for “Shore Leave” will have to wait until the 7th of July. My apologies. We’ll still have SG-1 season 10 on Friday, though…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I hate to burst your bubble, but actual scientific research proves that people have much better reading comprehension of longer pieces of writing when they read them from physical rather than electronic sources. It’s unclear why this is the case, but this has been replicated in different places with people of different ages, so it’s not just a matter of young people having shorter attention spans–which they do, by the way, because they’re constantly reading online.
Some technology is good, but we have too much of it. It causes us to be stupider. Just like junk food causes us to be fatter. It’s possible, of course, to choose not to eat junk food, but rising obesity rates prove that its availability isn’t all good.
One of the wondrous things about physical books and magazines is that they have endings. There’s a sense of accomplishment after physically reaching the end of something. Now try reading a list on Wikipedia and feeling any similar sense of accomplishment, even though you’ve probably read something much longer than a magazine.
luc: The youth-of-today-has-shorter-attention-spans thing has been a particular go-to complaint by adults about children going back to the 1960s, when adults said that children had shorter attention spans because of television. When I was a teenager, I was told my generation had a shorter attention span because of MTV and quick-cut music videos. Now it’s the Internet and eBooks.
And it’s bunk. Plato once said that the youth of Greece were malcontents and ne’er-do-wells and would never amount to anything. Every generation has said that the generation coming up behind them were inferior and useless, and they have always been wrong.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Is that “actual scientific research” linked anywhere, or only on paper?
@129/lordmagnusen – To reply to your hilariously posed question with an utterly boring answer:
Sixth-graders in Korea do have better reading comprehension on paper
But wait, these struggling Turkish fourth-graders do better with e-books
Hey, these Turkish fifth-graders do too (pdf link)
And so do these Israeli kindergarteners and first-graders
So it’s almost like maybe people are different and take in information in different ways to different effects…but with an apparent tendency toward enhanced reading comprehension for youth, due to things like pop-up dictionary searches, more captivating images thanks to animation…if you read the “actual scientific research.”
The South Korea study was conducted on 56 subjects, the Turkish fourth grade one on 77, the Turkish fifth grade one on 60, and the Israeli one is not available to the general public without paying. I’d hardly call those sufficient samples. But then again, I might be wrong, I’m not a scientist.
@131/lordmagnusen – Shoot, sorry, I forget I access these things from a .edu host and probably see more that way. The Israeli one was 40 kindergarteners and 50 first graders. They are all in peer-reviewed journals; the sample sizes are small but the science is a good foundation from which to study further.
The South Korea one looks like it’s behind a pay wall too. Or at least I couldn’t figure it out.
To correct a mistake, the fourth grade one was Florida students, though the author was Turkish , as was the journal.
Maybe I’ll say more when I’m not on my mobile.
I’ll take your word for their “soundness”.
The abstracts should all be readable, though, no? I just went digging for some stuff to counter @127…didn’t mean to actually get into the reliability of journals. :)
Well, yes, the abstracts are readable, but I just wanted to read the whole thing. :)
But that’s just as well, as I probably would get into a huge sidetrack talking about them.
I am a TOS expert and one of the things that drives me crazy (and has done so for some time) is an inability to answer the “simple” question.
“WHEN did Spock play, never mind win, his fifth chess game???”
It’s mathematical nitpicking, and if you google plenty of people have pointed it out before me, but on the bridge Kirk says:
“By installing a booster, we can increase that capability on the order of one to the fourth power.”
Which turns out to be basically no change, since one to the fourth power is still only one. Somebody in the room should have noticed that while filming…
New to this party!
My Kindle offered me “The Autobiography of James T. Kirk” by David Goodman for a dollar. It’s a rather silly book but has inspired me to go back and revisit some of the episodes that figure in the story, this one among them. The book spends a nice bit of time setting up the frenemy relationship between Kirk and Finney, detailing their friendship and the events that Kirk exposits on in his exchange with Stone.
This episode is somewhat infuriating in that it starts out so strong and ends so poorly. The whole set-up is brilliant, the exchange between Kirk and the Commodore is some of Shat’s best work, the relationship between Kirk and his old flame is about the best one in the series, and everything up to the reveal of the video log is top-notch.
Then everything falls apart. Cogley’s whole setup promises an ace up his sleeve but he turns out to have no case at all. Mysteries that were set up (how does a video get changed based on a computer getting re-programmed) but go unexplained. Hasty voiceovers provide a bunch of key exposition. The end of the story seems like it was stitched together at the last minute and a lot of seams are left showing. What a mess.
A few other thoughts.
– The control panel is hilarious. Talk about bad human-factors design. I was instantly reminded of the Ronald Reagan hospital call buttons from the old Genesis “Land of Confusion” video:
– The hero of our show had a black boss in 1965! It’s easy to forget how unusual and groundbreaking that must have been at the time.
– I seem to recall thinking that they, at some point, say something like “this is a visual recreation of the events on the bridge made by the computer based upon sensors and logs” which would at least try to justify the video being wrong. I didn’t hear that on the re-watch, perhaps it was in one of the Blish adaptations? The show always played fast and loose with where these “visual logs” came from (and how they often featured dramatic camera angles!) but here’s the rare place where a bit of techno-babble would have gone a long way.
@139/Sardinicus: “(how does a video get changed based on a computer getting re-programmed)”
By what we’d now call CGI, presumably. The reprogramming was done specifically to edit the computer video file, and the assumption of the episode was that altering that portion of the memory banks would have inadvertent effects on other portions of the memory banks. Perhaps we could draw a modern analogy with some kind of malware or virus that’s designed to hack into the log recorder files and allow image editing, but that has some more generally disruptive effect as a consequence. Maybe the worm that erased the original log files and the evidence of tampering also erased some other files, including parts of the chess program.
“The end of the story seems like it was stitched together at the last minute and a lot of seams are left showing.”
I think that’s partly true. There was a scene deleted, hence the clumsy voiceover.
“The hero of our show had a black boss in 1965! It’s easy to forget how unusual and groundbreaking that must have been at the time.”
1967, actually. And at that time, we already had Bill Cosby on I Spy and Greg Morris on Mission: Impossible. But they were both equals to their white co-stars, not superiors. So, yes, it was pretty unusual.
Although it was a harbinger of a trend. Ever since then, we’ve had countless examples of shows and movies where the white heroes had black superiors — police captains, FBI or CIA bureau heads, newspaper editors, admirals, you name it. It still shows up a lot today, often with Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, or Laurence Fishburne in the role. It always struck me as a way to pay lip service to equality (by having minorities in authority in-universe) while still keeping black actors in secondary roles (because the lead characters were the cops/agents/reporters/etc. in the field).
Surprised no math nerds in this thread have pointed out that “one to the fourth power” equals one. That’s a pretty lame-ass booster, if you ask me.
On Cogley’s book fetish, I would add a comment from a perspective as an attorney. I understand where Cogley is coming from. Like most lawyers, I have a subscription to a legal database where I can search cases and other legal authorities using the Boolean method and take advantage of all sorts of helpful and Innovative means of searching and processing the law. But if I am in a particularly complex area of law, I always pull the old law books off the shelves, or print out the cases so I can spread them out in front of me. No matter how good the method of toggling between Windows, Etc, there’s no better way to compare and distinguish esoteric legal opinions and subtle differences in the way cases are handled by the courts than to quickly be able to look between them and track the language. A single computer screen, no matter how big, cannot duplicate that. I use technology to find the law, create folders and quick reference guides to the body of law that I’m looking into. But when you’re actually digging into the legal opinions and trying to understand what a judge or a legislator was trying to convey as compared to another judge or other legislator, in my opinion there’s no substitute for having hardcopies in front of you.
We’ve seen people in the Star Trek universe can have several padds in froint of them.
Magnus: true. To me it’s a matter of personal preference. And because I’m specifically talking about the legal field, where statutes and cases are relatively brief, in the 3 to 10 page range usually, I think paper and Pages tend to lend themselves well to that kind of research. What I mean is, I may be looking at a case on an area of the law like say, First Amendment Free Speech. If I have two tablets in front of me or three or five and I know that there are certain excerpts of cases that I want to refer back to and compare, I’ve gotta do a lot of touch typing and scrolling on several different tablet screens in order to go back and forth between cases and find different excerpts of the language I’m looking for within the body of those cases. On paper, I can have two or three or ten opinions in front of me and quickly make notes or highlight them and it’s so much easier to go back and compare them and physically move them next to each other or order them in whatever way I wish. For me, it’s just so much faster than trying to do it on a screen or screens. Again, this has very little to do with Star Trek, but since Keith made an issue of Cogley’s book fetish, I thought I’d chime in. Lol cheers
But you are a man raised in the 20th century, who did all his legal studies on paper books. Cogley, presumably, is not. This is not the modern Battlestar Galactica, where they are distrustful of computers; even from TOS, Star Trek has shown that people do their learning and research with computers.
I find this episode memorable for what has to be the most insane costume in TOS, I am speaking of course of Jamie Finney’s ridiculous sailor suit, I mean seriously?
@146/Roxana: As I mentioned before, school-age children wearing sailor suits was a commonplace thing in America for decades (and is still routine for Japanese schoolgirls today, probably because post-WWII Japan adopted a ton of American pop culture and, in some cases, never let go of it). So it wouldn’t have seemed as bizarre to ’60s audiences as it does today. In retrospect, though, it does look very dated.
Any school that considers that an appropriate uniform should be investigated for pupil abuse. But a school uniform would certainly explain why she’s wearing the exact same outfit in all her scenes.
@148/Roxana: It’s only in Asia that sailor suits were adopted as school uniforms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was just considered fashionable for kids to wear sailor suits. Apparently it was a fashion trend started by a famous portrait of Queen Victoria’s young son (who would grow up to be Edward VII).
Speaking as a former teenage girl I can’t see Jamie wearing the exact same outfit several days in a row if it WASN’T some kind of uniform. Maybe she belongs to a gang. Or maybe she is Sailor Starbase 11 – and isn’t that a wild crossover idea!
I attended a private school in my country where girls used to (until very recently) wear sailor outfits until they were 15 or 16. It was founded by US Methodists back in the late 19th century, so it makes sense.
@150/Roxana: Perhaps she isn’t interested in clothing. I wasn’t when I was her age. I would have preferred to wear the same outfit all the time.
@152: I take your point, on the other hand if I was going to wear one outfit several days in a row that would most emphatically NOT be my choice. It’s neither becoming nor comfortable for slopping around.
@153/Roxana: Comfort seems like a pretty objective standard to me, but different generations and cultures can have amazingly different sensibilities about what’s becoming. I think it would be unrealistic for a future century’s fashions not to be totally bizarre and/or hideous to our eyes. I mean, look at how ugly ’70s or ’80s fashions appear to us today, and that’s just a few decades. Our own present-day sense of what’s stylish will no doubt seem just as bizarre or awful to our children, let alone our distant descendants.
On that note, I urge everybody to seek out the hilarious blog “Fashion It So”, where two people analyze the fashion in TNG episodes, because they’re simultaneously 1980s and 2360s fabulous.
@5, How did Cogley find books? Maybe you can order them by replicator? Paper books are apparently a niche market in the 23rd century as we see them from time to time.
And I heartily second MaGnUs’ recommendation of Fashion It So.
@156/Roxana: I don’t think that there are replicators in the 23rd century, but perhaps paper books are produced on demand in some other way.
We now now there are replicators in the 23rd century (see DIS), but they’re more like very advanced 3D printers, perhaps they make things like books and uniforms, but not more complex things.
@157/Jana: They didn’t have 24th-century-style transporter-based replicators, but they did have material fabricators that created uniforms and such. This is implied in “Patterns of Force,” when Kirk ordered a Nazi uniform made for McCoy and the doctor complained about the computer getting the measurements wrong. And the uniform synthesis process was actually seen in the opening scene of Discovery episode 4 (edit: I think this is what MaGnUs was referring to above). So it follows that they had the means to synthesize other items like books.
Yes, that’s what I was talking about. I forgot it had been mentioned in a TOS episode.
@160/MaGnUs: The Making of Star Trek discusses the futuristic mechanism that can chemically break down fabrics to their constituent fibers, clean them, and reconstitute them like new.
Which is actually kind of taking futurism in the wrong direction, since in real life it looks like we’ll have fabrics that repel dirt in the first place and don’t need to be cleaned, let alone regularly destroyed and recreated.
It’s much better than giant tapes for computers.
161, those were the days of paper clothing, after all.
Though actual dirt and grime absorbing materials would still be useful, and that includes human skin and oil that is regularly a problem with laundry today.
It would depend on the handwaving you wanted to do, I guess.
@159/Christopher: I know that they were able to create clothing (which is why I find the scene in Star Trek Beyond idiotic where Kirk opens a wardrobe full of identical uniforms), and also food. Making books is probably more work – all those letters on all those pages – but not inherently more difficult. But a machine that creates a specific kind of article is still very far from a 24th century replicator. I also thought that they didn’t call their machines “replicators”. Did DSC change that?
@164/Jana: I don’t believe I’ve heard the word “replicator” in Discovery yet. As stated above, the casual observer may have assumed the uniform fabricator at the start of episode 4 was a replicator, but it was probably meant to be something else. The FX shot that opened the episode showed it being assembled at a microscopic level, but it wasn’t a transporter effect, so it wasn’t the same technology used by 24th-century replicators (which are basically transporters that materialize stored patterns rather than “live broadcast” patterns).
It has always been shown that everyone has a black t-shirt under the colored uniform sweater, but whenever Kirks is ripped apart, its magically turned into a collar of some sort. And I checked, its the same ripped piece of clothing every time that happens.
@166/Mikael Bergkvist: No, the collar belongs to his uniform sweater. He just doesn’t wear an undershirt. I imagine that the undershirt isn’t an obligatory part of the uniform, and that people wear it when they’re cold.
The black t-shirt under the uniform tunic is a standard part of the uniform, but Kirk doesn’t wear one because he’s a ’60s TV action hero and therefore needs to be bare-chested as often as possible.
@168/Christopher: That’s the Doylist explanation.
As a kid, I used to feel a little ashamed for him because he didn’t have any chest hair.
I mostly enjoy this episose. My biggest gripe is with Shaw’s questions to McCoy. I get that the writers are trying to build up the drama, but it’s pure speculation that Finney truly hated Kirk (at least, as far as we know, and Shaw calls it hypothetical) — certainly too speculative to then deduce that Kirk grew to hate Finney as a result. That Cogley just sits there without objecting or cross examining makes him look incompetent.
Some of the complaints on here fail to appreciate when this show was made, its budget, and the technology available at the time. Such as, why did they use heartbeats instead of heat signatures or somesuch? Because that would have been difficult to make into good television at the time. Yes, these days you’d see some cool computer overlay with colorful figures scattered about, but that simply wasn’t going to happen back then.
I get that we’re talking about whether this holds up for today’s audiences, but at some point you have to accept that times have changed and not hold that against the story. I mean, The War of the Worlds doesn’t fail to hold up just because we know there is no life on Mars.
The scene in the bar with the two guys caught my attention (thank you for posting a picture)… their attitude reflects the gossip goin’ round “did you hear, Kirk killed Finney?” The one guy speaks, the other backs him up. What’s the psychology of these people, so quick to blame? The scene captures a truth about groupthink and human nature.
The scene in the starbase cantina has bothered me for years. It’s so ridiculous how Kirk’s old classmates treat him. Sure Kirk does come off as arrogant sometimes (with reason), but just writing him off like that? It was a pretty silly scene.
As for the Cogley character, Elisha Cook Jr. is thoroughly enjoyable in the role. I was surprised to learn that he had a great deal of difficulty remembering his lines (perhaps because of their inane content), but regardless, he delivered them elegantly and with conviction in the final product. As for the sacred books argument, I appreciated the attempt at romanticizing books even if it was nonsense.
I have my own take on the microphone, err, I mean the “white sound device”. Sure they could have done it all remotely like the crewmember in the transporter room, but perhaps it was simply easier to use the portable version on the bridge considering everone else was congregated there anyway… or something. Just a thought 🤷🏻♂️
@172/Thierafhal: Yes, these were Kirk’s old classmates, but that means they were also Ben Finney’s students at the Academy. They have a personal connection to the man Kirk was accused of killing, as well as to Kirk himself. So there’s nothing at all silly about it.
Also, implicitly, Kirk is very young for a starship captain — only 33 at this point. Per The Making of Star Trek, he was the youngest person ever to become captain of a Starfleet capital ship. And now he’s been accused of getting a crew member killed in a way that could easily be chalked up to inexperience or impulsiveness. It’s the sort of thing that would reinforce any doubts that might have already existed about Kirk’s youth and qualifications for his post.
Rewatching this one. It occurs to me that increasing the gain of the audio sensors by “one to the fourth power” would be pretty unimpressive, since that is also one. Far from the worst science howler that goes by on a regular basis, but it stands out for how easily it could have been fixed …
S
I’m watching some TOS for the first time in a long time. I started questioning this one within five minutes of it’s start. If the Enterprise was under Red Alert, everyone would know and it probably would have happened long before that pod had to be jettisoned. The entire bridge crew would have been a witness to the existence of the Red Alert and to whatever conversation Kirk had with Finney. Spock and others would have known when the order was given. The whole premise is contrived and that really specific control panel on the Captain’s chair was worthy of Looney Tunes.
I’m also pretty sure Areel broke some ethics rules at least by having that bar conversation with Kirk before telling him she was the prosecutor.
Cogley’s rant about hardcopy books is pretty ridiculous by today’s standards but I think it was implied that the computers did not contain the full text of the originals. He called it a synthesis and a homogenization. This was an anticipation by the writers of what computers would do with the material a couple centuries later.
Given this, when Kirk was being interviewed by Stone, I found it odd that the writers chose to have the computer ask for a clarification of what ship Finney was reprimanded on because of Kirk’s report. That was obviously done for the viewers but it could have been done more simply by Stone asking it. (i.e. “That was on the Republic, wasn’t it?”)
Dramatic music when Kirk pleads non guilty. Pffft, what did we expect him to say??
I’m glad the word “Vulcanian” was changed.
These court procedures really are awful. Areel engages in gross speculation about Kirk reciprocally hating Finney and Cogley doesn’t even object. Cogley asks Kirk to talk about the Red Alert and Kirk delivers something that sounds like closing arguments.
I think I saw how ridiculous that white noise device was even when I was a devoted fan, especially after Spock is able to eliminate the transporter guy’s heartbeat with a press of a switch.
Kirk fixes the “considerable damage” Finney caused by yanking some wires. OK.
Too much other silliness to mention in what could have been a great episode.
@173/CLB
Hmm, I still remain a little unconvinced. For a fresh viewer who has not read The Making of Star Trek, they wouldn’t know from watching this episode, or others, that Kirk was the youngest captain in Starfleet. With that in mind, inexperience is not something a fresh viewer would necessarily think of as potential evidence against him. Impulsiveness, sure, that can be deduced from previous episodes. However, Kirk adamantly denies lying about the incident and if due process has to consider a man innocent until proven guilty, I don’t see why that shouldn’t be expected from one’s colleagues.
I understand there is a personal stake involved between everyone and I can see Kirk’s classmates feeling angry about Finney’s death. I don’t think that justifies treating Kirk with contempt, though. Don’t misunderstand me, I can totally see your point of view that emotionally, his classmates are probably having any potential doubts of Kirk’s character reaffirmed by the accusations leveled against him.
Perhaps I should have considered my words better. I initially used the words ‘ridiculous’ and ‘silly’ for the scene in the starbase cantina and I see how that might have been an overreaction. However, I still feel that Kirk’s ex-classmates were way too harsh in their interaction with him.
@176/Thierafhal: “if due process has to consider a man innocent until proven guilty, I don’t see why that shouldn’t be expected from one’s colleagues.”
The reason we need laws and rules about due process is that people are not naturally that rational. It’s sadly all too common for people to mistake accusation for fact. Just look at the Salem witch trials.
And when people are angry, say, about the loss of a friend and colleague, the impulse is to look for someone to blame. So a lot of people latch onto the first available suspect and presume guilt. It’s hardly an invention of this episode. You see it all the time in fiction, and unfortunately in real life.
Re: Jame’s outfit and futuristic clothing in general being “hideous,” “silly,” or whatever, everyone should keep in mind that if you polled everyone who has ever lived on earth (so across all continents and all times) the vast majority would think that whatever you are wearing right now (and by you I mean any particular individual alive at this moment) is either ridiculous, silly, obscene, impractical or inappropriate.
We often think the same thing of people from the past and across the earth. Its normal. Fashion changes for whole hosts of reasons. I rarely have an issue with any of the costumes we see unless they are so impractical to the specific activity being portrayed; and even then I tend to err towards acceptance.
Popping in to object to one aspect of KRAD’s criticism of Cogley above, namely his insistence that Kirk be allowed to “face his accuser” and the bit about machines versus men.
My father is a law professor and I’m a historian and also have studied computer science, and Cogley’s basic approach and objection is, I would argue, perfectly sound. New technologies–especially forensic technologies–have been frequently tied to injustices in criminal law, for one very simple reason: the general public (including juries and judges) almost always treats them as more infallible than they actually are and almost never has the expertise to interpret and critique the evidence they provide properly. This is why law has historically established strong boundaries around what types of technological evidence can be admitted in court and under what circumstances. If you read any books on the US justice system and the problem of false conviction (esp. of African-Americans), abuse of forensic technology is ubiquitously associated with such cases.
In reading through these reviews in chronological order, I was struck (and somewhat amused) to see people a number of years ago bringing up facial recognition technology as an infallible tool that could have been used to detect Kodos, etc. In fact, as news reports have finally gotten around to acknowledging, the use of facial recognition software to identify criminals (esp. on the basis of random pictures or grainy security-cam footage) is extraordinarily problematic and has led to numerous documented cases of false arrests, etc.
Having attempted to build such algorithims myself, I can tell you this is pretty much baked into the concept: you can only work with the pixels you have, and the task of teaching a computer to associate and interpret these pixels is at best a struggle to understand and approximate the incredibly sensitive innate human ability to identify and read people’s faces. Even this human ability, though, is far from impossible to fool or deceive, as we’ve always known and allowed for in dealing with human witnesses!
When dealing with technology, however, we rarely acknowledge the built-in limitations, deficiencies, or failure rates, or build in the appropriate safeguards. Or rather, engineers do, but not lawyers.
Technology is a tool, but it’s a tool that is frequently deceptive if you don’t understand what it’s doing. Experts (except where they’re incompetent or–very commonly–deeply biased or self-interested) are usually in a position to understand the problems and limitations of a given technology and predict where it’s likely to fail. Laymen rarely are.
To circle back around to Samuel Cogley, for all his eye-catching rhetoric, he in fact does precisely what any good lawyer would do in trying to counter “technological” evidence against his client: he calls a human (Vulcan) expert witness to the stand who can tell him how that technology can fail or be abused and provide evidence that in this case it did so. The pervasive issue with many court cases in America is that defense attorneys very often don’t perform this basic due diligence for their clients and passively accede to the “expert” witnesses and alleged forensic evidence presented by the prosecution. That Cogley does so is a strong mark in his favor.
Thanks to KRAD for all his rewatches–I’ve enjoyed them very much.
“Stone is also the highest ranking African-American we’ll see in Starfleet in the series…”
Why are we to assume Commodore Stone is an American? Does the USA even exist in TOS’ time? This is a rather America-centric statement.
@180/Robert: Stone’s accent certainly sounds American, although it could be Canadian. Percy Rodriguez, like William Shatner, hailed from Montreal, Canada.
And of course the USA exists. Kirk is from Iowa, McCoy is from Georgia.
@181/Christopher—Not wishing to wander too far off topic, but Georgia has been part of two other nation states, so that’s no guarantee. ;)
But I believe we do see a fifty-two star flag in TNG? So the US lasted at least that long. My real point, of course, is that krad possibly conflated the actor with the character—which is even more ironic since you pointed out the actor is Canadian.
I always liked this episode just because it actually does deconstruct the “Redshirt” concept. The death of anyone under his command is something that results in Kirk being raked over the coals and a serious investigation of the subject. The fact Kirk isn’t guilty of negligence doesn’t in any way shape or form absolve him of serious investigation.
What I liked about this episode was that we got to learn something about Kirk’s back-story and we saw what a Starbase was like. Beyond that, it made little sense. My main gripe was – what was Finney’s ultimate goal? Okay, he was angry over his stalled career and he resented Kirk’s rapid ascent to power – so he sabotaged the ship to destroy Kirk’s career. Fine. But then what? Was he going to hide in the bowels of a ship trapped in orbit forever? Even if he escaped down to the planet, it would be known the sabotaged the ship and would be punished. And what about his daughter Jamie? Was he going to just abandon her? In addition, Sam Cogley’s alleged love of books and hatred of computers was undermined when he seemed to think Kirk was guilty after all because of the video evidence (“computers don’t lie”). And having an ex-girlfriend prosecute Kirk in this case? Legally unethical and Areel’s presence felt very tacked on in order to provide some distracting “eye candy.”
@184/gooch7: “And having an ex-girlfriend prosecute Kirk in this case? Legally unethical…”
In a civilian court, yes, but not in a military one. See my remarks on that matter in comment #4 above.
@184: Sometimes people hell-bent on revenge don’t really things through to their logical conclusion. I see it all the time in real life: someone murders someone(s) they want to get even with and then attempt to escape rather feebly and get caught, are forced to kill themselves rather than be caught, or go out in a hail of bullets. Finney is no different.
In the David Tilotta/ Curt McAloney Book ‘Lost Scenes’ (2018) apparently there was more of Cogley mounting a defenseof Kirk, but alas, it ended up on the cutting room floor. See pages 156-157.
Pretty bad episode.
I was struck by the casual sexism of McCoy’s implication that no doctor could look like Shaw. But by the standards of this series so far, I guess it hardly rates.
Of all the silliness involved in the white noise eliminator scene what stood out to me was that the computer would boost the sound by “1 to the 4th power,” which is just an extra long way of saying “1.” I know some defend all the effort that Roddenberry supposedly went through to make the science on Star Trek make some sense, but that must have happened later. This is a show about a starship that doesn’t begin to understand how orbits work, and here we see a line of dialogue that misunderstands middle school math.
One of the advantages of watching this episode in 2022 is that Kirk calling Shaw a “very good lawyer” after their kiss gave me a good chuckle now that that exact line has become something of a meme for reasons unrelated to Star Trek.
I saw some discussion about the footage of Kirk pressing the jettison pod button. That footage wouldn’t require that much to produce. It wouldn’t have to be anything as complicated as fully rendered CGI. Kirk did actually press the button at some point, so that footage already exists; it would simply have to be altered to remove the flashing red alert signal.
@188/Michael: “I know some defend all the effort that Roddenberry supposedly went through to make the science on Star Trek make some sense, but that must have happened later.”
No, it was there from the start. You have to keep in mind that the rest of science fiction TV at the time was far, far dumber, so Trek was ahead of the curve simply for knowing what the word “galaxy” meant and that you couldn’t achieve interstellar travel with rockets alone. Its science was far from perfect, but the fact that it tried at all put it far above almost everything else in 1960-80s SFTV.
As for “one to the fourth power,” I suspect it was scripted as 10 to the 4th and some typist transcribing the script left out the zero, and that nobody caught it amidst all the other thousands of things the makers of a TV episode have to keep track of. The problem with dumb little errors like that is that you can miss them over and over again because there’s so much else you’re trying to fix. I’ve had typos survive in novel manuscripts through multiple years of rewrites and revisions and through multiple passes by professional editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders. Any writer has.
As for the orbit thing, there are many cases in fiction where your science advisors tell you something is wrong, but you go with it anyway for the sake of drama or suspense. TOS’s makers recognized that “We’ve lost power! We’re falling out of orbit!” creates a greater sense of urgency and danger than “We’ve lost power! We’ll remain in a stable orbit indefinitely!” As suggested in comment #35, we can just assume the ship is in a powered, low stationary orbit rather than a stable natural orbit. In that case, losing power would, in fact, cause the ship to fall out of orbit.
I have to agree with that. In my third book I managed to misspell “liaison” three times within two paragraphs. Three of my proof readers missed it, and so did I until the final pass; and I had been through it at least five times. It happens. I thing Christopher has it right and the original script was for ten to the fourth power and the one was only a typo no one caught. It is amusing, though.
On a similar note, there’s an infamous goof in one of DC’s TOS comics (part of the “Mirror Universe Saga” in Volume 1) where a starship captain is supposed to be ordering his ship to reverse course, but instead he orders the helmsman to turn the ship 360 degrees.
The captain orders the ship to spin like a top? 😄 Cool but pointless.
what was annoying is that the light they put their hand on was a lie detector so is kirk immune to the machine also the zoomed in view of the video they should have demanded the wide shot and whole incident without edits be put in evidence and the red lights would have shown on the bridge how the heck do you just allow edited zoomed in clips
as to people recusing themselves they gave kirk the option to protest