Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 24 (The Ultimate Computer)

People are prone to mistakes.  Computers, we’re told, aren’t.  People might push the wrong button, but computers will execute instructions perfectly.  That’s where M-5 comes in.  It’s the latest creation of Dr. Richard Daystrom, a genius in artificial intelligence.  The M-5 computer can operate an entire starship with minimal crew, allowing those that would be needed to do less-dangerous work.

Captain Kirk doesn’t like it.  Dr. McCoy doesn’t like it.  Spock at least defends the computer, but is mostly interested in seeing how it performs.  At first, it performs well.  The initial test maneuver seems to go well enough.  It becomes increasingly clear, though, that the machine is a threat.  It even kills an ensign who was ordered to shut it off.  That doesn’t look good for the M-5.

To make matters worse, the Enterprise is set to go up against four other ships in what’s supposed to be a war game.  Those on the other ships think there will be simulated fire, but the M-5 destroys an automated ship that it wasn’t supposed to.  There’s no way to warn those on the other ships, making it look like Kirk is acting out because he might be out of a job.

In the end, M-5 stands down and the day is saved.  Thousands of Starfleet officers won’t be out of a job just yet.  However, one does wonder to what end automation is good for.  Sure, you can send probes and whatnot to chart planets.  However, at some point, you’d think someone would have to beam down to a planet. 

There are some things you can’t automate.  First contact is made by people.  It also doesn’t do a lot of good to discover new planets just to know about them.  Find an interesting planet and someone’s going to want to see it.

Also, as Daystrom found out the hard way, a computer is only as good as its programming.  There still needs to be someone calling the shots.  Machines don’t have the compassion or wisdom of a person.

It does seem odd that they’d use the flagship.  I probably would have used a smaller ship to test and maybe have the Enterprise come to the rescue.  One thing about Star Trek is that machines always fail spectacularly.  (Yes, it makes for good drama, but it does wear thin at times.)

There are those that will resist progress.  Progress doesn’t always mean better, though.  As Spock points out, computers are merely more efficient.  This doesn’t mean that they’re desirable or better.  It’s worth noting that neither Daystrom nor M-5 are villains.  They weren’t acting out of malice.  However, it was right to question them in this context.  Automation isn’t always the way to go.

 

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Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 23 (The Omega Glory)

Looking back on the original Star Trek, it’s amazing how many episodes featured races that were portrayed as being rather simple.  On occasion, as with The Omega Glory, the races were called savages outright.  However, it was odd to find a civilization at least on par with 20^th-century humans.

In the case of The Omega Glory, The Enterprise is looking for another Federation ship, the Exeter, commanded by Captain Ron Tracey.  They find the ship in orbit of Omega IV only to discover the crew turned to dust.  When Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the obligatory Red Shirt beam down to the planet, they find Captain Tracey, in uniform, interacting with the local population.

There are two warring groups on the planet:  The Yangs and the Kohms.  (The Yangs look European while the Kohms appear more Asian.)  Kirk finds that Tracey has been helping the Kohms, in direct violation of the Prime Directive.  Why?  They can live for more than a thousand years.  Tracey has found the Fountain of Youth.  As long as the landing party stays on the planet, they’re safe.  If they leave, they’ll turn to dust like the Exeter’s crew.

Kirk agrees to stay, if only to find a cure.  It soon becomes clear that something is up.  The Kohms and the Yangs are actually not all that different from the humans of Earth.  In fact, they have a constitution.  Or, should I say, The United States Constitution.  (As much as I hate to give away the big reveal, I do want to mention this later.)

Omega IV saw a nasty war which caused the aforementioned disease.  This apparently has little to do with anything.  Their longevity and immunity to the disease are little more than how their race developed.  Tracey is denied his magic youth serum and the Omegans are given a new understanding of how freedom works.

This brings me to The Constitution.  I find it incredibly odd that a planet would develop, word for word, a document that we also developed.  Star Trek was good at using allegory, even if it was thinly veiled.  However, this comes off as heavy-handed lecturing.  We even get a speech at the end about how freedom is meaningless unless everyone has it.

It’s a shame because it’s a message that is still relevant today.  Had it been done better, maybe with a reworded document, it could have been a decent episode.  I remember first watching the episode and wondering if Omega IV didn’t have founding fathers, exactly like ours, working out the document.  It would imply that both their world and ours had very similar histories.

I think with a little more thought and nuance, this could have even been a great episode.  There are too many negatives for me to get over, such as the delineation between races.  The episode is a little too blunt to be effective.  I’m used to a more subtle approach with my stories.

 

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Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 20 (Return to Tomorrow)

There were a few Star Trek episodes where I wondered about the implications.  It’s easy enough to write a scenario into a script, but it’s another thing to have actually gone through it or to have to carry it out. As they say, it looks good on paper.  One has to wonder what it actually means to have been implemented.

The Enterprise comes across a planet that’s lifeless and barren.  Except that the crew is greeted by the voice of Sargon, who invites them to a subterranean chamber where he and two others are stored in several orbs.  (The other two are his wife, Thalassa, and his former rival, Henoch.)  The three of them want to use the bodies of Kirk, Spock and a third crewmember to build permanent android bodies for them to live in.

Yes, it’s a risk.  In fact, there’s no good reason why the ship’s top two officers have to volunteer.  There are plenty of security officers onboard.  But, Kirk eventually agrees to let the survivors build their androids.  The androids could last for thousands of years, but will be limited in sensation.  This leads to Henoch wanting to keep Spock’s body.  In the end, the survivors realize that their time has passed.  They agree to depart their respective bodies in peace.

It’s hard to imagine that their consciousnesses were stored in orbs for however many centuries.  It must have been a boring existence.  I can hardly take being trapped indoors for 18 months with COVID.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to be contained in such a small space.

You’d think that they would have just gone ahead and built the android bodies.  True, that would have required resources.  The android bodies would require power and they could have been trapped underground anyway.  But, you’d think they’d maybe build a few anyway just to have them ready when a ship came along.

For that matter, it’s stated that their race seeded several other planets elsewhere.  This would mean that they had their own ships, or at least the capability of building them.  Why not build a ship and leave the planet themselves?  Even if they didn’t have warning that their planet would die, they could build enough android bodies to build a ship.  (There were originally more survivors.  Only three orbs made it to the episode’s present day.)

Ultimately, it’s a shame for the race to die out like that.  To spend all those countless years underground in orbs only to give up.  The tantalizing thing is that this is the first real mention of a race that seeded the galaxy.  There were other episodes that alluded to this, although there’s no mention if this is the same race that was seen in The Chase.  Just to have the three survivors pass on some information would have been nice.

I don’t really dwell on this episode, but I often wonder why more wasn’t done to preserve the last of that race.  I also wonder how the three survivors survived for so long and what actually happened to the others.  It would have been nice to know.

 

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Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 14 (Wolf in the Fold)

There were times that Star Trek could be progressive.  It dealt with issues such as race and war.  It even had a woman of color as a bridge officer.  Unfortunately, she never got to command a ship during the show’s three-year run.  There were times that the show didn’t go as far as it could have.

Then, there were times that they dropped the ball entirely.  I understand that the times were different, but some things make me tilt my head and ask what I just watched.

Kirk, McCoy and Scotty seem to be having a good time on shore leave.  They’re watching women do some sort of belly dance.  Scotty leaves with Kara, one of the dancers.  While Kirk and McCoy are walking around the town, they hear a scream.  Scotty is found standing over hear dead body, weapon in hand.

We’ve all seen enough Matlock and Murder She Wrote to know Scotty didn’t do it.  The authorities detain him anyway.  So, it’s up to Kirk and McCoy to prove him innocent, which is no easy task.  They even have someone beam down to run a test on Scotty.  Of course, Scotty is sent to a room with her where she can mysteriously wind up dead.

So, another young lady is brought in to interrogate Scotty.  You might think that she would wind up sequestered in a room with Scotty and wind up dead.  You’d be wrong.  This time, the lights go out, but there are other people in the room when she dies.

This is where it goes off the rails.  It wasn’t Scotty, after all.  It was some sort of malevolent force that was once known on Earth as Jack the Ripper.  This force has been inhabiting men for the purpose of killing women.  And all this time Kirk and McCoy thought Scotty had a problem with women.

I wish I was kidding on that one.  I’m not.  Apparently, a female engineer gave Scotty a bump on the head.  Now, he’s a full-blown misogynist.  It kind of makes you wonder what passed for progress back then.

While we’re on the subject, why leave Scotty alone with women?  If they’ve noticed the pattern, wouldn’t it make sense to assign a security guard to Scotty?  Even if he didn’t do it, it’s an awful coincidence.  (I know that it would ruin the surprise to have a security guard report back, but given the show’s track record with security officers, they have an easy out.)

On top of all this, the episode ends with the murder of an individual.  To get rid of the entity, they beam the person, with the entity inside, out into space.  No mention is made of the fact that they had to kill an innocent person.  There’s no debate or remorse or anything.  They just do it.

It’s really hard to think of this as a good episode.  It’s not particularly scary or tense by today’s standards.  I think that it would have been a totally different episode had it been written for one of the modern series.  Come to think of it, I don’t think any of the spin-offs ever reused the plot.  This is saying something, given that there were quite a number of recycled plots.  If you’re looking to watch all of the Star Trek episodes, this is one you’re just going to have to sit through.

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Star Trek: Short Treks -- Season 2 Episode 4 (Ephraim and Dot)

Star Trek has gone the animation route before.  I watched a few of the episodes and didn’t care much for it, mostly because of the bad animation.  That’s why I was a little nervous with Short Trek’s two animated series.  I’m glad to see that each episode has some decent animation.

With Ephraim and Dot, we have two main characters.  Ephraim is a space tardigrade looking for a place to lay her eggs.  She finds and selects the USS Enterprise.  Dot is an automated cleaning bot on the Enterprise who doesn’t take kindly to Ephraim’s presence.  The two engage in a sort of cat-and-mouse game where Ephraim enters the ship and Dot chases her off.

Despite the nine-minute run time, it would appear to take place over several years.  It’s a little confusing, since it’s one continuous shot.  For context, we see scenes from Star Trek starting with Space Seen and going all the way to the destruction of the Enterprise in the movies.

There’s no dialogue except from some lifted from the various episodes.  Dot and Ephraim don’t communicate with each other.  Ephraim just protects her eggs and Dot does nothing except protect the ship.  There’s an antagonistic theme common to a lot of old-school cartoons.

Stylistically, it almost looks like something we might get before a Pixar film.  I almost wonder if, like The Trouble with Edward, this wasn’t meant to be a little silly.  It’s kind of difficult to take literally.

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Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 12 (The Deadly Years)

Some of the episodes from the original Star Trek were memorable.  A few even hit it out of the park.  They didn’t have a huge budget, but the writing and acting were pretty decent.  There was enough of a fan base to spawn a sizeable franchise.  Unfortunately, most of the episodes weren’t that great.  Those like The Deadly Years were actually pretty thin.

A landing party beams down to a colony site only to find everyone dead of old age.  This includes people who were in their twenties.  Checkov is the one who initially makes the horrifying discovery.  When they beam back up, everyone in the landing party starts to age rapidly…except Checkov.

It’s not passed on to other crew members, which is good.  The bad news is that those affected don’t have long to live.  If McCoy, in his elderly state, can’t find a cure, that’s it.

To make matters worse, the ship is transporting Commodore Stocker to his new post.  Stocker is one in a long line of powerful people who are ust itching to get somewhere.  Stocker uses Kirk’s condition to commandeer the vessel and take it through The Neutral Zone.

When the Romulans catch them, they take this as an act of war and attack the Enterprise.  It’s fortunate that McCoy is able to save the day and allow Kirk to return to work immediately.

I could see this being a way of showcasing the hardships that elderly people have.  Instead, it’s almost a way of poking fun of those crotchety geezers.  (Kirk is the only one to have forgetfulness, for instance.)  I’m surprised that they didn’t have some kids on the bridge so that someone could yell, “Get off my lawn!”

Also, I’ve noticed that the names of planets seem to be a Greek letter, some word from Latin and a number.  Here, it’s Gamma Hydra IV.  I could just see some chart in the writers’ room for generating names.  (Take the first letter of your pet’s name and use the corresponding Greek letter…)

The episode comes off as unnecessarily campy.  I wonder if there was some rush to get an episode produced.  It looks like the kind of script that either wasn’t written well enough or went through way too many rewrites.  I don’t know that there would be an ideal way to handle old age except maybe to tone it down a little.

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Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 11 (Friday's Child)

I always wonder if things really were simpler back in the 1960s.  If television is to be believed, men worked outside the house and women took care of the house and children.  Children were usually happy and obeyed their parents.  (I suppose that by this same reasoning, people might look back on today’s media and assume the opposite is true.)

Star Trek, on occasion, also tended to present things simply.  The United Federation of Planets represented the good guys.  The Klingon Empire represented the bad guys.  And by good guys and bad guys, I mean Americans and Soviets.  Thus, when Captain Kirk shows up on Capella IV, it’s troubling to find Kras, a representative of the Klingons also vying for the planet’s resources.

The Capellans are a warrior race.  This would seem to give the Klingons an advantage, as they would seem to have similar values.  When Kirk offers medicine, it’s of little value.  (Those that lose in battle are usually left to die.)  What’s a Starfleet Captain to do?  I will say that it does require a rather interesting solution wherein McCoy has to gain the trust of the mother of the future leader of the Capellans.

It’s been pointed out that races on Star Trek tend to be a little monolithic.  It’s something I’ve noticed myself.  It’s not like there’s one sect of Capellans that value aggression.  It would seem that they all do.  There’s not a scientific class of Klingons.  All Klingons are conquerors.  It would seem that only the Federation has diversity.  I’m not sure if this is a product of the era or if the episodes usually tried to focus on the message.

My only real complaint about the episode is the side plot of the Enterprise being called away by a ship in distress.  It seemed like it was a way to fill time.  The landing party didn’t seem to be in any real danger, not that a main character would have been killed off anyway.  The distress call was a decoy, but it wasn’t clear to what end.  I’m sure there’s an explanation for it.

I can see why this was one of the episodes I didn’t recall.  You have a basic culture of the week with a stereotypical enemy and the good guys win.  In the end, the Capellans grant the mining rights to the Federation.  It would appear that the only one unhappy would be Kras.  Of course, that’s to be expected.  I don’t recall the good guys losing too many times in The Original Series.

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