Star Trek -- Season 2 Episode 2 (Who Mourns for Adonais?)

Space is vastly empty.  Consider that it takes light four years to get to from our star to the next closest one and there’s nothing in between.  It seems odd that a spaceship would be able to find interesting planets every week.  Granted, there are a lot of stars out there, but there’s no promise that any of them would have inhabited planets.  They could all be barren wastelands.  Not only that, but the Enterprise has a propensity for finding god-like creatures.

In this case, it would appear that they’ve actually found the Greek god Apollo.  He reaches out with a hand-like projection and holds the ship in place, demanding that the bridge crew come down to the planet.  Once there, the landing party is informed that they will stay and worship Apollo as humans once did thousands of years prior.  Likewise, the humans will tend sheep and do other things humans have long since given up.

It would seem that the Enterprise is trapped, but Apollo has some sort of assistance.  He also conveniently gets tired very easily.  This, of course, presents an opportunity.  Once the details are worked out, it’s just a matter of removing that assistance and the crew is off to the next planet.

This would make for a better episode if it didn’t seem so similar to The Squire of Gothos.  You have what appears to be an all-powerful being intent on keeping the Enterprise crew captive for its own ends.  It needs assistance which, once destroyed, incapacitates the being and allows the crew to leave.

What makes this different is the ancient-astronaut theory, in which several aliens came to Earth and set themselves up as deities.  (A few even had kids with the locals.)  It’s not clear why Apollo has a thing for humans or what he did for 5,000 years.  He states that worshipers give him some sort of power, but it’s not clear if other races would have the same effect.  Even if Apollo headed straight back to his home planet, he and the others of his kind had to explore the galaxy to find Earth.  They might have found another planet that would have been close enough.

The episode is just a little too uninspired for me.  It might have been more interesting to explore what Greek gods had done on Earth.  (I’m sure Apollo would have a few tales to tell.)  Instead, Apollo is intent on regaining his former glory.  All of the other members of the Greek pantheon knew the game was up and moved on.  It basically takes the Enterprise destroying his source of power for Apollo to take the hint.

I definitely think there was a lot of wasted potential here.  I get that it was a product of a different era.  The network may have assumed that the audience wanted more of an action show.  The episode might have been able to do more with the philosophical element had it not been for this.  The show even seems to have a 60s-era attitude towards women, even.  Take, for instance, that Scotty is interested in a female lieutenant.  It’s assumed that if she marries someone, she’ll leave the service.  I’m assuming that this attitude was adjusted by the time The Next Generation came around, as Starfleet had no problem with married couples serving on different ships.   You‘d think that we would have moved on in the next 300 years.

IMDb page

Prometheus (2012)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

WARNING:  I’m going to give away major details of the movie.  I’m not saying that it will completely ruin the experience, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to consider holding off on this review.  I recognize that not everyone likes spoilers.


It’s hard to expand on a movie if you weren’t originally planning on it.  Some movie series, like Lord of the Rings, were planned in advance.  In other cases, subsequent movies come across as a blatant attempt to cash in on the fame of the first movie.  When I saw the coming attractions for Prometheus, it seemed interesting.  A little research revealed that it was supposed to be a prequel to the Alien movies.  I had never been a big fan of the Alien movies.  I knew the basic concept, but I don’t usually watch action movies.  Still, Prometheus looked interesting.

The movie begins with an alien standing on Earth about to drink a black liquid.  Once he does, his body disintegrates and his remains fall into a stream.  The water carries his cells around the area, creating the seeds of life for our planet.  (At least, this is what I assume is going on.)

Countless years later, some archaeologists (Elisabeth Shaw and Charlie Halloway) find the same pattern of circles drawn by civilizations all over the world.  They’re not only separated by distance, but by time as well.  There’s no way that they could have all had contact with each other.  So what does it mean?  It’s believed that it’s an invitation to meet what one of the archaeologists calls the Engineers, who may be responsible for designing us.

So, the Weyland Corporation builds a trillion-dollar ship to visit a planet that is most likely one of the circles in the formation.  Janek is the captain of the ship, but Weyland sends along Meredith Vickers to keep their investment safe.  There’s also David, the android.  He’s there to make sure everything’s running smoothly while the crew is in hibernation as well as potentially translate in case they meet the Engineers.

After a two-year journey, the ship makes it to the planet.  (Well, technically a moon, if I recall.)  The atmosphere is toxic to humans, but they find a series of caves that has a suitable atmosphere.  They can take off their masks and really look around.  What they find is a huge decapitated alien.  Aside from the alien being something like nine feet tall, it looks fairly human.  Upon further examination, it’s discovered that their DNA is an exact match for humans.

The crew realizes that this is most likely an outpost.  The Engineers were probably doing some sort of weapons research and didn’t want to risk contaminating their home world.  It’s likely that an experiment went horribly wrong, killing everyone.  (Well, almost everyone.)  It’s probably best to get the heck out, especially considering that David has deliberately poisoned Charlie and that there are little worm-like creatures that can do some serious damage.

But, no.  Turns out that their mission is to meet the Engineers in hopes of finding a cure for old age.  David wants to push on.  He eventually finds a ship with an Engineer in suspended animation.  If you’re thinking that waking him is a bad idea, you’re right.  There’s a hologram that shows the vastness of space.  It’s implied that the Engineers seeded tons of planets, including ours.  For some reason, our planet was slated for annihilation.  Why they held off, I don’t know, but I think this guy was supposed to be part of the crew that was to carry out the mission.

Long story short, there’s an epic battle and a lot of people bite the dust.  (In at least one case, literally.)  Not everyone, though, so there is a strong possibility of a sequel.  I’m not sure that this would be a good idea.  If there is a sequel released, I’ll probably go just to see what happens.  However, I think that with some movies, you may be better off not knowing what happens next.

If you’ve looked around the Internet, you may know that there are a few unanswered questions.  The first thing that I wondered about was the opening sequence.  We’re left to assume that the Engineer’s DNA seeded the planet.  If this is the case, how is it that humans have an exact DNA match?  Did the Engineer’s DNA really disintegrate and reform something that resulted in an exact match, even though they look a lot different from us?  What are the odds that millions of years of evolution would produce something in any way similar to them?

Another thing that got me wondering is why they would send us to an outpost.  My first thought was that they may not have wanted to reveal the location of their home planet.  It’s possible that they could have sent us to a system that they could monitor.  If we ever did make it to the planet, they could then judge us.  Then again, how did we even know about the system in the first place?  I realized that it was possible that we were visited and we somehow figured out that it was an outpost with weapons of mass destruction.  If the aliens really did want us dead, we could use these weapons against them.

Why want us dead?  Why not?  We always seem to assume that aliens will be nice to us.  I remember a Twilight Zone episode where aliens land and say that they’re disappointed in is.  The various nations make peace with each other.  When the alien emissary comes back to see how we’ve done, he reveals that his civilization made our race to breed warriors.  We went in the wrong direction and were punished.  It’s possible that this is the case here.  Maybe we weren’t making progress quickly enough.  Maybe it wasn’t their kind of progress.  If they did intervene in our development, maybe we were allowed a reprieve.

That brings me to another question.  Why hold off the plan to wipe out humans?  Most likely, the Engineers realized that their plan was overkill and had no way to tone it down.  We see what the Aliens did in other movies.   I’m thinking that the one Engineer put himself in suspended animation because his fellow Engineers didn’t feel safe letting him off the planet just yet.  They’d leave him there either to warn others or until it was safe to let him leave.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out how David was able to figure out the Engineers’ language.  This has always been a pet peeve of mine.  David spent the two-year journey awake and “deconstructing” Earth’s languages.  I can understand maybe figuring out the text, or at least being able to make a good guess.  However, how was he so confident that he’d be understood when speaking?  Granted, the Engineer didn’t have a good reaction, but I’ve seen this in other movies and TV series.  I’ve never understood how it’s possible to speak a language you’ve never heard spoken.

Another thing that I often wonder about is why the aliens look the same as they did all those millions of years ago.  In however long a span of time, we went from DNA fragments to our current form.  How is it that their biological form stayed the same?  How did their language stay the same?

I’m not saying that this is a bad movie.  I’m just saying that I have a few issues with it.  Not having seen the other Alien movies, I’m not sure how many references I missed.  It looks to me like Prometheus could have been developed independently only to have the Alien references put in either to complete it or increase its odds of being produced.  You could easily have removed the Alien references and had a complete movie.

I don’t regret having rented this movie.  As I said, I may look into the sequel if they ever get around to making one.  However, I’ll be going in with no expectations. 

IMDb page

Coincidence? I think so. (Chariots of the Gods movie review)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

One thing I remember fondly of high school was those movies you’d watch in science or maybe history class.  The narration was jerky and the monologue was usually simple.  Picture quality was usually very low to begin with and deteriorated from constant use.  This was the first thing I thought of when I started watching Chariots of the Gods.  In fact, it didn’t look like they were playing it full screen.  The ‘documentary’ was made in the 1970s and shows its age.

This ‘documentary’ takes on the ancient astronaut theory.  For those that don’t watch the History Channel, this is the belief that we’ve been visited and even guided by aliens in our distant past.  The movie shows several things, like the pyramids and monoliths, that ancient humans couldn’t possibly have built.  (There are 2,000 ton pieces of granite with no quarry nearby, for example.)  There are also cave paintings that look vaguely like some guy with a round head.  Since the drawings look so much like a modern astronaut, this has to be proof of ancient visitors.

You may have noticed that I put documentary in single quotes when referring to this movie.  That’s because the movie is very light on the evidence.  It’s almost like an overview of The History Channel’s Ancient Mysteries.  Instead of having people on to explain what a particular item might be, it’s more like, “Look at the pyramids.  How did they build those?”  Then it’s on to the next thing.  (“Don’t these statues look like astronauts?)  It’s basically a world tour of interesting things that are supposed to show proof of ancient visitors.

Now, I’ll admit that the Nazca Lines, which are covered in this movie, are a little odd.  Why would a culture go through so much effort for that?  I’m just not making the connection on most of the other stuff.  We probably read a lot of stuff into things, like the drawings.  If you draw something with fingers and feet and a head, it’s going to look like a person.  Make the features strange enough and someone’s going to think it’s an alien.

Look at all of the science fiction we’ve made.  Does that mean we were visited by Klingons or Predators thousands of years ago?  Probably not.  Some guy was probably doodling on a rock face one day and decided to try something different.  I mean, if aliens were going to have us carve stuff in the ground, why a picture of a monkey?  If aliens were going to have us build a pyramid or other building, why use materials that would have been used on Earth at the time?  If it had been some unusual material, that would have been odd..  Heck.  They supposedly showed us how to make lenses for telescope.  Why not put in a few windows?

One thing that stuck out in my mind was this hole in the ground that was supposed to be a perfect cylinder except that it wasn’t.  It had a lot of water in it and was apparently used for sacrifices.  The movie posits that it was created when a rocket took off, which blasted this perfect cylinder-shaped hole in the ground.  I was wondering how that was possible.  I don’t think a rocket would cause ground to sublimate like that.  (It wouldn't have been a very efficient rocket if it had.)  Even if it did, how would it cause that much ground to just go away?

I wouldn’t recommend buying the movie.  Instead, get it streaming from Netflix if you can.  If I do watch this again, I’d love to watch it with someone that knows about archaeology.  It would be interesting to have them point out all the inaccuracies.  (I did find out that they were wrong about the population of Easter Island.)  Maybe we could even have a Mystery Science Theater 3000 for movies passing themselves off as documentaries.   How cool would it be to add a commentary track from actual experts?

Chariots Of The Gods Trailer - YouTube

Erich von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods?":Science or Charlatanism?  (About the book)