ST Recap: Where No Man Has Gone Before
Confession: Bill and I have been watching Star Trek episodes since August, so I've got a backlog of recaps. My goal is two a week until we're caught up, and then I'll post as we go. Because Bill finally got both his Air and his HHE shipments (oh, the saga of sending things overseas), he's got a plethora of things to watch, so he's not whipping through ST as quickly as he was before. (I think he's rewatching all the James Bond movies at the moment. Dr No is apparently hysterically funny, 40 years later.)
Anyway, without further ado, we move on to Episode S1:E4, "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
Summary: When the Enterprise crosses an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, Captain Kirk's life long friend Gary Mitchell is transformed into a godlike being determined to "rule" over his inferior human crewmates. Kirk is left with no option but to abandon Mitchell on an uninhabited mining colony, however it soon becomes clear Mitchell has other plans...
Just when you thought the shirts couldn't get any worse:
I can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse to have worked so long in a costume shop. I can't ever watch anything without looking at the costumes. My big thrill seeing Star Trek on IMAX was getting a good look at how the collars were done on the uniforms. That movie coming out about how Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare? I'm fairly certain that if nothing else, the costumes will be terrific.
And then, there's this:
Thank God they don't wear this color shirt anymore. I'm fairly sure Andrew pooped that color once.
On a related note regarding clothing, I thought this was interesting:
"Pardon me, Doctor, but you're wearing pants. This makes seduction a little more difficult."
Of course, it makes sense to have Dr Gainer wear pants, because she spends the latter half of the episode running around a rocky planet, which would be difficult in those short dresses the female crew wears. Which makes me wonder: do all the women have a choice about those dresses? Or are pants only permissable for certain ranks/positions? I vaguely remember someone (it might have been Zoe Saldana) saying that Uhura chose to wear the short dress because it showed off her extremely awesome legs better. Certainly, in the ten or so episodes of TOS that we've seen, Gainer is the only woman who has worn pants that I can recall - either in or out of uniform.
(I think Beverly Crusher wore pants a lot - and I know Deanna Troi wore them most of the time. Here's the question: was their ability to wear pants a function of the time (1960s v. 1980s), or was it a function of the writers giving them more actiony things to do than sit at the console and repeat what the computer said? (Which also could have been a function of the times, of course.)
I suspect much could be read into these pants. Certainly, Kirk's ray gun would like to read something into those pants.
What's my job again?
Apart from the odd color shirt (and the fact that Spock is in yellow - oh, thank God he didn't have to do that too often), there's another clear sign that the players aren't in what came to be their clearly defined roles. I mean, we think we all know what they did on the Enterprise, right?
Kirk? Captain.
Spock? First Mate.
McCoy? Doctor.
Sulu? Navigator.
Wrong.
The medical staff on the bridge
Note the clear absense of Doctor McCoy, who is instead replaced by....Sulu?
I have no idea. I wouldn't think that navigation skills would enable you to do surgery, but then again, we never saw McCoy do anything more surgical than wave a salt shaker over anyone, so maybe Sulu can do the job just as well.
And he's not exactly just window-dressing. He has actual medical opinions.
SULU: If you want the mathematics of this, Mitchell's ability is increasing geometrically. That is, like having a penny, doubling it every day. In a month, you'll be a millionaire.
(I love how the main doctor appears to be asleep during the meeting. Maybe that's why McCoy took over?)
For those wondering, Sulu's right. I wasn't sure - it does sound rather unbelievable, but I did the math and while the first two weeks are rather lean, on Day 16 you start talking real money and by Day 28, you've got $1.3 mil.
Two other noteworthy questions:
I'm kind of loving how Gary can sleep standing up.
Oh, the things they teach you at Starfleet!
James R. Kirk?
I looked that up - apparently no one had decided on "Tiberius" for Kirk's middle name, so they threw "R" on the gravestone. Roddenberry decided that if anyone ever called him on it, he would reply that Gary, though infused with God-like powers, was essentially human, and all humans make mistakes. I couldn't find if the writers who chose Tiberius knew about the previously used initial and ignored it, or just didn't realize. One thing's for sure: I doubt any of them realized that they'd ever have so rabid a fanbase that people would call them on a screwed-up fake gravestone.
(Or come up with random feminist theories as to why the female doctor is wearing pants.)
So: in the end, not a bad episode. We had a female who was something other than a love interest for Kirk, which bodes well for later episodes in that we've got the possibility that women can be more than window dressing. We had three deaths (Kelso, Gary Mitchell, and Elizabeth Gainer), and it should be noted that none of them wore red shirts. (The current count is 3 yellows and 2 blues. For the record, Bill and I are only counting the deaths among the Enterprise crew. It's not that the civilians or members of other crews aren't important, but they're not wearing the right color shirts.) we had proof that Vulcans should never, ever, ever wear yellow. All in all, not a bad 50 minutes.
Next up: The Naked Time, in which surprisingly, Kirk is not the one who goes shirtless.
Summary & screencaps obtained from TrekCore.
Anyway, without further ado, we move on to Episode S1:E4, "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
Summary: When the Enterprise crosses an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, Captain Kirk's life long friend Gary Mitchell is transformed into a godlike being determined to "rule" over his inferior human crewmates. Kirk is left with no option but to abandon Mitchell on an uninhabited mining colony, however it soon becomes clear Mitchell has other plans...
Just when you thought the shirts couldn't get any worse:
I can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse to have worked so long in a costume shop. I can't ever watch anything without looking at the costumes. My big thrill seeing Star Trek on IMAX was getting a good look at how the collars were done on the uniforms. That movie coming out about how Shakespeare wasn't really Shakespeare? I'm fairly certain that if nothing else, the costumes will be terrific.
And then, there's this:
Thank God they don't wear this color shirt anymore. I'm fairly sure Andrew pooped that color once.
On a related note regarding clothing, I thought this was interesting:
"Pardon me, Doctor, but you're wearing pants. This makes seduction a little more difficult."
Of course, it makes sense to have Dr Gainer wear pants, because she spends the latter half of the episode running around a rocky planet, which would be difficult in those short dresses the female crew wears. Which makes me wonder: do all the women have a choice about those dresses? Or are pants only permissable for certain ranks/positions? I vaguely remember someone (it might have been Zoe Saldana) saying that Uhura chose to wear the short dress because it showed off her extremely awesome legs better. Certainly, in the ten or so episodes of TOS that we've seen, Gainer is the only woman who has worn pants that I can recall - either in or out of uniform.
(I think Beverly Crusher wore pants a lot - and I know Deanna Troi wore them most of the time. Here's the question: was their ability to wear pants a function of the time (1960s v. 1980s), or was it a function of the writers giving them more actiony things to do than sit at the console and repeat what the computer said? (Which also could have been a function of the times, of course.)
I suspect much could be read into these pants. Certainly, Kirk's ray gun would like to read something into those pants.
What's my job again?
Apart from the odd color shirt (and the fact that Spock is in yellow - oh, thank God he didn't have to do that too often), there's another clear sign that the players aren't in what came to be their clearly defined roles. I mean, we think we all know what they did on the Enterprise, right?
Kirk? Captain.
Spock? First Mate.
McCoy? Doctor.
Sulu? Navigator.
Wrong.
The medical staff on the bridge
Note the clear absense of Doctor McCoy, who is instead replaced by....Sulu?
I have no idea. I wouldn't think that navigation skills would enable you to do surgery, but then again, we never saw McCoy do anything more surgical than wave a salt shaker over anyone, so maybe Sulu can do the job just as well.
And he's not exactly just window-dressing. He has actual medical opinions.
SULU: If you want the mathematics of this, Mitchell's ability is increasing geometrically. That is, like having a penny, doubling it every day. In a month, you'll be a millionaire.
(I love how the main doctor appears to be asleep during the meeting. Maybe that's why McCoy took over?)
For those wondering, Sulu's right. I wasn't sure - it does sound rather unbelievable, but I did the math and while the first two weeks are rather lean, on Day 16 you start talking real money and by Day 28, you've got $1.3 mil.
Two other noteworthy questions:
I'm kind of loving how Gary can sleep standing up.
Oh, the things they teach you at Starfleet!
James R. Kirk?
I looked that up - apparently no one had decided on "Tiberius" for Kirk's middle name, so they threw "R" on the gravestone. Roddenberry decided that if anyone ever called him on it, he would reply that Gary, though infused with God-like powers, was essentially human, and all humans make mistakes. I couldn't find if the writers who chose Tiberius knew about the previously used initial and ignored it, or just didn't realize. One thing's for sure: I doubt any of them realized that they'd ever have so rabid a fanbase that people would call them on a screwed-up fake gravestone.
(Or come up with random feminist theories as to why the female doctor is wearing pants.)
So: in the end, not a bad episode. We had a female who was something other than a love interest for Kirk, which bodes well for later episodes in that we've got the possibility that women can be more than window dressing. We had three deaths (Kelso, Gary Mitchell, and Elizabeth Gainer), and it should be noted that none of them wore red shirts. (The current count is 3 yellows and 2 blues. For the record, Bill and I are only counting the deaths among the Enterprise crew. It's not that the civilians or members of other crews aren't important, but they're not wearing the right color shirts.) we had proof that Vulcans should never, ever, ever wear yellow. All in all, not a bad 50 minutes.
Next up: The Naked Time, in which surprisingly, Kirk is not the one who goes shirtless.
Summary & screencaps obtained from TrekCore.