Star Trek 1x01: The Man Trap
As part of my awesome weekend, libitina and I went up to the Franklin Institute to see Star Trek: The Exhibition and see the Ult!Star Trek movie again, this time on the IMAX screen. If the intent of that exhibit was to make me want to buy every season of every version of the franchise ever the minute I walked out...it succeeded.
BUT. reccea discovered that the entire original series is available online at CBS.com (and is linked from Hulu and IMDb) so we have decided to work our way through the episodes. I'm trying to decide if these need a filter or something, but until I get complaints, I'll just post them under the "old skool Trek" tag.
Star Trek 1x01: The Man Trap
In which Doctor McCoy's ex-girlfriend turns out to be a salt-sucking creature and the Uhura/Spock is not completely made up.
To be accurate, McCoy's ex is dead and the creature has taken on her appearance. This is actually seriously weird since they seem to have begun the episode with the idea that the creature manipulates perceptions (McCoy sees Nancy as he knew her, Crewman Darnell sees her as a woman he left behind on a pleasure planet (which I guess was code for "brothel?") and Kirk saw her...as Nancy's husband remembers her, which is just kind of weird. Especially because halfway through the episode they start calling it a shape-shifter, because it finally figured out that if different people were perceiving it differently, it was at risk, so it began to appear as the same image to everyone. It's hard to tell if the writers seriously thought this was how the creature and crew would react as the episode continued or if they just forgot what they were doing halfway through, or if there was a writer/director script breakdown somewhere.
It's really no rougher than a) most pilots and b) the standard of the show. Notably, no red-shirts die. Two blue-shirts and a gold-shirt, but no red-shirts, which is a little disconcerting. Spock, at one point, gets a head injury and while there are smudges of green on his forehead, there also appears to be actual red blood. We're not going to to think about that too hard.
Character-wise:
Uhura completely hits on Spock, who is at least feigning oblivion. (He may actually BE oblivious - it's pretty easy to interpret emotionlessness as whatever you feel like.) She even puts her hand on his arm.
Sulu talks to plants. And hangs out with Yeoman Rand in the arboretum, apparently. He also takes command of the bridge at various points of the episode, which makes me pretty happy.
Scotty and Chekov do not appear at all.
Crewman Darnell, who is the first person to die in an episode of Star Trek - thus prompting the first example of, "He's dead, Jim!" - was Michael Zaslow who played Roger Thorpe on Guiding Light. (Which was also formative in my adolescence, shush.)
Jim Kirk? Kind of a bitch. I'm just saying. Also, his serpentine run and elbow crawl? Seriously? Seriously? No one burst out laughing and put a stop to that? Oh, 1966.
Message of the Week:
Something about making the buffalo extinct is bad and the last representation of a dying race can go ahead and die if it's killing Kirk's crewmen. Kirk loves his crewmen.
The women's uniforms seem to be sort of wrap-around at this point and just scandalously short, but they do all have nice shapes and I am particularly a fan of Uhura's thigh muscles. Also she speaks Swahili with the creature, who can apparently read minds. (Helpful for the ideal perception thing, I guess.) We did catch one woman wearing pants, which was kind of awesome, although we have no idea why. I kind of figure that women on Jim Kirk's bridge wear short skirts. But that could just be me finding Kirk a wee bit skeezy. (Kirk was always my favorite character in TOS, so I mock him with love and affection. But he was a wee bit skeezy.)
I think I expect shows from the 1960s to be more...restricted in many ways, so I was surprised to see:
a) Kirk telling Bones to stop thinking with his glands. (Because I guess they couldn't say dick?)
b) Spock beating the CRAP out of some woman (who was actually a salt-craving shape-shifting-kinda creature, but the image used was of the guest actress.)
In conclusion: I got nothing.
What Reccea Learned from Watching Star Trek - More concise and way funnier. :)
BUT. reccea discovered that the entire original series is available online at CBS.com (and is linked from Hulu and IMDb) so we have decided to work our way through the episodes. I'm trying to decide if these need a filter or something, but until I get complaints, I'll just post them under the "old skool Trek" tag.
Star Trek 1x01: The Man Trap
In which Doctor McCoy's ex-girlfriend turns out to be a salt-sucking creature and the Uhura/Spock is not completely made up.
To be accurate, McCoy's ex is dead and the creature has taken on her appearance. This is actually seriously weird since they seem to have begun the episode with the idea that the creature manipulates perceptions (McCoy sees Nancy as he knew her, Crewman Darnell sees her as a woman he left behind on a pleasure planet (which I guess was code for "brothel?") and Kirk saw her...as Nancy's husband remembers her, which is just kind of weird. Especially because halfway through the episode they start calling it a shape-shifter, because it finally figured out that if different people were perceiving it differently, it was at risk, so it began to appear as the same image to everyone. It's hard to tell if the writers seriously thought this was how the creature and crew would react as the episode continued or if they just forgot what they were doing halfway through, or if there was a writer/director script breakdown somewhere.
It's really no rougher than a) most pilots and b) the standard of the show. Notably, no red-shirts die. Two blue-shirts and a gold-shirt, but no red-shirts, which is a little disconcerting. Spock, at one point, gets a head injury and while there are smudges of green on his forehead, there also appears to be actual red blood. We're not going to to think about that too hard.
Character-wise:
Uhura completely hits on Spock, who is at least feigning oblivion. (He may actually BE oblivious - it's pretty easy to interpret emotionlessness as whatever you feel like.) She even puts her hand on his arm.
Sulu talks to plants. And hangs out with Yeoman Rand in the arboretum, apparently. He also takes command of the bridge at various points of the episode, which makes me pretty happy.
Scotty and Chekov do not appear at all.
Crewman Darnell, who is the first person to die in an episode of Star Trek - thus prompting the first example of, "He's dead, Jim!" - was Michael Zaslow who played Roger Thorpe on Guiding Light. (Which was also formative in my adolescence, shush.)
Jim Kirk? Kind of a bitch. I'm just saying. Also, his serpentine run and elbow crawl? Seriously? Seriously? No one burst out laughing and put a stop to that? Oh, 1966.
Message of the Week:
Something about making the buffalo extinct is bad and the last representation of a dying race can go ahead and die if it's killing Kirk's crewmen. Kirk loves his crewmen.
The women's uniforms seem to be sort of wrap-around at this point and just scandalously short, but they do all have nice shapes and I am particularly a fan of Uhura's thigh muscles. Also she speaks Swahili with the creature, who can apparently read minds. (Helpful for the ideal perception thing, I guess.) We did catch one woman wearing pants, which was kind of awesome, although we have no idea why. I kind of figure that women on Jim Kirk's bridge wear short skirts. But that could just be me finding Kirk a wee bit skeezy. (Kirk was always my favorite character in TOS, so I mock him with love and affection. But he was a wee bit skeezy.)
I think I expect shows from the 1960s to be more...restricted in many ways, so I was surprised to see:
a) Kirk telling Bones to stop thinking with his glands. (Because I guess they couldn't say dick?)
b) Spock beating the CRAP out of some woman (who was actually a salt-craving shape-shifting-kinda creature, but the image used was of the guest actress.)
In conclusion: I got nothing.
What Reccea Learned from Watching Star Trek - More concise and way funnier. :)