They have the equivilent shown in the episode “The arena” well they were fired like morters but took out an enemy position on an mountain… would have been cooler if they vaporized the mountain too…
BTW why did the vaporizing kill setting disapear in Next Generation?
Was it seen as too nasty? Not PC? Was it better to have a body hit the floor? I mean really.
Imagine you are on the early industrial planet Gorian VI which is run by a super intellegent piece of gum which is feeding off the emotions of the inhabitants (all of whom look like humans except for a giant ridgey bump on their left cheek) while making them super hostile to interlopers.
Your cover is blown by your android who could not contract the word couldn’t which is essential to their native greeting. Suddenly you are being attacked by a mob of Gorianians. Vaporizing a single attacker seems like a really nice deterent to the rest of the mob. Very showy and flashy.
Which reminds me … that episode always struck me as being a signal for a longer story arc. The aliens were everywhere, weren’t they, taking over high posts all over the federation? What happened after that one guy got his head blown off?
As bad as the Roman world was, I think Omega IV was worse.
Cloud William:“I plegleia neptum flagumm; to pec, liforstand–”
Kirk: Hot damn, that’s the pledge of allegiance.
And at the end when Spock is wondering if they’ve violated the Prime Directive (which coincidentally Kirk mentions in his opening Captain’s log that they’ll all die before they violate it :rolleyes: ), Kirk’s reply is:
“We merely showed them the meaning of what they were fighting for; liberty and freedom have to be more than just words.”
Uh, no. If they want them to be “just words”, that’s pretty much up to them.
Random trivia: The actor playing Explodey Head Villain in that clip, named Robert Schenkkan, won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years later for writing the play The Kentucky Cycle. This is almost certainly the most prestigious award ever for a former Trek bit player.
Well, we can take as read that the parasites were removed from all the Federation/Starfleet personnel and after a few months of investigations life returned to normal. However, if I recall correctly, there was some intimation that there were other colonies of those parasites out there. It’s not canon, but one of the best Star Trek novels ever, Unity, picks up on that thread and follows it to some very interesting new developments.
I dunno, Stephen Hawking won the Copley Medal some time after his 1993 guest shot, though admittedly he was already pretty well-known at the time.
As I understood it, the “parasites that disappear whole colonies” was supposed to have some tie-in with the Borg, but this was abandoned in favour of making the Borg techno-zombies and the parasite story arc was allowed to simply evaporate.
I’ve read the same in interviews with ST:TNG production staff, although the episode ends with the Enterprise sailing in front of a distant star cluster, with an alien-sounding signal being heard, as if summoning more naughty aliens.
AFAIK the Borg were cheaper to make (using spare still suits from Dune allegedly) and followed the same theme as the insect overlords that were supposed to have followed that signal to Earth. I even heard it touted as a good reason for having the Borg Queen :dubious:
Something like “We got lucky the first time we met them, but Captain Pike’s report makes it clear that these aliens’ awesome mental powers could lead to the collapse of the entire Federation if we gave them even one person to use as a bootstrap. It’s too dangerous even to let the reason be known. Slap a Keep Out sign on the place and let it be known we really, really mean it.”
My pet peeve has been done before, but I’ll repeat it: The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk gets lost on the planet with the Indians on it, and Spock faffs around until the very last second before taking the Enterprise off at Warp Nine to intercept the planet-killing asteroid that they were supposed to be stopping. On failing to deflect it, he orders the phasers to open fire and keep firing, bypassing all safeguards, until either the asteroid is stopped or the ship is too badly damaged to keep on any longer. Then the Enterprise has to limp back to the planet under impulse power in the hope that they will think of something when they get there in the few minutes they will have.
Since the journey takes months, you would think that Spock would have applied his giant Vulcan brain to a Plan B in the first place, such as “Put a tractor beam on the asteroid and apply a sustainable lateral vector to it for a month or so”, which would pretty much scupper any chance of a subsequent collision, or any of the other half-dozen plans that my poor 20th-century human brain came up with, but noooo, he’s got to stick with Plan A until he is well and truly painted into that corner. I’ve spoken of this before as the episode in which Spock effectively does his best to kill the Captain. :rolleyes:
I’m not sure what they were supposed to do when that episode ended. They get the planetside spire-thingy to push away the asteroid, and then they beam up to an Enterprise that is just as crippled, apprantly to wait in orbit for the next few thousand years. There was no indication that repairs were completed during the two-month slog, nor that the Enterprise summoned help from any other Federation vessel, yet as soon as they get Kirk back, everything’s okay.
Um, also they didn’t tell any of the locals how to open the temple, so I guess the next asteroid has smooth sailing. I could forgive the “we have to deflect the asteroid in one big push or destroy it”, instead of realizing that a gradual, gentle push over a few days or weeks would suffice, because these are TV writers, not astronomers or physicists.
The evil bricks are not the problem. The problem is the equal number of good but weak bricks. When your bricks crack under pressure, you’ve got a problem.
Nuh uh! If the danger was that the Talosians would get their hooks into someone’s mind, then why did Starfleet let Pike, Spock and the other landing party members walk in the first place? (I assume that the other landing party members were not, in fact, summarily executed in the name of Federation security.)
And anyway, if Starfleet thought that the Talosians might spell the doom of the Federation, what the hell kind of plan is telling everyone that the planet is totally and uniquely forbidden, but refusing to even hint why? Isn’t this the worst plan ever? Wouldn’t everybody both inside and outside the Federation immediately want to know what the big secret is? Or are we meant to infer that this is an expression of 23rd century science’s uncanny grasp of reverse psychology?
