Another Star Trek TOS Question: Changeling

Cafe Society
1

So it seems that I’m not the only one waxing nostalgic by watching ST:TOS on Netflix these days. As a avid trekkie in my younger days, who hasn’t seen TOS in 35 years, I’m really struggling. It’s not nearly as good as I recall and to be honest, I find some episodes torture to watch now.

But that aside, I do have a couple questions about the episode “Changeling” S2:E3, where Nomad comes back and starts destroying “imperfect life”.

I was under the impression, from maybe another episode or film, that when someone or something was in the process of transporting, they were effectively in stasis and could be held in mid-transport or even have their molecules dispersed across space.

Question 1:
Is that correct?

If yes, then why didn’t they just hold Nomad in mid-transport indefinitely, disperse it or even beam it into the sun rather than beam it on board? They knew it was hostile and murdered the 4 billion people? Why risk beaming it aboard at all? Is this just a straight-up plot hole?

Question 2:
Nomad fires an energy bolt directly at them from a long long way away (not sure how far, but it’s moving at Warp 15 and takes a while to hit them). They can’t outrun it which is fair enough, but why can’t they just move left, right, up or down? It seems to me if they went in any rearward direction at any warp speed, within the time it took to hit them they’d be millions of kilometres away.

Was this a predecessor to the “Prometheus school of running away”? Prometheus School of Running Away from Things | CinemaSins Wiki | Fandom).
Lastly, as one example of why I find TOS so cringe-worthy now is the end of this episode when Kirk starts joking around with Spock and Bones about Nomad being his “son” and what a good doctor he would have made etc.

OMFG!!!??? This thing just wiped out 4 billion people and you’re cracking jokes on the bridge??? I certainly didn’t get that the first time around but now it makes me feel sick.

2

TOS was notorious for lack of continuity regarding magic fixes for problems they were having. Something that worked in one episode wouldn’t work in another, or they’d never bring it up again. One of the things I remember reading about the bible for TOS was that they had all these amazing tools at their disposal, and half the episodes were built around “what if they aren’t available”? No phasers, no communicators, no transporter… happened all the time. TOS might also have been at the very early stages of TV shows being written by multiple, non-collaborating writers, so one guy’s silver bullet was somebody else’s thing to be ignored.

3

That wasn’t just limited the original series; pretty much every show has suffered from that to various degrees as a consequence of introducing magical technologies (not just the transporter but warp drives capable of crossing enormous distances in a few hours, “subspace” communications which was instantaneous until it wasn’t, sensors that could detect anything the plot required and nothing the plot rejected, a super-intelligent “ship’s computer” that could interpret vague natural language commands and produce the desired result but no general artificial intelligence except for a couple of lone androids, antimatter power sources and weapons and ‘shields’ to somehow protect against them, and the pièce de résistance, a “universal translator” that could ensure perfectly communications between different life forms except when it couldn’t) which should be able to solve practically any plot complication before the commercial break so then writers had to find ways to turn off or invalidate the technologies, often coming up with “particle of the week” solutions that worked once and were never heard of again. It’s the space opera version of why Hogan doesn’t just break out of the POW camp and why the passengers and crew can never escape from Gilligan’s Island. It is a tribute to the writers that they were able to sometimes write compelling stories despite the technomagic by focusing on interpersonal conflicts and subterfuge.

Stranger

4

I wondered about these myself. :rolleyes:

Question 1:

In “Day of the Dove,” Chekov wants to leave Kang & Co. inside the transporter in a state of “nonexistence.” IIRC, this was the only time the possibility was ever mentioned in TOS, though it should have been obvious. I mean, they could make as many copies of someone as they wanted to, as we saw in “The Enemy Within.” But apparently it wouldn’t have been “ethical,” as was implied in ***TAS ***and TNG. This, however, didn’t stop them from laundering Dr Pulaski and rejuvenating her when she was infected with a virus.

The difficulty in doing all this actually wasn’t addressed until TNG’s “Relics”: The pattern of a being or thing will eventually degrade over time inside the transporter buffer. Scotty was lucky they could rematerialize him after 75 years.

Question 2:

I always assumed that NOMAD’s energy bolts had some kind of homing system, making it impossible to run away from them. The issue of how energy bolts and phasers propagate in subspace and at such different speeds is better left to itself. They just DO, and we know because we’ve SEEN it!

5

A lot of the jokes at the end were like that: they’ve just avoided annihilation by a matter of seconds, and the moment the threat is over they’re yakking it up.

There were also a lot of instances where three redshirts would die gruesomely, and 30 seconds later Kirk would be putting the moves on the babe-of-the-week.

6

I think typically in TOS the actors would be shown in freeze-frame during the “twinkling” special effect, which is fair enough given the special-effects limitations at the time. Further, in “The Cloud Minders”, Kirk and Plasus are fighting, get beamed up, pause for a moment and resume fighting. Admittedly they were both under the effect of a natural gas that triggered aggression, but the suggestions was that they didn’t perceive (or were distracted by) the transport process.

However, there’s a moment in “That Which Survives” in which the landing party is being down and during the transport process, a mysterious woman appears and attacks the transport officer. We get a brief shot of Kirk’s mid-transport expression as he notices her action, but apparently can do nothing to stop it. As soon as he materializes on the planet, he calls up to see what happened.

So to answer your question, I dunno.

7

Wasn’t the whole point of that story that the resultant Kirk twins were psychologically incomplete to the point of uselessness and needed to be reunited? This is quite a bit different from the creation of the fully-formed “Thomas Riker” from TNG’s “Second Chances” where neither twin was aware nor showed any outward signs of what had happened.

8

Another problem is that this is one of four episodes where Kirk talks a computer to death: Induced self-destruction | Memory Alpha | Fandom

Kirk was the original black hat hacker.

9

That was due to the weird orange ore that was beamed up affecting the transporter. In TNG, Riker was duplicated in another transporter malfunction with no ill effects.

10

Finally, a scientific explanation.

11

Speaking of “That Which Survives”, they encounter something that has the power to fling the Enterprise a thousand light years away and is still able to affect the ship from that distance, as well as disrupting every cell in the body of whichever crewman is being attacked. And yet at the end when Spock and a redshirt show up just in the nick of time, the redshirt is able to disable the computer by shooting it with a hand phaser. You’d think a security system that powerful would be more difficult to kill, or at least have some kind of force field around it. :rolleyes:

(Also, I don’t know who wrote that episode, but I’ve always wondered if they were given specific instructions to make Spock as much of an insufferable prick as possible.)

12

As we’ve discussed before, the main problem with Star Trek (insofar as there is a problem) was the lack of quality scripts. This was very true with TOS and was also true with TNG. I can’t think of how many times I’ve read that they were writing and rewriting scrips even as they were filming episodes. And once the stars of the show (particularly in TOS) were comfortable, they would complain that their character wouldn’t say or do this or that (especially Nimoy). They would still be changing the scrips at the end, while they were filming the beginning. And some had total re-writes days before they were filmed. So at some point in TOS, they were just happy to have a script that worked for 50 minutes.

Additionally, I’ve been in the room when producers from two different 60s shows stated that they have no belief that these shows would viewed and viewed, copied and studied for 50 years. They knew they would been seen once in first run and once in re-runs, and hoped for some syndication, but that was far from certain. These were written in a week, filmed in six days and off they went to the next shows. We’re lucky that we received the quality we did.

BREAK

I agree with the OP on TOS quality. I recently scored CBS all access for the free one months and was going to go to town on some TOS. I was exceedingly unpleasantly surprised at the dearth of quality shows that I wanted to watch. Let me just add I’d rather watch “Spock’s Brain” 100 times than watch “Squire of Gothos” one more time. Even as a 14 year old, I’d throw a fit when that dog was trotted out.

13

No objection to the ST stuff, but IIRM the pilot of Hogan’s Heroes established why he didn’t break out. They were a lot more valuable in the camp than he would be outside. They break out for missions all the time, and sent people out to the Resistance to be picked up and brought back to England.
TOS had fewer technobabble solutions than later shows. The solution in “The Doomsday Machine” didn’t depend on anything we didn’t know and on no new discoveries. One of the many reasons I like that episode.

14

At the start of the series, they both repaired the boat and built a raft, but neither worked. :frowning:

15

I recently re-watched the entire original series. Spock’s character, and his relationship with McCoy, varied wildly from show to show depending on the writer. Sometimes he was completely robot-like and a total prick. Sometimes his human half was uppermost, and he was almost genial. Sometimes Spock and McCoy despised one another and were at each other’s throats. Other times they appreciated one another’s talents and they engaged in no more than mild ribbing.

16

I’d probably be a little schizoid too if I were half Human and half Vulcan.

17

Hey, it’s only 80 kilograms of extra matter, what’s the problem?

OP #1. It was an extremely powerful ship of an unknown civilization* that had agreed to a ceasefire and parley. Discretion and/or rules of engagement.

*As far as Kirk knew.

18

Basically it’s just a foolish inconsistency.

19

I remember when TOS was originally aired. It was breath-holding time, because it was science fiction in a medium that was swamped with Westerns. And part of the draw to Trek was a bridge full of people of all different sizes and colors, and they all got along!

To a kid who grew up with Duck-and-Cover drills, who remembers seeing mushroom clouds on the cover of Time magazine, this was the future. Mankind didn’t destroy itself!

Roddenberry boldly went where nobody had gone before.

Yes, watching TOS today can be…painful, even awkward. The cheezy props, costumes and rinky-dink special effects are terrible. Boxes covered with aluminum foil, spacesuits made of shower curtains and random flashing lights are pitiful. Yet in spite of the primitive nature of everything, the premise of Star Trek lives today.

I love Trek. I always will.

LLAP!
~VOW

20

We can always take comfort in the fact that, no matter how cheesy, trite and clumsy Star Trek was…

Dr. Who was worse.

By orders of magnitude.

Logarithmic.