Sorry I didn’t want to be late… as in the late pengvinkingpengvin.
It’s a sort of threat, I’ve never been very good at it. …
Anyway This week is Court Martial
Synopsis: Captain Kirk has been recalled to Starbase 11 to answer for the death of a crewman during an ion storm. Kirk finds that his recollection of the events don’t match with the computerlog which implicates him of the diliberate cause of Crewman Finney’s Death.
With an ex girlfriend acting as prosecution and his own computer testifying against him, Kirk can only rely on an eccentric defence lawyer Samuel T Cogley and a faulty chess program.
Thoughts:
One season and two court martials. Hard to believe but there it is.
Is a captain scrutinized this much whenever a crewman dies. Has Kirk had to answer for the several who have dies so far? What about Crewman Green, does his death go unavenged?
That being said there are some nice moments and touches. I like te fact that the Starbase comadore is not white. Star Trek seems to be pointing out a future where there are no limits for men regardless of their colour.
They even have a woman lawyer as a head prosecutor. Pretty ahead of its time I’d say.
Cogley and his books were a nice touch. He was a backwards old style renasance man in a computerized world. I love the idea he will defend Finney next but I can’t see how he could win.
Say when they restarted the engines was it a cold restart like in The Naked Time?
Finney seems a little high strung to be still an officer. Also, why in hell would anyone assign him to the same ship as a former crewmate who ruined his career especially when that crewman is now the Captain?!?!
I know it seems a bit geeky of me, but if the Enterprise is in a proper orbit around a planet, it should stay there without needing any help from the crew. There shouldn’t be any danger of the ship falling into the atmosphere. Even if the ship was in a low enough orbit to experience drag effects from the atmosphere, couldn’t they just set the engines to stay on?
I’m going to guess that if they had kept the engines on, the noise would have drowned out the sound of the individual hearts beating. But while we’re being geeky, did anyone else think Dr. McCoy’s “white sound” thingy looked a lot like a microphone.
Kirk’s obviously gotten a lot of medals, but he also seems to get in trouble a lot. With two courts-martial on his record (even though he was acquited), I doubt he’ll ever make admiral.
Did anyone notice that when Cogley cited the law he mentioned the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta and the something something of another place he mentioned two bits of earth history and a third that we obviously wouldn’t be familiar with? Was that to remind us we’re in the future?
Good show! I liked the reading of all of Kirk’s medals and citations. That guy sure gets around.
One thing that bothered me, though, was the silly way they subtracted everyone’s heartbeats at the end. With all that sophisted ‘scannig’ equipment they have on board, they could’ve given us a more elegant and technical way of doing it.
Over all, a very good ep, esp with all the diversity already mentioned. (I liked the old guy lawyer the best.)
And remember in The Menagerie they have Mendez who could be of Mexican or Brazilian or other Latin-American ancestry. Certainly a world where people advance based on the “content of their character”. I only hope they keep projecting that in such matter-of-fact, incidental way, I’d hate to see them start rubbing our faces in episodes where people of different colors fight each other and at the end there’s some sort of “moral” about how bad that is.
And she gets to keep the short dress, showing that women of that time are secure enough that flaunting their femininity does not threaten being competent professionals. Okay, so maybe it just shows the producers know what today’s audience wants to see
Yes, like you mention, the writers don’t seem to let the realities of properly running a ship or managing a large exploration agency get in the way of telling a story they liked. Or maybe they have writers who got shafted often enough by the Personnel Office in past service or government work, that they figure that governments WILL do something so counterproductive as keeping unbalanced officers in a command that their unbalance badly affects, and expect it to work (maybe they’re borrowing a page from the novel Catch-22?).
Yes…Notice how nobody on ENT or any of the other series, for that matter, had trouble scanning for people on board. Locating a heartbeat was obviously done just to create dramatic tension or some such stuff.
And the idea of Engineering being a place where someone could go to evade a search…Come on! They act like it’s some creepy basement where no one would go if they didn’t have to.
I like the idea of a legal proceeding in a sci-fi setting. Imagine some of the issues that they might have to deal with. Are clones legally people? Is travelling back in time and arranging for someone to not be born considered murder? How can you catch a thief who simply uses a transporter to zap stuff out of the vault?
Sadly, this ep didn’t deal with anything quite so nifty. Too many little things got in the way of what could have been a nice little legal thriller. As noclueboy mentioned, shouldn’t they have been able to use their ships sensors to find Finney, no matter where he was hiding? And shouldn’t Spock’s analysis have revealed computer tampering without having to resort to playing chess?
BTW… Spock’s back to being Vulcanian instead of Vulcan.
Good character bits, though. I particularly liked the scene in the bar, with Kirk getting the cold shoulder from the other officers. So, all is not sweetness and light in the world of the future. I hope they keep up the internal discord idea. It lends some nice tension. I’d hate to see it portrayed as some kind of perfect, conflict-free environment.
[2005]If I understand the rules of these threads correctly, such comments belong in [2005] tags, such as the ones you see here. Anything not in those tags should be as though it’s 1967 and we are seeing the show for the very first time.[/2005]
Speaking of which, I’m getting rather uncomfortable with the vast amount of female skin that is being shown. I think this Roddenberry fellow is going too far.
Oh, I don’t know. The way things are going, I could believe that by 2004, on whatever passes for TV then and we’re watching from our vacation resorts on the Moon, nobody will bat an eyelash if at halftime in an NFL championship game they have a singer that whips her top off altogether. We will have become blasé a bout it (or “enlightened” as them college longhaira would say).
This was a good episode but as others have mentioned, there were a LOT of mistakes. (Putting the Enterprise in such a low orbit that it would be susceptible to crashing so quickly) OR (The “fancy” way they can detect the presence of a human on board a star ship.)
Here’s some more mistakes.
Dr Spock (or is it Mr Spock ?) says that the ship’s amplifier can magnify sounds 1 to the seventh power !! Wow that’s a factor of ONE !!
If the ships PA was amplifying all the sounds of the ship, why didn’t we hear everyone’s voices amplified when they talked? Similarly, why weren’t the sounds of the ship’s engines amplified? Ventilation system?
Instead of “masking” everyone’s heartbeat on the bridge why not just shut off the microphones on the bridge - as they did with the crewman in the transporter room?
Isn’t it strange that on the Captain’s Chair there is a button specifically for the ejection of an ion pod? Does the ion pod play such an important role that it rates such a significant position? To me, this is like having a set of gauges on your dashboard that read “GAS” “OIL” “Pressure of Right Rear Tire”
Ben Finney was passed over for a promotion (many years ago) because he left a hatch open which Kirk discovered. If I had been Ben Finney I’d say “Maybe the hatch was properly closed but Kirk lied about it being open just to make me look bad and make himself look good?”
Anyway, did you notice who played Ben Finney? Richard Webb - the guy who was in Captain Midnight (later called Jet Jackson). I thought he was pretty good in that episode and I thought maybe HE should have been given the role of Captain Kirk instead of that Shatner guy.
As others have pointed out, it is good to see that women, even in the future, still like to show off some skin.
^^^Maybe that button on Kirk’s chair can be set for many different functions. Maybe he can call up the computer and say something like “During this mission the white button will be for ejecting ion pods,” or something like that.
I could go for that. If I were captain I’d have one button set to bring me food, another to bring me a drink, and a third to call up that cute new yeoman stationed on deck 12.
