Star Trek: The Doomsday Machine

Why isn’t Nichelle Nichols in this episode?

There are a lot of episodes in which one or more of the main supporting characters (Sulu, Uhura, Scott, Chekov after season 1) are absent. The actors might’ve been on other projects, and frankly it doesn’t make sense that they’d all be present for every adventure. The characters would be off-duty, on shore leave, undergoing training etc. With a crew of 440, we’d expect to see other officers on shift at least some of the time.

In contrast, compare NextGen in which every episode contrived to show all the opening-credit actors, even if it was only one line in one scene.

If only she’d been edited out of the episode, then we could have said “She was, but not any more!” :slight_smile:

What Bryan Ekers said, and according to Memory-Alpha’s episode guide, Uhura also did not appear in the next episode Wolf in the Fold, but she was back just in time to get her mind erased by Nomad in The Changeling.

Her imdb profile lists two 1967 movies (the same year “Doomsday Machine” and “Wolf in the Fold” were first broadcast). I can easily picture her taking a few weeks away from Trek for her breakout role as, um, Ruana in Tarzan’s Jungle Rebellion.

I see she played the same character in the 1970 sequel. It would’ve been kinda cool to see her as Storm’s mom in the new X-Men movie. Oh, well…

It would have involved a flashback, because Storm’s mother died in an explosion in Cairo when Storm was 5.

Exactly when did I become such a geek?

Hmm…can you pronounce Storm’s name accurately? Then you’re a real geek.

Thanks. I recall George Takei missed The Gamesters of Triskelon to make The Green Berets.

How hard is “Munroe?” :smiley:

Well, that’s how it’s spelt, but in fact it is pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove.

Surely you mean Throatwarbler Mangrove? :eek:

Ripper is from the South, so he types with an accent.

These two Tarzan “films” were just episodes of the Ron Ely TV series edited together and released to theaters, so her segemnts would only have taken the usual 5-7 days to film.

IIRC, Nichols was hired on an episode-to-episode basis on “Trek,” but Roddenberry (a former lover) tried to get her in as many as possible, sometimes with only a single line or two. I think only Shatner and Nimoy (and Kelley in the second and third seasons) were given full season contracts. Even Doohan was, iirc, only guaranteed 13 episodes per season.

Sir Rhosis

Throatwobbler!

At a personal appearance,James Doohan told me this was his favorite episode in large part because it was more technology-based than other episodes. He seemed to like the somewhat harder SF stories more. Dunno if that’s common knowledge but just thought I’d share.

[trekkie_pedant]430[/trekkie_pedant]

Bah. Neutronium can’t be shaped into a giant carrot. The whole reason it’s neutronium in the first place is that its gravity is stronger than not only molecular bonding but one or two rather powerful atomic forces. Hard SF my eye. grumps

I always liked it, though.

Name-dropper! :stuck_out_tongue:

What’s even harder is elasticizing the neutronium so that sometime the giant carrot’s maw is only a little bigger than a shuttlecraft, while at other times it’s big enough to swallow a Constitution-class starship!

Maybe she was in the bathroom.

I thought it was common knowledge that Nichelle Nichols is extremely allergic to neutronium.