Just saw the digitally remastered version of this one. Some thoughts while watching:
[ul]
[li] Kirk vs. Picard. This was such a hilarious example of “firing first” Kirk that I could hardly believe it. Enterprise discovers 4 billion people dead. Suddenly they’re fired upon. They find the ship, then Kirk fires a photon torpedo; direct hit. Once they find out it did no damage at all, he then tells Uhura to hail them, and says “We are on a mission of peace!”[/li][li] Nomad’s blast is “equal to 90 photon torpedos” - and they get hit three times! That’s one tough Enterprise![/li][li] Lucky that Nomad’s creator’s name kinda matched Kirk’s name, otherwise The Enterprise and the entirety of Earth’s population would have been destroyed.[/li][li] Glad they kept Vic Perrin’s voice for the remaster. It’s good to hear Dr. Zin again.[/li][li] Shocked at myself for never before drawing the parallels between Nomad and V-Ger.[/li][li] Apparenty it’s Enterprise protocol to open every shipwide channel when Uhura sings.[/li][li] Loved LOVED the “Nomad cam”[/li][li] Scotty is killed with a lightning bolt, then Nomad repairs him. The other five cremen Nomad kills are killed with energy beams that disintigrate their entire bodies. Lucky that.[/li][li] Uhura’s mind is wiped, then she begins to relearn everything from scratch. Towards the end, it is mentioned that in a couple of days she’ll be at the college level, and therefore will be able to return to her duties in a week or so. :eek: Communications officers only require a college degree? And, AFAIK, no mention of her loss of memories or experiences will ever be mentioned again.[/li][li] Loved this 60’s sexist exchange:[/li] “That unit is defective. It has chaotic thinking.”
“That unit is a woman.”
“A mass of conflicting impulses.”
[li] Why in hell didn’t they digitally remove all of the wires? There are scenes where Nomad wanders around where you can see the wire for a solid minute.[/li][li] Seriously bad spelling error: the schematic of Nomad. If you pause it, the lower item reads “transmition.” I wonder if they caught that in post-production and said “meh.”[/li][li] Spock’s mindmeld scene: could’ve trimmed that up a bit maybe[/li][li] No remorse shown for the dead crewmen, or the four BILLION dead people on those planets.[/li][li] Why, at any point during Nomad’s logic breakdown, didn’t they just beam it into space? Was it really necessary to attach those anti-grav things and walk it to the transporter room? And they sure do forget about those anti-grav things alot. They had no trouble with carting 500 kilos of Nomad around, but on TNG they need floating forklift-looking things.[/li][li] For once a funny exchange at the end - Kirk pretending to be proud of a Nomad-like Doctor son.[/li][/ul]
Scotty got zapped by Nomad’s force fields, not by its offensive weaponry. For the same reason the antigrav things were needed to haul it around while it suffered its logical nervous breakdown.
Yeah they blew that one, actually the Enterprise gets hit four times, the initial attack then three more. So the Enterprise can take the equivalent of 360 photon torpedoes OK, but in The Ultimate Computer the starships Lexington and Excalibur were severely damaged with just two of three hits with full phasers.
Still I think the opening battle was one of their best, very dramatic and full of tension.
I always interpreted that as Nomad weighed 500 kilos and they would need those to move him after he went berserk and supposedly his anti-gav would be out, you may be right though.
For some reason, “site to site” transporter ability didn’t seem to occur to anybody until The Next Gen. (Site to site as defined as not having to go to the transporter room to get beamed somewhere.)
There was a TOS episode where Kirk is beamed “intra-ship” (to the engine room to eject a trespasser, I think), and Scotty thinks it’s a pretty ballsy move. (Par for the course, of course, for Kirk.)
This episode, for all its faults, has one of my favorite Spock lines. After Kirk tricks Nomad and it starts getting ready to self-destruct, an impressed but unperturbed Spock says: “Your logic was impeccable, Captain: we are in grave danger.”
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, but didn’t Nomad have several whip antennas at the top? Might you have been seeing one of them instead of an actual support wire?
In “Assignment, Earth”, Kirk orders “beam us directly to Seven’s* apartment” (from the missile launch site). That could mean to beam them up and immediately beam them back down to that location, however.
*Gary Seven, not Seven of Nine, obviously, though Kirk would presumably not be averse to being beamed into her quarters.
I love how Nomad’s parts show up in “Balance of Terror” (is that the right one?) where they steal the cloaking device…Nomad’s head is part of the cloaking unit. (Someone can correct me on the episode and which came first.)
The episode you are thinking of is The Enterprise Incident third season, Balance of Terror was first season, the cloaking device consisted of Nomad’s head along with Sargon’s sphere.
Except, of course, when they are beaming up from a planet… So needing to go to the transporter room to get disassembled was not obviously a requirment.
There should be no reason why site to site wouldn’t exist in TOS except for the writers just not thinking about it.
“Beam up” from the bridge, but held in memory (and not appearing in the T-room), and then redirected/reassembled in someone’s walk in closet.
