Your math is off. At the time of TOS, warp speed was considered the cube of the factor x speed of light. So Warp 7 (343xSoL) * 144 hours would give you 49,392 light hours which is roughly 5.6 light years. But your point still stands, how’d he do it?
I know this saying. It was invented in Russia.
“Friday’s Child,” with guest stars Julie Newmar and Tige Andrews.
This episode gets a lot of flak that I think is undeserved. Until the final act, it’s a good “Prime Directive” story. It should have ended with Kirk and company beaming out during or just after the final battle between the Yangs and Kohms, and turning Tracey over to Starfleet for court martial.
Regarding Deus Ex Machina:
“The generic annotated Star Trek episode”
All right, now we come down to the ending. Now, depending on which season the episode was in, there are three endings. They were very strict about this in the editing.
In the first season, it was the “test by superior beings” ending.
Kirk: But what were these Old Ones, anyway?
Amazingly superior being: (appearing suddenly, waving a large magic wand) Aha, it was all just a test! There’s hope for you yet! We’re not going to destroy you after all, at least not this century!
It’s always the Old Ones, too. Or the Great Ones. The Something Ones, anyhow. The Blue Ones, maybe.
No, the Dull Ones. “We poor inferior beings were put here by the Dull Ones. They put us to sleep for a thousand years. You woke us up, Kirk, so you must die.”
The second season was the high-tension one. Kirk’s on the planet with the hyperexplosive, it’s time for a last-minute beam-up, and what’s malfunctioning? The transporter of course! No kidding.
Spock: (over communicator) Five. Four.
Kirk: Scotty, hurry up.
Spock: Three. Two.
Scotty: (over communicator) It’s fixed, but I don’t…
Kirk: Scotty! Detonate and energize! (pause) No! ENERGIZE and DE…
haphooOOOOMMMPPPHHsizzle
But in the third season, it was Spock. See, for the first couple years they hadn’t really gotten his character down, but in the third season it was all well-defined.
Kirk: Spock! Isn’t it true that Vulcans have the ability to tapdance backwards through time while levitating through walls and juggling loaded phasers, blindfolded?
Spock: Yes, Captain, but it requires immense concentration.
Kirk: You’ll just have to try, Spock!
Spock: Ommm…oooooo…Oh, I did it. I guess it wasn’t so hard after all.
I was rereading Whitfield’s “The Making of Star Trek” a while back, and had forgotten that when NBC asked for an unprecedented second pilot episode, one of the three scripts under consideration was “The Omega Glory”. (The third choice was “Mudd’s Women”.) I wonder if there would have even been a Star Trek if “The Omega Glory” had been the second pilot, or if NBC execs would have laughed Roddenberry out of the screening room.
I doubt very much that the ending we saw was the one in the original story outline. I’d love to learn how it came about. Offhand, I suspect the NBC censor had something to do with it. (“No, no! If you’re going to show two civilizations fighting to the death, one has to be AMERICAN, and the AMERICANS have to win!”)
Well, there are limitations in the real world. First Contact was 1996, and Glenn Corbett died in 1993. Even had Corbett lived, it would have been weird to use the same actor 30 years after the fact. It would be like casting Ricardo Montalban as Khan in The Wrath Of Khan or Charlie Brill as Arne Darvin in Trials And Tribble-ations.
So you’re saying, the needs of the story outweigh the needs of the few, or the one?
In the “theories you came up with” department, I think it is obvious that the “caretaker” was no more real than anything else on the planet.*
The planet is designed to give you anything you want, anything you even think about. And right then, everyone on shore leave wanted an explanation. So the machine gave them one, that their limited minds could understand.
Did it never occur to anyone that the idea of having some lone guy spend his entire life by himself on this planet, just waiting for something to go wrong go wrong go wrong really isn’t the way anyone would design the system? AND that he was right there, within walking distance, ready to fix issues?
I mean, the original designers of the planet must have had better minds, so they don’t wish up lions and tigers and zeroes (oh my!) without understanding the consequences. They wouldn’t need a “caretaker” to fix their boo-boos.
Even the writer didn’t get it, which is why we have the sequel episode in TAS where ther non-existant caretaker dies.
*unless you meant “ex machina” literally?
Much as I agree with you about the grittier feel, and as much as I like Scott Bakula and John Billingsly, the series is a swing and a miss. The characters never seemed to get established, the plots were recycled, and the whole temporal cold war just doesn’t work.
I get the impression that the network interfered too much with the show.
I just randomly watched Charlie X, a couple points. They show Kirk’s navel, also they have a soft focus moment on Kirk’s face when Charlie walks in on a briefing just when they’re realizing what a threat he is, about 32:00.
I got the impression that they didn’t really have a plan, beyond the basic characters and setting of the show, and that the war with the Xindi and the Temporal Cold War were more or less ad-hoc storylines. The Temporal Cold War in particular seemed like it was a ST:TNG concept reanimated by a Dr. Frankenstein who was actually a vet.
IMO that was kind of the problem with all the follow-on Star Trek series; they resolutely kept the episodic format of ST:TOS and ST:TNG. DS9 varied from it a fair bit, and it was a marked improvement to have story arcs that spanned seasons, and recurrent characters, etc… Voyager OTOH, seems to have gone in the exact opposite direction with a setting almost guaranteed to have short 2-4 episode story arcs and standalone episodes.
Enterprise kind of tried to have it both ways, with the episodic format early, and the Xindi storyline in the last couple of seasons, but IMO they should have tried to combine them a bit more than they did.
I kind of think that the series was too Archer, T’Pol and Tucker centric; Reed, Sato and Mayweather were considerably less developed, with Mayweather having what, one secondary sub-plot concerning him in 4 seasons?
Did you catch the part where Kirk and Charlie get into the turbolift to go to the bridge, and Kirk is wearing a completely different shirt when they get out?
Maybe a transporter malfunction switched the turbolift shaft with the Batpole shaft that week.
There was one particular episode that centered on Mayweather, but he was, for the most part, scenery. Phlox, on the other hand, was one of the most amusing regulars ever in any ST series.
Sorry to say, but that actor that played Mayweather was one of ther worst series regular actors in the history of TV. He was Jake Lloyd bad. Bad actors point at him and say, “See? I’m not a bad actor!”
With all the attention on the franchise, they couldn’t find someone, ANYONE else that could act?
The real acting problem with Enterprise is Jolene Blalock. I don’t think she is very good. While Jeri Ryan or Leonard Nimoy seemed to be able to convey a character ruled by logic rather than emotion well, Blalock just seems wooden.
I think Anthony Montgomery’s character is just boring. He wasn’t a great actor, but he didn’t have much to work with. (Trivia note: I just learned Anthony Montgomery is Wes Montgomery’s grandson).
I think that was an intentional decision to return to the series’s roots with three main characters, a la Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Voyager ran for 7 seasons, but there were some problems with the show and they tried to resolve them but unfortunately had many of the same issues.
Every woman who has played a Vulcan has gotten that review. Heck, I could name a couple of cop roles played by women who got that review. It’s not the actor, it’s a combination of the role and society’s perceptions of women.