Week Three of the “new Series” Star Trek.
This week’s episode Where no Man has gone before
A recap of the rules
No one can user later undiscussed episodes.
The movies are a no no.
Later Star Trek series are out of bounds as well. We’ll treat this as Star Trek Year Zero.
New Episodes Air Tuesday Nights at 8pm on NBC
If you have that Alberta station you may post 1 day early but you must use spoiler boxes.
You may treat this as it were the sixties on the grounds that the discussion sticks to the show. Each new episode is a new episode
Ok here we go:
This is obviously the first episode (though one must wonder why show it third) There are some huge changes in the look of the show unless this is supposed to be earlier in the five year mission. Notice there is no voice over in the openeing. Spock looks really weird.
He mentions one of his ancestors was human so he’s not a pure Vulcanian. I guess that might effect his character or at least explain why he’s on an earth ship. Perhaps his ancestor crashed on Earth and he was raised there.
Kirk seems to be able to always beat him in 3D chess. this is the second mention of that (Charlie X last week showed Spock being beaten by Kirk’s illogical moves)
The story was interesting. Kirk’s friend becomes godlike and forgets how to be a good human. I like the phaser rifle a nifty and powerful weapon. What I really like is the fact that all the technology is not discussed in great length. It is like the way we used todays devices. I’ll say I phoned a freind in Europe but wouldn’t go into huge detail about how it worked.
Finally they are exploring. No picking up or dropping off they are traveling outside the galaxy to see what is what.
Why fly into the energy barrier? Fly over it it is just a thin band.
New fact: Kirk’s middle initial is R. On the tombstone. I think I also saw the year he was born. Looked like 21 something, anyone else catch that?
Over all not too bad. Kirk’s compasion was almost his udoing in this episode.
I thought I saw Spock smiling in this one. I thought Vulcanians weren’t supposed to have emotions. What gives? Of course, since this is apparently the first episode being shown out of sequence, maybe the idea wasn’t fully developed when they were shooting it.
Well, the energy barrier is just dumb. The Galaxy certainly doesn’t end like that. The band must be the limitations of their special effects - I assume it is a shell, but it’s still dumb.
I’m glad they didn’t show this one first - the earlier episodes were better. This is too much like an Outer Limits superbeing episode.
I did like the mention of the Academy - it gave Kirk a history, and gave some insight to his personality. I hope we see more of this.
I didn’t like the way the plot revolved around a character who we haven’t seen before and who expires before the final credits. I’m not entirely sure why though. I guess I just didn’t like the guy very much. Shoot him with something, quit wasting time! And the girl was a wimp for too long, although she got backbone later on.
I didn’t like the uniforms, if that’s what they were. I see from what other folks have posted that this one was made earlier? Well, if they ditched these uniforms in favor of the ones we’ve seen so far, good choice.
The whole “wall at the end of the galaxy” thing annoyed me to no end. Really really bad science fiction. I call foul.
How do we know that this week’s episode was filmed earlier than the other two that have been shown? I mean, I know the uniforms and the medical officer are different, but maybe the producers just didn’t like how they were before and changed them for the third episode.
Anyway, very good performances from the guest stars, Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood, catching the profound effect of their circumstances, and their mental isolation from other humans.
I’m so glad to see science fiction aimed at an adult intelligence on television, after all the cheap kiddy stuff in the 1950s. The Outer Limits was a step in the right direction, although it was an anthology without sustained characters. Let’s hope they don’t drop the ball on this one (no pun on Desilu intended).
I thought this an interesting episode. I suppose we’ve seen people becoming godlike before (last week with Charlie, in fact), but you really felt the difficulty Kirk had in bringing himself to fight his friend. Spock was kind of creepier in this episode; I hope he returns to his usual more taciturn self. Kellerman’s a good actress; I also liked the idea that this crew is so big that it isn’t surprising to see a new face from time to time.
Interesting concept for a show. However, I hope the show’s creators don’t overdo it with the “godlike” beings. I mean, imagine if there was one who just toyed with the Enterprise crew as if he was a child, or just a bothersome nuisance…
Spock called Kirk “Jim” and that was jarring. I agree - if this wasn’t an episode shown out of order, I don’t like the direction - everything seemed off. If this was an earlier episode shown out of order, maybe they should have gone through one more rewrite and refilmed it, or just scrapped it.
Yeah, this is what makes me doubtful. We’re looking at three episodes and two of them concern the captain trying to cope with humans who have been adapted to have enormous God-like powers.
What? They couldn’t come up with more than two plots for the first three episodes? This better not come back again.
Over the winter break, I was able to get my hands on six episodes of Babylon 5 - from “Legacies” to “Chrysalis”. This was my first exposure to the series, my previous plan of videotaping the reruns on Scifi having fallen through. I have a few questions about these episodes, but first off, I’d better say that I really enjoyed five out of the six ones that I saw (Legacies was, I thought, a bit weak) and that these are more inquiries than criticisms.
Tech’n’stuff
Babylon 5 rotates to create gravity, and it apparantly does so at a quite-rapid rate. Current projections for rotating space stations require them to be at least a kilometer wide to prevent dizziness from the inner ear “sensing” the rotation. Is there som mention of this difficulty in the series?
Starfuries are launched using the stations rotation to get them going (nice idea, btw). However, in the launching sequence, we see them going one after another, several seconds apart. Does that mean that they go out in an arc?
What do PPGs fire?
C&C does not appear to rotate, as evidenced by the viewscreen showing still stars. How do they stay on the ground, then? Magnetic boots?
Other stuff
Does the CGI improve as time goes on? The stuff in Chrysalis was amazing (for the time), but some, especially in “Legacies”, is rather awkward.
More importantly, does the scoring change? The greatest annoyance with watching these episodes was that the music is practically always an electronic-sounding series of tones, without any complexity that one gets from instruments, rhythmical rather than melodic. Is there any orchestral-style scoring for later seasons?
Does anyone else think that Sinclair has a distinct resemblance to a certain presidential candidate?
A Voice in the Wilderness
How did Sinclair know that the missiles wouldn’t hit him as he descended into the crevice, where covering fire was unavailable?
Wasn’t there any sort of evacuation of the outer levels before the battle? One would think that that would greatly reduce casualties
Babylon Squared
It was stated that it takes several hours to get to B4 in realspace, and that a few rounds were needed to evacuate everyone. Garibaldi was overseeing the evacuation at the time, but what was Sinclair doing? Asking Zathras some more questions? Talking about socks?
Chrysalis
Wow.
It seems that the story of a malfunction aboard EF1 will be told to the public at home. How, then, will they explain the jamming of the gold channels? That should be noticable to a few outside the government.
If Garibaldi was wounded on the back, why did they flip him over so that the wound was against the bed?
I figured that this was the pilot because the picture that TV Guide used for the Fall Preview issue bit on Star Trek had Kirk and Spock with the phaser rifle. They usually take those pictures from the first episode, since the others aren’t ready yet.
I didn’t see the thread on Charlie X, but I liked that show. It is an old universe, and even the future in Star Trek is but a few hundred years from today, so it makes sense that there are old very advanced races around. They needed to have a human as a point of contact in the show. This one, with Gary Lockwood (who was the star of the old Roddenberry show The Lieutenant, by the way) becoming a superman is far less original.
I like the idea of having an astrophysicist on staff. It just makes darned good sense, especially since that Vulcanian guy shouldn’t be the resident expert on all things scientific. And making the astrophysicist an Asian guy was a great victory for multiculturalism!
I saw the TV Guide write up about this new show idea and thought it might be a lot of fun, but seeing that much gratuitous violence on prime time NBC… Well, I may just have to fire of a letter of complaint.
With those misgivings out of the way, let me say how happy I am to see a serious look at life in the future. I would love to see whatever writer’s guide they may have. Because there seems to be a heck of a lot of untold back story to the major characters. I remember seeing some of Rodenberry’s earlier stuff (mostly cop shows), and he seems to like having well developed characters.
Yeah, that Glactic Barrier was kind of silly, but how else would anyone show what fictional space oddities might look like? Special effects are very time consuming and thus very expensive.
My youngest boy, Stevie, seems to have developed a fixation on that devil eared Vulcanian. Not sure how I feel about that.
Oh yeah, did anyone else see that super funny Alka Seltzer commercial? Hoo boy, those guys is funny!
On it’s own, the episode was fun. But it did seem a little odd to have two episodes in a row about humans who can’t deal with their new god-like powers. Hopefully we’ll see a little more variation than this in future episodes…
Whatever order these episodes were shot in, it would have been nice if they’d at least acknowledged the similarities. You know…“Be careful how you deal with Charlie, Captain. Remember what happened with Gary Mitchell.” Maybe it’s good they didn’t do that, if they’re showing them out of sequence.
What’s cool is that both episodes didn’t show the afflicted folks simply going on a rampage. They took some time to explore the human elements of what happened to them. And both figures, ultimately, couldn’t be saved. That’s a change from most TV.
So… what year is the show set in? I think this was the first referrence to any kind of time frame. They mentioned that the previous vessel to try and cross the barrier went missing over two centuries earlier. Given that the Russians and the Americans are still unable to even make it to the moon, I’d guess we’re looking at no less then 100 years before we get to even that first ship… so some time in the late 23rd century? Anybody spot any other referrences?
