I liked that one because Mudd looks EXACTLY like my undergrad advisor. I mean, for a second I thought it was actually him, then I remembered that he probably hadn’t been born yet.
There’s women on the Enterprise; I think it was canon that a quarter of the officers & crew were female. And it wasn’t that the Women were “objecgtively” hot; it was that they had some magic pheremone wackiness going on that caused humans to overreact.
I won’t address the issue of Vulcan virginity, partly because I don’t care and partly because I *really *don’t care. But I think Spock didn’t react to them less because of his iron self-control and simply because he’s not (mostly) human. He just wasn’t wired to react to the specific scents they were giving off. One of the series – Enterprise, maybe – had a Vulcan character comment that she found the smell of humans vaguely unsettling.
So, coming in cold, how do you like your fifty year old television? How’s the sets seem to you? The music? The costuming? The FX?
Eh, I knew what I was getting into. The bluray clean up really helps. The sets are surprisingly decent for their age (but another lolz to the painted backgrounds on the planets). The music was pretty decent too, although the singing on the theme song in season 3 really annoyed me. That was worse than the “singing” version of the Seinfeld theme. The costumes…I was wondering this last night - does the crew ever wear anything OTHER than their uniforms when on the ship?
I’ve been admiring poor Uhura for managing to sit in her ridiculous dress (with her ridiculous matching fake-panties just in case) and keeping everything to herself, you know? But we just watched "“Tomorrow is Yesterday” and saw a peek of actual underwear. How humiliating! (I love her - she gets almost absolutely nothing to do but she’s always over there, tough and classy and a little bit slyly funny.)
Well, to be fair, most of the time, the crew members you see are on duty. But there are occasional scenes where a crew member is wearing more casual clothes, such as in The Naked Time where Sulu imagines himself to be a samurai and is prancing around bare-chested with a sword. Or The Tholian Web which has Uhura off duty in her quarters and is wearing a nightgown.
It happens a lot more often starting with TNG, from Troi and Crusher’s leotards when they’re doing the holo-exercise program, to Worf’s gi when he’s doing his martial arts exercises, to just casual wear on the part of almost everybody at different times.
“On duty”? In Wolf in the Fold (with Scotty on trial for murder on Argelius), Scotty, McCoy, and Kirk go bar hopping in uniform!
Maybe it’s easier to pick up belly dancers in your snappy uniform.
When a US Navy ship is in (non-home) port, do the sailors wear their street clothes into town or their duty uniforms?
Civies, usually, unless ordered to wear the crackerjacks.
Civies are more comfortable than the uniform. (Cheaper, too.)
Let me rephrase that, because I honestly don’t know, but I’m struck by how many portrayals of sailors in port have them in uniform…
When a US Navy ship was in (non-home) port in the WWII era (when Gene Roddenberry was in the military), did they wear uniforms or civvies when the sailors went into town?
I honestly don’t know, either. Sorry.
I was in the Navy in the 80’s. We were allowed to wear civilian clothes on liberty after achieving E4. A teeshirt, jeans, and sneakers was cheaper than wearing your dress uniform. So, if you plan on whoring it up and passing out drunk in some gutter, you wear your civies. (In The Sand Pebbles, the crew of the Yangtze patrol gunboat went on liberty in their dress whites, and I would cringe watching that.)
On special occasions (Fleet Week in the host city, World’s Fair, First port visit to communist China since forever, etc.), the C.O. may order “uniform only” liberty for PR reasons.
However, back in the day, as you say, it may have been that junior enlisted sailors weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes, or they couldn’t afford them, or they didn’t have enough personal storage space aboard their ship to store them.
But in the case I mentioned above, Kirk, Scotty, and McCoy aren’t junior in rank or maturity level. And officers in Gene’s time definately could afford civilian clothes, as well as have permission to wear them if they wanted to, off duty.
Photo: Rear Admiral Nimitz being sworn in as Chief of [the] Bureau of Navigation, 1939, in a buisness suit. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h62000/h62008.jpg
Definitely true about the 25%, BTW.
But we didn’t see Enterprise “women” in that episode, did we? Only a woman, Uhura, right? (I don’t have any vids to check.) Wasn’t the frequently-present Yeoman Janice Rand missing in action? (I refer only to the first part of the first season, before Grace Lee Whitney was let go.) ISTR such because in “Corbomite” Kirk was quite a bit bothered (um…) when the Yeoman popped into his cabin for some reason, and a paralllel was played with the gal that targetted Kirk.
That seems awfully convenient. It reminds me of the early episodes of “Wonder Years” in which Kevin would meet an interesting new girl. “Whiny”-whatzername would suddenly be missing from the cafeteria. And I mean before the time when she moved away for a while.
With regards to uniforms, on the other hand, Navy dress whites get all the girls. My cite: I once went to Spring Break at Daytona Beach when I was old enough to find it all very, very funny.
Those are some pretty good counter-examples, as far as being entertaining overall.
But “Syndrome” had a major pacing flaw. Did the landing party have a many months or a few minutes (seconds?) left to find Kirk before beaming up and tackling the asteroid? (Spock certainly took a long time explaining to McCoy why he was supposedly wrong, BTW.)
After failing to tractor or split the asteroid, we are back to months to spare (although with the warp drive shot our ship can barely keep ahead for that duration).
Maybe Spock meant that the optimum point was a close flyby to the planet, and they only had a short time to take advantage of that window of opportunity, before the asteroid made its next orbital approach, this time the killer. But Spock never actually said that. If he was being even very roughly accurate in his rock illustration, the asteroid would have struck the planet before he could make it to the bridge.
And “Incident” had at least one very screwy scene. After Kirk’s death is faked, our faux Romulan is beamed aboard the enemy ship, and hilarity ensues. The Romulans had their reasons for not desroying the Enterprise outright, and they even (testily) agreed to an exchange of hostages during negotiaions, but they would still have had shields up while playing footsie.
Even assuming that their shields could somehow be bypassed, by generally greater Federation technology, they would have been watching the ship like so many hawks. Devil-may-care Kirk would have been in deep doo-doo.
Sheeeesh!
Corn My Dad Grows - man, Shatner’s let himself go over the years. I barely recognized him. Even at the tender age of 79, he still manages to get some though. Not really a fan of his sons, and that “celebrity sex list” b-story has been done so many times (has that story ever PROPERLY been used?). Strangely, in this episode they never left earth…infact I didn’t even detect any sci-fi elements, other than unusually large stalks of corn growing in a suburban back yard.
The Enemy Within - did everyone know that Takai was gay when the show was filming, because that was the gayest dog I’ve ever seen. Hey, how come in every single parody of this episode, Evil Kirk had a beard? So did anyone NOT see the twist coming that they changed shirts?
That trope is informed by a later episode, Mirror, Mirror, where some of the crew ends up in an “evil” universe due to a transporter accident. In that episode, mirror-Spock wears a goatee. The trope expanded over the years to the point where “evil twin”=“wears goatee”, except where it’s subverted by the “good” twin normally wearing a goatee and the evil one being clean-shaven.
It’s expanded WAAAY beyond Star Trek, too. In the webcomic Order of the Stick, the naive, chaotic good bard Elan’s evil twin Nale, sports a goatee.
So that’s why parodies almost invariably stick goatees on evil duplicates.
Wow, so TOS did the good/evil twin story TWICE?
Sort of. In “The Enemy Within,” one thinks at first that the other Kirk is evil, but in fact he is part of the Kirk we know: i.e., unrestrained by conscience or judgment. Contrariwise, the “good” Kirk is pretty much useless; he cannot make a decision because he cannot bear the thought of causing harm, even when it’s necessary. Neither of them were the real Kirk, and neither could be a good long-term captain.
Also, in “Mirror, Mirror,” nobody ever actually meets their counterparts, an Beadless!Spock isn’t fooled for an instant. (Which is less a comment on his intelligence versus his counterpart’s than it is a comment that it’s easier for a civilized man to fake barbarity than the reverse.