EARLY ACCESS - The Worst Love Interest in Star Trek History? (S3E16)
Added 2023-04-03 20:52:02 +0000 UTCOur YouTube edited reaction to The Mark of Gideon will be posted Thursday, but you can watch it right now!
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Comments
Overpopulation was always kind of a dumb concept to me. Something should always prevent it. A lack of food. A lack of medical care. Disease. Some type of birth control. A desire for less children. A lack of clean water. The expense in raising additional children. A lack of energy. A lack of natural resources. Combat or war between those can't stand being packed together any longer. The lack of a desire not live under certain circumstances. Etc.
Chtphr Rrr
2023-04-04 23:49:50 +0000 UTCI never actually noticed this as much before you mentioned it, but it is indeed the case that TOS suffers immensely from the old writing trope (which is unfortunately very much alive still today) of pushing the heroes up by making everybody else completely incompetent. Future Star Trek shows will do that less I feel (it'll still happen, but less often, and less extreme)
Andreas Schmitt
2023-04-04 17:18:35 +0000 UTCThis was definitely a case of "can we maybe focus on the actual plot instead of somehow forcing the young sexy blonde into there, whether it makes sense or not?". The girl made ZERO sense in this story. Nor did the fake enterprise. Using Kirk or his crew to infect the population, to re-start a normal dying process is fine as an idea. But the actual idea was almost not addressed at all. You have a huge amount of time with a pointless romance, which doesn't even pay off. In city at the edge of forever the drama was that the woman Kirk was in love with had to die for the greater good. Here... they don't have the balls for that so she gets saved in the end (nevermind the fact that not even the romance preceeding that was well executed). So that's completely useless. The fake enterprise is completely pointess. Tricking Kirk into infecting someone... sure.. putting him on a HUGE ship with filtered air (in case they copied that) with a single other person is not exactly a great way to ensure infection. The entire beaurocracy and red tape thing was funny, but how exactly did that add anything to the plot? So this planet has a ton of red tape AND is overpopulated? The romance, the fake ship stuff and the red tape were all a complete waste of time, which is why the actual plot got no time to develop and be explored. To me that's why this episode failed horribly: I cannot decide what it is actually about and shoves a pretty girl in there just because they think it will get them ratings if Kirk kisses the 100th hot blonde.
Andreas Schmitt
2023-04-04 16:52:19 +0000 UTCWhile the sight of people packed together like sardines does make for a striking visual statement, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. "Soylent Green" used the same trope with much the same effect.
Rob
2023-04-04 01:21:21 +0000 UTCIt's not the worst episode, but it might be about the dumbest episode. I read some review of this episode once that said that this was a completely unrealistic episode due to the fact that a planet so overpopulated that its citizens can barely move has the unique ability to build an exact replica of the star ship Enterprise. Then you think further and wonder how in the world Kirk would not recognize that the ship was not a replica. Nothing about the ship replica makes any sense! They have used the ship as a replica for several starships. Really I think they needed to quit doing this. Those examples weren't great. The Lexington and the mirror universe ISS Enterprise go a high-backed captain's chair. Some the damaged ships had hanging pipes and green glows. I think even if you ignore the duplicate USS Enterprise part of the episode that it's still a very, very uninspiring episode. Overpopulation was a big concern around the 1960s. That topic could have been addressed better in some much better way. The actor Gene Dynarski returns from the Mudd's Women episode and even makes a Next Generation appearance and an appearance on Seinfeld as the son of Lloyd Bridges (Commander Cain from Battlestar Galactica) before passing away in 2020 at age 86. Guest actress Sharon Acker who played Odana just died about 2 1/2 weeks ago on March 16, 2023 at age 87. I had assumed that she was younger than Shatner. Acker was apparently featured in the (Battlestar) Galactica 1980 pilot. The actor David Hurst who played Ambassador Hodin also died somewhat recently in 2019; a Jewish kid born in Berlin, he was one of the nearly 10,000 children who were sent to the United Kingdom between 1938 and 1939, but he never saw his mother again after fleeing Nazi Germany. The story for this episode was co-written by Stanley Adams, who previously played Cyrano Jones in "The Trouble with Tribbles".
Chtphr Rrr
2023-04-03 23:55:12 +0000 UTC
