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Matt and Sean talk about planting seeds that will bear fruit DECADES later in Star Trek: The Original Series. Captain Kirk and Khan meet for the first time. Does this major sci-fi rivalry hold up?
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/trekintime
Matt and Sean talk about planting seeds that will bear fruit DECADES later in Star Trek: The Original Series. Captain Kirk and Khan meet for the first time. Does this major sci-fi rivalry hold up?
YouTube version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/trekintime
Follow us on X: @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
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Creators & Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
In this episode of Trek in Time, we're going to be talking about misunderstanding or underestimating the traumas of the past. That's right, everybody. We're talking about Star Trek season one. Hold on to your butts, Matt. It's Space Seed. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time. We're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order.
We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So currently we're talking about early 1967 and we're talking about the original series. And who are we? I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids. And with me as always is my brother, Matt.
He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you today?
I'm doing great. And I'm also really excited because The Lower Decks just started back up again. Yes. It's final season.
Yeah.
There has been, I've seen some chatter in Reddit around, like, we need to save this show. And I'm not sure, do you know, was it canceled or did the series producers decide, like, it's time for us to end this? I'm not sure. I would lean on the side of it may be that it was time to end it because I can't imagine this is a crazy expensive show to produce.
So it's like, I don't think they would necessarily cancel it. It's also very popular for my understanding. A lot of people that really follow it. I would also think there would be interest on the part of the cast to first be able to do other projects, but also this seems like it's a no brainer that they'll do a movie every once in a while.
This is a context where in animation, they're not going to get older and they could just continue to once a year, pop out a movie and they could do all sorts of shenanigans in animated film.
The other thing to keep in mind is that some of the people that are involved in Lower Decks are now involved in the, uh, Starfleet Academy TV show. So that may also be playing a role here that the creators were kind of like, we want to do something different. They're artists, they're creators. It's like we did this for five years and we want to try something different. So it may be that as well.
Before we get into our conversation about Space Seed, we always like to take a look in the mailbag and see what you've been saying about our previous episodes. So what did you find in the mailbag this week?
Now this, this episode, Sean, A Taste of Armageddon, got a lot of really good comments. I had a real hard time narrowing it down today. Uh, so first we have one from Style8686 who wrote, I'm so glad that you have this whole podcast just to talk about my favorite show from the 60s, Get Smart.
Such a classic. Great to see it is still appreciated. It even gave me my profile name. Style's a champion game player from Blue Adept by Piers Anthony, but I'm afraid my own skills are closer to those of an Agent 86 of Control. Oh, and it was nice to see that the other old show, Star Trek, got a mention too.
Yeah. So, thank you, Style. Thanks for dropping in. Mate, I couldn't stop giggling after I read that one. Uh, then we also had a comment from Old Trekkie, cause I, uh, who I had, I had complained about Spock doing his, like, mind meld through the wall thing, like, what's the deal with that? Well, Old Trekkie pointed out, spoilers, question mark, nitpick, Matt, in the future episode By Any Other Name, Spock does the mind meld through a wall thing again.
Mark Loveless responded saying, and coming up very soon in Devil in the Dark, Spock mind melds with another Mothra Horda without touching it before mind melding by touching it. So I thought it was funny that he does both in that episode. So yes, I completely forgot about those, that he does this a few times in the original series.
So. Oops. That's a lot of Star Trek to keep in our minds. Matt and I are going to get it wrong sometimes. Yeah. And then, I mean, like, I'm not joking, Sean. There were a bunch of comments I wanted to put in there, but just for time, I didn't do it. But then when we got to wrong answers only, we had a bunch of these as well today, too.
And I had a hard time narrowing down what I wanted to put in for the wrong answers only for the next episode, which is Space Seed. Dan Sims had me laughing pretty hard when all he wrote was Space Seed. Redacted.
And then AJ Chan wrote, Space Seed, the Enterprise encounters an abandoned planet where the planet is covered in industrialized cities and vast piles of garbage. The landing party tries to solve the mystery of what happened to all the people. After some hijinks, they discover a small robot named Wally who has been protecting a lone seed.
Sulu and the crew begin, uh, bring plants from the botany lab to leave Wally with a great environment. Wally calls his new garden, Botany Bay. So I thought that was a nice little tie in to WALL E. That was a nice little tie in. Yeah. And Mark Loveless, of course, had a good one that had me laughing. Plot of Space Seed.
Kirk is called into space court due to the fact that with his interplanetary adventures, in quotes, he's got about two dozen kids from different alien mothers now wanting child support. Still can't work out why this episode was called Space Seed. Maybe Sean knows. Don't throw that in my court. No, no, no.
To circle back to the WALL E Reference. I love that synopsis. And I kid you not, I started to get misty eyed as it went on, because you can't talk about the movie WALL E without hitting a very sensitive spot in my heart. That movie, I went to it knowing it was a sci fi story. And I had a small child with me at the time.
My son was young when that came out. And I went to that movie. Not realizing that the first 40 minutes of it would effectively be the most beautiful silent film that's ever been made. And by the halfway point, I was crying so hard that my son was like, are you okay? And I still, when I talk about that movie and the character of Wally, it immediately gets me misty eyed.
It is the animation equivalent of Spock's death in the Wrath of Khan. So good segue onto this episode. That noise you hear in the background, well, that can only be one thing. It's the read alert, which means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. And Matt, similar to last week's, I found this one strangely lacking. Take it away.
Okay. Alright. The Enterprise discovers an ancient sleeper ship, the SS Botany Bay, which escaped from Earth's eugenics wars in the late 20th century. The genetically engineered passengers, led by war criminal Khan Noonien Singh, seize control of the Enterprise and attempt to destroy the ship.
That is, well, that's not really what happened. Exactly right. That's not really what happens.
It's not really what happened.
It wouldn't be better to say that Khan Noonien Singh and his cohort tried to steal the Enterprise so that they can go on a galactic quest to rule the galaxy. That might have been a better summary.
But instead, they were just like, they captured the ship so that they can destroy it because shenanigans? That makes sense. Yeah. This episode directed by Marc Daniels, story by Carey Wilber, teleplay by Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilber. A little bit of background about the writing of this.
Wilber originally wrote the story for this, for a different TV series, the general plot had originally been created by Wilber for the series, Captain Video and his video Rangers. Matt, how does that strike you as a TV show? That sounds awful. I had never heard of it before. Anyway, in his original version, the humans were from ancient Greece and they were in cryogenic suspension.
There would be a number of Attempts at evolutions of this and eventually it would be converted into a Nordic vision so that these would be almost, uh, Ubermen kind of being discovered with a Nordic background. I don't know if the change from that to something else was done because of the Aryan overtones of saying that these are, you know, Scandinavian ancestry and Ubermen.
So eventually though, they landed on the idea of going with a Sikh in command and Hence, Khan was created, but in the number of permutations, when it came to writer credit, by the time that this was coming to air, Gene Roddenberry attempted to claim primary writing credit for this episode. He had been involved in the writing at the very last stages, including giving, uh, Khan his name, but the number of permutations that originated with Wilbur's screenplay, the Writers Guild of America said, no, you don't get credit.
He gets credit. So Wilbur got story credit. He also got partial teleplay credit, and Gene L. Coon, who had been the primary mover of big shifts in evolution of the story, got co-teleplay credit. Interesting that some of the details that originally were being toyed with, these at one point were based on Wilber's first draft for Star Trek.
He had picked up, remember when we had the previous episode that took place on the, uh, in the penal colony where they were using the mind wipe machine to change prisoner attitude. He took an element about the evolution of treatment of prisoners and made them originally just straight up criminals. They, there was no overarching, uh, genetically modified people aspect.
Gene L. Coon brought that in, which I thought was an interesting evolution. And as I mentioned, the idea of them being Nordic at one point, it was effectively going to be like a Leif Erikson. It was going to be almost like a Viking explorer style of leader. And eventually that would, would turn into Khan.
Amongst the original cast, we see a lot of everybody. We see William Shatner, we see Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly. I'll come back to Scotty. We see Nichelle Nichols. Scotty, in this one, last week, during our conversation, Matt, you mentioned a lot of good Scotty presence in the episode. That episode was filmed, broadcast before this one, but filmed after this one.
This one, the producers had been getting such positive feedback about the character of Scotty that they began in this production to push for Scotty to get more airtime. So I think it's fascinating. This is the episode where the producers like put Scotty more in the forefront because he's starting to get a fan base.
And next episode in production was the one we talked about last week in which Scotty is left in command of the ship. And we really, really loved all that. So I think it's, I think it's neat how you're beginning to see at this stage, it's late in the season. But you're beginning to see how the fan reaction to these characters is beginning to shape the look of the show.
Also interesting, during the production of this episode, cast was given an early dismissal on one Thursday during the production of this episode. So they could go home because the broadcast of the episode, The Balance of Terror, was happening that night. So that gives you a sense of the gap between production and airing.
Balance of Terror was one of the first episodes of the original series we talked about. So they were given off the evening to be able to watch that and broadcast, which I think tells you two things. It gives you a sense of the gap between production And then the, uh, airing of the episode, it also lets you know, I think, that everybody involved in production of this show knew that Balance of Terror was a special episode.
I think it was an episode that they recognized, oh, we just stepped into what this show is is. And that was part of our discussion when we talked about it, we had talked, I remember about some of the very earliest episodes while feeling Star Trek, like the Corbomite Maneuver, it still wasn't quite there yet.
It still was a little bit like, Hmm, I kind of like feel like it's a little loosey goosey with what it means to be Starfleet, but by Balance of Terror, it's really starting to gel. And by here we're starting to see the different characters who are stepping up. We're seeing more Sulu. We're seeing more Scotty.
The guest actors for this episode, uh, little known actor named, uh, according to my notes, Ricardo Montalban. Hmm. Wonder whatever happened to him. As Khan Noonien Singh, Madlyn Rhue as Lieutenant Marla McGivers, Blaisdell Makee as Spinelli, Mark Tobin as Joaquin, Kathy Ahart as the crew woman, and John Winston as transporter technician.
This is an interesting note because John Winston as lieutenant Kyle. He had a name. Uh, I think it's interesting that for whatever reason in this episode notes, he didn't have a name. The time of original broadcast, February 16th, 1967. So almost Valentine's day, which can mean only one thing, Matt. Yes. It's time for you to sing.
I'm a believer. For the last time, I hope. Good. And at the movies, well, Matt, believe it or not, we're not going to talk to the Bible this week, we're talking Grand Prix, thank God. Yes. This is a somewhat interesting film for a couple of reasons for me. It was a movie we're going to go into the Wayback Machine now.
Uh, Matt and I used to work, not at the same time, but consecutively at a video store in Boston. And this movie was on the shelves. And one day as I was shelving movies that had been returned, I spotted this movie and I am a large James Garner fan, big fan of the Rockford files. And I saw the movie and I thought I've never heard of this movie before.
So I took it home and I watched it and loved it. It is a classic of what I think of as slow paced realism, if you are a fan of a movie like Bullet, it's that kind of pacing where it is This movie is about Formula One racing, and it is about Formula One racing that includes a lot of actual Formula One racers and a lot of footage of races, which reaches a point of absurdity, because if you were to build a movie today with as much racing as this movie has, you would feel like you were no longer watching a movie.
You are now just watching Formula One racing. There are such long scenes that are just about the races themselves. But it's the tone of the filmmaking that follows the Bullet's model of there's something in the characterization of showing something that is ostensibly not changing, but giving you a sense of who the people are that is at work in this movie.
And so as a mood piece and As a piece of interesting cinema that's kind of lost in a kind of ether of the past, I really, really like this movie. It is not a melodrama by any stretch of the imagination. So it's in that vein of late sixties, early seventies cinema, where it feels like it's more about the journey than the destination.
And so this is a movie that I actually do give high marks to, and I recommend. And on television, we, of course, have been looking at the Nielsen ratings, trying to compare Star Trek, which averaged about a 12 with other programs of the era, including Bonanza, which is the number one show of this year with a 29 to give you a sense of the scale.
And we've moved through a lot of different programs that are well known shows, everything from the Andy Griffith show, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, classics of rerun shows that would have been on the air on reruns broadcast through the seventies, eighties and nineties on Nick at Night for decades.
And we reach now a show, which is a show I was aware of for one very particular reason. And that reason is likely appearing on the video that you are watching right now. Yes. Petticoat Junction earned a whopping 20 in the Nielsen's. So we are still at programs that are hitting 20s compared to Star Trek's 12 on average.
And a little surprising nugget, this episode, Space Seed, earned just below a 10. This is not one of the higher rated episodes of the original series at time of broadcast. I found that. Very interesting. But Petticoat Junction, yes, the image you're looking at is an actual still from the opening credits of the show.
Matt, is this a program that you were at all familiar with? I've never seen it, but I'm aware of it. I knew it was out there, I recognized the name, but I've never seen a single episode. Yes, Petticoat Junction is the American sitcom that was aired on CBS from 1963 to 1970. And it takes place at the Shady Rest Hotel, which is run by Kate Bradley and her three daughters, Billy Joe, Bobby Joe, and Betty Joe and her uncle, Joe Carson.
And uncle Joe was often a punchline in mystery science theater 3000. So if anybody is suddenly aware of like, Oh yeah, I remember them making that joke and I never quite got it. That was uncle Joe. It was. A part of a franchise and this, you know, kind of like Norman Lear, how everything that Norman Lear touched was in some way related to something else from Norman Lear.
So you end up with all in the family, didn't do the Jeffersons and Maud and One Day at a Time and like the connective thread of all those programs. Well, the Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were both in the same universe as Petticoat Junction. So if this property is ever purchased by Disney, we could eventually see all of those characters appear in a Marvel movie.
Wouldn't that be exciting? And in the news. On this day in February of 1967, we continue to see headlines about how great things are going in Vietnam. We see a news story about voting in India. We see President Johnson making announcements with Congress. We see news about the Soviet Union possibly shifting its stance on a missile pact, the new story that stood out to me.
Well, it was about president Johnson, barring agency influence over education. That's right. President Johnson was finally putting an end to the CIA being involved in recruiting spies through a student association in the United States. This was a news story that I read and reread and then had to do some research on because I was like, what?
That was a thing? That was a thing? Looking into it deeper. I discovered, yes, there was in 1967. CIA director Richard Helms had, as he would later recall, one of the darkest days of his career when president Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the agency's best kept secrets, a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism.
Ramparts, however, had only a small part of the story about the CIA's. Two decades long efforts has abhorred the National Student Association. The investigation caused Johnson to effectively say, this has to end now because we've been caught. And the program was shuttered. There is a book called Patriotic Betrayal, and this is not an endorsement of the book, but it is just me saying, like, this book exists.
Uh, Patriotic Betrayal is an investigation by a former NSA officer. It was published in, I want to say 2010 or thereabouts. And it's a deep investigation using memos and letters about the program, investigating what was going on. It originated in 1947 and both the NSA and CIA were established in that year.
And the CIA had its fingers in this. The CIA by its charter is not supposed to do any work within the United States. So this was in fact breaking its charter. I found myself as I was reading this, I'm like, how has this not been turned into a television series or a movie? Because. Yikes. Yeah. On now to our discussion about this most recent episode.
We are of course talking about Space Seed and we are going to start off with Matt, your big picture thoughts. I know you were excited about this one. So take it away.
Yeah. I've been looking forward to this one because there's so much sci fi stuff to mine here. It's so deep, like the whole eugenics wars and like. You could make a movie about that, which they kind of did. And then you could follow up on that theme again in other series, which they did.
It's like, there's a so much sci fi goodness in the storytelling here. Um, there, of course it's very 1960s and there's some part that make you kind of go cringe and there's like a, like, really?
You thought that was a good idea? There's still that going on in this episode, but high level, this is one of my favorite episodes of the original series. And it might be, you know, it might be because When I was watching this, I can't remember if I saw this first or Wrath of Khan first, but like, you know, you know, I was 10, 12 years old and that's when I start just consuming Star Trek.
And so it's like, the original series episodes I'm watching, the movies are coming out and I'm watching them. So it's like, I was just in it. So it was kind of all a mishmash and that may be part of the reason why I'm so in love with this one. Um. Because they deal with it again later. You get the, it's like this episode deals with the ramifications of past actions and then Star Trek 2 deals with the ramifications of past actions.
It's basically doing the same thing again in the future of like, Oh, Kirk, when you put them on that planet, you done screwed up, son. Um, it's, it's. It's interesting to see how this kind of echoes again and again and again through Star Trek. It's just a wonderful theme, very rich. And I also love Ricardo Montalban in this episode as well as the movie.
He's a very commanding presence. Yeah. Um, perfect casting. Um, he's also a beautiful man, you know, like his physique and everything. It's like, no joke. It's like, you didn't have to do too much to him to make him look fit. Like he towers over everybody and he's also incredibly fit, like big arms and big chest.
And it's like, I remember in the movie, they, they, I don't know, I don't know if it was a prosthetic they put on his chest or if that was actually his chest in the movie, but it's like, they made him very like robust. And so it's like, it comes across as, oh yeah, I do believe he's stronger than everybody else in the room.
I do believe he's this, you know, authoritarian guy who's charismatic and can make people do whatever he wants. It's like, I, you believe every aspect of this. So for me, this episode is just like, It's the most classic of classic Trek. It's just great sci fi storytelling. And it makes me angry to learn that Roddenberry tried to take credit for this when he really didn't have too much to do with it because it's actually a really interesting idea that really, in my opinion, paid off with dividends.
Yeah. I remember definitely seeing this before seeing the movie. I was, of course, watching the reruns all the time when the movie came out so i'm sure i had seen it in that regard but there was a rebroadcast of the original episode and i believe it had may have been recolorized using colorizing methods of the time right before Wrath of Khan was in theaters.
So this was like the movie was coming out on Friday. They rebroadcast this on NBC as a special at 8pm the Thursday before because it was like perfect lead in and it was I remember watching it in the living room. I'm sure you watched it there too but you just may not remember it because you're dumb. No, you're younger than I am so of course your memory is not going to be as clear at that point but yeah it was.
Uh, yeah, the, as you mentioned, the mining of what does it mean to do something and not solve the issue. And the idea that in the 1990s, these figures rose up, seized power. And had to be violently rejected and that a cohort of them. And here's the interesting thing. It, it becomes muddy. And I've heard people talk about this episode in saying that.
For whatever reason, these people were captured and then ejected into space. They never say that it is presented as this was their method of fleeing. They saw an opportunity to get away. And so launch themselves in a cryogenic ship with the hope of maybe there will be a place that we can call home in the future.
And that is the takeaway here. They are not criminals. under arrest, but are self exiling in flight. And I love the moment when Spock says, would you tell a war weary population that some 100 Napoleons had just escaped? And that framing of the 1990s, which of course, We're in the year 2024, and there's always that aspect of like, Oh, what a goofy miss.
Like, fine. It's sci fi. It doesn't matter that they were prognosticating 30 years in the future. What they were effectively doing were placing a third world war as far in the future as they were from World War II. That's all that was. It's saying like, Oh, we're this many years from World War II. Well, we'll say that many years forward, there's another war.
Sci fi. That placement of that event then. It has shaped Star Trek, not just about the eugenics aspect, but all these through lines of when Warp Drive was invented and the setting of various storylines when people go back in time or refer to events in the past of Encounter at Farpoint depicts an early 21st century court where Picard is put on trial by Q and it involves
submachines on armed guards around a judge who has complete freedom to execute people at will, while a filthy rabble of post apocalyptic public sit in the background. I've always found it fascinating in that scene. Why are those people there? Just like, rabble, ugh, kill him, ugh! Like, why are you here? Like, huh?
Anyway, all of that is born of one brief reference. Here in this episode, this is the beginning of gelling a longer history of Trek. We've had them travel back in time already. We talked about the episode where they went back, they met the pilot, the pilot had to help them unco you know, like, dis re return the evidence and destroy it so that they could go back to the future without having contaminated the past.
None of that Did as much as one small scene of, oh yeah, there was this war in the 1990s and the people responsible for it got away and watch all the shoots come out of that seed and turn into the long history of Star Trek lore that has emerged since then. We see some classic moments for me, some of my favorite moments, Spock at the dinner scene
with his grilling of Khan and saying, so you believed in this and pushing Khan, who at this point is trying to masquerade as like, I'm just a guy from the past until Khan finally snaps. We one would have ruled one of us would have ruled and it's then revealed. Oh, okay. You just outed yourself. And him turning to Kirk and saying, you're a brilliant tactician because you let your number one go at me while you look for weakness.
They developed Khan intentionally to be a nemesis for Kirk. Because as I mentioned at the top of the episode, the original framing around this was to be just a bunch of criminals. And it was At a certain point in rewriting, they were like, it needs to be somebody who can go toe to toe and actually best Kirk.
There needs to be the thread of that. So here we have now the development of that as a personality. Looking at Kirk and saying, ah, I see how good you are. There has to be that respect because Khan is supposed to be superior in every way. But for him to acknowledge in that moment, Kirk, you have something.
You've, you've bested me in this moment. There has to be that Achilles heel. The Achilles heel is he underestimates opponents. He does that. We see that here. We see that in Star Trek too. So we have that great moment. We also have a lot of nice stuff with Scotty. As I mentioned, Scotty would have a bigger role in the episode produced later, which was Taste of Armageddon from last week.
But here we see the beginning of that where we get to see Scotty run out of the room where everybody else passes out. He gets out. He's the one who gets out and is able to say like, I tried to do my best. I tried to get after Khan, but I just couldn't catch up to him. So we get a nice moment with that.
And we also get in this, I want to talk to you about a bit about the prequels. How do you feel about the depiction here of the superior eugenics people and think about how it's been depicted in various prequels. We've seen eugenic individuals in Enterprise and we've seen them in Strange New Worlds. How do you feel about the depiction here compared to what we've seen in now things that were made later?
I think that's kind of, for me, similar. Like, I think Enterprise did a decent job with their depiction of these kinds of people because we made fun of it at the time. It's like, the crazy outfits they had on that made no sense. Everything was torn and weird. And then in this one, they're wearing like, just, Mesh.
It's like, it's great. I love it. Why are they wearing, why are they wearing mesh? Yeah. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. I'm going to go to sleep for a thousand years. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, there's weird attire choices that they did in both Enterprise and this, but the performance and the way that they're written about how they are stronger and better or smarter, but their arrogance, It's the best of them, um, that felt true, um, for Strange New Worlds, it was different because it wasn't these guys.
It wasn't the Earth eugenics people they dealt with. It was like a different kind of race that was going down a similar path, and it was based on the, the bias of what happened with the Khan folk versus what they were doing, and they were basically, it was, you know, racism. So it was I really did like the way these two prequel shows dealt with the same theme and explored new avenues on them.
Um, I thought that was really kind of fun and interesting because Enterprise just fleshed out more of the backstory about how they were created and why they were created and all that kind of stuff. And then Strange New Worlds dealt with the ramifications of that. We were so terrified by this part of our history that we let it get the better of us.
And we just said across the board, this can never be good. And we're biased against people that didn't deserve it. So it's like, I like the way they did it. Both shows dealt with it. What about you? I think that this is in certain ways a more sophisticated handling than Enterprise. I'm not crazy about what Enterprise did with it.
I know, like, I do recognize what you were saying about, like, they fleshed out the backstory a bit more and I'm, I'm like fine with how that, what that contained, but the depiction of them, I really didn't like the depiction of them because I feel like there was a kind of over dependence about How they're depicted in Wrath of Khan and putting them in the torn outfits and trying to make them look ragtag felt more born of that in a cartoon, in a cartoonish way where I feel like this depiction, if the Enterprise depiction had leaned a little more heavily on this, I think it would have felt more related.
Then what they did, because what they did looked like a bunch of costuming that was meant to tell us like, Oh, you remember Wrath of Khan? These are those guys. I'm like, uh, no, it's like,
yeah,
as you mentioned, mesh, interesting choice. That's not what I took away from it though. I said that's not what I took away from it because their clothes were explained away.
We don't have to rehash all this, but the clothes were explained away because they were kids that grew up remote. They didn't have anything. So of course their clothes are going to be rag tag. It's not because they're related to the Khan movie, It was more of a, they were trying to do a costuming choice, ultimately didn't quite hold together of like, then when you came across an opportunity, couldn't you've made better clothes?
Couldn't you have changed your outfit once you got access to better clothes? Is it felt like the earlier depiction in that show felt a little bit more trying to create linkages and imagery as opposed to what the movie actually did in a big divergence from this, like the movie, right, how are they surviving?
Oh, they're ragtag. They're putting stuff together in a harsh environment. So they look like this. I would have appreciated that kind of logic placed in the enterprise depiction. I also like you've brought out the. Strange New Worlds depiction is a really well done flip side of the coin in saying, like, okay, you've had all of that bad blood happen, what are the ramifications of that, and creating a nice continuation Of the themes that we've started talking about here, the idea of you haven't solved the problem.
You've just put it away. And I think as a theme, it is so subtle here at a time when what was going on culturally around concerns. We talked about it in the news story, like subverting U. S. law in order to convert students to help you fight communism. The Cold War is at the forefront, but it's a Cold War and it's being fought In strangely hidden ways, it is being fought through proxy wars in Vietnam.
It is not being dealt with directly. It is creating pockets of distrust as opposed to solutions. It is not open conversation. It is hidden agendas. And for this show, I'm gaining an interesting respect for the program in a way that I didn't expect. And it's handling of shining a light in the way that sci fi often tries on the current time.
And it's really in the past couple of episodes really shown a light on, are we actually addressing our problems? Are we dealing with them? This is a period of time, the civil rights movement is starting to pick up its steam and really become a presence in the culture. And here you have a group of people showing up saying like, Oh, remember all those things you didn't want to deal with 200 years ago?
We're back. And that's a bold statement to make on a broadcast in 1967 when all the hauntings of history are back and not being addressed. And for better or worse, largely for worse, continue to echo through American culture to this day, still having a reckoning around issues to this day. That's one of the reasons why this episode is one of my favorites is because of like the best sci fi deals with struggles you're having at the time through allegory, through fable, through like, it's, it's not dealing with it directly.
It's telling it through a lens to make it more palatable to hear. And so this one is doing just that. I do want to cycle back really quickly where how you had talked about there was interesting things they did with Spock and they did with Scotty. There was also some cool stuff they did with McCoy. Like when McCoy gets the knife held to his throat,
I just love McCoy.
It's like he
is cool as a cucumber and just like you could get the artery behind my neck. It's like, it'll be the faster way to do this. It's like, he's just It's like you grizzled old man, it's like you are just so wonderful and just how sarcastic he is and challenging he is to Khan. And you could tell that Khan kind of like seems to begrudgingly respect that a little bit.
Like, yeah, this guy isn't afraid of me. He's just like, okay, you're going to kill me, kill me. Like, and here, here's how you do it better. It's like, it's just a great reaction, but Sean, this leads into one of my biggest nit picks on all of the original series. He basically just threatens to kill the Doctor.
The Doctor calls Kirk down, and what does Kirk do? He gives him access to all the technical documents about the ship. It's like, what is wrong with the writers of the original series, they kept, like, security means nothing. It's like, there are so many characters that are dangerous that they let wander the ship.
And it's like, here's a dude already shown aggression and tried to kill one of your crew, Oh, you want to learn about how the ship actually functions? Sure. Go ahead. You know, here you have full access. It's like, I don't understand why they do that. And I kind of thought like there would be an easier way to do it of like him just saying, could I have access to books to learn what's happened in the past 200 years?
And then Kirk's like, here, here, use our library computer and you can learn about the history. And then you could show him hacking the computer and he gets his way into technical documents to learn how the ship works. So it's like, you could have explained it away like that, but the fact that he just asks for, give me all the information about your ship and Kirk's like, sure, it makes him look like a complete moron.
It's just like, it's, I don't understand. I don't understand. It's the expediency of Kirk. It's the expediency of writing. It's illogic to move the plot forward and it bugs me too. It's like you end up with that moment of just like, there was so many different avenues getting there that would have made more sense.
Um, to loop back to the McCoy of it all, the brilliance of the line, when Khan says, where am I? He says, you're in your sick bed, holding a knife at your doctor's throat. It's The sarcasm, the beautiful sarcasm of that. Yeah. And, uh, growing up, Matt and I learned how to speak sarcasm from a very early age. So it's, it's something that we both have respect for.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is you can have a show be brilliant and saying like, don't take the mistakes of the past and put them away because they will come back to haunt you. The brilliance of that messaging and yet the sexism of this episode. I just want to very briefly address the sexism on display here, where poor McGivers is effectively her entire character trait is she is a romantic and is swept off her feet by a real man who shows up acting like a jerk.
Emotionally abusive. And that's what does it for her. And then he abuses her into doing his will. And that is all just, Oh, women going to be women. And. Well, it's pretty rough. It's pretty rough. It's rough, but there is something I thought that was Okay, so the part where Khan is like just straight up gaslighting her and like just being abuse emotionally abusive and all that kind of stuff is gross.
It's like gross, gross, gross, but it serves a purpose. And it's not just, it's not, I would argue it's not sexism of the time. I think it was deliberate because it's like, here's this man that ruled part of the world. He's this cutthroat guy. Of course he's going to be disgusting. Of course he's going to treat a woman like this.
Of course he's going to be emotionally abusive and manipulate her. All that stuff. It's like, okay, it's, it's accurate for the character. It's accurate for the story. It makes sense where it becomes sexist. It's at the end to me, where at the end of the show, they're basically exiling them. And he's like, she can come with me.
And she's like, I'll go with you. And it's like, what the hell is happening here? It's like, that's where it makes it kind of like a, well, you, you writers at the time, you, you were going down an interesting path here and you could have made a statement for women at the end of her being like, Screw you, get out of here and being happy that he's being exiled.
But the fact that Kirk and crew let an abused woman go with the abuser and that the woman who you thought understood what had happened and was trying to make things right clearly didn't learn anything from what had just happened. It's just like, what? That's where things fall down for me. It's not the initial abuse, abusive relationship.
It's the, the culmination of that relationship. Abusive relationship kind of shines the whoa, 1960s are going to 1960s here. Yeah. For me, it's not just isolated on Khan's treatment of her, which like I understand everything you just said about the nuance of the writing there. The whole romanticizing of strongman.
Yeah. Well, the romanticizing is one thing. But just if you remove what this episode is about, they never find the botany Bay. They never like they're cruising through space and they land on a planet where the currency is. You need to be able to share nuggets of history. The aliens on this planet say, like, if you want to come down here, you need to be able to tell us all about your history.
And Kirk says, I guess I need the ship's historian, the ship's historian. Really? Yeah. Like that's a role? High demand job. Anyway, here comes the givers. Kirk has constantly demonstrated his crew is his number one priority. And he is not able to remember this crewman's name. Yes. Doesn't really care about her role.
And to her face is basically like, yeah, get on the stupid telepad. Get on this pad. Hurry up. Come on, sweet cheese. Yes. It's just like, it is. Exactly. It is gross boss behavior. And it is like that for me is the big, that's hard to watch. And then you get to Khan abusing her. Okay. That's hard to watch. And then you get to the end that you mentioned where stronger ending for her as a character would have been to say like, I need to stay here because you're terrible and I need to pay for my mistakes.
Having a character say, I need to pay for my mistakes would have been the cherry on top of the message of, you can't just bury your mistakes. Because the episode ends up making the very mistake that it's arguing against throughout the entire episode. So. Kind of inadvertent stepping in it. Well, inadvertent, but pays off in a big way later, Sean.
Oh, it sure does. I'm glad. Let's not, you know, the idea that the episode makes the mistake that it was advocating against is the only reason why we get to this point. I know. The big payoff that we, that we enjoyed in the early 1980s. Cause I'm saying, I'm glad they made that mistake. Yes. Absolutely. Pro mistakes.
I chalk that up to, this is like, and coming at it from a writer's perspective, um, that is an accidental gift that the writers gave themselves. And writers I'm using is like a loose term for like the entire team around Star Trek from Roddenberry, everybody around him, everybody involved. This is a, this is an accidental gift they've given themselves and those things are precious when you're writing something and you put something down which you're not even sure what might come of it, but then you realize later that you can go back and mine that and it becomes So much more important than it ever seemed before.
The idea of exiling him to a planet where it's going to be a rough going and the closing line from Spock. It would be interesting to come back in a hundred years and see what has sprung from the seed you planted today. Woof. Like, yeah, for me, like that moment is just like, for me, it's like, it's almost like, it's like they did it on purpose, but of course they did not.
Yeah. They did not. Happy accident. So viewers, listeners. How do you feel about this episode? Does it work for you the way it works for Matt and me, where we tie this all together to, I mean, this taps into the deepest, uh, nuggets of why we love Star Trek. Does it do that for you? Or is this one fall away because of reasons that you'd like to share with us?
Jump in the comments and let us know. Don't forget, if Also, when you jump in the comments, share with us, wrong answers only, what you think the next episode is about. That's going to be this side of paradise, kind of as evocative as space seed in its own way. Trying not to be gross. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you wanted to share with our viewers and listeners?
I did not this week because my, uh, my Undecided channel has taken the week off. We're not publishing a video. I have travel happening. Uh, By the time this episode's out, I will have just gotten back from a trip to Mexico, visiting the BMW plant about all the stuff they're doing for sustainability, which is really kind of cool stuff.
Uh, so more stuff coming, but nothing to touch on right now. As for me, if you want to check out my website, seanferrell. com, you can find out more information about my books there. You can also just go wherever it is you buy your books. That includes your local bookstore, your public library, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever it is.
My books are available everywhere. I also have a Kickstarter going on right now for a D& D adventure that I've written, which is based upon the movie Predator. And I'd hope you'd be interested in checking that out. If you play role playing games, it's a Kickstarter program. So the link will be in the show notes below.
And if you'd like to support the show, easy ways to do that, to like, subscribe, share it with your friends. Those are things that everybody can do. And if you would like to more directly support us, you can go to trekintime. show, click the become a supporter button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads and automatically makes you an ensign, which means you will be subscribed to our program out of time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program.
It might be movies, it might be TV shows, it might be anime, it might just be Matt and I singing songs together. It won't be that. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.