Matt and Sean talk about finally solving the mystery of Jack the Ripper’s identity, and other things that make no sense in Star Trek: The Original Series, “Wolf in the Fold.”
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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 talking about things that make you go, Huh?
That's right, we're talking about Wolf In the Fold. Star Trek, the original series, originally aired on December 22nd, 1967. This is episode number 36 in shooting order. But 43rd in broadcast order, 14th of the second season. And if my eyes don't deceive me, December 22nd, 1967, well, that effectively makes this a Christmas episode.
Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we're talking about Star Trek in chronological stardate order. Which means we've worked our way starting with Enterprise. We've swum through the time stream until finally we've landed in 1967. And we are now talking about the original series season two. 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 I am Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And Matt, are you ready? Are you ready? Not really, Sean. Yeah, we had two great weeks there. We had two weeks where I was just like, this is Star Trek.
And it was like, I like this episode because it is Star Trek. And this week I'm just like, Oh,
boy, here's a preview, Sean, in my notes, halfway into my notes, I wrote, this is boring.
Boring! Cue up the clip of Homer Simpson and that appropriate spot. Well,
we've given people a sneak preak, uh, of But this will not be boring because we're both tired because of the time change and
we're ready for it.
We are ready to go. We are exhausted and caffeinated at the same time. And you know what that means? It means I'm going to break into a sweat even though I'm in a cold basement. All right, everybody. For those of you who want to right now, I encourage you to jump in the comments and just type in hashtag cold sweat.
Let's see how many we can get going. Before we go into our conversation about this episode, we always like to take a look at the comments that you've shared with us from our previous episode. Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week? When you're done wheezing into your microphone.
Thanks for getting me laughing, Sean, right before I'm supposed to read comments.
Okay. So we had some good ones. Uh, last week's episode, you and I both talked about how much we liked it. It was the doomsday machine, lots of action, lots of stuff happening, but there was a variety of feedback on this one. Um, there was from PaleGhost69, did not like this episode, wrote, this was my only note from when I watched ahead.
I think I was referring to the other captain, but rewatching again for this episode, it might've been about the crew's reaction to his takeover. You're not wrong, but I thought that was an interesting take that was different from what you and I had. But then just like you and I, Wayouts commented, I love this episode.
The gritty, the, I have nothing left but vengeance, story is so classic. My parallel was Michelle Forbes, Admiral Kane in the Battlestar Galactica remake. Um, which I thought was interesting. So yeah, it's a very kind of classic, you said like Moby Dick, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Uh, then we also had old Trekkie chiming in saying, response to me.
Cause when we talked about it, I was like, why do they keep coming out from the front? Like the big doobie from the front. Why are they attacking the doomsday machine from the front? As Spock points out, the outer hole is made of pure neutron, neutron tinium. What was it? Was it neutronium? Neutronium I think is what, yeah, they said in the show.
Yeah. The maw is the only vulnerable aspect. And yeah, what I had said was not like. Completely accurate. What I was getting at was it looked like they kept going out like a thousand miles in front of it, turning around and going straight at it. And it was like, you could come at it from an angle. You could parallel it and zip around the front and shoot in the hole.
It's like from an angle, it's like, it felt to me, like the way they were depicting it made it look like they were always going way, way out in front for no reason. And then turning around and attacking right in front.
It's like, if you have to get rid of a shark by punching out of the nose, doesn't mean that you have to go a hundred yards away from the shark and the go straight at it. You can figure out how to get to the nose in more subtle ways.
And then of course, Sean, wrong answers only for today's episode. Mark Loveless. Thank you Mark. And as Mark wrote, I had this one written in my head months ago, just waiting for the right episode for it.
And yes, surprise, surprise. It doesn't involve or mention poop. So here we go. Plot of Wolf in the Fold. The Enterprise investigates what appears to be a fold in the space time continuum, and during the investigation, a mysterious man suddenly appears. He immediately looks around, drops his shoulders, and says in a voice of combined recognition and resignation, Oh, you've gotta be kidding me.
He seems to know everyone on board, and when Kirk asks him his name, he simply grins and says, You can call me Wolf. The ship is attacked by a Klingon vessel, and Wolf starts saying, Now, if you do this, it should make them do that. With a slight bit of know it all sarcasm and so on. It's clear Wolf seems to know what is going to happen next moment to moment.
So Kirk decides to try some of Wolf's weird suggestions. They disable the Klingon ship and get away. Kirk thinks, Kirk thanks Wolf, who asks to be returned to the fold. And before, before being transported off, Kirk asks Wolf if he's from the future. Wolf laughs, cocks an eyebrow saying, not exactly. As he's beamed off, Wolf unknowingly accidentally drops a book, which has his picture on the back cover and as he is apparently the author.
So who is Wolf? Apparently 21st century sci fi author, Sean Ferrell.
I think, I think I saw that coming way too late, like right, right at the end, but yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. You can call me Wolf. I think that's going to be my new closing name.
So that noise you hear, and those lights you see, normally that means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. This week means that we all get to sit back and relax as Matt tackles one of the longest Wikipedia descriptions I've seen. And I include it here in its entirety, simply because the absurdity of how long this one is really brought me joy in thinking about Matt having to read the whole thing.
Matt Take it away. Is this gonna be like a bedtime story? It will be roughly five minutes longer than the episode itself based on the size. Oh god. Good luck.
Okay Mr. Scott is implicated in a series of bizarre murders on planet Argelius during a planned break, Scotty, Kirk and Bones encounter a series of events where Scotty is blamed for murdering three women, two local to the planet and one crew member aboard the Enterprise, Lieutenant Tracy. The prefect wants to investigate the murder on the planet, but all methods seem futile.
Once aboard the Enterprise, the computer, fed with all medical records of Scotty, begins analyzing Scotty's responses to all the questions. The committee realizes that Scotty is not lying, and indeed, someone or something else, is responsible for the murder. The committee finds that the thing resembles Jack the Ripper.
Can I just pause for a second? Just the insanity of this plot
is hysterical. It resembles Jack the Ripper, of course it does, who has been rumored to exist throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries on all systems between Earth and Argelius. Upon further analysis, Hengist, security advisor to the prefect is found to be possessed by the creature which causes fear in humanoids and kills them.
It takes control of the enterprise and threatens to kill them all. Spock overrides the controls, setting them to manual, overloads the computer banks by getting it to calculate the last digit of pi.
This sounds like, it sounds like it was a Mad Libs episode. Just give me a serial
killer, a verb and a color in mathematics.
Red Jack, red Jack, red Jack. So the last is calculating the last digit of PI, impairing the thing for a few hours while Bones tranquilizes the entire crew on board, the thing is captured inside Hengist finally and transported to the furthermost regions of the galaxy in thousands of small pieces.
Okay. That last sentence is wrong.
There's a lot of things in this, in this summary that are wrong, but it was so big. I was just like, I'm going to make Matt read this entire thing. Thank you, Sean. You're welcome. Well, the part of the reason why I did that is because I feel like this episode is going to need that as filler and we might end up having a conversation about like things like the Trekness of things as opposed to just this episode, because when it gets down to it, Matt, I have not talked about this before recording this, but I'm willing to bet that Matt and I are not gonna have a lot to say about an episode , that, let's get down to the point of it right now. The episode did not have a lot to say. The episode was an idea. Yeah. That they then stood there and went
for 40 minutes. . It was
for those that are listening, Sean just did a little soft shoe dance. Yeah, I did a little soft shoe
for, for the listeners who are driving, who, who can't watch a screen. Yes. Uh, directed by Joseph Pevney. Written by Robert Bloch. We will get back to Robert Bloch in a moment. The original air date, December 22nd, 1967.
We of course have William Shatner as Kirk, Leonard Nimoy almost as Spock, I couldn't help but wonder what was Leonard Nimoy doing that he wasn't here for a lot of shooting. I feel like he would have been on the planet, but I have a feeling Leonard Nimoy was not available for the entire shoot and they were just like, we don't even really need you.
So like he probably got an hour worth of work in on this episode, because he's in only the end of it. Even to the point where I feel like they didn't bother to write into the script, Kirk telling Spock about what was going on. They have Scotty accused of murder on the planet. And at a certain point, Kirk goes.
And goes, Hey, Spock, we need a special device transported down with this with a crewman. And he's like, okay. And so sends this woman down, he doesn't bother saying, uh, Spock, Scotty's been accused of murder. Can you believe this crap? Yeah. DeForest Kelly, of course, as McCoy, James Doohan, as Scotty, this episode had to be byproduct of the recognition that Scotty was becoming more and more of a fan favorite. It may not have originally been written. I imagine with Scotty as the one accused, I have a feeling it could have very well been McCoy or Kirk being accused. Spock may have been the third person on the planet, but that they shifted it.
And again, I kept looping back to like, was this, in fact, Nimoy was not available. They shifted names on the script without changing attitudes. They just basically leaned into the absence instead of trying to rethink the entire episode. We get a bit of George Takei as Sulu, and we get to see what George Takei thinks people act like when they're high.
Oh, my God, original time of broadcast, December 22nd, 1967. And what was the world like at the time of original broadcast? Well, Matt, you're going to get one of, I know you're going to get to now share with us your rendition of one of your favorite songs. Take it away, Matt. Daydream believer by the Monkees.
I always like to let him get through the second verse.
For those who don't know, Sean's actually seen the Monkees in concert. So take that, Sean. That was great, Matt. Thank you.
And in the movies, well, at the end of 1967, the top picture for a number of weeks, basically about two months, was a reissue of Gone with the Wind. We've talked about this before. It was the number one film this week as well, so people were lining up to see it in theaters just before the holiday season.
And on television, we are talking Nielsen ratings because we are able to compare apples to apples in this era of television. Gets trickier when we talk about the modern era and you're suddenly talking about, well, this is being broadcast and this is being uploaded for stream and consumers are going wherever they want to get it.
It's hard to say which shows are beating which shows. But back in 1967, they were measuring everything with the Nielsen's. And so we're looking at programs like the Andy Griffith show and the Lucy show, which were at a 27 while Star Trek in its second season was at about 11. 5. Well, also amongst the top shows of the 1967, 1968 season was our number seven program, the Red Skelton show.
This is of course, the variety comedy sketch program featuring famed comedian, Red Skelton, it aired on NBC starting in 1951. They gave it a short leash pulling it in 1953. They said, this show's a loser. It's not going anywhere. Get it out of here. And then CBS said, how about we take it and we'll put it on the air for 17 years.
It was on CBS until 1970. At which point, guess who, that's right, if you were to say NBC came crawling back, you'd be right. And they were like, well, we got to get a bit of that sweet meat. We got to, there's still some juice left in the tank. And it aired on NBC from 1970 to 1971. What's that noise? Sounds like a sad trombone.
And in the news. Well, we are seeing headlines similar to what we've seen previously, we've seen in New York City specifically, the government trying to deal with school budget issues, we're seeing political machinations between the mayor and the governor, we are seeing headlines about Johnson in meetings with Theo, who is the head of South Vietnam, and the two of them in this headline Johnson meeting with Theo, heals rift on Viet Cong.
Good news for everybody in late December of 1967. Oh, what's this tiny little headline toward the bottom just above the fold? Why, yes, Hanoi declared it had shot down two B 52 bombers. The war did not go well. On now to our discussion about this episode. And for those of you who are unclear about the context of this episode, the, the hard hitting drama of it, the sheer ethos and gravitas of the episode. We will share now with you a promotional photo of James Doohan surrounding this episode. Why yes, here he is. Now, this is Scotty. I'm looking now at the photo of Scotty who looks like, well, it's just another day at the beach. Hi, I've been accused of three murders.
All right. One, uh, big topic. I mean, we've talked about it before. I don't think we need to ring every droplet out of the wash rag on this, we've talked about it before we need to talk about it again, we can get out of the gate and simply say. A show that was trying to be progressive and it was progressive, it made changes to what was seen on television.
It pushed the envelope for people of color in roles that
were center. But women get more scared than men, Sean. Women gets more scared than men. It's
it's as Spock says, it's only logical because women are, of course, weaker and more scared than men. Uh, and it starts in a, I mean, it's good to know that, you know, hundreds of years from now, belly dancing as an art form will still exist.
Um, the most boring
belly dancer,
the
best line in that scene is this is a hedonistic society and the camera's panning around and I'm like. This is a hedonistic society. This is a hedonistic society. Have you seen Eyes Wide Shut? Yeah.
Yeah, this is a hedonistic society. This is how hedonistic this society was.
The name of the planet in the episode and part of my joy of giving Matt such a long synopsis to read was hearing him mispronounce the name of the planet, every time he said it, it's Argelius. So here we have this pleasure planet, Argelius. It's a hedonistic society. And, and it's all about like what feels good.
And that's just who these people are. It's all about what feels good. And then notice when we got to next generation, when it came to a pleasure planet, They never went back to Argelius. They created a new pleasure planet for next generation because nobody involved in Trek, remember Gene Roddenberry was involved in next generation.
Nobody was like, let's go back there. This episode leaves a terrible stain. So they are at a belly dancing bar. And watching performers and it turns out that the hedonistic performer who comes on so strong to Scotty at what appears to be a price because the captain has paid for or requested her visit and she comes over and it turns out she's dancing for her father in front of her former fiance, like there's a whole bunch
of Icky in this show. So much
Ick, there's just like, like, Oh, were you like, and you, I love the questioning when Kirk is not even trying to be casual in his, I'm trying to protect my crewman. He's so aggressive. The acting is not great in this episode. I don't think anybody gave it more than five minutes of prep time because Shatner is hot out of the gate in his questioning of everybody.
When he points a finger at the musician and it's just like, and you, where were you? And he's just like, I wasn't here, but he's like, and how did you know the dancer? And he's like, well, she's danced for me since she was a little girl, she's my daughter. And it's suddenly like, Oh, this is a society of just simple hedonists who do things like begin to get their daughter involved in a lascivious, somewhat soft sex work enterprise so that they can grow up in like
watching the bridge crew or watching the bridge crew hanging out at a strip joint. It's basically what we're seeing in the Captain Kirk, bought a lap dance for Scotty. Then they talk about the next strip joint they're going to, because they keep saying, Oh, I know this place.
I know this place down the street. The women are, and they never say what it is. It's just like, yeah, it's like, Oh, geez.
Best line though. We find out through some casual conversation between McCoy and Kirk that this is not as lascivious as it sounds. In fact, this is in order to help Scotty get over his recent resentment of women as a result of when the line that was written, I found hysterical to the point where I had to stop the show and laugh for a bit, McCoy says.
Don't you remember that the explosion that gave Scotty the concussion was caused by a woman? Which, my mind immediately turned into the question, did a woman explode in engineering? Okay, okay, okay. Okay, okay.
Scottie just like, oh, lass. This is dangerous.
Lass, you're about to blow. And then she blew up and he got thrown against a bowl cap and he's just like, stupid women, stupid women.
This is, as I'm reading the description that you forced me to read and I made the comment of this feels like a Mad Libs episode. Yeah. When we were, when I was watching this, and this is the first three minutes of the episode that this is all set up, all I thought was, Oh, I barely remember this one, but this is going to be rough was the first thing I thought, because this entire episode to me had no cohesiveness.
It felt just like random ideas that people in a writer's room came up with. And they were just slapping together. And then like, like a five year old kid. And then it does this, this, this, this, this. And then, and then this happens and this happens and this happens. And then it was like, there was no, there was no.
They're there. It's like, if you're going to make a Jack the Ripper story, make it a Jack the Ripper story. You know what I mean? Like it was just, there was, there was no cohesiveness or singular vision in this. It felt like written writing by committee. Yeah, it was. All over the place. And that initial scene to me was the first warning flag of, Oh, Matt, strap yourself in.
This is going to be rough.
Yeah, there's, I have, I have a couple of responses. One of which is going to sound as I get into it a little really far afield, but it does have a point, which is the Matt Parker and Trace Stone, the creators and main creative leads behind South Park, there is a video that is available of them giving a room full of Screenwriting students advice on how to structure a story, how to like, how to begin to map out a plot and it's incredibly useful. And it's remarkable because one of the things about South Park, and I'm not currently a viewer of South Park. I haven't watched it in many years. I was an avid viewer for a period of times at the on and off during the first decade and a half of their, of their run. One of the things about that show was always, it always seemed so incredibly quickly topical. It would be 10 days after a news story would break and they would have an episode about that very thing. And it was always just like, how are they putting together 30 minute shows that fast to be able to talk about a thing that literally just happened this week.
And in their writing advice seminar, they talked about just what you pointed out, which is if you have a story and it is this, and then this, and then this, and then this, you are going to lose your audience before you get even halfway through. Their model is you say this, but then this, and therefore this, and it's the, and therefore, and therefore is where you are creating a causal link that leads everything building, until you reach your final conclusion that keeps you engaged. You're, I think you're spot on with this episode feeling like it was a and then and then and then it's just events going down. The other thing is I want to revisit Robert Bloch, the writer of this episode. We've talked about Robert Bloch before.
One of the things that I really liked about Robert Bloch's previous episode was, Robert Bloch was the writer of What Little Girls Are Made Of. That's the Android creation episode in which Nurse Chapel is reconnected with Roger Corby. He's not even the original Roger Corby, but he is Roger Corby, but he's an Android version and he is now recreated other individuals as Androids and has a vision of replacing humanity with a permanent, always healthy and true copy Android society. And one of the elements in there was the Stahn, the giant Android who represented the old ones and talked about the old ones who had invented this technology and Robert Bloch, it turned out in our research, we discovered that he had been mentored by HP Lovecraft, who of course was the wildly successful, in a long term frame, horror writer who wrote about the Cthulhu, who wrote about the idea of great impending ancient evil, who dabbled in a horror way with ideas of science fiction, things from space, things from another realm that were beyond our perception, not necessarily Ancient evils that were born of demons and devils, but demons and devils that were, in fact, ancient alien things that had come to Earth and touched humanity in its primitive state.
So here, in this episode, Bloch is writing about something that he touched on in Other forms of his production. He was a short story writer. He was a novelist and Jack the Ripper was a keen interest to him and Bloch, I want to share some of his biography around this in particular on Jack the Ripper.
Bloch continued to revisit the Jack, the Reaper, the Jack, the Ripper theme, his contribution to Harlan Ellison's 1967 science fiction anthology, Dangerous Visions was a story, A toy for Juliet, which evoked both Jack the Ripper and the Marquis de Sade in a time travel story. The same anthology had Ellison's sequel to it, titled The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World.
His earlier idea of the Ripper as an immortal being resurfaced in Bloch's contribution to the original Star Trek series episode Wolf in the Fold. His 1984 novel Night of the Ripper is set during the reign of Queen Victoria and follows the investigation of Inspector Frederick Aberline in attempting to apprehend the Ripper and includes some famous Victorians such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle within the storyline.
So here you have ideas that are not just Bloch, they are evocative of Lovecraftian horror structures, ancient evils from another world, horror that is born of sci fi as opposed to just horror that is from the depths of hell. Like the idea of a Poe horror story versus a Lovecraft horror story was that Lovecraft very often evinced a sci finess to it that Poe wouldn't.
And the fact that Ellison, who we know is also a Star Trek writer, who, sitting on the edge of forever, was Ellison's, and we know the experience of writing that destroyed Ellison's relationship with Roddenberry, and he would never view the episode that was aired, he would never view it as his work because they had deviated from his script, but the idea that the two of them together crafted out ideas of Jack the Ripper that would then manifest into this episode as this ancient evil.
I think there's an idea there that it would have been fun. Could have been cool, could have, could have worked in a different way. This is not two people who don't know how to write. This is not two people who don't have good ideas. But it is something about this episode where it feels simultaneously thin and rushed.
And I think it is extremely telling that this horror themed episode, we know from a previous episode with the one with Trillane, that was, or not the one with Trillane, the one with the two aliens who masquerade as a witch, a black cat, the castle, the warlock. That was a Halloween themed episode. This one is also a horror story, but this was not put anywhere near Halloween.
It was put out the week of Christmas, days before Christmas. I think the network knew not many people watch television this many days away from Christmas. I think this episode was put where it was in the season, basically because, well, we're not going to throw it away. So let's put it here. Matt, when you were watching this, were you moved in the same way I was to say like, okay.
The idea of the ancient killer, the horror that is manifesting, what might they have done that might have made it work? Oh my god.
There are so many different things you could have done, Sean. And for, like, when I was watching this, it was so sad because it's like, we're watching in chronological order and we just had two very good episodes.
Yeah. Like, very Star Trek y episodes and then it's this record scratch of this. It's like, wow. Made by, it feels like it's made by a completely different team. But like, as I'm watching it, I'm like, they should have just focused. It was like, I felt like it was like halfway in the episode before they even get to the ship and do the trial stuff.
And then it's like the last 10 minutes that Jack the fucking ripper comes up. It was like, this is what the entire episode has been about. And this is the first time you've ever uttered his name or anything like that. They didn't drop clues early enough. They didn't drop the mystery of all of that stuff early enough.
And it was like. That's to me what they should have done differently was like they should have immediately had something happen on this planet didn't have to be a hedonistic society or any of this stuff, and by the way this planet for some reason for all about love, Well are we're gonna have to like sentence him to the ancient tradition of not just death But slowly torturing him to death.
It was like really death is good enough. You don't have to it's like I don't know. We're gonna put him to death, resurrect him and kill him again. You know what I mean? It's like, it was just like that kind of stuff, but they could have just focused right in the beginning of just making the mystery of the Jack the Ripper kind of feeling almost immediately in the beginning.
He kills this thing, doesn't remember anything. The second murder is just the first, like there was nothing added by the second murder. So why isn't the second murder him holding the bloody thing? But he's like, I do remember this. I didn't do this. I bumped into something. So it's like they could have started dropping the mystery in.
And, or they could have had the murders look and be behaving like the Jack the Ripper murders. Yes. You know what I mean? Like they could have done things where they mirrored the history, which would get people to that conclusion faster in the episode. So there would be a better reason that Kirk is investigating and pushing for further investigation of like, well, he didn't do this because there's all these clues that are getting ignored by the local people. Where there was none of that in this. Yeah. It's just like him trying to fight for his friend. And it was like that for 30 minutes and it was only in the last 10 minutes that all the mystery came together, and they presented the mystery for the first time. So for me that was the mistaken Storytelling is they just you did the soft shoe in the beginning. This entire episode was a freaking soft shoe And I was so bored.
Yeah, I was so insanely bored and it was like, It was only when they got onto the ship and they did the whole Scotty thing doing the like, you're not lying all that stuff. It was only at that point then the show started to feel like oh, you kind of a point here, You're going for something. Why did you wait till the third act to start the stuff that should have been introduced in the first act?
Yeah, it's just like it felt like basic storytelling to me. It felt like That, that to me is the easy fix is like, just focus on that one little theme. If that was your theme, Jack the Ripper, set it up in act one.
Yeah. It's, yeah, it falls into a trap that I just discussed recently with my partner. Where we had watched something and I said, it fails because it fell victim to the writer saying, I'm going to keep what this is in my pocket so that there'll be really surprised at the end.
And the problem with that is when you think you're being clever in that way, you're actually cheating the audience and a real test of your writing skill comes from, okay, instead of putting that in my pocket, I'm going to put it on page one, and then I'm going to figure out how to still surprise the audience.
The surprise doesn't necessarily come from name, the surprise comes from the how, so they withheld Jack the Ripper because they wanted Jack the Ripper to have a splash when it was finally revealed. But the splash should have been, how could this possibly be Jack the Ripper? It should have been right out of the gate.
Like I kept thinking for some reason, members of the enterprise go to a derelict ship or something that's found in space where people, it turns out have been trapped and they get trapped as well. So there's going to be a ticking clock of like, Oh, we only have so much time. The air is running out.
Hopefully the enterprise can figure out how to get us out of here before we run out of air. And we need to figure out how to send the enterprise a message. And while they're there, a murder is discovered. So on the wall is written Red Jack in blood. So now they very quickly, Oh, use computers, look into the record banks.
Red Jack, that's a name that was used to describe Jack the Ripper back on earth. How could that possibly exist? And then as they continue to peel back the layers of things, it is the combined terror of the trapped people who know their air is running out and there is a killer amongst them that then becomes the eventual revelation.
Like there's something here that it, why would it want to create fear?
Yes. You're describing the movie, The Thing. Yes. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's like, yeah, the 1984 version, I think it was 84, 82, whatever it was, the 80s version of The Thing is I love that movie dearly. Yeah. And it does a beautiful job of creating that you're in a confined space.
One of you is a murderer. You can't trust anybody. Go. It is tense. It's thrilling. It's exciting. And you just described that setup. It was right there. It's like the thing is an old short story. It's like that technique is an old technique. It's not something new. Why they didn't do that. I don't understand.
They got there. They got there. Once they got into the ship in that room and all that kind of stuff, they kind of got the idea of we should confine these characters in some way and have this one of these people as a murderer. And they got there briefly, but it was just like, you missed the point that we could have an entire episode.
It keeps going back to the idea that it's thin and it's rushed. It feels like, it feels like a pre first draft. It relies so heavily. On the convenience of the person who's in charge, being willing to go along with whatever Kirk and his crew need to conduct this investigation in their way. Like the, the fact that it relies so heavily on the prefect going like, I'm going to allow it, I'm going to allow it, I'm going to allow it, like why, why, why even have it on a planet where you have a legal structure, if that's what going to happen. That's what took me to the idea of like, just make it a, they stumble upon a derelict ship, they beam aboard to help. And then they find themselves trapped there. There's nobody in command. There's no, there's no power structure. You don't need a power structure to have that situation. You'd need the powder keg.
You need the ticking time bomb. You need everybody to be working out of fear. And then you need to have the moment of wait a minute. What if the point is the fear? If we've had a killer here this entire time, and somebody is sabotaging the ship in order to put it in this terrible position, and then what if the weirdness is that the ship life support is dying, and then somehow it gets repaired, and then it breaks again, and somebody's like, it's like somebody's doing this to us.
What if that's the scenario? Yeah. What if it's, it's the, why would somebody want to do that? Why would somebody just want to create a sense of fear? What if the fear is the point? And then you begin to get to where they ended up. But this one is reliant upon a, it's like a house built on stilts. It's like, yeah, you could do it, but why are you doing it?
Like, what is, why are you doing this? This is so much effort for no payoff. And like I said, I felt like the performances were like rushed. I don't feel like, I feel like Shatner looked at this and was just like, this is ridiculous. And he performs it in a way that comes across slightly ridiculous. You end up with the guest star playing the prefect who is also Landreau.
Do you remember him? Oh, yeah. Same actor. And he comes across as almost pretty much the same character.
He's like, well, there's, there's also the casting of the inspector, which was like, to me, I looked at it as stunt casting. It's like the most meekest ineffective inspector and he's the bad guy. Yeah. It was, it was kind of obvious what they were doing there.
Um, which actually unrelated to the entire conversation you're having right now. I absolutely loved the horrendous fight scenes. Yes. With the stuntman. With the stuntman who's twice his size and wearing a horrible skin cap. It's like the meekest. It's like me. It would be like me on screen. And then suddenly it's the Rock being my stunt man wearing a skin cap. It was, what are you doing? It
was fantastic.
You didn't have a smaller
when they cut to him rushing around the table and he's like getting into a post. It's clearly not him. It's just like this guy is towering over Shatner. He is full head taller and he is in a, in a crouched, like he like knows Grav McGraw.
He's just like hands up and he's just like, I'm ready to fight. And it's just like, yeah, wild. Like, and the things they have him do, you're telling me that other actor couldn't have. Like throwing a punch, he could have done it all falling on the ground at all. That one thing he did is like, they had him do like, didn't he rush around the table and then push himself off the table so he could do a two footed kick at one point.
Like that was the one thing he did. And then he had to do a backflip when Kirk like threw him to the ground. Like if that's the only reason you got a stunt man, don't have the stunt man. Yes. Change the choreography to simplify it. Let Hengist, Don't film him from the front. Yeah.
Cause the first time you see him, he's from the front.
Yeah. And he goes, ha! It's like, it's so not the same guy.
The only way it could have been worse is if he also had a really big beard and had like hair coming out from underneath the uh, the wig. A neck tattoo. A neck tattoo. Awful. Simply awful. Yeah. So to go. Like, as I mentioned, like Matt's and my take on this.
And again, we didn't talk about this before we started recording. I feel like there's not really any value in talking about it any deeper than we have. It is, it's not an episode. If this had been a. If this had been a animated episode, it would have just been like, okay, like, it's a cartoon show. Like, everybody would have been like, okay, that's fine.
You're trying to entertain the kids. But it gets bogged down in such odd issues around, like, I even feel like the reason it's a hedonistic society and the reason why the belly dancer is the first person to be killed, because Jack the Ripper famously killed prostitutes. So I'm like, it's over reliant on things like that.
And instead of trying to be a story about characters. It's not concerned with who Scotty is. It's concerned with an innocent person being accused of a crime that's a heinous crime
and It's interested in the twist. I think I think you hit the nail on the head with it, It was interested in the twist and they didn't know how to pull a twist off. You know, I mean they didn't know how to do it and and it's unrelated, I started watching a show last night called Paradise.
It's on Hulu. If you know nothing about it, Do not read anything about it. Okay. Watch it. Yeah. The first episode, it's made by the people who did, I think it's, This Is Us or something like that. It's, it's, uh, made by a well known team, got really good actors in it. It's about the president and the president is murdered.
And that's not spoiling anything because that's like literally the first thing you see in the show. The dude's dead. So no spoilers there. But it's about the Secret Service agent who's in charge of protecting him and the story unfolding. And the artistry of how they tell the story you think you know what you're about to get into for this entire show You do not.
And the way they reveal it at the end of the episode was like watching, uh, What was it? The, the, you know, Kaiser Soze movie. Yeah. Like I remember seeing that in the theater. Your mind goes Or Sixth Sense. At the end of Sixth Sense, your mind blows. Like I did not see that coming. Really well done. But it's earned because they drop clues and stuff throughout where you're kind of like, you start to feel like, Something's not quite right here, but you're not thinking about it's very subtle, They set it up in a really smart way.
And then by the end you're just like holy crap. This is a show that is not just in my wheelhouse, It's like made for me kind of a thing. Like by the end of it and I thought it was just gonna be a fun drama, And whoa, it's way more than their fun drama. This episode needed that it needed, if they wanted to do a twist, they needed to know how to pull it off and drop more clues and more things earlier on.
So that it earns the reveal where it did not earn a reveal. It didn't even try to do a
reveal. Yeah, it's disappointing. It's like, it's very disappointing. And it's like the one thing that I kind of like smirked at was when Red Jack goes into the computers and is doing all of his shenanigans of like, I'll kill you all.
And he's yelling at the crew. Like, I mean, the easiest way to help the crew not be afraid is to tell them what's going on. Instead, keep it from them and drug everybody. It's just like, don't ask me any questions. Take this drug, get high. Yeah. Like, yeah. All right. But one of my favorite things was the conversation between Spock and Kirk.
Where they're like, well, there are some mathematical problems that don't have a solution. Perhaps we can use that to our advantage to drive the thing from the computer by taking so much of the computer's power to do that thing. And I was just like, eh, that's basically the plan that they come up with the Next Generation to go against the Borg.
I'm like, okay, yeah. So like that is that as a plot device that as a, as a way to fight a computerized, like, like, that's pretty cool. That's sci fi. But other than that, this one does not stand up as nope. Yeah. Anything that's really going to evoke a well thought conversation. So viewers, listeners jump to the comments.
You've already been typing cold sweats. That may be enough. I mean, I mean, come on, cold sweats, maybe all you get from this episode. But if you had something that you wanted to share, what was your response to this episode or what was your response to our conversation about this episode, or what was your response to the idea of having to type cold sweats, let us know in the comments.
And of course, don't forget long answers only, Changeling next week. Looking forward to talking about that one. I am, but let me know wrong answers only. What is that one about? Come to the comments. As always commenting, liking, subscribing. Those are great, easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you'd like to more directly support us, you can go to trek in time dot show, click the become a supporter button, throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And when you do so, not only do you get to leave a little bit of a goose bump. But you also become an Ensign, which means you'll be signed up for out of time, our spinoff podcast, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program.
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