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Matt and Sean talk about cherry picking from history, and messing around in someone else’s present, in Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 21, "Patterns of Force.”
Matt and Sean talk about cherry picking from history, and messing around in someone else’s present, in Star Trek: The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 21, "Patterns of Force.”
On William Shatner’s acting: https://youtu.be/HiPzJEp5gDU?si=hxJ0ontDrwOMe4H4
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (04:04) - - Viewer feedback
- (07:19) - - Today's episode
- (09:53) - - This time in history
- (17:19) - - Episode discussion
Follow us on X: @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
Sean Ferrell: In this episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about how those who propagandize from history are doomed to repeat it. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we take a look at Star Trek in stardate order. That means that we are going chronologically from where we started in Enterprise, went through Discovery, then we hit the original series. No, we hit Strange New Worlds, then we hit the original series. And then we paused the original series to step backward as the most recent season, season three of Strange New Worlds dropped. And now that we've completed our discussion about those 10 episodes, we've returned to the original series. Is everybody confused? Good.
Matt Ferrell: Job done.
Sean Ferrell: Job done. So here we are talking about the 50th episode of of the original series, overall, the 21st of the second season, Patterns of Force. This is an episode that dropped on February 16, 1968. Welcome to everybody to Trek in Time. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, 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. Matt, how are you on this Sunday afternoon?
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing great, how about you?
Sean Ferrell: Could be better, could be better. I feel a little bit like I remember the episode of the original series where they went to the planet that had the asylum on it where the mentally ill people were being forced into servitude by a machine that basically wiped their ability to be independent. I feel a little bit like I look like the patient who had managed to escape. And it turned out he had actually been a doctor on the planet and he was wild eyed and he talked like this. I feel a little bit like I look like him. And there's a reason for that. Matt and I, for those viewers who are actually looking at us on YouTube, we're not hirsute men. We have the balding, we have the. What happened to your hair, man?
Matt Ferrell: I refer to it as the Jean Luc Picard.
Sean Ferrell: Yes, you leaned into the Jean Luc Picard in a way. I have not in a long time. I used to buzz it all off, but more recently I like to keep what I call the baby bird look. So a little bit on top, kind of like fuzzy up toward the top and then keeping it short on the sides. And today was a day where I was, I was like, it's time, it's time to trim. I got to go in there and trim. So I went in, got my trimmer and I trimmed my beard and then I started to trim the head itself and I went ramp and rimp and rimp and rimp and the battery, she died. So depending on how I hold my head, astute viewers may notice a little uneven, some patches, some. Oh, did he attack himself with child safety scissors? It's going to be that kind of look. So that's where I am right now. So while we're recording this, I have set up my let's just call it incredibly stupid buzzer to charge. So hopefully, fingers crossed, the amount of time it takes to record this will be enough time for it to charge so I can finish the job and get on with my day. I need to maintain my reputation as a sharp looking guy. On now to our discussion about Star Trek. Before we dive into this episode Patterns of Force, we always like to revisit your comments about our previous episodes. So Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week?
Matt Ferrell: Well, this is about the finale of Strange New Worlds, new life and civilizations and the feedback kind of universally felt like our take on the episode. Jason Dumb wrote, Definitely a mixed episode for me. Doctor who is a religious metaphor and a fun detail to put into the previous episode, but I don't think it belongs in Trek. Neither does Ley lines. I hate this. Or a great evil of the universe. I agree with Matt. The Spock Kirk relationship deserves more than we did a mind more than we did a mind meld. And now we're besties. I still enjoyed the episode that's kind of on par with me. And then you have happy flappy farm who wrote we liked the episode. The mind meld really explained how a reserved Vulcan personality like Spock could form a strong bond to someone who is also reserved like Kirk. We felt like the lifetime portion of the episode dragged a bit. It was such a hit the brakes moment when we were jerked from this intense fight to a slowed down homey scene. Thanks for the lively review. And then finally we had Dan Sims who wrote really wish they had like two more episodes in this season to say to yes, have a full episode dedicated to the life they could have had. And I don't know some other way to finish the season.
Sean Ferrell: There's a wrap up Ouch.
Matt Ferrell: Dan coming in dropping the gauntlet. But you can see there's like this varied everybody's reasons for why they liked or didn't like it's. There's a lot of different reasons for it but everybody kind of had this kind of mixed reaction to the finale.
Sean Ferrell: Which I think I not to hammer too hard on this point, which I know we've talked about in the past. The. Yeah, the remembrance that, oh yeah, this was a strike beleaguered season. Like so many TV shows that we saw over the past 12, 14 months, they were shows that were either halted or delayed as a result of two different strikes in Hollywood. And I really do feel like the unevenness of this season lands squarely in that. Because how do you jumpstart production and get it back on track quickly without saying like, okay, if we're going to do things the way we know we want to, it's actually going to delay season three until 2020. And they did not want to do that. So you end up with some episodes that are like, oh, how about we do a one where they're dancing all the time? It's like, okay, is that what people have been asking for? That's what we got. So I think that this season ended as kind of a metaphor for how the entire production probably felt. Probably a little uneven. Probably a little bit of. Are we sure we're doing this? I guess we are. So we'll see what season four. But before we get there. Yes, you've got some flashing lights, you've got some noises in the background. That of course is the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Yes, we're back to Wikipedia. Matt, Good luck.
Matt Ferrell: I like that. We're modern times. It's all AI baby. Yeah, go back in time. It's back to the Wikipedia. So here we go. The crew of the Enterprise visits a planet dominated by a Nazi culture and at war with its planetary neighbor. The Enterprise is visiting the planet of Ekos that is surrounded by system Zeon inhabitants. Ekosians are violent and Zeons are peaceful people. Enterprise wants to contact a Professor John Gill from Earth who came here to research without interaction. But the planet turned into a Nazi type colony hating the Zeons. Apparently. John Gill becomes the leader of Ekos and hatches a plot to eliminate the Zeons. Spock and Kirk beam down and try to contact John Gill but run into trouble and are captured. They scheme to get out of the jail with one of Zeons and arrange to meet John Gill, but realize that John Gill is drugged and Malekon is controlling the entire process. Bones is beamed down and gives a stimulant that finally works on John.
Sean Ferrell: The writing is wild, right? Yes.
Matt Ferrell: Who explains to Kirk what went wrong with his observation mission and saves the day by giving an eye opening speech to the people of Ekos restoring the peace. Wild ride, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Well done. Season 2, Episode 21, directed by Vincent McEveety, written by John Meredyth Lucas, originally broadcast on February 16, 1968 we have, of course, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley representing our original crew that we know and love, and guest appearances. It's kind of a long list for this one because it mostly takes place on the planet. David Brian playing Professor John Gill. Chuck Courtney as Davod, Skip Homeier as Deputy Fuhrer Malekon, Richard Evans, Patrick Horgan, Valora Noland, William Wintersole, Paul Baxley, Peter Canon, Gilbert Green, Bart La Rue, Ralph Maurer, Ed McCready, Eddie Paskey as a trooper. We know Eddie Paskey from other episodes. He's usually a crewman. So here he is. He's apparently working deep, deep, deep undercover. And William Blackbird as Lt. Hadley. What was the world like at the time of original broadcast on February 16, 1968? What was everybody singing along to? Yes, everybody. Guess what? We're going back to all the big hits we'd been talking about for literally several months before we took a break to go into Strange New Worlds. Why, yes, that is. Love is Blue by Paul Marriott, once again the number one song in the country at the time of original broadcast. Take it away, Matt. That's right. Lovely as always, Matt. I don't know if you think about this the way that I think about this song. I believe this is in fact the song that was our parents first dance. It was at their wedding. Yes. Yes, it was. Can't get through a recording with this without thinking about our parents, huh? And at the box office, people were lining up for the number one film. It was once again, Guess who's Coming to Dinner, the film that dominated the box office for about two months straight.
And on television, we've been trying to take a look at the Nielsen ratings and taking a look at the top programs during the year 1967 into 68, but we ran into difficulty. I ran into difficulty. Let me be honest, Matt didn't have a thing to do with this. If there's any fingers to be pointed, point them right at me. If there's any credit to be given, give it all to me. Just ignore Matt. That's all I ask every day. Won't people please ignore my brother? Anyway, a lot of the top programs were the same programs that we talked about during season one. So I started looking at other ways to slice the broadcast television pie and find some things to talk about that we hadn't talked about before. And it suddenly occurred to me, Matt, that we never talked about the competition. Do you know what I mean by that?
Matt Ferrell: No, we haven't really talked about those.
Sean Ferrell: Shows that aired directly opposite Star Trek.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, right.
Sean Ferrell: So Here we are, 1968. A little late for this one. Yes, 1968, a television program that aired on ABC in 1967. This show was canceled before the beginning of 1968. Hondo. How familiar are you with Hondo?
Matt Ferrell: I'm not familiar at all.
Sean Ferrell: It's an American Western. It starred Ralph Tager. It aired on ABC from September 8th until December 29th. It only had 17 episodes and it was canceled because it was up against shows like Star Trek and mainly Gomer Pyle. Like those were the two. Like, okay, it was number three. When you only have three broadcast channels and you're number three, you're in last place. So it didn't make it out of 1967. It did make it into, strangely enough, syndication, even with only 17 episodes. The sweet spot for syndication at this point and has continued to to this day, syndication is you get 100 episodes. That's the target goal. That's what makes it hard for the modern golden era of television where a season is only 10 episodes. What does syndication look like for those programs? It's going to be a interesting era in the next couple of decades to see what happens with those programs. But in the 60s, if you got 100 episodes total, you were going to make it to syndication. But Hondo made it into syndication even only with 17, and continues to be aired on different channels. Mainly those Pluto-esque streaming services or local broadcasts where there are those. If anybody's familiar with digital television antenna broadcasts where you've got like your Fox broadcast, but then there are sub broadcasts beneath it, so it's channel five and then 5.1, 5.2, 5.3. Some of those channels that focus intensely on reruns from the 1960s and 70s. This program continues to be rerun, which I found interesting. It's one of those shows I've never heard of, I've never seen. It is based on a 1953 film that starred John Wayne. And so here this series focuses on Hondo Lane, who is a former Confederate cavalry officer who moved west after the Civil War, took a indigenous bride and then as part of a U.S. army extermination attempt, his wife is killed and he becomes then a kind of David Jansen esque fugitive figure, wandering the area, helping stop injustice and making sure other people don't fall victim to the U.S. army. This is, I mean during a civil rights era to make a show where the hero is a Confederate soldier. And okay, this blurs a lot of weird lines. But one of the things that stood out for me as I mentioned, depicted by Ralph Tager and normally what Matt likes me to do is to provide an image to share with the commentary here. And this time around I've given him a multitude of images. I've given him three images and Matt's probably thinking, wow, why did he give me three images? I just wanted to point out that Mr. Tager appears to have one expression. So if we can share all three images, I think it's just an interesting, it's an interesting homage to this expression. And in the final image I want to point out it is Mr. Tager with a horse. If you look closely, the horse has the same expression. And finally, in the news on this day, February 16, 1968, headlines. I mean we're going to be talking about history. What we learn from history, what we don't learn from history when we talk about this episode. And here is a newspaper full of headlines that if you didn't know it was from 1968, could feel like it was from 2025. Headlines such as wide foreign aid waste is described to Congress, Israelis use jet, and day long clash with Jordanians use US Marines gained 200 yards in a day at Hughes Citadel. Yes, these are headlines about ongoing strife in the Middle east, concerns that US taxpayer dollars are not being used properly overseas. And the military operations in Vietnam continued to be a quagmire when a 200 yard advance is considered progress. When everybody on the ground and in the article talks about recognizing, yeah, this isn't going the way we hoped it would.
On now to our discussion of this episode. So Matt, we've talked about this before. In the original series in particular this season we have ended up with gangsters in Chicago. We've ended up with ancient Rome depicted as a 20th century television viewing civilization. And now here we are, Nazi Germany back again, better than ever. There are reasons why these episodes took place. One of them being cost. You want to show a bunch of people on a different planet but you don't want to spend the money to make it look like another planet. Well, we've got a room full of costumes right over here. So it's ancient Rome or it's Chicago or in this case it's just any city where Spock makes the very ham fisted comment of like, well, evolution must have taken place here in a very similar pattern to Earth because It looks like 20th century buildings. Like, okay, guys, like, you don't need to, you don't need to try and push it too hard. But that is a huge factor behind the creation of this kind of episode. Yeah. And I also want to get this aspect out of the way. What is the point of this kind of thing? There is a ridiculousness to the premise no different than the ridiculousness of we found a planet that has evolved from Roman times, but it's 20th century equivalent. We have a planet that is made up of Chicago mobsters. We have like the ridiculous, but they wave away the ridiculousness so easily and so quickly that it's clearly not the point. That's one of the things I appreciate about some of these original series episodes. They're like, yeah, we get it. It doesn't make any sense.
One of the critiques that Next Generation and later Star Trek dealt with was, was, oh, they go to the planet where everybody's ears are blobby and then they go to a different planet where everybody's nose is blobby and then they go to another planet where everybody's chin is blobby and it's like, okay, where are they going to put the prosthetics this week? It's just like aliens are just people with various blobby parts added on.
Matt Ferrell: There's a quote for the box.
Sean Ferrell: There's a quote. Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Star Trek.
Sean Ferrell: Star Trek. It's just people with different parts of their body turned blobby. Yeah. That's going to be the pitch for my TV show when Hollywood comes knocking on my door and says, do you have an idea? I'm going to be like, yeah, it's about different planets where the different body parts are just blobby depending on where you go. And they're going to be like, sold. But the original series handled it a little bit differently in that they didn't really address it. They were just like, you're going to a different planet and oh, it's the Ekosians. And what are they like? They're basically just humans. No attempt to explain was this an Earth colony? Like, why are the people identical? Why is a neighboring planet also identical? How come they're all just humans? It's not the point. The point is the metaphor. The point is the plot. The point is getting into like. So they just wave all this away. So we end up with the ridiculousness of all this being just kind of like, treated as if it's non existent. So for me as a viewer, and maybe this is balanced in part as well by my own nostalgia for episodes like this. I'm usually okay with it. I'm just like, yeah, they found a Nazi planet. Okay, like, fine. What is your story here? And for this one, this is the one in comparison to the Roman one and the Chicago Mobland one, this is the one that I think works the best because this is the one that I think they had more than just, well, let's put people in these costumes and make it a different place. This is the one where they seem to be playing with the idea of this historian has gone to this place and through motivations that we are not given any. We don't give any attention to the motivations that lead this man to completely shatter the Prime Directive in an egregious way.
Like, this is another layer of the ridiculousness of this episode that they completely, just like, they. They ask the question, like, John, how could you have done this? But no answer is ever going to come that makes any sense. He egregiously breaks the Prime Directive and then lands on an audacious platform of Nazi Germany was the most efficient government that Earth ever knew. Like, okay, side note, the depiction of that and the Nazism of it all kept this episode from being broadcast in Germany until the 21st century. It did not appear. It was not dubbed. Until more recently, it could not be broadcast. It was not included in a dub, box sets or DVD sets or anything. So, like, let that speak for itself. But I think at work behind this is an intention to tell an important story, an important message. It is inside a goofy shell. But I feel like there is something at the heart of this which is trying to tell something serious. And I'm curious, do you land in similar terrain as me on that or do you look at this and just say, nope, it's just all ridiculous. It's all frosting.
There's no cake here because I will get into what I think I see after you respond, unless you want me to talk about it now.
Matt Ferrell: So my, my, my take on this episode is not that far off from yours where all these episodes where they find a Roman Empire that's like, well, that's just like on Earth, silly, stupid, whatever. This is the one that does it the best. I have seen this episode numerous times where there's other episodes we've watched where it's like, I've seen it maybe once. This one I've seen a lot. I actually enjoy this one when it comes on. It's not one of the best episodes. Not even close. I enjoy It. I enjoy it for what it is. It's goofy. It's got a very. It's got a crystal clear message. Like, it, like, it, like, punches you on the nose. It's so direct as to what they're saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely. And especially they come out right out and say it at the very end. And the conversation on the bridge, they're just like, hey, power corrupts. It was like, okay, guys, I picked that up for the entire 45 minutes of the show. You didn't have to say it. I do enjoy it for the goofiness. I enjoy it for the message, the clarity. I understand why they did this episode. So there's. I can't hold anything against it, especially for 1960s television. I'm going to twist this a little bit, though, Sean. Watching this episode now made me horribly sad because I was disturbed at how prescient this episode is to freaking today. It's like they chose Nazis because everybody hates Nazis. It's a universal. It's a clear bad guy. And today that's not clear anymore. Today some people say, hey, the Nazis had some good ideas. And then in this episode when they go, the Nazis were the most efficient government. They had some nice ideas. It was like, what. What is happening right now? It's like they're basically stating MAGA propaganda in the episode. And I was just kind of blown away of like, you'd watch this episode.
Like, I watched it maybe 20 years ago, and of course you're like, it's ridiculous. This is never going to happen again. This is so stupid. And now we're living through a time where we're watching this exact thing.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: I think unfold right in front of us. I am totally baffled at, like, it turned from a silly episode that I enjoyed watching to an incredibly prescient, depressing episode that I still enjoyed watching.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. Yeah. I ended up in similar terrain. And for me, that's part of what unearthed what I think is the. In my notes, I wrote down, what's the point of doing this episode? Clearly there's the shock factor. You land in a planet and you have that first Nazi soldier step around the corner, and it's clearly meant to be like a lightning bolt in your face. And then you get through the obviousness of what you pointed out. They say power corrupts, but hidden within that is like, Kirk says something about the leadership principle, like the idea that an individual can have too much sway over it goes like a song that's been on repeat on my Spotify playlist lately. Has been cult of personality by living color. Like the idea that you end up with somebody being the magnet that pulls everything to them for good or for ill, is at play in this. And one of the things that stood out to me was you don't get to invoke a previous era and then be selective about what you get to keep. That I think is at the heart of the seriousness underneath the shock vector and the obviousness of statements like power corrupts. I think that this is sending the message of you can't cherry pick history and you can't say, oh, we want to keep this, but not that it was an efficient government. So if we say we're Nazis and build an efficient government, that's okay because we're not wanting to lean into the other part of it. And the point being you don't get to do that. And I think that it. I just wanted to say real quickly, I think it goes both directions as well in the form of ultimately clear to eyed taking everything that is historically factual in you take the good with the bad works the other direction as well, which is what the more encompassing and diversified vision of history is actually trying to do.
To say, to recontextualize things like what was the impact of European colonization of this part of the world? Were there benefits? Were there positives? Absolutely. The world we're living in right now, where you and I live right now, is the result of all of that. And we can't just say like, oh, I wish none of this happened. But it also brought with it extreme negatives. It eradicated the lifestyle and culture of the people who already were here. And there are impacts as a result of choices made by our forebears that we need to look at and be able to say, we accept that that happened. We don't need to say, I therefore need to pay the price for it. But we do need to accept the reality of it and we need to accept the presence of a truth that cannot be bent away from that full story. We can't say, oh, I'm choosing just to honor my forebears who did good things. And I'm not going to accept any. Anybody talking about the negative that may have come out of that. And I think that this episode is. You mentioned prescience. I think it's actually prescient in that way, in that it's saying there is a reality that exists behind us and you don't get to pick which parts of it you own and which you don't. And I appreciated that in this moment as you said, watching it now felt very different from the last time I saw this. When I realized what episode we were about to watch, I actually had a. Oh boy, I don't think I'm ready for that. And then as I was watching it, I found myself thinking like, wow, for 1968, it's actually sending a message to 2025. Not just in the context of like, oh, imagine how confused our culture is right now about who the good guys and the bad guys are. It's not just that. It is actually a message also about own it all, take it all in, be honest with yourselves about what it was and what it could be.
And you make your decisions today based on that reality, that truth, not just the part you like or the part you don't like.
Matt Ferrell: Well, that's the thing I thought was kind of eye opening to me rewatching it now, which is when they made this, it was very close to the end of World War II. And so it's a reflection of looking back on what has happened and what it means.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And now we are so far away from that, we're generations removed from it. Yeah, we've forgotten those lessons. And so we're watching today is a, a reminder of don't forget your history.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And it made me think of there's this YouTube show called Surrounded, I don't know if you've ever seen it, where they have a guest and they put 20 people around them. And then the people, it's opposing points of view. So they have a doctor in the middle and they have vaccine deniers surrounding them. And the vaccine deniers can raise their hands and race to the chair to have a chance to have a one on one with this person. And then the people that surround them can vote the person out. Like if they don't like where the conversation's going, they can raise flags. And if a majority of flags go up of get somebody new in the chair, they lose their time talking to the person. It's a fascinating show. And they did one recently with right wing people surrounding. I'm blanking on his name. He's a commentator, reporter guy blanking on his name in the middle. And one of these people that was confronting, got on the chair, was talking to him, came right out and said, I'm a fascist, you know, I believe in this. And so the questions he was getting responded back from the person in the middle was, so you want a dictator, you want full on fascism? The guy's yes, yes, I believe in a benevolent dictator will be able to do so much more than what our current system does and blah, blah, blah. And all my thought was, when I watched that was, that guy is so naive. There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. As soon as you have somebody in that position, they have that power, they will never give up that power. And if it's somebody that ends up distorting in a direction that you don't like, you can no longer do anything about it. And this episode goes straight at that because it's like, yeah, okay, the German Nazi government may have been very efficient, but as you pointed out, you have to take it as a whole.
It's like the reason it was efficient is because it was a dictatorship. And then guess what? Because it's a dictatorship, guess what they ended up doing? Killing millions of Jews. So it's like you can't take one without the other and power corrupts. And so I thought it was very interesting to kind of like wrap my head around the different time periods that the show has made and what it meant then and what it means today. It's just for a goofy episode, Sean. I did not expect to have this much introspection. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And to add to the goofiness being deeper than its surface level, I think the end of the episode is absurd. Right at the end.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean, it's awful. It's an awful ending.
Sean Ferrell: It's an absurd ending. But I actually feel like again, 1968, like you said, they were two decades removed from World War II. And I think what it is depicting is the 1960s idealism that we could actually have an end to that kind of moment, an end to that kind of conflict, like World War II. Because what is the wrap up here? The Nazi regime on this planet is immediately dispelled simply by a speech given by a drug addled alien who says, oh, it's actually this guy. He's corrupted everything and he's the bad guy. And that's enough. That's all it took. Now this entire planet has been happily proceeding with.
Matt Ferrell: Correct.
Sean Ferrell: Following the warmongering people. They've been happily following the warmongering that has been leading to an all out attack on another planet to exterminate them. And now it's like, well, now that they've removed that, Spock says, I think both these planets would be great to join the Federation. And it is cartoonishly absurd. But I think that it is an idealism in 1968 that is shining through. They needed it to end in an upbeat way, that it can't just be like, oh, now becomes the decade long fight back against this fascist regime, the machinery of which is now in place. And there are going to be people who are going to be like, no, we're not going to let go of it. That kind of depiction was what we unexpectedly found when we got episode seven of Star wars when it was like, oh, yeah, remember how the Empire had been destroyed? There's a thing called the First Order. Okay. It was a resurgence of this horrible Empire that nobody liked. But some people are like, were they really that bad? Like, yeah, that can't happen at the end of an episode in 1968. They can't have it end with the like, oh, boy, now we got to deal with a Nazi planet. So they end with an idealism. And it actually, I found something there that was hopeful for me. We talked about, like, hard to watch this episode in 2025. I found myself watching it in part thinking they were only two decades removed from World War II. The Germany of 1968 was different from the Germany of 1948. The progress that had been made in 1968 was real. Things were not perfect, but there was progress. We were at this point, the civil rights era is on the move. The anti war movement of Vietnam is on the move. We're seeing progresses in science and diplomacy. These things are on the rise. Nothing is perfect. But things had changed in a way in two decades. Things had changed dramatically from the 1940s.
And I found myself thinking things can move so quickly. Yeah, this era could move quickly as well. And it's incumbent upon us to push the direction we want it to go and try to bring things to a place of conversation, Diplomacy, finding common ground as opposed to vilification. And what we're seeing now, again, similar to the past, 1968 was also a year of assassinations. It was a year of political leaders being killed for speaking. And we're seeing that now as well. We need to move back away from that precipice and back toward the areas of how do we talk about difference and how do we talk about not agreeing as opposed to how do we shout each other down? So I found this episode kind of highlighting these moments for me in a way that it was far more profound than I anticipated given in my mind. This was the, oh, yeah, this is one of those, we don't have a lot of money, so let's put some costumes on people and run around like they're Nazis. Yep.
I think that there was more to this one than in the other two.
Matt Ferrell: The other thing that I have seen this numerous times. So it wasn't a surprise, but it was a nice reminder to see. This is like, you know, when you watch a good summer blockbuster film, it's a action adventure. It's fun, exciting, but it's also funny. This episode is very funny and there are some really good comedic moments and I just want to kind of hit two of them, which was Spock saying to Kirk, you're gonna make a very convincing Nazi. And there's this double take that Kirk gives him, like, what does that mean?
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And then on the in when they're in the jail cell and they're both spitballing how to get out that scene I adore because it's this fun repartee between the two of them and then this stranger that's just watching the show of like what is going on here between these two. And Kirk making the suggestion of the realization about the thing in their arms and Spock going, oh yeah, we could use it to do this.
It's about this far apart. And so the way that they're tag teaming together is the thing I love about Star Trek of like you're watching smart people being good at their jobs and doing things in a way that nobody else can do. And it's like, here's these two guys doing it and the whole thing of him climbing on the back of Kirk, and Kirk, all of his responses are just that, you know, he's in pain, he wants him to pick up the pace because Spock's heavy and all that kind of stuff. I thought it was charming, funny. It's one of the reasons I love Star Trek is that scene, that scene specifically. So I just want to call that out.
Sean Ferrell: And it's a nice moment to see after we just watched the episode which is supposed to be planting the seed, which you and a lot of our other viewers and listeners did not enjoy as much as I did. But the idea of their connection, the depth of their friendship and their history together being what it is, seeing a moment like that where it's, they're having fun in that moment. It's like as actors you can tell like they're genuinely enjoying the work of what they're putting together and it shines through and I really appreciated that. In that vein, there is a link that we'll include in the show notes. It is to a YouTube episode of a channel that what I believe the channel does is just analyzes actors and their choices and how they come to portray the characters that they portray. And there was one about Shatner that I found very interesting because it's, it makes the argument I have had in my head and heart for a while, which is the hamminess of the depiction of Shatner is overblown. And that when you get down to the era that he was working in and what he was doing and the choices he made, they were of a style of acting and his training was Shakespearean and there's a lot going on there that is actually showing a lot of smart choices. And I enjoyed watching this YouTube video about him and the choices that you see on screen. So we'll include it in the show notes so that you can enjoy it as well. I hope you take something away from it the way that I did, which was a deeper appreciation of Shatner's performance and what he brought to this character. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you want to share with our listeners and viewers about what you have coming up on your main channel?
Matt Ferrell: Just stay tuned because I have a bunch of videos coming up about typical stuff Sean, got one on a battery breakthrough that's making zinc batteries way more appealing. There's a couple of solar panel advancements that I'm going to be talking on, talking about coming up. So there's a good slew of things coming over the next three or four weeks.
Sean Ferrell: As for me, as always, if you're interested in checking out my books, you can visit my website, seanferrell.com or you can just go to wherever it is you buy your books, your local bookstore, your public library, or online retailers like bookshop.org, all of my books are available in all those locations. If you'd like to support the show, leaving a comment, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends, those are all great ways for you to support us. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show, click the Become a supporter button there. Not only do you get to throw some coins at our heads, but you will become an ensign, which means you'll be signed up for our spin off show Out of Time. We should talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. So it might be other sci fi movies, tv, TV shows, whatever. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. Thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.