165: Star Trek TOS Season 1, “This Side of Paradise”

https://youtu.be/TNrv5ta13o4

In this episode we’re talking about underestimating the traumas of the past from Star Trek: The Original Series. Is this drug trip of an episode worth the watch?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell 🐨

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

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 why gardening is dumb. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time. This, of course, is the program that takes a look at Star Trek in chronological stardate order. And we also take a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we're talking about 1967.

And this week, we're talking about this side of paradise from season one of the original series. Episode number 25 in shooting order, but 24 in broadcast order. And who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is my brother, Matt. He is the guru and inquisitor behind the YouTube channel 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. Other than being still somewhat sick with a cold, but I'm other than that, I'm fine. How about, how about you?

I, you know, Have not had a cold that I'm aware of, but I am dealing with workplace workload that has made me feel like all I want to do is lie down on the floor and groan.

So that's fun that going for me, but just in general, I'm fine. So let's all just hold on together. Before we get into our conversation about the most recent episode, as I mentioned before, this side of paradise. And we always like to take a look at what your thoughts were about the previous episode. So Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?

There's okay. First, there's a lot of comments on this one and I had a hard time cherry picking it down just to a few. But one that caught my eye was Dan Sims wrote something that made me laugh, which was Space Seed. Our last episode. Space Seed really was the perfect name for that episode, sprouted so many seeds for future episodes and movies.

Yes, it did. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Well done. I wholeheartedly approve that joke. We had one from Wayouts123 who wrote, what I want to know is how they're going to gel Strange New Worlds Spock knowing La'an and this about Space Seed because La'an never hides who she's related to. And yet in this one, Sean, they were like, the history of who these people were was like spotty at best.

So how do you score that circle between what they're doing in Strange New Worlds and this?

I think you could maybe dip a little bit of desired ignorance around the initial confusion around who Khan was. But I think when it comes to what Khan represented, I think you could still see that connective line because Spock is the one who right out of the get go is like, if these people who are Who we think they are, this is not great.

Yeah. And I think that meshes with his understanding of La'an because her entire thing was to bring all of that right to the forefront. And so I feel like there's a drive to be like, we need to be careful about these people. These people are terrible.

Yeah. I mean, the part of the history that was lost was that the fact that they had launched themselves into space, but they knew who Khan was once they discovered who Khan was. So I guess in that way, you could say it doesn't. It's not disconnected. It's just, it is connected.

So it's just subtext effectively. Spock doesn't say, look, I used to work with somebody on the Enterprise who was related to him and that was a problem. It was him immediately saying like, would you want to say to a world, a war weary population that a bunch of Napoleons had just escaped?

Like he knew how to frame it. So, I feel like that was born in part from not just studying history, but actually having worked with La'an. And of course, that's just me retconning everything to make it work.

Well, back to the comments. We had one from Happy Flappy Farm that hit on a topic we kind of talked about a little bit in the episode with Space Seed. The whole, man, he's kind of smarmy the way he's treating women. This episode is a good one with a couple of issues. For one, I have never understood the trope of a woman who's helpless, hopelessly attracted to powerful men.

Yuck. Given your guests full access to your library, dumb. What organization would do that? Yeah. I believe Roddenberry didn't think through the Star Trek world before creating the series. Looking back, it seems like he was shooting from the hip with the episodes. There doesn't seem to be a detailed background story like Star Wars and other long established sci fi stories.

I would agree with that. I think he probably had a very kind of high level, like, idea as to what he wanted, but they were just kind of figuring it out as they went. I don't see a big problem with that, but there are start, there are like sci fi series that have whole fleshed out worlds before they even write a script. Doesn't mean one's necessarily better than the other, but you can definitely feel that they were kind of shooting from the hip a lot on this show..

Yeah, I feel like, I feel like that is, I think it's a good, it's a good assessment. And I feel like you end up with, on the one hand, you can say, here comes a show like Farscape. Shoot from the hip, go where currents lead you, characters evolve in ways that maybe aren't on the page the first time they appear. And then at the other side, you've got something like Babylon 5, where there was a story Bible that they did not deviate from. And it was, I've got a point to tell. I have a five year story.

Here we go. So like, and Star Trek, I think does probably, the original series probably leaned far more heavily into shoot from the hip territory than it did story Bible territory. Um, and I think there are a couple of the series that are in our future, which lean more toward maybe a little bit more story Bible territory.

Like, yeah, I think later seasons of deep space nine, I think they were mapping things out in a different way for that series than they did for next generation or for the original series. So, but it is, there is a spectrum here and I think happy is not wrong to point out that, yeah, I think they knew character wise what they were trying to do more or less, but as far as like consistency in.

Which quadrants of space have humans been to? Sometimes there are statements made where it's just like, we've never been out this far. And then other times it is just like, well, we're here all the time. This is like, how can both of those be true?

It's a little more of a sci fi improv. It's just them going, yes. And yes, yes. And Klingons. Yeah. Um, and then of course, the last comments I want to bring up are, there were a lot of wrong answers only for today's episode about, uh, this side of paradise. I had a really hard time narrowing it down, but I had to give it to Mark Loveless. Again, this time, because there's a whole chain on this.

Plot of this side of pair, pair of dice is what he wrote. Okay. Scotty always seems to win at playing craps in the mess hall during the weekly craps night with his lucky dice. One, one game Spock happens to watch keeps a deduces that Scotty's lucky dice are specifically altered so that he will statistically roll more sevens than anybody else.

As punishment, Kirk tells Scotty he's won space latrine. He's, he's on space latrine duty for a month. , to which PaleGhost69 wrote space latrine is an interesting concept. Go dig a hole in an asteroid so we can dump our feces 10 million, 10 million years later, a poop comment strikes a planet to which old Trekky wrote at Mark Loveless with the Don Henley tie in for the win, LOL. So I just. It's, I did like Mark's wrong answers only, but I also liked the chain that followed. The conversation that followed. So thank you to everybody.

This is the kind of high level Trek conversation we're aspiring to on this channel. Thank you everyone for jumping into the comments. That noise you hear in the background, that's not your internet flaking out and those lights you see are not you having some kind of conniption. No, it's the Reed Alert, which means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Have at it.

Okay. Despite exposure to fatal radiation, the Federation colony on Omicron Ceti III appears to be thriving. A landing party from the Enterprise investigates finding the colony's population to be healthy beyond explanation. Leila Kalomi, an old friend of Mr Spock's, shows the landing party strange flowers that seem to impose a state of pure bliss and perfect health on all exposed to its spores, even Spock, but at the cost of ambition and self-discipline.

This episode directed by Ralph Senensky, story by D.C. Fontana and Nathan Butler, and Teleplay by D.C. Fontana, and of course D.C. Fontana, we've talked about her before. She is a pretty consistent writing stalwart in the writing room and helped shape quite a bit of Star Trek. And our main cast, as always, is on display.

We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, and Nichelle Nichols, as well as a good bit of George Takei as Sulu. And among the guest stars, Jill Ireland as Leila Kalomi, Frank Overton as Elias Sandoval, Grant Woods as Lieutenant Kelowitz. Michael Barrier as Lieutenant DeSalle, Dick Scotter as the painter, Eddie Paskey as the crewman and Walker Edmondson as the voice of transporter chief.

A little fun side note, you had Eddie Paskey and you had Michael Barrier as a part of this program. And the names of those crewmen were originally something different, but since they had both appeared in other episodes as Recurring characters, the names are changed. So these are the same characters we're seeing through.

It's a little bit like having a Miles O'Brien in the transporter room on Next Generation, and eventually you just are surprised if you don't see Miles O'Brien. The original time of broadcast, March 2nd, 1967. That's right, Matt. This was the episode that mom watched on her birthday. And

what was playing on the radios? What was the number one song? Well, Matt, it's a return to an old favorite of yours. Kind of a drag by the Buckinghams. Take it away.

That's great as always. Thank you, Matt. And at the movie theaters. We just can't, I like still am stunned. We can't escape it. We can't escape certain movies. And I'm still stunned by the fact that movies were given opportunities to find an audience. And I'm thinking right now, uh, I'm a big fan as well as my partner.

The two of us are big fans of the podcast, how did this get made? Which is of course a podcast that takes a look at Bad movies or weird movies, or why was this made movies and comedically takes them apart. And we are going to be going to a live show this coming Friday. And the movie they're going to be talking about is a movie that literally

it's still in theaters and is just about to drop on the streaming services on Thursday. Megalopolis Megalopolis is just out and it was considered a huge flop because it costs something like 120 million to make, not counting advertising. And then it made, I think 5 million and it's by a well respected director.

And I keep thinking, as we do this part of this show, and we look at a movie like the number one film, March 2nd, 1967, was the movie Hawaii, which returned to number one in its 20th week of release. A movie returning to number one after 20 weeks does not happen today. Movies are out of the theaters by the 20th week, even if they were at number one for three or four weeks at the early part of their run, they're gone because that's how it works now.

So here we go once again, 20 weeks in number one, Hawaii. A movie, of course, about how Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow and Richard Harris settled the islands of Hawaii. And on television, we have been looking at the Nielsen ratings to get a good apples to apples comparison between shows like Bonanza, which earned a 29, And Star Trek, which earned on average a 12 in its first season.

To give you a sense of the scale. We've talked about a lot of programs, Hogan's Heroes, Smothers Brothers, Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Disney. And this week, a show that I will admit, Matt, is another one of those programs that I am like, what alternate reality is this from, even though I have heard this show named in things, I'm thinking most notably Mystery Science Theater. This would be a program that would have been used as a punchline by the crew. Rat Patrol. Matt, have you ever seen an episode of Rat Patrol? I've heard of Rat Patrol, just like you. I've heard of it. Maybe through Mystery Science Theater, but I've never ever seen a single episode.

So this is a program that aired on ABC between 1967 and 1968. The show followed the exploits of four allied soldiers, three Americans and one British who are part of a long range desert patrol group in the North African campaign during World War II. Yes, just like Hogan's Heroes. There's nothing like mining World War II for I'm not even sure if this was a comedy.

It was a half hour long program, so I have to think it was a sitcom, but maybe not. Their mission? To attack, harass, and wreak havoc on Field Marshal Rommel's vaunted Afrika Korps. The show, interestingly, I found this To be more compelling than the premise of the program itself, the show is inspired and loosely modeled on David Sterling's British Special Air Service, which used modified jeeps armed with machine guns as the transport through the desert during World War II.

And there was a group called Popski's Private Army, and they did do this harassment of the Afrika Korps. But what I found interesting is that when this show premiered on the BBC, there was tremendous backlash because Americans didn't have a hand in that. The premise of the show would present it as if A majority of Americans were out there doing this with the assistance of some Brits.

In reality, it was the British, the Australians, and New Zealanders who were looking at this and saying, this isn't accurate at all. So it was pulled from the BBC after six episodes. It of course would go on to only air in the US for two years. So while I think it's probably got a soft spot for a certain audience that maybe it was a kid at the time.

I can't imagine it was landing incredibly deeply with wider viewers. And in the news, interesting headline here about a congressman from New York city representing Harlem house, excluding Powell, in a vote of 307 to 116, rejecting the inquiries cen, who he rejected the inquiry censure move, and over the vote overrode two party leaders' desires.

This was a case of a Congress person who was accused of corruption. Being expelled from Congress, he would go on to sue in the U. S. Supreme Court. He would win his case, and then in 1969, he would win his seat back. Eventually, he would be replaced by Congressman Rangel, and Rangel would represent Harlem well into the 21st century.

On now to our conversation about this episode, This Side of Paradise. I'm Not keeping careful track about who talks when and who talks for how long and who talks about what, where, when, and why, but Matt, I'm going to invite you to start this conversation. What were your thoughts about this episode?

Uh, um, this was a, Okay, episode. I, at the end of the day, it's like, I remember seeing this because for me, the memory of watching this show was the plants exploding in people's faces, but I didn't remember much else of it. And after finishing this episode, I can see why it was kind of like a, it was an okay episode. It was totally fine.

Nothing totally, nothing super bad, nothing super great, but I thought it was, it was an interesting idea. And I'm curious to see if you think the same thing, but the theme seemed super clear. Like this was a, uh, a commentary on the counterculture of the time, uh, the increase of drug use of the time, um, looking at the hippies and the druggies of the time of like, they're not taking responsibility for their actions, they're all peace, love, man, you know, that kind of a thing.

It seemed like it was a very clear shot across the bow, at the counterculture movement of, you don't know what you got, like it's, there's responsibilities. There's things that you have to do that you don't like to do, but you got to do it because there's responsibilities. Uh, that seems like the clear theme of this one.

So, uh. For me, I would say it did a decent job at that. My favorite sci fi, you know, of course, is like, it's making a commentary of what was going on at the time. This does that. I don't think it did it in a super heavy handed way, which I appreciated. Yeah. But it was also not hidden. Like it was kind of wearing on its sleeve for me, but it wasn't bashing me over the head with it.

So I think they did kind of thread the needle a little bit, but it was the fact that it wasn't as subtle as it could have been. Yeah, I agree with that assessment. You know, that a little bit. Yeah. But other than that, there was some weird stuff. I was going to say, there's the weird stuff of like how sometimes things are filmed.

The woman walking in the room, the gauzy filter over her, that kind of like, oh, so 1960s woman falling in love with somebody. Oh, she's a love interest to Spock. What did you do? There's that stuff that was kind of corny as a 21st century viewer of this 20th century show. But overall, I thought it was an okay episode.

Yeah. I, And I feel like we've had the pod people as a anti communist metaphor in Star Trek and in other things before. This stands out, like you said, this isn't about communism. This is about the hippie experience and literally the unplug because ultimately one of the things I appreciate about this. It did not do what a previous episode did where they met the space hippies and the space hippies were all just like, Hey, groovy man, we're going to play this music.

And you know, like go into your cafeteria and play with Spock on his space harp. This doesn't land in parody in the way that that did. This is just demonstrating people saying, you know what? You have power as long as I give you power. And the moment I say. No, I'm not going to do that. Sorry. And go wandering off.

If enough people do that, the system stops being a system. And this episode for me becomes more of a filler episode and not in the form of they were killing time between other more important episodes. I don't mean it in that way at all. I mean filler in the form of grout for who these characters are.

This episode, I think, does one thing very, very well Which is provide a lot of context for the characters for other episodes. I think the moment you see Kirk by himself on the bridge, and nice little side note, the shot of the bridge being completely empty was used in the Star Trek Next Generation episode.

When Scotty is discovered by the Next Generation crew and he ends up going to the holodeck and he's sitting on the bridge of the Enterprise, the original Enterprise, the images from this were used to create that imagery. So I thought that that was a really cool little nugget of, of fandom info. Um, but I feel like this one does a bunch of stuff around who is Kirk as a captain.

What is his vision of his role and the vision of what the role of the Enterprise is? What is Spock's vision of his role in service to the larger mission? Spock puts it explicitly, I have a duty to that man on the bridge. So it's like putting into words what we fans carry with us internally, like Spock's commitment to Kirk.

It's put into words in this episode, you end up with seeing people unplug from service and not being monstrous as a result, not acting hippy dippy, not doing anything other than simply saying like, Oh yeah, I'm going to go live on this planet now. That's it. I'm done with this part. I'm going to go down here.

And in a very 1960s vision of what it means to have drive and ambition, I love the fact that when the leader of, when Sandoval, the leader of the colony, wakes up, when he comes out of this stupor because he gets angry enough to now wake up, he's like, we've wasted so much time. We haven't achieved anything.

What is the large scale achievement of an agrarian colony? The 1960s vision of what it means to be a person is on full display. And I don't think I'm too keyed in on it. It's really, it's a different era. And it's the kind of thing that like, You and I have talked off camera a number of times about what does it mean to have to work?

What is a job? And what does it mean to have drive? And the idea that somebody who has literally traveled through space to go to a planet where they're like, we are settling up an agrarian colony. And then they say, Oh, we've only been growing enough grain to sustain ourselves.

Okay. Failure? Like, yeah, no, there's a, there's a, we haven't achieved anything. There's definitely like, kind of like in the subtext I read through that, the ending was like, there was kind of like a capitalism versus communism kind of like vibe going on here, where it was like, unchecked capitalism is not a good thing.

Like, not everything can grow, grow, grow, the goal is not to just make and keep as much as you can. It's like, there's an element of what they were doing on this planet that's like, it should be admired. Like, perfect health, happy life, they only grow what they need, it's like, what is, what is wrong with that?

Oh, you don't have responsibility. Oh, what? We're growing, we're growing the food that we need to eat. How is that not responsibility? Like, there's, there's an aspect to it that was just kind of like, everybody's doing a thing. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just like, everybody's doing their part. But that's communist.

That's communist, Sean. We can't have communism. So that's, that's bad. Yeah. And the one person who demonstrates To be clear, I'm not advocating for communism. Yeah. Just to be very clear. We're not coming there at all. But it's like, the one person who demonstrates the Breakdown of that system is McCoy, who strangely becomes even more Southern and 19th century.

Oh, sir, have you had a mint julep? And I'm just like, what is it with McCoy that whenever they have him in a position where he's supposed to be like, okay, you're not quite yourself. It immediately devolves into Foghorn Leghorn suddenly shows up on Star Trek. Well, I say, I say, I say, you know, I keep pitching them.

You keep missing them. It's. There's a kind of, and we've said, we talked about the animated series before about, okay, the animated series seems to stand on par almost with the original series episodes, as if like, is this cartoon that well written or is this show not that well written? And this is one of those episodes that I think stands at that, that precipice where this could have been an animated episode.

Or an actual live action episode equally because It's doing, it's doing, it's pushing so little of an agenda to be captivating from an action perspective. It is so much about a thought experiment of what does it mean to have service? What does it mean to be part of a hierarchy? What does it mean to have drive?

This episode seems to stand in a place between being an animated episode and an actual live action episode in a way, because it is not about action or drive to capture your eyeballs through what's going on on the screen as much as it is thought experiments around what it means to be a part of a system or a hierarchy.

And what does it mean to have drive? What is drive? What is ambition? What are goals? And in that way, it is A time capsule of 1960s thinking in a way that I think a lot of other episodes of Star Trek don't demonstrate quite as bluntly. I feel like this one is fairly blunt in its, what does it mean to be a man?

A man has drive, a man has ambition, a man leaves his print. And I'm like, this is all at a time when, as we've talked about multiple times, headlines from the New York Times talking about, yeah, Vietnam's going okay. What does it mean for The Cold War to be at the stage it's at, which is a few notches below hot.

You've got Cuban missile crisis. You've got Khrushchev versus Kennedy. You've got all of these things in just the recent past, and you've got a shooting war in South east Asia, in which you've got a number of different forces coming together and everybody wants to make sure it doesn't expand. But if it doesn't expand, how do you win?

And what does winning mean in that context? And it hadn't yet occurred to anybody that winning couldn't look like winning. And here's a TV show saying, yes, if you're going to go set out the bold endeavor of starting an agrarian colony, that a colony has to accomplish something. What does that mean? We don't know. It's like, okay, this is like an episode of ideas, but it doesn't even know what ideas it's pushing. And I find that kind of fascinating as a time capsule.

It's not even a time capsule, Sean, because that exists even to today. The thing that popped in my head as you were talking was maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago, it's probably 10 years ago.

I was a director level at a company and there was an executive retreat where it was basically directors, VPs, and the C level folks all went to this retreat in Cape Cod and we discussed the business, where we were going over the next year, how things were going, the high level stuff. And in that conversation, the CEO made a comment about how like one of our products was like how compared to one of our main competitors and they were ahead of us and he expected that we would increase x percent and like take the lead and do all the stuff and then in the same breath talked about how we were doing financially which was fantastic like we were doing phenomenal like fantastic and when he brought up how like we're kind of behind and we have to get ahead we have to win i i did this kind of like What?

What? We're doing great financially, but we're not number one. So we're, we suck because we're not number one. And as I'm thinking this, my boss, who is the VP, raised his hand and went, excuse me, but does not being number one is, what does that get us? Like, we're already, you just said super profitable. What, what, what's the point?

And he got, the CEO got so angry, like, lost his cool, reamed my boss up and down, and it was super embarrassing for my boss, but at the same time, it made the CEO look worse than the dressing he was given, the dressing down he was given my boss. And afterwards, he was like, A bunch of us went out and my boss looked at me and I was like, uh, I completely understood where you were coming from.

And everybody else was like, yeah, right, right. Like nobody understood. Yeah. Why do we have to be number one if we're a very close number two? It's like, yeah, okay. Our stretch goal. Yeah. Let's see if we can get, beat them out. But that's not the goal unto itself. And this show is kind of like, Encapsulating that.

You have to be ambitious. You have to have, you have to show something. It's like they did show something. Yeah. This agrarian society they created that had survived radiation that should have killed them after like a week. It's like, that is an accomplishment. Yeah. They're all kind of like stoners, but they survived for years.

It's like, why is that a bad thing? They survived for years and we haven't accomplished anything. You discovered a thing that could be a new drug that could heal people. Yes. Like, uh, didn't you just, you know, survive something that Spock was literally like the way they describe what the radiation does, the Bertholdt rays, Bertholdt rays, classics, sci fi, like we'll just create a name of a thing and say it exists.

And the description they say of what the Bertholdt rays does effectively sounds like it just microwave radiations the meat off of your bones. They describe it in a way just like, yeah, it's not great. It's terrible. And here are these people who have been living this way fine for years. And they're like, you're a bunch of losers. You losers.

But the other part of it, Sean, is this, this drug that these plants give you, it also grows back appendixes and it like gets rid of scar tissue. And it like, it solves all these things. And like, when you come out of its fog, your fog state, You still have that new appendix. You still have gotten rid of that scar tissue.

So it's like, uh, has nobody, like, commenting that you found some miracle, like, miracle, like, live forever drug that you could give people and then heal them and then you could live forever and you wouldn't have to be dependent on it? It's like, you just heal yourself up. And then you're good to go. Yeah.

It's like they don't comment on that at all. Well, they have one closing line, an episode have one closing line, which is like, I guess it's a kind of a nice byproduct of having visited that planet . But they also presented as a nice byproduct and we'll never go back there again. Like, yes. What? Yes. If nothing else, wouldn't the treatment for illness be like, we've got this person, they have this catastrophic illness.

We're going to take them to this planet. We're going to expose them to this thing. Then we're going to take them off the planet and make them mad. Now they're healed. Like, isn't it really just that simple? Like you don't even need to do research. Like, how do we extract the enzymes from the spores so that we can use it as medicine?

How do we do that? You don't even need to do that. You just need to set up a space station. It's just like, yeah, all we do is send sick people down there, bring them back. And then we slap them, get sprayed in the face, slap them and make them mad. And then they're healed and they go home. That's all. Like it's a weird treatment, but it's kind of like primal scream therapy.

If you get down to it, like. I mean, so bizarre, but I, like I said, to like kind of loop back, like I still liked watching this episode because it gives that kind of grouting between the characters about other things. So it's a filler episode from the, well, let's put it in between Space Seed, like a big critical episode for Star Trek and what will come next, which is another one of my favorites, The Devil in the Dark.

So we'll put this one in between them. It'll be fine. So it is filler in that sense, but I also feel like it's filler in the sense of giving the characters an opportunity by behaving strangely to really demonstrate what are their allegiances when they're not like that. And I feel like, especially with Kirk at the center and the people around him, when Kirk goes to Uhura and says, Get me in touch with Starfleet Command.

She's like, I'm, I'm really sorry. No, I'm not going to do that. We're going to see other episodes with Uhura where it's clear she views him as like, you're the guy, you are the guy. And Spocks puts it into words. In this episode, you have the nice moment when Kirk comes around the corner and all of his Reportees are lined up waiting for their turn on the pad and he goes up and he's like, report to duty.

And they're just like, really sorry, sorry, no. Other circumstances, any other episode, all those people jump at his command and his presence. They respond to him differently. I think this episode does a nice job of creating negative space to help render that for other episodes. And so for that reason, I do like it.

And I also found it interesting from, and I want to ask you about this, the whole Strange New Worlds aspects of this. I was trying to do the math in my head. They say that he knew the woman that he falls in love with six years earlier. That would put it into what I believe is the upcoming year of Strange New Worlds. So do you want to make a prediction? Will we have an episode of Strange New Worlds with this character?

I think so. I would imagine. I think we will. And here's, here's why I think that it's like, it, it seems like, cause my first thought was, Ooh, this is right in the spot they haven't hit yet on Strange New Worlds.

And then I was like, they're definitely going to have her because it's like, one of the things that are doing is that kind of like soap opera love story between him and, uh, the nurse, nurse Chapell and how they're together. They're not together. They still love each other, but they're apart. And then there's gonna be this other love interest that comes in.

So it's like this is gonna create that soap opera that they seem to be leaning into. So it's like, it, it fits right into what Strange New Worlds is trying to do with some of these characters. And then on top of which it just kind of ties the knot in the bow nicely onto the linking these shows together. So I would be shocked if she's not in it.

Yeah. And I found myself compelled by like, what might that look like? What might an episode of Strange New Worlds with this character look like? Might it even be more than one episode? Might this be a character who appears in a few episodes to show a development of a relationship where Spock is really torn with his, I think one of the things Strange New Worlds has done nicely is demonstrated a path for Spock where he's dipping in and out of Vulcan ness and the presentation of this episode gives us an idea that he was in full blown, no, I have to be Vulcan when he broke her heart.

So I'm interested what that means as far as the arc for his character, where they're taking him in preparation for him being Kirk's first officer, who is fully embraced as we talked about at the very beginning of our revisit to the original series episodes, how Spock's Vulcan ness had been ratcheted up from what was in the original pilot and what we've seen in some episodes of Strange New Worlds.

So I think that's an interesting path for the, for the character, both in the original series episodes, that revelation of he broke her heart and he has regrets around that. And the spores free him from worry of what does it mean to not be Vulcan? That's ultimately what it happens to Spock is he fights it so painfully when he's first exposed and I love the fact that it's surprising.

When he's Mm-Hmm. . When he's sprayed with the spores, she's like, that shouldn't hurt. This shouldn't be happening. And it's ripping away a layer of control that he has to maintain. And for me, that is one of the most fascinating aspects of the character is that it's not born of biology, it's born of choice. And when the examinations of that take place in this and in other things, like some of the movies, like I love the permutations of that.

And you sound very Vulcan, Sean, which I think will make you happy when I say, I found that fascinating. I did.

So on that note. So, let's leave our conversation in the past and invite you, the viewers and listeners, to jump into the conversation now in the future.

Jump into the comments and let us know, how did you feel about this episode? Did you agree with Matt and I that it has elements to it that almost from a historical and abstract perspective are interesting, but the episode itself just kind of It sits there and is fine, but is not grappling or challenging in a way that perhaps Space Seed was, or perhaps the next episode will be, which is of course, Devil in the Dark.

As I mentioned, it's one of my favorites, but I cannot wait to find out what it's about from wrong answers only in the comments. What is the Devil in the Dark about? Please let me know. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you wanted to share with our viewers about what you have coming up on your main channel?

Well, what's out there now, and also from our other podcast, Still to Be Determined, uh, I have a video going into a shape changing metal alloy, very Star Trek y, science fiction kind of stuff. Weird, weird, weird. That can potentially be the future of heating and cooling. Think of refrigerators, air conditioners, our homes, all that kind of stuff. Literally just a metal that You put pressure on, it heats up, you take the pressure off, and it gets really, really cold. And so using that as the future of heating and cooling.

As for me, if you're interested in finding out more about my books, please visit my website SeanFerrell. com, or you can go directly to wherever it is you buy your books.

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