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Matt and Sean talk about rips in space, space madness, and Tholians, in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 9, “The Tholian Web.”
Matt and Sean talk about rips in space, space madness, and Tholians, in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 9, “The Tholian Web.”
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (01:23) - - Viewer feedback
- (04:53) - - Today's episode
- (06:00) - - This time in history
- (10:14) - - Episode discussion
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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 going to be talking about space madness. Now, I'm serious. We really are going to talk about space. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time. This is, of course, the podcast that takes a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order, and yep, you guessed it, we're back in the original series. We had a couple of breaks there as we looked at new shows like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy, but here we are back in season three of the original series with episode nine, the Tholian Web. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror. 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. But enough about that boring stuff. Let's talk about Trek.
Matt Ferrell: That's right.
Sean Ferrell: So before we get into our conversation about the Tholian Web, let's take a look at the comments that you left in our most recent video. Let me correct myself in a recent video, because I did a tiny, whiny stuff through no effort of our own, somehow are further in the future than we normally are. I don't even understand how we got here, but we are looking back at you, you guys, from a, from a distant peak. So take it away. Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week?
Matt Ferrell: Have some fun comments from the episode Is there no Truth in Beauty? Which is the episode that hurt me to my soul to watch. We had a comment from Dan Sims, who wrote, oof, hard to come back to the original series. I'm very much with Matt on this episode.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And then we had one from. This one had me laughing for quite a while. So thank you very much, Babarudra. I think we broke Matt.
Sean Ferrell: We did. Yes.
Matt Ferrell: Yes, we did. And then after that, we had one from Steve C. Photos, who actually was a little kinder to this episode, who said, I really enjoy this episode. It's ridiculous, but entertaining, unlike And the children shall lead, which is just painful to sit through. Spock. If Marvik saw the Medusan, then dangerous insanity will follow. Jump cut to Scotty saying, the controls are all yours, laddie. I also love how one of the designers of the Enterprise is off the wall bat crap crazy between he and Dr. Daystrom. I think Starfleet's mental health services are lacking. Seriously, if DC Fontana had an opportunity to rewrite this script, I think it would have been an excellent episode. I think she would have the story focused more on the Spock Miranda conflict and less on what is beauty or beautiful or ugly. Oh, well, budget cuts. Yeah, I love this comment. I think if DC Fontana had her hands on this, it would have been a killer script, but her hands were not on the script. So yeah, we have a couple comments for wrong answers only. One's super short, but had me laughing. PaleGhost69 wrote empath, a time traveling Betazoid woman joins the bridge crew for a day to tell them how they feel. Sick burn.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: To next generation. Okay. And then we of course have Mark Loveless. Plot of M Path. The crew of the Enterprise go back in time to the 21st century Earth to collect some biological samples. Surprisingly not a whale. An encounter. A nerd who writes comments for something called a podcast that is delivered via video on something called YouTube. Spock assumes that due to the lack of hair on this commenter, as well as the two brothers in the video, that this bald fascination with the future was the direction humanity was taking. Based on the commenter's name, he referred to this line of thinking as the M Path. While Spock found the approach of this M character to be rather pathetic and sad, the humans on the Enterprise found the empath to be inspiring. This inspired several crew members to shave their heads, proudly declaring themselves quote, nerds. And in the future, bald captains were considered practically royalty, such as future Captain Picard.
Sean Ferrell: Wow. I love inserting us and mark himself into the lineage of what leads to Captain Picard being considered a sex symbol. So retconning him through us and himself. Wonderful. Thank you everybody for the comments. As usual, they bring us great joy. We're on now to our conversation. Those lights you see, those sounds you hear, that means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away, Matt.
Matt Ferrell: Captain Kirk is caught between dimensions while the Enterprise is trapped by an energy draining web spun by mysterious aliens. Are they mysterious because they're named Right from the.
Sean Ferrell: That's what I love about this is it inverts multiple things. It says, Captain Kirk is caught between dimensions. True. But it puts the emphasis on Captain Kirk as if we're following him. We're not. We're following the Enterprise looking for Captain Kirk. And yeah, mysterious aliens that they say, oh, it's the Tholians. Including a line that I love from Spock, the infamous Tholian punctuality. So not only do they know who they are, they know a lot about them.
Matt Ferrell: So they're punctual. They're punctual.
Sean Ferrell: This is, of course, the Tholian Web this is the 64th episode produced. Ironically, the 64th aired overall the ninth of the third season. This episode, directed by Herb Wallerstein, written by Judy Burns and Chet Richards, originally broadcast on November 15, 1968. And what was the world like at the time of original broadcast? Well, Matt, I had a shudder run down my spine when I realized you'd be singing this one again. But it is of course the number one song this week. Hey Jude. Take it away, Matt. I think what I enjoy most about Matt's rendition of hey Jude is he cuts back so deeply on the na na na na's. And at the box office. Let me say that without a British accent. At the box office, Funny Girl was once again the number one film in the US. This is of course, the Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif film which helped launch her career. And on television, we've been looking at all the different shows that had a slot in the primetime lineup on Friday nights. Some of these would have been running against Star Trek, like the show we're going to talk about now. We've talked about things like Judd for the Defense, the Don Rickles show, and the Generation Gap. This week we're going to talk about something well, that unlike some of those, we actually remember it's the Dick Cavett Show. But what you may not know about the Dick Cavett show, and I did not realize this despite the fact that this show did exist during my lifetime. The Dick Cavett show as a name refers to television programs that aired on ABC, PBS, USA and CNBC in various forms between 1968 and 1995. I do not know whether this was the result of. Did he create the show and then syndicate it? Did he own the name to it and then provide it as a syndicated program to these various networks, I do not know.
But to have a run between 1968, 1995 with the same name on a variety of different networks, I would have to guess that in some way Dick Cavett was able to be the controlling entity over that which, which speaks to his foresight, first of all, but also the cultural impact. He was a show that ran opposite of other talk show formats at various points, even going head to head against Johnny Carson. And the very first daytime show that he aired featured Gore Vidal, Muhammad Ali and Angela Lansbury. What I think is most famous about that first trio of guests is that Dick Cavett made them wrestle until one of them was victorious. And it was, of course, Angela Lansbury. And in the news, on this day, November 15, 1968, we see a lot about protests in New York City regarding school closures. We see information about the transition. This is a post election headline. So it had to do with Nixon having won the presidency, the beginning of the transition era. And the headline that stood out to me though was one that's very specific to New York City. But I couldn't help but zoom in on the museum trade's man made whale for bigger one. That's right. This is a story about the American Museum of Natural history replacing a 76 foot blue whale from the ceiling with a 94 foot blue whale. That's right. Only in America can the blue whales get bigger. I thought it was an interesting little story as they zoomed in on the moment that a 66 foot section of the whale was being hoisted to the ceiling. The larger 94 foot whale still hangs there to this day and I have been there to see it within the past couple of years. So this headline and the images that accompany it jumped out at me. On now to our discussion of the Tholian web. So Matt, we have talked about this one before. Do you remember why and how?
Matt Ferrell: Previous shows have brought the Tholians back? It's come up a couple times.
Sean Ferrell: Well, more than that, I don't know if you remember this. Previous shows have brought back this very storyline. Mirror Darkly in Enterprise used this episode as its backdrop as the Enterprise encountered its Mirror universe storyline in which the Defiant, which disappears in this, was actually stolen by the Tholians in the Mirror universe. And then it's an explanation for how the mirror universe has such high level tech considering the humans were a warring and effectively third rate group of of species in the Mirror universe. So it was fun to get to this one and to have that running in the back of my mind. Especially when you have the closing moments when Kirk says I was in a universe by myself. And I couldn't help but think were you fun to think that he was in a. It was potentially he had been pulled into the mirror universe. I just think that that's a neat timey wimey thing. Not only would he have been pulled into potentially the mirror universe, he could have been pulled into the past. It could have been he was actually in the Enterprise era. So it lays out some interesting timey wimey shenanigans that would have been fun to explore. But I wonder, Matt, as a starting point in this conversation, should we talk about the parts of this episode that that feel a bit like an echo of an earlier episode? Or should we just talk about do you know what I'm referring to. You've got that look on your face.
Matt Ferrell: No, you don't know what you're referring to.
Sean Ferrell: I like this episode. I want to start off by saying I like this episode. But one thing about this episode that bothers me as a viewer, from this perspective in this podcast in which we are watching all of these so closely next to one another, this is not the first time Spock has been in charge, and it's not the first time that McCoy talks to Spock as if Spock is doing all these things for nefarious reasons to take command of the Enterprise.
Matt Ferrell: Yes.
Sean Ferrell: And to me, it's a bit of a record scratch in this one. I like this one very much. And by itself, if those elements are here just in a capsule, by itself, I think it works. But as far as the continuity of the entire series, this is one of those elements that to me is a demonstration of not having concern about long term storytelling. That is an overarching narrative for the program. And it's more than anything else a demonstration to me of the massive shift culturally in what it means to make episodic television and to tell these stories that we do even in programs as, you know, episodic as a crime drama, a Law and order, any of those things. We now as viewers have been trained to look for those narrative arcs that show progress in some fashion. We like to have that in some sort of evidence. And you only have to look at the self referential criticism in a Simpsons episode, which after 30 years, they've now looped back on storyline so many times that they make jokes about the fact that it feels like we've done this before, because they have. But that to me was like. That was the one element in this one that I was just like. I really like that in this moment. And I also didn't like, for me, some of the writing around that moment felt like it wasn't well thought out because the criticisms that McCoy keeps leveling at Spock felt weirdly manufactured in a way that they're empty.
Sean Ferrell: It was just like, there's nothing like you're not complaining about anything. You're just at each other to be at each other. And it's one directional. Because Spock is not rising to the bait. And I understand narratively it's all constructed so that you can have Kirk leave the tape. You can have them watch it together. You can have them realize we have to work together. You can have what I think is a very nice closing of them both, feigning ignorance about what are you talking about kind of like going at a right angle to the whole, Vulcans cannot lie because Spock is full blown lying. But, yep, I found myself. I still like it. I like the episode. But that element, it's a little weird and a little clunky. And I was just like. That could have used a little bit additional work. You know, things like McCoy getting all up in arms about Spock, you've lost the captain because you fired phasers. Why did you do that? And it's like, what? Like,
Matt Ferrell: That stuff didn't bother me at all, now that you brought it up. When they were in the room going at each other and McCoy's bringing up the whole thing, you just want the captain seat. I was like, where? Where the hell is this coming from? I was like, with my reaction. But that was like a blip in the broader scope of the episode, which I thought was pretty good. And one of the things I thought was interesting that they were setting up in the episode, which obviously did not pay off in any way, was Spock was unwilling to give up on the captain. Yeah. And was putting the ship at risk to get the captain. And Bones, who's the human who tends to be very emotional, was the one that was basically like, we lost him. We gotta deal with it. We lost him. Let's get. Get out of here. Because we lost him. We gotta protect the ship. And it was like the exact opposite of what you'd expect from the logical Vulcan and the overly emotional human. They were doing the opposite. And that could have been a really interesting argument and contention that they could have had in the room. Don't make it about Spock trying to steal the captain's seat, being like Spock. Admit to yourself that you can't give up on the captain. You're letting your emotions get the better of you. And Spock being like, no, you know, I mean, they could have had something along those lines, but they never even dealt with it. Yet they set it up beautifully. I didn't understand why they did it.
Sean Ferrell: They did set that up beautifully. How compelling would it have been for McCoy to say to Spock, Spock, you've got to think logically here. And have Spock kind of recoil of just like you're going to tell me about logic and have McCoy leaning into the cold equations are, we've got these 400 people on this ship, and even if we. Even if Kirk is alive and we have no proof that he is, even if he is in this moment, the logical path is for us to get out of here and have it.
Matt Ferrell: But then you could head. He could have very easily said, the logical path is to stay here. And here's why. He could have been saying, I'm science,
Sean Ferrell: make it a logical argument episode.
Matt Ferrell: And the science says that he's still here. So I'm not giving up on him. Not for emotional reasons, but for logic. It could have been a very interesting discussion between the two of them. And yet it's all about, you just want the captain's seat. Wait, didn't you bring this up before? And where's this coming from, dude? Yeah, let it go, McCoy.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, but it is. I now I really do wish that that had been the storyline, because that would have been great. I had like all sorts of fan fictiony narration in my head around, like, what would it look like to have McCoy coming at him with his bombast, but have it be like, you're being illogical and at the same time, you could have had a. The turning point. I'm like, here we go again, rewriting the episode.
Matt Ferrell: Rewriting. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: I find myself thinking, like, what if they watched Kirk talk about, like, depend upon each other and have then the turning point be McCoy saying, you don't understand how touched I am at your commitment to the Captain. And it's killing me to keep telling you we've gotta let him go. Like, having the two of them get closer together in a kind of, you know, solace of each other,
Matt Ferrell: which would explain the ending when they both are like, simpatico about lying to the captain.
Sean Ferrell: You know what I mean? It's like, it would have.
Matt Ferrell: This is why this was a note I wrote down, because I was really enjoying the role reversal between these two characters for the episode. It was like, really resonating with me. And yet they just did nothing with it.
Sean Ferrell: Let's go back to some of the nuts and bolts of the episode, which starts with the hunt for the Defiant and discovering it looking rather green. And I like the element of that, that it's. This goes back to something we've talked about again and again in the podcast, about how often Star Trek, arguably the longest tenured hard sci fi or hard-ish sci fi on television. How often it steps so closely to horror and haunted house territory, which that's really kind of my sweet spot, you know, I've talked about. I write sci fi. And of course, everybody who listens to the podcast is regularly probably has heard not me, but Matt talk about my time travel novel, man in the Empty Suit. But I also. I'm currently in the revision process on my first horror novel that will be published either later this year or early next year. So for me, the straddling of that line is, that's the sweet spot. That's the perfect line. And I like the start of this episode, which has that kind of, we're looking for the castle and we're in the back of this wagon and, oh, I think I see it on the hill. And when they show it, there's a streak of lightning behind it and there's dead trees everywhere. And the people are like, oh, well, that looks inviting. And you having that moment in this where they find the ship, it is eerily green. There's no reference from anybody about how, you know, the coloring of it. But Spock does make the point of saying, we can see it, but it should not be there. There's something about the physics of the situation that is not working normally. And then it is. This region of space has something about it where it's pulling itself apart and it's. Again, it leans into this kind of old horror trope almost from, like, Hammer movies of the 50s, with the idea of the ground here is wrong, this terrain is evil. This is a bad spot to be. We should not be here. The tone of that.
I loved the. The initial tone of that. And how did you feel about the setup of that? And then getting to the Defiant and finding the madness that had taken hold of the crew and leans very heavily into the horror of all of that and showing a kind of harrowing number for 1960 television. Lots of dead bodies everywhere. Casually referred to as like, well, it looks like the captain's neck is broken. I think these people killed themselves. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Dr.
Matt Ferrell: Sean, one of the things I wrote about in my notes with all the dead bodies was, like, clearly, budget cuts, they couldn't do a lot of doctoring to the set. So what can we do? Let's just get every extra we can find and just hurl bodies everywhere.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it worked.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. But that whole opening sequence, I thought, was really well done. It was filmed really well. It was acted very well. It was very subtle. It was very. Lots of gaps of just, like, kind of an ominous overtone to it, which is that horror aspect. They're building the tension of the mystery of, like, something freaky went here.
Sean Ferrell: This is a weird place to be,
Matt Ferrell: especially when Chekov is alone in the engine hearing room. I thought that entire scene was really well done. It did not feel like 1960s Shatner esque over performance. It was incredibly subtle. I thought Chekov's performance was great, and it was very kind of unnerving, especially when he starts to get that weird reaction of something's wrong with him. Yeah, I loved it. It reminded me of when we talked about Enterprise, how, like, the first season or two was so heavy into horror.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it works.
Matt Ferrell: This is an example of them doing that on the original series. It works really well. Free Twilight Zone.
Sean Ferrell: I completely agree that this one, you pull back from it. Like, when I think about this one, I think of it as being one of the ones I really loved as a kid. I loved the ghostly reappearances of Kirk as they began to see him. And he's coming, you know, literally ghost Kirk coming through the walls. And as a kid, I remember my mind boggling of, like, I remember thinking, the first time I saw this, I was probably 9 or 10, and I remember sitting, watching this and thinking, what is happening? Like, I could not fathom how what I was seeing made any sense. And not in a this isn't logical sort of way, but instead in a. I can't put these pieces together. I can't. I can't understand the underlying reality that they're trying to tell me about, because it was so a kind of visceral response and a kind of the. The fact that the first appearance of him is in a mirror. And I love that element. He's in a mirror. And Uhura is not believed. It's this like, oh, she's clearly got the space madness. And at that point, everybody's getting the space madness. And you mentioned Walter Koenig in his understated moments in the engineering room. One of the things I love about that sequence is how odd it is where the bodies are located, because there's two dead bodies atop.
Matt Ferrell: Just on a table.
Sean Ferrell: Not even on a table. It's part of the engine itself. Like, they're on top of this thing and it's just like, how would they end up there? Like, what kind of fight were they in? That they were like, I'm gonna fight you on top of this thing and then we're gonna kill each other. But he then goes from A to Z. Because by later in the episode, Walter Koenig's entire direction was, okay, Walter, we're gonna tie you up with a seatbelt to this medical table. And then you're just going to arch your back and scream as loud as you can. And it's. There's mania on hand. The funniest one being in the midst of the funeral service for the captain.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Where Spock says, yeah, and we will shall miss our Captain. And then a man erupts, just goes bonkers. And then everybody quietly looks at each other and sits back down.
Matt Ferrell: I was gonna say the only reason they had that scene was to have that moment, and it felt that way to me. But the thing that. To go to the horror aspect, the two horror tropes that are in here that are very effectively done, are the people losing their minds. Just the madness aspect is scary. And that could have been the only horror thread they pulled. But then there's also a ghost story. It's like, here's the Captain. Spooky, spooky, spooky. And the fact that they wove those two together was very clever, because then the people who see the Captain think they're nuts. And people who say they've seen it, other people think they're nuts. It did a great job of, like, pulling the rug out from under those characters to make them not sure of what they're actually seeing, because they might be going crazy just like everybody else is.
Sean Ferrell: Very clever.
Matt Ferrell: I thought it was a very clever way to do it.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. And as I mentioned before, we talked a bit about the not caring for the meat that was on the bone of the storyline around Spock and McCoy, like, having tension between them, but liking ultimately some of the resolutions and kind of, like the character connective moments. They were trying to get to a place. I didn't like how they got there, but I liked being there. In particular, for me, one of the scenes that stood out was when McCoy is going at Spock and spins the Captain's chair around to kind of reprimand him to his face, and then pulls himself back together and realizes, like, I'm like. He says, I think this area of space is getting to me. But it's not that he's exhausted at this point, and he says he apologizes. And then Spock says, I think Captain Kirk would have said, don't worry about it, Bones. Which, for me, is a really lovely moment. It is this connective tissue where Spock is saying, like, you're as much my friend as you are the Captain's friend. And I don't need the apology because not only because I'm a Vulcan, but because I am your friend. And I really liked these elements. And the connective lines between a lot of the characters in this one are nicely handled. This is, of course, the third season, so we end up with people saying things like, if we lose Scotty, we've lost. Like, if Scotty's not in the engineering room. We are not going to get this thing to fly again. So. And it's. And he's saying that to Spock. So it's like, I know you're smart, Spock, but if we lose Scotty down there in the engineering room, we're cooked. And when Chekov is accompanying the captain and the captain is giving him encouraging statements about like, okay, good work, you've done this thing. Get back to me like, he's the youngest member of the crew as far as the main characters are concerned. But we've seen now him become one of the trusted.
He is a part of the away team in this way. I also really liked. You know, you mentioned it before, we're seeing budget cuts, but it doesn't feel like we're seeing budget cuts because they came with restrictions. Comes creativity. And one of the things on display in this one, I really love the away team spacesuits. It was a replacement for the style that was in the previous versions we've seen look more like surgical gowns. They've got, like, kind of a loose fit and they're kind of like a big baggy thing. They look like beekeeper outfits more than anything else. They're fine as far as, like, you know, special effects. For a show in the 1960s, they were fine. But these. Here we are in 1968, the astronauts are launching into space and they're all wearing these silver uniforms. And they made these away team outfits, I think, to say, like, yeah, let's like lean into the NASA of everything that's going on right now. And they look futuristic. They don't look like beekeeper outfits. They've got that weird, like, straight up from the shoulder. It's all straight, but it works.
It's kind of a retro, futuristic sci fi that I really dug.
Matt Ferrell: I thought it was an interesting choice because it's like they already had established what it looked like in the early years. But it was very clear to me of like, oh, the Apollo missions and stuff like that was probably changing their attitude and they're leaning into where the pop culture has gone around space. So I thought it was a very clever adjustment. But it was also surprising because they have so little money. And it was like, how much money did you just spend on making these costumes in their third season?
Sean Ferrell: I bet not as much as you'd think. I bet, like, once I bet one person in the. In the costume department with what would be like a full body silver suit, put on some boots that probably were from another movie or TV show. It's weird tubing down the arms and then. Yeah, yeah, the headpiece literally looks like it's just, yeah, like Kirk and Spock and they got the names on it. It's like, this is my personal outfit. I loved that. And I also liked that it was reminiscent of spacesuits that we will talk about in probably, I'm going to guess probably about five months, six months from now. Yep. Because these, these look like the uniforms, the space outfits from the movie. And so here I was watching this and just like, oh, I, I love the fact that it looks like there's a connective line between these and what we're gonna see in the movie. So it got me really psyched about getting to the films.
Matt Ferrell: I felt that way about the Tholian itself. Cause like the way they depicted the Tholians in the other shows, the, the more modern shows, they did a really good job of just emulating the, the cheap 1960s special effect of the Tholian. I was like, all right. It's like, I saw it. I was like, I know you, I've seen you walk around. So it felt very of a theme, which was really nice to see.
Sean Ferrell: And I love the simplicity of, you know, again, leaning into. We don't have the budget, so we're going to go back to something we did in the Corbomite maneuver. We're going to have a puppet that's going to be talking to the camera as if it's an alien. But this time, in what was a kind of stroke of genius, let's invert the color scheme. Let's make it look like this thing is potentially like as I'm watching the Tholian talk and it's like, you got out of our space, you darn kids. As it's saying all those things, I'm looking at that image and I'm like, it's presenting it as the entire. The interior of their ship is running super hot because they're crystalline beings that can move. So it presents this idea that like is one of the things that work with the Tholians, that they operate in an incredibly intensely hot environment. Because that it looked like flames just flickering everywhere to me and I loved it. It's a simple thing like, yeah, let's just invert the color scheme on the film and make it look weird and then put on a silly voice and I'm sitting there as a 50 something year old man and like, yeah, this is fun. So it's just like, it works.
Matt Ferrell: There's one other thing I wanted to bring up, which is a tangent. But the Tholian web itself, I think it's super cool. Yeah, but it's so not effective. It's so not effective though.
Sean Ferrell: Hold still. Hold still.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, hold still while we box you in.
Sean Ferrell: Don't. We don't want you to be here,
Matt Ferrell: but we don't want you to be
Sean Ferrell: here, so we're going to keep you here.
Matt Ferrell: But it's such a cool concept. It is for me, Sean. It gave me flashbacks to being eight years old in elementary school when we had a computer lab. I don't know if you remember this, in Oneonta, New York, Greater Plains. We had Apple II computers. And the computer lab that they got, they're all brand new and fancy. And I remember getting trained on how to use them. And one of the programs I remember learning how to use was a program called Turtle Graphics. And yes, Sean, this has stuck with me for what is it now, 40 plus years. It's like ingrained in there. I can't get it out of there. I had so much fun playing with this Turtle graphics program. You literally would just like punch in coordinates. And the, what your little cursor thing looked like was kind of like the Tholian ship. So it was kind of like this weird like little triangle looking thing just like the Tholian ship. And you'd type in like coordinate like 10 comma, no, 50, and it would go zip, zip. And it would draw a line just like the fully in web. And we could draw pictures of things. And I remember doing
Sean Ferrell: A digital etcher sketch?
Matt Ferrell: Yes. A very complicated one. But I remember using this exact program a couple of years after I learned how to use it. And I remember making Optimus prime from Transformers. And it was so intricate. And I remember all the other kids in the school were like doing it's a flower and you come over to my computer, it's a rendering of Optimus Prime. I remember the teacher going, how much time you've been spending on this? Not enough!
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's fantastic. I don't remember that program at all. I think that's probably one of those things where as you were a couple of years behind me, they may have introduced that. Because what I remember at the computer lab was the Oregon Trail. Oh yeah. And the number of times I got cholera.
Matt Ferrell: You've. You've died of dysentery.
Sean Ferrell: You've died of dysentery. Hey children, do you want to learn what it means to shit yourself to death? Well, here's a game. So I think in short, like I. This has been kind of a. We've jogged left and jogged right on the conversation on this one. But I feel like on the whole, like, I just, I like this one. I land in a place where I'm like, it hits a lot of really good notes and it's got that really weird grisly part in the middle where I'm just like, McCoy's not making any sense. This feels like it's all intended just to get us to a point where they can come together as a team. So it feels a little forced. But around that, I just think that this whole episode, as far as a what can we do that that's going to save us some money and have a bottle episode where we just stay inside the ship and we go to the commissary tomorrow and we yell at everybody in the commissary who wants to put on a Star Trek outfit and go lie down on the floor for five minutes while we film you. Like, it's a cast of thousands that aren't moving. And so it worked. I like this one. It works.
Matt Ferrell: I'm with you. And I wish, Sean, I wish, I wish that this was the episode that we had come back to after Starfleet Academy because is there no truth? And beauty was like jumping into an ice cold pool. This would have been a nice soft landing back into the original series because I really enjoyed this one.
Sean Ferrell: I completely agree. There are good episodes ahead of us. That's what's kind of weird about the third season is it is wildly uneven. They were struggling with the budget cuts at this point and there are some gems ahead of us, which includes next week we will be talking about the episode entitled For the World Is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky, which spoiler right now is an episode I remember very fondly. Very cool sci fi concept. So wrong answers only. Jump into the comments. What's that one about? And in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us on this one. As always, jump into the comments. Let us know what you thought about this episode. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. Is there something about this episode that really stood out to you that Matt and I forgot to talk about? Let us know. Liking, commenting, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you want to support us directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the join button there you're able to throw some coins at our heads and you'll be made an Ensign. Which means you'll be signed up for our spin off show out of time in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in joining us there. Thank you so much, everyone, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.
As well as the Tholians, we end up with a bit of the. Cut that because that was the beginning of a sentence that has no ending.
Matt Ferrell: Yes. I was like, where is he going with this sentence?
Sean Ferrell: It’s all jazz.