161: Star Trek TOS Season 1, Tomorrow is Yesterday

https://youtu.be/Rklhx53qO2k

Matt and Sean talk about time travel shenanigans on Star Trek: The Original Series. This time travel plot is something we’ve seen before, but is it still charming enough to work?

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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 a time travel story that does away with all that, let's make it logical nonsense. That's right everybody, we're talking about Star Trek Season 1, Tomorrow is Yesterday, episode number 21 in shooting order, but 19 in broadcast order. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we watch every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order.

We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. So we're currently talking about 1967 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 I'm also here with my brother, Matt, who is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. What was funny is the past couple days, Sean, I was doing some work around the house and I just wanted something on the back of the TV. And I opened up Pluto TV and just put it on the Star Trek, like Deep Space Nine channel. There's just random episodes that were coming on and I can't tell you how excited I am to get to Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.

We're going to be jumping between all those shows because they're all happening at the same time. Yeah, I can't wait for that. And yet I was thinking How many years away is that?

It's at least two years. I think it'll be about one and a half before we get to next generation. We get to next generation in a year and a half, but it's going to take like another year. And then it's probably two years. To get to the point where Deep, Deep Space Nine shows up. So, so if that's what you're interested in, listeners, we'll see you in like four and a half years.

Before we get into our conversation, we always like to take a look at what you've had to say about our previous episodes. So, Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week? There's some great comments this week. So there's a bunch. I'll try to go through these kind of quickly. Uh, the first one, this is all about from the episode, The Alternative Factor, which was the last one we talked about.

Which was a hot mess of an episode. The negative, trippy, you know, 60s, uh, anyway, uh, Happy Flappy Farm wrote, some crazy highlights from this episode, a high voltage access panel in a hallway, letting a crazy guy wander the ship, Bones, quote, he's not going anywhere. Next scene, Lazarus gets up off the bio bed and starts wandering the ship again.

Facial hair. Is it there or not? Sean, quote, We will work episodes of TJ Hooker into this channel chronologically. Me, audibly, NOOOOO! That's really funny. So that's one vote for no TJ Hooker. Correct. Then from uh, Mark Loveless, he wrote, Sean, I am not from the Miri alternate universe. As you know, in that universe, yourself, Matt, and myself have a full head of luxurious hair.

Now I'm saddened, let us speak of this never again, of that glorious universe. To which PaleGhost69 responded, Oh no, does that mean I'm bald in that universe? Or does everyone have luxurious hair too? To which Mark replied, I personally am convinced that that universe only exists to taunt myself, Sean, and Matt.

However, I say this as an individual without extensive quantum physics knowledge, so truthfully, I don't know. I love that term. I do. I agree with Mark. It is there just to taunt us. Yes. And then for the wrong answers only, I couldn't make a decision between two responses. One from AJ Chan wrote, Tomorrow is yesterday.

Agent Daniel's time machine breaks, stranding him in the past where he meets a young boy named Braxton. Hijinks ensue with other time traveling goons, and the boy is inspired to protect the timeline. Daniels goes back to the future, and the boy later grows up to become Captain Braxton. I just like the way he tied Daniels into this whole storyline.

Yes, me too. And then Mark Loveless wrote, strap on your hats, strap on your seatbelt for this one, Sean. Okay. Tomorrow is yesterday. McCoy refused to use the online calendar on the ship, and still uses an old printed calendar to track things. The rest of the crew hates it. Hate this, as they have to book appointments this way.

Uhura decides to alter his calendar to teach him a lesson, and this throws off distribution of meds. Sulu gets infected on some planet, and is supposed to be on a strict meds schedule, but this throws it off, and he ends up growing an extra nose, just above his butt. His other meds that are thrown off suppress both sneezing and farting.

Hilarity ensued. Tomorrow

is yesterday.

I love that that has nothing to do with the name of the title. I love, well, they switched his calendar around to teach him a lesson. So they made, you know what I mean? Tomorrow is yesterday. Just like, all right, this is a nightmare. A nose above his butt.

Thank you, Mark. Wild as always. That sound you hear in the background. Yep. You guessed it. That's the read alert. It's time for Matt to read the Wikipedia description. Matt, you don't even need to take in a deep breath to get through this one because it's about yay big. Okay.

It is short. In the episode, the Enterprise is sent back in time to earth in the 1960s where the US air Force detects it. The crew must correct the damage to the timeline and find a way to travel back to the future. That is the most succinct, accurate, and pleasing description we've ever had.

There was no screwing around on that one. They were like, what's it about? It's about this. Is it interesting? Probably not. Episode directed by Michael O'Herlihy. Written by D. C. Fontana. D. C. Fontana, we, of course, have talked about before. She is a, uh, cornerstone to a lot of Trek. She's a terrific writer, and I really enjoy her work. In this episode, we have most of the usual cast. We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and George Takei.

And we have a good amount of Madgel Roddenberry. As well, in this episode, making an appearance as the voice of the computer, of course. In a way that, well, we'll get to that later. Yeah. We also have guest actors, Roger Perry as U. S. Air Force Captain John Christopher, Hal Lynch as the police sergeant, Richard Merrifield as a technician, John Winston as Transporter Chief Kyle, Ed Peck as U. S. Air Force police Colonel Fellini, Mark Dempsey as an Air Force captain, Jim Spencer as a policeman, and Sherri Townsend as a crewwoman. This episode was originally broadcast on January 26th, 1967. So we, last week, we jumped forward in time to later in 1967. So we had left behind a lot of the things that we had been seeing holding a pattern of, uh, being number one in the country at the time.

Now we're looping back, talk about tomorrow's yesterday, and we find ourselves back with the monkeys at the top of the charts, I'm a believer. Held the number one spot for about six weeks, the beginning of 1967. And as always Matt's version of this, although acapella is memorable for what he does with the second verse.

Matt, do you want to take us into the second verse real quick? It catches me by surprise every time. I love it. And in the movies, we're back yet again with the Bible. Yes. The story that just won't ever end was a film by Dino De Laurentiis. It held the top spot for a few weeks, not consecutively, but here it is again.

And on television, we were comparing Star Trek, which in its first season earned about a 12 in the Nielsen ratings against other programs in 1966 and 1967, Bonanza being the number one show for that year with a 29. So it gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking about. And we've talked about lots of well known programs, everything from Bewitched, Green Acres, the Beverly Hillbillies.

We recently talked about the Smothers Brothers. And Walt Disney's wonderful world of color, which was the introduction of Walt Disney's anthology program that would be on the television for years. And another one that was on television for more than a decade was the Saturday night at the movies, which earned a 21 according to the Nielsen ratings.

This was NBC's entry into showing movies on television. And it was the first to broadcast in color, relatively recent feature films for major studios. Up to this point, television studios had been broadcasting primarily in black and white. And so NBC's entry into color was largely the first. It was also what drew Walt Disney's program

from ABC to NBC, because Walt Disney at that point, Disney had a huge host of programs that had been filmed preciently in color, even though they had been broadcast in black and white, they had color versions. So NBC was the network that was able to, to utilize those color broadcasts. And here they also entered in the early 1960s, 1961, and it ran until 1978.

What ended this? I don't think Matt is going to have to scratch his head too long about that. What change do you think might have caused the Saturday Night at the Movies and an earlier entry in this list of Thursday Night at the Movies on CBS? What do you think caused those programs to disappear in the late 70s?

HBO. Exactly. So, cable television's entry into the market and a network called HBO, which said, you know what? You pay us a little extra money, you won't have any commercials, and we'll show you these movies multiple times. And in the news, we have ongoing conversations around a number of things we've talked about in the past.

It includes ongoing conversations about Vietnam. China is constantly in the headlines at this point. And there is a armistice pledge that was being worked on between the Israelis and the Syrians at this point. It would have predated the current situation in Syria by decades. Syria was considered a very stable nation at that point, living under a dictatorship of Assad.

On now to our conversation about this most recent episode. Ah, time travel. That plot line, which is so easy to deal with, so easy to drop into something. And I say that as somebody who wrote an entire novel about time travel. So let me, I don't know if you are looking at my notes in this. I have notes that I made shortly after it.

And after each note entry for the first three bullet points I made, I asked a simple question, did it make sense? So let's take that list at the top. The time travel in this episode, does it make sense? No . Okay, now next it was, well, here's, okay, here's the thing. Here's my, here's my reaction to this episode as I'm watching it

'cause I remember this episode. I've seen it numerous times, but my memory was fuzzy of like the details. But as I'm watching it, I dunno about you. I enjoyed it. I was en, I was enjoying myself. Mm-Hmm. until the end when it comes to the time travel stuff. 'cause by the end. The way they wrapped it up was like a, wait, what?

Wait, you're going to fly around the sun, go back in time before you go forward in time. And because you transport these guys back to where they quote, were, they're not going to remember what just happened. Wait, what? That makes no sense. Mm-Hmm. , no, it doesn't make any sense. But at the, at, at that point in the episode, I didn't care.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like, it was just, it was, it was just washing over me. It didn't matter that it didn't make sense and the fact that there was like no logic to it whatsoever. At the same time, you and I and everybody watching this comes after the back to the future. Which did a decent job of setting up a basic semi logical premise of time travel. Yeah. It, it doesn't pass the Back to the Future sniff test. So it's like, but that was also 20 years after this, this, this show came out so.

What I think is interesting is this is a case of an episode that you realize, Oh, they remade this into a movie. It's it's like, Oh, Oh, okay. Like, like you think about like, Oh, how did Star Trek enter film production?

What were the stories that they went with? Oh, the motion picture. They came up with an idea for the motion picture that would be like, Oh, this, this satellite from earth went out into space and it comes back and it's altered and it's become powerful and it's dangerous. We haven't reached it yet, but there is an episode of the original series where that is the exact plot.

So that is coming. They just reused a plot to create a movie. And then The Wrath of Khan, I don't know if you've been made aware of this Matt, but Khan was introduced in the original series. So they reused an original series plot to then jump off of that and create a plot. And then obviously Star Trek III is an offshoot of two, but then you get to four and it is a hijinx filled, largely comedically told Star Trek story about time travel back to a earlier era of earth, which was our era at the time. That is the exact template of this episode. This episode, I can't help but wonder if everybody making it had fun doing it.

So when they were proposing a fourth film, if these actors and people involved in production weren't like, Let's do something fun. We've just done hard storytelling around a vengeful Khan and trying to bring back people from the dead. Let's do something a little lighter and this one stands out. Like you, during the watching of this, I sound very similar to the way I did last week.

None of this makes sense and I don't care. I had a great time. I like this episode. I had fun with this episode. This episode does some of the goofiest stuff and they're all tongue in cheek. They all look like they're having fun doing it and I don't need, like, I completely agree with you. The last eight minutes of the episode, it's just like, why did you land on that as your solution?

There were other solutions that would have followed the logic of the episode so much better, but at the end, okay, fine. Like, it's fine. And in this one, uh, I don't know if you, like me, were watching the remastered version. I found the remastered special effects really engaging. I thought that it was a really, like when you first see the Enterprise flying above earth and it's the newer special effects, I was like, this is fun.

This is cool. This looks neat. And then at the end, when they're doing the whole slingshot around the sun, this is fun to see something that looks like newer CGI, making it look more compelling and more engaging and more dangerous. I was totally on board. But at the same time, those special effects also still had kind of a retro feel, which I enjoyed.

Like when they first showed the Enterprise in the opening, from the perspective of being on the earth, looking at it in the sky. In the original show, it was that horrible little model just going tinky tinky tinky tinky tink across. They made the special effects look really good, where it's a CG render of the Enterprise, but they still had that goofy movement as it was going through the sky.

And so it still feels like it still had a model feel, even though it looked crisp and new I really appreciate that they put that kind of feel to their updated special effects. It still held true to, I'm watching a show from the 60s, but it just looks better and crisper than it did before. Um, the other thing I want to point out is kind of like the tie to the time.

One of the things I like about this time travel that they did for this episode, The Voyage Home, and they do it again and again, is It allows them to make commentary on the time that it was made in an interesting way. That's one of the things I love about science fiction. And so for this episode, like the Voyage Home is making a statement about like the 80s environmentalism, you know, save the whales, all that kind of stuff.

It was making a very clear connection to that. And this, 60s, Vietnam War, War Around the World, you just talked about the New York Times headline of Israel and all that stuff. This had that, you could feel that in this episode because they're very distrustful of the UFOs. It's a Cold War tension. Yeah.

Correct. So it's like, is this the Russians? Is this something else? And the military is just hyper vigilant about what the hell this thing is. And I thought it was really interesting how they dealt with that when they had the Captain Braxton come on the ship. And they're, he's, he's very reluctant, like only one to give his like his serial number kind of a thing.

He's like very reluctant. And the more he learns, he starts to understand, oh, Oh, I, I kind of have to help them because like, I understand what's at stake. Um, even though they used, you're going to have a son as his big turning point, which I thought was a little like, really? That's the thing that's going to, okay.

But, but regardless it was, I thought it was interesting how they dealt with, All the tensions and things that were at the time, and they were kind of, kind of doing a late commentary on that. It came through a lot unclear for me. I also think it was really interestingly handled from the perspective of the Cold War tension is there, but the military was not skewered.

It was, it was everybody in the military is treated with a kind of respect right down to the security guard. And the security guard for me is one of the highlights of this episode. This guy is beamed aboard the ship with his gun drawn and is so stunned by what is going on around him that I love the handling of disarming him.

That it is not a neck pinch. It is not phasers. It is, it is McCoy going up and standing next to him and just very calmly. I'll take that. I'll take that away from you. And then stepping back, everybody's standing there and just staring at him as he can't take his eyes off of Spock, who of course, green tinged skin, pointed ears, is, what are you going to look at in that room?

Are you going to look at Kyle? Come on. And then later on, I love the entire, are you hungry? Would you like some soup? I have, for some reason, I have food dispensers right here in case the captain beams aboard a ship and is like, quick, get me some food. Like, it doesn't make any sense that he has that ability right there, but he does.

He makes him some soup. And this guard, I love everything about the security guards presence on, on this, in this episode. Having said all of that, this, like you said, there is the opportunity in sci fi to make commentary. There's also plenty of opportunities for any show to inadvertently step in it again and again and again, from a perspective of like, we're making smart shows, but we're not going to pay attention to our own, oh, let's call it sexism.

The voice of the computer has been altered because to Spock's dismay, they took the ship to a planet that was largely. Run by women. Women. And these women decided that the personality of the computer was lacking. So they gave it a woman's personality, of course, and that means it talks sexily to the captain.

And, I mean, Well, it take, it take that. It's just so much gross. It's so much gross. Take, take, take that and then add the scene where Captain Braxton is being walked through the ship for the first time, and an Ensign walks by, a female Ensign walks by, and he does a double take and watches her walk by, and then the music is that trumpet going, bah wah bah wah wah.

I see he's looking at her, it was just like Yeah, what is happening right now? It was the sexism was rampant and gross everywhere. And on the note about the computer voice change, my one note I wrote was WTF question mark. What was the point of that plot element? It didn't pay off in any way. It was just there to be there.

It was there to be there. Completely unnecessary. It didn't have any relation to anything at all. It was just there. It was, and it was strange to me that it was written by D. C. Fontana, who is a woman. Yep. And there's this like, mmm. I almost, I almost felt like, was this added after her script? Like did she write this?

And then another writer came in. It certainly felt like that, didn't it? It's like, there, there 38 minutes and we'd have to add a few more minutes of content, let's add something that's a little funny and a male writer came in and just added it because it had zero connection to anything of the main plot.

Yeah. It felt tacked on. It did. It did. So. We already talked about like the end of the episode where like, I'll put on my writer hat for just a moment. There was so many things that I think would have been more within the plot to change that would have made more sense. Like what's wrong with just returning these two men to earth before they do the slingshot maneuver?

Hey, captain, go put your flight suit back on. We're going to beam you down into the middle of a very rural, rustic area of Nebraska, and you say you parachute it out. And we're going to beam you down in there. You just come out of the woods and you're like, I've been walking for 36 hours and like, I, something happened to my ship and it blew up and I parachuted out and I landed over here.

Like just do anything like that. Or you just return him and the guard to earth and let them be two people who claim they were abducted by aliens. That where the Kirk and the crew would have been coming from, they would have known that at this point in Earth's history, people who are making those claims were getting lots of media attention, but not a lot of belief.

So just return them and say like, done. But we can only say that from where we sit now. Because at the time UFOs were making, and it was just recent, big headlines. So in making a show in 1966, 1967, where you're talking about UFOs, you don't have the perspective of 2024 Sean, who's like, you're being goofy about how this is going to be interpreted.

They will be dismissed. They will be deemed as crackpots, like no problem. But the whole slingshot, beam them back. Now they precede the moments that happened. Does that work? Quantum physics? Does it make sense story wise? No. Like, okay, fine. We'll hand wave all that away. We still had fun. Let's go back to the beginning of the episode.

There are so many decisions made. Okay, go ahead. I say, before you go back, the whole thing that drove me nuts was they understood that We don't want to change history. So we want to reduce exposure or trying to go back and like destroy the evidence of the photographs of the Enterprise. We want to go back and undo some of this damage.

How do you reduce the, how do you reduce your exposure? Okay. Let's, let's send two crewmen with new technology back to the surface a second time to increase the risk of exposure. And that's what I was going to get to beam them somewhere into the facility. far away from the room where they have to be, even though they knew the room they had to be in and could have beamed directly into the room.

They didn't do that. And then on top of which, at this point in the show, Captain Braxton is on board. Like he's on board with their mission. He understands, I can't tell people about this. I'm going to help you with this. They could have just sent him alone, beamed him in alone. And if he got caught. Hey man, he's not from the future, he hates practice, where'd you come from?

I came wandering in from the woods and looking for people to tell my story to. He could have played it off. It's like, why didn't they just do that? It's like, I don't understand why Sulu had to go and Kirk had to go and they had to beam them like 50 yards away from the room. So they had to go sneak into the, it was just.

Yeah. Sean. That was, that was where I was headed. Like to go back to the beginning of the episode. Yeah. The number of things that take place, do they make sense? And it falls back into the camp for me of wild decisions are being made. Kirk. Yeah. Putting a Spock's comment, they might have nuclear warheads on this plane.

They could have telled. And if they, if they hit us, they could damage us. Like, okay, they might have nuclear warheads on an airplane. Not at that point. Like that wasn't done. In a plane, in a fighter plane like that, they weren't armed with nuclear warheads. So no. And could they damage us? Yes. Potentially.

Potentially. But a tractor beam on the plane, uh, what is that doing? Like, why are you doing that? Oh, captain, that might destroy the plane. And Kirk's response of like, nothing I can do about that now. I already gave the order. He just sits there, waits for the plane to get crushed. Okay. Now beam him aboard, not beam him down to the planet.

Like, take him out of the plane and beam him to earth. And he will not know how he got there. It will be mysterious. We will be a weird UFO that everybody saw and they like, okay, fine. Like you said, why not beam the captain down once he's on board? He keeps saying, I want to go with you. And they keep saying, we can't risk it.

But we can risk us going down with technology, not even trying to disguise ourselves, which becomes a trope of the show in the future. Like every time they beam down in the second and third season, it's just like, we're going to put on costumes that we suddenly have. All of that, none of that makes sense.

Including, um, as you said, like, or they're trying to destroy evidence. They know exactly where it is. They have the ability to know where people are. Why not just cause an accident? Why not cause a fire that late at night guards are on duty, but there's nobody in those buildings. Start a fire. Oh, the computer room got totally fried.

Oh, the film development room got totally fried. There was a huge conflagration. It looks suspicious, but we can't figure out what the cause is. There are so many things they could have done that would have made more sense. But if they had done any of those, we would have lost out on opportunities to have things like the fight scene.

When Sulu is in the dark room and Kirk realizes that they've been caught and there is one of the longest fight sequences with some of the most obscure martial arts maneuvers I've ever seen, including one that is very clearly a, I will step backward through the doorway, look for the bar that is above the door so I can hold onto it and swing. I want you to pick, which was your favorite maneuver? I have a feeling I know.

It's when he hurls his entire body at the two guys. So he's horizontal and just, and just like, like, hits them to knock them down with his body. It's like, how is that a good fight move? Because now you're on the ground with them riding around.

You have no more advantage. It's like, what, what is the point of that? I think it would have been, like, the only maneuver that would have been more questionable is if he suddenly just had a greased up pig and just like, released it into the room. It was just like, somebody get that pig! Uh, it is a wild fight sequence, and it is For me, I watch all of this episode with like a smile on my face because it's all so goofy.

It's all so silly. Yeah. Even things as simple as Sulu and Kirk beaming down and they're amazed at a cork board. Like they walk down that hallway and they're just like, Oh, look how quaint this is. They, they're leaving notes in the hallway. Like, I mean, come on cork boards, cork boards, like nobody in their century has ever left a note on a fridge.

Like, come on, like, we know it's the future, but it's, uh, it's not like everybody's just like done away with like, Oh, a public posting. Like you've got advertisements. We you, Oh, look at this. How quaint this is paper. Uh, so there's that element to it. It's all for me, it's, it's charming. It's it really kind of underscores them at play.

And it just seems like it's a light hearted romp. That's, that's the word I was missing. It is charming. The reason I liked it, it's the same exact reason. It's like, there's so much in the episode I just was rolling my eyes out of like, Really? That's the choice you're going to make? That, I just did that again and again for the entire episode, but I still found it charming because there was still some good humor in it.

The basic premise that I talked about, like, that's doing a commentary of the time, I really enjoyed. So it's like there was enough there for me to kind of like get on board and understand I'm on a little bit of a crazy train. And it's like, I'm on a crazy train and I'm going to enjoy my ride. And it was like, that was the charm of it was, was there as bananas.

It felt like a Saturday morning cartoon. Yeah, it did very much. It felt more of a cartoon than a lot of the episodes of the animated series, yeah, in a strange way. Yeah. Um, and another part of this episode that I continue to really like is at this point in the season, we're now, you know, there are 20 episodes into filming.

They know who their characters are. They're giving these actors an opportunity to, even when they don't have a major part to play, they're letting them shine through. Even when they're not on screen. I love the references to Scotty. When they go through the calamity of there's suddenly showing popping in 20th century earth and the ship is barely flying and they're like, okay, we don't have any power.

We're flying on impulse. We are in orbit, but it's not a good orbit. We got to get to a better orbit because this is dangerous. This isn't sustainable. And somebody is just like, is Scotty even alive? They don't know what has happened below decks yet. And then suddenly power comes back on and Spock very calmly is just like, the chief engineer is still alive.

I love that from the point of view from, okay, Scotty is a miracle worker. He's given us power at a time when everything says like we should be barely holding on. We've just had this calamity happen and he somehow has magically gotten his power back. I love it from the characterization perspective of Spock, who isn't like, oh, thank God he's alive.

It is just a very like, we have power. Our engineer is alive and it sounds cold, but it is not. It is him kind of, I read that as Spock knows that everybody on the bridge is going to want to know, like, Oh, this is a sign that our friends are still with us. So it's just like, he's kind of broadcasting in a dry, logical way.

Our engineering department is still functioning. They are alive. So people can go about their work. I liked even the moment Uhura falls to the ground and Spock helps her up. I couldn't help but like flashback to Strange New Worlds again. Like the way that's informing my interpretation of this is just like, he's just like Lieutenant and he helps her up and just like.

She kind of gives a couple of smiles in the background in this episode and looks like the wig that she's wearing is on backwards in a weird way. But it's like, there's moments that it's just like, okay, the relationships here are broadcast. Sulu going down to the air force base with Kirk. He's the one who's constantly talking about he loves history.

And so it's like, I could envision him being like, can I go with you? This is an opportunity for me that I can't pass up. Little things like that. And the discussion around having to calculate doing this slingshot maneuver and how Scotty and Spock are like, there's theories and it's the exact theories that work in Star Trek 4.

This is like, they're doing now what they will do later. And it's like, they're kind of getting good at it. I like the fact that they're able to be like in four, like, okay, we not only can know that we can travel, but we can do it in a way that's kind of controlled. We can get to exactly when we want to go and we can get back to where we want to be.

And then this one is just like, Oh, cross your fingers. But all of that is Done in the name of characterization. I feel like McCoy in this one in particular is he's got a great line where, it's, uh, Kirk says, you're so logical, you might as well be Spock. And he's just like, if you're going to insult me, I'm going to leave.

And it's just like those little digs, those little, like, like, don't treat me the way you treat him. Come on. And his interactions with, um, I've mentioned it earlier, the guard in the transporter room. I think that his like very cautious, like he's walking up to a very angry kitten. He's like I'm not going to hurt you, and I know you're not going to hurt me because you're too scared.

Like, this whole approach to disarming the man is just so charming. And it's, for me, watching this is not, you're not looking for logic and you're not looking for real time travel and you're not looking for Like, these things to add up, you're looking for the, it's not about swashbuckling, but that's what it felt like.

It felt almost like watching Kirk launch himself horizontally across the floor into those two guys. Worst maneuver ever. I would love to see the martial arts class where they're like, today we are going to talk about throwing your entire body at two people and not getting a good result. That's the maneuver we're breaking on today.

It's, That entire thing is like swinging in on a chandelier. It's like an Errol Flynn film. It is, it is gonzo, like spectacle and swashbuckling adventure. It's not on a ship, but it might as well be. It's like, we're going to go aboard the pirate ship and steal the treasure from them. And it's just done in the name of fun.

And I really got behind it. And as you said, it is all of that, and it's mixed with Cold War tension. It is, when they're arrested by the Air Force police, it is like, who are you? How did you get in here? You are in serious, serious trouble. And even that guy is not played as a patsy or a fool. He is played, he is played with a serious edge to him, like, I'm, I can bury you under this base.

Like, there is no mention of a lawyer, anything. He is like, there are charges that are ahead of you, but I don't even turn you in until I'm satisfied with the information I want to get. So it's like, it's, yeah, this is a cold war story told through a comedic swashbuckling lens. And I find that really kind of fascinating.

It's this kind of time capsule of of the moment. Yeah, I do like that they didn't make the, like, oftentimes you'll see this in shows where they'll make the cops the bad guy. Yeah. They'll make the cops bad. They'll make them the punchline. Yeah. Yeah. They never did that in this. I mean, they were all doing punch lines.

They were all jokes, but everybody was doing that. It wasn't the crew, Star Trek crew versus the non Star Trek crew. It was just the way they were portrayed was like they're on top of their game. They're, they're good at their jobs. They're doing what they're doing. They're trying to get the answers, They just get foiled. And it was, I never felt like they were being shown to be stupid or gullible or anything like that.

Which I appreciate a lot. Or rooted against. Yeah. Yep. So viewers, listeners, what did you think about this episode? Were you on board with it the way we were or do you find this one hard to swallow? Let us know in the comments. Next week, we will be visiting the episode, Return of the Archons. As usual, please jump into the comments and let us know, wrong answers only, what is Return of the Archons about?

Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you want to talk about? What do you have coming up on your main channel? Well, I have a episode that should be out by now about some very weird solar technologies. That are, they're just weird, fascinating. So I just wanted to talk about them. It's not your typical solar panel.

It's kind of like early lab research. That's doing some kind of banana stuff. That's worth exploring. As for me, if you're interested in checking out my books, please visit my website, seanferrell. com, or you can go just directly to wherever it is you buy your books. They're available everywhere, including your public library.

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