159: Star Trek TOS Season 1, "Arena”

https://youtu.be/5gqmmSdHnjw

Matt and Sean talk about a brand new threat on Star Trek: The Original Series! That we’ve seen before. Do the new Star Trek show’s retcons break the enjoyment of this episode?

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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 retcons that have really pulled the rug out from underneath a classic episode. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek. We're watching them in chronological stardate order. We're also taking a look at the world of the time of original broadcast.

So we're currently talking about 1967, a year Matt and I both remember not at all. We were not born in the 60s.

Who are we? I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids. And Matt, I'm going to do it again. Buy my book! Thank you. That's what counts as self promo for me? If anybody has a better idea of how I could do self promo, please let me know. 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.

And Matt, how are you this fine day?

I'm doing great, Sean, because a lot of my travel for the moment is over. So I've been kind of catching my breath a little bit. Yeah. And then I get a little terrified, Sean, because. I'm going to Mexico in October, L. A. in October, Germany in November, Las Vegas in January.

Shprechenzie, wow, that's a lot of travel. I'm not built for this. No, we Ferrell men are not built for traveling through too many time zones at one shot, so. I feel for you. You can take me along. I'll carry your bags.

Today we're going to be talking about Arena. This is from season one and it was the 19th in shooting order, the 18th in broadcast order. But before we get into that, we always like to take a look at what you've said about our previous episodes. So Matt, what have you found in the mail bag for us this week?

There were a lot of really good comments. I had trouble narrowing it down just to a few, but the first one, Sean, this is about Squire of Gothos, Gothos, where we talked basically the character Trelaine is basically just a Q. Yeah. PaleGhost69 basically killed me with this comment. John Delancey looked weird in 1967.

Thank you, PaleGhost. Yeah. On the mark. Then we had Mark Loveless, uh, who wrote, well, I am team Matt on this one. Not a fan of Squire of Gothos. I remember watching this in my youth and found it awful. It was painful and predictable. Sure, decently acted and all, but I had so many problems with the plot. One small example, wouldn't a young and slightly unsupervised Q child get out of the proverbial giant magnifying glass and start frying these little ants when they broke his sword?

Speaking of, the quote, you broke my sword, has been stuck in my head for a week now. Sorry Sean, but I had so many problems with this one. I actually, I, I, I really loved that moment for his kind of childish, petulant, like you broke my toy. Like it's, for me, that's part of the charm of the episode, but I do understand why, like somebody's, you know, charming, entertaining moment is like nails on a chalkboard to another person.

So yeah, I get it. Then we had one from Jason Dumb who wrote, Fun discussion, the god like aliens is an overused trope in Star Trek for me. There are good Q episodes and what you have, but often this feels like lazy storytelling. The charismatic performances like Trelaine and Q are why these episodes are remembered fondly, I think.

Yeah. And I, I picked this one out from Jason because it relates directly to today's episode, to me. This is one of my nitpicks for today's episode, but we'll get to that later. And then finally, for wrong answers only, what is today's episode about? Arena. Happy Flappy Farm. Sorry, Mark. Had to spread the love, Mark had a good one, but I had to go with Happy Flappy Farm this week.

The crew visits an entertainment planet where they enjoy shore leave in an arena featuring the classic artist, The Monkees. Spock studies the illogical human fangirl effect that the popular band incites. That would be an interesting episode if it existed, especially if Chekhov had been on the show at that point.

As we've discussed he was introduced specifically to get a hold of Monkey Mania. That noise you hear in the background, well, no surprises here. That, of course, is the reed alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. And, as I said last week, somehow the worm has turned and the Wikipedia descriptions, well, they're not that bad.

Take it away, Matt. Okay. The Enterprise comes under attack by unknown aliens while investigating the near destruction of the Cestus III colony. While chasing the aliens into unexplored space, both ships are captured by the powerful Metrons, who force Kirk and the alien captain, later identified as a member of the Gorn race, to trial by combat.

The winner's vessel will be set free while the loser ship will be destroyed. This episode directed by Joseph Pevney, story by Frederick Brown, Teleplay Teleplay by Gene L. Coon, the story by Frederick Brown, Arena. It was a sci-fi story by Frederick Brown, he was an American sci fi writer. It was first published in June of 1944 in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

The members of the Science Fiction Writers of America selected it as one of the best science fiction stories published before the advent of the Nebula Awards, and it was included in the Science Fiction of Hall of Fame. Volume one, Covering 1929 to 1964. I thought this was interesting. The, the original story, the skeleton is very similar of two aliens pitted against one another by more powerful beings in order to see who will win a war, effectively saying when it comes to massive scale conflict, boil it down to

individuals who will then, through trial by combat, decide the winner. The arena short story and Frederick, Frederick Brown's work in general was more of a almost Twilight Zone like structure in that there would be a twist at the end. And in the original short story, the twist was that the individual who was responsible for Effectively winning a cosmic war on behalf of his people through one to one combat was returned to his people and nobody knew that this had taken place.

So he returns and discovers that everybody around him, all the humans are saying like, we shot one thing and then we won the war. We don't know what happened. What happened, but we did it and he knows what happened. He knows that it was the one to one combat that he participated in. So that's got a very Twilight Zone aspect to it.

So I think that it's an interesting jump to go into the teleplay by Gene L. Coon. Gene Coon at this point was the showrunner. He, joined a few episodes ago. We've talked about him recently in the past. He joined effectively to take pressure off of Gene Roddenberry, who was overextended by being producer and showrunner.

So at this point, Gene Coon has stepped in and has taken a short story and turned it into this script. So it's a little bit of both Frederick Brown and Gene Coon both bear a lot of the responsibility for the development of this episode. The main cast, as always, we have the standard crew. We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly.

We have a little bit of James Doohan, a little bit of Nichelle Nichols, and a little bit of George Takei. But we also see Carole Shelyne as the Metron, Grant Woods as Lt. Kelowitz, Sean Kenny as Lt. DePaul, Jerry Ayres as O'Herlihy, Tom Troupe as Lt. Harold, and James Farley as Lang. A couple of notes here, Carole Shelyne as the Metron, well, Carole Shelyne, this is something for you and I to look forward to in approximately, I am going to guess conservatively a year and a half.

She appears in The Next Generation. She is in season one of The Next Generation. So we will see her when we reach that program, as I mentioned, timing being what it is, I'm guessing a year and a half. So tune in for that. Also, Matt, I don't know if you, when you were watching this episode, uh, Lieutenant DePaul, who's in the navigator station throughout this episode.

I don't know if you looked at him at any point and thought, wow, does that guy look like Captain Pike? Did you? Yes. Did you? Yes. Because Sean Kenny was in fact the actor who played the disabled Pike in the episode where we see Pike in the wheelchair. So he had enough of a similarity to the original actor who played the captain, put some prosthetics on him, make him look disfigured.

And we've got our Pike. What I found interesting about Sean Kenny in this episode, Matt, and I don't know if you picked up on this, he managed to make the navigator look incredibly wooden and terrified all at once. Yes. Every moment they showed the bridge crew, he looked like he was holding on to that thing like, Oh my god, oh my god, I'm in space!

And the world at the time of original broadcast. This original broadcast was on January 19th, 1967. So we're still looking at A lot of the same things we've seen before, such as the number one song, it was still I'm a Believer by the Monkees. Matt, give us a few bars.

I'm going to have to stop you there. We don't have the rights for that much of the song, Matt.

Oh, geez. And in the theaters, a little movie called The Bible in the Beginning. Yes, The Bible in the Beginning. is a 1966 film. It released in late 1966, but it took it several weeks to actually reach the number one spot. It was a film produced by Dino De Laurentiis, directed by John Huston, and it recounts, get this, the first 22 chapters of the biblical book of Genesis.

If they were making this today, they would say, let's focus on one chapter and we'll turn it into a series. It covered the stories from the creation and Adam and Eve to the binding of Isaac. And I don't know about you, Matt, but when I see this movie, I can't wait to see how this entire series ends.

And on television, we're looking at the Nielsen ratings, we're comparing shows like the number one show of the year, Bonanza, which earned a 29 to shows like Star Trek, which earned a 12 to give you a sense of the scale that we're looking at. We've been working our way down from number one, and we've covered a lot of well known shows like Bewitched, Green Acres, the Jackie Gleason show, that Beverly Hillbillies.

And this week We're going to talk about another show that you might have heard of. Yes. It's a little program called Hogan's Heroes. Hogan's Heroes is the American television sitcom created by Bernard Fine and Albert Ruddy, which is set in a prisoner of war camp. Don't stop laughing yet. It's a, a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany during World War II.

It really, I, the late sixties, they were like, let's do it. Let's make. A comedy set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. It's about a group of allied prisoners who use the POW camp as a base of operations to sabotage and conduct espionage in Nazi Germany. It ran for six seasons, 168 episodes from 1965 to 1971 on CBS and has been broadcast in reruns ever since.

It's a show I remember watching when I was a kid and I thought it was funny, I like, yeah. But now I understand the context of what it came from, it was funny, it was funny to me as a kid. As an adult, I'm like, what were they thinking? What were they thinking? And it was only 20 years after the war, I mean, it's, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it would be like CBS releasing a sitcom today about soldiers in Iraq, and during the US invasion. It just, like, really? Like, there was a There was a hunger for that and it lasted. So apparently there was. And in the news, lots of stories that relate to previous headlines that we've talked about, continuing discussion about Vietnam. There seems to be at this point an interesting drip, drip, drip when it comes to talking about Vietnam that is a little bit like, huh, things don't seem to be going the way Keep hoping they'll go.

So there's a headline here. Foes in Vietnam appear to spurn Saigon on truce. The headlines up to this point that we've seen have been President Johnson going over there, President Johnson talking about how great Southeast Asia is going to be once this pesky little war is over. And it feels to me, here we are in early 1967, just the very early beginnings of if we're winning so great, how come they don't want to talk about peace?

There is also a continuing look at the Con Ed scandal that we talked about last week. They are now doing open hearings at this point in New York City, looking into the overcharges that Con Ed was responsible for. And also, I found it interesting, a sub headline here. Albany Favors 2 Tickets Sold at Banks in Lottery.

Yes, New York State was just beginning to figure out how a New York State Lottery would work. Here we are, many decades later, and people are regularly buying tickets hoping to win prizes that are astronomical in size in order to quote, fund public works. I don't know about that. On now to our discussion about this episode.

As mentioned, we are talking about Arena. And I said at the top, the retconning has pulled the rug. And so do you want to start with talking about the Gorn from the perspective of the retconning? Or do you want to talk about the episode and get to the retconning later? No, let's talk about the retconning because we can get to the other stuff later.

All right. Yeah, the Sean, the dude in the suit, the dude in the suit, the dude in the suit, it's guy in the suit, and of course the sixties, they had to do it. They had to do it this way. I get it. I love them for it. I really do. Yes, I, there's a special place in my heart for this episode and my rewatch of this was kind of a stunned realization that I didn't remember a big part of the episode, which was the chase.

I didn't remember any of that. I remembered they were in a chase. In my memory, it was, they were already chasing a ship that had done something, caught up to it, then the arena happens. A huge portion of this episode does not take place on the planet. And I found myself in this rewatch thinking, God bless them, God love them.

Look at this guy in this uncomfortable suit, which could blink. When he blinked a few times, I was just like, Hey, good on them. They made this rubber suit blink. Good job. And it's just like, like I said, a special place in my heart. I loved rewatching this. I had so much fun rewatching it, but I had fun rewatching it in the way I have fun watching a mystery science theater episode.

It is. Yes. Weird. It's just weird choices. Well, let's, let's talk, we're kind of going to blur the line for what you were talking about here, but like the whole, like everything that's not on the planet with the dude in the rubber suit, there's some enjoyment there. It's actually a, there's a lot to it. I did not remember.

Like for me watching this episode, I was like half the episode. There was nothing in my memory banks about any of it and so part of it was like holy cow They were doing a lot more with this episode than I remember I just remember them being on the planet and the fight between Kirk and the guy in the suit And the thumbnail of the guy in the suit when I went to go watch it, I was like, this is, this is going to be so hard to watch.

It's just, oh, it's gonna be so hard to watch. And it was like, actually not the majority of the episode was Kirk, but the dude in the suit. But the part that I thought was where we get to the retconning, the retconning in the next, Strange New Worlds, and before is they basically have redone the Gorn to actually make them terrifying where they're like the alien from Aliens, but crazy smart.

Yeah. So, not only are they very smart and ingenious about how they kinda like try to coordinate their war plans and stuff like that. But if you go one on one with them, you're screwed, because they are just straight up, just like, top of the food chain, holy crap, shark on legs, just like, they will go right through you.

That's the problem, is that they've retconned it of like, hey, these are alien from aliens, let's just pretend that the old episode doesn't exist with the dude in the suit, and they explain how he is super strong, which the new ones are as well. But he's super slow. Yeah. The fight scene up close, Sean, with him doing the slow motion arm swings, I was like, Okay, why would you do that?

It's like, think about the 1980s Sean. It was like, was it 1982, 84 when the first Terminator came out? Terminator never runs. Terminator's not fast. He just walks everywhere and he has. Terrifying. He is absolutely terrifying because he cannot be stopped. So why did they have Kirk go hand to hand with this thing?

They could have just kept him at a distance and his only advantage was his speed. And so then you'd have the Gorn. But the fact that they had them in hand to hand combat, like right from the beginning, I was like, what are you doing? Cause he's doing the slow motion. And then Kirk, I don't know what Kirk was doing.

He was doing the slow motion fighting back. Did you pick that up? I was like, Shatner, what are you doing? You should be bopping and weaving. It's like, you don't have to go slow. We're not like trying to pretend we're shooting at 120 frames per second slo mo Michael Bay thing here. It's like, no, you should be moving fast and then you should be moving slow.

It's like, what is going on? Yeah. I completely agree. And I, and I, This is a case of, okay, very clearly retcon has impacted an existing episode, but I don't mind it. I don't care because what they ended up doing was they took the Star Trek universe and they said we could introduce another alien or we could connect it to an alien that existed in the original series and alter that alien so that it becomes more exciting.

You, the viewer, will be okay. It is a retcon that I think when they introduced the first retcon through Enterprise and had a full CGI monster that Archer fought, it was maybe a little jarring. Maybe a little, like, it wasn't really well utilized. But what they've done in Strange New Worlds is, as you said, they have created a species that is ultimately terrifying.

I do think there is an aspect of that, that if you keep that in the back of your mind while watching this, and kind of hand wave there, we don't know who these people are. It adds to the tension of this episode because I think if you kind of mentally rewrite the episode and say Kirk and crew know they're chasing a Gorn, it becomes almost more critical for them to catch them and destroy them.

They have a background. The Federation understands who the Gorn are. So I think that whether they know who it is or not. Kirk's logic does make sense, but I think it makes even more sense if Kirk is like, we can't let the Gorn get away with this because we've seen what the Gorn are capable of in Strange New Worlds.

I think that a little bit of on the fly rewriting in my own head added to the tension of, yeah, they got to catch these people. They got to stop them. And then it adds then to, it feels like Strange New Worlds to a certain degree leaned heavily on the idea of the Gorn are defending their space. And so that is also at play here.

So I feel like this episode is almost like a, if you're going to do the full rewatch of the entire series, get ready to watch this one and really enjoy half of it and laugh of half of it and hopefully come out the entire thing having had fun because I'm with you. The half that's on the ship. I found gripping and compelling and surprisingly tense when the, I'd forgotten they go down to Cestus III.

I'd forgotten that they, they get into combat, they have to use that mortar. And I was just like, holy cow. I was kind of like stunned at some of that. So I'm with you. It's like part of the retconning that works for me is the fact that you say they didn't know who the Gorn were in this it's like the Gorn ship was so far away they were barely picking up on it and they were chasing it so you could kind of explain it away as they didn't know it was the Gorn like up until the last minute when they finally caught up to it they wouldn't have known it was the Gorn until they finally caught up with it so I was fine with that the fact that this species was so aggressive wiped out this planet it's like up was very aggressive and actually doing a really good job at cat and mouse with Kirk.

Yeah. That, that fit. Yeah. Completely fit with what we've been seeing in the Gorn and the new shows. The only thing that really for me just does not fit was dude in a suit moving in slow motion. That was it. That was like, for me, that was the only thing that didn't work as far as what the retconning dissonance was.

But that you just hit on the head what my feeling of this episode was. I had a blast watching this show. Like, I was dreading watching this, Sean, because of my memory of watching it 20 plus years ago of like, Oh God, that dude in the suit. And it's just him and Kirk going at it and fighting and blah, blah, blah.

I completely forgot about everything else. So I'm watching this. I was like, Oh, this is, Oh, this is great. Oh, this is fantastic. Oh, they're chasing them. And Kirk's got, wants blood. He's chasing them down. Like, this is fantastic. It was like the whole thing. It was like, I was, I was, I was riveted. I was really enjoying the episode.

And then when it got to the mystery science theater part, It flipped from, I'm on the edge of my seat to, Oh my God, I'm just cracking jokes in my head the entire time because this was just laughable to watch. But it still worked. At the end of the episode, I had a really fun time with this episode. I did not come away rolling my eyes like I was expecting to, even with the dude in the suit.

A couple of, uh, things I wanted to point out when they were shooting the Cestus 3 sequence, which again, I thought was terrific. There is a element of, they arrive at Cestus 3, they beam down, they're stunned to find that everybody is dead and everything has been destroyed. That is from a storytelling perspective.

I was a little bit at first, I was like, they didn't bother scanning the planet when they got there and seeing the things weren't the way they should have been. There's no life signs, Captain. There's no life signs. Everybody's dead. Like the base is gone. And like, Like, did nobody look out the window? Um, yeah, but I hand waved that away quickly.

I liked the, we're getting, he's got people there and he has them acting strategically. They do an interesting job of showing Kirk as a strategic thinker in this episode that leans into something you mentioned before about the cat and mouse of it. Um, the three dimensional chess aspects of Kirk are on display here with him.

I don't care if you can see anybody, just fire on their location, get out to opposite ends. He relies on the expertise of people around him well in this episode. He asked that one guy, where do you think they are? Oh, I think they'd have the high ground. I think they'd be at this azimuth. And he fires one of those mortars and effectively like ends the combat.

So it's presented as like, he was right and shocked the Gorn out of their position and forced them to try and flee. Um, I thought all of that was interesting. Lots of explosions on the planet. Don't typically see that in the original series in this way. A lot of times, In original series, the moment they're down on a planet, it is clearly a sound stage where the horizon is a wall immediately behind them.

And it's a lot of forced perspective. This was actually outside the entire thing was filmed on a location, which would be used again in Trek. Um, the sequences where they were running through explosions permanently affected the hearing of both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Shatner's left ear was hurt, Nimoy's right ear was hurt.

I believe that was the, they had opposite sides. I don't remember if I've got it right or left correctly on each of them, but each of them suffered because each of them at various moments, and I noted this while I was watching the episode, holy cow, was he close to that explosion? Yeah. Yeah. And yes, he was a little too.

And so, uh, yeah. So a safety issue there, like, yeah, go ahead on the, on the action sequences. That, I was shocked on a couple of things because in previous episodes, we've had Shatner's stunt double doing fights that's like, dude, why is Shatner not doing this? It's like, this is like, there's nothing dangerous about what he's doing.

And then in this one, he looks like he's by about five feet. Away from one of those explosions. Yeah. And I'm like, holy crap. You just took the star of the show and you put it next to a pyrotechnics that close. What were you thinking? Why was that not a stunt man? I was really surprised. Yeah. But on the stunts, Sean, I don't know if you were laughing like I was laughing, but like the really bad bobbing and weaving

that he kept doing. Shatner did a modern dance move at one point. Yes. It looked like he was doing modern dance, like, doing it, but when the explosions would go off, he was like on his, like, thing going, the ship going, okay, do this, do this, this. And he'd go running and go, and there was this one where he did this, like, Forward flip into the, um, big, uh.

Yeah, the gully. Bomb crater. Yeah. He landed as he's landing, he's pulling his thing back out and he's talking again before he's even stopped moving. Yeah. And I was just like, one, that's either super badass. Yeah. Or that was just like, what? He was like feet away from an explosion and he's like mid air like, boop boop boop, Sulu, do this thing, and he's flying.

He falls into the crater and is just like, what's the status? And I'm like, you mean while you were running? You were suddenly like I wonder what the status of the ship is. Kaboom! A little too, a little too much of a rapid fire response in that moment. I did like the communication from him to the ship, leaning on Sulu to be like, you're in charge, here are my orders, do what I say, keep the ship safe.

Sulu reluctantly does everything he's been told to do. Nice moments for Sulu in that regard. I also, there's a nice bunch of repartee in this episode. It starts with a very strangely knowing, uh, Comment from McCoy about like, yeah, Rancath, it's privileges, right? It's this very bizarre, like, what is he referring to?

Like, did something happen that like, remember that stuff that went down and we couldn't believe it? Like, like, what is McCoy referring to here with this giggle that speaks of Body content. Um, but I really liked Spock and Scotty having a conversation on the bridge about various ways to try to get power to work in the ship.

It was a really, really nice way of saying, Scotty is the guy. He knows what he's doing because Spock makes a bunch of recommendations and it's Spock. So we're like, here comes Mr. Science. He's going to come over and drop some science on you. And he comes over and says. We could do this, or we could do this, or we could try this.

And Scotty is just like, tried it, did it, didn't work. And he gives that little smile that's just like, Mr. Spock. Yeah. Who are you talking to, buddy? Who are you talking to over here? And it's just, I loved that moment. And the episode is clearly about something other shows up and kills our people. So we're going to kill it back in order to not appear weak.

But it is, there's no alien bashing in this episode. That's one of the things I really appreciated about it. It was not, let's go kill these aliens. It is, we have been wronged. This is about justice and Kirk drives the ship with a level of intensity in this episode. Little melodramatic in the responses.

But the responses I think fit in the looks that people give to each other on the bridge as he is effectively saying, fly the ship apart if you have to, in response to flying too fast is going to potentially damage the ship. He needs to catch these people and the sense of relief on his and Sulu's face when they realize that they are catching up to the alien vessel.

Like those moments were something like something we've talked about this before, a movie like Das Boot, uh, the kind of cat and mouse games that are being played, the kinds of pursuit that you need to put in place during this kind of ship to ship warfare. I think that this episode did a surprisingly good job of conveying all of that.

Like I said, I didn't remember that aspect of this episode, so I really, really enjoyed all of that. I thought it was really terrific. How did you feel about the focus of Kirk in driving the ship in the way that made people, including Spock, have moments of like, Are you bloodthirsty here? What is going on?

How did you feel about all of that? I liked it. I mean, it was, it, it ratcheted up, it was a little melodramatic. It was a little bit too much over, like, dialing it up to 11 when they could have kept it at a nine. In general, I liked it. And at the end of the episode, it had a clear point that the show was making, um, which I thought was really good.

So this is my complaint about some of the previous episodes where it's kind of like, we just went through 45 minutes of this for what? Like what was the, what was supposed to be the takeaway from this episode? What was the character development? Like what was the point? This, this episode had a point and I thought That was really good.

It kind of evolved like Kirk's point of view on things. It gave the message to the viewer of like, here's the point we're trying to drive home. Um, I thought it was great. I had no problems with it. Um, to take a little left turn quickly, the issue I did have And I brought this up in the comment section when the, uh, that commenter wrote, they rely on too much Q like, god like aliens.

That is my one, not the guy in the suit, my problem with this was the god like alien that just like, A random alien steps in and goes, we're gonna make you two fight. It's like, what is going on here? That was, that wasn't necessary. They could have contrived something else that wouldn't have involved a third party playing God to force them to do this stuff.

Right. They could have done something completely separate. Um, to me that was the big disappointment because the original series, I forgot how much they lean on that again and again and again. These super powerful, omnipotent aliens doing things from the pilot all the way to this. It's like they gotta, they gotta take their, they gotta come up with something different.

It's getting old. It's getting old fast. Yeah, it is an over reliance on that and it does paint an interesting comparison between what Enterprise was, what the original series was, and what Next Generation is, and this kind of Enterprise was a little lost in its own, oh, we're just entering the forest and we don't know what's here.

And the original series is maybe over reliant on, we are a small thing in a very big universe and we don't understand all the giants that might show up and be more powerful than us. And Next Generation, I think does an interesting job of bridging those two. Yeah. Kind of balancing those two. It'll be interesting as we get to Next Generation.

I say that knowing that like Q is in there and their Nagilum is an alien that they meet that is all powerful. Um, but it's balanced in a different way, I think by a lot of other episodes that are about the kind of geopolitical aspects and the movements of empires and federations against each other or with each other and all of that kind of feels like a different kind of balance.

So I'm interested to get to that stage. I don't disagree with you about the Metrons. I do think that if you were to try to come up with a different scenario, it would have pulled away from the part of the episode I really liked. I think you would have had. Yeah. Lost some of the cat and mouse at the beginning, so I feel like in this episode, if you got a guy in a rubber suit, sure, throw in a space god and make him, like, cryptically say, come back in a few thousand years, maybe we can be friends.

Like, it was a slightly less troublesome introduction of another god like alien, um, because the beginning of the episode did such a good job of keeping my attention. And it also included a statement that I thought was a really wonderful framing of the Federation and Starfleet at this point, which will come back years and years from now when Picard tells Spock, there's no room for your cowboy diplomacy anymore.

And Spock takes umbrage at the framing of cowboy diplomacy. In this episode, Kirk flat out says, we're the only law out here. We are it. And I thought, what a terrific moment, a perfect framing of that mentality of, There's no system. There's us. And we make the choice. And so he's making that choice. I thought it was a really interesting statement given the overall arc of history in Trek and what Picard later on would say.

Before we sign off, uh, viewers, listeners, what did you think about this one? Jump into the comments and let us know. And also while you're jumping into the comments, don't forget, wrong answers only. What is the next episode about? The next episode? Alternative Factor. And I can't wait to see how many of you say it's a rival program to the X Factor.

Before we jump off, Matt, do you have anything you wanted to point out to our listeners or viewers about what you have coming up on your main program? By the time this is out, I will have my episode out about living in my net zero home for the past year. I'm breaking this up into two different episodes, and this episode is talking about how has the energy efficiency aspect of my house worked out over the past year, um, cause I've got a lot of different, I've been heat pumping all the things, I've got all the induction cooktops.

I wish you hadn't said that. Yeah, I know, heat pumping all the things, you don't like that, Sean? I'm going to get that on a t shirt. Stop, stop. Make you uncomfortable? Mm hmm. Yeah, that episode will be out. I think it's interesting, it's just a year later update. As for me, if you're interested in finding out more about my books, you can go to seanferrell.com, which is my website, obviously, or you can just go wherever it is you buy your books. My books are available everywhere. That includes your public library. If you'd like to support the show, please leave a comment, leave a like, share it with your friends, subscribe. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the program.

You can also support us directly by going to trekintime. show and click the Become a Supporter button there. It allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts and we get down to the difficult business of talking about a guy in a rubber suit and my brother heat pumping everything.

Thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.