https://youtu.be/syPOfZOcUVc
Matt and Sean talk about “Meh” episodes that lead to Motion Pictures, like Star Trek: The Original Series’, “The Changeling.” How does a 1960’s version of AI hold up to today’s version of actual AI?
Matt and Sean talk about “Meh” episodes that lead to Motion Pictures, like Star Trek: The Original Series’, “The Changeling.” How does a 1960’s version of AI hold up to today’s version of actual AI?
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (02:30) - - Viewer Feedback
- (07:13) - - Today's Episode
- (10:33) - - This Time in History
- (16:34) - - Episode Discussion
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Creators & Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
Hi, this episode of Trek in time, talking about things that don't compute. That's right. We're talking about the Changeling. This is Star Trek the original series, originally broadcast on September 29th, 1967, episode number 37 in shooting order, 32 in broadcast order, that makes it the third of the second season, yes, we've jumped around quite a bit back and forth in time.
We're back at the beginning of the season. Why would they put this one third? Hmm. I think we'll touch on that a bit. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological star date order. We're also taking a look at the world at the time of our general broadcast.
So we're talking about September 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. With me as always is my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Matt, how are you this fine day?
Doing great. Had a good weekend watching, uh, bad movies, Sean. I think I told you about that one. I watched, uh, Was it the, um, the Electric State on Netflix, which just came out, which is based on a book that I actually backed on Kickstarter. And I was very excited to see it. And then, oh boy, it's, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's got cheesy dialogue, some lack of character development where you feel connected to characters, but it's still fun.
It's still whizz bang special effects, lots of action. So if you want to check out your, turn off your brain. It's a good time.
I'll throw out a couple of movie recommendations myself. I have recently seen the new Captain America movie, which has been out for a while, but I also saw Mickey 17 recently and I recommend them both.
I thought Mickey 17 is an incredible movie and I thought the new Captain America was a lot of fun and it does what you just described the Electric State as not doing, even though it is a popcorn film, it is meant to be action oriented. You actually do feel like the characters are having internal changes and conflict, and you get a sense of them being the grounding to the action.
So I thought it did a really, really good job and I really enjoyed the film. Enough of our banter as our show notes, put it banter. That part is done. Move on now to your comments from previous episodes, Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week?
Well, last week, Sean, as you'll remember being in a cold room, but still having the cold sweats because we were both tired and over caffeinated and you said, if you know how this feels, hashtag cold sweats in the comments.
Well, we got a bunch of cold sweats in the comments of people understanding and
There with the sweaty pits in the cold room
Yeah, couple additional comments. PaleGhost69 wrote cold sweats. I'm a landscaper in the Midwest so it's appropriate. And then also wrote this episode of the original series, wolf in the fold, put me to sleep. Glad I didn't miss much. And then Mark Loveless wrote, Hey man, like those drugs man, like wow, heavy dude, let's go to the planet strip bars bros.
My fave strip bar is called cold sweat, man. So there was that. And then we had, um, from JD Lewis, he wrote about Wolf on the Fold. Awful episode, but wonderful reaction. This episode was such a hot mess. I don't know if it was either a lack of ideas or deadline pressures, but it feels like as if DC Fontana approached Robert Bloch to contribute another episode.
Instead of coming up with a new idea out of whole cloth, Bloch instead decided to adapt his classic thriller episode, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, and awkwardly shoehorn it into Star Trek continuity. The original thrill episode was brilliant, but this episode is a white hot dumpster fire. In fact, since Spock was absent for more than half of the episode, it feels like a subpar early first season episode.
And then he rolled right into wrong answers only for this week's episode. Very good. Wrote in next week's episode, the changeling while Kirk is on shore leave, Kirk buys himself a brand new sports car, the changeling 3000. However, unbeknownst to Kirk, his new car is actually a Decepticon like creature with a malevolent intelligence.
So when Kirk takes the car out for a test drive, hilarity ensues. As always, I eagerly look forward to your future reactions. Thank you for that. And then we also, yeah, that was a good one. And then we also had from Mark, Mark Loveless chiming in with his wrong answers only this week, Plot of the Changeling.
McCoy meets his doppelganger on a planet and decides to take him back to the ship to show him off. Since they are so physically similar, when they beam aboard, they become one person. The problem? The doppelganger is into soil science, so everyone coming to sick bay is getting some of the weirdest advice ever.
Take two aspirin and wash your roots off so that you absorb nutrients. Get some rest, soak in the tub, and swallow whole these space worms. Spock figures out what happens, and Scotty reprograms the transporter and split McCoy back into two people. Side effects cause laughs, as McCoy now loves the taste of space worms.
Ah, Mark.
I'm gonna talk about these in reverse order. Mark, yet again, provides a synopsis to an episode that does make me feel like he's from the mirror universe because, and suddenly I find myself thinking has Star Trek. I do not recall, has Star Trek done, they've done the transporter malfunction creates a duplicate.
Yes. They've done that a number of times. Have they ever done transporter malfunction combines two people into one individual? I don't recall. I don't think they have. That would be an amazing episode. Yes it would. Because, imagine the episode in which two characters, well known characters, have a transporter accident, and then if I'm shooting the episode, what I do is cast a new actor to play the combined entity.
Yeah, and then you have that entity demonstrate traits and knowledge of those two characters while they're trying to figure out how to separate them And then you end up with the dilemma of are we now killing an actual individual in order to reclaim the original two? What are the ethics of killing this person in order to bring back those people?
Yes I really really like that idea and I also want to comment on the previous one. I can't help but think, okay, has there been a, the comic book world does this all the time. Has there been a Star Trek Transformers crossover? No, if not, that'd be kind of amazing. If not, why? Because Kirk getting into a car and the car turns out to be a Decepticon.
That's fun. Yeah, that's fun. So that noise you hear in the background, that's not Matt having a conniption. And those lights, that's not Matt's battery power breaking down. No. Yes, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Have at it, Matt.
The crew of the Enterprise deals with Nomad, an indestructible planet destroying space probe that thinks Kirk is its creator.
The space probe is beamed up, and after completing an analysis, Mr. Spock reveals that his real creator is Jackson Roykirk, a scientist from the 20th century. Spock enters the mind of Nomad and finds out the original space probe was destroyed when another alien probe somehow united with it, deleting its memory banks and resulting in a new machine with a new objective, sterilize all units which are imperfect.
When Nomad takes control of the Enterprise, Kirk tells Nomad the truth, making it realize that Nomad itself is flawed and must destroy itself. Star Trek The Motion Picture Was in part an expansion of this episode.
This episode originally broadcast on September 29th 1967, directed by Marc Daniels written by John Meredyth Lucas.
Guest appearances include Blaisdell Makee as Singh, Arnold Lessing as a security guard, Vic Perrin as the voice of Nomad, Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Leslie yet again, William Blackburn as Lieutenant Hadley, Meade Martin as a crewman, Roger Holloway as Lieutenant Lemli, and Frank DaVinci as Lieutenant Brent. We also have from the main crew, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols.
And George Takei doesn't do much, but he is present. He mainly just reacts with surprise when a floating nomad suddenly comes over his shoulder. We also see Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel. A little bit of information about the writer of this episode, John Meredyth Lucas. He's the son of screenwriter Bess Meredyth and writer director Wilfred Lucas, and the adopted son of director Michael Curtis.
Lucas grew up in Southern California where, and I, as I read this, I couldn't help but think like, okay talented man. But at this time of the 20th century. Yeah. They didn't know what to do with a kid who had ADHD. Listen to this bio and tell me if you don't think that this is somebody who struggled in school, despite the fact, very fertile, creative mind, Lucas grew up in Southern California where he attended a number of schools, including Urban military academy, Pacific Military Academy and Beverly Hills High School. After a failed attempt at college, he began his Hollywood career with a job as an apprentice script clerk at Warner Brothers. He is best remembered for the work he did on Star Trek, the original series, as a writer, producer, and director. He wrote four of the episodes, broadcast from 67 to 69, The Changeling, Patterns of Force, Alon of Troyes and That Which Survives.
He also directed three of the episodes broadcast in 1968, The Ultimate Computer, The Enterprise Incident, and Alon of Troyes. The latter was the only episode in the original series to be directed by its writer. Lucas was credited as producer for the latter part of the second season. High achievement, apparently really bad at school.
Like, well done, Mr. Lucas, well done. So at the time of broadcast, September 29th, 1967, well, Matt and I weren't singing along to anything at that point because Matt and I didn't exist yet. I know Matt loves to sing this song now. Take it away, Matt. The Letter by the Box Tops. What is
this? Sorry. Great. I've never, I've never heard this song.
Oh man. And at the movies, people were lining up to see the number one film this week, To Sir With Love. To Sir With Love is the British drama that deals with social and racial issues in a secondary school in the East End of London, starring Sidney Poitier and featuring Christian Roberts, Judy Geason, Susie Kendall, Patricia Rutledge and singer Lulu, who also sing saying the theme song, which has been a number one song on other weeks, we've already talked about that a couple of times. And on television, we've been talking about comparison, comparing Nielsen ratings. So we've talked about things like the Andy Griffith show and the Lucy show, which were up in the 27s in comparison to star Trek, which in its second season averaged somewhere in the 11s.
And without even consulting Matt, I went on a limb and I did something on my own. Matt, buckle up, we're skipping a bunch of shows. Now you'd wonder why are we skipping a bunch of shows? Because these are shows that we've already talked about in the first season. I found myself as we're talking about the second season, we're seeing other shows all in the top slots that we talked about for the first season of the original series felt a little stale to me. So I thought I'd jump down the list, skipping over the Dean Martin show, Jackie Gleason show, Saturday night at the movies, the witch, Beverly Hillbillies, Ed Sullivan, the Virginian, Friday night at the movies, Green Acres, the Lawrence Welk show, and Smothers Brothers comedy hour.
We've talked about all those programs previously. So we're skipping down to number 19 on the most watch list for 1967 to 1968. The Nielsen rating of the 19th most popular show is still a 21. 5, putting it well above Star Trek. And here on this podcast, we always like to talk about, are we slipping between the cracks between realities?
Do we actually know as much about popular culture as we think we do. This week, Matt, here's a show that I think will, once again, make you question whether you're in the prime universe or not. The number 19th most popular show of 1967 with a 21. 5 Nielsen was of course Gentle Ben. Gentle Ben is a bear character created by author Walt Morey and first introduced in a 1965 children's novel, Gentle Ben.
The original novel told the story of a friendship between a large male bear named Ben. And a boy named Mark. The story provided the basis for a 1967 film, Gentle Giant, the popular late 1960s U. S. television series, Gentle Ben, and a 1980s animated cartoon. And two early two thousands made for TV movies.
Yes, Gentle Ben has been in popular culture in various forms a lot. And yet I've never heard of it. Not only did it have all those details that made me say what now. Here, now we're showing an image from the show. We're showing you an image from the show. And if you're wondering, why does that bear look like it's drunk on Tranya, why, yes, the actor from the show who played Mark, the little boy, is in fact Clint Howard, who appeared in a number of original of the, of versions of Star Trek. He's been in Star Trek throughout his life. First appearing as Balok in the episode, the Corbomite Maneuver, which is one of the first episodes of the original series. We talked about it a while back. Clint Howard is a favorite of mine, but here I see this image and I'm just like, Clint Howard as a child with a bear. Are we in fact lucky that Clint Howard is alive?
I know. Let's put a little child actor leaning up against a bear. What could possibly go wrong?
For a good time, look up the show and then look on Google and look at just the images. Just the promo images alone. I marvel that Clint Howard is alive.
Because in no picture does the bear look like it's having a good time. Finally, in the news, on this day, September 29th, 1967, the headlines. Well, the headline that jumped out, there are a number of different stories here. We're seeing, uh, the teachers union in New York agreed to a new contract. Robert Kennedy was planning on campaigning for a new state charter.
The Israeli government was defending its plan to move settlers into areas that were originally controlled by Palestinians. And of course, that is a ongoing issue that decades later is still being the, it's a part of, of the long and difficult history of that region. But the headline that stood out to me the most was in the upper left hand corner, president denies military victory is goal in Vietnam.
Matt, how genuine do you think it is? To say, yeah, the war we're fighting, we don't really think that winning is the, it's called, it's called moving the goalposts, Sean. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Very, very disingenuous headline. On now to our discussion of this episode, Matt, big picture. I'm going to just like throw out my big picture thoughts about this one and you can weigh in as to whether you agree, disagree.
I found this one a bit of a meh with some interesting ideas, and I can understand why at a later date they would say, Oh, we're going to make a movie. How about we just remake that one episode called The Changeling. Where do you land on that?
Oh, for me, this episode is a mixed bag because I'm right there with you.
There were some interesting ideas and things that they did. That was like, that's kind of a cool concept. Yeah, well, that's an interesting one. That's I like how they're handling this with Spock and this thing and doing, you know, X, Y, and Z, but man, Sean, there were some, what like record scratches and just like, well, what are they, what are they doing? What are the.
We haven't talked about this before we record just for everybody's edification about our discussions on these episodes. The recording that you hear is our first conversation about these episodes. We do not prep each other for our thoughts about these things. I have a feeling I'm going to know the answer that you're going to give to this question. Okay. What was the most record scratchy moment for you in this episode?
For me, it was the Uhura stuff. I knew it. It was just like, what? Bluey? Yeah. What? What?
Let me look directly at the camera and say, Bluey. And I'm like, why are they going for comedy? What is the comedic goal of this episode?
Well, I get it though, Sean, because like, if you think about like blockbuster movies of the seventies and eighties and nineties, it's always a balance of drama and humor and action and suspense, it's always like bouncing between those and you have moments of levity after a moment of like hardship. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's like you're, you're, it's an emotional release that you're giving the audience. And so that makes the funny moment funnier, and it helps to break the tension of the tension that you've just created. There's a whole reason behind it. They didn't do that in this. They just, they just tried to make it funny.
And it was like, you're making a funny about a character that's an awesome character. What are you doing? What are you, what are you? And the best part, Sean, was they wiped her mind blank. She is basically an automaton. So basically, they're basically saying Uhura is back to being a baby in a grown up body.
We have to fill her, we have to fill her back up with health. Knowledge. And yet they fill her back up with knowledge in like, what feels like a day. Like they're, she's back to reading at a, like a second grade level and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, wait, it's been hours. How are you possibly doing this?
And then two, you wiped her slate clean, which means she will have none of her Starfleet training. She will have no like concepts of languages and she will have like, what are you doing? What are you doing, Star Trek? It made me angry, Sean.
Yeah. It would have been one thing if it had said like It had wiped all recent memory.
She blacked out the past week. She couldn't recall things that had happened more recently. Like that would have been sufficient, like for her to be in the shocking control of this machine and then for Kirk to say, like, let her go. And then when it lets her go, it says something along the lines of, I was in the process of correcting her and they find out that she's lost memory for the past two weeks.
But she knows who they are and she can tell, like, she wakes up and she's just like, wait, what star date is it? It doesn't make any sense. So it's like, that would have been fine to say, like, this is the power this machine has to be able to do this. Oh, it would also then one of the things that the machine doing that opens up and they didn't really draw this direct line, but I thought like, that's kind of their way in how does Spock mind meld with a machine they're effectively arguing that it has the ability to interface at a mental level.
And so that's where that, that it opens that door, which I think is an interesting story element, but they didn't do enough with it to make it can actually useful.
The the extra salt in the wound though with the Uhura bit where they wiped her memory, was the sexism that was laid on top of the robot Nomad.
Yeah, he does it and they ask him why he did it and he says Uh, this is a one this unit is a woman, a mass of conflicting impulses. And I was like, Oh, oh, Star Trek, what are you doing?
And once again, once again, period of time, isn't it Spock who's just like, well, yes, granted.
Yes. Yeah. He agrees with it, which makes it worse.
But it's just like, it was not just a bad concept that they just played on one of their key characters. Like why would you do that to a key character that now you have to explain how she gets her memories back, which she can't. Like, why would you put yourself in a corner like that? And then on top of it, Oh, let's just all make it sexist.
Nomads are sexist.
We also get another shot of Scotty. Like it occurred to me that what they were doing with Scotty at this point, they knew they wanted to incorporate him more into the show. So let's kill him. And it feels like what they've done is said, okay, if we have the triumvirate, we have Kirk and Spock represents the logical aspect of Kirk and McCoy represents the emotional aspect of Kirk. It occurred to me that what they were doing, whether by design or just instinctive writing, was turning Scotty into the physical, emotional impulse of Kirk. Scotty jumps into things physically in a way that you can see Shatner's performance demonstrating Kirk also feels that urge to jump in and do a thing, but he has the ability to remain in command and pull himself back and keep and understand if I jump in right now, it's going to kill me or it's going to harm somebody else.
I can't do that. Whereas Scotty just jumps in impulsively and gets killed left and right basically without fully dying. So it's like they've managed to figure out like, oh We always have red shirts who are dying and then we get plenty of red shirt deaths in this one. Where at the end of the episode when it's again a light hearted comedic ending to the episode of like oh my son that gets you right here.
Like you just had multiple crew people die.
Yeah, it's like four or five people because of that, because of that machine, you really shouldn't be making jokes in the command chair on top of which billions of people before this were killed.
Yes. Billions.
Yes. Which I don't know if you remember this, we talked about the planet that they go to and they're like, the Malurians are gone.
We've talked about that as a story element before. Do you remember that? Yes. Do you remember when? It was in an episode of Enterprise, right? Where the Enterprise goes to a planet and discovers that the Malurians are on this planet and are doing things behind the scenes to, that are damaging to the people on that planet.
And the writers of that episode made the Malurians the villains because they thought it would be funny. That a species, that a group of people who eventually will be completely wiped out, be the bad guys. I don't know if I appreciate the punchline of what they thought was funny about that. I don't think it strikes me as being, I think it strikes me as being just desserts kind of a thing.
I think it's just desserts, but it's also like, like really? Like it's, there's something about it that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, but it just feels like blech. But yes, we have billions of people dead. We have crew people dying, and then we have Kirk.
Yuck, yuck, yuck, not the best look on some of the characters faces. And it ends up with, as you mentioned, like the humor is not being done to balance anything out. It's just being put in to have it there. It turns it into an uneven take. Pulling back though, to those elements that stood out as workable. And in some cases, I think outright impressive.
What were those elements for you that stood up? It was just like, this is a neat idea. I like this part of this.
For me it was all the AI. It was all about the AI of how there's this artificial intelligence that was accidentally created by merging and repairing something and its belief structure is completely alien to us.
Like, you know what I mean? It's like why it's doing what it's doing makes sense to it, but it's completely alien to what we as a living creature would think. Why the hell are you even doing that? It's kind of like, to me, you know, in a different way, it's kind of like the prelude to the Borg this episode, because it's about an AI that's out of control and we have to find a way to get it under control.
And then there's also the 2025 Matt watching this going. We are literally in a moment around AI, like an AGI, truly intelligent AI, Sean is in our near future. And that is not science fiction for me to say that it is inevitable the way we are racing toward this at an exponential rate, we are going to have a freaking Nomad on our hands at some point in our lifetimes. And this episode, I was like watching it going, wow, if only like the 1960s writers could understand where we'd actually be in 2025.
Yeah.
They could have made this episode so much better. It's a cool concept. I like the concept. It just was not well executed.
Yeah. You touched on the Borg and there are fan theories and there have been a couple, I believe, of the Star Trek novels that have actually incorporated ideas like it, and Nomad is effectively V'ger from the motion picture. And there are fan theories and there's been some books that have been written around the concept that these deep space probes that ended up coming back altered were coming back altered because they had actually interacted with the Borg. So there was something about like the protoborg idea of something interacting, self repairing, and then sending back with the programming having been adjusted.
So it does clearly tie into that as a concept. It's a part of a thread of Star Trek in that way. It's also a part of a thread, as you mentioned, the AI ness of it. It's a very hard sci fi concept. This is probably one of the more hard sci fi episodes of the original series that we've talked about up to this point, where in this era, we're not too far from 2001, a space odyssey coming out, which of course has Hal the computer. We're a couple of decades away from War Games which the aspect of that is more about the inadvertent warmongering at a time in the cold war, like the 1980s cold war message is what's important there. This, I don't think necessarily has a cold war message as much as it felt to me, like it may be as a counterculture message, because it comes down to Kirk saying this is a changeling, this is the child who's been replaced by something else that isn't quite the human that you would think it is, and it's true nature doesn't come to the surface until it's too late.
That's the story of the changeling. Uh, uh, a magical creature replacing a human child and only when the parents are too late in realizing that this thing isn't human, do they identify it. And it feels like that's kind of a counterculture argument of at this point in time, all the movements that were going on around aspects of civil rights, anti war movement, the hippie movement. All of these things were young people's movements. And it feels to me a little bit like this is looking at culture through the sci fi lens and saying, there's this disconnect here. Where the two sides think they're talking about the same thing, but actually aren't.
And even drilling down into, they can't even identify the same history. Nomad thinks it is talking to its creator having misidentified because of faulty information. So it's effectively a tale of information disconnect leading to false assumptions, leading to conflict. And not only does that feel like the counterculture movement.
That feels like our current cultural state. It's a kind of like looping back yet again to like that as a big concept. What do you think about that as a, Oh, tapping into what was going on in the sixties and how this is manifesting in this kind of story?
What I thought it did strike me that way, but I wasn't looking at it purely from I was looking at it more from a modern take looking back versus at the time, because we're living in a world of misinformation and Nomad, its entire structure is based on misinformation.
Doesn't have all the facts, but it goes off half cocked. Thinking that it's in the right because it has that information even though it's not correct information. It's only partial. That's the world we're living in today right now. You got people who are in control that are spreading misinformation deliberately, making judgment calls based on misinformation, it's off belief not a fact and it's like to me it was like very prescient.
It was also, it was a little disturbing how much of this episode, some of the concepts were hitting at what our world is like at the moment, which, you know, were not the case in the writer's heads when they wrote this, but it was like, damn man, like if they had, I could totally see remaking this episode today.
Uh, with more of a laser focus and you could have really made this episode list a killer episode.
I couldn't help. I couldn't help but think like they didn't realize it at the time, but they really created a character that was a, they managed to create a character entirely out of the concept of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Correct. A hundred percent. Absolutely. Like I have enough information to think I know what I'm doing.
It's like, you don't know you're an idiot and yet you're still charging forward.
You don't know that you've got gaps and you don't understand. Like there's no. With the machine thinking there is no avenue for introducing ethics at this stage, there's no introducing the idea of like murder is wrong.
Like this is not a machine that was built with any kind of. And it's also about living with that functioning in that way for this machine. So when it comes back, it is just the Dunning Kruger effect. I think I know therefore.
It's living within that bubble and refusing to hear anything outside that bubble, which is to me was the other part of it. They're like, Oh my God, this is like what we're living in right now.
In that vein, like we end up with a lot of scenes where Kirk is talking to the machine and Spock is kind of providing a backing role where he kind of stands behind him and nudges him the right way of just like, almost like he's poking him in the ribs with a sharp stick when he's just like, well, my name's not, yes.
What did you think about the depiction of, of Kirk's logical maneuverings and how to deal with this machine that is, it's effectively so dangerous because it is so unhinged.
In previous episodes, Kirk has gone off a little half cocked and I like that you brought up how Scotty is now becoming that kind of like avatar of same motivations as Kirk, but he goes off half cocked and Kirk keeps a little more of his composure as a commander.
In previous episodes, it's episode that Kirk is a better captain in this episode than he was in an episode a year earlier.
So you can see how they're evolving the character and kind of where we were finding it. Yeah, and I like where they're landing with him now for that. Because he doesn't go off half cocked here, and I really appreciated the unspoken dialogue between him and Spock like you're talking about the nudging.
It's like he understands very clearly what Spock is getting out of like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can see the, the, almost the inner monologue in Kirk's head at times when he's dealing with Nomad and when he's saying things and not doing things. And when they're on the bridge and, and stuff is about to happen and he's, you can tell he's keeping his calm and like stringing Nomad along to not have a conflict.
And then Scotty goes off half cocked and gets killed. You know what I mean? It's like, you can see him playing that game of chess in his head of, I got to keep this thing, believing what it believes. Otherwise we're going to lose control. I thought that was fantastic. That's one of my favorite parts of this, this episode was the Spock aspects, the Kirk dealing with Nomad.
I thought was really well done. Yeah. It was just the Uhura on the other stuff that was like. What are you doing?
Yeah. So overall, I feel like this is an episode that kind of sits on the center of the scale. It lands a little bit of it. Like I found myself very engaged by the big ideas. I liked the personification of the machine.
As I said, all of the themes about counterculture, about not understanding the assumptions of the other when there seems to be common ground, but it's actually got gaps in it. Like I saw all these things that work in it undone a little bit through some of the stuff with Uhura and you end up with strange scenes that don't really go anywhere as a result of that.
But at, and at the middle of it, balancing, you know, sitting at the middle between those two extremes is some action that's rather intense. You end up with, they don't have a fallout from the death of the crewman that makes sense. But the death of the crewman, the scenes where Nomad so blithely is able to just erase these security guards from existence is foreboding and it creates a sense of true danger on the ship that you don't usually get, even when a character like Khan is running around the ship. He's taking people. He's capturing them. He's put trapping them. He's using them through torture to control other people, but this is something other. This is just like zap a zap. Well, there's just destroys them outright, which is an intense level of violence and action to depict and even the simplicity of Nomad going through the barrier on the cell door with absolute ease, even though they didn't use special effects to depict it.
I thought it was very effective to create the sense of like, this thing should not be on this ship. How do they get rid of it?
But the, um, the sense of danger was palpable and really well done the one thing I had it raised the question of like how the hell they can get out of this situation. Yeah, which is in your mind the entire episode, which is great.
But the problem I have with how they got rid of it. It's not I have a problem. Cuz like the way they kind of like made it question itself. Like you are imperfect. So if you're gonna obey your rules, you have to do this and it's freaking out I was like very smart very clever. Okay, now they got to get it get off the ship I don't know if you felt this Sean, but when they thought they put it on the transporter Beam into space.
Beam into space. My first thought was, well, not even to any point, but it's like, why are you beaming into space? Because if it then gets control of itself, it's going to kill you. Like you're taking it on faith that it's actually going to destroy itself when you throw it into space. So just a few episodes ago, you beamed somebody into space and said, disperse it as widely as possible.
Why wouldn't you do that? Because that's the surefire way of to make sure this thing can't just turn its back and kill you later. It's like, I didn't understand why they didn't do that. I thought that was clear. I mean, from a visual storytelling point of view, it's like we can have a big boom at the end of the episode closure. Yeah. I understand that.
It's the same reason why at the beginning when they're like, this thing just killed billions of, this, this killed billions of people on this planet and they communicate with it and they're like, we know there's nothing living on this thing. We know this is a machine. It's only about this big.
And they're like, we can transport you aboard. At that moment, they could have just said, okay, we're just dematerializing it and just spreading the atoms like.
But, but that to me is more forgiving, forgivable. Cause here's, you know, Starfleet exploration, meet new life forms. I understand why they did that that way, right.
But it was the, now we're going to kill this thing because it has to be killed. Disperse it into space through the transporter. Like, what are you, what are you doing? Taking the risk of getting control again?
It is an element that leaves open, uh, like, okay, things were done in a different way just to keep the story going.
So yeah, we can be forgiving. We can be forgiving of that. Matt and I are big hearted like that. Can we? Yes, we can, Matt. We are going to do that. All right. Okay. Hashtag kind hearted, cold sweats, kind hearted. That's my version of a motivational speech. So listeners, viewers, what did you think about this one?
Did you find it enough fun? Like it seems Matt and I both found it. Or was this one where you were just like, uh, uh. Clunky gears all the way down. Let us know in the comments and don't forget wrong answers only next week, we'll be talking about The Apple. So jump into the comments and let us know what that will be about.
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