More ST: TAS

[Destructionator XV]

You might remember a while ago I was watching Star Trek: TAS and talking about it, with the intention to eventually watch the whole series of my tapes.

Well, I got sidetracked for a while, but just watched a couple more just now: "One of Our Planets is Missing" and "The Lorelei Signal".

In the former episode, a giant living cloud that eats planets was heading toward a Federation colony of 80 million people, who would all die if it ate the planet (which everyone had to repeat many times throughout the half hour episode, as if we didn't understand it the first time).

Kirk calls the governor of the colony and warns him to start an evacuation, but they don't have many ships and it is really short notice. He says only 5,000 of them will make it off.

Interesting to note that fact - this colony apparently didn't have many starships available.

The crew of the Enterprise determine the cloud being has a brain, and Kirk first suggests blowing it up with the ship's photon torpedoes, but this wouldn't be enough to actually destroy it, given the creature's huge size (about half an AU). Spock suggests self destructing the ship with antimatter (found in the creature's intestines) to have enough energy to kill the brain in one big blow.

Some people object to killing it, saying Starfleet regulations forbid killing intelligent things, to which Kirk responds that if it was the creature or the colony that dies, he'll pick the creature. The ship prepares to blow itself up.

But first, Spock wants to talk to it. He technobabbles himself to contact, and the are able to talk the creature out of eating the planet at the last minute. He tells the creature to go home since if it stays, it might accidentally eat people, which it doesn't want to do after learning that people exist and what they are.



This reminded me of the TNG episode Silicon Avatar, where the entity ate life off planets, and Picard wanted to talk to it, with the option of killing it as a backup plan. The resemblance is slight, but if you think that Picard knew about this mission, his decision to talk to the crystalline entity makes more sense. (Of course, TAS isn't part of the official canon continuity, but I like to sometimes pretend it is.)

And, of course, a giant living cloud was also used in TMP, which I haven't seen for a very long time and don't remember much about at all...



Today's second episode also reminded me of a TNG episode: the second season Unnatural Selection. In the TNG ep, Doctor Pulaski magically gets older, and then the transporter magically cures her, originally planned to use patterns on file, but when none were found, they used magic hair.

Almost the same thing is done to Kirk and co. in this TAS episode.

We start out with the ship getting a signal from a probe that affects all the men on the ship and brings them to a weird planet.

Kirk, Spock, Bones, and a redshirt (who survives, btw) beam down, and all comment on how beautiful it is. The redshirt asks if the captain wants the 'usual routine scans' done, but is told Spock would do them as they proceeded into Castle Anthrax.. err a temple with young women.

The men are quickly subdued and get magic headbands that drain their life force into the women. They escape from their prison and go to hide in a huge urn.

Meanwhile, on the ship, Uhura takes command, determining that the men can't be trusted on this mission. She stations female security guards at the transporters and has female scientists take new readings, since Spock's were wrong. She seems to have the situation under pretty much control.

Uhura really kicks ass in this episode. She quickly figures out something is wrong, and quickly takes command to start solving it. And it gets better.

Spock heads back to the temple to reclaim his communicator so he can warn the ship not to send anyone else down, not knowing Uhura was already on top of things. When he gets to the communicator though, he asks for an all female rescue party.

Uhura and her TOS miniskirt wearing (which I find hilarious in a way) female guards beam down to the temple and demand Spock be released to them. When the women on the planet refuse, Uhura orders her team to simply stun them all and take Spock back by force, which they do quite trivially with the help of a telepathic message from Spock telling his location.

They rescue him and beam up. Nurse Chapel tries to reverse the aging process, but she fails.

Meanwhile, it has started to rain where Kirk, Bones, and the redshirt are hiding, and they are in danger of drowning. Uhura and her team beam back down to rescue them.

We now see one of the most badass moments in the episode: Uhura takes her phaser and vaporizes a vase next to one of the women on the planet and delivers this line: "Release Captain Kirk and his men or we will destroy this temple!"

She means serious business, and this gets the cooperation of the locals. Her team locates the others, shoots the urn in which they were hiding, and beam back to the ship.


We now have another quick drop of the women's competence, when Spock suggests something and Uhura and Chapel respond "we tried that", which was good to see; they knew what they were doing. Then Spock suggests using the transporter to fix them, and they do.

There is some exposition about how the planet ended up being this way, and their curse is broken and the planet's women are given the chance to integrate with Federation society, which they accept, and live happily ever after.



Like I said, the magic transporter cure and aging reminded me of Unnatural Selection TNG, but I think the real coolness here was Uhura seriously kicking ass.

[Cpl Kendall]

I think I have these episodes in book form. Anyways, the similarities to TNG and TPM are quite easily explained. The early TNG seasons took quite a few scripts from the aborted Phase 2 project, and TPM cost so much to produce because it had to absorb the budget from the failed Phase 2. It's not a stretch that Gene would have taken ideas from TAS if he could.

[Destructionator XV]

And I just watched another one of my tapes. Today's two episodes were "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth" and "The Counter Clock Incident".

First, a quick note: the latter once again used the transporter trick to fix an aging problem. But more when I get there.

Both episodes made good use of the vocal talent of James Doohan again. In the first one, Doohan played three characters: Scotty (of course), Arex, and Ensign Walking Bear, all three of which had lines in many of the scenes.

In the second one, Nichelle Nichols played two character: Uhura (again, of course) and Karla Five, the female alien from the backward universe.

Back to the first episode for a quick summary. The Enterprise is following the remains of a probe that scanned Earth and they encounter a starship which captures the ship and beams a few members of the crew over.

The owner of this starship is an alien who visited Earth in the past and is the basis of many of the legends in ancient people. He gives a riddle to the captured crew members (Kirk, Bones, Scotty, and Walking Bear), who figure it out then they start to talk.

Meanwhile, on the ship, Spock is working out a way to break the Enterprise free.

The owner of the starship shows Kirk and co a little zoo he had created, keeping animals from all around the galaxy in perfect peace in their minds. He offers a similar thing to humanity, wanting to bring peace to his children, including the savage humans. Naturally, Kirk rejects this, and argues that children eventually need to outgrow their parents, and he thinks humanity has - they don't need the alien anymore.

After some brief action, the ship escapes and Kirk convinces the alien to go his separate way and everyone lives happily ever after.


My summary here is very compressed, but I thought it was a pretty good episode. It once again goes back to ancient gods being aliens, which we saw time and time again in TOS (and later, TNG and DS9), and handles the situation in a nice way - the villain wasn't really trying to be bad; he honestly wanted to help but humanity didn't want it. The villain/alien ends going off sadly: he has been alone for a long time and is lonely. I find myself hoping he finds new friends in his travels.


The second episode has and old Robert April (first captain of the Enterprise) and his wife on their way to Babel where they would meet several Federation ambassadors for April's mandatory retirement: he is 75, which is apparently the top age for Starfleet in TAS.

On the way, they stop to see a "nova" (the episode consistently mixes up terminology, saying nova where they meant supernova, anti-matter when they meant something else (negative matter? it used several random terms for it)) and a ship is zooming toward it, at over warp 30!

Kirk is concerned that the ship will hit the star and burn up, so he hails its captain. No response, so he grabs on with a tractor beam, which gets the ship's attention, who calls back, but speaks backward!

They quickly figure that out and read the message, which tells them to let her go. However, the Enterprise can't undo the tractor beam and ends up getting dragged along at warp 20+ into the star. (The speed numbers seem absurd too: at warp 20, you'd think they'd cross the distance to the star in no time at all, but it was shown to take almost a minute, with Spock counting down the whole time.)

To everyone's surprise, they aren't dead, but are instead in a universe with white space and black stars. Furthermore, the clocks are running backward!

They call the ship that dragged them in, and the pilot agrees to help. They go to the Earth of the backward universe and work with a scientist there who figures out a way to get the Enterprise back: giving birth to a star via supernova and flying through it.

However, everyone on the Enterprise is rapidly (?) aging backward. In a matter of hours, most everyone on the ship would be infants again! No reason is given as to why they age backward so quickly; it doesn't really make sense.

On the way, the crew starts to get so young that they forget how to operate the ship: the children crew aren't trained to work the machines. The oldest people there: Spock, and Aprils have to take over. (Spock is also shown as being younger than Robert April here, implying that he is less than 75 years old.)

They succeed, but everyone on the ship are babies. April says the transporter will fix them and thinks if he wants to go back to being old. He decides to since he was happy with his first life (which again doesn't make much sense: he forgot he was a Commodore earlier, going with the fact that their brains anti-aged too, but still remembers his later life?) and they all go through the transporter to be magically fixed.


I enjoyed watching it, but as you can see, the script really still needed a lot of work: it was inconsistent and didn't really make sense in a lot of places. The magic transporter reset button comes up again, used on everyone in the crew, which is weird. Pretty bizarre; below average quality episode for the series.


If I were to rate both, I'd give the first one a 4/5 and the second a 2/5.

[LadyTevar]

My local library had novelizations of all those scripts, but I never got to see them on TV :sad:

[Destructionator XV]

My dad's friend got him the whole series (all 22 episodes) on VHS many, many years ago, which is what I'm watching. I don't think the tapes have been available for a long time, but I do think the series is now out on DVD. Being as short as it is (22 half-hour episodes), I can't imagine it would be terribly expensive to buy or rent.

Failing that, youtube has at least a handful of them up.