Fuzzy Necromancer wrote:Okay Edvarius. I know that SR388 is somehow involved in Metroid games, but I'm unable to glean your meaning beyond that. Please elaborate.
SR388 is the home planet of the Metroids as well as one other Zerg/Tyranid level threat whose name I will omit for spoiler reasons.
Also, on a more meta level, in the games Samus Aran works for a government called... the Federation.
“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.” --- Charles Bukowski
to me the prime directive was never an issue on the episode because of the previously lost federation ship. the locals involved themselves.
what really annoys me is the council never thought to give the other planet a phone call to come to agreement about letting the enterprise off the hook
I was six years old and this was the very first ever Star Trek episode I ever saw. I was a fan instantly. Scotty is at the top of his game here. The way he gets to the bottom of things and takes no $#!+ from the ambassador made Scotty a hero and role model for me. Spock has some great, memorable lines, "There is a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder. (pinch)" and "Practicing a a peculiar form of diplomacy," among others. Spock also gets to show off his telepathic abilities, a trick we wouldn't see again until next season's "By Any Other Name." Kirk is a real force here. He drives the whole episode and even lays out a room full of guards and disarms them in time for a surprised Spock to show up to offer help. I also liked the guest stars, David Opatashu and Barbara Babcock and especially (I think she was mentioned earlier) that delightful Yeoman Rand stand-in who was with the landing party.
I'm really enjoying the ideas and updates discussed on this thread. General Order 24 was an intriguing concept. For a super-peacenik Federation, one wonders how the total nuking of a planet became a standardized procedure on their books. This story was very relevant back when it first aired during the Vietnam War with casualty counts on the evening news. Some thought reducing the war to the simple numbers of it was oddly impersonal. The story is even more relevant today with computers inextricably linked into our daily lives and news reports of "cyber" warfare on our minds. There's a lot of fertile ground to cover in revisiting this episode.
rickgriffin wrote:I dunno, war has always been sanitized to one degree or another. Why do you think people go to great lengths to ignore veterans who come home after? They were the only ones really exposed to it and so are contaminated. This just happens to be an even fuller realization of that.
Back during the Enlightenment, the general consensus was that an army should not be made of volunteers (which is the current situation of the US Armed Forces) because you don't want a professional class of soldiers. While a professional army would be better trained, it also has a vested interest in the war business. War should actually require the sacrifice of citizenry, to ensure that the army will not fight unless it is clearly in the nation's best interest. This is part of why the second amendment makes reference to a well-regulated militia: the idea is the voting population WAS the militia, and that the best defensive force will be made up of people defending their own homes, families, and livelihoods.
cdrood wrote:I have some disagreement on this episode. I feel the "war" to be weak. War's have reasons for existing, even if they are stupid. Territory, ideology, someone stepped on a flower and earned the death penalty, etc. This one has none of that. Even if it's forgotten or don't matter, there's at least the rhetoric that "the enemy are a bunch of baby killing fascist drug dealers who park in the handicapped spot" to keep things going. There's none of that here. There's no goal, not even destroying the "enemy"
They even got along so well with Vendakar to be able to set up a two way computer system that controls a planetwide system of disintegration chambers and immediately detects non-compliance. Why couldn't/wouldn't they have ended the war when this system was negotiated? Neither side has anything the other wants, obviously; including their annihilation.
This isn't war. It's population control. That would have made this a much better episode than Mark of Gideon on that subject AND made this episode much better since the "war" is weak"
You would think that if there's a war, there's got to be interest in winning it. But what are the terms for winning this war? Is the goal to have your computer simulate that it's annihilated every single one of the enemy? It's certainly problematic that the war itself doesn't have any plausible reason for existing.
In a sense, though, that makes this work in a way that TNG would not. This is obviously an allegory for the Cold War, but it doesn't feel preachy. It feels like a pure sci-fi concept, where they start with the "what if" question about a never-ending sanitized war, and then developed this story around it. The premise itself isn't sound, but the exploration itself feels creative. And Kirk doesn't give a speech about how evolved and perfect humanity is, he offers something that feels a bit more authentic: we have the power to kill, but we choose not to.
rickgriffin wrote:I dunno, war has always been sanitized to one degree or another. Why do you think people go to great lengths to ignore veterans who come home after? They were the only ones really exposed to it and so are contaminated. This just happens to be an even fuller realization of that.
Back during the Enlightenment, the general consensus was that an army should not be made of volunteers (which is the current situation of the US Armed Forces) because you don't want a professional class of soldiers. While a professional army would be better trained, it also has a vested interest in the war business. War should actually require the sacrifice of citizenry, to ensure that the army will not fight unless it is clearly in the nation's best interest. This is part of why the second amendment makes reference to a well-regulated militia: the idea is the voting population WAS the militia, and that the best defensive force will be made up of people defending their own homes, families, and livelihoods.
It seems to be fairly easy, to convince people of a war being in their best interest, regardless on if there's actually a rational reason to go to war.
"If you get shot up by an A6M Reisen and your plane splits into pieces - does that mean it's divided by Zero?
- xoxSAUERKRAUTxox
I tend to think of this one as an example of how Kirk always wins, entirely because the writers are in his side.
He thinks that the prospect of a real war will scare these people to the negotiating table, so of course that's what happens. Obviously the enemy won't launch a preemptive strike, dooming millions of people; that would make Kirk wrong. And Kirk can't possibly be wrong, he's the hero!
Likewise, the question of what form peace might take, and whether it could possibly end up being even worse than the status quo isn't addressed. Nor are the myriad other ways this could backfire and blow up in Kirk's face.
Now I don't entirely mean this as a criticism of the show; it's good old-fashioned pulp sci-fi, and Kirk is the good old-fashioned space-cowboy, who always wins no matter the odds. That's just the way the show was, and that's fine.
But I think it really contributes to what makes Wrath of Kahn so interesting. Kirk's made a career out of gambling with life & death, and it's never once blown up in his face. He's never had to face any sort of consequences for his hasty choices, until one day 20 years later, he does.
I'm not sure they could launch a preemptive strike. They have no fleets, we don't know if they have any real interplanetary weapons ready at all; it's been 500 years and they've been playing GalCiv the entire time. The point of the show is that it's one thing to move some pawns vs the act of actually killing and losing all the stuff (because clearly they value stuff more than people in the first place). As said earlier in the thread, you can't get there from here; what civilization would agree to do this and stick with it for 500 years? Surely someone would play dirty and actually attack at some point and win by catching other other with it's pants down. So Kirk pulls it off, I mean you blow up 2 disintegration chambers meant for thousands of casualties and a computer they have no backup for despite it's utter crucial nature to their society and *bam* negotiations. Because story.
Last edited by Robovski on Mon Oct 02, 2017 7:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
TV episodes, especially episodic ones, tend to be rather pat in general, though I do think it was more prominent in the 60s. In fact, I think that's part of the difference between TOS and TNG. They still always returned to the status quo, sure, but taking a situation with a complicated problem and ram it full-force into total victory even with a bunch of lingering questions in the wings? It takes a certain kind of writing and charisma to pull that off and Kirk could convince you yeah he TOTALLY saved the day and was the hero. In early TNG it usually came across as "haha, we got the best of you, we win".
I probably would like this episode more if the ambassador didn't come off as an obvious anti-diplomacy/pro-war straw man of the "any diplomacy is appeasement" variety.
Edit:
zugabdu wrote:A real solid TOS episode, one that would have been a disaster in TNG or VOY. Hell, in those shows, someone on the crew would be vociferously arguing that they should all just beam down and let themselves be disintegrated because of the Prime Directive (and the writers would expect us to take that argument seriously). I can imagine Harry Kim saying "it'd do a lot more good than harm." Given the course of his life, maybe it would.
Even Voyager wouldn't do that.
Parody Voyager might, but not actual Voyager. This is Flanderization.
