TOS - Is There in Truth No Beauty?

[clearspira]

Star Trek, despite its premise, is not about meeting aliens.

It's about meeting humans.

Hence why they need to be similar to us in order to do metaphors about war, poverty, HMOs, or holoporn.

It's a Sci-Fi spin on a lot of old Western stories where the plots dealt straight up with cultural differences.

A good example is the stock plot of a Chinese man's queue being cut off and the protagonist having to stop him from enacting blood vengeance on the asshole cowboy who did the act. Another is how ever single TV Western seems to have at least one episode dealing with a Japanese Samurai who found his way to America, and for whatever reason, needs to kill himself (The interesting bit if, unlike the Chinese queue one, the Samurai stories can split between talking the guy out of seppuku while others resolve the matter with him killing himself despite Western protestations).

It doesn't take much to rearrange either turn them into simple Klingon/Generic-Warrior-Race-o-the-Week plots.

Well that's the narrative parallel. Star Trek is a prominent example in mainstream with its rich introspective narrative of cultural reflection. Not sure how it ranks with that among sci-fi in general but it's significant.

It's only real competitor in the pop culture sphere is Rod Serling's impact through not just the Twilight Zone but many other things he wrote or was involved in.

I watched Seven Days in May and instantly felt his hand in it before I checked and found he wrote the screenplay. It his style of show where discussing the issues at hand is what comes first. I can disagree with the two sides taken (IMO, they were both right and wrong, the problem was how they were split on issues that ultimately made both wrong), but I can appreciate watching a movie that really wanted to talk about one of the major issues of the Cold War right as the Vietnam War began to get going for the US, that is containment vs confrontation.

I saw Seven Days and I immediately thought ''yay! someone else remembers one of my favourite TV series from the late nineties'' and then I saw Rod Serling and I got sad.

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

[Deledrius]

I saw Seven Days and I immediately thought ''yay! someone else remembers one of my favourite TV series from the late nineties'' and then I saw Rod Serling and I got sad.

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

I recently re-watched the pilot, probably the first time since it originally aired. It holds up pretty well for what it was. Not a bad show.

[Robovski]

Star Trek, despite its premise, is not about meeting aliens.

It's about meeting humans.

Hence why they need to be similar to us in order to do metaphors about war, poverty, HMOs, or holoporn.

It's a Sci-Fi spin on a lot of old Western stories where the plots dealt straight up with cultural differences.

A good example is the stock plot of a Chinese man's queue being cut off and the protagonist having to stop him from enacting blood vengeance on the asshole cowboy who did the act. Another is how ever single TV Western seems to have at least one episode dealing with a Japanese Samurai who found his way to America, and for whatever reason, needs to kill himself (The interesting bit if, unlike the Chinese queue one, the Samurai stories can split between talking the guy out of seppuku while others resolve the matter with him killing himself despite Western protestations).

It doesn't take much to rearrange either turn them into simple Klingon/Generic-Warrior-Race-o-the-Week plots.

Well that's the narrative parallel. Star Trek is a prominent example in mainstream with its rich introspective narrative of cultural reflection. Not sure how it ranks with that among sci-fi in general but it's significant.

It's only real competitor in the pop culture sphere is Rod Serling's impact through not just the Twilight Zone but many other things he wrote or was involved in.

I watched Seven Days in May and instantly felt his hand in it before I checked and found he wrote the screenplay. It his style of show where discussing the issues at hand is what comes first. I can disagree with the two sides taken (IMO, they were both right and wrong, the problem was how they were split on issues that ultimately made both wrong), but I can appreciate watching a movie that really wanted to talk about one of the major issues of the Cold War right as the Vietnam War began to get going for the US, that is containment vs confrontation.

I saw Seven Days and I immediately thought ''yay! someone else remembers one of my favourite TV series from the late nineties'' and then I saw Rod Serling and I got sad.

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

I remember it, it was on in Chicago on Wednesdays before Voyager came on. I really liked it.

[Eishtmo]

I saw Seven Days and I immediately thought ''yay! someone else remembers one of my favourite TV series from the late nineties'' and then I saw Rod Serling and I got sad.

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

I do remember it quite well.

[Beastro]

I saw Seven Days and I immediately thought ''yay! someone else remembers one of my favourite TV series from the late nineties'' and then I saw Rod Serling and I got sad.

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

I do recall it, IIRC Anthony Le Pagia's brother was the star.

TBH I never would have made the connection though from that movie's title.

[Alex]

Gary Mitchell was said to be unusually strong in ESP even before he got his crazy god powers; it was stated in his episode that the Federation conducted tests on humans who demonstrated ESP, but we never saw it.

If you freeze-frame the shots of them looking at the c.v.s of Gary Mitchell and Dr. Dehner, you can read all about their various different ESPer skills!

[griffeytrek]

So rewatched this since Chuck has fixed/reposted it. It dawned on me that for a relatively meh third season episode, there really is a lot of deep ongoing lore that would appear to come from this one. Aside from the obvious Geordi's Visor comes from the dress's tech. The new show Prodigy while seemingly most closely related to Voyager, would appear to draw a huge amount from Is There In Truth No Beauty. We have the main cast member being a Medusan in a robot suit. And it seems like his intended but forgotten purpose was to be the Navigator for the ships experimental Protostar hyper warp drive.

[Frustration]

Sigh. No one seems to remember that show. Although time travel may be involved.

Great premise, terrible follow-up episodes. Demonstrating that you really need to work out some acceptable plots to use while you think up new ones when starting a show with a concept that high.

[Frustration]

The idea that a moment of visual stimulus could destroy any human mind is just silly. Now, if we were talking Langford Basilisks, that might be somewhat plausible - but they require more than a moment's exposure and take more time to cause an effect. And even then we don't really expect to find them in reality - we're the long product of evolution, after all, and the worst failure we can plausibly expect is a 'warm reboot' of a mild seizure and return to consciousness.

It's just a conceit in a 1960s TV show. Not all the ideas in science fiction, even good science fiction, need to be good.

[AndrewGPaul]

As far as I remember from David Langford’s BLIT, direct viewing of the “parrot” image (which is what inspired my avatar image) does in fact kill nearly instantly. The one character who succumbs to it during the story takes a longer exposure, but that’s because he’s been getting repeated glimpses of partial or distorted versions, in his peripheral vision.

BLIT is one of the things that sprang to my mind, too ( you can read it here). Another is a TNG novel where the Enterprise encountered an alien ship which caused severe mental upset to those crew who viewed the interior. Geordi could view it with no issues due to his VISOR, and Data could reprogram his senses to cope, but then suffered the same distress from viewing the “normal” surroundings of the Enterprise.