My Brain Hurts
Every Sunday night, the local NBC affiliate plays the old Star Trek with remastered special effects. The latest was "Spock's Brain." This episode, which started off the ill-fated third season, is considered one of the worst episodes.
It's not that bad. (When I was a kid, I thought it was great.) Its main trouble is not the silly plot, but that it lacks drama. There's not that much in the way of Kirk and company finding Spock's brain and putting it back where it belongs.
I haven't seen the episode in a years, and here are a few of the things I noticed:
There's a shot that I don't believe they'd ever done before. Looking over the Captain's chair and control panel, the characters act in front of the main viewscreen.
Humans can live on life support quite a while with no brain, but a Vulcan (as both McCoy and Spock know) can last only 24 hours.
They're still using fahrenheit.
There is some bad writing, but I think the worst is when Kirk questions a surface inhabitant of the glacial planet. He's essentially a caveman, and, for no good reason (except it will matter in the plot), Kirk starts asking him about their cavewomen. (You could argue this is part of the search for Kara, who stole Spock's brain, but Kirk seems to be off on another tangent.)
Kara presses a button on her wrist and this knocks out the landing party. They wake up wearing belts so that when she presses a button they'll be immobilized. Were these belts necessary?
What's the deal with Scotty's hair?
When Spock is reunited with his brain, he starts talking about how the planet had a great civilization thousands of years ago, but it regressed to where they don't know anything. He then says (and I doubt many have noticed this, since the point is he's just talking while the others laugh at how he won't shut up) this hasn't happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. So, with all the planets and civilizations they're aware of, there's no example of regression as significant as what happened 2000 years earlier on Earth, not throughout the entire galaxy? How odd.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:06 AM
13 Comments:
The Roman Empire bit is not only Earth-centric, but bizarrely Western European-centric. After the fifth century CE, civilization in Western Europe pretty much collapsed and literacy was mostly confined to the monasteries. But neither the Near East nor the Balkans experienced this collapse at all. Odd that Spock didn't know this. Maybe he's been reading too much Diderot and Voltaire?
I do think this is an awful episode, but "so awful that it's good" -- unlike some episodes that are simply boring with almost no redeeming qualities, like "Immunity Syndrome" and "Gamesters of Triskelion".
Scotty wore his hair slicked back for the entire third season, IIRC.
Are the remastered shows worth watching for the new effects? I have the DVDs of three-fourths of the show (season one, season two, and the animated series) and I like them because they include the scenes that we almost never saw, because the shows were trimmed in syndication.
When I first got into Trek, it was during a time that they were not being syndicated in L.A. (although one friend who lived on a high hill in the Valley could pick up the show from a San Diego station). So I read all the stories in the James Blish books before seeing them. Eventually they were syndicated on channel 13, and later channel 5, and I managed to see every single episode.
These days, I especially enjoy seeing shows that I didn't like, like "Elaan of Troyius", because in most cases I only saw them once, and that was thirty years ago. So it's almost like finding a brand new episode of ST:TOS!
I've always liked "The Gamesters Of Triskelion" and, whatever else you think about "The Immunity Syndrome," you gotta admit the the death toll is impressive.
The new effects are nice, but they only amount to a few shots every episode. Better starships and planets, but not much more. I'm happy to watch the episodes again on TV, but I wouldn't replaces old DVDs, or anything like that.
The single most amazing thing about "Spock's Brain"...
...is that it's still being discussed almost 40 years after it originally aired.
"Star Trek" fandom runs DEEP.
Todd
P.S. I had a similar experience to you recently after seeing "Friday's Child" for the first time in decades. Bad, yes, but not as godawful as I remember it being (nostalgia?).
P.P.S. "The Omega Glory", however, still sucks Big Time.
While I guess I agree that the Triskelion episode may not have a great plot, butI think it is one of the most memorable episodes and is the one I think of whenever I hear the the Star Trek action theme. The day-glo colors, the hot fighting girl with the peroxide hair and shocking halter top, the quatloos.... I can think of at least two homages to that episode- once on the Simpsons and once during the newsteams' rumble in Anchorman (though they also borrowed from Planet of the Apes and Batman). Something tells me there are others- Anyone else know?
I'm surprised Spock didn't give the classic Star Trek list of three examples - two from Earth pre-1967 and 1 from another planet and generally unpronounceable. (Like great generals in the mode of George Washington, Napolean and Ramareleus of Negatoralia 3.
Speaking of Rome, was there any reason that Romulans had so Roman references in their names? Is "Romulus" actually the Romulan name for their planet or is that just what earthlings call it?
Speaking of 1960s TV Sci Fi, I've started watching the original Doctor Who episodes on YouTube. I've finished the first doctor, which ran from 1963 to 1965 I think. I'm in the first season of the second doctor (1966). Seeing as this series was more or less contemporary with Star Trek, why are the production values so much worse than Star Trek? Even into the 70s, When I actually watched the series as it was released in America, the production values were mostly laughable compared with even the king of rubber suits, Lost in Space.
Everything about Star Trek has been parodied. It's hard to believe there was a time when SNL did its first season parody that it still seemed sort of fresh.
Perhapst he most famous fight in Star Trek (along with its famous fighting theme) is in "Amok Time." (Check out http://youtube.com/watch?v=XyhhFzE5O5U&mode=related&search=.) It's been parodied in Cable Guy and on Futurama.
Star Trek was an expensive American network show (though Roddenberry would have liked to spend more). I'm not sure if British TV had the same sort of budgets.
As to the Romulan name, the Vulcans have the same problem. (I guess we couldn't pronounce their real name). And I don't care who named the Medusans, that's just rude.
Are we forgetting Somebody's law of planetary development which states that the Roman Empire (and presumably other historical Earth events) happened in other places throughout (but with alternate results)(I'm not good on episode names but its the one where Kirk and McCoy fight as gladiators while a very straight sports announcer calls the action- apparently that planet had not yet evolved ESPN slickness).
This would explain (using that term very generously) why there are so many classical (Earth) allusions throughout the galaxy even in the Next Generation universe where in the last (and probably worst) Star Trek movie, the Romulan's sister planet was called Remus.
It was always part of the 'official' Star Trek backstory that the Romulans came from twin planets Romulus and Remus. We had named them that, of course, because during the previous Romulan war we had never seen or talked to actual Romulans, so we had no idea what they called themselves.
Besides, everyone in space speaks English, so why would this suprise you?
In World War II movies of the previous era, the Nazis and Japanese spoke English too. I will take that problem as an assumed theatrical necessity (there's a better term which I can't think of right now) rather than as a flaw as in the logical construct of the series.
Wasn't there a universal translator in everyone's ear which automatically translated speech into understandable language to the hearer. This goes some way to explaining why the characters can understand each other (as opposed to why the viewers can understand them)
The universal translator is in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, isn't it?
Also, should we call "Remus" a "sister" planet? Wouldn't it be a brother? Or maybe an uncle.
That was a babel fish. I specifically remember a cylindrical device used in Star Trek though it may have been in one of the Pilot episodes where they have funny uniforms
The cylindrical "universal translator" appeared once in the old show: in the second-season episode Metamorphosis.
Obviously, such a device is totally impossible, unless it uses telepathy. You land on a new planet, and a blue guy says to you, "Randsfd Prizzt!" By what means could you translate this?
If telepathy is possible, then a device like this could work by reading the mind of the speaker. Of course, that assumes that aliens have similar minds to us, and that a mechanical device can read them. And if all this were possible, then why couldn't this same device read the mind of someone who wasn't speaking? That would have been very convenient on many occasions.
And no matter how you slice it, a translator would contradict those occasions that the Enterprise crew encountered a semantic misunderstanding with the aliens they met.
As far as parallel development -- they encounted a parallel Roman Empire on one planet, and there was another time that they encountered a world where the continents were shaped just like on Earth, but these were exceptional cases, and the crew expressed surprise when it happened. (The Romans were expressly stated to be speaking ENGLISH, which is impossible if you think about the history of the English language and how it depended, in so many ways, on Britain not being controlled by a single empire.)
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