So, it’s come to this. Our favorite crew against these plastic-looking blobs on the planet Deneva that afflict pain and mind control against their victims. In a nutshell, that sums up the episode “Operation: Annihilate!”
In this episode, we finally get to meet some unfortunate victims of Captain Kirk’s family. His brother Sam (played by Shatner with a moustache) is DOA in this plot. Aurelan, his sister-in-law, and Peter, his nephew. Aurelan dies in a very memorable scene in sickbay. Peter never really comes out of it, at least in the footage that made the cut. There was a scene filmed, intended to be at the very end of the episode, in which Peter appears on the bridge and tells his Uncle that he is staying behind on Deneva.
Scene with Peter Kirk that was cut from the episode
Let’s take a moment to talk about the creatures themselves. Take a look at this image:
“It doesn’t even look real!” You said it, Yeoman!
I know the show was on a tight budget, but could they have made the parasites a little more believable? It doesn’t take away from the potential of the story line for me if they are 100% realistic or not. The viewer has to suspend their disbelief to the max on this aspect of the story. I feel that someone who doesn’t know what they’re watching could flip over to this and instantly think the show is hokey because of these rather fake looking parasites.
What saves this episode for me is the excellent performance, as always, from Leonard Nimoy. Spock has to go through a lot here to find the solution of how to cure the Denevans of this affliction. Isn’t it convenient that he has the forgotten inner eyelid? Those Vulcans, saving the day in unexpected ways!
So, that ends the first season of Star Trek. I will be writing a post in the next few days of my impressions of the season as a whole. Of course, the regular weekly reviews will resume on September 15th with “Amok Time.”
I had trouble getting to sleep. This has been common for me if I have to try to sleep in bed that I’m not used to. I’m just so used to sleeping on the couch in the living room that my body has a hard time doing anything different. I think another contributing factor is that I’m not active enough during the day and am not truly tired when I try to go to sleep sometimes.
I only slept for 34% of the test. In case you’re curious, the test was from around 10:30pm through 5:00am. I distinctly remember just lying there, trying to count sheep and trying to just shut down. It wasn’t working very well for me. The tech said they did get some data, but it’s very possible that they will have to do a second test. This is common. This test would more than likely be a fitting for the CPAP machine. They have to get the pressure that I would need to use figured out during this second test. I should know something in around two weeks.
I did come home and sleep some more, so I’ll be OK. I think that I need to start being more active right now to try and help the initial problem. I definitely can do that.
I am sitting here in a room at the UT Sleep Clinic about to undergo a sleep study. I have had problems sleeping for quite a long time. It’s about time that I did something about it.
It is probably a safe bet that I am going to end up wearing a mask when I sleep. They’ve already tried it on me. It isn’t that bad! As long as it helps me to fall asleep and stay asleep without sitting up and sleeping in a sitting position, I think I can do this.
Recently we got tired of the arrangement of our living room. I felt that the speakers were not configured properly to totally enjoy watching a movie in 5.1 surround sound at home. So, we reconfigured our living room and arranged the speakers in a more favorable configuration. It sounded pretty good. It needs to be said here that we don’t actually have the .1 part. You see, we never bought a subwoofer. That got me to thinking, “Gee, I should really do something about that!”
Well, we are going to get one. But then another problem came up. Newer Blu-ray movies are in sound formats that our receiver can’t decode. The standard formats are Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. Even newer than that are Dolby Atmos and DTS-X, which are more directional sound formats than traditional surround sound. A favorite YouTube channel of mine, TechMoan, has a great video where he installed some Dolby Atmos speakers in his living room, and explains Dolby Atmos as well, you can watch that at this link.
What spurred this thinking on was when I was watching one of my favorite movies recently, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Greg noticed that the Blu-ray had both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. While we could decode the Dolby sound, when we tried to use the DTS track, it just came back in 2 channels instead of 6. Our receiver is a 10-year old model. Here’s a photo in case you’re curious:
That’s a Sony STR DG-810. It’s actually capable of 6.1 channels, you could add a surround back speaker to the mix. It’s a good unit, we got it from someone here in Knoxville via Craigslist for only $75, at a time when a very old RCA receiver we had started emitting very bad ground loop noise. In a very strapped budget mode, it was a good buy at that time.
Now, however, we have a more flexible budget to play with. After looking around at various websites, we decided to go with the Onkyo TX-NR555. This amp is a beast, at least as far as we’re concerned. It’s capable of 7.2 channels, 80W of power per channel, for up to 980W. Here is a photo of the new receiver in its home:
Let me tell you, this receiver is sweet. It takes a complicated setup of several devices in our home theater and lets us run it through one unit. It eliminated a whole bunch of cables from our wiring. That is a major fringe benefit. It’s very convenient to be able to do that. Watching CE3K with the true DTS-HD Master Audio is like night and day. Particularly when you hear alien ship flybys. The whooshes in surround sound make it very real, like you are really there.
I am very happy with this purchase. It was about time that we upgraded!
Maybe someday, the price of 4K will come down enough to where we might consider that purchase. Probably not for several years, at least.
It goes without saying that “The City on the Edge of Forever” is and always has been my favorite Star Trek episode. There has never been any question of that. But what makes it so great? My review this week will attempt to explain why *I* think so.
The story is and of itself a great premise. I say this of the finished episode. There has been lots of articles and books written about the writing process of this episode. In case you don’t know, the story idea was being worked on way back before the first season actually began filming. The story was written, and rewritten, and rewritten again before we ended up with was was telecast 50 years ago on April 6th, 1967.
I must say, it was a true classic on the first viewing. It remains a classic today for me and many others for one simple reason: it is deep. The characters are so good in this story. Kirk in love where he shouldn’t be. Spock being the voice of reason he always is. McCoy is the “random element” (as Spock puts it at one point), and Edith Keeler, played by the always dynamic Joan Collins, is a wonderful, fascinating, dynamic character. She is one of the best characters in any Trek episode.
The Guardian of Forever is a character in this too. This mysterious portal of a long dead civilization that is the catalyst for the problem in this story is so fascinating. I wish they would have found a way to do another story or two with the Guardian being possibly utilized in a more planned fashion that what happened here. I know there is an episode of the animated series (“Yesteryear”) and several Trek novels that have explored the possibilities of the Guardian. Honestly, I never read many Trek novels, although I do own a copy of the novel “Imzadi” where the Guardian is used by Riker to travel back in time.
The climax of this episode is so riveting. I have never watched this episode and have ever felt anything but tense and shocked by the decision that Kirk had to make to restore history to what it should be. Just watch this clip.
I don’t know if I could have done what Kirk did given that situation. It’s tough to make a personal sacrifice like that, even when the stakes of Earth’s future is on the line. William Shatner plays the scene with all of his great talent.
I just can’t say enough good things about how much I have always enjoyed this episode. It honestly has always deserved the recognition that it has gotten as one of the best episodes of any version of Star Trek there has ever been, before or since.
Next week, the season finale! Blobs take over people’s minds, and well, Spock almost goes nuts!
Tomorrow we head back home. It has been a memorable trip, in more ways than one. It goes without saying that, given the jobs that Greg and I are in, we are taking a trip to get away from the grind of Breaking News. In this case, we took the Breaking News with us.
Who knew that the I-85 Collapse would happen the day we got here? Fate just plays a strange game sometimes. In this case, it was just mere coincidence. It really didn’t affect anything we planned to do at all, nor did we think it would. It just created a minor problem in the long run.
This trip still turned out to be a major success, and we have a story to remember for a LONG time.
OK, so that post title was total clickbait. Sorry.
But, after the collapse of the Northbound I-85 bridge yesterday, which happened to be the first of 4 days here in Atlanta for me and Greg, you gotta ask yourself, “Boy, did we pick a great time to come here or what?”
It will take a LONG time to get that section of both sides of the roadway fixed. We are still managing to get around town OK. It pays to use Google Maps and listed to traffic reports on WSB-FM 95.5… Depend on it.
Ugh, sorry, thought that was one of their promos.
If you are reading this and you live in the Atlanta area (and we just might be future residents ourselves), please take it easy on each other. It’s not going to be easy to deal with this for the next few months, believe me. If you are resilient and can work around the problems, everything will turn out OK in the end.
By the way, if you are looking for a comical solution to this bridge mess, this tweet I saw today was HILARIOUS.
Where in the world do I begin to analyze this very confusing mess of an episode?
Any attempt by me to try and describe the plot here would probably confuse you even more and might melt your brain. Suffice it to say that I don’t think anyone could do any better or worse. If you are curious, just read the entry at Memory Alpha (the Star Trek wiki.)
This show was very troubled at every stage of production. One of the great blogs out there that I love to read is Star Trek Fact Check by Michael Kmet. He has done a whole series of articles looking through production documents trying to make some sense of what was going on behind the scenes in the production of this episode. His blog was started to try and clear up misinformation printed in other books, but on top of that there is lots of great information about what was going on during the development of this disastrous episode. Here is a link to Part 1 of his look at the production. He will be writing more on the topic in the future.
It’s well documented that John Drew Barrymore had agreed to guest star in this episode and play Lazarus, only to not show up for work. Desilu complained to the Screen Actors Guild and he got suspended for 6 months as a result. Robert Brown had to step in on practically no notice and play this role. He tried, but I don’t think any actor could have salvaged what was already a watered down, confusing script.
Lazarus #1 (the bad one)
Lazarus #2 (the good one)
Let’s examine some of the many story points that I have problems with here:
The propensity for Lazarus to continue to fall off of cliffs and ledges is just flooring. He does this multiple times throughout the episode.
Lazarus’ First Fall in Act One
Yes, he falls again in Act Three!
I can understand it happening the first time, but *two* times? Even the most inexperienced starship Captain would not let him go near a rock formation after the first time. Maybe Kirk just hated Lazarus. The galaxy may never know.
The cheapened Engineering set. A set was already built, why did they go to this crappy setup?
Not the great elaborate Engineering set we’re used to…
I mean, it’s nothing but a small room with various consoles we’ve seen in previous episodes. Granted, it was described in earlier drafts as the “Energizing Lab.” Couldn’t they just have called it the “Dilithium Chamber Room” or something more conducive to it *not* being Engineering? Another blemishing script detail that was overlooked.
Speaking of which, in that photo, is Lieutenant Masters, played by Janet MacLachlan. She does as good as she can do here, but her role was to be so much bigger than it actually ended up being. I refer to of course the fact that Masters and Lazarus #1 (the bad one) was supposed to have some sort of romantic relationship. As the Fact Check article mentions, “Space Seed” also had a female crew member in love with the antagonist. One of the stories had to be changed. As a matter of fact, Stan Robertson, the NBC Standards and Practices representative assigned to Star Trek, suggested that Masters be a civilian instead of a crew member in order to make the plot in this episode make more sense. That suggestion fell on deaf ears apparently, Gene Coon removed this aspect of the story. I felt that if Robertson’s idea had been utilized, it might have made the story stronger and more coherent to me.
I get the story. I get what it was aiming for. Two beings in parallel universes. The bad one, the negative one, trying to destroy the positive one and bring down two universes in the process. Matter and anti-matter. Like I said, it’s not that I don’t get the story idea at all. It’s just that the execution of this is very, very sloppy, awful, painful, downright…. I think I’ve ran out of adjectives to describe the debauchery that is going on here.
I don’t think there is an actual soul out there that even likes this episode. Is it the worst episode of the entire series? I’m going to go out on a limb and say it very well could be. If “Spock’s Brain” didn’t exist, I am sure that a lot of people would think that this would be the worst. If you were to say this was the worst episode of the first season, then you would not be debated for an instant.
Fortunately, next week, we go from what could be the worst, to my absolute favorite episode of the entire Original Series:
As I sit here typing this, we are about to embark on another adventure. Destination: Asheville, NC. We haven’t visited there for at least 5 years, I think it’s well overdue for a visit!
I am definitely going to go to some record stores while we’re down there.
By the way, did you know our music collection is mostly listed online? No? Well, go to this link and look at my collection on Discogs.
While we were out a shopping center yesterday, some idiot decided to, well, be an idiot. This person stole my Human Rights Campaign magnet off the back our car. Not only that, they went further and bent our license plate. My initial feelings was anger, sadness, irritation, you name it and I was probably experiencing it simultaneously.
As a testament to how wonderful Greg always is, he listened, reassured, told me everything would be OK, and calmed me down. I made a Facebook post after that initial reaction died down:
I had a great reaction to that, and for that I thank you all. I feel better today…
