Obsession:
The Plot:
Kirk attempts, at any cost, to destroy a vampiristic creature he
met before as a young officer. (Tivo.)
So we have another of the episodes in which Kirk encounters a
mysterious creature that feeds on humans, and decides to kill it. Kirk
gets a lot of good press for not killing the horta in 'The Devil in the
Dark', although that seems to be the be curious out-of-character moment
for him. The salt vampire of 'The Man Trap' is killed even though it
would seem common commercial salt production would be plenty to keep it
safely controlled.
The flying space pancakes in 'Operation- Annihilate' are killed
off, although the suggestion that they are parts of a mass mind seems to
suggest that it might be possible to communicate and reason with it.
It's hard to know what to reason about (``Stop killing us'' ``Who are
you?''), but in 24th Century Trek they'd undoubtedly try it out.
The giant space amoeba of 'The Immunity Syndrome' is ... well,
there's probably little to be done about that given how lethal and
mindless it seems to be, although the existence of one does suggest
there should be a giant space ecosystem we don't see again. (Yeah,
there's the giant space pancake that thought the Enterprise-D was its
mommy, but that's a *much* smaller creature and Team Picard really
couldn't handle it.)
This is the episode to give us Kirk's history on the Farragut,
giving about the biggest lump of backstory we ever get on the Young
Kirk. He re****ted Ben Finney for inattention to duty, and he survived
one of those many horrid events that happen to other star****ps.
This also gives us our second round of The Obsessed Captain,
after 'The Doomsday Machine', and the first time the obsessed captain is
the Hero. In this context, it's kind of amazing nobody bothers to talk
about Moby-Dick, but that wouldn't become lodged as the Official Star
Trek Indicator Of Being A Driven Captain until 'The Wrath of Khan',
whereupon it became just something you did with captains every couple
dozen episodes so that they could act all driven and borderline crazy.
I wonder if any of the Trek writers ever actually read Moby-Dick.
(For all its reputation as an impenetrable lump of text, I
liked Moby-Dick. It may have more information about 19th Century
Whaling than there *is* information about 19th Century Whaling in it,
but the style -- particularly in how it's mostly a bunch of little
chapters on different topics, most of them having nothing to do with
the plot which was pretty well covered by the Mister Magoo adaptation
anyway -- worked for me.)
I'd always had good recollections of this episode, but in
watching the remastering it seemed more stitched-together than it had
before, possibly because they've done the exotic alien creature able to
kill at a touch several times before, and components like the
last-minute trans****ter rescue were *also* done already, particularly in
'The Changeling'. That comes across more as padding this time, though.
One of the elements of this -- the cloud creature charing and
inhabiting the Enterprise -- would be reused in 'The Lights of Zetar'.
Sometimes I like that episode; sometimes I don't. When I'm in the mood
for it, that's a very creepy show and I feel spooked by the Zetar cloud
intrusion. It is a neat gimmick, though, and it feels like it's
underused, although energy critters are always hanging around the
holodeck in the 24th century.
Thoughts While Watching:
- Tritantium: yet another exotic material we'll never hear from
again except in technical manuals.
- Spock phasers off a specimen without even starting to wonder
if they're living rocks again.
- I guess the salad forks are to make this look more like
geology.
- I like the modest crane shot used for sending out the raw
deadmeat.
- Red alert is apparently more than just a state of bridge work.
- They have a rendezvous in eight hours and they're prospecting?
- Spock doesn't know the curious properties of di-kironium in
its previous 'natural' infestation? His omniscience is slipping.
- Well, at least they don't use the metaphor of a door opening
.... and closing ... to explain why the sensors don't pick up what
they're designed to pick up here.
- They're dead! Ignore their breathing please. At least Rizzo
made it, although he would have to be re-formed as a Muppet.
- ``What happened is medically impossible!'' Unless you use
something like tele****ters to bring them out.
- ``Check those record tapes. I want your medical analysis as
quickly as possible.''
TOM: Oh, what, now Kirk wants McCoy to do *research* on top of
calling people dead? Next he's gonna want McCoy to try resuscitating
somebody.
- Kirk never imagined a being which could disguise or even
transform itself under sensor analysis even though half the
nigh-omnipotent beings they encounter do that trick.
- It's a good thing Garrovick proves im****tant to the plot or
else the close-up on him as he comes out the turbolift would be really
odd.
- 94 mark 7, angle of elevation 6 degrees. What?
- ``What was the size of the thing you saw, Ensign?''
CROW: I can't really say, it's too hard to do the special
effects right.
- Scott decides to take the time to screw up the engines royally
in a procedure we've never heard about before and will never hear of
again.
- McCoy skimmed over the medical record tapes but the Garrovick
and Kirk connections didn't pop out? For that matter, the im****tant
points of the deaths weren't right up in the first paragraph? Who
writes these re****ts, the Committee Against Comprehension?
- ``Captain Garrovick was very im****tant to you, wasn't he,
Jim?''
TOM: McCoy's got his full Deanna Troi game on today.
- Extended warp eight isn't so good for the Enterprise. This
week.
- It's a matter-energy creature using gravitational fields for
propulsion. This is practically a festival of 60s technobabble for the
show.
- Nurse Chapel gets to actually deploy psychology and
personality. Shame it ends up backfiring and almost destroying the
****p, not to mention nearly killing Spock. That'll teach her to have a
personality. But this is the sort of thing that teaches people not to
use real switches.
- ``There. It's coming, sir.'' Someone remembered Nichelle
Nichols is seeing Gene Roddenberry.
- Flu****ng the radioactive waste into the ventilation system ...
this is back in the days when a few dozen rem were good for you.
- So now there's a time-synch thing to throw out of?
- So, now, the first time Garrovick almost got people killed it
was a momentary pause which would have made no difference; the second
time it was an unintentional action which could easily have killed Spock
if the script were willing to kill a title character.
- It's lucky for Kirk that Spock concluded the creature is about
to spawn, as this cuts off any question of pursuit.
- Antimatter is superpowered magic again. Maybe it's some kind
of antimatter-catalyzed reaction.
- By the way, those antigravity hand-holds clearly don't simply
work by disabling ****p's gravity. They appear to be rated for 57,000
g^{k}s, whatever the heck that is.
- 30,000 kilometers is apparently the maximum trans****ter range,
based on it being chosen as maximum range when a trans****t was
necessary.
- I wonder if the trans****ter rescue was just written in at the
last minute when they realized the show was a bit short and they already
paid for the last minutes of 'The Changeling' script.
- ``I'd like to talk to you about your father ... several tall
stories I think you'd like to hear.''
Wonder if the guy playing Garrovick thought he was going to ever
appear on the show again ever.
- Wow, there's a mighty neat-looking crater the Enterprise
leaves behind in the remastering. They're lucky that planet wasn't
inhabited by people, although I suppose that the cloud creature would
have taken care of that.
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