Random Star Trek discussion

Yes!
Its lined up right again!
"Naked Time" and "Naked Now" back-to-back!!

I'll never not be baffled as to why Roddenberry thought having "The Naked Now" was the best possible follow up to the pilot.

This episode probably would've gone over a lot better if it had aired at a point when we knew who these characters were a bit better.

Three's Company, season 4, episode 12.

Harry Mudd!!

Senor Naugles!

According to Wikipedia, that's exactly what Roddenberry was trying to show viewers with that episode.

Star Trek: The Next Generation's creator, Gene Roddenberry, wanted to include an episode revealing the characters' motivations to the audience early on in the series. As a basis, he turned to the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Naked Time."

I kind of get it, if he wanted the characters to act more reserved or secretive most of the time while the audience remembers what sort of people they really are, but I don't know how well it worked.

At least Picard was responsible enough to make sure Jim Yoshida was never seen again.

"Contagion".

The ready-room replicator originally had a sliding door like the TOS/DIS flood slots.
Except the TNG version is transparent and tinted instead of opaque yellow.

Seen this episode scadzillion times, and I never noticed while staring right at it.
My mind must have been wandering every single other time.

"Mudd's Women".

I know less and less what to make of this episode every time I see it.

The venus drug turns out to be a fucking jellybean placebo, right?

So....why does the brunette in the green dress set off the medical scanner when it's shut off?
If she's not radioactive or something, cuz the pills are jellybeans, is this episode trying to tell us magic is real in the Trek universe?

My head-canon is either....

1. Like the guy in "Bedknobs And Broomsticks" Harry thinks he's fake, but he's real. He bought jellybeans at an alien gas station with the intention they were placebos, but they were infused with alien vitamin Z, which has the exact same effect as venus drug. For whatever reason, Starfleet tricorders of this era can't read vitamin Z. At least without an upgrade patch.

2. The whole thing is Kirk or McCoy's wet dream.

...nope, Kirk switches the pills for fakes.
Dammit.
I guess it's #2 then.

https://twitter.com/pencilscratchin/status/1661619530932666368?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

I wonder how many of these Forbin has kitbashed together over the years...

Heh.

DS9's "Sanctuary" tonight. The one with the weird-looking refugees from the Gamma Quadrant. Their society is female-led and they thought the wormhole would lead them to their new homeworld of "Kentanna."

The word Quintana is pronounced the same way and, in Spanish, is the feminine word for "country house."

Ages ago, I saw an interview with one of the writers for the Adam West Batman series. His hobby was to learn foreign languages and one of the things that he liked to do was work non-English obscenities into an episode to see if anyone would notice. Eventually, the producers got letters from people complaining about it, so they told the writer not only to stop doing it, but that they'd have to check his scripts for obscenities. Now, this didn't bother him, because he knew they didn't speak anything other than English, but he played by their rules, like a good boy. Until they rejected a word in his script that they thought was obscene. It wasn't. So, he replaced it with the most offensive word in any language that he knew. They said, "Looks great! Let's get this to production." When they got the complaint letters, they never asked to check one of his scripts again.

So, a friend and I were talking about "The Doomsday Machine" episode, and I pointed out that they just left the fucker there at the end of the episode. No calling of a Federation tow-truck to haul it to the nearest starbase and let the finest minds in the galaxy figure it all out. Nope. My friend responded that perhaps they intended it to be a floating memorial. That's when it hit me: The big fuck up with leaving that thing behind that I never once thought of until now.

I've said in the past that you'd think that they'd want to inspect any of the tech that might have been left behind. Not only to see if you can learn anything from it, but also, HTF do you know that it doesn't have repair robots that are going to pop out and start fixing things? Or worse yet, all you did was give it the equivalent of a turbine flame out and as soon as the power levels drop to zero for a long enough period of time, it'll start back up. Wouldn't that really fuck up your day? Besides, that may not be the only one of those things out there, so you really want to figure something to kill them that doesn't involve sending a big ol' starship up the pooper.

This time, however, I realized that even if the insides of that thing had been turned to glass, you can't let anybody have that thing. Why? The Enterprise's phasers were useless against the neutronium hull. Now, let's say you connect a couple of warp engines to the pooper side of that thing. You now have what some would call "a really fast, pointy stick." Other people would call it a "giant space dildo." Now, what happens if you point your giant space dildo at a planet and punch the "go really fast" button on the controls?

Will both the planet and the space dildo be vaporized in the collision? Or will the dildo punch through the planet? Yeah, that'd be a real bummer wouldn't it? You're there in Quark's Bar on DS-9, someone asks you what's your home planet, and when you tell them, they say, "Wasn't that the place that got fucked to death by a giant space dildo?" Ouch. That hurts.

Okay, so the Feds grab, tuck it safely away where no one can find it, and nobody outside of the crew of the Enterprise and high-ranking Starfleet officers knows what the thing is and can do, so you don't have to worry about anyone coming to take it. Problem solved, right? Nope. Because while Kirk & Co. don't know what's coming, we do. Specifically the Borg. If you can fuck a planet to death with your giant space dildo, what do you think that thing could do to at least the first few Cubes it encountered? I'm betting it could fuck them to death, too. Then, I'm sure that at some point the Borg will recalibrate their shields by adding more inverse muons to their shields or something, I don't know. It'll be one of those vanilla bullshit things like you get at Starbucks or something.

Bummer, but that thing's still got plenty of uses, provided the Borg don't figure out how to punch holes in the thing. It makes a handy shield to protect other ships as they close in. Or to protect damaged ships so that they can retreat and repair. And if the Borg do manage to figure out how to punch holes in the thing, and you still defeat them anyway, great! Because when you crack their tech, you'll know how to do it too. Which means you can make better ships. And you're gonna need 'em. Because when everyone else sees what that giant space dildo can do, they're gonna want one of their own. And since you seem to know where to find them, we'll just take yours while you go look for another one. Okay? Thanks. Have fun now.

Sure, it might be a bit much to expect the Federation to whip out the ol' giant space dildo to deal with the Borg, the first time the Enterprise encountered them. But by the time they realize shit is going to go down at Wolf 359, I'm figuring they're gonna dust it off for that. Up until that point, you could maybe say that it was like Churchill allowing the bombing of Coventry to occur, because if the British did anything significant to stop it, there was a good chance that the Germans would realize that the Allies had cracked the Enigma machine. But Wolf 359 is a bit of a different story.

Imagine you're talking to someone in a bar and after they tell you their credentials to your satisfaction, they drop this little bombshell on you, "Oh, yeah, we totally could have stopped 9/11 from happening even after the planes took off, but to do it, we'd have had to reveal that we had some advanced technology nobody knew about, and that would just make things worse." To which you will undoubtedly respond, "Worse? How the fuck could it be worse?" Hmm. Not sure which I would find more disquieting: That my companion doesn't have a good answer, or that he does. Anyway, that's the kind of thing we're talking about here.

Okay, we know that both McCoy and Spock were alive and well for at least part of the series. Scotty got restored after the Battle of Wolf 359, so the Borg probably wouldn't have meant that much to him. But, presumably, out of a crew of 400 (give or take a few dozen red shirts) and say, maybe a dozen flag officers, who knew about the giant space dildo, there were probably 50 or more still around who might remember it. Presumably, they would have ways of contacting people who could put such information to good use that didn't involve them tweeting at the President of the Federation. You'd think that they'd do so. And if they couldn't get those people to do anything, there's always the media.

So, yeah, there you have it. Don't leave your giant space dildo out where other people can find it, is what I'm saying.

Section 31 must have decided there were no right hands for it to fall into, and pushed it into a blackhole.
We saw right in DISCO that those cloaked Federation warbird things have stronger tow-truck capability.

Ahem.

And you call yourself a Star Trek fan.

Yes, “fan.” Not obsessed. I haven’t read any of the novelizations since probably Reagan was President.

wasn't Frazer's character stuck guarding the space dildo at the beginning of "Ship of the Line"?

Fun fact: Nichelle and Gene were chewing on one another before he and Majel hooked up.

I've only read about a half-dozen Trek books, including Vendetta. It's considered one of the seminal TNG novels that marries up with events in TOS. I'll give Peter David (or whoever else was involved in writing the novel) credit for coming up with the brilliant idea about the planet killer being a weapon developed to fight the Borg.

Nichelle worded it delicately in her biography, but Gene wanted a threesome with Majel , and Majel was into it it, but Nichelle wasn't, and bailed on the relationship after that.

Well, all three of them can try again now.

So, Shat's a little upset that Simon and Schuster is using his name in ads.
https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1663236209735512064

Can't say as I blame him, since they're saying that he wrote those books when he clearly didn't. (This isn't the Tek novels that Shat had ghosted for him, either.

Am I the only one nerdy enough that when they watch an episode, they plot out all the time travel that happened before that episode?

For example, every TOS episode after "Trouble With Tribbles" Burnham, Saru, Georgiou, Mariner, Boimler, Sisko, and Dax have all stood on the bridge of the 1701 Enterprise.
Ones before "Tribbles" are only missing Sisko and Dax.
But, Mariner and Boimler remember Sisko going back to the Enterprise, so it's kind of covered.

And during all of it, Data's head was/is buried under San Francisco.

Data's head lasts 500 years.

No wonder Tasha was into him.