DVD, Star Trek S2 (Assignment: Earth) (2)
Out of the blue the good ship Enterprise has decided it's necessary to perform the 'light-speed breakaway factor,' as Kirk calls it in his log, and head back in time to the year nineteen hundred and sixty-eight. Why? Because of it being some kind of important time for humanity, things might have gone wrong so they want to have a look-see. Never mind about the dangers associated with time travel itself, or with messing up the timeline, or not being able to get back - no, it's just pop back for a view of history. It makes the Temporal Investigations Department look entirely necessary and the idea that time travel wasn't used on a regular basis until the 26th Century is flown in the face of (not that they knew that when making 'TOS'). It makes sense that time travel was going to be regulated much more severely if starships were taking it on themselves to do such things in the 23rd Century, and it's just the sort of wacky, silly idea of Trek that the modern versions take as their inspiration after years of much more sophisticated and sensible approaches had made the history of the future more believable. But I ask again, why go back to 1968? The real reason was production related. I'm not referring to the fact that going around 20th Century rocket bases and swish Sixties apartments, plus the use of significant minutes of NASA stock footage, was likely a big budget saver and they were right at the end of a long season, no, I'm talking about killing two birds with one stone.
They were concluding Season 2 of 'TOS,' but were also hoping to create a spinoff of sorts for the new characters of Gary Seven, his ditzy secretary, Roberta Lincoln and the mysterious black cat woman, Isis. I don't know whether this was purely Gene Roddenberry's idea as he may have felt Trek was naturally winding down, or if he merely wanted to expand his eggs to an additional basket, and seeing the success of 'Mission: Impossible' (and perhaps the James Bond films, too), wanted a piece of that contemporary-set spy-fi pie (and that series did, unaccountably, outlast 'TOS' by more than double its length, seven seasons!). The Cold War era was certainly breeding plenty of spy series' in both the US and UK ('The Champions' is what came to mind). It may have been a suggestion by the studio that they wanted something new? Whatever the motivation, however, it wasn't the best use of Trek's time to try and set up what would have been a very loosely connected spinoff. Not to say it doesn't have intrigue about it, Robert Lansing is charismatic as this brooding presence, matter of fact, yet full of surprises, what with his intelligent cat and his super-gadgets, as well as a computer with attitude. He's certainly a unique fellow, almost Vulcan in his reserve and quick-wittedness and I can imagine him being a likeable lead. Not so sure about Teri Garr, whose young woman, though full of non-nonsense and initiative, is also more of a comedy character than someone you could take seriously. Isis the cat was the best role in the episode, very impressed with her (even the Transporter Room door opens only wide enough to allow her through)!
I don't think I've ever really warmed to this episode. Coming as it does, right at the end of a season there's somehow more expectation, for no other reason than Season 1 had such a powerful couple of episodes to end with, and generally, the later Treks tended to bow out on a high with some big cliffhanger or some exciting conclusion, so I may have been conditioned to expect that. But primarily the problem is that our regulars are defanged, have very little agency in the story, and are shown to be in the wrong in their attempts to prevent Seven from carrying out whatever mission he's trying to accomplish. The supporting cast, and even Dr. McCoy, who don't forget was bumped up to the main titles this season, are largely ignored - it's nice that they all appear, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and Scotty. No Chapel, sadly, and Majel Barrett didn't even get to do the voice of the Beta 5 computer - it was Barbara Babcock, uncredited, also as the voice of Isis, who had various roles on 'TOS' before and after this, as did Paul Baxley in his last role here as the Security Chief, and Bruce Mars, too, who'd memorably been Finnegan in 'Shore Leave,' this time a mere policeman. The supporting cast have a few short scenes from their stations on the Bridge or in Scotty's case, the Transporter Room (which features both a Science Viewer as we've seen before, and now a Viewscreen, too, purely for the purposes of Scott scouring the NASA rocket for signs of Seven's presence!). I really want an episode that ends a season on a high and features all the cast - whenever guests are given the main focus it tends to be less enjoyable.
Even Kirk and Spock are relatively muted, and right from the moment Seven takes on everyone in the Transporter Room to try and escape, somehow able to resist a Vulcan Nerve Pinch and throwing off the superior Vulcan strength of the First Officer as easily as the humans there, we see this guy is more powerful than any of them. We find out that he's not some superman like Khan, he's actually an agent of some aliens that have chosen him and others from the 20th Century to be some kind of guardians of their planet and deal with things that are likely to upset the balance. That's the impression I get, anyway. He's been conditioned, presumably altered (it takes a Phaser Kirk appears to use on wide beam to stun him, plus he can overload the forcefield at the door of the Brig), and given a host of tech toys to achieve his benevolent objectives, but he is still a human from that century - he has knowledge of other races, he recognises Vulcans and knows from this that humans and Vulcans on a ship together means they're from the future, so he's well up on galactic events (though perhaps not in detail as he mentions the nuclear rocket must be stopped to prevent World War III, which would eventually happen around a century later), but his focus is on the here and now, and his calm acceptance of all these facts makes him seem cooler than Spock himself. And that's a problem since it does take away from Spock.
Even the setting isn't that new and different, though it is one of the first times Trek visited the era in which it was made, with various series' and films doing the same over the years ('Enterprise' visited the 21st Century, 'DS9' the 20th, 'Voyager' went to the very year they were in production in 1996, and 'Star Trek IV' was all about a trip to 1986, the year the film came out), because they'd already done the same thing in Season 1's 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday' (although that was actually after this, 1969, so they should know already that everything turned out fine!). They even pull the same trick of beaming up police when threatened by them. One scene that was reused for 'Star Trek IV' is when they're captured by the authorities and held for questioning with their Phasers and Communicator before them, so you can see the episode's influence on other Trek, it's just that as a whole it all seems rather inconsequential and clumsy. Perhaps if it had begun a successful spinoff as was planned, we might be looking back on it with more fondness - I can't imagine there would have been much connection with the wider Trek universe had it gone to series, since Seven is so squarely positioned in this precise time and on this exact planet, but if it had lasted a while they might have found ways to bring in familiar Trek races or characters with time travel always a possibility. I don't think I would want it to have existed, and it doesn't bother me that it didn't come to anything, my concern is only that it didn't make for the best Trek story.
One possibility, through retconning, obviously, as 'Enterprise' was over thirty years in the future when this was made, could be that Seven was part of the Temporal Cold War and that he was being used to fend off a front that had opened in this delicate era of human technological development. Now that does tally with Trek and makes for juicy speculation, so much that I wish 'Enterprise' had dealt with it, maybe even brought back the character, and preferably the actor (if Lansing was still acting then). Maybe the mythical Season 5, the panacea for all woes since it can be as amazing as our imaginations allow, would have held just such an episode? Lansing himself is clearly being treated well as we can see from the amount of the screen time he's afforded, as well as a rare post-titles credit, which never happens! His technology is little more than gimmickry, what with a little handheld device that can give people a ray of happy pill sleepiness, unlocks doors and does just about everything. A voice recognition typewriter, the Beta 5 computer (built to the same sort of specifications as Dr. Daystrom's own from 'The Ultimate Computer' as we see from the same outputs, though arranged differently), which also has a portable module in the shape of a glowing green cube, which you can imagine Roberta taking with her and arguing with at inopportune moments in the series. And not forgetting a vault that has some kind of advanced Transporter within it, in the form of a blue cloud… He even has a kind of Replicator as part of the computer which creates fake CIA and NSA documents and ID.
It's not just Gary Seven (which we also learn is a codename, adding more mystery to his identity), who has advanced technology - the Enterprise herself is somehow able to avoid visual detection by using its deflector shields, which I don't think quite tallies up with what we've seen before or after. Sure, shields would make it impossible for scans to penetrate, but they should still be visible to satellites and the naked eye, it's not a cloaking device, after all! Perhaps it's just sleight of hand, much like Mr. Leslie showing up in four different roles in the episode, adding credence to the idea there's a whole family of Leslie brothers serving together! How else could we explain him showing up on the Bridge in red, in a corridor in gold, wearing a technician's outfit in Engineering, and then appearing later as a Security Guard? Unless he's actually not human and never needs any rest so they get him to pull different shifts for different roles. Or he's a clone. Or the production just wasn't that bothered about keeping track of what the extras were doing… I like it, it means that when he was killed off in 'Obsession,' as sad as it was, he had at least four brothers to carry on the family name aboard the Enterprise! Someone else that has more than one role is James Doohan, lending his voice to NASA control, giving out information like 'intruder alert,' that sort of thing, as well as being Scotty, who mainly stays in the Transporter Room - it's odd that he and Spock are both in there when they intercept Seven's beam, but they were clearly not wasting any time whatsoever in getting to the story, we're already back in time when the episode begins, probably so Seven had more exposure.
We began the season with a woman who also takes the form of a black cat, and we come full circle here as Isis is revealed to have a female form (was Catwoman from the Sixties TV series of 'Batman' in their minds?), no doubt to give Roberta Lincoln pangs of jealousy over Seven, as well as arguing with the computer. If only the season had come full circle in better ways, though, as it did somewhat peter out when (aside from the first episode), it had a generally strong opening that cemented the main trio often, but also explored the other characters, too. All that is lost in this episode, I don't even remember seeing Kirk, Spock and McCoy together and in an episode when we really could have done with a scene on the Bridge where they all laugh off this latest escapade and set course for new adventures, to nicely round things out, we don't get one! Kirk sparkles as he tells Seven and Lincoln they're going to have all kinds of adventures, which he can't tell them about (how would he know when he didn't even know who Gary Seven was at the start of the episode?), then leaves them to it - it's odd that they don't mind letting Roberta in on the knowledge they're from the future and Spock's an alien, but I suppose if she was going to be any use to Seven she had to know all. Interesting that they believe what happened was what was supposed to happen, which I think is known as a temporal causality loop.
Everything works out right in the end, except there are things which are hard to accept, granted they're only small, but would Spock really advise Kirk he must trust his intuition on whether to allow Gary Seven to carry out his mission? It could be seen as some kind of development for Spock, except I'm sure it was all forgotten in the gap between seasons - if McCoy had been there he'd have given Spock a hard time, and that's really what the jokey ending should have been, discussing Spock's reasoning, to which he would undoubtedly reply that when all logical courses have been removed what remains must be a leap of illogic. Something along those lines, anyway. The other thing that didn't make sense was Lincoln whacking Seven on the back of the head with a small metal box and him collapsing to the floor, stunned, if not unconscious - earlier in the episode we saw him take on Redshirts, Kirk and Spock, and here all it takes is a little lady with a small box! Perhaps she hit him right on his Achilles heel, the one spot where he's vulnerable to attack (a stretch, admittedly!). And while I might have complained about the stock footage, I actually found it quite fascinating, the sheer awesome power of the boosters somehow putting Trek's depiction of powerful starships to shame. It may have been some of the footage from this rocket that was actually used in the 'Enterprise' opening titles, too, which is a fun connection, although I'm sure one launch is much the same as another.
I can't say I didn't like this episode, it's just, as I mentioned above, the things about it that mean I don't like it as much, and wish it had been a traditional Trek story rather than having ulterior motives. It has been enjoyable to go back over Season 2, there have been some episodes I liked slightly less, and others slightly more, but the general feeling is that it was a success. My personal favourite is Season 3, perhaps because it had less coverage, is talked about less, and often in a negative way, but none of the three seasons of 'TOS' are bad, they all have a high proportion of good episodes and memorable moments. It's amazing that the Trek name goes on even to this day and is a tribute to both what they set up in this original series, and what they were able to do in later films and TV. Especially in this time when Trek seems to have been hijacked by those who appear to have specific agendas to dumb down and appeal more widely, it's reassuring to go back and see the relative sophistication of the world that was created, one that feels so much more contained and realistic than the fantasy perpetrated so much today. Of course, this episode isn't the best example with which to counter that style, since they use time travel so coolly and without fanfare as if it's an everyday occurrence, but that may be one more reason I'm not entirely sold on this particular story. On the whole it's been satisfying to get a good, strong dose of proper Trek in my viewing diet. I don't know if I'll review Season 3 since I was starting to write more detailed reviews by the time I got there originally, whereas the first two seasons either weren't reviewed or were very basic appraisals, but maybe, one day.
**
Friday, 30 July 2021
Nocturne
DVD, Smallville S2 (Nocturne)
I don't know, I used to like this one, but now it seems a little silly. There are still things to like, but similar to the theme of poetry running through it, it's a bit mushy and maybe my mush threshold has gone down over the years, not that the tolerance was ever very high in the first place! It's very much a freak-of-the-week story after more variety in the stories so far this season, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons I warmed to it originally, getting me back in that Season 1 vein, what with the 'freak,' Sheriff Ethan and a few recognisable elements like that. This time it was the Martha story I found more engaging, Lionel toying with her as he toys with everyone, but only as a result of her compassion in taking time to speak with him and show her intelligence. It's an intriguing combination, the pair of them, and after so many negatives spoken about the Luthors and seen in the way Lionel in particular conducts himself and his business, you do wonder what could have possessed Martha to want to work for him. Is it really that she believes she can work some good there as a man on the inside while at the same time supporting her family by earning? It is a pretty far-fetched idea that she would want that, or that Jonathan would allow it, even more so than a boy that turns into a vampire-like creature of immense strength and dangerousness!
Lionel is clearly smitten with her, taken by her honesty and brightness, but he may also be slightly flattered that she'd give him the time of day considering how much of an impact his closure of the plant had on the town and that he was the big bad enemy of Smallville. It is strange that he chose to come somewhere he was so vilified after his accident, but perhaps that says more about his life in Metropolis, that he'd rather come to a nest of bad feelings than show weakness to his city cronies. That's not entirely true as the first day on the job for Martha is a helicopter trip to the big city, so it's not that he's hiding out at the Luthor Mansion, but perhaps he does find some solace there compared with Metropolis? Although it seems like a victory that Martha's position has meant she can bend his ear and influence him for good by looking out for the medically blighted Byron, who's illness is a result of his own company's experiments or lack of success with same, it's also a sign of him getting his claws into her in a unique way: if she thinks she can manipulate him she's being naive, because everything comes at a cost as I believe we find out eventually. But it is fascinating to see that play out between them and a little chilling to see him give ground when you can easily suspect he has ulterior motives to draw Martha further into his world and sympathy.
Lana being romanced by some lad that lives in a basement (or a redress of the Kents' storm cellar as it looked to me!), on the other hand, just doesn't have the same intrigue. There's so much subtext about the trust between Lana and Clark that it just gets a bit much. It's nice that things get patched up between them over the course of the episode as she sees that he genuinely cares and wants to look out for her, but Lana comes across as a bit of a weirdo, still spending dark nights hanging out at her parents' graves! Okay, so she deliberately waited there hoping to meet the mysterious poet who had been leaving her finely scripted messages by night, but it's still a little strange. Pete, on the other hand, gets a taste of what it's like to ride shotgun with the Man of Steel (as Lana calls Clark this episode), ending up thrown through the broken down windscreen of an old car. As usual, the questions are how anyone could have seen the damage done, such as how Clark got into the boarded up house, or the mess made of the shed Byron chucked him into, and not wonder how it was possible. Byron's out of the equation because he doesn't remember what happened when he'd changed into beast-man with black eyes, Lana's knocked unconscious, as so often happens, and Lionel's blind. But he's not stupid and you do wonder how people don't put these simple equations together to equal Clark being some kind of meteor-infected person, as that's the general answer. Lana and he even have a direct conversation about sharing secrets at the end and whether she can accept someone who's different!
It could be as simple as there being less for me to grasp hold of and write about in a review, as I do often find that even if I love an episode, it doesn't inspire me to speculation or exploration of topics and themes and the broader place an episode has in the canvas of the series. I don't find much to write about with this one: Chloe doesn't have a great deal to do, other than look like she's enjoying herself in response to Clark and Lana's obvious discomfort with each other, Jonathan doesn't have a great deal to do otherwise (but I did like that he's sensible and gets the police involved), and Lex is mainly there to continue showing annoyance at his Father, as well as threatening him if he does anything to hurt the Kents. Still, it is one of the better episodes this season so far, so if not a good example, getting there - I still jumped when the raving dog bursts into the window frame. Even better, it whimpers and runs off when it finds Clark really is made of steel! I also liked the attention to detail of Clark having to make a show of lifting the hay bales when Lana shows up at the farm, pretending to find it hard work! Good job. And it is nice to see a familiar Trek personality in the series: Gwynyth Walsh, Byron's Mother, was best known as Klingon sister, B'Etor in several Trek productions.
**
I don't know, I used to like this one, but now it seems a little silly. There are still things to like, but similar to the theme of poetry running through it, it's a bit mushy and maybe my mush threshold has gone down over the years, not that the tolerance was ever very high in the first place! It's very much a freak-of-the-week story after more variety in the stories so far this season, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons I warmed to it originally, getting me back in that Season 1 vein, what with the 'freak,' Sheriff Ethan and a few recognisable elements like that. This time it was the Martha story I found more engaging, Lionel toying with her as he toys with everyone, but only as a result of her compassion in taking time to speak with him and show her intelligence. It's an intriguing combination, the pair of them, and after so many negatives spoken about the Luthors and seen in the way Lionel in particular conducts himself and his business, you do wonder what could have possessed Martha to want to work for him. Is it really that she believes she can work some good there as a man on the inside while at the same time supporting her family by earning? It is a pretty far-fetched idea that she would want that, or that Jonathan would allow it, even more so than a boy that turns into a vampire-like creature of immense strength and dangerousness!
Lionel is clearly smitten with her, taken by her honesty and brightness, but he may also be slightly flattered that she'd give him the time of day considering how much of an impact his closure of the plant had on the town and that he was the big bad enemy of Smallville. It is strange that he chose to come somewhere he was so vilified after his accident, but perhaps that says more about his life in Metropolis, that he'd rather come to a nest of bad feelings than show weakness to his city cronies. That's not entirely true as the first day on the job for Martha is a helicopter trip to the big city, so it's not that he's hiding out at the Luthor Mansion, but perhaps he does find some solace there compared with Metropolis? Although it seems like a victory that Martha's position has meant she can bend his ear and influence him for good by looking out for the medically blighted Byron, who's illness is a result of his own company's experiments or lack of success with same, it's also a sign of him getting his claws into her in a unique way: if she thinks she can manipulate him she's being naive, because everything comes at a cost as I believe we find out eventually. But it is fascinating to see that play out between them and a little chilling to see him give ground when you can easily suspect he has ulterior motives to draw Martha further into his world and sympathy.
Lana being romanced by some lad that lives in a basement (or a redress of the Kents' storm cellar as it looked to me!), on the other hand, just doesn't have the same intrigue. There's so much subtext about the trust between Lana and Clark that it just gets a bit much. It's nice that things get patched up between them over the course of the episode as she sees that he genuinely cares and wants to look out for her, but Lana comes across as a bit of a weirdo, still spending dark nights hanging out at her parents' graves! Okay, so she deliberately waited there hoping to meet the mysterious poet who had been leaving her finely scripted messages by night, but it's still a little strange. Pete, on the other hand, gets a taste of what it's like to ride shotgun with the Man of Steel (as Lana calls Clark this episode), ending up thrown through the broken down windscreen of an old car. As usual, the questions are how anyone could have seen the damage done, such as how Clark got into the boarded up house, or the mess made of the shed Byron chucked him into, and not wonder how it was possible. Byron's out of the equation because he doesn't remember what happened when he'd changed into beast-man with black eyes, Lana's knocked unconscious, as so often happens, and Lionel's blind. But he's not stupid and you do wonder how people don't put these simple equations together to equal Clark being some kind of meteor-infected person, as that's the general answer. Lana and he even have a direct conversation about sharing secrets at the end and whether she can accept someone who's different!
It could be as simple as there being less for me to grasp hold of and write about in a review, as I do often find that even if I love an episode, it doesn't inspire me to speculation or exploration of topics and themes and the broader place an episode has in the canvas of the series. I don't find much to write about with this one: Chloe doesn't have a great deal to do, other than look like she's enjoying herself in response to Clark and Lana's obvious discomfort with each other, Jonathan doesn't have a great deal to do otherwise (but I did like that he's sensible and gets the police involved), and Lex is mainly there to continue showing annoyance at his Father, as well as threatening him if he does anything to hurt the Kents. Still, it is one of the better episodes this season so far, so if not a good example, getting there - I still jumped when the raving dog bursts into the window frame. Even better, it whimpers and runs off when it finds Clark really is made of steel! I also liked the attention to detail of Clark having to make a show of lifting the hay bales when Lana shows up at the farm, pretending to find it hard work! Good job. And it is nice to see a familiar Trek personality in the series: Gwynyth Walsh, Byron's Mother, was best known as Klingon sister, B'Etor in several Trek productions.
**
Stardust City Rag
DVD, Star Trek: Picard S1 (Stardust City Rag)
Watching this series makes me feel like I've been Bjayzled. This is the most horrific episode so far, and not just because of the gory scene of a legacy character being basically tortured to death. He may not be a much-loved character, but he's just one in a diabolically impressive list of three characters brought back only to be killed off, either physically or emotionally. Add to this the continued fracturing of established Trek continuity and the inspirational, hopeful future we watch it for, by the constant references to money (Maddox doesn't know how he'll repay Bjayzl's loan; the Fenris Rangers keep their money on Freecloud; Rios jokes his fee doubles for flying into Romulan space), visiting another seedy 'Star Wars' Planet Cantina, and the biggest slap in the face that suggests the old Trek way of showing good morals, hope and positivity, is the backward, naive and misguided notions of a past that is now gone, leaving in its place a jaded, depressing and negative depiction of life in the late-24th Century that is as divorced from the rest of Trek's optimistic vision as any other dystopian sci-fi. The fact that they use a genuinely much-loved character to do this makes it even worse, Seven of Nine may as well have just karate-chopped Picard to the floor, then kicked him in the head for all the respect that is paid to preserving what makes Trek, Trek.
For all that I still can't say I hate the episode or the series, but I do find it troubling and worrying, especially when you consider that it was written by Kirsten Beyer, a frequent Trek novelist, and directed by Jonathan Frakes - these are no newbies to the franchise, these are the bread and butter, dyed in the wool production members that know their stuff, have paid their dues and now have the opportunity to reiterate the values of Trek in the face of so much apparent opposition from writers and directors that don't have Trek experience and don't seem to like the Trek that we grew up with! I suppose their argument would probably be that this is all part of the development towards a positive ending, the constant refrain of serialised TV (especially in this new Trek era), when you're supposed to wait a whole season before anything positive happens and in the mean time have to put up with misery, darkness and depression on a circular basis, all stemming from the desire for cliffhanger endings that shock. When I first saw it I had the vision of Luke Skywalker saying: 'Then my Father is truly dead,' and dragging the dying remains through the disintegrating Death Star, with Trek as the almost-corpse. What is it that stops me from actively hating this episode in particular, I wonder? Because I don't hate it. I don't much like it, in fact I border on disliking it, but there is something special in there, seeing the two characters of Trek that had both been Borgified, but had never met on screen, interacting together…
When I first saw this I just thought how lovely it was to have Seven back almost twenty years since she last played the role, and Jeri Ryan did a good job at returning to her famous character. It's not like she's unrecognisable - I had been worried from reading comments from her and friend Jonathan Del Arco (Hugh, who doesn't appear in this episode - neither do Soji or the Romulans siblings), that she couldn't find the voice and ended up playing it more casual. I can believably see Seven ending up this way since the trajectory we left her on was becoming more human in those last few episodes of 'Voyager.' She almost came back for 'Nemesis,' which I'm not sure how would have worked, and in one sense it's wondrous that we have actors returning to their characters so long after it had seemed their time with Trek was done. We had Leonard Nimoy back as Spock, Patrick Stewart as Picard, Brent Spiner as Data, and now Jeri Ryan as Seven, four characters that, in the time of 'Enterprise' on TV and after 'Nemesis' at the cinema, you'd have thought a practical impossibility, yet here they stand! But it's not enough to simply have characters played by the original actors, as the latest 'Star Wars' trilogy proved. I suppose with things like the Kelvin Timeline films, 'Star Wars' and 'Dr. Who' all bringing back famous faces in the last decade or so you could say it was inevitable that the biggest guns would eventually return for Trek as that was the trend (still no Worf in the offing as far as I know…), and as long as they were going to try and resurrect the TV side of it, and pump money in, it was more likely than the more minor characters showing up.
It's not enough to pump money in, however, you need to pump creative juices in and Kurtzman Trek is the most derivative not just of Trek, but of any and all sci-fi and fantasy. In some ways they seem to strive to get things right, yet while they can throw in references to Tranya (Balok's beverage of choice in 'TOS'), or a sign for Mr. Mot's Hair Emporium (shame Picard didn't look him up, but then he'd probably never get away from the bald, voluble Bolian), or 'Mr.' Quark of Ferenginar, they get the broad brushstrokes so wrong. Take Seven of Nine. Or should that be Annika Hansen, as her human name goes? You would have thought, given how we left the character at the end of her series, developing her human emotions, having developed so much in the time she was on Voyager, that she'd have fully embraced her humanity in the years since we last saw her. Even her Borg implants were being reduced in the final episodes of the series, yet here we have the fully formed Seven, fully formed as in back to how she was, in some ways. She has the same eyebrow piece, in fact it looks even bigger, she has the same attitude, and no matter how charitable and heroic she's portrayed to be, trying to maintain order in a dangerous region of space that was apparently abandoned by the Federation when 'the rescues ended' (the Romulan rescues?), taking the law into her own hands, as Picard points out, she appears to have seriously regressed. If this isn't an example of the uninspiring, negative depiction of the Trek universe, I don't know what is!
It's true that we don't know the ins and outs of her life since returning to the Alpha Quadrant with her Voyager crew and what we do gather is that it wasn't a good time - she had dealings with this Bjayzl, a callous, empty villainess responsible for not only harvesting the Borg implants from living ex-drones, but specifically doing the same to Seven's beloved Icheb, a man who joined Voyager's crew and found a new place there, eager to reach their home, since he had none now, and to become part of their Federation. It's heartening to see that he did, wearing the uniform we've already seen depicted in other flashbacks to the mid-2380s. He was a science officer on the USS Coleman (where they never run out of mustard, I'm sure), but was somehow captured by Bjayzl's people who mercilessly extracted his vital components in 2386, leaving Seven to come and put him out of his misery since he was too far gone to rescue. That's a traumatic incident in her life and sets the tone for the episode, or at least, the partial tone. Just as I threw in that joke about mustard, they try to have some fun with a basic heist story that really doesn't go anywhere and doesn't fit the serious and tragic tone the episode began with. This unbalanced impression is something that blights this era of Trek far too often and is the result of poor writing or a lack of understanding in what makes Trek work: dignity of the characters.
It's not that you can't have fun with them, but you need to be especially careful not to undermine the seriousness of their intent and beliefs, and Patrick Stewart's wish to lighten up Picard by throwing in silly jokes, as I've learnt he was the one in favour of this, only makes things seem more frivolous - he's at his absolute worst in this episode, which is harder to take because he also has moments where he seems at his most Picard: standing outside Raffi's door when she's chosen to stowaway aboard La Sirena after they've left Freecloud; the scenes with Seven (the bits when she's not being condescending and humouring his silly old beliefs that have no place in this new, nastier, broken Trek universe). None of that can make up for the ludicrous hamming it up with a cartoon French accent and an eye patch, it really is excruciating to see. Rios has more of the calm detachment and quiet control than Picard exhibits, even while wearing a ridiculous hat and multicoloured 'futuristic' clothes! Oh dear, never try to go futuristic with fashion because it just looks silly - they have an entire bar full of 'exotic' outfits like the worst excesses of sci-fi films from the Eighties and Nineties, Trek occasionally included ('Star Trek III' comes to mind). It's all the fault of 'Star Wars' which did a fine job of creating such a weird and wonderful collection of motley aliens in its original trilogy that everyone else has been trying to ape that ever since. Bjayzl herself looks like she escaped the Dabo wheel at Quark's bar (she looks almost just like M'Pella!), and I must say I'm getting tired of these derivative visions they have for Trek.
Getting back to Icheb and Seven's difficult life post-Voyager, obviously she was going to be seriously affected by this. But why didn't she turn to her Voyager friends? We still don't know a thing about what happened to the ship or its crew, we don't know whether she ended up marrying Chakotay whom she'd become very close to in the final episodes, nor do we know why she ended up outside Starfleet. Was she eager to break away from the rigid regulations that had served to curtail her natural impulses so long? I can see something of the Seven in this new version, but it's all negative. Apart from her willingness for self-sacrifice, but then she learned that on Voyager. There's a backstory we're not privy to with Bjayzl, who calls her Annika, and my suspicion was that her experiences with this evil woman were what led her to abandon her human name, as if it was tarnished. In reality I suspect they wanted her to be as recognisable as possible to get all those 'Voyager' viewers back to Trek, so it's a marketing gimmick - same reason she's wearing the older eyebrow piece. But of course they wouldn't put her in the catsuit now, that sort of thing's frowned upon, right? Why bring back Icheb only to kill him? Just to make her life more tragic, and that's a very sad decision. I don't want to see the old characters return only to show them living in a hard, brutal, hopeless, bleak life, that's not what Trek's about. Sure, Seven isn't living in a cave, moping and mumbling about the past, she's chosen to actively pursue justice (or vigilantism), so that's positive in a way, yet it's a skewed and distorted positive, like she's lost the moral compass she had with Janeway, the Doctor and Tuvok, guides that were able to bring her along on the right path.
It's like she's thrown away all the lessons she learned and I can only imagine there was a big falling out with Janeway, and because Seven was no longer constrained to the microcosm of Voyager she couldn't be kept around until she saw the error of her ways, and simply up and left. But this is all speculation, an attempt to explain away her merciless, jaded behaviour, taking things into her own hands and giving the trailer for the series a chance to show a twin Phaser Rifle-toting Seven blasting a baddie to death. Once again we see that this era of Trek is tainted with the desire to appeal, not to the intellect, but to the emotion. They want us fist-pumping the air and yelling as one of our beloved characters metes out summary justice to someone evil. There's no possibility of reprieve, no chance to be better, Bjayzl is just a Khan, a Dukat. Actually she's not, because they were truly great and nuanced enemies and this Trek era can't seem to get beyond two dimensions for its villains. They don't seem to understand basic concepts of right and wrong, either, which makes it hard to create moral stories and only adds to the messy miasma of confused plotting. Morality isn't the only problem, we get constant references to money in this episode - I know we're supposed to be outside Federation space, but it's just one more thing that seems to be a continual reminder that the Trek universe we knew and understood is gone.
I wonder if Manu Intiraymi was approached to reprise Icheb? Maybe he was and declined (reading Memory Alpha, he wasn't, and would have liked to), thinking it was pointless to return only to be killed off? Look, Icheb was never that great a character, I can't say I was devastated when he died, but at the same time it was unnecessary - have him crippled for life, that would still be motivation enough for Seven to become one of these Fenris Rangers. And even now they could bring him back in flashbacks as they've done occasionally on this series, so it's not like there was no chance to ever see the guy again. I don't think this was the intent, but it was almost like they were having a little laugh with us, since I don't get the impression Icheb was particularly popular, so bring him back, then kill him off right away in the most gruesome manner. Or is it more sinister? I believe, though I've never seen them, the actor played the character in unofficial fan productions, so was this a way to get back at him? I hope not. It's not the first time he was played by another actor, as someone else took on the role of Icheb from a future time in 'Shattered' (ironically, set in 2394, only five years before this one and eight years after he died in this official timeline), one of the great 'Voyager' episodes that cleverly toyed with various different time periods at once. They didn't even get that guy back to play this iteration. Not that it mattered, it was a short scene, soon over and as I said, we didn't learn much about his career post-Voyager.
The next character brought back in order to kill him was Bruce Maddox. Once again he was played by a different actor - I heard that the original actor had moved on to teaching acting so maybe he was unavailable, but I feel like they should have made an effort to get Brian Brophy back. I know, it was a long, long time since we last saw the character, and unlike Icheb, who was in a number of episodes across the last couple of seasons of 'Voyager,' Maddox only appeared in one, and that was way back in Season 2 of 'TNG,' shown in 1989! But what an episode 'The Measure of A Man' was, the kind of proper storytelling you simply don't get on Trek any more, sadly. And he had enough resonance that he was mentioned at least once more. This new guy was fine, we never knew the character well enough for it to be jarring, and he's about thirty years or more older, plus he's killed off in this episode so it's not like he was going to become integral in Trek. And that's where we come to the most controversial moment of a most controversial episode: Agnes 'Aggy' Jurati's coldblooded murder of her former boss and partner. We'd already had to watch a slightly sappy recording of her and Maddox baking cookies, teeing her up for the shock one-eighty (why is it that people watch so much 2D screens these days when we know TV died out in the mid-21st Century - it couldn't be because we like to show off our effects? I can't help thinking Jurati would have more likely been watching that scene in the Holodeck, unless Picard hogs it all the time he's on board).
Jurati is set up as this weak, worried Hoshi Sato-alike, a puppy with big eyes and an eager disposition, unused to being outside a lab. It's a big deal for her even to be given the responsibility of beaming the crew off Freecloud in the event things go awry and we're always having slightly sickly scenes for her to be 'cute.' Not in the way Elnor is 'cute' by being one step behind everyone else all the time ('duh… are we still pretendin'…?'), but in an attempt to cue her up as 'loveable.' Rios certainly thinks so as you notice he's taken a shine to her which goes on through the season, maybe because she's an innocent and he's seen so much horror that's what he needs? Except she's not an innocent - ta-da! They pull the rug from under us by giving us a shocking, 'thrilling' conclusion where Jurati kills Maddox in Sickbay. It seems these Emergency Holograms have even less power than they did in Voyager's day as the EMH can be instantly overridden with no recourse to any warnings or flags about dangerous behaviour which you'd think would be in-built in the system! Maybe that's why they didn't set one of these holos at the Transporter console instead of Jurati (or even program the computer to do it on their signal!). In subsequent episodes we're led to believe Jurati was acting under the influence of a mind meld from Commodore Oh, but here she seems fully in control, and like hypnosis, it seems excessive that a Vulcan could force someone who isn't a killer by nature, to murder. Not saying it couldn't happen, I can't recall an example, but it's possible. It's just not the impression I got from the scene when she's saying she wishes she didn't know what she knows or was shown what she was shown.
Presumably this is referring obliquely to the 'vision' of the future seen by the Jhat Vash, which was about synthetic life breaking in from some other dimension or some other weird domain like something out of the 'Avengers Assemble' film. How much more evidence do you need that Trek takes its cues from Marvel fantasy now much more than science fiction or its own past? So she seems to be operating under free will, that Maddox is somehow responsible for this galaxy-ending (snore), event, but who knows? Why wouldn't the EMH alert someone? Why wouldn't the computer? How could this happen? Why would this happen? Ratings? Shock value? Again, Maddox isn't a beloved character so it's really neither here nor there, but it is a problem that this mild-mannered scientist becomes a murderer and then she's not even punished! Oh, it was a mind meld or something, she's not responsible, rap on the knuckles and on with your life. But that's all to come in the next 'exciting' instalment of 'Star Trek: Misery– sorry, Picard'! It was really a one-two punch to close out the episode, what with Seven murdering Bjayzl. It's not just the murder, though, it's the impression that Picard is some old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who needs to be humoured and then ignored because we don't want to ruin his quaint illusions about mercy, morality and all that guff. It is like pointing to past Trek and saying, 'sure it worked back then, but the world's tougher now, nastier and those silly ideals of yours don't work now.' It's distressing, disappointing, depressing and hateful, and it's not like the true Trek view is ever espoused.
Other than Picard, but he's shown to be just some old guy, so who cares. It's the greatest indictment of this era of Trek in the whole series and is the reason I came to like this episode less on second viewing. At least in old Trek when they put a point of view like that they also strongly showed the opposing one, but the writers make it seem like this is the prevailing attitude, the correct one, the one they believe. Even worse when Beyer is the credited writer so you'd think she had the strongest say on this episode. Did she really want to turn Seven into someone so broken? I get it, that's the theme of the series, brokenness, all of them are damaged in some way, but we don't get the catharsis of seeing things made right. Even what could be called the B-story of this episode, where Raffi tracks down her son, Gabriel Hwang, and his Romulan wife (love the hairdo, by the way - traditional is best), carrying her unborn granddaughter, and she's utterly rejected by him for leaving him and his Father - we're reminded she's a drug user ('I'm clean now'), and it just adds to that sense of hopelessness and misery that permeates this sorry excuse for Trek. Hopeless and pointless and exhausting, says Seven, describing her job as Ranger, a bit like Elnor and the Knights of the Romulan Women's Way, or whatever it was called, who only take on hopeless causes. Well, I guess at this time period they're all kept in constant employment, so that's nice, then, isn't it?
There's even time to show banal evil as Icheb gets sliced up to the accompaniment of classical music and a female technician who's completely detached from his humanity (or Brunali-anity, to be precise). She even calls him 'buddy,' and this is another of my major bugbears for the series and modern Trek in general: yes, I've said it before, but it's the casualness of the speech, the contemporary manner and style and words that don't fit with Trek's world. There's so much of it in this episode, perhaps not more than other episodes, but I've had a few weeks' break from it and coming back it stands out starkly, especially when you're used to watching the other series', as I do, particularly the 24th Century ones. It really takes me out of it, to the extent that, when Rios is instructing Jurati on the correct terminology and she uses words like 'affirmative,' it jars in a different way because that's how dialogue should be most of the time, yet isn't. There are the usual points of speculation or niggling nitpicks, but they're small fry compared to the glaring faults and horrors of this episode: how do Phasers kill without disintegration? I know they do this a lot on modern Trek, and 'at least' we got Bjayzl being completely disintegrated, although it was more like an explosion or bursting than the scything dissolution that was so effective in the past. Why didn't she just beam out like some of her patrons did, you'd think she'd have an escape route planned at all times? Seven's rifles are back to the pew-pew-pew projectiles instead of screeching beams. Seven is notorious, as Rios says, and Picard is clearly well known, so why wouldn't he be recognisable?
It was somehow typical of this generation of writers that they had a snatch of the 'Voyager' theme play as Seven beams back down to Freecloud to carry out her shoot-'em-up revenge scheme, as if they don't see any disconnect between that time and this. Picard says it best: 'murder is not justice, there is no solace in revenge.' The one genuine moment is when Seven asks Picard if he reclaimed his full humanity after he was freed from the Borg and he reminds her that they're both still working on it. In other words it's an ongoing process that will probably never end. Except it will end for him, much sooner than we could ever have anticipated since he basically becomes a Borg by the end of the season! That's where the series really came off the rails, if it was even on them in the first place, but we'll get there. I'm sorry, but we have to, I must finish reviewing this season as much as I'm going off this Kurtzman era, as much as I want to like it, I don't, and I don't see that changing, to the extent that I probably won't bother doing reviews for new Treks after this season. That's how far I am from enjoying and getting anything out of it that's in any way a positive. But hey, at least they have a high effects budget, as evidenced by all the animated Freecloud ads that pop up to 'greet' them while in orbit. Yeah, thrilling, really impressive, well done, good to see Trek isn't dead. Pointless gimmickry lives on! Oh, and I forgot to mention who the third character was that got killed off: Seven herself, she's no longer the same person and seems dead inside.
As 'DS9' is my favourite Trek I should give a little space to discussing the one reference we've had to that series (not counting Worf, who has basically been reclaimed by 'TNG' since 'DS9' ended). Rios is said by Mr. Vup, the Reptiloid with the snazzy sense of smell that can so easily be fooled, to have handled trouble with the Breen for a Mr. Quark of Ferenginar. Good old Quark, he's actually my favourite character in all of Trek, Armin Shimerman did such an incredible job over the years. I could imagine them bringing him back and I know Shimerman did don the makeup in recent years for at least one convention appearance (as the actors who played Gowron, Martok, Jadzia, Rom and Nog have also done), is still acting, and I think would be open to returning, though it would need to be worthwhile and not just a face on the viewscreen like his 'TNG' cameo was. At one time Shimerman was the Robert Picardo of 'DS9' - the Doctor kept showing up in films and TV, writing books, etc, but that all ended when 'DS9' ended, his cameo at the end of 'Insurrection' also cut just before. I liked the reference, it fitted with the kind of nefarious characters they were dealing with, and also we learn something about him: if he's 'of Ferenginar' that presumably means he never did get his own moon - perhaps he ended up returning to the Homeworld as his brother was Grand Nagus and could get him some lucrative contracts (I'm sure there's a Rule of Acquisition about that sort of thing, and I don't mean 'never let family stand in the way of business,' or maybe I do!), but it would have been better if they'd said 'of Deep Space 9,' as I like to think of him still there on the station, tending bar, the last one left.
**
Watching this series makes me feel like I've been Bjayzled. This is the most horrific episode so far, and not just because of the gory scene of a legacy character being basically tortured to death. He may not be a much-loved character, but he's just one in a diabolically impressive list of three characters brought back only to be killed off, either physically or emotionally. Add to this the continued fracturing of established Trek continuity and the inspirational, hopeful future we watch it for, by the constant references to money (Maddox doesn't know how he'll repay Bjayzl's loan; the Fenris Rangers keep their money on Freecloud; Rios jokes his fee doubles for flying into Romulan space), visiting another seedy 'Star Wars' Planet Cantina, and the biggest slap in the face that suggests the old Trek way of showing good morals, hope and positivity, is the backward, naive and misguided notions of a past that is now gone, leaving in its place a jaded, depressing and negative depiction of life in the late-24th Century that is as divorced from the rest of Trek's optimistic vision as any other dystopian sci-fi. The fact that they use a genuinely much-loved character to do this makes it even worse, Seven of Nine may as well have just karate-chopped Picard to the floor, then kicked him in the head for all the respect that is paid to preserving what makes Trek, Trek.
For all that I still can't say I hate the episode or the series, but I do find it troubling and worrying, especially when you consider that it was written by Kirsten Beyer, a frequent Trek novelist, and directed by Jonathan Frakes - these are no newbies to the franchise, these are the bread and butter, dyed in the wool production members that know their stuff, have paid their dues and now have the opportunity to reiterate the values of Trek in the face of so much apparent opposition from writers and directors that don't have Trek experience and don't seem to like the Trek that we grew up with! I suppose their argument would probably be that this is all part of the development towards a positive ending, the constant refrain of serialised TV (especially in this new Trek era), when you're supposed to wait a whole season before anything positive happens and in the mean time have to put up with misery, darkness and depression on a circular basis, all stemming from the desire for cliffhanger endings that shock. When I first saw it I had the vision of Luke Skywalker saying: 'Then my Father is truly dead,' and dragging the dying remains through the disintegrating Death Star, with Trek as the almost-corpse. What is it that stops me from actively hating this episode in particular, I wonder? Because I don't hate it. I don't much like it, in fact I border on disliking it, but there is something special in there, seeing the two characters of Trek that had both been Borgified, but had never met on screen, interacting together…
When I first saw this I just thought how lovely it was to have Seven back almost twenty years since she last played the role, and Jeri Ryan did a good job at returning to her famous character. It's not like she's unrecognisable - I had been worried from reading comments from her and friend Jonathan Del Arco (Hugh, who doesn't appear in this episode - neither do Soji or the Romulans siblings), that she couldn't find the voice and ended up playing it more casual. I can believably see Seven ending up this way since the trajectory we left her on was becoming more human in those last few episodes of 'Voyager.' She almost came back for 'Nemesis,' which I'm not sure how would have worked, and in one sense it's wondrous that we have actors returning to their characters so long after it had seemed their time with Trek was done. We had Leonard Nimoy back as Spock, Patrick Stewart as Picard, Brent Spiner as Data, and now Jeri Ryan as Seven, four characters that, in the time of 'Enterprise' on TV and after 'Nemesis' at the cinema, you'd have thought a practical impossibility, yet here they stand! But it's not enough to simply have characters played by the original actors, as the latest 'Star Wars' trilogy proved. I suppose with things like the Kelvin Timeline films, 'Star Wars' and 'Dr. Who' all bringing back famous faces in the last decade or so you could say it was inevitable that the biggest guns would eventually return for Trek as that was the trend (still no Worf in the offing as far as I know…), and as long as they were going to try and resurrect the TV side of it, and pump money in, it was more likely than the more minor characters showing up.
It's not enough to pump money in, however, you need to pump creative juices in and Kurtzman Trek is the most derivative not just of Trek, but of any and all sci-fi and fantasy. In some ways they seem to strive to get things right, yet while they can throw in references to Tranya (Balok's beverage of choice in 'TOS'), or a sign for Mr. Mot's Hair Emporium (shame Picard didn't look him up, but then he'd probably never get away from the bald, voluble Bolian), or 'Mr.' Quark of Ferenginar, they get the broad brushstrokes so wrong. Take Seven of Nine. Or should that be Annika Hansen, as her human name goes? You would have thought, given how we left the character at the end of her series, developing her human emotions, having developed so much in the time she was on Voyager, that she'd have fully embraced her humanity in the years since we last saw her. Even her Borg implants were being reduced in the final episodes of the series, yet here we have the fully formed Seven, fully formed as in back to how she was, in some ways. She has the same eyebrow piece, in fact it looks even bigger, she has the same attitude, and no matter how charitable and heroic she's portrayed to be, trying to maintain order in a dangerous region of space that was apparently abandoned by the Federation when 'the rescues ended' (the Romulan rescues?), taking the law into her own hands, as Picard points out, she appears to have seriously regressed. If this isn't an example of the uninspiring, negative depiction of the Trek universe, I don't know what is!
It's true that we don't know the ins and outs of her life since returning to the Alpha Quadrant with her Voyager crew and what we do gather is that it wasn't a good time - she had dealings with this Bjayzl, a callous, empty villainess responsible for not only harvesting the Borg implants from living ex-drones, but specifically doing the same to Seven's beloved Icheb, a man who joined Voyager's crew and found a new place there, eager to reach their home, since he had none now, and to become part of their Federation. It's heartening to see that he did, wearing the uniform we've already seen depicted in other flashbacks to the mid-2380s. He was a science officer on the USS Coleman (where they never run out of mustard, I'm sure), but was somehow captured by Bjayzl's people who mercilessly extracted his vital components in 2386, leaving Seven to come and put him out of his misery since he was too far gone to rescue. That's a traumatic incident in her life and sets the tone for the episode, or at least, the partial tone. Just as I threw in that joke about mustard, they try to have some fun with a basic heist story that really doesn't go anywhere and doesn't fit the serious and tragic tone the episode began with. This unbalanced impression is something that blights this era of Trek far too often and is the result of poor writing or a lack of understanding in what makes Trek work: dignity of the characters.
It's not that you can't have fun with them, but you need to be especially careful not to undermine the seriousness of their intent and beliefs, and Patrick Stewart's wish to lighten up Picard by throwing in silly jokes, as I've learnt he was the one in favour of this, only makes things seem more frivolous - he's at his absolute worst in this episode, which is harder to take because he also has moments where he seems at his most Picard: standing outside Raffi's door when she's chosen to stowaway aboard La Sirena after they've left Freecloud; the scenes with Seven (the bits when she's not being condescending and humouring his silly old beliefs that have no place in this new, nastier, broken Trek universe). None of that can make up for the ludicrous hamming it up with a cartoon French accent and an eye patch, it really is excruciating to see. Rios has more of the calm detachment and quiet control than Picard exhibits, even while wearing a ridiculous hat and multicoloured 'futuristic' clothes! Oh dear, never try to go futuristic with fashion because it just looks silly - they have an entire bar full of 'exotic' outfits like the worst excesses of sci-fi films from the Eighties and Nineties, Trek occasionally included ('Star Trek III' comes to mind). It's all the fault of 'Star Wars' which did a fine job of creating such a weird and wonderful collection of motley aliens in its original trilogy that everyone else has been trying to ape that ever since. Bjayzl herself looks like she escaped the Dabo wheel at Quark's bar (she looks almost just like M'Pella!), and I must say I'm getting tired of these derivative visions they have for Trek.
Getting back to Icheb and Seven's difficult life post-Voyager, obviously she was going to be seriously affected by this. But why didn't she turn to her Voyager friends? We still don't know a thing about what happened to the ship or its crew, we don't know whether she ended up marrying Chakotay whom she'd become very close to in the final episodes, nor do we know why she ended up outside Starfleet. Was she eager to break away from the rigid regulations that had served to curtail her natural impulses so long? I can see something of the Seven in this new version, but it's all negative. Apart from her willingness for self-sacrifice, but then she learned that on Voyager. There's a backstory we're not privy to with Bjayzl, who calls her Annika, and my suspicion was that her experiences with this evil woman were what led her to abandon her human name, as if it was tarnished. In reality I suspect they wanted her to be as recognisable as possible to get all those 'Voyager' viewers back to Trek, so it's a marketing gimmick - same reason she's wearing the older eyebrow piece. But of course they wouldn't put her in the catsuit now, that sort of thing's frowned upon, right? Why bring back Icheb only to kill him? Just to make her life more tragic, and that's a very sad decision. I don't want to see the old characters return only to show them living in a hard, brutal, hopeless, bleak life, that's not what Trek's about. Sure, Seven isn't living in a cave, moping and mumbling about the past, she's chosen to actively pursue justice (or vigilantism), so that's positive in a way, yet it's a skewed and distorted positive, like she's lost the moral compass she had with Janeway, the Doctor and Tuvok, guides that were able to bring her along on the right path.
It's like she's thrown away all the lessons she learned and I can only imagine there was a big falling out with Janeway, and because Seven was no longer constrained to the microcosm of Voyager she couldn't be kept around until she saw the error of her ways, and simply up and left. But this is all speculation, an attempt to explain away her merciless, jaded behaviour, taking things into her own hands and giving the trailer for the series a chance to show a twin Phaser Rifle-toting Seven blasting a baddie to death. Once again we see that this era of Trek is tainted with the desire to appeal, not to the intellect, but to the emotion. They want us fist-pumping the air and yelling as one of our beloved characters metes out summary justice to someone evil. There's no possibility of reprieve, no chance to be better, Bjayzl is just a Khan, a Dukat. Actually she's not, because they were truly great and nuanced enemies and this Trek era can't seem to get beyond two dimensions for its villains. They don't seem to understand basic concepts of right and wrong, either, which makes it hard to create moral stories and only adds to the messy miasma of confused plotting. Morality isn't the only problem, we get constant references to money in this episode - I know we're supposed to be outside Federation space, but it's just one more thing that seems to be a continual reminder that the Trek universe we knew and understood is gone.
I wonder if Manu Intiraymi was approached to reprise Icheb? Maybe he was and declined (reading Memory Alpha, he wasn't, and would have liked to), thinking it was pointless to return only to be killed off? Look, Icheb was never that great a character, I can't say I was devastated when he died, but at the same time it was unnecessary - have him crippled for life, that would still be motivation enough for Seven to become one of these Fenris Rangers. And even now they could bring him back in flashbacks as they've done occasionally on this series, so it's not like there was no chance to ever see the guy again. I don't think this was the intent, but it was almost like they were having a little laugh with us, since I don't get the impression Icheb was particularly popular, so bring him back, then kill him off right away in the most gruesome manner. Or is it more sinister? I believe, though I've never seen them, the actor played the character in unofficial fan productions, so was this a way to get back at him? I hope not. It's not the first time he was played by another actor, as someone else took on the role of Icheb from a future time in 'Shattered' (ironically, set in 2394, only five years before this one and eight years after he died in this official timeline), one of the great 'Voyager' episodes that cleverly toyed with various different time periods at once. They didn't even get that guy back to play this iteration. Not that it mattered, it was a short scene, soon over and as I said, we didn't learn much about his career post-Voyager.
The next character brought back in order to kill him was Bruce Maddox. Once again he was played by a different actor - I heard that the original actor had moved on to teaching acting so maybe he was unavailable, but I feel like they should have made an effort to get Brian Brophy back. I know, it was a long, long time since we last saw the character, and unlike Icheb, who was in a number of episodes across the last couple of seasons of 'Voyager,' Maddox only appeared in one, and that was way back in Season 2 of 'TNG,' shown in 1989! But what an episode 'The Measure of A Man' was, the kind of proper storytelling you simply don't get on Trek any more, sadly. And he had enough resonance that he was mentioned at least once more. This new guy was fine, we never knew the character well enough for it to be jarring, and he's about thirty years or more older, plus he's killed off in this episode so it's not like he was going to become integral in Trek. And that's where we come to the most controversial moment of a most controversial episode: Agnes 'Aggy' Jurati's coldblooded murder of her former boss and partner. We'd already had to watch a slightly sappy recording of her and Maddox baking cookies, teeing her up for the shock one-eighty (why is it that people watch so much 2D screens these days when we know TV died out in the mid-21st Century - it couldn't be because we like to show off our effects? I can't help thinking Jurati would have more likely been watching that scene in the Holodeck, unless Picard hogs it all the time he's on board).
Jurati is set up as this weak, worried Hoshi Sato-alike, a puppy with big eyes and an eager disposition, unused to being outside a lab. It's a big deal for her even to be given the responsibility of beaming the crew off Freecloud in the event things go awry and we're always having slightly sickly scenes for her to be 'cute.' Not in the way Elnor is 'cute' by being one step behind everyone else all the time ('duh… are we still pretendin'…?'), but in an attempt to cue her up as 'loveable.' Rios certainly thinks so as you notice he's taken a shine to her which goes on through the season, maybe because she's an innocent and he's seen so much horror that's what he needs? Except she's not an innocent - ta-da! They pull the rug from under us by giving us a shocking, 'thrilling' conclusion where Jurati kills Maddox in Sickbay. It seems these Emergency Holograms have even less power than they did in Voyager's day as the EMH can be instantly overridden with no recourse to any warnings or flags about dangerous behaviour which you'd think would be in-built in the system! Maybe that's why they didn't set one of these holos at the Transporter console instead of Jurati (or even program the computer to do it on their signal!). In subsequent episodes we're led to believe Jurati was acting under the influence of a mind meld from Commodore Oh, but here she seems fully in control, and like hypnosis, it seems excessive that a Vulcan could force someone who isn't a killer by nature, to murder. Not saying it couldn't happen, I can't recall an example, but it's possible. It's just not the impression I got from the scene when she's saying she wishes she didn't know what she knows or was shown what she was shown.
Presumably this is referring obliquely to the 'vision' of the future seen by the Jhat Vash, which was about synthetic life breaking in from some other dimension or some other weird domain like something out of the 'Avengers Assemble' film. How much more evidence do you need that Trek takes its cues from Marvel fantasy now much more than science fiction or its own past? So she seems to be operating under free will, that Maddox is somehow responsible for this galaxy-ending (snore), event, but who knows? Why wouldn't the EMH alert someone? Why wouldn't the computer? How could this happen? Why would this happen? Ratings? Shock value? Again, Maddox isn't a beloved character so it's really neither here nor there, but it is a problem that this mild-mannered scientist becomes a murderer and then she's not even punished! Oh, it was a mind meld or something, she's not responsible, rap on the knuckles and on with your life. But that's all to come in the next 'exciting' instalment of 'Star Trek: Misery– sorry, Picard'! It was really a one-two punch to close out the episode, what with Seven murdering Bjayzl. It's not just the murder, though, it's the impression that Picard is some old-fashioned fuddy-duddy who needs to be humoured and then ignored because we don't want to ruin his quaint illusions about mercy, morality and all that guff. It is like pointing to past Trek and saying, 'sure it worked back then, but the world's tougher now, nastier and those silly ideals of yours don't work now.' It's distressing, disappointing, depressing and hateful, and it's not like the true Trek view is ever espoused.
Other than Picard, but he's shown to be just some old guy, so who cares. It's the greatest indictment of this era of Trek in the whole series and is the reason I came to like this episode less on second viewing. At least in old Trek when they put a point of view like that they also strongly showed the opposing one, but the writers make it seem like this is the prevailing attitude, the correct one, the one they believe. Even worse when Beyer is the credited writer so you'd think she had the strongest say on this episode. Did she really want to turn Seven into someone so broken? I get it, that's the theme of the series, brokenness, all of them are damaged in some way, but we don't get the catharsis of seeing things made right. Even what could be called the B-story of this episode, where Raffi tracks down her son, Gabriel Hwang, and his Romulan wife (love the hairdo, by the way - traditional is best), carrying her unborn granddaughter, and she's utterly rejected by him for leaving him and his Father - we're reminded she's a drug user ('I'm clean now'), and it just adds to that sense of hopelessness and misery that permeates this sorry excuse for Trek. Hopeless and pointless and exhausting, says Seven, describing her job as Ranger, a bit like Elnor and the Knights of the Romulan Women's Way, or whatever it was called, who only take on hopeless causes. Well, I guess at this time period they're all kept in constant employment, so that's nice, then, isn't it?
There's even time to show banal evil as Icheb gets sliced up to the accompaniment of classical music and a female technician who's completely detached from his humanity (or Brunali-anity, to be precise). She even calls him 'buddy,' and this is another of my major bugbears for the series and modern Trek in general: yes, I've said it before, but it's the casualness of the speech, the contemporary manner and style and words that don't fit with Trek's world. There's so much of it in this episode, perhaps not more than other episodes, but I've had a few weeks' break from it and coming back it stands out starkly, especially when you're used to watching the other series', as I do, particularly the 24th Century ones. It really takes me out of it, to the extent that, when Rios is instructing Jurati on the correct terminology and she uses words like 'affirmative,' it jars in a different way because that's how dialogue should be most of the time, yet isn't. There are the usual points of speculation or niggling nitpicks, but they're small fry compared to the glaring faults and horrors of this episode: how do Phasers kill without disintegration? I know they do this a lot on modern Trek, and 'at least' we got Bjayzl being completely disintegrated, although it was more like an explosion or bursting than the scything dissolution that was so effective in the past. Why didn't she just beam out like some of her patrons did, you'd think she'd have an escape route planned at all times? Seven's rifles are back to the pew-pew-pew projectiles instead of screeching beams. Seven is notorious, as Rios says, and Picard is clearly well known, so why wouldn't he be recognisable?
It was somehow typical of this generation of writers that they had a snatch of the 'Voyager' theme play as Seven beams back down to Freecloud to carry out her shoot-'em-up revenge scheme, as if they don't see any disconnect between that time and this. Picard says it best: 'murder is not justice, there is no solace in revenge.' The one genuine moment is when Seven asks Picard if he reclaimed his full humanity after he was freed from the Borg and he reminds her that they're both still working on it. In other words it's an ongoing process that will probably never end. Except it will end for him, much sooner than we could ever have anticipated since he basically becomes a Borg by the end of the season! That's where the series really came off the rails, if it was even on them in the first place, but we'll get there. I'm sorry, but we have to, I must finish reviewing this season as much as I'm going off this Kurtzman era, as much as I want to like it, I don't, and I don't see that changing, to the extent that I probably won't bother doing reviews for new Treks after this season. That's how far I am from enjoying and getting anything out of it that's in any way a positive. But hey, at least they have a high effects budget, as evidenced by all the animated Freecloud ads that pop up to 'greet' them while in orbit. Yeah, thrilling, really impressive, well done, good to see Trek isn't dead. Pointless gimmickry lives on! Oh, and I forgot to mention who the third character was that got killed off: Seven herself, she's no longer the same person and seems dead inside.
As 'DS9' is my favourite Trek I should give a little space to discussing the one reference we've had to that series (not counting Worf, who has basically been reclaimed by 'TNG' since 'DS9' ended). Rios is said by Mr. Vup, the Reptiloid with the snazzy sense of smell that can so easily be fooled, to have handled trouble with the Breen for a Mr. Quark of Ferenginar. Good old Quark, he's actually my favourite character in all of Trek, Armin Shimerman did such an incredible job over the years. I could imagine them bringing him back and I know Shimerman did don the makeup in recent years for at least one convention appearance (as the actors who played Gowron, Martok, Jadzia, Rom and Nog have also done), is still acting, and I think would be open to returning, though it would need to be worthwhile and not just a face on the viewscreen like his 'TNG' cameo was. At one time Shimerman was the Robert Picardo of 'DS9' - the Doctor kept showing up in films and TV, writing books, etc, but that all ended when 'DS9' ended, his cameo at the end of 'Insurrection' also cut just before. I liked the reference, it fitted with the kind of nefarious characters they were dealing with, and also we learn something about him: if he's 'of Ferenginar' that presumably means he never did get his own moon - perhaps he ended up returning to the Homeworld as his brother was Grand Nagus and could get him some lucrative contracts (I'm sure there's a Rule of Acquisition about that sort of thing, and I don't mean 'never let family stand in the way of business,' or maybe I do!), but it would have been better if they'd said 'of Deep Space 9,' as I like to think of him still there on the station, tending bar, the last one left.
**
Tuesday, 20 July 2021
Red
DVD, Smallville S2 (Red)
Red for danger. Red for stop. Red for… no, really, please stop, this isn't fun! Clark being a bad guy - you'd think that would be a great concept, but it shows up the flaws in the character: no one can stop him. It takes the combined efforts of his Father acting on information from Lex, and with the assistance of Pete, to save Clark from himself, and that was the best part of the episode, as well as the subsequent scenes. Well, perhaps not the one with Lana where he can't explain he was under the influence and the great stone face tells him where to go after he treated her so shabbily while being affected by red Kryptonite. It's not one of the good episodes, but being Season 2 it still comes out as having some nice moments, even if the majority is painful to watch. It's not just the to-ing and fro-ing around Lana that annoys, it's the discomfort of seeing Clark be a bad boy, and then of course it all gets reset at the end, except Lana thinks Clark was just acting up. The other loose ends are dealt with: the fake FBI man on the hunt for Jessie and her Father, is killed and the latter go back on the run. Pete, fortuitously in on the secret now, is the first to make the connection between Clark's aberrant behaviour and the school ring, although his role would have been played by Martha previously if Jonathan had needed to do something to stop Clark.
At least Clark had good taste when he was being bad: I'm not talking about the posh suits, Ferraris and motorbikes, I'm talking about something much more important - he had both the Apple Display I used to have and, what's even better, was playing on a GameCube! While it is sad to see him be so horrible, I did like the scenes with his parents as they're forced to deal with this new level of problem, Jonathan especially was portrayed very well - he doesn't have it in him to back down, even when he knows what Clark can do, but he also has strong reasoning in his words (which you sometimes think he should use for himself!), and can make a lot of sense on the fly. I think one of the things that doesn't appeal about the episode, however, is that I know it ties into the end of the season and I never liked Clark ditching his clean-cut image, even for an episode. It's like the characters in 'Star Trek' suddenly swearing, drinking and smoking (oh, I forgot, they do now!), it just doesn't feel right, and one of the series' strengths is its strong moral leanings about right and wrong.
One good thing is that Lex has the opportunity to take advantage of Clark's newfound relaxed behaviour and you half believe him when he says he's going to tie up some loose ends at the office and then the pair of them can go off to live it up in Metropolis, probably with nefarious motives. Except you know that, while he'd dearly love to know all Clark's secrets (all everyone's secrets, indeed), he's more responsible than that and is just humouring him so he can inform his parents what's going on. At least he is more responsible at this point in the series and wants to help Clark even when Clark wouldn't see it that way. Maybe he thinks he took drugs or perhaps it's just normal, teenaged angst that he recognises, despite the novelty of someone usually so stable exhibiting such feelings, but either way he does something to help, further putting him in the Kents' good books. It's disappointing that Lana herself didn't spot the signs that something's wrong, but then she seemed to want him to be like that and maybe she felt this act was the only way he was going to be big enough to pluck up the courage to approach her, and then she's disappointed, but it's more distressing that this is one of many times when something happens to one of them or Clark has to do something and can't tell her what was really going on, and she gets all huffy about it, and it's not good.
Almost hidden underneath all the shenanigans is the theme of material goods not bringing permanent happiness, with Lex' upbringing always such a clear contrast to Clark's. Yet Clark still sometimes wishes he had some of the things others had and he doesn't shy away from admitting it at the end, however uncomfortable it was to his parents and himself. From an outsiders perspective their farm looks ideal: vast space, animals, machinery, a barn, so it's not like poor Clark was living in poverty on some hot, cramped flat in the middle of a congested city. At the same time you can imagine that once in a while he might wish he had a big TV (although you never see any of them watching TV, settling down for a film or whatever, but they're probably too tired after the long farm day), or a games console, or a… wait, a jet-ski? What's he going to do, cart it down to Crater Lake? Actually I suppose he could do that, just carry it around like a tennis racket!
There are some good shots in the episode, and not just that lovely helicopter pullback as Lana moodily rides away from Clark at the end, but the moment Clark rides off the farm on his Father's bike and the Director allowed us to see it all in one shot rather so many cuts as you get too often on TV series', or when Jonathan smashes the ring with a sledgehammer, or when Clark pushes Lex' pool table into the FBI guy to trap him against the wall. I'm guessing Lionel didn't have any sight at this point, although we're meant to think he's intrigued by this Clark Kent he's never met before - in reality, in the series' continuity, he was supposed to know all about Clark, at least I think he did, so it wouldn't make that much difference either way if he could see Clark firing bullets into his own hand and lobbing a pool table around, or not. But as for the episode, it's not the best, not the worst, although it is a contender for that spot so far. I'm sure we'll see worse episodes this season. It's strange, usually when you get episodes where someone acts out of character it can be quite entertaining, but not when it's Clark, I suppose.
**
Red for danger. Red for stop. Red for… no, really, please stop, this isn't fun! Clark being a bad guy - you'd think that would be a great concept, but it shows up the flaws in the character: no one can stop him. It takes the combined efforts of his Father acting on information from Lex, and with the assistance of Pete, to save Clark from himself, and that was the best part of the episode, as well as the subsequent scenes. Well, perhaps not the one with Lana where he can't explain he was under the influence and the great stone face tells him where to go after he treated her so shabbily while being affected by red Kryptonite. It's not one of the good episodes, but being Season 2 it still comes out as having some nice moments, even if the majority is painful to watch. It's not just the to-ing and fro-ing around Lana that annoys, it's the discomfort of seeing Clark be a bad boy, and then of course it all gets reset at the end, except Lana thinks Clark was just acting up. The other loose ends are dealt with: the fake FBI man on the hunt for Jessie and her Father, is killed and the latter go back on the run. Pete, fortuitously in on the secret now, is the first to make the connection between Clark's aberrant behaviour and the school ring, although his role would have been played by Martha previously if Jonathan had needed to do something to stop Clark.
At least Clark had good taste when he was being bad: I'm not talking about the posh suits, Ferraris and motorbikes, I'm talking about something much more important - he had both the Apple Display I used to have and, what's even better, was playing on a GameCube! While it is sad to see him be so horrible, I did like the scenes with his parents as they're forced to deal with this new level of problem, Jonathan especially was portrayed very well - he doesn't have it in him to back down, even when he knows what Clark can do, but he also has strong reasoning in his words (which you sometimes think he should use for himself!), and can make a lot of sense on the fly. I think one of the things that doesn't appeal about the episode, however, is that I know it ties into the end of the season and I never liked Clark ditching his clean-cut image, even for an episode. It's like the characters in 'Star Trek' suddenly swearing, drinking and smoking (oh, I forgot, they do now!), it just doesn't feel right, and one of the series' strengths is its strong moral leanings about right and wrong.
One good thing is that Lex has the opportunity to take advantage of Clark's newfound relaxed behaviour and you half believe him when he says he's going to tie up some loose ends at the office and then the pair of them can go off to live it up in Metropolis, probably with nefarious motives. Except you know that, while he'd dearly love to know all Clark's secrets (all everyone's secrets, indeed), he's more responsible than that and is just humouring him so he can inform his parents what's going on. At least he is more responsible at this point in the series and wants to help Clark even when Clark wouldn't see it that way. Maybe he thinks he took drugs or perhaps it's just normal, teenaged angst that he recognises, despite the novelty of someone usually so stable exhibiting such feelings, but either way he does something to help, further putting him in the Kents' good books. It's disappointing that Lana herself didn't spot the signs that something's wrong, but then she seemed to want him to be like that and maybe she felt this act was the only way he was going to be big enough to pluck up the courage to approach her, and then she's disappointed, but it's more distressing that this is one of many times when something happens to one of them or Clark has to do something and can't tell her what was really going on, and she gets all huffy about it, and it's not good.
Almost hidden underneath all the shenanigans is the theme of material goods not bringing permanent happiness, with Lex' upbringing always such a clear contrast to Clark's. Yet Clark still sometimes wishes he had some of the things others had and he doesn't shy away from admitting it at the end, however uncomfortable it was to his parents and himself. From an outsiders perspective their farm looks ideal: vast space, animals, machinery, a barn, so it's not like poor Clark was living in poverty on some hot, cramped flat in the middle of a congested city. At the same time you can imagine that once in a while he might wish he had a big TV (although you never see any of them watching TV, settling down for a film or whatever, but they're probably too tired after the long farm day), or a games console, or a… wait, a jet-ski? What's he going to do, cart it down to Crater Lake? Actually I suppose he could do that, just carry it around like a tennis racket!
There are some good shots in the episode, and not just that lovely helicopter pullback as Lana moodily rides away from Clark at the end, but the moment Clark rides off the farm on his Father's bike and the Director allowed us to see it all in one shot rather so many cuts as you get too often on TV series', or when Jonathan smashes the ring with a sledgehammer, or when Clark pushes Lex' pool table into the FBI guy to trap him against the wall. I'm guessing Lionel didn't have any sight at this point, although we're meant to think he's intrigued by this Clark Kent he's never met before - in reality, in the series' continuity, he was supposed to know all about Clark, at least I think he did, so it wouldn't make that much difference either way if he could see Clark firing bullets into his own hand and lobbing a pool table around, or not. But as for the episode, it's not the best, not the worst, although it is a contender for that spot so far. I'm sure we'll see worse episodes this season. It's strange, usually when you get episodes where someone acts out of character it can be quite entertaining, but not when it's Clark, I suppose.
**
The Omega Glory (2)
DVD, Star Trek S2 (The Omega Glory) (2)
It could be said this episode is an amalgam of various Trek ideas used before, but it could also be said this was the origin of various Trek ideas since the story was one of the original plots laid out for the series as a possible pilot. How much of the story was finished back then I don't know, and it's just as possible that some of the tropes were incorporated into this final version rather than the other way around, but it's interesting that a story that was suggested so early in development should have taken almost two years to come to fruition. Perhaps this was because they had so many ideas to take up their time that it was only at this final stretch of the second season they were able to fit it in. Alternatively, it's possible they were simply running out of ideas and had to cast around for anything that could fill a slot just to battle to the end of the season - I've already noted in recent reviews that the season was becoming tired, the last couple of episodes suggesting fatigue in the writers and actors, and this one continues the trend, although it is better, perhaps because of the advantage of being previously formed.
So what do we have? A renegade Starfleet officer who ends up on a primitive planet and decides to exercise his power for his own gain or some other motive ('Bread and Circuses' and 'Patterns of Force' to name two this season), some Starfleet crew are reduced to crystals of their components (the Kelvan punishment in 'By Any Other Name' - I'm sure the Salt Vampire from 'The Man Trap' would be happy, tasty snacks scattered all around, or should that be water vampire since that's what was removed?), there's another Constitution-class vessel ('The Doomsday Machine' and 'The Ultimate Computer' - they certainly got their money's worth out of those sets!), it's a Prime Directive issue (they certainly got their money's worth out of that concept this season!), and we come full circle to the start of the season when it was usually Kirk, Spock and McCoy beaming down together. Maybe it is that the series was starting to become a little formulaic at this point, and I'm sure in the jumbled up airing of episodes that they chose (rather than the production order in which I watch), they could have spaced out similar episodes better, but it's not that this is a dull episode, it's just that it does appear to be one seen quite a few times before.
This time it's a very specifically patriotic angle, not the Vietnam parallel of 'A Private Little War,' but an alternate history where Communists (the Kohms), were able to rise to power on this planet (Omega IV, hence the episode title, which is otherwise a little shaky), and the Americans, or Yanks, or Yangs in this case, were reduced to barbarity, though they still hold dear the American constitution. It has more meaning for the original US audience and I can't imagine Trek doing something so patriotic now as it's much more aimed at being a global brand and trying to appeal by being all things to all people in a way that this episode does not. Yet there's still something reassuring about that in old Trek, the American-centric style was like sampling another culture, similar to your own, but different, which works doubly for the fact that it is supposed to be a future culture of what humanity could be if it got its act together and if the galaxy was filled with weird and wonderful races that all exhibited an aspect of humanity and played on that to create stories that examine those aspects, something lost in the muddle of cliffhanger storytelling and desperate-to-please-everyone soap opera twists that makes up modern Trek's 'style.' In comparison, this is quite simple and straightforward, though it does have its reveals, such as the constitution and the parallels with Earth history.
If it had been the only one of its kind this season it would have stood out much more, but part of the reason I didn't warm to it as much on this viewing was that it has been done a few times, and while I usually enjoy thematically linked episodes and like to point out the consistency of similar groups of stories for categorisation purposes, this may have been one too far, especially after the lacklustre 'Patterns of Force' coming so close behind. The episode isn't helped by a lack of something between the trio of main characters (McCoy is at his most pessimistic when he says in his experience evil usually wins, an attitude you'd not expect from Trek, especially 'TOS'), and almost no establishing of the situation back on the Enterprise - there's no sign of Scotty (which suggests, if you take it with the fact that Sulu has been elevated to temporary command, that he's either incapacitated for some reason, has some vital engine work that must be overseen, or is on another assignment, dropped off on either a planet, a station or a starship), or Chekov, and this close to the end you really want to see all the cast. Spock sounds like he has a cold, which only further makes him seem a little distant (as well as being kept in a separate cell to Kirk), or muted, and McCoy is also working on his own for a chunk of the story, so there isn't that impression of brotherhood and the cast exploring things together. Instead it seems to be Kirk getting into a fight every few minutes and having to work everything out for himself.
When dodgy Captain of the USS Exeter, Ronald Tracey (perhaps a descendent of the crew of 'Thunderbirds'?), manages to take on our Captain in a fistfight, despite looking ten, or even twenty years older, I assumed it was because he'd been affected by his exposure to the planet, a potential fountain of youth that he wants to exploit (see 'Star Trek: Insurrection' for details), either because he plans to live for hundreds of years or for the profit he can make off it, Ferengi-like, or more likely, both. But later on we find out the inhabitants only live so long because they're descended from those that had the makeup to survive the disease and were thus strengthened from that hereditary immunity so there's no benefit to being there other than to get immunity from the water extraction that killed the Exeter's crew. At least I think that's what happened, I may have missed dialogue or didn't pay close enough attention… I can only assume that Tracey thought he was feeling younger and healthier, like a placebo effect, and also that Kirk was weakened by captivity and fighting the Yang captives he was thrown in with, and Tracey has the vitality of a driven madman. He also has no redeeming features, which doesn't help, I like a sympathetic villain whose motives you can at least understand, not one who is just greedy and murdering (we see him kill Redshirt, Galloway, with his Phaser).
Kirk himself doesn't appear to be at his best, usually he loves a good fight and a chance to test his mettle, but maybe having to constantly take on opponents through the episode made him sick of it. Or he was getting demoralised from having to deal with rogue Starfleet/Federation personnel and wished he could be out doing something more fun, like taking on the Klingons or Romulans? It was unlike him to let his guard down so the Yang could batter him with the metal bar they'd just dislodged from the prison window, and then he isn't able to overcome Tracey when the devious Captain takes Kirk on in words as well as fists in front of the Yangs. Kirk just seems a bit tired, which was unfortunate since he then had to do a sort of Andorian fight where he and Tracey are tied by one wrist with a curved blade left for one of them to claim - of course Kirk still prevails, then refuses to execute his opponent, sparing him in the same way he did the Gorn Captain in 'Arena,' not something the 'Evil One' would do, and proving himself good. There's a bit of theological difference to our own Bible, as although we see the book of Haggai is in there, we also get an illustration of the Devil looking like Mr. Spock, which is not theologically accurate - the pointed ears and all that comes from Medieval mythology, not Christian teaching! But we can say that not everything was identical to our own history so perhaps they'd incorporated such things into their Bible for some reason - they already were saying the constitution wrongly, like a jumble of sounds without meaning.
Spock may not have been on best form either, but at least he earned his keep by using the nerve pinch on occasion - he claims he did try to teach Kirk (shame you couldn't teach me that, says he), which suggests anyone could do it with the right technique, and borne out by both Picard, Data and Burnham employing it in other Treks. Data I can buy because he shares greater than normal strength with Vulcans, but humans? I don't believe it's ever been laid out in canon what exactly is happening - it could be strength, it could be a bit of telepathy, neither of which a human would be able to utilise, but if it's just where you press then that's a lot less mysterious and I'd rather believe Spock was making light at that moment rather than he'd actually given Kirk a lesson in the attack. His other contribution is the old close proximity telepathic suggestion which we've now seen twice (once in 'A Taste of Armageddon' and then again against the Kelvans in 'By Any Other Name'). Earlier in the episode I was wondering why he didn't employ it on the Yangs Kirk was trapped with, to give his Captain a better chance. In the end he does use it on that same girl (Sirah, though nothing to do with the guy of the same name from 'The Storyteller' on 'DS9'!), in the last scene to get her to pick up the Communicator, so I don't know why he didn't earlier. I wasn't quite sure how Spock was injured: Tracey bursts in as they're about to contact the Enterprise, phasers the machine and Spock was either touching it or standing close enough to experience the shockwave of energy? I don't think we've ever seen someone affected by being near a Phaser beam before.
I did like seeing the two starships in the same shot as the Enterprise approaches the orbiting Exeter, and we find out that (possibly), four shuttlecraft are the standard complement (as opposed to hundreds we see in modern Trek, which is utterly ludicrous - you see how much more seriously they took the internal reality back then and it really pains me how loose they are with it now), so we can assume this is true of the Enterprise, too. Once again we get to see that each ship carries its own unique badge, the Exeter's quite different as a long, horizontal strip, another detail you don't see in contemporary Trek, probably 'too much trouble' and 'who cares about such minor details when the fate of the galaxy is at stake' - I do. We see McCoy write with a stylus on a padd and he mentions biological warfare experiments in the 1990s, another reference to a period yet to happen from the perspective of the series' production - I'm surprised they didn't throw in a reference to Khan or the Eugenics Wars as that would seem to be just the sort of thing that would go on in that conflict (although the first Gulf War used chemical weapons, so…). It also adds a little more depth that this is a Prime Directive issue, that these people don't know about other worlds, and while Tracey is all for exploiting them and their planet, Kirk says they have no right or wisdom to interfere with the development of the planet, a bold statement considering his 'side' had lost in the war that was avoided on our world, as Spock says (so far, anyway…), although the Yangs were coming back strongly.
I wonder if he'd have been more open to changing the balance of power if the Yangs were being overthrown by the Kohms? That might have made for a more interesting episode because the rights and potential of the Federation-like side being quashed by Communism could have made for a much tougher dilemma. A bit like 'A Private Little War,' though in that it was about outside influence (again, the 'Communist' Klingons arming one side, so Kirk restores the balance of power), and I can't help feeling this one had more potential than it demonstrated. I like Morgan Woodward (who only died in 2019), he's one of the most expressive and energetic guest actors on the series, his role as Dr. Van Gelder in 'Dagger of The Mind' was unforgettable (especially for being the first person to be shown having a mind meld applied), and he's still strong here, but the character, like Van Gelder, comes off as being a bit mad and not much more. Why else would he throw off his allegiances and beliefs for the sake of living longer or profiting, did he really hold Starfleet's tenets so lightly? There was another actor who appeared in both 'Dagger of The Mind' and this: Ed McCready, an inmate in the former, here as Dr. Carter, the ill-fated Chief Medical Officer of the Exeter whom left a video log before he died. He'd had a couple of other small roles, too, including an SS Trooper in 'Patterns of Force.' David L. Ross (Galloway), was another to appear in multiple episodes, and like Mr. Leslie (who gets name-checked by Kirk when he beams down with Sulu and another Redshirt at the end), he returned as his character after death, although it was misspelled Galoway later.
**
It could be said this episode is an amalgam of various Trek ideas used before, but it could also be said this was the origin of various Trek ideas since the story was one of the original plots laid out for the series as a possible pilot. How much of the story was finished back then I don't know, and it's just as possible that some of the tropes were incorporated into this final version rather than the other way around, but it's interesting that a story that was suggested so early in development should have taken almost two years to come to fruition. Perhaps this was because they had so many ideas to take up their time that it was only at this final stretch of the second season they were able to fit it in. Alternatively, it's possible they were simply running out of ideas and had to cast around for anything that could fill a slot just to battle to the end of the season - I've already noted in recent reviews that the season was becoming tired, the last couple of episodes suggesting fatigue in the writers and actors, and this one continues the trend, although it is better, perhaps because of the advantage of being previously formed.
So what do we have? A renegade Starfleet officer who ends up on a primitive planet and decides to exercise his power for his own gain or some other motive ('Bread and Circuses' and 'Patterns of Force' to name two this season), some Starfleet crew are reduced to crystals of their components (the Kelvan punishment in 'By Any Other Name' - I'm sure the Salt Vampire from 'The Man Trap' would be happy, tasty snacks scattered all around, or should that be water vampire since that's what was removed?), there's another Constitution-class vessel ('The Doomsday Machine' and 'The Ultimate Computer' - they certainly got their money's worth out of those sets!), it's a Prime Directive issue (they certainly got their money's worth out of that concept this season!), and we come full circle to the start of the season when it was usually Kirk, Spock and McCoy beaming down together. Maybe it is that the series was starting to become a little formulaic at this point, and I'm sure in the jumbled up airing of episodes that they chose (rather than the production order in which I watch), they could have spaced out similar episodes better, but it's not that this is a dull episode, it's just that it does appear to be one seen quite a few times before.
This time it's a very specifically patriotic angle, not the Vietnam parallel of 'A Private Little War,' but an alternate history where Communists (the Kohms), were able to rise to power on this planet (Omega IV, hence the episode title, which is otherwise a little shaky), and the Americans, or Yanks, or Yangs in this case, were reduced to barbarity, though they still hold dear the American constitution. It has more meaning for the original US audience and I can't imagine Trek doing something so patriotic now as it's much more aimed at being a global brand and trying to appeal by being all things to all people in a way that this episode does not. Yet there's still something reassuring about that in old Trek, the American-centric style was like sampling another culture, similar to your own, but different, which works doubly for the fact that it is supposed to be a future culture of what humanity could be if it got its act together and if the galaxy was filled with weird and wonderful races that all exhibited an aspect of humanity and played on that to create stories that examine those aspects, something lost in the muddle of cliffhanger storytelling and desperate-to-please-everyone soap opera twists that makes up modern Trek's 'style.' In comparison, this is quite simple and straightforward, though it does have its reveals, such as the constitution and the parallels with Earth history.
If it had been the only one of its kind this season it would have stood out much more, but part of the reason I didn't warm to it as much on this viewing was that it has been done a few times, and while I usually enjoy thematically linked episodes and like to point out the consistency of similar groups of stories for categorisation purposes, this may have been one too far, especially after the lacklustre 'Patterns of Force' coming so close behind. The episode isn't helped by a lack of something between the trio of main characters (McCoy is at his most pessimistic when he says in his experience evil usually wins, an attitude you'd not expect from Trek, especially 'TOS'), and almost no establishing of the situation back on the Enterprise - there's no sign of Scotty (which suggests, if you take it with the fact that Sulu has been elevated to temporary command, that he's either incapacitated for some reason, has some vital engine work that must be overseen, or is on another assignment, dropped off on either a planet, a station or a starship), or Chekov, and this close to the end you really want to see all the cast. Spock sounds like he has a cold, which only further makes him seem a little distant (as well as being kept in a separate cell to Kirk), or muted, and McCoy is also working on his own for a chunk of the story, so there isn't that impression of brotherhood and the cast exploring things together. Instead it seems to be Kirk getting into a fight every few minutes and having to work everything out for himself.
When dodgy Captain of the USS Exeter, Ronald Tracey (perhaps a descendent of the crew of 'Thunderbirds'?), manages to take on our Captain in a fistfight, despite looking ten, or even twenty years older, I assumed it was because he'd been affected by his exposure to the planet, a potential fountain of youth that he wants to exploit (see 'Star Trek: Insurrection' for details), either because he plans to live for hundreds of years or for the profit he can make off it, Ferengi-like, or more likely, both. But later on we find out the inhabitants only live so long because they're descended from those that had the makeup to survive the disease and were thus strengthened from that hereditary immunity so there's no benefit to being there other than to get immunity from the water extraction that killed the Exeter's crew. At least I think that's what happened, I may have missed dialogue or didn't pay close enough attention… I can only assume that Tracey thought he was feeling younger and healthier, like a placebo effect, and also that Kirk was weakened by captivity and fighting the Yang captives he was thrown in with, and Tracey has the vitality of a driven madman. He also has no redeeming features, which doesn't help, I like a sympathetic villain whose motives you can at least understand, not one who is just greedy and murdering (we see him kill Redshirt, Galloway, with his Phaser).
Kirk himself doesn't appear to be at his best, usually he loves a good fight and a chance to test his mettle, but maybe having to constantly take on opponents through the episode made him sick of it. Or he was getting demoralised from having to deal with rogue Starfleet/Federation personnel and wished he could be out doing something more fun, like taking on the Klingons or Romulans? It was unlike him to let his guard down so the Yang could batter him with the metal bar they'd just dislodged from the prison window, and then he isn't able to overcome Tracey when the devious Captain takes Kirk on in words as well as fists in front of the Yangs. Kirk just seems a bit tired, which was unfortunate since he then had to do a sort of Andorian fight where he and Tracey are tied by one wrist with a curved blade left for one of them to claim - of course Kirk still prevails, then refuses to execute his opponent, sparing him in the same way he did the Gorn Captain in 'Arena,' not something the 'Evil One' would do, and proving himself good. There's a bit of theological difference to our own Bible, as although we see the book of Haggai is in there, we also get an illustration of the Devil looking like Mr. Spock, which is not theologically accurate - the pointed ears and all that comes from Medieval mythology, not Christian teaching! But we can say that not everything was identical to our own history so perhaps they'd incorporated such things into their Bible for some reason - they already were saying the constitution wrongly, like a jumble of sounds without meaning.
Spock may not have been on best form either, but at least he earned his keep by using the nerve pinch on occasion - he claims he did try to teach Kirk (shame you couldn't teach me that, says he), which suggests anyone could do it with the right technique, and borne out by both Picard, Data and Burnham employing it in other Treks. Data I can buy because he shares greater than normal strength with Vulcans, but humans? I don't believe it's ever been laid out in canon what exactly is happening - it could be strength, it could be a bit of telepathy, neither of which a human would be able to utilise, but if it's just where you press then that's a lot less mysterious and I'd rather believe Spock was making light at that moment rather than he'd actually given Kirk a lesson in the attack. His other contribution is the old close proximity telepathic suggestion which we've now seen twice (once in 'A Taste of Armageddon' and then again against the Kelvans in 'By Any Other Name'). Earlier in the episode I was wondering why he didn't employ it on the Yangs Kirk was trapped with, to give his Captain a better chance. In the end he does use it on that same girl (Sirah, though nothing to do with the guy of the same name from 'The Storyteller' on 'DS9'!), in the last scene to get her to pick up the Communicator, so I don't know why he didn't earlier. I wasn't quite sure how Spock was injured: Tracey bursts in as they're about to contact the Enterprise, phasers the machine and Spock was either touching it or standing close enough to experience the shockwave of energy? I don't think we've ever seen someone affected by being near a Phaser beam before.
I did like seeing the two starships in the same shot as the Enterprise approaches the orbiting Exeter, and we find out that (possibly), four shuttlecraft are the standard complement (as opposed to hundreds we see in modern Trek, which is utterly ludicrous - you see how much more seriously they took the internal reality back then and it really pains me how loose they are with it now), so we can assume this is true of the Enterprise, too. Once again we get to see that each ship carries its own unique badge, the Exeter's quite different as a long, horizontal strip, another detail you don't see in contemporary Trek, probably 'too much trouble' and 'who cares about such minor details when the fate of the galaxy is at stake' - I do. We see McCoy write with a stylus on a padd and he mentions biological warfare experiments in the 1990s, another reference to a period yet to happen from the perspective of the series' production - I'm surprised they didn't throw in a reference to Khan or the Eugenics Wars as that would seem to be just the sort of thing that would go on in that conflict (although the first Gulf War used chemical weapons, so…). It also adds a little more depth that this is a Prime Directive issue, that these people don't know about other worlds, and while Tracey is all for exploiting them and their planet, Kirk says they have no right or wisdom to interfere with the development of the planet, a bold statement considering his 'side' had lost in the war that was avoided on our world, as Spock says (so far, anyway…), although the Yangs were coming back strongly.
I wonder if he'd have been more open to changing the balance of power if the Yangs were being overthrown by the Kohms? That might have made for a more interesting episode because the rights and potential of the Federation-like side being quashed by Communism could have made for a much tougher dilemma. A bit like 'A Private Little War,' though in that it was about outside influence (again, the 'Communist' Klingons arming one side, so Kirk restores the balance of power), and I can't help feeling this one had more potential than it demonstrated. I like Morgan Woodward (who only died in 2019), he's one of the most expressive and energetic guest actors on the series, his role as Dr. Van Gelder in 'Dagger of The Mind' was unforgettable (especially for being the first person to be shown having a mind meld applied), and he's still strong here, but the character, like Van Gelder, comes off as being a bit mad and not much more. Why else would he throw off his allegiances and beliefs for the sake of living longer or profiting, did he really hold Starfleet's tenets so lightly? There was another actor who appeared in both 'Dagger of The Mind' and this: Ed McCready, an inmate in the former, here as Dr. Carter, the ill-fated Chief Medical Officer of the Exeter whom left a video log before he died. He'd had a couple of other small roles, too, including an SS Trooper in 'Patterns of Force.' David L. Ross (Galloway), was another to appear in multiple episodes, and like Mr. Leslie (who gets name-checked by Kirk when he beams down with Sulu and another Redshirt at the end), he returned as his character after death, although it was misspelled Galoway later.
**
Body Harvest
N64, Body Harvest (1998), game
Takes me back, this one… Back exactly twenty years as I haven't played it since the first time, the end of May to the end of June 2001. Not because it was a bad experience, it was simply that it was a one-off type of game, not the kind to offer multiple options, game types or co-operative/competitive modes for more than one player. In that respect it was very compact, but that didn't take away from the quality it had to offer. So why hadn't I returned to it before now? I'm not really sure, but part of the reason may have been that it was an intensive month of playing it twice - wishing to get the most life out of games in those days I usually began with the easier difficulty setting (designated rather disparagingly 'Zero' in this case!), and so I did with 'Body Harvest,' only to find that it restricted progression to the end of the third level (America 1966), so I piled in and went for the next (and only), difficulty up: 'Hero.' I had some problems with bugs in the system (and I'm not talking about the alien variety you come up against in-game!), where it kept crashing, and most notably when the third stage of America failed to open the Shield Portal through which it was necessary to travel to beat the level's boss threat, requiring restarting at the beginning of Stage 1 of that era! And it was no joke getting through America, especially the first stage, where there were so many opportunities for the humans you were there to save, to be crushed, shot or eaten, just as much at risk from the wheels of your own vehicles as the alien attackers since they would run around in the road, often directly into your path…
All this being said, and as much as I enjoyed the game, especially at the great bargain price of £9.99 in HMV, brand new, I was not encouraged by the experience enough to want to revisit it, at least not for some time, and that, as I'm demonstrating, was the case! With so many other terrific N64 games to replay, not to mention a steady influx of secondhand GameCube games (and in the last couple of years, Wii), it was simply a case of not getting around to it, but it was always there in the back of my mind as one to go back to eventually. I also liked the idea of recreating the same time of year period I played it originally to assist in connecting to the happy memories I have of the game as well as life around it, so as 'World Snooker Championship Real 2008' on the Wii had kept me away from more traditional gaming pursuits for almost half the year (surprisingly), and I required something more action-oriented, plus the realisation of the twentieth anniversary of my original experience, 'Body Harvest' seemed an ideal choice to pull myself away from snooker and get stuck in on the N64 again - I'd meant to pack the old console away for a while as I had before bringing it out to rediscover 'Zelda: Majora's Mask' (another title I'd not returned to since original play-through), but kept it out after that knowing there would be some game on the system I might play in the near future.
Much like 'Jet Force Gemini' I had impressions that weren't entirely favourable, in the case of 'Body Harvest' it was that the graphics were pretty poor, and as with 'JFG' I was expecting it to look terrible, if not close to unplayable using the VGA adaptor I required to be able to play it on the Dell flat panel monitor I use for gaming - while some N64 games work through the yellow video port on this screen, usually games with a high resolution, the majority don't, forcing use of the inferior VGA port which always makes things appear washed out and loses all contrast on very light colours (for example, '1080º Snowboarding' is completely whited out in snowstorm levels). I was very pleasantly surprised to find, much as I had been with 'JFG' that the game actually looked pretty good, and since it had always been quite basic anyway and the reputation was for poor visuals, the low expectations I had worked in its favour and I found it to look very nice with well developed environments. The negatives were still apparent, mainly in the draw distance for the environmental shapes of hills and buildings which would appear out of the fog, but in some cases this actually enhanced the atmosphere of the level - I'm thinking specifically of Java 1941, a dark swampland where it's always raining so you expect it to be gloomy, only adding to the sense of an alien pall on the landscape so that when the clouds part and the darkness rolls away at the end it's really quite lovely.
Probably the worst offender in terms of visuals was America as entire buildings would pop up as you sped along, or at least solidified out of the orange fog. These things didn't bother me as you're much more intent on the tasks you have to accomplish or the locating of vehicles that will transform your fortunes: this was the game's biggest selling point and remains to this day a great pleasure and the main draw of the game. The fact you could approach any vehicles you discovered and, provided it had fuel and wasn't locked (in a few rare occasions you needed to speak to someone before it would be possible to use), take it for a spin, gave the game an incredible sense of freedom. But what it was really about was showing how small and insignificant you were outside of the safety of a wheeled shell, to the point you actually felt exposed and vulnerable trudging along in your armoured biosuit. The reverse was also true, however, as once you have even a small, basic car, your ability to scout out the level and explore is increased in magnitude and you feel empowered. And that's before you even get the joy of experimenting with various different forms of transport: the super-fast motorbike that allowed you to speed around Greece 1916, but especially the selection of planes and helicopters that opened up the world of flight. Cleverly, this last was generally kept for the end of levels where it couldn't mess up the structure of the game, but on finishing America Stage 1 for example, you had to take a helicopter to get clear across the level to the Shield Portal which was only big enough for a person to walk through, and seeing all those skyscrapers from the sky gave a whole new perspective to the cities.
The game was expertly put together to provide both a freeform gaming experience of exploration and play, but also a tight action adventure with stakes and threat. This came from the necessity of protecting the hapless humans of each time period (who, oddly all looked the same!), fodder for the greedy alien creatures sent to, yes, harvest them. The structure was brilliant with a whole subset of different creatures working together to expose the ant-like humans to the grim blobs of harvester goo that would seek them out and drag them to the spider-like alien for digestion - as soon as you hear that bleeping alarm that a Harvester wave has just beamed in like some evil 'Star Trek' Away Team, and the red warning arrow points the direction, you're put on high alert as you frantically try to get there before anyone dies. It was very well judged, because if you knew your way around the levels and had access to a vehicle you had enough time to get there and run over the ugly beasts rushing into the sides of houses in order to bring them to rubble and expose the nest of humans to panicked escape attempts while smaller bugs go for you and flying ones shoot at you. If you could just kill off the main bug before the globules of human-carrying slime returned to it, they'd be saved as the goo itself didn't harm them, only being fed to the main chomper. But if you didn't know the level or you were caught without a vehicle, that's when it became really tense as it was easy to get lost, the arrow only pointing as the crow flies, not the best route to get there!
If this tension and madcap dash for protection was one of the best aspects of the game, it was counterpointed by vast levels which you were encouraged to explore to your heart's content. While you had specific mission goals to accomplish in order to progress, such as finding a vehicle with enough weight to go through a dividing fence, opening up a new area, there was also value in simply checking each building in case they were accessible (the majority of doors were barred so you knew they weren't), in which you could find characters to talk to, weapons, ammo, health, fuel, and even special items such as the Alien Artefacts or Weapon Crystals which I was never entirely sure on the purpose of, but appeared to be for making a special weapon. It seemed the weapon came purely from the Crystals, I never discovered what the Artefacts did as I never took time to find all of them (three in each time period). I was only able to locate all three in America and didn't have the patience to go back over the other levels and scour them, though this would add a level of extension to the game it was otherwise lacking, even if game length was pretty good and when you're going through it for the 'first' time, not really knowing where you are or what you have to do, it does take a while - it does show how much this learning experience takes up, however, as when the glitch happened in America (where the Shield Portal didn't open, exactly the same issue I experienced twenty years ago!), I was able to get through all three stages in one day, so probably three or four hours in total (including multiple attempts as it could be reasonably tough), and while my total time was 10 hours, 23 minutes (and 58 seconds), it was probably more like four times that, given the number of times I had to replay sections!
The major glitch I experienced this time aside, the game is pretty solid considering how big the levels were and how much was asked of the machine, especially so early in its lifespan, but there were still frustrating issues here and there, and few more than the experience of getting stuck on scenery, either in a vehicle or on foot. It was much easier for this to happen when you were within a vehicle and the worst cases were when you just went slightly over the lip of a hill or sheer drop and the car would be unable to back out, leading either to an angry ditching in the gully below, or a hopeful attempt to eject and keep going on foot. I once had to make the second jump on America Stage 1, and used the buggy, not getting up enough speed and landing short, gripped on the side of the opposite cliff, below a large drop into water that was not survivable. I managed to eject and the buggy rolled down, but by keeping the stick forward and wiggling it side to side I was able to slowly edge up this steep incline which you wouldn't normally be able to ascend, and pop over the top, saving my attempt on the level instead of certain death, so not all glitches were annoying. It was just that, for all the freedom and speeding around you were given, it just seemed harsh when you'd just misjudge something and end up in water where you were almost guaranteed to die, forced to restart from the last save point at the beginning of a stage!
In fact, this give and take approach and the sense of real danger to yourself as well as the humans you're trying to protect, actually made me more attached to the game because it made the freedom sweeter - the same was true of the vehicles, where if they ran out of fuel you couldn't use them any more unless you had your own cans saved up. Even then, if you were desperate there was always the option of returning back to Alpha I, your space-hovercraft (where your glamorous assistant resided), to reset the positions of all vehicles in the level, so they generally thought of every eventuality. The biggest annoyance was always the fact that your specialist suit was so cumbersome, most affected by water. You could swim, but it was very slow and your suit was frying in the meantime until you eventually died if you failed to reach dry land in time. Not quite as cumbersome as swimming, but not far off, running on foot could be a bit of a trudge, especially if you were caught out in the open without a vehicle, and the turning of your suit was so clunky and awkward you almost feel they should have included a weightless level to show that in zero-g it was actually an advantage. The pros were that it could pack in various weapons and had reasonably good armour (though nothing against the terrifyingly huge creatures you'd face as you progressed). You needed it, too, as some aliens were so big it was like looking up at a building from your perspective on the ground, another very impressive aspect of the game.
You really feel like an ant scurrying across the land and the sense of scale was very impressive - there were two camera views, one up close for a more traditional viewpoint of most third-person action-adventure games, and then a distant, pulled back perspective that gave a much wider view of the surroundings and was necessary for the speed at which you could travel in vehicles. It really was the difference between humans and Borrowers in scale, and touches such as the sound of your heavy boots clomping vanishing when the camera pulls back only added to the sense of a lonely hero in a vast environment. The naturalistic nature of the levels helped, too, whether it was the golden yellow sands of Greece, the greenery of Java or the built up areas juxtaposed with orange desert sands and rock (like 'Dune' - complete with giant sandworms, too!). This worked much better than if it had been some ugly alien planet, and the time travel story gave them the excuse for a great range of vehicles from rickety World War I planes to 1960s police cars and World War II bombers (in fact, maybe I should have played the game back in 2016 as that's the 'contemporary' time your character comes from!). In keeping with gaming tradition, the final level was much less interesting, ugly, tough and not much fun - it's amazing how common this phenomenon is as you'd think more effort and time than any other would be spent on the final level, but that's probably the opposite of reality as deadlines loom and pressure rises to finish a game, while the first level has the most amount of time for tweaking and getting it right.
Strangely, I had no memories of Siberia, the last proper level before the atypical buzz around in the alien landscape of the Comet. The first three, Greece, Java and America had all stayed with me, but Siberia had been lost in its own haze of dull greens and browns. Partly that's due to playing the first three levels through twice (Zero, then Hero), but also it was the most ugly level - they took the time to have snow gently falling so why not have it settle? There were snowy areas, but too much was a duller version of Java. There was a spot of 'Blast Corps' influences with tasks such as destroying the five pump houses of the nuclear reactor in the time limit, and transporting a missile, that kind of thing, but it was certainly the least enjoyable Earth-based levels. It was certainly challenging, sometimes from my own unwillingness to join in - one example is that early in the level you're supposed to get a combine harvester and mow down a load of civilians that had been turned into zombies, but it was so antithetical to my mission of protecting humans that I chose to avoid the shamblers, missing out on the vital ammo they carried and making my task far harder, but I did succeed all the same: I'm supposed to be there to save them, not harvest them myself! But even now as I think back, Siberia doesn't resonate much, it all blended together.
What I did have memory of was the actual final level on the Comet in 2016. And it was memorable for all the wrong reasons: after four levels of glorious freedom of exploration and playing with countless vehicles you're restricted to the terrible Alpha 1 'tank' hovercraft, the most difficult machine to handle in the game, and much of the challenge comes from the trial of dealing with the enemy using this unwieldy vehicle, when the challenge shouldn't come from the poor control issues. It's also much more linear and basic: kill everything in your path simply to survive and keep the ammo coming… so you can kill everything in your path. It's worrying to think that before Nintendo stepped in and ordered the makers to add RPG elements to the game this is probably what the game would have largely consisted of, as it certainly wouldn't have gone down as a classic in my eyes. And this is what I was referring to above when I said final levels are usually the worst. It's a trial to get through and the only good feeling is finishing it!
I had to wonder if Nintendo's influence on the game stretched to more than just suggestion of gameplay improvements, but one of their actual properties - I know Nintendo requested they add RPG elements to improve the experience (talking to characters, collecting things, entering buildings, that kind of thing), but I also wonder if there was some 'Metroid' influence? I didn't know this series at the time I originally played it, still some years away from discovering Samus Aran and her space quests, since 'Metroid Prime' on the 'Cube was my first exposure. For some reason Samus skipped the N64 generation, I don't know why, but perhaps Nintendo simply had enough on their plate transforming so many of their top properties from 2D to 3D they didn't have time, plus they don't present updates from every series in each console generation, perhaps to develop more anticipation and give players a feeling of exclusivity (I'm still disappointed that so many of their top franchises were farmed out to other companies, such as Sega doing 'F-Zero GX' on 'Cube, when only Nintendo can fully realise their own properties). But here we have the orange biosuit complete with large shoulder pads, an attached gun with unlimited ammo on its most basic setting, shooting up alien bugs while discovering the story of what this is all about, chasing around a lot of outdoor environments - there's even an evil 'Samus' in black as a humanoid adversary! It's the closest we got to a 'Metroid' game on the N64 and this suggests it would have been terrific!
While the game has a serious story, none other than the wiping out of humanity by alien hordes, there's also room for some humorous references within it, something else I enjoyed about the game. Right from the 'Camberwick Green' connection near the start of Greece where you need to gain access to a fire engine in the town of 'Trumptonas,' if you know a little TV and film history you'll enjoy the connections. Other ones I spotted were 'Port Humphrey' where a Bogart-alike lets you use 'The Javanese Queen,' to a certain 'Professor Brown' in America who's development of a nitro fuel enables your armoured car to go faster (88mph perhaps?), an apt reference since you start one hundred years in the past at the beginning of the game and proceed to go 'back to the future' again! If you explore, there's even a well-hidden 'Bates Motel' in a corner of the America level, purely there for fun, as well as more general sci-fi examples such as men in black and UFOs with little grey aliens. You can see the British background of the makers in some of these, none more than a 'Blue Peter' reference with a plaque to 'Shep' (in loving memory, 1972-1986), and mention of the 'Mabel' Peace Prize, which couldn't be more surreal! This sense of fun prevents the game from seeming bleak and po-faced, when a vast action game could still recognise it's fun. And it is fun, great fun. They maybe took it too far at the end with all the 'Star Wars' Vader and Emperor dialogue in the final confrontation, but that's probably more to do with my fatigue with that franchise now!
Other details of the game that deserve mention are the map and the music. The former is a lifesaver for putting your position and the terrain in context as well as giving you further incentive to explore as so much of the level is greyed out until you actually visit there. This also tells you what your current objective is, lessening all that confusing wandering around trying to work out what you're supposed to be doing that can plague a large, 3D game world. Here, the worlds are huge, but they're well mapped out and nicely divided up with the internal logic of the alien shield walls that prevent travel between stages until certain prerequisites have been met. The music is suitable for filling these huge levels and as you'd expect, is context sensitive depending on what's going on - so when there's the threat of a Harvester Wave, or a nearby enemy (shown as an orange blob on the handy radar, which I would have liked to have been a little more detailed rather than being limited to the compass points, enemies and the green triangles that denoted vehicles), it changes to enhance the sense of jeopardy just when you want to take it slow and explore a new area you're forced to rush through it and fling yourself into a previously unexplored part in order to save the humans (there's also the personal incentive to do this, not just to get each of the 5000 point bonuses for no humans harvested or no humans killed, but because a meter for the whole time period shows how many have died and if it fills up to maximum you have to start the whole level over again!).
A very useful addition is an optional marker you can put on the map which will give you a purple arrow to follow in game that points the way to wherever you select it to be, giving more options for how you find your way around. Then, although I said there was no replay incentive, you can actually replay any of the levels, and the bosses, at any time, to improve your time and score, so if high scores are a motivating factor, this adds life to the game. And it's really divided into two parts: the external in which all the action takes place, and the internal where you can explore buildings or perhaps underground sewage tunnels, that sort of thing. When you're inside there's absolutely no threat and you don't have the option of using your weapons, it's purely for the RPG side of the game, speaking to characters (the attractive illustration of their faces next to the text dialogue reminded me of Amiga graphics which was a nice connection to older games like 'Supercars 2' or 'Mean Arenas'), searching furniture (a bit like 'Impossible Mission'), and enjoying the period decor of each location. It broke up the gameplay a bit, and though your suit is a bit unwieldy and shows up the limitations in a confined environment, the addition of different music gives it variety. If there is a complaint it is that not enough of that variety was in the music, so every level has the same aural background rather than being level specific, when they could have had more fun with that aspect. On the other hand, this also means we don't get the cliched Greek instruments, American rock or classical Russian styles and it does the job well, plus I counted fifteen different external tracks and four internal, not to mention specific ones for the map or when aliens attack.
The weapons and aiming system work pretty well, though it can be a little awkward when you've got aliens all around and you're trying to concentrate on one, especially when you're out of the protection of a vehicle. It makes sense that you can't look up as far as you want, and in vehicles you have to turn to get more coverage, forcing you to think on your feet (or your wheels), and the side roll becomes invaluable if you are taking on enemies on foot. The standard weapon is a bit puny, as you'd expect, and I found the shotgun to be most effective, especially as most combat takes place close range, though the rifle was very useful for its longer range and so more time in which to attack. While aliens have a health bar to deplete, this goes for vehicles and even buildings themselves, so again, there's a much closer connection to the world than in a lot of games where most of the scenery tended to be indestructible. The fact you can smash through fences or rumble over trees adds greatly to your sense of having an impact on the environment, too! The story isn't bad, even though it's fairly slight, with this black-suited version of you, which you eventually learn is actually you, a clone created from the drop of blood shown in the intro - surprising to see so much blood on a Nintendo game back then, but it was a good scene-setter at the start. I didn't smash my previous time (7:40:28), but I did beat the score (950425 this time, opposed to 826575 before). It may not be the sort of game you want to play more than once (every twenty years), but while you are playing it there's much to enjoy, so much that I can't help but recommend it.
****
Takes me back, this one… Back exactly twenty years as I haven't played it since the first time, the end of May to the end of June 2001. Not because it was a bad experience, it was simply that it was a one-off type of game, not the kind to offer multiple options, game types or co-operative/competitive modes for more than one player. In that respect it was very compact, but that didn't take away from the quality it had to offer. So why hadn't I returned to it before now? I'm not really sure, but part of the reason may have been that it was an intensive month of playing it twice - wishing to get the most life out of games in those days I usually began with the easier difficulty setting (designated rather disparagingly 'Zero' in this case!), and so I did with 'Body Harvest,' only to find that it restricted progression to the end of the third level (America 1966), so I piled in and went for the next (and only), difficulty up: 'Hero.' I had some problems with bugs in the system (and I'm not talking about the alien variety you come up against in-game!), where it kept crashing, and most notably when the third stage of America failed to open the Shield Portal through which it was necessary to travel to beat the level's boss threat, requiring restarting at the beginning of Stage 1 of that era! And it was no joke getting through America, especially the first stage, where there were so many opportunities for the humans you were there to save, to be crushed, shot or eaten, just as much at risk from the wheels of your own vehicles as the alien attackers since they would run around in the road, often directly into your path…
All this being said, and as much as I enjoyed the game, especially at the great bargain price of £9.99 in HMV, brand new, I was not encouraged by the experience enough to want to revisit it, at least not for some time, and that, as I'm demonstrating, was the case! With so many other terrific N64 games to replay, not to mention a steady influx of secondhand GameCube games (and in the last couple of years, Wii), it was simply a case of not getting around to it, but it was always there in the back of my mind as one to go back to eventually. I also liked the idea of recreating the same time of year period I played it originally to assist in connecting to the happy memories I have of the game as well as life around it, so as 'World Snooker Championship Real 2008' on the Wii had kept me away from more traditional gaming pursuits for almost half the year (surprisingly), and I required something more action-oriented, plus the realisation of the twentieth anniversary of my original experience, 'Body Harvest' seemed an ideal choice to pull myself away from snooker and get stuck in on the N64 again - I'd meant to pack the old console away for a while as I had before bringing it out to rediscover 'Zelda: Majora's Mask' (another title I'd not returned to since original play-through), but kept it out after that knowing there would be some game on the system I might play in the near future.
Much like 'Jet Force Gemini' I had impressions that weren't entirely favourable, in the case of 'Body Harvest' it was that the graphics were pretty poor, and as with 'JFG' I was expecting it to look terrible, if not close to unplayable using the VGA adaptor I required to be able to play it on the Dell flat panel monitor I use for gaming - while some N64 games work through the yellow video port on this screen, usually games with a high resolution, the majority don't, forcing use of the inferior VGA port which always makes things appear washed out and loses all contrast on very light colours (for example, '1080º Snowboarding' is completely whited out in snowstorm levels). I was very pleasantly surprised to find, much as I had been with 'JFG' that the game actually looked pretty good, and since it had always been quite basic anyway and the reputation was for poor visuals, the low expectations I had worked in its favour and I found it to look very nice with well developed environments. The negatives were still apparent, mainly in the draw distance for the environmental shapes of hills and buildings which would appear out of the fog, but in some cases this actually enhanced the atmosphere of the level - I'm thinking specifically of Java 1941, a dark swampland where it's always raining so you expect it to be gloomy, only adding to the sense of an alien pall on the landscape so that when the clouds part and the darkness rolls away at the end it's really quite lovely.
Probably the worst offender in terms of visuals was America as entire buildings would pop up as you sped along, or at least solidified out of the orange fog. These things didn't bother me as you're much more intent on the tasks you have to accomplish or the locating of vehicles that will transform your fortunes: this was the game's biggest selling point and remains to this day a great pleasure and the main draw of the game. The fact you could approach any vehicles you discovered and, provided it had fuel and wasn't locked (in a few rare occasions you needed to speak to someone before it would be possible to use), take it for a spin, gave the game an incredible sense of freedom. But what it was really about was showing how small and insignificant you were outside of the safety of a wheeled shell, to the point you actually felt exposed and vulnerable trudging along in your armoured biosuit. The reverse was also true, however, as once you have even a small, basic car, your ability to scout out the level and explore is increased in magnitude and you feel empowered. And that's before you even get the joy of experimenting with various different forms of transport: the super-fast motorbike that allowed you to speed around Greece 1916, but especially the selection of planes and helicopters that opened up the world of flight. Cleverly, this last was generally kept for the end of levels where it couldn't mess up the structure of the game, but on finishing America Stage 1 for example, you had to take a helicopter to get clear across the level to the Shield Portal which was only big enough for a person to walk through, and seeing all those skyscrapers from the sky gave a whole new perspective to the cities.
The game was expertly put together to provide both a freeform gaming experience of exploration and play, but also a tight action adventure with stakes and threat. This came from the necessity of protecting the hapless humans of each time period (who, oddly all looked the same!), fodder for the greedy alien creatures sent to, yes, harvest them. The structure was brilliant with a whole subset of different creatures working together to expose the ant-like humans to the grim blobs of harvester goo that would seek them out and drag them to the spider-like alien for digestion - as soon as you hear that bleeping alarm that a Harvester wave has just beamed in like some evil 'Star Trek' Away Team, and the red warning arrow points the direction, you're put on high alert as you frantically try to get there before anyone dies. It was very well judged, because if you knew your way around the levels and had access to a vehicle you had enough time to get there and run over the ugly beasts rushing into the sides of houses in order to bring them to rubble and expose the nest of humans to panicked escape attempts while smaller bugs go for you and flying ones shoot at you. If you could just kill off the main bug before the globules of human-carrying slime returned to it, they'd be saved as the goo itself didn't harm them, only being fed to the main chomper. But if you didn't know the level or you were caught without a vehicle, that's when it became really tense as it was easy to get lost, the arrow only pointing as the crow flies, not the best route to get there!
If this tension and madcap dash for protection was one of the best aspects of the game, it was counterpointed by vast levels which you were encouraged to explore to your heart's content. While you had specific mission goals to accomplish in order to progress, such as finding a vehicle with enough weight to go through a dividing fence, opening up a new area, there was also value in simply checking each building in case they were accessible (the majority of doors were barred so you knew they weren't), in which you could find characters to talk to, weapons, ammo, health, fuel, and even special items such as the Alien Artefacts or Weapon Crystals which I was never entirely sure on the purpose of, but appeared to be for making a special weapon. It seemed the weapon came purely from the Crystals, I never discovered what the Artefacts did as I never took time to find all of them (three in each time period). I was only able to locate all three in America and didn't have the patience to go back over the other levels and scour them, though this would add a level of extension to the game it was otherwise lacking, even if game length was pretty good and when you're going through it for the 'first' time, not really knowing where you are or what you have to do, it does take a while - it does show how much this learning experience takes up, however, as when the glitch happened in America (where the Shield Portal didn't open, exactly the same issue I experienced twenty years ago!), I was able to get through all three stages in one day, so probably three or four hours in total (including multiple attempts as it could be reasonably tough), and while my total time was 10 hours, 23 minutes (and 58 seconds), it was probably more like four times that, given the number of times I had to replay sections!
The major glitch I experienced this time aside, the game is pretty solid considering how big the levels were and how much was asked of the machine, especially so early in its lifespan, but there were still frustrating issues here and there, and few more than the experience of getting stuck on scenery, either in a vehicle or on foot. It was much easier for this to happen when you were within a vehicle and the worst cases were when you just went slightly over the lip of a hill or sheer drop and the car would be unable to back out, leading either to an angry ditching in the gully below, or a hopeful attempt to eject and keep going on foot. I once had to make the second jump on America Stage 1, and used the buggy, not getting up enough speed and landing short, gripped on the side of the opposite cliff, below a large drop into water that was not survivable. I managed to eject and the buggy rolled down, but by keeping the stick forward and wiggling it side to side I was able to slowly edge up this steep incline which you wouldn't normally be able to ascend, and pop over the top, saving my attempt on the level instead of certain death, so not all glitches were annoying. It was just that, for all the freedom and speeding around you were given, it just seemed harsh when you'd just misjudge something and end up in water where you were almost guaranteed to die, forced to restart from the last save point at the beginning of a stage!
In fact, this give and take approach and the sense of real danger to yourself as well as the humans you're trying to protect, actually made me more attached to the game because it made the freedom sweeter - the same was true of the vehicles, where if they ran out of fuel you couldn't use them any more unless you had your own cans saved up. Even then, if you were desperate there was always the option of returning back to Alpha I, your space-hovercraft (where your glamorous assistant resided), to reset the positions of all vehicles in the level, so they generally thought of every eventuality. The biggest annoyance was always the fact that your specialist suit was so cumbersome, most affected by water. You could swim, but it was very slow and your suit was frying in the meantime until you eventually died if you failed to reach dry land in time. Not quite as cumbersome as swimming, but not far off, running on foot could be a bit of a trudge, especially if you were caught out in the open without a vehicle, and the turning of your suit was so clunky and awkward you almost feel they should have included a weightless level to show that in zero-g it was actually an advantage. The pros were that it could pack in various weapons and had reasonably good armour (though nothing against the terrifyingly huge creatures you'd face as you progressed). You needed it, too, as some aliens were so big it was like looking up at a building from your perspective on the ground, another very impressive aspect of the game.
You really feel like an ant scurrying across the land and the sense of scale was very impressive - there were two camera views, one up close for a more traditional viewpoint of most third-person action-adventure games, and then a distant, pulled back perspective that gave a much wider view of the surroundings and was necessary for the speed at which you could travel in vehicles. It really was the difference between humans and Borrowers in scale, and touches such as the sound of your heavy boots clomping vanishing when the camera pulls back only added to the sense of a lonely hero in a vast environment. The naturalistic nature of the levels helped, too, whether it was the golden yellow sands of Greece, the greenery of Java or the built up areas juxtaposed with orange desert sands and rock (like 'Dune' - complete with giant sandworms, too!). This worked much better than if it had been some ugly alien planet, and the time travel story gave them the excuse for a great range of vehicles from rickety World War I planes to 1960s police cars and World War II bombers (in fact, maybe I should have played the game back in 2016 as that's the 'contemporary' time your character comes from!). In keeping with gaming tradition, the final level was much less interesting, ugly, tough and not much fun - it's amazing how common this phenomenon is as you'd think more effort and time than any other would be spent on the final level, but that's probably the opposite of reality as deadlines loom and pressure rises to finish a game, while the first level has the most amount of time for tweaking and getting it right.
Strangely, I had no memories of Siberia, the last proper level before the atypical buzz around in the alien landscape of the Comet. The first three, Greece, Java and America had all stayed with me, but Siberia had been lost in its own haze of dull greens and browns. Partly that's due to playing the first three levels through twice (Zero, then Hero), but also it was the most ugly level - they took the time to have snow gently falling so why not have it settle? There were snowy areas, but too much was a duller version of Java. There was a spot of 'Blast Corps' influences with tasks such as destroying the five pump houses of the nuclear reactor in the time limit, and transporting a missile, that kind of thing, but it was certainly the least enjoyable Earth-based levels. It was certainly challenging, sometimes from my own unwillingness to join in - one example is that early in the level you're supposed to get a combine harvester and mow down a load of civilians that had been turned into zombies, but it was so antithetical to my mission of protecting humans that I chose to avoid the shamblers, missing out on the vital ammo they carried and making my task far harder, but I did succeed all the same: I'm supposed to be there to save them, not harvest them myself! But even now as I think back, Siberia doesn't resonate much, it all blended together.
What I did have memory of was the actual final level on the Comet in 2016. And it was memorable for all the wrong reasons: after four levels of glorious freedom of exploration and playing with countless vehicles you're restricted to the terrible Alpha 1 'tank' hovercraft, the most difficult machine to handle in the game, and much of the challenge comes from the trial of dealing with the enemy using this unwieldy vehicle, when the challenge shouldn't come from the poor control issues. It's also much more linear and basic: kill everything in your path simply to survive and keep the ammo coming… so you can kill everything in your path. It's worrying to think that before Nintendo stepped in and ordered the makers to add RPG elements to the game this is probably what the game would have largely consisted of, as it certainly wouldn't have gone down as a classic in my eyes. And this is what I was referring to above when I said final levels are usually the worst. It's a trial to get through and the only good feeling is finishing it!
I had to wonder if Nintendo's influence on the game stretched to more than just suggestion of gameplay improvements, but one of their actual properties - I know Nintendo requested they add RPG elements to improve the experience (talking to characters, collecting things, entering buildings, that kind of thing), but I also wonder if there was some 'Metroid' influence? I didn't know this series at the time I originally played it, still some years away from discovering Samus Aran and her space quests, since 'Metroid Prime' on the 'Cube was my first exposure. For some reason Samus skipped the N64 generation, I don't know why, but perhaps Nintendo simply had enough on their plate transforming so many of their top properties from 2D to 3D they didn't have time, plus they don't present updates from every series in each console generation, perhaps to develop more anticipation and give players a feeling of exclusivity (I'm still disappointed that so many of their top franchises were farmed out to other companies, such as Sega doing 'F-Zero GX' on 'Cube, when only Nintendo can fully realise their own properties). But here we have the orange biosuit complete with large shoulder pads, an attached gun with unlimited ammo on its most basic setting, shooting up alien bugs while discovering the story of what this is all about, chasing around a lot of outdoor environments - there's even an evil 'Samus' in black as a humanoid adversary! It's the closest we got to a 'Metroid' game on the N64 and this suggests it would have been terrific!
While the game has a serious story, none other than the wiping out of humanity by alien hordes, there's also room for some humorous references within it, something else I enjoyed about the game. Right from the 'Camberwick Green' connection near the start of Greece where you need to gain access to a fire engine in the town of 'Trumptonas,' if you know a little TV and film history you'll enjoy the connections. Other ones I spotted were 'Port Humphrey' where a Bogart-alike lets you use 'The Javanese Queen,' to a certain 'Professor Brown' in America who's development of a nitro fuel enables your armoured car to go faster (88mph perhaps?), an apt reference since you start one hundred years in the past at the beginning of the game and proceed to go 'back to the future' again! If you explore, there's even a well-hidden 'Bates Motel' in a corner of the America level, purely there for fun, as well as more general sci-fi examples such as men in black and UFOs with little grey aliens. You can see the British background of the makers in some of these, none more than a 'Blue Peter' reference with a plaque to 'Shep' (in loving memory, 1972-1986), and mention of the 'Mabel' Peace Prize, which couldn't be more surreal! This sense of fun prevents the game from seeming bleak and po-faced, when a vast action game could still recognise it's fun. And it is fun, great fun. They maybe took it too far at the end with all the 'Star Wars' Vader and Emperor dialogue in the final confrontation, but that's probably more to do with my fatigue with that franchise now!
Other details of the game that deserve mention are the map and the music. The former is a lifesaver for putting your position and the terrain in context as well as giving you further incentive to explore as so much of the level is greyed out until you actually visit there. This also tells you what your current objective is, lessening all that confusing wandering around trying to work out what you're supposed to be doing that can plague a large, 3D game world. Here, the worlds are huge, but they're well mapped out and nicely divided up with the internal logic of the alien shield walls that prevent travel between stages until certain prerequisites have been met. The music is suitable for filling these huge levels and as you'd expect, is context sensitive depending on what's going on - so when there's the threat of a Harvester Wave, or a nearby enemy (shown as an orange blob on the handy radar, which I would have liked to have been a little more detailed rather than being limited to the compass points, enemies and the green triangles that denoted vehicles), it changes to enhance the sense of jeopardy just when you want to take it slow and explore a new area you're forced to rush through it and fling yourself into a previously unexplored part in order to save the humans (there's also the personal incentive to do this, not just to get each of the 5000 point bonuses for no humans harvested or no humans killed, but because a meter for the whole time period shows how many have died and if it fills up to maximum you have to start the whole level over again!).
A very useful addition is an optional marker you can put on the map which will give you a purple arrow to follow in game that points the way to wherever you select it to be, giving more options for how you find your way around. Then, although I said there was no replay incentive, you can actually replay any of the levels, and the bosses, at any time, to improve your time and score, so if high scores are a motivating factor, this adds life to the game. And it's really divided into two parts: the external in which all the action takes place, and the internal where you can explore buildings or perhaps underground sewage tunnels, that sort of thing. When you're inside there's absolutely no threat and you don't have the option of using your weapons, it's purely for the RPG side of the game, speaking to characters (the attractive illustration of their faces next to the text dialogue reminded me of Amiga graphics which was a nice connection to older games like 'Supercars 2' or 'Mean Arenas'), searching furniture (a bit like 'Impossible Mission'), and enjoying the period decor of each location. It broke up the gameplay a bit, and though your suit is a bit unwieldy and shows up the limitations in a confined environment, the addition of different music gives it variety. If there is a complaint it is that not enough of that variety was in the music, so every level has the same aural background rather than being level specific, when they could have had more fun with that aspect. On the other hand, this also means we don't get the cliched Greek instruments, American rock or classical Russian styles and it does the job well, plus I counted fifteen different external tracks and four internal, not to mention specific ones for the map or when aliens attack.
The weapons and aiming system work pretty well, though it can be a little awkward when you've got aliens all around and you're trying to concentrate on one, especially when you're out of the protection of a vehicle. It makes sense that you can't look up as far as you want, and in vehicles you have to turn to get more coverage, forcing you to think on your feet (or your wheels), and the side roll becomes invaluable if you are taking on enemies on foot. The standard weapon is a bit puny, as you'd expect, and I found the shotgun to be most effective, especially as most combat takes place close range, though the rifle was very useful for its longer range and so more time in which to attack. While aliens have a health bar to deplete, this goes for vehicles and even buildings themselves, so again, there's a much closer connection to the world than in a lot of games where most of the scenery tended to be indestructible. The fact you can smash through fences or rumble over trees adds greatly to your sense of having an impact on the environment, too! The story isn't bad, even though it's fairly slight, with this black-suited version of you, which you eventually learn is actually you, a clone created from the drop of blood shown in the intro - surprising to see so much blood on a Nintendo game back then, but it was a good scene-setter at the start. I didn't smash my previous time (7:40:28), but I did beat the score (950425 this time, opposed to 826575 before). It may not be the sort of game you want to play more than once (every twenty years), but while you are playing it there's much to enjoy, so much that I can't help but recommend it.
****
The Ultimate Computer (2)
DVD, Star Trek S2 (The Ultimate Computer) (2)
Continuing the trend for the tail-end of Season 2 to feature lesser episodes compared to the majority of a pretty successful year's run (a strange development considering Season 1 ended on a particularly strong selection, including some of its best episodes!), we have this bottle episode which is nonetheless important for introducing the character of Dr. Richard Daystrom, the genius behind 23rd Century starship computing (Spock says the basic designs of their computers are his), a man on the same scale as Zefram Cochrane (it's called a revolution as great as warp drive in the episode), for his importance to future technology (and perhaps Emory Erickson for his invention of the Transporter over a century earlier). Daystrom is one of those names (much like Cochrane), that resonates into the future, referenced in most other Trek series', with his Daystrom Institute garnering numerous mentions (though we didn't actually see it until 'Picard'), so you'd think this would be an episode to anticipate! In that case it's surprising how little I was engaged by this one because I have the impression I'm going to like it, then it falls somewhat flat. Not for lack of trying, either, as it deals with a theme that is ever more pertinent as time passes: the mechanisation of society to the detriment of workers in manual labour roles. Leaving aside the technological issues of the limitations of 'TOS' production, one reason the addition of drones from 'Star Wars' into the 23rd Century landscape (which 'DSC' so worryingly introduced), feels wrong, is because we get the sense future humanity has learned the importance of human usage - they no doubt have the tech to be able to have machines perform most tasks, but they choose to keep the human hand and brain in.
This is what ultimately messed up the ultimate computer, a human brain that wasn't entirely sane, the price for genius perhaps, but the issue at hand is the replacement of even key personnel as a Captain to make decisions or any other role that would normally be essential. This is the horror of robotics to us, that the thinking mind could be replaced by the cold intelligence of order, all compassion removed. Over the years we've seen this idea become more complex as both robotic and holographic life made by humans took on the characteristics of their makers: sentience. Is M-5 sentient? Only in the sense that it knows it must survive as that is the programming it was given. Based on Dr. Daystrom's mind it also has his flaws, that of a bitterness towards those who doubted him and a need to succeed at all costs. Daystrom himself is hardly bothered by the malfunctions of his pride and joy - though we see he is regretful of the damage to property when the M-5 causes the Enterprise to destroy an unmanned, automated ore freighter, but as the stakes rise and real people's lives are lost in battle, while he is upset, you don't know if it's more because his theories have been proved wrong and his life's work isn't getting the chance he wanted for it, to the point where he eventually speaks of it as if it's his child, defending it and losing his cool, regardless of the loss of life, intent on the rightness of his creation in direct proportion to the opposition that grows against it.
In that respect it's quite a sad story, this once great scientist who believes he's created the next stage of computing, but which fails to be kept under control so spectacularly. It does make you wonder if the machine could have been modified so that it was able to automate the many tasks, while at the same time was always able to be overridden. It may be that it did actually form the basis of future starship computing as by the 24th Century the computer is even more integral to the ship, so advancement must have occurred. At the same time it would seem most likely that this later work of Daystrom would have been buried because I doubt many would wish to serve on a starship that used technology which had caused so much devastation in its development (the 'Voyager' episode 'Nothing Human' comes to mind which explored the idea of medical advancements arrived at by inhuman experiments by a Cardassian scientist, a story inspired by Nazi experimentation on humans). While the episode sets up these big themes it somehow fails to carry them off in the most dramatic and engaging fashion. The fault is partly that it is a purely ship-bound story, not that a stage play mentality is a bad thing, it's just that it's not written to be compelling enough to carry the drama. You can see exactly what's coming, it's like a tanker's turning circle and takes its time to get where it's going, to the extent that it felt like a 'Picard' episode - not a lot happening, and what there is doesn't excite or stir.
The argument of computer logic versus human emotion would be the ideal examination of Spock and McCoy, and by extension, the combination of their attitudes that makes up Kirk, and while this may have been the intention (Spock is very much for the M-5, while McCoy is biased against it), nothing really comes of it. There are hints of how the other crewmembers feel (we're down to a skeleton crew of twenty as M-5 has so much control of the ship), most notably Scotty only cooperating with the integration into the ship's systems on the direct orders of his Captain, and Chekov almost seems mesmerised by the damage it wreaks on the other ships. But other than the two points of view specifically shown by Spock and McCoy there's nothing to get a hold on. There's some good self-searching from Kirk, quoting poetry and recalling the romanticism of a life at sea which made me think of that Holodeck scene on the HMS Enterprize where Picard eulogises the way of life in 'Generations,' but somehow the drama isn't there most of the time. It's impressive to see four starships in one shot, though less so when you can tell they're just arranged that way to multiply the image, it's not like we see them passing each other or anything like that, so the visuals, in what is the closest to a fleet battle 'TOS' ever had, can only take you out of it.
Commodore Wesley was quite a good character (played by Barry Russo who was also Lt. Commander Giotto in 'The Devil In The Dark,' so he got a good promotion there!), and I'm glad Jim Kirk knew him, as to me it seemed like all he wanted was revenge on the Enterprise for the deaths of so many crewmembers in the 'training exercise,' but that's the moment that really did hit home: Kirk knew how he thought and that he wouldn't fire on them if the shields were down - it could have been a ruse, but he still wouldn't take that chance and because of that they're saved. It was pretty effective to show Wesley's ship only via Viewscreen, with that high-backed Captain's Chair denoting a different Bridge, plus it added (or should have), to the tension by never leaving the Enterprise. Yet it doesn't, the tension is dissipated, there isn't that close feeling of 'Balance of Terror,' the most similar experience the ship went through that I can remember. Darkened, empty corridors should have been a great source of an oppressive atmosphere as M-5 closes off sections it deems unnecessary since most of the crew have disembarked to a space station (which goes unnamed), and the horror as M-5 vaporises Ensign Harper (Sean Morgan also had another role on the series: Lieutenant O'Neil in 'The Return of The Archons,' so he had a demotion!), who tried to disengage it, should have been more palpable. Perhaps there's too much repetition in scenes, Kirk expresses scepticism, Daystrom exudes smug confidence, Spock supports the idea and McCoy hates the idea. That's about all there is to it.
I actually love seeing the same class of station as K7 from 'The Trouble With Tribbles,' I just wish it had been given a name, but then with M-5, perhaps they felt calling it something like J4 might confuse the issue in the audience's minds? It's obviously just a reuse of footage from a previous episode, which isn't a problem because it gives continuity and coherence to the series' technology, but then we get a little too much reuse and it starts to feel cheap: the ore freighter Woden is the Botany Bay from 'Space Seed' and the listing Constitution-class starship that has been damaged by M-5 is from 'The Doomsday Machine' - it's not that it was wrong to reuse such things, just that it adds more impression of a flawed, unfinished episode. No, not unfinished, just undeveloped, not taken as far as it needed to go. There's also a bit of a big problem in the fact that M-5 is supposed to be a move towards automation, and yet the Woden shows this automation already in action! Granted, an ore freighter is going to be relatively simplistic in its operation than a starship - loading on cargo, heading from A to B, unloading cargo. But it didn't quite click with the story's internal logic and may have been best avoided. But then there'd be the problem of requiring a target to 'threaten' M-5, which hadn't yet escalated to human deaths so it was a difficult situation to write well. (They do throw in a typical Trek list of characters to put Daystrom's qualities in context, with a familiar name, Einstein, followed by a 'future' invention, Kazanga, then topping it off with a Vulcan name, Sitar, which was supposed to be Sakar, but was apparently mispronounced by Shatner!).
Technology taking on a life of its own and going haywire is a standard sci-fi trope going back to 'Frankenstein' and there have been plenty of examples of the sub-genre in Trek over the years ('Civil Defence' on 'DS9' always stands out to me), and I did like Kirk's vulnerability, questioning his own motivations and whether they're honourable or self-serving, does he resent progress or is it really progress at all? The idea of progress is such a meaty topic to delve into, so many things in modern life are considered progress when they're really only change, but it's so easy to get caught up in something looking shinier and consider it to have progressed, when it's really only that it's new to the time it's in. A perfect example is Trek itself, the modern versions (the Kurtzman era we can call it), features so much more effects work, larger sets and a bigger budget, and yet it has so far failed to capture my imagination in any way, but it's thought to have made progress because of the superficial advances that have come to TV production through standing upon the developments of the past. 'TOS' was made so many years ago and yet the characters and storytelling remain appealing, leaving aside the aesthetics or effects, so in many ways Trek has regressed, taking on the zeitgeist of modern tropes to the detriment of what made Trek work so well in the past.
This episode isn't the best one to use in argument for how good Trek used to be, let's be honest! It is one of those stories that turns into Kirk talking the computer down, which had already been done at least once this season, so they were beginning to rely too heavily on ideas used before - it even felt like Kirk should have just jumped straight into it as he's had so much practice, and using Daystrom's own beliefs in murder as being contrary to the laws of man and God to combat the same flaws in its mental personality was a little too easy. What if it had decided to reject Daystrom's position? Daystrom himself doesn't have the ability to logic it to destruction, but then he's going easy on it because he doesn't want it destroyed, he still sees it's problems as kinks to work out of the system, even with so much death! It would have been nice in future Trek to hear Daystrom made a full recovery and was responsible for other advancements in computing, but his fate remains unknown, sadly, the impression being that he burnt his genius out by being so successful early on in life - we almost had a year to nail Trek's time period to: he's said to have done his pioneering work when he was twenty-four, and that was twenty-five years ago, but when M-5 is about to give us his date of birth he cuts it off! Foiled again… (until 'Star Trek II,' anyway).
James Doohan gets to expand his contribution again (having only just done the voice of Sargon in 'Return To Tomorrow'), this time as the voice of M-5 (Trek likes to use male voices for bad computers, perhaps because it sounds more authoritative, assertive, even authoritarian - see 'Dreadnought' on 'Voyager' for example), in preparation for the many voice roles he played on 'The Animated Series.' It's just a shame Scotty wasn't more integral to the episode (though quite surreal to hear the Engineer say a line, then immediately after, M-5 speaks - I could instantly tell it was him!). There's a rare example of more than one person in a Jefferies Tube at the same time (they used to crawl around together plenty of times in later Treks, but on 'TOS' the space was so small it was usually only one at a time), when Spock and Scotty try to shut M-5 down, while Kirk holds back the desperate Daystrom. He needn't have, I'm sure Spock was much more capable of holding off the man and would simply have given him a nerve pinch, just as he does later when the man loses it. As you would expect, Spock knows all about the M-5 computer (it's probably a hobby of his to keep up to date on tech manuals as much as Scotty does), while the previous four versions had problems. I don't think I ever actually heard the word Multitronics once, which I was expecting.
Kirk's hackles being up and having an undefined, but strong instinct of danger, could have had more play, though I did enjoy the scenes between him and McCoy - the Doctor even follows one of his predecessors in bringing a drink to the Captain's cabin to cheer him up when he's at his lowest point, just as Dr. Boyce famously did for his Captain, Pike in 'The Cage.' Kirk admits to never having felt at odds with the ship before, and we get a visualisation of this with a bulky new control pad attached to the Captain's Chair as an interface to M-5, which looks very out of place and uncomfortable. Kirk has rhapsodised the Enterprise in the past so it does bring home the difference this time, though he concedes that it could just be his resistance to change - he does actually suggest he could do a lot of other things and it would be fun to speculate on what he might have done if he had been replaced as Captain of a starship. It gave me the impression he'd find something outside the service, perhaps even join the merchant marines, as we hear one crewmember who's discussed for a Landing Party (which never goes ahead), served in that organisation, proving there are other spacefaring powers out there and the ECS (Earth Cargo Service), as seen in 'Enterprise' may well still be in operation, who knows?
It's good to hear some technobabble related to common speak in later Trek, such as engrams, as it's said that human engrams were impressed on circuits for M-5 to be able to think like a human brain. What's more interesting as a concept is McCoy's own engrams being suggested for the same, quite entertaining coming from Spock - a computer that is annoyed with technology! M-5 uses a forcefield around itself to prevent any tampering from the puny humans (carbon units infesting USS Enterprise?), though once it had given up control by destroying itself I wasn't sure what the issue was with the comm system, other than dramatic licence - you'd expect that once its control was removed it would have been possible to contact the approaching Wesley before he fired on them, though they do mention communications doesn't work. And I was unsure about the issue of the punishment for murder - Kirk assumes that M-5 would believe murder is punishable by death, and he's right, but does that mean he agrees with it? The only offence requiring the death penalty, as we heard in 'The Menagerie,' was to visit Talos IV (since entirely ignored when they did exactly that in 'DSC,' either preferring not to address the issue, uncharacteristically for Trek, or not even knowing about it, just as likely!), so perhaps Kirk was playing on Daystrom's beliefs? It does seem hard to accept the 23rd Century Federation would condone execution…
Daystrom's argument for the reason for M-5's necessity is that space is too dangerous for people, quite in opposition to Captain Archer's speech that they could have sent probes out, but they preferred to see for themselves. I wonder if Daystrom had heard of the events surrounding Control in Season 2 of 'DSC' (maybe he doesn't like Netflix), because artificial intelligence doesn't seem very reliable - it's a shame Kirk was too young to talk it down in those days as that would have saved us wading through one of the worst seasons of Trek (only beaten by Season 1 of the same series - progress!). There have been plenty of examples from other civilisations that had been turned on by their creations (The Old Ones in 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?'; the robots from 'Prototype' to name but two). 'Picard' tried to make an effort towards the issue, but was lamentably confused and messy. I can't say this episode was the same, it's more that it was spare and a bit empty, much like the ship in which it took place and the season continues to wind down to a stop.
**
Continuing the trend for the tail-end of Season 2 to feature lesser episodes compared to the majority of a pretty successful year's run (a strange development considering Season 1 ended on a particularly strong selection, including some of its best episodes!), we have this bottle episode which is nonetheless important for introducing the character of Dr. Richard Daystrom, the genius behind 23rd Century starship computing (Spock says the basic designs of their computers are his), a man on the same scale as Zefram Cochrane (it's called a revolution as great as warp drive in the episode), for his importance to future technology (and perhaps Emory Erickson for his invention of the Transporter over a century earlier). Daystrom is one of those names (much like Cochrane), that resonates into the future, referenced in most other Trek series', with his Daystrom Institute garnering numerous mentions (though we didn't actually see it until 'Picard'), so you'd think this would be an episode to anticipate! In that case it's surprising how little I was engaged by this one because I have the impression I'm going to like it, then it falls somewhat flat. Not for lack of trying, either, as it deals with a theme that is ever more pertinent as time passes: the mechanisation of society to the detriment of workers in manual labour roles. Leaving aside the technological issues of the limitations of 'TOS' production, one reason the addition of drones from 'Star Wars' into the 23rd Century landscape (which 'DSC' so worryingly introduced), feels wrong, is because we get the sense future humanity has learned the importance of human usage - they no doubt have the tech to be able to have machines perform most tasks, but they choose to keep the human hand and brain in.
This is what ultimately messed up the ultimate computer, a human brain that wasn't entirely sane, the price for genius perhaps, but the issue at hand is the replacement of even key personnel as a Captain to make decisions or any other role that would normally be essential. This is the horror of robotics to us, that the thinking mind could be replaced by the cold intelligence of order, all compassion removed. Over the years we've seen this idea become more complex as both robotic and holographic life made by humans took on the characteristics of their makers: sentience. Is M-5 sentient? Only in the sense that it knows it must survive as that is the programming it was given. Based on Dr. Daystrom's mind it also has his flaws, that of a bitterness towards those who doubted him and a need to succeed at all costs. Daystrom himself is hardly bothered by the malfunctions of his pride and joy - though we see he is regretful of the damage to property when the M-5 causes the Enterprise to destroy an unmanned, automated ore freighter, but as the stakes rise and real people's lives are lost in battle, while he is upset, you don't know if it's more because his theories have been proved wrong and his life's work isn't getting the chance he wanted for it, to the point where he eventually speaks of it as if it's his child, defending it and losing his cool, regardless of the loss of life, intent on the rightness of his creation in direct proportion to the opposition that grows against it.
In that respect it's quite a sad story, this once great scientist who believes he's created the next stage of computing, but which fails to be kept under control so spectacularly. It does make you wonder if the machine could have been modified so that it was able to automate the many tasks, while at the same time was always able to be overridden. It may be that it did actually form the basis of future starship computing as by the 24th Century the computer is even more integral to the ship, so advancement must have occurred. At the same time it would seem most likely that this later work of Daystrom would have been buried because I doubt many would wish to serve on a starship that used technology which had caused so much devastation in its development (the 'Voyager' episode 'Nothing Human' comes to mind which explored the idea of medical advancements arrived at by inhuman experiments by a Cardassian scientist, a story inspired by Nazi experimentation on humans). While the episode sets up these big themes it somehow fails to carry them off in the most dramatic and engaging fashion. The fault is partly that it is a purely ship-bound story, not that a stage play mentality is a bad thing, it's just that it's not written to be compelling enough to carry the drama. You can see exactly what's coming, it's like a tanker's turning circle and takes its time to get where it's going, to the extent that it felt like a 'Picard' episode - not a lot happening, and what there is doesn't excite or stir.
The argument of computer logic versus human emotion would be the ideal examination of Spock and McCoy, and by extension, the combination of their attitudes that makes up Kirk, and while this may have been the intention (Spock is very much for the M-5, while McCoy is biased against it), nothing really comes of it. There are hints of how the other crewmembers feel (we're down to a skeleton crew of twenty as M-5 has so much control of the ship), most notably Scotty only cooperating with the integration into the ship's systems on the direct orders of his Captain, and Chekov almost seems mesmerised by the damage it wreaks on the other ships. But other than the two points of view specifically shown by Spock and McCoy there's nothing to get a hold on. There's some good self-searching from Kirk, quoting poetry and recalling the romanticism of a life at sea which made me think of that Holodeck scene on the HMS Enterprize where Picard eulogises the way of life in 'Generations,' but somehow the drama isn't there most of the time. It's impressive to see four starships in one shot, though less so when you can tell they're just arranged that way to multiply the image, it's not like we see them passing each other or anything like that, so the visuals, in what is the closest to a fleet battle 'TOS' ever had, can only take you out of it.
Commodore Wesley was quite a good character (played by Barry Russo who was also Lt. Commander Giotto in 'The Devil In The Dark,' so he got a good promotion there!), and I'm glad Jim Kirk knew him, as to me it seemed like all he wanted was revenge on the Enterprise for the deaths of so many crewmembers in the 'training exercise,' but that's the moment that really did hit home: Kirk knew how he thought and that he wouldn't fire on them if the shields were down - it could have been a ruse, but he still wouldn't take that chance and because of that they're saved. It was pretty effective to show Wesley's ship only via Viewscreen, with that high-backed Captain's Chair denoting a different Bridge, plus it added (or should have), to the tension by never leaving the Enterprise. Yet it doesn't, the tension is dissipated, there isn't that close feeling of 'Balance of Terror,' the most similar experience the ship went through that I can remember. Darkened, empty corridors should have been a great source of an oppressive atmosphere as M-5 closes off sections it deems unnecessary since most of the crew have disembarked to a space station (which goes unnamed), and the horror as M-5 vaporises Ensign Harper (Sean Morgan also had another role on the series: Lieutenant O'Neil in 'The Return of The Archons,' so he had a demotion!), who tried to disengage it, should have been more palpable. Perhaps there's too much repetition in scenes, Kirk expresses scepticism, Daystrom exudes smug confidence, Spock supports the idea and McCoy hates the idea. That's about all there is to it.
I actually love seeing the same class of station as K7 from 'The Trouble With Tribbles,' I just wish it had been given a name, but then with M-5, perhaps they felt calling it something like J4 might confuse the issue in the audience's minds? It's obviously just a reuse of footage from a previous episode, which isn't a problem because it gives continuity and coherence to the series' technology, but then we get a little too much reuse and it starts to feel cheap: the ore freighter Woden is the Botany Bay from 'Space Seed' and the listing Constitution-class starship that has been damaged by M-5 is from 'The Doomsday Machine' - it's not that it was wrong to reuse such things, just that it adds more impression of a flawed, unfinished episode. No, not unfinished, just undeveloped, not taken as far as it needed to go. There's also a bit of a big problem in the fact that M-5 is supposed to be a move towards automation, and yet the Woden shows this automation already in action! Granted, an ore freighter is going to be relatively simplistic in its operation than a starship - loading on cargo, heading from A to B, unloading cargo. But it didn't quite click with the story's internal logic and may have been best avoided. But then there'd be the problem of requiring a target to 'threaten' M-5, which hadn't yet escalated to human deaths so it was a difficult situation to write well. (They do throw in a typical Trek list of characters to put Daystrom's qualities in context, with a familiar name, Einstein, followed by a 'future' invention, Kazanga, then topping it off with a Vulcan name, Sitar, which was supposed to be Sakar, but was apparently mispronounced by Shatner!).
Technology taking on a life of its own and going haywire is a standard sci-fi trope going back to 'Frankenstein' and there have been plenty of examples of the sub-genre in Trek over the years ('Civil Defence' on 'DS9' always stands out to me), and I did like Kirk's vulnerability, questioning his own motivations and whether they're honourable or self-serving, does he resent progress or is it really progress at all? The idea of progress is such a meaty topic to delve into, so many things in modern life are considered progress when they're really only change, but it's so easy to get caught up in something looking shinier and consider it to have progressed, when it's really only that it's new to the time it's in. A perfect example is Trek itself, the modern versions (the Kurtzman era we can call it), features so much more effects work, larger sets and a bigger budget, and yet it has so far failed to capture my imagination in any way, but it's thought to have made progress because of the superficial advances that have come to TV production through standing upon the developments of the past. 'TOS' was made so many years ago and yet the characters and storytelling remain appealing, leaving aside the aesthetics or effects, so in many ways Trek has regressed, taking on the zeitgeist of modern tropes to the detriment of what made Trek work so well in the past.
This episode isn't the best one to use in argument for how good Trek used to be, let's be honest! It is one of those stories that turns into Kirk talking the computer down, which had already been done at least once this season, so they were beginning to rely too heavily on ideas used before - it even felt like Kirk should have just jumped straight into it as he's had so much practice, and using Daystrom's own beliefs in murder as being contrary to the laws of man and God to combat the same flaws in its mental personality was a little too easy. What if it had decided to reject Daystrom's position? Daystrom himself doesn't have the ability to logic it to destruction, but then he's going easy on it because he doesn't want it destroyed, he still sees it's problems as kinks to work out of the system, even with so much death! It would have been nice in future Trek to hear Daystrom made a full recovery and was responsible for other advancements in computing, but his fate remains unknown, sadly, the impression being that he burnt his genius out by being so successful early on in life - we almost had a year to nail Trek's time period to: he's said to have done his pioneering work when he was twenty-four, and that was twenty-five years ago, but when M-5 is about to give us his date of birth he cuts it off! Foiled again… (until 'Star Trek II,' anyway).
James Doohan gets to expand his contribution again (having only just done the voice of Sargon in 'Return To Tomorrow'), this time as the voice of M-5 (Trek likes to use male voices for bad computers, perhaps because it sounds more authoritative, assertive, even authoritarian - see 'Dreadnought' on 'Voyager' for example), in preparation for the many voice roles he played on 'The Animated Series.' It's just a shame Scotty wasn't more integral to the episode (though quite surreal to hear the Engineer say a line, then immediately after, M-5 speaks - I could instantly tell it was him!). There's a rare example of more than one person in a Jefferies Tube at the same time (they used to crawl around together plenty of times in later Treks, but on 'TOS' the space was so small it was usually only one at a time), when Spock and Scotty try to shut M-5 down, while Kirk holds back the desperate Daystrom. He needn't have, I'm sure Spock was much more capable of holding off the man and would simply have given him a nerve pinch, just as he does later when the man loses it. As you would expect, Spock knows all about the M-5 computer (it's probably a hobby of his to keep up to date on tech manuals as much as Scotty does), while the previous four versions had problems. I don't think I ever actually heard the word Multitronics once, which I was expecting.
Kirk's hackles being up and having an undefined, but strong instinct of danger, could have had more play, though I did enjoy the scenes between him and McCoy - the Doctor even follows one of his predecessors in bringing a drink to the Captain's cabin to cheer him up when he's at his lowest point, just as Dr. Boyce famously did for his Captain, Pike in 'The Cage.' Kirk admits to never having felt at odds with the ship before, and we get a visualisation of this with a bulky new control pad attached to the Captain's Chair as an interface to M-5, which looks very out of place and uncomfortable. Kirk has rhapsodised the Enterprise in the past so it does bring home the difference this time, though he concedes that it could just be his resistance to change - he does actually suggest he could do a lot of other things and it would be fun to speculate on what he might have done if he had been replaced as Captain of a starship. It gave me the impression he'd find something outside the service, perhaps even join the merchant marines, as we hear one crewmember who's discussed for a Landing Party (which never goes ahead), served in that organisation, proving there are other spacefaring powers out there and the ECS (Earth Cargo Service), as seen in 'Enterprise' may well still be in operation, who knows?
It's good to hear some technobabble related to common speak in later Trek, such as engrams, as it's said that human engrams were impressed on circuits for M-5 to be able to think like a human brain. What's more interesting as a concept is McCoy's own engrams being suggested for the same, quite entertaining coming from Spock - a computer that is annoyed with technology! M-5 uses a forcefield around itself to prevent any tampering from the puny humans (carbon units infesting USS Enterprise?), though once it had given up control by destroying itself I wasn't sure what the issue was with the comm system, other than dramatic licence - you'd expect that once its control was removed it would have been possible to contact the approaching Wesley before he fired on them, though they do mention communications doesn't work. And I was unsure about the issue of the punishment for murder - Kirk assumes that M-5 would believe murder is punishable by death, and he's right, but does that mean he agrees with it? The only offence requiring the death penalty, as we heard in 'The Menagerie,' was to visit Talos IV (since entirely ignored when they did exactly that in 'DSC,' either preferring not to address the issue, uncharacteristically for Trek, or not even knowing about it, just as likely!), so perhaps Kirk was playing on Daystrom's beliefs? It does seem hard to accept the 23rd Century Federation would condone execution…
Daystrom's argument for the reason for M-5's necessity is that space is too dangerous for people, quite in opposition to Captain Archer's speech that they could have sent probes out, but they preferred to see for themselves. I wonder if Daystrom had heard of the events surrounding Control in Season 2 of 'DSC' (maybe he doesn't like Netflix), because artificial intelligence doesn't seem very reliable - it's a shame Kirk was too young to talk it down in those days as that would have saved us wading through one of the worst seasons of Trek (only beaten by Season 1 of the same series - progress!). There have been plenty of examples from other civilisations that had been turned on by their creations (The Old Ones in 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?'; the robots from 'Prototype' to name but two). 'Picard' tried to make an effort towards the issue, but was lamentably confused and messy. I can't say this episode was the same, it's more that it was spare and a bit empty, much like the ship in which it took place and the season continues to wind down to a stop.
**
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)