Views from Crestmont Drive

The Enterprise encounters an enormous alien vessel that blocks its path and threatens its destruction.

• Now watching the episodes in production order; this one is production order #2, after “Where No Man Has Gone Before”; this was the first episode to feature DeForrest Kelley as Dr. McCoy, Nichelle Nichols as Uhura (wearing a tan uniform, though), and Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand. (And I have to say, in this and other early episodes, I’m impressed by the subtlety and complexity of Kelley’s characterization of McCoy. He was the equal of Shatner and Nimoy, even though he wasn’t given nearly as much to do.)
• Along with “The Naked Time”, this has always been one of my favorite episodes, in part because it shows so much relatively routine interaction aboard the Enterprise; it details how things play out in a crisis, in ways elided in most later episodes.
• Example of this: how systematically Kirk orders various changes to the ship’s speed – quarter speed, half speed, warp one, etc. – and thereby establishing the relationship between sub-light speeds and the warp speeds.
• At the beginning of the episode the Enterprise is “star mapping”, a legitimate if rather routine task for such a big ship. Wouldn’t a smaller ship do just as well? Or automated probe? Also, with the stars, as usual, passing by the viewscreen pretty quickly, you wonder how it works when they time a star mapping shot to a particular moment. Aren’t they ‘filming’ or taking stills continuously? Bit of failure of imagination here, I’ve always thought.
• Trek effects: the turbo-lifts are famous people moving devices, and the impression of the lifts moving quickly is illustrated entirely by the moving bars of light that presumably represent floors, or decks. But in almost every scene inside a turbolift, we see way too many of those moving bars than can be plausible, considering the number of decks imagined in the Enterprise – even before detailed schematics were developed after the show ended.
• Bailey is a loose cannon, clearly unstable from the beginning, and I’m surprised how long he lasts. At first encounter with the alien ship, he says “I vote we blast it” and Kirk replies sardonically about the bridge not being a democracy. More to the point, this shoot-first and ask questions later attitude is typical of crude media science fiction, and one arc of this episode is how this attitude can be overcome – Kirk’s diplomacy and earnest appeals, trumping Bailey’s panic — into one of understand and mutual comprehension. [Conservative fear vs. humanistic acceptance, I am inclined to think.]
• It’s fascinating in two or three scenes to see Kirk, not so concerned about the apparent danger from the alien ship, as he is curious about Bailey’s behavior, as Kirk eyes him.
• At the end of Act 1, this is the first time we see the Enterprise fire its phasers. In typical Trek FX, the resulting explosion knocks everyone around aboard the Enterprise, and we see shots of crewmen in a corridor being tossed over to one side, and then the other.
• In Act 2, more routine yet personal discussions, as McCoy counsels Kirk as they have a drink in Kirk’s quarters.
• Yeoman Rand is introduced as bringing Kirk’s lunch, a “dietary salad” at McCoy’s direction. It was years after I first saw Trek before I understood that, in real life, a “yeoman” is not necessarily a woman. Kirk makes a remark here about how it’s irritating that he was assigned a female yeoman, but as the series went on, *all* the yeomen were female.
• One of the great Trek FX shots is when the second ship, the Fesarius, approaches, appearing first as a small dot growing larger as it comes nearer… and keeps coming, until we realize that compared to the Enterprise, it’s *enormous*. A terrific sense of wonder moment. (Let me see if I can link to this image from the Memory Alpha page for this episode — though this isn’t as big in this shot as it gets.)
• This episode has two great, memorable musical cues: the first, energetic and a bit frantic, when the initial cubical buoy is first seen; the second, a 2 by 4 note ominous theme, when the huge Fesarius appears. Music by Fred Steiner; I think the second theme may have been reused in later episodes, though I don’t think the first one was. [Later edit: it was]
• The enhanced graphics versions of the Enterprise, from various interesting angles, and the Fesarius, are terrific; though I appreciate how the original cubical buoy was left deliberately fuzzy and multicolored, growing more and more fuzzy as it spun faster.
• Interesting though uncharacteristic compared to later episodes, are how Kirk, several times, makes general announcements to the ship’s crew reminding them of the Enterprise’s noble mission, how misunderstands can be overcome, and so on. They serve of course also to inform viewers of what this show is about, as distinct from most movies and TV SF before it. And we never saw any such similar announcements in later episodes, as the series went on.
• Balok, the voice from Fesarius – seen as a weird white bald head, through a fishy lens effect – informs the Enterprise that it will be destroyed. And it says, “We make assumption you have a deity, or deities, or some such beliefs which comfort you.” And so it gives them 10 minutes to prepare. This line represents a key theme throughout most of Trek, where time and time again we saw stories about how ideas of gods were obsolete, or how entities once thought to be gods were actually aliens, or computers, etc. (Though at least once there was dialogue in a later episode that implied an assumed monotheistic belief, as well.)
• Kirk’s appeals to reason, to explain why the Enterprise is there, why they destroyed the buoy, and so on, grow frantic. “If you’ve examined our records… you know this to be true!!”
• It’s nice how the Bailey/McCoy/Kirk character arc dovetails with Spock’s reference to chess, to inspire Kirk to another game, poker, which inspires the episode’s central conceit – the claim to Balok that the Enterprise is equipped with a special substance, corbomite, that reverses any attack on the ship to destroy the attacker. OTOH, his tone as he makes this claim (“We grow annoyed at your foolishness”) is so different from his earlier appeals, that anyone sensitive to human speech might immediately suspect some dishonesty.
• Right after this there are a couple lines between Spock and Scott about Spock’s father and his human mother. One senses the insertion of these lines (likely by Roddenberry) to establish this key aspect of Spock’s character early on.
• In Act 4 we see, again, a much more detailed rendition of an extreme ship event, in this case straining the engines, increasingly for several minutes, in an attempt to break the tractor beam hold from the alien ship towing them to their doom. Spock recites dangerous engine temperatures; everyone on the bridge shakes slightly, then moreso, as the ship vibrates dangerously; in the corridors, those crewmen fall over.
• And so the threatening alien situation is redeemed: the Enterprise returns to assist the now disabled alien vessel that was towing it. The boarding party discovers that the weird white alien head was just a prop; the real Balok is a short little boyish creature. On the one hand, points here for supposing that the inside of an alien ship would not have the same dimensions as the Enterprise – the three who beam over and told to bend over, for the low ceiling at their destination, a consideration that I don’t think ever happened again in the entire series. On the other hand, the alien commander *assumes* that the humans would not have been frightened by his real form, thus the weird puppet prop – but surely it assumes too much to imagine what an alien race would be frightened, or comforted, by.
• And while it’s striking to be told that this small Balok is in charge, without additional crew, of the whole Fesarius ‘complex’, we get no clue as to the purpose of such an enormous complex; or why Balok is suddenly so eager to recruit a companion for his travels. There’s a lot of unexplained backstory here – how big is his First Federation? When will they meet up again? And so on and on.
• Yet the ultimate payoff is the comity between Balok and the Enterprise crew, representing the successful testing of unknown intentions and the defeat of xenophobic thinking, to the point where Balok offers to give them a tour of his ship. Last line: “Yes we’re very much alike, captain. Both proud of our ships.“

The Blish/Lawrence adaptation, in ST12:

• This very late adaptation is literal to the point of absurdity; we get words about characters crossing the room, or how the turbo lift comes to a stop and starts moving horizontally, p106.
• And questionable wording, as in the first line: “Spock was making a map of the galaxy’s planet [sic] systems.”
• And p110, “in the bridge”.
• And in places there are a few extra lines, as if lines from the script were omitted during filming or edited out later:
  • Sulu warns Bailey about both Spock and Kirk
  • An explanation of what flypaper was (a reasonable thing to explain, in the 23^rd century, perhaps)
  • Sulu says “this is for real” rather than, as broadcast, “this is not a drill”.
  • Near the end, Scott says “On your hunkers” rather than “Bend low”.
• Most oddly, there are several passages that read as if the adapter is describing what was seen on TV, not what the characters were seeing, e.g. p117, referring to the bridge screen, “In the lower quadrant of its frame, the immense Enterprise hung motionless, and in the distance, the other ship (for it was a ship) was still small but was continuously growing.” And a similar passage later as Balok’s small ship tows the Enterprise. Just after that, the adaption has Kirk say to the bridge crew what he said, in the broadcast, as a captain’s log.
• A striking scene not broadcast comes after Sulu utters the line, “I knew he would” [a continuity error; Sulu was responding to a line of Balok’s that wasn’t actually recorded], in which Kirk comments about Sulu not being “a very inscrutable Oriental” and Sulu responding—for half a page—about his watching movies from the time of the “Sino-Western trouble” in which the villains were Oriental and how Sulu was unable to mimic them. Cut from the script or cut for time in editing? And was that really appropriate banter during the last 60 seconds of a countdown that might have ended in the destruction of the Enterprise?

An infection brought on board the Enterprise causes crew members to reveal their innermost fears and desires, as the ship spirals in toward a disintegrating planet.

• This time the planet is blue, appropriately, since it’s a cold ice-planet. In the enhanced graphics, there’s a new shot of the domed building of the scientific outpost.
• The story is triggered by a doofus move – an idiot plot device – in that not only are the suits that Spock and Tormolen beam down in not sealed (so that any airborne contagion could still infect them), but Tormolen takes his glove off, to scratch his nose, and then touches a surface and gets infected.
• Trek physics: the crisis of the episode depends on the idea that this planet, Psi 2000, is “breaking up”, which somehow means that its mass and magnetic fields are changing, which affects the Enterprise’s orbit, which is problematic because people on board are infected with a disease that renders them unstable and that puts the ship in jeopardy. What were they thinking of? What does it mean for a planet to “break up”? Real astrophysics suggests planets are extremely stable unless they are hit by something, in which case chunks might be blown out of them, yet would still remain largely stable (as Earth perhaps survived an impact that split off the Moon). Otherwise… even if a planet were disintegrating for some reason, its mass would have to go *somewhere*; that mass wouldn’t somehow just disappear, disrupting the Enterprise’s orbit.
• Later in the show there’s a line about how, as the planet shrinks, the Enterprise adjusts its orbit to “maintain the same distance” from the planet’s surface. Why would it need to do that?
• The enhanced graphics exacerbate the problem: we see the planet surface spinning past so fast, beneath the Enterprise, on the view monitor, that it’s amazing the ship doesn’t slingshot away into space. The new graphics aren’t any more valid scientifically than the old.
• There’s a serious ethical theme here, as Tormolen wonders “if man was meant to be out here…” It’s not as trivial an issue as it might have seemed at the time, as here in the 21^st century we realize what humanity has done and is doing to this planet.
• This has long been a favorite episode – it was a Hugo nominee – mostly I suppose for its revelations of character among the crew: Sulu and his rapier; Riley and his song; Spock and his confessions; Kirk and his anguish.
• Sexism: Riley, infected, locked into the engineering room, gives out fanciful orders over the intercom to the entire ship, focusing on women’s makeup and how their hair should be worn loosely around their shoulders.
• It’s been one of my favorite episodes for one particular reason: the rhythm and pacing, especially of the second half of the show, maintains a tension unmatched in any other episode. You see it ratchet up, in a yin and yang of competing forces: routine communications alternating with increasingly emotional outbursts: Uhura to Kirk rather blandly: “Have you found Mr. Spock?” Kirk responds, almost hysterically: “YES I’VE FOUND MR. SPOCK I’M TALKING TO MR. SPOCK RIGHT NOW!” at which point Kirk realizes he’s infected too.
• There are plot issues, of course – any show, like a series produced every week, is done so quickly it’s amazing they get so much done that still seems right decades later – but I couldn’t yet notice that, why weren’t Kirk and Spock infected earlier, when they brought Sulu down, instead of later via Nurse Chapel’s tears?
• Famous line: Sulu, infected and playing swashbuckler, presumes to protect Uhura, calling her a “fair maiden”. To which Uhura replies, so quickly you almost don’t notice, let alone absorb the implications of what she says, “Sorry, neither.”
• First time we see the (first season) engine room. I think. I really should watch these episodes in production order, rather than broadcast order.
• And first time we see Scott’s “Jeffries Tube”. I think.
• And first time we see Spock’s neck pinch, or nerve pinch, I think.
• Trek physics: talk about the engines having been turned off, the “intermix formula” for matter and antimatter, and having to raise the temperatures of those without risking “implosion”.
• The enhanced graphics include a chronometer on the nav panel where Sulu sits – it shows not only a clock but a *stardate* counter, which, in keeping with the dialogue and story line, changes from 1705.0 back to 1702.0.
• Trek physics: the “theoretical relationship between time and antimatter”, as Spock says, results in the ship going back in time, and moving “faster than is possible for normal space”, as they start the engines anyway and escape from the planet. This sets up the later episode, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”, in which they accidentally go back in time to Earth in the 1960s.
• Still, the enduring highlight of this episode is the revelation of the characters. Spock’s breakdown was a last minute story idea (according to Memory Alpha), was shot in a single take, and resulted in fan mail to Nimoy going exponential.
• The end: calm. They acknowledge the potential for time travel, to any era, any planet, and suppose they might try it someday. And Kirk says, “steady as she goes.”

Blish’s adaptation, in ST1:

• Blish avoids the contamination scene, in which Tormolen takes off his glove and exposes himself to an infection, entirely. Blish has Kirk make some plausible speculation about why the dead members of the observation station behaved the way they did, in response to having some infection (e.g., someone would take a shower with clothes on in a hurried attempt to decontaminate themselves).
• Blish has the planet named some long technical string, and the nicknamed “La Pig”, rather than the Psi 2000 of the script.
• Blish tries to rationalize the idea of the planet’s breakup, and how it would affect the Enterprise orbit, p79t: “As the breakup proceeded, the planet’s effective mass would change, and perhaps even its center of gravity – accompanied by steady, growing distortion of its extensive magnetic field – so that what had been a stable parking orbit for the Enterprise at one moment would become unstable and fragment-strewn the next.”
• There are substantial differences between Blish’s version and the broadcast story, since the latter involved some elements introduced in the last stages of production. In particular: Spock’s breakdown in the briefing room, and the entire time travel sequence at the end, are not here. Nor is Scott’s phasering through the wall to get into the engineering room. Instead, McCoy’s antidote to the disease involves a gas spray into the ship’s ventilation system. Riley recovers in the response to that, and lets the others into engineering himself.
• At the same time Blish has some remarkably implausible sequences in which, Kirk having thrown emergency bulkheads inside the ship, to stop the spread of the disease, has Uhura crawl between the hulls and communicate the McCoy by knocking on the metal in “prisoners’ raps”…! The crews’ communicators don’t work inside the ship?
• Instead of Spock’s breakdown and recovery seen in the broadcast version, in Blish’s story Spock experiences a “general malaise” and excuses himself to his quarters. At the end of the story, he is heard crooning to himself in his cabin and playing some instrument that “nobody else on board could stand to listen to it”.

In this second series pilot, the Enterprise encounters an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy that triggers ESP in two crewmembers.

• Watching the current CBS blu-ray set of these episodes, here we see nicely enhanced graphics of the galaxy, the haze of the Milky Way, as the Enterprise approaches the “edge of the galaxy”.
• Trek physics: the whole concept of the “edge of the galaxy” is ludicrous, of course; it’s like speaking about taking a walk to half a yard outside a valley. There’s no edge of a galaxy, or a valley, that is that distinct. None other than Isaac Asimov wrote an article in TV Guide, around late 1966 or so (he’d at least seen this episode of Trek, and had seen Lost in Space), criticizing this point, though of course the errors in Lost in Space were worse.
• This was the second pilot, to NBC, after “The Cage” [which was later incorporated into “The Menagerie”], though not the first episode shown as it ran on TV. By the time the show went into regular production, things had changed, like the uniform colors and trim, the shape of the viewscreen monitor on the bridge, and so on. Spock’s make-up here is relatively crude; Scott has an oddly colored tan shirt; Spock wears a gold shirt, like Kirk, not the blue one he wore later, throughout the series.
• The two guest stars here were relatively prominent actors: Gary Lockwood, who played Gary Mitchell, later starred in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sally Kellerman, who played Elizabeth Dehner, later starred in the film MASH.
• As in other early episodes, we see lots more crewman in the corridors, as well as ladders and overhead panels that weren’t bothered with in the later shows.
• Sexism: there’s a “Yeoman”, Smith, on the bridge in the early scenes, whose job is merely to serve coffee apparently; she doesn’t do anything else. In a later scene, as the ship is endangered, Gary Mitchell reaches behind him to hold her hand, implying I’m not sure what – that they know each other? Or more likely that he feels compelled to offer comfort to the nearest frail woman?
• (It was some years after watching Trek in its first run before I learned that the word “yeoman” didn’t automatically mean female… They always were on Trek.)
• More sexism: when female crewmen appear (I think this is true throughout the show), they are either taken for granted as service providers (bringing lunch, or coffee, as Yeoman Rand does in “Charlie X”), or are treated an exceptional to the acceptable routine of male experts. When Elizabeth Dehner appears on the bridge to discuss ESP, Gary Mitchell asks sarcastically if her job is to “improve the breed” and then, when she says, “I heard that’s more your specialty” Gary turns away and remarks to the nearby helmsman, “Walking freezer unit”. (Because they couldn’t say the b word on 1960s TV.)
• As Spock listens to tapes from the Valiant, the ship whose recorder they’ve picked up, which preceded them exiting the galaxy (by half a light-year!), he talks about a “magnetic space storm”. Is this a real thing? Trek repeatedly invokes such events, and Lost in Space did all the time (more often as “cosmic storms”), and I’ve never understood what they meant, if those were real things. (We do hear about solar flares that affect Earth’s magnetic field, but such ‘storms’ are surely a problem only relatively close to a star, compared to the Enterprise being out in interstellar space.)
• It’s odd how the barrier becomes visible only as the Enterprise approaches it. Interstellar and intergalactic space is remarkably transparent — that’s how we can see galaxies a billion light years away. And why is it a band that happens to be horizontal with respect to the Enterprise’s current orientation? (Trek physics: because the writers and producers project movements and events that we experience on a subjectively ‘flat’ Earth into three-dimensional space, without thinking about it.)
• The SFnal premise here is about ESP, extra-sensory perception. In the story, the lost Valiant had been investigating the topic, in their last hours. Now Kirk asks Dehner what she knows. “It’s a fact that some people can sense future happenings – read the backs of playing cards and so on.” This is an obsolete premise; it’s not a fact, as we know in 2017, that people can do that. ESP, telepathy, and the like, were fads in the 1950s and 1960s, when there seemed to be some reputed evidence. In SF literature, such themes were routine, even in the “hard SF” magazine Analog. But as the decades passed, reliable evidence never showed up, and modern understanding of neurology and the mind rules such powers out. There is no telepathy, no psychokinesis, no visions of the future, none of it.
• After the Enterprise retreats from its exploration into the force field at the edge of the galaxy, its warp ability gone, Kirk comments in his log that “Earth bases that were only days away are now years in the distance.” This is a nice, and rare, acknowledgement of the difference between their warp drive, that allows fast transit between stars, and lack of warp drive, which is far less than the speed of light.
• Watching this episode now on Blu-ray, on a big TV, I can see details I never saw before. You know those medical panels above the beds in sick-bay, with several vertical scales that display various medical conditions? Now I can see them: the scales are for Temp, Brain, Lungs on the left; Cell Rate, Blood, Blood, on the right. [Or are these enhanced graphics?]
• Gary Mitchell, having been zapped by something in the force field at the edge of the galaxy, develops superpowers. He lies in bed in sickbay, and reads Spinoza on a small monitor that extends on an arm over his bed. To Kirk, he calls Spinoza “simple, childish”, and says he doesn’t agree with him at all. In the next scene on the bridge, Spock monitors Gary’s reading, as he reads faster and faster, a page every second. Now I can see that the pages are headed “The Ethics”. Which is in fact a work of Spinoza’s. Give the production team points for attending to such details. (OTOH I didn’t try to read the text on those screens.)
• Dehner is assigned to monitor Mitchell. Mitchell complains to Kirk that with 100 women on board, couldn’t he do better? Point here, 100 women is about ¼ of the entire crew.
• Sexism: Dehner tries to mollify Mitchell: “Women professionals do tend to overcompensate”. Argh.
• Dehner challenges Mitchell’s reading retention, and he quotes a sonnet: “My love has wings, slender feathered things with grace and upswept curve and tapered tip”, that he attributes to Tarbolde from 1996 (!).
• When Spock examines personnel records for Dehner and Mitchell, we see typewritten cards that display, among other things, dates of birth. Dehner’s is 1089.5, Mitchell’s is 1097.7. Are these… star dates? More about this below.
• The Enterprise travels to Delta Vega, somehow only a few days away (without warp), that has an impressive lithium cracking station – impressive in the visual. At Spock’s cold advice, Kirk realizes he has to maroon Mitchell there, before his powers enable him to take over the ship, and the Earth colony they might next go to. It doesn’t go well. Mitchell escapes; Dehner develops similar powers, and Kirk chases after them. He tries to negotiate with Dehner, about the danger Mitchell portends: “You know the ugly savage things we all keep buried that none of us dare expose. But he’ll dare–!”
• Mitchell makes tombstone appear, for Kirk, and it reads 1277.1 to 1313.7. The latter date coincides with the log entry star dates in this episode. But meaning what? I think that by this time the production staff had not decided what stardates meant. The eventual meaning was that one stardate meant one day… but this tombstone implies *years*. More about star dates in later episodes.
• Despite Mitchell’s godlike powers, Kirk defeats him in a fistfight, with a laser rifle and a handy block of stone. Dehner, drained from fighting Mitchell, dies: “You can’t know what it’s like to be almost a god.”
• Broad theme: would humans with superpowers be a good thing, or not? Would such beings threaten those without those powers? This theme is still very much with us.
• Memory Alpha notes that the fistfight at the end is what sold NBC the show. -!! This was the primary way in which “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was superior to “The Cage,” in NBC’s view, apparently, and Trek TOS repeatedly staged such action scenes, in the manner of westerns at the time, since that was how real men dealt with their disputes.
  • In contrast, such crude violence went out of style in succeeding decades; did Picard ever get into a fistfight with anyone? (Not rhetorical; I don’t recall.) Steven Pinker, in his study of the history of violence The Better Angels of Our Nature, cites this diminished taste for physical violence in (certain kinds) of popular entertainment as one of many such trends of just the past 50 years.
• We learn that “The Man Trap” was chosen as the first episode to be broadcast, because for various reasons the other episodes completed by then had issues, and the issue with “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was that it was too expository…
• The episode ends on a reflective note, with Spock admitting that he too “felt” for Gary Mitchell, and Kirk wryly replying that “I believe there’s some hope for you after all, Mister Spock.” This is the first of many acknowledgments throughout the show, and especially in the first season, of Spock’s dual nature, though in ways that have always struck me as a tad patronizing. Spock’s heritage is one of subduing his emotions in the service of logic and rationality, and presumably this attitude has got him where he is, as science officer on a ship full of what amount to him as alien beings. (One might wonder, why didn’t Spock stay on Vulcan, or join the Vulcan starship we hear about in a later episode?) Yet those alien beings are always ready to rub in any example of his internal discipline slipping in any way. Hmm. May revisit these thoughts in later episodes.

The Blish/Lawrence adaptation (in ST 8, p85):

• Being in a later book, this ‘adaptation’ is much more literal than those in Blish’s first three or four volumes. Discrepancies from the broadcast script are mostly incidental – a few extra or missing lines here or there, as if the adapter didn’t have the very final version of the script, or because changes were made during filming that were never documented in a script.
  • E.g. p86, reference to a “Q signal” before the Valiant’s recorder begins transmitting.
  • P108, more lines from Gary Mitchell as he and Dehner have escaped into the hills: “Soon we will fully control our bodies. We’ll never grow old. You’re woman enough now to like that. Always young, as beautiful as you desire to be.”
  • 6, Kirk’s plea to Dehner is “In God’s name, Doctor, make you prognosis!” using a phrase I think never uttered in the broadcast show.
  • P111, it’s missing Dr Dehner’s last line in the broadcast, “You can’t know what it’s like to be almost a god” in favor of “It’s—all over, isn’t it?” This seems like a last-minute inspiration on the part of the director or actor.
  • P111, and Kirk’s final line is different: as broadcast, “I believe there’s some hope for you after all, Mr. Spock” while the adaptation has “Watch yourself, Mr. Spock. Your compassion is showing.”
• The adaptation does try to ‘explain’ the changes roles of some regular characters: how Sulu is now a physicist; how another doctor is on board because McCoy is on ‘special study leave’ p88. At the same time the adaptation retains obsolete terminology: “materializer” instead of transporter.
• There are a couple passages in which one wonders how familiar the adapters were with the show, in odd choices of words: p105.8, after repairs the Enterprise is ready for “takeoff”.