Views from Crestmont Drive

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”.

The Enterprise picks up a human orphan who’s grown up supposedly alone on an alien planet.

• The enhanced graphics, which in an episode like this matter only in scenes of ships rendezvousing or sailing through space, show a more detailed Enterprise, but especially in the first scene, with Enterprise and Antares, they look obviously CGI, a bit artificially phony compared with the relative solidity of seeing models.
• Interesting how the main guest character here has a telling tic, as in “The Man Trap,”  where Nancy or her other guises were constantly chewing on their knuckle – here Charlie, when provoked, rolls his eyes up into his head as he makes someone go away, or breaks Spock’s legs. These things might have been in the script, but sometimes they were inspired directorial suggestions.
• Here we establish that each ship has a distinctive emblem patch sewn onto its crews’ uniforms.
• Charlie is a classic awkward adolescent, but some of his behavior strikes autistic chords – he interrupts, he has no social skills, he frets about being liked. “I tried to make them like me!”
• Trek physics: the ‘roar’ of the ship as it passes the POV, even in deep space.
• As in other early episodes, there nice scenes of everyday crewmen busy about the ship, including a scene (with up and down scale harp music; music in this episode by Fred Steiner) as Charlie watches a technician guiding a plastic pipe downward through a hatch in the floor. And later, a key scene in which Spock, Uhura, and numerous random crewmen hang out in a rec room, with Spock playing his oddly-shaped harp, and Uhura singing, until Charlie interrupts and demands attention.
• And later: a scene set in a gym, with random crewmen doing calisthenics in the background. We never see this gym again, in the entire series.
• Set design: The astronomical photos mounted on the upper walls around the bridge are curious. They’re cool but pointless, like the huge galactic photo on the wall of Alpha Control at the very beginning of Lost in Space.
• Set design: it’s been noted how much the set design benefited from lighting – especially in the corridors and rooms of the Enterprise, how colored lights gave the same sets different looks for different scenes.
• Kirk isn’t actually particularly good at explaining awkward adolescent things to Charlie.
• Tech anachronism, perhaps: in this episode we have Kirk instructing a chef to use meatloaf to simulate turkey for “Earth day’s Thanksgiving”, while later in the show (especially by Next Gen), virtually any food or drink can be manufactured with a push of a button, or voice command.
  • Of course he means the United States’ Thanksgiving, and it’s a parochial, nationalistic assumption in TOS that specifically American values will prevail, some 300 years from now. (Another example was how the list of potential starship names, as given in The Making of Star Trek (p164), includes Lexington and Yorktown, significant names in American history no doubt but hardly likely to be so in the world history of 300 years from now.)
• I have a “Nitpicker’s Guide” book about TOS that points out continuity errors, and I’m trying not to look at it — but I noticed a huge continuity error while watching this evening. After Kirk tries to explain something to Charlie, Kirk is summoned to the bridge, and Charlie follows. Before leaving, Kirk is wearing his gold shirt. When they reach the bridge, he’s wearing his green lounge shirt.
• Mention in captain’s log of “UESPA”, pronounced “you-spa”, which is never mentioned again.
• Charlie’s awkward devotion to Yeoman Janice Rand: “If I had the whole universe, I’d give it to you.”
• Trek physics: how the stars *stream by* as the Enterprise is underway to a new destination. Think about this: suppose the average distance between stars, in our area of the galaxy (not the galactic core) is roughly 4 light years, as our sun is from Alpha Centauri. When the Enterprise travels at warp 1, the speed of light [though I think the relationship between warp speeds and multiples of the speed of light is never specified in the show itself, but was extrapolated in various concordances and commentaries], it would take *four years* to travel from one star to the average next. At warp 10, 1000 times the speed of light [by those extrapolations], it would still take…. 1.5 days to travel from one star to the average next. So how fast would the Enterprise need to move for the stars to be visibly streaming past the camera?? It doesn’t bear close examination. But it makes for subjectively comfortable visuals.
• Striking scenes from when I first saw this episode at age 11: Charlie turning a woman (a young woman, as is invariably referred to as a “girl” in this series) into an iguana. Another young woman he turns into a very old woman, who is horrified when she realizes her condition. And finally – as Charlie shuts down a raucous rec room, a victim, another woman, stumbles into the corridor *with no face at all*, just a featureless mask.
• This story is tragic and has a sad ending. Charlie survived for 14 years on a desolate planet by being given special powers by the native Thasians – and now he can’t not use them, to qualm his adolescent fears and rejections, to strike back at those who offend or make fun of him. The Thasians come to take him back, and restore most of his damage. He pleads with his fellow humans. “I can’t even touch them! I want to stay….!”
• Kirk, to give him credit, tries to negotiate.
• Mysterious line: the Thasian appears on the bridge and says, “I have taken my form centuries ago so that I may communicate with you.” What does this mean? Centuries ago? No explanation – but its intriguing implications were the kind of thing that thrilled me about this show, more than its surface adventure. A sense of wonder moment, a momentary glimpse at something barely understandable.
• Ending here also muted. Janice, having reappeared on the bridge (in the nightgown she was wearing when Charlie made her disappear from her quarters), weeps subtlety, stepping up to the comfort of the captain’s chair. Kirk comforts her: “It’s all over now.”
• This was the first story adaptation by James Blish in his very first Star Trek book. He titled the story “Charlie’s Law”, and he ended it by emphasizing Janice’s anguish:

The boy and the Thasian vanished, in utter silence. The only remaining sound was the dim, multifarious humming surround of the Enterprise.

And the sound of Janice Rand weeping, as a woman weeps for a lost son.

• After browsing Memory Alpha today – it seems to be the ultimate compendium for story details and production background of every Trek series and film that has ever existed – I should stand corrected on my comment two posts ago that Blish apparently improved on many of the scripts he turned into short story narratives. He was working from early versions of scripts – literally, early typewritten drafts the studio didn’t need any more and mailed to him – and so plot differences from broadcast episodes were at least in part for that reason. Thus, in his version of “The Man Trap”, which he called “The Unreal McCoy”, the characters were named Bierce, not Crater, and the planet was Regulus VIII, not M-113. Still, I should reread Blish’s versions, and follow Memory Alpha’s notes, and try to figure out why I thought Blish’s versions were sometimes superior to the broadcast episodes.

Blish’s adaptation, in ST1:

• First, Blish renames the story “Charlie’s Law”, as in, be nice to Charlie or else.
• As was common in these early books, Blish summarizes scenes as often as he transcribes all the dialogue from some scenes.
• The story explicitly states that Kirk is fond of Rand – a point of possibility that, the producers of the show realized, led to Rand’s character being written out (so the possibility of a romance between them would not interfere with Kirk fraternizing with guest characters)
• Twice in the book Blish calls Uhura “Bantu”.
• He references the other ship’s “Nerst generator” – a term from his own Cities in Flight stories, I recall, since when I first read and reread Blish’s early Trek books, I also read his quartet of “Cities in Flight” novels.
• Blish expands a last-word line from Charlie, p18t: “Being a man isn’t so much. I’m not a man and I can do anything. You can’t. Maybe I’m the man and you’re not”. The script did not include, or omitted, the final line.
• Blish omits the silly scene of the bridge crew turning every device on to challenge Charlie’s control.
• The line about “I have taken my form centuries ago….” Is missing, but Blish has a different mysterious reference, as the Thasian explains why they can’t restore the crew of the other ship: “We could not help them because they were exploded in this frame; but we have returned your people and your weapons to you, since they were only intact in the next frame.” The oddness of the reference has a similar effect.

(This was, chronologically, my first post of notes and annotations I re-watched Star Trek TOS, The Original Series, beginning with this episode because it was the first broadcast is thus the first episode on the Blu-Ray set TOS that I bought a few months ago.)

In this episode: The Enterprise makes a routine visit to a planet occupied by an archaeologist and his wife, only to become prey to an alien monster that can change its form to look like anyone in the crew.

• The episode’s premise is odd, though not in a way any original viewer of this debut episode would likely have recognized: why is this huge starship, with a crew of 400+, making a stop at a remote planet to perform an annual medical check for two archaeologists? This begs the question of what the starship is for, its authority, its scope, and so on. Would a modern aircraft carrier stop by a remote Pacific island to perform an annual physical on a couple botanists?
• Kirk and his party beam down to meet Dr. Crater and his wife. The mysterious premise is established immediately: Kirk and McCoy are seeing different versions of Nancy Crater. And Crewman Darnell, an even different version! But it’s always struck me as implausible how, in the opening scenes, the monster can appear differently to three people *simultaneously*. (And what’s up with Crewman Darnell’s service discipline, that he should go wandering off into the wilderness to…shag a young woman who glances at him alluringly?)
• Trek physics: Trek displayed recurring patterns of intuitive (and wrong) physics – most visibly, the Enterprise in orbit of a planet, always seemingly *banking* inward as it circles the planet like a plane that is turning in the air. And, visibly arcing, as if the planet below is only a few miles in diameter. (Not to mention that there’s no reason the side of the ship need stay aligned with the planet’s surface below; an object in orbit wouldn’t constantly turn to stay in orientation with the planet below unless it were being powered that way.)
• Also, the planet is *visibly* rotating – both in original effects and in enhanced effects.
• And the most recurrent bit of pandering to intuitive senses of physics: the silly *swish!* as the Enterprise flies past the viewer, in the credits.
  • All of these issues are not about the producers making careless mistakes. They are about the producers, and their special effects crews, making deliberate decisions, to make audiences feel comfortable with what they are seeing. If a plane makes a swoosh sound flying through the air, then a starship should make a similar sound flying through space. This entails the whole realm of intuitive physics — whose base example is why people assume a heavy object falls faster than a lighter one. (Though it doesn’t.) Science fiction — especially SF films and TV shows — is rife with examples of appealing to audiences’ intuitive physics. The original film Star Wars is one of the worst examples (spaceships flying like jet fighters!); the earlier film 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the best examples of trying to depict spaceflight as it would actually occur, though even it has minor implausibilities.
• The story develops as another crewman dies, and McCoy, in his lab on the Enterprise, discovers that the first crewman died of a complete lack of salt in his bloodstream…
• There is a nice scene as the monster changes itself into a black crewman, apparently not replacing anyone, but responding to Uhura’s imagination. The two meet each other, speak Swahili to each other… the monster apparently mesmerizing Uhura until they are interrupted.
• And then there’s a silly scene in a botany lab where Sulu is pursuing his latest hobby. (These early episodes, to give them credit, made more attempts to characterize the relatively minor recurring characters — Sulu with his botany here, his fencing in “The Naked Time” — than the last couple entire seasons did.) The scene is cute, but the plant that Yeoman Rand attends, Beauregard, is so obviously played by some guy under the table sticking his arm up into a puppet, it’s embarrassing.)
• The story has two huge implausibilities. First, how is it a creature needs (only) *salt* to survive? Second, how is it it’s the last one left? What killed them off? Dr Crater explains later that the salt “ran out”. How could that have happened to a race that had presumably evolved and lived for millions of years?
• On the other hand, there’s a striking echo here of our current awareness of the sixth extinction, and *why* the buffalo and passenger pigeon went extinct – because humanity expanded over the planet and killed them off. Too bad the scenario here did not suggest some more plausible reason for the extinction of these creatures.
• Kirk’s log entries are narrated in an oddly hushed tone, compared to those in later episodes.
• A nice touch: the low hum of background noise when on the planet. There’s no implied cause; it’s audio decoration to enhance the feeling of alienness.
• Uhura is a little dippy here, in her scene mocking Spock.
• One nice feature of early episodes like this one: there are lots of extras wandering around the Enterprise corridors, as if it really is a ship full of hundreds of crewmen. As the series went on, fairly quickly producers stopped paying for so many extras, and corridor scenes came to show only the main characters in each story.
• On the other hand, in several scenes we get the impression that all the crewmen know each other. Plausible? Maybe, if the entire crew numbers only 400.
• One of those quote I’ve always remembered: “She lives in my dreams, she walks and sings in my dreams.” Crater talking about his late wife.
• Another plot issue: why is the creature suddenly so ravenous? As Nancy she seemed fine when they first arrived, not as if about to starve. They even had a few salt tablets left! And yet, as the story goes on here, no sooner does the creature strike one person down, then it turns on the next.
• The ending here is muted and thoughtful (unlike many 2^nd season shows where they felt the need to end on a joke of some sort) – Kirk thinking about the buffalo.
• When the Enterprise departs at the end – at warp 1 – the planet recedes fairly quickly, more quickly than similar shots in most of the rest of the series. As if the producers thought it not quite correct. Actually, if the ship is departing at the speed of light (warp 1), the planet would recede fairly quickly.

Blish adaptation, in ST1:

• Blish retitles it “The Unreal McCoy”
• Presumably following an early draft of the script, the adaptation names the planet Regulus VIII and the characters Bierce, not Crater – while Blish describes the encampment is being inside a crater.
• Blish uses the term “petachiae” to describe the mottling on the dead man’s face.
• Blish acknowledges that what Spock finds out about the “Borgia root” is only what the Bierces themselves said in an earlier report. (Otherwise, why would the Enterprise have details – and names – for every plant on every remote barely occupied planet?)
• This version avoids the shoot-out with Crater in the broadcast episode; instead Kirk orders both Bierces aboard the ship.
• Per Blish’s practice in his early Trek books, the narrative follows only a single character’s POV. Thus, Blish has none of the side scenes that we saw in the episode, with the creature changing into Uhura’s Swahili-speaking crewman, or the biolab scene with Rand, Sulu, and the silly plant “Beauregard”.
• Blish adds a bit of speculation about why the race died out: “It wasn’t really very intelligent—didn’t use its advantages nearly as well as it might have” referring presumably to the shape-changing. Spock comments: “They could well have been residual. We still have teeth and nails, but we don’t bite and claw much these days.”