Views from Crestmont Drive

As noted a couple posts ago, in my series of Star Trek Rewatch posts, I’ve just reread James Blish’s first Star Trek book – published just over 50 years ago! – to note the changes he made from the original script versions of the seven episodes adapted there, or the changes that survived from the early script drafts he received that were changed by the time of filming. I’ve described points about the episodes “Miri” and “The Conscience of the King” in their posts. The other five episodes in the book are annotated here.

As I mentioned before, Blish wrote short story versions of these episodes from scripts, often early drafts of scripts that differed in substantial ways from the final shooting scripts, and did so without having seen the show himself — this was a time before the show was seen in the UK, where he lived. Clearly, the same situation applied to the cover artist of this Bantam paperback, James Bama, who not only casts a greenish glare over everything, but depicts the Enterprise with rocket fire shooting out all three cylindrical sections of the ship!

“Charlie X”

• First, Blish renames the story “Charlie’s Law”, as in, be nice to Charlie or else.
• Blish summarizes scenes as often as he transcribes all the dialogue from some scenes. The early Blish Trek books were slim paperbacks of 130 pages or so, containing short story versions of seven or eight episodes each, and so turning a 50-minute script into narrative with all dialogue intact was not feasible. (Or necessarily desirable; some plot developments are better summarized, in a short story narrative, while in a teleplay such developments *have* to be explained via dialogue.)
• 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”.
• Blish has Charlie make all the phasers on the ship disappear.
• 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.

“Dagger of the Mind”

• Again, Blish tends to summarize scenes rather than transcribe lots of script dialogue.
• No issue here about a planetary force shield, suggesting that the planet’s atmosphere is sufficient deterrent to potential escapees.
• Some lines from the deleted speech by Adams explaining his motives survive here, p37: “I’m tired of doing things for others, that’s all. … Trust mankind to reward me? All they’ve given me thus far is Tantalus. It’s not enough. I know how their minds work. Nobody better.”
• Blish acknowledges the huge air duct but calls it a crawl-space meant for servicing power lines.

“The Man Trap”

• Blish retitles it “The Unreal McCoy”
• Following an earlier script, the planet is Regulus VIII and the characters are named 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.
• Again, Blish follows a single character flow story line. Thus, he 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.”

“Balance of Terror”

• In this one you can tell Blish, having seen only a handful of early scripts sent to him for this book, and never having watched the broadcast show itself, wasn’t entirely clear about some of the series’ premises. In the opening of this story, as he builds toward justifying the occurrence of a wedding on the Enterprise, he says: “Traveling between the stars, even at ‘relativistic’ or near-light speeds, was a long-drawn-out process at best.” p54.6. Even though at other times he refers to the warp speeds.
• He notes the blandness of the chapel.
• He identified Spock’s homeworld, Vulcan, as a planet of the star 40 Eridani.
• Blish has a nice line describing the Romulan energy weapon fired at the Enterprise: “Moving with curious deliberateness, as though it were traveling at the speed of light in some other space but was loafing sinfully in this one, the dazzling bolt…” I’m guessing this was not a description in the script.
• In Blish’s version, no one has seen a live Romulan – but bodies were found in the first Romulan war and so they are known to be of the “Vulcanite” type – though this doesn’t lessen the dramatic reveal of seeing the Romulans, and how they are “dead ringer”s for Spock.
• Blish understands there would have to be a *sphere* of satellites around the Romulus/Remus system, p59t.
• Technical jargon: Uhura (for some reason it is her) detects what turns out to be the invisible Romulan ship via a “De Broglie transform” and then Spock calculates that the ship is on a “Hohmann D” transfer orbit back to Romulus. Needless to say, not terminology in any version of a script.
• Blish also isn’t quite clear, in this first Trek book, about the relationship between the characters; Spock is a “funny customer”; “his manners are bad by Earth standards”, and no one particular likes him.
• Big plot change: Blish’s story has Kirk take time out to complete the marriage interrupted at story’s opening.
• Also a substantial change: since Blish realizes they’re in a single star system, Spock has noticed a cold comet and now realizes they can use it as a diversion. Not, as in the broadcast show, does the Romulan ship for some reason fly into it directly. (Still, Blish has Spock find the comet in an ephemeris. An ephemeris of what, all comets in all planetary systems everywhere?? Or for some reason, an ephemeris of comets in this one system? Blish may have known his biology, but apparently had no sense for scale in astronomy.)
• (Also, of course, again, Blish omits all scenes in the broadcast episode on the Romulan ship itself, sticking to a single story line.)
• Kirk uses the comet’s passage between the two ships to accelerate toward the Romulan ship and fire its phasers. Then comes the scene in which the phaser crew downbelow is disabled. Kirk has already sent Spock there, and sees on the intercom screen Spock struggle to hit the phaser fire button.
• And in Blish’s version, both Tomlinson and Stiles die – avoiding the issue, in the broadcast episode, of how Spock managed to save one, but not the other.

“The Naked Time”

• 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”.

Kirk must determine if a Shakespearean actor is the same man as the infamous “Kodos the Executioner,” whose crimes Kirk witnessed 20 years before.

• This is an offbeat, exotic episode, with strong characters and a powerful moral dilemma, that is nevertheless somewhat unsatisfying as a Trek episode – because there’s nothing particularly science-fictional about it.
• The opening scene is striking—we might wonder for a few seconds if we’re watching the right show. (Is this Star Trek?)
• The enhanced graphics, showing the exaggerated curving of the Enterprise orbiting the planet, are getting absurd. Did it not occur to the team doing these enhanced effects realize that this curvature was not the least bit realistic?
• The is a stardate confusion as Kirk interrogates the library computer for background about Kodos. The stardate of this episode is 2817.6, and Kodos was presumably killed 20 years before. Yet the computer begins to say, “On stardate 2794.7, Kodos—“ before Kirk cuts if off. Someone was thinking here that one stardate meant one year, perhaps, rather than one day.
• Do we understand that Kirk comes on to every pretty young woman who crosses his path – or is he being strategic and calculating, as he’s later accused, by playing Lenore along simply to get at her father?
• The exterior of this planet, the sixth or seventh planet we’ve seen so far in the series, is showing production limitations – big lumpy rocks on a surface of sand. The lighting helps, but otherwise, it’s rather threadbare.
• Yeoman Rand is seen for barely a few seconds. This was her last appearance in the show. Originally she had a scene where she interrupted Kirk and Lenore on the observation deck, but the show was running long and the scene was cut.
• Why is McCoy drinking in the middle of the day..?
• The observation deck scene comes very close to the criteria I established early on, in this introductory post. I know that this is one of the dozen episodes I never saw when first run; and I know that in syndicated reruns, this scene was always cut. I had read the scene in Blish’s version, of course. But I think I have seen the scene just once before, when this episode was included among the handful of episodes I bought on DVD (two episodes per disc!) back in about 2000. But that was likely the only time before now that I’ve seen it. Close, but not a scene I’ve *never* seen, as I’m wondering might exist.
• Early drafts of the script had a different crewman, Daiken, as an eyewitness in danger from the Karidian troupe, and consigned to engineering (by the way, why is engineering otherwise so empty?). By final shooting script, he becomes Riley, perhaps because the actor was available again. Yet I wonder if anyone didn’t think of the irony of sending Riley down to engineering, all alone, when it was he who, infected in “The Naked Time”, locked himself in engineering and almost caused the destruction of the ship.
• The episode has a unusual score, by Joseph Mullendore (listed without first name in the credits), quite unlike most of the series music, with some familiar themes in lounge music variations. His versions of the Enterprise flyby and orbit theme have a swanky, leisurely tone; and in fact the cocktail party music is a slowed-down version of the series’ main theme. On the other hand, the music for the two play scenes, at the very beginning and then near the climax of the story, is a charming, chamber music theme highlighting winds, appropriately baroque for scenes of Shakespeare plays. This music is very memorable, but I think never used again in another episode.
• The scenes between Karidian/Kodos and Kirk are very dramatic, and Karidian has some striking lines, which he bitingly chews as he accuses Kirk of some kind of inhumanity: “I find your use of the word mercy strangely inappropriate, Captain. Here you stand, the perfect symbol of our technical society. Mechanized, electronicized, and not very Human. You’ve done away with Humanity, the striving of man to achieve greatness through his own resources.”
• Kirk disagrees, of course, but the theme seems out of place in the current story; it’s more the eternal cry of the humanities who resent the modern world, its science and technology, even if the internet, or starships, allows them to spread their word. Some conflicts will never end, apparently.
• Karidian again, avoiding a direct question about his past: “Blood thins. The body fails. One is finally grateful for a failing memory.” And then he cries out, an existential anguish: “I am TIRED…!”
• Blish’s short story version follows the script very closely, with two notable alterations: there is no rec room scene, with Uhura singing her song over the intercom to Riley in engineering (as he’s poisoned). As with other scenes off the direct story-line, Blish omits it, and merely reports the consequences. Also, he omits Kirk requesting Karidian read into the intercom there to conduct a voice test.

The Enterprise discovers an Earth-like planet populated only by children, infected by a disease that doesn’t affect them until puberty, but a disease that affects the Enterprise landing party within hours.

• The initial scene has the Enterprise picking up an “old-style SOS” from a planet hundreds of light years out from Earth – then reaching the planet, and seeing it is another Earth, a sphere with exactly the same continents as our Earth.
• But no clouds! More like a globe than a real planet. A limitation of hurried special effects at the time, apparently. (The enhanced graphics version, linked above, adds clouds.)
• This is surely the most absurd, and needlessly so, coincidence in the entire series. Later in the series we got planets patterned after Chicago in the 1920s, and Nazi Germany, and Rome advanced to the 20^th century, but a duplicate Earth is far more unlikely than any of those. And it’s a pointless coincidence, because the story that follows in no way depends on the planet being a duplicate Earth.
• Well, maybe except in a couple ways, implicitly.
• First – well, first, let me step back. When I was obsessed by this series, in my high school and college years, there were scant resources that explored the development and production of the series. There was Stephen E. Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek, in 1968 (published before the show’s third season, and cancellation), and then in 1973, David Gerrold’s two books, including The World of Star Trek, published at exactly the right time for my obsession in watching Trek reruns five days a week. (And there were ‘concordances’, by Bjo Trimble, that compiled references to every person and planet and stardate mentioned in the entire series – as I already had been compiling on my own, to an extent.) I devoured these books and read them repeatedly. And then, as I’ve said, by the time I left college, I’d turned my attention to literary SF, and my obsession with Trek mostly evaporated. I did dutifully watch every Trek movie that came out…once… though I think I gave up after the first NextGen movie. I watched the NextGen series when it was on, once, and have never rewatched any of it (though I still might, since I think general consensus is that it was superior to the original in some ways). I’ve looked back on TOS, The Original Series, fondly over the decades since, and read occasional memoirs by the actors involved (Nimoy, Shatner, Takei), but only occasionally watched it.
• Now that I’m returning my attention to TOS, there are far more resources available, including detailed websites like Memory Alpha, and also, as I’ve recently found out, the immensely detailed books by Marc Cushman, These Are the Voyages, that document in detail the creation of the series and the production background of every single episode – from early drafts of each script, to how the scripts were revised, to the casting, to the production and how the directors worked, to the post-production issues about music scoring and special effects. And including the Nielsen ratings for how each episode fared, against the competition on the other two networks.
• So: only in recently reading such resources, have I learned that one of series creator Gene Roddenberry’s selling points, to pitch the show to a network willing to finance and broadcast the show, was a so-called “parallel-world hypothesis”, the notion that other planets would evolve species similar to humans, and their history would evolve similarly to our own, even to the extent of parallel societies — to justify the idea of filming episodes supposedly set on other planets using existing studio backlot sets of western towns or city streets. Because though the Enterprise was “seeking out new life and new civilizations”, we could imagine that these new civilizations would be so much like our own that the production crew could use existing sets to film episodes supposedly set on alien worlds.
• His pitch worked; the show sold, after a couple tries, to NBC.
• And I think that’s why this episode starts with the absurd premise that another planet, hundreds of light years from our Earth, might have developed in exactly the same way. That way, when the Enterprise crew beams down, they can land on a street that looks like a mid-20^th century street – using the Desilu backlot, in Culver City. It’s cheaper to do that than to create an entire imaginary alien planet.
• Second – and also, to justify that the people on this planet speak English. Here’s another Trek cheat, that encounters with aliens invariably involve the human language English. We saw this first in “The Corbomite Maneuver”, wherein the alien Balok spoke English to the Enterprise, first via his scary puppet, and then in person – without explanation. We next saw an alien in “Charlie X”, as the Thasian appears on the Enterprise bridge, at the end – but the Thasians were advanced, cerebral creatures, and perhaps spoke telepathically (so that the humans on the Enterprise bridge only *thought* he was speaking English). Then there was “Balance of Terror”, in which scenes aboard the Romulan ship used spoken English, perhaps simply as a cinematic convention, until the end of the story, when Kirk and the Romulan commander speak directly to each other – in English. With no suggestion as to how this was plausible.
• Later episodes of Trek suggested the use of a “universal translator”, a cylindrical, hand-held device that would automatically translate the language of any alien being to English, and vice versa. But I don’t think that was invoked in the series’ first season, which – remarkably, looking back now – involved only another couple episodes, after this one, in that entire season, that involve visiting truly alien species, who might not be expected to understand English.
• Another resource I’ve recently acquired is La-La Land Records’ original series soundtrack collection, which I’m now following. For now, point is, this episode uses tracks form earlier episode, and has no original music.
• Back to this episode in particular. The early plot has the Enterprise crewmen beaming down onto this planet, seemingly in ruins resembling mid-20^th century Earth, populated only by children who talk about “the before time” and “grups” and “onlies”; and then quickly becoming infected by the disease that has killed all the adults on the planet, leaving only children. This suggests a recurring problem that the show might have taken more seriously: how do our people from the Enterprise, beaming down to *any* planet, protect themselves from pathogens? Apparently they don’t think about it. (Actually, they did think about it in “The Naked Time”, and screwed up anyway.)
• The development of this story is reasonably intelligent – stuck down on the planet, infected and unable to beam back up to the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock and McCoy sift through records left by the deceased adults, and piece together the planet’s “life prolongation project” that led, 300 years ago, to the deaths of the adults, and the extended lives of children, who age only one month in 100 years. But as they do age, once reaching puberty, the disease affects them, and they develop blue sores on their skins, and quickly go insane and die, as we see two examples of in this story. As adults, the landing party quickly develops the blue sores …
• They beam down a couple portable computers – toaster-sized boxes with a couple rows of buttons across the top. As with the control panels on the Enterprise bridge, there was no thought, back in the mid 1960s, to the kind of keyboard entry we take for granted on our computers today—these boxes, and the Enterprise control panels, consisted of rows of on/off switches, or buttons to push. So it’s amusing to see Spock, hearing computations from Farrell over his communicator and then punching three or four random buttons on his box to somehow enter that data.
• This scene entails a bit of mathematical illiteracy – the line “12 to the 10^th power”. What could that possibly mean?
• Noticeably, these scenes as the crew compiles data and deduces what happened on this planet are conducted in rather hushed tones – a directorial decision, presumably.
• And then the show depicts scenes among the “onlies”, the children who are hiding themselves from the Enterprise intruders, led by “Jahn”, played by the quirky actor Michael J. Pollard, who assumes, as they all do, that the adults, these new “grups”, are dangerous and must be fought. So he decides to steal the “little boxes” they use to talk to their ship. Which he does. This leaves the landing party, disconnected from the Enterprise, with only 170 hours, 7 days, to devise a cure for their infection, all by themselves, without the Enterprise computers’ help.
• Their mission is to devise a “vaccine” to cure their disease. Though script-writer Adrian Spies (pronounced Spees, I just learned from Cushman’s book) was an admired scripter in Hollywood at the time, neither he nor the producers were much studied in science. A vaccine prevents someone from acquiring a disease; it doesn’t cure someone who already has the disease. (Perhaps a vaccine would prevent the kids from developing the disease as they hit adolescence, but the problem at hand is curing the Enterprise crew, who’ve already acquired the disease.) See Blish comments below.
• And the plot develops with several dramatic scenes, as Miri’s crush on Kirk, compromised by Kirk’s comfort to Yeoman Rand’s infection on her legs, leads Miri to go back to Jahn’s kids, and plan a betrayal.
• Then follows several scenes in which these kids chant, describing Kirk as “lovey-dovey”, how they should “bonk bonk” him on the head. Miri develops the same blue sores. Kirk confronts the children, and they mock Miri’s advice: “Tell them Jim, tell them Jim…”
• But Kirk pleads with them, perhaps connecting with Jahn by pointing out that the food stores are gone, that they’ll all die soon, even if they won’t one by one get the disease. This is one of the great dramatic Kirk scenes, as he pleads with them: “Please let me help you”, and, “You’re gonna be *just* *like* *them*” he tells them, about their fear and hatred of the adults, grups, whom they still remember.
• McCoy manages to concoct the ‘vaccine’ anyway, even without communicators to double-check calculation using the Enterprise computers. He injects himself with it, collapses… and his sores fade away.
• The story finishes with the Enterprise departing, with reference to a medical team left behind to rehabilitate the kids.
• Of course a recurring Trek flaw here is that we are left to presume that this collection of children, 20 or so, on these few streets that the landing party visits, somehow represent the entire planet. Are there not hundreds or thousands of other children who have survived across this planet, given this scenario? We never know. Again and again, throughout the series, a single crater or valley or soundstage set is supposed to represent an entire planet, even though we know from our own Earth that any one location is hardly representative of the variety of locations and cultures that we know here.

Blish’s Version

With this story I’ve begun re-reading the James Blish adaptations of the Trek scripts, which he was contracted by Bantam Books to write, and which were published beginning in January 1967 – part way through Trek’s 1^st season – even though the show was not yet shown in the UK, where Blish lived, and Blish’s stories were often based on preliminary versions of the scripts (again, as indicated by Cushman’s book), not the final shooting scripts.

I’ve mentioned before that my impression was that Blish often improved the scripts, especially in his earlier books. (In the later books – the books generally included short story versions of half a dozen episodes, and so extended through 12 volumes – he became much more literal about almost transcribing the scripts, rather than novelizing them, since that’s apparently what the readers wanted.) My hypothesis about this was temporized by understanding, via Marc Cushman, that Blish was often sent early drafts of scripts, and not final versions.

That might explain some deviations of plot points. But in rereading his version of “Miri”, I stand by my initial claim that Blish – as great a genuine science fiction author as any of those Roddenberry hired to write for Trek (Robert Bloch, Jerry Sohl, Richard Matheson, and even, eventually, Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison) – did actually improve on the scripts he was sent. Reading, in Cushman, about how the scriptwriters we do multiple drafts based on producer feedback (mostly to make their idea consistent with the vision of the show and the characters), what Blish did was, in this sense, doing a final rewrite – or a rewrite based on some draft – that noticeably improved plot and scientific plausibility. (In particular, checking Wikipedia, Blish’s formal education was in biology.) Too bad he wasn’t at Desilu to help with the production of the show.

Case here—Blish’s “Miri”

• Blish jettisons the absurd notion of a duplicate Earth, replacing it with a much more plausible idea that the planet visited in this story is an early Earth colony (in particular, a planet around the star 70 Ophiuchi), which explains the resemblance of Earth architecture and the natives’ speaking of English. In his story, the landing party beams down to the “central plaza of the largest city” on the planet.
• His dialogue about the landing party’s investigation of the disease is more detailed and intelligent that the version that was filmed, and more likely than any earlier script. He discusses the idea of a “vaccine”, but then stresses the development of an “antitoxoid” to cure the adults.
• There is much more intelligent discussion of the details of the biomedical investigation – biopsies of the blue lesions; discussion of spirochetes as secondary invaders that cause the mania; reference to Koch’s postulates; discussion of antibiotics to treat the mania; discussion of virus reproduction; and so on. Blish’s training as a biologist lent this story especially some scientific credence that Hollywood scriptwriters could not provide.
• On the other hand, Blish tends to omit entirely scenes that don’t involve the Enterprise crew – here, e.g., scenes among the kids as they deride Kirk and wonder what Miri is doing with him. We get some of Kirk’s dramatic plea to the children, but only in a scene directly with Miri.

Music

I’m going to be paying closer attention to the musical scores in each episode, and will edit or amend earlier posts with such discussion. I had not realized, until examining that La La Land Records soundtrack compilation, and reading Cushman, how relatively few Trek episodes had scores written directly for them – some 30 out of 79 episodes over the three seasons. As was the practice at the time, and may still be for all I know, musical cues written for one episode were usually recycled for later episodes, via a gradually growing ‘library’ of musical cues by various composers. “Balance of Terror” and “The Corbomite Maneuver”, for example, had custom scores, albeit ‘partial’; both by Fred Steiner, both with strongly identifiable themes, as I think I’ve mentioned.

Of course anyone watching all the episodes over and over in syndication, usually in random order, would hear familiar musical cues again and again, without being able to place where each theme ‘originated’. Only now watching the shows in production order, and having these other resources at hand, am I finally able to recognize certain themes as belonging to particular episodes, and composers.

“Miri” was a “tracked” episode – no music written especially for it, but with lots of music drawn from earlier episodes. In fact, the scenes in which the maniacal young man runs out to protect his broken tricycle is scored with the “Balance of Terror” theme…