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Forced Patterns
From: Marc Thomas
Hi Trek TV Friends, I loved Kaelin's adorable sehlat. What? Gmail's spell check doesn't know the word 'sehlat'?!? And you call yourself a computer program! Fine, google, a sehlat is a Vulcan teddy bear. Not Vulcan, Alberta, Vulcan the Planet. Cheeese! There will be a TAS episode about Spock and his pet. So those of you weary of the animated Trek, know that there is something of some worth there. Although, I think I prefer Kaelin's Vulcan kitten, now that I've seen it. Anyway I'm so happy when something new shows up on the fan art page. And the new Dustin picture! Does anyone else want to print those 'About Us' drawings and make a Trek TV coloring book? Of Course you do, you all do. Great work Tracy. Oh by the way,Chris' "Nothing will get the juices re-flowing through your recently pinched subclavian nerve like a double tribble burger with cheese" is so disturbingly true. The vegetarian alternative just doesn't cut it Great podcast with Dr. Todd, Thea and Melvar. I'm glad I didn't miss a live show, I was in between two long days Friday night and would have slept through the uStream feed. Rather than being awakened by the podcast, I would likely have incorporated it into REM sleep. My poor Flying Brain Parasite would have had terrible nightmares about alien mind control. I hate to think what Sargon was doing to Captain Kirk's body. He seemed a little indecently into it, didn't he. I imagine Kirk was still sore a week later when he visited The Planet of the Nazi's. I'm sure you've observed that this is exactly the same premise as A Piece of the Action. Why eschew the hokey Hogan's Heroes-que germanic fake accents? It's already a little tasteless to wallow in the Leni Riefenstahl aesthetic, why not go all in? (Miss Leni was Hitler's cinema propagandist extroidinare, good artist, bad lady) It's nice to see another episode extolling the sanctity of the Prime Directive, but it seems to me that Federation's first-contact scruples could be explored with more nuance than this. Sub-dermal transponders? Never seen before or since. Remember all the call-backs and continuity from a couple weeks ago? Nonetheless, McCoy's implanted radios serve as a fine plot device for the K/S bondage scene. I do appreciate the pains Roddenbury (really Gmail? Roddenbury's not in the data base?) took to demonstrate that phasers are not lasers. He had actual science guys explain to him that lasers couldn't do what phasers were supposed to, and he listened. In the Trek future, lasers are just something constructed on the fly out of crystals dug from the wrist. I assume that they used the laser later to cauterize their wounds. Here's another very standard teleplay convention of the period. The old mentor gone wrong. On any given night during the 60's there were innumerable old colonels, cowboy elders or other wise-men of yesterday, whose fall from great moral heights confused and disappointed the dashing young protagonist. This drama is regurgitated every time Kirk meets some peer or hero from his Academy days. Who said "...every one else in star fleet is an asshole?" This episode was famously not dubbed into German until the 90's. Coincidentally, I was in Munich for a few nights back then and while I never saw this episode on German TV, I did see some TNG, and there is no TNG like TNG dubbed into German. When I go abroad, I always watch lotza TV. Also, during that long ago Teutonic holiday…I was out late one night, quite jet lagged and bedraggled when one of Berlin's finest stopped me in the street demanding to see my papers. It was so cool, and while most people would think "Oh Wow. This is totally like a war movie" I was all "Oh Wow! This is totally like Patterns of Force." Maybe I'll say more about Patterns of Force next week, I've never been a fan of Trek's Nazi fetish which this episode spawned. Speaking of genocide... As a Fucking American and heir to all those wild west shenanigans, I feel obliged to point out that Custer was not killed at Wounded Knee but rather the Battle of Little Big Corn Dog. I really liked the off topic banter you had with your Australian friends. It was so engaging, I just discovered that I have Netflix streaming so I've been catching up on the Futurama. I enjoyed hearing about your remote wilderness excursions and casino sleaze. You are all really quite antithetical to the stereo type of the pallid, frail and unworldly Trekkie. I listened to the Return to Tomorrow show while suffering an embarrassing rout in a chess match against a seven year old boy, so the nice things said about me by you, my Trek TV friends were well timed, thank you so much. I hate chess. It's part of my job, though. I'm a house pet for a superior intelligence. My main accomplishment out side of my Trek TV content contributions is that I have managed to live indoors. I need to see who Castile from The Supernaturals is. Thank you to Kaelin and Julian and while I am not planning on doing a podcast as such I am writing and illustrating what will hopefully become a small anthology of illustrated Sci Fi audio shorts. I planned to post them on a web site all at once, but maybe a podcast format would be better. I don't really know about this sort of thing. Usually I just rewrite the same two stories every ten years then hide them in a cardboard box. Which reminds me, one of these stories is predicated on the general familiarity by the audience with a frozen carbonated beverage known as an Icee or a Slurpie. The fictional analog being Opu's Squishie drinks as seen on The Simpsons. Does the rest of the world know what these are? Or does America need to export more of it's junk food products. It would be helpful to know. With weepy Manga eyes of appreciation, Marc Thomas