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Last of the Kirk-hicans
From: Marc Thomas
Hi Trek TV Friends 400 hundred years and change ago in this, the new world early English colonial settlements were starving,and suffering general privation having exhausted their store of grain following a failed harvest they had naught left among there provisions but Flake Bars! Then, the native people whom they mistakenly named Indians, taught them the use of local and unfamiliar sustenance, such as the potato, tomatoes and corn dogs. This kind gesture was re-paid not in kind but unkindly indeed. Thank not, the sweet white God of Europe for the intervention of The Preservers. I don't have a single least favored episode of Star Trek, shades of horrible can manifest themselves so differently that to dishonor one among all others is hardly fair, but this third outing for season three offers an impressive bounty of awful and deserves a place at the bottom of my list of all time best Treks. So if I'm like all... "Oh man Im having such a nice day I'm too happy… what to do? what to do….? I know! I'll watch THE PARADISE SYNDROME! It's more than a predictably maudlin ending It's patronizing and offensive to indigenous people everywhere Mommy in my brain says "if you don't have anything nice to say…Dot Dot Dot.." Okey, okey...I like the shipboard story, nearly a B story really, so apart are Kirok and his forgotten fellows aboard good ship U.S.S. 'E'. It almost feels topical. There has been lotza chatter about asteroid impacts and the consequences due if, indeed when, such should happen and what NASA, E.S.A, Russia or the Taiko-Commies can do about it, and no one in the know ever suggests blowing the rock to smithereens a-la that stupid Bruce Willis movie. Launching a space craft to hover near a potentially offensive ass or meteoroid lure it into a safer orbit by gravitational persuasion has been proposed, I believe. But I don't know how massive a probe would be needed to effect such a subtle and ju jitsu-istic technique. I guess someone does though, and its pretty cool to think about, but this will never prevent a massive impact on the big or small screen because its not entirely or even marginally cinematic. Phil Plait, Pamela Gaye, Michiu Kaku and Neil de Grasse Tyson are just some of the luminaries of astronomy and astro-fizz who have referenced this episode and it's ass-teroid kicking bazooka-beam when discussing this subject on science podcasts. And yes I know I over emphasized the ass in asteroid twice in the same paragraph, and yes, I know, further more that acknowledging this does not make it okay. But let's not become distracted from my larger point, namely that... The beauty of TOS death rays lies in their use of vaporization instead of explodification. So refined, nice and tidy, I love TOS. The only problem with the Spock, Scotty, and Boner Mc Grinch B side is the very narrative driver of this half of the episode. An asteroid heading towards the planet of the dispossessed and noble savages cannot possibly be traveling at speeds which would challenge the Enterprise's capacity to catch it. It's a natural periodically orbital body, I am I supposed to believe its traveling at warp? Are you? Fed ships routinely flip Einstein the bird while asteroids, comets and the general flotsam and jetsam of space all politely obey the strict edicts of Newton. The urgency of the chase reads false and is a little hard to take seriously. But I like it when Spock is in charge, and I love the bridge of the real Enterprise, it's just so beautiful. I suppose the scenery Kirok's cavorting in is beautiful too but I've seen it on the opening credits of The Andy Griffith Show and other productions that used this reservoir on the outskirts of L.A. as a backdrop. It perty much looks like where I grew up, North Hemisphere, boring. One wonders which other displaced cultures got their own planet? Only those who suffered from European expansion or could this be the opportunity to discover cultures lost so long ago that archeology has yet to find hide nor hair. Perhaps there are planets inhabited by the descendants of people whose ways were lost to advance of various Caesars . I'd love to know about the variety of societies which existed then became extinct throughout Asia and Africa and Elsewhere. How about the Pix, the ancient Gauls, Huns or those adorable Homo Floriencines from Indonesia? Maybe The Preservers have a nice place for us just waiting in the wings. I'd love to see the Neanderthal planet or was that already covered by The Galileo 7? This whole white man as a god among the less melanin deprived was already a worn out and insulting trope by 1968 and the writers and everyone in the script room should have known better. Getting back to Kirok though…. you gotta hand it to him, even in a state of profound amnesia he still knows how to break the prime directive, spectacularly. If his stay had lasted longer he would have undone everything The Preservers had tried to accomplish. Thank God, even Ku Rock the great-white, priestess-nailing, God, that I don't have to watch this again for a while It gets better next week, oh yeah, next week its gonna be all kindza love from me you'll see……you'll see that Spock can get his piece of the action with out faking divinity! It's great to see all the new Tracy themed fan art, the simply captioned ones are hilarious, click , enlarge and enjoy. the Muguto piece honors the early Cubist adoption of the collage technique by Braque and Picasso, and while i had to apply research before understanding the very appropriate Mad Max reference, I did and now do get it, the disturbing MFP image. Massive envy for Collin's Floridian itinerary, wish there really was a slide show Looks like we have another steady eMailer, a heretical TNG centristic like most of modern Trekdom but literate in the true canon. I would totally join his Star Trek club just to see Bryce Cakes drive up in his Trek Car. Finally, from me, another Tracy the Space Girl photoshop illustration Here we learn that Yeoman Rand, missing for the past year has been reassigned to the Hot Dog on a Stick kiosk in the enterprise rec room. Meanwhile, Tracy is bored and disgusted by a renewal of cold war hostilities when Chekov tells Iowa farm boy Jimmy that corn dogs were actually invented in Russia I listened to last weeks Trek TViganza while on the videophone with my brick and mortar friend from California, this was kind of like having a podcast during a podcast. some measure of fun this, and there fore we have tentatively planned a bromantic tuesday night around next weeks show. If circumstances allow this to be made so, I'd like to say "Hey Chris, you are being addressed directly…. from the internet, isn't that weird?" As they will say in the dystopian future nightmare of Vulcan occupied California "Live Long and have a nice day" Marc Thomas