where are your gloves and your helmet?

*eyes Nicholas Meyer suspiciously*

Watched about an hour of Wrath of Khan last night, then went to Memory Alpha to see what info they had on the official excuse for Khan recognizing Chekov. Meyer had this explanation that amounted to 'bla bla bla Conan Doyle forgot continuity too bla bla yeah I probably could've put Uhura on the Reliant just as easily but I didn't bla bla it works so what are you complaining about'.

Look, was it because she was a woman or because she was black? Because the explanation is one of those non-explanations that's really basically an excuse for 'I didn't want to put a female character through something painful and awful and nasty because hurting women on screen is bad somehow', or else for '... well, I wanted to use a specific black actor for the captain and putting two black people in high command positions would've looked exceedingly weird and anyway someone would've given me flack for all two of the prominent black characters in the movie being subjected to Very Bad Things'.

(Personally I like Walter Koenig's answer to the question. At conventions, he tells people that Chekov was on the Enterprise during Space Seed, and that his one encounter with Khan involved Chekov making Khan wait for the bathroom for so long that Khan was furious with him when he emerged, thereby guaranteeing that Khan would remember Chekov as somebody who had wronged him.)

Made it through "The Way To Eden" aka the SPACE HIPPIES episode last night.

It gets a lot easier to slug through if one spends as much of the episode as possible knowing that Adam, the grinning one with the curly orange hair, went on to play the leader of the Good Ole Boys band in The Blues Brothers. Kind of hilarious imagery results, although it still helps to turn the sound off during the musical numbers.

It then gets a lot harder to slug through upon realizing it's about a group of utterly dedicated people loudly and unquestioningly following a leader who screams HEALTH FREEDOM, YOUR SOCIETY MADE ME ILL, I REFUSE TO SUBMIT TO WHAT SCIENCE SAYS WILL KEEP ANYBODY SAFE and then goes about setting events in motion intended to kill everybody on board the Enterprise, after having them storm all the vital parts of the ship in the name of FREEDOM. Because none of them like or want to deal with society or accept the fact that things are not to their liking. And their idea of countering situations they don't like is to yell the same insult over and over and over as if that were an argument.

(I am aware that actual hippies and 60s activists were reacting to incredibly repressive sit-down-and-shut-up-you-little-idiots conditions in the real world. But this was a Star Trek episode that had all the authenticity of a Very Special Episode about racism written by old white men, and it understood hippies about as well as the script for "Miri" understood children, and portrayed them about as well as the 35-year-old actor in "Miri" who was supposed to be someone who'd been twelve for two hundred years.)

ST:TOS last night was Bread and Circuses. The premise was a little more painfully "really? REALLY?" than Patterns of Force- there's parallel cultural development and then there's coming up with recognizable names and the English language- but the writing wasn't half bad, the satire of television and entertainment was pretty good, the acting was all around decent, and the Spock-McCoy scene in the cells was really good development on both characters. (Even if both I and the person watching it with me both saw Spock's "Oh, really?" comment as the jumping-off point for about a dozen different possible slashfics.)

The actor playing Merik looked like a red-headed version of Vladimir Putin. I'm not objecting, it was just kind of entertaining coincidence.

Saw "I, Mudd" last night. Very enjoyable. Somewhat jarred by the remastered image of what looked awfully like an overly complicated 1990s Blue LEDs All Over The Place Because We Can control panel in Norman the Android's abdomen, but whatever.

I have inquired with a friend of mine who is also watching original series ST and it appears we both had a bit of Mandela Effect about this episode. Both of us remembered Mudd's climactic line to Norman as "I am lying to you right now." I don't think either of us remembered Kirk saying "Mudd always lies" first, either.

Fun episode, though. Glad I watched it.

Watched some more original series Star Trek episodes.

Thank the little grey gods of Asgard for the remastered version of The Doomsday Machine, because the episode before it on Netflix was The Apple, and OH GOD WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY

There were just... there were just so many things wrong with The Apple, and I had forgotten virtually all of them. I think I had mixed it up with A Private Little War because of the hair and the lower-tech natives, or possibly with the space hippies episode because of the body paint. (including the fact that I could no longer look at the body paint design on at least one guy's cheek and not see it as a scroll up/scroll down cursor.) I don't know. There was so much wrong with The Apple, including 'One of my fellow crewmembers died in- whoops, two of- whoops, three of- oh, whatever, hey, yeoman who looks like Adele, wanna get it on?' Chekov, that the only redeeming feature I could think of for it was that the yeoman who looked like Adele actually kicked some ass when it came time to fight. Mostly it was just Benji Saves The Universe levels of bad.

The remastered Doomsday Machine, however, was brilliant, and overcame the only issue I think I ever really had with the episode, which was that I first saw it when I was maybe nine or ten and had to have my father explain to me that Star Trek was made before George Lucas came on the scene and that it really wasn't fair to compare the special effects to Star Wars. I believe I thought the Machine itself was made of papier-mache at the time. Having dealt with that issue, the writing and acting and characterization all got to stand out properly, and I very much appreciated that fact. I'm putting that one up there with Balance of Terror for best episodes I've rewatched so far.

Memory Alpha said two things about the episode that surprised me. One was that D. C. Fontana said it was her least favorite episode of the entire series. The other was that the actor playing Commodore Decker admitted that he thought the whole premise was silly, that he acted the part like he was in a cartoon, and that he didn't realize it had been written as a Moby Dick analogue with him in the Ahab slot until seeing it in a review several years after the fact.

“George Phblat’s new film [....] has brought the word ‘Bad” to new levels of badness. Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This bad film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene… simply bad beyond all infinite dimensions of possible badness.”

- not so much Benji Saves The Universe as "The Alternative Factor", which had me longing for the nuanced realism of "Miri" and muttering the Demotivator caption* for "Spock's Brain"

*HEY, THEY CAN'T ALL BE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER

Watched "Miri" last night. Had a couple of basic reactions.

( I know it's fifty+ years on at this point and probably past the statute of limitations for TV, but still. )