Hot take: one major reason why TNG sort of abandoned the parallel-earth premise (aside from, to a certain extent, "The Royale") is because many of the same ideas could be explored on the Holodeck without the suspension of disbelief required to believe that there's a whole bunch of incredibly-earth-like planets in the galaxy. See, for example, the Dixon Hill episodes.
@@mem1701movies More makeup effort than was typically seen in TOS. TOS, "paint'em as diff color makes'em ale-yun!" ________________ The holodeck also alleviated time-travel abuse in TNG. Still plenty of time shenanigans, but none of the Yankee in King Arthur's Court variety ... until they finally went to Old San Francisco. But hey, they held out for years!
They could easily lampshade that in a single scene: Data: Sir, the constant recurrence of planets with remarkably similar parallels to Earth's own development combined with the ubiquity of bipedal life forms that share not only phenotypic similarities but also sexual compatibility suggests a force that has been acting to influence the development of carbon-based life throughout the galaxy and possibly beyond for at least one billion years. Picard: And what precisely do you propose we do to deal with this situation, Commander Data? Riker [interrupting because of course] I propose we track them down and kick their asses! Picard: Duly noted, Commander Riker. Ship's Log, please erase all trace of this conversation and any information it contains.
Incidentally, the original idea for Trials and Tribble-ations was as a sequel to A Piece of the Action. Sisko and crew were to return to Iotia and find the inhabitants had, instead of emulating gangsters, had started emulating Kirk, Spock et al. Basically, it was going to have become the Star Trek Convention planet. #TheMoreYouKnow
In the World of the Federation book, there's an entry for that planet that says that when the Federation got back to check on them there was a fully functional starbase in orbit.
Yes! And another often-used trope was, "A ship exactly like yours, with equivalent weapons and crew, vanished without a trace in this dangerous region. We're gonna send you to re-trace their steps and see what happens!" A real-life military or exploration force would never hand out a mission like that... they'd send _FIFTY_ identical ships to see what happens.
Aren't you supposed to be working? You're always telling me how busy you are, but you've still found time to leave about half a dozen comments on this one video! I'm on to you, missy.
I’d say that the Earth from the alternate TNG reality where the parallel universe Riker memorably said “THE BORG ARE EVERYWHERE!” would be a top contender for the worst parallel earth!
high contender is the one where the Bajorans have started fighting a war with the Federation... not the Cardassians. The Bajorans already eliminated the Cardassians as a Galactic Power. just, how... crazy would that change the events of DS9? good question... mm... sooo many things different. Hmm yeah I also was expecting a show about alternate realities, but this was pretty nice too.
@@haroldlee8110 well… If they assimilate everyone in the main Trek universe they would have gained the technology to jump realities (which I’m sure they already have anyway given they can time travel and they’ve assimilated various members of Star Fleet who are likely to know about dimension hopping and they were able to go to fluidic space)… So, once they get the whole Prime Milky Way galaxy they’d probably invade other realities like the mirror universe, where if they’re are Borg th… what the fuck would mirror Borg be like? I wanna see mirror universe Borg now…
You're probably aware that the genesis of Star Trek was that Roddenberry wanted to tell socially critical stories in The Lieutenant, but the networks wouldn't let him. For his next show, he wanted something the network censors wouldn't bother. So he chose Sci-Fi & created our beloved Star Trek TOS 🖖.
Very funny and well researched but Miri is not a "pre-pubescent child," she is "pubescent." In fact, her puberty is both the cause of her "hots for Captain Kirk," as you put it, and the disease that inflicts her. Bonk Bonk, Bad Grup!
" Why would anyone want to put the Captain in a bag ?." Best Spock comment ever. "He was kidnapped you dope !!!". Best villain come back. " A piece of the action."
I feel like the intended message at the end of Omega Glory is meant to be a critique of McCarthyism, what they're basically saying is "someone being a Communist doesn't mean our constitutional rights don't apply to them"
IMO, Roddenberry - who wrote it, if I remember correctly, was deliberately trying create an ambiguity. If one pays attention to the literal words, Kirk doesn't say that one should *impose* the US constitution on the Koms, but rather that it *already applies*.
I was thinking Scotty had Oxmex with a communicator he could have beamed him up and said "now who has who bitch" . I know they had 20 minutes left to fill.
...The idea that fascism is efficient is mostly leftover fascist propaganda - Take the phrase you referred to "At least [Mussolini] made the trains run on time" - He didn't. The fixing of the Italian rail infrastructure attributed to him, primarily by his own propaganda machine, was done between WWI and 1922 when he rose to power. The actual changes to the Italian rail infrastructure he made rather than made by his predecessors? Showboat train stations on major routes that foreign dignitaries were likely to see - i.e. wastes of resources designed to make him look good on the world stage rather than actually improve things.
Well what you say is pretty irrelevant since Italy opposed The Holocaust. But it's true The Nazis wrecked The Reichsbahn, something that helped lose them WW2
@@alanpennie8013 at first, Mussolini disagreed with Hitler’s antisemitism let alone any of the rest. But after a few years he started going along with it and adopting some of it into his own regime. He cynically used it to further his power once Hitler had overtaken him. Tell the whole story
@@neutrino78x (By definition). In the History of the modern world there has never been a legitimate Communist Country. Under a true Communist system the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. In the 20th century's great ideological schism actually pitted the private Capitalism of the West against the "state Capitalism" of the USSR. "The struggle between Communism and Capitalism never actually happened," according to Economics professors Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick . "The Soviets didn't establish Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels model of Communism. They thought about it, but they never actually did it." Under a true Communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state Capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials. People tend to decry Marx, sure! But what they should really do is read his work and his philosophy before claiming to be able to attribute his name or ideals to any of these corrupt failed governments. Even Marx himself was very much aware that for his ideas to be implemented it would require a dramatic social and perhaps even violent upheaval of the status quo in order to be implemented. Later on in his life he understood that while what he was suggesting my have sounded Ideal it would more then likely never actually happen due to the so easily corruptible nature of Human Beings.
@@kaitlyn__L Mussolini's attitude isn't really relevant when it comes to The Holocaust. The point is that Italian functionaries opposed it to the best of their ability.
"Of all the powers from Earth's history that you could choose from, you chose the Nazis. You could pick literally anything else. You could pick the British Empire, or Japan, or the Byzantines. But you picked the freaking Nazis. The hell is wrong with you?"
Or he could have chosen to model the society on the Federation, given as that’s canonically the best regime Earth has ever known and the one a Federation citizen would be the most familiar with.
I really don't like the idea that the historian has choosen Nazis because they were so efficient. They weren't. But they had a very strong Propaganda maschinery to let it seem like they were. And nearly 90 years later this propaganda still survives.
Also: the Nazis did not make the trains run on time and the Nazi German state was massively inefficient as Hitler made his subordinates fight amongst each other to reduce the chances of being deposed. So, yeah, not sure Gill was such a great historian.
After the invasion of Poland, Nazi Germany was in a state of steady collapse. Partly due to the British blockade and partly because they had an almost ENTIRELY military driven economy and such things are impossible to maintain long term. That and the fact the Third Reich, while ahead in a limited few areas, were technologically far behind France, Britain and the USA.
Yeah, it is a REALLY weird take. "The Nazis were actually a super great society if you take away all the evil shit. I should definitely try to model a new society on it, and not on any of the other countless societies I should be aware of as a historian!"
The real reason the episode was made was a bunch of WW 2 stuff was available on the cheap so yes let's make a Nazi planet episode. IMO the idea has potential if it had been followed up on. Gill at best was losing his memory if you ask me as any objective study of the Third Reich shows it was poorly run and had to go to war to prop up its rotten economy.
Also, in what history did Christianity bring down the Roman Empire? The Roman Empire converted to Christianity, and not only did it (the western empire) last for another hundred and fifty years after conversion, the western Roman empire wasn't even the strongest part of the Roman empire. The eastern Roman empire, fully and fanatically Christian (also keeping slavery as well as a lot of the trappings of Rome amid its Christianity all the way through its history), stayed around for another thousand years, only falling to the Ottomans in 1453. When I was a kid, I was always baffled by the "Not the sun, the son of God," distinction because even as a kid, I realized that there was nothing particularly superior between worshiping the sun and worshiping the son of a deity. Now, I'm baffled at the idea that Christianity, which Rome fully adopted, somehow is the supposed catalyst to bring this fictional Rome down.
I think Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took a view that Christianity weakened and in part led to the fall of the Roman empire. In terms of the show I sort of got the sense it was more the idea that Christianity/the children of the son would humanize the society and transform it into something different not necessarily end the political unit completely which as you point out would be equally historically implausible. However the whole son/sun pun thing and attitude suggested to me the writers had a view that vaguely non-denominational Christian monotheism is somehow an advanced religious view (the Jesus was cool thesis) that engenders respect for common humanity, basic rights etc., I don't say that is true, but it is an attitude various people have (I feel like I've seen the thought in both conservative and hippy versions) or have had including I felt from the dialogue of the episode the writers of that episode. Also for better or worse in the Western European (and Anglo shere) popular mind at least the Roman Empire is the western part. Byzantium and environs don't count as the real Roman Empire. This is a feature of both influential histories like Gibbon and the political history of Europe Charlemagne got the pope to anoint him as Roman emperor and lots of later kings, emperors and dictators have styled themselves as the inheritors and revivors of the tradition of Rome which would make no sense if you admitted that Byzantium was Rome. Basically it's about a popularity contest and branding, not historical rigour.
I watched that episode as a kid and thought nothing of it. But after listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "The History of Rome" podcast, I was screaming at the TV when Spock said that the Romans didn't worship the sun. I'm like, "The Cult of Sol Invictus, Spock! You should know this!"
I think it’s just that a new source of morality (or whatever) has emerged which could some day lead to the end of the corrupt status quo. Also, it might not directly imply that the government will fall, just that “goodness” will survive
Very well said Kaguya. I also found it funny, I didn’t know a lot about the history but I did know it was called _Roman_ Catholic and the Vatican was _still in Rome_ and so forth so found it laughable just from that alone. Not to mention the Romans redacted a bunch of the parts of the Bible they didn’t like and all that kind of stuff.
Miri's Earth is never mentioned again. One big plot hole in Voyage Home is the fact that Spock states that Humpbacks are native to Earth of the past, but since Miri's world is Earth and they wiped themselves out in the 1960s well before having the chance to kill off their Earth's marine life, couldnt Kirk and crew have just taken whales from Miri's planet and put them in their own Earth's ocean? Furthermore, since Bones discovers the cure at the end, do they ever try making Earth 2 a second home world and rebuilding it? Another thing Ive wondered about Miri's Earth is its solar system. Is Earth the only planet thats the same or does Miri's homeword share a star with other duplicated versions of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, etc...
Was Miri's Earth a pre-warp civilization? It might be that contact was barred by the Prime Directive or by whoever from "Star Fleet Civil Affairs" did the clean up.
The aliens were communicating with whales from Earth whale song is incredibly complex, so whales from another planet would have a difference and would not sing in the same patterns
Same with the mentioned Department of Temporal Investigations. I haven't read their novels (but I absolutely do want to), but just there one appearance in "Trials and Tribble-ations" tells me all I need to know about how great a series around them would be!
Even with the explanation that alot of the "duplicate earths" were created By the preservers (the native American planet and I believe the roman planet is also implied to have also been the product of that in novels along with it eventually joining the federation by TNG) or other aliens in the case of the old West world much like basically all the human worlds in Stargate I've always found that another very fascinating idea to explore a community from earth's past given an entire new world to develop and grow on
In the Nazi one I found it amazing that Kirk and Spock randomly got uniforms that fit so well. Then McCoy doesn't get the right sized boot when they custom made one for him...
I always like how they manage to say Spock is just from a different country. I always went with that as a kid wherever it was used on TV. For some reason it is just weird now, but it's still fun.
The transporter creates the uniforms. McCoy’s didn’t fit cause there is a running gag of him not trusting the transporter that runs all the way through the original cast movies.
The one episode you didn’t mention was Season 3’s The Paradise Syndrome. That’s the one where the Preservers saved some of the Native American tribes. There are some novels that explored the possibility that the Preservers were responsible for all these duplicate situations. One of them, Shatner’s co-written Preservers, mentions that in addition to a few duplicate Earths. There are four Q’onos duplicates (the Klingon homeworks), two Vulcan duplicates, and a duplicate of Andor, the Andorian homeworld. I recall this theory under discussion in the 70s and 80s in Trek fanzines. i’ve leaned on this theory, though it does mean that Miri’s world and Omega IV had humans of the 1960s who were transplanted…
Steve: "Why can't they just have a normal illness where someone just coughs until they can no longer breathe?" Me: "That sounds like a horrible way to die!" Kirk: "There are no good ways..."
Even when I was a kid I wondered about how detailed that book about 1920s gangsters must've been. Not only telling you exactly how everything looked, but how to actually build tommy guns and the automobiles and other technologies of the time. Also, I'm glad Lower Decks called out Starfleet for its habit of showing up, doing something to change a world, and then moving on without bothering to do a follow-up
in some of the civilization-of-the-week episodes it's explained that there are PLANS to do that, but the episode ends and we never SEE those take effect.
Many say Starfleet is going to come and help them - but since it isn’t Kirk & all’s job to do that - of course we don’t see it happen. Also TV show in the 60s were generally all written to be stand alone episodes. The only shows that weren’t were miniseries. It wasn’t until the 90s did TV really have series shows. Even TNG had a few two part episodes. Babylon 5 was the first TV show that was mostly serial Then Deep Space Nine started to get a bit more serial when the Dominion showed up.
Steve, Gene Roddenberry’s original treatment for “The Omega Glory” had the Yangs and Kohns as an earth colony that was trying to live together and it just didn’t work. They had a war and their descendants keep the war going. I like this better.
One of the things I find interesting in "Patterns of Force" is that Spock gives a half-assed Nazi salute. You would expect Spock, who is extremely observant and detail-oriented, to do it more accurately. But I get the idea that Leonard Nimoy was, rightfully, not so enthusiastic about the gesture.
the interesting thing with the final moments of Bread and Circuses, it wasn't Kirk Spock or McCoy that connected the Dots of who the Children of the Sun were, it was Uhura who had to explain to them that it's not the Sun but the Son of God. I always notice that and wonder why they gave that spot to her.
Because Spock and Kirk are played by members of the Jewish Faith, and we believe that G-d is One, and doesn't have a son. Also, the real G-d does not need a starship.... (cue movie Trek....)
She got that line because she's the communications officer and she's presumably been listening to the Roman NBC's broadcasts in the background through the entire episode. And the Trek writers worked to give her lines and appearances because the presence of a black woman in a responsible bridge officer position was one of the progressive messages in a 1960s TV show. Nichelle Nichols tells how Martin Luther King himself persuaded her to stay on the show because of the positive message it was displaying for all the little black girls and boys in America.
The episode with the “Proto-Vulcans” is maybe the only time we see a prewarp alien race that resembles an already established species other than human. I like to think that episode is a direct response to all the whacky “oh look it’s some humans on this planet” in TOS and early TNG.
The closest I can recall to an "alternate Vulcan" of sorts is in the TNG episode "Who Watches the Watchers". It's less of an alternate Vulcan though, and more just primitive people that happen to resemble or be related to Vulcans...somehow. memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_(episode)
The thing that really bugs me about that Nazi planet episode is that it perpetuates the lie that the Nazis had an efficiently run society. "The trains run on time," etc. That lie needs to be put to rest, it really does. Edit: You're right about one thing they were good at. Branding. Probably the thing they're best at, second only to increasing human suffering.
The amount of parallel Earths that the _Enterprise_ encounters in such a short space of time would be like winning the jackpot in every lottery around the world, all at the same time.
It may well have been in honor of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, itself a reference to Darwin's famous ride, and one of the more significant sci-fi novels of its little slice of time.
"A cough that gradually gets worse until you die" This is pretty similar to Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, I gotta say, that's a really shitty way to go.
What is more American than showing up somewhere, declaring our ways to be better, and then washing our hands of the consequences? The bifurcation of the "good america" and the "bad america" in star trek always intrigues me.
@@alanpennie8013 similar but different in enough ways that it’s significant. Yes some groups not representative of the entire population asked the larger guys to come in and “help”. But then that could also be said about Vietnam and Korea. So we’ve got to look at what actually happened and the ways they were treated once they got there - that’s what defines these conflicts in history and in the public consciousness. And there were only two small incidents against the Federation by Bajor, one led by one guy who was just dealt with, the other orchestrated by a third party which immediately crumbled after that connection was revealed. So it was basically just a brief military coup. That’s hardly a sustained effort against the presence.
Something I've always found fascinating (wink) about the TOS episodes involving 'parallel Earths' is that while, obviously (and as you pointed out using Roddenbury's own words) they were written to be cost-savers for the studio, they still tried to make the similar-to-Earth-but-not-quite idea fairly central to the plots of those episodes. It wasn't just like: "Oh, this planet is just like 1960's earth. Anyway...." The planet being such a close mirror to Earth was almost always used as commentary on where America was at the time of the filming of that series. You pointed out the Vietnam war element, and the Nazis, but even the Roman planet had some pretty interesting commentary on the fake nature of the entertainment industry (the dials for "cheers" and "boos" during the gladiator battles comes to mind, and the "We'll do a SPECIAL on you!" threat given to one of the fighters. Hell, even one of the gladiators gives McCoy shit for being a crappy fighter and making him look bad on TV. Not a very deep comment, I know, but I really liked this episode of yours, Steve, and wanted to leave a comment you might enjoy. Cheers.
I'm sure that if McCoy had scalpel the size of his sword, he could given the nasty gladiator a good slicing of his jugular vein. The reason Spock was able to fight better is that Vulcans were a warrior race before Surak reformed their society to focus on mastery of their emotions. Vulcan's violent history and warmongering took them out to the stars for their exile from Vulcan, and after landfall, they settled the Two Worlds to become Romulans. Want to know more about Romulan history? How about reading Diane Duane's ST TOS novel "The Romulan Way" or Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz trio of ST TNG novels, "Vulcan's Soul: Exodus, Exile and Epiphany"?
Or another one of the all-powerful (or nearly so) beings the Star Trek universe has just around every corner. Maybe it was the Metrons, or the Douwd, or whatever the two people from Catspaw were, or Trelane. (Writing this, I suddenly understand why Yet Another All-Powerful Alien Species is considered a TOS cliché in particular, since all but one of those are from that series.)
Fun episode Steve. Thanks for this stroll down TOS memory. I also seem to remember a TOS episode about the gunfight at the OK Corral. Funny plots back then. And they kept us coming back for a lifetime. Thanks again, Steve.
@jdslyman I think it's rather appropriate that American fascism manifests the way it does, considering how shallow and anti-intellectual much of American culture is. He's the perfect equivalent.
I love parallel earths! When I used to blog on anthropology topics, one of my most read posts was about this very subject. It's that lovely blend of social insight, creativity bred from the desperate need to save money on sets, and unconscious self-revelation that really gets me.
I’m slightly surprised Miramanee’s World from “The Paradise Syndrome” wasn’t included in this video, but perhaps it didn’t qualify since it’s a habitat created for its inhabitants by an alien race? 🤷🏻♂️
I am incredibly disappointed that in the Bread and Circuses segment you neglected to talk about the fact that there is apparently literally a Space Jesus. Like, the groundbreaking reveal of the episode is that the characters realize the religious minority are worshiping the Son of God. Like, whenever you see somebody say "oh, Sisko is a space jesus" or "oh, Michael Burnham is space jesus" you can say "no, no, you're all wrong, Space Jesus was born on 892-IV"
Does anyone remember Ray Bradbury speculating about Christ on other planets? "The Man"? "Christus Apollo"? Both predate Star Trek's pronouncement from Kirk that, "We have no need for gods;" which, unfortunately, was followed by the TV-friendly, sponsor-placating, "we find the one...quite sufficient."(lines from 'Who Mourns For Adonais', Star Trek, TOS.)
Honorable mention to The Orville and the Facebook Society. That was a fun episode with a TOS vibe. For Starfleet officers going through trauma, The Lost Years Excelsior did a nice job with Chekhov and the aftermath of WOK and how the eels/mind control etc. impacted his personal life and career. Uhura and Nomad could have been done much better if it was a modern show.
The girl / woman who played Miri had an amazing career, worthy of actual investigation unto itself. My favorite parallel was the episode with the twin planets that virtualized war and sent the randomized victims from attacks into disintegration chambers. One might argue that it wasn't a true parallel as we only occupy a single planet, but it seemed to me rather obviously a reflection of a variation on the Cold War.
Yes, Miri was played by Kim Darby. She also acted in twenty-five other TV programs and over thirty movies, including the original True Grit with John Wayne and, as an adult, played the school teacher in a film based on Zenna Henderson's stories of "The People." (With William Shatner.)
Well said. Authoritarianism in general leads to abuse. “Othering” of any persons permits this to happen. Add to this self reflection; it’s too easy for a movement to be blind to falling into this itself.
The gangster planet is returned to in the star trek NES game, where it is found in nuclear winter and hopefully your historian is still alive to access the library computer to find out that communicator lead to everyone deaded. The crew then goes back in time and you spend the whole mission juggling your historian, McCoy, and spock in your two companion slots to cheat at gambling mostly. You dont go back forward in time, presumably so you can have an alibi for violating Romulan space stealing a cloaking penetrating scanner on the black market and smashing up the warbird trying to rightfully arrest you... rather than like ask permission to travel through Romulan space to get home. Failing to go back in time gets you court marshaled for breaking the prime directive and leaving the communicator there.
If I remember correctly William Shatner actually wrote a series of Star trek novels and one of the mysteries explored was the duplicate Earths. They were taken more seriously and turned into a classified secret. It was thought that the duplicate Earths were the product of the Perseveres and the existence of them lead to the unsettling conclusion that the main Earth may not be the original Earth.
I have an issue with the episode “Patterns of Force” and in that regard also to a lesser extend with the depiction here. The episode leans into the narrative, that the Nazis would have been super organized and would have brought unity and order. The cruelty would have been just the dark side of this otherwise “perfect” system with the best intentions. But that is, imo, a dangerous misconception that glorifies the Nazi-partly more than they deserve. It is true, that horrible things happened due to an industrialization of murder, but being German myself, I can tell, the Nazi-Party’s seemingly efficiency and order was in fact a horrible mismanagement, first paid by printing more and more money, later paid by robbing minorities and forcing them into slavery, then by counterfeiting foreign money and eventually by robbing other countries. The system was destined to collapse from the get-go. Also, the entire system was corrupt as hell, lead by bribery and nepotism and full of frauds. They even killed their own supporters when it was in their interest. There was no unity, there was fear and there was no order, there was just despotism. The Nazi leaders were, as Nazis tend to be, little more then small-time criminals, crooks and some sadists with delusion of grandeur who cared little about human lives and in many cases even little about their own ideology. They were not some economical and military geniuses with just a lack of morality. I think a lot of evil in the world would not exist, if this lie about the “good side” of fascism wouldn’t be told anymore. I get why Steve did this while being an outspoken Nazi hater. He followed probably the logic of the episode and had a point to make, but by doing so he unfortunately repeated the myth of the organized and unified Nazis. I thought it would be important to point that out.
There's a great video 'Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda' that covers nicely how their own propaganda is the impression we're left with decades later.
You must remember that this is seen through the eyes of 1960s common view of history. Gene Roddenberry and other writers were not historians, and a common running joke in American society in the 1960s was exactly what the host here says, "Even Hitler had the trains run on time." Most would agree now that the only benefit of Nazism was the Autobahn.
I've only seen the Star Trek movies but your videos caught my eye.. I'm imagining your a pretty big fan? I just wanted to say I enjoyed your enthusiastic delivery.. It's always a pleasure to listen to someone talk about something they're passionate about.. thanks for the video! oh yeah cool shirt man!
A big reason the parallel Earth trope was used in TOS was it allowed the showrunners to substantially save money on sets and costumes for those episodes.
@@andywellsglobaldomination Which doesn't always help; the same idea was used by Irwin Allen when he pitched THE TIME TUNNEL to Fox, which had no problem using costumes and sets along with clips from their film library for shows set in the past. It was cheap and quick, but the show didn't endear itself to fans, and lasted only one season, no matter how economical the execution was.
Well, it did explain why Spock wasn't going to die from the illness, only the people from Earth. It doesn't change much, since Spock still can't leave the planet, but it is a difference.
Fun fact: I was born in the early 1980's and yet was able to see the VERY FIRST run of Pattern of Force in Austrian National Television. This particular show had been forbidden to be shown until the late 90's because it had been deemed too "controversial".
@@bjorn00000 I haven't even seen all of TOS in its entirety but I knew about the Nazi earth so I knew that even if there were some earths I missed out on seeing it would be pretty hard for them to be worse than the nazi planet.
@@Galenus1234 Yeah, that episode was banned from German TV for a long time. First the ZDF (public network) only would select single episodes to buy, until they had about half of the series. I think I saw some of the first runs of their second batch. Only in the 80s SAT.1 (private-run network) came around and bought and dubbed the rest - except for that one. It was dubbed even later when the DVDs came out. But I had an opportunity to see that episode earlier - in my place we could also receive one neighbouring TV channel from Belgium, and they once showed the whole series in order witch dutch subtitles, so me and may mother watched it.
I LOVE TOS for the fact that it generally just waves it's hand at logical explanations. To me it kinda drags down the other series when they "have" to give logical explanations to weird space shenanigans.
By the way, the actor who played Melakon, the late Skip Homeier, turned up once more in TOS as Doctor Sevrin, the insane physician who led the Space Hippies on a quest to find Eden, the parallel Earth which was poisonous - as compared to the similar parallel Earth where Miramanee's Amerindian people lived, whose vegetation was edible by humans. You may have missed a few parallel Earths there.
The Omega Glory suggests that our Earth is just the latest manifestation of a planet with our exact history. Which means there’s some other planet out there less far along in development than ours.
I love how, just after the sequence where Enterprise knocks out an entire city block with a great phaser blast set to stun, for the next minute there is a green aura surrounding the screen, bleeding onto the web page.
The “A&E” joke got me laughing, I recall those days as well….was born in 1980 so I recall flipping to A&E at times pre-history channel and some Nazi documentary would be on…no matter the time of day…
The same was true of The History Channel years ago. People used to joke the channel should be called "The Hitler Channel." Now THC programming mostly consists of reality-TV dreck and pseudo-historical documentaries about aliens and the paranormal.
Can we just all agree that it's a little screwed up that the two Jewish actors in the regular TOS cast were dropped into Nazi uniforms for an episode of the series?
Please see my comment about how most Nazis in Hollywood movies were really Jewish actors costumed as Nazis. So, Shatner and Nimoy's wearing those uniforms would be totally appropriate considering that they're Jewish actors playing Nazis in this episode.
I love the fact that Lower Decks basically calls out how Starfleet/Federation don’t keep track as well as they should with both the whole Landru planet thing and the Pakleds. Honestly I need Lower Decks to keep having fun while calling out this stuff!
Saving this for later as I've got a bunch of meetings but seeing a new upload from you, seeing the title & seeing the length of the video brought a big smile to my face! A kind and funny dude talking star trek is just what I need!!!! Keep up the good work 😁
Steve's got a cool thing going on here. With excellent timing he even paces in his own awkward bits. Not an easy thing to do, and then moves right on to another clip that proves the righteousness of his beautifully snarky narrative. How about that parallel Earth of 1966?
What I want to see in a Trek episode is a parallel Earth that shows our Earth as the backwards primitive one. Say one where the dark ages never happened and they're miles ahead of us in technology
It's not a parallel Earth episode, but ENT's "Civilization" is a fun throwback to TOS. The crew justifies visiting the Akali because they need to correct environmental and cultural contamination that the Melurians had already perpetrated as a result of their mining operations. It's my favourite S1 episode. Plus, the Melurians get their come-uppance 100 years later when Nomad destroys their solar system! 😁
We could ask why were they never brought into contact with, say, a perfectly parallel planet Vulcan? Or an ancient parallel Romulus? Or (fill in your alien planet here)? Only Earth. Also, the Omega Glory is deservedly in my bottom ten TOS episodes.
Yeah, I always found weird that in Start Trek they just land in a planet of, well, humans. No explanation given to see if they have any connection to Earth or where they came from except for the fact that the show's weekly budget didn't even include SFX makeup.
Even weirder is that they all speak American English as opposed to English English. As for where they came from, my theory, borne out of watching many of the episodes, is that an advanced spacefaring race called The Preservers airlifted humans from 20th century Earth and settled them far from home. You would think that Sargon's race would do that or that white-colored race featured in ST TNG episode "The Chase" would have made that kind of thing happen.
Kirk is pretty flippant about the whole business yeah. They actually cover this in lower decks; evidently Starfleet consistently doesn’t follow up on TOS planets and Landru is back in business by the time Mariner beams down.
18:37 I'd love to see an episode, or storyline, in "To Boldly Go" in which the Iosians, with back-engineered Federation Tech, set out to expand their turf to the stars. Especially when they discover that the Federation, far from being their superiors in crime, are actually their opposition. Like a mob boss discovering that he's been tricked in to working for the Feds (even that pun works).
The alternative script for the 35 Trek Anniversary DS9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations involved the Defiant encountering the Sigma Iotions after all that time who are now obsessed with Starfleet and Kirks crew! In essence the entire episode was a riff on Star Trek fans and convention behavior. I think it would have been awesome.
That's....actually pretty brilliant. It even makes sense if you consider that Q seems obsessed with testing humanity and potentially even guiding them and helping them evolve. It would make sense to throw unique moral challenges at humans to see how they would respond from his point of view.
I love this episode so much. Related: I don’t care who knows this, but “A Piece of the Action” is one of my all-time favorite classic episodes! It’s just FUN. Which new series have forgotten until “Strange New Worlds.”
32:50 Also, the Nazi regime was infamously inefficient, rife not just with ordinary corruption and graft but also administrative redundancies that existed only to keep the department heads fighting for Hitler's approval rather than building power (or effectively doing their jobs). German agriculture was also almost as backward as Soviet agriculture and with far fewer excuses.
Concerning the "creepiness" of Miri: She has the emotions of a pubescent (NOT prepubescent) girl. It is perfectly normal for a thirteen- year-old girl to have a crush on an adult man. He didn't reciprocate or do anything at all inappropriate. If he had encouraged it, THAT would have been creepy, even in the sixties.
You are overthinking it. They visited so many alternate earths is twofold: 1) less special effects required, which is cheaper. 2) they could adapt existing science fiction stories into scripts.
Honestly A piece of the Action is probably my all time favorite TOS Episode. I love the Morality Plays and the Philosophical stuff, but sometimes ya just need a good old fashioned Caper Episode.
One thing that gets me about the gangsters' clothing was how the studio knew what suit sizes Shatner and Nimoy wore before they wore them? Dd the costume wardrobe crew do measurements for both actors before buying or making the suits to fit both Shatner and Nimoy? I found the taking of the suits from one set of gangsters and just giving them to Shatner and Nimoy to clothe themselves hard to believe unless you're willing to believe that in Hollywood, anything is possible. Ask any guy about what happens when he buys a suit off the rack at a men's clothing store: a member of the store's tailoring staff emerges from his backroom to mark where alternations are to be made using pins and chalk. After those alterations are made, the customer returns to the store for another fitting before whipping out a credit card to pay for the suit.
Only the security folks and engineers like Scotty wore the red shirts. In ST TOS lore, ship crew members assigned to Security and who wore red shirts were expendable. So, yeah, Starfleet was negligent towards crew members wearing red shirts: all those years of training to be security staff and what happens? You wear a red shirt and get killed protecting any officer wearing command yellow and science blue tunics. Question: if engineering is really applied science, why does Scotty wears a red shirt? Should he not wear a blue shirt instead?
Some TH-camr recently investigated that red shirts cannon-fodder idea. It actually turns out that red shirts were not the most likely to die, when you count up all the fatalities.
Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action differ from the others is that Kirk and Co are trying to mitigate damage done by other Federation people. (More explicitly in Patterns). So I give him more of a pass on the Prime Directive in those cases than the others.
Kirk was always more willing to be... creative if the Prime Directive had already been broken on the basis that the damage was already done. Now that I think of it, he seems to have handled less sophisticated societies more carefully than more advanced ones: he is careful when trying to get a balance of power and to try to avoid war in that one episode where the Klingons are giving some of the local town people muskets to start a genocide against the peaceful hill people. Meanwhile, he’s pretty rough with societies of the 20th and 19th century equivalent, I guess the thought being that they are advanced enough to sort themselves out?
I notice there are a few more parallel Earths than the ones discussed in this video. For example, there's the parallel Earth from "Return of the Archons," the one from "Plato's Stepchildren", the one from "The Paradise Syndrome," and maybe even the Earth from "This Side of Paradise." And how come the inhabitants all seem to convenient speak American English as opposed to the "Queen's English"? Wouldn't you expect that most Nazis to speak German unless they were highly educated and wealthy enough to visit the US or England? Let's talk about Nazi uniforms worn during this episode. I just wish the studio's wardrobe department had performed better research about who wore what uniform. The grey uniforms and helmets worn by Spock and Bones were those of the Waffen-SS, Himmler's own version of the Wehrmacht (the German word for their Armed Forces, translated as "war machine"), while the black uniform worn by Kirk were the SS goons. Gestapo agents--not seen in this episode wore leather trenchcoats. Ditto for Gauleiters. What's a "Gauleiter", you ask? They're Regional or District Party Chiefs: "Gau": Region; "Leiter": Leader. Quick: Name a movie where you see a Gauleiter? Give up? How about "The Sound of Music"? You saw him almost all the time, accompanied by his SS goons. Some Nazi officials in this episode like Daras, Melakon, and Eneg wore the Brown shirts or yellow shirts, even though the original thugs who wore the Brown Shirts were purged during the "Night of Long Knives" in the early 30s. A few more questions: 1. How do the Zeons know about "the Nazi Planet"? Were they the ones who discovered it? 2. Who gave the Nazis the knowledge that they were not the only planet in their system? John Gill or Isak? 3. Who gave the Nazis missile technology to go to war against Zeon? John Gill again, or Isak?
@@shepwillner7507 1. How do the Zeons know about "the Nazi Planet"? ANSWER: Telescopes! Also: The Zeons were already space-faring (though only interplanetary), and had sent landing parties to study Ekos. 2. Who gave the Nazis the knowledge that they were not the only planet in their system? ANSWER: Telescopes, radio transmissions, Zeon scouts who blabbed. 3. Who gave the Nazis missile technology to go to war against Zeon? They developed it themselves (though borrowed heavily from stolen Zeon tech, which they reverse-engineered). Your questions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the episode - or maybe just a very poor memory.
Someone in the 23rd century trying to do "Nazis without the cruelty" thing feels like someone in the 21st centuey trying to do "Confederates without the slavery" thing
I just realized (and you'll probably mention this at some point, I'm only at 26:05) how messed up it was to have Shatner and Nimoy, two Jewish men, dress up like Nazis and be tortured by them.
In one of my WEB Griffin novels about the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today's CIA) operations in South America, one character tells another character that most of the Nazis in Hollywood movies were portrayed by Jewish actors, not Germans. The title of that novel if readers are interested is "The Honor of Spies."
I think that if you stunned an entire city block, then some people would probably die. Then again the Enterprise didn't usually wait around for the health and safety reports.
Hot take: one major reason why TNG sort of abandoned the parallel-earth premise (aside from, to a certain extent, "The Royale") is because many of the same ideas could be explored on the Holodeck without the suspension of disbelief required to believe that there's a whole bunch of incredibly-earth-like planets in the galaxy. See, for example, the Dixon Hill episodes.
@@mem1701movies More makeup effort than was typically seen in TOS. TOS, "paint'em as diff color makes'em ale-yun!"
________________
The holodeck also alleviated time-travel abuse in TNG. Still plenty of time shenanigans, but none of the Yankee in King Arthur's Court variety ... until they finally went to Old San Francisco. But hey, they held out for years!
I've always believed that these planets where experiments from super futuristic aliens. Or maybe a Q.
@@jpotter2086anywhere where power and wealth are valued more than life and liberty might not be one where life is unattainable and not livable.
They could easily lampshade that in a single scene:
Data: Sir, the constant recurrence of planets with remarkably similar parallels to Earth's own development combined with the ubiquity of bipedal life forms that share not only phenotypic similarities but also sexual compatibility suggests a force that has been acting to influence the development of carbon-based life throughout the galaxy and possibly beyond for at least one billion years.
Picard: And what precisely do you propose we do to deal with this situation, Commander Data?
Riker [interrupting because of course] I propose we track them down and kick their asses!
Picard: Duly noted, Commander Riker. Ship's Log, please erase all trace of this conversation and any information it contains.
@@shaggyspade2468 I love the Q angle. It explains so much.
Incidentally, the original idea for Trials and Tribble-ations was as a sequel to A Piece of the Action.
Sisko and crew were to return to Iotia and find the inhabitants had, instead of emulating gangsters, had started emulating Kirk, Spock et al. Basically, it was going to have become the Star Trek Convention planet.
#TheMoreYouKnow
Heaters, curtains, the blower , typewriters, typical gangster talk.
I would have loved that. But Trials and Tribbleations is one of my favorite funny episodes.
That would make a good Lower Decks episode.
As much as I loved trials and tribble-ations I'm sad we never got to see that.
In the World of the Federation book, there's an entry for that planet that says that when the Federation got back to check on them there was a fully functional starbase in orbit.
"Krik destabilize alien society" is one of the arch types of Star Trek plots, the other one is "Enterprise encounters mysterious powerful entity"
Yes! And another often-used trope was, "A ship exactly like yours, with equivalent weapons and crew, vanished without a trace in this dangerous region. We're gonna send you to re-trace their steps and see what happens!" A real-life military or exploration force would never hand out a mission like that... they'd send _FIFTY_ identical ships to see what happens.
Pretty sure that's both the intro and main plot for "Into Darkness". 😑
Enterprise encounters artificial intelligence but foils it with abstract or silly concepts that were somehow not built into a sophisticated AI system.
Kirk's the reason why the prime directive was made lmao.
Krik.. :)
I like the original series, but man you have to suspend an awful lot of disbelief.
Aren't you supposed to be working?
You're always telling me how busy you are, but you've still found time to leave about half a dozen comments on this one video!
I'm on to you, missy.
@@AndrewD8Red uh oh... busted.
@@AndrewD8Red I'm still working anyway, that's why it's taken me all afternoon to watch a 40 minute video ☺️ x
That’s half the fun!
The Next Phase
I’d say that the Earth from the alternate TNG reality where the parallel universe Riker memorably said “THE BORG ARE EVERYWHERE!” would be a top contender for the worst parallel earth!
high contender is the one where the Bajorans have started fighting a war with the Federation... not the Cardassians. The Bajorans already eliminated the Cardassians as a Galactic Power. just, how... crazy would that change the events of DS9? good question... mm... sooo many things different.
Hmm yeah I also was expecting a show about alternate realities, but this was pretty nice too.
It would be interesting to find out what the Borg would do after they've assimilated everyone? 🤖🤨
@@haroldlee8110 well…
If they assimilate everyone in the main Trek universe they would have gained the technology to jump realities (which I’m sure they already have anyway given they can time travel and they’ve assimilated various members of Star Fleet who are likely to know about dimension hopping and they were able to go to fluidic space)…
So, once they get the whole Prime Milky Way galaxy they’d probably invade other realities like the mirror universe, where if they’re are Borg th… what the fuck would mirror Borg be like?
I wanna see mirror universe Borg now…
You're probably aware that the genesis of Star Trek was that Roddenberry wanted to tell socially critical stories in The Lieutenant, but the networks wouldn't let him.
For his next show, he wanted something the network censors wouldn't bother. So he chose Sci-Fi & created our beloved Star Trek TOS 🖖.
NOT A PARALEL EARTH, A TANGENT IN HISTORY
Very funny and well researched but Miri is not a "pre-pubescent child," she is "pubescent." In fact, her puberty is both the cause of her "hots for Captain Kirk," as you put it, and the disease that inflicts her. Bonk Bonk, Bad Grup!
" Why would anyone want to put the Captain in a bag ?."
Best Spock comment ever.
"He was kidnapped you dope !!!".
Best villain come back.
" A piece of the action."
She's actually a 6000-year-old dragon
I feel like the intended message at the end of Omega Glory is meant to be a critique of McCarthyism, what they're basically saying is "someone being a Communist doesn't mean our constitutional rights don't apply to them"
I never read it that way, but I can see it.
I think that's definitely what was intended but it's really not how the message was delivered.
@@scaper8
Yep.
Even in the worst years of The Cold War American Communists still enjoyed legal equality with other Americans.
IMO, Roddenberry - who wrote it, if I remember correctly, was deliberately trying create an ambiguity. If one pays attention to the literal words, Kirk doesn't say that one should *impose* the US constitution on the Koms, but rather that it *already applies*.
Also should they not really have helped the coms as the United earth is in the final post scarcity stage of communism
"Miri, who is simultaneously a prepubescent child and also hundreds of years old"
Didn't realize Trek had an anime episode
"She LOOKS like an eight year old girl but she's ACTUALLY an ancient dragon spirit who LOOKS like that."
@@Entertainer13 and when she’s another 1000 years older she’ll look 16!
All the harems, how could i not see it :P
@@Entertainer13 "And wields a katana even though this setting has no cultural equivalent to Japan to produce such a weapon."
Invented, no less.
Hmm, the ability to stun a large area from orbit. There is no way that would ever come in handy for any situations later.
Always bugged me a bit that that was never used again.
@@renatocorvaro6924 Probably other 24th century powers had counterdefences.
Discovering some mind-bogglingly useful thing and then promptly forgetting about it has always been a hallmark of Star Trek.
I was thinking Scotty had Oxmex with a communicator he could have beamed him up and said "now who has who bitch" . I know they had 20 minutes left to fill.
...The idea that fascism is efficient is mostly leftover fascist propaganda - Take the phrase you referred to "At least [Mussolini] made the trains run on time" - He didn't. The fixing of the Italian rail infrastructure attributed to him, primarily by his own propaganda machine, was done between WWI and 1922 when he rose to power. The actual changes to the Italian rail infrastructure he made rather than made by his predecessors? Showboat train stations on major routes that foreign dignitaries were likely to see - i.e. wastes of resources designed to make him look good on the world stage rather than actually improve things.
Well what you say is pretty irrelevant since Italy opposed The Holocaust.
But it's true The Nazis wrecked The Reichsbahn, something that helped lose them WW2
@@alanpennie8013 at first, Mussolini disagreed with Hitler’s antisemitism let alone any of the rest. But after a few years he started going along with it and adopting some of it into his own regime. He cynically used it to further his power once Hitler had overtaken him. Tell the whole story
@@neutrino78x (By definition). In the History of the modern world there has never been a legitimate Communist Country. Under a true Communist system the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. In the 20th century's great ideological schism actually pitted the private Capitalism of the West against the "state Capitalism" of the USSR. "The struggle between Communism and Capitalism never actually happened," according to Economics professors Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick . "The Soviets didn't establish Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels model of Communism. They thought about it, but they never actually did it." Under a true Communist system, says Resnick, the workers would control all aspects of production and decide how any surpluses are used. But in the wake of the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks imposed a layer of state managers to operate industry in the name of the people. That system, which Resnick and Wolff call "state Capitalism," actually ceded decisions about the use of profits to government officials. People tend to decry Marx, sure! But what they should really do is read his work and his philosophy before claiming to be able to attribute his name or ideals to any of these corrupt failed governments. Even Marx himself was very much aware that for his ideas to be implemented it would require a dramatic social and perhaps even violent upheaval of the status quo in order to be implemented. Later on in his life he understood that while what he was suggesting my have sounded Ideal it would more then likely never actually happen due to the so easily corruptible nature of Human Beings.
@@kaitlyn__L
Mussolini's attitude isn't really relevant when it comes to The Holocaust.
The point is that Italian functionaries opposed it to the best of their ability.
"Of all the powers from Earth's history that you could choose from, you chose the Nazis. You could pick literally anything else. You could pick the British Empire, or Japan, or the Byzantines. But you picked the freaking Nazis. The hell is wrong with you?"
"Well, the costumes department had a bunch of these uniforms left over from that war movie the studio made earlier this year, so..."
Watching The History Channel (?)
Or he could have chosen to model the society on the Federation, given as that’s canonically the best regime Earth has ever known and the one a Federation citizen would be the most familiar with.
I really don't like the idea that the historian has choosen Nazis because they were so efficient.
They weren't. But they had a very strong Propaganda maschinery to let it seem like they were. And nearly 90 years later this propaganda still survives.
An empire so successful it lasted almost 10 years!
Also: the Nazis did not make the trains run on time and the Nazi German state was massively inefficient as Hitler made his subordinates fight amongst each other to reduce the chances of being deposed.
So, yeah, not sure Gill was such a great historian.
After the invasion of Poland, Nazi Germany was in a state of steady collapse. Partly due to the British blockade and partly because they had an almost ENTIRELY military driven economy and such things are impossible to maintain long term.
That and the fact the Third Reich, while ahead in a limited few areas, were technologically far behind France, Britain and the USA.
Yeah, it is a REALLY weird take. "The Nazis were actually a super great society if you take away all the evil shit. I should definitely try to model a new society on it, and not on any of the other countless societies I should be aware of as a historian!"
The real reason the episode was made was a bunch of WW 2 stuff was available on the cheap so yes let's make a Nazi planet episode. IMO the idea has potential if it had been followed up on. Gill at best was losing his memory if you ask me as any objective study of the Third Reich shows it was poorly run and had to go to war to prop up its rotten economy.
Quite. He, or rather Mussolini, declared they did. Mussolini didn't actually change when the trains came, nor made them more efficient.
@Sarah Scott check out the book, the man in the high castle
Also, in what history did Christianity bring down the Roman Empire? The Roman Empire converted to Christianity, and not only did it (the western empire) last for another hundred and fifty years after conversion, the western Roman empire wasn't even the strongest part of the Roman empire. The eastern Roman empire, fully and fanatically Christian (also keeping slavery as well as a lot of the trappings of Rome amid its Christianity all the way through its history), stayed around for another thousand years, only falling to the Ottomans in 1453.
When I was a kid, I was always baffled by the "Not the sun, the son of God," distinction because even as a kid, I realized that there was nothing particularly superior between worshiping the sun and worshiping the son of a deity. Now, I'm baffled at the idea that Christianity, which Rome fully adopted, somehow is the supposed catalyst to bring this fictional Rome down.
I think Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took a view that Christianity weakened and in part led to the fall of the Roman empire.
In terms of the show I sort of got the sense it was more the idea that Christianity/the children of the son would humanize the society and transform it into something different not necessarily end the political unit completely which as you point out would be equally historically implausible. However the whole son/sun pun thing and attitude suggested to me the writers had a view that vaguely non-denominational Christian monotheism is somehow an advanced religious view (the Jesus was cool thesis) that engenders respect for common humanity, basic rights etc., I don't say that is true, but it is an attitude various people have (I feel like I've seen the thought in both conservative and hippy versions) or have had including I felt from the dialogue of the episode the writers of that episode.
Also for better or worse in the Western European (and Anglo shere) popular mind at least the Roman Empire is the western part. Byzantium and environs don't count as the real Roman Empire. This is a feature of both influential histories like Gibbon and the political history of Europe Charlemagne got the pope to anoint him as Roman emperor and lots of later kings, emperors and dictators have styled themselves as the inheritors and revivors of the tradition of Rome which would make no sense if you admitted that Byzantium was Rome. Basically it's about a popularity contest and branding, not historical rigour.
I watched that episode as a kid and thought nothing of it. But after listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "The History of Rome" podcast, I was screaming at the TV when Spock said that the Romans didn't worship the sun. I'm like, "The Cult of Sol Invictus, Spock! You should know this!"
I think it’s just that a new source of morality (or whatever) has emerged which could some day lead to the end of the corrupt status quo. Also, it might not directly imply that the government will fall, just that “goodness” will survive
Very well said Kaguya. I also found it funny, I didn’t know a lot about the history but I did know it was called _Roman_ Catholic and the Vatican was _still in Rome_ and so forth so found it laughable just from that alone. Not to mention the Romans redacted a bunch of the parts of the Bible they didn’t like and all that kind of stuff.
effectively, the 'hierarchy' of the Romans became the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church
Miri's Earth is never mentioned again. One big plot hole in Voyage Home is the fact that Spock states that Humpbacks are native to Earth of the past, but since Miri's world is Earth and they wiped themselves out in the 1960s well before having the chance to kill off their Earth's marine life, couldnt Kirk and crew have just taken whales from Miri's planet and put them in their own Earth's ocean? Furthermore, since Bones discovers the cure at the end, do they ever try making Earth 2 a second home world and rebuilding it? Another thing Ive wondered about Miri's Earth is its solar system. Is Earth the only planet thats the same or does Miri's homeword share a star with other duplicated versions of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, etc...
Was Miri's Earth a pre-warp civilization? It might be that contact was barred by the Prime Directive or by whoever from "Star Fleet Civil Affairs" did the clean up.
The whales from Miri's planet have a different accent from our earths native born whales.
The aliens were communicating with whales from Earth whale song is incredibly complex, so whales from another planet would have a difference and would not sing in the same patterns
… or even the same KEY!
@@Brakiros Indeed amoung earth's whales, have regional different dialects=different patterns of clicks & whistles.
I would watch a _Star Trek_ series that was just an _X-Files_ -esque investigation of the parallel Earths.
Same with the mentioned Department of Temporal Investigations. I haven't read their novels (but I absolutely do want to), but just there one appearance in "Trials and Tribble-ations" tells me all I need to know about how great a series around them would be!
Sliders meets the FBI?
Even with the explanation that alot of the "duplicate earths" were created By the preservers (the native American planet and I believe the roman planet is also implied to have also been the product of that in novels along with it eventually joining the federation by TNG) or other aliens in the case of the old West world much like basically all the human worlds in Stargate I've always found that another very fascinating idea to explore a community from earth's past given an entire new world to develop and grow on
*Sliders-esque 😉
You mean "Sliders".
In the Nazi one I found it amazing that Kirk and Spock randomly got uniforms that fit so well. Then McCoy doesn't get the right sized boot when they custom made one for him...
I always like how they manage to say Spock is just from a different country.
I always went with that as a kid wherever it was used on TV. For some reason it is just weird now, but it's still fun.
The transporter creates the uniforms. McCoy’s didn’t fit cause there is a running gag of him not trusting the transporter that runs all the way through the original cast movies.
@@JonatasAdoMHe is OBVIOUSLY Chinese
@@JonatasAdoM But never said he was from France. That's another alien's shtick.
The one episode you didn’t mention was Season 3’s The Paradise Syndrome. That’s the one where the Preservers saved some of the Native American tribes. There are some novels that explored the possibility that the Preservers were responsible for all these duplicate situations. One of them, Shatner’s co-written Preservers, mentions that in addition to a few duplicate Earths. There are four Q’onos duplicates (the Klingon homeworks), two Vulcan duplicates, and a duplicate of Andor, the Andorian homeworld. I recall this theory under discussion in the 70s and 80s in Trek fanzines. i’ve leaned on this theory, though it does mean that Miri’s world and Omega IV had humans of the 1960s who were transplanted…
With Miri`s world, the entire Earth may have been duplicated in some way. Part of the plot shows that the land masses match almost exactly.
Except for the lack of technology, that planet wasn't bad at all, a paradise as long as the astroid deflector kept working.
Steve: "Why can't they just have a normal illness where someone just coughs until they can no longer breathe?"
Me: "That sounds like a horrible way to die!"
Kirk: "There are no good ways..."
All this talk of parallel earths just makes me want to go rewatch Sliders. Well the first couple of seasons. I'm not an idiot.
Good to see John Rhys Davies in series other than "Shogun" and not in "Indiana Jones" movies in Muslim roles.
Even as a Sliders fan the last 2 seasons are just a little crappy
Even when I was a kid I wondered about how detailed that book about 1920s gangsters must've been. Not only telling you exactly how everything looked, but how to actually build tommy guns and the automobiles and other technologies of the time. Also, I'm glad Lower Decks called out Starfleet for its habit of showing up, doing something to change a world, and then moving on without bothering to do a follow-up
in some of the civilization-of-the-week episodes it's explained that there are PLANS to do that, but the episode ends and we never SEE those take effect.
I guess someone cottoned on to that and that's how star trek 2 story came from.
much of the original Star Trek parrel Earths was due to Limited budget!
Many say Starfleet is going to come and help them - but since it isn’t Kirk & all’s job to do that - of course we don’t see it happen. Also TV show in the 60s were generally all written to be stand alone episodes. The only shows that weren’t were miniseries. It wasn’t until the 90s did TV really have series shows. Even TNG had a few two part episodes. Babylon 5 was the first TV show that was mostly serial Then Deep Space Nine started to get a bit more serial when the Dominion showed up.
Steve, Gene Roddenberry’s original treatment for “The Omega Glory” had the Yangs and Kohns as an earth colony that was trying to live together and it just didn’t work. They had a war and their descendants keep the war going. I like this better.
One of the things I find interesting in "Patterns of Force" is that Spock gives a half-assed Nazi salute. You would expect Spock, who is extremely observant and detail-oriented, to do it more accurately. But I get the idea that Leonard Nimoy was, rightfully, not so enthusiastic about the gesture.
the interesting thing with the final moments of Bread and Circuses, it wasn't Kirk Spock or McCoy that connected the Dots of who the Children of the Sun were, it was Uhura who had to explain to them that it's not the Sun but the Son of God. I always notice that and wonder why they gave that spot to her.
That was a neat grace note.
Because Spock and Kirk are played by members of the Jewish Faith, and we believe that G-d is One, and doesn't have a son. Also, the real G-d does not need a starship.... (cue movie Trek....)
She got that line because she's the communications officer and she's presumably been listening to the Roman NBC's broadcasts in the background through the entire episode. And the Trek writers worked to give her lines and appearances because the presence of a black woman in a responsible bridge officer position was one of the progressive messages in a 1960s TV show. Nichelle Nichols tells how Martin Luther King himself persuaded her to stay on the show because of the positive message it was displaying for all the little black girls and boys in America.
Also because she gathered that information from monitoring planters communications
Also she’s a linguist.
Where's the episode where we visit an alternate Andor or Vulcan?
Although not a planet visit, I'd say TOS:Balance of Terror. But of course the best parallel Vulcan is TNG:Who Watches the Watchers.
The episode with the “Proto-Vulcans” is maybe the only time we see a prewarp alien race that resembles an already established species other than human. I like to think that episode is a direct response to all the whacky “oh look it’s some humans on this planet” in TOS and early TNG.
The closest I can recall to an "alternate Vulcan" of sorts is in the TNG episode "Who Watches the Watchers". It's less of an alternate Vulcan though, and more just primitive people that happen to resemble or be related to Vulcans...somehow.
memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Who_Watches_The_Watchers_(episode)
@@DataLal My headcanon says the Mintakans were descendants of one of the old Romulan colony ships that left Vulcan thousands of years ago.
Star Trek 2009
It's also the episode where we can never again visit an alternate Vulcan.
**rimshot**
The thing that really bugs me about that Nazi planet episode is that it perpetuates the lie that the Nazis had an efficiently run society. "The trains run on time," etc.
That lie needs to be put to rest, it really does.
Edit: You're right about one thing they were good at. Branding. Probably the thing they're best at, second only to increasing human suffering.
The amount of parallel Earths that the _Enterprise_ encounters in such a short space of time would be like winning the jackpot in every lottery around the world, all at the same time.
I’d like to imagine the SS beagle was named after porthos, but that would be too cheesy.
Well officially it was probably named after the boat Darwin did his voyage in, but everyone knew the real reason they called it that I'm sure. :)
Starfleet has a policy about not naming ships after specific pets. Beagle was Admiral Archer's sidestep.
@@Madhouse_Media >>Starfleet has a policy about not naming ships after specific pets.
It may well have been in honor of The Voyage of the Space Beagle, itself a reference to Darwin's famous ride, and one of the more significant sci-fi novels of its little slice of time.
"A cough that gradually gets worse until you die"
This is pretty similar to Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, I gotta say, that's a really shitty way to go.
Or you know, events of the past year and half...
Steve! You forgot the Native American planet from The Paradise Syndrome. How could you forget Kirok? (Great ending on this one, btw.)
The native Americans wildlife and plant life on that world were brought there by the Preservers so it wasn't a parallel evolution just a transplant
I AM KIROK!!!!!!!! Lol
They were transplanted there like the Hadrosaur race in Voyager, by a more advanced alien race.
What is more American than showing up somewhere, declaring our ways to be better, and then washing our hands of the consequences? The bifurcation of the "good america" and the "bad america" in star trek always intrigues me.
"Bajor is actually Afghanistan". Discuss.
@@alanpennie8013 similar but different in enough ways that it’s significant. Yes some groups not representative of the entire population asked the larger guys to come in and “help”. But then that could also be said about Vietnam and Korea. So we’ve got to look at what actually happened and the ways they were treated once they got there - that’s what defines these conflicts in history and in the public consciousness. And there were only two small incidents against the Federation by Bajor, one led by one guy who was just dealt with, the other orchestrated by a third party which immediately crumbled after that connection was revealed. So it was basically just a brief military coup. That’s hardly a sustained effort against the presence.
"My country is a death cult." Truer words have never been spoken.
Something I've always found fascinating (wink) about the TOS episodes involving 'parallel Earths' is that while, obviously (and as you pointed out using Roddenbury's own words) they were written to be cost-savers for the studio, they still tried to make the similar-to-Earth-but-not-quite idea fairly central to the plots of those episodes. It wasn't just like: "Oh, this planet is just like 1960's earth. Anyway...." The planet being such a close mirror to Earth was almost always used as commentary on where America was at the time of the filming of that series. You pointed out the Vietnam war element, and the Nazis, but even the Roman planet had some pretty interesting commentary on the fake nature of the entertainment industry (the dials for "cheers" and "boos" during the gladiator battles comes to mind, and the "We'll do a SPECIAL on you!" threat given to one of the fighters. Hell, even one of the gladiators gives McCoy shit for being a crappy fighter and making him look bad on TV.
Not a very deep comment, I know, but I really liked this episode of yours, Steve, and wanted to leave a comment you might enjoy. Cheers.
I'm sure that if McCoy had scalpel the size of his sword, he could given the nasty gladiator a good slicing of his jugular vein. The reason Spock was able to fight better is that Vulcans were a warrior race before Surak reformed their society to focus on mastery of their emotions. Vulcan's violent history and warmongering took them out to the stars for their exile from Vulcan, and after landfall, they settled the Two Worlds to become Romulans. Want to know more about Romulan history? How about reading Diane Duane's ST TOS novel "The Romulan Way" or Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz trio of ST TNG novels, "Vulcan's Soul: Exodus, Exile and Epiphany"?
I remember the celestial cigar on the original seasons and another thing these episodes a lot of them like other sci fies are aligory stories
I think these can all be explained with “a Q did it.”
Works for me.
Or the Preservers.
Or Janeway did it
Or another one of the all-powerful (or nearly so) beings the Star Trek universe has just around every corner. Maybe it was the Metrons, or the Douwd, or whatever the two people from Catspaw were, or Trelane. (Writing this, I suddenly understand why Yet Another All-Powerful Alien Species is considered a TOS cliché in particular, since all but one of those are from that series.)
That was a well-made episode. This is the first time that I have seen your content and I was thoroughly enthralled by your commentary. Well done.
I sometimes suspect that we might actually be living on the worst parallel Earth...
I'd call this philosophy Anti-Leibnizianism!
(Leibniz argued we live in the best of all possible worlds)
Fun episode Steve. Thanks for this stroll down TOS memory.
I also seem to remember a TOS episode about the gunfight at the OK Corral. Funny plots back then. And they kept us coming back for a lifetime.
Thanks again, Steve.
I didn’t even realize they get Fox News on Ekos.
@jdslyman I think it's rather appropriate that American fascism manifests the way it does, considering how shallow and anti-intellectual much of American culture is. He's the perfect equivalent.
I love parallel earths! When I used to blog on anthropology topics, one of my most read posts was about this very subject. It's that lovely blend of social insight, creativity bred from the desperate need to save money on sets, and unconscious self-revelation that really gets me.
I’m slightly surprised Miramanee’s World from “The Paradise Syndrome” wasn’t included in this video, but perhaps it didn’t qualify since it’s a habitat created for its inhabitants by an alien race? 🤷🏻♂️
Miri's planet was called Mondas (points to those who understand that reference 😉).
I guess people that watch Star Trek related content are amongst those Who know what you mean ;)
Hence the Boomtown Rats' song "I don't like Mondas".
actually, no
Call the Doctor...
I am incredibly disappointed that in the Bread and Circuses segment you neglected to talk about the fact that there is apparently literally a Space Jesus. Like, the groundbreaking reveal of the episode is that the characters realize the religious minority are worshiping the Son of God.
Like, whenever you see somebody say "oh, Sisko is a space jesus" or "oh, Michael Burnham is space jesus" you can say "no, no, you're all wrong, Space Jesus was born on 892-IV"
If there are two Jesuses there's very likely a very large (though not infinite) number.
@@alanpennie8013 "Christus on Infinite Earths"
Does anyone remember Ray Bradbury speculating about Christ on other planets? "The Man"? "Christus Apollo"? Both predate Star Trek's pronouncement from Kirk that, "We have no need for gods;" which, unfortunately, was followed by the TV-friendly, sponsor-placating, "we find the one...quite sufficient."(lines from 'Who Mourns For Adonais', Star Trek, TOS.)
@@royjacksonjr.4447
For those who like this sort of story,
La Befana, by Gene Wolfe,
is very brief and covers all the bases.
I wish that it had been revealed at the end that the rebellious slaves were actually followers of JOSEPH SMITH!
The thing is about Omega Glory is that the Enterprise crew were really slow in figuring out that the Exeter were still there but turned to crystals.
Honorable mention to The Orville and the Facebook Society. That was a fun episode with a TOS vibe.
For Starfleet officers going through trauma, The Lost Years Excelsior did a nice job with Chekhov and the aftermath of WOK and how the eels/mind control etc. impacted his personal life and career.
Uhura and Nomad could have been done much better if it was a modern show.
The girl / woman who played Miri had an amazing career, worthy of actual investigation unto itself.
My favorite parallel was the episode with the twin planets that virtualized war and sent the randomized victims from attacks into disintegration chambers. One might argue that it wasn't a true parallel as we only occupy a single planet, but it seemed to me rather obviously a reflection of a variation on the Cold War.
Yes, Miri was played by Kim Darby. She also acted in twenty-five other TV programs and over thirty movies, including the original True Grit with John Wayne and, as an adult, played the school teacher in a film based on Zenna Henderson's stories of "The People." (With William Shatner.)
Well said. Authoritarianism in general leads to abuse. “Othering” of any persons permits this to happen. Add to this self reflection; it’s too easy for a movement to be blind to falling into this itself.
The gangster planet is returned to in the star trek NES game, where it is found in nuclear winter and hopefully your historian is still alive to access the library computer to find out that communicator lead to everyone deaded. The crew then goes back in time and you spend the whole mission juggling your historian, McCoy, and spock in your two companion slots to cheat at gambling mostly. You dont go back forward in time, presumably so you can have an alibi for violating Romulan space stealing a cloaking penetrating scanner on the black market and smashing up the warbird trying to rightfully arrest you... rather than like ask permission to travel through Romulan space to get home. Failing to go back in time gets you court marshaled for breaking the prime directive and leaving the communicator there.
That's... actually a pretty interesting concept.
If I remember correctly William Shatner actually wrote a series of Star trek novels and one of the mysteries explored was the duplicate Earths. They were taken more seriously and turned into a classified secret. It was thought that the duplicate Earths were the product of the Perseveres and the existence of them lead to the unsettling conclusion that the main Earth may not be the original Earth.
Do you remember the name of the novel(s)?
"The Omega Glory" totally jumps the shark when they bring in the flag.
E-Pleb-Neesta!
I have an issue with the episode “Patterns of Force” and in that regard also to a lesser extend with the depiction here. The episode leans into the narrative, that the Nazis would have been super organized and would have brought unity and order. The cruelty would have been just the dark side of this otherwise “perfect” system with the best intentions. But that is, imo, a dangerous misconception that glorifies the Nazi-partly more than they deserve.
It is true, that horrible things happened due to an industrialization of murder, but being German myself, I can tell, the Nazi-Party’s seemingly efficiency and order was in fact a horrible mismanagement, first paid by printing more and more money, later paid by robbing minorities and forcing them into slavery, then by counterfeiting foreign money and eventually by robbing other countries. The system was destined to collapse from the get-go.
Also, the entire system was corrupt as hell, lead by bribery and nepotism and full of frauds. They even killed their own supporters when it was in their interest. There was no unity, there was fear and there was no order, there was just despotism.
The Nazi leaders were, as Nazis tend to be, little more then small-time criminals, crooks and some sadists with delusion of grandeur who cared little about human lives and in many cases even little about their own ideology. They were not some economical and military geniuses with just a lack of morality. I think a lot of evil in the world would not exist, if this lie about the “good side” of fascism wouldn’t be told anymore.
I get why Steve did this while being an outspoken Nazi hater. He followed probably the logic of the episode and had a point to make, but by doing so he unfortunately repeated the myth of the organized and unified Nazis. I thought it would be important to point that out.
There's a great video 'Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda' that covers nicely how their own propaganda is the impression we're left with decades later.
Yes that is an important point that shouldn't have been overlooked!
There is a pattern of states that go on and on about how strong and manly they are where they are actually extremely inefficient and corrupt.
You must remember that this is seen through the eyes of 1960s common view of history. Gene Roddenberry and other writers were not historians, and a common running joke in American society in the 1960s was exactly what the host here says, "Even Hitler had the trains run on time." Most would agree now that the only benefit of Nazism was the Autobahn.
I've only seen the Star Trek movies but your videos caught my eye.. I'm imagining your a pretty big fan? I just wanted to say I enjoyed your enthusiastic delivery.. It's always a pleasure to listen to someone talk about something they're passionate about.. thanks for the video! oh yeah cool shirt man!
A big reason the parallel Earth trope was used in TOS was it allowed the showrunners to substantially save money on sets and costumes for those episodes.
Which was explained, at length, in the video. Did you miss that, somehow?
@@andywellsglobaldomination Which doesn't always help; the same idea was used by Irwin Allen when he pitched THE TIME TUNNEL to Fox, which had no problem using costumes and sets along with clips from their film library for shows set in the past. It was cheap and quick, but the show didn't endear itself to fans, and lasted only one season, no matter how economical the execution was.
It's as if you watched the video, and heard Steve mention that....
Why was the appearance of the planet in Miri completely irrelevant to the actual story?
Sloppy writing and budget, I guess. They just wanted to explain the familiar setting and forget to add something meaningful.
It was just an excuse to re-use an existing set, probably.
Well, it did explain why Spock wasn't going to die from the illness, only the people from Earth. It doesn't change much, since Spock still can't leave the planet, but it is a difference.
What's hilarious is, the planet being identical to Earth would have made MORE sense with the second example, the Yang/Com planet.
Well as MST3K would put it, they just didn't care.
Steve: What’s the worst parallel earth in Star Trek?
Me: Nazi earth…..
Fun fact:
I was born in the early 1980's and yet was able to see the VERY FIRST run of Pattern of Force in Austrian National Television.
This particular show had been forbidden to be shown until the late 90's because it had been deemed too "controversial".
Literally everyone that's watched TOS knew the answer immediately after he asked the question.
@@Galenus1234 TOO CONTROVERSIAL????? Jesus that's depressing.....
@@bjorn00000 I haven't even seen all of TOS in its entirety but I knew about the Nazi earth so I knew that even if there were some earths I missed out on seeing it would be pretty hard for them to be worse than the nazi planet.
@@Galenus1234 Yeah, that episode was banned from German TV for a long time.
First the ZDF (public network) only would select single episodes to buy, until they had about half of the series. I think I saw some of the first runs of their second batch.
Only in the 80s SAT.1 (private-run network) came around and bought and dubbed the rest - except for that one. It was dubbed even later when the DVDs came out.
But I had an opportunity to see that episode earlier - in my place we could also receive one neighbouring TV channel from Belgium, and they once showed the whole series in order witch dutch subtitles, so me and may mother watched it.
He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it....again and again and again.
I LOVE TOS for the fact that it generally just waves it's hand at logical explanations. To me it kinda drags down the other series when they "have" to give logical explanations to weird space shenanigans.
By the way, the actor who played Melakon, the late Skip Homeier, turned up once more in TOS as Doctor Sevrin, the insane physician who led the Space Hippies on a quest to find Eden, the parallel Earth which was poisonous - as compared to the similar parallel Earth where Miramanee's Amerindian people lived, whose vegetation was edible by humans.
You may have missed a few parallel Earths there.
Just don't eat those funky striped pears and wear boots, you'll be OK.
The Omega Glory suggests that our Earth is just the latest manifestation of a planet with our exact history. Which means there’s some other planet out there less far along in development than ours.
a run to pick up the Federation cut from Sigma Iotia II, would be the great start to a Lower Decks episode.
I thought this episode would be about: which earth affected by time travel is the worst like when edith keeler wasnt killed or something
I love how, just after the sequence where Enterprise knocks out an entire city block with a great phaser blast set to stun, for the next minute there is a green aura surrounding the screen, bleeding onto the web page.
The “A&E” joke got me laughing, I recall those days as well….was born in 1980 so I recall flipping to A&E at times pre-history channel and some Nazi documentary would be on…no matter the time of day…
The same was true of The History Channel years ago. People used to joke the channel should be called "The Hitler Channel." Now THC programming mostly consists of reality-TV dreck and pseudo-historical documentaries about aliens and the paranormal.
"Strange. A parallel Earth development, but in the middle ages..."
"Damnit, Spock! We're at a Renaissance Festival!"
Can we just all agree that it's a little screwed up that the two Jewish actors in the regular TOS cast were dropped into Nazi uniforms for an episode of the series?
Especially William Shatner, who had one of his most significant roles pre-Trek with Judgment at Nuremberg.
Please see my comment about how most Nazis in Hollywood movies were really Jewish actors costumed as Nazis. So, Shatner and Nimoy's wearing those uniforms would be totally appropriate considering that they're Jewish actors playing Nazis in this episode.
It's called...acting
The "Galaxie Quest" got me! I love your stick and Posts!!
I love the fact that Lower Decks basically calls out how Starfleet/Federation don’t keep track as well as they should with both the whole Landru planet thing and the Pakleds. Honestly I need Lower Decks to keep having fun while calling out this stuff!
Saving this for later as I've got a bunch of meetings but seeing a new upload from you, seeing the title & seeing the length of the video brought a big smile to my face! A kind and funny dude talking star trek is just what I need!!!! Keep up the good work 😁
i wish they do a paralel Qo'noS too someday
Steve's got a cool thing going on here. With excellent timing he even paces in his own awkward bits. Not an easy thing to do, and then moves right on to another clip that proves the righteousness of his beautifully snarky narrative. How about that parallel Earth of 1966?
What I want to see in a Trek episode is a parallel Earth that shows our Earth as the backwards primitive one. Say one where the dark ages never happened and they're miles ahead of us in technology
It's not a parallel Earth episode, but ENT's "Civilization" is a fun throwback to TOS. The crew justifies visiting the Akali because they need to correct environmental and cultural contamination that the Melurians had already perpetrated as a result of their mining operations. It's my favourite S1 episode. Plus, the Melurians get their come-uppance 100 years later when Nomad destroys their solar system! 😁
We could ask why were they never brought into contact with, say, a perfectly parallel planet Vulcan? Or an ancient parallel Romulus? Or (fill in your alien planet here)? Only Earth.
Also, the Omega Glory is deservedly in my bottom ten TOS episodes.
I’ve seen this video like 4 or 5 times for some reason and I always grin at Steve’s expression after his a&e joke
Yeah, I always found weird that in Start Trek they just land in a planet of, well, humans. No explanation given to see if they have any connection to Earth or where they came from except for the fact that the show's weekly budget didn't even include SFX makeup.
Even weirder is that they all speak American English as opposed to English English. As for where they came from, my theory, borne out of watching many of the episodes, is that an advanced spacefaring race called The Preservers airlifted humans from 20th century Earth and settled them far from home. You would think that Sargon's race would do that or that white-colored race featured in ST TNG episode "The Chase" would have made that kind of thing happen.
2:27 I thought the "Miri" planet was a lost Earth colony in an earlier draft of the script, and the planet was less "perfect Earth copy" before.
Kirk is pretty flippant about the whole business yeah.
They actually cover this in lower decks; evidently Starfleet consistently doesn’t follow up on TOS planets and Landru is back in business by the time Mariner beams down.
I liked the episode: "Return of the Archons" (Are you of the body?) Landru brought peace to that earthlike planet.
18:37 I'd love to see an episode, or storyline, in "To Boldly Go" in which the Iosians, with back-engineered Federation Tech, set out to expand their turf to the stars. Especially when they discover that the Federation, far from being their superiors in crime, are actually their opposition. Like a mob boss discovering that he's been tricked in to working for the Feds (even that pun works).
The alternative script for the 35 Trek Anniversary DS9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations involved the Defiant encountering the Sigma Iotions after all that time who are now obsessed with Starfleet and Kirks crew! In essence the entire episode was a riff on Star Trek fans and convention behavior. I think it would have been awesome.
"Those who will not learn History are condemned to repeat eleventh grade." --James Loewen
Parallel Earth's are easy to explain. Q did it. He does like to spread a little discord every now and then.
That's....actually pretty brilliant. It even makes sense if you consider that Q seems obsessed with testing humanity and potentially even guiding them and helping them evolve. It would make sense to throw unique moral challenges at humans to see how they would respond from his point of view.
I love this episode so much. Related: I don’t care who knows this, but “A Piece of the Action” is one of my all-time favorite classic episodes! It’s just FUN. Which new series have forgotten until “Strange New Worlds.”
32:50 Also, the Nazi regime was infamously inefficient, rife not just with ordinary corruption and graft but also administrative redundancies that existed only to keep the department heads fighting for Hitler's approval rather than building power (or effectively doing their jobs). German agriculture was also almost as backward as Soviet agriculture and with far fewer excuses.
In the TNG episode "Who Watches the Watchers," they find a parallel Vulcan. The Mintakans are proto- Vulcans.
"whoa a whole planet ruled by fascists- glad I dont live there" *adjusts tie, worryingly runs hands through hair*
Gotta love Star Trek physics--and Kirk's Law
Parallel Earths were just replaced by the Holodeck.
That's a good point.
"Ever notice that all the parallel earths are always kind of crappy?"... Ha ha... Great idea for a video.... Clever. Thanks.
Does "Code of Honor" from TNG count as a Parallel Earth? I'm not sure if the over-the-top stereotypes qualify as "Parallel", "Offensive AF", or both.
We do not discuss Code of Honor with outsiders.
Both
@@prettyhuman hahaha
@@prettyhuman Isn't that the same rule for "Fight Club"?: First rule: Don't talk about Fight Club. 2nd rule: Repeat Rule One.
"What could possibly go wrong, we'll write out as many offensive tropes possible. This sounds great guys."
It always amazed me how many planets looked like the Paramount backlot
Concerning the "creepiness" of Miri:
She has the emotions of a pubescent (NOT prepubescent) girl. It is perfectly normal for a thirteen- year-old girl to have a crush on an adult man. He didn't reciprocate or do anything at all inappropriate. If he had encouraged it, THAT would have been creepy, even in the sixties.
You are overthinking it. They visited so many alternate earths is twofold: 1) less special effects required, which is cheaper. 2) they could adapt existing science fiction stories into scripts.
Honestly A piece of the Action is probably my all time favorite TOS Episode. I love the Morality Plays and the Philosophical stuff, but sometimes ya just need a good old fashioned Caper Episode.
One thing that gets me about the gangsters' clothing was how the studio knew what suit sizes Shatner and Nimoy wore before they wore them? Dd the costume wardrobe crew do measurements for both actors before buying or making the suits to fit both Shatner and Nimoy? I found the taking of the suits from one set of gangsters and just giving them to Shatner and Nimoy to clothe themselves hard to believe unless you're willing to believe that in Hollywood, anything is possible. Ask any guy about what happens when he buys a suit off the rack at a men's clothing store: a member of the store's tailoring staff emerges from his backroom to mark where alternations are to be made using pins and chalk. After those alterations are made, the customer returns to the store for another fitting before whipping out a credit card to pay for the suit.
"Fizbin"- great bit of Star Trek humor
And where Scotty may put you in "concrete galoshes."😂
I honestly think "A Piece of the Action" is the best of the parallel Earth stories--from an entertainment angle, at least.
Steve: Is Starfleet negligent to its officers?
Everyone in a red shirt: ......
Only the security folks and engineers like Scotty wore the red shirts. In ST TOS lore, ship crew members assigned to Security and who wore red shirts were expendable. So, yeah, Starfleet was negligent towards crew members wearing red shirts: all those years of training to be security staff and what happens? You wear a red shirt and get killed protecting any officer wearing command yellow and science blue tunics. Question: if engineering is really applied science, why does Scotty wears a red shirt? Should he not wear a blue shirt instead?
Some TH-camr recently investigated that red shirts cannon-fodder idea. It actually turns out that red shirts were not the most likely to die, when you count up all the fatalities.
Thank you. I just found out about your channel. Really awesome content. Keep up the good work.
Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action differ from the others is that Kirk and Co are trying to mitigate damage done by other Federation people. (More explicitly in Patterns). So I give him more of a pass on the Prime Directive in those cases than the others.
Kirk was always more willing to be... creative if the Prime Directive had already been broken on the basis that the damage was already done. Now that I think of it, he seems to have handled less sophisticated societies more carefully than more advanced ones: he is careful when trying to get a balance of power and to try to avoid war in that one episode where the Klingons are giving some of the local town people muskets to start a genocide against the peaceful hill people. Meanwhile, he’s pretty rough with societies of the 20th and 19th century equivalent, I guess the thought being that they are advanced enough to sort themselves out?
I notice there are a few more parallel Earths than the ones discussed in this video. For example, there's the parallel Earth from "Return of the Archons," the one from "Plato's Stepchildren", the one from "The Paradise Syndrome," and maybe even the Earth from "This Side of Paradise." And how come the inhabitants all seem to convenient speak American English as opposed to the "Queen's English"? Wouldn't you expect that most Nazis to speak German unless they were highly educated and wealthy enough to visit the US or England?
Let's talk about Nazi uniforms worn during this episode. I just wish the studio's wardrobe department had performed better research about who wore what uniform. The grey uniforms and helmets worn by Spock and Bones were those of the Waffen-SS, Himmler's own version of the Wehrmacht (the German word for their Armed Forces, translated as "war machine"), while the black uniform worn by Kirk were the SS goons. Gestapo agents--not seen in this episode wore leather trenchcoats. Ditto for Gauleiters. What's a "Gauleiter", you ask? They're Regional or District Party Chiefs: "Gau": Region; "Leiter": Leader. Quick: Name a movie where you see a Gauleiter? Give up? How about "The Sound of Music"? You saw him almost all the time, accompanied by his SS goons. Some Nazi officials in this episode like Daras, Melakon, and Eneg wore the Brown shirts or yellow shirts, even though the original thugs who wore the Brown Shirts were purged during the "Night of Long Knives" in the early 30s.
A few more questions: 1. How do the Zeons know about "the Nazi Planet"? Were they the ones who discovered it? 2. Who gave the Nazis the knowledge that they were not the only planet in their system? John Gill or Isak? 3. Who gave the Nazis missile technology to go to war against Zeon? John Gill again, or Isak?
@@shepwillner7507 1. How do the Zeons know about "the Nazi Planet"?
ANSWER: Telescopes! Also: The Zeons were already space-faring (though only interplanetary), and had sent landing parties to study Ekos.
2. Who gave the Nazis the knowledge that they were not the only planet in their system?
ANSWER: Telescopes, radio transmissions, Zeon scouts who blabbed.
3. Who gave the Nazis missile technology to go to war against Zeon?
They developed it themselves (though borrowed heavily from stolen Zeon tech, which they reverse-engineered).
Your questions reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the episode - or maybe just a very poor memory.
Someone in the 23rd century trying to do "Nazis without the cruelty" thing feels like someone in the 21st centuey trying to do "Confederates without the slavery" thing
I just realized (and you'll probably mention this at some point, I'm only at 26:05) how messed up it was to have Shatner and Nimoy, two Jewish men, dress up like Nazis and be tortured by them.
In one of my WEB Griffin novels about the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today's CIA) operations in South America, one character tells another character that most of the Nazis in Hollywood movies were portrayed by Jewish actors, not Germans. The title of that novel if readers are interested is "The Honor of Spies."
The Nazis in Hogan's Heroes were all Jewish too.
never seen this channel before, but the earth 2 batman comment had me cracking up
I think that if you stunned an entire city block, then some people would probably die. Then again the Enterprise didn't usually wait around for the health and safety reports.
What about people voiding their bowels at that moment?
This was a lot of fun to watch, thank you. I think I appreciate those "alternate/copy earth" episodes a bit more now.