2:58 glitch right? yah that seems like the uploader downloaded episodes to a computer from a disc... either disc was degrading or download from disc had some defectiveness and so that is what he has to work with to upload scenes here. Happens all the time with older shows and movies. Studios now back up these things on cartridges (much like larger flash drives) to try and keep these things from degrading and quality staying intact without having to use up hard drive space, including external HDDs.
if you all thought internet piracy was bad for business say hello to instant cassettes. its on vhs and ready to rent before its even in theaters lol. now if you will excuse me, i need to crack open a can of fresh air and look for the passcode for my luggage myself because I'm surrounded by assholes who can't seem to help to save their lives.... HEY!!! i told you never to call me on this wall IT'S AN UNLISTED WALL!!!
IKR Like why wasn't Will freaking out? I would've been like "YO F#%& THIS SH*T! Get me off the ship! Get me off! Get me off! We're all gonna die here!" but Will is just stone faced probably thinking to himself "man I sure hope I don't get type-casted into this role."
Antimatter explosions look impressive but not all the antimatter gets consumed. Between the heat of the explosion and stray particles (and no functioning shields on the saucer section) it’s not a surprising outcome.
I remember this, still crazy to see it all these years later. A Galaxy-class ship blowing up right in front of the "Enterprise" with what must have been 1,000+ souls aboard-and there's nothing more Picard can do than say "Raise shields" to save his own ship. Worse, Picard knows his friend is dead, even as he watches the saucer section slowly burn...
I would think his first instinct on hearing of a possible warp core breach would be to order transporter lock on as many Yamato crew as possible, and beam.
@@Hunpecked They had just entered visual range, maybe they weren't yet into transporter range until right before the breach. How many people can they transport at once and how much time does it take?
@@Hunpecked The core didn't breach, the anti-matter containment pod 'seals' dropped. As described later that's considered basically to be impossible. It was a 'Titanic' situation, something no designer ever thought could happen. In the 45 second Picard and the other captain had?
@@marcziegenhain8420 A number of Star Blazers fans really dug this episode - So they may have conflated Donald with "Donmel." In the Japanese Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) series, there is a character named Donmel in the first season. That could have led to some confusion over the years.
Even with the literal 1-2 minutes between that line and the explosion the Enterprise-D's transporter rooms could have saved dozens of people. Plus, he should have separated the saucer section before the Enterprise even got there, then when the engine/weapons section blew up they would have had at least a little warning to evacuate (or maybe the saucer section would have blown up first, but even so at least the engine section would have survived longer).
@@KevsterWilson With all the computer problems Starfleet ships have it should be possible to detach the saucer section manually (and we see them reattaching "manually" without computer guidance in the premiere, which should be a lot harder). You just need to separate the clamps and then very gently fire the impulse engines on the saucer. Main problem would be if turbolifts went down as people were going back and forth, but unlike a battle they could just leave most people in the section they started in
Ironic, two sister ships named after the two most famous vessels on two opposite sides of the Second World War, aircraft carrier USS Enterprise CV-6 and battleship IJN Yamato.
Contagion is a very underrated episode, one of the rare highlights of season two. The loss of the Yamato and all hands is still a shocking scene. Picard was really starting to come into his own by this point.
I've always thought you could take Season 1 and 2, and just strip the bad parts out and combine them into a pretty decent single season long compilation. This episode would make the cut for sure.
The music didn’t help, add to the scare factor and realizing the families on that ship burned to death whe the saucer melted. Imagine being in day care and…. Yeah…
@@pbdye1607 I wonder if she felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. XD
That still image of Captain Varley fuzzy reception with his eyes lit up like a god is for ever burned into my mind. It eerily captures the horrors of their deaths.
It helps when you think of it as if it actually were UHF. Another example is the data rod from ITPML - it behaves exactly like what you'd expect a video tape would, down to the idea that damaging it would reduce the video quality (hiding any visual flaws in the forgery). Or how about the WoK battle being pretty much a battle between wooden ships but in space. Star Trek's always been metaphorical like that, at least before nutrek. Also, if subspace is so fast and has so much bandwidth, then it would be virtually free to add an analog video+audio component (think something NTSC-like, AM video+audio) to the subspace signal.
The solution in the end to the computer virus that infected Enterprise, Yamato and Romulan ships was something that IT people find funny today, "Have you tried turning it off and on?"
I find it funny that they didn't think of that. But, I understand this is a work of contemporary fiction, so they cannot create problems and solutions that are too complicated.... At least not always . I wonder who thought of the "paradoxical shape" booby trap, as a delivery system for a computer virus, in "I, Borg". That was the kind of genius level that I would expect from _real_ military engineers at M.I.T. or the Pentagon, etc! 👏👏👏👏
@@TheNoiseySpectator I think that idea has been done before, in the form of asking an AI/computer something that leads to a contradiction. In the form of a paradoxical shape is relatively novel, though, I think. From what we later learn about Borg curiosity, such as regarding the Omega Molecule, it seems retroactively rather well suited.
A *bit* more complicated than that. Geordi mentioned essentially reformatting the active hard drives (of all three computer cores, i.e. a RAID system), and then restoring from archival (offline or read-only) backups.
I feel like the Odyssey was more impactful. The best ship the federation had shown at that point and the dominion were tearing into it like it was nothing. Then just to make a point they don't allow it to escape and ram into it. Was shocking to see the federation back handed so easily by ships that were so much smaller. When the borg did it they had their massive cube and even then the ships put up a longer fight but the Odyssey was doing nothing to do the dominion ships.
@@Whatatwist2009 Seemed like Keogh was such a good captain too; you really got to like him over the course of the show. Then for a captain and crew that competent on a ship that powerful to be destroyed.. that really drove it home. This s*** is serious.
@Tin Watchman Same here. Seeing the Enterprise in both movies get destroyed was hard to watch but in Generations, it was dumb that it was taken out by one outdated Klingon bird of prey despite the whole shield fiasco. Riker should've been court martialed for his ineptness in fighting the Bird of prey! He should've opened up with everything the Enterprise had and blew up the enemy ship! As for Star Trek III, I was pissed off that the Klingons murdered David and that Starfleet wouldn't let Kirk rescue Spock so he had to break the rules to do it. I also disliked how Starfleet as a whole was treated as being jerky and how disrespectful a lot of Starfleet officers were to Kirk and his command crew.
@@sonicology Ho boy, the Will D. Porter would put the USS Farragut to shame for badluck. Pretty sur the ship would blow up the moment it's completed on the dock yard! :D
"Captain, would you consider evacuating non-essential crew to the Enterprise?" "No, Picard, that would be premature." "Well then, how about trading your crew for Wesley Crusher & some draft picks?"
The whole ship is going crazy, the computer killed 18 people and we have children aboard, but evacuating non-essential personnel would be premature. I wouldn't want your crew to go through the trouble of pushing a few buttons on your transporters without good reason.
I think by the dominion war era that stopped and likely was not the case post dominion war. The Borg and Dominion woke up the federation that they might have been exploration focused but they were equally military ships aswell. Something they got lazy about and forgot after the peace with the klingons.
Putting families on a starship is good policy. People are away for years and problems like this are rare. Not any different from putting families in hurricane zones, earthquake zones, landslide zones, tornado zones, etc.
@@SeansModelBuilds Well that works in alot of cases but the enterprise was designed and used for more long term missions and wasn't really assigned a set region. During the Dominion war and post war this is likely the way they went as starfleet became much more military focused.
@@kevinslater4126 I disagree as the ships while used for exploration and such were also to function as the military arm of the federation. At any time they could end up at war. This means you have to spend time and effort to get the non starfleet personal off the ships if war broke out quickly or risk them which would likely cause issues with the crew. Neither is a good option. The federation got spoiled during its golden era of peace. Very few minor wars took place once the klingons became an ally. This was illusion was shattered by the borg and later the dominion. The starfleet by the post DS9 era and into the picard era i suspect is much more along the lines see in the TOS movies. They are likely much more of a military with exploration and science being secondary priorities for their ship designs and function.
The first two seasons of TNG made space a creepy/eerie place. The episodes had a very spooky vibe. I think, these first two seasons are much underrated.
It's a shame they went in a more lame and goofy direction after that, the first 2 seasons were more like X Files in space and I liked that style a lot better. Changing it is what got TNG labeled as a King of the Nerds show back in the day. It had a more diverse and larger audience in the first couple seasons. I miss spooky Star Trek, it scared me as a young kid.
My College bus used to get in at 5.00 and it took 5 minutes to run home so I missed the cold open of EVERY TNG. I'd have these little story gaps that I never quite understood till I got to watch them again years later
Centurion! What was that radiation spike at 300 mark 20? Antimatter explosion, Subcommander. Sensors are showing one and a half Galaxy class Federation ships on that bearing at five light-minutes. One and a half?!?!? Helm, get us over there now!
Uhm... Why wouldn't there be debris? No, seriously, this is a gripe I have with Trek since a long time, how come in DS9 we see all these debris lying around in the Dominion War of starships, yet in this episode (and in a few others) there's no trace of the remains of the ship. No debris pretty much means "Yeah, that starship you reported as being destroyed? We're gonna have to chalk it up to Missing In Action and take you to a court martial, cuz there's no debris there, which means you're lying". And again, I can't stress this enough: why wouldn't there be no debris? It's a Starship, it has circuitries and mechanisms all over the place, and a frigging hull, even if you explode something as small as possible with an H-Bomb, you're still gonna get lots of pieces everywhere, now imagine that with a ship that's over 100.000 Foot squared.
it's fitting really, the Yamato was the ultimate expression of Japanese hubris, their nigh unshakable belief that their martial prowess would carry the day, even against BOTH of the strongest navies on the planet, at the same time. likewise, the federation believed that just because they wanted to play nice that every monster or bloodthirsty tyrant would be more than happy to play ball, hence their massive Galaxy class ships having children aboard. both mistakes cost millions of innocent lives needlessly.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 It's actually not a coincidence. TH-cam's compression algorithms have trouble when a lot of stuff is changing on the screen at once, which is what is happening with the effect in the show.
@@michaelkossin2765 Artifacts are usually the result of packet loss over a network of a non-streaming compression/media format (in other words, packet loss during the upload, somehow the CRC still checked out, it happens sometimes). YT's converter error correction managed to knit it together without too much interruption.
Heartbreaking when you know from the U.S.S. Enterprise Technical Manual that the U.S.S. Yamato sent a subspace congratulatory message upon the launch of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
megnetic seals on the antimatter chamber are decaying instead of captain it's a warp core breach or self destruct sequence nope anti matter seals on the chamber are decaying
That long shot from 0:30 to 0:56 is great. It felt like they used steady cams 90% of the time in Star Trek. Taking that away and doing it as an uncut moving shot adds to the tension and uncertainty. Really love it.
I've seen this a million times. It's no less shocking each time, though. They could have chosen any other class of ship, but they made the Yamato a Galaxy Class. Then promptly destroyed it onscreen. It was a bold move. DONALD...!!!!
I think it was so that they could have the "possible design flaw" subplot. I really like the episode, but it really bothered me, even as a kid, that Varley didn't put two and two together about the probe. "Weird things immediately start happening following a scan by a mysterious probe". I'd even have loved a handwave of it. Meh, it's still a great episode.
It's like when they destroyed the Odyssey at the end of season 2 of DS9 when they introduced the Dominion; basically saying if the Enterprise was there, this would have happened to them. Both are great scenes.
thegreenmanofnorwich I know what you mean. It’s like in a Star Trek show, none of the other crews in Starfleet are ever as clever as the ones on screen, that the show is centred around.
"Sensors indicate... no life readings, sir." "Okay, well, that was interesting. Back to where we were before these shenanigans so rudely interrupted us, eh?"
@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Captain's Log, Stardate: Four, two, nine, nice, eight, point three, semicolon hashtag schwa alpha-gamma-niner. Today absolutely nothing of note or import happened today except I spilled my tea while watching the Yamato burst in to flames inexplicably and all hands aboard died mostly instantly. Absolutely nothing.
@@Dekline25 maybe they could've saved some if they starting transporting people as soon as they were in range but they didn't even have time to finish a conversation
People have died and the lights are dimming as he’s talking and he’s like “nah, lets not bring anybody over to the flying convention center right over there”
This was at the time a kind of interesting story concept. I've always liked the episode because it shows there's more going on in the universe of Star Trek than just purely episodic storytelling.
For Star Trek online players, this is the start of so much trouble. This is where Taris first encounters Iconian technology. We don't see Hakeev, but we know he is onboard the Haakona. Picard denied her the Iconian technology, but she went searching for more...
In my small country town, someone tried to open a Asian/fusion restaurant named “Yamato”. It was plagued with problems, and closed after two months. That was a few YEARS ago. The space it was at, is still empty and closed. But the “Yamato sign” still stands by the road. I think of this scene, every time I pass it.
The most haunting scene of all of my StarTrek experience.. Even above the Odyssey being destroyed. This still illicits an emotional response that is horrifying to me every time I see it even to this day.
This was right around the time that TNG was starting to gain its footing. The crew of the ship was getting more comfortable with each other, especially Picard. Season 3 would be even better with its character-based episodes.
Season 2 was just ok. It had its moments, like this episode and the introduction of the Borg. But overall it was meh and had some cringeworthy episodes. Season 3 is when it really got good.
I think that this episode, and "A Matter of Honor" (the one where Riker kicks ass as the first officer on a Klingon ship) are the only Season 2 episodes worth watching. Yeah I agree the quality of the show went way up after this season.
"Shields up" - the delivery from Patrick Stewart on those two simple words is perfect here Heck of a job with the Yamato explosion, 30 years later it still holds up as great effects....that saucer section still spooks me, did it just continue burnt up and floating off into space??
He nailed it perfectly. Understated but tragic. Reminds me of some of Shatner's body language in Balance of Terror. Calm, tiny yet totally right. You completely believe the character.
Just remember the crew died long before it burned up. Looking at any starship being destroyed is disturning. The Enterprise self destruction in Star Trek 3 was sad but she went out like a champ. Only half her saucer was destroyed and her body was still intacted as ship crashed down to Genesis.
Captain Varley was a familiar face in African American households. The actor Thalmus Rasulala was in What's Happening, Good Times, Roots and Blackula. It's a shame this fine actor would only live two years after this scene. 51 is too young.
"Ain't it a bitch when your fancy pants starship blows up? Wouldn't it be nice if you could reverse time to prevent it? Well, now you can! Introducing Temporal Causality Loop In a Box!"
This is from the episode Contagion. The Yamato was destroyed by a virus which was in a probe from Iconia. The Yamato also appeared in the episode Where Silence Has Lease.
It was terrific seeing Thalmus Rasulala as Captain Donald Varley of the USS Yamato - he was an Awesome actor and leading man with a long career in theater, television, and films; Friday Foster, The Out of Towners, Blacula, Born American, and many other films.
I always loves this episode, "Contagion". The first real Romulan story, a cool introduction to the Iconians, and of course, the cool destruction of the Enterprise's sister ship Yamato. It was an all around good episode, one of Season 2's few gems.
One thing I love about this scene of the Yamato exploding is that it looks credible. As in it doesn't look like a pyrotechnic, gasoline-fueled fire ball that only moves in one direction, expanding for a moment then rapidly shrinking and disappearing. If you look at the first frames of the explosion it is starting in the engineering section, below and behind the saucer. The expanding shockwave is exactly what a place devoid of gravity would be: a sphere. It isn't growing in tendrils and spikes, thus betraying it's very-much gravity-influenced origin as a pyrotechnic explosion that was layered into the scene. The heart of the explosion is bright with only the saucer barely blocking a tiny part of it, giving a spatial sense to the Yamato. In nearly an instant the ball of plasma and radiation has overtaken the Yamato, still largely spherical. By the time the scene cuts from the bridge and Picard back to the viewscreen and the Yamato, the explosion has begun to expend the greater part of its energy, but is still growing and beginning to separate into discrete layers that also hint that possibly some parts of the engineering section just fractionally(?) delayed some of the energy, thus the slightly darker spots in the shock wave behind the saucer. Even with the superheated, almost blindingly bright plasma shockwave there would still be some discrete debris, glowing hot, flying out from the source of the explosion, just as we see here. I love that the saucer is shown beginning to burn from the inside out as it continues to move rapidly with the decaying shockwave behind it. Maybe it had a tiny instance of resistance to the explosion before whatever shields there might've been failed utterly, exposing the underside to the full power of the explosion. The start of the explosion and expanding shockwave would have given it a kick outwards even as the underside was being exposed to the plasma and radiation, thus beginning the process of consuming the lighter internal parts of the ship that only visually manifest as the energy and heat works through all the decks and erupts out. Unless I'm mistaken the first growing locations of burn-through appear at what would have been the rear of the saucer as the hanger that was at the back of the saucer is now facing towards the Enterprise, hinting the the explosion not only kick the saucer out, but imparted spin.
@@joerochon4058 Stars don't shine because they are on fire. They shine because they are hot thanks to nuclear reactions inside their core. Fire can only exist with oxygen.
@@TastyTardis Ah, I see. I had to look that up right now. Just because something is extremely hot and giving off light, that does not mean it's on fire. Well, I learned something new today. Thank you. I wonder if Jerry Fisher meant that the explosion produced looked realistic because once the fuel (air and other combustables on board) was done burning, all that was left was a shock wave pushing the saucer. I think I just liked the effort he put into writing all that. lol
RIKER: Do you wish to beam over any nonessential personnel? VARLEY: No, that would be premature. PICARD: How so? You've requested aid and you ship is falling apart. What, exactly, is your definition of "premature?"
Enterprise has 20 transporter rooms... each with 7 pads. Transport cycle is less than 10 seconds... they could transport hundreds of people within a minute if Data automated it all from the bridge
@@Medicranger 20-30 seconds is literally how long it took for the Yamato to blow up considering what evacuation measures are like on a thing such as a starship thats many kilometers in diameter id say thats completely irrelevant the outcome is the same they simply didnt know the ship was going to blow up without warning
@@xGoodOldSmurfehx Galaxy class ships are not kilometers long. At their tip to tip point, they are still less than 700 meters, which length includes the nacelles, that are not manned. Transport doesn't require the target to be on a pad, only the receive unit, not since the original series. They should have immediately evacuated the ship, shut down all systems, and took it in tow instead of trying to fix it in the middle of the neutral zone.
i remember this episode back in 89 in my home city of Jacksonville fl, i was just a 24 year old a trekky since 1972, i worked hard 10 to 11 hour days inclueding nights, 5 days a week and Saturdays is when i unwind and the new star trek tng is how, was airing 6pm, me and my family would gather together to watch we was so very amazed by this episode, it was so epic looking, so fantastic fresh and cutting edge, i never forgot it, and to this day it is still one of my all time favorites
This made a massive impact on me when it was first broadcast and I was a schoolboy. Watching as another Galaxy class starship was destroyed. It was a hell of a teaser sequence!
@@mbaxter22 She was a core character with as much development as any of the others; Her abilities were an accessory to that. The writers could reach for that tool when they needed to bridge a plot or story gap without inflating the script past runtime, which was very useful in some scripts. Definitely better than the ol' "As you know..." followed by a character dumping remedial exposition on other characters for the audience's benefit.
Space Battleship Yamato, which was brought to the US with a dub called “Star Blazers” which renamed the ship, characters, and dumbed down the plot is in my opinion the greatest space opera of all time. The premise is that due to an alien race absolutely wrecking Earth’s space navies and dropping enough radioactive bombs on Earth to kill all life on the planet within one year a second, benevolent alien race makes an offer to Earth. These friendly aliens, from the planet Iscandar, have developed a device capable of reversing the radiation poisoning from the Gamilas’ (the enemy aliens) bombs. The problem is that we need to send a ship to get this device and our entire space fleet save one ineffective ship have been sunk. Iscandar was at least kind enough to send Earth the designs for their own engine, capable of intergalactic flight, but that still doesn’t solve the ship problem. So what do the Japanese do? They take the refurbished wreck of the Japanese World War Two Battleship Yamato, ( my profile picture) which was going to be used an evacuation ship, slap the new engine and a ton of weapons that would make the Borg retreat on it and send it on a journey to Large Magellanic Cloud. If you watch it, note the design of the Yamato’s analyzer unit and that the show was made three years before Star Wars.
I just love that a Starfleet Captain could simply decide to enter the neutral zone by himself without checking back with Starfleet HQ. It's not like that could cause a intergalactic war or something.
Its not the initial explosion that disturbs me but the way they portrayed the saucer section basically melting from the antimatter field... plus you can see some of the decks and hallways get exposed and it gives you a sense of scale somehow making it even creepier.
Even in _Star Trek Online_ , Iconian Viral Probes are a pain: They shut down entire subsystems, cause a great amount of damage, and just generally get in your way. A few times they shut down ship systems for story purposes, including causing a transporter malfunction mid-mission. And they're rarely deployed alone: Solar Gateways, Raiders, battlecruisers, and dreadnoughts. When the Iconians return to the galaxy, they do so with a vengeance. And this was just _one_ Viral Probe.
90% of the ST:O storyline is a massive blur to me. The only thing I really remember is: spare baby space Hitler because he hasn't done a Hitler yet. If you kill baby Space Hitler you're as bad as Space Hitler. Thanks Sela.
@@sheilaolfieway1885 Well being honest her entire race is bascially slaughtered out of jealousy with only a few of them left in front of her eyes and then suddenly a being that is basically a monkey in her eyes came out to challange her and she got her arm cut off. I don't know about you fam, but anyone would get angry about that won't they?
@@walternelson2687 Sela's story arc isn't done until you finish the Yesterday's War arc. But yes, she's the character you love to hate. Then there's Hakeev. He should have given Oh some notes on WTFery. And also on what happens if you talk instead of firing. And Taris is also insane. What is it with these Romulans? And not all of them are bad, though.
@@rightsideup6304 Kahless was a bada$$. How do you cut off an energy being's _arm_ ? Yet he did. I don't blame T'Ket for wanting revenge on Sela, but all Romulans? That's blowing things out of proportion, especially since the Iconians ended up trying to wipe out anyone they couldn't turn into servitors. It's funny when you realize how *&^%ed up time is when everything unravels. It's about as &^%$ed up as the Hur'q and Fel'lkiri.
This is only tangentially related to the event, but I've often wondered how emergency alerts were handled as the civilians go? Do they get the same unfiltered message as the crew? Such as "Red Alert!" or "Abandon ship!?" With all the warning klaxons blaring? Or were they given a calmer, watered-down alert? In emergency situations, would civilians gather in designated safe areas of the ship? Or would they be ordered to the nearest escape pod launches? Or ordered to shelter in their own quarters? Maybe they've been coached and have practiced what to do in dangerous situations? I know, I know, stupid and arcane, but I find myself wondering about things like this since they are only lightly touched on like in ST: Generations. Even then it didn't show what was happening to the families and civilians until the order to evacuate to the saucer was given. At that point, I got the impression that people were mostly going about their daily routines, despite the attack and subsequent attempts to fire back and move away from the Duras Sisters' BoP. We only see the semi-chaotic rush in the passages as the computer warns that the core is going critical.
Presumably as star fleet is one of the more valuable jobs/places to "improve oneself" that anynoe aboard the enterprise is among the higher echelons of human society. Presumably the standards are pretty high as are the expectations of anyone on board. At least that's how a competent society like the federation would act imo.
Which is why I always thought that taking civilians onboard these ships was a huge mistake. I never liked the idea, except maybe on scientific/medical vessels. Thematically, it’s just bad writing.
@@MasterJediDudewhy? There are plenty of civilians in the industries of science, exploration and technological development, and even in military industries. It isn’t like Starfleet ships are pleasure cruises, where anyone can sail for a holiday. (Outside of specific guests who, are traveling to one specific destination from another.) While there are certainly some civilians whom are either children of the crew or spouses, The majority of civilians are scientists, Researchers and other students/experts in assorted fields. They are posted aboard Starfleet ships because they are just that, students/experts in their fields. Starfleet is the largest space faring organization in the Federation. So if there are civilians in certain fields of exploration, archaeology, science etc that can benefit the federation, Starfleet will allow them to work aboard their starships.
When the USS Yamato exploded , they should have Deanna Troi make a blood curdling scream . Really a missed opportunity for dramatic effect by the writers.
Sheer arrogance, like Varley's immediately preceding decision to illegally enter the Neutral Zone in the first place. If the Federation Council wanted Starfleet to secure Iconia in order to prevent Romulans from getting the technology first, a diplomatic solution via threat of war would've been the right answer, not a lone Galaxy-class starship going rogue... to do what exactly? Strip an entire planet of 500,000 year old ruins of vast underground cities? At best lead the Romulans directly to Iconia, assuming they didn't have the archeological evidence the Yamato had obtained? And he didn't think the entire Romulan Star Navy wouldn't at least mobilize just to steal a brand new Starfleet Galaxy-class starship? Come on. Captain Varley may have been an old friend of Picard, but his actions here deserved Court Martial and imprisonment. He was directly responsible for the deaths of every being who needlessly died on the Yamato, probably well over a thousand people including civilians and children. The Galaxy-class mission was peaceful exploration and long term civilian scientific work, not ad hoc interstellar politics. This man might be the very worst captain ever depicted in Star Trek, and there have been dozens of enormously terrible people in charge.
@@johannpopper1493 Indeed. The only thing worse than that is a Starfleet captain that is working directly with the enemy to destroy Starfleet from the inside.
@@johannpopper1493 But the potential of Iconia would have been a real game-changer. I'm sure Captain Varley was perfectly capable of estimating the potential consequences, and decided that getting to Iconia first was worth risking a confrontation with the Romulans. He just didn't expect the Iconian software to take over his ship. As for refusing to evacuate any personnel... that is another issue.
Evacuation is the LAST possible resort for a captain, especially given their location in the neutral zone... How many times did you see Picard evacuate everytime something critical went wrong with the Enterprise?
'Sensors indicate no life readings sir' that's a good way of saying it Data since the Yamato exploded and everyone onboard was instantly killed before they could evacuate in the escape pods well that happens with an uncontrolled matter/Antimatter mix when the magnetic coils on the antimatter chamber begin decaying without warning.
I completely forgot. The actor that played the Captain of the Yamato....... he also played the father of LeVar Burton's character in the mini series ROOTS.
Back in late 80s when this was written, a reboot or factory reset would seem like a magical feat. But in today's standards the moral would have changed into "Don't plug in USB obtained from unknown source" and "if you must do it, make a virtual sandbox so it cannot affect main systems" 🤭
An image of the Yamato was created by Nagilum in the episode Where Silence Has Lease. This is a clip from the episode Contagion. An Iconian probe transmitted a virus into the Yamato's computer. When the Enterprise downloaded the Yamato's log into it's computer, the virus was also downloaded. The virus was contained in the log.
This was the one and ONLY time I recall seeing a Warp Core Breach properly depicted. "You're ship flares up like an exploding sun...!"--Khan Noonian Sing; "Space Seed", Original Series Season 1
Didn't Voyager once say the Delta Flyer core breach would expand over, like, a million kilometers or something crazy? I always imagined that would be more akin to how a warp core antimatter containment failure should look, especially knowing that the core is strong enough to power the ship at velocities hundreds of times the speed of light. Or like in 2009 when they dump the cores into the black hole. Every other ship destruction and core breach in Trek just looks dinky and small when realizing there's a giant stick of matter-antimatter dynamite that detonates.
@@agquad I'm unaware of ST:V's description...but it fits considering what you laid out. By that metric, even the Yamato detonation was a mere firecracker, when what we need to see by the definition from ST:V is Tsar Bomba. I'm guessin' that pushes FX budgets too much, tho...
Same like with the Galaxy Class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D and the U.S.S. HOOD as WW2 ships U.S.S. Enterprise CV-65 and the Battleship HMS HOOD and the same with the T.O.S. Constitution Class U.S.S. Enterprise and the Lexington which were also both WW2 aircraft carriers and with the proposed ships of the NX Class the Enterprise,Columbia,Challenger,Discovery and Endeavor which were named after the space shuttles.
That was indeed a very serious design flaw. The computer should not have executed unsigned code, and should not have allowed it access to hardware, or even to anything outside a sandbox.
![[TH] VCT Pacific - Playoffs Grand Final // PRX vs GEN](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/G345ud5yRGA/mqdefault.jpg)
When you're not sure if it's the Yamato or TH-cam that's breaking up...
That glitch was PERFECTLY timed.
2:58 glitch right? yah that seems like the uploader downloaded episodes to a computer from a disc... either disc was degrading or download from disc had some defectiveness and so that is what he has to work with to upload scenes here. Happens all the time with older shows and movies. Studios now back up these things on cartridges (much like larger flash drives) to try and keep these things from degrading and quality staying intact without having to use up hard drive space, including external HDDs.
Or remembering how long until your next phone bill! 🤣
#ThisThreadsHilarious
@@vysearcadia522 - so you have no idea either?
@@danielmarinucci9342 XD
To quote Dark Helmet "Even in the future nothing works"
if you all thought internet piracy was bad for business say hello to instant cassettes. its on vhs and ready to rent before its even in theaters lol. now if you will excuse me, i need to crack open a can of fresh air and look for the passcode for my luggage myself because I'm surrounded by assholes who can't seem to help to save their lives.... HEY!!! i told you never to call me on this wall IT'S AN UNLISTED WALL!!!
Omg good one
Still one of my favorite films.
@@buckwheatthe3rd
Oh shit. There goes the planet.
@@MirekFe there is no shortage of clean air i swear
Over 30 years later, and this scene still manages to be utterly horrifying...
IKR Like why wasn't Will freaking out? I would've been like "YO F#%& THIS SH*T! Get me off the ship! Get me off! Get me off! We're all gonna die here!" but Will is just stone faced probably thinking to himself "man I sure hope I don't get type-casted into this role."
@@thomashajicek2747 I thought his reaction was fair you could see him take a big gulp. Trying to contain his emotions over what just happened.
@@robhileman8890 That was soy juice.
Should have turned it off and turned it on again.
Over 30 years later and this scene still manages to be utterly stupid!
Starfleet really should have kept up the payments on their antivirus software.
Ha ha ha! 😆
Thanks Bruce that's worth a chuckle
Mcaffee even came pre-installed.
They thought windows defender was good enough.
@@fritzstudios8571 that guy was a survivalist who had a compound in the Caribbean
It’s the saucer section slowly burning up that gets me. At first you think, oh maybe the saucer section will be ok. But then, no.
It does make me wonder how it explodes like that. And how the saucer looks like it could survive at first and why it didn't.
@@jakehayes1998 Intense heat can vaporize a thin metal "skin" very quickly.
@@Zorro9129 Of extreme levels of radiation
Antimatter explosions look impressive but not all the antimatter gets consumed. Between the heat of the explosion and stray particles (and no functioning shields on the saucer section) it’s not a surprising outcome.
Kind of like that time they let troy drive the ship
I remember this, still crazy to see it all these years later. A Galaxy-class ship blowing up right in front of the "Enterprise" with what must have been 1,000+ souls aboard-and there's nothing more Picard can do than say "Raise shields" to save his own ship. Worse, Picard knows his friend is dead, even as he watches the saucer section slowly burn...
@@NotAnAngryLesbian Like Camelot.
I would think his first instinct on hearing of a possible warp core breach would be to order transporter lock on as many Yamato crew as possible, and beam.
@@Hunpecked They had just entered visual range, maybe they weren't yet into transporter range until right before the breach. How many people can they transport at once and how much time does it take?
This was when writing was done well, and effects existed to further the story, instead of just being eye candy
@@Hunpecked The core didn't breach, the anti-matter containment pod 'seals' dropped. As described later that's considered basically to be impossible. It was a 'Titanic' situation, something no designer ever thought could happen. In the 45 second Picard and the other captain had?
The actor playing Donnel did a fantastic job. He just seems so natural, as if it's a role he'd been playing for years.
The captain's name is Donald Varley not Donnel.
@@marcziegenhain8420 I stand corrected. All these years I though Patrick Stewart was saying 'Donnel' lol
@@marcziegenhain8420 A number of Star Blazers fans really dug this episode - So they may have conflated Donald with "Donmel."
In the Japanese Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) series, there is a character named Donmel in the first season. That could have led to some confusion over the years.
The point here is that the actor did a great job 👏🏻
@@Alamandorious virtue signaling
"Do you wish to evacuate non-essential personnel?""
"No, that would be premature."
Whoopsie.
It was premature. The ship wasn't coming apart yet.
Premature Evacuation? We have pills for that now. ;)
No that would be prema...🔥💥🔥🔥🔥💥💥
Even with the literal 1-2 minutes between that line and the explosion the Enterprise-D's transporter rooms could have saved dozens of people.
Plus, he should have separated the saucer section before the Enterprise even got there, then when the engine/weapons section blew up they would have had at least a little warning to evacuate (or maybe the saucer section would have blown up first, but even so at least the engine section would have survived longer).
@@KevsterWilson With all the computer problems Starfleet ships have it should be possible to detach the saucer section manually (and we see them reattaching "manually" without computer guidance in the premiere, which should be a lot harder). You just need to separate the clamps and then very gently fire the impulse engines on the saucer. Main problem would be if turbolifts went down as people were going back and forth, but unlike a battle they could just leave most people in the section they started in
Ironic, two sister ships named after the two most famous vessels on two opposite sides of the Second World War, aircraft carrier USS Enterprise CV-6 and battleship IJN Yamato.
Not ironic. Good writing.
And the Yamato here STILL saw more service than her WWII namesake.
And both soon assimilated by a Borg Cube. 🤩
@@samsignorelli Shots fired!
(But not by the Yamato)
Also, here the Yamato is broken in half by an explosion, as was the IJN Yamato.
Contagion is a very underrated episode, one of the rare highlights of season two. The loss of the Yamato and all hands is still a shocking scene. Picard was really starting to come into his own by this point.
Just like her namesake which was the Japanese super-battleship Yamato when she was sunk by US Navy carrier planes on April 7th 1945.
Wait but Riker has a beard here. I thought he only had a beard in s3 onwards??
@@OhManTFE he has a beard starting with the first episode of season 2
You can see he has gotten a lot more stolid. @@JamesC1981
I've always thought you could take Season 1 and 2, and just strip the bad parts out and combine them into a pretty decent single season long compilation. This episode would make the cut for sure.
Somewhere on the cutting room floor:
Troi: "Captain, I sense no life."
Picard: "Of course. Thank you, counselor."
You are my personal hero for that comment XD
How about,
Troi: " captain I sense no life"
Picard: "no shit Sherlock"
troi should have been left on the cutting room floor
@@sarasarah1810 Ginan should of had Trois job in my opinion.
SOMEWHERE on the drawing-room floor: AN GALAXY CLASS THAT WORKS.
It's two things that get me. Captain Donald's glitched viewer picture eyes, and then the burning saucer. This scene horror factor is through the roof.
The music didn’t help, add to the scare factor and realizing the families on that ship burned to death whe the saucer melted. Imagine being in day care and…. Yeah…
No talking/movement during the eyes part, then head tilted back, maybe it was a glimpse of them getting incinerated.
@@jayenglish6631 "Look, Teacher, look! That ship looks just like ours!" "Why yes, it d..." O_O "Counselor Troi, please report to Day Care...NOW."
@@pbdye1607 I wonder if she felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. XD
@@jayenglish6631 XD LOLZ!!!
That still image of Captain Varley fuzzy reception with his eyes lit up like a god is for ever burned into my mind.
It eerily captures the horrors of their deaths.
Definitely for shadows the upcoming horror
amazing attention to detail
Lol
It helps when you think of it as if it actually were UHF.
Another example is the data rod from ITPML - it behaves exactly like what you'd expect a video tape would, down to the idea that damaging it would reduce the video quality (hiding any visual flaws in the forgery).
Or how about the WoK battle being pretty much a battle between wooden ships but in space.
Star Trek's always been metaphorical like that, at least before nutrek.
Also, if subspace is so fast and has so much bandwidth, then it would be virtually free to add an analog video+audio component (think something NTSC-like, AM video+audio) to the subspace signal.
@@kargaroc386 I need a college degree to fully understand this comment lol.
Captain, do you want to evacuate nonessential crew over to Enterprise ? No, that would be premature. Good call captain.
Every man tries to avoid premature evacuation :D
They needed to pull out as quickly as possible.
@@jotdoc true dat :)
I don't think they'd have made it anyway, the ship blew up just a minute later.
@@beayn transporters?
The solution in the end to the computer virus that infected Enterprise, Yamato and Romulan ships was something that IT people find funny today,
"Have you tried turning it off and on?"
I find it funny that they didn't think of that.
But, I understand this is a work of contemporary fiction, so they cannot create problems and solutions that are too complicated....
At least not always .
I wonder who thought of the "paradoxical shape" booby trap, as a delivery system for a computer virus, in "I, Borg".
That was the kind of genius level that I would expect from _real_ military engineers at M.I.T. or the Pentagon, etc!
👏👏👏👏
@@TheNoiseySpectator I think that idea has been done before, in the form of asking an AI/computer something that leads to a contradiction. In the form of a paradoxical shape is relatively novel, though, I think. From what we later learn about Borg curiosity, such as regarding the Omega Molecule, it seems retroactively rather well suited.
Nah they had to clear affected memory too. They had to erase all the infected files.
A UNIX machine is cleared that way, only Windows can be infected between boots.
@@tonyburzio4107 Either this is parody of bad UNIXers or you are in for surprise...
I love that the fix was turning everything off and back on.
A *bit* more complicated than that. Geordi mentioned essentially reformatting the active hard drives (of all three computer cores, i.e. a RAID system), and then restoring from archival (offline or read-only) backups.
Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?
Microsoft survived into the 23rd century?
@@Cyberbeagle1000 unexpected IT Crowd
Must be a Microsoft system.
Same impact as watching the USS Odyssey in DS9. The Enterprise is a character so watching something that is nearly her die is painful
I feel like the Odyssey was more impactful. The best ship the federation had shown at that point and the dominion were tearing into it like it was nothing. Then just to make a point they don't allow it to escape and ram into it. Was shocking to see the federation back handed so easily by ships that were so much smaller. When the borg did it they had their massive cube and even then the ships put up a longer fight but the Odyssey was doing nothing to do the dominion ships.
Do you realize that the name Yamato has an actual historical background?
@@Whatatwist2009 Seemed like Keogh was such a good captain too; you really got to like him over the course of the show. Then for a captain and crew that competent on a ship that powerful to be destroyed.. that really drove it home. This s*** is serious.
It was painful, even more so knowing that there were civilians on the Yamato including innocent children.
@Tin Watchman Same here. Seeing the Enterprise in both movies get destroyed was hard to watch but in Generations, it was dumb that it was taken out by one outdated Klingon bird of prey despite the whole shield fiasco. Riker should've been court martialed for his ineptness in fighting the Bird of prey! He should've opened up with everything the Enterprise had and blew up the enemy ship!
As for Star Trek III, I was pissed off that the Klingons murdered David and that Starfleet wouldn't let Kirk rescue Spock so he had to break the rules to do it. I also disliked how Starfleet as a whole was treated as being jerky and how disrespectful a lot of Starfleet officers were to Kirk and his command crew.
Counselor Troi felt something similar to what Obi-wan Kenobi felt as hundreds of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
In this case, it was over a thousand people.
Exactly what I thought
Spock got there first
I fear something terrible has happened.
good thing she is only half Betazoid
Captain Picard: "Contact the two nearest Federation ships, the Arizona and Maine. If they're not available, contact the Bismarck and Hood."
Data: Captain, the USS William D. Porter is offering assistance. Shall I accept?
Picard: Red alert! Shields to full, all crew to battle-stations!
@@sonicology Ho boy, the Will D. Porter would put the USS Farragut to shame for badluck. Pretty sur the ship would blow up the moment it's completed on the dock yard! :D
Didn't the 'Victory' turn up in an episode?
"Sir, the Montblanc has signaled she's leaving New Halifax immediately."
The U.S.S. Thunderchild is on standby
"Captain, would you consider evacuating non-essential crew to the Enterprise?"
"No, Picard, that would be premature."
"Well then, how about trading your crew for Wesley Crusher & some draft picks?"
Somebody who knows start trek AND sports? Where you been all my life lol.
SEND ME BEVERLY CRUSHERRRRR!
...please just TAKE Wesley
pay you his weight in gold pressed latinum to take him
.. pretty please?
They should have used Wesley to plug the hole in the antimatter seals.
The whole ship is going crazy, the computer killed 18 people and we have children aboard, but evacuating non-essential personnel would be premature. I wouldn't want your crew to go through the trouble of pushing a few buttons on your transporters without good reason.
And this, Starfleet, is why you don't put families on a starship.
I think by the dominion war era that stopped and likely was not the case post dominion war. The Borg and Dominion woke up the federation that they might have been exploration focused but they were equally military ships aswell. Something they got lazy about and forgot after the peace with the klingons.
Putting families on a starship is good policy. People are away for years and problems like this are rare. Not any different from putting families in hurricane zones, earthquake zones, landslide zones, tornado zones, etc.
@@kevinslater4126 What about having your family on the planet that your ship's Starbase is at? Best of both worlds.
@@SeansModelBuilds Well that works in alot of cases but the enterprise was designed and used for more long term missions and wasn't really assigned a set region. During the Dominion war and post war this is likely the way they went as starfleet became much more military focused.
@@kevinslater4126 I disagree as the ships while used for exploration and such were also to function as the military arm of the federation. At any time they could end up at war. This means you have to spend time and effort to get the non starfleet personal off the ships if war broke out quickly or risk them which would likely cause issues with the crew. Neither is a good option.
The federation got spoiled during its golden era of peace. Very few minor wars took place once the klingons became an ally. This was illusion was shattered by the borg and later the dominion. The starfleet by the post DS9 era and into the picard era i suspect is much more along the lines see in the TOS movies. They are likely much more of a military with exploration and science being secondary priorities for their ship designs and function.
That ship was rated 0% on Rotten Yamatoes.
Really? Cuz its Yamatoer rating was 93%.
X'-D LOL
Take my upvote and get out
@@justdog5506 X'-D
It should have at least been the same color as Red Dwarf 😬
The first two seasons of TNG made space a creepy/eerie place. The episodes had a very spooky vibe. I think, these first two seasons are much underrated.
Agreed.
I enjoyed these seasons the most
It's a shame they went in a more lame and goofy direction after that, the first 2 seasons were more like X Files in space and I liked that style a lot better. Changing it is what got TNG labeled as a King of the Nerds show back in the day. It had a more diverse and larger audience in the first couple seasons. I miss spooky Star Trek, it scared me as a young kid.
My god how great this series was. Words can't express it tbh. I watched this episode when it came on Sky one back in 1990.
Caught the reruns a few years later on bbc2, 6pm right after Neighbours which my family always watched 😅
My College bus used to get in at 5.00 and it took 5 minutes to run home so I missed the cold open of EVERY TNG. I'd have these little story gaps that I never quite understood till I got to watch them again years later
Ship destruction done right. Not just a bang and no debris left
Yeah, always thought the SFX in this scene were excellent.
well if the Romulans didn't know we where here before, violating the neutral zone AGAIN, they do now!
Centurion! What was that radiation spike at 300 mark 20?
Antimatter explosion, Subcommander. Sensors are showing one and a half Galaxy class Federation ships on that bearing at five light-minutes.
One and a half?!?!? Helm, get us over there now!
@@JeanLucCaptain romulans violate the neutral zone too.
Uhm... Why wouldn't there be debris? No, seriously, this is a gripe I have with Trek since a long time, how come in DS9 we see all these debris lying around in the Dominion War of starships, yet in this episode (and in a few others) there's no trace of the remains of the ship. No debris pretty much means "Yeah, that starship you reported as being destroyed? We're gonna have to chalk it up to Missing In Action and take you to a court martial, cuz there's no debris there, which means you're lying".
And again, I can't stress this enough: why wouldn't there be no debris? It's a Starship, it has circuitries and mechanisms all over the place, and a frigging hull, even if you explode something as small as possible with an H-Bomb, you're still gonna get lots of pieces everywhere, now imagine that with a ship that's over 100.000 Foot squared.
I know every ship in the Federation had the designation "USS" but... Hearing "USS Yamato" will never not sound wrong to me.
Why is every federation ship have a USS designation. What does USS mean in this case?
@@Kishanth.J It means "United Star Ship" or "Space Ship" depending on who you ask.
It sounds better than...
USS Bombed and Torpedoed Until She Rolled Over
it's fitting really, the Yamato was the ultimate expression of Japanese hubris, their nigh unshakable belief that their martial prowess would carry the day, even against BOTH of the strongest navies on the planet, at the same time. likewise, the federation believed that just because they wanted to play nice that every monster or bloodthirsty tyrant would be more than happy to play ball, hence their massive Galaxy class ships having children aboard. both mistakes cost millions of innocent lives needlessly.
@@overboss9599 mostly during the Borg battles.
2:56 when tranmission gets so bad it distorts the hardware physically
lmfao. all the comments about low res, but this one is the best.
Yup the artifacts were a YT encoding error, exactly when the viewscreen distorted.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 It's actually not a coincidence. TH-cam's compression algorithms have trouble when a lot of stuff is changing on the screen at once, which is what is happening with the effect in the show.
@@michaelkossin2765 Artifacts are usually the result of packet loss over a network of a non-streaming compression/media format (in other words, packet loss during the upload, somehow the CRC still checked out, it happens sometimes). YT's converter error correction managed to knit it together without too much interruption.
The malfunction occurred due to a faulty isolinear chip within a YT secondary processor, that causes a gravimetric abnormality....
Heartbreaking when you know from the U.S.S. Enterprise Technical Manual that the U.S.S. Yamato sent a subspace congratulatory message upon the launch of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Noooo! They were sisters! They loved each other!
The biggest difference between the Yamato and the Enterprise is the Yamato has the Wave Motion gun.
How much do you wanna bet they say it like "YamAto" instead of "YAmato" to avoid a lawsuit
@@TNTspaz The Yamato was an actual Japanese battleship, so lawsuits wouldn't really enter into it.
Tom Holmes I think he’s talking about the Anime one..
@@johnilarde8440 yeah, but the anime ship is the real ship, rebuilt into a spaceship.
Enterprise did something like that to in “The Best of Both Worlds” episode.
I just remember how they used to use 80's DeathWish synth sounds in music in Star Trek TNG.
you see what happens when you do not think a computer virus can cause havoc on your system because it almost never happens
3:00 You know the malfunction is powerful when it breaks the 4th wall.
megnetic seals on the antimatter chamber are decaying instead of captain it's a warp core breach or self destruct sequence nope anti matter seals on the chamber are decaying
That long shot from 0:30 to 0:56 is great. It felt like they used steady cams 90% of the time in Star Trek. Taking that away and doing it as an uncut moving shot adds to the tension and uncertainty. Really love it.
Good observation.
I've seen this a million times. It's no less shocking each time, though. They could have chosen any other class of ship, but they made the Yamato a Galaxy Class. Then promptly destroyed it onscreen. It was a bold move.
DONALD...!!!!
I think it was so that they could have the "possible design flaw" subplot. I really like the episode, but it really bothered me, even as a kid, that Varley didn't put two and two together about the probe. "Weird things immediately start happening following a scan by a mysterious probe". I'd even have loved a handwave of it. Meh, it's still a great episode.
It's like when they destroyed the Odyssey at the end of season 2 of DS9 when they introduced the Dominion; basically saying if the Enterprise was there, this would have happened to them. Both are great scenes.
@Gary Church uchuu senkan yaaaamaaaatoooooo! -und it was an awful anime-movie
thegreenmanofnorwich I know what you mean. It’s like in a Star Trek show, none of the other crews in Starfleet are ever as clever as the ones on screen, that the show is centred around.
The Enterprise and Yamato working together😏 I'd love to see Enterprise, Yamato,and Bismarck
"Sensors indicate... no life readings, sir."
"Okay, well, that was interesting. Back to where we were before these shenanigans so rudely interrupted us, eh?"
Captains Log with strange numbers to sound like a date
@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Captain's Log, Stardate: Four, two, nine, nice, eight, point three, semicolon hashtag schwa alpha-gamma-niner. Today absolutely nothing of note or import happened today except I spilled my tea while watching the Yamato burst in to flames inexplicably and all hands aboard died mostly instantly. Absolutely nothing.
@@sarcasticguy4311 nope for you it's porno date not star date because your not a star you just watch porn🤣🤣
Writer: "What's the SFX budget for this episode?"
Producer: "Not too good"
Writer: "Yamato is Galaxy class"
The fx wernt good in the 90s period.
"Varley, you rascal, have you tried switching it off and on again?"
Which ended up to be the solution.
...varley's not here right now...please leave a message at the breach... ... ...BOOM...
So basically the virus was a defunct version of Windows?
Sheila olfieWay - They must have given Windows Me a try...poor sods.
turning it off and on again? No, that would be premature
Looks like Starfleet is still using Windows ME in the Future.
Memmnarch1981 Or windows vista! 😂
Seriously LMF0 !!!! I'm dying
@@pricelessppp Double LMFO !
Nope. Using Windows 10.
They're likely using Apple iTunes as their OS.
My first thought was abandon ship and here he goes "nah, let's not even evacuate the non-essentials"...
They wouldn't have had time anyway
@@jimhuffman9434 The Enterprise has transporters
@@Dekline25 maybe they could've saved some if they starting transporting people as soon as they were in range but they didn't even have time to finish a conversation
People have died and the lights are dimming as he’s talking and he’s like “nah, lets not bring anybody over to the flying convention center right over there”
@@battlesheep2552 lol, "(no)that would be premature".alright, if you say so. 30 seconds later* boom
This was at the time a kind of interesting story concept. I've always liked the episode because it shows there's more going on in the universe of Star Trek than just purely episodic storytelling.
Worf: "Captain. Another vessel is coming within sensor range. It is Gamilon."
Jordie needs to install a Wave Motion gun, it'll deal with those pesky Romulans.
Captain Avatar would not have allowed this attack unanswered.
If people knew how cool the reference is it’d be at 10k
The Comet Empire could stomp the Cardies.
So says Miles O'Brien.
So say we all.
I’m enjoying all these comments about Star Blazer! That was a great show. It introduced me to all things anime.
For Star Trek online players, this is the start of so much trouble. This is where Taris first encounters Iconian technology. We don't see Hakeev, but we know he is onboard the Haakona. Picard denied her the Iconian technology, but she went searching for more...
Hold up, Hakeev was aboard the Romulan ship in this episode?
In my small country town, someone tried to open a Asian/fusion restaurant named “Yamato”.
It was plagued with problems, and closed after two months.
That was a few YEARS ago.
The space it was at, is still empty and closed. But the “Yamato sign” still stands by the road.
I think of this scene, every time I pass it.
The loss of Yamoto and the Odyssey were so sad
Well, look at the bright side in Star Trek Online. Starfleet made a Yamato-class starships , that was meant for tactical operations
Enterprise-D too!
The actor playing Donald is fantastic it's like he's played this role for years
Never underestimate cyber-warfare.
Not just any type of cyber-warfare This is Cyber-Warfer done by the hand of Iconian Tech hell by a virus delivered by an ancient Iconian Probe.
@@FLAME4564 it wasn't even warfare or a virus. the damn probe just copied a part of its operation system
The most haunting scene of all of my StarTrek experience.. Even above the Odyssey being destroyed. This still illicits an emotional response that is horrifying to me every time I see it even to this day.
it's a design flaw well yeah if the computer turning off the antimatter containment system is a design flaw, then oh yes, it is a design flaw.
This was right around the time that TNG was starting to gain its footing. The crew of the ship was getting more comfortable with each other, especially Picard. Season 3 would be even better with its character-based episodes.
@S C They can be tolerated if someone tells Wesley to shut up.
Not until High collars. No Pulaski and no Roddenberry. Did it gain its footing
Season 2 was just ok. It had its moments, like this episode and the introduction of the Borg. But overall it was meh and had some cringeworthy episodes. Season 3 is when it really got good.
I think that this episode, and "A Matter of Honor" (the one where Riker kicks ass as the first officer on a Klingon ship) are the only Season 2 episodes worth watching. Yeah I agree the quality of the show went way up after this season.
@@mbaxter22 Q Who, The Measure Of A Man, Time Squared, and Where Silence Has Lease were also great s2 episodes.
"Shields up" - the delivery from Patrick Stewart on those two simple words is perfect here
Heck of a job with the Yamato explosion, 30 years later it still holds up as great effects....that saucer section still spooks me, did it just continue burnt up and floating off into space??
He nailed it perfectly. Understated but tragic. Reminds me of some of Shatner's body language in Balance of Terror. Calm, tiny yet totally right. You completely believe the character.
Industrial Light & Magic. Awesome stuff!
Just remember the crew died long before it burned up. Looking at any starship being destroyed is disturning. The Enterprise self destruction in Star Trek 3 was sad but she went out like a champ. Only half her saucer was destroyed and her body was still intacted as ship crashed down to Genesis.
Everyone is so well trained they need commands to do the most obvious and basic things...its a wonder they are able to operate starships at all :)
Its likely the Federation would have sent a recovery ship to make sure there isnt anything recoverable by anyone other then the Federation.
Captain Varley was a familiar face in African American households. The actor Thalmus Rasulala was in What's Happening, Good Times, Roots and Blackula. It's a shame this fine actor would only live two years after this scene. 51 is too young.
Seriously? Oh, man. I didn't know that.
That would be premature
Magnetic seals: Aight i'm boutta head out
NON-ESSENTIAL Personnel, what could possibly make it premature?
@@CorwynGC Tarnish his career.
@@bluerisk Nope. Saving civilians at should ALWAYS be a good career choice unless you work for the bad guys.
3:47 truly the oh shit moment..
How about fact that it looks like its about to collide into the Enterprise. Would ypu have panicked on that bridge.
3:36 THIS is why Starfleet never approved the Wave Motion Gun.
It was sad seeing the destruction of the yamato.
Kind of like her namesake which was the Japanese super battleship Yamato.
@ET Hardcorgamer Yamato: great ship in the wrong war. Just like the Maginot Line.
Hurry Enterprise...you only have 244 days left to save Earth!
Donald varley would have been a great character to keep around
We'll be right back, after these important words from our sponsor!
"Ain't it a bitch when your fancy pants starship blows up? Wouldn't it be nice if you could reverse time to prevent it? Well, now you can! Introducing Temporal Causality Loop In a Box!"
Do you wish to evacuate all non-essential personnel?
No, that would be prematu-*BOOM*
240p we meet again.
There, there.
@@AegisNova here, here!
@@TheMrPeteChannel There, here!
@@joshualogan6655 Here, there!
@Clinton Pendleton When!
One of my favorite episodes when I was a child.
Still so good 🖖
This is from the episode Contagion. The Yamato was destroyed by a virus which was in a probe from Iconia. The Yamato also appeared in the episode Where Silence Has Lease.
That one was a illusion
@@hamhockbeans That Yamato also had the number 1305-E whereas here Yamoto's number is 71807
I can only imagine the frustration of seeing your scrapped work on television because you didn't have the time to fix it.
@Reunite The British Empire Which number would be more realistic?
I wonder if T'Ket had anything to do with this...
"Yamato, come in. Captain, come in! Donald! Come in!"
If you've ever served on a boat, you know how desperate that is.
It was terrific seeing Thalmus Rasulala as Captain Donald Varley of the USS Yamato - he was an Awesome actor and leading man with a long career in theater, television, and films; Friday Foster, The Out of Towners, Blacula, Born American, and many other films.
I always loves this episode, "Contagion". The first real Romulan story, a cool introduction to the Iconians, and of course, the cool destruction of the Enterprise's sister ship Yamato. It was an all around good episode, one of Season 2's few gems.
I told you pissing on the computer core of the Yamato was a bad idea, but did you listen nope you thought it would be fine you thought wrong.
One thing I love about this scene of the Yamato exploding is that it looks credible. As in it doesn't look like a pyrotechnic, gasoline-fueled fire ball that only moves in one direction, expanding for a moment then rapidly shrinking and disappearing.
If you look at the first frames of the explosion it is starting in the engineering section, below and behind the saucer. The expanding shockwave is exactly what a place devoid of gravity would be: a sphere. It isn't growing in tendrils and spikes, thus betraying it's very-much gravity-influenced origin as a pyrotechnic explosion that was layered into the scene.
The heart of the explosion is bright with only the saucer barely blocking a tiny part of it, giving a spatial sense to the Yamato. In nearly an instant the ball of plasma and radiation has overtaken the Yamato, still largely spherical. By the time the scene cuts from the bridge and Picard back to the viewscreen and the Yamato, the explosion has begun to expend the greater part of its energy, but is still growing and beginning to separate into discrete layers that also hint that possibly some parts of the engineering section just fractionally(?) delayed some of the energy, thus the slightly darker spots in the shock wave behind the saucer.
Even with the superheated, almost blindingly bright plasma shockwave there would still be some discrete debris, glowing hot, flying out from the source of the explosion, just as we see here.
I love that the saucer is shown beginning to burn from the inside out as it continues to move rapidly with the decaying shockwave behind it. Maybe it had a tiny instance of resistance to the explosion before whatever shields there might've been failed utterly, exposing the underside to the full power of the explosion. The start of the explosion and expanding shockwave would have given it a kick outwards even as the underside was being exposed to the plasma and radiation, thus beginning the process of consuming the lighter internal parts of the ship that only visually manifest as the energy and heat works through all the decks and erupts out.
Unless I'm mistaken the first growing locations of burn-through appear at what would have been the rear of the saucer as the hanger that was at the back of the saucer is now facing towards the Enterprise, hinting the the explosion not only kick the saucer out, but imparted spin.
I alwayst thought you needed air to have fire, so no, it's not credible
@@koenkeep If that were the case, every star in the sky is an illusion. I am pretty sure they are on fire.
@@joerochon4058 Stars don't shine because they are on fire. They shine because they are hot thanks to nuclear reactions inside their core.
Fire can only exist with oxygen.
@@TastyTardis Ah, I see. I had to look that up right now. Just because something is extremely hot and giving off light, that does not mean it's on fire. Well, I learned something new today. Thank you.
I wonder if Jerry Fisher meant that the explosion produced looked realistic because once the fuel (air and other combustables on board) was done burning, all that was left was a shock wave pushing the saucer.
I think I just liked the effort he put into writing all that. lol
@@joerochon4058 You are right tho, it does look cool as fuck. I liked the episode a lot. Really miss old Trek now more than ever.
RIKER: Do you wish to beam over any nonessential personnel?
VARLEY: No, that would be premature.
PICARD: How so? You've requested aid and you ship is falling apart. What, exactly, is your definition of "premature?"
they would probably not even have had time to beam more than a handful of people anyways
bet you and the others didnt think of THAT huh?
@@xGoodOldSmurfehx You're right. None is better than some.
Enterprise has 20 transporter rooms... each with 7 pads. Transport cycle is less than 10 seconds... they could transport hundreds of people within a minute if Data automated it all from the bridge
@@Medicranger 20-30 seconds is literally how long it took for the Yamato to blow up
considering what evacuation measures are like on a thing such as a starship thats many kilometers in diameter id say thats completely irrelevant the outcome is the same they simply didnt know the ship was going to blow up without warning
@@xGoodOldSmurfehx Galaxy class ships are not kilometers long. At their tip to tip point, they are still less than 700 meters, which length includes the nacelles, that are not manned. Transport doesn't require the target to be on a pad, only the receive unit, not since the original series. They should have immediately evacuated the ship, shut down all systems, and took it in tow instead of trying to fix it in the middle of the neutral zone.
This is the Picard I wanted to see on the new series.
i remember this episode back in 89 in my home city of Jacksonville fl, i was just a 24 year old a trekky since 1972, i worked hard 10 to 11 hour days inclueding nights, 5 days a week and Saturdays is when i unwind and the new star trek tng is how, was airing 6pm, me and my family would gather together to watch we was so very amazed by this episode, it was so epic looking, so fantastic fresh and cutting edge, i never forgot it, and to this day it is still one of my all time favorites
This made a massive impact on me when it was first broadcast and I was a schoolboy. Watching as another Galaxy class starship was destroyed. It was a hell of a teaser sequence!
The captains eyes when the screen froze gave me nightmares
@@maarekstele2998 Maybe Varley was not actually human, (Or not a "Terrestrial - human, per se.)
Maybe he was a Jaffa of the 24th century.
Troi would've sensed the deaths of the Yamato's Crew. A thousand minds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Nice call, Obi-Wan Kenobi...
@@PCCphoenix You do know Troi in the series was a Telepath, right?
Troi's abilities enhance or disappear based on the script. Most of the time they didn't know what to do with her lol.
@@mbaxter22 She was a core character with as much development as any of the others; Her abilities were an accessory to that. The writers could reach for that tool when they needed to bridge a plot or story gap without inflating the script past runtime, which was very useful in some scripts.
Definitely better than the ol' "As you know..." followed by a character dumping remedial exposition on other characters for the audience's benefit.
"Vergil. give me the Yamato"
"If you want it. Then you'll have to take it"
ah a gamer of culture i see.
@@legionofmetal9968 indeed. likewise
Starblazers?
@@TangSooTerp that was a Devil May Cry reference. i've never heard of star-blazers though so i may have referenced it unintentionally
Space Battleship Yamato, which was brought to the US with a dub called “Star Blazers” which renamed the ship, characters, and dumbed down the plot is in my opinion the greatest space opera of all time. The premise is that due to an alien race absolutely wrecking Earth’s space navies and dropping enough radioactive bombs on Earth to kill all life on the planet within one year a second, benevolent alien race makes an offer to Earth. These friendly aliens, from the planet Iscandar, have developed a device capable of reversing the radiation poisoning from the Gamilas’ (the enemy aliens) bombs. The problem is that we need to send a ship to get this device and our entire space fleet save one ineffective ship have been sunk. Iscandar was at least kind enough to send Earth the designs for their own engine, capable of intergalactic flight, but that still doesn’t solve the ship problem. So what do the Japanese do? They take the refurbished wreck of the Japanese World War Two Battleship Yamato, ( my profile picture) which was going to be used an evacuation ship, slap the new engine and a ton of weapons that would make the Borg retreat on it and send it on a journey to Large Magellanic Cloud. If you watch it, note the design of the Yamato’s analyzer unit and that the show was made three years before Star Wars.
Varley: "Good to see you again Jean-Luc...despite your antique humour"
You gotta love that animosity between the two captains
I just love that a Starfleet Captain could simply decide to enter the neutral zone by himself without checking back with Starfleet HQ. It's not like that could cause a intergalactic war or something.
this Freaked the hell out of me as a kid
I still get dark vibes from this.
It's like when you first get exposed to the concept of a brain aneurysm, and feel like every headache will kill you
It emphasises the dangers of space travel and how vulnerable you really are no matter how big or advanced your ship is
I remember first watching this in my first senior class. Those were the times. They knew how to shock people and gain our full attention.
But, you must have gone to a lousy school, if they were letting you watch TV in class, especially on the first day! 😟
Picard "How bout you send your crew over and we outfit them with some fancy new red shirts?"
Its not the initial explosion that disturbs me but the way they portrayed the saucer section basically melting from the antimatter field... plus you can see some of the decks and hallways get exposed and it gives you a sense of scale somehow making it even creepier.
Even in _Star Trek Online_ , Iconian Viral Probes are a pain: They shut down entire subsystems, cause a great amount of damage, and just generally get in your way. A few times they shut down ship systems for story purposes, including causing a transporter malfunction mid-mission. And they're rarely deployed alone: Solar Gateways, Raiders, battlecruisers, and dreadnoughts. When the Iconians return to the galaxy, they do so with a vengeance.
And this was just _one_ Viral Probe.
90% of the ST:O storyline is a massive blur to me.
The only thing I really remember is: spare baby space Hitler because he hasn't done a Hitler yet. If you kill baby Space Hitler you're as bad as Space Hitler.
Thanks Sela.
T'Ket is a monster...
@@sheilaolfieway1885 Well being honest her entire race is bascially slaughtered out of jealousy with only a few of them left in front of her eyes and then suddenly a being that is basically a monkey in her eyes came out to challange her and she got her arm cut off. I don't know about you fam, but anyone would get angry about that won't they?
@@walternelson2687 Sela's story arc isn't done until you finish the Yesterday's War arc. But yes, she's the character you love to hate. Then there's Hakeev. He should have given Oh some notes on WTFery. And also on what happens if you talk instead of firing. And Taris is also insane. What is it with these Romulans? And not all of them are bad, though.
@@rightsideup6304 Kahless was a bada$$. How do you cut off an energy being's _arm_ ? Yet he did.
I don't blame T'Ket for wanting revenge on Sela, but all Romulans? That's blowing things out of proportion, especially since the Iconians ended up trying to wipe out anyone they couldn't turn into servitors. It's funny when you realize how *&^%ed up time is when everything unravels. It's about as &^%$ed up as the Hur'q and Fel'lkiri.
This is only tangentially related to the event, but I've often wondered how emergency alerts were handled as the civilians go? Do they get the same unfiltered message as the crew? Such as "Red Alert!" or "Abandon ship!?" With all the warning klaxons blaring? Or were they given a calmer, watered-down alert?
In emergency situations, would civilians gather in designated safe areas of the ship? Or would they be ordered to the nearest escape pod launches? Or ordered to shelter in their own quarters?
Maybe they've been coached and have practiced what to do in dangerous situations? I know, I know, stupid and arcane, but I find myself wondering about things like this since they are only lightly touched on like in ST: Generations. Even then it didn't show what was happening to the families and civilians until the order to evacuate to the saucer was given.
At that point, I got the impression that people were mostly going about their daily routines, despite the attack and subsequent attempts to fire back and move away from the Duras Sisters' BoP. We only see the semi-chaotic rush in the passages as the computer warns that the core is going critical.
Presumably as star fleet is one of the more valuable jobs/places to "improve oneself" that anynoe aboard the enterprise is among the higher echelons of human society. Presumably the standards are pretty high as are the expectations of anyone on board. At least that's how a competent society like the federation would act imo.
Which is why I always thought that taking civilians onboard these ships was a huge mistake. I never liked the idea, except maybe on scientific/medical vessels. Thematically, it’s just bad writing.
I imagine alerts for civilian spacefarers are akin to the old atomic bomb drills
Nice conjecture dude! Too bad CBS killed it all with "Discovery & Picard"😡😢😩
@@MasterJediDudewhy? There are plenty of civilians in the industries of science, exploration and technological development, and even in military industries. It isn’t like Starfleet ships are pleasure cruises, where anyone can sail for a holiday. (Outside of specific guests who, are traveling to one specific destination from another.)
While there are certainly some civilians whom are either children of the crew or spouses, The majority of civilians are scientists, Researchers and other students/experts in assorted fields. They are posted aboard Starfleet ships because they are just that, students/experts in their fields. Starfleet is the largest space faring organization in the Federation. So if there are civilians in certain fields of exploration, archaeology, science etc that can benefit the federation, Starfleet will allow them to work aboard their starships.
A stone cold awesome opening to one of early TNG's best episodes.
They remain amizingly calm and composed watching over 1000 die, starfleet training must rock.
When the USS Yamato exploded , they should have Deanna Troi make a blood curdling scream . Really a missed opportunity for dramatic effect by the writers.
Lost 18 people due to a system issue they cant explain. Why not evacuate all non essential personnel like Riker asks? Better safe than sorry
Sheer arrogance, like Varley's immediately preceding decision to illegally enter the Neutral Zone in the first place. If the Federation Council wanted Starfleet to secure Iconia in order to prevent Romulans from getting the technology first, a diplomatic solution via threat of war would've been the right answer, not a lone Galaxy-class starship going rogue... to do what exactly? Strip an entire planet of 500,000 year old ruins of vast underground cities? At best lead the Romulans directly to Iconia, assuming they didn't have the archeological evidence the Yamato had obtained? And he didn't think the entire Romulan Star Navy wouldn't at least mobilize just to steal a brand new Starfleet Galaxy-class starship? Come on. Captain Varley may have been an old friend of Picard, but his actions here deserved Court Martial and imprisonment. He was directly responsible for the deaths of every being who needlessly died on the Yamato, probably well over a thousand people including civilians and children. The Galaxy-class mission was peaceful exploration and long term civilian scientific work, not ad hoc interstellar politics. This man might be the very worst captain ever depicted in Star Trek, and there have been dozens of enormously terrible people in charge.
@@johannpopper1493 Indeed. The only thing worse than that is a Starfleet captain that is working directly with the enemy to destroy Starfleet from the inside.
@AgainstTheSystem .ATS in the long run tho, if youre stupid, u suffer. :)
@@johannpopper1493 But the potential of Iconia would have been a real game-changer. I'm sure Captain Varley was perfectly capable of estimating the potential consequences, and decided that getting to Iconia first was worth risking a confrontation with the Romulans. He just didn't expect the Iconian software to take over his ship.
As for refusing to evacuate any personnel... that is another issue.
Evacuation is the LAST possible resort for a captain, especially given their location in the neutral zone... How many times did you see Picard evacuate everytime something critical went wrong with the Enterprise?
Wow! This is absolutely excellent writing and acting and directing as is usual for Star Trek.
“Yamato coming into visual range now”
Image instantly fills view screen like it’s on top of them!
That was heartbreaking, everyone on the Yamato died when the ship exploded.
'Sensors indicate no life readings sir' that's a good way of saying it Data since the Yamato exploded and everyone onboard was instantly killed before they could evacuate in the escape pods well that happens with an uncontrolled matter/Antimatter mix when the magnetic coils on the antimatter chamber begin decaying without warning.
Love the random pressing of buttons! And when weird rocks fall from the ceiling, when the ship gets hit by a torpedo!
I completely forgot. The actor that played the Captain of the Yamato....... he also played the father of LeVar Burton's character in the mini series ROOTS.
Back in late 80s when this was written, a reboot or factory reset would seem like a magical feat.
But in today's standards the moral would have changed into "Don't plug in USB obtained from unknown source"
and
"if you must do it, make a virtual sandbox so it cannot affect main systems" 🤭
In 89 I think all you could do is a reboot. And have a set of emergency boot disks near your computer. And reformat the drive.
"Firewalls? Sandboxes? Airgapped systems? What're those?!?!?!"
An image of the Yamato was created by Nagilum in the episode Where Silence Has Lease. This is a clip from the episode Contagion. An Iconian probe transmitted a virus into the Yamato's computer. When the Enterprise downloaded the Yamato's log into it's computer, the virus was also downloaded. The virus was contained in the log.
Now that's what you call blown to smithereens. The saucer section should have been blown to bits yet it just burns up.
Classic. I remember watching this and was literally gob smacked jaw dropped when it blew up.
Goodbye earth... ...a ship is taking off... ...its the space battleship....
YAMATO
This was the one and ONLY time I recall seeing a Warp Core Breach properly depicted. "You're ship flares up like an exploding sun...!"--Khan Noonian Sing; "Space Seed", Original Series Season 1
Didn't Voyager once say the Delta Flyer core breach would expand over, like, a million kilometers or something crazy? I always imagined that would be more akin to how a warp core antimatter containment failure should look, especially knowing that the core is strong enough to power the ship at velocities hundreds of times the speed of light. Or like in 2009 when they dump the cores into the black hole. Every other ship destruction and core breach in Trek just looks dinky and small when realizing there's a giant stick of matter-antimatter dynamite that detonates.
@@agquad I'm unaware of ST:V's description...but it fits considering what you laid out. By that metric, even the Yamato detonation was a mere firecracker, when what we need to see by the definition from ST:V is Tsar Bomba. I'm guessin' that pushes FX budgets too much, tho...
There's like 300,000 kg of anti-matter onboard normal storage from the tech manual.
Same like with the Galaxy Class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D and the U.S.S. HOOD as WW2 ships U.S.S. Enterprise CV-65 and the Battleship HMS HOOD and the same with the T.O.S. Constitution Class U.S.S. Enterprise and the Lexington which were also both WW2 aircraft carriers and with the proposed ships of the NX Class the Enterprise,Columbia,Challenger,Discovery and Endeavor which were named after the space shuttles.
And the real IJN Yamato only once fired its 18.1 inch main batteries in anger. It never sank an enemy vessel.
Well, hopefully someone will find the wreck. Perhaps even rebuild it in to a space....
...oh wait...
Or rebuild it to sail on liquid oceans on planetary surfaces
That was indeed a very serious design flaw. The computer should not have executed unsigned code, and should not have allowed it access to hardware, or even to anything outside a sandbox.
Geordies running Norton update on the rear bridge station.
Ship is "falling apart", 18 people lost... "do you want to evacuate non essential personell?" "Nah, it'll be fine" 20 seconds later *ship explodes* 👌