Series Overview for Star Trek: The Animated Series

This week in Trek news, The Shat has his knickers in a twist because the 50th anniversary for Star Trek is coming up, and the people at Paramount and CBS haven't announced plans for anything or contacted him at all. He wants to do some kind of musical. Anybody else see him suddenly trying to snuggle up to Georgie again?

*******

So here we are, doing another series overview, and it seems like that took no time at all. Probably because it didn't. Back in the day, a season was 26 episodes or there abouts, running on approximately the same schedule as the average school year. Then I found out that cartoon shows have a sixteen-episode season, running September through the end of December, and then January through whenever.

In the last few years, a season runs for however long the maker decides it should run, from the traditional 26 episodes, to three episodes. (Seriously: WTF, Sherlock?) Here, we got one and a partial seasons. And that partial season only existed because the show won a Daytime Emmy. 

(TOS won two Hugos and an NAACP award, but the first Star Trek Emmy went to TAS. By contrast, TNG won 19 Primetime Emmy awards over the life of the show, and was nominated for another 39. The comparison I'm giving here is not so much about the qualities of the shows, but an illustration of what happens in the earlier years of a fandom. By the time TNG arrived on the scene, the fandom was fully established, and had received multiple films, as well as having a good presence at conventions. The franchise was doing well, and CBS was willing to throw money at the new show, as opposed to TOS, which kept having its budget cut.) 

So we got 22 episodes, which is less than a typical season of Star Trek, but more than your average Saturday morning cartoon show. We've talked a bit about how we got this show ("kids in space"? whut?), what got nixed right away (Jimmy Doohan doing pretty much all of the voices, Chekov) and what became the status quo (Jimmy Doohan doing all of the voices, Arax at the helm).

Let's look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Animated Series, shall we?

First up: the animation

Gonna be blunt: the animation sucks. It suffers from low cell count, which is not just a medical issue. When I talk to people about TAS, they either have never heard of it, or didn't bother to watch, because they heard it was terrible. What's terrible is the animation. It was done by the Filmation animation house, which was known for uber-cheap Saturday morning shows (mostly animated, but some live-action as well). There were often times when they recycled shots. For instance...

This is the most common shot of the series. How do I know? It generally shows up once during each episode, sometimes multiple times. Basically, most times when Kirk is talking to Spock on the bridge. 

The second-most common shot?

It's the same shot, with Bones added in. On occasion, someone else will be standing there instead of Bones, but generally, it's Bones. If the trio is chatting on the bridge, this pops up without fail. It was even used in an episode where Spock passes out, and they removed Spock from the extreme left and placed him along the bottom edge. 

The motto at Filmation seems to have been "quantity over quality," though there were definitely times when you can tell that they were trying harder to make better quality stuff. They rotoscoped some parts, which is an inexpensive way of getting decent animation quickly and easily. (Quick description of rotoscoping: tracing. No, I don't consider this to be cheating. Frankly, I don't consider tracing to be cheating ever, but no one needs to know my strong opinions on tracing. They got the job done quickly and cheaply, so I'm not gonna throw stones at it.)

Kirk and Spock's swimming scenes from "The Ambergris Element"
were rotoscoped from episodes of Aquaman, which was also made
by Filmation.

Something else Filmation was known for: long, panning sweeps across terrains or landscapes. There was no actual animation involved (just moving the camera over a static image), so it was inexpensive and killed some time. This absolutely happened in TAS. Often, shots of the Enterprise were used as a background while someone else gave a log recitation, or to just kill time between scenes. More than once, a scene on a planet surface would end, we would go to commercial, and return from break to a shot of the E... sometimes several long seconds of the E. Then we would go right back to the planet again. Sometimes we would get a tiny bit of animation, where the starburst patterns on the front of the engines would spin, but a lot of the time, it was just static shots of the ship.

The places where the animation would be redeemed were definitely the background and establishing shots. I was floored by the artistry of these shots, and often asked myself if I was watching the same show.

"The Ambergris Element"

"The Lorelei Signal"

"Once Upon a Planet"

"The Pirates of Orion"

"The Practical Joker"

"Yesteryear"

Whoever was doing the background and still shots on this show clearly had some skillz - the kind you pay bills with. This was not unusual for Filmation, who seems to have made a regular habit of pairing lovely backgrounds with crap movement. A lot of the credit for that was given to background department head Erv Kaplan, who worked as color director on TAS. (Another TAS alum, as layout artist, is Glen Keane. I'm sure the average reader doesn't care, but I had a squealy fangirl moment when I saw him listed under Mr Kaplan. For those less obsessed with animation than I am, Glen Keane is a lead animator for Disney, and probably animated your favorite Disney film characters.)

The difference between the animated and live shows

There were two things I wondered about going into this series: How would the stories change, and how would the visuals change?

In the first case (story), I wanted to know how a typical Star Trek story could be pared down from 60 minutes to 30. While there is such a thing as a 60-minute animated show, it's not a weekly thing. They generally exist as 30 minutes (weekly show), 60 minutes (holiday specials), and 90 minutes (theatrical release or made-for-tv movies). Why are they always 30 minutes for weekly shows? Because it takes months to produce a hand-drawn, animated show. Theatrical films like Disneys take four years, pre-planning through finish.

So you know that CBS and Filmation were not going to just take whatever completed scripts they had lying around and just animate the action instead. They were also concerned because in moving Star Trek from prime time to Saturday morning, they were banking on an audience of only children. This was not the case, as adult fans of Star Trek were continuing to watch, but now that it was considered to be more "family friendly" certain things were not going to fly.

They could not have Kirk bed every cute alien that came his way.

In the case of Kirk and his extraterrestrial affairs, this went out the window and stayed there, with the exception of one episode: "The Jihad." In the final episode of season one,  a human huntress named Lara suggests to Kirk that they hook up and "make some green memories." Despite her aggressive flirting, Kirk turns her down, and it's actually pretty tame compared to some other Trek fare.

In fact, the only other romantic moment I recall from this series is in the final episode of season two, when Robert April kisses his wife, and it's pretty chaste.

So TAS is TOS minus the overt sexuality.

Okay, what else?

Well, with half the run-time, we missed out on a lot of interpersonal relationship moments. I didn't realize how much I missed the Spock-Bones ribbing until it showed up again, fifteen episodes in, on "The Eye of the Beholder."

Also missed and rarely addressed: the relationships of the bridge crew. There were small moments in TOS where we got to see the others relating to one another without the help of the Golden Trio, and you know they genuinely cared for one another and worked well as a team. There really isn't much of it here, which is a shame, because I kind of liked Arax and I wanted to see how he might have formed friendships with the others. 

Surprisingly, the remainder of the stories stayed intact. They all struck me as very Star Trek, and the plots themselves did not seem to suffer from a lack in time in which to tell them. Some of the unused TOS scripts were even rewritten to fit within the construct of the animated series ("More Tribbles, More Troubles"). True to form, a few of these episodes were fantastic, some really just sucked, but most were okay.

"More Tribbles, More Troubles"

And how about them visuals?

We made out like bandits on the visuals. Because we essentially nixed being uncomfortably close to Kirk's love life, we also ditched most of the ridiculous outfits that the Girl du Jour wears. That's a bit of a mixed bag for me, because while I hated so many of those costumes, I did enjoy making fun of them. But in exchange, we got those gorgeous backgrounds that I was raving about earlier, plus our storytellers were allowed to pretty much write whatever the hell kind of story they wanted, based on the fact that drawing complicated alien cities (and the people that inhabit them) is quicker, easier and cheaper than building the sets and costumes. The Boldly Going was made all the more believable because none of the aliens needed to be humanoid. They didn't even need to breathe air.

Freed from the constraints of a live-action show, Star Trek lost no time in replacing the navigator with an alien with six appendages.

And adding another communications officer.

The very first episode  ("Beyond the Farthest Star") featured not only Arax and M'Ress, but also a ship that could not have been easily produced with models, and a non-humanoid alien.

And they just kept getting better...

"Albatross"

"The Infinite Vulcan"

"The Jihad"

"The Slaver Weapon"

And can we just talk about some of these Gojira-type monsters? Feels like Gene Rod was standing in the background saying, "Can we get bigger? Scarier? More teeth?"

"The Ambergris Element"

"Eye of the Beholder"

"Mudd's Passion"

Variations on this dragon-thing showed up in multiple episodes

"Once Upon a Planet"

"How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"

"Yesteryear"

Let's take a look at some actual episodes...

Command Gold Star Awards

"Yesteryear"

Kirk and Spock discover that something has been changed in Spock's timeline, so he uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time to fix it, posing as his own older cousin. When little Spock runs off in the wilderness to prove himself, his pet sehlat is fatally injured and he makes the tough decision to put him down. The network thought the outcome was too dark and wanted to change it to a happier ending, but Gene Rod put his foot down. He felt to alter it would cheapen the episode and insult the intelligence of the audience. He was right. The episode, though feelsy, is excellent because the ending was allowed to stand.

"The Slaver Weapon"

This is the second time that an episode of Star Trek has felt like a good science fiction story was translated into Star Trek terms (the first being a TOS season one flop, "The Alternative Factor"). The earlier episode felt as though the story existed by itself, and Trek characters had been slotted it. It also translated to a live-action show in the worst way possible. Here, the feeling of solid, non-Trek science fiction is the same, but a better job was done in making the two mesh. Writer Larry Niven had a series of stories with characters similar to Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, and simply altered things to make them fit. In the episode, our trio encounters a hostile race that takes them hostage, and a mysterious weapon with a mind of its own. Three of my favorite characters get to take center stage in an excellent story.

"The Ambergris Element"

This one was not quite as good as the previous two, and it did have some issues, but I like the fact that Star Trek decided to do an episode that featured an underwater environment. It lent itself nicely to several special effects lenses that have been used in other episodes with less success. It has a large monster, a sunken city, and some sketchy surgery that leads to Kirk and Spock living in a large water tank on the E. It ends with a bit of interplanetary politics and some iffy science, but there were more things that I liked about this episode than not.

"Are You High, Star Trek?"

The episodes that I hated the most in this series all seemed to surround stories too off the wall to work, or visuals that looked like bad acid trips.

"Bem"

Some a-hole alien is onboard the E, observing how Starfleet operates in action. He gets them kidnapped by hostile Prime Directive aliens, and is later revealed to be a "colony creature" or, lots of dudes stacked one on top of another, like Vincent Adultman from Bojack Horseman. From the start, I hated Bem. Not only is he a complete dick from the start, but them he breaks into different parts to pick-pocket Kirk and Spock, setting them up to fail in the freakiest way ever. I wanted to punch Bem the whole time. Even at the end, when he suggested that he commit his people's version of suicide.

"The Infinite Vulcan"

I really tried to like this one. I really did. It's written by our beloved Chekov, and it starts out pretty good. But it was plagued by constant rewrites, and Gene Rod bugging Walter Koenig to include things that he wanted. What we ended up with was two stories stitched oddly together.

The E ends up on a planet inhabited by plant people. They have mostly died out due to plague, but were rescued by some human dude who turns out to be one of those meglo-maniacal assholes from Khan's sleeper ship. He intends to use the plant people as his army, and will wage war over the galaxy. But first he kidnaps Spock and makes a giant copy to use as some kind of general or some shit. This episode was a mess. I look forward to getting Chekov back and never having to watch "The Infinite Vulcan" again.

"The Magicks of Megas-Tu"

This is my least favorite episode of this series. They wanted to do a story about the E meeting God, which had been pitched to TOS and nixed by the network, so they tried it again for TAS. Also nixed. But the network said they could meet the Devil. And thus did this episode become "the one where they meet the Devil." So why do I hate this episode? It's ridiculous, start to finish. The E encounters some hole in space or something, which is then followed by several minutes of visual vomit that probably are really cool when viewed on mushrooms. The crew meets the Devil. Then it turns out that his people are aliens who went to Earth a long time ago, and were then put on trial in Salem for witchcraft. The E crew is then put on trial as well. The whole thing is just awful.

So what's the bottomest of the Bottom Lines?

Again, when I mention this show to people, they either don't remember it, or think it's awful and don't bother to watch the whole thing. It could for one of many reasons, or it could be all of them. Its differences to TOS and its descendants may point to the reason why no one watches this series:

- It was relegated to Saturday mornings, so unless you were a fan of the original, were a kid at the time, or made the time to tune in then, you probably didn't see it.

- The animation sucks. Like, a lot. Trust me, I do not watch shitty animation, and if your show boasts a low cell count, I will turn it off. So I understand that complaint.

- The animated series was denounced as canon at the end of season one TNG, despite the fact that some of that TAS canon was cherry-picked to keep. However, in 2006 it was reinstated as canon. The idea doesn't seem to have taken right away, but things mentioned in TAS started showing up in Voyager and Enterprise, and it is considered canon by Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.

"Soooo, should I watch this, or what?"

YES!

Despite the shitty animation quality, the stories are just shorter Star Trek faire, often with the same kinds of themes and campiness. Guest stars from TOS episodes pop up from time to time, including Mark Lenard as Sarek and Roger Carmel as Harcourt Fenton Mudd, There are some irksome things (why does Spock become the Magic Vulcan?), but it retains most of the charm of the original series,  is good for a few laughs here and there, and includes some scenarios that would not have been possible on TOS.

If you want to skip the crap and just view the best of the animated series, check out "The Slaver Weapon" and "Yesteryear," as those seem to get the best reviews across the board. Everything else gets mixed reviews at best, and be sure to check out my votes for worst if you're in the mood to scream "WTF, Star Trek?" at your viewscreen.

Next week we start films, so grab your popcorn, because that shit is a roller coaster.

*******

So a few weeks ago when I bought that first Teas' Tea, I bought another flavor, the green tea. I was excited. I love green tea. Much like "The Infinite Vulcan," I wanted to like this tea. I really did. But it was not good. Being that it was unsweetened, I added sugar. That did not help.

"Oh, that's my favorite tea," said Roomie cheerfully.

"It's gross," I reported.

"I'll take the rest," she volunteered.

She took a pull... then she pulled a face. "That doesn't taste right. Maybe it's a bad bottle."

Bottle looked fine. She drank the rest and did not get sick, so we guessed it had not gone bad.

This week I bought another bottle from a different store entirely.

I took a sip. "Same. Not good."

"Bad batch?" suggested Roomie. "New recipe?"

"Possibly," I replied. "Either/or. Do I keep buying bottles at different stores, hoping that someday it'll taste better?"

"Dunno," said Roomie.

So, I don't recommend this week's tea. Maybe it is just a bad batch and I'll get a good bottle later. I really don't have a good answer.

http://www.teastea.com/

Uhura and Bratty

ST:TAS Season Two, Episode Three "The Practical Joker"

"The Practical Joker"
Air Order: 19
Star Date: 3183.3
Original Air Date: September 21, 1974


Hey friends, just in case you're paying attention, yes: this episode does take place more than one hundred years before the previous episode. Doesn't our ships' crew look fabulous for being more than 100 years old?

*******

Kirk's Log 3183.3: "Doing this asteroid survey thing and feeling like hot shit because we're ahead of schedule."

As everyone knows, anytime you've ahead of schedule on anything, something will come along to fuck up all of the shit, and you'll end up late.

For instance, Romulans in Klingon cruisers.

So the Romulans start firing, and Spock guesses that they were waiting behind the asteroid to ambush the E.

"Let's fight back!" says Scotty.

"Naw," says Kirk. "We're outnumbered. Let's just walk away."

Wait, Mr Shoot First and Ask Questions Later wants to walk away? Is it Opposite Day or something?

So they fly in the other direction, and the Roms chase them, and Uhura opens a channel.

"What the hell?" Kirk asks the commander.

"You're in our space," the commander replies.

"We're nowhere near your space!" says Kirk. He threatens to file a complaint in the same sort of voice that bitchy entitled soccer moms use when they ask to speak to your manager.

"Yeah, you forgot that trespassing into our space is punishable by death, huh?" And the commander signs off to fire again.

Scotty says the shields can't take more hits at close range, and Sulu reports some kind of weird anomaly up ahead.

"Not on the sensors," says Spock. No equipment can figure out what that thing is.

"Cool, let's fly into it," says Kirk. "We can lose them that way."

Wow. Really? Getting into a fire fight with the Romulans isn't worth it, but flying your expensive ship and it's 500 crew members into some mysterious space goo is perfectly safe?

Kirk is the kind of guy who will sniff the milk when you offer him the carton and say "Smell this."

Half-way through the cloud-thing, Kirk remembers to ask Spock what their chances are of coming out the other side. Not before. Half-way through. They do come out the other side, and Sulu says that the Romulans wisely turned away and decided not to fly in after the E, so Kirk has effectively lost them. 

I'm not giving him credit for that. That was a dumb move.

They decide to pause there in space for repairs.

Later, the senior crew members are in the briefing room, sharing a meal, and for once, the food is not those weird little colored squares of Jell-o, or whatever the hell those were. It's actual food. 

They talk about repairs, and toast themselves for being awesome. Sulu spills water down the front of himself, and I vow not to make a cum joke. Please feel free to make your own, though.

As turns out, they all spill water down their fronts. Kirk proposes that they have a practical joker on board.

"So what?" asked Bones. "We did that back at the Academy, with trick glasses."

 And Sulu chimes in:

STAHP IT, STAR TREK.

Scotty says it might be problem with the food replicator. Kirk tries to take a bite of his food, and the fork bends away from his mouth. They laugh.

Kirk's Log, supplemental: "Everybody's getting punked. Even Spock."

So Spock finds some new piece of equipment at his station, and instead of one large eyepiece like usual, this one has two eyepieces, like binoculars. You know what's going to happen. Much like Kirk saying, "Let's just fly through that random pea soup in space," Spock decides to put his eyes to the eye-holes of this mysterious equipment. Sometimes, I wonder why any of these people are still alive.

Everyone laughs at Panda Spock, and I guess that scene was not so much a scene on its own as it was a break in Kirk's supplemental log. I kind of like that. Normally we just get some voice over with an exterior shot of the ship for log entries.

More Kirk Log: "It's not as funny now."

Arax and M'ress are eating in the mess hall and invite Scotty to join them. He is busy working, and thanks them, planning to grab a grilled cheese on rye and head back to work. The replicator then drops a crap-ton of food on him, and I'm left to think about how fucking awesome a grilled cheese on rye sounds.

M'Ress and Arax laugh, but Scotty is pissed off, and he ends up blaming them for it, claiming that he's going to report them. The replicator tosses a cream pie in his face.

Kirk's Log continues, saying that everyone is now on edge.

An irate Kirk stomps onto the bridge, yelling about pulling clean uniforms out of the laundry chute and finding this on the back:

I'm sure you can imagine the barking laugh I let out at seeing that for the first time. (I was sitting in the stands at an indoor pool, too. It ricocheted off the walls.)

 A raucous laughter issues from the PA system, but Kirk just thinks it's one of the bridge crew. He's alerted to the fact that fog is seeping in under the door to the lifts, and he and Spock go through the door. I guess that there's another door on the other side of the lift, because they walk through the lift and into the corridor. A scan says the fog is real, and Kirk slips, ending up in Spock's arms. There's a nice little moment for all you Spirk shippers out there. It even comes complete with an Austin Powers-type pick-up line:

"Oh no, I fell over! Oh no, I fell over again!"

They hear the laughter through the PA again and surmise that the practical joker is actually the ship herself.

On another deck, Sulu, Bones and Uhura are taking their down-time together, and enter what is marked as the "rec room." As soon as the door closes, Spock calls a general alert. But they don't hear him because THEY'RE IN THE FUCKING HOLODECK, YOU GUYS! First appearance of holoeck, y'all! They don't call it that, but you know that's totally what it is. The room started out plain and empty with a podium in the center, and Sulu programmed it for the beach.

They decide to take a walk through the woods, and the scene changes to a wooded area. M'Ress pages them over the PA, but the call isn't broadcast in the holodeck.

Uhura remarks that it's nice that they can hang out without having to worry about pranks, and they hear that laughter again. Bones decides that it's just an audio tape rewinding. But further along, a deep-ass hole is being covered up by branches and leaves.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

So they're walking through the forest, and Bones makes his second "just what the doctor ordered" remark in three minutes. Then they fall in the hole, and I wonder if he'll say this isn't what the doctor ordered. Bones starts yelling at the laughing computer, and she twists his words into unclever puns.

On the bridge, Kirk and Spock ask the computer where Sulu, Uhura and Bones are, and she gives them cheeky answers. Kirk asks Scotty to shut down all of the computer's logic functions.

On the holodeck, Sulu and Uhura help Bones out of the pit. I really like that Uhura is shown helping her fellow crew member rather than just standing to the side watching Sulu do it. She may be wearing the world's shortest skirt and a pair of what is essentially go-go boots, but she's perfectly capable of helping a friend. You go, TAS.

Bones makes a vague threat against the computer, who declares that she'll cool him off, and the holodeck switches over to a snow storm. Sulu is concerned that they won't be able to see the exit in all the snow.

Down in the computer room, Scotty tries to shut down certain parts of the computer. The Enterprise retaliates by turning off the gravity. Scotty hits the ceiling, as does the bridge crew.

Arax looks awesome in zero-g. Also, pretty sure that's Scotty on the left.

On the bridge, Spock suggests that the E is trying to protect herself, and that if Scotty leaves the computer room, the E will turn the gravity back on. Kirk suggests this to Scotty, who crawls along the ceiling and into the corridor. He falls to the floor.

Spock, in normal gravity, suggests that something in that mysterious cloud they flew through altered the E, and now she is having the equivalent of a nervous break-down.

"How do we fix it?" asks Kirk.

"Fuck if I know," replies Spock. "Do I look like a mechanical Freud?"

Down in the holodeck, our intrepid trio are freezing their asses off without a solution. Uhura reminds them that they're still just in a room, so if they walk far enough, they should hit a wall. This is smart thinking, and they start walking through the snow.

A search party has discovered that Sulu, Uhura and Bones are trapped in the holodeck, and the door is jammed. They report to Kirk, who calls Scotty for Ops assistance, and they all start laughing. Spock determines that the ship is mixing their air with laughing gas, which apparently sucks for Vulcans. The trio in the holodeck trudge through the snow, laughing their asses off about how they're going to die.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Kirk's Log, supplemental: "Spock managed to get the air thing fixed before passing out. Three cheers for the Magic Vulcan!"

So they've determined that they only have six hours of breathable air left. Seems kind of late in the game for a Disable the Ship plot, but whatever. Six hours of breathable air left, six minutes left to wrap up this episode. I guess the writers set their own timer against themselves to come up with a solution. Though if you're like me, you knew instantly how the plot had to be concluded.

Scotty and his Ops Reds have given up trying to use electronic devices to get the door to the holodeck open, and are now utilizing crowbars. The E has decided that she's tired of snow, and switched our trio over to something more interesting.

It's all good, though. In another moment, the doors of the holodeck are pried open, freeing them. But after almost freezing to death, they're sent back to their stations on the bridge. I hope they called their unions after this mission. That's some straight bullshit.

The computer takes over the helm, and directs them back to the Neutral Zone.

Of course the Romulans are waiting for them.

But then the E stops and poops out this grey thing from the shuttle bay doors.

"The hell?" asks Kirk.

The grey thing morphs into another Enterprise. It looks like they're just flying in tandem, some space apart, but I guess it's meant to be seen as the new Enterprise is three times larger as the original. Oddly, the original looks like CGI here.

The Romulan ships back off a bit, and the bridge crew discuss what might be happening. Spock suggests that the E is getting revenge on the Romulans for firing on her earlier. 

Bones reminds them that the Roms will fire on the fake E, destroy it, and still have the upper hand.

But Kirk says that the Roms are all honor-bound and will find being tricked a worse fate than death.

We get a cool shot from inside the Romulan ship at this point. When they aren't able to contact it through subspace radio, they fire on it. It deflates like a balloon, and we hear the computer laughing. Maybe the laughter is also being broadcast over the PA of the Romulan ships. It's certainly heard when the fake Enterprise deflates, and I guess no one told the E that in space, no one can hear you chuckle.

The Romulans chase the remaining Enterprise.

Kirk decides to trick the computer into thinking that he's terrified of flying back through that intergalactic sludge.

Of course the E finds this fascinating, and flies herself right through the cloud again.

This time, the Klingons follow. We get another shot from inside their ship, only this time, we see it from inside the cloud. It reminds me of the opening scene from "The Magicks of Megas-Tu". All of the drugs were done on this show.

Back on the E, the computer's new personality is shutting down, and helm control is back. Flying back through the cloud somehow reversed the whole thing, even though Spock originally described the issue with the computer being "subatomic particles attacking the ship like bacteria attacking living matter." I guess flying through the cloud again just reverses that. 

Uhura says she hears something over the radio, and puts it on over the PA. It's the Klingon ships, yelling at one another to control the food dispensers. Much like both tribble episodes (here and here), Kirk has decided that, rather than help the Romulans, he'll just let them deal with it themselves, and the bridge crew laughs, and they fly off into space.

This episode was okay. We got some nice moments, like with that Spirk ship moment in the corridor, and when Sulu and Uhura help Bones out of the pit, and later, when he's tired of walking through the snow and they encourage him.

But there were a few unexplained things as well. For instance, how big was the cloud-thing? Was it so big that the Romulans could not have flown around it, and gotten at the Enterprise that way? Was following it their only course of action? While we're talking about the Romulans, what was up with that subplot? How did they know the Enterprise would be at that exact spot at that exact time? Did they infiltrate some information saying that the E was investigating space phenomena in the area? Kirk himself said they were three days ahead of schedule, and he had no idea that he'd be there at that time. How did the Roms know they'd be there? What's more, why were they there in the first place? Both the Romulans and the Enterprise claimed that each one was in their space. If the Romulans were right, why was the E in Rom space? Seems like a pretty big mistake to make, sending the E into Rom territory, especially if the punishment is death. It seems far more likely that the Roms were in Federation territory, but if that's the case, we never find out why.

The plot hole vendor apparently had lots of product to push this week.

A last thing concerning the holodeck, something which I've thought of often, and which is suggested here, but not explained: how does the holodeck work? I mean, I know the main logistics, but if Uhura is correct, and you simply walk far enough, you will hit a wall. I have never seen anyone run into the wall of the holodeck. I know that from the point of perspective, when you journey through the scene presented to you by the computer, the scene will change as you move and present you with different scenery, ie, walking down the street. But if Uhura is correct, you should actually, physically walk forward through the holodeck room and hit that wall eventually. The room is not infinite. I tried looking up the specs and technology for the holodeck, but this one piece of information seems to be missing, like some weird technological plot hole.

*******

So I have this theory, and even though I've had it for a while, I know others have had it, too. It's the theory of _______ Spice. Most of the time, the produce in question is pumpkin, but it can work for many different fruits or veggies. The theory is... that food item doesn't actually taste like pumpkin, or the other produce mentioned. It just tastes like the spice palette used. So pumpkin spice, apple spice and durian spice will all taste similar, because they don't really go out of their way to include that taste of produce. While apple spice is less likely to taste only like the spice palette used, I have encountered some apple spice items that just taste like a combo of cinnamon and cloves and nothing else.

The tea I had this week was like that. I had a mug of Tazo Organic Peach Cobbler, and did not expect it to fall into the realm of (Blank) Spice Theory, but it did. You know what peach tastes like. You probably know what peach cobbler tastes like. This tasted like neither. The box claims that it's made of "black teas with peach notes, apple and cinnamon, and other natural flavors." Wait, did it say apple and cinnamon? It did. And guess what this tea tastes most like? Apple and cinnamon. Any "peach notes" involved were gone with the wind, and while there was some apple, it mostly just tasted like a spice palette. Don't get me wrong, it was good. But it does not taste like peach or cobblers.

http://www.tazo.com/Product/Detail/6

Uhura and Bratty