In this episode we talk about the improbabilities of alternate Earths, Captain Tracey's career path up through door maintenance, and Chekov's axe.
It's a fun episode that's somehow equal parts good and bad. It's got both somehow in one weird package.
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7 comments:
This ep probably filled the season quota for "Spock = The Devil" jokes all on its own; and I love how literal the jokes are this time. To be fair to Spock's devilry, this is like the third or fourth time that he's made a telepathic suggestion at a distance. It *is* hilarious that nobody notices or executes them for it.
I don't know how many times I'd seen this ep before I realized that the title "Omega" "Glory" can be read as "Final" "Flag." I guess Omega's society is descended from Earth colonists who got dumped thousands of years back in time? Anyway, it's great that the Enterprise crew's knowledge of 20th Century Earth actually fails for once.
About the language thing, I can't tell what you were objecting to; the Yang's pidgin sounding dumb, or Kirk being able to recognize it, or Kirk declaring the native language invalid. So Kirk's grabbed their Holy Words, upended their religion, gets worshipped as a servant of God, and brushes off the question of the Prime Directive--I love how this gets caricaturized in the first scenes of Into Darkness.
(PS: the login worked correctly this time too! Looks like they actually fixed it.)
(Alternatively, it's also possible that my cookie-blocking browser add-on has broken.)
Glad to hear the commenting is working better.
I know he's influenced folks through walls in "A Taste of Armageddon" and "By Any Other Name," but in both of those instances he was working through solids. Air is a poor conductor of electricity and telepathy.
But yeah, good point. It's weird the arbitrary things that I do and don't accept.
I never caught that about the title either. You know I complain about the TOS titles, so I never gave that one a second thought.
My knock with the language is that the Yangs have to know both the "pidgin English" and the standard English version of The Constitution. If they can only translate the written words into pidgin, then how could they recognize the English version? If they knew the English version, then why the pidgin at all? Language and culture are so unpredictable as to be arbitrary, so I don't think it's impossible. And I get that it's all so that we can see their knowledge has been corrupted and watch Kirk demonstrate his familiarity of their ancient texts, but it's kinda strange none the less.
I think the idea is that Yang English has diverged from pre-Federation English, but not so far yet as to make the two completely unintelligible to each other. Apparently English is weird for not having this happen more.
Man, I want to say that the show usually skips over language barriers much bigger than this, but I actually can't think of another time that they've met an unfamiliar culture without the aid of trained diplomats, telepaths or a ship's computer.
I think you accidentally replaced the "Omega Glory" entry instead of copying it.
Should be fixed. Thanks for that link on English, BTW. It was a good read.
Heh, I remember overnight shifts.
And yeah, really cleverly written. I lifted the link from Neko, who 'most always has things of that quality.
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