I missed a lot on the first editing pass on this so I'll have to set it up and redo it.
This one starts slow, but we really warm up to it. Full warning, we do talk frankly about sex and sexism in this one.
I try to avoid rewriting the episodes, but this one really demands it. Mostly because it has so much potential that isn't realized. We call back to a lot of episodes to try to understand this one, without much success.
Follow-up: Tombstone came out in December of 1993, Wyatt Earp came out in June of 1994.
17 to 01 is available on iTunes. It updates Friday nights at 8:30 PM ET / 7:30 CT. We're also amazingly on Stitcher.
1 comment:
At the end you guys say the Melcosians are stupid for not just using their telepathy to rummage around in the crew's heads, but... isn't that what happened? The ep is a visualization of Melcosian telepathy, rummaging around in the crew's heads?
Oh, Checkov... hey, since Kirk's mind provides the pattern for their deaths, maybe that means he thinks chekov's womanizing is going to get him killed.
"Where have you ever seen clothes like this before?" "On the Clantons!" Heh. So, I think you guys are being unfair to the ep. I thought the crew
-*do* know from the start that they're in a bizarro world of the Malcosians' making (ie, they know it's not time travel),
-speculate genre-savvily about how hard they expect to be railroaded (the initial "replay history" remarks), and
-have experienced enough godlike beings that they (and the viewer) *can't* just assume that the place and people aren't real.
You guys are probably right that more explicit "explainer lines" could be added, but I don't know how you'd foreshadow the final confrontation. Early on, have them recite a list of recently encountered gods, wizards, dreamscapes and historic replica societies? It takes a bit to set up the obliviousness of the townsfolk, introduce the four opposing gunmen, and execute Chekov's Subplot. I don't think you can sacrifice any of that without harming the episode; and as it stands, they progress through every conceivable way of influencing the bizarro world (and its people) until the "mind over matter" gambit is all they have left. That's a strong build-up, and I'm reluctant to undermine it.
I'm surprised that you want to discard the "humans can be destroyed by their own violence unless they rise above it" ending in favor of "these people could be clones, brainwashed trespassers, or disguised members of my own crew for all I know--let's murder them as efficiently as possible to see if bizarro world reacts somehow."
Y'know, that's a thought: the townsfolk *are* Enterprise crew, only some of whom can be (partly, temporarily) shocked out of their assigned Tombstone, AZ personas. That might add substance without requiring any further changes.
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