Thursday, April 28, 2016

17 to 01: The Tholian Web


This is one of the crazier behind the scenes bits. The network and the studio are putting the screws to Star Trek and things are starting to come apart.

Nick at Nite is actually still a thing, but it's "nick@nite" now which tracks. Lost in Space ran from 1965 to 1968, a three-year run comparable to that of Star Trek. Strange, right?

The Russian space dog I was thinking about was Laika. They sent her into space prior to sending humans. Nick Abadzis wrote a comic about her in 2007 called Laika and it's pretty good and by good I mean it's about a dog that has no idea she's going to be sent into space and...then return to your uncle's farm upstate and live happily forever.

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.

EDIT: The audio for this should be fixed now.

5 comments:

SkilTao said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
SkilTao said...

An episode which is NOT about sentient crystals trying to sew shut a hole in the fabric of space.

"Uhura, ghosts aren't real! Now keep looking for that ghost ship."

The space suits are a real step up from their usual terrible away team protocols. I was so happy about that, and the colorful bits on the front of the suits, that I almost didn't notice that we only /get/ the suits so that Kirk can survive floating in transdimensional space later.

Mutiny *is* a rich concept--good on TNG for scraping it out of this ep and making a two-parter out of it (with brain slugs). And y'know, ENT had a sequence of eps in a region of unstable space, which is probably derived from this TOS ep; and FarScape's "Flax" ep looks like a straightup reworking of the Tholians' 'Web'... I'm not saying it surprises me how many people watch TOS and say "TOS didn't do [idea] very well, I bet I can do better;" and as a rule I *do* enjoy things that are composed of references to previous things; but I'm starting to feel like there's diminishing returns in having so many creators return to TOS' well too often.

VanVelding said...

Dude, of the few Enterprise episodes I've seen, I actually did see the 2 (3?)-parter in the mirror universe. It was actually pretty cool.

Me? I never get tired of taking a concept and rolling it over and over again until they get it right. Inexhaustible patience for that shit over here.

I am sorry for all of the delays in posting lately.

SkilTao said...

No worries, shit happens. Especially this time of year. And I was expecting miscellaneous delays whenever you finished viewing season 3 anyways.

I'm all for rolling old ideas around; but at some point it stops being "writers trying to get an idea right" and "everybody writes this so it's a trope now." I guess I'm feeling pre-emptively jaded about hypothetical shows I haven't watched yet--I'm sure the feeling will pass.

I completely forgot that ENT's mirror-verse eps involved the Tholians! I was thinking of something earlier in season 4 with dozens of megaspheres. Maybe I'm wrong about what inspired those eps, then, since they had more fun with Tholians later.

VanVelding said...

I'm actually kinda intrigued about the Tholians coming back. Very few things about Enterprise interest me.

As far as feeling pre-emptively jaded about things, I get that sometimes.