Thursday, August 11, 2016

17 to 01: The Way to Eden


I bet you all wanted to tune in for us side-tweeting anti-vaxxers and Simpsons references. Lucky, lucky you.

I'm pretty glad we never got Kirk hitting on Dr. McCoy's daughter because that would be creepy. But what's the verdict on hippies here? Good? Bad? Mislead? Fashionably hopeless?

17 to 01 is available on iTunes. It updates Thursday mornings at 2:00 AM ET / 1:00 CT. We're also amazingly on Stitcher.

3 comments:

SkilTao said...

The hippies' objections to authority look foolish, but I could totally see their complaints as legit under, say, Romulan rule. (THAT would've been a very different episode.) All in all, I think it would've worked better if it weren't basically the hippy version of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.

Also glad it wasn't another Power Trio + Fem Lead ep.

The poison motif is great. The hippies seducing the crew, Severin bringing plague to the indigs, spiritual poison vs actual poison.

Good point about the ep being an opportunity to differentiate the characters. Lots of little bits to like in the ep- Chekov/Spock teamup, how the hippies have no sense of personal space, everybody giving Chekov funny looks for walking with a hippy, how Dr Sevrin *isn't* a Vulcan or a Romulan or anything else with an existing cultural connection to Spock, the songs... I like the idea of the Federation capturing and renaming a Tholian ship; and good call from Derek about the thigh-highs letting the singer get farther than anyone else.

"I have no doubt you will find Eden, or make it yourself." -I wonder if this was the seed for Project Genesis in Wrath of Khan.

VanVelding said...

Yeah, the kinky-haired blonde does kinda remind me of David Marcus (who he obviously is NOT), but it is possible some of these hippies did end up working on Genesis.

Real life hippies came from the anti-war movement (among other things), but without The Federation fighting in Vietnam and without any real Federation culture independent from Starfleet culture, there's nothing for space hippies to fight against. Absent a dimensional society with flaws and strengths, or recognition of the same by the middle-class guys running this show, hippies are railing against society itself.

SkilTao said...

Hm. The lack of a society to rail against makes for a curious, and surely unintended, parallel with Let That Be Your etc. Wasn't expecting that; puts your point in sharp relief, though.