Well, yeah. I mean, he had to have a name for people who noticed that at times the writing wasn't worth shite.

Huh—what do you know. It's several years later and if his name is Cushman he just published the second volume of These Are the Voyages. [checks] Yup. Sounds like him, as he also did a book on I, Spy.

"Cultural homogeneity
As far as all planets in Star Trek having just one culture"

I wonder what the actual number of Japanese willing to commit hari-kari or sepukku would have been. For all that's been made of it, the average person, regardless of indoctrination, is all about self-preservation.

I tried, Zack, but your relentlessly cutesy reviews get so fucking depressing. Between that, the absurd carryings on over, gee, someone somewhere used that kind of plot before, the strange rantings about things the show has to do, apparently in willful ignorance of the plain fact that tv series do indeed have all…

Jaysus. Michael Dorn can't act when his whole face is showing. C'mon.

In Cushman's new book he details all the things that went off the rails and contributed to the episode's murk, including losing its guest star a day or two before shooting began.

"But you have to accept that, given enough of it, you'll end up re-treading a lot of ground."

Because they'd have to continually stop and answer questions, or draw unwanted attention while posing as German soldiers?

There's no Kirk act of war in Balance. Pursuing and destroying a ship that just killed three hundred or so civilians in the process of committing an act of war against your people and territory is not in turn an act of war. Iirc the Romulan ship is still in Fed territory when it's destroyed, making the situation all…

Interesting points. Zack's bizarre, off the cuff claim about Pearl Harbor doesn't make much sense.

Funny, as I hadn't watched TOS in twenty years and was amazed at how well the best episodes hold up. About one in six are still remarkably good television, without caveats (unless you're the sort that can't go to theater because it doesn't look 'real'), pretty much as good as it gets in terms of scripts and acting,…

More than half your objections are answered in the episode, or you're simply drawing incorrect conclusions.

Yeah. I mean, people of color, and women, never act like entitled assholes.

Your objections are addressed in the script.

"Sure, a murderer for all the right reasons, but I doubt that makes it better. "

Yup. As should any culture that denies reproductive equality to the male of the species. Out, Earthlings!

"After expanding our crew's past, we're back to doing a greatest hits
package up of some old themes. There's the godlike alien being; there's
the attempts to push that godlike being to the limits of his endurance;
and there's a female crew-member who becomes enamored of said godlike
being, to the point of forgetting…

I can't imagine how one would even go about designed a scanning system
that could read a whole planet from orbit, let alone half a dozen of
them.)

"And apparently BoT is a major influence on the new Abrams' film."