[Nate the Great]

March 2nd, 1967, "This Side of Paradise"

No fiver (again?)
Transcript
Memory Alpha

The episode:

* The colony had 150 people, less than half of the Enterprise's crew. Why do the creators keep implying such small planetary populations? They don't have to cast all of them, would it hurt to say a thousand or ten thousand?
* As an amusing aside, the transcript describes the path in the colony as "tarmacadamed." My mind did not go to "tarmack" upon seeing that word, I had to look it up. Why "paved" couldn't have been used I can't fathom.
* They didn't bring a subspace radio technician. For some bizarre reason the phrase "Next Tuesday" keeps echoing in my mind. Weird.
* For some reason McCoy's line "On pure speculation, just an educated guess, I'd say that man is alive." has long stayed with me. Must be the snarker in me.
* Hey, the script says "Vulcanian" and last week Memory Alpha promised me that we were done with that nonsense!
* Ugh, McCoy saying that the colonists are so healthy that he'd have nothing to do. Putting aside broken bones and concussions, how do you know a supervirus won't be sweeping through next month?
* Leila's comments to Spock about how she can see past the mask to his real feelings come off a little too much like self-insert fanfiction, don't they? I imagine that there are any number of women over the past fifty years who have felt similarly. It reminds me of the continued obsession some women have with Mr. Darcy as some kind of perfect man. Blech.
* Erm, why is Starfleet Command so insistent on moving these people against their wishes? They have no jurisdiction here. If the locals renounce their Federation citizenship status, Kirk has even less of a leg to stand on.
* Okay, here we go with the telepathic spores. They thrive under Berthold rays, can that be replicated on board? They evolved in conjunction with the local flowers until humanoid hosts arrived? If humanoids never evolved on this world, how would the spores know what they are? Even if they absorbed the knowledge of other planets from the colonists, why would they feel the need to spread? Is this supposed to be a simple survival instinct? Is each spore a separate consciousness, or is it a hive mind?
* Kirk can't stop everyone from going down? There's only one transporter room, isn't there a critical part that he can remove to disable the thing?
* With McCoy's Southern-ness being emphasized here, I wonder if that's his natural state and when he's on duty he consciously dials it down.
* Again Spock refers to his parents in the past tense. Insert ranting about series bibles here, moving on...

Memory Alpha:

* This episode is the source of the empty bridge shot later used in "Relics." Can you imagine how sad it'd be if it didn't exist? The only other time I can think of where the bridge was completely empty is aboard the duplicate Enterprise in "The Mark of Gideon."
* Supposedly the book "Star Trek 101" names this as one of ten essential TOS episodes. I don't see it. It's a good concept, but there was just too much repetition and at the same time events seem to move too quickly.

YouTube:

* Spock gets sprayed and kisses Leila. I'm glad that it took longer for the spores to affect Spock, no doubt these spores aren't used to green blood.
* Kirk beams Spock up and goads him into a fight.