[Zeke]

Catchup time!

Joe: Oh, sir, it was terrible! They just lay down and died. It must've been the Pax!

I Wikipedia'ed "pax" and I'm still stumped (seemingly no applicable definition).

It's from the Firefly movie. The Pax was a government experiment in making civilians happy and docile. It worked a little too well.

In the opening scene several characters were missing their chest emblems (I still call them Cochrane deltas for reasons explained elsewhere).

I love that explanation, though it doesn't work as well when you remember that the delta hasn't always been all of Starfleet's logo -- each ship had its own in Kirk's day. (The VOY episode "Friendship One" screwed this up by putting a delta on the titular pre-TOS probe. The writers must have found out quickly, because no deltas were used on ENT.)

Excellent budget-saving device.

Mark Altman pointed out in a review that "The Menagerie" could so easily have been an excuse plot: "Hey Mister Spock, what was it like to serve with Captain Pike?" Ever since I read that, I've been deeply unimpressed with episodes that DO use that sort of plot, such as VOY's "11:59".

Why not tell everyone, even the Klingons, outright, "The people on this planet can manipulate your senses. If you go there you may be enslaved for the rest of your life."

Later series introduced the idea of a warning beacon that could be placed near dangerous things, as in VOY's "Memorial". Maybe Starfleet got around to that eventually. More important, though, banning contact with the Talosians because of their powers is strictly a TOS thing to do. The Starfleet we know from later series wanted to make friends with the Crystalline Entity. For reasons both good and bad, they would definitely not give up on contact with the Talosians, so I doubt General Order 7 lasted much longer.

Incidentally, Zeke, was the misspelling of Vina as Vena a joke or reference to something?

It wasn't deliberate. I'm not sure where the error came in, but I'm pretty sure I used an online plot synopsis as my reference for the fiver, and some of those have the wrong spelling. (The character's name isn't listed in the credits.) One of these days I'll fix it.

With that "Reeding" reference I was expecting to be a reference to Enterprise, which still doesn't exist.

It is an ENT reference. In the first episode they go to Rigel X and Reed asks if some butterflies are real or "some sort of hologram". It was controversial at the time with people who were looking for things to find controversial. Of course Earth didn't have TNG-type holotechnology yet, but the concept exists even today. (The same scene inspired this Kevin Wald filk, a riff on the Dolly Parton song that was used as the theme for the show Butterflies.)

the TJ Hooker thing came out of left field

You think THAT one did, try the one in this OC fiver.

but to me the name refers to The Life of Reilly

Me too! I love that site. It's fascinating to see the anatomy of a comics disaster -- how all these talented pros managed to bounce off each other in all the wrong ways, and how many patch jobs on top of patch jobs were needed.

Kirk: Oh, don't go all Reeves-Stevens on us.

I'm going to guess that this is a reference to Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Natch. This is a reference to Avenger, the conclusion of the first Shatnerverse trilogy. The bad guys in that book are an eco-terrorist cult called the Symmetrists, and without giving too much away, they turn out to have been involved in several important TOS events.

As usual, there are a lot of fun bits in the book. My personal favourite:

McCoy grinned proudly at Spock. "Hear that? They're applauding ME for a change."
"Doctor," Spock replied, "I am pleased that you think so."
Kirk cupped a hand to his ear. "Is someone applauding?"
McCoy's grin faded as he looked back to the screen. "I liked you both better when you were dead."

How could the Enterprise have Romulan spies aboard?

I think that was a reasonable concern. Secrecy is what the Romulans do, and nations here on Earth have kept agents in deep cover for long periods of time (as the show "The Americans" is currently reminding everybody).

Spock: That logic is unsound, Captain. An invisible ship may still be able to see other ships, just as a man with his hands over his eyes is still visible.
Kirk: (gasp) You can see me when I do that?

Gasp!

I actually stole this joke from a serious bit in the novelization of DS9's "The Search" (in which, you'll recall, the Defiant really is kidding itself about being invisible to the Jem'Hadar -- though they get that fixed later).

Side note: Kirk actually has a point here. Someone truly "invisible", i.e. completely translucent, would be unable to see because light would pass right through his retinas. A useful cloaking device would have to be more sophisticated than that.

I had to look this one up. Valen is a Bablyon 5 character.

More important, this scene plays out exactly like one in the episode "Atonement", so I took both the Centurion's dying message and the Commander's reaction from it.

Spock: Unfortunately, we cannot fire phasers again until our first three shots leave the screen.

That sounds like a video game reference, but which one?

I had Mega Man in mind, but it could've been several others, such as Samus in the first Metroid game. Three is a common bullet limit for platformers to prevent sprite overload.

McCoy: Are you confusing "women" with "pokémon"?
Kirk: No...but Raichu is a cutey.

Um, eww. On so many levels.

Shh, nobody tell Nate about Moemon.

No fiver [for "A Taste of Armageddon" or "This Side of Paradise"]? That's a surprise.

We have about six TOS fivers not done yet, most of them memorable episodes. This is because when we realized the series was nearly done, we staffers divvied up the best of the leftovers for the "End of 5MST" event. We really intended to do them all -- that's why we went ahead and started the event -- but several of us (not just me for once!) had bit off more than we could chew. Result: the last few unfived TOS episodes are really memorable ones whose absence is puzzling if you don't know the story. Btw, one of mine that I got halfway through at the time was "Spock's Brain", and that's why the first half of that fiver was so much older than the rest.

Kirk: Sneaking, sneaking, la la la la la...

Is this a reference to an Enterprise fiver?

Nate, Nate, Nate... what do we have a search box for? I first made this joke in 2001 in the DS9 pilot fiver, and it's since been in an absolute crapton of others both by me and guests. By the way, the inspiration for it was this children's song, so if you've ever wondered what tune this gag is sung to, listen to the mp3 on that page. The song is often done B-I-N-G-O style, dropping one word from the chorus each time around, hence the generic "la la la la la".

But yes, that particular one probably is a reference to an ENT fiver. This one, to be exact.