In this episode of Trek In Time, we're gonna be talking about Animotion. That's right. We're talking about Obsession from Star Trek The Original Series originally broadcast on December 15th, 1967. This is number 47 in shooting order. 42 in broadcast order, 13th of the second season. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological order. And we're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast, and we're also paying attention to when Sean's voice cracks uncontrollable. That's right. We're talking about a lot of different things. And who are we? Well, I'm the aforementioned Sean Ferrell, whose voice occasionally cracks despite the fact I am 54. Sean, I'm a published author. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids, and with me as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. Together, we like to chat about the Trek. Matt, how are you doing today? I noticed your voice is not cracking. When your, your voice cracked. My first thought was, is he Peter Brady going through changes? Yeah, that's right. You've got to rearrange. Well, as we always like to at the beginning of the show, we like to dip into the mailbag from the previous episodes and see what you've had to say about those episodes that we talked about previously. I just said the same sentence, forward and backward. I don't know why. Please just take my hand and come along with me on this journey. I will get to a stable place very, very soon, I promise. Before we started recording, I said to Matt, it's been a week. Mm. And then Matt said, yeah, it has. And then we talked about stuff we probably shouldn't have talked about before, starting a recording. Yes. I now disturbing stuff and I'm now kind of in three places at once trying to bring it all down. I'm trying to chill out and get back to Bedrock. And that bedrock for me is Trek. It's the one. One thing I can hold onto in this crazy world. So, Matt, what did you find in the mailbag for us this week? Just for viewers, we literally were like having a conversation. We're like, we're all doomed. Hey, let's record some Star Trek. So here we are. There we're, uh, the classic episode Gamesters of Triskelion that everybody loves. No, they don't. They all seem to hate it. Uh, but we had a lot of fun comments. From Happy Flappy Farm we had, we were so relieved this wasn't a Chicago gangster episode that we ignored the bad beginning. Eventually, that el, the elation wore off, and the ridiculousness and sexism of the activities on the planet overwhelmed our ideas of decency. The only bright spots of the episode were the scenes on the ship Ugg, the Mylar balloon costume. Oh, the horror of bad wigs and green skin paint. Next. Yeah, I hadn't thought about the fact She does look like a deflated weather balloon. Yeah, she does. Shauna looks like if she was just inflated, she'd be able to tell us what the barometric pressure was anyway. PaleGhost69 wrote, I may be reading too much into this, but Gamesters of Triskelion was a pointless waste of time. That's its thesis. The aliens (triskelionians? Triskelions? Triskes?) are wasting time doing pointless things just as we are watching episodes of Star Trek. We have the power to change the world and universe around us, but this is what we choose to spend time on because we are bored. Oh my God, it got so meta, or it could just be a bad episode. PaleGhost69 bending reality. Yes. I, I feel like I'm in a box. Oh boy. Oh boy. And of course wrong answers only. Very good. Mark Loveless, I haven't read this yet. I like reading these cold with you, Sean. 'cause experiencing it together for the first time is always fun. Plot of obsession. Uhura decides to get into voodoo, but seems to take things too far, awakening an interdimensional demon who gets mad because he's been summoned and Uhura, seems fully unprepared with requests, so he takes it out on the Enterprise itself. After much back and forth between the crew and the demon, the threat to the enterprise is reduced and the demon goes away. Kirk demands Uhura stop the voodoo stuff. So in a final ritual, she spits into a bottle seals it, writes obsession on the front of it, and throws the bottle into a time portal. Rumor has it that the bottle went back in time and hit some guy named Calvin Klein in the head. No idea what happened to the obsession bottle after that, to which he followed up with a separate comment for Sean, only. Uhura also gets latrine duty. Okay. We were all wondering. Thank you everybody for your comments as always. They are. I was gonna say they're on target, but they're also, I mean, it's interesting to have an episode that you unifies everybody so completely behind it that nobody jumps up and just like, wait a minute, you're talking about my favorite episode? No, nobody said that. Nobody said that. That noise you hear in the background, the flashing lights you see? No, that's not Sean losing his mind. That's the read alert. It means it's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away. Matt. Captain Kirk becomes obsessed with destroying a murderous entity that killed many of the crew of his old ship. After finding a mysterious cloud that quickly kills three crew members, Captain Kirk is determined to find a way to understand it and destroy it, stopping it from spreading to more planetary systems. Kirk recalls his past experience with this cloud a few years earlier in a different planetary system on the other side of the galaxy. His obsession with this cloud starts to interfere with his decision making skills as the commander of the Starship prompting a medical record from Bones and Spock. Sometimes the descriptions of this stuff, Sean, are so. What? Yeah, you reached the end. It's like some of the Wikipedia sentences. You reached the end and you're like, I don't remember how this began. Yes. It's like, where, where, where am I? Soon Spock and Bones realize why Kirk is obsessed with the cloud. The enterprise begins attacking the cloud only to realize the cloud is not running away and manages to enter the air circulation system of the enterprise. Kirk, Spock and Bones finally devise a way to destroy the cloud. I'm sorry. This is an awful description. Yeah, it pretty much is. Yeah. Oh boy. This is, as I mentioned before, episode number 13 of season two, originally broadcast in December 15th, 1967. Guest appearances include Majel Barrett as Nurse Christine Chapel, Steven Brooks as Ensign Garrovick, Jerry Ayres as Ensign Rizzo, Eddie Pasky once again as Lieutenant Leslie, and we'll be talking about him again in more detail. William Blackburn is Lieutenant Hadley and Frank Da Vinci as Security guard. Stephen Brooks as Ensign Garrovick. We'll be talking about Garrovick more, but I wanted to point out that Brooks at this point was a fairly well-known figure on television. Brooks was best known as Special Agent Jim Rhoades in the first two seasons of the television series, the FBI, which ran from 65 to 67. We've actually talked about the FBI here on the show as one of the shows that was a popular program at the time. His guest appearance here was one of many of various television shows that were popular at the time. He was also on the show, the Invaders, and he played Dr. Greg Petit as part of an ensemble cast from a short-lived medical drama called the Interns, which ran from 71 to 72. Among the regular crew. We pretty much have everybody here. We have a return happily of George Takei. He's back. Apparently the Green Berets finished filming and he was able to reprise the role of Sulu and he doesn't look any worse for wear, thankfully. And the world at this time. December 15th, 1967. We've moved back in time. Matt, I'm sorry to say we were so close to being in 1968 permanently, but we just had to drift backward and. I think we'll see some old favorites. I know you'll be excited to, to see them back in rotation, but this one kind of surprised me, the number one song at the time, Brenda Lee rocking around the Christmas Tree. Matt, give us a few bars. I could, Sean? Yes, but I refuse. Yes. I was going to say, this is a song that Matt and I both know very well because it was on regular holiday rotation. Our parents were of that generation that when you'd go to the gas station and you'd fill up a tank, you could get a free Christmas album at various times of the year. So we had a bunch of Christmas record albums that were emblazoned with, I don't remember which gas station it was. Sunoco or Hess or something like that. I think it was Hess, it was probably Hess, we had these Christmas albums. They would be broken out every year. Rocking around the Christmas tree was one of the standards on that. And to this day, it is a Christmas song that I enjoy putting on at Christmas time. And I will admit there are times at any time of year where I'll find myself humming various Christmas songs and this is one of them. But there were things about the song I did not know, and I found these interesting. Brenda Lee, who recorded the song. The song was written by Johnny Marks, who had previously written Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer and a Holly Jolly Christmas. Whoa. Yeah. I was like, holy cow. That's like for one guy to be like, I'm just gonna scribble out a couple of tunes. Do with these what you will. Oh yeah. You're gonna be singing these every year for the rest of your life. And Lee recorded the song when she was 13 years old, she had an incredibly mature sounding voice. So it sounds like a, to me. Almost like a late teen boy or a young woman in her early, maybe twenties, but she was only 13, and she recalled saying that she had no idea why Marks wanted her specifically to sing it, saying she was only 12. She was 13 according to the calendar. She had not done a lot of things with recordings, but for some reason he heard me and he wanted me to do it, and I did, and it became the big standard that she was known for, for the holiday season. And at the movies, yes, it's back like a bad penny. We can't shake Gone with the wind. Let us move on. And on television, we've been trying to compare in the Nielsen's Apples to Apples, Star Trek, getting in about 11.6 during its second season, a dip from its first season versus other programs that were popular at the time like this one. This is at number 30. Tied with Lassie, which we talked about last week, It Takes A Thief which ran on ABC, earning a 19.9 in the Nielsen's. It Takes A Thief was an American action Adventure television series that aired on ABC for three seasons between 68 and 70. Starring Robert Wagner in his television debut as sophisticated thief, Alex Mundy, who works for the US government in return for release from prison. So kind of a late sixties spy thriller ish, Suicide Squad sort of storyline. For most of the series, Malachi Throne played Noah Bain, Mundy's Boss. It was among the last, in that era of the spy television genre. Although Mission Impossible would continue for a few more years into the seventies. So this is in the era where Danger Man, the Saint, the Spy, like these programs were popular through the sixties and then drifted away. It Takes A Thief was inspired though not based upon a 1955 motion picture To Catch a Thief directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Both their titles stem from the old English proverb, set a thief to catch a thief, and Wagner in his memoir said that he consulted with Kerry Grant, who starred in To Catch a Thief on how to play Alexander Mundy. I thought that was a neat tidbit. And in the news on this day, Friday, December 15th, 1967, oh, blah, blah, blah, yawn, house rejection of aid bills. Uh, ya, ya, ya. Gold pool plans, new safeguards as buying surges. Whatever, whatever. Junta in Greece firmly in power after coup fails. So what, so what, what's this? The middle of the page core of virus is made Artificially. Yes, Matt? Here it is. Palo Alto, California. December 14th. Scientists have produced artificially in the laboratory, the active infectious inner core of a virus, the achievement. The achievement, mm-hmm by a scientist at Stanford University seems close to the laboratory production of life itself. It does not guarantee however that this will ever be achieved. The active virus core material is DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid. I bet you didn't think I was gonna get through that on the first go did you Matt? The master chemical of all life and the substance that determines the heredity of every living thing so far as is known. Biologically active DNA had never before been produced artificially in the laboratory. The accomplishment is believed to open the way to important progress in the study of genetics, the nature of virus infections, and probably the nature of cancer. The research therefore, is believed to be significant for many of the illnesses and biological problems that beset mankind. It may be even more important in its potentialities for disclosing the most intimate process of life itself. When the artificially produced DNA was put into living cells, it infected the cells just as a normal virus would. The infected cells stopped their own normal functioning to produce viruses and said, then the cells ruptured and died, and a host of new viruses spewed forth. This sobering writeup of having created an artificial virus. In 1967, just a couple of weeks before Christmas, what cheery news to share with the public. I read this and as I read it, I kept thinking, COVID, COVID, COVID. Mm-hmm. COVID, COVID COVID. On now to our discussion about this week's episode Obsession. I've lost track of. In the back and forth of who goes first, talking about episodes. So Matt, I'm gonna invite you to jump in, start our conversation here. How did you feel like, let's start big picture. Just overall impression, how did you feel about this episode? Oh, Sean, I didn't remember this episode. I did not remember this episode. I think I blacked this episode out. My feelings on this one are complicated. There are aspects of this episode I really enjoyed, felt very star trekky, but. Something I couldn't shake something. Sean, Sean, Sean from like, remember when we first started watching the original series and Kirk, the first time we saw him, seemed very blase about all the crewmen he was getting killed. Uh, he's back. And what the hell? It's like I thought we had evolved past this. He gets so many people killed and spends so little time being upset about it because of his Obsession. It was weird. It was really, really weird that I, it was great to see that Spock and Bones, they tried to like, dude, you're taking this too far. We might have to take you outta command. But the fact that they were being so delicate around it. It was like he has now gotten how many people killed at this point in the story, and you guys are still being like, you know what, we're gonna give him a second chance. Actually. How about a fourth chance, buddy? You got it. It was weird. It was really weird and I couldn't get past that on this episode. So for me, my overall take is kind of a, what the hell? Logic is out the window, things that happen that the decisions characters make in this episode, make little no to no sense to me for the main plot. And so for me, that kinda really makes me not like this episode. But there's also some fantastic character development between the different core characters on this show that I loved. So it's like I'm very torn. Yeah. Would be kind of where I landed. I can see where you're coming from. Um, I see a lot of the similar components that you're, that you're recognizing. And for me, there were a couple of things that kind of smoothed out those rough edges like. This to me was just 1960 television as opposed to a more contemporary story where they would dive deeper into various aspects of those rough spots that you talked about. I found it interesting that this is, in some aspects, reusing tropes that they've used before. They've used the, this young officer reminds me of me at that age. So they've used that before. I think they use it better here. Mm-hmm. Than they used it then when we've, we've seen Kirk do that. I also recognize that yes, we do have a Kirk who is somewhat blase about some of the deaths. I'm very interested in hearing from our viewers and listeners jump into the comments. Do you think that he was blase or do you think that there was, as I think there was, I think there was a subtle amount of guilt that was overridden by the obsession in driving after it. Let me, let me, let me give it to you this point. The end of the episode. He is vindicated because his gut reaction was correct, but the problem is it's littered with corpses to get him there and he ignores direct orders for the medicine that's got a shelf life that has to be delivered to save who knows how many people. And he's doing this off of a gut feeling. And the fact that it's proven right, doesn't justify it in my mind. Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Okay. It's like, yeah. It's, it's one of those, it the ends justify the means. Yeah. And it's like, what if he was wrong? What if he, what if he, he could have very easily been wrong. And then there's all these corpses, not just on his ship, but on the planet that they're trying to take medicine to. And it's like that is a reckless, like a horrendously reckless gamble that he's taking. And it makes him a bad commander. And that's kind of where I'm like landing of like, to me that's like a, wow, you took his character too far over the line for me, where it's almost unjustifiable to pull him back again. So they took the obsession. It was interesting, the Moby Dick, the tilting at windmills, all that kinda stuff. It was like, that was interesting. But I think they took him too far across the line to then redeem him and bring him back. It's like, I get what you're saying. That's very well said. You. He lucked. He lucked out. It's like this, it's like he got lucky. Like that's bottom line. I think that's, I think that's very well said and it, and it leads into what my next take on this was, which is I think. There are, this story has been retold by Trek a couple of different times. Yeah. And told better. Mm-hmm. And I think that's a product of time. Again, this is the 1960s, so they were dealing with, it feels very much like this kind of television from the 1960s is very much bold splashes of color on the wall. Yeah, that are meant to grab your attention, hold your attention, but there's not as much interest in nuance and digging deeper into ultimate meaning beyond that surface. As much as we have in later television, and I think later versions of this story include Picard in First Contact when he is driven to pursue the Borg backward in time and is putting other people at danger because he recognizes ultimately the danger that the Borg present if they're allowed to plant a seed in the past. Mm-hmm. And it wrestles with these ultimate issues around humanity, guilt, culpability, responsibility, it deals with those better than this does. Another episode that comes to mind, I don't remember the name of the episode, is the one where the Enterprise is sent in pursuit of another federation ship whose captain is going into Cardassian space and is attacking outposts and is threatening to start another galactic war. And his argument is, I know the Cardassians, because I fought the Cardassians before. I know how they think and what they are doing here doesn't make sense from any perspective other than as preparing for war. And it revolves around PTSD, questions about the ability to let the past trauma go. Miles O'Brien is a key player in that episode. And it ends with Picard shutting down that captain. They get him reigned in and they then take him back to the Federation where he is going to stand trial. But Picard makes the point of communicating with the Cardassians that they've been working with and trying to find this guy. He's not wrong. None of what you are doing here makes sense except from a perspective of preparing for war and we are now watching. So it is, they never reveal him being right or wrong. Mm-hmm. They deal with the moral dilemma of the action. And I think that within this episode, I found myself in a similar place to you, Matt, where I was able to lean heavier. It sounds like I was able to lean heavier into just full on enjoyment of the episode and not be pulled out of it by that, even though I do recognize, oh, there's a much better episode that could have been told around Kirk. I, you're right, Kirk goes far enough that the bodies that litter the past 24 hours are kind of crazy to say like, oh, but at least like he was right. So therefore his instincts like bore it out. But that's what Star Trek was at this point. Yeah. Star Trek. In this moment you have Kirk debating his actions with an engineer, a science officer, and a doctor, all of whom are going to argue from the point of here's what we know. Here's what we know will happen, that these things combine and here's what the consequences will be. And he keeps going back to my gut, my gut, my gut, my gut. And for them in this moment, I think the point of this episode is that gut instinct can win out. Gut instinct should be listened to, which is interesting given it's an era where we just read the headlines. Scientists had just managed to create a virus in the lab. This is during the Cold War. Nuclear bombs were being built and tested, getting bigger and bigger and bigger and stronger, and stronger and stronger. They were preparing to send up the moon launch, they would be walking people on the moon for the first time. Satellites were in orbit around the planet. People were going up into space for longer and longer periods of time. This is an era of science, so for a science fiction show, it's not all that unusual for sci-fi of this era to make the point of, yes, science can be sciencey. But it can't tell you about life. Life is about what lives in a man's gut. So that's what this feels like to me, writ large. But it also is a, a damning statement on at the same time, I think unintentionally. Yeah. In the final shot of the episode. And yes, I'm watching the remastered versions with the new special effects, but the, it's kind of like, uh. Good job, Jim. At the very end in the final shot, I think you're gonna mention what I also noticed, the final shot as the ship is pulling away from the planet is the largest crater you have ever seen. And basically like a third of the planet is just destroyed. Yeah. Like destroyed. Yeah. And you know that this is gonna basically kill the planet because with all of that stuff that got exploded, it's gonna probably create an like. Frozen nuclear winner atmosphere and like, yeah, yeah. It's gonna be create a, like it's nuclear winner and it's gonna kill everything on the planet. And it's like, and they're find a way, like, good job guys. It's like, yeah, we just destroyed that planet. Yeah. Oh, well. They not only do they, not only do they do that, I thought that it was a brilliant maneuver on the special effects team in the remastering to have that Yes. Demonstrated in that way. I was just like that. That's incredible. Yes, but they say before they do it like, oh, this will create massive shockwaves that the Enterprise could be disrupted by, which could disrupt our ability to get you back because we'll be ripping, I think they say a third of the atmosphere off the planet. Mm-hmm. Like so even if there's not a nuclear winner. Which there obviously would be, they're destroying the planet. A third of the atmosphere, they're destroying the planet is gonna be ripped off. So like this, this is now going to be a, a dead world. And it's done from a perspective of like, they found a place where it's not gonna hurt anybody. There's no living, like there's no people about. But wildlife, they don't show it. They don't show. Its being barren. It does have an atmosphere. So it is and plants, and trees and things. So there's life on this planet. Yeah. Not intelligent life, but there's life. Yeah. So it's, it is kind of, you know, I think of the era to say like, science is moving forward. And I, I mean we, this kind of hearkens back to the conversation Matt and I were having before we started recording this. There is a moment in this that reminds me of what we're going through now with the development of AI and the continuing debate around what that means of science is running forward to a certain degree and leaving the humanity to kind of pick up the pieces and say, what about us? And this episode seems to be landing squarely on, yeah, science can be sciencey even at the very beginning. Simple things like. Well, oh, you get this thing that's a reading based on a certain chemical. And Spock is like, that can only exist in a lab. It has never been seen in nature. So it's like, here is at the very beginning of the episode, science saying this can't happen. And Kirk's saying, but it does, and you gotta trust me. This is. This is, this is to me the dissecting Trek of like, what was the world like at the time? I think there's a lot of parallels to the where we are right now in society, because for decades, facts and knowledge and science were, and technology were paramount, and we're having a backlash to that right now where people are more like, my feelings, my feelings, my feelings is kind of like that's the pendulum swing we're right now. And it was probably the same thing around that time in the late sixties, early seventies. If there was a, A feelings swaying away, 'cause things were advancing and changing so rapidly. I think it's a gut reaction for people to kind of recoil back. Yeah. And it's kind of fascinating to me that we're in that cycle? Yeah. Or in it right now. Yeah. So we're paralleling the sixties right now. I wanted to talk briefly about some of the scenes that were, I thought, really, really cool character development. Like there is the debate that, that Matt and I seem to land on slightly different sides of around. Like, oh, is it distracting to have all these moral implications not addressed or is it just kind of like, okay, well if you just go for the ride, it can still be kind of fun. But then when you get into those moments where it is the direct references of Spock going to McCoy, I need your advice. I loved that scene. I like the scene where McCoy goes to Kirk and is like pushing him on things and Kirk is like back off. You're gonna damage our friendship. And McCoy is like, I'm not here as a friend, I'm a chief medical officer. You are acting funky and I need a witness in the form of a command officer. And Spock walks in and it's this like McCoy had gone in by himself, probably in orchestration with Spock to say like, oh yeah, let me go in and see if I can get him to back down a bit. And if he does, I'll just leave. But if he doesn't, I'll need to call you in. So when he opens up that door, it's not like, this is not coincidence, obviously it is like they're laying out effectively a trap for Kirk. Yeah. And I found all of that fascinating. The stuff that Scotty does, he's weighing on the background just like you're flying the ship apart, you're gonna damage the, the ship. We could explode in any minute. And Kirk's response, you gotta speed us up. Mm-hmm. All of these things are, I felt really well rendered. Again, they don't dive into the moral implications of some of these things, but you end up with the crew giving each other side eye a lot in the form of like, he's really kind of losing it. And then you get into the cat and mouse with the cloud. And again, remastered version is what I'm watching as well. The cloud on the planet, the cloud in the ship. It's just like somebody with some dry ice doing a, what I thought was a very good job. They managed to direct the dry ice mist pretty well, so that it seems kind of contained and creepy when it comes out in the, and I remember this from childhood like you, when this episode started, I found myself largely going, I don't remember this at all. Yeah. Until we get to the magical scene where Spock decides he's going to close off a grate. Yes. I remember the shot too, of him putting his hands like, whatcha you doing dude? And like, uh, it's like Spock seems to be panicking, which is very, is not gonna . Human emotion. What's, what's happening here buddy? Like, what is that? Like what are you, what are you doing there, fella? But the stuff with Garrovick, I found myself thinking as the episode went on, it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world for them to have Garrovick come back. What a, like I found myself thinking like kind of a wasted character that actor did a really good job, did with a very small part, and making him seem very human and really like connected as a member of the crew. In responding to Kirk as a kind of like, I know who you were to my father, I recognize that relationship. And also playing it a bit as not trying to rekindle that kind of relationship now with Kirk, but inadvertently doing so. I found myself thinking like if they had brought back Garrovick as a recurring character who could kind of become the one red shirt who doesn't die every time they go to the planet, it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world. Yeah. It would've been an interesting deepening of Kirk as a figure, as a captain to have him have a kind of protege. And I found myself thinking like it's really kinda a shame that they didn't do that. How did you feel about the performance of that actor in portraying Garrovick and Garrovick oh, and the idea of a Garrovick like character. They keep toying with, oh, you reminded me of me when I was that age. But they keep dropping those characters and then they fly away. Yeah. I I, I would've liked it too. I thought he was great. I thought his character was engaging. I thought the connection between him and Kirk and Kirk and his father was really interesting. A lot of depth to mine there. Yeah. You know, a lot of stuff to get outta that story, but it doesn't surprise me that they didn't, 'cause at the time, yeah, not gonna, another recurring character, you have to pay all that kind of stuff, actor and all that kind of stuff. It's like obviously it's not gonna happen and you could see it happening on like a Next Generation or a Deep Space Nine. But even they did stuff like this too, where they had a compelling character come in and they just did nothing with it ever again. So it's, it's. It was disappointing, but at the same time, I get it. Um, I liked it. I, I thought he was very good. My last comment, the first group to go down to the planet and Kirk recognizes like, oh, there's the smell. The smell. There's the smell. Do you smell that sickly sweet honey smell? And the security officers go off to look for sensor readings. And have been told, do not hesitate. Use your phasers shoot to kill. And they don't. And immediately go out. And for the first half of the episode, everybody who sees the cloud for whatever reason, doesn't freezes in their tracks. It's like if a Klingon jumped out and went, haha, they would shoot immediately. But a Misty cloud, they're left going, oh, what? Yeah. It didn't make, that didn't make sense in sense. A very weird way. Yeah. But did you notice that amongst the first deaths were. Or was Lieutenant Leslie, who is a recurring character as we have talked about him before. He has been in a number of episodes. He is played by Eddie Pasky. So we see the death of Lieutenant Leslie, but guess what, Matt? He's not dead. He's in another, I think 12 episodes. Yeah. He's not dead. I just, he's a regular, I just think that's fun. Yeah. Like you talked about like, oh, this episode doesn't do a very good job of wrestling with the moral implications of the captain having caused the deaths of the crew in this way. And I, argue to you. The reason why is because everybody in that crew knows nobody stays dead. There. There is another, there is one last thing I wanna bring up. And it's Nurse Chapel. Like of all the scenes? Yes. Like you're talking about the Spock and the bones thing and the character development and the way that's all handled. I thought it was fantastic. I thought her scenes were fantastic too. Yeah, and part of the reason for that is. Thank you Strange New Worlds for giving me a whole new perspective on Nurse Chapel. Yeah. But like the way that she goes in and convinces him, she goes, do you see this? There's one word on this that the doctor's given you, eat and if you don't, you're gonna, and she like threatens him and then walks out and when she puts it back in, into the, and hold her back into the rack of little discs was like, what was that? It's like, I just love the fact that she was blackmail on her own using Yeah. Yeah. On her own. Using her best judgment. She knows what he needs to do. Yeah. And I thought the way she did it was very funny, very charming, and it felt very true to the character, yeah, they realized on Strange new Worlds, and so it's like, it's one of those, you know, that I can't remember what the actress's name is that plays her. Yeah. She probably watched all the scenes. Like, they probably put it a comp. I wouldn't be surprised if they put a compilation of here's all of Nurse Chapel scenes from the original series and she probably watched them all and like the writers clearly studied the hell out of all this. And I just, I just love that how they rendered this new version of her to be true to the character. And it's a side character. What I think is interesting is it sets up, it sets up a life arc for the character. Yeah. That to me. They managed to create the backstory character who is, she's more verbose. She's more witty. She leans more into the spontaneity of the moment. She's jokier in Strange New Worlds. And then we know that in between that and here she has her love affair with Roger Corby. She goes off and does that work. Their relationship breaks down. The next time she sees him, she discovers he is now an Android version, that he has been dead. She has gone through stuff that has been emotionally jarring, which then paints the idea that this Christine Chapel has been through so many things, especially the relationship with Spock, the love affair with Corby. Whatever happens in those intervening years, she's a more mature and quieter person. In this moment, I was just like, still there in this moment. There was a little bit of a flash Yes of the earlier manifestation, which of course is not earlier. It's actually later they, yeah. Managed to do such a good job on that show of filling in the gaps of creating characters that fill in a gap that we didn't even know we had. Yeah, and I find that remarkable, and I agree with you that moment. For Chapel in this, it really stands out as like they had, they were this far away from saying like, oh, we've got this great character. Let's do a lot more with her. Mm-hmm. They were this far away from doing that if only they had recognized it earlier. So in closing, does anybody think that we are wildly off base and think that this is the best episode they've ever watched or this is just complete trash? Jump into the comments and let us know. I think Matt and I kind of land in the middle. Yeah, with me a little more in the pro column than him. I think that this one was a lot of fun for me and I was willing to ride along despite the fact that there are these moral ghosts lurking in the background. But what did you all see when you watched this one? Let us know as always, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the channel and we appreciate your support that in that way. But if you want to throw some quatlu's at our head, get them to bounce off the old Noggins. Go to Trek in Time Show. Click the join button there. Not only does it allow you to support us directly, but it will make you an ensign, which means you'll be signed up for our spinoff show out of time in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in joining us there. Next time, we are gonna be talking about immunity syndrome. Please jump into the comments, wrong answers only. What is that one about? Considering I just revealed that on this date in history, 1967. Scientists had just created viruses in the lab. What a timely episode to have. So thank you everybody for taking the time to watch or listen, and we'll talk to you next time.