1.14 “Balance of Terror”
(I hope nobody minds me kicking off the thread for this one!)
Nice start: Within the first minute, we have a wedding (yay!) but hints of trouble to come (lost communication with two earth outposts). I like that the wedding appears to be nondenominational, or at the very least, recognizing “our many beliefs”.
Random thought: The Enterprise’s view screen appears to be almost exactly a 16:9 ratio, the same as today’s HD television sets. Pretty good prognostication on the set designer’s part!
Love the 60s-era graphic of the Neutral Zone.
Spock: “And now, necessary exposition.” Romulans! But we know almost nothing about them…yet….
Kirk: “Their war, not ours.” After Dara pointed out the Nazi-hunting parallels in “The Conscience of the King” (which I’d never picked up on before), this week’s look at post-war grudges is more obviously connected to WWII than I’d thought about in the past.
More looks at areas of the Enterprise we don’t often see; this time, the phaser control room. I’ve said it before, but I really like it when we get to see these different areas and personnel beyond the standard bridge crew.
First glimpse of a Romulan ship! Pity that their later alliance with the Klingon Empire (and 1960s budgetary constraints) led them to share ship designs with the Klingons (as much as I love those designs) rather than keep developing their own designs (until ST:TNG, at least).
Mr. Stiles was a bit abrasive, but I like that after Sulu backed him up, Kirk was willing to listen to their concerns.
Nice of the Romulan video pickup to zoom in on the commander’s face. And if it wasn’t enough of a shock that the Romulans look like Vulcans, the commander is Spock’s father! Boy, that’ll make dinner table conversation uncomfortable. Nice to see that Kirk called Stiles out on his bigotry.
Ah, the tortured life of a Romulan commander. They do a good job of using formal language and Roman analogues to sketch out (if in broad strokes) the basics of Romulan military society.
How do phasers explode after a certain distance? They seem to be operating more like photon torpedos. (Most likely, photon torpedos simply hadn’t been thought of yet, and they needed some sort of analogue to depth charges. It’s still a bit of a niggly continuity problem, though.)
Assuming the Romulan’s plasma blast isn’t a “heat seeking” type of weapon, couldn’t the Enterprise have reversed along a curve to get out of the plasma weapon’s path, rather than simply backing up in a straight line?
ST:TWOK gets a lot of recognition for its submarine-style battle between the Enterprise and the Reliant, but this is the only other time in the series that I can think of where they present a space battle using submarine warfare concepts.
The cramped design of the Romulan ship’s bridge, with its crew gathered around a central console, does a good job of reflecting a submarine bridge (just in case we hadn’t picked up on the similarities already). I do find it amusing that they carried the submarine analogy far enough to have people on the ships whispering. While it makes sense for actual submarines floating in water, which conducts sound, I’m pretty sure that even in Star Trek, the vacuum of space will still prevent the ships sensors from “hearing” people speaking on the enemy ship. Transmissions and energy output, yes — but not speech.
A rare instance of Spock just outright screwing something up!
The nuclear weapon explodes, the Enterprise is jostled, and everyone falls one direction…except Uhura, who staggers uphill. But then she gets to take over navigation — nice to see her getting away from the communications console for a bit!
Just as in ST:TWOK, Spock runs into a contaminated area of the ship in order to get critical technology up and running just in the nick of time. I remembered this being a good episode in its battle between the Enterprise and the Romulan vessel, but it’s been long enough since I watched it that this is the first time I’d really seen the similarities to the Enterprise/Reliant battle. It’s likely just an artifact of basing a space battle on submarine warfare tactics, but it’s still fun to see.
I still think that this is one of my favorites. Such a wonderful introduction to the Romulans. I know we have one more good Romulan episode coming up (in Season Two, I think). I really like the TOS portrayal of the Romulans, and have never been entirely happy with the direction that they took in TNG (and especially in Nemesis). If only the Powers That Be had run with the world- and culture-building that Diane Duane did in her Rihannsu novels; she did an incredible job of taking what these few TOS episodes gave us and creating a real, vibrant culture. Unfortunately, they decided to go a different direction, and I’ve always felt that, while not presented horribly, the Romulans generally ended up being far less than what they could have been.
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