For the record, this is the first episode of TOS I vividly remember seeing as a kid, and it blew my freaking mind. I was primarily a TNG sprog, and DS9 as it simultaneously aired, but reruns for TOS were a staple in the household too.
As an adult, it's still my favourite TOS (and yes, I know Shatner's story with it), but oof. What would have happened to the Horta if they hadn't been able to provide value to the miners? 😬
There's a more direct return to the story in "Home Soil", when the Enterprise discovers that a planet was mislabeled as lifeless, when it in fact had inorganic life which then attacked terraformers. That time, thankfully, the lifeforms were left in peace once identified as sentient.
That said... I LOVE the exocomp episode.
(Was not happy with how Lower Decks spoofed it by making the exocomps jerks.)
But any episode where Data becomes an advocate is a winner in my book. :)
@MLClark I don't really feel any series after Voyager is canon. Enterprise retconned lore. Discovery retconned EVERYTHING. Lower Decks I feel is less star trek and more national lampoons star journey.
I've not watched Picard, and only an episode or two of Strange New Worlds... and wasn't a fan.
I do not like Abrahms influence on Star Trek. And I like less the complete disregard Paramount has shown Majel Barrett with the computer voices.
We are mostly in agreement!
Can't stand Lower Decks - it's The Office in space, not Trek. The Orville did better homage comedy *within* a Federation-style universe.
Abrams had no right to take on a franchise he didn't even like.
Enterprise retconning and hypersexualizing everything drove me bonkers.
Picard made me so mad I wrote "fanfix" scripts (early in pandemic - we were all going nuts).
SNW, I think is the best NuTrek by far. So there we dissent. But pretty close!
Our *almost* perfect resonance on Trek reminds me of this Emo Philips skit. Have you heard it? :)
@MLClark "DIE HERETIC!"
I do enjoy me some Emo.
I'm a second generation Trekkie, mum grew up on TOS and even spent time chatting with Doohan and Takei when they were doing some signings at the mall she worked at. Before there were conventions for things.
She likes to say she wrote a script for it, but in modern terms, she wrote fanfiction. And I kinda wish she'd stuck with writing, she could have done it while raising kids.
Second-gen Trekkie, too. :) I'm glad you two had something wonderful to share in this series. An active imagination is a gift (usually!), even if she never went much further with her prose.
@MLClark She tried, it's a lack of computer she can use in bed that's preventing her right now.
She's killed more than a few laptops...
@MLClark If only. lol
She got the Dragon program so she could speak it all out, but now she can't sit in front of a computer for long. She had metal put into her back a couple years back and hasn't been wanting to do much of anything since.
@MLClark "NO KILL I."
The first TOS episode I remember watching is "The Man Trap," for some reason. My father was abusive to us, but at least he introduced us to Trek, so there's that.
I've long forgotten who wrote it, but I remember reading a SF novel where human colonists on another world were almost wiped out by the native life forms. They finally figured out how to coexist. It's a life lesson I try to practice. Hey, they were here first.
@MLClark My first was Amok Time. It's the only episode of TOS that I saw during its original run. Only got to see it (and other shows like The Avengers and The Wild, Wild West) b/c of a babysitter who was more interested in talking to her bf on the phone than enforcing my bedtime. Five or six years later, TOS was in syndication and a part of my daily, after school routine.
@MLClark I like that there was a spiritual return to this narative in TNG with the exocomp episode. A tool that was developed gained self preservation tendancies and it was seen as "a bug" and they were not functioning how they were intended to.
When it wasn't useful, they were going to destroy them all as a failed experiment... until their bugs were seen through the lens of "this is self preservation, not a bug."