Writing Blog Post 4: Star Trek

I decided to watch another episode from the second season of Star Trek titled “Bread and Circuses.” As you could guess from the name, this episode referenced the Roman Empire and actually was a very entertaining and interesting episode. The writers toyed with the idea of the crew finding a planet that was identical to Earth if basically everyway imaginable except the shape of the landmasses. The catch was, on this planet, the Roman Empire (or pseudo version of it) never fell from power into the 20^th century. The background of this story is that a former spaceship captain from Star Fleet, Captain Merrick, who arrived on this planet and took complete control. This is against the oath that captains have to take when they prepare to explore the universe. When Kirk, Spock, and Dr. Bones arrived, slaves who wanted to kill them immediately captured them. Kirk convinced them to bring them to Merrick. Merrick had an assistant who kept trying to convince Kirk to surrender his ship to their planet and used the claim that if he interfered and harmed this planet, even if it dealt with escaping, it would go against his oath as a captain. Kirk cleverly declines to surrender and gives a secret code to Scotty saying that the crew was okay when, in fact, it was a call for help. The ship found a loophole and decided to scare the planet instead of directly interfering through killings. In the meantime, Spock and Dr. Bones fight gladiators to save their lives and Kirk keeps getting tested by this assistant guy. I was personally happy that I got see the “Vulcan death grip” in action twice in this episode. The final battle happens when Kirk revolts against the gladiators and Scotty cuts the power to the planet for a few seconds so Kirk can escape, find a gun, and rescue Spock and Dr. Bones. Before they are beamed back up aboard, Merrick is killed by his assistant. An interesting sup-plot is the whole sun worshipers thing. At the end, the one girl on the ship makes a claim that the sun is really their “Christ” and is just coming in the 20^th century as opposed to the 1^st century like on Earth. Another thing that caught my attention was how this Earth had no war in 40 years. We learn during this time from Spock that Earth had 3 world wars, the third one doubling the amount of deaths of the second one. This was sneaking of the writers to sneak in a warning of a third world war.

Right, now actually to the prompt part. I would say Star Trek is way more into the whole aliens and other life forms then the other series that we watched. The point of the Enterprise is to “go where no man has gone before,” and in this show, they do just that. The whole concept is flying this ship around to foreign planets and exploring the life forms there while being put into life threatening situations. The writers did a great job of exercising many cool futuristic concepts. It seemed to be that the other series that we watched, such as BSG, Firefly, and BTVS all used sex as a primary pull-in method. Not so much Buffy, but the other two series added sex scenes and things of that nature to try and keep the viewers entertained. Star Trek rarely used sex in its episodes, but Kirk was caught kissing a female slave in this episode. The other series most likely have to use sex appeal because Star Trek covered just about every possibility of futuristic encounter in their many series and seasons on the air. If these series did the same thing as Star Trek, then it wouldn’t be anything new. The sex appeal adds to those series because it honestly has no other alternative. Some people may like that, as for me, I’ll stick to Captain Kirk and Spock exploring the galaxy and conquering every challenge thrown at them.