Joseph Nebus
06-27-2008, 04:51 PM
Requiem For Methuselah
The Plot:
Kirk falls for the ward (Louise Sorel) of a man (Jams Daly) who
holds a cure for the ailing Enterprise crew. (Tivo.)
So with the series finally coming to its end Star Trek at last
gets around to ripping off _The Tempest_, or at least part of the setup
to _Forbidden Planet_. Well, all right, maybe it's not the first
ripping off of _The Tempest_ since the template of ``the ship comes to a
strange planet where a nigh-omnipotent being puts the crew through
miscellaneous hassles and the male lead falls in love with his ward'' is
a mighty general one and one fruitful for all sorts of stories. (For
example, 'The Cage', 'Metamorphosis', and even arguably 'The Savage
Curtain' have such elements.) Still, this is one where it's much easier
to make the parallels to the Prospero-wizard and
Whatever-her-name-is-daughter and to the distressed sailors.
Now and then I see people grumbling about this episode for
suggesting that so much of human history is the result of alien
intervention. This is the result of people not paying attention: while
it's possible that Flint is an alien disguised as human, the text of the
episode and the apparent intent of the creators is that he should be a
human with the circumstance of having all the time in the world. And
that makes for an episode really quite in line with a Roddenberry-ish
humanistic philosophy: that anyone could be a Great Man, given the time
and the desire to improve themselves.
Still, the idea of Flint The Immortal taking on all sorts of
identities seems to be one that makes at least a few fans uncomfortable.
I've seen complaints, for example, that if Flint were *actually*
thousands of years old then his nose would be much larger since,
apparently, noses keep growing through one's life. I'd never heard this
before and that still sounds like a weak reason to dismiss the episode.
It's not like immortality is all that absurd or wild a reach as a
science fiction premise, after all.
(A slightly stronger complaint is that, apparently, the early
life of Johannes Brahms is very well-documented and that the episode
would be stronger if they had picked a contemporary composer with more
obscure origins. Perhaps, but that is still quibbling. I imagine with
four thousand years to practice a person could get very good at leaving
the impression of a history.)
And eventually _Voyager_ decided to do a couple episodes with
Captain Janeway chatting with an emergency holographic Leonardo da Vinci
(``Please state the nature of the backwards-written emergency''), and
tried to tiptoe around this episode by just saying that Kirk claimed to
have met him. This implies that Kirk broke his promise to Flint.
Possibly Flint changed his mind, or Kirk doesn't think promises to the
dead (after Flint's end) are worth anything.
In any case the sense I got from the _Voyager_ mention was that
the producers didn't really like Immortal Flint With The Past Identity.
Bbut they couldn't deny it without provoking a Nerd Riot, and they
couldn't fail to mention it or else they'd be accused of not knowing
their Trek -- an accusation Brannon Braga never escaped and which
spoiled much of his credibility in trying to write a prequel -- so they
just held it at arm's length like that.
Maybe the Immortal Flint is a slightly immature idea -- maybe a
person could have superlative healing abilities, but overcoming the
heart being stabbed? In 3800 BC? -- but it's also one of those simple
ideas you can state, understand well, and form romantic notions about.
I think Trek was weakened by trying to distance itself from an impulse
like that.
I've noticed that it seems to be traditional for immortals to
decide they don't want to do anything and to find everything terribly
dull. Flint is at least a partial exception. He doesn't seem to have
any particular interest in the hurly-burly of the world right now, and
Brack -- his implied previous-generation existence -- was described as a
recluse, but Brack was also involved enough in the world to be a wealthy
financier. And it's not as though Flint is trying to seclude himself
from humanity for good: he's explicitly looking for someone he can love
with less pain. Perhaps he just needs stretches of solitude in between
times of involvement.
He is continuing to do things which he appears to love, though:
he's still painting as da Vinci, or composing as Brahms, and he's
inventing with all the cleverness of a highly experienced person with
the super-science toys of Original Series Trek to play with. That is,
he's still *alive*, vital, active. That's a twist which I like.
Oh, and once again we have androids with personalities which
blow up over the pesky 'emotion' bug. That would turn up again as a way
to make sure the creation of Lal didn't in any way affect any further
Trek episodes ever. While we've gotten androids created by aliens
('What Are Little Girls Made Of?', 'I, Mudd', 'Return To Tomorrow'), I
think this is the first set of human-created androids which we've seen.
Still, you can understand why early Next Generation viewers were
skeptical of Noonian Soong's sooper-genius just because he created the
First Known Android after we'd seen so many of them before.
Thoughts While Watching:
- A raging space epidemic! Luckily they're right where they can
find ryetalin. Isn't that lucky?
- If this weren't a third-season episode they could afford
redshirts to do the mining.
- Oh, great. Four hours to dig some ryetalin and they've got a
KillBot on their hands.
- Notice James Doohan has no reservations about phasering
Shatner from orbit.
- The cliffhanger is disposed of rather swiftly, really.
- ``Are you a student of history, sir?''
CROW: He's a Renaissance Fest performer! Get out of there!
- A crane shot? They can't afford crane shots this season!
- McCoy establishes that Flint has all sorts of old books we
don't need to see.
- Kirk's willing to give one hour of the -- either two or four
-- available?
- Leonardo da Vinci, Reginald Pollack, Sten.
- Rayna wants the fun of talking dimensional babble with Spock.
She would.
- Spock will have a brandy: he's going against tradition for
either all Vulcans or at least for his father's race.
- So Saurian brandy was made at least 100 years ago, too.
- Spock concludes that Flint can't have any reason to hang fake
da Vincis. I think he's underestimating Flint's capacity for whimsy.
- Hey, wouldn't it be great if Flint just liked creating
pastiches and fan fiction and was just messing with Spock's head?
- Kirk remembers, without saying as much, incidents like
Trelaine and other fake hosts.
- That's not a lot of ryetalin considering the apparent need.
- ``Let me make amends.'' Rayna enters.
TOM SERVO: [ As Kirk ] You're amended! You're amended!
- Rayna has seventeen degrees. That's stretching plausibility
for her apparent age.
- McCoy frowns at Flint's choice in honey mustard sauce.
- Kirk's happy to take advice from Rayna. He knows how to
charm.
- ``The result of pressures which are not ... your concern.''
He's been busy leading a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest, a
shining planet known as Earth.
- They have a Brahms-esque waltz. I assume it's correctly
Brahms-esque.
- The initial screening didn't notice iridium in one part per
thousand? I would think that'd be enormously simple to scan for?
- The waltz's manuscript is signed Johannes Brahms. Why did
Flint do that?
- ``Flint is the greatest, kindest, wisest man in the Galaxy''.
The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever
known in my life.
- Stop command! She's really very intent on this!
- Hey, when did Spock's phaser get recharged? Oh, uh-huh, Spock
snuck up on M-4. That's it.
- In the remastered castle there's a little pennant waving on
top.
- Spock professes to not understanding the 'male logic' that
involves jealousy to the brink of homicide. That's pretty snobby talk
for little mister pon farr there.
- There are financiers in the 23rd century minus thirty years.
They didn't run a check on Rayna before?
- So after a one false start and another process they only have
two hours and 18 minutes for delivery.
- Hey, Rayna and Flint are watching on an Apple Monitor.
- People in TV shows who suspect they're being monitored always
look into the camera.
- Now how could 'Rayna Kapec' not appear in any database? I
mean, what are the odds that's a *unique* name in a Federation of a
thousand worlds?
- Flint mutters to his screen about Kirk ending his usefulness:
he knows he's the antagonist this episode.
- Why is Kirk begging Rayna to come?
- Rayna 16! That's kind of a catchy name.
- They've got one of those fancy Internet-connected fridges in
the corner there.
- They've found Lieutenant Ilia!
- And now there's a Young Pulaski!
- So how did Flint work out his birth to a specific year?
Granted he had a lot of time to work it out.
- Wait, Flint has a gadget to teleport and shrink the
Enterprise? The heck?
- The fiend! He's turned the ship into an AMT/ERTL model!
- Oh, and he can freeze time too? Or ... he freezes the people
and some of the Christmas tree lights, but not all? What's going on
besides not everybody getting the director's notes for filming the
insert shots?
- Flint has seen 100 billion dead. This could be used, with
demographic projections, to date the Original Series, if it weren't just
hyperbole.
- Flint offers them a chance to wake up in a thousand or two
thousand years. Think how embarrassed he'd be to learn he was dead
by then.
- Flint's secret of immortality is safe, although his secret of
time-freezing starship-teleporting shrinking might be threatened.
- And so, as all immortals do, they eventually get to a
fist-fight with Kirk.
- Oh, great, so love kills robots. This would seem to imply
that if Data had made out with the Borg Queen he could've brain-frozen
the Collective.
- Hey, this was Kirk's last romance-of-the-week, up till The
Voyage Home, wasn't it?
- In the WOR/New York City cut, they eliminated all of McCoy's
speech about what love drives men too, making Spock's ``Forget ... ''
command seem more like a lack of faith that Kirk can work out his
feelings on his own.
The Plot:
Kirk falls for the ward (Louise Sorel) of a man (Jams Daly) who
holds a cure for the ailing Enterprise crew. (Tivo.)
So with the series finally coming to its end Star Trek at last
gets around to ripping off _The Tempest_, or at least part of the setup
to _Forbidden Planet_. Well, all right, maybe it's not the first
ripping off of _The Tempest_ since the template of ``the ship comes to a
strange planet where a nigh-omnipotent being puts the crew through
miscellaneous hassles and the male lead falls in love with his ward'' is
a mighty general one and one fruitful for all sorts of stories. (For
example, 'The Cage', 'Metamorphosis', and even arguably 'The Savage
Curtain' have such elements.) Still, this is one where it's much easier
to make the parallels to the Prospero-wizard and
Whatever-her-name-is-daughter and to the distressed sailors.
Now and then I see people grumbling about this episode for
suggesting that so much of human history is the result of alien
intervention. This is the result of people not paying attention: while
it's possible that Flint is an alien disguised as human, the text of the
episode and the apparent intent of the creators is that he should be a
human with the circumstance of having all the time in the world. And
that makes for an episode really quite in line with a Roddenberry-ish
humanistic philosophy: that anyone could be a Great Man, given the time
and the desire to improve themselves.
Still, the idea of Flint The Immortal taking on all sorts of
identities seems to be one that makes at least a few fans uncomfortable.
I've seen complaints, for example, that if Flint were *actually*
thousands of years old then his nose would be much larger since,
apparently, noses keep growing through one's life. I'd never heard this
before and that still sounds like a weak reason to dismiss the episode.
It's not like immortality is all that absurd or wild a reach as a
science fiction premise, after all.
(A slightly stronger complaint is that, apparently, the early
life of Johannes Brahms is very well-documented and that the episode
would be stronger if they had picked a contemporary composer with more
obscure origins. Perhaps, but that is still quibbling. I imagine with
four thousand years to practice a person could get very good at leaving
the impression of a history.)
And eventually _Voyager_ decided to do a couple episodes with
Captain Janeway chatting with an emergency holographic Leonardo da Vinci
(``Please state the nature of the backwards-written emergency''), and
tried to tiptoe around this episode by just saying that Kirk claimed to
have met him. This implies that Kirk broke his promise to Flint.
Possibly Flint changed his mind, or Kirk doesn't think promises to the
dead (after Flint's end) are worth anything.
In any case the sense I got from the _Voyager_ mention was that
the producers didn't really like Immortal Flint With The Past Identity.
Bbut they couldn't deny it without provoking a Nerd Riot, and they
couldn't fail to mention it or else they'd be accused of not knowing
their Trek -- an accusation Brannon Braga never escaped and which
spoiled much of his credibility in trying to write a prequel -- so they
just held it at arm's length like that.
Maybe the Immortal Flint is a slightly immature idea -- maybe a
person could have superlative healing abilities, but overcoming the
heart being stabbed? In 3800 BC? -- but it's also one of those simple
ideas you can state, understand well, and form romantic notions about.
I think Trek was weakened by trying to distance itself from an impulse
like that.
I've noticed that it seems to be traditional for immortals to
decide they don't want to do anything and to find everything terribly
dull. Flint is at least a partial exception. He doesn't seem to have
any particular interest in the hurly-burly of the world right now, and
Brack -- his implied previous-generation existence -- was described as a
recluse, but Brack was also involved enough in the world to be a wealthy
financier. And it's not as though Flint is trying to seclude himself
from humanity for good: he's explicitly looking for someone he can love
with less pain. Perhaps he just needs stretches of solitude in between
times of involvement.
He is continuing to do things which he appears to love, though:
he's still painting as da Vinci, or composing as Brahms, and he's
inventing with all the cleverness of a highly experienced person with
the super-science toys of Original Series Trek to play with. That is,
he's still *alive*, vital, active. That's a twist which I like.
Oh, and once again we have androids with personalities which
blow up over the pesky 'emotion' bug. That would turn up again as a way
to make sure the creation of Lal didn't in any way affect any further
Trek episodes ever. While we've gotten androids created by aliens
('What Are Little Girls Made Of?', 'I, Mudd', 'Return To Tomorrow'), I
think this is the first set of human-created androids which we've seen.
Still, you can understand why early Next Generation viewers were
skeptical of Noonian Soong's sooper-genius just because he created the
First Known Android after we'd seen so many of them before.
Thoughts While Watching:
- A raging space epidemic! Luckily they're right where they can
find ryetalin. Isn't that lucky?
- If this weren't a third-season episode they could afford
redshirts to do the mining.
- Oh, great. Four hours to dig some ryetalin and they've got a
KillBot on their hands.
- Notice James Doohan has no reservations about phasering
Shatner from orbit.
- The cliffhanger is disposed of rather swiftly, really.
- ``Are you a student of history, sir?''
CROW: He's a Renaissance Fest performer! Get out of there!
- A crane shot? They can't afford crane shots this season!
- McCoy establishes that Flint has all sorts of old books we
don't need to see.
- Kirk's willing to give one hour of the -- either two or four
-- available?
- Leonardo da Vinci, Reginald Pollack, Sten.
- Rayna wants the fun of talking dimensional babble with Spock.
She would.
- Spock will have a brandy: he's going against tradition for
either all Vulcans or at least for his father's race.
- So Saurian brandy was made at least 100 years ago, too.
- Spock concludes that Flint can't have any reason to hang fake
da Vincis. I think he's underestimating Flint's capacity for whimsy.
- Hey, wouldn't it be great if Flint just liked creating
pastiches and fan fiction and was just messing with Spock's head?
- Kirk remembers, without saying as much, incidents like
Trelaine and other fake hosts.
- That's not a lot of ryetalin considering the apparent need.
- ``Let me make amends.'' Rayna enters.
TOM SERVO: [ As Kirk ] You're amended! You're amended!
- Rayna has seventeen degrees. That's stretching plausibility
for her apparent age.
- McCoy frowns at Flint's choice in honey mustard sauce.
- Kirk's happy to take advice from Rayna. He knows how to
charm.
- ``The result of pressures which are not ... your concern.''
He's been busy leading a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest, a
shining planet known as Earth.
- They have a Brahms-esque waltz. I assume it's correctly
Brahms-esque.
- The initial screening didn't notice iridium in one part per
thousand? I would think that'd be enormously simple to scan for?
- The waltz's manuscript is signed Johannes Brahms. Why did
Flint do that?
- ``Flint is the greatest, kindest, wisest man in the Galaxy''.
The kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever
known in my life.
- Stop command! She's really very intent on this!
- Hey, when did Spock's phaser get recharged? Oh, uh-huh, Spock
snuck up on M-4. That's it.
- In the remastered castle there's a little pennant waving on
top.
- Spock professes to not understanding the 'male logic' that
involves jealousy to the brink of homicide. That's pretty snobby talk
for little mister pon farr there.
- There are financiers in the 23rd century minus thirty years.
They didn't run a check on Rayna before?
- So after a one false start and another process they only have
two hours and 18 minutes for delivery.
- Hey, Rayna and Flint are watching on an Apple Monitor.
- People in TV shows who suspect they're being monitored always
look into the camera.
- Now how could 'Rayna Kapec' not appear in any database? I
mean, what are the odds that's a *unique* name in a Federation of a
thousand worlds?
- Flint mutters to his screen about Kirk ending his usefulness:
he knows he's the antagonist this episode.
- Why is Kirk begging Rayna to come?
- Rayna 16! That's kind of a catchy name.
- They've got one of those fancy Internet-connected fridges in
the corner there.
- They've found Lieutenant Ilia!
- And now there's a Young Pulaski!
- So how did Flint work out his birth to a specific year?
Granted he had a lot of time to work it out.
- Wait, Flint has a gadget to teleport and shrink the
Enterprise? The heck?
- The fiend! He's turned the ship into an AMT/ERTL model!
- Oh, and he can freeze time too? Or ... he freezes the people
and some of the Christmas tree lights, but not all? What's going on
besides not everybody getting the director's notes for filming the
insert shots?
- Flint has seen 100 billion dead. This could be used, with
demographic projections, to date the Original Series, if it weren't just
hyperbole.
- Flint offers them a chance to wake up in a thousand or two
thousand years. Think how embarrassed he'd be to learn he was dead
by then.
- Flint's secret of immortality is safe, although his secret of
time-freezing starship-teleporting shrinking might be threatened.
- And so, as all immortals do, they eventually get to a
fist-fight with Kirk.
- Oh, great, so love kills robots. This would seem to imply
that if Data had made out with the Borg Queen he could've brain-frozen
the Collective.
- Hey, this was Kirk's last romance-of-the-week, up till The
Voyage Home, wasn't it?
- In the WOR/New York City cut, they eliminated all of McCoy's
speech about what love drives men too, making Spock's ``Forget ... ''
command seem more like a lack of faith that Kirk can work out his
feelings on his own.