1. Hot fast Neptunes. Either it’s Pelops’ tell-all autobiography, or Systemic’s top exoplanet story of the year. (Seen at james_nicoll‘s LJ.)
2. Zack Handlen has started reviewing the original (i.e. actual) Star Trek series at the AV Club; he starts (reasonably, I think) slightly out of order with a review of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Among many things about this episode that are a little off (the old-style uniforms from the first pilot; the absence of Bones and Uhura; Kirk’s middle initial; the fact that they travel through the navigational hazard, not around it; etc.), it suddenly occurred to me the last time I watched it that the title is wrong. Other men had gone there before, cosmographically and in plot-situation, sometime in the 21st century (which now looks like a rather optimistic estimate for human exploration of the galactic rim). (After the Pelops reference above, “galactic rim” looks somehow salacious, but let it go.)
3. Over at the Blog Gate, Scott Oden asks how noble we want our Orcs to be? Just noble enough to refrain from the “galactic rim” joke, I’d say.
confessions of an ex-Star Trek junkie…
It never occurred to me until I read your post and the Handlen Review, but the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy is one of the few pieces of story continuity in the original Star Trek. It’s there in the 2nd pilot, and it’s a major plot device in the episode where alien invaders turn most of the crew into dodecahedron paperweights. I also have a vague recollection that it may have been mentioned in the Halloween ghosts & goblins episide with Antoinette Bower as a sexy witch. In both cases — I think — it’s mentioned as having destroyed the ship of those entering the galaxy from Outside. And to me, that would suggest the notion that the barrier is artificial, a defensive screen protecting the entire galaxy. Might be the basis for a decent story with one of the Enterprise crews searching the galaxy for whatever civilization was capable of creating such a mechanism. And of course, you’d have to bring in whatever enemy the galaxy is being proected from — the “Doomsday Machine” planet killers, perhaps.
Clearly, I spent WAY too much of my youth watching Star Trek.
Years back, before VCRs were widespread, I took a New York City vacation. And to my surprise and delight, Star Trek was playing on a local NYC station — it hadn’t been on any station I had access to in years. So, I set aside a dinner hour — even while on vacation in Manhattan — to watch Star Trek. And, proving both that there is a god and that he has an impish, if not malign, sense of humor, the episode they broadcast was the one about the “Space Hippies.”
I did the town, instead, and did it darn well.
Re: confessions of an ex-Star Trek junkie…
“Might be the basis for a decent story with one of the Enterprise crews searching the galaxy for whatever civilization was capable of creating such a mechanism. And of course, you’d have to bring in whatever enemy the galaxy is being protected from — the “Doomsday Machine” planet killers, perhaps.”
Interesting! An ST novel like that might lure me back into reading more ST novels. Might be a good basis for a later-generation ST movie, too.
I hate the “Space Hippies” one. It’s only real rival for worst episode, in my view, is “Return to Tomorrow” (with Sargon and the glowing mind-beachballs etc.). And even that one has a cool scene or two (like when evil Hanoch-Spock takes over the bridge of the Enterprise).
Anyway, having Manhattan on the other side of the door must have been a pretty good consolation.
Hehehe . . . you said “rim” 🙂
–Scott
DID NOT! Anyway… so did you! (Shagrat the third-grader chiming in there.)