Title: Court Martial
Airdate: 02/2/1967
Plot Summary
After an ion storm, a crewman is killed. Kirk is put on trial after questions of his death don’t quite add up. Kirk has to defend his decision with his career in the balance.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk shows he’s a fighter. He’s usually right and knows when he is. So he demands the court martial to prove his innocence, which of course he does.
Jame nearly slaps the crap out Kirk when she believes that he killed her father. Then when the evidence is even more pronounced, she changes her stance. It’s unclear whether she found out her father was still alive and had a change of heart. Cogley reacts to her reversal peculiarly making me wonder if there was some deleted scenes on that.
Logical
Spock will not betray his Captain. He basically says the captain is right and the computer is wrong. His logic is tortured but laudable.
He does get the idea to play chess against the computer which he beats consistently. That’s what blows the case wide open.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy uses the old “the famous Jim Kirk is a friend of mine, want to have a drink?” on a woman. Turns out the woman is the prosecuting attorney for the trial.
Canon Maker
We find Kirk once served on the Republic. Finney’s daughter, Jame, was named after Kirk.
No starship Captain has ever served trial before. I don’t believe there was anything in Enterprise to contradict this, even technically.
This is the first time the highest ranks of the fleet are called “Starfleet Command.”
Canon Breaker
The insignia confusion continues as most of the people on the starbase has the Enterprise delta on their uniforms. This will change later when we see uniforms for different ships.
Spock is listed as Lieutenant Commander even though he is a commander by stripes and by being the first officer. Though Finney has the same rank with the same stripes.
We see the Captain can hit yellow or red alert from a button on his chair. I’m not sure that’s a canon breaker but typically the captain just calls for alert out loud.
Then there’s a convenient “Jettison Pod” button on the chair which seems fairly random. They also put it next to the condition green light. Looks like the engineers and designers were trying to get Kirk in my opinion.
Technobabble
They can hear heartbeats across the ship and mask them as necessary. The Enterprise’s orbit decays pretty quickly and a few jumper cables in a Jeffrey’s tube can disable it entirely.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Redshirt
Finney dies in the ion storm. OR DID HE?
I Know That Guy:
Elisha Cook Jr plays Samuel Cogley. You may remember him from The Maltese Falcon, Shane, and Rosemary’s Baby.
Richard Webb play Finney with suitable crazy eyes and flop sweat.
Joan Marshall plays Areel Shaw.
Percy Rodrigues plays the Commodore with gravitas. He was a prolific voice-over actor and narrator.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
This half a great episode. The setup is outstanding and you really want to know how Kirk’s going to get out of this. The evidence is damning enough. A rigged computer seems like an obvious answer but still, how are they going to get there?
Spock then finds out that the computer was tampered with when he continually beats it at chess, an idea I found very clever.
Then we get back to the trial and everything just turns into a train wreck. From the bizarre sound deadening heartbeat listener (no internal sensors?) to the idea that the Enterprise will lose orbit in just a few minutes with no one at the helm. We have screwdrivers still orbiting the Earth from the sixties. It’s just not how orbital mechanics work.
Then there’s Cogley who is charming enough and I like the idea that he is a bookworm distrustful of computers and that’s what screwed over Kirk, broken machines. But it’s not really done in a fulfilling way. And what of Finney? He obviously did all right to get all the way to Lieutenant Commander on the Enterprise after an incident as an Ensign. But he finally goes all binky bonkers?
It all just doesn’t come together very well after a promising start.
Cultural Impact
I add this section on occasion when I see something interesting and here it’s the fact the Commodore as well as the tribunal judges are people of color. The thing I always hear from the left is the “Star Trek was always woke.” This is totally incorrect because they simply look at the results and not causes or intent.
When Trek put in people of color in various roles, most notably Uhura but there were many in various roles throughout the series, it was to show that merit was the most important thing, not skin color. It was to portray a future where we didn’t care about that anymore, we simply put the best people into the best positions. It was to show that your immutable characteristics are least important thing about you. And it was correct.
Now it’s clear the motivations in Hollywood and modern writing is to make the immutable characteristics the MOST important thing about a person. The reason why they put in people of color is for no other reason than they are people of color. The result may be the same but the reasoning for it is totally ass backward. They do not understand this and do not realize how they are denigrating the very people they claim to help.
This is the difference between woke and non-woke. We are working towards the same result but we have vastly different goals. I don’t know if the left will ever really understand that.
