Woods.pa@PARC-MAXC@sri-unix (12/10/82)
A few remarks on recent digests... I'm glad somebody else thought to ask about Luke's light saber. Those two questions (did he lose his when he lost his hand, and where did Vader get his if Luke's came from his father?) have been bothering me ever since TESB first came out. (Of course, the first question won't bother me as long as Luke manages without it from now on -- hah! -- and the second won't bother me if Darth turns out not to be Luke's father -- hah!) Note that we don't actually see Luke with a saber in the closing minutes of TESB; if he shows up with one in ROTJ, there'd better be an explanation along with it! (Don't you love empty threats?) Nice of Nathan to remember the Star Trek ratings from Stevenson Hall; I was part of the "Bridge Crew" that concocted them, and I think I even made the ratings (and accompanying plot synopses) available to SFL a year or so ago. There were in fact two 5-star (max rating) shows, one being Tribbles and the other being A Piece of the Action. I think this tells us something, e.g., it's easier to do good comedy than good drama. The basic plot of APotA was so far-fetched that the show would have been considered lousy if done seriously, but as a comedy it fits right in, and all the essential aspects of the plot are at least given an attempt at justification. Tribbles doesn't even require that much suspension of disbelief; the plot holds together and all the different subplots and running gags blend with each other very well. The City on the Edge of Forever, which many people have pointed to as the best Trek ever, got "only" 4 1/2 stars on our 0-5 scale. We all agree that it's an excellent show, but there's a basic flaw in the plot, and in an essential element at that. [SPOILER??] The Guardian is displaying Earth history, and Spock starts recording it at some point. Then McCoy goes through the portal, and history is changed, and the "display" stops. They get the Guardian to replay it, and Kirk and Spock jump through. Later, they look at the tricorder record to compare "future" events on the two time-lines. But HOW do they manage to have a record of what the future is SUPPOSED to be, since McCoy mucked it up before the Guardian got that far? (It's also not clear how they got the recording of the changed future, since they jumped through before getting that far, but one can argue that they made the recording and then jumped through on the third showing.) Also, less significantly, why couldn't they tell which recording was which? Then Spock would have known right away whether the "correct" future required that Edith die, as soon as he saw her obituary. There is a final objection, namely that it seems odd that the events displayed by the Guardian should include such details as Edith's obituary, but one can hand-wave that by noting that her death was an important "cusp" in history. -- Don.