Okay fans - last chance for Charlie X - (next up - one of my favorite episodes - Balance of Terror.)

Little Robert Walker, Jr. trivia - his stepfather was David O. Selznick and his mother, Jennifer Jones, won the 1943 Best Actress Oscar for the lead in The Song of Bernadette.

Interesting background for this young actor who went on to do nothing particularly memorable (except for his appearance in Star Trek: The Original Series.)

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Posted by Ace Midnight

Between sanity and madness

Member since Dec 2006

89790 posts

Posted on 8/1/13 at 7:41 am to Ace Midnight

*BALANCE OF TERROR*

One of my favorite episodes - in production order, the first true space battle in TOS. Staged and paced very much like a submarine battle, this episode is a template for the best of all the Trek films, "The Wrath of Kahn" - which is essentially the marriage of 2 great episodes - this one and "A Space Seed".

Mark Lenard makes his first appearance in TOS, and wears pointed ears, but he plays the first Romulan seen on screen in this episode.

The Romulan Commander is unnamed in the episode, but is very clearly supposed to represent an older, more experienced Romulan version of Kirk. The tactical battle remains gripping to me some 40 years after seeing it the first time.

We also get McCoy's best line in all of TOS.

quote:
In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million earth-type planets...and in all the universe, three million million galaxies like this one. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don't destroy the one named Kirk.

There are issues (phasers appear to be photon torpedoes - however, from a production standpoint, torpedoes hadn't been introduced yet. This is also the only time we see a weapons battery directed to fire in TOS.

Also a tender moment on the bridge between Kirk and Rand - almost an embrace - a wonderful bit of nonverbal acting on the part of Whitney and Shatner.

Racism is also directly addressed for the first time in TOS.