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Podcast Enterprise: S1E29 Operation annihilate

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: The USS Enterprise is approaching the planet Deneva. Captain Kirk is actually very nervous at this point because there’s something wrong with down there in Deneva, and Uhura is not able to communicate with the people there, and his brother is also down there.

And Spock very helpfully says that there’s some pattern of mass insanity that has been jumping from planet to planet, and now it’s going to be on Deneva. And Kirk is naturally very worried about this. There’s no response to their calls. While they’re approaching this planet, they find that a small ship, a Denevan ship is flying towards the Denevan sun, which is very hot, and then it gets very close to the sun. It disintegrates, but not before the Enterprise picks up an exclamation where the person on the Denevan ship says he’s free, and whatever it is, it’s gone. He’s free and he dies.

That’s it. So now, the issue is they have to get down on Deneva and with a small landing party. When Kirk teleports down there, he finds that the place is more or less deserted. It’s supposed to be a hugely populated planet, but there’s nobody there. However, they go down there, they look for people, and then, it looks like some people are coming out to attack them, but they don’t want to attack them, but they’re being forced to attack them against their will.

It seems they’re being controlled by something else or someone else We don’t know at this point. Kirk eventually finds that his brother is dead. His sister-in-law is acting crazy. His nephew is unconscious. So the sister-in-law and nephew, they take them back to the Enterprise and there they find that the sister-in-law is being controlled by something in her body.

She’s trying to tell them what went wrong on Deneva, but she’s not able to because something is choking her from within. And she starts screaming. Things go from bad to worse. Eventually she passes away, but they have to find out what is going on Deneva. So Kirk and the landing party, they return with Spock and they try to find whatever this infestation is, the source of this infestation.

And then they come across these icky, plasticy looking huge, pink colored creatures that are sticking to the ceilings and walls and making weird noises. One of them attaches themselves to Spock, and from then on he is also infected. He undergoes excruciating pain. He tries to talk, but this thing tries to prevent him from talking.

It’s controlling his thoughts, it’s controlling his emotions, but through his sheer Vulcan physique, he’s able to push down the pain and control whatever it is this thing is trying to do. The Enterprise must naturally now try and dissect these parasites. Parasites that are infecting people and turning them insane.

And they find that it’s some sort of brain cell or those creatures are some sort of loose brain cells of a creature that we never really see. They’re flying all over the solar system infecting people from planet to planet, bringing them down.

Driving them insane and through a lot of trial and error, to cut a long story short, they find that the only way to kill it is to throw intense light at it. So that’s the only way it can be killed. There is no other way of getting rid of it. It is resistant to almost everything. So the sample that they have in the lab, they take it to a chamber and subject it to that light, which I believe is 1 million candles per square inch intensity.

So when they do that, they find that the thing is dead. So naturally now Spock has to be cured and Spock being Spock decides to have himself cured without protecting his eyes from the intense light because the people down there on the planet cannot have that sort of protection. So he goes into the chamber, they switch on the light, and he goes blind.

And then after that, very conveniently they find that they don’t have to throw the full spectrum of light at the creature, just the ultraviolet light. So seed satellites are released all around the planet that release high intensity ultraviolet light, and the creatures are killed restoring order to some extent, and I’m sure we are gonna talk about this later, but Spock does regain his sight.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E28 The city on the edge of forever

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:  The Enterprise is orbiting a planet they know nothing about and it’s on red alert because there are these time distortions that are causing all sorts of issues for the Enterprise.

And the ship was shaking this way and that. So what happens is something happens to the navigation board the helm console, and it shorts. And because it shorts, there’s some sort of electrical shock on Sulu, he falls over and Captain Kirk, he decides to send for McCoy. So when Dr. McCoy comes to the bridge, there’s still these time distortions and Captain Kirk and Spock, they’re trying to figure out what this is, and Sulu is lying on the ground. So Dr. McCoy injects him with something called Cordrazine. You’re supposed to give very little of it because it sort of stabilizes the body and brings down the heart flutter or something like that, he says.

And so that’s what he does. He injects Sulu, who then wakes up with a silly smile on his face, but he seems okay. And then while this goes on, after he injects, Sulu with the Cordrazine, McCoy comes forward, there’s another time distortion. And this time it’s pretty violent. And so what happens is McCoy falls forward, injects himself with a huge dose of Cordrazine, and that’s it.

He goes insane, completely insane. He starts screaming about killers and assassins. He doesn’t want Kirk or Spock to come anywhere near him. He doesn’t trust them. His face goes the shade of red. And then screaming, he runs out of the bridge and he somehow goes into the teleportation room.

He knocks out the operator, he teleports himself to that planet. And apparently all of these time distortions as Kirk and Spock figure out by then are coming from that planet. And there’s a particular spot in that planet that is causing all of these time distortions. And McCoy has gone there on his own.

So what happens is now that they have lost the doctor and the time distortions are causing other issues for the ship, a small landing party including Kirk and Spock, they decide to teleport down to the planet wherever McCoy went to so they can try and figure out what’s going on here.

So when they go down there, they find some extraordinarily old ruins that are, I don’t know, millions of years old, I think. And there’s an arch like creation that’s looks like a stone arch and it looks vaguely like plastic also in my head. And they find that this thing, it talks and it calls itself the Guardian of Forever.

It’s some sort of an ageless computerized, but not computerized being that can play and replay time and you can use it as some sort of a time travel portal. And by this time, McCoy has also reappeared. He comes back, and this is a in perfect timing. The Guardian of Forever decides to show them a history of Earth and McCoy jumps into the visuals of that, and he has transported himself into the past.

And then Kirk and the landing party realized that the Enterprise has disappeared because apparently McCoy has gone back into Earth’s past. He’s changed something and now history is different and the only way to bring it back to normal is for Kirk and Spock to go there themselves to whichever time period McCoy went to and try and fix things.

They figure out where McCoy disappeared to. They transport themselves through that Guardian of Forever, back to Earth’s past. They find themselves in a mission run by a very intriguing woman called Edith Keeler. And they try to blend in and sort of do work for her and take advantage of her hospitality until McCoy appears, and so that they can prevent him from doing whatever it is he’s doing that changes its past and so that the Enterprise can also come back. Kirk also gives Spock the orders to create a computer out of nothing, which he has to do with all the primitive tools. And like he says, stone knives and bear skins. He has to use all of that to somehow create a mnemonic computer.

He does that and then they find that the event that actually causes a change in earth’s history is the death of Edith Keeler herself. So either she lives or she dies. If she lives. Earth’s history is altered forever, and we can talk about it, Bala, because if she lives, for some reason, Nazi Germany wins World War II.

Now if she dies, that event can be prevented. So McCoy is a catalyst here because he is the individual who somehow prevents her from being killed. What happens basically is that she must die, and Kirk has been growing close to her. He doesn’t want her to die, but he comes to realize that if he allows her to live, all sorts of things are going to happen.

And as it is observed in this episode, if Edith Keeler lives millions would die where they didn’t die before. So they have to let things play out. They find McCoy and after a while, McCoy comes back to normal. Kirk decides to take Edith Keeler out for a movie. He leaves her there. When he realizes McCoy is back and he’s normal, he goes to talk to McCoy, and then Edith Keeler decides to follow Kirk and the car hits her and Kirk has to allow that car to hit her because otherwise history is pretty much destroyed and they have to go.

And that event, her death allows them to come back to their own time.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Ask the Design Thinking Doc - How might we How might we

Everyone, Happy Gandhi Jayanti (His birthday today!!!)

If this was year 1921 and if Mahatma Gandhi were to communicate to all us today using Design Thinking parlance, what would he say?

How might we attain independence from the British rule while not physically hurting anyone?

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E27 The alternative factor

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Okay, I’m gonna have a bit of trouble summarizing this anyhow, let me try. So what happens here is when this episode opens, you have the Enterprise approaching an uncharted planet, and they know nothing about this planet. It seems to be an Iron-Silica type planet, and it’s the only one in that quadrant.

As the Enterprise approaches this planet, everything winks out for a few moments. You know, everything blinks in and out, and there seems to be some sort of non-existence as Spock and Kirk discuss and everything winks out of existence, and then everything comes back into existence.

So while they’re discussing this, they also find that there’s some sort of life down there on that planet, or more specifically, there is one life, one person down there when there was no life there before. So, and it also because of this winking in and out of existence, it seems that Star Fleet command is worried about an alien invasion or something of that sort, some sort of invasion status.

And they want Kirk to investigate. They also want the Enterprise to be bait. So Kirk decides to beam down to that planet. And try to figure out what this singular life form may be. He finds a man called Lazarus and he has something like a UFO, some sort of contraption, some sort of spaceship type thing that looks like a UFO.

Lazarus mumbles something to Kirk and he falls down a cliff and he’s taken back to the Enterprise and into the sick bay where they find that he rants and raves about monsters and some sort of creature destroying civilizations. And the Enterprise must help him stop it, and it all gets very confusing at that point, even for Kirk.

So eventually what they find is that…, okay, what we see is that Lazarus also seems to wink in and out of existence. There are scars on his forehead that appear and then disappear, and his nature theoretically keeps changing. But he’s still insane throughout and for some reason, to cut a long story short, he’s taken to the bridge.

He learned something about what is going on. He wants dilithium crystals of the Enterprise to try and cut through space time, go into a parallel universe, and stop himself. And then Kirk is outraged at this idea. Eventually, Lazarus does manage to get the dilithium crystals. He wants to fit them into that UFO type craft of his, which he claims is, I don’t know, it travels between time or it travels between universes. He says both. He wants to go from this universe to the other universe and stop himself, but in a fisticuff that follows kirk falls through the wormhole and finds himself in the parallel universe. He meets the other version of Lazarus who’s supposed to be very sane.

And then with that Lazarus’s help Kirk somehow tricks the Lazarus in our universe to go into some sort of fugue plane, some sort of limbo where they fight each other for all eternity. Back to you, Bala.

Oh boy. I don’t know how you managed to summarize that, but, but it did make a lot of sense already.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E26 Errand of Mercy

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: The Enterprise has received communication from Star Fleet Command, and they’re asked to divert their route to Organia, which is a Class M planet and the only Class M planet in this area.

And it’s also disputed area. Why it is disputed is because the Klingon Empire is expected to attack Organia and Star Fleet Command and the Federation, they have been trying to negotiate with the Klingons, but that is broken down. And now Star Fleet Command is afraid that there will be a surprise attack on Organia and based on what information the Federation has, it seems that Organia is a very backward and primitive planet, and they need to be protected from a potential Klingon attack. Captain Kirk gives certain orders to Sulu and he puts him in charge of the Enterprise. He beams down to Organia with Spock as second in command.

They beam down there and that’s when they find that Organia is a bit of a strange place. It looks primitive. There are some purple goats and there are some people shepherding them. And there’s this castle in the distance and what? Purple or green goats, I forget.

Anyhow, colorful goats. So basically what happens is none of the Oregonians seem to be surprised that Captain Kirk and Spock have beamed down in their midst. Logically they should be surprised because they are a primitive race, but they’re not surprised. Captain Kirk and Spock, they’re greeted by Ayelborne, who was supposed to be part of the Council of Elders.

It seems that Organia does not have any sort of ruling council, but they do have a Council of Elders. So basically what happens is Kirk feels like banging his head against the wall because the Oregonians will not listen to him regarding the Klingon attack. They’ll do absolutely nothing. They keep smiling, they do nothing.

They try to comfort Kirk and tell him that nothing is going to happen and everybody’s safe and nobody is going to attack Organia. And what eventually what happens is the Klingons do attack, they appear, and you find this rather fascinating Commander Kor, who barges into the Council of Elder’s room. He is quite impressed with Kirk, I think, because he tries to make him a liaison. And Kirk here is pretending to be an Organian and not a very convincing one. And basically Kirk is still trying to save the Organians from the Klingons. He’s trying to outwit the Clingons. The Organians don’t want to be saved. The Klingons are getting irritated with Kirk’s interference, especially after he blows up a munitions depot and the Klingons finally capture Kirk, put him in a certain cell and then Ayelborne for some reason, or somehow he manages to get Kirk out of there.

He just sashays into that cell and gets Kirk and Spock out, and that’s when they realized that something is not right with the Organians. See, they are not what they seem. They seem to be a little different. And finally, when the conflict really comes to a boiling point, and war is being threatened and Kor is a threatening Kirk and Earth and the Federation.

And Kirk is threatening Kor right back and talking about order and justice and again, trying to convince the Organians. It is revealed that the Organians are not going to allow any of them to fight. This is because they’re actually incorporeal beings of pure thought that are millions of years ahead of both humans and Klingons, and they’re not going to allow anybody to fight.

Their powers are too great. They can appear and disappear in many places at once. And finally, they force both the humans and the Klingons to make peace before telling them to leave the planet.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E25 The devil in the dark

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: On the planet Janus VI, a mining colony, the miners have deployed a security detail to the underground caves.

And everybody’s afraid because apparently there’s something that comes out of those tunnels. It creates more tunnels, it comes out and it kills miners. And 50 people have been killed already. So when the teaser ends, you find that one more person has been killed and nobody knows what is doing the killing.

And they’re also expecting the Enterprise here. So by the time the Enterprise arrives, so many people have died. And Captain Kirk, Spock and McCoy, they beam down to this mining colony. It’s underground. And The head of this colony, Chief Vanderberg, he is really worried about this.

It seems that whatever this creature is, it burns him to a crisp and there’s very little left of the body after the creature is done with them and nobody knows what it is. And after Spock talks to him a little bit, it seems that this creature started attacking them after they opened the tunnel to the lower levels. So there’s some sort of connection there. And Spock also notices that there are these silicon nodules that the miners have been collecting. Chief Vanderberg says that they are useless, trinket type things, there’s no value to them.

So that’s all very peculiar. Eventually what happens is that the creature attacks again, and even Kirk closes some security officer to this creature, and it seems that it has a pattern to its killing. And McCoy also discovers that this whatever this monster is, it’s not exactly setting the it’s victims on fire.

It’s using some sort of corrosive acid, and this acid is so strong that it’s able to bring down walls and the creature soon realize is quite intelligent. It manages to attack or it manages to break its way into the nuclear reactor and it takes a pump from there so that the reactor is going to go super critical.

Everything is a huge mess. Kirk has to find a way to attack this creature, surround it, kill it, and free the miners because they’re also mining something very important, which we will talk about. And then as things do, Kirk comes face to face with the creature, and it’s very surprising because the creature is not what they thought it was.

It’s a silicon life form for one. It calls itself Horta secondly, and it seems to want something. And there is where you see Spock using the mind meld with an alien creature. He finds that it’s a she. She’s trying to defend her nest and her eggs. Those silicon nodules that the miners kept finding and destroying were actually her eggs.

So she was trying to defend her territory and eventually what happens is, they find a way to work together with Horta so the miners can mine for the Pergium or what the element that they’re looking for. And this Horta will help them. They’ll live in mutual coexistence and that’s how it ends.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E22 Space Seed

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

When this episode opens, you find that the USS Enterprise has encountered a derelict spacecraft. It’s very, very old. It’s centuries old, and it’s apparently sending out signals in Morse code, which makes the captain and everyone else very curious because nobody uses Morse code these days.

The spacecraft is of a strange design, and Spock identifies as DY100, which is probably built in the 1990s. So, of course, everyone must investigate this derelict ship. So the captain and a small group of people, they teleport to this spaceship and they, they find a lot of people apparently in deep freeze.

They don’t have a heartbeat, but they’re alive and there is some system keeping them in place and alive. And from the looks of it, it seems that these people have been genetically augmented. And this is confirmed by one of the historians in that landing party one Lieutenant Marla McGivers.

And Dr. Mc McCoy also confirms that once the systems start taking off, that these people are coming back to life, especially the leader who’s a huge hulking man who’s with an impressive personality. And long story short, this man is stronger than everybody else. He’s more intelligent than everybody else.

He’s taken back to the Enterprise and there they find that this individual, he’s much smarter than he appears. He is very manipulative.

The historian, McGivers, finds herself drawn to his magnetism and his name is very curious. His name is Khan Noonien Singh, and apparently he’s from Northern India. Apparently I have not heard anyone with that name anyhow, so he is supposed to be a Sikh from Punjab. He is powerful. He was apparently also a dictator of a large part of Earth before he was exiled, along with a lot of other genetically augmented humans.

He’s also relic of the Eugenics War of the 1990s apparently. And now here what happens is Kirk doesn’t know what to do with this guy. He’s scheming to take over the Enterprise. Lieutenant McGivers helps him try and take over the Enterprise. The other sleepers in that derelict ship are also awakened.

What Khan Noonien SIngh exactly wants is made clear over the course of the story. He wants to establish a new world order or new universal order. What happens eventually is he gets into a fight with Captain Kirk and Kirk being the ingenuous captain that he is, manages to defeat him. However, after all this is over, Kirk does not want to have him destroyed or killed or imprisoned or anything like that.

So he takes a decision to have him dropped off at a certain planet called Seti Alpha five. So that he can rebuild his life with the intelligence and the genetic augmentation that he’s gone through. And Marla McGivers decides to go with him.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Books n Stuff Podcast: S2 Episode 04 - Sci-fi Authors with Sumit Shetty, Pune Writers Group

Welcome to the Books n Stuff Podcast.

A very simple question to you. Just take a piece of paper and pen or a your mobile device. Think of any authors or creators that come to your mind when I say the phrase science fiction.

Just the top 3, 4, 5 names maybe.

How many Indian science fiction writers popped up in your list? If you are anything like me, my best guess is you probably have none in your list.

But Sumit Shetty from the Pune Writers Group can rattle off a dozen names from the top of his head. In my chat with him for the Books n Stuff podcast, he didn’t stop with Indian Sci-fi authors, but also covered Chinese (Chinese origin too!) Sci-fi authors as well. We, Earth people, haven’t colonized Mars yet, or we would have had Sumit rattle off a few Martian Sci-fi authors as well.

Till that happens, check out some of the stories and authors that we discussed about in this exciting podcast episode:

• Inspector Matadeen
• Gollanz Book of South Asian Science
• Kyla chandar dutt - 1835
• Anil Menon
• Arjun Rajendran
• inconceivable idea of the sun by Anil Menon
• Leila by Prayag Akbar
• The woman who thought she was a planet by Vandana Singh
• Things we found during the autopsy
• Moustache by S Hareesh
• Broken Stars and Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
• Three body problem by Cixin Liu
• Story of My Life by Ted Chiang

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E21 Return of the Archons

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

We’re going to discuss the Return of the Archons. And what we have here is the Enterprise visiting a peculiar planet where all sorts of odd things happen.

So basically it begins with Lieutenant Sulu and O’Neil on the planet. This is called Beta III. They’re on the planet, they’re undercover, they’re dressed in some 19th century garb, and they’re being surrounded by violent people. They’re walking like zombies. And two lawgivers.

These are men and hoods with staffs. So what happens is that Sulu makes an emergency call back to the Enterprise. They want to be teleported back, but O’Neil is captured. Sulu is brought some under some sort of energy field and his personality changes by the time he gets back to the Enterprise.

Now because this has happened, one man is missing and the other man’s personality has changed, and Sulu is talking about things like the body and Landru and peculiar things like that. So Kirk has to go down to Beta III and try to figure out what’s going. And there they find exactly what Sulu and O’Neil found, that the people are walking around like zombies.

They have flat expressionless faces with odd smiles. They talk in a very strange sing song manner. They don’t seem to understand anything. They don’t seem particularly intelligent, and they’re accosted by this guy called Bilar who asked them whether they’re there for the festival.

And Kirk has no idea what this is. However, he and the crew managed to get rooms in a nearby what is that, A hotel or something? And they witnessed what this festival actually is, it goes on from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM and it’s utter chaos. There’s violence, there’s debauchery, there’s screaming, there’s laughter.

It’s completely out of control. And when the clock strikes six in the morning. Everybody’s back to normal, zombie-like smiling stupidly and things go on as usual. So what happens is that Kirk knows that these people are under the control of something called Landru. And Landru, according to what he understands from Reger, who is the inkeeper for lack of a better word, the hotel keeper or whatever is a profit kinda individual who keeps the entire planet under his control, and Landru wants peace.

He wants stability. And he has gathered all these people under a singular personality trait. The characteristic. And he calls them the Body. And Landru now knows that Kirk and the crew are not part of the Body. Neither is Reger and there is an underground there. So Kirk interacts with the underground.

Basically what happens then is that they’re caught by the law givers. All sorts of things happen. Landru appears as a projection. He can’t hear anything Kirk says, so there’s a dead end there. And then Landru, because Kirk and the crew are not integrating into the body. Landru decides to take them away and have them mind wiped or brainwashed and then integrated back.

However, the person who’s supposed to do that procedure is also part of the underground and Kirk gets out. And then to cut a long story short, what happens is basically Kirk decides that he has had enough of this nonsense with Landru and he manages to get an audience with this character. And by now, he has deduced at Landru with his odd focus, logic and sterile environment he’s created has to be a computer. And so when he finally comes face to face with this large computer, Kirk being Kirk, outwits the computer and causes it to self-destruct, freeing all the people there. And finally, the Enterprise can leave.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E20 Court Martial

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Here the Enterprise is at Star Base 11 for repairs. And Captain Kirk, right at the beginning, he’s sitting with Commander Stone off star Base 11. Basically what happened is the Enterprise ran into an ion storm and the Enterprise lost one of their officers. Their records officer called Benjamin Finney and Kirk is being held responsible for his death.

This is cause he apparently ejected the ion pod investigating that ion storm before a red alert. And that causes all sorts of problems for Kirk because he has to be court-martialed. And the computer records show that Kirk made a mistake. Kirk denies that he made that mistake. However, the computer contradicts him.

It shows him making that mistake. And therefore he’s also being held for perjury because it looks like he’s lying to the court. And what we have here is a courtroom scene and everything is very, very tense. Kirk runs into an old flame called Ariel Shaw. She’s the prosecution. However, she sympathizes with Kirk and she gives him some suggestions on what to do, what to say.

And she also gives him the name of a lawyer who can help him. And this lawyer is a character called Samuel Cogley. He’s a very interesting guy who’s completely against computers. He believes Kirk, they go to court, they try to prove that Kirk did not make that mistake.

However, the prosecution produces some video footage that shows that Kirk did in fact cause Finney’s death. Even Spock knows that there’s something wrong here. Spock instinctively trusts the computer because according to him, the computer cannot make mistakes. However, Spock trusts the captain. He knows Captain Kirk cannot make such a mistake.

He goes back to the Enterprise, he does some thinking, and then suddenly it strikes him that he should play chess with the computer. The computer keeps losing. Which it’s not supposed to do. And Spock knows that it cannot lose against him because he programmed the computer to play chess.

So he takes this evidence back to court and then he tells the court that there are only three people who can actually tamper with the computer in that way. One is the captain, one is Spock himself, and one is Benjamin Finney who’s the records officer who’s supposed to be dead. They go back to the Enterprise with a skeleton crew.

They use a computer auditory device to try and filter out the heartbeats of the whoever’s on the Enterprise. And they find that Finney is the only person there whose heartbeat is still there. Everybody else’s has been filtered out, but Finney apparently is alive on the Enterprise.

Kirk confronts him, there’s a huge fight. Finney is completely deranged because he wants to get deep revenge on Kirk for something he did a long time ago and he’s also sabotage the Enterprise, which Kirk after defeating him in that fight. He has to fix the Enterprise and eventually what happens is Kirk is acquitted and he’s let go, and Finney is taken into custody.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

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