Star Butts 0x01: The Cage
And now for something completely different!
Alex, Josh, and Mumbles got together to watch Star Trek, and you can watch along with this commentary track! Just queue up the episode on Netflix or your physical media of choice, and follow the instructions at the beginning of the commentary track to experience Spoiler Warning On Your Television. Because… well, CBS wouldn’t let us just upload the an entire episode of Star Trek to YouTube, now would they?
In this episode, we take a look at the original unaired pilot episode for the Original Series, with the always memorable Captain Pike! And First Officer… Number One! Uh, they didn’t actually name all of the characters. But hey, Spock’s in it…
We’ve also got an RSS feed set up for future episodes. You can find that over on the sidebar, or directly here.
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100% psyched for this.
I thought it was pretty funny that Star Trek gets known for “Kirk bangs green skinned alien babes”, when the green skinned alien babe in question was only aired in the credits sequence (and I think Kirk only sleeps with Obviously Human Women)
There is another green-skinned Orion woman in the third season episode “Whom Gods Destroy”, but Kirk brushes her off.
Kirk’s womanizing in TOS is one of those things that became memetic, following his character to the movies, even though it’s not very present in the show itself. Half the time it happens, Kirk is seducing some lady to try and save crewmembers or his ship, the rest of the time the lady guest star is an old girlfriend of his. Edith Keeler is Kirk’s only legitimate romancing of a lady in TOS, and that practically plays out like a chaste schoolboy crush. (Similarly Kirk’s reputation for always breaking the Prime Directive, when half of PD episodes are actually about Kirk cleaning up someone else’s mess.)
Anyway, this essay gets really academic in its language, and then veers into a discussion of Jewish representation in TOS, but the first two or three sections are pretty instructional about how often Kirk *doesn’t* bang the alien babes–or any babes, really. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/
“Jesus, smell the gagsome Flashman colonialism coming off that one. Minging.”
“These misreadings are supported by a subterranean network of ideas about masculinity, pop culture, and the past that consistently reinforce them, hitting refresh on these dank memes.”
WHAT AM I READING.
Well that was fun. I hope to see more Star (head)Butts in the future!
This might have been the series if the episode had been more about Pike’s relationship with the crew members and less about Pike as a character. I mean, it did an ok job with introducing a couple of the characters, but Pike was the only one they tried to flesh out at all.
It’s a blessing, though, since we later get that nice dichotomy between Kirk’s exuberance and Spock’s logical coolness, with Bones’ cantankerousness and dry humor playing off of both.
And on the point of humor, yeah we don’t get to see a lot of it in this pilot as compared to some of the actual series episodes, but that ending scene is a nice foreshadowing of things to come.
I’m getting an odd problem with the RSS feed, where my media library can’t download the episode. It’s not a big deal since I can just download this one manually, but for what it’s worth I noticed what seems like an errant, third enclosure line in the feed source:
Hey, just a quick note, I noticed that the mp3 download link doesn’t point at the right file – it points at http://spoilerwarning.net/spodcast/starbutts.mp3 but the actual file is at http://spoilerwarning.net/spodcast/starbutts1.mp3
Thanks for all the entertainment!
Fixed, thanks.
I love how quickly they went from “humans would never accept captivity, not even in a golden cage” to “unless you are disfigured/disabled, then it’s not even a question – controlling torture-happy abusive buttheads it is”. Unfortunate implications.