Well, this is a moderately fun story. It seems to have been remade and redeveloped for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the similarities are glaring. The episode is also a bit slow and it has a truly ridiculous series of events with Uhura that just... wow, I can't even begin to figure out what they were going for there. Some more horribly sexist stuff makes this an episode that will be easy to forget.
He said it! He finally said it! Was this the first time with the actual phrase.
It's a good episode. Yes, it looks silly, but the stakes are high, you only realize slowly what the probe is up to (and why), it's very futuristic, Kirk for once is not swinging his fists (his solution is still aggressive though).
SAT word of the day:
non sequitur :loudspeaker: /nɒn ˈsɛkwɪtə/ noun :arrow_forward: a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement :exclamation:"his weird mixed metaphors and non sequiturs" :tv:cf. also Voyagers episode 2x05 Non Sequitur
Kirk, for once, defeating a crisis with logic instead of brawn is a nice angle. Even Spock was impressed. Scotty was again very hot-headed and getting thrown around.
Solid sci fi story all around.
Spock, "Our shields absorbed the equivalent of 90 photon torpedoes of energy."
30 seconds later after a direct hit on the enemy with a photon torpedo.
Spock, "No damage. It absorbed the impact."
Kirk, "What? Nothing can absorb that much energy!"
ROFL! Who writes this? This would likely have all been on the same sheet of paper. How could they not have caught this? Hahahahhahaha...
I wonder why they went back to the old theme for S2???
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-04-26T22:52:36Z— updated 2017-11-20T16:57:16Z
[7.1/10] I’ve talked about this before in the context of Star Trek, but one of the things that stands out to me watching this show is how many tropes it solidified, if not invented. My lens for original recipe Star Trek is often its heavily-influenced comedic successor Futurama, and everything from “paradox absorbing crumple zones” to stentorian-voiced robots to probes colliding with alien phenomena leave me mildly chucking and the problems and solutions in “The Changeling.”
And that’s completely unfair. Sure, there’s something kind of ridiculous about Kirk convincing a robot to blow up just based on the fact that it cannot resolve a case of mistaken identity, but there’s also something pure and goofily sci-fi about that too. To the modern eye, it’s kind of a silly tactic, given how much that sort of thing has been ingrained in the popular culture, but it is also, true to form, a Star Trek solution that relies on the wits of the captain and not just his fits.
It doesn’t help that Nomad is pretty clearly a redecorated water heater on a fishing line. But there too, it’s wholly unfair to blame a television show from the 1960s for not having its effect up to snuff. The flashing, accusatory milk canister isn’t necessarily as scary as it’s intended to be, despite the way it blasts and vaporizes the various members of the crew, but it proves the point of a piece of dangerous and advanced technology that cannot be controlled, only directed.
The premise of that is, at least, fairly interesting. Even in a show featuring god-like beings on a near-weekly basis, the notion of two probes colliding, combining, and creating a new, collective mission rings mildly implausible, but it’s still a neat enough concept. I like the fact that Nomad’s goal -- to seek out new life, and the alien probe’s goal -- to sterilizes the samples it collects, get mishmashed in the resulting probe’s settled on aim to seek out new life and if it is not perfect, destroy it. There’s some “just go with it” logic necessary for that, but hey, I’m willing to hop on board.
Nomad also presents the latest being with practically-supernatural powers trying to understand humanity on the show. Star Trek’s hit these notes several times before, but there’s still something at least a little compelling about Nomad being drawn to Uhura’s singing, and something eminently memeable about it shouting out “non-sequitor!” or “insufficient data!” to many responses it gets from the befuddled humans it interacts with. (Nomad’s line about Spock being a logically ordered unit is a nice touch to that effect too.)
And in that vein, the episode plays with the idea that if Kirk could keep up the charade of being the “James Roy Kirk” who invented Nomad, he might actually be able to use it for good. The fact that Nomad kills Scotty when he tries to defend Uhura (giving us our first “He’s dead, Jim” if I’m not mistaken) is obviated by the fact that when scolded by Kirk, Nomad is also able to bring him back from the dead. There is a power to Nomad, and there’s the possibility that Kirk could harness it for unmitigated good.
(Side rant: the last scene seems to be toying around with these ideas in a comedic guise. That’s all well and good, and I’ll admit, there’s something quite amusing about Kirk joking about how Nomad though of him as its mother, giving a yente-ish “My son, the doctor” declaration, and saying “it gets you right here.” But there’s also something really word about him being that blase and jocular after that thing killed half a dozen of his men. I suppose when you lose as many redshirts as Kirk does on a weekly basis, you just get used to it.)
Of course, if Nomad were able to be cowed and use as an instrument of good, it would drastically change the show, and so everything must go back to the status quo. The upshot is that Nomad proves to be too dangerous to be kept around. Its robotic and myopic focus on perfection means it does not recognize the value of other sentient, “disordered” beings and kill, vaporizes, or mind-wipes them with reckless abandon.
There’s some interesting ideas at play there -- sense that rigidity or the quest for perfection at all costs can lead to some terrible results. (And I might be reaching with this, but it wouldn’t be the first time that Star Trek made some oblique references to Nazism.) There’s also the strange pitiableness of Nomad simply trying to fulfill its mission, and existing as enough of a sentient being itself for Spock to perform a mind-meld, but not being able to understand why others would be so upset at it taking lives. It is that rigidity, that quest for perfection, that ultimately proves to be Nomad’s downfall, which fits into the types of irony Star Trek likes to bake into its episodes.
Still, there’s a fair amount of repetition and padding on the way to solving the mystery. It becomes clear that Nomad is a threat and while Kirk seems content to pacify the item when trying to come up with a plan, it takes too many cycles of “it just killed a dude” for him to actually try to get rid of it. And again, the solution is perfectly legitimate, but comes off a little hokey to a viewer coming to the now-stereotypical robo-character fifty years later.
Still, even if these things have become tropes -- the robot that cannot divert from its mission, the mistaken identification of its creator, the A.I.-defeating paradox -- those tropes had to start somewhere, and they had to be passed down from somewhere. “The Changeling” isn't my favorite episode of Star Trek, and I wouldn’t call it the show’s cleverest or most entertaining installment, but there is something fascinating, as Spock might put it, about seeing those tropes deployed so earnestly and unironically. In an era where sci-fi in particular is constantly eating its own tail and trying to subvert expectations, seeing it all played straight has an attraction and uniqueness all its own.