christmas eve

[calimac]

It's 7.30 Christmas eve and already thoroughly dark outside. (And inside: I'm working on the computer without a room light on, which I don't really need right now.) B. is off at Christmas eve vigil mass, so she won't have to go tomorrow which we intend to spend being secularly Christmassy.

I went down to the grocers at noon - usually I'm a bit earlier, about 11 am - to pick up the weekly grocery order that we'd submitted online for picking, and the parking lot was about as full and busy as I'd ever seen it. Took me close to five minutes to get out. Patience is a virtue.

A few nights back we did our quasi-annual drive around looking for lights that are festive and imaginative but not too overwhelming or flashy, I mean flashing. Were mostly in Santa Clara this year, and found some good ones.

So since B. was not practicing her violin in the living room tonight, I piggybacked on her watching of Star Trek: TOS episodes that she'd taped from a handy cable channel. Her marker was at the end of "The Doomsday Machine," Norman Spinrad's episode, so I rewound and watched that. Gripping story, good writing, good acting, like a lot of second-season episodes. My only question is, if they could beam Kirk back from the maw of the machine, why couldn't they earlier beam Decker? Or was it that he didn't want to go, and was frankly suicidal by that point?

I also remember that David Gerrold wrote that he was present for the filming of this episode, while waiting for "Tribbles" to come up. He says they were rehearsing the scene where Decker is telling Kirk about the machine. Shatner had a goofy grin on his face, and when William Windom as Decker mentioned its giant maw, Shatner said, "Its ma? Did you see its pa?"

If they'd kept that, it would have made three jokes in the episode.

Comments

[cmcmck]

khag molad sameakh as they say.

[sturgeonslawyer]

I have long held that "The Doomsday Machine" is incredibly, well, what back in the sixties we called "dirty".

Consider the machine: From in front, its maw is a classic vagina dentata, while from the side it's, well, very phallic (though I've also heard it compared to horn-o-plenty).

Consider the action:

Decker, armed with a full starship, attempts to slay the thing and perishes.

Kirk, the Hero, armed only with a shuttle, rams it into the thing's, uh, opening.

On the Enterprise, they desparately try to beam him home.

The shuttle goes in. From a side view, the thing ... ejaculates.

And only then does Kirk appear on the transporter pad. Sweaty, breathing hard... from piloting a shuttle?

I swear, if he turned around, you'd see fingernail marks down his back.

Spinrad, of course, denies any such intentions.

[calimac]

You need to rewatch the episode. That's not exactly what happens.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Okay, maybe not exactly. It has been a few decades. But surely close enough for Freud to slip in, no?

[calimac]

Maybe. I'm not sure if some of your supporting evidence is accurate. But Freud can slip in anywhere a sufficiently determined Freudian wants him to.

Everything is either
Concave or -vex
So whatever you dream
Will be something with sex

[wild_patience]

No. It's Decker in the shuttle trying to jam it after failing to destroy it by firing on it by his starship. Kirk and Scotty manage to get Decker's ship running enough that it can be flown into the giant maw. Scotty goes back to Enterprise and just Kirk takes the starship Constellation into the Doomsday Machine, beaming back at the last possible second. (Drawn out by very convenient problems with the Enterprise's transporter.)

I was impressed that they show Kirk knowing how to do more than press buttons and bellow commands in this one. He is working with his hands, trying to fix the crippled starship. He so rarely strikes me as being competent that this was nice to see.

[sturgeonslawyer]

OK...but I don't think those details really have much effect on the overall schema I'm suggesting. They are the kind that get easily forgotten over time; but I did come up with this hypothesis immediately after watching the darn thing back in the '70s.

And, given the other things Spinrad wrote in the mid-to-late '60s (The Iron Dream, The Men in the Jungle, Bug Jack Barron....), I have real trouble believing he's being completely, um, forthcoming about this one.

I am most definitely not a Freudian*, but it doesn't take too much of a whop upside the head for me to see when someone else is utilizing blatant sexual symbolism.

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* At least, not what Freud or his faithful followers would think of as a Freudian. I think he had a good idea about people being driven by suppressed/repressed desires and urges ... but I also think he was a dirty old man, and that not all suppressed/repressed desires and urges, by a long shot, are sexual.