Nobody Here But Us Chickens (Assorted Nonsense #3)
Sweeten Up Your Sorrows with a Sliver of Subtitle
This is the third edition of Assorted Nonsense on Substack, a newsletter from Donovan Street Press Inc.
By Joe Mahoney
I’ve been selling books at craft fairs lately. Cuz there’s so much money in it.
That’s joke. More about jokes in a bit.
I like craft fairs. Usually you’re the only one selling books. It’s not like having a table at a science fiction convention, or a book fair, where you’re a writer attempting to sell your books to other writers attempting to sell their books to you. At craft fairs you sell books to people selling you hot sauce, jewellery, crotcheted platypusses and other cool, artisanal fare. And ordinary people coming through the doors, sometimes in droves.
There are lot of craft fairs in the Riverview, New Brunswick area.
I usually do well enough at these craft fairs to pay for the table and then some. Occasionally I do quite well, though this seems more common before Christmas. Sometimes my sister Susan Rodgers joins me to sell her books. That makes it worth doing right there, spending quality time with Sam (I call her Sam, cuz that used to be her initials).
The other day on Facebook I joked about selling 264 books at this sort of thing, as though that was normal. I thought it was a high enough figure to be obviously ridiculous, but I guess not. This is a bad habit of mine: making a joke that I think is obviously a joke but that actually isn’t obvious. That’s why certain people in my life think there are no dogs in Russia (banned after the tragic death of Laika on Sputnik 2; just too painful for Russians to see dogs after that).
Anyway, the craft fairs are fun once you get over the fear of not selling anything. And the awkwardness.
Cuz the thing about these fairs, as my niece said to me the other day (and which I know perfectly well myself) is that you walk in off the street and you’re afraid to make eye contact with any vendor. Cuz you know if you talk to them, you’ll feel sorry for them and want to buy something from them. Something you don’t necessarily want. But maybe you do talk to them because you’ve accidentally made eye contact, and you want to be nice, and you ask lots of questions, with the sinking feeling that you’re just wasting their time cuz you know you’re not going to buy anything.
I’ve taken measures to address that issue. Those pieces of paper you see in front of each pile of book contain short, snappy descriptions of each book, such as “Memoir: For fans of CBC Radio” and “Science fiction Time travel Set in Summerside, Prince Edward Island (when not in space).”
And I found this poster helped (though I’m changing the photo from a generic Golden Retriever to my daughter’s Cocker Spaniel, Oz):
Now I just sit back and let people examine my wares, confident they’re getting all the initial info they need. And I’m right there to answer any questions they might have. Often they look at my books, say thanks, leave, and come back later and buy one, and only then do we talk.
Not awkward at all. Just relaxed.
New Review for A Time and a Place on Amazon:
Uniquely original sci-fi time travel adventure
A fun romp through space and time with enough unexpected twists to keep you guessing. Packs a surprising amount of heart for a story that starts out drily witty and plunges you immediately into the bizarre world of demons, portals, body swapping and talking cats.
~T Haney
Nerd Corner
Star Trek: Where No Man Has Gone Before
Where No Man Has Gone Before is actually the second pilot for the original Star Trek series. After NBC rejected the first pilot, The Cage, Lucille Ball, who co-owned the production company Desilu, apparently convinced NBC, in a somewhat unprecedented move, to make a second pilot. I gather there were a lot of notes from NBC execs on how to make the show better.
Samuel A. Peeples wrote this episode with Gene Roddenberry, Peeples coining the title and now famous line “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
But who am I kidding? You probably know this already. If you’re reading this, you’re probably as big a nerd as I am, if not bigger. (That’s a compliment, not an insult.)
Here’s some stuff you probably don’t know.
Deep in my blog material (or maybe not so deep) you’ll find stuff about how I went through a pretty dark period in my early twenties, starting around my second year in Toronto. One of the things that kept me going was Star Trek. CBC was airing original series episodes every Saturday morning at 10am. They were a glimmer of light in an otherwise deeply anxious time. My roommates and I would sit on our big couch in the living room of our Celebrity Place apartment on Maitland Street (our unit was called the Garbo) and watch Star Trek on a tiny little television that we called the Hypnogourd. That television couldn’t have been more than three inches wide (I might be exaggerating a bit.) But it did the job.
I looked forward to that one hour all week long. Sometimes we just need that one sliver of light, that one bit of flickering joy, to cling to.
Where No Man Has Gone Before is one of my favourite episodes. It’s head and shoulders better than The Cage in terms of polish. Whatever notes the NBC execs delivered to Roddenberry apparently did the job—or at least, didn’t hurt..
Curiously, once again mental powers figure prominently in this episode, just as they did with the Talosions in The Cage, and the salt vampire in the Man Trap, and will again later with Charlie in Charlie X. Is Star Trek a show about science fiction or psychokinesis? Anyway, this time it’s a crewman and friend of Kirk’s, Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood), who develops increasingly God-like powers after passing through some kind of barrier at the edge of the galaxy.
The plot proceeds quickly enough that I didn’t question any of it the first seven-hundred and forty-two times I’ve watched this episode (another joke; I haven’t actually counted. Could well be more). Keeping the plot moving briskly is a storytelling trick, especially in the medium of film: keep things moving fast enough so people (Alfred Hitchcock called them the Plausibles) don’t have time to stop and question anything. When they made the first Bond film with Sean Connery, Dr. No, the filmmakers considered the material so implausible that it was considered a given that the plot needed to move FAST so nobody had time to think about it and go, hey, wait a minute…
I questioned stuff this time around. NBC had their notes; here are mine:
After hearing about what happened to the Valiant, the last ship that tried to cross the mysterious galactic barrier (it was destroyed with all hands lost), Kirk decides to risk his entire ship doing exactly the same thing. In fact, he considers the Valiant having been destroyed the best argument to continue. Isn’t that Einstein’s definition of insanity? Repeating the same thing, expecting different results? (Yes, I know Einstein probably never actually said that, but it still applies.) Clearly Kirk does not actually have enough information to proceed. He makes no effort to mitigate risks. Bad captain.
So they cross the barrier and bad things happen including burning out the brains of crewmembers with high ESP (extra-sensory perception) abilities. Some even die. Their deaths are barely noted. Death is cheap in space, I guess. But some, like Gary Mitchell, survive, and start to develop Godlike powers.
Kirk reluctantly decides to strand Gary on a remote planet before he gets too dangerous.
As they transport down with a heavily sedated Gary, who they have to carry to the transporter room, he suddenly acquires the ability to stand on his own on the transporter pad for the duration of the transport, after which Kirk catches him. I wonder how long they discussed that before filming it.
“Wait, there’s no place on this thing two people can stand together. For, like, when somebody needs to hold somebody else up.”
“No problem! Unconscious people are able to stand up on there own here, somehow.”
“Alrighty then!”
I love the following exchange between Kirk and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner (Sally Kellerman) after teleporting down to the barren planet:
Dr. Dehner: “There’s no soul on this planet but us?”
Kirk: “Nobody but us chickens, Dr.”
Which Shatner delivers pretty straight. The only thing you can do with a line like that is deliver it. It’s a ridiculous line but I love it. Back when I used to make cassette mix tapes (I used to have the most awesome mix tapes) I would insert excerpts from TV shows and movies in between the tunes. That’s one I used.
At about this point I’m thinking that Star Trek is famous for being actual science fiction, for the most part. The original series, at least. As opposed to fantasy like Star Wars, which features space and technology but little or nothing in the way of science.
But this whole episode revolves around extrasensory perception and abilities. Gary (and later, Dr. Dehner) is able to shoot lightning from his hands, detect others’ thoughts, read books in a flash, exercise telekinesis, make plants appear out of nowhere, and so on. It’s basically just sorcery.
Before someone says, but wait! Isn’t that Arthur C. Clarke’s third law?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Maybe. But no attempt is made to frame it as science. It’s just, the Enterprise travels through a strange energy barrier at the edge of the universe and suddenly people with a predisposition to ESP develop powers we associate with Gods. Why?
Interestingly, Sulu is not the navigator in this episode. He was the ship’s physicist. (Remind me to tell you about the time I took physics from my father in high school and failed one of his tests. Ouch.)
Dr. McCoy is not in this episode. The Doctor here is Dr. Mark Piper (Paul Fix.) Between the pilot The Cage, The Man Trap (the first to air) and this episode, there have been three doctors. The Federation was having as much trouble hanging onto doctors as the Canadian medical system is right now. My wife and I have been in New Brunswick a year and a half now and still don’t have a family physician. Hopefully our McCoy will come along soon.
Yeoman Rand is not in this episode either. (The actor who played Yeoman Rand, Grace Lee Whitney, wrote a memoir, which I haven’t read, but which is apparently worth reading).
Here’s a question: the character of Gary Mitchell becomes increasingly evil the more mental abilities he acquires. Why? Why does greater power affect his morality? That question is neither asked nor answered. Mitchell himself warns that he’s becoming more dangerous. Why wouldn’t he keep that to himself? He may be getting more powerful but apparently he’s not getting any smarter, no matter how much he reads. Or are those warnings some vestigial morality?
Kirk: “Above all else a God needs compassion”
Where was Kirk when somebody needed to tell the Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament that so many times?
Spock is still yelling his face off in this episode. The other characters keep looking at him as if to say “what the f*** are you yelling about?” Spock’s skin is quite yellow here. He has harsh eyebrows and sometimes produces a hint of a smile.
At least Nimoy is much closer to the actual character of Spock in this episode. Shatner, on the other hand, is one hundred percent Kirk right from the get-go. How did Shatner nail the character so well so quickly?
Security personnel are wearing blue shirts in this episode. It seems to help their survival rates.
There’s a character in this episode by the name of Lee Kelso (Paul Carr). He’s friends with Gary Mitchell. Paul Carr played him well. Too bad Mitchell kills him. (Oh, ah, spoiler alert. Sorry.) It would have been nice to see more of that character.
Prior to attempting to kill Kirk, Gary Mitchell creates a grave for him, complete with a gravestone. Famously, the name on the gravestone is James R. Kirk. Later in the series, Kirk’s middle name would be revealed as Tiberius, not anything starting with the letter R.
Why didn’t the producers of Star Trek just stick with the middle initial R for Kirk? They couldn’t think of any name starting with R? Reginald? Rupert? James Rupert Kirk. Would have been a fine name.
I have a memory of the SF author James Blish stating in one of his Star Trek short storializations that Kirk’s middle name is Thaius. James Thaius Kirk. When I found out (as a kid) that everyone else thought it was Tiberius I was outraged. Looking for it now in Blish’s book, I haven’t been able to find it. Nor can I find anything about it online. Maybe it’s a false memory. We’ll see if I stumble across it as I continue to read through the Blish versions.
Kirk wields a phaser rifle in this episode that looks completely ridiculous. It does beg the question, though: why aren’t real guns more colourful? Would we not take soldiers and bad guys as seriously if they wielded pink and yellow firearms? (That’s right up there with the question, equally pertinent: why have guns at all?)
It’s a rousing finale with a fist fight between Kirk and Mitchell, presaging the fist fight between Kirk and Soran (Malcolm McDowall) many years later, at the end of Kirk’s life, in the movie Star Trek: Generations. Kirk really gets lucky here with the deaths of the two incipient Gods, Gary Mitchell and Dr. Dehner, basically talking Dr. Dehner into killing Mitchell, just before she conveniently dies. (Oh, ah, spoiler alert again… sorry.)
I absolutely love the (relatively) new computer generated graphics in the Star Trek version I’m watching on netflix, all exterior shots of the ship and planets tastefully redone.
Despite my nitpicking, the episode moves fast enough to entertain this Plausible, and remains one of my faves.
James Blish didn’t get around to short storializing Where No Man Has Gone Before until his eighth collection of adaptations, Star Trek 8. By that time Bantam Books had stopped bothering with chapter indexes in the books. Incidentally, these books must have been making a killing for Bantam: my copy of Star Trek 1 is the 24th printing (Star Trek 8 the 10th). Course, I have no way of knowing the print run.
Blish has Kirk and Spock start the story in the briefing room, playing chess, just as in the televised episode. He never starts with an excerpt from the Captain’s Log, as in the episodes. That might have cleared up some confusion for a friend of mine, who once admitted that for years she’d wondered who the heck “Captain Slog” was.
Eight books into his storializations, Blish needed to explain Dr. McCoy’s abrupt absence. He does so thusly:
“Live Sciences ready sir,” Dr. Piper’s voice reported. He was temporary— McCoy was on special study leave—and rather an elderly man for the Starfleet service, but he seemed to be a competent enough physician.
Blish describes Gary Mitchell as being “a popular officer”. Shortly afterward, Mitchell describes Dr. Elizabeth Dehner to Kelso as a “walking refrigerator,” loud enough for everyone else (including Dr. Dehner) on the bridge to hear. I guess they like jerks on the Enterprise. He does apologize later, with, according to Blish, “all his charm,” but charm by no means denotes sincerity. Perhaps this is why Gary so quickly and easily becomes dangerous with his newfound abilities: he was always a jerk. Makes one wonder. What would have happened had it been Kirk or McCoy turning into Gods? Or someone practised in controlling their emotions, like Spock?
Disappointingly, Blish omits Kirk’s “Nobody here but us chickens” line, replacing it with a terse “Just us, Doctor.” Starting to wonder about Blish’s sense of humour. Or did Shatner ad lib that line? Hmm…
As Gary’s powers increase, Blish describes his condition worsening: his once ruddy flesh now had a “silvery cast, suggesting solid metal.” In the televised version they opted simply for greying temples; much easier on the make-up department.
Most of Blish’s adaptation mirrors the episode. But there’s one striking difference in the final confrontation. In Blish’s version, Kirk tries to talk sense to his old friend right to the end. He tries to warn Gary Mitchell before Gary is crushed to death in the grave. Not so in the televised version, in which Kirk realizes it’s kill or be killed. Or rather, kill or allow humanity be enslaved to a new, superior brand of human.
And once again, Blish ends on dialogue, with Kirk saying,“Watch yourself, Mr. Spock. Your compassion is showing.”
Whereas in the televised episode, after Spock says, “I felt for him too,” Kirk concludes with, “I believe there is some hope for you after all, Mr. Spock,” and they exchange a look, with Spock smiling slightly, before cutting away to a starscape on the bridge screen, and then an exterior shot of the Enterprise sailing away.
Check out the podcast I co-host with Mark A. Rayner. It’s called Re-Creative. In it, we talk to creative folk about the art that inspires them.
In our latest episode Mark and I are joined by a veritable Swiss Army Knife of writers, Mark Leiren-Young.
Mark has written in multiple genres and formats, including television, animation, journalism, comedy, theater, and film. And he loves Spider-Man and Kurt Vonnegut, just like Mark and me.
We NERD OUT in this podcast, talking about how Vonnegut influenced Mark LY in his writing.
We discuss Mark LY’s career, which has included stints writing for television, animation, and we even get into how he became the media’s go-to guy for discussions of how to save the Orca.
Listen in on this fun and rollicking conversation!
That’s it for this time around. Thanks for reading! Hope to see you back.
They could have stuck with the Roman theme and had him be James Romulus Kirk or James Remus Kirk.