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Star Trek: The Original Series 107-108 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-08-09 12:00:08
Edited:
2026-01-08 03:08:20
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Episodes: What Are Little Girls Made of? + Miri

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Comments

punterjoe

I always wondered why Trek navel gazed about originals and copies in episodes like this - but never gave a thought to the Transporter - which destroyed the original (maybe harvesting the energy of the former matter) and just sent information to rebuild the original at the destination. Although we all go through a similar process - none of us have the original cells we were born with, yet we don't consider ourselves replicas. Cells die. New cells are created - just not all at once.... but is it really that different? I hope you stick with the Trek franchise. I can't wait to watch you react to Picard - and Voyager's "Tuvix" episode. There was also a great Outer Limits (1990s) episode that wrestled with this - starring the amazing Enrico Colantoni (Galaxy Quest/Veronica Mars/Just Shoot Me etc)

Pam Nail

Yes, the big guy is Ted Cassidy aka Lurch from The Addams Family. :)

Daniel Dawson

The actress that played Christine also played Lwaxana Troi in TNG

Alan Pownall

A persons personality is formed by experiences (and biological factors in the brain) but you can't just give a factual telling of those events and expect the same person to form - you would need to replay them all in order and have a perfect recall. I doubt most people can trace why they think duty is important or their thoughts on family etc to a single memory; in many cases it's just stuff we learned and carried with us long after the initial teaching moment has faded.

Pam Nail

"What Little Girls Are Made Of" was written by Robert Bloch, who wrote the novel Psycho (which was adapted into Hitchcock's film). He wrote two other Trek episodes, as well as several screenplays for horror movies in the 60s and 70s.

Actuarial Lurker

Predicted or influenced the emerging "life-like sex partner robot" which with AI could be even more realistic

Actuarial Lurker

The tall henchman is the guy who play LURCH on the 60s Addams Family TV show

Actuarial Lurker

Simone- Nurse Chapel you probably know- is Deanna Troi's mother in later seasons...Majel Barrett is the voice of the ship's computer system

Amos T Fairchild

I'm watching the remaster along with you guys. The special effect scenes are the same length, so it still works fine and stays in sync. The effects are a bit better for sure, but still keep the feel of the older show.

MrCAL

Really enjoyed your discussions here. The sign of a well written Sci Fi script is when it highlights multiple possible perceptions of a given issue and for the watcher to look inward on their own sense of morality and understanding regarding it. Too many modern day sci Fi shows/ films today just tell you what you are supposed to think, rather than encouraging you to doubt, test and hypothesis ones way of thinking. The scientific method.

HansD

"Captain! Children!" -- "Spock, get the flamethrower!"

Actuarial Lurker

A pandemic that only kills adults- as opposed to recent movies where pandemics kill kids or make women infertile

bstroup
>>146073407

Also plays the guy Butch fights to take control of the gang in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Rupert Purcat

Great conversation George, I think much of our decisions process and emotions and even memory recall rely on biochemical reactions, hormones, liver function so on and so on - how much of that chemical process can be modeled with clones. How much does our personality and experiences are due to the chemical reactions in our bodies and biota. Fascinating area of thought.

Monica Alarcon

I would say keep watching the original version. Me personally I've been watching the remaster for these watch-alongs because I've already seen the original like three times and I've had the remastered version for a long time now and I never got to it and I wanted to check it out just to compare...

Gaius Frakking Baltar

Shatner's young daughters, Leslie and Lisabeth, appeared as two of the "onlies" in the Miri episode. It's probably the only reason why Kirk didn't order the Enterprise to nuke the whole group of annoying little bastards from orbit.

REDR58

Speaking of Lurch and The Addams Family, Carel Struycken who plays Lurch in the 1990s Addams Family movies also portrays Mr Homm, Lwaxana Troi’s (Majel Barrett) servant in the TNG series. Struycken also appears in the Twin Peaks series as “The Giant.”

Ohmss

Once you two finish the series, you should play (or at least watch a play through) of the old point-and-click adventure computer games Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and the sequel Star Trek: Judgment Rites. The games fill the gap between the series' end and the first movie. Each chapter is treated like an "episode" and all main characters of the original cast come back to voice. Really great examples of early 90's computer gaming and compelling stories!

Odd Thomas

Listen, I love LOVE the OG movies with Kirk, but this series is dulllll. Every episode is glacially paced (even allowing for the time period) and every episode is 'What if X had an evil twin!'. Like Simone, I was much more enamoured with TNG, it's so much better as a TV show. The themes George loves in OG Trek are explored much more satisfyingly with Picard.

Richard Powers Hardt

Ted Cassidy was the android here and Lurch. He played every role like this in the 60s

Opti_Frog

I had to google why the hell the "Miri planet" was a duplicate of earth. "According to the 2012 Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novel Forgotten History by Christopher L. Bennett, the planet was the Earth from an alternate parallel timeline that had become folded into the prime timeline due to temporal instability in the region." Sure. 😄

Alan Kobb

The title comes from an old nursery rhyme. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that's nice. What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy-dog's tails.

Michael Green

The interelationship between memory and personality is far more complicated than you are allowing for, George. For one, the actual physical structures of our brain definitely do matter for how we think and what we think. Traumatic brain injury can result in extreme personality changes without impacting memory. We aren't just a cloud of electrical signals puppeting a pile of meat; we are, for better or worse, also the meat. In this sense, your belief that memory transfer would result in an identical person is actually just the "soul" by different words.

Kyle Baker

So the writers really just forgot to explain the duplicate earth thing huh. :D

REDR58

Simone and George, never apologize for badmouthing Florida.

zak

Will the real Kirk Shady please stand up? More like "Will the real Jim Shady please stand up" cmon George it was right there!

Kyle Style

you guys watch the movie Passengers! please

ExtraBigAssTaco
>>146070179

To be more specific, the actress is Majel Barrett, and was Gene Roddenberry's wife. She is also the voice of the computer in TNG, as well as involved in many aspects of the entire Star Trek franchise over the years.

Turnt SNACO
>>146099110

To each their own. I just turned 35 and watched the first season of this series on a whim a few years ago, and absolutely LOVED it. Yes, of course aspects of it are dated - and some episodes are considerably better than others. What Are Little Girls Made Of is honestly the first one that really got the gears turning in my head. Of COURSE TNG does a lot of things "better" - but to dismiss this entire series as if it has NOTHING of value is incredibly short sighted and naive. Those other series and the rest of Star Trek as we know it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the groundwork this series established. TOS was WAY ahead of its time, not just in the commentary and concepts it presented, but also just in how well written a lot of the dialogue and characters are. The show opens with a conversation between Spock and Uhura that gives you a lot of context about each character, without literally spelling it out to you or giving some kind of overbearing, expositive narration. But one of the most interesting things to me was seeing the progressive commentary of the time. The fact that women being respected in the workplace and working equal positions to men, was seen as forward thinking, and other, now-dated concepts like that. This show has its place in history and I think it's totally valid to explore and discuss it, even if the viewer isn't COMPLETELY enamored with it.

Turnt SNACO

What Are Little Girls Made Of was the first episode of this series that really turned my brain gears....I was like, okay, they are looking at some pretty cool stuff here.... Just fantastic sci-fi.

Raven Dark

Regarding the discussion you were having with Simone about memories making up who a person is, George, I guess I have a problem with seeing it that way because of one specific thing. I've heard stories about people who have ended up with amnesia, who still do or say things a certain way, the same way as they did before they lost their memory. For example, take someone who who's afraid of dogs because they were bitten by one as a child. They lose their memory. Then they encounter a dog and are afraid of it, but don't know why. Or someone has a certain quirk such as wringing their hands when they're nervous, or pacing when they're worried. They lose their memory, but when they become nervous, you see them wringing their hands, or pacing when they get worried, and not just doing those things, but in a way that's so similar to the way they did it before that it's obviously "them." Within the concept of memory forming who a person is and that person being a different person if the memory is gone, how would you explain things like that? I suppose what I'm referring to is something like instinct, or maybe that's kind of along the same lines of what Simone meant when she mentioned "you-ness." I'm not asking this to pick an argument, but because I find the whole concept fascinating, and I like discussing it with someone who's opinion differs from my own. These Star Trek reactions are great by the way, and I am with Simone--I can't wait for you to get into TNG.

Sergio Meira

As Michael said above, our embodied selves are so intervowen with the actual physical composition of our bodies that it may very well be impossible to transmit "us" or upload "us" to a significantly different body. IT people tend to think that "we" are programs, i.e. bio-code (Hofstadter's famous book Gödel-Escher-Bach even made this claim explicitly: we are self-referring patterns), but current theories would tend to disagree. It's not that something quite interesting couldn't be done by uploading our memories and personality traits to a machine, or to a compeletely different kind of body; it's the identity thing -- "it's still us!" -- that is really difficult to believe at this point. (The differences between bodies can be such that, as an IT-researcher friend of mine once said, it may take programming that is significantly different from you and your brain patterns to make a machine that actually simulates your behavior -- just like Google Translate translates texts in ways that are remarkably different from how a human translator would operate. In both cases, the output -- your behavior, a translated text -- may be the same regardless of whether you or the machine are doing it, but the mental method used by you to produce your behavior, or to produce a translation, will be remarkably different from the machine methods -- via algorithms or stochastic methods of translation.)

Michael Bauer

"What Are Little Girls Made Of" is a great example of the philosophical nature of sci-fi - and why I love it so much. Star Trek (and other sci-fi, but Star Trek first and foremost) contributed a lot to my budding interests in science and philosophy as a kid (grew up with TNG, started watching TOS at ~15)... together with a lot of encouragement from a few great teachers and the support of my parents, I eventually ended up graduating in philosophy, formal logic, and philosophy of science at university. To this day, I have never regretted a minute of it :) P.S.: One thing I've learned: Identity across time and space - and for living things also across metabolic changes, an almost complete exchange of physical make-up, across growing up, changes in dispositions - and in all possible thought-experiments concerning duplication, memory-erasing etc... is a very complicated subject. Physical constitution certainly isn't a a good identity-criterion - our cells are all replaced over time. And even in a completely physical universe, having the same memories won't suffice either - not even because of genes, but because of a truckload of phenotypic aspects which in addition to memory itself determines the dispositions for your body and your mind to react to changes in itself and the environment. We can even go a step further and ask whether the determinants of identity are entirely internal, or whether identity also depends upon how something is embedded into which kind of environment... fascinating stuff.

Ginger

George: "That rock looks a little phallic" - Me: Oh, just you wait. xD That prop has been a meme among Fans ever since.

JBK405

Original vs Remastered is one of those Big Debates amongst Trekkies right now. I actually don't mind the remaster, since unlike the Star Wars Special Edition they didn't CHANGE anything. No new dialogue added, no old dialogue removed, no plotpoints modified, it's ONLY an aesthetic upgrade. So you can still get the original story, which I think is the most important point. However, I do think that the show loses some of the charm of the original with the new effects. Some of them no question are definitely improvements, but most are just generic mid-00s CGI. Given how much CGI has improved since then they already look outdated, and if it's going to be outdated either way I may prefer outdated practical effects from the '60s. This is not something to get hung up on either way, it's just a question of personal taste. The runtime is identical so anybody can watch along with either copy. Regarding the presence (or rather absence) of androids in this series so far, it's partially connected to what the cultural perception of a "computer" was versus a "robot" at the time. Now we think of a robot as a computer that has a body, but that wasn't the case then. In the '40s and '50s, and extending into the '60s, the two concepts very different things in the public mind. "Computers" were mechanical devices that could store and retrieve data, but couldn't "think". Independent "Robots" were thought of as a different branch of technology. For example, in Isaac Asimov's 'Robot' series -- which invented the word 'robotics' -- robots have 'positronic brains' that allows them to walk and talk and do all that cool stuff, but when a person uses a computer it's a giant device with thousands of relays and punch cards and input/output instead of just a disconnected positronic brain sitting on a desk. The Enterprise has a computer, but it speaks in that artificial-sounding mechanical tone with flashing lights and whirring noises at every query. There's nothing "human" about it, it's obviously a device. So when the show introduces androids here, they're from an alien civilization with technology very different from our own. For "Miri", they had the planet be a copy of Earth just so that they could use pre-existing sets for the post-apocalyptic world to save on costs. Expanded Universe novels did try and explain it by saying it's actually our Earth from a parallel universe, but that was just an after-the-fact patchup when people complained that they never explained it in the episode.

Sergio Meira
>>146156930

Whereas I have graduated in Linguistics with a minor in Math and Physics, and went on to get a Ph.D. in Linguistics. And I haven't regretted a single minute of it either. :-) You sound like my kind of guy. I wish you well.

Ginger

"What a funky looking kid anyway" That's because this 14 year old character was actually played by a 27 year old actor. ^^

SpankTheMonk

You were asking how the open credits are made, just today a episode dropped of Tested with the Okudas who are known from lots of amazing Star Trek graphic design and art direction starting from the TOS movies and into TNG and beyond. Check it out on YouTube shouldn’t spoil anything in The TNG show

SpankTheMonk

Oh and if it wasn’t mentioned at least a half dozen times by others. Back in the 1960s the western in space was a pitch for Star Trek. So instead of using a stun setting or Vulcan neck pinch to stop violence a more 1960s Batman tv series fight would ensue in almost every episode.

Kinokind

First, it wasn't a "beaker of death", it was a "flask" of death. Don't they know the difference between a beaker and a flask? Second, Simone should have recognized Michael J. Pollard, who played "Jahn", the oldest boy. He was one of the firemen in Steve Martin's "Roxanne", which was filmed in Nelson.

SpankTheMonk

Oh, and… will-am… Shat..ner is Canadian! 🇨🇦🖖. And I am given it all I can-nadian but James Doohan is too 🍁🖖

Michael Bauer
>>146149188

Regarding a "different kind of programming" being required to simulate behavior - that's a really fascinating topic! Theoretically, all Turing-complete languages and systems are equally capable of doing any effective computation. If you have an algorithm, the substrate on which it is implemented is irrelevant for the fact the system performing the algorithm will exhibit the (functional) properties that go along with performing such an algorithm... a philosophical point that funnily enough has kinda made it into public consciousness via the incredibly demonstrations of what can be simulated in minecraft. Practically, time/space/energy constraints do play a role - so certain computational architectures will definitely be preferable (artificial neural networks over von-Neumann architectures for example)... and as you allude to - certain shortcuts and workarounds will be needed to get it to exhibit the high-level properties of a simulated system whose actual realization has a fundamentally different architecture. But the real issues lie deeper - do our mental processes have the computational power of Turing-machines? Or might they have trans-Turing capabilities, as e.g. Roger Penrose has argued (though perhaps not very convincingly)? Beyond that, there is the perennial issue of the primacy of subjective experience and the (probably) fundamental impossibility of its operationalization - which means even if we had managed to create "actual" (phenomenal) consciousness, there's no way we could know for sure. This is an epistemic issue even in a physicalist or neutral monist view... one of many epistemic and metaphysical issues which remain intractible, perhaps fundamentally so. To return to the point you made - I certainly agree that simulating any given aspect of human behavior on a given computational architecture might require completely different "realizations" than the mental processes in ourselves. However, I would argue there is an interesting dynamic here we can investigate: The longer the timespan you want to simulate and the larger/more central the aspect of behavior, the more of the actual dynamics (of mental processes) you have to simulate - because you need to be more precise about the determinants of dispositions which in turn determine how the simulated system's "meta- and hyperparameters" evolve in response to changes in itself and the environment. If there are elements of randomness - you need to be ever more precise about where in the "causal graph" the elements of stochasticity lie, and what determines the probability distributions for the stochastic processes. Importantly, though - while this will require a more "realistic" representation of dynamical meta- and hyperparameters, it remains entirely agnostic about any "lower level" of realization, algorithmic and physical realization - so your point about potentially having different implementation stands, but would be immaterial if *all* the computationally salient properties are actually simulated... ... But we don't even know that everything about mentality is (Turing)-computable. We have good reason to suspect that phenomenal consciousness is not operationalizable (even in a completely physicalist view) - and we certainly aren't in an epistemic position to make definite proclamations about issues concerning the metaphysics of identity. So while we can certainly do "quite interesting" stuff as you allude to - we should always be aware of the rather severe and fundamental limits to our understanding of such issues.

Darin Foat

I'm glad you guys are enjoying TOS. The second half of Season 1 had some absolute classic episodes. (And one real dud IMHO)

James Wilson

Speaking as a Floridian, being called America's wang is actually a step up from how we're usually referred.

Dazzler & Em

Just to pick up on a couple of things. First of, love the expressions from Simone as she is desperately trying to hide her excitement about watching TNG with George while at the same time not give away any spoilers. From some of the comments from Simone, I take it that you will continue your journey into TNG, will this include the TOS films first? Either way it is another reason to keep enjoying your videos. Has Simone and her love for Men in black 3 become the new Simons peg? Both of your thoughts on what makes a person are probably right as we understand so little of what makes us unique.

Gary Fixler

Simone: "Youness, oh, that sounds weird. I need to stop saying that." every old lady named Eunice: 😢

Robert Evans
>>146118913

There will be another episode where the 'duplicate earth' gets a passing reference some named theory and that's the hadn't waving in your face. Were all know it's because budget and technical limitation kind forced their Hand in the 60s

Robert Evans
>>146099568

And he will voice a couple of more characters before the series run is finished. "Quick and merciful'

Gábor Szabolcs Koszper

I'm pretty sure the personality is a function of the physical brain because personalities have been changed because of brain injury, and it wasn't the shock of the accident, it was the injury of the brain. The mind is not just the memories you have, it's also how you react to the memories.

David Martin

The costume designer for Star Trek said that the costumes he designed for the "sexy women" were designed to look as if one slip of a strap would cause the top to fall off. As you can see throughout the series, he was usually successful. I agree that Andrea's is his finest accomplishment.

Angela D. Mitchell

The "Miri" episode really stuck with me -- this is the first time I've seen it since I was a kid, and it's still fricking creepy. The young guy leading their gang is character actor Michael J. Pollard, who just a year later would make a big impact in "Bonnie and Clyde." He's such a specific character actor -- always kind of childlike and strange. He's great in small but memorable roles in "Melvin and Howard," "Roxanne" and "Scrooged," among many other things.