Comments

1. Anonymous says:

   February 9, 2010 at 7:18 pm

   This lat­est TOS DVD fea­tures one of the bet­ter TOS episodes, “The Ulti­mate Com­puter”, and one of the worst, “The Omega Glory”. “Ulti­mate Com­puter” is prob­a­bly the last great TOS episode, focus­ing on the age-old con­flict between man and machine–can a com­puter run the Enter­prise as well as man? On the other hand, “Omega Glory” is an annoy­ing, thinly-disguised (and dated) com­men­tary on the Viet Nam War. The new DVD release fea­tures superb video qual­ity, although the audio had a few flaws (“hic­cups” in the dia­log, pic­ture and sound out of synch at times).
   Rat­ing: 4 / 5
2. Anonymous says:

   February 9, 2010 at 8:00 pm

   Gene Rod­den­berry had a dream and it was star trek his infini­tive vision lives on today with all the new star trek series but his orig­o­nal series is still one of the best in these two episodes he con­tin­ued to live true to the rest or the star trek episodes I recomend this and all the orig­o­nal star trek episodes
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
3. Frederick Baptist says:

   February 9, 2010 at 9:46 pm

   If you are decid­ing which vol­umes to keep, this one only just falls under the “nice to have but dis­pens­able” cat­e­gory which is a pity because the first episode, “The Ulti­mate Com­puter” is actu­ally one of the best episodes from the sec­ond sea­son and comes after a string of mediocre episodes. We get a very inter­est­ing premise: “Will computers/technology ever make humans redun­dant? This sim­i­lar premise has been vis­ited many times over since in movies like “Ter­mi­na­tor”, “The Matrix” and “I, Robot” and will prob­a­bly still strike a chord with view­ers many years into the future as well. The act­ing is very good and cou­pled with one of the bet­ter scripts ever writ­ten for Trek make this a very mem­o­rable episode indeed.

   Now for the down­side: “The Omega Glory” is a ridicu­lous episode which unlike the very sim­i­lar episodes “Piece of the Action” and “Pat­terns of Force” in which the vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal par­al­lels with Earth his­tory were explained by Prime Direc­tive vio­la­tions, we are expected to believe that inex­plic­a­bly, some planet light years away devel­oped the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence word-for-word and have exactly the same flag as the U.S. The two war­ring fac­tions are also called the Yanks and the Com­mu­nists! The ridicu­lous plot and aver­age act­ing makes this among the 3 worst ever episodes in the entire Trekdom.

   I see that Ama­zon is now offer­ing down­loads of indi­vid­ual episodes for about $2 each. It’s prob­a­bly a good way to get around this conun­drum and per­haps order the one episode and for­get the other one as quickly as pos­si­ble!
   Rat­ing: 3 / 5
4. Rottenberg's rotten book review says:

   February 9, 2010 at 11:14 pm

   These two episodes share the theme of great genius gone wrong. In “Com­puter”, Kirk strug­gles to free the Enter­prise from the grip of a com­puter that’s become self-aware. “Omega” had Kirk and crew trapped on a prim­i­tive planet whose his­tory is being altered by another star­ship cap­tain. Though “Omega” is prob­a­bly more ridiculed (espe­cially for its end­ing) it’s actu­ally a great episode, and the clear win­ner of the two.

   Not to say that “Ulti­mate Com­puter” is a bad ep — far from it. When the “Enter­prise” has Dr. Daystrom’s M-5 com­puter installed so that it can take part in a series of wargames (uh oh!!), the ship also gets Day­strom him­self. Ufor­tu­nately, the machine gets too big to take orders from the crew, and not only goes into busi­ness for itself, but soon crosses the line between wargames and pure war. You just can’t say enough about actor William Marshal’s boom­ing voice. You’d think that a man who finds it eas­ier to con­nect with machines than mankind would sound more like Wally Cox — mak­ing Marshall’s role here one of cre­ative mis-casting. “Ulti­mate” is also in search of a coher­ent theme. Until the machine loses its cyber­netic mind, “Com­puter” is a great story about men at risk of being made obso­les­cent by machines. And then it goes wrong — and the com­puter decides that it’s human and pro­ceeds to make a great case for it by los­ing its mind. While “The Next Gen­er­a­tion” blurred the line between AI and human intel­li­gence, this episode just assumes that machines con­sider them­selves human and there­fore free to act utterly illog­i­cally. The promis­ing plot arc, in which the imper­fect minds of Cap­tain Kirk & Crew man­age to out-think the mas­ter brain, is lost. Instead of a great dis­cus­sion about the ironic virtues of man’s imper­fect mind, we get some moral­ity play about its supremacy. This is old hat for Trek, which con­fronted our heroes with a host of think­ing machines that also proved sus­cep­ti­ble to being talked out of their exis­tence by imper­fect men (Nomad, Lan­dru & V’Ger come to mind). This was the episode that intro­duced (to Trek, any­way) the term “Dunsel”.

   “Omega Glory” takes lumps for its ridicu­lous look­ing end­ing, but it’s still a great ep — a great vari­a­tion on the theme of alien soci­eties that model them­selves on shreds of our own. Dis­cov­er­ing a derelict star­ship in orbit of an unex­plored planet, Kirk finds its crew wiped out by a mys­te­ri­ous plague — their bod­ies dis­solved into dry crys­tals. Real­iz­ing that they’re infected, Kirk & Crew fol­low the recorded warn­ings of the now dead crew of the other ship — beam down to the planet’s sur­face. There, they find two war­ring civ­i­liza­tions — Kohms and Yangs. The first is peace­ful, and seems to take its orders from Ron Tracy, the cap­tain of the stricken ship. The Yangs are sav­age — the bad guys. Unfor­tu­nately, Tracey has more than the safety of the Kohms to think about. The immu­nity of the planet seems to have turned its inhab­i­tants into immor­tal super­men. Has Tracy dis­cov­ered the “Foun­tain of Youth?” And will he have to vio­late the “Prime Direc­tive” to learn its secret? This was a great ep. that works off its great cast­ing — vet­eran TV actor Mor­gan Wood­ward chews up the script as Tracy, mak­ing you won­der how Trek would have looked had it been a show about his adven­tures. The end­ing, in which Kirk rhap­sodizes about the virtues of know­ing free­dom, is pure corn, but Tracy’s char­ac­ter keeps the story hum­ming with his fire and brim­stone deliv­ery. (As an alternate-Earth soci­ety story, like “Pat­terns of Force” or “Bread & Cir­cuses”, “Glory” is unique in that it saves that rev­e­la­tion for the end.)

   Trivia: In “Glory”, Ron Tracy thinks he’s found the foun­tain of youth. In the “Logan’s Run” TV show, Wood­ward played an “Elder” — one of the select few men who were allowed to live past their 30th birth­day, even if secretly.
   Rat­ing: 4 / 5
5. Cseeley6 says:

   February 9, 2010 at 11:52 pm

   The Ulti­mate Com­puter
   
   Approach­ing a Starfleet space sta­tion, the Enter­prise receives orders to test a new com­puter sys­tem. The M-5 mul­ti­tronic unit, cre­ated by fore­most com­puter sci­en­tist Dr. Richard Day­strom, is the next evo­lu­tion in ves­sel oper­a­tion and con­trol. The M-5 can oper­ate a star­ship with a lim­ited num­ber of crew mem­bers, a fact that Kirk can’t believe. The machine will be tested in ves­sel maneu­vers, rou­tine con­tact prob­lems, and war game exer­cises against a task force com­manded by vet­eran ship com­man­der, Com­modore Robert Wes­ley. With the major­ity of the Enter­prise crew on the space sta­tion the ship gets under­way with a crew of twenty.

   Kirk, who thinks that hav­ing a sin­gle com­puter run a star­ship is dan­ger­ous, reluc­tantly goes along with the tests; at first all goes well. The M-5 per­forms every­thing asked of it with smooth pre­ci­sion. Var­i­ous ship maneu­vers and land­ing party deci­sions for a plan­e­tary sur­vey mis­sion are han­dled by the M-5 with the pro­fes­sion­al­ism and expe­ri­ence of a vet­eran star­ship crew. Kirk uneasily watches on as the M-5 han­dles all the things he has trained his entire life to do. His frus­tra­tion is fur­ther fueled after he wit­nesses his ship under con­trol of the M-5 react­ing to an unsched­uled attack drill. The USS Lex­ing­ton under the com­mand of Com­modore Wes­ley and the USS Excal­ibur under the com­mand of Cap­tain Har­ris are out­ma­neu­vered by the M-5 unit and have mul­ti­ple “hits” scored against them.

   Kirk’s uneasi­ness is jus­ti­fied when the M-5 destroys the SS Woden, an auto­mated ore freighter. Kirk orders the Enter­prise back to the space sta­tion and the M-5 to be taken off-line. The M-5 has ideas of its own as the machine, which has pro­tected itself with a force field, kills an engi­neer try­ing to dis­con­nect it while draw­ing more power. With the main attack force for the war games on the way, Spock and Scotty attempt to bypass the M-5, and Kirk and McCoy try to delve into Day­strom him­self. In his early twen­ties, Dr. Richard Day­strom won awards and acco­lades for his duotronic break­through. The Enter­prise and her sis­ter ships in Starfleet uti­lize the duotronic com­puter sys­tems cre­ated by Day­strom. That tri­umph in Daystrom’s career was about a quar­ter of a cen­tury ago and the M-5 unit was to be his comeback.

   The M-5 unit shows what a supe­rior sys­tem it really is when it fools Scotty and Spock, thwart­ing their attempt to regain con­trol of the ship. The machine that was impressed with Daystrom’s per­son­al­ity to make it more suited to star­ship con­trol seems invin­ci­ble and there seems to be no hope for the approach­ing task force. Kirk’s fears are brought to real­ity when the M-5 opens fire on the unshielded task force with weapons at full power. The machine launches dev­as­tat­ing attacks against the task force com­pris­ing of the USS Lex­ing­ton, Excal­ibur, Potemkin and Hood. The star­ships were dam­aged in the unpro­voked and cal­cu­lated M-5 attack pat­tern. The M-5 ren­ders the Excal­ibur severely crip­pled, killing the crew aboard. Kirk des­per­ately has Day­strom try and talk some “sense” into his cre­ation only to find the doc­tor an unsta­ble man who is proud of what his “child” has done. Wes­ley receives per­mis­sion from Starfleet to stop the Enter­prise at all costs with the remain­ing ships at his com­mand. Try­ing one final gam­bit Kirk attempts to con­vince the M-5 that it has com­mit­ted mur­der. The machine using the right and wrong lessons that were pro­grammed into it deac­ti­vates itself leav­ing the ship open to attack. The Enterprise’s shields drop, and when the task force goes in for the kill Wes­ley breaks off the attack at the last second.

   Great space bat­tles as the Enter­prise tests the M-5 unit. I guess they fig­ured if the M-5 could sur­vive Kirk then it was ready for mass pro­duc­tion and use!
   
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5

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