Comments

1. Anonymous says:

   July 24, 2010 at 9:25 am

   The Enter­prise is held by an unseen force which threat­ens to destroy the ship.

   Kirk tricks the force into believ­ing that the fed­er­a­tion have a weapon that will inflict equal or greater dam­age on any attacker. Guess what hap­pens in the end.
   Rat­ing: 3 / 5
2. Steve (observer8@aol.com) says:

   July 24, 2010 at 9:49 am

   I enjoyed this video mainly because of the “Bai­ley” char­ac­ter. His out­spo­ken, con­fused and impul­sive behav­ior was amus­ing to watch.
   Rat­ing: 4 / 5
3. Anonymous says:

   July 24, 2010 at 12:17 pm

   While explor­ing an uncharted region of space, the U.S.S. Enter­prise comes upon an alien space buoy which is cube-shaped and spins, warn­ing ships away and block­ing the starship’s path. Kirk’s orders the phasers to destroy the buoy but imme­di­ately an alien’s ship, the I.S.S. Fesar­ius, shaped like a large, glow­ing crys­tal traps the star­ship. A ghostly, almost skele­tal face appears on the viewscreen, iden­ti­fy­ing itself as Balok. He tells Kirk that the U.S.S. Enter­prise has tres­passed and com­mit­ted hos­tile actions, and there­fore, must be destroyed. Employ­ing a trick from the Earth game, poker, Kirk tries a des­per­ate bluff by con­vinc­ing Balok that if the U.S.S. Enter­prise is fired upon, the cor­bomite in the starship’s hull will self-destruct and destroy both ships.
   Rat­ing: 3 / 5
4. Charles Ashbacher says:

   July 24, 2010 at 2:32 pm

   The inten­sity of this episode and the calm­ness of most of the Enter­prise crew in the face of immi­nent destruc­tion demon­strate the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of Star Fleet per­son­nel. Crew­man Bai­ley is the excep­tion, when faced with the unknown; he pan­ics and is relieved by Kirk. When Balok, the com­man­der of the alien ship, states his inten­tion to destroy the Enter­prise, Kirk argues his case, but when that fails, he engages in an elab­o­rate bluff. He claims that a device called Cor­bomite has been incor­po­rated into the Enter­prise, which will cause any destruc­tive energy to be returned to the attacker, destroy­ing the attacker.
   
   The ruse appar­ently works, as the attack is sus­pended and a small ship is then used to trans­port the Enter­prise to another loca­tion. When the Enter­prise breaks away, Balok’s small ship is dam­aged and sends out a dis­tress sig­nal. Rather than flee, Kirk chooses to beam over and assist the crew. In a ges­ture of effec­tive com­mand, Kirk allows Bai­ley to be a part of the away team.
   
   To their sur­prise, they learn that there is only one per­son in the crew, and he appears to be a human child. The nasty “per­son” that appeared on their view­ing screen was an ani­mated dummy. In clos­ing, the Fed­er­a­tion has made a new friend and crew­man Bai­ley has accepted the assign­ment of being the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Fed­er­a­tion to Balok and his species.
   
   There is sub­stan­tial sub­stance to this story, when humans encounter other species, the ini­tial con­tact will be unpre­dictable and prob­lem­atic. An intel­li­gent and tech­no­log­i­cally advanced species would be very sen­si­ble in tak­ing a duplic­i­tous approach to first con­tact. By appear­ing to be some­thing else, as did Balok in this episode, the new species would be able to see whether the behav­ior of humans would match their lofty rhetoric. Also, the peo­ple who made the first con­tact must be calm, col­lected and will­ing to die rather than take a chance in mak­ing a major mis­take when encoun­ter­ing another species for the first time. This is a very under­rated episode; I rank it in the top ten of all episodes of the orig­i­nal series.
   
   Rat­ing: 5 / 5
5. Brian Overland says:

   July 24, 2010 at 3:48 pm

   This episode was the first to be shot dur­ing the reg­u­lar pro­duc­tion sched­ule. It was nei­ther the first to be aired (Man Trap) nor was it one of the two pilots (The Cage, Where No Man Has Gone Before). But oth­er­wise, it was “first,” and it has the virtue — or draw­back — of spend­ing more time than usual build­ing char­ac­ter rela­tion­ships and show­ing how the chain of com­mand worked on the ship.

   The Enter­prise is repeat­edly threat­ened with destruc­tion by an advanced race that oper­ates a gigan­tic mother ship. The shot of the tiny Enter­prise against the alien ship, fill­ing the whole screen, was rel­a­tively cheap to do but still man­ages to impress. Much of the action con­cerns ten­sions aboard ship dur­ing the cri­sis. While this makes for some good scenes, the onboard ten­sion is not nearly as fast-paced as in the com­par­a­tively supe­rior “Bal­ance of Terror.”

   Kirk and McCoy are unusu­ally at odds here. The pro­duc­ers and writ­ers were still work­ing out the nuances of this key rela­tion­ship. This episode estab­lishes that McCoy is the one per­son on the ship who can second-guess or crit­i­cize Kirk and man­age to get away with it (i.e. not end up in the brig). It has not yet been estab­lished that this is pri­mar­ily a deeply friendly, sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship, even when Bones is being cranky.

   The cor­bomite maneu­ver of the title is excit­ing and already shows Kirk as an out­stand­ing com­man­der. In some ways, Shat­ner took to the role very quickly. But if you really think about it later, this bril­liant maneu­ver turns out to prob­a­bly have been unnec­es­sary. By far the best part of the episode is the end­ing. I am always moved by the sil­hou­ette shot of the alien com­man­der lead­ing the Earth men through his ship as he says “We are much alike, you and I, Cap­tain, both proud of our ships.“
   Rat­ing: 4 / 5

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