Star Trek Retro Review: "Court Martial" (TOS) | Courtroom Episodes
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- Опубликовано: 6 фев 2025
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#startrek #review #startrektheoriginalseries #startrektos
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
My wife suggests that Finney was so bored while hiding on the Enterprise, that he tried to occupy his time by playing chess. He kept losing to the computer, so he got angry and reprogrammed it to ratchet down the difficulty. THAT'S the evidence that Spock found.
Oh that's perfect! 👍👍
I like that the Trial Panel had Black officers on it, and in the 60s at that!
Stone is Kirk's C/O in this episode. Progressive.
So much DEI! *gasp* "Star Trek has always been woke " - Steve Shives
Cracking up at the "Eliminate the heartbeat of the transporter chief" joke. Perfect comedic timing as always.
I saw that joke coming and still got a great laughing from it.
The casual "sabotaj" drops made my day
"So Spock pushes a button and kills that guy." I have always had the exact same thought when Kirk tells him to stop the guy's heartbeat. Also, your William Shatner pronunciation of "sabotage" didn't go unnoticed. Great video. Thanks.
Tonight on Star Trek: It's JAG officer vs. JAG officer. It's a JAG off!
Aaah, Pittsburgh humor.
@@KassFireborn 😂 Beat me to it!
13:34 Or better yet, JAG! BTW, there have been a TON of Star Trek actors who have appeared on JAG & its’ spinoff, NCIS. Of course there’s Scott Bacula, but also Steven Culp, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, Rene Auboronois, Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, Jeri Ryan, Susanna Thompson, John Billingsley, Connor Trinneer, Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park, Odet Fehr, Wison Cruz, & Annie Wershing.
Watch out when the justice starts flying.
"a point of view in search of a character" is such a splendidly succinct way to describe low-caliber writing that can be found in movies and TV shows from across the decades.
Also, Cogley's ancestor in our era is definitely one of those people who makes sure you know they don't own a TV and that their kids have zero screen time.
I was born in 1961, and saw this episode when it aired. At the end, I turned to my older brothers and said, "Was Finney going to hide on the Enterprise forever? I mean, was he going to camp out somewhere, like a hobo?"
They'd have discoved him when the Enterprise had to undergo a refit.😂
7:07 I like the buttons on Kirk's armrest. He can activate yellow and red alerts, which makes perfect sense. He can activate one hyper-specific function that doesn't come up in any other episode. And there are two other buttons that apparently don't do anything. Because this ship has no other important functions that the Captain might need to activate himself. Nothing to do with weapons, or shields, or the warp core, or even the comm system. But yeah, just in case he needs to jettison that pod, the button is right there.
It wouldn't be _completely_ unreasonable for the buttons to be programmable (with labels) to meet the needs of the moment.
The Jetison Pod button always makes me laugh--it's location seems like a recipe for unintentional disaster. Sort of like how, with a simple flick of a switch, a hand phaser can be made to easily overload, disintegrating the person holding it, as experienced by the unfortunate bum in City on the Edge of Forever.
The two untouched buttons obviously allow Kirk to switch between which plot-specific function he needs at the moment.
Softkey?
Kirk had secretly been planning to jettison that pod and kill Finney the whole time, and had been subtly maneuvering him into the position to execute his plan. I mean this is Kirk we're talking about. Give the man some credit.
Something that I really miss in the Kelvin post-2009 version of Kirk is exemplified in this episode. He’s not a loose cannon. He’s creative, clever, and daring, but TOS has him *mostly* be a by the book officer much like Picard in TNG, but with Riker’s youthful action and romantic heart. Descriptions of him by others talk about he was a wunderkind of the Academy and usually what we see of him in the command seat of TOS is an encyclopedic knowledge of both the ship and the regulations that govern Starfleet and the Federation. The Kelvin version is primarily centered on rule breaking, womanizing, and “going with his gut” until Star Trek Beyond, written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung, keys into a more mature Kirk that really helps the movie *feel* more “authentically” Trek.
Yeah, as wonderful as Wrath of Khan is, the Kobayashi Maru really forever changed how Kirk is presented. He's no longer the bookish nerd that flew up the ranks because of how talented he is, he's the devil may care rule breaker that cheats his way to being captain. Strange New Worlds does a good balancing act of having Kirk trust his instincts but also be someone who has advanced quickly because he really is just that good and also because everyone likes him.
Too much of Kirk's modern reputation/portrayal is actually cultural osmosis of tropes about him. People think he's more like Zapp Brannigan than the actual character in TOS.
Kirk is a bookworm smart guy and picard was the swashbuckling scoundrel, but due to Spock the vulcan equivalent of a raging teenager and Riker the by the books sex machine standing next to these guys they tend ro not be rightly shown
@@benallen7403And it's ironic because that same movie has Kirk not following standard procedures, resulting in the Enterprise getting beaten up and a bunch of crew/cadets being killed, and Kirk admitting it was a mistake and acknowledging the junior officer he ignored had been correct in asserting they should follow the rules.
@@keith6706 Didn't face a court martial for that little blunder, did he...
The computer thing makes sense given the state of computers in the 60s. Computers were basically "instruction machines" that too programs that were on the punchcards or tape or whatever medium they were using, and the computer was basically only interpreting the data being fed into it. So while you could have a bug in a program, if other programs are also misbehaving, then it means that there's something wrong with how the system is processing instructions.
There weren't layers upon layers of programs running programs in 1960s computers to point fault in other directions, and there was no way that the writers could have known that this would be how computers evolved in the future. So while it's seems like a really weird, direct leap of logic on Spock's part, it's really an artefact of the technology that was present at the time.
Well said!
Absolutely! The episode is from '67, even the classical "GOTO considered harmful" paper only came out in '68. And structured programming was only a decade old. For anyone looking for *some* illustration of how weird things were back then, perhaps "The story of Mel" is ..approachable enough :)
It also seems like a rudimentary example of data poisoning: messing with the ML model to produce inaccurate results and Spock caught that the computer was off somehow. I don’t think Roddenberry et al were up to speed on machine learning at the time but it tracks for me
We also dont know enough about the audit trail of the records. Directly tampering with them might have shown up on review but since they are arranged as clips, presumably in numbered order, if you change the way the export proccess sorts numbers you get an "authentic" file out of true order that shows the desired narrative. It would also cause the chess program to reprioritize move values allowing spock to beat it and presumably a bunch of other minor computer related issue that wouldnt be needed to be explicitly said in the story.
I know im reaching pretty far for this theory but there is plenty of room in the story for plausibility to do the heavy lifting. For all we know ol bug eyes didnt have the breakdown til recently, having a existential crisis on his service anniversary because its another year without advancement.
Thanks for reminding me of this episode. Two things jump out at me as you reviewed it:
First, that Percy Rodriguez was in this episode. It was rare for Black actors in the mid-1960s play to play authority figures, and this is another example of Trek being ahead of its time.
Second, the character of Jamie looks just like Gidget!
Gidget's Dad Fakes His Own Death Space Beach Party-a-bongo!
Yeah, even in TOS they had black admirals outranking Kirk. Oh sorry, I forgot the narrative that "only modern Trek is woke".
@@StormsparkPegasus This exactly. a galaxy of billions of stars pays attention to colonialism and its baby racism. How woke.
As a nerd I do get a kick out of the fact that Kirk’s lawyer/defender was a paper book guy in an era of computers…and the show had the foresight to understand how unusual that would be in that kind of future
And instill Kirk’s love of old books through the series. 😊
"BOOKS, young man!" 😁
When you made the gag about eliminating the heartbeat of the transporter room crewman, I thought for sure you were gonna make a Miles O'Brien joke.
@@renatocorvaro6924 O'Brien would not be on the Enterprise until Stardate 4525. Court Martial was Stardate 2947. So O'Brien escaped this particular moment of suffering.
"Raving, slobbering, Bug eyed Weirdo" is my new favorite character description.
But, enough about William Shatner...
"They had a Star Trek fight"
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
FISTICUFFS
The kind of fight that should have you in an emergency room with IV's hanging out of your arm while you struggle back to consciousness.
“Spock pushes a button, and kills that guy.” 😂😂😂
I appreciate the way you said Sabotage this whole review... neat
This is one of the first episodes I remember watching, as a little tyke, and being freaked out at the "heartbeat elimination" bit.
When this episode first aired back in the '60s (and I love this episode) I thought the most ridiculous thing about it was the idea that there would happen to be a camera directly on the console where Kirk's finger was resting. Today cameras are ubiquitous, so that's not so big a deal. But are we supposed to believe that the designer of the Enterprise thought a "Jettison Pod" button was so important that they would make it one of five buttons at the captains side at all times?
I'm curious what Finney's plan was, after Kirk is found guilty. Like, he was hiding out on the Enterprise was he going to show up to work after Kirk's found guilty and just go, hi, I'm the new records officer... Jakey....
Like, his daughter's on the space station right? Why not sneak over there, get her, and try and hop a transport somewhere else and start over? And then let the fact that the daughter's suddenly missing provide the a-ha moment.
He...probably just didn't think that far ahead, and keep in mind he wasn't right in the head. After the sabotage and during the trial, he was making things up as he went along.
Maybe he just didn't care what happened to him as long as he watched Kirk get busted.
Probably planning that _after_ Kirk is found guilty, transporting himself to the station, and _then_ disappearing with his daughter. It's implied that Finney contacted Jamie and that was why she went to Cogley with her change of heart. It really feels like the writers were planning a two-parter but the producers nixed that and they had to cut a bunch to fit it into the time allotted. For crying out loud, they had Shatner do a voice-over to explain how Finney sabotaged the _Enterprise_ and how to fix it.
Can't wait for the next one. "There it sits!"
"Redjac. Redjac! Redjac!" Sounds like this is not the next one. That episode was memorable, especially for the twist when aired, so hopefully that will be reviewed.
That's the computer using electro-mechanical switches. More switches need more power and generates more heat.
Last I was this early, Klingons hadn't performed Shakespeare yet.
I think Spock's reasoning about the whole "beating the computer at chess" thing, is predicated on the fact that Spock "gave the computer an understanding of chess equal to his own". It wasn't like Spock was playing Battle Chess. He was literally playing against HIMSELF which is why he insists that the only possible outcome should have been stalemate after stalemate. The fact that Spock was able to beat the computer 5 times in a row indicated to him that the MEMORY of the computer had been altered and therefore the recording of Kirk jettisoning the pod BEFORE he called Red Alert was in question. Since only Kirk and Finney (as Records Officer) had authorization to mess with the computer memory, that suggested that Finney could still be alive (the alteration would have to have occurred AFTER the ion storm event). Still pretty tenuous logic, but at least there is a direct connection between the memory of the computer being altered and Spock being able to beat it at chess. Now, of course, he needs to go through the whole tedious business of re-entering his chess knowledge into the computer memory. Damn that Finney anyway!
Thanks for having fun "seriously." I love Star Trek, and your commentaries are a pleasure to watch.
Something occurred to me while watching your fantastic review of this episode Steve, and that is related to the idea of Kirk essentially ordering Finney to his death. When we find out that Finney is actually alive, that negates the whole idea of the court martial being over whether or not Kirk followed procedure. I wonder if something could have been made out of the idea that a tiny detail of procedure (i.e. when the Red Alert was called) would be the difference between being exonerated or having his career destroyed over a crewman's death. This would then change the culprit of the computer record modification so would then turn it into something different, but I was intrigued about the idea anyway.
Keep up the great work!
I like that you keep saying "sabotage" the weird way William Shatner says it...
Telly-kin-isis!
I just love how you alert for spoilers on a 50-year old television show. You rock, Steve.
I love your math. Since I was born in 1966, it makes me feel young, as when the world was new.
@@AlanDavidDoaneGreat callback!
@@AlanDavidDoane Wrath of Khan and I was born in March, 1964. 😂
Things I adore; Man of Steel, paper books over digital, and everything Steve puts out. I don't know if this is ironic or absurd but I love your style brother.
I love your humorous synopsis/review of this episode LOL 😂
Hi Steve. I always thought Jaime's sudden change of heart indicated that she knew her father was alive, and that Cogley realized this and was trying to find a way to prove it. Until Spock proved the computer had been tampered with, he couldn't demand the court to reconvene on the Enterprise (this never made sense to me, Spock could have just as easily tracked Finney down if Cogley had communicated his suspicions).
Heck yeah! Im super excited for "measure of a man"! Also, I don't know if your allowed to or maybe it's just out of your scope or maybe you jist don't wanna,.but i would love to see reviews of "Star Trek Continues". I think those 10 episodes were some of the best Trek to be put out and were a welcome addition when there was little other new Trek available. Anyway, good video as always.
Thanks!
Excellent, as always - and it's really exciting to see that the courtroom episodes are getting their turn!
I love the mystery that's impossible to figure out. You gotta watch to nearly the end.
Courtroom drama and sci-fi blend well together. "Court Martial" is excellent in spite of some lapses in legal procedures. It's quite impressive how engaging the uneven pacing of the story flows to the point you don't notice the main court scene happens in an empty room. The surprise twist helps to elevate "Court Martial". It isn't just that Records Officer Ben Finney was Not Dead, but he was very much alive and still aboard the Enterprise, hiding from the ship-wide search! Made my dad drop his cigar. 👍👍
Those academy classmates must have been held back a couple of decades.
I laughed out loud at that superb and quite unexpected transporter chief joke. Very well done.
Thanks
Säbotäge. Lovely.
You mean Computer Killer Kirk?
By the way Finney behaves, he clearly ought to be at least a Commodore at this point in time. Grudge or not: in his heart, he got promoted and it fits perfectly.
One of my favorite classic trek episodes and great review as always! Re the „tampering with the computer makes it bad at chess“-conundrum: back then a common sci-fi trope was that computers in the future would function like brains (eg asimov, lem). So for the audience back then, who most likely knew even less about computers that we do now, might have conveived of that as finney „knocking the computer on the head“, which of course would make it bad at chess
The opening was absolutely pitch perfect XD
I've always liked this episode. Finney is horrible, but you can see how he got as messed up as he is. Jaime's anger is understandable too, she genuinely believes that a man she's known her whole life murdered her father when he became 'inconvenient'. And the spoofed computer records would even work if the episode was made now, despite all the progress we've made technologically.
One of the best TOS episodes, IMHO.
Finny's break point might have been Kirk showing up in Engineering, after figuring out he'd been made.
Like, that craze might have been brand new, freshly broken.... I dunno. I'm grasping at straws here.
Given the blight of regurgitative AI the last few years, Cogley's attitude toward computers seems depressingly fresh these days. Rev up that Butlerian Jihad!
"They have a Star Trek fight.,"
Ahaha! Terse, precise marksmanship! 😂
Wow, this is early in the day, the sun isn't even down yet! So many of Steve’s videos are posted after 10 pm!
That's a fair review. An often clunky, but fun episode. And Elisha Cook Jr is one of my favourite actors. Even if his character is poorly-written, he's still great, and he's never less than watchable.
You need to watch more hacker/security conference talks. Security exploits often have side effects. 😊
Like, in some very rare cases, long prison sentences?
11:56 "sabotăge" FANTASTIC!!!
I always found it interesting that this is the only time in all of TOS we see a female dress uniform (Areel Shaw).
The contradiction of the courtroom computer not reporting that Kirk's testimony is a lie, while the ships computer indicates Kirk lied is a clue there's something wrong with the ship's computer.
This has one of the best Kirk moments, where he demands the court martial. The story goes in a weird direction, but the scifi gimmick they use at the end and the fistfight are at least satisfying. Good episode.
That look Lt.Uhura gives Kirk when he kisses Shaw on the bridge, I always wondered if that was Nichelle Nichols looking at Shatner.
The VO line from Kirk, "beaten and sobbing," always cracks me up. Also the mathematical goof about "1 to the fourth power."
11:55 Respect to your attention to detail
I always enjoyed this episode, but pretty much the same misgivings as yours
As usual, this was an excellent video
Wild fanon theory: Like the TNG era computer, the TOS era computer has crossed the threshold into artificial general intelligence. The reason Spock keeps beating it at chess is because it is intentionally throwing the games to try and send a warning - because while it's smart, it can't actually disobey the orders Finney gave it to frame Kirk. (Or, alternatively, the program Finney snuck into the computer is consuming so much bandwidth thanks to his somewhat erratic coding that the 24th century Stockfish equivalent is only able to draw enough processing power to play perfectly 30 moves ahead and Spock's Vulcan brain-and-training is actually able to beat a computer that's "only" playing perfectly 30 moves ahead - but I think there's a heck of a lot more meat on the idea of a computer that is a General AI but is still fundamentally a computer - it can't actually do what it's not hardwired to do, and it's not hardwired to talk to the crew outside regulated data channels and reports.).
Or...Finney deleted a few programs to free up enough available memory so he could render his fake evidence video...
I loved watching that episode when I was a kid.
Thank you for pronouncing "sabotage" correctly. 😉
Looking forward to more of these!
This is one of my favorite TOS episodes. I love Elisha Cook, Jr. as the lawyer. I also love his sole reliance on his legal tomes. It is my understanding that some contemporary lawyers are starting to put too much trust in computers and losing their ability of keep tons of legal precedent in their memories.
"What does the computer's poor chess performance have to do with Finney altering the logs?" Well, recall, at the time the episode was recorded, even among professional engineers, "software" and "hardware" overlapped a lot. Re-programming was often literally a case of re-wiring. So it's not Finney sitting at a console tapping out a program, it's more like he went into the physical console with a pair of plyers and a soldering iron.
18:56 well you see Steve, 23rd century starships all run on Grok, and if you tamper with the training dataset, the whole ship might explode ;P
I feel like the computer being bad at chess evidence works because most people at the time didn't know how computers work
Great Episode ❤
I think that "Court Martial" is an underrated Trek episode. It is one of the first really good "courtroom" dramas set in a futuristic format. While "The Menagerie" was the first that depicted a court-martial, it was here that it really got explored. And I love the speech given by Elisha Cook as Samuel Cogley. It really shows that no matter how far we 'boldly go' in terms of space travel and peaceful exploration of other planets and cultures, we still have to pledge, protect, and defend the rights of all humans.
Just my opinion....
Brings back vivid memories of when I first saw it and thought it was filmed in Black &White!
I love your dedication to sabotaaaje
22:00 c'mon Steve, you know that the Ion Pod exposition would be delivered by Lt. Cmdr. Jamie Finney.
Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, authors of The Expanse series, made the same point about being able to tell a wide variety of stories in science fiction in general. Mystery story, courtroom drama, horror, western, detective, etc. One of many aspects of sci fi that I love.
I was half expecting the Star Trek title shot to accompany the 'Duhnk-Duhnk' at the start lol
I’ve seen (and enjoyed) this episode many times. In a recent viewing I came to think that the reason Jamie comes to forgive Kirk is because she has learned her father is alive. When Cogley witnesses her conversion, he realizes that an external force has changed Finney’s daughter’s behavior. He begins to suspect that Ben Finney is alive. I feel like that’s what the actors are playing even if it’s not stated.
I really enjoy Shatner's acting in his "I DEMAND IT!" scene.
I think the message here is very strong and with AI and deepfake everywhere has even more staying power.
Also I think its a very interesting detail that Finney is said to have been an instrustor at Starfleet Academy when he met Kirk, adds another layer to his hatred of him because Kirk is the young up and coming officer who passes by someone like Finney who feels entitled to a command position, but can't even admit when he screwed up or care enough to not half-ass his job beforehand.
I love that the TOS dress uniforms make them all look like old European royals who forgot their medals that day
Mayella Ewell. I got that reference. Thank you Steve for giving me a brief sense of superiority. And great video as always. Thanks.
Sabotaaage. Nice. But yeah, the chess thing feels like it was written by and for people who didn't understand how computers worked. Re: actual lawyers, a buddy of mine's hobby horse is that every Starfleet vessel needs at least one actual attorney onboard. So often we get captains of ships negotiating treaties, other diplomatic things, and getting involved in legal issues where an actual attorney would probably prove more useful than someone whose primary skills are leading and managing a starship crew.
13:53 You see Timeson, the ion pod foots the charge for the rest of the ship!
Solid review. Your criticisms are well founded, and yet, like you, I think the episode works. I think it's better than the courtroom stuff in "The Menagerie", but that's not a surprise, considering the courtroom stuff there was just a facade around The Cage.
"And Spock kills that guy" lol'd
the chess thing probably made a lot more sense in the 1960's when nobody had any idea how computers worked and they were basically a sci fi technology
Challenging the Enterprise computer to chess feels like a very Spock way of investigating
The logic here reminds me of "Field of Fire", the DS9 episode where Ezri calls up Joran to help investigate some murders, and their conclusion is "Oh, the murderer doesn't like to see pictures of people smiling. It MUST be an emotionally traumatized Vulcan!"
Cogley's computer phobia makes a lot of sense from a 1960s standpoint. Computers were just beginning to be adopted by a lot of companies, and they were decimating accounting and payroll departments. Tons of people whose jobs were basically to do the simple arithmetic to track money flowing through companies suddenly lost their jobs to soulless machines. It was really the first time that white collar workers faced mass job insecurity since the Depression, and worse than that time, these jobs were never coming back.
If one pays attention to some small details, one of the ships being repaired in this episode, listed by registry only was NCC-1864, which is the registry of USS Reliant, that was first seen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Love the Star Trek courtroom episodes!
In addition to the points made, it is curious that neither Kirk nor his lawyer appears to have seen the video of Kirk jettisoning the pod prior to its being played in court. Perhaps pre-trial discovery is different in Star Fleet.
Either that or, in preparing for trial, Cogley only reviews the evidence if it is printed on paper.
funny and well observed review and on all the main points i agree with you.Personally i like the funny or action or horror stories best though some would give me nightmares when i was a kid
I highly recommend "Possum Rob"'s retro review of this episode. Lots of points that contrast with Steve's, both are great analyses. It's on youtube, the channel is called "accidentally derivative studios"
Looking forward to next episode. Both "Measure of a Man" and "The Drumhead" are excellent episodes.
"they're annoying enough now!" So true!
I work in a company that has a known "broken" history record issue. If 2 people are working on something at the same time and one of them saves changes, all the changes made to that point by both people are assigned to that person. When the 2nd person saves their changes all the changes are assigned to that person and the 1st set of changes are undone. It's a mess and has been for five loooooooooong years because apparently no one can figure out how to fix this [or because the company doesn't want to pay for them to do so despite the issues it has caused, because ... ] So, though back in the day I couldn't see the altered records plot as realistic - I can now.
Nice blink-and-you-miss-it reference to To Kill a Mockingbird!
And yes, Alice Rawlings does bear a certain resemblance to Collin Wilcox…
I'm no fancy big station lawyer and I don't trust them machines.
I felt seen by your slight against those who only read actual books ;)
17:05 You're right. I never thought about this before but consider if Finney had been played cold and calculating. Apparently dispassionate despite what Kirk had done -- only until Kirk mentions that the daughter is aboard. And only then does he lose his shit. That would be interesting.
"These are their voyages" **phaser noise** **phaser noise**
I was thinking of the door-swish noise.
@@jpolowin0 door swish is better like they're entering the courtroom!
TOS: SVU is basically “The Enemy Within”
I've wanted Kirk's green dress top from the first time I saw it in color.
Now I want spock's too.
Also, telltale heart...
I love how you pronounce "sabotage" the way Shatner does, but you don't make a big deal out of it with a joke.
If you know, you know.