Voyage Neepery: Mechanical Man
Mar. 26th, 2007 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI finished off the second half of S2 over the weekend, so there may be a few of these over the next few days.
The Mechanical Man is not one of my favorite episodes. It's one of the problematic ones made during Basehart's illness at the end of S2, and I remember, as a dedicated Admiral Nelson fan seeing it for the first time and having no idea what had happened, feeling downright cheated by the way they dangled his imminent presence in front of the viewer and never actually produced him. Apart from that, and the really old trope (reminiscent of one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories) of a drill probe through the Earth's crust setting off worldwide seismic activity, it isn't that bad, and seems to have a better proportion of new to stock footage than several of the other late S2 episodes.
Curiously enough, Omir, apparently an electronically augmented human, refers to himself as an android, while the completely synthetic beings in Cyborg, back at the beginning of the season, were ... well, eponymous. That seems to be a reversal of the way those terms are usually used.
The real neepery, though, is this, which only struck me afterwards. (And I haven't, I confess, gone back to check the DVD, so I could be wrong about this.) At one point in the episode, Crane uses the Flying Sub to visit the drilling dome. At the end, though, the Admiral is reported to be inbound -- in the Flying Sub! I think this may be the closest the writers ever got to acknowledging that there is more than one Flying Sub at a time -- though they go through four or five in S2 alone and usually seem to have a replacement by the next episode. Then the thing about making 'surface contact,' which I initially thought was just a clumsy excuse to make the arrival happen off-camera -- makes sense, if the docking berth is already occupied.
I had some fun with the idea of an FS-2 in Ambassador, but I hadn't thought of landing on the upper deck as a solution to the logistics of having two of the things at the end.
Or maybe the writers just goofed, and I think about this stuff way too much.
The Mechanical Man is not one of my favorite episodes. It's one of the problematic ones made during Basehart's illness at the end of S2, and I remember, as a dedicated Admiral Nelson fan seeing it for the first time and having no idea what had happened, feeling downright cheated by the way they dangled his imminent presence in front of the viewer and never actually produced him. Apart from that, and the really old trope (reminiscent of one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger stories) of a drill probe through the Earth's crust setting off worldwide seismic activity, it isn't that bad, and seems to have a better proportion of new to stock footage than several of the other late S2 episodes.
Curiously enough, Omir, apparently an electronically augmented human, refers to himself as an android, while the completely synthetic beings in Cyborg, back at the beginning of the season, were ... well, eponymous. That seems to be a reversal of the way those terms are usually used.
The real neepery, though, is this, which only struck me afterwards. (And I haven't, I confess, gone back to check the DVD, so I could be wrong about this.) At one point in the episode, Crane uses the Flying Sub to visit the drilling dome. At the end, though, the Admiral is reported to be inbound -- in the Flying Sub! I think this may be the closest the writers ever got to acknowledging that there is more than one Flying Sub at a time -- though they go through four or five in S2 alone and usually seem to have a replacement by the next episode. Then the thing about making 'surface contact,' which I initially thought was just a clumsy excuse to make the arrival happen off-camera -- makes sense, if the docking berth is already occupied.
I had some fun with the idea of an FS-2 in Ambassador, but I hadn't thought of landing on the upper deck as a solution to the logistics of having two of the things at the end.
Or maybe the writers just goofed, and I think about this stuff way too much.
