#incidentally i think both actresses would rock both parts

[silvertonedwords]

Not me with 11,000 words of Mary and Matthew from Downton Abbey that I wrote mostly in the last two weeks...I don't know why they've decided to move back into my brain, but they have. I'm still working on Together too, I promise.

[kazarinn]

Roundup of all the things I’ve translated within the last month

Those who have been following me for a while might know that the last month saw me be very unusually prolific with translation (especially Digimon-related ones), to unprecedented extents. I'll be very honest about the fact that it's because of the current quarantine, which has left me with not a lot to do and a sense of boredom that translation somehow happens to satiate a bit ^^;; That said, the very large number of translations I'd been posting has caused things to get a bit buried, and has made things easily missable, so I've decided to make a bit of a roundup post summarizing everything I've done in the last month.

Of course, there's probably still more to come in the near future -- I have two books (the Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia and the Gakken Digimon Adventure tri. Memorial Book) hopefully coming in the mail soon, and I still have some stuff lying around I might take up if my mood warms up to it, but since I've finally cleared up a ton of the backlog I felt I should take a breather to summarize stuff. (Although, every time I say I've cleared the backlog, suddenly more interesting things pop up...^^;;)

Digimon Adventure, Adventure 02, Tamers, Frontier

Digimon Adventure 02 Drama CD "Armor Evolution to the Unknown" I will be honest in that this is actually my favorite thing to have translated in this past month. Actually, fiction translation has a higher level of difficulty for me than things like interviews -- because I want to be careful with what real people have said, I tend to be less stringent about rewording things, whereas with fiction I hold myself to a higher standard to make things flow well. But that's actually what makes it so much fun, because I can challenge myself to play with wording and broaden my horizons, and moreover Adventure 02 has a ton of characters, and it's really fun to try and make unique "voices" for all of them. That said, translating this was a bit of a wake-up call, because the sheer amount of pop culture references (to things made before I was even born, at that) and wordplay everywhere led me to the very harsh realization of why so few people have attempted to translate this drama CD into so few languages over the past two decades ^^;; I give my thanks to the anonymous Japanese commenters on Nico Nico Douga who pointed out many of the really old and obscure pop culture references, and I ended up spending several hours on Japanese Wikipedia looking up things like said old anime and British punk rock artists. I might not have gotten everything, and I'm sure there are people out there who probably would have been able to pull it off better than I did, but it ultimately became a test of my abilities as a translator, and if it's fun and entertaining and enjoyable, then that alone makes me satisfied. But I think this will be the last time (at least for a while) that I try translating something audio-only with no transcript -- my hearing is not that great, not even in English ^^;;

The Mystery of the American Box Bug A story from Adventure and Adventure 02 director Hiroyuki Kakudou that has some very tangential (at best) relation to Digimon, but is amusing nevertheless.

Digimon Adventure Character Complete File -- Future Encyclopedia Little "dialogue" snippets from an Adventure/Adventure 02-related book, checking in on the kids-turned-adults during the time of Adventure 02's epilogue. I actually translated this a long time ago, but I lost the transcript for it and I'm pretty sure (given how long ago it was) it was probably pretty embarrassing by my current standards, so I went ahead and did this over again. There are some other things in this book that are interesting and/or amusing, like further background info on the kids' family lives and room layouts, so if I have some spare time I might do some of those in the future, although naturally doing the entire book would probably be practically impossible.

Digimon Series Memorial Book: Digimon Animation Chronicle — Special interview with Hiromi Seki, Hiroyuki Kakudou, and Yukio Kaizawa An interview with some perennial Digimon staff members about Adventure through Frontier (and a bit of X-Evolution). We've had no shortage of these kinds of interviews over the years, but this one happens to summarize a lot of things that used to be considered "obscure" in the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, even though this book (and thus this interview) is one of the most prominent resources for diehard Digimon fans out there. Also, Frontier-related development info tends to be somewhat rare, so it's nice to hear about it. The Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia that I'm hoping to get my hands on soon allegedly has a similar interview with the same three people. I don't know specifics about it yet, but I'm informed that it mostly covers similar territory to this one, but also allegedly has some very fascinating details that weren't in this, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

Message from Digimon Adventure producer Hiromi Seki, to Toshiko Fujita Posted by Adventure producer Hiromi Seki to the LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna Twitter on February 8, 2019, right before the 49th day (last day of mourning, in Japanese tradition) after Taichi Yagami voice actress Toshiko Fujita's passing.

Mimi Tachikawa and Lilimon Posted by Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou on his blog, talking about the intent behind Mimi Tachikawa's character and her corresponding track in the drama CD Digimon Adventure: Two-and-a-Half Year Break.

Digimon Adventure tri.

On Creation and Production for “Super Evolution Stage: Digimon Adventure tri.” A post by Director Kenichi Tani about his work on the Adventure tri. stage play. Despite technically being under Adventure tri. branding, the stage play actually has surprisingly little in common with the Adventure tri. anime in terms of both content and production background, and moreover Digimon hasn't had a lot of contact with the stage medium all that much, so I thought it'd be interesting to translate something about its production, especially since this tends to be a lesser talked-about part of the franchise.

October/November 2018 Gashapon Blog interviews with Kenji Watanabe This is actually two interviews, one where Digimon franchise creator and character designer Kenji Watanabe talks about design for a Digimon gachapon set, and one where he talks about Adventure tri.'s Omegamon Merciful Mode, but I'm categorizing it under the Adventure tri. section because I figure the vast majority of readers will be reading the interview for the latter.

Digimon Adventure tri. voice actor comments (Part 1: Reunion | Part 2: Determination | Part 3: Confession | Part 4: Loss | Part 5: Coexistence | Part 6: Our Future) A series of voice actor comments that were posted to the official website prior to each Adventure tri. movie being released. I'd actually had it on the brain to try my hand at these when they were first posted, but various circumstances happened and I never got around to it, until now. In retrospect, though, I think it turned out for the better that I didn't attempt them on the spot. Adventure tri.-related interviews tend to be much more difficult to translate than most Digimon-related ones, and although there are a few reasons why, the biggest one is that, during its run, it had a very tight spoiler embargo, resulting in a lot of vague language being used, and so when you translate from a language like Japanese -- where having proper context can be life or death -- not knowing the original context behind what was being said can throw the end result into completely incorrect and misleading interpretations. While I was working on these, I did actually end up having to pull up the movies again and reference what scenes were being referred to multiple times just so I could phrase the sentence correctly, so yeah, I think it did ultimately work out. Incidentally, this is also the first direct Adventure tri. production-related thing I've translated since 2016 (mainly due to the expenses incurred by importing magazines and my difficulty with translating print media at the time). Looking back at it, I'm honestly kind of ashamed at my own inexperience from back then, but sadly, I don't have the original magazines anymore, so I can't do much to fix it, and so I'm kind of glad to have these as my sort of attempt at "redeeming myself".

Digimon Adventure tri. — Yoshimasa Hosoya interview on “To Me” Also from the official website, discussing voice actor Yoshimasa Hosoya's involvement with the ending theme song from part 3 (Confession), "To Me".

Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna

Anime! Anime! interview series (Director Tomohisa Taguchi interview | Natsuki Hanae and Chika Sakamoto interview | 02 human cast voice actor interview | 02 Digimon cast voice actor interview | Producer Yousuke Kinoshita and supervisor Hiromi Seki interview) I didn't actually know this was a series until very recently, so you'll have to forgive me for translating these out of order. Technically, all of these were posted in February to March 2020, after the movie was released in Japan, but it's pretty much spoiler-free. It's got a huge amount of development and background info behind LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, so I recommend them as reading for anyone interested in seeing the movie.

"In regards to the new Digimon project" Otherwise known as "what happened when Hiroyuki Kakudou accidentally revealed that they were making another Digimon Adventure-related movie". Since the news that original Adventure director was recusing from LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna due to some kind of creative difference over lore ended up naturally being a hot topic, I felt like having a proper translation of his statement on the matter would be a useful thing to have. Despite technically being LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna-related, it also has a transcription of his tweets regarding Adventure/Adventure 02 background lore along with some surprising production details, so it may interest fans of the original series as well.

Digimon Continues to be Loved Thanks to its Creator’s Commitment — With Digimon Character Designer Kenji Watanabe An Asahi &M article (sort of a half-interview) with Kenji Watanabe over his involvement in LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, which, unusually for a Digimon anime work, actually had him directly involved in production from beginning to end. I put this on the post already, but this article gets a lot dangerously closer to outright spoilers than you'd expect for this kind of material, so if you're particularly keen on going into the movie "completely clean", best to maybe avoid this one until you've seen the movie.

Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna — Website messages from Hiromi Seki and Yousuke Kinoshita It's just a short greeting message on the official website. I wanted to translate it mainly because it's not on the official English site.

Animage Plus interviews with Yousuke Kinoshita Also something I'd wanted to translate for a while but never got around to (until now). A triple set of interviews with LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna producer Yousuke Kinoshita, who also talks about Adventure's 20th anniversary and the "Memorial Story" short story collection crowdfund.

Digimon Adventure:

Interviews with Yabuno Tenya and Atsuhiro Tomioka (Part 1: V-Jump Web | Part 2: Digimon Web) A two-part interview (each part on different websites) with Digimon Adventure V-Tamer 01 artist Yabuno Tenya and Digimon Adventure: lead writer Atsuhiro Tomioka, discussing their respective works and Adventure:'s surprising relation to V-Tamer.

Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou’s initial comments on the Digimon Adventure: reboot A triple set of blog posts from original Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou about the Adventure: reboot and what relation it has to him and the original Adventure (along with some fun trivia about the latter). I figured some people out there might be curious about what the original Adventure director thought about Toei rebooting his series.

Digimon games

Explore the Secrets of Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode’s Evolution! Interview with Habu and Tomono Decode is rather inaccessible to the West right now (being unlocalized, and on the region-locked 3DS at that), so the idea of translating too many things relevant to it is pretty low-priority to me at the moment, but it's still a game of significant interest to the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, and is also notable as one of the first major titles spearheaded by Digimon game producer Kazumasa Habu, so I felt that there'd be quite a few people interested in this one.

Interview with Producer Habu of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory: Highlights and Future Prospects A 4Gamer interview that I'd wanted to translate since I'd first read it, but never got around to. Incidentally, I decided to go back and make some revisions to the wording for the Famitsu interviews I translated for the original game. They were some of the first things I ever translated, and it...kind of shows. ^^;; Normally I don't like to lock myself into a habit of constantly going back and revising old work, as doing so tends to be a bit of a black hole, but since the original Cyber Sleuth is still quite the hot topic among the fanbase right now (and especially with Complete Edition being recently released), I thought it might be worth it this time.

Famitsu.com interview with Kazumasa Habu on Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory Another Hacker's Memory interview, a bit less detailed than the above but still fairly informative.

Other

Iwata Asks #14: Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project mirai Somehow this ended up the only non-Digimon thing on the list ^^;; The version of this game that eventually did make it to the West (Project Mirai DX) is so different from the original game that it meant this Iwata Asks was never officially translated, so I thought it'd be worth taking a shot at this one. I don't have any plans to translate any other Iwata Asks at the moment, mainly because it requires me to have more than a passing knowledge of how each game works for proper context, but I hope you can at least enjoy this one.

[per-ineptia-ad-astra]

Star Trek Episode 1.15: Shore Leave

AKA Rabbits and Pistols and Women, Oh My 

Our episode begins on the bridge, where Kirk is looking over a pad with a yeoman while awaiting a report from a landing party. He gets a kink in his back, so the yeoman starts giving him a backrub, but since both she and Spock are standing behind Kirk he doesn’t realize who is giving him the backrub. This results in quite possibly one of the most infamous lines in all of Star Trek.

[ID: Kirk sitting in his chair on the bridge, his back being rubbed by a brown-haired yeoman, caught in a moment of realization as he says, “Dig it in there, Mr. Sp--” and sees Spock walking past him.]

As everyone does their best to pretend that didn’t just happen, the yeoman says that Kirk needs sleep. Kirk replies that he gets enough of that from McCoy. Presumably he means that McCoy has been telling him that he needs to sleep, and not that McCoy is somehow giving him sleep, although really, anything’s possible. Spock says McCoy is right—wow, get that one on tape—Kirk and everyone onboard need rest after what they’ve been through the past three months. (Exactly what that is is left to the imagination.) Everyone except Spock, of course. He’s fine. He’s always fine. Evidently Kirk is too tired to bother putting up a fight about this, because he tells Uhura to send the landing party report to his quarters and staggers off the bridge.

We then see said landing party down on the nearby planet, which is so unbelievably lush and green that it has actual trees and grass instead of a soundstage with some foliage stuck on.

[ID: McCoy and Sulu walking down a sunlit grassy lane with trees to the right and tall plants at the edge of a pond to the left.]

McCoy and Sulu are naturally quite awed at this incredible beauty. Sulu says that it has no people and no animals, making it perfect for relaxation. No animals? Wow, that must be a really interesting ecosystem—how did a whole planet evolve with no animal life, while still resembling Earth so closely? The plants would have to have evolved unique mechanisms for reproduction without animal life to help pollinate them, not to mention the effect that no herbivorous consumption would have and—right, sorry. No animals means a good vacation! That’s the important thing. I guess.

Anyway, McCoy thinks the planet is just the place for some relaxation time for the crew, if they can get Kirk to authorize shore leave there. It does seem like a nice place to chill out after a lot of stress, but I question the Starfleet policy of letting crews take shore leave on random newly discovered planets as long as they don’t appear to have sapient native life as determined by some people wandering around on a small portion of it for a few hours. There could be plenty of threats there that they just haven’t uncovered—or, on the flipside, a whole crew full of people beaming down to loiter around could wreck havoc on an alien ecosystem. But, eh, it’s just plants, it’ll be fine.

McCoy comments that “you have to see this place to believe it—it’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland.” Bones, my man, I don’t know what copy of Alice in Wonderland you read, but I don’t remember its primary feature being nice-but-totally-normal-and-physics-obeying parkland.

Sulu stops to get some samples of the plant life, while McCoy wanders off happily, obviously enjoying the chance to just have a nice stroll through nature and chew on a stalk of grass. That is, until he spots something...unexpected.

[ID: A large humanoid white rabbit standing among the foliage, wearing a checked red and yellow shirt, yellow waistcoat, and brown and gray neckcloth, with an umbrella tucked under one arm.]

The rabbit exclaims that he’ll be late and hops (sort off) off through the undergrowth. A moment later a young girl in a blue and white dress runs up and asks McCoy if he’s seen a rabbit around. All poor Bones can do is point mutely in the direction the rabbit went, and the girl gives him a curtsy and runs after the rabbit.

McCoy stands there in abject shock for a moment before managing to bellow for Sulu, who comes running. Despite being only a few yards away, Sulu was evidently too absorbed with horticulture to notice any of what just happened, and there’s now no sign of either rabbit or girl. He asks McCoy what’s wrong, but McCoy can’t seem to find the words, and really, can you blame him?

[ID: McCoy standing by the edge of a pond, holding a grass straw tensely and staring in front of him while Sulu puts a hand on his shoulder and asks, “What is it, doc?”]

“Oh god, this is it. I knew this job was going to drive me insane and it’s FINALLY HAPPENED.”

After the break we get a captain’s log from Kirk talking about how nice this planet they found is. You can tell he’s tired and kind of out of it from the way he rambles a bit, and takes a moment to remember the entire stardate. Despite this, the yeoman currently talking to him in his room notes that he isn’t in any of the shore leave parties. Kirk waves this off and dismisses her, but this does nothing for Kirk’s solitude because she is immediately replaced by Spock.

Kirk asks Spock which shore leave party he wants to go with, but Spock says he’s not interested in going at all. On Vulcan, he says, “to rest is to rest, to cease using energy. To me, it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass using energy instead of saving it.” Well, it would be. Your planet doesn’t have any green grass. The idea of going outside to relax probably would be pretty foreign on Vulcan, which is generally rather lacking in environments that anyone would consider relaxing.

The conversation is interrupted by Uhura paging Kirk to say there’s a call from McCoy. Kirk genially tells her to open a channel, little suspecting what this conversation is going to be about.

McCoy—remarkably calmly—says that either all their sensor probes are defective, or he is. Kirk naturally asks him to explain, leaving McCoy in the unenviable position of having to describe what he just saw. Kirk takes the whole story to be a joke, while Spock stands there rolling his eyes to the heavens. It’s understandable enough; even for people with as many weird experiences as these guys, giant talking rabbits aren’t something you expect to encounter, although I have heard that they appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one.

Kirk figures that this is a trick of McCoy’s to get him to come down to the planet—that he doesn’t think Kirk will come down for shore leave unless he’s baited with a bit of mystery. Which doesn’t sound terribly like McCoy, I have to say. He seems less likely to make up a weird story about a rabbit as part of a cunning plan to lure Kirk into shore leave, and more likely to just physically drag him down to the planet by the ear.

Spock, evidently deciding not to get involved in these weird human things, says that actually he did have something he came here to discuss. He’s checked Dr. McCoy’s log—pre-rabbit sightings—and apparently there’s a crew member aboard who’s being a bit of a problem.

“[He’s] showing signs of stress and fatigue, reaction time down nine to twelve percent, associational reading norm minus three.”

“That’s much too low a rating.”

“He’s becoming irritable and quarrelsome, yet he refuses to take rest and rehabilitation. Now he has that right, but we’ve found--”

“A crewman’s right ends where the safety of the ship begins. Now, that man will go ashore on my orders. What’s his name?”

“James Kirk.”

[ID: 1. Spock looking at Kirk with a look of mock surprise and innocence while saying, “James Kirk.” 2. Kirk stares back at Spock. 3. Spock saying, “Enjoy yourself, Captain,” with a decidedly smug smile. 4. Kirk staring at Spock, now with a GTA-style overlay saying ‘wasted’.]

Weeeeelll, there’s not a whole lot Kirk can do about that devastating takedown except swallow the pill and go take some shore leave already. Spock tells him that they’ve detected no animals, no artifacts, no force fields (? was that a potential problem?), it’s just a nice pleasant green planet. But even as he’s saying this we see, down on said pleasant green planet, a rock by a pond slowly move aside on its own to reveal….A GUN! No, not a phaser—an actual, old-fashioned revolver. Dammit! The NRA got here before us!

Unknowing of the terrible threat looming nearby, a couple of crewmen—a goldshirt woman and a blueshirt man—are investigating some of the plant life. The blueshirt is intent on scanning some ferns, prompting a complaint from the goldshirt that he’s too focused on work, work, work, and not appreciating the natural loveliness all around them. The blueshirt responds that he’s focused on work because they’re working—they’ve got a report to make to the captain and things aren’t going to be nearly so pleasant if it’s not ready on time. Right after he says that, who should beam down but Kirk himself, along with the yeoman. Oh man, speak of the devil. Don’t you hate it when you’re talking about your boss and he immediately materializes out of thin air in front of you?

Luckily for the crewmen—Rodriguez and Teller, Kirk calls them—he’s not here to crack the whip. Told that they’ve finished the survey, he tells them to submit it to Spock and then clock out and enjoy themselves. Incidentally, Kirk calls the goldshirt Teller, but she’s played by the same actress who played Martine last episode. The character was named ‘Mary Teller’ in the script, but once they got on set someone noticed that they had—again, somehow—accidentally cast someone who had already appeared as a named character, and changed her first name to Angela to match Martine...but as you can see, it’s a bit inconsistent. And a bit jarring, if she is the same character, to see her so bright and happy and with budding romantic tension between her and Rodriguez, considering what happened to her last week. It worked out pretty well when they did this with Riley, but this time, not so much.

At any rate, Rodriguez points Kirk over to where Sulu and McCoy were. Kirk and the yeoman head over there, talking a bit about how incredibly beautiful the surroundings are. The amount that this planet gets talked up in the episode initially struck me as a bit odd; don’t get me wrong, it’s quite nice and pretty, but I don’t think I would call it jaw-droppingly, impossibly gorgeous. But then, y’know, I see trees everyday. I can see trees right now just by turning my head about ninety degrees. If I spent the majority of my life in a spaceship, seeing the same gray, florescent-lit surroundings every day, breathing in sterilized air and rarely seeing any space more open than Engineering, I’d probably be awestruck at the first bit of green I saw in months too.  

The captain and the yeoman find McCoy some way away, still standing by the pond and brooding over his sanity. Kirk is all ready to set into some teasing about rabbits and the sighting thereof, but while McCoy is still not entirely sure he didn’t hallucinate the whole thing, he’s got at least one thing a bit less easy to dismiss: large footprints in the dirt nearby.

[ID: Kirk kneeling in a dirt track, examining two sets of four-toed footprints.]

Those don’t look a great deal like rabbit tracks, but then, that didn’t look a great deal like an actual rabbit either. Kirk is, reasonably enough, not quite ready to commit to giant talking rabbits yet, but evidently something is going on here, so he calls up to the ship and tells the shore leave parties to stand by and not leave the ship. Right when they were about to disembark, too. You could probably hear the collective groan clear on the other side of the ship.

McCoy expresses some surprise at Kirk suspending the leave, since after all it’s only a giant talking rabbit that came from nowhere, what’s worrying about that? Kirk asks if McCoy can explain this whole business and McCoy has to admit that he can’t, and since neither can Kirk, he’s erring on the side of caution and not bringing the entire crew planetside until they figure out for sure that whatever’s going on isn’t dangerous. It’s probably not dangerous, but then again most people would say a quick checkup for a couple of isolated archaeologists probably wasn’t dangerous. A socially stunted teenage boy probably wasn’t dangerous. Someone beaming up with a bit of glittery space dirt on them probably wasn’t—you get my drift.

So nobody’s getting their vacation until Kirk gets some answers, but before they can start working on that there’s a sudden explosion of noise—gunshots. Which I don’t expect people from the twenty-third century could readily identify, but it’s obviously a big scary dangerous-sounding noise, so everyone takes off at a run to go see what’s going on.

What’s going on turns out to be...Sulu, standing in a clearing and happily firing off the revolver we saw earlier. Naturally Kirk is all “wtf, Mr. Sulu” and Sulu cheerfully explains that look! it’s a gun! isn’t it cool??? Apparently antique gun collecting is one of Sulu’s many side hobbies, and this one is a really cool old super rare gun that he’s been wanting for ages, which he just happened to find laying under a rock nearby. He seems weirdly unperturbed by a centuries-old Earth weapon—let alone the specific centuries-old Earth weapon that he just happened to want—turning up on a newly discovered, uninhabited and definitely non-Earth planet. Also, apparently Sulu’s interest in guns did not at any point include an accompanying interest in gun safety, since he thought it was a good idea to just start firing the thing off randomly for kicks.

Kirk puts his hand out and gives Sulu a stern “hand over the toy, young man” expression, and Sulu reluctantly gives it up. He tries to explain to Kirk how the gun works, but fails to mention the part about how you really shouldn’t just stick a loaded gun straight into your belt unless you want to shoot yourself in the leg, so naturally Kirk does exactly that.

Well at any rate, that confirms that there’s more going on here than one brief localized hallucination. Speaking of which, Yeoman Barrows suddenly spots more of the strange tracks they saw earlier, running right past them. Kirk orders Sulu to take Barrows and follow the new tracks AND NO MORE SHOOTING THINGS. Meanwhile, he and McCoy are going back to the glade to investigate the original set of tracks. Frankly I’m not sure how useful ‘the glade’ is as a place name on a planet that seems to consist of nothing but glades, but that seems to be what Kirk is going with. As the captain and the doctor head off, we see a strange antennae rise from the rocks and turn towards them.

Kirk and McCoy walk back to The Glade, chatting about how strange and obnoxious this whole situation is—can’t even go down for a spot of fresh air and sunshine without weird shit happening. Still, McCoy says, it could have been worse—Kirk could have been the one who saw the rabbit. At that Kirk laughs and asks McCoy if he’s feeling a bit picked on about all this, and McCoy admits that yeah, just because you know exactly what’s going to happen when you tell someone you saw a giant humanoid talking rabbit doesn’t make it fun.

Kirk says that he knows what it feels like because he got picked on a lot back at the Academy, though presumably not for rabbit-related reasons. Evidently, as he himself freely owns up to, Kirk was not just a serious student but a “positively grim” one, which made him an easy target for inter-student-body trolling. That Kirk was especially studious and strait-laced in his academic years is an aspect of his character that’s consistent throughout TOS (remember Mitchell’s remarks about Kirk being a “stack of books with legs”), but it’s one that seems to be easily forgotten about in favor of the assumption that Kirk must have been a wild, rule-breaking, carefree kind of student more interested in having dorm room hookups than passing tests. I’m just sayin’. Take notes.

At any rate, Kirk relates how there was one particular upperclassman named Finnegan who took special delight in taunting and pranking him—putting soup in his bed or a bucket of water on the top of a door. Which, honestly, as far as college pranks go that’s pretty lacking in creativity, but it clearly got to Kirk as evidenced by the fact that he’s still kinda sore about it some fifteen years later.

In the midst of all this reminiscing, they notice a new set of tracks—young girl tracks. Or, well, not that there’s anything about them that specifically says ‘young girl’, but since McCoy saw a young girl in the vicinity of the rabbit we can make a safe assumption. Kirk decides to split up; he’ll follow the Alice tracks, and McCoy can follow the rabbit tracks. McCoy’s amenable to this.

[ID: McCoy saying, “I got a personal grudge against that rabbit, Jim,” with a broad grin.]

Kirk hasn’t been alone for very long, though, when he hears a voice calling, “Jim!” He turns—and there, leaning against a nearby tree, is a young man wearing a silver shirt and an insufferable expression, accompanied, as all Irish people are legally obligated to be, by cheerful jig music. It is, or appears to be, Finnegan himself, in the flesh and just as fresh and smirking as he was at the Academy-- something he demonstrates by grasping Kirk’s shoulders in a brotherly fashion before walloping him with a punch that sends Kirk head over heels into the grass. As Kirk lays there stunned, Finnegan dances around laughing like a hyena and taunting Kirk to get up and fight back.

Now, Kirk, of course, is no longer an Academy freshman, but a decorated starship captain with ample experience in dealing with highly unusual circumstances and keeping his head in times of stress, so naturally his measured response to this impossible situation is to stay calm and evaluate what could be causing this and how dangerous—only joking, he gets up and charges at Finnegan with clear intent to strangle the bastard. I can’t really blame him, though. They cast Finnegan to perfection; the actor does a really good job at being an annoying little shit.

Before the fight can really get going, though, a sudden noise cuts across the clearing. Not gunshots, this time, but a terrified scream. Kirk immediately takes off in the direction of the sound, leaving Finnegan behind to jeer at Kirk for running from a fight.

As Kirk pelts across the grass he’s joined by McCoy, also running to see what’s going on. The two of them track the noise down to Barrows, sobbing and gasping on the ground next to a tree with her uniform all torn away from the collar on one shoulder, a rare case of the fragility of Starfleet uniforms being a problem for someone other than Kirk. And honestly I’d say Barrows gets a worse deal out of it, since the female crewmembers have so much less uniform to lose in the first place. Poor yeoman doesn’t get an undershirt, either, or, apparently, even a bra with straps.

Barrows says, rather frantically, that she was just walking along when suddenly “he” appeared—a man in a cloak with a jeweled dagger. Kirk asks if she’s sure she’s not imagining all this. That’s pretty damn rich from a man who was fistfighting his inexplicably appearing college rival a couple minutes ago. What, does he think Barrows imagined this so hard it ripped her uniform?

She gets rather rightfully pissed and tells Kirk that no, she did not dream up being attacked, you jerk. McCoy comments that the man she’s describing sounds like Don Juan. Which is quite a leap since all he has to go on is “cloak and jeweled dagger,” which could potentially describe an incredible amount of characters. Hell, that could be Barrows’s D&D character. But no, apparently McCoy got it in one, because Barrows says that actually, as she was walking through the woods, “it was so sort of storybook...I was thinking, all a girl needs is...Don Juan.”

Really? I mean, I don’t mean to judge anyone else’s romantic fantasies. But, well, I could see walking through some beautiful woods and thinking the scene just needed a charming prince or maybe a unicorn or something. Not so much, “gee, it’s so beautiful around here, all a girl needs is to be violently assaulted by a fictional character legendary for being a womanizing sleaze.”

Well, anyway, that was weird. Hey, come to think of it, where’s Sulu? Shouldn’t he be around here somewhere? Barrows says that he ran after the cloaked fellow. Oh dear. New plan: Kirk tells McCoy to stay with Barrows while he goes to look for Sulu. As Kirk runs off, the mysterious aerial appears again, seemingly tracking him, but it goes unnoticed by everyone.

Kirk soon finds himself leaving the trees and meadows and jogging out into a rocky, desert-like area. It’s still pretty out there, though, with some wildflowers growing around, which Kirk stops to admire. Kirk. Kirk, buddy, I like flowers too, but you’ve got a crewman potentially in danger here. Maybe we could enjoy the foliage later.

A moment later, though, Kirk spots something a lot more distracting than a pretty flower: a pretty woman!

[ID: A white woman with blonde hair braided in a ring around her head, wearing a dress which is half white and half black with a pink flower design on the black half, standing in front of a cliffside surrounded by plants.]

Kirk stares in stunned rapture as the woman approaches. This is not just any woman; this is, judging by Kirk’s disbelieving murmur of, “Ruth…?” someone he knows, or knew. Random woman that Kirk knows who we’ve never heard of before? Gee, I wonder what connection he could possibly have to her. I’m going to guess she’s not his aunt.

“It is me, Jim darling, it is Ruth,” the woman says, and moves in to rub against Kirk’s cheek. Well, that’s an upgrade from Finnegan at any rate.

After the break Kirk gives a rather distracted captain’s log: still investigating this weird planet, lost a crewman but found a woman so it evens out. With a last vestige of professionalism he attempts to call McCoy, but the communicator isn’t working. Kirk is exactly as bothered by this as you would expect someone to be whose phone just broke right when they needed to call someone but really didn’t want to.

Anyway, back to more important matters: “How can it really be you, Ruth?” Kirk says it’s been fifteen years, but she hasn’t aged a day. He really seems quite emotional about all this. Kirk’s always courteous to the girls of his past, but he doesn’t usually get this worked up about seeing them again. Ruth must have been someone really special to him.

Sadly, the dreamy romantic atmosphere can only last so long before it gets shattered by reality, in the form of a communicator chirp, specifically. It’s McCoy, wanting to know if Kirk’s having any luck finding Sulu. You know? Sulu? Your crewman that you’re supposed to be looking for? Might be in danger? Remember him? Apparently not, because Kirk only manages a vague “hmm?” and then, when McCoy wants to know what the heck is going on over there, Kirk mumbles that he’s sure Mr. Sulu will be just fine. Maybe he’ll find a woman too! Or another gun. Whatever. He’s fine. It’s fine.

But Kirk just can’t get a break in here, because he promptly gets another call. This time it’s from Rodriguez, reporting that he just saw a flock of birds go overhead. “Don’t you like birds, Mr. Rodriguez?” Kirk asks, so Rodriguez has to remind him of that tiny little detail that there are no birds on this planet. Or at least, there aren’t supposed to be, according to all those scans they took.

Welp, Kirk says, guess those scans were defective, how bout that, funny ol thing, probably not important though...but, for all that he clearly wants to tell Rodriguez to go away so he can get back to Ruth Time, Kirk’s captain instincts are still hanging in there somewhere, so with a sigh he snaps out of it and tells Rodriguez to have all the search parties meet back at The Glade before hanging up. Ruth tells him to go do what he must and that he’ll see her again if he wants to, then walks off back into the desert, leaving Kirk alone among the rocks with only his memories...but just for like, five seconds, because he promptly gets another call.

This time it’s Spock, reporting that they’re getting some strange readings indicating some kind of ‘power field’ down on the planet, and that there’s “a highly sophisticated energy draining our power and increasing, beginning to affect our communications.” How energy can be highly sophisticated is beyond me, honestly (is it wearing a monocle? what?), but you’re the science expert there, Spock. Seems this energy might be coming from beneath the planet’s surface, possibly indicating some kind of industrial activity going on down there.

Well, I think at this point we can definitively say that Something Weird is going on down here. Kirk heads off back to The Glade in pursuit of answers, and as he leaves we see another aerial, sticking up from a rock and twirling attentively in his direction.

Meanwhile, McCoy and Barrows are having a cheerful meander through the woods. Lovely as the woods are, though, Barrows comments that she wouldn’t want to be alone in them. “Why not?” McCoy asks. I dunno, man, because she just got attacked by an armed man with distinctly dishonorable intentions? I think that’d put most people off a stroll through the woods, no matter how nice said woods are.

Barrows hasn’t been dissuaded from the romantic ideal entirely though, and says that in woods like this a lady should be dressed in some fancy fairy-tale princess duds. I was thinking ‘long pants and hiking boots’ myself, but whatever works for you.

McCoy replies that if she was so dressed she’d have “whole armies of Don Juans to fight off...and me, too.” Not sure if “let me just remind you of that scary encounter you just had with a threatening man” is the best approach to flirting, but going by the moment of tender hand-holding they proceed to have, I’d say Barrows is down with it. (Hmm...Bones...Barrows...kind of goes together. In a morbid way, but still.) Still, the whole thing doesn’t feel quite in character for Bones, which might be explained by this plot originally being intended for Kirk (of course) with McCoy swapped in later. Kirk and McCoy are pretty much interchangeable, right? Sure.

Barrows is quickly distracted from the hand-holding when she spots something in the trees nearby: the exact kind of fancy fairy-tale princess clothes that she was just talking about, hanging on some branches. Imagine that. She runs over to the clothes and holds the dress up to herself gleefully, exclaiming, “Look at me, doctor! A lady to be protected and fought over!” When McCoy suggests the clothes would look even better with her in them, Barrows isn’t sure if it’s a great idea, but decides to go for it. Now, uhhh, if Barrows wants to wear a pretty princess dress that’s entirely her prerogative, and I don’t blame her for wanting to change out of that awkwardly ripped uniform, but putting on a set of fancy clothes that mysteriously appeared in the woods? That sounds like an excellent way to get captured by faeries and I would not recommend it.

Barrows goes to change behind some bushes, brazenly ignoring the possibility of being kidnapped by the fair folk, and McCoy is very deliberately Not Peeking when he gets a call from Rodriguez. The communicator has gone all staticy and squawky, though, and McCoy only just makes out the message that they’re supposed to meet back in The Glade before Rodriguez cuts out, and no amount of shouting “ESTEBAN!” into the communicator gets him back. Which is a pity for Rodriguez, because the scene cuts to show us that he and Marteller are in quite the spot of bother: they’re leaning up against a tree, clutching each other, while a tiger prowls about nearby. Yes, a tiger. Not a dude in a tiger suit, or a dog with stripes painted on, or even stock footage of a tiger: an actual, real, 100% bonafide, quite expensive tiger. Rodriguez tries desperately to get ahold of McCoy again without setting off Shere Khan over there, but the communicator doesn’t pick up at all this time.

Blissfully unaware of the tiger trouble, McCoy watches Barrows emerge, all dolled up. Meanwhile, Kirk is talking to Spock and demanding some answers about all this. Spock is hesitant, but Kirk says it’s his job to provide answers. Cut him some slack there, Kirk. It’s pretty hard to come up with a good scientific explanation for giant talking bunnies and magic women. Well, one that doesn’t involve massive intoxicants, at any rate. Speaking of which, Spock wants to know if they’re really sure these haven’t been hallucinations. Kirk rather doubts that, since one of those ‘hallucinations’ clocked him across the jaw. A fair point, although I would also put forth the rather relevant detail that by now we’ve had multiple people seeing the exact same thing, not a common feature of hallucinations.

Spock wants to know if they should maybe beam down an armed landing party, who I’m sure would be terribly effective, but Kirk says no, there hasn’t been any real danger so far, just weirdness (he hasn’t seen that tiger yet). Right as he says that, he looks up and sees a flock of...are those geese? Oh shit, you better send that armed party down after all, Spock, things just got dangerous.

Meanwhile, Sulu (remember him?) is walking through a nearby canyon, probably wondering where the heck everybody is, when the ground behind him opens up like a trapdoor and a samurai jumps out and starts attacking him. Man, we were getting some perfectly good character development for Sulu this episode but now we’re back to “a samurai! because he’s Japanese! get it? get it?”  

Sulu pulls his phaser on the samurai, but the phaser doesn’t seem to want to fire, and Sulu’s forced to make a run for it, right into Kirk, who is trying and failing to call McCoy. Sulu warns Kirk about the aggro’d samurai heading towards them—but he’s gone. No samurai to be seen. “Captain, you’ve got to believe me!” Sulu insists, and usually “you’ve got to believe me” is the best way to guarantee that someone will not believe you, but luckily for Sulu Kirk’s seen enough weird shit of his own today that at this point, sure, samurai, why not.

Sulu reports that he got a call from Rodriguez telling him to meet back at The Glade, but the communicators were acting up, and now it seems his phaser is out too. Kirk tests his, but it’s also dead. Great, now we don’t have any way to fight off the geese.

While they’ll mulling over this latest development, something appears up on a nearby outcropping of rock—the familiar human-shaped swirl of light of someone being transported. It appears to be Spock, but instead of the usual smooth materialization, he fades in and out several times before finally making it all the way. Just your periodic reminder that traveling through transporter is kind of terrifying.

Kirk wants to know what the heck, man, did he not just say to not send anyone else down? Spock says he had to come down because ship-to-planet communications are now completely out, and the mysterious power field is soaking up energy so quickly that he calculated that if they hurried they could just about get one person transported down before that went out too. Naturally he sent himself; I mean, he’s only the first officer, who better to risk sending through a shaky transporter beam? At any rate, that was the last of the transporter juice, so they’re all stuck down there now with no contact with the ship. The shuttles are conspicuously unmentioned by anyone—but then, if the energy-eating field is that strong, flying a shuttle into it probably wouldn’t end real well.

Back in The Glade, McCoy and Barrows have arrived (and McCoy has found another stalk of grass to chew on), but no one else is there yet. At least it doesn’t look like anyone is there yet, but McCoy thinks he hears something or someone moving around nearby. That makes Barrows nervous, but McCoy says her brave knight will protect her.

Over in the desert, Kirk, Spock and Sulu hear the tiger approaching, along with the ominous background music. They spread out to find the source of the noise, but there’s another problem in The Glade: a knight in black armor on a horse, charging towards McCoy and Barrows with lance at the ready. Barrows freaks, but McCoy is done with this shit. First a talking rabbit, then magic guns, and now this nonsense? He’s not having it. These damn things are all just hallucinations, and he’s going to prove it...by standing directly in front of the knight.

Under some circumstances, that might have been the correct option. Unfortunately for McCoy, these are not those circumstances, and Kirk and Spock come into The Glade (having, apparently, missed the tiger completely) just in time to watch their friend get hit in the chest by a very much not imaginary lance. The knight turns towards Kirk and Spock next; Spock tries to fire his phaser  at it, but of course, the phasers aren’t working. Luckily Kirk still has that gun he confiscated from Sulu—which has somehow not gone off throughout any of these adventures--and it’s working just fine, fine enough to shoot the knight right off his horse. Dang, Kirk is a good shot with that thing, considering he’s never so much as encountered one before.

Everyone rushes over to McCoy, lying lifeless in the grass. That’s right, McCoy is dead. Oh god! McCoy! We hardly knew ye! Oh, I can’t believe this has happened. And so early on in the show, too. What a tragedy.

[ID: McCoy laying prone on the grass with a small bloody hole in his chest, while Kirk, Spock, and Barrows in her princess clothes kneel around him.]

Not that I have experience with these things but that seems to be a remarkably small and clean wound for a lance to the chest.

In shocked grief, Spock, Kirk and Barrows kneel around the body of their fallen comrade. Barrows is especially emotional, sobbing that it’s all her fault, until Kirk grabs her by the shoulders and sternly tells her to get a grip. I suppose he needs everyone to have a clear head since they’re still in a crisis situation but it seems a wee bit harsh. Poor Barrows. She’s had a really bad day. Although not as bad as McCoy’s day, I guess.

Sulu calls Kirk over to the body of the fallen knight, laying in the grass some way away. As soon as Kirk gets there it’s easy to see what got Sulu’s attention: underneath the visor of his helmet, the knight’s face is plasticky and clearly artificial (although the eyes are just a little unnervingly realistic).

[ID: A headshot of a knight laying on the grass with his helmet visor opened, showing the face of a white man with brown hair but with a flat, artificial sheen.]

“It couldn’t be alive,” Kirk muses. Kirk, don’t be mean to the stuntmen.

Spock comes over to scan the body—luckily his tricorder is still working (don’t ask why). He says that the knight is indeed not a corpse but a “mechanical contrivance” which has the same cell structure as all the plants around them. Which means that not only this knight, but everything on the planet has been manufactured. Oh my god. We’re in WESTWORLD.

So a mysterious black knight just appeared out of the blue, ran down poor McCoy, then got shot and turned out to be fake all along. Okay. Sure. To be honest, you could stick that sequence of events in the Arthurian canon and it wouldn’t stand out much.

Suddenly, just to add to all the weirdness, an airplane flies overhead. Somewhere else, Rodriguez and Marteller are watching it with astonishment. Rodriguez asks if Marteller remembers “the early wars and funny air vehicles they used” that he was telling her about. One wonders how that conversation came about. Was it before or after the tiger?

Anyway, Rodriguez brings this up because that, of course, is one of those very same airplanes he mentioned. Marteller asks if it can hurt them, and Rodriguez says it can’t unless it makes a strafing run. Naturally, the plane immediately makes a strafing run. The two run off, barely avoiding the hail of bullets, and escape into some nearby undergrowth, where Marteller falls over. Rodriguez kneels down, concerned, calling her name, but she doesn’t respond. I have no idea whether she tripped, fainted, or was shot and is now dead. It’s really not clear.

Back in The Glade, something weird (sorry, something else weird) has happened while everyone was distracted by the plane: McCoy’s body has vanished, along with the fake knight. Well, that’s great.

Spock has a hypothesis. He asks Kirk what he was thinking of right before he saw the people he mentioned. Kirk thinks back and says that he was thinking about being in the Academy and his youth and all that, and then Finnegan showed up. And speak of the devil—there he is again, Finnegan himself. Kirk demands Finnegan give him some answers about what’s been happening to them, but Finnegan just laughs and runs away.

Kirk’s not going to stand for that. He’s had a bad enough day—verbally outfoxed by Spock, had a potential bit of lovely shore leave turn into a massive headache, one of his best friends is dead, and now this horrible little bastard is having a laugh at him. There’s only one thing to do—track down Finnegan and take out some aggression on him. He tells Spock to take Sulu and find McCoy’s body—and just, uh, leave Barrows somewhere, I guess—while he goes after Finnegan. Spock is a little taken aback by this sudden turn of events, but Kirk has run off before he has a chance to argue.

The chase takes Kirk back out to the desert. Finnegan keeps popping up in the distance, moving from place to place so quickly and inexplicably that it seems like he’s teleporting. All this time Finnegan’s peppy jig motif is playing, which is suitable enough for the immediate situation but a bit disconcertingly cheerful considering one of our beloved main cast members died and had his body stolen like two minutes ago.

Finally, Kirk tracks Finnegan down to a small ledge and once again demands that Finnegan give him some answers. Finnegan’s response to this is to jump off the ledge, onto Kirk. So begins a long fight scene in the desert dust. Kirk gives it a good show, but Finnegan seems indomitable. He knocks Kirk flat and then stands over him, taunting Kirk about how Kirk went and got old while Finnegan is still a twenty-year-old college student in fine fighting form. Well...a twenty-year-old in fine fighting form, at any rate. He’s got way too much energy to be a college student.

Despite being Super Old, Kirk gets back up and continues the fight. This time he’s the one who knocks Finnegan down, and Finnegan promptly starts moaning about how he can’t feel his leg and Kirk has broken his back. This is, of course, a trick, and as soon as he gets the chance he flips Kirk over onto his back. Somehow, between landing on the ground and getting a close-up, Kirk manages to rip his shirt clean off most of his torso.

[ID: 1. Kirk landing on his back in the dirt while Finnegan begins to get up from the ground nearby. 2. Kirk laying flat on his back, bruised, with his shirt torn off one shoulder almost to his stomach.]

how did you even do that

He lays there, seemingly unconscious, and Finnegan starts laughing about how Kirk can sleep now, sleep as much as he wants, sleep forever and forever. Oh. Uh. That got creepy.

Luckily for Kirk, a commercial break happens, and by the time it’s over, he’s recovered somewhat. He gets up and says, once again, that he wants answers. Finnegan tells him to earn them and throws dirt in his face, and they start going at it. Again. Seriously, this fight lasts for a long time.

Eventually, they come to a halt, both disheveled, bleeding, and covered in dirt. “Kinda makes up for things, huh, Jim?” Finnegan asks. I don’t know if the “things” are Finnegan’s bullying back in the day or everything that’s gone wrong today—or maybe both. Hard to say, because when Kirk questions him yet again, Finnegan says, “I never answer questions from plebes,” causing Kirk, clearly at his breaking point now, to bellow “I’M...NOT...A PLEBE!” as only William Shatner could.

Kirk asks Finnegan why the hell he’s here, magically still a cadet just hanging out on a supposedly uninhabited planet, which is pretty weird, y’know. Finnegan says he’s “being exactly what you expect me to be.” Which is more information than Finnegan’s provided so far, but not enough to dissuade Kirk from getting back up and finally giving Finnegan a right good sock on the jaw.

As he stands there catching his breath, Spock suddenly appears and asks if Kirk enjoyed his fight. Well, I say suddenly. It seems suddenly, but honestly he could have been standing there for the past ten minutes playing a trumpet and wearing light-up sneakers and I doubt Kirk would have noticed during that fight.

Kirk admits that yeah, actually, he did enjoy that. He’s been wanting to beat up Finnegan for years now and he finally got the chance and damn, it felt good. Spock says that this all fits into his theory: that these things and people are showing up because the Enterprise crew were thinking about them. You don’t say? I’m kind of amazed it took them this long to realize that, honestly. I mean, if something becomes relevant soon after I happened to be thinking about it I immediately notice it because that kind of thing strikes you as odd, right? And if something literally appeared in front of me right after I mentioned it, I think my immediate instinct would be to ask for something else just to see what would happen, which in this case would rather give the game away.

Anyway, Spock says that they must all control their thoughts, which is definitely a thing humans can do under pressure. He thinks that everything is being manufactured below ground and placed above via a system of secret tunnels, kind of like Disneyland. Then he starts talking about the tiger Rodriguez encountered—and said tiger immediately shows up nearby. Great job controlling your thoughts, Spock!

Apparently, Shatner wanted Kirk to wrestle this tiger, but basic sense prevailed and he was talked out of it. I wonder how that conversation went. “I gotta fight the tiger! It’s what this Kirk guy’s all about! I know, I’ve studied him!”

Luckily Kirk and Spock make their getaway without anyone having to fight the tiger. As they run back to The Glade, the airplane returns for another strafing run, so they have to outrun that too. Then, because I guess this is the part where all the previous bosses return and you have to fight them again, the samurai appears as well, but Kirk and Spock don’t have any time for that so they just push him over and keep going without even slowing down.

Back in The Glade, Barrows is in her uniform again and sadly hanging up the princess clothes on some branches. Her ripped collar seems to now be on the other side. Man, there’s just magic clothes all over this episode. And just to make Barrows’s day even worse, a leering mustachioed man appears in the brush behind her—Don Juan, one presumes. Man, somebody had a really weird idea of what women fantasize about.

Barrows screams and Sulu and Rodriguez rush over to rescue her—Sulu seems to be hoping that just kind of waving his hands around in the air will do the trick. Before yet another fight scene can break out, Kirk and Spock show up and tell everyone to stop this nonsense, at which point Don Juan just kind of obligingly leaves.

Kirk tells everyone to stand at attention and to not breathe or think. I hope he has some kind of plan beyond that because that is not a sustainable course of action. I mean, that’s how you get a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Or just some passed-out crew. Incidentally, Rodriguez is here, but Marteller is nowhere to be seen. What happened to her? Is she dead? Did he just leave her laying in the woods somewhere? I have no idea, because she never gets mentioned again.

So the crew lines up and tries desperately not to think about tigers or samurai or vintage guns or airplanes or Don Juan or fancy princess clothes or talking rabbits or old flames or college rivals or anything else, and while they’re doing this an old man in blue robes suddenly appears.

[ID: Kirk, still bruised with a badly torn shirt, looking in surprise at a kindly-looking white man with white hair, wearing a blue robe with gold leaf embroideries on the chest and cuffs.]

Dangit! Which one of you was thinking of an old man in blue robes?

The man, who seems to know everyone’s names, introduces himself as the caretaker of the planet. He apologizes for all their troubles and says that ‘they’ only realized just now that the Enterprise crew didn’t understand what was going on—that everything that happened was only meant to amuse and entertain them. On this planet, you can imagine any kind of experience you want, and it’ll happen. Spock calls it an amusement park, and then explains to everyone else that that’s ‘an old Earth term’ for a place where people went to have fun experiences. Wait, does that mean that amusement parks don’t exist anymore? Why not? When did we lose our amusement park capabilities? Man, I don’t know about this future, guys.

The Caretaker says Spock has got it right—this is basically one giant amusement park. The whole planet, in fact, was constructed for the Caretaker’s people to come and play. Sulu expresses surprise at the idea that a species that seems to be so advanced would still play games, but Kirk says that on the contrary, the more advanced the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play, and the Caretaker agrees. Okay, cool planet, guys, but have you considered maybe, I dunno, putting up some signs or warning buoys or something so random space travelers who don’t know what the place is about don’t stumble upon it and have a really bad day?

Speaking of having bad days, Kirk might have his answers now, but he’s not exactly happy about his best friend and CMO getting killed by what was more or less a rogue audio-animatronic. But then who should call out but the CMO himself, who comes strolling over, looking decidedly not dead. Also he has a couple scantily-clad women with him for some reason.

[ID: McCoy saying, “Possibly because no one has died, Jim,” as he stands in front of the pond arm-in-arm with two women wearing fluffy bikinis, feathers in their hair, and what looks like a feather boa wrapped around one leg; one woman is in pink and the other in yellow.]

McCoy says he was taken below ground for ‘repairs’ and that there’s a huge factory complex down there that can make absolutely anything. They even fixed his shirt! So McCoy is fine, and we can call off the mourning, what a relief. Phew. Really had me worried there.

Barrows, though, seems less than amused by the fuzzy girls and asks what’s up with that. McCoy mutters something about a cabaret he visited that had these chorus girls and, well, here they are. Really? That’s what you were thinking about, after being brought back from the dead by an advanced alien civilization in an underground factory? A cabaret you went to once? These people have weird priorities.

This is one part of the episode that strikes me as interesting because it’s quite different from how I would expect a more modern sci-fi story to handle it. The idea of a planet-sized super-advanced alien theme park that can generate whatever you’re thinking about is in itself not a story idea I’d be surprised to encounter today. But the idea that all these creations are mechanical replicas built in a giant underground factory kind of is. You’d expect a race as advanced as that to be using, I dunno, holograms or telepathic projections or just something that’s straight-up never explained. I mean, even by the time of TNG we have regular humans using holodecks, which do everything this planet can do with just hard light or whatever. It’s a sort of linear thought process, I think, which shows up more than once in Star Trek and plenty of other sci-fi, wherein the idea of super-advanced alien/future tech is expressed as “okay think of what we can do right now, and then imagine it could be done faster and better.” Rather than taking a sideways step to imagine some completely new technology, it’s basically “well we have factories that can produce artificial things, so the advanced aliens must have bigger factories that can quickly produce more lifelike artificial things.” Of course, all sci-fi is going to have that to some extent because it’s impossible to completely extricate our imaginations from our current understanding of the world. But sometimes it’s especially obvious.

McCoy, seeing Barrows’s expression, turns the fuzzy girls loose to go pester the rest of the crew. Kirk is curious about the Caretaker’s species, but the Caretaker gently says that he doesn’t think humans are ready to understand them yet. But Uhura calls Kirk to say that ship power and communications are back on, and the Caretaker says that the crew is free to take their shore leave on the planet if they want. Well, that’s nice of them. Not everyone would share their planet-sized amusement park with total strangers.

So Kirk tells the shore leave parties to start beaming down. Spock says that he’s had quite enough excitement and is going to go back and hold the fort on the ship, and Kirk almost overrules him and says that he’ll go instead because as the captain he’s not allowed to have fun. But then he sees Ruth approaching in the distance and decides that, you know what, he’ll stay after all. Personally it seems to me that knowing that the long-lost love you were smooching was actually a plastic simulacrum of them would kind of take the joy out of it, but hey, what do I know about these things. I just hope they explain the ‘anything you think of will immediately appear’ situation to everyone before they come down, or any crewmembers with an anxiety disorder are going to get a nasty surprise.

Some time later, everyone returns to the ship, looking quite refreshed and happy. As Kirk, McCoy, Sulu and Barrows come onto the bridge, Spock asks if they enjoyed their shore leave, and they all agree that they did, very much. “Most illogical,” Spock comments. I don’t know what exactly he finds illogical about that, but then that pretty much is Spock’s fall-back way of expressing disapproval regardless of how much sense it makes.

So everyone laughs, and they fly off, and we have a nice happy ending. The filming of Shore Leave itself was rather less happy. The original script was written by Theodore Sturgeon, but Roddenberry thought it contained too much fantasy, so he handed it off to Gene L. Coon for a rewrite—but in some sitcom-worthy misunderstanding, Coon somehow thought that Roddenberry wanted more fantasy. So Roddenberry himself wound up re-rewriting the script, but at that point they were so out of time that he was writing it while the episode was being filmed. I have no idea exactly what levels of ‘fantasy’ were involved in either version of the script that Roddenberry disliked so much. Unicorns? Werewolves? Women characters not getting harassed by mustachioed stalkers for no real reason? Who knows.

The script also called for an elephant along with the tiger, and an elephant was actually hired and brought to set, but various shooting difficulties meant that it never wound up getting filmed. No word on whether Shatner wanted to wrestle the elephant too.

You may also have noticed Kirk suddenly has a new yeoman seemingly replacing Rand. By this point, Rand had been written out of the series; Balance of Terror was the last episode she would appear in (in filming order, The Conscience of the King was the last episode Grace Lee Whitney worked on). Exactly why the decision was made to write Rand out so unceremoniously is not really clear to me, and there seem to be lot of differing viewpoints on it; one thing that is clear is that it was a huge blow to poor Whitney, who was abruptly dismissed from the show through no fault of her own. To be honest, I don’t personally think that Rand was written especially well most of the time, but I think that she could have been written well, which is what makes it such a shame that she was removed from the show without getting the chance to get any real character development. Within the show itself, there’s no reason given for Rand just being gone one day (people just appear and disappear at random on this ship), though I’m sure the EU has that covered. Personally I just hope she found a ship that was a lot less stressful to be a woman on. We’ll miss ya, Rand!

TREK TROPE TALLY: We’ve got one crewmember death, followed by one crewmember un-death, plus one truly incredible case of a Uniform Unformed with Kirk’s shirt magically destroying itself between shots. Next time we’ll finally see some shuttle action in The Galileo Seven.

[mst3kproject]

313: Earth vs the Spider

First we had It Conquered the World, in which It failed to even conquer the town of Beechwood.  Now we have Earth vs the Spider, in which the poor Spider is badly outnumbered even when it, too, is only really menacing one small California town.  It's an incongruous title in other ways as well, but I'll get to that.

High school student Carol Flynn is worried when her father doesn't return from a drive, so she and her rather tactless boyfriend Mike set out to see what's keeping him.  There's no trace of the man, but they do find a huge silk rope across the road, which they follow into a cave, which turns out to be home to a spider the size of a house!  A giant dose of DDT appears to kill it (along with the entire rest of the cave ecosystem), so a teacher has the gigantic corpse taken back to town and stored in the school gym so that scientists from across the country can come and study it. Before that can happen, however, the spider is brought back to life by the Power of Rock N Roll, and soon it's off on the inevitable rampage!

The movie never tells us how they got the huge spider back to town.  Did they just strap it to the top of a truck?  Did they airlift it with a helicopter?  In either case, how did they first get it out of the cave?  Maybe they used whatever it was they did to transport King Kong to New York.

Other than that, it's kind of hard to find anything to say about Earth vs the Spider. It's another bland, by-the-numbers sort of movie that doesn't really have anything to make it stand out from the pack.  It's something to look at for seventy minutes, but it doesn't linger.  The most memorable thing about it is the scene in Lilo and Stitch where it's playing on the televisions in a shop window and Stitch finds it inspiring.

That said, the movie is not necessarily bad.  In fact, there are places where it pays a surprising amount of attention to everyday details that help make the silly story feel more grounded.  For example, Carol's father doesn't seem to have been a very responsible man, but at the same time we can tell he and Carol were very close and she takes great offense whenever anybody else refers to his poor reputation.  Yet in spite of her love for him, she knows she has no grounds to defend him, either, and is eventually forced to admit that his having run off to gamble his paycheque away is a very real possibility.  Her distress over the loss of the bracelet he bought for her would seem like an over-reaction under other circumstances, but understandable due to her grief at his death.

Other character also have nice touches like this.  The fact that Mike keeps putting his foot in his mouth, or that he doesn't have his own car but must borrow one from a friend, make the characters feel more like real teenagers even if the actors don't always look the part.  It's also nice to see that the kids actually have parents who can be supportive, worried, or strict by turns, as the situation demands.  The small town setting makes it plausible that the characters cannot consult with scientists or the military about their spider problem.  The closest thing they have is their high school science teacher.  He's not exactly on the cutting edge of research, so he uses what he's familiar with rather than coming up with some esoteric technobabble solution to the monster.

So the characters are fairly convincingly written (George Worthing Yates also co-wrote Them!, which is easily the best of the 50's giant bug movies), but unfortunately they're less-convincingly played.  I kind of have a thing for June Kenney (Carol), who looked awfully cute in her circle skirts and sailor collars, but she's not a good actress.  She always sounds like she's trying too hard, which makes her the opposite of Eugene Persson (Mike), who sounds like he's barely trying at all.  If they were both at the same end of this scale it might work, but the fact that they're equal opposites just emphasizes how much they both suck.  The Sheriff's skepticism when he first hears about the spider is understandable, but Gene Roth's overacting does neither him nor the movie any favours.

Special effects are a mixed bag.  A composite shot of Mike and Carol running along a ledge doesn't look bad – you can buy that they're actually in Carlsbad Caverns for the purposes of the movie.  A moment later, however, we see a tarantula move through the same image of the cavern, which has now been cut out so that the spider can pass behind the rock formations without an expensive process shot.  This looks terrible, and there's a spot where you can see the edge of the cut-out cardboard.  The dried-out victims that have been drained by the spider are amusingly gruesome, but the skeletons strewn around the cave are obvious plastic.  The huge strands of silk that make up the spider's web look quite nice, all filamentous and springy, but when we see bits of the spider in the same shot as the humans they always look hideously fake.

Come to think of it, where are all those skeletons supposed to have come from?  We don't hear about a rash of car accidents or missing persons along that stretch of road – maybe we should have, since it would give extra foundation to Carol's fears for her father's safety.  There's got to be a dozen or more corpses sitting around in there.  Who were these people?

The spider itself is realized (quote unquote) like all Bert I. Gordon's giant creations are – mostly through superimposed shots of a live tarantula, with a bit of very limited puppetry.  While the latter is, as I've already observed, pretty dreadful, the process shots here are about as good as they ever got in such movies.  Certainly they're a hell of a lot better than the bugs with holes in them of King Dinosaur or The Cyclops.  The angles are matched very well to the background footage, and the spider is never obviously transparent.  As long as it's not expected to interact with its environment or the characters, it's quite acceptable.  It seems that by this point in his giant bug movie career, Gordon had a good handle on what he could and could not get away with, at least as far as superimposition went.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering why you've never heard of a 'bird spider', that's because it's a species found mostly in the rainforests of Columbia and Venezuela.  Bird spiders are golden-brown in colour and about as big as a bread-and-butter plate, make poor pets because of their aggressive temperament, and never come anywhere near the southwestern United States unless a human brings them there.  The furry little spider the movie shows us, supposedly representing a normal-sized bird spider, looks like an ordinary Chilean rose-hair to me. Rose-hairs are half the size of a bird spider (also called a goliath bird-eater... because yes, they do) and not even in the same genus, though both are in the tarantula family.  Spider nerd out.)

Unusually for a Bert I. Gordon movie, Earth vs the Spider never delves into the question of why there's a giant spider running around.  His other movies all give excuses for embiggening things: Glenn Manning's cells were mutated by exposure to the plutonium bomb, the locusts in The Beginning of the End ate irradiated grain, Empire of the Ants blames a toxic spill, and Village of the Giants has the Goo.  None of these are very plausible, but they all make it over the 'just accept it' threshold so we can get to the story beyond.  Earth vs the Spider brings the idea up, but never bothers to do anything with it.  The teacher notes that while the spider may be dead, 'the principle that caused it to grow' is not, and it's important to study this so they won't end up with more giant spiders that could easily overwhelm human civilization.

This idea is somewhat reminiscent of Them!, in which the elder Dr. Medford fears that the ants, which breed faster and build more efficiency, will drive humanity to extinction.  Unlike in Them!, however, the plot point serves only as an excuse for bringing the spider into town so it can wake up and have stuff to wreck.  Nobody ever finds out why it was so big, and at the end the cave is sealed up with explosives while the mystery remains un-solved – it's never even referenced again.  In the other Bert I. Gordon 'giant creature' movies, the beastie's origin is frequently key to its defeat.  In The Amazing Colossal Man the scientists are able to find a cure for Glenn's condition after they realize what effect the plutonium bomb had on his bone marrow.  In Village of the Giants, Genius discovers an antidote to the Goo.  Earth vs the Spider?  Nothing doing.  Why did they even bother to bring it up? It seems like the best approach might have been to just not worry about the origin of the spider and hope the audience wouldn't think of it themselves.

This is the other place where the title seems very strange.  The idea that the spider is a menace to the entire Earth is merely an exaggeration, but the title Earth vs the Spider also seems to imply that the spider itself is from somewhere else, like the interdimensional spiders of The Giant Spider Invasion.  If you're gonna give us a Spider from Nowhere, fine, but don't do that after a title that seems to promise us a Spider from Mars!

I am not watching Giant Spider Invasion next week.  Fifty-foot spiders are something I have to pace myself with or I'll run out of things to say about them.

[mtwy]

Rolling Stone

USA May 9th 1985

On sale April 23rd 

How Rosanna Arquette, Madonna and director Susan Seidelman lost tempers and found each other through ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’

Lucky Stars

By Fred Schruers

Our ostensible subject is Desperately Seeking Susan, the bargain-budgeted ($5 million) little film, directed by Susan Seidelman, that went from being an oddball artistes showcase to Orion Pictures rush-to-release entry for the Easter-season box office. Though the picture breaks many rules, both artistic and commercial, the result is one of the fresher entertainments to make it through the Hollywood bottleneck in these formulaic times.

Part screwball comedy, part satire, part set designer’s equivalent to “out” jazz, Susan turns on mistaken identity. Arquette’s bored housewife, Roberta, follows the trail of Madonna’s gutterball schemer, Susan, into a slapdash murder mystery that scrambles suburbanites and hipsters into something between farce and freaky fable. Early on, Roberta gets a knock on the head that gives her amnesia, and the two undergo an identity switch, setting up a skein of sardonic jokes that bounce off the wall at unexpected angles. Madonna owned a platinum LP when she signed on to the project and has since earned a second one. The consensus, even among industry skeptics, is that the singer has the goods onscreen, too. What clearly has Arquette cutting conversational wheelies, though, is Orion’s promotion of the film, in which she seems to play background to Madonna’s phosphorescent pop icon. “Can you blame them?” she says. “A studio sees a hot commodity and they immediately capitalize on it. It’s a little misleading, because it’s not a teen movie. I know the preview has been playing before The Purple Rose of Cairo, and it’s been booed. The audience was people who love Susan Seidelman and who would go to see me, and that’s sad.” There are precious few young actresses who can give Rosanna a power outage, onscreen or off. From a speck on the horizon, hitchhiking cross-country and arriving in Los Angeles at age seventeen, she’s built a career mostly on the kind of quicksilver expressiveness she showed in Baby, It’s You and in TV’s The Executioner’s Song; at twenty-five, she’s in the front rank of actresses arriving at stardom. Today she drove in to Hollywood from her new house an hour up in the Topanga Canyon hills, leaving a coating of ocher dust behind the back tires of her otherwise gleaming Saab Turbo. Her silky, silvery dress is a bit of a war whoop among all the cut glass and linen of this Beverly Boulevard restaurant’s cool, mirrored spaces, yet there’s something more fundamental out of place. It’s as if her heart were thudding audibly, even visibly, while she charges forward and back in a virtual self-interview. “I’ve never been like this. I’m a wreck. I get hurt easily. I don’t have a tough shell. That’s why I’m so freaked out. I’m so insecure. I’m really insecure. It’s pretty stupid for me to be in this business, isn’t it?” Rosanna pauses, then gives a little tadpole wriggle with her right hand to signal that she’s not really waiting for an answer. She glances once more at the Polaroid and tucks it away. She can’t stifle these complaints, yet she can’t stand voicing them. “We’re great friends,” she concludes in her trigger-burst style. “All these things I said to her. I think her performance is really good. All I’m saying is, ‘Let her be an actress.'” “I had a few scenes where I was really sh*ttin’ bricks,” says the twenty-four-year-old refuge from Pontiac, Michigan. “A few times I was so nervous I opened my mouth and nothing came out.” Madonna is anything but mute tonight, as she takes a break from the Los Angeles rehearsal sessions for her first tour, and though she pauses occasionally to punctuate a phrase with a Mae West-ian secret smile, she lets you into the conversation only edgewise. “I think I surprised everybody, though, by being one of the calmest people on the set at all times. I think that had to do with the fact that I was in total wonderment: I was gonna soak everything up.” One keeps waiting for the brittle bitch, the self-absorbed bombshell who’s supposed to lurk under her winking, vamping, wriggling electronic image, but the Madonna who sits talking over coffee comes on disarmingly humble. Rosanna has expressed resentment over the insertion into the movie of a Madonna song backing a quickly rewritten scene in which the Susan character gyrates around a New York club. A video clip using the unreleased tune, “Into the Groove,” spotlights Madonna. “It does take things out of context a bit,” says Madonna, “kinda calls attention to another facet, but…” What that “but” means is, it sells tickets, chumps. Still, it’s become an issue… “Yeah, really?” says Madonna. “Who’s it become an issue with – besides Rosanna?” Her laugh is quick and not unkind. Insiders say the song found its way into the film on its own virtues. “Susan Seidelman was not out to make a pandering rock & roll movie,” says executive producer Michael Peyser, 31, who worked on Susan after serving as associate producer on Woody Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo. One of the music coordinators, Danny Goldberg, had no time to compile a soundtrack LP when the film’s release date was pushed up, but in talks with MTV execs, he paved the way for “Into the Groove” to air, even though the song might never show up on vinyl. Madonna is not naive about the studio’s gambit: “I have a big audience of kids for my music, and you know how they use soundtracks to push movies – I think they’re using me in the same way, and it’s really a drag, because I’m trying to establish myself as an actress, not as a singer making movies. But I’ll be happy if it becomes a commercial success, simply because it’s a different kind of movie than most of what’s out now. There are a few formulas people have been using the past five years, with Flashdance and Breakin’ and all that stuff; this movie is like a return to those simple, straightforward caper comedies Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard made in the Thirties. They give you a taste of real life, some poignance, and leave you feeling up at the end – none of that adolescent-fantasy bullshit.” If Madonna is a fan of screwball comedy, Susan Seidelman is more intent on spray-painting her own signature on the canvas of the blank generation she grew up with. “I think I’m a little bit of a satirist,” she says. “I grew up in the epitome of Sixties suburbia. You know, Dunkin’ Donuts shops, TV dinners. We had canned vegetables at home because we thought it was more modern than having fresh vegetables. So that pop-Andy Warhol-whatever aesthetic is something I took for granted. “Inside that, I wanted to make a fable about identity and appearances. But this film isn’t an essay. I dislike movies in which the theme becomes the plot, where everything is like an essay on Loneliness or Frustrated Housewives of Sexual Whatever. If you look at movies like Some Like It Hot or Tootsie, you could probably write a lot about sexual roles, but the films don’t get bogged down in their message. To be able to show something rather than tell it is much more interesting, and the best devices are the ones that work most invisibly. I mean, if Rosanna’s character is torn between her husband and another guy, and we see her in a magician’s box being sawed in half – that works great if you think about it, but it’s gonna work on an immediate level, too. To me, a script is a skeleton that I liked enough to – well, hang my skin on.” The skeleton of Desperately Seeking Susan had been rattling around Hollywood for five years before finding its skin, and it would be there still were it not for a coming together of inspired amateurs who – not incidentally in this male-run industry – are mostly women. The script was the debut effort for Leora Barish, 36, who has quit life as sometime saxophonist in Manhattan’s East Village and moved to California seven years ago. She brought it to a close friend, Sarah Pillsbury (whi indeed is from Minnesota cake-mix clan her name evokes), who went from Yale to producing documentaries, including a 1979 Oscar winner. Teamed with friend Midge Sanford, savvy in the Byzantine ways of Hollywood development deals, Pillsbury optioned Barish’s script as their first project. It floared through studio limbo, gathering praise from many women and indifference from most men, but it refused to die. “We reconceived it as a lower-budget, up-and-coming-star kind of movie as opposed to using the older, established actresses we’d been talking about,” says Sanford, and finally Orion took up the option. Sanford and Pillsbury sent Arquette’s agent the script, and a week later, in June of last year, she signed up. The producers had been fans of independent filmmaker Susan Seidelman’s critically lauded debut film, Smithereens, and they tapped the director for Susan early on. Seidelman, 32, had come out of the split-level Philadelphia suburb of Abington, studied fashion design at Drexel University and clerked for a few months at a local TV station before applying to film schools; New York University “shocked” her with an acceptance. She moved to the Lower East Side in 1974, when St. Mark’s Place was a strip of shuttered hippie boutiques. She gravitated toward directing in the three-year course and began piling up awards with her twenty-eight-minute debut, “And You Act Like One, Too,” about a too-married woman. Smithereens, begun in 1980 with $10,000 from her grandmother’s will, became the surprise hit of the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. (“I think they wanted to make a statement about mainstream American films,” she says diffidently.) In it, young actress Susan Berman played Wren, a sort of punk-rock groupie living by her wits against the harsh and indifferent backdrop of the Lower East Side and it’s punk rajah, Richard Hell. Shooting was delayed when Berman, racing along a row of loft windows, ran out of fire escape (“like some horrible Road Runner cartoon,” recalls Seidelman) and broke a leg. Still, Seidelman brought it in for $80,000, and it earned plenty more – enough to buy her a SoHo loft whose spotless varnished-wood floors and sparse, Sixties-gauche furnishing hardly mirror the unkempt world of her films. So messy and wheedling are her heroines that Seidelman’s films seem to have at least one foot in the genre pundits are calling “slob comedies.” Madonna’s Susan is an empress of trasg, a libidinous but untouchable she-wolf who washes down cheese puffs with vintage wine, cadges triple tequila sunrises and steals other peoples’ goods and services with an amiable, Pigpen-ish air. Madonna admits that when she arrived in New York in 1978, she, like Susan, “relied on the kindness of strangers.” When Seidelman heard of the singer’s interest in the part, she invited her over: “She was nervous and vulnerable and not at all arrogant – sweet, but intelligent and verbal, with such a sense of humor. I just started seeing her as Susan.” The chiefs at Orion were skeptical – some 200 actresses had read or been video-taped for the part – so Madonna was given a screen test. “She had this presence you couldn’t get rid of,” says Sanford. “No matter how good the other people were, we kept going back to that screen test.” “Susan is conniving, an opportunist,” says Madonna, “but she really did care about {Roberta’s husband} Gary Glass and her boyfriend, Jim, and all these people.” Part of her cockeyed charm is a warmth underlying her aloof facade: “Anybody who goes around acting like nobody matters obviously is protecting themselves and hiding what they really feel. So I always wanted to have that little underneath there.” What underneath may be the “little tiny girl” Arquette is sure she sees in Madonna – perhaps the girl whose mother died when she was six. “I knew I had to be extra special supercharming to get what I wanted, ’cause I grew up with a lot of brothers and sisters {she was the theirs of eight children}, and we had to share everything, I did all I could to really stand out, and that nurtured a lot of confidence and drive and ambition.” Poet Edward Field wrote that Mae West “comes on drenched in a perfume called Self-Satisfaction,” and it’s a knack Madonna shared. She and Seidelman had a decent repport, but conflicts between the young director and three precocious pros – Arquette, Laurie Metcalf (as Roberta’s vituperative sister-in-law) and Aidan Quinn (as Roberta’s love interest) – were frequent. Production veteran Michael Peyser often picked up the pieces. “Susan has a wonderful quality; she guileless, totally honest,” he says, but he pegs her as a Hitchcock-style director: “She comes from filmmaking, as opposed to directing. She was working with excellent people, like Laurie and Aidan, who are and will be major stage actors of their generation; they’re used to a little more stroking.” “I really do like actors,” says Seidelman. “I’m not manipulative, at which Hitchcock prided himself. I’m not good at hiding what I feel. I can’t say, ‘Oh, brilliant’; when I’m unhappy, it’s written on my forehead.” Amid the production’s turmoil, Madonna took consolation from Mark Blum (so likably obtuse onscreen as Roberta’s husband, Gary). “If I’d get upset, he’d take me aside and tell me a joke or make an analogy about the situation, chill me out.” Rosanna, fresh from her dream collaboration with director Martin Scorsese on his forthcoming After Hours, was not to be chilled out. She and Seidelman staged tense debates over the degree of Roberta’s amnesia, and during one twenty-hour day, an angry Rosanna burst into tears. Stalled and frustrated, Seidelman cried too. “You could say it was cathartic,” says Seidelman. “You scream, cry, get it out and go on.” “Our whole souls were in it,” says Rosanna now, “but any film I’ve ever made was hard. By the second month, she would look at me and I would know what she wanted. It’s just that I had never worked with a director who needed complete control of me. See, I never rehearse my lines exactly how I’ll say them. I just memorize them and know my character.” While making After Hours, she points out, Scorsese was “never negative. In one situation he came up to me and said, ‘Do you think you should laugh in this scene?’ and I said, ‘Oh, no, Marty. I can’t see where she’d laugh in this scene.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah. You’re right. You’re right. Forget I ever said anything.’ And he walks away. That’s what he does, very subtly. It’s like he planted the seed, watered it and split. And as I was doing the scene, I don’t know where it came from, but I just started laughing.” Arquette also had few problems making Lawrence Kasdan’s next film, Silverado. “I’m just a pioneer woman heading west who has a very strong vision. And she wants to work her land.” She’s completed two other projects, a public television play, Survival Guide (“It’s just a very bizarre half-hour comedy”) and the recent disaster The Aviator, which prompted At the Movies reviewer Gene Siskel to say, “This is garbage,” while Roger Ebert confirmed, “Transcendentally bad.” Rosanna’s one-time boyfriend, Toto drummer Steve Porcaro, had been so upset at the love scene in The Executioner’s Song that she says she made The Aviator partly because “it didn’t have any nudity, it was safe – one of those all-American kind of movies.” Her eventual breakup with Porcaro spurred her recent spate of work. Now Arquette is with L.A.-based record producer James Newton Howard, and things seem… serious: “We work hard on our relationship. We have an incredible therapist. Our guy’s name is Don, and he’s great. We’re gonna work out all the shit in our relationship before we make a giant decision like getting married. “I don’t want to talk about my relationship with Steve Porcaro anymore,” she says, with some heat. “We’re very good friends. But everybody’s gotta ask me, ‘Well, you’re the Rosanna in the song,’ and blah-blah. Isn’t it boring? Say this: ‘I am so bored talking about my relationship with Steve Porcaro.'” She made another change around the time of the breakup. “I had gone to drug program with a friend. That was another thing {reported in the media}, that I was the one with a drug problem. I did take drugs. I smoked a lot of pot. I don’t think I was an addict.” (These days, Rosanna will not touch drink or drugs, and her choice for lunch is a spinach-and-avocado salad and mineral water.) “Life is wonderful. Why do you guys have to look for the shit? ‘Cause it’s bad karma for you to do that, do you know that? It’s not proper journalism.” It has become clear that Rosanna just had a crash course on this subject: “I did nine interviews yesterday.” The actress and her publicist seem determined to blow back the Madonna promo machine by filibuster. The problem is that the quick-draw dramatics that are a blessing in front of the camera make her emotional dynamometer shudder ominously during what should be a simple talk. “I grew up pretty fast,” she says of her gypsy-like upbringing on the artsy-hippie circuit traveled by her actor father and writer mother. “I think I was nineteen when I was fifteen. And now I’m fifteen. Madonna taught me a good lesson, because she just laughs off the band press. They think they’re hurting her, and she just laughs: ‘Ah, that’s bullshit.’ But I still get hurt.” She’s balancing her promo chores with acting class: three times a week, she joins a group of about fifteen (Nicolas Cage among them) for four-to-five-hour-sessions with Sandra Seacat. “She’s also Jessica Lange’s coach,” says Rosanna. “She’s a very spiritual, highly realized being, a guru.” Her list of professional heroines includes Lange, Christie, Hawn, Winger and Spacek, but hovering above them all is Natalie Wood. The cat who shares Rosanna’s hillside retreat is named Natalie, and when Arquette was being costumed for her character in Baby, It’s You, she balked at a pageboy haircut until someone reminded her it recalled Natalie. Wood is an interesting point of reference for Arquette – two beauties whose acting carries a seemingly artless transparency. Right now, Rosanna is a capital-A Actress, and as a result she’s in many ways a considerable snob. But for the last three pictures she shot, she took pay cuts that left her with perhaps half of her real price. She’s pouring her life into her work, and that leaves rough edges. She’s walking contradiction in terms, a Topanga Canyon firecracker. Rosanna abruptly jumps up and reaches into her coat pocket, fetching a plastic bag of sizeable vitamins in assorted colours. She counts out a handful, recounts and down them with water: “Stress depletes your body of vitamin B and C.” As an afterthought, she pops one more. The ritual seems to take the pedal off the floor, and she looks across the table apologetically, coat over her arm. “This is who I am, just hyper and emotional. I always have been. My emotions have always been right there.”

[netmaddy-blog]

Spreading the Not-So-Good News

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/spreading-the-not-so-good-news/

Spreading the Not-So-Good News

The influence of the occult upon our everyday lives is staggering. An African missionary from the Mandinka tribe of West Africa, once asked a congregation a question similar to that asked by the Apostle Paul of the Galatians. His 11-minute message, spoken in the mid-90’s, I can still recall, as he shouted the question: “You foolish Americans… who has bewitched you?!”

The basis of his message was that, right here in the good ole’ U.S. of A., everywhere he looked, he could detect an occult influence. Whether it was through the media, commercials, from the “alternative religions,” even from the pulpits of well-meaning Christian ministers, what this man was detecting was something OTHER than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Crystals, guided imagery, healing meditation, Christian Science, Kabbalah, Mormonism…why has “Christian America” so eagerly accepted these ideas that, at their root, are so contrary to that which would be considered orthodox? Why are so many things OTHER than biblical concepts being sought out to meet the needs of those who claim to be Christians?

In 2 Corinthians, 11th chapter, the Apostle warned that some would come preaching “another Jesus” and “a different gospel.” He wrote, “…as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” There are three types of doctrine spoken of within the New Testament: the doctrine of man, the doctrine of devils and the doctrine of Christ (and of God). Personally, I contend that Bible illiteracy is the basis for this continual weakening of Orthodox Christianity. One example of this can be found in the number of Southern Baptists who are joining the Mormon Church. According to the Arizona Latter-day Sentinel, April 2, 1988, “…an average of 282 members of their church join the LDS church each week. Coincidentally, the (sic) average Southern Baptist congregation has 283 members, which means the Baptists lose 52 congregations each year to the Mormons.

Though a group may mention the name ‘Jesus’ and season their conversation with spiritual-sounding, familiar Christianese, not all that glitters is gold. For example, those who worship The Sacred Mushroom (No, I’m NOT kidding) refer to a mushroom as ‘Jesus’ so, based upon Romans 10:9-10 (…if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.) they consider themselves to be “saved.” Some actually believe this and have placed their faith in a fungus.

We must ask ourselves just WHO this Jesus is whenever that Name is spoken. Is he Lucifer’s brother? The archangel Michael? An Ascended master? A mere prophet? A fungus? Or is the ‘Jesus’ to whom they refer the Lord of all Creation that He claimed to be? You see Jesus of Nazareth was either a liar, a lunatic, or truly Lord of all… the way WE must see Him as well.

PART 2: The FARCE is with us!

After the first Star Wars movie, Christian bumper stickers came out stating that the “Force” was with us. Thinking the Star Wars movie was a Christian allegory, many assumed this “Force” being referred to in the film was the Holy Spirit. Of course, as we all know, the Holy Spirit is NOT a force, but the third Person of the triune God that we worship.

Right?

Not according to a 2001 survey by the Barna Group which stated that 61% of Americans believed the Holy Spirit to be a mere symbol of God’s presence rather than a living entity. Scripture clearly reveals that the Holy Spirit has a purpose – to empower those who trust in Christ for the advancing of His Kingdom – as well as personal character traits. Yet, I marvel at how many Christians, ministers included, refer to Him merely as “it” – IF they acknowledge Him at all. Just as amazing, 60% of adults believe Satan is merely a symbol of evil. Yet, 81% of us believe angels exist and influence people’s lives.

What is most startling about the Star Wars phenomenon is not the advent of yet another movie, but the real ways in which people around the world appear to be forming a religion out of the thing. The Anglican Digest reported that the first school to teach Jedi – named for the Jedi Knights from the series – was recently opened in Romania. Courses at the Star Wars Academy include the correct use of light saber swords, and lessons on how to speak Wookiee.

The BBC reported (2002) that at least 70,000 people in Australia wrote-in “Jedi” as their response under the category of religion on the last census form. Hard-core fans of the films have been trying to have Jedi declared an official religion around the English-speaking world for years now.

The same situation occurred in New Zealand in their census of 2001. Similarly, more than 390,000 people in England declared themselves Jedi in their census of the same year – a shocking number when you consider that only 260,000 people in England declared themselves to be Jewish! There are various Internet campaigns going on now that encourage voters in the U.S. to petition for Jedi as an official religion on the next U.S. census form.

Star Wars creator, George Lucas, once said: “I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people — more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system. I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery.”

Well, it backfired, George. In a Time magazine interview, Lucas downplayed any religious implications about his series, but then went on to admit to using “the Force” as a representation of God and the Dark Side warrior, Darth Vader, as a metaphor for the evil that exists inside us all. How different is that from saying all humans are born in sin and need the help of “God” to save them? Sounds pretty religious, does it not?

Sadly, very few proponents of this Jedi faith have noticed that their new “religion” is very elitist and only a very few of the Star Wars characters are permitted to attain any benefit from the Force, that being only those referred to in the series as Jedi Knights. Far from being literally a ‘life-force’ that can be harnessed by the underclasses and oppressed, it can only be used by a chosen few High Priests.

The Holy Spirit is so-entitled for one very specific, obvious reason: to distinguish Him from EVIL spirits, deceiving devils that are constantly at work in our midst, killing, stealing and destroying even those who call themselves ‘Christian.’ The Holy Spirit empowers us. He convicts us of sin AND of our righteousness. He comforts, exhorts, edifies and confirms. He is a constant Teacher and reminds us of all that Jesus taught (so read what Jesus taught). He’s the exact SAME Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and He desires to take up residence in anyone who believes that Jesus is who He said He is.

Jesus sent Him. So, He’s obviously all well ever need! He’s no mere force, but where Satan and his minions are concerned, He will make YOU a force to be reckoned with.

PART 3: The Kabbalah Kraze

The latest trendy religion is the Kabbalah. Pop singer Madonna has reportedly donated tens of millions to the cause. Other famous followers include comedian Roseann Barr, actress Demi Moore and many others. In today’s occult revolution where every dimension of the occult is being explored, there has been a revived interest in Kabbalah among both Jew and Gentile.

Although its Jewish origin makes it unique, Kabbalah is still essentially an occultic practice, and is thus incompatible with the Judeo-Christian faiths. Its Pantheistic theology teaches that all reality springs directly from God’s own essence. Even if one believes that these “emanations” from God’s essence have “gone through a descent of ten spheres on four different levels” – whatever THAT means – the conclusion is inescapable that even he who is on the lowest level is still of one essence with God; and thus, ultimately, that individual IS God. This is a concept that is incompatible with the Biblical concept God, who created the world out of nothing, NOT out of Himself. In Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew word for “create” is “bara,” referring to something coming out of nothing. This verse debunks Pantheism, the belief that God is IN the creation and IS the creation. God is not the tree, the rock, the building or the air. Yet, Pantheism holds that God permeates everything, and, therefore, IS all.

Pantheism is not unique to the practitioners of Kabbalah. I once debated a believer in Pantheism and asked him if God was in those bird droppings on the rock wall before us. I believe I heard his mental wheels come to a screeching halt for a moment. “Come now,” I said, urging him not to check his brain at the door, “your beliefs are either absolutely true in all instances or they aren’t true at all.” Incidentally, he was a member of a local mainline Christian denomination. Pantheism is being embraced by many Christians. The concept is, basically, that only the spiritual dimension exists. Some Pantheistic religions include Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. Pantheism also forms the basis for Transcendental Meditation and some aspects of New Age mysticism.

This should not be confused with the concept of God’s omnipresence. God IS omnipresent. He’s everywhere at once. David said, “…if I ascend up into heaven, thou (God) art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there,” (Psalm 139:8). But God is NOT the created world. In fact, He is completely EXTERNAL to the created world. Worship belongs to the Creator, not His creation. Paul tells us in Romans 1:25 that there will be those “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator….”

God is related to the world as a sculptor is related to his sculpture, or I am related to this message on my computer screen right now. The sculptor is not the sculpture. The writer is not the writing. The sculpture and the writing are productions. They are produced by the one that creates, and what one creates, can be created again. Perhaps it will be different or it may be better.

God created everything just by speaking it into existence. It was not difficult. He’s God, you know. “Let there be light and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Poof! “Let the waters bring forth and they brought forth, Let the earth bring forth and it brought forth” (Genesis 1:20,24). Poof! God was not put to a test to make the universe. Some say, “Mankind was a more difficult product!” God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground; we must not have been TOO tough. Like a mud pie maybe. Poof! He took a rib from Adam’s side, spoke a word, and turned it into a woman. Poof! That was not hard for God. This whole creation was not such a magnificent production where God was concerned. To us, it is absolutely unfathomable. With just a little word, it all came to be, or at least, got started. It was really easy for the Creator. Genesis1:31declares that in six days – even if a day is as a thousand years in God’s economy – it all came to be, simply through His spoken words.

Imagine having that kind of an all-powerful Creator God handling our measly, temporal problems! He WANTS to handle our lives in this same way, but we must GIVE them to Him.

PART 4: If it’s broken, let’s fix it

North America is the only continent on earth where the Church is not growing, despite a 2002 Barna survey revealing that 85% of us self-identify as Christians. The exodus from American churches has reached biblical proportions. People are leaving organized churches at a rate of 53,000 a week in Europe and North America combined (the U.S. lost 57,500 in the entire Vietnam War, to put that number in perspective). As a whole, Christians lose 7,600 a day to other religions or irreligion. According to the North American Mission Board (NAMB), the need for new churches is greater than it’s ever been as evidenced by the church-to-population ratios over the last century. For example, in 1900, there were 27 churches, of multiple denominations, per 10,000 people. Today there are 12 churches per 10,000 people. Meanwhile eight churches close their doors permanently every day; nearly 3,000 annually.

The mind boggles regarding the latest in American Church statistics. For example, the number of ministers who no longer believe in the infallibility of Scripture is startling: 85% of the Presbyterian USA pastors said NO; 85% of the Methodist pastors said NO; 85% of the Episcopal pastors said NO; 55% of the Baptist pastors said NO; 45% of the Catholic priests said NO. (Source: Warner A. Bonner, LeadershipJournal.net)

A whopping 42% of Americans believe Jesus committed sins. Whereas Jesus directed us to “go and make disciples,” only16% of American Christians are involved in a discipleship process of regularly meeting with a group or individual for spiritual growth. The Internet is the only mass medium whose audience share has grown during the past decade (I can attest as this ministry’s e-Mail outreach grows annually). The proportion of the population using the Internet as a spiritual resource has increased by two-thirds since 1998. According to the Barna Group, “Our studies continue to show that people are using the Christian media to provide elements of ministry that are not adequately provided to them by their local church.” He explained, “For some people, these media complement their church experience. For others, a combination of these media forms a significant portion of their faith experience….”

Church leaders should start strategizing right about now! Yes, the times they are a-changing’. The Church must wisely adapt and reach the masses where they are, but we must cautiously filter everything we read and hear through the teachings of Jesus Christ. Remember the wise counsel of Paul: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ,” Colossians 2:8. Sadly, much of this modern-day spiritual smorgasbord, including the New Millenium’s hybrid faiths – though they may well be signs of the apostasy of the end times – are really anything less than the unpaid invoices of the Church at large.