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Episode
032
The Changeling
The Enterprise encounters Earth’s first deep space probe, but something is different. Instead of discovering new life, it wants to wipe all wipe out all imperfect life. How will Kirk and crew escape? Find out when “The Changeling” goes in the Mission Log.
– Love the intro on this one. “I AM KEN RAY”
– Really looking forward to hearing you guys talking about Kirk talking another computer to death.
– Ken, who would you say is currently “the most erotic scientist” in history?
– I was wondering why Uhura speaks “English” when they have a Universal Translator. Do they not have the Universal Translator at this point? If they do, she should actually be speaking Swahili the whole time.
– Where DID Nomad get so much power?? They never really explained. One probe observes, the other deals with soil samples, so combined they… have a superweapon that equals 90 photon torpedoes in strength? Why?
– “Mirror, Mirror” is one of the most important TOS episodes, I think. I’m pretty excited about it.
Uhura speaks Swahili in that scene because Nichelle Nichols pushed for it. I understand what you guys are saying that the Starfleet nurse probably wouldn’t have taught her Swahili when everyone speaks English, but Uhura was from Africa and Nichelle argued that it would be the language she would revert to if her mind was erased.
She is shown to pick up languages quickly, and it wouldn’t be completely out of Starfleet/Federation ideals to teach the ‘first’ language first. I would like to think she mastered Swahili and passed the test the day before and the Nurse was teaching her English that day. 🙂
The singing in the opening credits irritates me to no end.
Yeah, a human space probe from the 21st century and an alien “dirt collector unit” bonk together in space, somehow combine their programming and become a fire hydrant sized entity that’s powerful enough to depopulate entire solar systems? I can’t even get my laptop and my PC to cooperate even though they were programmed on the same planet by members of the same species in the same coding language. And the soil sample collector probe had factory-installed powers that would make the Borg quake in their boots because…
Uhura’s “knowledge banks” are completely erased but she can remember a rather complex language like Swahili she learned as a child. The much easier English she probably learned at the same time or a little later is completely gone? Most educated people from the African Great Lakes region I’ve met so far grew up bilingual or even trilingual. It’s usually a combination of Swahili and either English, French or Portuguese. For example, my neighbour is from Kenya and learned English, Swahili and a local language as a child. I assume that the communications officer on Star Fleet’s flagship has an excellent academic background – and people like that usually weren’t raised in an isolated monolingual village,especially not in the 23rd century.
The re-education will give Uhura her personal memories back and make her remember every experience that made her the person she was before Nomad messed her up… how exactly? Does the computer library have her entire private life on file? She’s exactly the same person she was before in the post-Nomad episodes. That’s impossible!
I’m sorry, this episode doesn’t hold up at all. Because it’s insultingly stupid. Nomad is a completely ridiculous plot device. The aliens who made Tan Ru probably have espresso machines that can reverse the gravitational pull of a black hole and pizza ovens that double as time / space portals, since they like absurdly overpowered technical appliances so much.