Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “The Counter-Clock Incident”

One more continuity nod — the supernova they’ve chosen as their return point is Minara, from “The Empath.”

I’m with Keith — the Aprils are a nice touch, but everything else about this is mindboggling in its idiocy. If time is reversed in the other universe, then people’s perceptions should be reversed along with it, so it should still seem forward to them! There’s also no reason they’d perceive the controls operating backwards or the ship moving backwards, and how does it possibly account for black stars in white space? (Especially since few stars are actually white; most are red, orange, yellow, or occasionally blue.)

And there are plot holes I hadn’t even thought of before. If Karla Five was perceiving time backward, why did she contact the Enterprise after they activated the tractor beam? Actually none of that scene makes sense, since her reactions and perceptions had to be going forward in order for her to perceive herself as using the supernova to return home, so her speech being backward is inconsistent. Also, Beta Niobe blew up a year or two earlier; it would just be a supernova remnant by now. If Amphion had become a living star at that point, how could she have emerged through it safely? It shouldn’t even have been possible to return home. It’s contradictory to say it’s viable in one direction but not in the other direction just a day or two later.

(Although it’s a nice touch calling it Amphion, which was the name of Niobe’s husband in Greek myth.)

Also, how exactly do they ignite a dead star to life? They talked about it like it was a matter of routine, but it’s an incredibly tall order. (DS9 would later portray it as an astonishing technological feat in “Second Sight.”)

Most of all, why were they suddenly de-aging so rapidly in the final act? Before, it had been established that time was just going backward, implicitly at a one-to-one rate. Obviously Karla and Karl didn’t live out their entire lives in a matter of less than an hour. And yet in the climax, Kirk and Spock talk about the rapid de-aging as if it’s already established, even though it’s never been hinted at until that moment. Some dialogue must’ve been cut from the script. (I believe Alan Dean Foster’s version explained it as a side effect of the high warp velocity.) The artists had fun showing young versions of the cast, but how come their clothes shrank with them? And if they forgot all accumulated knowledge, how did they even remember what their mission was? None of it makes a shred of sense. There have been some inane Trek episodes over the years, but none has had such a dense concentration of idiotic and impossible ideas in such a compact space.

This was the first of the episodes that Foster expanded to full novel length by adding a sequel adventure, in Star Trek Log Seven. He made one change to the episode plot per se, by having the Aprils choose to remain young, and then followed it up with what appeared to be a self-contained adventure that Foster reportedly based on an episode proposal he’d developed for a prospective season 4 of TOS, introducing Kirk’s Klingon rival (and former exchange-program roommate) Commander Kumara, who would later return in Log Ten. The story involved the discovery of a seemingly impossible rogue planet, and the occurrence of two impossibilities so close together eventually led Spock to realize that everything they’d experienced, including the events of “The Counter-Clock Incident,” had all been an illusion as part of an alien experiment. Evidently Foster found this episode so nonsensical that he couldn’t come up with a way to explain it as anything real, so he just straight-up said it never happened. Although even that explanation doesn’t convince me, because it wouldn’t have taken Spock nearly so long to figure out that none of this made any sense.

@11/random22: In terms of redeemable things… Hmm. Well, we get a new angle on the Enterprise as it flies into the supernova remnant. And there’s a nice reuse of the rotoscoped shot from “The Cage” where the ship tilts and flies in toward the camera. And I’d say the first minute or so of the episode proper is actually perfectly okay — it only starts going to hell once Karla Five’s ship is detected. And I’ll give props to Bronson for his mastery of Trek continuity minutiae — Robert April, Beta Niobe, Minara, Babel, Capella IV, the San Francisco Navy Yards, even a callback to the transporter fixes from “The Lorelei Signal” and “The Terratin Incident.”

Although I must say, the Aprils will not go down among Doohan’s and Nichols’s better voice characterizations. Okay, they were both trying to sound elderly, but they gave overly labored and unappealing performances. Although Doohan’s Karl Four was even worse. I don’t know what he was trying for there. Nichols’s Karla Five, though, was actually not bad — it took me a few moments to realize it was her, since she changed the timbre of her voice rather effectively.

Otherwise, I can’t even find much positive to say from an animation standpoint. Like I said, the de-aged character designs were creative, but the whole thing was too cursory. Not to mention that it felt like a rehash of the “Terratin” dilemma, the crew getting smaller and losing the ability to work the controls. And the whole episode is pretty static — they travel into an entire alternate universe, albeit a stupid one, yet we spend almost the entire episode on the Enterprise bridge, and our only glimpse of Arret (Terra spelled backward, ha ha) is a brief visit to one laboratory. There are no particularly interesting design elements in the other universe; simple negative starscapes and backward-moving ships don’t cut it. And Karla Five’s ship is a jumbled and ugly design — plus, if it’s meant to be too small to carry more than a few people, why is it rendered almost as large as the Enterprise?

@26/krad: But if it’s a matter of military usage, shouldn’t a medical officer be addressed by rank instead of title? I looked it up, and in the US military, medical doctors are always properly addressed by their rank in formal protocol, never by their academic title. Granted, Starfleet isn’t the US military and might have different rules. They do seem to refer to people by job title a lot, like Engineer Scott or Counselor Troi. But that strikes me as being less than a strictly formal usage.

@30/dunsel: I don’t think Keith is saying it’s sexist of Kirk to call her Mrs., I think he’s saying it was sexist of Fred Bronson to write it that way. After all, Bronson actually exists and is capable of being held accountable for his decisions and assumptions; Kirk is an imaginary construct that only does what the writers make him do.

@31/Roxana: TAS was intended and promoted as the first Saturday morning series made for adults. Children were not its exclusive target audience. And it would’ve been simple enough to rewrite the opening log entry to say that their distinguished passengers were Commodore Robert April and his wife, Doctor Sarah April. If anything, the fact that he ignores Sarah in the log entry is even more dismissive of her worth than the fact that the characters address her as “Mrs. April.”

@36/Roxana: I don’t think any of the concepts in TAS are intrinsically more kid-oriented than the concepts we got in TOS. A giant Spock clone is no more absurd than a giant Apollo. The crew being miniaturized is no siller than the crew being accelerated to superspeed or transformed into small blocks of styrofoam (and Flint did miniaturize the entire ship and crew in “Requiem for Methuselah,” in fact). Lucien’s magic is no sillier than Sylvia and Korob’s magic. Harry Mudd’s love potion is no sillier than the Psi 2000 virus making Sulu swashbuckle and Riley caterwaul.

And look at all the serious adult themes TAS dealt with. “Yesteryear” and “The Survivor” involved characters dealing with the death of loved ones. “One of Our Planets is Missing” had them wrestling with the imminent destruction of an entire planet and the wrenching decision to save only the children. That episode and others had Kirk willing to kill himself and his entire crew to stop a threat. The Taurean women in “The Lorelei Signal” had killed countless males to keep themselves alive over the years. The Phylosians and Aquans were the few survivors of species that had been nearly exterminated in past cataclysms. “The Slaver Weapon” speaks of a past cataclysm that destroyed all sentient life in the galaxy, and ends with the onscreen death of the villains, an extraordinarily rare level of violence for a ’70s Saturday morning show. “Albatross” involves a plague that killed off nearly an entire colony world’s population. These are dark subject matters.

The only way in which TAS’s writers adjusted their approach for children was by toning down the sex and onscreen violence. That was it. In no other way was the show written for children. You can see that if you compare it to its contemporary shows and the ways they did pitch themselves to children — focusing on juvenile characters, including cute animal sidekicks, avoiding violent content or any mention of death, telling overtly pedantic stories built around moral lessons (most Filmation shows actually had the characters address the audience at the end to restate the moral), etc.

Didn’t I hear once that it’s an old British custom that surgeons are called “Mister” instead of “Doctor?”

@61/Eduardo: Morrow’s line about the ship being 20 years old never made sense, because The Search for Spock was set at least 28 years after “The Cage.” (Remember, “The Cage” was 13 years before “The Menagerie,” plus the 15 years since “Space Seed.”) Although modern chronological assumptions put it 31 years after. It also makes no sense because the Enterprise was rebuilt top to bottom before TMP, which is no more than a dozen years before TWOK. So Morrow’s line has always been ignored in chronological considerations. It’s generally assumed that he was off by a factor of two; the Okuda Chronology puts the commissioning of the Enterprise in 2245, based on Roddenberry’s preference that the ship be about 20 years old when Kirk took command. So since Pike commanded it for at least 12 years before Kirk, there’s room for April to be captain for several years before Pike.

@63/Jana: I grew up watching Filmation’s non-violent heroes from a very early age, and they (along with TOS) were very influential in shaping my sense of morality (which is why I’m unhappy that modern TV heroes are so much more violent on the whole). So I don’t think you have to be a certain age to appreciate it. Maybe it’s just that kids today are more routinely exposed to shows about fighting and shooting, so they take it for granted and need to be older before they begin to question it. Or maybe it’s just individual variation.

 @67/Lisa: I think the opposite counterpart of Doctor Who would be Patient Oh That Guy.

@75/krad: They covered that in “Terratin,” not here. This wasn’t shrinking, it was aging backward — and yet the uniforms somehow adjusted to the changing proportions of the de-aging bodies. Logically, if the uniforms were going back in time too, they would’ve been unwoven back into their original xenylon fibers and the crew would’ve been left naked.