Big hand clutching Enterprise

 

So last night, Star Trek was really good. StarTrek Next Generation? No, the regular, vanilla plain Star Trek, classic, original. 

Season Two. Episode Two. They're flying through space, you know, and this big hand, gigantic hand, comes out at them. 

And then when they study it, they say, well, it's not a hand .. doesn't have any flesh. It's some kind of energy field. And the hand just stops the Enterprise and starts squeezing it 

Spock is looking at the scanner, and then he puts the cycle in the frequency, and they're talking to the thing over their futuristic TV phone wall display, and a face appears, and it's Apollo, from the Greek myths. He has their ship in doldrums.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, in the end, they discovered that what the original Greek myth figures were - were aliens who landed in the Mediterranean in ancient times, and, you know, left some stories for people, and then took off. 

I don’t like when people suggest that Indigenous civilization’s advancements came from above [Aliens]. But this is okay, it’s science fiction. Those Greek myths don't make perfect sense, so they are a good yardstick for dealing with today's malaise. [The first sign of an infection, Google Speaker tells me.]

And this Apollo is floating around in space, and he beckons the commander and a couple of others down to his planet. He can disappear-o more or less at willow. And falls in love with one of the crew, and she she falls in love with him, and she really wants to stay with him, but Capt. Kirk talks her into staying with the crew. 

“You're human. You should be with humans.”

And that works. And Apollo is kind of super broken hearted. They manage to find – the crew back on the ship with their sensors, computer breadboards and solder irons -- that his power comes from a temple on his planet. It looks like it’s made of Styrofoam. So they destroy the Styrofoam temple with dry ice. 

And, boy, it's just a lot of psychology and 1950s stuff and myth, which in the fantasy world, it's everything. When this show was on I think I was going out to the Nitty Gritty teen club. I missed this. But the stories are moralistic, like the kind of story they did back then, that anyone could understand, and it was somewhat serious about the future of humanity, the future of which was a big question.

What's the name of the black woman? Uhura? Got it. See I never watched this show until the Pandemic. She is a scene stealer from her heart!

There's two things going on in this episode in that one, Kirk and the patrol are dealing with Apollo, while two, Spock and Uhura and the Enterprise crew are trying to dislodge the ship from the big hand of Apollo and sap his magic power. They are trying to fix the radio thing-a-ma-bob on the starship, and they have Uhura work on it, and, you know, she's soldering. I didn't have the sound on, so I don't know what she was saying, but I thought that it was probably really advanced. She was black and a woman in a miniskirt, that she was soldering electrical parts. Star Treks was out there!

Anyway, by tweaking the circuits they are able to disengage from the clutches of The Hand in Space, singing, Unhand me, you rapscallion Apollo!

It's said ML King urged Nicolette Nichols to continue in role of Uhura when she thought it was inapt, cause she set a TV example of what a person can accomplish. I don't know if that's made-up Internet stuff. I will end with one of my go-to truisms. They don't call it a Web for nothing.