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Cake day: December 26th, 2023

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  • It’s a powerful and understated bit of acting how when Spock thought Kirk might have been in actual mortal danger he got visibly worried and broke protocol, calling him Jim over the comms. It’s a great display of his human side breaking through in a moment of high stress.

    I don’t know how much of that was intentional, but I think this is the first instance of Spock calling Kirk Jim.

    This episode has a lot of firsts. The first “I’m a doctor…”, the first distinction between the type 1 and type 2 hand phaser, the first and only episode of TOS to not open on a shot of the Enterprise.

    …and the first and only TOS episode that has zero female lines. A fact that prompted Gene Roddenberry to write a letter to Gene Coon reminding him that if Star Trek is a future where women are completely equal and share the same responsibilities as men, then the show needs to reflect that.

    While that doesn’t stop this from being one of the better episodes of Star Trek, I thought there should have been a few female miners while watching. But I didn’t realize that Uhura, Chapel, and any other female crew members were also absent from this episode.