"Star Trick: The Ion Tempest"

The original draft was written on an electric typewriter, which lacked square bracket [] characters. It was inspired by my English teacher's revelation that Forbidden Planet was just Shakespeare's The Tempest ... in spaaaaaaace! All spellings, punctuation, capitalizations, weird Shakespearean allusions, etc. are as in the original.

You have been warned.

• In the original, the spoken lines are unindented on the first line of text but indented by 3 spaces on the subsequent lines of text. There seems to be no way to do that kind of indenting in HTML. I don't even know if it's possible in Microsoft Word.
• You kids are probably too young to remember, but In Search Of was a show about myserious unsolved mysteries of mysteriousness, like UFOs or ghosts or bigfoot. It's kinda reminiscent of half the shows on the History Channel today. The "fascinating" thing was that it was was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, in one of his few non-Trek screen appearances.
• Spock's choice of measuring time in increments of drawer-slammings was inspired by an episode of The Tonight Show, back when it was hosted by Johnny Carson. He and Ed McMahon were rattling off a trivia list of how long various activities took, such as blinking your eyes or popping a balloon, punctuating each entry with a low whistle (to try and sound mock-interested). They claimed it took one one-thousandth of a second for a drawer to slam shut.
• Technically, Star Trek starships don't generate antimatter. They carry antimatter as fuel.
• "Cathy Lee" was, of course, supposed to be Cathy Lee Crosby, one of the hosts of ABC's That's Incredible!. If you don't remember this show, it was ABC's answer to NBC's Real People, only with more ridiculous claims about ghosts and catching bullets with your teeth.
• The reason most Star Trek aliens look like people was hinted at all the way back in the original series episode "The Paradise Syndrome." They waited until season 6 of the Next Generation, though, to reveal the full answer. In the 6th season episode "The Chase," we learn that 4 billion years ago, the first alien species made it to the stars. They looked like humans wearing special-effects makeup. Because they found no other alien species to befriend, they seeded the life-bearing worlds of the Milky Way with genetic programs that would drive evolution toward producing beings that resembled them. Star Trek scriptwriters have about as thorough a grasp of evolution as they do of quantum mechanics.
• "Oh fiddle farp!" was something my mother used to say on rare occasions. The direct inspiration here, however, was a play on Battlestar Galactica's "felger carb," which I originally misheard as "felder carp." Hence the "check in every centar" joke a few lines later.
• Spock's admonition that grades are highly illogical stemmed from my having heard about Summerhill. My 10th grade English teacher was a complete New Ager, who believed in psychic powers. I never learned whether she believed in angelic space aliens, though. Anyway, one of the recorded lectures she played for our class was about both the gradeless Summerhill system of learning, and the notion of schools teaching things like meditation. In retrospect, I wonder if the recording wasn't of a spokesman for Maharishi Institute University. Despite my excellent school grades, I was in complete agreement with the sentiments of this recorded lecture. Probably because I believed it would improve my chances of getting telekinetic powers.
• "Triancus," as I later learned, was actually spelled "Triacus." As you no doubt recall, it was the planet inhabited by Gorgan-summoning kids in the original series episode "And the Children Shall Lead."
• The fake Sanka commercial was, of course, a callback to a similar spot in Star Trek: Not of Matter. The name "Sucka" came from a Mad Magazine parody of a Sanka ad, in which a 3rd world coffee picker chided the American consumer because "wife make instant coffee and husband too spineless to object." When even a downtrodden plantation worker calls you henpecked, you know you've got issues.
• Khan's insistence on ellipses whenever he mentions ... Captain ... Kirk came from the scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where Khan first learns that Kirk is now an Admiral. His emphasis on ... Admiral ... Kirk was what my teen-age mind was trying to capture in this script.
• The computer saying "Hi there!" was supposed to be Eddie, the shipboard computer on the starship Heart of Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• I imagined this story's Ariel as looking like a Jack Kirby monster, such as Awesome Android. "Hraaaagnaaaag!" was inspired by a Don Martin article in the October 1979 issue of Mad Magazine, devoted to comic book sound effects. He said that "ARRARGHNNARRGH" was "an entire dialog script for the Hulk." (Clearly he'd put too much importance in the Lou Ferrigno Hulk TV series. The Hulk in the comics spoke in Johnny Weissmüller Tarzan English, spouting grunted homilies in the third person such as "Hulk smash!".) Sadly, this is the one issue of Mad Magazine that I've lost from my collection over the years. I let some kid borrow it up at ISOMATA in the early 1980s, and it vanished never to be seen again. It's too bad, because it also had a Lord of the Rings musical called "The Ring and I."
• "Hyper-theoretical" came from the Jim I mention in my Author's Notes for Messiah to Super-Human. He'd attended a lecture called "Black Holes and Warped Spacetime," given by a guy who claimed to do "hypertheoretical astrophysics." In retrospect, I'll bet that "hypertheoretical" really just meant "conjectural."
• In the 1970s, Ricardo Montalban did a series of ads for the Chrysler Cordoba (example). He was always going on about the car's "rich Corinthian leather."
• Checkov [sic] made mention of "O'hura" as a sly reference to the misspelling of Uhura's name in my earlier Star Trek: Not of Matter script.
• The "Muller Beer" commercial here was a reference to the Miller Beer ads on TV at the time, such as this one.
• "Ben Kenobi's Theme" is what John Williams called it during the first movie. In The Empire Strikes Back, since Ben Kenobi was dead, he renamed it the "Force Theme."
• Scope was (and still is, by some accounts) a brand of mouthwash.
• Aames Home Loan had a series of commercials in the 1970s, featuring a man in trouble who called them and had the cavalry (or in one case, the U.S. Navy) ride to his rescue. Here's an example.
• I got "megacredits" from Starfire, the hexmap war game.
• Kirk saying "Please, don't bother me with far-reaching human goals" was inspired by a Mad Magazine article about things you'll never hear celebrities say. The article had Marie Osmond saying "You wanna fool around?", and Anita Bryant (or some other activist celebrity) saying "Please, don't bother me with causes!"
• And of course, I got Sulu's job title wrong. He wasn't a navigator, he was a helmsman. The difference being, the helmsman steers the ship, and the navigator tells the ship where to go. Which is totally di... hey, wait a minute....
• Despite what you saw in the movie Outland, you don't blow up if you're exposed to vacuum. You do, however, quickly lose consciousness from lack of oxygen.