The Fiver
Kirk: Spock, you beamed us down to the middle of nowhere.
Spock: No, Captain. The middle of nowhere is just over there.
Kirk: Whatever. Just remember, obey the Prime Directive.
McCoy: Do no harm?
Kirk: No, the Prime Directive!
McCoy: Always be prepared?
Kirk: Didn't you watch TNG? It's all they ever talked about!
Nice density of humor, there.
Flavius: We're son worshippers. Remember that. There will be a quiz later.
Kirk: You know, the twist ending loses something when we see it in text.
Flavius: Well, pretend you're reading 'sun' and not 'son' anyway.
I feel that there could've been one more more line, a joke about scripts or somesuch.
Kirk: Well, while we're sitting here in jail, you can tell us more about this weird sun obsession of yours. I don't recall anything like it in our Roman mythology.
Flavius: It's not Roman, it's Jewish. Long ago, the son took on our form and taught us to love one another. However, some people didn't like him calling himself God, so they killed him, but he came back to life, and now we follow him.
Kirk: Still not ringing any bells.
Time for another Hitchhiker's quote. “And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."
Claudius Marcus: Welcome to our planet. You must be proud of your friend Merik for finding it.
Kirk: I come to bury Merik, not to praise him.
Marcus: Ah! Now here is an honourable man.
Merik: I'm getting a bad feeling about this. (looks at calendar) Crap! March 15!
I'll just leave
this link to the Reduced Shakespeare Company's version of Julius Caesar here. It's amazing how the episode was first broadcast
on March 15th, isn't it? I'm pretty sure that it wasn't intentional.
McCoy: Thanks for saving me, Spock.
Spock: No problem, wimp.
McCoy: I'm sorry for getting into an argument with you earlier.
Spock: Yeah, you
are pretty sorry.
McCoy: Hey, I'm trying to be good, but you keep twisting everything I say to be an insult!
Spock: It's not my fault you're so pathetic!
McCoy: Am not!
Spock: Are too....
I'm suddenly imagining a buddy comedy where these two get assigned as college roommates and they have to figure out how to live together before they kill each other.
Bones and Pointy Ears, coming this fall!
Drusilla: I wonder, what possible catastrophe came crashing down from heaven and brought this dashing stranger to tears?
Kirk: Nothing. I wish to be alone.
Drusilla: I see you. You're a man surrounded by fools who cannot see his strength, his vision, his glory... That and burning baby fish swimming all round your head.
Kirk: You're not a vampire, are you?
Drusilla: What makes you say that?
Kirk: Nothing.
Drusilla: I'm naming all the stars.
Kirk: You can't see the stars; that's the ceiling. Also, it's day.
That's at least three Buffy jokes crammed into one scene. Yikes. I had to look these up, FYI. I didn't watch Buffy, but the language is so awkward that I knew they had to be a reference to something.
Memory Alpha
* Only TOS episode where the natives are specifically speaking English. Apparently this is only to emphasize the parallel development, but I still say it wasn't worth it because it creates plot holes in other episodes.
* The director blames a tighter shooting schedule for the lower quality. I blame the script.
* The death tolls are actually higher than mentioned.
Nitpicker's Guide
* Phil brings up the Prime Directive definition, saying that if followed elsewhere they could never bring Spock along since he'd be "an anachronism." An anachronism is something that doesn't belong in the time period that it exists in, it only works if Phil means that Spock belongs on this planet in the future after formal first contact is made. I think Phil meant "an anomaly."
* If Hodkin's Law can create a copy of the Roman Empire, why was the copy of the Nazis in "Patterns of Force" so unbelievable?
* If a split-second of indecision bars a person from command, what about Kirk's moment of indecision facing the vampire cloud in "Obsession"?
* It seems odd that "Condition Green" couldn't be a codephrase to beam the party up, using the subcutaneous transponders if necessary.