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The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 143: Star Trek: Friday's Child and The Deadly Years
🕑 Added 2025-07-07 22:09:14 +0000 UTCWe're at the midseason finale point for our Star Trek season 2 Watchcasting, but before we take a one week break from the show we're here to try and make sense of two more episodes in Friday's Child and The Deadly Years!
CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) - The Nextlander Watchcast Episode 143: Star Trek: Friday's Child and The Deadly Years
(00:00:15) - Intro.
(00:01:35) - Just launching right into Friday's Child.
(00:06:34) - Our cast, and production notes.
(00:12:08) - The set-up for this episode: would you believe it revolves around mining rights?
(00:20:41) - Never get involved in Capellan politics.
(00:25:53) - What's going on with the ship during all this?
(00:30:43) - Racing through the California desert with a pregnant lady.
(00:36:24) - Three officers and a baby, and the final (terrible) confrontation.
(00:47:30) - The aftermath of whatever all this was.
(00:52:36) - Break!
(00:53:05) - We're back, and it's time for The Deadly Years!
(00:54:31) - Production notes, and cast talk.
(01:00:16) - The planet that makes you old.
(01:07:59) - The bodies and minds begin to fail.
(01:19:49) - Using the courts to get grandpa's car keys away from him.
(01:25:59) - This is not the man to be dealing with Romulans.
(01:34:54) - The juice that makes you young, and the Corbomite comeback.
(01:39:21) - Failing to learn a lesson.
(01:46:13) - Outro.
Comments
Robert Denby
OK so that thing you're talking about with the quality inconsistency between shots... Back in the pre-digital days, doing a fade effect or a cross dissolve on film meant you had to photograph that film AGAIN with the fadeout. So you were using a copy of a copy of a copy by the time you saw the finished effect*. And there's a quality inconsistency when you're cutting back and forth between that and something as sharp as I'm assuming the camera negative they scanned off of for the Blu-Ray. And this applies to ALL the optical effects where they had to rephotograph the film with animation added to it or composites, so phaser blasts, the viewscreen, titles, and the like are all going to have that quality shift. Also and this is getting very minute but those optical shots look extra bad on the Blu-Ray because they sharpened and denoised those particular shots I'm assuming in an attempt of blending them together just a little bit better with the rest of the shots. *Also very granular but this is why it became popular to use VistaVision cameras on big visual effects movies starting with Star Wars. Doing those kinds of shots on higher resolution cameras meant you didn't notice the quality degradation nearly as much when you were running them through an optical printer.
WulfBane
It is funny to look at many of the original cast Star Trek movies and how many include themes that Kirk shouldn't have taken a promotion to Admiral and finding ways to get the Enterprise back. They truly never learned from this episode.
