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This song is all about Bones and how he, not Kirk, finally gets the girl. At least for a little while.  The premise behind this episode is that the Enterprise finds a generation ship hurtling through space on a collision course for a federation planet, Daran V. At first, they just think it’s an asteroid, but then they discover it’s a ship with a whole society contained within. The thing is, nobody ON the ship realizes that’s where they are. They just think they’re on some world called Yonada. Bones has also been afflicted by a fatal disease, xenopolycythemia, which they figure out how to cure by the end of the episode. Bones and NatiraBut before that, Bones, thinking he’s going to die soon, falls for Natira and gets married. Once Kirk n’ friends figure out how to wrestle control of the ship from the computer and get the ship on course to a new world, they all leave, including Bones. He’s duty bound to stay with the ship, but he hopes to see Natira again in the future. I never saw that story, so who knows?
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Day of the Dove is the only track on Year Four that I traded for. I knew that I wanted it, because it is the last appearance of Klingons in the original series, unless you count the fake Klingon in The Savage curtain.  I knew that I wanted to do a follow-up to my Trouble with Tribbles song, and because it falls at the end of the album, Day of the Dove was perfect. I knew that something wacky and experimental like this would work better towards the end instead of the beginning. Day of the Dove LaughWe had so much fun creating my Tribbles song that I wanted to do it again. I also wanted to include Patrick vocally this time, so we brought in Kang, the Klingon Captain from Day of the Dove, as a new member of the Klingon gang. I also thought it would be fun to continue the story of the characters from the first song and show the listeners how they have progressed since Tribbles.
This was the last of the four songs I wrote for Year Four. As it was, I had a bunch of musical ideas laying around that I thought might turn into a song. It was just bits and pieces here and there, much like the incomplete western scenery that dominates this episode. In a way, all those fragmented pieces were very much a reflection of the props and atmosphere of Spectre of the Gun. Nothing complete or whole. There were things that I thought might make a great intro, nice bridge or a killer chorus; but all rudimentary and mere pieces. I did finally notice, however, that they were all in the same key. So what did I do? I crammed them all together and made this song.
The song I wrote for this episode is a love song. It’s one of those that’s not really directly related to the episode itself, but once I had the idea and the song started to take shape, I just had to go with it.  This episode features a Medusan ambassador, Kollos, who is so ugly, to look at him drives humanoids insane. Rough, right? His traveling companion is Miranda Jones, and she, being a telepath, is trying to achieve a mind meld with Kollos in order to understand the alien species better and to be able to utilize their unique senses and navigation abilities. This is all very interesting, and there’s this other guy, Marvick, who is in love with Jones, and he goes crazy and drives the ship outside of the galaxy, and then Spock goes crazy, and it’s a big mess. But instead of writing about one of those things, I had this other idea. Kollos and Miranda Jones are kind of stuck together, and I just imagined Kollos being secretly in love with her. In the episode, we learn that Miranda is jealous of anyone else who is able to communicate with Kollos the way she wants to, and I just thought, what if Kollos has made a connection with Miranda Jones, much the same way she has made one with him? The song is from the perspective of Kollos as he tries to explain to Miranda how he feels.
Sometimes the lesser episodes can be the most fun to write about. A case in point is the track we concocted for (if I may be blunt, a turkey of an episode) “And the Children Shall Lead.”  Don’t get me wrong; there are some fun and funny scenes throughout this segment of the series, but the Enterprise crew and Kirk in particular are pretty much just going through the motions. The children referenced in the title are a group of youngsters whose parents have been killed off and are seemingly left to their own devices. They cry and scream when they don’t get their way; the overblown bratiness makes it difficult to identify much with the kids, despite their apparent loss. It turns out the true villain of the piece, the character we refer to in the song as a “creepy angel,” is laughably silly.
 I would rank “The Enterprise Incident” among the classic episodes of TOS Season 3, as well as one of the best of the series as a whole. I’ve likened it to a “City on the Edge of Forever” for Mr. Spock. enterprise incident spockFor that reason, I really wanted the song to be perfect. I spent a long time writing it as well as recording the demo, and insisted we keep the studio version very similar to the original.
“Bread and circuses” is a phrase used in politics to describe how a party in power generates public approval. This approval is not generated through policy or excellent leadership, but through diversions, distractions and the immediate, shallow requirements of a misled public.
A lot of our songs are told from the point-of-view of a character in the episode. Sometimes it’s Kirk, sometimes it’s Spock. Sometimes it’s from the point of view of the guest star. In this case, I decided to tell it from the point of view of the computer. In this episode, The Ultimate computer, the Enterprise is testing a new computer system that runs the ship. It is experimental, and it starts to make odd choices, like not using the captain for an away mission. Eventually, it gets out of control and, as usual, Kirk has to outsmart the computer to defeat it. He tricks it into destroying itself. Because of this, I wrote the song from the computers point of view from the moment it is activated until It ultimately commits suicide. Throughout the song it does not understand that it is doing anything wrong. It is merely existing and being itself and in charge. As it was programmed to be.
The Omega Glory is one of those episodes of Star Trek that is recognized as being notably preposterous. The problem with this episode is that the writers took a great idea, built on it, and then sent it down the crapper in what can best be described as one of the dumbest ideas in Star Trek history.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare
When writing fandom music, I find there is very often a clear song idea hiding among the standout scenes of an episode; I think of it like trying to assemble the pieces of a puzzle. For some of my other Year Four songs (“Assignment Earth,” “And the Children Shall Lead”), I had an immediate idea of what I wanted to write about. With “By Any Other Name,” there were several interesting bits of plot and character that could have been made into songs (not to mention the ridiculous notion of the energy barrier around the galaxy and nearly all of the Enterprise crew members being turned into D20’s). Still, this particular episode is one of my childhood favorites, along with the likes of “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “The Corbomite Maneuver,” so I wanted to do it justice. |
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