Deconstructing Year Four: The Ultimate Computer

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.

Not only was this the first song that I wrote for year four, but it was the first demo sent out for any of these songs all the way back in March of 2014. It was written before we even started writing songs for Spock’s brain. The style is pretty much straight forward Rock. I introduced Noah to a band called Jets to Brazil shortly before this and he really liked them. That inspired me to attempt to write a song in that style. I wouldn’t say that the final song is terribly close to their Style but it is highly inspired by it.

The song also features the rare keyboard stylings of Patrick O’Connor. Something that we only see one time every couple of albums.

This is a fun song to play live and I think a lot of our regular fans probably already recognize it since we have been playing it for a while. I look forward to them hearing what we’ve done with it in the studio.

Five Year Mission
Year Four
The Ultimate Computer
Written by Mike Rittenhouse