YMMV / Star Trek S2 E24 "The Ultimate Computer"

• Angst? What Angst?: The Big Three end the episode in surprisingly high spirits after a botched war game that got about 500 Starfleet personnel killed.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: From the beginning, it's obvious that Dr. Daystrom has some social awkwardness which informs, or is informed by, his over-protectiveness of M-5. He realizes that he is among Mildly Military men, and attempts to keep a form of humility about his work and what it means to Starfleet. He seems both somewhat at a loss, and assertive (owing to Command backing him up regarding M-5), when it comes to threatening the status of M-5's ultimate control of the Enterprise, or questioning its ability. This becomes much less ambiguous as the episode goes on and Daystrom becomes a Broken-System Dogmatist, culminating in his catastrophic breakdown when Kirk very bluntly informs Daystrom that M-5, responsible for much death and destruction at this point, must be destroyed.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Kirk's fear that he's useless if he's not in command gets worse after Star Trek: Generations, where he admits to Picard that he hasn't made a difference since leaving Starfleet.
  • It is also a major part of his character arc in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, his fear that by accepting a promotion to Admiral, he is admitting he is too old and slow to captain a starship anymore.
  • A hundred years on, Star Trek: Lower Decks will show that Starfleet forgot the lessons learned in this episode and try the entire thing over again, only with a more powerful automated ship and more horrific body count.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Spock remarks that "the most unfortunate lack in current computer programming is that there is nothing available to immediately replace the starship surgeon." Star Trek: Voyager introduced the Emergency Medical Hologram, which is exactly that — and while it was originally designed to be used under only limited circumstances and was considered questionable (leading to Starfleet going through at least four different versions of the program with limited success), at least one EMH was able to actually function as the full-time primary doctor for a starship for multiple years.
  • In the final scene, Spock makes a comment about what would happen if he were to "impress (McCoy's) memory engrams on a computer". One (admittedly non-canonical) expanded universe series reveals that the EMH does have personality information drawn from multiple doctors, including McCoy.
  • Star Trek: Picard makes the whole thing funnier courtesy of Captain Rios, who has an entire holographic crew (including a medical hologram) that he created via the "self-scan option", meaning that he did impress his memory engrams into a computer to create five holographic versions of himself. When Raffi Musiker gets all five of them in one room, the resulting torrential flood of illogic does prove most entertaining.
• Jerkass Woobie: Daystrom is being completely unreasonable where his precious computer is concerned. However, it's clear that he feels very guilty about the deaths that resulted from his machine and has to be committed. Presumably, he got better and went on to bigger and better things, judging by the existence of the "Daystrom Institute" by the TNG era.
• Retroactive Recognition: William Marshall had a lengthy career before and after this episode, but in the long run, he might be better known to 80s kids as The King Of Cartoons. Or, if you're into 70s blaxploitation, Blacula.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • We are supposed to sympathize with Kirk when M-5's choices for the landing party doing a survey mission include, contrary to Kirk's choices, neither himself nor McCoy as they are "non-essential personnel" for the mission. In fact, Kirk's habit of leading from the front this way along with assorted members of his senior staff, often needlessly exposing himself and them to unexpected danger (or death, if they're not one of the leads) is a common and frequent criticism of his leadership style.
  • Additionally, while Kirk's choice of geologist was based on overall experience, he failed to account for whether there might be another choice with better personal experience, when he overlooked a junior geologist fresh from the academy in favor of his department head, even though the former spent considerable time in the sector and had previously visited the planet in question while serving aboard a civilian vessel.
• Values Resonance:
  • Kirk reports to his superior officer (Commodore Stone) in "Court Martial", who turns out to be a black man (Percy Rodriguez). Dr. Daystrom, the creator of the M-5 computer and one of the Federation's greatest geniuses, is also black (William Marshall), and eventually revealed to have created the computers used on all Federation ships including the Enterprise. Dr. McCoy's medical staff includes the eminently qualified Dr. M'Benga (Booker Bradshaw), who is African himself (and the staff expert on Vulcan physiology). He appears in two episodes. M'Benga's assistant is a Dr. Sanchez, played by a Hispanic actor. With them, their race is a total non-issue, as you would expect with an interstellar and multi-species federation.
  • In an interview shortly before his death, William Marshall said "It's impossible to overstate the impact it had in the 1960s when white Captain Kirk referred to the black Daystrom as 'sir'." More here on the importance of casting an Afro-American as the Federation's greatest computer systems designer.

---