Trivia / Star Trek S1 E16 "The Galileo Seven"

• Author's Saving Throw: Some fans have criticised the episode for the lack of consequence for Boma's gross insubordination to Spock. In the Star Trek novel Dreadnought, it is revealed that Scotty and McCoy called for the court-martial of Lt. Boma and he was convicted and dismissed from Starfleet, showing that, while Starfleet was not a military organization per se, it still had its basis there.
• Creator Backlash: Leonard Nimoy considered the episode a failure, because it was made out of Spock's popularity, but he didn't enjoy being the central character for once.
• Deleted Scene: Several lines of dialogue in the preview did not make it into the final cut. The Commissioner says "Do you know what you have done? You've concerned yourself with only seven people. You said something about a needle in a haystack. It's useless." Kirk replies "If they're not there, commissioner, then they're dead by now."
• Exiled from Continuity: Possibly the fate of the shuttlecraft Columbus. All the shuttlecraft seen on the show are the Galileo or later the Galileo II (after they remember that the original Galileo was destroyed in this episode). Not that there ever was a different model or mockup of the Columbus, anyway. It is also notable that later incarnations of the Enterprise also have shuttlecraft named Galileo and Copernicus. The reason for the Columbus' dissapearance from the Enterprise's registry (including future Enterprises) may very well simply be due to Values Dissonance, history now gives us a much clearer, less biased picture of Christopher Columbus.
  • The Remastered versions of the show have given the Columbus a cameo in a later episode◊.
• Hostility on the Set: In an interview in Starlog magazine, John Crawford (who played Commissioner Ferris) stated that he had a very unpleasant time in his scenes with William Shatner on the bridge.
• Science Marches On: All the talk of quasars and "quasar-like phenomenon". When the episode was made it had still not been determined exactly what a quasar is. Today we know that it is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that emits a LOT of energy due to infalling matter in its accretion disc. But modern understanding of quasars makes the premise of this episode (a "quasar-like phenomenon" within a galaxy) extremely silly.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The episode was originally to include Janice Rand, but the script replaced her with Yeoman Meares following Grace Lee Whitney's dismissal from the series.
  • Don Marshall, who played Boma^note and who had previously appeared in a Very Special Episode of Gene Roddenberry's previous series "The Lieutenant" titled "To Set It Right" as a young black Marine private (with Nichelle Nichols, who went on to play Lt. Uhura, cast as Marshall's character's fiance; only for the Pentagon to threaten to withhold the free usage of equipment and extras supplied by the Marines, then when Roddenberry alerted the NAACP, the Backed by the Pentagon status was withdrawn; contributing to the episode not being aired, the series' cancellation and the episode not appearing on television under TNT aired reruns in the early 1990s, played the part so well that the production team wanted to bring Marshall back. However, by that time Marshall had signed up to co-star on "Land of the Giants".

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