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chrisbaird-ma
Reviews
Star Trek: That Which Survives (1969)
Beware the cubic disco ball of doom
This episode is better than most of the rest of season three, but that's not saying much. There's really not much to the story. A mysterious woman keeps killing crew members and ends up being the projection of a computer (the swirling cubic disco ball of doom!) left on auto-pilot by an extinct civilization. The subplot of the Enterprise being thrown 1000 light years and suffering sabotage seemed added for no reason but to fill out the plot. The scenes where Scotty had to climb in by the plasma flow and make repairs or the ship would explode were entertaining thanks to fine acting by Doohan and nice visuals, but they make no sense from a scientific perspective and seem added for the sole purpose of creating drama.
My wife walked in during the repair scenes and our conversation went something like this. My wife: "Why is Scotty down by those sparks?" Me: "He has to fix a sci-fi-mumbo-jumbo-thingy." My wife: "Why doesn't he turn the sparks off first?" Me: "The enemy did some sci-fi-mumbo-jumbo-thingy to the ship so they can't." My wife: "Why did the enemy do that?" Me: "To create drama. There's no real reason given." My Wife: "How does he fix it?" Me: "He waves a sci-fi-mumbo-jumbo-thingy in a dangerous place." My Wife: "Why is it dangerous?" Me: "To create drama. There's no real reason given. My wife: "Why don't they wait until the power runs out so the sparks go away so they can make repairs safely?" Me: "Because the ship is going to explode in 12 minutes." My wife: "Why is the ship going to explode?!" Me: "To create drama. There's no real reason given."
In summary, these scenes exemplify much of season three: contrived nonsense. Other odd tidbits:
- The woman is just an optical projection of a computer, but for some reason must physically touch people in order to kill them. - The woman's touch is only deadly to one predesignated person at a time and we never find out why. - The woman knows everyone's names and we're never told how. - The disco ball of doom has the power to explode every cell in a person's body from 1000 light years away, yet one phaser shot to and its destroyed (talk about anti-climatic). - The victims have every cell in their body exploded, and yet they look exactly the same on the outside. - Spock is unusually annoying in his demand for precision for no real reason.
Star Trek: Elaan of Troyius (1968)
Babysitting a brat is not fun to watch
Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise discover that they have been assigned to transport baby-sit a princess who ends up being a selfish brat in the interest of inter-planetary peace. Watching adults attempt to baby-sit brats does not make for great entertainment unless its a comedy, which this episode isn't.
At the beginner, the viewer wonders how the script-writers are going to manage to get Kirk to kiss the female alien of the week when she is such a jerk. They manage it alright, but only by resorting to magic alien powers that force Kirk to be attracted.
The good: The alien has a foreign-sounding accent and at least doesn't sound like she just beamed up from California
The bad: Just about everything else
Star Trek: The Mark of Gideon (1969)
People on Gideon apparently have no self control
I won't attempt to summarize the plot as it is fairly complex and other reviews have summarized it just fine. My reaction to this episode: either the script writers don't understand population dynamics and human nature, or they do and just wanted to insult Catholics. The message of this episode seemed to be: without vigorous contraception and perhaps even abortion, sterilization, and euthanasia, we are all doomed to be literally buried in a giant mass of living bodies. There's three problems with this statement:
1) People can avoid having too many babies without resorting to contraception, abortion, sterilization, or infanticide. It's called self control. If humans don't copulate, they don't have babies. I know it's no fun to many people to have the self control to not get a girl pregnant, but it sure beats being buried alive in a mountain of living people. The people of Gideon would have learned self-control long before letting their planet get that bad.
2) A planet only has finite resources. The food would run out and become a natural check to the population long before every square foot of the planet became covered with people. It's basic ecology. The creature at the top of its food chain, such as the tiger, has no natural predators, and yet it doesn't reproduce infinitely. The availability of food limits the population of top-level predators.
3) The people of Gideon could have built up. The space above a planet's surface is limitless. For instance, take a walk through downtown New York during rush hour and you may feel like you are on Gideon. But once you step into a building and take the elevator up away from the planet's surface, there's plenty of space.
Star Trek: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969)
Predictable but still engaging
This is a surprisingly decent episode of Star Trek in an otherwise quickly declining third season. There is nothing glaringly wrong or annoying with this episode, but also nothing especially new or suspenseful. The Enterprise stumbles on two alien humanoids locked in eternal battle; both from the same species but with a slight skin difference that has created the prejudice behind the battle they are carrying out which is representative of the battle being carried out between their races back on their home planet. Despite the plot being well-worn and predictable, this episode is surprisingly watchable due to decent acting and musical scoring. The problems I see that this episode has:
1) The black/white makeup for the aliens is just awful. That's not skin. That's cheap paint applied clumsily. It would have looked at lot more real if they had gotten two white actors and sun-tanned half of the face.
2) Upon rescuing the first black/white alien, Kirk and McCoy go on and on about how alien he really is, how he must have come from some unknown star system and be a mutant. But then this alien gains consciousness and immediately speaks perfect American English. This was very jarring and made the whole wow-he's-so-alien bit look silly. I know this happens in almost every episode, but it was especially bad in this scene. At the very least the actor could have faked an exotic accent like in other episodes.
3) As soon as you see the aliens have their first contentious exchange you just know that the message is going to be that prejudice is bad and symmetrical war just leads to mutual destruction. Despite being predictable and forced, this message still has value.
4) Kirk and the crew really didn't do much this episode. They just watched the two aliens lock horns and waited for them to self-destruct.
Star Trek: The Empath (1968)
So Slow
This entire episode could have been shown in ten minutes without any removing any of the plot. But taking a ten minute plot and stretching it into a hour presentation makes for a very slow and boring show. The viewer is forced to watch essentially the same scene five times in a row: one of the crew gets tortured, the Empath girl makes over-expressive sad faces for several minutes, she heals the crew-member, and then the cycle repeats again and again, seemingly with no end in sight. It's like watching Groundhog Day: you see it once and you feel like you've seen it ten times. It's obvious at this point that the production team has run out of money and run out of ideas, and they are desperately just trying to fill minutes.
Combining a virtually non-existent set, bad acting, bad special effects, and a plot so simple that it quickly becomes un-engaging; this episode fails to maintain the illusion of drama. It no longer looks like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy trudging along some alien planet in palpable peril. It looks like Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley bumbling about a Hollywood stage counting the minutes until they could go home and watch a ball game.
The mission of the production crew for this episode seemed to be: find a girl with very sad looking eyes and let's do a hundred close-up shots of her eyes, and then fill the rest of the episode with fluff. I consider the principles of empathy and self-sacrifice to be noble and inspiring. This episode simply doesn't do these principles justice. What the Empath girl was doing wasn't really free-will sacrifice because they were all pawns in the aliens laboratory. Every time she healed a crew-member, she was enabling the aliens to have more subjects to torture. She was effectively a useful fool perpetuating the torture cycle with her "empathy". The truly empathetic action would have been for her to refuse to play along with the "experiment" and stop enabling the sadists.
Between the syrupy, fluttery music, the Empath's over-exaggerated mime expressions, and the blinking "special effects" I felt like I was watching a high school's failed attempt at modern dance. I say all this as an ardent Star Trek fan. Episodes like this are just painful to watch because they show how far Star Trek had fallen.
Star Trek: Requiem for Methuselah (1969)
He's been all those people? Really?
Kirk and crew land on a planet to retrieve medical supplies in the midst of an epidemic, but are cordially taken captive by a Renaissance man, Flint, who has a mansion filled with art. He lives as a loner on the planet with a woman and Kirk is curious why. The mystery of it all was engaging, but the end strained credibility. I felt this episode had the following problems:
1. Flint ends up literally having been Da Vinci, Moses, Mozart, Alexander, and every other big name in history. My only reaction was: Really? What, the human race is so backwards that all the great advances and creations in history are really the work of one semi-human super being?
2. Flint has been all those amazing, honorable, people, and yet he gets in a brawl over a girl? I doubt Moses or Da Vinci would do that.
3. It's not enough that Kirk falls in love with every female human and female alien he trips over, he now smothers affections on female robots too. Has that man no dignity? You half expect him by the end of the series to fall in love with monkeys in skirts. Hundreds on the Enterprise will die if he doesn't get the medicine in time, but he doesn't care because he just met an emotionless robot that is shaped like a woman. In season two, such negligence would have gotten Kirk court-martialed.
4. Kirk is unbearably nosy and unmannered. He is being treated hospitably by a powerful host, and how does he repay the hospitality? By seducing his host's woman and looking behind doors that are expressly forbidden. At point of the show I was hoping Flint would toss Kirk the skunk out of his house before he stunk up the place too badly.
5. Why do Flint and Kirk fight over the robot? Flint can just make a copy and give it Kirk, or even go into the secret backroom and give Kirk one of his back-up robots.
Star Trek: The Lights of Zetar (1969)
Scotty gets a girl
The Enterprise encounter a light cloud that has the power to hijack and even damage other people's brain waves. This cloud takes a special interest in a new female crew member that Scotty is smitten over. The cloud tries to take control of the girl's body through her brain. In the end, the light cloud ends up being the spirits of dead humans looking for a body to possess. Not much of this episode makes a whole lot of sense or is very compelling. Why did the spirits seek out this one girl? Why did the spirits of decent humans think they had the right to possess another human? Why did the spirits make the bodies they possess talk like frogs? How can a air pressure chamber possibly drive out spirits and brain waves from the girl? The only reasonable answer to these questions seems to be: "do whatever it takes to move the story along". Scotty asks rather sweetly to his love interest, which is refreshing compared to Kirk's usual domineering womanizing. But his sweetness gets rather pathetic and condescending, like he is trying to pet a little a sparrow.
Star Trek: Wink of an Eye (1968)
What would you do if you could accelerate you internal sense of time?
I found the underlying plot device of this episode intriguing and well performed. The Scalosians live in a state where time is greatly accelerated compared to those around them. This enables them to become virtually invisible and accomplish many things in a short time span. I found this possibility intriguing. What would you do if you lived at a faster rate than those around you? The Scalosians accelerate Kirk into their time state so that he can come live with them and help propagate the race. Kirk and Spock are physically in the same room, but it is as if they are stuck in different universes. Kirk sees Spock as virtually frozen in time he is going so slow, and Spock experiences Kirk only as a waft of air and a buzzing sound because he is moving about so quickly. Kirk must figure out a way to communicate with Spock so that they can defeat the Scalosians. He cleverly thinks up to record a computer message and have Spock play it back at low speed. He could have just as well written a message on paper, but I guess there's no paper around in their century. The other thing is that Kirk wasn't really invisible, he was just going too fast for Spock to see. If he just sat motionless for a few minutes in front of Spock, Spock would have seen him just fine. But I guess such an approach does not make for very exciting television. Oddly, despite the crew's time running one hundred times slower than the Scalosians, they still manage to accomplish just as much.
The only thing I didn't like about episode was the trashy prostitute-like head Scalosian female and her trashy relationship with Kirk. She kept throwing herself at Kirk, and he eventually gave in and played along. Some people like this kind of thing in a TV show, but I find it just cheapens everything. Somehow Kirk has the discipline to be captain of the military's flagship, but he doesn't have the discipline to keep his lips off every girl he meets. Riiight.
It would have been interesting to see Kirk use this time acceleration trick in future episodes to thwart his opponents now that he has mastered it. Sadly, such in not possible in non-arcing episodic television.
Star Trek: Plato's Stepchildren (1968)
Big bully tortures the good guys - without end
There is not much to the plot of this episode. Some super-powerful Greek-looking aliens decide to torture Kirk and Spock by controlling their bodies and making them do embarrassing, painful, and downright evil things. The show goes too far and shows the aliens deriving sadistic pleasure from forcing Kirk to kiss and then whip Uhura, and Spock does the same to Nurse Chapel. I am amazed that this episode was even allowed to air on 1960's television. Sadism has no place in entertainment, even if it's the bad guys doing it. You keep watching thinking that Kirk will take control before things get too bad, but he doesn't until the very end and things just keep getting worse. This episode is demeaning to the characters as well as the actors that had to go through with it, and should have been rejected by the production crew.
Star Trek: For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (1968)
Intriguing sci-fi plot, terrible love story
The plot for his one is interesting enough: the crew discovers a hollow asteroid with an entire world inside. Even more interesting, the inhabitants don't know they are living in an asteroid and that there is a universe outside of their world. Unfortunately, their asteroid world is on a collision course with a planet and Kirk must help them. The crew meets up with the high priestess of the people who is guided by an oracle. Kirk and the crew must convince the people of the truth or get to the asteroid's controls and deflect it from its collision course. But the oracle has significant powers and is very protective of the control room. If you can ignore the low-budget feel and mediocre acting of this third-season Star Trek production, the plot is quite engaging. There are even ancient markings in the oracle room that the crew must decipher in order to proceed to the control room.
There was just one gaping failure in the whole show: McCoy's love affair and marriage to the high priestess. The dialogue is so poorly written, the acting so badly executed, the body motions so stiff and robotic, and the entire premise so absurd, that it was painful to watch. McCoy, a seasoned doctor loyal to his ship, suddenly wants to abandon his post and stay on the asteroid because he met some dim alien girl with whom he shares nothing in common. The writers throw in the fact that McCoy has a recently-acquired terminal illness to make it all more plausible, but that just makes the love story seem more manufactured. McCoy professes an undying and eternal love for this alien girl he just met, and then leaves her by the end of the show. The scenes where they were professing their love seemed more like they were in the middle of getting a root canal. Because McCoy's character is generally likable and non-sensical, I found these scenes quite demeaning to his character.
Star Trek: The Tholian Web (1968)
Beware the interphase!
I found the science fiction of this episode a little too far-fetched. The fabric of space in our universe somehow gets tangled with the space of another universe so that people and objects fade between the two universe, a potentially fatal event known as interphasing. Kirk gets stuck in the other universe, and the crew must get him back solidly in the right universe as he fades back and forth. Spock has never seen such wild phenomena, but somehow he still knows how to calculate exactly when objects will shift between the two universes. To complicate things, the Tholian space ships are very slowly building some kind of giant energy net in order to trap the Enterprise. Overall I found this episode far-fetched. You can't build a workable net out of energy or light beams. Additionally, the net was so big that the Enterprise could just fly through one of the holes. Also, slowly building a space net is a very impractical way to fight a space-traveling enemy. Ships don't usually sit around and wait for you to build a net around them. Why didn't the Tholians just shoot the enterprise or employ a tractor beam if they shun violence? Furthermore, why build a net with holes? It's not like they're fishing and need holes for the water to strain out of. Why don't they just build a complete shell?
Star Trek: Spectre of the Gun (1968)
Cowboys in space!
Star Trek is in full third-season decline mode at this point, throwing out pitiful desperate pleas for an audience with such gimmicky plots as cowboys in space!, hippies in space!, kids in space!, and Abraham Lincoln in space!. Sci-fi and westerns are two completely different genres; they don't mix. Battlestar Galactica did it, as did Star Trek TNG and even Macgyver. Every time a sci-fi show does a western, it falls flat and is a sign that the show has jumped the shark. When I see s sci-fi show doing a western plot, I think to myself "The writers and actors must be really get bored with their genre and wished they worked in a different genre." But this episode is worse than your average sci-fi-does-western schlock. The cardboard set is literally half-built and looks worse than the set of a high school stage production. The evil gunslingers are robotic. The crew knows that the whole setup is an illusion created by aliens, but they still play along and are terrified. The plot makes little sense. The crew survives the gunfight by literally doing nothing. How anti-climatic. You could just tell that the script writers were itching to slip in a pacifist message into the Western shootout, but weren't sure how to do it without making the whole thing boring. Chekov gets killed but than is magically alive again at the end of the show.
Star Trek: Day of the Dove (1968)
Engaging drama with a unsatisfying ending
An alien that emotionally feeds on violence has arranged for the Enterprise and some Klingons to end up at each other throats. They fight it out but slowly realize that the real enemy is a blob of light that is playing them like pawns and pitting them against each other. Most of the show is quite engaging with the drama of holding back the Klingons, trying to figure out what is going on, and confronting the real enemy. Much of the acting is unfortunately poor and over-the-top such that it dilutes the drama and the engaging plot. The ending is overly simplistic and pacifistic. All the heroes had to do in the end was laugh and all the violence ended and the enemy went away. If only it were that easy.
Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
Plausible sci-fi and introspective themes make this one a gem
I was surprised by the reviews on this message board. I consider this to be one of Star Trek's best episodes. Star Trek tends to portray two types of aliens, both implausible: aliens that are essentially human with minor plastic surgery, and abstract clouds of light/energy. In reality, aliens are more likely to be like the strange creatures we find on earth such as jelly-fish or electric eels: distinctly non-human but still contained in a well-defined body of tissue. I like this episode because the alien, Kollos, is a clever concoction, is very alien, and yet is plausible. Kollos is not some nebulous blob wafting through space, but instead sits inside a transport pod that humans carry about. If humans look directly at Kollos, they go insane. It should be obvious that it is not Kollos' ugliness that drives men mad. Rather, Kollos emits a frequency and pattern of light that damages the human brain and it is the brain damage that makes the men mad. This is much like an epileptic having a seizure if they see flickering lights. A creature with this effect is quite alien and yet very plausible. The crew takes precautions to not look at Kollos, but still treat him with respect, he being an ambassador for his people. Kollos' telepathic interpreter, Miranda, can mysteriously see Kollos without going mad. In a clever plot twist, we learn later that Miranda can do this because she is blind.
The action is well acted in this episode, giving a real sense of suspense. Additionally, the story's exploration of the nature of beauty is thought-provoking.
I only have two gripes with this episode. First, I found it annoying how every male on the Enterprise was obsessed with Miranda's beauty. I know this was somewhat central to the episode's theme of the nature of beauty, but the producers could have done it more subtly. The seniors officers of a flagship military vessel are a disciplined lot. They aren't rendered into babbling fools every time a pretty girl walks in the room. The whole effect just fell flat because Miranda wasn't even that pretty. Secondly, the odd camera angles were very distracting. I can give the camera crew some leeway for trying to spice up the aging third season with some novel camera angles, but there were far too many in this episode. The strange camera shots really took away from the episode.
Star Trek: And the Children Shall Lead (1968)
Yes, this episode is as bad as people say
Annoying children take over the Enterprise by shaking their fists. Yes, that pretty much sums up the whole episode; there is not much more to the plot than that. Kirk becomes a social worker and tries to help the children work through the grief of loosing their parents, but accomplishes nothing. There's a problem with putting children into adventure shows: they slow down the plot and they are typically very bad actors. I put this episode up there with Spock's brain and Hippies in Space as the worst Star Trek episodes. All three have one common element: annoying adolescent antagonists. If producers wants to put children or child-like characters in an episode, they should make the kids cute or smart or grappling with issues. Kids as evil villains just doesn't work.
Star Trek: The Paradise Syndrome (1968)
Strange premise, strange execution
Indians in space! This episode starts with a strange premise: Kirk gets lost among Native American Indians on an alien planet, gets amnesia, and is considered a God. With bad acting thrown in, it just goes downhill from there. The love scenes between Kirk and the Indian girl were just painful to watch; they were classic late 60's/early 70's cheese. People tune into Star Trek to see space ship battles and alien worlds; not to see the hero frolic mindlessly through the meadows with an Indian girl to syrupy flute music. In the beginning, as soon as Kirk encounters the band of male and female Indians, you just know which one Kirk is going to fall in love with: the one with the pretty face and form-fitting outfit. Once they marry, you just know she's going to end up dead so that the show can reset for the next episode. In the end, everything seems to be unraveling when Spock heals Kirk's amnesia with a mind meld (that seems to be a lazy script-writer's solution to everything) and pushes one button to deflect the asteroid: anti-climatic! The whole subplot about deflecting the asteroid and deciphering the obelisk had a lot of potential. If the producers had cut out the love story and Indians, and focused solely on the asteroid and obelisk, it would have been a lot more interesting.
Star Trek: The Enterprise Incident (1968)
Excellent spy plot
This is one of Star Trek's better episodes. The suspense and unpredictability is masterfully developed. Kirk and Spock seem to fall into the hands of the Romulans and seem to be loosing control of the situation when in reality they are on a spy mission retrieving a cloaking device. When Spock starts giving into the Romulan commander's enticements to become a traitor by playing on his emotions, you get the feeling that something is fishy but don't know what. For once, the female lead is not a young, dim, half-dressed bimbo. Cunning, intellectual, and forceful, this female commander is the perfect match to go head to head with Spock, which unfortunately can't be said to the females Spock gushed over later in the third season.
Yes, Kirk overacts in this episode as he does in almost all third season episodes. But if you just get used to his hamminess and take it for what it's worth, it does not detract from the show too much in most cases.
Star Trek: Spock's Brain (1968)
The audience must have lost its brain to buy into this premise
The other reviewers are right. This episode ranks up there with the space hippies one as the worst of the whole Star Trek series. Aliens steal Spock's brain and he survives without it! Riiight. Not only does he survive, Mccoy can control him like a wind-up toy with a little remote control. It gets worse - much worse. The aliens who performed this miraculous non-lethal brain surgery are attractive young females (of course!) that have a three year old's intelligence and can't string together a full sentence. Despite the females' dumbness, they manage to keep Kirk and crew at bay through most of the episode. The scene where McCoy reconnects Spock's brain one step at a time and Spock gains functionality one limb at a time was just painful to watch. The brain does not work that way. And the second the brain surgery is done, Spock gets up and walks around as if he just got a message. I've been through serious surgery. You can't just get up and walk around the second the surgeon says done.
Star Trek: The Way to Eden (1969)
Space hippies can do no wrong.
This episode is probably Star Trek's worst. Aside from the basic weirdness of 1960's hippies in 23rd century space, this episode managed to insult everyone. People who are sympathetic to hippies are insulted by this episode's exaggerated portrayal of hippies as aimless, clueless, cult-like, misbehaving children. People who are annoyed by hippies are insulted by this episode because they are watching characters that are annoying. Worse still, the crew acts like hippies are cool and engaging. When a rebellious band of thugs steals a ship, spreads disease because they don't like vaccines, and foments chaos on your ship, you throw them in confinement. But instead, Kirk keeps pardoning them of their offenses, let's them have free rein of the ship, buys into their delusions of Eden, and even let's them put on a folk concert. Why? Because hippies are cool. That seemed to be the message of this episode: if you're cool (have tattoos and play the guitar), then you can get away with any crime.
One of the low points of the whole series is when Spock has a musical jam session with the hippies for no reason at all. It had nothing to do with the plot and was painful to watch. I have heard others say that this episode is supposed to be funny; a kind of fish-out-of-water humor with hippies on a military spaceship. I did not find it funny. Watching malcontents be disrespectful and adolescent jerks is not funny to me. It was just painful to watch the capable and honorable Kirk submit to denigration at the hands of brainless adolescents for no apparent reason.
Like so many other third-season episodes, this one seemed like a desperate plea for a new audience. Throw hippies on the show and maybe hippies will start watching the show. Throw Abraham Lincoln haphazardly into a story and maybe the history buffs and conservatives will start watching the show.
Star Trek: The Cloud Minders (1969)
Medium quality episode with more embarrassing Spock romance
I found this episode to have a medium quality: nothing incredibly engaging but also very little that was painful to watch. Kirk and Spock arrive at a planet to pick up some much-needed supplies for a distant suffering planet and find themselves embroiled in class warfare. The class warfare theme has been done better a hundred times by other shows and books, so there was little new to chew on in terms of the plot. The dialogue and acting was still interesting enough to keep the show moving despite the ho-hum plot.
With that said, I did find the the Spock's romance painful to watch and disloyal to the show's roots. Spock is logical and unemotional. He is not supposed to fall in love with the first girl on a planet that he trips over the way Kirk tends to. And I know that girl was supposed to be attractive and eye-candy for the viewers, but she looked uncomfortably anorexic to me. All I could think of during her scenes was "that poor anorexic girl is forced to bare her limbs and ribs for a couple of dollars in Hollywood.
In the end, solving the planet's class inequality problems with gas masks seemed like an easy out for lazy writers.
Star Trek: All Our Yesterdays (1969)
Lacks depth
While not containing any material that is glaringly awful, this episode ranks as one of the series worst for the worst crime in Hollywood: boring the viewer. The plot just didn't have the depth to carry the episode for 50 minutes. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get thrown by accident into a planet's past and must get back to their own time. That's it. You just know eventually that they'll slip away from the locals back to the time portal and get home. There's also a love affair thrown in for Spock which is painful to watch because it is so poorly scripted and acted, and also because Spock doesn't do love affairs. And even if Spock did have love affairs, it would be with some witty and intellectual Vulcan, not a dim cave-woman. I could almost sense Nimoy's embarrassment in being forced to act out this plot line. The explanation that going back in time somehow changed Spock into his primitive ancestors was really implausible. Out of all the times and places in the past they could have been thrown, Spock just happens to end up with a young, pretty, half-dressed woman who is lonely and hungry for affection. What lazy and implausible script writing. It's bad enough when a trivial romantic subplot involves Kirk. We can partially forgive the script writers for this because Kirk's womanizing nature seems to attract such subplots. But when a trivial romantic subplot involves Mr. Non-emotional himself, it is jarring and annoying. It felt like this absurd subplot was thrown in just to kill as much time as possible because there was so little of other plot elements.
Star Trek: The Savage Curtain (1969)
Rehashed plots and themes spell Star Trek's doom
Most of the plot elements and themes in this episode have been hashed and rehashed in earlier episodes. Kirk and Spock end up on a planet pitted against bad guys in a gladiator match by superior aliens, for the fifth time. The themes of good versus evil and violence versus peace come off as stale and old news. Worse still, instead of winning in some clever way, or resisting violence when they have the upper hand, Kirk and Spock get out of this mess by simply winning a wrestling match. The only novel item in this entire episode is the one thing that most spells its doom: Abraham Lincoln on an alien planet. There is no real reason given for his appearance, even by the end when the credits are rolling. The phrase "jump the shark" could just as easily been replaced historically with "Lincoln meets the aliens".
Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder (1969)
Palpable suspense
I would consider this episode to be one of Star Trek's finest. While many episodes are cartoonish fun without any real sense of danger, this episode combines excellent acting, convincing dialog, and an unpredictable plot in order to give us a suspenseful tour de force. A power hungry woman, Dr. Lester, forcefully and secretly swaps minds with Captain Kirk in order to take command of the Enterprise. Once inside Kirk's body, she must act just like Kirk in order to avoid suspicion, and she must also kill the real Kirk now stuck in the her body. However, the crew knows the real Captain Kirk too well to be deceived for too long. This episode explores an interesting situation: if your mind were transferred to someone else's body to your detriment, how would you convince others of your true identity without them thinking you have gone mad. Kirk quickly discovers the best route: get to someone you know best.
This episode is memorable not only for what it did show but what it didn't. A man-woman mind switch storyline could so easily degrade into sexist farce played for cheap laughs. This episode does not do that. Instead, Dr. Lester in Kirk's body is fully capable of running the star ship from the perspective of training and intelligence, despite being a woman. Dr. Lester's real problem is not that she is a woman, but that she has become mad with jealousy and hunger for power. Her other real problem is that she is not really Captain Kirk down to every last mannerism and thus cannot fool the crew. Dr. Lester's failure comes because of madness and dishonesty, not because of her gender. Also, the theme that she was denied a deserving command years ago because of gender discrimination could have become annoyingly preachy. But instead of insulting the intelligence of the viewer with sermons, the producers just subtlety drop hints that gender discrimination can have far-reaching negative effects. Also, this episode did not show an un-scifi plot that could have happened in any detective or crime show. The final thing that this episode thankfully leaves out was Kirk kissing and schmoozing yet another female. I'm sure some people enjoy this facet of Star Trek, but whenever a romance is thrown into a Star Trek storyline, I find it badly written, poorly acted, and simply distracting to the main plot. It's even worse if the victim of Kirk's affections is an alien. Do you really think a different species would be romantically attracted to aliens? (Do you dream of kissing a squid?) Fortunately, in this episode, instead of the preacy-ness, sexist humor, un-scifi plot, and womanizing of so many other episodes, we get a surprisingly mature and engaging production to close out the series.
The other facet I like about this episode is it's take on the nature of authority in a just society. While it's true that Kirk's authority to command the ship is respected primarily because Starfleet Command backs up his authority, there is something more important and subtle in establishing authority without resorting to being a tyrant: competency. Competency in a command post goes beyond basic fitness for the job according to the rule book; it also entails respecting an unwritten cultural code, working for a greater good, having a knack for insight into the details, and having a leadership persona that projects confidence, restraint, wisdom, and control. The crew of the Enterprise does not follow Kirk's orders so enthusiastically just because Starfleet Command requires it. Rather, they trust him because of his competency and leadership skills. While Dr. Lester had all the training and knowledge to command a ship according to the book, she lacked the competency to be a true leader. The crew quickly picked up on this.
Star Trek: Assignment: Earth (1968)
Good acting distracts you from all the plot holes
This episode is riddled with plot holes, implausible events, and annoying political commentary, but the acting of Gary Seven and Ms. Lincoln is good enough to overshadow all of this. Points to consider:
1. The Enterprise obeys a strict non-interference dictum, yet they are willing to endanger the entire future of the earth by traveling back in time, just to do historical research.
2. The Enterprise decides it must travel back in time to figure out how the earth survived the 1960's, and yet all they could ever want to know about the 1960's is available in their ship's computer archives of 1960's newspapers, magazines, TV news reports, and declassified military reports. It's not like the 60's were literally prehistoric.
3. Kirk stumbles upon Gary Seven and for no good reason decides Gary must be a bad guy. He decides to hunt down Gary and stop him even though he has no idea who he is or what he he is doing, despite all the risk in altering the future.
4. The lack of millions of time traveling tourists bumbling all over 1960's New York means that time travel is very hard or is in most cases forbidden by time cops. Yet, the Enterprise crew treat time travel like it's a walk in the park.
5. A single weather satellite cannot give you different-angled views of an object on earth's surface, no matter how powerful it's zoom lenses.
6. Using teleportation, Kirk and Spock could beam right to where Gary Seven is and stop him. The argument that they don't know where Gary is and therefore don't know where to beam is invalidated at the beginning when Scottie verbally leads Kirk and Spock to Gary. Scottie could simply beam them to Gary instead of telling them directions.
7. This episode makes political commentary with the subtlety of a sledge hammer: "Nukes are bad!" Political commentary in fiction can be thought provoking, but when the audience is bashed over the head with a political viewpoint, it becomes annoying propaganda. Besides the lack of subtlety, this viewpoint is also naive. Nuclear armaments prevented World War III ("peace through strength").
8. If a foreigner sabotages a powerful U.S. military asset, it is considered treason - a serious crime specifically mentioned in the constitution and often worthy of the death penalty. And, yet we are supposed to be cheering for Gary Seven as he sabotages a missile. Why? Apparently, being trained by advanced aliens gives you license to play God and subvert the will of the people, because they don't know what's best for themselves.
9. There's no better way to take the Star Trek shine off of Kirk and Spock than to put them in normal clothes, wandering around regular New York, accomplishing nothing, and having no comedic run-ins or witty exchanges. I see this every day (it's called "commuting"), and it's not terribly interesting.
Star Trek: The Deadly Years (1967)
One of the few episodes that has aged well
Many of the original Star Trek episodes are nearly unwatchable decades later due to poor special effects, dated political commentary, and bad acting. "The Deadly Years", however, has withstood the test of time and is as engaging as it ever was. I believe the graceful aging of this episode is a result of a few things:
1. Good acting. It's hard for a young actor to convincingly and seriously portray a decrepit old man without turning it into farce, but the cast did a fine job here.
2. The plot required no special effects beyond makeup
3. The makeup was excellent
4. The enemy was one that every generation will have to face: old age.