If they only aged one month in one hundred years maybe things like gum disease could only spread at the same rate too?

I do agree with point 4 though!!

Despite the plot holes I think this was a brilliant episode because of the sense of menace it created – still creepy after 40 years, especially that Jahn character…

As for Spock being an authority, that was ALWAYS the plot device. The only times that I recall anyone knowing more about an Earth topic than Spock was the original Noonen Kahn Sing episode (where the female historian is consulted) and the holiday planet where Sulu finds the police revolver he’s been obsessing about (as an adolescent at the time I was much more interested in McCoy’s showgirls).

By the way, does anyone know where I could track down a DVD of the blooper reel that Roddenbery used to schlep around to Trek conventions in the 70s? An earlier comment about a bouncing phaser reminded me of a hilarious blooper scene where Kirk kicks a mace out of Sulu’s hand, it falls to the floor, and bounces back into his hand again! They also had a scene where Kirk is doing the usual voiceover about going where no man has gone before and the video shows Kirk with an evil look skulking up to a Trek door marked “Yeoman Rand” It was great stuff!

– They had iPhones, but discovered Steve Jobs doesn’t take Federation credits.

Seems like while the technical details about how everything worked and what the ship would be capable of (you mention bio-suits, for instance) the characters at least were in character and well-scripted. And that makes it infinitely better than most third season episodes.

1) The “morse code” distress beacon had been transmitting for over 300 years. Wow, that’s some pretty good batteries there, cause the power grid was off. Also, why not beam directly to the building with the transmitter?

2) Didn’t detect human life forms with ship’s scanners or tricorders, nor seemed to be able to detect location of children with tridorders.

3) Where were the red shirts and their communicators? They disappareed until right at the end.

4) Nobody on the Enterprise thought it strange they hadn’t heard fromt he surface in days? Noone thought to use the transmitter to tell the Enterprise to beam down more communicators? They had no uplink/downlink to network computers on the surface to ship’s computers?

5) No effort at all to bring down a team in biosuits to set up a lab or help with medical needs, and there was no way to beam infected crew back to an isolation area on the E?

6) 300 years with no bathing or laundry, the clothing on tha backs of the kids would have rotted away, not to mention they’d all have rotted out teeth, gum disease, scurvey and malnutrition and a host of other medical and health problems.