Just tossing around the tribble as it purrs to no end,or when it is dead, then you have a kapooted tribble, sorry.

Mim

the plants might be poison but they had to get there water from some where. even if it wasnt water. some liquids could have been in the soil maybe even the rock. you hit it with a phaser on high and ‘boom’ instant explosive reaction.

It’s still inconsistent. Other episodes treat a few light years as a great distance, while episodes like this act as though it’s nothing t’all. If it was that easy to travel that far – even if you had to shut down the engines after a day – then the galaxy would turn into a very small place. Yes, the writers back then couldn’t have realized the scrutiny these things would have gone through later, but Rodenberry did have scientific consultants, as well as individuals on staff ensuring continuity was kept as often as possible. Since this was a 3rd Season ep, I can only assume the often-maligned Frieberger wasn’t as concerned as Rodenberry (though ‘Arena’ has a similar problem, when at the end of the episode the crew find themselves thrown 500 parsecs from where they were).

As for transporting them across great distances, that’s fine for an ancient race capable of creating planets, but the Enterprise returned under her own power, so it doesn’t really apply. Losira didn’t modify the engines to go faster, she merely sabotaged them so that the antimatter valves would get ’stuck’. So it still doesn’t fit. It also doesn’t make sense within the context of the plot, as Losira was trying to prevent the Enterprise from interfering, and throwing them 1000 light years away when they could just come back a few days later would clearly be – and was – ineffective.

The exploding dirt thing happened a lot in TOS, not just this episode. For some reason they had this habit of making things explode when a phaser would hit them, rather than melt or superheat (which would make more sense).

All that aside, I’m actually not a nitpicker. I can enjoy most things without the little errors bothering me. I think this episode was weak, plotwise, so the errors just make it that much worse.