Review

“What does God need with a starship?”–James Kirk, “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” I know, it’s off the map to mention “Star Trek V” in a review of a TOS-R episode, but in watching “The Squire of Gothos,” I couldn’t help but replay the moment from the 1989 movie through my head where James Kirk faces down a God-like being with some healthy skepticism.  Captain Kirk does not suffer deities kindly, especially those who abuse their power.  Be it an Ancient Greek god or a super-computer, there is a recurring theme that comes up throughout The Original Series and it is best summed up by Mr. Spock in this very episode: “I object to intellect without discipline.  I object to power without constructive purpose.”  Fellow Trek fans, this is the sort of stuff that elevates Star Trek above your average science-fiction fare.  “The Squire of Gothos” is vintage Trek.

Trouble brewingThe Enterprise takes aboard a passenger: Charlie Evans.  He’s spent his life in isolation, never met a girl, and doesn’t know how to dress.  So of course he’s one happy fanboy when he finds himself aboard the Starship Enterprise. He develops what’s politely called a “crush” on Janice Rand, snubbing all the other hotties on the ship.  It must be her unpredictability that he finds so arresting; she’s offended when he slaps her butt yet when he somehow impossibly jams a playing card down her cleavage she’s charmed and impressed.

Once again it befalls me to offer the defense of a not-very-well-thought-of episode of original Trek. When most people bring up “The Omega Glory,” it’s to do their impression of William Shatner’s inimitable (well, actually, VERY imitatable) delivery of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the episode’s infamous climax: “WE…THE PEOPLE…of the unitedstates…do ORDAIN and ESTABLISH this Constitution–!!” It’s a groaner of an ending that quantifies Gene Roddenberry’s somewhat flat-footed idea of a rampant biological war between parties on an alien planet that effectively throws them into the Stone Age. That in itself isn’t bad (if having already been done in a sense in episodes like “Miri”), but Roddenberry (who was supposedly inspired to write this episode after viewing the actual Constitution on a trip to Washington D.C.) turns “The Omega Glory” into a Cold War parable that’s strangely racist, with warring “Yankees” and “Commies” descended from yet another culture apparently identical to ours right down to language both spoken and written.

It’s one thing for television producers to torture their fictional characters, but it’s quite another when they torture their hapless viewers. Unfortunately, that’s the result of this pointless, turgid, plodding episode. “Plato’s Stepchildren” is among the “bitter dregs” of the third season, if not the entire series. Here’s the plot: The intrepid Enterprise crew responds to a distress call from a small society of aliens with psycho-kinetic powers who torture Kirk and Spock to force McCoy to make a permanent house call. The crew discovers the chemical source of the aliens’ power, juices themselves up with a super high dose, and beats them at their own game. The end.

“Welcome to Bad Science Fiction Theatre…” “I am your host, Leonard Pinth-Garnell.” Some readers of this site have expressed concern at what they consider the undue flippancy with which I’ve summarized some previous episodes of “Star Trek.”  Therefore I shall endeavor, this week, to stick strictly to the facts of the plot in my synopsis.

From the opening moment of “Shore Leave” you can tell this will be a different type of Star Trek episode. Kirk’s mistaking a backrub from the lovely Yeoman Barrows to be one from Mr. Spock shows the whimsical and subtlety sexually charged nature of one of the more fun outings for the Enterprise’s crew. Down scouting out a rest stop Sulu exclaims “no animals, no people, no worries,” seemingly shocked to find a planet that isn’t overrun with gangsters, Indians, or Nazis. What they have found is an idyllic planet full of misadventures that looks ever better now fully remastered in living color. It is a good thing that Kirk ignored McCoy’s report of spotting a large white rabbit, not a Florida White Rabbit, a human-sized one (with Alice of Wonderland trailing) or we would never get to visit this “Shore Leave” Planet.

TRIUMPH OF THE BILLKirk & Company save us from the Nazis and proves we can all get alongSantayana once said “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” but in the case of John Gill, he didn’t forget, he just made a really, really bad call. It was a bad call, John, a bad call. Thus goes “Patterns of Force,” in which a Federation historian (this time not an unhinged captain, commodore or woman who wants to change bodies with Kirk for a change showing that even academics can get into the act of nearly destroying, not only one planet, but possibly two) uses Nazi German as the template for a brave new Ayran world. It’s such a great idea that the neo-cons watching this episode as kids probably thought what a great idea this would be oneday…but I digress.

Here’s another classic Trek episode that needs no defense—in fact it’s one of the all time greats, and probably ranks among my top handful of Star Trek episodes ever made. Kirk and Spock meet the franchise’s first Klingons and wind up coming up against a far more powerful—but ultimately benevolent—force when the Federation and Klingon Empire begin a rush to war.

“Tomorrow is Yesterday” is one of those Original Series episodes that is just plain fun, with a few melodramatic moments, an interesting science fiction concept, lurching starship sets (or at least lurching cameras), and a few obligatory fistfights. One could very easily watch it, feel satisfied that this was vintage Trek, and go on to the next episode on a TOS DVD without taking a critical look some forty years after it first aired in 1967. Anniversaries work their way into reviews like this; the episode aired about twenty years after pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted what people immediately began calling flying saucers and UFOs, and only two days before the tragic Apollo 1 fire, which is somewhat ironic given the mention of the “first manned moon shot” heard over the Enterprise bridge speaker

GETTING INTO THE ACTIONWhether you’re a die-hard fan of the original series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager (and, god help you, if you are), it’s hard to argue that there’s only one series which did comedy well and that was Classic Trek. Unlike Next Generation (which tried to be funny, painfully in episodes like "Manhunt" and the somewhat wittier "Captains Holiday" in which Picard vacations on a pleasure planet with the story eventually degenerating into mindless technobabble) and Voyager, Classic Trek and Deep Space Nine were the only series for which humor was an essential ingredient.

Ahh yes… "And The Children Shall Lead" is another often maligned episode from Trek’s infamous 3rd season. The episode is so unremarkable that doing a review of it was reduced to a chore that neither Anthony, myself nor any of our regular contributors really wanted to do. I got inspired to write it first so I win? Although Trek’s producers may have been better off taking W.C. Fields advice to "never work with children," the Remastering actually gives us a chance to take another look.

The Enterprise crew are on their way to some well-deserved R&R when Starfleet orders them to investigate the radio silence from the billions of inhabitants of the Gamma 7A system, as well as the loss of the starship Intrepid, crewed (despite being named for a U.S. aircraft carrier) by Vulcans. The Enterprise discovers a huge black splotch, which Spock identifies as “a zone of energy which is incompatible with our living and mechanical processes.” Worse, inside lurks—I kid you not—a giant space amoeba, some 11,000 miles wide (the metric system having fallen by the wayside for this episode).

"Bring Back Kirk!"Enterprise finds one of its sister ships, the Event Horizon – uh, Defiant – floating dead in space. Everyone important beams over and finds the crew dead with their hands wrapped around one another’s throats. After much investigation and careful consideration, "Bones" rules out natural causes and concludes that they killed each other. He also discovers that props and corpses aboard the ship are becoming immaterial. Fortunately, whatever’s going on doesn’t affect deck floors.