Star Trek: Start to Finish

All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays (Netflix; Memory Alpha) finds the crew of our favorite starship beaming down to a planet whose star is about to nova and whose inhabitants have vanished. There, in a library, they find an old man who seems to teleport around the room. As one does.

It quickly becomes apparent that the people of the Sarpeidon have invented a time travel device they call the Atavachron. They’ve used it to travel back in time to escape the impending nova, and are all hiding out in the past. Leaving aside the inherent problems with changing the past and just plain fitting that many people into the population of the past (language barrier?), this makes for a very neat little plot device.

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Kirk gets separated and does a little jail time, but this is a Spock-and-Bones episode. Those two get transported into a desolate ice age and meet the lovely Zarabeth, who has been exiled there. Spock succumbs to despair (emotion!) and falls for Zarabeth (she is pretty hot), but Bones keeps up the fight and they all get home alright.

There’s some silliness in Spock “reverting” to his ancestral ways thrown in there that’s a little hand-wavy (he wasn’t Prepared; why should he be changed?), but if you can ignore that this is a great twist: it gives Bones a leading role (he’s so often the comic relief or the doomsayer), while putting Spock into a position where Nimoy can do some acting and flex the character in new ways.

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I liked this episode a ton. There’s a few great scenes and a few great lines, there’s an interesting set up and a good delivery of it, and there’s enough sideline mysteries that you’re left wondering a bit at the end.

Best Bit of Dialog

Kirk: Spock, are you in the library?
Spock: Indeed not; we are in a wilderness of arctic characteristics.
Bones: He means it’s cold!

Grade

B+; would be higher if not for the slight hand-waving all over the plot.

The Savage Curtain

The Savage Curtain (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is an episode where the crew meets Lincoln, is imprisoned by rock aliens, is challenged on the differences between Good and Evil, and fails to mount even a cursory defense of their ideology.

Interesting Bits

Kirk explains how the teleporter works. We meet Surak. They miss an opportunity to discuss labels by instead saying that they don’t matter. There’s a ridiculous rubber suit alien. Everything is bad.

Why it’s crazy annoying

Because in the end, after the battle is won, the rock aliens say that they can’t tell the difference between the sides; good and evil both use the same methods to forward their goals. This is the point where Kirk stands up for Freedom, gives the long monologue about his values and delivers the lesson. Or rather, it should be that point, but instead Kirk just says the game is rigged, makes no attempt to explain how that changed anything, and then leaves. Total copout.

Grade

D

Requiem for Methuselah

Requiem for Methuselah (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) gives too much away in the title, but is otherwise excellent.

The crew is suffering from Rigelian Fever, which will kill them all in a few days. They need ryetalyn quickly to make an antidote, and when they land on the only planet within range that’s got it, they’re shot at by a robot drone and threatened by an old guy who owns the place.

But when they threaten him back, he invites them to his house, introduces himself as Flint, offers them all the ryetalyn they need, and even offers to make the antidote for them. As if that weren’t fishy enough, he’s got never-catalogued da Vinci paintings and scores by Brahms and expensive manuscripts. And a hidden girl (there’s always a girl).

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I hesitate to even put this in the spoilers box, because the title already gives it away: this guy has been a live for thousands of years; he can’t die and has collected all this stuff, and claims to have been the historical da Vinci and Brahms. No surprises there, but it is interesting that he’s not an alien or anything; he’s just naturally and inexplicably immortal. He has no idea why and no explanation is given or even tossed out as a possibility.

His relationship with the hidden girl Rayna is more mysterious, and it’s fittingly the axis around which the plot turns. But let’s ignore the Rayna/Flint dynamic and focus on the inevitable Rayna/Kirk dynamic. Kirk meets her briefly for two scenes and is smitten. He loves her, says as much, and when he claims with certainty that she loves him back, she doesn’t argue. Later Flint and Spock both affirm that love. A possibility that I had never even entertained before suddenly hit me:

What if Kirk isn’t just a womanizing wanderer? What if he actually likes these girls? What if he’s just the most lovesick person to ever set foot on a starship, and he just has the best luck at finding people but the worst luck keeping them around? What if Kirk is, in short, a tragic hero, whose capacity for love drives him to greatness, but whose heart is always dashed on the rocks by fate?

That’d be a pretty awesome, moody, interesting character. But I don’t really think that’s who Kirk is. Kirk is a womanizer, he does just wander into relationships and then have no problem taking off, and when things do get serious the universe kindly shatters all possibility of a lasting commitment by conveniently killing off whomever Kirk banged this week.

And the Flint/Rayna bit is interesting, but you’ll have to watch the show for the full details. All I’ve got to say about that is: why is Data so novel, since the universe is apparently teeming with androids?

Now all this is good. Great, even. You get Kirk dealing with who he is, an interesting pair of guests, a neat dynamic between those three, Spock there to support, McCoy there to comment, and a messy, tragic end that leaves almost everyone shattered. But then the last scene is an absolutely perfect capstone, where Spock uses his Vulcan Mind Meld to help Kirk in whatever little way he can, because he knows that his friend needs it. We as an audience are left wondering if he knew by himself or because he listened to McCoy’s fantastic paean to love. We also get to wonder whether Kirk ever finds out. But it’s a wonderful show of mercy (an emotion?) on Spock’s part, and it’s woven so perfectly into the plot that it pulls everything together and emphasizes all the right points.

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Best Bit of Dialog

McCoy: You see, I feel sorrier for you [Spock] than I do for him [Kirk] because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to. The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word love isn’t written into your book.

Grade

A+; easily one of my favorite episodes in a long time, if not the whole series.

The Cloud Minders

The Cloud Minders (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) brings us to Ardana, the only known source of zenite, needed to stop an agricultural plague. But when they get there, the crew is attacked by the miners!

The local government (played very well) is hush-hush about why the miners are upset, and try to play it off as a simple uprising. But it soon becomes evident (in multiple ways, including a terrible voice over by Spock) that Ardana is a bifurcated society with the workers oppressed by an upper class who literally lives in the clouds.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this episode. There’s prejudice and class, torture and diplomacy, intrigue and technobabble. There’s even a teleporter that uses a new special effect for no apparent reason.

But in the end it’s weak tea. The problem isn’t prejudice; it’s this magic gas that McCoy finds easily but has gone undiscovered forever. The ruling class really is smarter and really is right to rule; the working class really is dumber and are doomed to just go on working the mines, but now with gas masks. And neither side learns a lesson about anything; they aren’t even sure they believe in the gas, let alone their mistaken assumptions about each other. In short, this episode tries to say lots of big important things and gets in its own way while making it a sci-fi.

Grade

C

The Way to Eden

The Way to Eden (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is full of hippies. Clad in even-more-graish-than-usual and slightly-more-revealing-than-usual attire, sporting lots of hair and odd medallions, the Space Hippies are following Dr. Sevrin and looking for Eden. They’ve hijacked a space cruiser and the Enterprise is hot on their tail; quick work is made of the chase and they’re brought on board after a tractor beam tug-of-war causes the cruiser to explode.

Yes, the Enterprise was told to go get a hijacked ship and blew it up. No one bats an eye at this.

Then they have to put up with the Space Hippies once they’re onboard complaining about their freedoms being impinged and calling everyone Herbert. The episode does a good job of portraying them as fools under the control of Sevrin, who Spock quickly determines is insane. What evidence does he have? Oh, he talked to him.

But there’s some sedition going on, lots of talking about who people are and what they want. The Space Hippies bring people out and get ‘em going. And then they take over the ship to go to Eden.

It all goes awry, of course, but not because the crew stops them; Eden isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Sevrin actually is all sorts of crazy.

But this episode is actually pretty good, if you can get past the ridiculously over-the-top nature of the Space Hippies and the more-than-occasional folksy musical interlude (with songs that aren’t half bad, truth be told). The story is simple but interesting, the characters get a lot of screen time to talk, and the situation is relevant. If anything I’d play up the Space Hippies legitimate beefs with the “modern” era (regimented society, technological omnipresence, constant war) and stretch out the end, but neither is possible without cutting something else, so I’m giving them a pass there.

Grade

B+