Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis (Memory Alpha; SD Video) really doesn’t have anything to do with a metamorphosis, but it’s a good enough episode that we can forgive it a misleading title.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have picked up a Starfleet Commissioner, who was acting as a diplomat to stop a war when she caught Sakuro’s Disease. Now, she needs to get back to the Enterprise to be treated, or she’ll die.
Why didn’t they pick her up in the Enterprise, you ask? Well, because if they had the episode wouldn’t work. So instead they’re in a shuttlecraft. And their shuttlecraft is easily abducted by a shimmering field of energy, which takes them to a planetoid not too far away.
Begin Spoilers
There they meet Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive, who disappeared 150 years ago, at the age of 87. But here he is looking hale but bored on this planetoid in the middle of nowhere.
He’s survived because that shimmering energy field is The Companion, and it has healed him, cared for him, and loved him for all that time.
End Spoilers
This episode deals in the currency of love. What does it mean to love? Can love be stifling, and can the lover be made to realize it? Whom can you love?
These are all interesting questions, but they’re not enough to fill up the episode. But here, for a rare change, that doesn’t matter. This is a leisurely paced episode that pulls off the slow burn. You feel the truth of it when Cochrane claims that “immortality consists mostly of boredom.” And the grinding pace makes it obvious that this story– which has been going on for decades before this episode begins– is a slow burn itself, and it’s not a comfortable one. But it is worth telling.
Grade
A
