By Any Other Name
By Any Other Name (Memory Alpha; Video) finds the crew responding to a distress call on a strange planet with a purple sky. Why is it always a purple sky?
Suddenly, two pastel-clad people walk onto the soundstage.
Rojan: It was very kind of you to respond to our call so quickly, Captain. Now, you will surrender your ship to me.
Kirk: You have a very strange sense of humor, Mr…? [Rojan hits a button; Kirk is frozen into a living statue!]
Oh, no! Rojan is a bad guy from Andromeda who’s leading a scouting party so that his empire can invade! But why is the scouting party stranded on this rock?
Kirk: What happened to your ship?
Rojan: There is an energy barrier at the rim of your galaxy.
Kirk: [With Total Non-Challance] Yes, I know; we’ve been there.
That was the day Kirk leveled up in awesome.
There’s a lot of stuff in this episode, including death by cubism, vulcan hibernation, the first mention of the ship being powered by a matter/antimatter engine, and Scotty drinking an alien under the table. It’s all good fun.
Scotty: I found this in Gannymere. Er, Gannygun. Ganny– ganny– ganny- Gannymede.
Alien: Well, what is it?
Scotty: It’s a… uh… a. It’s green.
But there’s no real substance here. It’s the standard win-by-pointing-out-your-seemingly-invincible-enemy’s-psychological-flaws plotline, which has been done better elsewhere in the series.
One curious note: the aliens modify the Enterprise so she can go somewhere past Warp 11, and can make the trip to the Andromeda galaxy in a mere three hundred years. At the end, there is no indication that they would remove that modification. So is the Enterprise the fastest ship in the Federation by a few orders or magnitude?
(And why didn’t they just teleport the alien’s power projector into space while they sped along at Warp 11?)
Grade
B+
