And the Children Shall Lead
And the Children Shall Lead (Video; Memory Alpha) is a neat idea that runs out of steam before the credits and then flails about being boring for forty more minutes.
The nugget of goodness is that an evil spirit has convinced the children on the new colony of Triacus to kill their parents and then take over the galaxy, using the Enterprise as their transport. The spirit gives the kids powers and they chant creepy things and look odd.
I would start a spoilers block here, but there are no spoilers in this episode: eventually Kirk figures out how to turn the kids and wins the day. But it takes him an entire episode of wandering around the ship and seeing people do crazy things before he tries, because “they’re children!”
This episode has Kirk ignoring a blatant threat to the ship, McCoy disappearing into sick bay and not participating in the plot, and Spock being completely unhelpful in bothering to explain how any of this makes any sense at all.
It’d be okay if the kids were hiding something that kept the spirit alive and Kirk had to find the McGuffin, but they’re not. It’d be okay if the spirit could be extracted from the kids and we could see progress as each kid is freed and the plot unfurls, but that’s not the case. It’d be okay if the opposite happened, and the plot slowly reached tentacles into the crew, but it’s not.
What I’m trying to say is that this is a mediocre episode completely ruined by pacing (back to our old nemesis) and a lack of an explanation.
Summary Quote
McCoy: They’re crying, Jim. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s good to see.
[We saw how it happened, and it didn’t make any sense to us, anyway. But it is good to see, because it means that this episode is over.]
Grade
D-
