Wolf in the Fold (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is where Scotty kills a hooker.
Investigator: The outlook for your friend is quite grim.
Kirk: What is the law in these cases?
Prefect: The law of Argelius… is love.
This episode is incredibly lame.
Kirk and McCoy don’t think that Scotty actually killed the girl, so they try to get a device from the ship that’ll read Scotty’s mind.
Wait, what? There’s a device on the ship that can read people’s minds? And we haven’t seen or heard of this yet? Because it seems like that’d be a pretty handy device to have around.
Begin Spoilers
But they can’t use that device, since the operator is killed, too. Instead, they use the Argelian Empathic powers of the Prefect’s wife. Except that she’s killed, too.
So they use the computer, aka a lie detector. And then they propose outlandish ideas about invisible monsters that could be the killer. And it turns out the outlandish ideas are right.
And it turns out the monster is the investigator. And that it can jump into the Enterprise’s computers and control the ship. But it can’t jump into people who are given a happy pill. But it can jump into a dead guy and make him walk around. But when you give that dead guy a happy pill the monster can’t jump out.
End Spoilers
Seriously, it’s like two eight year olds wrote this episode, and they were trying to outdo each other in how awesome they could be. And they both failed their awesome rolls. Critically.
Grade
F
The Apple (Memory Alpha; SD Video), disappointly, contains not a single Apple product. This might be explained by the episode being originally aired some fifteen years before Apple was founded, but I thought Star Trek took place in the future.
Now, even if I forgive the suspicious lack of futuristic iProducts, this episode is kind of terrible.
The Enterprise is circling Gamma Trianguli VI, and a landing party is sent down. They think it’s paradise. But obviously, it’s not; one of the crewmen is killed by a poisonous plant and the world seems to be attacking the landing party and pulling the Enterprise out of its orbit.
There’s a lot of wandering here where absolutely nothing happens.
Then they find the natives. This brings us to…
Best Bit of Dialog
[Natives wrap flowers around Spock’s arm]
Kirk: It does something for you.
Spock: Yes, Captain: it makes me uncomfortable.
Begin Spoilers
We learn that the Natives serve Vaal, who appears to be a machine that controls the entire world. They feed him exploding rocks to keep him running. The solution to all the problems in this episode is violence, and it works.
End Spoilers
This episode has nothing going for it. It tries to work the mistaken paradise angle but just ends up looking lame. It tries to play the should-we-intervene card but is overridden by the impending-danger card. It tries to discuss utilitarianism vs idealism and which is the better method for determining the crew’s course of action, but gets shot down because everyone is about to die. But most of all, it just has no conflict. The baddie is faceless, the henchmen are clueless, the plot starts about two-thirds of the way in, and the resolution involves no insight and no clever tricks.
Grade
F
The Alternative Factor (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is really bad. Above an uninhabited world, the Enterprise suddenly sees the entire universe vanish for a split second, and then reappear. Perhaps the just-materialized man on the planet below knows what’s going on?
Begin Spoilers
Lazarus knows, but he’s not telling. He is, in fact, lying about it. And everyone knows it. But they don’t know what’s going on, and they can’t get him to tell them. So they wander around doing a lot of nothing for a very long time, until Lazarus makes his move and steals their dilithium crystals.
He needs them, you see, to jump across the barrier between this universe and the anti-matter universe, where his opposite awaits. Lazarus means to kill his opposite, knowing full well that it would be the end of everything.
No, that doesn’t make any sense. Neither does how they avoid it.
End Spoilers
It’s episodes like this that make Star Trek look bad. The plot is junk, and there really isn’t anything that happens in the middle half-hour of the show. Lazarus has a ridiculous fake beard. No one has anything to act with but surprise and frustration, and so the performances are terrible. The premise could be interesting, but they do nothing interesting with it. This episode is just really bad.
Which, since Conscience of the King was Ron Moore’s favorite and Devil in the Dark was Shatner’s favorite, probably means that this is some other luminary’s favorite episode of all time.
Grade
F
If the William Shatner that exists only in the worst stereotypes was allowed to ghost-write an episode of Star Trek, what he would write would be The Conscience of the King (Memory Alpha; HD Video).
Badly written, poorly paced, and terribly acted, this episode is a mystery where you know who did it and how, and the only question is when Kirk will decide to do something about it. There’s a plot twist that’s so predictable it hardly deserves the name (I wrote that line twenty minutes in; the reveal is at forty-four minutes).
It does have two redeeming qualities, but they are minor. Uhura sings, which I find hilarious because of how out of place it seems. And Reilly returns, now transfered to Engineering but mercifully without a new, red shirt.
Grade
F
