Star Trek: Start to Finish

Catspaw

Catspaw (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is kind of a neat idea that’s badly done. A landing party that doesn’t include Kirk, McCoy, or Spock is missing. Kirk, McCoy, and Spock promptly beam down to rescue them.

Begin Spoilers

What they find are aliens pretending to be wizards who can control everything. They do nothing interesting. They’re here trying to understand sensation. But it turns out that everything they can do is just an illusion. This tourists-looking-for-sensation thing is interesting, but not developed in any way and really serves as pretext instead of being what the whole plot is about.

On the other hand, this is a kind of lame idea, done better than it should be. They come from a land without sensation, but their powers are all about creating illusions, which are pure sensation?

End Spoilers

However, it does have this amazing bit of dialog:

[Disembodied heads warn of danger]
Kirk: Spock, comment.
Spock: Really bad poetry, Captain.
Kirk: A more useful comment, Spock.

Grade

D+; it was sort of interesting, but was pretty thin gruel.

Operation — Annihilate!

With a name like Operation — Annihilate! (Memory Alpha; SD Video), how could this episode possibly be good? Still, it’s the season one closer for the original series, so… maybe it has some interesting ending?

Well, this hails from the time before seasons meant anything. Cliffhangers? Never heard of ‘em.

ANYWAY.

The Enterprise is headed for Deneva, chasing a line of planets that have all gone crazy and destroyed themselves. And it soon becomes clear that Deneva has already started down this road. To make matters worse, Kirk’s brother Sam is stationed on Deneva with his family.

The set for Deneva is some crazy university covered in art installations that look incredibly like mid-60s university art installations. This causes your brain to vomit distractingly every time the crew goes down to the surface.

Which they do with frighteningly little preparation. “Here’s a planet where people are going crazy for no apparent reason; let’s not take any precautions to avoid the same fate. No, we’ll just beam down and meander about.”

Begin Spoilers

Which is why it’s a good thing that the crazy spreads not via tiny microbes that infect your brain when you inhale them. No, instead it spreads when flying jellyfish that resemble fried eggs careen across the screen and sting you.

No, I’m serious.

End Spoilers

Now, the above might make you think that this episode is terrible. And from a technical standpoint, that’s pretty close to correct. But the contagious insanity and the family angle and the slow creep onto the Enterprise itself, and then the aching decisions of how to fight the menace are all handled well.

Begin Spoilers

Except that they don’t appear to consider a simple quarantine. You make sure no one leaves the planet, and you continue looking for solutions. This is not that tough, people.

End Spoilers

Grade

C+

This Side of Paradise

This Side of Paradise (Memory Alpha; SD Video) takes our favorite crew on a mission to find whatever happened to the Sandoval Expedition, which landed on Omicron Ceti III back before the Federation discovered that the Berthold Rays in this part of the galaxy would kill all life on the planet after a week of exposure.

Now it’s a little silly that the Enterprise is going to make sure that the Berthold Rays did actually kill the expedition, but that’s a small setup price to pay for what is really quite a good episode.

Of course, when they land, what do they discover?

McCoy: On pure speculation– just an educated guess– I’d say that that man is alive.

This episode plays out in the by-now-established routine: mysterious happening, unhelpful natives, danger to the ship, nadir, lucky breakthrough, and resolution.

But what makes the episode shine is Spock’s story. On the planet is Leila, whom Spock knew years before on Earth, and who had loved him. Because Spock’s not into this whole “emotions” thing she got burned. But because of this planet, Spock gets another, better chance.

Begin Spoilers

The planet is home to a plant that provides the body with healing, and in the process creates contentment bordering on euphoria. Spock, here and here alone, can love Leila. But in order to save the ship, he must give that up. Spock has one chance to really, truly be happy, and this is the story of how duty forces him to give that up for the greater good. It’s well written and well played.

End Spoilers

Best Bit of Ironic Dialog

Kirk: Make sure the landing party works in teams of two; I don’t want anyone left alone down here! [Stomps away from Bones alone, as the doctor stands alone]

Grade

B+

The Return of the Archons

The Return of the Archons (Memory Alpha; SD Video) takes our favorite crew to Beta III, where the Archon disappeared a century ago. There they find a society without war, without fighting and populated by people with only happy thoughts. Kirk immediately sets out to destroy it.

Which is ironic, since this is the first time we hear about the “Prime Directive.” Spock doesn’t want to disrupt the society, despite them holding the landing party captive and threatening to kill them and destroy the Enterprise. And thus begins a long line where the Prime Directive is basically just something that gets mentioned before being ignored.

Begin Spoilers

I have no idea what this “Red Hour” “Festival” thing is in the beginning. How does that fit into anything, aside from giving the audience the heebie-jeebies?

End Spoilers

But aside from that one (large) loose end, this episode holds together nicely. It tells a simple story well, and explores how oppression happens, and how hard it is to rebel against what appears to be “The Good.”

Grade

A-

The Menagerie, Part II

The Menagerie, Part II (Memory Alpha; HD Video; Review of Part I) starts with a ‘previously on’ for the first time.

Begin Spoilers

Pike is trying to escape from the Talosians, and the Talosians are using their mind powers to show him pleasant lies in hopes that he’ll stay and be in their zoo to teach them how to live, since they’ve forgotten. The crew try to rescue him, but only get stuck themselves. In the end, the Talosians decide that humans are more trouble than they’re worth, and it’ll be easier if the entire Talosian race just slowly fades away.

End Spoilers

The most interesting parts are the what-might-have-beens from the flashbacks to the original pilot.

Pike: My name is Christopher Pike. Commander of the space vessel Enterprise from a star group at the other end of this galaxy.

But of course, in canon Star Trek they’re only in the Alpha Quadrant, and Voyager gets in real trouble when they end up on the other end of the galaxy.

Random Enterprise Crewman: Now that entryway might have stood up against hand lasers, but we can transmit the ships’ power against it. Enough energy to blast half a continent!

Aside from being a neat excuse to trot out a laser canon, this kind of goes against everything I remember about the military capabilities of the Enterprise. Star Destroyers slag planets with turbolasers and Centauri Battlecruisers fling asteroids down on helpless people, but the Enterprise is a science vessel made for science missions, and it doesn’t have the capability to destroy planets.

Spock: All Decks prepare for hyperdrive!

Mr. Spock, don’t you mean “Warp Factor 7,” like you said in Part I? I mean, at least be consistent in the episode. 7 is already way higher than the Enterprise goes in any other episode.

Grade

B+; I liked it in spite of myself, and I did actually forget one of the plot twists, which was a nice surprise.

The Menagerie, Part I

There’s mischief afoot, and you know exactly how it ends because this is one of the most famous episodes of TOS ever: The Menagerie, Part I (Memory Alpha; HD Video). And let me tell you, knowing the reason everything is happening is kind of detrimental to the suspense.

Kirk and Spock arrive at Starbase 11, summoned by a call from command. But there was no call, insists the starbase. All there was was people talking about poor old Fleet Captain Pike, who was once the captain on the Enterprise, but has now been delta-radiated in a tragic accident and cannot move or talk. It really sucks to be him.

Begin Spoilers

And that’s why Spock fakes that call, and fakes new orders to freight Pike half-way across the galaxy to Talos IV, where the two of them spent some quality time all those years ago when Pike and Spock were the Enterprise’s command staff. Back then, there was some crazy stuff going on. What stuff? Oh, that’s part two.

End Spoilers

Among other things, this episode contains the first mention of “Starfleet.” Previously, it’s been “Earth Command” or “United Earth” or other gibberish. But now we see a document that says “For eyes of Starfleet command only” and has the little swooshy arrow Star Trek logo, so that’s pretty much set in stone. (we see that document when Kirk is shown it, objects, and the Starbase Commodore says “Oh, I’m certifying I cleared you to read it,” as if that was good enough).

But whoever this newfangled “Starfleet” is, they sure have dumb rules. They have only one crime that deserves the death penalty, and that’s going to Talos IV.

Wait, More Spoilers

They also let the Commodore of the starbase and the Captain of a hijacked ship chase that ship together, alone, in a shuttlecraft. No, really.

End Spoilers

But despite it’s valiant effort to re-use the original pilot (with a smart in-universe rationale), this is only an okay episode. It’s got a nice mystery, but the mystery is simple enough that repeated viewing aren’t interesting. The mish-mash of old effects/costumes/sets with new ones is interesting in a meta sense but not in any other way. And Pike isn’t given a chance to be interesting in the flashbacks or in the present, which cuts down on how much we the audience cares.

But they certainly do a good job of tying the characters into the action such that it’s clear that they care a great deal. This seems like it’s a tough thing to do, but I’m looking at it as weaving the characters I know into the plots, whereas the writers on TOS were thinking more about creating the characters in the first place. So it was probably easier than I imagine, but it’s still good writing.

Best Unintentional Bit of Ironic Dialog

Pike: [after not assigning Number One to the landing party] Sorry, Number One, with little information on this planet we’ll have to leave the ship’s most experienced officer here covering us.

Grade

B+

The Naked Time

Without question, The Naked Time (Wikipedia; HD Video) is the best of the episodes I’ve seen so far.

Spock and Joey go down to an outpost to see why they aren’t responding, and they find that everyone died doing crazy things. Joey gets goo on him and brings the crazy back to the Enterprise.

The crazy removes inhibitions, so the actors get to explore their characters without having to filter them. This makes for some really awesome scenes (Spock, Kirk) and some hilarious ones (O’Reilly; Sulu).

Begin Spoilers

Although Nimoy has some trouble with his teary-eyed loss of control, the content is great: it’s almost verbatim what Kirk says to Spock in the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie to piss him off.

And Kirk’s ode to the ship is similarly smart. The Enterprise really is Kirk’s love, and the lines Shatner is given really do that relationship justice.

End Spoilers

It is also the birth of technobable (“water has become a complex chain of molecules”; “controlled implosion”) and the first time we see a replicator (although it has no name yet).

Also interesting: the captain’s log is told from a perspective after the episode ends, so Kirk can say things like “unknown to us, a totally new and unusual disease has been brought aboard.”

Spock uses a slide rule at one point. While he’s sitting at his computer console. Funny enough, this makes perfect sense given computing power in the 60s.

Best Ironic Quote

Kirk: “Don’t tell me that, Science Officer! It’s a theory; it’s possible!”

Grade

A+