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
Obsession (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is really, really good.
The Enterprise is looking for tritanium when they stumble upon a monster made of mist. It kills by sucking all the red blood corpuscules out of the victim, and it’s crazy quick. And Kirk has seen it before.
The first half of this episode deals with Kirk’s Ahab-like quest to kill the thing. He can’t explain why, but he knows that the thing is alive and intelligent. McCoy and Spock are so confused by his irrational behavior that they consider relieving him of duty. This upside-down interplay between the three primary characters makes this episode so radically different than any other episode that it’s a welcome and refreshing change of pace.
This episode is also just leaps and bounds better than the normal episode on a technical level. The lighting is more pronounced, upping the contrast visually and making everything more pronounced. The camera angles are tighter, giving the episode a unique claustrophobic feeling that pulls you into the characters as they struggle with what’s going on around them. And the writing is spot on:
Spock: “I need your advice.”
McCoy: “Then I need a drink.”
Spock: “I do not understand your reasoning.”
McCoy: “You need advice from me? You must be kidding.”
The acting, as always, could use a little work. It’s the weakest link in the chain, here, with Shatner giving his usual uneven performance. In some scenes you can sense that confusion and obsession; in others he plays it too heavy and just shouts it. (He’s also looking a little heavy in this episode.) But the acting is better than average, especially from Kelley, who hits the conflicted but determined note just right.
Grade
A+
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.
The Enterprise finds entire star systems destroyed, and in the middle of one is the battered hulk of the Constellation, sister ship to the Enterprise. The Constellation had a run in with The Doomsday Machine (Memory Alpha; SD Video).
This episode is pretty good, but it’s the same old structure.
There are two things that stand out here. One is really good and one is really bad.
We get an interesting character in Commodore Decker (here playing the role of ‘unhelpful native’), and he’s well acted. He has a pathos that’s easily accessible and a stubbornness that’s at once abhorrent and altogether understandable. He is, unlike many walk-on parts in the show, a character that you can believe is a real person when they’re not onscreen.
But we also get a big, not-in-any-way-subtle reference to nuclear war. The Doomsday Machine is repeatedly likened to “H-Bombs:” a weapon you’re never supposed to use, even if you build it. Except that’s about the only thing they have in common. The H-Bomb is meant as a deterrent, and works incredibly poorly as anything else. It’s a one-shot device. It isn’t particularly useful if you want to fight a real war. But the Doomsday device is none of those things: it’s a capital ship in it’s own right that repeatedly attacks, is nigh indestructible and nearly unstoppable. If you could build this device, you could either build things to destroy it, or build manned ships so that you’d never use it.
A couple points on Starfleet regulations:
- The ship’s doctor should, like a navy ship’s doctor, have the ability to force the captain off duty if they start acting crazy. So should the XO.
- Kirk walks around the bridge to ask questions of each person. Why? He’s got a chair. It even swivels.
- The Captain shouldn’t be on every single landing party.
- When transporting into a dangerous situation, send an ensign first, and then the bigwigs.
- Backup systems are important. A second transporter would be great. Oh, what’s that? They have a second transporter in some episodes? Yeah.
Grade
B+
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 Changeling (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is a thoroughly mediocre robot-of-doom episode.
It’s remarkable only because it happens right after I talked about Uhura lacking substantive roles, and here she gets something approaching an actual part. She still plays the damsel-in-distress, and she’s still a second-tier character, but it’s more than her usual fare. She gets a little drama, and we learn a little about her, and that’s more than we’ve gotten up to now.
Grade
B
The Devil in the Dark (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is your standard monster of the week episode: Janus VI is a sparsely-populated mining colony and the miners are dying, eaten alive by chemical spew. The Enterprise is called in, and searches for the monster. They find it, they hurt it. There’s a little twist that they foreshadow heavily, and the episode ends with gumdrops and rainbows. There is no content to discuss, and no subtext to plumb.
Grade
D; it does what it does well, it’s just that what it does is kind of lame.
I’ve been thinking for some time that it would be fun to watch Star Trek from beginning to end: every episode of every series, and each movie. I’ve seen some of them before, but it’s not in any way exhaustive. I thought it’d be fun to record my reactions as I watch, and this is where I’ll do so. But I’m warning you: I’m busy, so this won’t be a quick process.
I just watched The Man Trap (Wikipedia; HD Video), which was the first Star Trek episode ever aired. I watched on CBS’s website on their Star Trek Remastered series; since the original series was shot on film they can go back and bring out a lot of quality in the images, and let me just say that they’ve done a terrific job of it. The clarity and color quality are impressive, even if they do show off those cheesy backgrounds.
But the backgrounds I was expecting. The quality of the script kind of blew me away. This was not just trash sci-fi; it wasn’t junk. It was predictable, but I think that’s more because Star Trek has become such an archetype. This is a monster-of-the-week episode, but it dealt with love and extinction and giving up and loyalty.
And it had some gems of dialog. At one point Kirk looks at the recluse scientist and scolds him “You bleed too much, Crater. You’re too pure and noble.” That sounds absurd on it’s face, but in that context and at that time it’s perfect, and all the more so for the absurdity.
I’m looking forward to the next episode.
