Star Trek: Start to Finish

The Lights Of Zetar

• The Lights Of Zetar* (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) takes the crew to Memory Alpha, namesake of the Star Trek Wikia. But before they get there, a mysterious storm of lights crosses their path and makes the obligitorily beautiful visiting expert feint!

And wouldn’t you know it but the storm did a number on Memory Alpha, too. And it’s gonna come back to finish the job on the Enterprise unless the crew can figure out a way to stop them!

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The lights are the last remnants of Zetar: a collection of noncorporeal echoes of the last survivors of that planet. And they’re slowly taking over the body of Lt. Mira Romaine, whose love of learning is matched only by her love of Scotty. Yes, Scotty.

This episode almost has a nice little freedom speech about the remnant versus Mira, and it almost has a nice discussion on identity, and it almost has a clever solution to destroying a life form native to space, but it lets the ideas wither on the vine and does the life-saving without explaining why it works. The result is an episode that needed one more draft to really shine, but instead just feels like a good idea badly done.

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Grade

B-

Wolf in the Fold

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.

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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.

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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