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).
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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.
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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+
