Star Trek: Start to Finish

Requiem for Methuselah

Requiem for Methuselah (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) gives too much away in the title, but is otherwise excellent.

The crew is suffering from Rigelian Fever, which will kill them all in a few days. They need ryetalyn quickly to make an antidote, and when they land on the only planet within range that’s got it, they’re shot at by a robot drone and threatened by an old guy who owns the place.

But when they threaten him back, he invites them to his house, introduces himself as Flint, offers them all the ryetalyn they need, and even offers to make the antidote for them. As if that weren’t fishy enough, he’s got never-catalogued da Vinci paintings and scores by Brahms and expensive manuscripts. And a hidden girl (there’s always a girl).

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I hesitate to even put this in the spoilers box, because the title already gives it away: this guy has been a live for thousands of years; he can’t die and has collected all this stuff, and claims to have been the historical da Vinci and Brahms. No surprises there, but it is interesting that he’s not an alien or anything; he’s just naturally and inexplicably immortal. He has no idea why and no explanation is given or even tossed out as a possibility.

His relationship with the hidden girl Rayna is more mysterious, and it’s fittingly the axis around which the plot turns. But let’s ignore the Rayna/Flint dynamic and focus on the inevitable Rayna/Kirk dynamic. Kirk meets her briefly for two scenes and is smitten. He loves her, says as much, and when he claims with certainty that she loves him back, she doesn’t argue. Later Flint and Spock both affirm that love. A possibility that I had never even entertained before suddenly hit me:

What if Kirk isn’t just a womanizing wanderer? What if he actually likes these girls? What if he’s just the most lovesick person to ever set foot on a starship, and he just has the best luck at finding people but the worst luck keeping them around? What if Kirk is, in short, a tragic hero, whose capacity for love drives him to greatness, but whose heart is always dashed on the rocks by fate?

That’d be a pretty awesome, moody, interesting character. But I don’t really think that’s who Kirk is. Kirk is a womanizer, he does just wander into relationships and then have no problem taking off, and when things do get serious the universe kindly shatters all possibility of a lasting commitment by conveniently killing off whomever Kirk banged this week.

And the Flint/Rayna bit is interesting, but you’ll have to watch the show for the full details. All I’ve got to say about that is: why is Data so novel, since the universe is apparently teeming with androids?

Now all this is good. Great, even. You get Kirk dealing with who he is, an interesting pair of guests, a neat dynamic between those three, Spock there to support, McCoy there to comment, and a messy, tragic end that leaves almost everyone shattered. But then the last scene is an absolutely perfect capstone, where Spock uses his Vulcan Mind Meld to help Kirk in whatever little way he can, because he knows that his friend needs it. We as an audience are left wondering if he knew by himself or because he listened to McCoy’s fantastic paean to love. We also get to wonder whether Kirk ever finds out. But it’s a wonderful show of mercy (an emotion?) on Spock’s part, and it’s woven so perfectly into the plot that it pulls everything together and emphasizes all the right points.

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Best Bit of Dialog

McCoy: You see, I feel sorrier for you [Spock] than I do for him [Kirk] because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to. The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word love isn’t written into your book.

Grade

A+; easily one of my favorite episodes in a long time, if not the whole series.

That Which Survives

That Which Survives (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is the episode where Mr. Spock is as annoying as he actually would be if you knew him, and you want to punch him in the face. Sadly, no one in this episode does so.

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There is, though, a holographic woman who kills by touch, an artificial planet, a black second-in-command in sickbay and a woman helmsman. There’s the continued confusion over how fast the Enterprise can go before it blows up, and a not-terrible plot. But mostly this episode is completely forgettable.

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Best Dialog

Spock: “Can you give me Warp 8?”
Scotty: “Aye, sir. And maybe a wee bit more. I’ll sit on top of the warp cores meself and nurse them.”
Spock: “That position would not only be unavailing; it would also be undignified.”

Grade

C

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Memory Alpha; Video) is that episode with the people who are half-white and half-black that’s all allegorical.

I don’t really know what to say about this episode. The allegory is so naked, so unsubtle, so ham-fisted that what could be an interesting way to tell a story you couldn’t otherwise tell instead becomes a monotonous slog through an hour.

But I hesitate because I don’t know how much my being fifty years removed from the situation is coloring my perception. How daring a gambit was this when it aired? How far did this push the envelope?

Y’see, these aliens hate each other because they’re black on opposite sides. And their hate is repulsive: they have been chasing each other for 50,000 years to settle old scores. The crew thinks it’s ridiculous, and they want to get back to doing what they’re supposed to do. All that is fine. The little twist ending is fine. Even the silly use godlike powers is fine.

But it’s our old enemy pacing that gets us. This is a ten minute idea played out in a one hour show. There’s nothing interesting that happens after the opening gambit, and the crew literally spends the last ten minutes sitting in the bridge watching monitors as the climax happens to other people. Then they just fly away.

Perhaps that’s the most disturbing part: the crew flat out says that prejudice is a thing of the past, that they have no idea what it’s like, and that the human race has overcome it. Despite being a flat out lie, this inculcates them from learning anything from the experience. The crew is our stand-in as an audience; they represent us in the story. Letting them rise above these petty squabbles without effort allows us to pretend to be able to do likewise. It allows us to enjoy our bigotry while pretending that it doesn’t exist, and that’s all the more poisonous.

How much does our fifty years removal allow us to poisonously pretend the same?

Grade

C-

The Empath (Video; Memory Alpha) is terrible. It’s the old away-team-captured-by-aliens-on-a-planet-that-they-thought-was-abandoned schtick, complete with big-headed aliens performing a mysterious experiment.

Added to the boring retread is the fact that they use the term “empath” completely incorrectly. The titular empath doesn’t feel others’ emotions, but instead takes their injuries upon herself and heals them. She very literally “feels their pain,” but in so doing takes that pain from them, and then within seconds heals from it herself. That’s neat, but that’s not what an empath is.

And further, it undermines the entire episode. The big-headed aliens are trying to teach her to be self-sacrificing, and to do so they make Kirk, McCoy, and Spock offer their own lives or each other. But the crew is in actual danger when they do so; the Empath seems none the worse for wear after she does her injury-transferral trick. So the lesson should be “this is of no cost to you; do it all the time.”

And then there’s the terrible, terrible writing. The dialog is flat, and McCoy spends the entire time spouting expository technobabble that only barely makes sense. The aliens aren’t threatening or interesting or menacing, because they’re too busy being mysterious. And the twist ending is predictable and lame while also being more like a “keep left” than a real twist.

Favorites

This was DeForrest Kelley’s favorite episode. The Devil in the Dark was Shatner’s. The stars of the show pick the worst episodes to love.

Grade

D

Plato’s Stepchildren

Plato’s Stepchildren (Video; Memory Alpha) are immortal humanoids who have built Plato’s Republic after visiting Earth millennia ago and settling on a rogue planet that escaped the nova of its star. They need a doctor and McCoy fits the bill.

This episode has a whole lot of good in it, and a sizable dosage of silliness. On balance it works, but only just.

Thirty-one of the Platonians possess powerful telekinetic powers, with varying levels of ability. The dwarf Alexander is the only one who lacks the power, and he is treated as a slave by the others. This leads quite naturally into the standard Star Trek get-the-outsider-on-your-side story line where the crew beats the odds by using the disaffected society member’s access to break the hold of the overlords. And surprisingly, they don’t do it. Alexander (played brilliantly by Michael Dunn) wants none of the power, for he has tasted its downside for hundreds of years and refuses to be like his oppressors.

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Instead, after lots of Kirk and Spock doing ridiculous dances and movements, the crew figures out the source of the power and attains it themselves. Alexander is apparently fine with his friends using the power– they even use it on him– which is dissonant but not impossible to believe.

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The Kiss

This is also the episode where Kirk and Uhura share the first televised interracial kiss (which Shatner stole from Nimoy because he’s a blowhard). But what struck me was that the scene features two kisses– Uhura gets kissed, but so does Nurse Chapel. Uhura and Nurse Chapel are both played by actresses who got their roles in the show because they were sleeping with Gene Roddenberry. That they both get kissed on the planet whose inhabitants can move them about like puppets had a few too many undertones for me.

Grade

A-. This is a solid episode with a strong plot and some great acting.

Day of the Dove

The Day of the Dove (HD Video; Memory Alpha) starts with Kirk getting punched in the face by a Klingon, and quickly goes downhill from there.

Best part

The Klingon Captain Kang is played by the Technomage from B5.

Worst part

Basically everything else in the episode. There’s some terrible sword fighting, Klingons in blackface, a being that’s crazy powerful but stupidly scared, a total lack of backstory, a simple plot mechanic with no twist, and a sixties pean to race relations that’s so guileless it doesn’t even pretend to be anything else.

Grade

D

Specre of the Gun

Spectre of the Gun (HD Video; Memory Alpha) is like distilled TOS. There’s a new civilization to contact, a warning ignored, a confounding obstacle involving godlike powers, and a simple solution waiting to be found that makes everything all better just in time for the closing credits.

Awesome Dialog (Part I)

[Checkov is making out with the illusion of a girl]
Kirk: Uhm… Mr Checkov?
Checkov: What can I do, Captain? You know we’re always supposed to maintain good relations with the natives.

Awesome Dialog (Part II)

Kirk: How did you manage to test it?
McCoy: It wasn’t necessary; it’s simple; nothing could go wrong.
Kirk: Up ‘til now, everything has gone wrong!

Awesome Dialog (Part III)

Scotty: [Takes a drink of bourbon] It’s to kill the pain.
Spock: But this is painless.
Scotty: Well, you should’ve warned me sooner, Mister Spock. Fire away.

Grade

A. This is a solid episode, if a little on the silly side, and it has a slew of awesome dialog.

And the Children Shall Lead

And the Children Shall Lead (Video; Memory Alpha) is a neat idea that runs out of steam before the credits and then flails about being boring for forty more minutes.

The nugget of goodness is that an evil spirit has convinced the children on the new colony of Triacus to kill their parents and then take over the galaxy, using the Enterprise as their transport. The spirit gives the kids powers and they chant creepy things and look odd.

I would start a spoilers block here, but there are no spoilers in this episode: eventually Kirk figures out how to turn the kids and wins the day. But it takes him an entire episode of wandering around the ship and seeing people do crazy things before he tries, because “they’re children!”

This episode has Kirk ignoring a blatant threat to the ship, McCoy disappearing into sick bay and not participating in the plot, and Spock being completely unhelpful in bothering to explain how any of this makes any sense at all.

It’d be okay if the kids were hiding something that kept the spirit alive and Kirk had to find the McGuffin, but they’re not. It’d be okay if the spirit could be extracted from the kids and we could see progress as each kid is freed and the plot unfurls, but that’s not the case. It’d be okay if the opposite happened, and the plot slowly reached tentacles into the crew, but it’s not.

What I’m trying to say is that this is a mediocre episode completely ruined by pacing (back to our old nemesis) and a lack of an explanation.

Summary Quote

McCoy: They’re crying, Jim. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s good to see.
[We saw how it happened, and it didn’t make any sense to us, anyway. But it is good to see, because it means that this episode is over.]

Grade

D-

By Any Other Name

By Any Other Name (Memory Alpha; Video) finds the crew responding to a distress call on a strange planet with a purple sky. Why is it always a purple sky?

Suddenly, two pastel-clad people walk onto the soundstage.

Rojan: It was very kind of you to respond to our call so quickly, Captain. Now, you will surrender your ship to me.
Kirk: You have a very strange sense of humor, Mr…? [Rojan hits a button; Kirk is frozen into a living statue!]

Oh, no! Rojan is a bad guy from Andromeda who’s leading a scouting party so that his empire can invade! But why is the scouting party stranded on this rock?

Kirk: What happened to your ship?
Rojan: There is an energy barrier at the rim of your galaxy.
Kirk: [With Total Non-Challance] Yes, I know; we’ve been there.

That was the day Kirk leveled up in awesome.

There’s a lot of stuff in this episode, including death by cubism, vulcan hibernation, the first mention of the ship being powered by a matter/antimatter engine, and Scotty drinking an alien under the table. It’s all good fun.

Scotty: I found this in Gannymere. Er, Gannygun. Ganny– ganny– ganny- Gannymede.
Alien: Well, what is it?
Scotty: It’s a… uh… a. It’s green.

But there’s no real substance here. It’s the standard win-by-pointing-out-your-seemingly-invincible-enemy’s-psychological-flaws plotline, which has been done better elsewhere in the series.

One curious note: the aliens modify the Enterprise so she can go somewhere past Warp 11, and can make the trip to the Andromeda galaxy in a mere three hundred years. At the end, there is no indication that they would remove that modification. So is the Enterprise the fastest ship in the Federation by a few orders or magnitude?

(And why didn’t they just teleport the alien’s power projector into space while they sped along at Warp 11?)

Grade

B+

Return to Tomorrow

Return to Tomorrow (Memory Alpha; SD Video) finds the crew of our favorite starship lured by a powerful distress beacon to a dead world, where a disembodied voice who identifies himself as Sargon tells them that, though he is long dead, the crew must help preserve what is left of him or all mankind will perish.

It’s all happiness and roses.

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Sargon and two others kept their minds alive in an elaborate underground bunker when their race destroyed themselves. Now, half a million years later, they want to borrow three human bodies and construct themselves new, robot bodies to live in.

Why didn’t they build robot bodies instead of the elaborate underground bunker? That’s an excellent question.

But the one who borrows Spock’s body does not want to be a robot; he wants a living body. So he plots to kill Sargon and escape.

Why doesn’t he just jump into the robot for now, escape later, and do his shenanigans out of sight of Sargon? That’s an excellent question, too.

Now it’s up to the crew to… watch, pretty much, as the three duke it out and the major characters play no role in the rest of the episode.

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For all that, the idea of this episode is interesting, and provides the characters with a great excuse to show their science side. As Kirk says,

Kirk: Risk. Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.

It also gives Nimoy a chance to shine playing a baddie, which he does far too well to do it so rarely. He has this perfect smirk that drips uncaring malice, while still making you like the guy because it’s so obvious that he’s just doing exactly what he most wants to do in the world. And as a contrast to the normally staid Spock, the condescending Henoch is a perfect foil.

Best bit of ironic dialog

Spock: Captain, I do wish to inspect whatever this is that lived that long ago.
Kirk: I would like to have my science officer with me on something as unusual as this, but it is full of unknowns and we can’t risk both of us being off the ship.

Best bit of totally silly dialog

[With no context] All readings are off the charts, Captain.

Grade

B+