Well that break didn’t last long. I found myself pondering what to watch on a spare Friday evening and my hand drifted to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first movie entry in the series and the first new Star Trek since the TV series ended in 1969, ten years earlier. I remember this movie with some fondness, because it was the first Star Trek I got to see in first release, and on the big screen to boot. I remember being immersed in the wonder of spaceships and the pretty visuals. Being only a kid at the time I think the story was mostly lost on me.

And that’s kind of how it appears in the canon now, in the ripeness of time. It’s a luscious visual feast and a nostalgic return to something already loved, but not a strong piece of film in its own right. It plods along and is cerebral rather than exciting. I have the Director’s Edition DVD (one of several recuts of the film to make it work better), which runs to 141 minutes on PAL (it’d be a solid 2 and a half hours on NTSC). The first 2 minutes and 50 seconds of that is an orchestral overture accompanied by a receding starfield image and nothing else. It feels like attending a concert. And I remember being grossly disappointed by that music when I first heard it in the cinema. I was hoping for a rendition of the theme from the TV series, but instead I got this… foreign, unfamiliar music. But that theme is now intimately familiar, as it was used as the theme music for Star Trek The Next Generation. And watching the movie again, I have to say that Jerry Goldsmith’s music is one of the highlights of the film. It’s given prominence by the many scenes in which nothing happens but panning and sweeping shots of space exteriors to the accompaniment of the music. You could almost close your eyes watching this film and enjoy it as much.

The overture eventually ends and we are treated to and opening scene of three Klingon vessels attacking a mysterious space cloud thing. Klingons!! Awesome, I remember, when I was that excited kid in the cinema seeing this for the first time. The movie was going to be a huge space shoot-out between Klingons and Captain Kirk on the Enterprise! What’s not to love?! (I was prejudiced somewhat by the recently released Star Wars, 2 years earlier.) Except it didn’t turn out that way. The Klingons are merely there to show how impossibly powerful and impervious this cloud thing is, as it destroys them each without lifting a cloudy muscle. The Klingons, by the way, are the first appearance of the modern brow-ridged variety, and look much cooler than the Klingons ever looked in the TV series.

There’s a scene of Spock on Vulcan, apparently failing some sort of ceremonial logic thingy. We switch to Starfleet Headquarters, which apparently has taken over the Presidio in San Francisco, where Kirk is revealed to be an Admiral, but is heading up to the newly refitted Enterprise to take command, as the hostile cloud thingy is headed straight for Earth. Kirk beams up to an orbital station – the transporters have been upgraded with late-1970s special effects and now take twice as long to do their job. We are treated to a full four and a half minutes of orchestral starship strip-tease as Scotty takes Kirk over to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft, flying lovingly around the Enterprise in a sensual manner.

Kirk relieves Captain Decker of his command, setting up the only real tension in the movie. The crew are rushing to get the ship ready for departure, and not all the systems are working yet. This is demonstrated when Starfleet tries to beam science officer Sonak and another crew member directly on board, only for them to get mangled. In a welcome return, Janice Rand is now the transporter chief. When she gets the contraption working properly, the last crew member to beam aboard is a bearded and reluctant McCoy, who complains about having been drafted back into service. With his beard and giant gold pendant around his neck, he looks more like a Bee Gee than a doctor, dammit! Another crew member is the exotic Deltan navigator Ilia, who makes a bizarre comment about having an oath of celibacy on record with Starfleet. This makes sense when you know the back-story given in the novelisation (which I had and read, though it took me some years to figure out what “celibacy” meant) about Deltans producing human-affecting pheromones and being so sexually advanced that any human having sex with a Deltan would be consumed by addictive lust – but none of that is ever mentioned in the film, making it weird and inexplicable.

34 and a half minutes into the film, the Enterprise finally gets underway, with another 2 minutes of visual starship porn. A very cool feature of this Enterprise is that it is not lit by some mysterious ambient lighting that pervades space and conveniently illuminates space ships. It’s dark, and lit only by an appropriately directional light from the sun and exterior running lights. The ship looks fantastic. It heads out at Warp 0.5, passing Jupiter in 1.8 hours (which implies Warp 0.5 is about a quarter the speed of light). The problem is when they try the warp engines, which haven’t been tested since the refit. They produce a wormhole and the ship is in danger of being destroyed by an asteroid. Kirk tries to fire phasers, but Decker overrules him and uses a torpedo to destroy the asteroid, explaining later that the phasers now go through the warp drive, so wouldn’t have worked. 1-1 Kirk-Decker. McCoy is straight into his most important role – not doctor, but advisor to Kirk, telling not to push people so hard. It’s now that you become acutely aware that something is missing from the old team: Spock.

Cue the appearance of a mysterious long-range shuttle, which deposits Spock, fresh from Vulcan. He fixes the engines, then explains how he felt a “mind” calling to him from the mystery cloud. As they approach the cloud, Spock becomes more contemplative. The cloud fires at the Enterprise, injuring nobody but Chekov as his panel explodes. Another shot will destroy them, but Spock notices the cloud is using frequencies of “a million megahertz” (i.e. terahertz radiation), and broadcasts friendship messages at that frequency, which halts the attack. They spend another half an hour of screen time flying into the depths of the cloud, past lots of cool scenery. Eventually the cloud gets bored and probes the Enterprise, disintegrating Ilia. She reappears as a robotic reconstruction, assigned to investigate the “carbon units” (i.e. life forms) on board Enterprise. Decker draws the short straw of showing robo-Ilia around.

Spock leaves the ship in a space suit to try to meld with the cloud’s mind, and comes back half dead, but with a story about it being perfectly logical, but with no sense of who it is. The cloud is curious and naive. Robo-Ilia says the cloud is named V’ger, and V’ger demands information about its creator, which for some reason it thinks is on Earth. If its creator does not respond, it will destroy all the carbon units on Earth. In typical style, Kirk bluffs, saying he needs to talk to V’ger personally to explain why the creator hasn’t responded. Robo-Ilia takes him, McCoy, Spock, and Decker out of the ship, across a Giant’s Causeway of hexagonal blocks, to a dilapidated but eerily familiar looking space probe. Kirk reads the name plate: “V—GER”, and brushes off the dirt to reveal “VOYAGER 6”, an Earth probe launched in the 20th century and lost into “what they used to call a black hole”. Apparently its programming was corrupted and it returned to Earth to seek what it thought was its creator and destroy everything else. Shades of Nomad, from the TV episode “The Changeling“, anyone? Anyway, they try transmitting the download code to V’ger, but it burns its own wiring out, forcing the creator to physically reconnect it and join with V’ger. Decker volunteers and melds with Robo-Ilia in a symbolic rebirth thing, leaving just the Enterprise and a saved Earth to fade into the end credits.

It’s not a bad story. It’s just… watching it is a very… leisurely experience. There are several nice scenes. The music is good and the special effects are very nice for the 1970s. The story makes more sense in the novelisation, where it actually has some exposition. There are themes that could have been explored here – the relations between the power trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in particular – that aren’t developed until the following films. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great. About the same as a mid-range TV episode – about the same as “The Changeling”, in fact.

Tropes: Kicked Upstairs, Leave The Camera Running, Teleporter Accident, Mandatory Unretirement, Our Wormholes Are Different, Putting The Band Back Together, Russian Guy Suffers Most, Robot Girl, Machine Monotone, Recycled Script, Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence.
Body count: Crew of three Klingon battle cruisers, entire personnel of Epsilon IX station (all vapourised by V’ger), Commander Sonak, unnamed female crew member (both mutated in transporter accident), Lieutenant Ilia (zapped by V’ger), Commander Decker (officially listed as “missing”).

“Turnabout Intruder” is the last episode of Star Trek, and what a dismal ending.

Kirk meets yet another old flame from his academy days, Dr Janice Lester, part of an archaeological expedition on some planet that sends a distress call. Lester is ill, but as soon as she and Kirk are alone she activates an alien device that swaps her mind with that of Kirk’s. It turns out she is insane with envy of Kirk’s starship captain position, and resentment of the fact that (in her mind) it was because she is a woman that she could not succeed as well as Kirk.

The rest of the episode is spent with William Shatner hamming it up as the mind of an insane woman in Kirk’s body. “Kirk” uses his authority to have “Lester” (with Kirk’s mind) safely sedated in sick bay, but “Lester” manages to talk to Spock and convinces him that it’s Kirk’s mind inside. Spock can’t convince anyone else though, and “Kirk” organises a court martial for mutiny. McCoy and Scotty don’t know what to make of the situation, though the fact that “Kirk” is suddenly clearly bug-nuts insane in between filing his nails should ring some bells. And all the time there’s this rippling 1960s-style sexist undercurrent that Lester lost it because she could never be as powerful as a man, and couldn’t accept that like other women. It seems like in the Star Trek universe women can have positions of power, but Lester seems to blame her own incompetence on the “fact” that they can’t – so it’s a rather mixed message here.

There could have been a dramatic ending, but it’s deus ex machinaed away by the expedient of Lester going even more insane and losing her grip on Kirk’s body, so the mind swap simply wears off. It’s a lame ending to an uncomfortable story, about the only redeeming feature of which (by which I mean so-bad-it’s-funny) is Shatner’s positively loopy over-acting.

Well, it’s been a long ride through all the episodes, and what a downer to end on, but there were definite highlights along the way. I’m not sure if I’ll continue with any more of these sort of reviews. I might have a few months off and then see what I feel like watching.

Tropes: Grand Theft Me, Driven By Envy, I Just Want To Be You, Female Misogynist, Large Ham, Evil Is Hammy, Kangaroo Court, Anti-Mutiny, Axe Crazy, Different For Girls, Values Dissonance, Stay In The Kitchen, Deus Ex Machina, Reset Button Ending.
Body count: None!

“All Our Yesterdays” is an episode I remember well because I had the Fotonovel version of it when I was a kid. Watching it again was actually pleasant, because of the feeling of nostalgia, and the fact that I think this is a decent episode.

It starts with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beaming down to a planet that is about to get destroyed by its sun going nova in a few hours (timed to the minute by the Enterprise, apparently). There’s supposed to be a large native population without spaceflight technology, but they seem to have all vanished. In a library, they find only one old man, Atoz, and a couple of his clones, who keep talking cryptically about hurrying up and getting to safety. Kirk never sits the guy down and asks him a straight question to find out what happened to everyone, so this part is a bit farcical, but it does build the mystery.

The library is full of memory discs, which show images of the planet’s history. While viewing one, Kirk hears a woman calling for help from through an archway, and of course races off to investigate. Spock and McCoy follow hot on his heels. Kirk appears in a street populated by people out of witch hunt Salem, and fights off some ruffians who are harassing a woman. Spock and McCoy appear in a snowy wilderness. They can talk to each other, but can’t get back to the library. Kirk gets into a sword fight, and is captured and thrown into a cell, where a prosecutor comes to accuse him of witchcraft. Meanwhile, McCoy starts freezing to death (despite Spock being the one from a hot planet and unused to the cold) and he and Spock trudge through the snow until they meet a mysterious figure clad in furs. It turns out to be a beautiful woman named Zarabeth, who Spock starts falling in love with when she strips down to a few strategically placed scraps of leather.

The story makes little sense to this point, but suddenly the pieces start falling into place. Kirk mentions to the prosecutor that he came from the library, and the prosecutor lets slip that he knows about it. He explains that everyone fled the nova through a time portal, so they could live out their lives in their own planet’s history. Spock and McCoy must have gone to a different time period because they were looking at a different memory disc. The prosecutor explains Kirk can never go back because his molecular structure has been changed by a machine in the library to suit the new time he is in, but when Kirk says he underwent no such process, the prosecutor tells him he must hurry back or die. He takes Kirk to the portal and Kirk finds his way back, where Atoz is most upset and tries to keep pushing him back through.

Kirk orders Atoz to locate the ice age disc so he can get Spock and McCoy back. But in the ice age, the normally vegetarian Spock is eating meat and kissing Zarabeth and getting mad at McCoy, who keeps insisting they try to get back. Zarabeth says they can’t go back, and Spock meekly agrees. McCoy argues that Spock is losing his logical mind because they’re 5000 years in the past, when Vulcans were still savages. This is a cool bit of storytelling logic, but it would have made more sense if Spock’s molecular structure had been altered to match 5000 years ago. Anyway, McCoy convinces Spock to look for the portal, conveniently just as Kirk locates the right disc, and they return to the present after a sad farewell to Zarabeth. Atoz dashes into the portal, and the crew beam back and warp out just before the sun explodes.

There are some plot holes, including the fact that Atoz keeps trying to push Kirk through the portal without adjusting his molecular structure, and the whole miscommunication thing with him. But those aside, I really like this episode. It has mystery, drama, conflict, a cool use of time travel, and it kinda makes sense. I call this one a winner from season 3.

Tropes: Literary Allusion Title, Ancient Keeper, Cloning Blues, Portal Door, Flynning, Changed My Jumper, Burn The Witch, Girl Of The Week, Fur Bikini, Cool Gate, Trapped In The Past, Temporal Sickness, Get Back To The Future, Veganopia, Meat Versus Veggies.
Body count: None!

“The Savage Curtain” is another episode I didn’t remember any details of until after I started watching it, and then it was not until about halfway through that I remembered the remaining major plot elements. It starts with the Enterprise surveying a dull and supposedly lifeless volcanic planet, only to find Abraham Lincoln, complete in monumental chair, appear on their viewscreen as if floating in space. He asks to be beamed aboard, and Kirk displays an odd reverence for what is presumably an alien trick by according “Lincoln” full presidential honours. There’s an interesting point when Lincoln asks if they still measure time in minutes, and Kirk says “we can convert”.

After some time filling byplay on board, Kirk, Spock, and Lincoln beam down to a mysteriously habitable area on the planet, where they meet Surak, a similarly long dead and revered Vulcan. The jig is revealed to be an experiment by one of the natives of the planet, a semi-omnipotent being made of rock. It wishes to understand the strange carbon-based concepts of “good” and “evil”. Of course, what better way to do this than to arrange an involuntary battle to the death between representatives of both sides!? (That’s an average of 2.33 involuntary battles to the death per season of Star Trek!) Ranged against kirk, Spock, Lincoln, and Surak are Genghis Khan and three fictional evil dudes (though one is a dudette). When Kirk objects and refuses to fight, the rock alien threatens the Enterprise with destruction unless they play along.

In the opening fist fight before the factions retreat to build weapons, Spock once again gets to fight the girl. Given time to discuss and plan, Lincoln argues they should fight dirty, citing his experience as a wartime President and arguing that anything goes as long as good wins. Surak argues otherwise and wants to go talk peace with the evil guys, insisting it is the only way. When he inevitably gets captured, Lincoln bravely goes to the rescue. When he inevitably gets captured, Kirk and Spock bravely go to the rescue. Lincoln warns them it’s a trap before getting a spear in the back, then Kirk and Spock duke it out one last time, managing to kill the evil leader, which causes the other three to flee. The rock alien pronounces judgement, saying that there’s no difference between good and evil as far as it can see. Kirk points out that they were fighting to save their comrades, while the baddies were fighting for power. The rock alien dismisses them, apparently learning nothing at all from its experiment.

The ending is really rushed and pointless, which seems wrong given the padding at the front of the episode. They could have restructured it to make it hold together better, but there’s probably not much point as it’s pretty uninspiring stuff that smells like reheated plots from a half-dozen other episodes.

Tropes: Two Of Your Earth Minutes, Famous, Famous, Fictional, Sufficiently Advanced Alien, Starfish Aliens, Blue And Orange Morality, Involuntary Battle To The Death, Archived Army, Would Hit A Girl, Reluctant Warrior, Actual Pacifist, Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, Voice Changeling, Dirty Coward.
Body count: Surak, Abraham Lincoln (both killed by the evil guys).

“The Cloud Minders” is another anvilicious episode along the lines of “Let That be Your Last Battlefield”. The moral here is again anti-prejudice and discrimination, played out between an elite ruling class and a lowly working class. Literally lowly, in an almost painful piece of symbolism, as the rulers live in the beautiful cloud city of Stratos, while the workers (called Troglytes) toil in the mines on the surface of the planet Ardana.

The Enterprise is there to collect supplies of the mineral zenite, which is the only cure for a plague threatening to wipe out all vegetation on some other planet. Kirk and Spock ignore the Ardanian request to beam down to their clod city, and instead go to the mines, where they are attacked by disgruntled Troglytes led by Vanna, who Spock gets to fight in a rare case of the crew fighting hand to hand with a woman. The High Advisor of Ardana, Plasus, rescues Kirk and Spock with a security team and takes them up to the safety of the city, which is all crystal spires and togas, setting up the urban segregation of this crapsaccharine world.

Here they meet Plasus’ daughter, Droxine, who wears a startlingly revealing light blue outfit that has Spock going google-eyed in a most out-of-character way, complete with some cringeworthy flirting dialogue. There’s some revelation of the plight of the Troglytes and bigoted dismissal of concern by Plasus, leading to a persecuted Troglyte jumping off the city and plummeting to his death. Spock goes all introspective, weighing up the beauty of Droxine against the ugliness of the society she inhabits. There’s even a Gilligan cut of Plasus assuring Kirk there is no violence in their society, followed by a shot of him torturing a captured Troglyte.

There’s a subplot about the Troglytes being exposed to an intelligence reducing gas from the zenite mines, which is part of the justification the cloud dwellers use for persecuting them. Kirk deals with Vanna, offering her gas masks to allow the Troglytes to grow to their full potential. Plasus is naturally opposed and there’s a standoff in the mines and all the drama and action basically happens crammed into the last 5 minutes of the episode, where it feels very rushed. Phew…

It’s a pretty lame episode. The moral is worthy, but it’s heavy-handed, and developed in annoying ways. Spock’s character is almost completely subverted as he basically turns into a lovestruck moron. Kirk interferes with a Federation member’s government with impunity. The plot idea is actually kind of good, but it’s not treated right.

Tropes: Anvilicious, Unobtainium, The Plague, Would Hit A Girl, Crystal Spires And Togas, Urban Segregation, Crapsaccharine World, The President’s Daughter, Theiss Titillation Theory, Character Derailment, Gilligan Cut, Agony Beam, Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right.
Body count: One Troglyte (suicide by jumping from Stratos).

“The Way to Eden“… and so we move from one of the best episodes of season 3 to one of the worst. It has space hippies and six, count them… six groovy musical numbers, including Spock playing along while the hippies and Enterprise crew dance.

The hippies arrive on the Enterprise after being rescued from a stolen ship. They are seeking the mythical paradise planet of Eden, and behave in a very 1960s anti-authoritarian way, including some far out slang. Spock, weirdly enough, is the only crew member who gets along with them, as we see his spiritual side and curiosity come out. He also pulls out a Vulcan harp to jam with the hippies and their wacky musical instruments. During one of the musical numbers, we see Sulu on the bridge tapping his toes and grooving to the rhythms, implying that they are broadcasting them throughout the ship for no apparent reason.

The story, as far as it goes, is that the leader of the hippies (though he refuses to be called a leader, saying that they are all equals) is the previously respected Dr Sevrin, a former professor of acoustics, who has rejected civilisation and wishes to find Eden where they can all live in harmony. McCoy finds in a medical examination that Sevrin is a carrier of a fatal infectious disease, which Sevrin denies exists in a deniariffic act of denying denial. McCoy wants to isolate Sevrin lest he infect his followers or anyone else he comes into contact with, which upsets the hippies. (While confined, we even see the brig guard toe-tapping to the piped music from the hippie/Spock jam session.) One of the hippies is an old flame of Chekov’s and there’s a minor subplot about how they don’t understand one another any more.

Of course, Sevrin escapes and the hippies take over the ship from auxiliary control, disabling the main bridge with ridiculous ease. Sevrin uses a sonic attack to cripple any resistance and takes the ship on a wild ride through the Galaxy until they find a planet that he claims is Eden. How he knows this is anyone’s guess. The hippies steal a shuttlecraft and go down to the planet, which looks nice enough when Kirk and Spock go down to chase them. There is a comment about Sulu being interested in botany – the first we hear about that since way back in season 1. But the beautiful vegetation is acidic and poisonous, and the hippie Adam and then Sevrin die after eating some of the fruit. Eden is an illusion, and the remaining hippies are left to find their own way again.

Wow, it’s just a horrible episode. The hippies are straight out of the 60s, just dressed in wacky space clothes variants of hippie garb. The musical numbers are obvious filler. The Enterprise operational procedures and security make no sense whatsoever. Kill me now!!

Tropes: Musical Episode, Pleasure Planet, Future Slang, Xenophone, Cult Colony, Typhoid Mary, Science Is Bad, Selective Obliviousness, New Old Flame, Cardboard Prison, Brown Note, Poison Is Corrosive, Death World, Reactionary Fantasy, No New Fashions In The Future, Filler.
Body count: Adam, Dr Sevrin (both from eating poisonous fruit).

“Requiem for Methuselah” is something of a take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and so shares some similarities with that other classic of science fiction, Forbidden Planet. It begins with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beaming down to a supposedly uninhabited planet to find a source of ryetalyn, which they need to cure a lethal outbreak of Rigellian fever on board the Enterprise. (At first I thought the drug they were talking about was Ritalin!)

On the planet they are attacked by a robot (shades of Robby, or Ariel/Caliban), and saved by an old man calling himself Flint (shades of Morbius, or Prospero). He first angrily orders them to leave, but changes his tone when Kirk insists at phaser-point on finding a cure for the fever. Flint invites them to his home while the robot, M-4, gathers and processes the ryetalyn in a technicolour science lab. Is his amazingly well-appointed home (he even has a flat-screen TV!), Spock is amazed to see what are apparently original works by Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and other famous historical artists. In a turnabout, Kirk is concerned with science (the ryetalyn), while Spock is preoccupied with art. Kirk is equally amazed to see the beautiful Rayna (shades of Altaira, or Miranda), Flint’s young ward, who he immediately begins seducing. He dances with her as Spock plays an original piano composition written in the unmistakeable hand of Brahms. Although beautiful, Rayna is probably the most clothing-covered girl of the week yet seen in the series.

Things are looking good until McCoy reports that M-4 has botched the ryetalyn and M-4 decides to try killing Kirk. He phasers it, and Flint appears to apologise. Suspicious now, they search behind a forbidden door that Rayna had indicated earlier, finding primitive versions of Rayna, now revealed to be an android! Not only The Tempest, but also Pygmalion! And Flint is revealed to actually be Leonardo, and Shakespeare, and Brahms, and thousands of years old!

It turns out Flint has created Rayna to be his companion and assuage his immortal loneliness, but needed Kirk to stir her emotions so that she would be a real woman. Rayna enters the forbidden room and discovers the secret about her own creation, turning her against Flint as he talks to Kirk about her in the third person while she is present. Kirk and Flint fight and Rayna is so torn between her loyalties that her circuits overload and she dies. Kirk and Flint are both shocked. Flint, now distraught and alone, lets them leave with the ryetalyn. Kirk is depressed too, having fallen in love with Rayna. In the closing scene, Spock uses a mind meld on Kirk as he sleeps, and says the word, “Forget…” – a touching variant on the famous “Remember” line he would utter at the end of The Wrath of Khan.

I really enjoyed this episode. The story is decent, the mystery is intriguing, the revelation is clever, and the execution is pretty well done. This is definitely one of the best episodes of season 3, IMO.

Tropes: The Plague, Technicolour Science, Girl Of The Week, Forbidden Fruit, Robotic Reveal, Robot Girl, Pygmalion Plot, Julius Beethoven Da Vinci, Beethoven Was An Alien Spy, Really 700 Years Old, Who Wants To Live Forever?, Disney Dog Fight, Logic Bomb, The Dulcinea Effect, Laser Guided Amnesia.
Body count: 3 Enterprise crew form Rigellian fever pre-credits, Rayna.

“The Lights of Zetar” is an episode I remember primarily from the Star Trek bubble gum collector cards I had when I was a kid (card #82 in the linked set). I remember it has a bunch of flashing coloured lights, and not much else.

The story revolves around Scotty’s girl of the week, Lieutenant Mira Romaine, who is being taken to the library planetoid of Memory Alpha. On the way they experience a space storm (the aforesaid flashing coloured lights) which affects the nervous systems of many of the crew with minor symptoms. Romaine suffers the worst, fainting. The storm moves on to Memory Alpha, and when the Enterprise arrives they discover everyone on the planetoid dead.

They return to the ship, but a transporter glitch suspends Romaine in transit for a few seconds. She reappears, with the lights flashing in her eyes. The storm chases the Enterprise around a bit, and it becomes clear the lights have possessed Mira, giving her precognitive abilities to predict how it will move. Scotty plays it down, claiming it to be some sort of space sickness. The storm enters the ship and the lights swarm Romaine, entering her body. McCoy says he has no idea how to remove them. Spock merely says that Romaine has a high level of empathy, which is probably why the lights picked her. They speak with her voice and explain they are the last survivors of the planet Zetar,and want Romaine’s body so they can continue to live.

Scotty objects and Kirk decides to drive the Zetarians from Romaine. Since none of his scientific officers have any idea how to do this, Kirk unilaterally decides to stick Romaine in a pressure chamber and jack up the air pressure. Oddly enough, this works, apparently killing the Zetarians without anyone showing a shred of regret at having wiped out the last of a sentient species. The ending is happy, except Romaine needs to leave the Enterprise to rebuild Memory Alpha, so poor Scotty will probably never see her again.

A rather blah episode. The story seems like trotting out the same old recycled plot elements again, solved by Kirk pulling a completely unheralded miracle solution out of a hat. Except for that gaping plot problem, it’s all fairly predictable and uninspiring. Poor Scotty.

Tropes: Girl Of The Week, Fainting, Spooky Silent Library, Teleporter Accident, Powers Via Possession, Space Madness, Puppeteer Parasite, Dying Race, Only You Can Repopulate My Race (kind of), Guilt-Free Extermination War, Final Solution, Ass Pull.
Body count: Everyone on Memory Alpha (killed by Zetarians), 10 Zetarians (killed by pressure).

“That Which Survives” opens with Kirk organising a landing party to investigate a strange planet that is too small, dense, and atmospherically endowed to conform to normal planetary geology. The party consists of Kirk, geologist D’Amato (fair enough), and for some inexplicable reason McCoy and Sulu. Perhaps Sulu’s earlier demonstrated fleeting passionate hobbies also includes a spot of geology. As they beam down, a mysterious woman mysteriously appears in the transporter room and kills the transporter operator, while Kirk and company can only look on as they dematerialise. They appear on the planet and immediately try to contact the Enterprise, but it’s no there! On board, the bridge crew are stunned to see the planet vanish!

It looks like some sort of Brigadoon world setup, but the Enterprise‘s replacement helm officer soon determines that the ship has actually been thrown across space almost 1000 light years. “990.7 light years” intones Spock, after no more analysis than looking at the starfield on the viewscreen. Back on the planet, Sulu attempts to explain the planet’s state by comparing it to the Tunguska event, prompting Kirk to exclaim, “If I’d wanted a Russian history lesson, I’d have brought along Mister Chekov.” The mystery woman appears on the planet and kills D’Amato, prompting Kirk to assign geology duties to Sulu. Through a futile attempt to dig a grave for D’Amato with a phaser, they discover the planet isn’t made of normal rock, but has been artificially constructed.

Replacement helm officer Rahda sets course back to the planet, saying it will take 11 hours to get there. Spock corrects her, “11.337 hours. I do wish you would be more precise, Lieutenant.” Back on the planet, the party’s concern for food and water is trumped by defending themselves against the mystery woman. Kirk and McCoy try to get some sleep while Sulu volunteers for the first watch. He immediately walks to the far side of a rock outcrop, to a location where he can’t see Kirk and McCoy – standard Starfleet watch procedure, I assume. The woman appears and attacks Sulu, but Kirk and McCoy are awakened by his screams and interfere in time to save him. Her touch disrupts Sulu’s tissues, but Kirk intervenes without being affected. They speculate she can only harm one person at a time. She later appears, saying she has come for Kirk, and McCoy and Sulu stand interposed, preventing her from reaching Kirk. This strategy seems to work fine until they stumble into a cave and find a computer controlling the planet, and it produces three copies of the woman, one to kill each of them!

On the Enterprise, meanwhile, the woman has appeared again and killed engineering crewman Watkins, and sabotaged the engines. Spock states that they have 14.87 minutes until the ship blows up – his penchant for excessive numbers of decimal places has now been fully Flanderised. Scotty needs to fix them by crawling into a duct and poking a spanner into a hatch. But wait… the ship has been subtly altered by the instant 990.7 light year flinging process, so Spock advises Scotty to reverse the polarity on the spanner! Scotty saves the day just in time and a party beam down to save Kirk and co. by destroying the computer security system on the planet. A recording of the woman (named Losira) appears and explains that her race died out ages ago, and as the last survivor she has programmed the computer to defend the station against anyone not of their species.

A moderately interesting episode, with some good moments of suspense and drama. Spoiled by the playing up of Spock’s personality quirks and the fact that they are dealing with yet another semi-omnipotent alien force.

Tropes: Vanishing Village (averted), Ludicrous Precision (3 times!), The Tunguska Event, That’s No Moon, Rock Paper Switch, Flanderisation, Reverse Polarity, Sole Survivor.
Body count: Nameless transporter officer, geologist D’Amato, crewman Watkins (all zorched by projection of Losira).

“The Mark of Gideon” is the episode I was least looking forward to rewatching. Not because it’s bad, but because this was one of the most horrifying, nightmare-inducing things I ever witnessed on TV as a child. I still get creeped out thinking about it.

It’s a story about Kirk beaming down as the first ever diplomatic envoy to be allowed on to the surface of the planet Gideon. The planet is known as a paradise with no disease and long-lived natives. Kirk beams down to the coordinates given by the Gideon High Council, and finds himself apparently back on the Enterprise, only everybody else is gone. (This is not the scary part.) Mysteriously, Kirk finds a bruise on his arm, that he has no memory of receiving. (This is not the scary part.) We cut to … the Enterprise, where Spock and Scotty are upset that Kirk seems to have vanished – never arriving on Gideon according to the Council. (This is not the scary part.) Spock requests permission to beam down and search for Kirk, but the Council refuses.

Kirk, on the empty Enterprise, comes across the lovely Odona. She has no memory of where she came from or how she got there. (This is not the scary part.) Kirk notices the ship is flying away from Gideon at warp speed, so uses the controls to drop out of warp. Odona comments that she didn’t feel any change; Kirk agrees and says that’s weird. (This is not the scary part.) Odona starts remembering bits of where she came from, saying how horrible it was, always being surrounded by people, and how nice it is being on the ship alone with Kirk. (This is not the scary part.)

They notice a rhythmic thumping sound, which Kirk doesn’t recognise as normal ship operation. He says it seems to be coming from outside, but… that’s impossible… (This is not the scary part.)

Kirk opens a viewport, and they see THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE SHIP STARING IN AT THEM! (This is the scary bit!!!)

Arrrrrgh!!!! Arrrrrgh!!!! Arrrrrgh!!!! Arrrrrgh!!!! Even writing about it freaks me out.

We learn that the Gideon Council had Kirk beamed into an exact replica of the Enterprise on the planet, and that they are deliberately exposing Odona to some disease that Kirk was carrying, to reintroduce disease and death to Gideon. She falls ill and her father Hodin of the High Council enters the fake Enterprise to thank Kirk for helping them. He is dumbstruck as to why they would want this, surely Gideon is a paradise? Alas no, they explain, with no disease or death, their population has grown so much that the entire planet is shoulder-to-shoulder with people, and nobody ever gets any privacy. (This is not the scary part.) Kirk is aghast, wondering why they don’t use modern contraception, at which Hodin explains that they love life so much that it would be against their nature.

The questions that arise from this are numerous. If the planet is that full of people, what do they eat? Where do they grow food? How do they deal with waste? Basic hygiene? It’s obvious they’re still breeding… (This is not the scary part.)

Spock meanwhile beams down to the coordinates they sent Kirk to, and finds the fake Enterprise. He deduces its nature immediately, finds Kirk, initiates some fist-fighting with native guards, and beams up with Kirk and Odona. McCoy cures her so she won’t die, but her blood now contains the virus necessary to reduce the population on Gideon, so she returns there (this is not the scary part), parting wistfully from Kirk as the Enterprise flies away.

Actually, you know what, everything else about this story is freaky and horrible too, yet I still can’t get over that image burnt into the primal fear centres of my developing brain when I was a kid. Objectively, I’d say this isn’t a bad episode. It has plot holes and problems, but the suspense and mystery are well done. Just don’t make me watch it again.

Tropes: Accidental Nightmare Fuel, Ontological Mystery, Amnesiac Hero, Ass In Ambassador, Gaussian Girl, Jungle Drums, Population Control, Empire With A Dark Secret, Who Wants To Live Forever?, Nobody Poops, Depopulation Bomb.
Body count: None!