“The Galileo Seven” is an episode I remember well, because it was one of the ones I had as a Bantam Fotonovel way back in the day when I was a kid. I think of it as a strong and dramatic episode, though perhaps that might be tinged with nostalgia.

The first thing to notice about this episode is that the Enterprise is investigating the Murasaki 312 quasar. Now, having studied quasars for my Ph.D., I know quasars are enormous and enormously powerful phenomena generated by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies. They are not something the size of roughly a solar system that you can fly up to and inside and take scientific readings of with a starship of the range of the Enterprise. Of course, nobody knew that back in 1966 when this episode was made, so that’s forgivable. In fact the idea that they were relatively small, close objects similar to what we see in this episode was still scientifically supportable at the time. So no real criticism, but it is odd to see.

Immediately following this plot revelation, we are treated to our first view of one of the Enterprise shuttlecraft, the Galileo, leaving the hangar bay in a majestic scene (albeit a majestic 1960s special effects scene). On board are seven crew members: Spock, Scotty, token Yeoman Mears, Lieutenants Latimer, Gaetano, and Boma, and Dr McCoy. Wait… what? What is Dr McCoy doing on an expedition to scout an astronomical phenomenon? I guess he’s there in case the shuttlecraft shakes from side to side and someone bruises an arm. In plot terms, he’s there to be a foil for Spock’s wrestling with the difficulties of his first command, by arguing for human emotion over Vulcan logic, but that’s hardly a mission role.

The “quasar” produces an ion storm that prompts Sulu to declare, “These readings make no sense!” The Galileo loses contact and is set adrift in the heart of the “quasar”, in what was meant to be a three hour tour…

And this is all before the opening credits!

Anyway, the Galileo ends up stranded on a desert island planet in the middle of Murasaki 312, which conveniently blinds the Enterprise‘s sensors so that they can’t find them. What’s more, they’re on a clock, because they have to deliver a shipment of plague-curing drugs to Makus III before a deadline when they’ll be sent on to a plague-ridden colony, as Kirk is constantly reminded by Commissioner Ferris, who may be the single most smarmy and annoying character in the entire series. Frankly, I’d have paid good money to see Kirk rip his shirt and take Ferris in a fist fight right there on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Things are grim on the planet, with only enough energy to take off with 4 people on board. Spock says the decision of who to leave behind will be his. He then orders the expendable Latimer and Gaetano to scout the area, staying in visual contact with the shuttlecraft. They immediately wander off past some rocks that block their line of sight and encounter an eerie fog. Latimer gets skewered by a positively enormous spear with a stone head – the stone spear point alone was about the size of a large turkey. Investigating, Spock remarks that the spear point is similar to the Folsom points of Earth, although to me it looks much more like a Clovis point. Spock orders the ever more expendable Gaetano to remain on guard near the spot where Latimer got spiked.

Back in orbit, we see a shot of stars streaking past the Enterprise, despite the fact that it’s in orbit about a planet, so stars shouldn’t be going anywhere with respect to it.

Meanwhile, back on the Planet of Doom, Gaetano is approached by a giant hairy ape-man in classic zombie arms-out-in-front pose. Sorry, the poor late Gaetano. Scotty has been working full steam on reconfoogling the Galileo to run on the power from the phasers, while Yeoman Mears has been doing nothing but appearing in soft focus shots and being terrified.

There’s some drama involving Boma being insubordinate to Spock behind his back, to the approving nods of McCoy, over Spock’s use of logic treating people as mere objects. Before lifting off, Spock allows 10 minutes to bury Gaetano (and presumably Latimer) – I’d like to see any gravedigger work that fast – if the hostile natives will allow it. Eventually they take off, with all five remaining passengers thanks to lightening the shuttlecraft, with just enough fuel to make one orbit. Although by this time Commissioner Ferris (booo!) has ordered the Enterprise to depart for Makus III.

Spock’s “illogical” reaction is to dump and ignite the fuel, producing a flare that the Enterprise can see. But without fuel their orbit decays and the Galileo begins to burn up on re-entry – though why it didn’t burn up the first time it entered the planet’s atmosphere without any power is unexplained. Yeoman Mears finally provides a reason for her to be in this episode, with the observation that “It’s getting so hot!” But the Enterprise is on hand and beams the survivors on board just before the Galileo becomes slag.

Yeah, actually not as bad an episode as I make it sound. It has drama and tension and shows Spock in a new light. It’s really the first Spock episode, with Kirk having relatively little to do. If only he’d punched Ferris’s lights out it would have been a great episode.

Body count: Latimer, Gaetano, landing search party member O’Neill (killed off-screen).
Tropes: Science Marches On, Negative Space Wedgie, Readings Are Off The Scale, Cold Equation, Ominous Fog, Streaming Stars, Zombie Gait, Gaussian Girl, No One Gets Left Behind, Captain Obvious, Everybody Laughs Ending.
(Image © 1966 Paramount Studios, used under Fair Use.)

“Shore Leave” is an episode I remember vividly – for being a bit silly. It’s certainly more whimsical and lighter in tone than many other episodes, but watching it again now I found that it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as I remembered.

It does begin oddly, with McCoy and Sulu amongst a landing party on a new planet, apparently covered in idyllic vegetation but with no animal life whatsoever. When Sulu goes off to take some botanical examples (showing again an apparent interest in botany which I’d never noticed before this rewatching of the series), McCoy spots a giant white rabbit complaining that it’s late, followed by an obvious Alice in a blue pinafore dress. Has McCoy been fiddling with his medicinal drugs, you may ask.

The planet they’re on is another ugly and unrealistic looking thing from the orbital view, this time a bright lime green. On the bridge, Kirk apparently has a new Yeoman, replacing the unfortunately lamented Janice Rand. We later learn this Yeoman’s name is Barrows, as she plays an important role as a romantic interest for McCoy.

Kirk joins McCoy on the planet, convinced the doctor’s report of a white rabbit is some sort of joke. They hear a gunshot and run to find Sulu practising with a revolver, which he says he found just lying on the ground. He says it’s a vintage weapon, which would make a good addition to his collection (another case of Sulu having some random hobby for one episode), and has to explain to Kirk and McCoy how it works. This raises the question of how or indeed if Kirk and McCoy recognised the noise of the gunshot that brought them running.

Things get even more mysterious, with a first-person POV shot of some sort of antenna tracking the landing party as they walk across the terrain. Yeoman Barrows suffers clothing damage in an encounter with Don Juan, prompting McCoy to gallantly escort her. Meanwhile Kirk bumps into Finnegan, an old rival from his Academy days, and then Ruth, an old flame. Sulu encounters a samurai warrior, who attacks him with a sword. Also on the planet are extras Lieutenant Rodriguez and Angela Martine (who was the unhappy bride-to-be in “Balance of Terror“). They encounter a tiger, then Angela does one better than getting her fiancé killed in the previous episode, and is strafed to death by a mysterious fighter plane.

There are a couple of small continuity/production errors. The appearance of fictional characters and other people and animals on a planet scanned to be devoid of animal life is explicable as part of the plot. But in a couple of scenes we also clearly see insects buzzing around – a fly and a butterfly – which are not obviously related to the eventual explanation of the other stuff. Presumably these were just random inclusions of insects in camera shot during the filming that they never removed. Also, when Sulu runs along a shaded section of a small gully, you can see him generating three sharp shadows, obviously from film lighting.

Yeoman Barrows fantasises about a beautiful fairy-tale princess dress to replace her ripped uniform, and lo, one appears. She changes into it as McCoy half-averts his eyes. The pair are then attacked by a black knight on horseback, with a lance. McCoy states that “these things are not real; hallucinations cannot hurt me” and stands his ground. Clearly he believes they are merely hallucinating all of these weird people and objects – which raises an interesting question about what he thinks Barrows is really wearing now. The black knight runs McCoy down and kills him!

Kirk encounters Finnegan again and bests him in an inevitable fist fight, magically suffering major shirt damage in the cut between two directly adjacent scenes. He goes down wearing an undamaged uniform, and in the very next shot is shown lying on the ground with his short half torn off! After Finnegan is beaten, Spock appears, beaming down to inform Kirk that the transporters no longer work (after his last risky use of them). This begins the long tradition, seen throughout Star Trek, of the transporters being such a powerful plot device that to enable any sort of story where crew are trapped somewhere, they first have to have the transporters suffer some sort of malfunction or be mysteriously jammed by alien influences.

Spock conjectures that the planet is somehow producing the people and animals in response to the landing party’s thoughts – citing the example of Rodriguez thinking of a tiger just before seeing one. Except at this point they haven’t found Rodriguez again and there’s no feasible way Spock could know that Rodriguez had even encountered a tiger, let alone been thinking of one beforehand! A benign advanced alien then appears and explains that this is a pleasure planet for his race, designed to manufacture anyone’s desires, and that Angela and McCoy have been “repaired” and are now alive again. McCoy shows up in the arms of two fur bikini-clad girls, demonstrating that this is indeed a pleasure planet, to the jealous dismay of Barrows. All is well again!

Except I’ve always found this “resurrection” of McCoy to be a bit creepy, ever since the first time I saw this episode. Apparently all the constructed people are made of plant matter, and as we see in the case of the Black Knight, appear to be plastic dummies on close inspection. McCoy was, for all intents and purposes, really dead at one point, and was somehow brought back to life by being patched up with this same plant material. I’ve always had a hard time seeing this patched-up, revivified version as the real McCoy (so to speak). Lurking in the back of my mind there’s always the fear that from now on the Enterprise‘s medical officer is actually some sort of Stepford clone…

A final point on this episode is that it shows just how amazingly inadequate the Enterprise scanners are. A fantastically powerful and technological construction lurks just under the ground of this entire planet, yet the scans showed nothing – no technology, no refined metals, at all. I guess if you want to hide totally from Starfleet, all you need to do is live in a cellar. We saw this before on Talos IV in “The Menagerie“, in fact – scans showed no technology on the planet, yet there was an entire underground alien civilisation. Maybe they should invest in some ground-penetrating radar.

Body count: Angela Martine, Dr McCoy – both brought back to life by the planet’s manufacturing abilities.
Tropes: Fleeting Passionate Hobbies, Uncanny Village, Standard Hollywood Strafing Procedure, Lying In The Dirt Together, I Wish It Were Real, Your Mind Makes It Real, Amusement Park Of Doom, Pleasure Planet, I Got Better, A Lady On Each Arm, Fur Bikini, Everybody Laughs Ending.
(Image © 1966 Paramount Studios, used under Fair Use.)

Now this is a good episode. “Balance of Terror” is the tale of the Enterprise‘s first encounter with a Romulan vessel. Before this encounter, as we learn, no human or Romulan had ever seen each other. The two races had fought a war with primitive “atomic weapons” (so primitive they weren’t even called “nuclear”), and established a treaty along a Neutral Zone buffer between their regions of influence. So much of the well-known Star Trek mythology is established in this episode for the first time, it would be difficult for it not to be a classic episode.

The story opens in a wedding ceremony, with Kirk stating his happy position of having the authority to marry couples as the ship’s captain. An odd thing is that everyone at the ceremony is in Starfleet uniform. Including the bride, Angela Martine, whose only concession to tradition is some white feathers arranged in her hair. She is being given away by Scotty, for a reason never explained. Alas, the ceremony is interrupted by a red alert and battle stations, with the news that the nearby Earth Outpost 4 has been attacked. Angela and her fiancé Robert Tomlinson return to their posts in the weapons control room.

Spock shows a map of the Outposts and the Neutral Zone – a two-dimensional map showing a linear border with 8 human outpost stations along it. Of course this is a simplification for television, as a space border must be a surface, and would be considerably more penetrable than a linear boundary on a 2D map. We learn that Kirk’s orders with regards to the Neutral Zone are “inviolable”: he must not enter it under any circumstances; the Enterprise and all the Outposts are to be regarded as expendable, rather than risk any incursion into the Zone. Of course, Kirk later ignores this and chases the Romulan war craft into the Zone.

We meet Lieutenant Stiles, serving as navigator in this episode. He hates the Romulans, because they killed some of his family. He makes the odd statement that there may be Romulan spies on board the Enterprise – rather a big reach given there’s no evidence presented at any stage that any Romulans have ever breached the Neutral Zone before the present warship.

The ship destroys Outpost 4 and turns on the Enterprise, and we hear the evocative Romulan/Klingon attack music for the first time in the series. The ship becomes invisible, “deflecting light rays around itself”, but Spock can somehow track it on his sensors. This physics-bending state of affairs is never explained. One would expect a cloaking device for a spaceship to concentrate on deceiving electronic sensing, not eyeballing, or rather to achieve both or be essentially useless. Spock gets a view on to the bridge of the Romulan vessel, revealing its commander is… his father!!

Wait no, that’s Mark Lenard, who would later go on to play Spock’s father, playing the Romulan commander, who is never named. We learn the Romulans resemble Vulcans, which primes Stiles to insinuate that Spock may be a Romulan spy. We later see several scenes on board the Romulan vessel (that the Enterprise crew don’t see), during which it becomes clear that the Romulan Empire is essentially Ancient Rome in Space, with a Praetor back home, and a Centurion as second-in-command on board the ship. And of course there’s the classical allusion to Romulus, founder of Rome.

What follows is, essentially, a game of World War II submarine cat-and-mouse. There’s a tactical briefing during which Kirk pushes around a huge, black, leather-bound book on a table for no apparent reason. There are some shots traded and damage taken. And there’s even a silent running stand-off, waiting for the other ship to make a mistake. They even whisper during this phase, apparently to avoid making any sounds that the other ship, across the vacuum of space, could pick up…

The Romulans flee to a comet tail, which obscures vision and sensors. That’s one unrealistically dense comet tail. The Enterprise fires a bunch of “phasers”, but these actually look like depth charges photon torpedoes. The stand-off is broken when Spock accidentally touches an alarm button, causing Stiles to go ballistic with unconcealed bigotry. Shots are exchanged and damage occurs, with Yeoman Rand making what must be her last appearance grabbing Kirk for comfort in the face of death. Stiles leaves to help in the weapons room, and Uhura takes his place at the bridge navigation/weapons console – she has shown a lot of skills already! When more damage is sustained, Stiles gets in trouble and Spock rescues him, removing Stiles’ bigotry. The Romulans are defeated and self-destruct rather than surrender. The only casualty on board the Enterprise is, inevitably, Tomlinson. Angela is stoic in her mourning and Kirk is left to ponder the horrors of submarine interstellar warfare.

Body count: Entire personnel of Earth Outposts 2, 3, 4, and 8, including Commander Hansen of outpost 4; entire crew of Romulan Bird of Prey, including commander and centurion; Lieutenant Tomlinson.
Tropes: Wedding Smashers, 2-D Space, Space Cold War, Almost Dead Guy, Invisibility Cloak, Space Romans, Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right, Space Is An Ocean, Sub Story, Silent Running Mode, Space Does Not Work That Way, Worthy Opponent, It Has Been An Honor, Not So Different
(Image © 1966 Paramount Studios, used under Fair Use.)

Now we reach an episode that I remembered virtually nothing about: “The Conscience of the King“. The title is of course part of a famous line from Hamlet:

The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King

And the episode begins appropriately enough with a cast of actors performing a Shakespeare play, alluding already to the “play within a play” structure of Hamlet. The play being performed is, however, Macbeth. The reason for this becomes clear in hindsight, as we see the actor Anton Karidian, playing Macbeth, murdering Duncan and proclaiming, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” – a line that resonates with later developments in this episode.

As I watched this episode, I got the feeling that it didn’t need to be a Star Trek episode at all. The story doesn’t hinge on anything futuristic or technological. It would work just as well as an episode of Monk, say, or as a Hercule Poirot adventure. About the only significant restriction is that it needs to take place after Shakespeare, just in order to make all the allusions. In that sense it’s somewhat disappointing. It’s also not a particularly scintillating episode in itself. The story is somewhat intriguing, with an air of mystery over the true identity of Karidian (the plot basically concerns Kirk’s suspicion that Karidian is in fact Kodos the Executioner, the presumed-20-years-dead dictator of a planet). But it seems too contrived to be a really convincing story.

Anyway, it opens with an awkward profile shot of a friend of Kirk’s, Tom Leighton. Leighton has tricked Kirk to his planet in order to show Kirk the actor Karidian, whom he believes to be Kodos. After the Macbeth performance, we again see Leighton in awkward profile, trying to convince Kirk. This culminates in Leighton turning to face the camera, revealing an eyepatch and mask covering half his presumably horribly disfigured face. Kirk remains unconvinced, and takes the opportunity to flirt with Karidian’s lovely daughter Lenore, until they stumble across Leighton’s body while taking a romantic jaunt under the moonlight.

This is enough for Kirk, who now takes over Leighton’s desire for revenge. He has the acting company’s transport leave without them, stranding them on the planet, with only the Enterprise as handy transport. Lenore beams aboard to ask Kirk to take the company to their next destination. This is an inexplicable bit of an excuse for more flirting – why didn’t she just call by radio? Anyway, the Enterprise ends up carrying the actors.

Kirk discovers Lieutenant Riley – who had his moment of glory back in “The Naked Time” – is also a survivor of Kodos’s regime and has him transferred to engineering to keep him out of the way. It doesn’t help, as Riley is poisoned and ends up in sickbay. Spock gets suspicious of Kirk’s motives and confides in McCoy, who tells him to stop worrying and have a drink, leading to this very interesting exchange:

Spock: My father’s race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol.
McCoy: Now I know why they were conquered.

This is the first I ever recall hearing about Vulcan being conquered! And in fact this is noted on Memory Alpha as contradicting other canonical information known about Vulcan.

Now there’s only Kirk left who has ever seen Kodos. He goes to his quarters, revealing a bizarre pattern of coloured lights shining on the wall outside his room. The purpose of these coloured lights escapes me. Spock confronts Kirk, but is interrupted by the screech of an overloading phaser, prompting Kirk to declare a “double red alert“(!). Disaster averted, the actors begin a performance of Hamlet for the crew, now falling fully into the “play within a play” allusion.

Without spoiling the ending, we learn that Karidian is indeed Kodos, and he suffers an ironic and tragic death, echoing further Shakespearean parallels. It’s actually wrapped up quite neatly in the end. Okay, it’s kind of a satisfying story, really – it suffers mostly because it’s so out of place for Star Trek, and so the 23rd century setting and the characters we know and love seem entirely superfluous to that story.

Body count: Tom Leighton, Anton Karidian/Kodos.
Tropes: Literary Allusion Title, Never Found The Body, Two Faced, Evil Is Hammy, Tampering With Food And Drink, Red Alert, Cold Equation, I Did What I Had To Do, Show Within A Show, Villainous Breakdown, Daddy’s Little Villain, Karmic Death, Please Wake Up
(Image © 1966 Paramount Studios, used under Fair Use.)

The only two-part episode in the entire series, “The Menagerie” is easily one of the most memorable. It recycles the previously unaired pilot episode into a framing story that adds significant new elements and drama to the events in a masterful piece of seamless writing. This really is an impressive piece of television.

We start at Starbase 11, to which the Enterprise has been called by an urgent signal. The starbase is represented by a matte painting, which looks amateurish compared to the brilliant one for Delta Vega from “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. When we get inside the base buildings, we are treated to a view out the windows which looks like a cardboard cutout of the Seattle Space Needle. But these oddities are quickly pushed aside by the dramatic reveal of Captain Christopher Pike, the previous commander of the Enterprise. Although he says nothing, he is easily one of the most memorable guest characters of the series, as he appears scarred and confined to a wheelchair, unable to move or do anything but communicate “yes” or “no” by causing lights to flash with his brainwaves.

While this is a brilliant piece of drama, it’s a bit difficult to justify, especially these days when we are building technology now that allows people to control computers to do arbitrary commands with nothing but brainwaves. Even if you can’t do that and are restricted to flashing a light, you can still use Morse code or something to communicate more than just “yes” or “no”.

That niggle aside, the drama really ramps up rapidly, as we learn that Spock has lied about receiving the message and starts acting shiftily. He heads to the starbase computer room, where he uses a couple of nerve pinches to deal with the computer technicians. The mainframe computers are covered in kitschy blinking lights, and Spock uses them to spoof a message from Kirk to the Enterprise to prepare for a top secret mission. Taking the message is a Lieutenant Hansen, who is apparently in charge of the Enterprise while Kirk and Spock are away. This anonymous crew member who we’ve never seen before is third in command?

Spock’s behaviour is increasingly bizarre, highlighted by him talking to his old captain, Pike, and saying, “I must, I have no choice.” Knowing what Spock’s about to do, I wonder if he really has no choice… surely there are some options. Anyway, Spock takes Pike back to the Enterprise and warps out of orbit, leaving Kirk behind. Dumbfounded and disbelieving, Kirk gives chase in a starbase shuttlecraft – the first time we see a shuttlecraft in the series. Although this is kind of odd; one would imagine a large starbase would have some sort of longer range vessel available at all times.

The Enterprise picks up the shuttle after it runs out of fuel, because Spock refuses to abandon Kirk to drift in space. Spock then gives himself up for court martial on the charge of mutiny. We’re halfway through Part I by now, and if you haven’t seen this episode before it’s impossible to fathom Spock’s motives. The mystery makes it highly intriguing and compelling.

During the court martial proceedings, Spock plays footage from an earlier mission, when he served under Captain Pike. This is the footage from the pilot episode “The Cage”, and we see almost all of it during the court hearing over both parts of this episode. In itself, “The Cage” makes for compelling viewing – it really was a pretty good pilot. Dosed out here as a flashback, with breaks in which Spock and Kirk exchange tension-building dialogue, it works even better.

Some odd things to note about the “Cage” footage: Captain Pike is seen using a bog-standard clipboard, not the (retro-)futuristic electronic clipboard thingies that Kirk uses. In one scene when Pike is walking through the corridors of the ship, we see a pair of other crew members in mufti, the male wearing shorts and the female in a short cheerleader-style skirt, both looking not much older than teenagers – it’s really weird. When the crew land on Talos IV (the same planet Spock is apparently trying to take the crippled Pike back to), the native scenery includes mysterious humming plants, which are rather funky in a 1960s furniture kind of way.

To cut a long story short, The earlier Pike is captured by the Talosians, who are giant-brained telepaths who want to mate Pike with a female they captured years ago to breed a colony of humans for them to run experiments on. Naturally Pike gets rescued, but the cute female turns out to be horribly deformed and only cute in the telepathically induced dream world. The Talosians turn out to be somewhat contrite, apologising because they didn’t realise humans would object so strongly to being treated as captive experimental subjects(!).

I won’t detail the ending, but suffice to say that Spock’s mysterious actions are explained and, naturally, he isn’t found guilty at the court martial. The story wraps up rather neatly and is overall one of the stand-out episodes of the series. Even though it’s twice as long, it didn’t feel like it watching it in one sitting. (I’m actually fearing some of the poorer episodes to come, as they will no doubt feel longer than this one.)

Body count: None.
Tropes: Clip Show, Once For Yes, Twice For No, Technology Marches On, We Will Use Micros In The Future, Conflicting Loyalty, Screw The Rules, I’m Doing What’s Right, Framing Device, Flashback, My Brain Is Big, Telepathy, Adam And Eve Plot, People Zoo, Throwing Your Sword Always Works, Green Skinned Space Babe (the trope namer!), Dying Race
(Image © 1966 Paramount Studios, used under Fair Use.)