November 2012
2 posts
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ST:TOS 2.16 The Gamesters of Triskelion
Kirk, Chekov and Uhura become gladiator slaves so that a race of omnipotent beings can place internet bets on them. Kirk hooks up with Lady Gaga, who has green hair. Omnipotents of the week turn out to be brains on pedestals. Ew.
Not a heinous episode, but with frequent motifs like grabby Kirk, enforced battles and the omnipresent omnipotence, this show is starting to look like it was written...
October 2012
23 posts
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ST:TOS 2.15 The Trouble With Tribbles
Comedy Episode! Klingons and and entire race of creatures from the Lincraft remainders bin. As ludicrous space romps go, this is actually a lot of fun. Nobody is being too hammy, so the plot of the story is still allowed to breathe and isn’t suffocated with silliness. It’s fun. After the last two weeks of nebulous angst monsters, it’s nice to see tactile threats from not only...
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ST:TOS 2.14 Wolf in the Fold
Scotty is suspected of murdering a belly dancer, and to clear his name they have a seance. Then the spirit of Jack the Ripper possesses the Enterprise. I don’t know what’s worse, last episode’s fart monster, or the misogynist lady-killing energy creature from this week. I hope nebulous threats aren’t the recurring antagonists down the back end of season 2. Bring back the...
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ST:TOS 2.13 Obsession
Kirk becomes obsessed with a stinky cloud of death. It’s like the Lost smoke monster, but if it was a vampire. It killed Kirk’s crew when he was a junior Lieutenant on the Farragut, way back when, and now he wants revenge. I think Star Trek is running out of steam; the deadly space fart is close to being the silliest creature they’ve ever come across (after the injured rock...
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ST:TOS 2.12 The Deadly Years
We’re starting to stray into hoary old tv tropes territory; the old people episode. The landing party gets irradiated and it turns them ancient. There’s a race against time to cure the crew before they all end up dead of natural causes, while a doofus admiral orders the ship into the Romulan neutral zone, because Kirk has developed dementia. Another of Kirk’s old flames is on...
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ST:TOS 2.11 Friday's Child
The crew beam down to a planet where the entire population are dressed by a girl on speed with a Spotlight card. They meet original ‘Catwoman’ Julie Newmar, who is knocked up and almost as feisty as ‘Leela’ from Doctor Who. There is a Klingon involved somehow, and for some reason they have to flee to the hills and the whole thing ends up looking like one of those lost in...
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ST:TOS 2.10 Journey to Babel
The ones about Spock are always the best. Spock’s parents show up at a diplomatic function (his dad is an Ambassador) and there are murders, a potential intergalactic war brewing, a blood transfusion, plastic surgery, an insurmountable rift between father and son and a space battle. This episode is overflowing with drama! I love it when Star Trek is this involved. So many characters...
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ST:TOS 2.09 Metamorphosis
This is peculiar in the extreme. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are travelling with a woman negotiating a peace treaty, who has developed some bizarre syndrome. They’re kidnapped by a glowing yellow thing that has been having an affair with Zefram Cochrane, who invented warp speed. He’s been made young again, and has been living with the yellow glitter monster for hundreds of years. He calls...
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ST:TOS 2.08 I, Mudd
Oh good. A comedy episode. They are always so hilarious. I don’t mind some jokes here and there, but a whole hour of lunacy? Harry Mudd is the king of a world of androids, who intend to conquer the universe through obsequiousness. Yes, you read correctly, an entire race of CRAZY MACHINES! Kirk & co. manage to confuse them with an amateur theatre production. There are some good bits,...
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ST:TOS 2.07 Catspaw
Gothic nonsense. I wasn’t really paying much attention. After the castle and the witches and the cat that became a lady and the voodoo spaceship, I decided this was too doolally to warrant my attention. I think they were omnipotent, or at least telekenetic. Cat lady became enormous at one point. Kirk tricked her by pretending he wanted to get jiggy with her. If she’d seen the show,...
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ST:TOS 2.06 The Doomsday Machine
CRAZY MACHINE! Massive planet-eating, spaceship-trashing crazy machine. Awesome. Noble sacrifice, destruction of an entire solar system, and some last minute transporter jiggery pokery. Love it.
Redshirts dead = 400+ on the Constellation, (and the population of an entire solar system).
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ST:TOS 2.05 The Apple
When Kirk beams down with heaps of dudes in red shirts who you’ve never seen before, you know carnage isn’t far behind. Deadly spitting plants, explosive rocks, lightning on queue. Dead, dead, dead. The planet looks like the Garden of Eden, and there are a bunch of innocents living in a village doing what Vaal tells them. Vaal, it turns out is CRAZY MACHINE! (Season 2’s version...
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ST:TOS 2.04 Mirror, Mirror
Parallel universe! Awesome! Season 2 is paying out. Kirk, McCoy, Scotty & Uhura get caught in a transporter accident and end up in a parallel universe where everybody is evil and rank is achieved through terror and assassination. Uhura wears a spectacular two-piece that reveals her midriff, and Sulu tries to crack on to her. Like Peter Allen grinding up on Liza Minelli. Four awesome episodes...
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ST:TOS 2.03 The Changeling
Crazy deadly machine! Nice change from all the omnipotence they’ve been running into. Nomad is a space probe sterilising whole planets with imperfections that has mistaken Kirk for his creator. Nomad’s electric brain is swiss cheese, and he’s killing people left right and centre. Thankfully, Kirk manages to double-talk him to death. It’s an apocalyptic Abbot and Costello...
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ST:TOS 2.02 Who Mourns for Adonais?
I had high hopes for Season Two with Chekov’s groovy hair and Spock’s deadly boner, but here we are again with Omnipotent of the Week. Thankfully, it’s a good one, with a giant glowing green hand grabbing the Enterprise, no less! The omnipotent is Apollo, from the race of beings who were once worshipped as the gods of Olympus, and he’s looking for some more...
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ST:TOS 2.01 Amok Time
Spock develops a case of terminal randiness. Apparently Vulcans must root or die. They head back to Vulcan (after a lot of malarkey about whether they should go somewhere else first) and instead of rooting, Spock’s wife forces him to fight with Kirk. Apparently, rolling around on the ground with Shatner is the same as banging the missus, and Spock’s potentially fatal friskiness...
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ST:TOS 1.29 Operation - Annihilate!
Kirk’s brother lives on a planet infested by plastic vomit. The vomit is a single-celled organism that gets into Spock’s spine and drives him crazy. I love watching vomit flap about trying to get on people. Phasers can’t destroy it! If only it sat on their faces and controlled their actions like Starro from Justice League. That would be totes amaze. They kill all the flying...
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ST:TOS 1.28 City on the Edge of Forever
This is hot shit. McCoy goes batshit crazy after injecting himself with his futuristic drug pump. He jumps through a mystical portal to America in The Depression. Kirk and Spock follow, and meet Joan Collins. Kirk falls in love with her, but has to watch her die because she helped the Nazis win the war. One of those butterfly effect things. Joanie is pre-shoulder-pads precious, and Kirk is...
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ST:TOS 1.27 The Alternative Factor
Time travel. Alternate universes. Anti-matter dimensions. An egomaniac driven crazy by the thought that there is another version of him. No, this isn’t William Shatner watching the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie, it’s the plot from The Alternative Factor. Heaps of BIG SCIENCE FICTION ideas, but the story makes little, or no, sense. How fragile a personality do you have if you can be...
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ST:TOS 1.26 Errand of Mercy
Klingons! I don’t know how the Klingons became such a rich and interesting culture, because here they are just Space Nazis, and Kirk and Spock get to be the plucky French resistance. It’s like ‘Allo ‘Allo in space. Also, again with the omnipotent aliens. What is this show’s obsession with omnipotent creatures? Get over it already.
Redshirts dead = 0
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ST:TOS 1.25 The Devil in the Dark
Sentient rocks. This is what I love about Star Trek, that they can zip about all over the galaxy and still be surprised when rocks turn out to have personalities. Spock does a mind-meld on the rock and gets to screech “PAIN!!! PAIN!!!” at the top of his lungs. Again with the emotion! McCoy has a classic line when he’s asked to fix the poor old rock monster: “I’m a...
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ST:TOS 1.24 This Side of Paradise
Spock has a pash. How many times are they going to torture this poor Vulcan with emotion? Kirk gets his most ardent wish and is left alone in charge of the Enterprise. I’m surprised he didn’t go and get jiggy with her nacelles. There’s something about plants spraying their spores over people, but I was playing Angry Birds while this was on, and I didn’t really get what...
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ST:TOS 1.23 A Taste of Armageddon
Barbara Babcock in a midriff! Kirk cracks it with a polite war where people voluntarily wander off to death chambers because they’re statistically marked for death. Clearly fears of the H-Bomb at work - the weapon that supposedly destroys life, but leaves buildings intact. This is one of the few times when violence is the answer.
Redshirts dead - 0 - a surprise given how many people beam...
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ST:TOS 1.22 Space Seed
Ricardo Montalban! Khaaaaaaaaan! The Enterprise finds the Botany Bay adrift. They discover Ricardo Montalban in a deep freeze. When he thaws out, he turns out to be Khan, genetically engineered dictator from the early to mid-nineties. Hilarious. If only they knew that in the early to mid-nineties, Ricardo Montalban was actually the straight man to Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling cop in The Naked...
September 2012
33 posts
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ST:TOS 1.21 The Return of the Archons
More wacky omnipotence! This is fear of a red planet. Kirk and the gang land on a planet that has affordably devolved into the wild west, and everyone behaves the same. The subtext is clearly about the American fear of Communism, fear of unity and conformity. Calling it soulless and making it appear dictatorial and machine-like and claiming that equality means nobody has freedom or a soul seems...
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ST:TOS 1.20 Court Martial
Kirk is court martialled for jettisoning a pod and thereby killing a crewman before he ordered a red alert. Fairly generic space trial, with all sorts of Perry Mason antics going on. Kirk’s sexy ex-girlfriend is the prosecutor, his defence attorney is a crotchety old curmudgeon, and head of the Starbase where the trial takes place is black (which I’m sure was quite progressive in...
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ST:TOS 1.19 Tomorrow is Yesterday
The Enterprise is thrown into the past (the present when it was made) and intercepted by contemporary fighter planes (ie 60’s jets). Some interesting moral dilemmas - keep a dude from the past and bring him to the future to stop him polluting the timeline, but he could be the ancestor of a future space pioneer. In the end, Spock conjures up a solution that involves hiding behind doors and...
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ST:TOS 1.18 Arena
Exciting and action packed! Awesome attack on a colony at the start of an episode, before *yawn* omnipotent beings step in and force the captains of the two opposing forces to fight each other on an arena planet. Kirk is outmatched, physically and with weaponry, but he has his old Kirk guile. Shirtless guile, but guile nonetheless. He soon outwits the rubber Godzilla-man (a Gorn).
3 Redshirts...
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ST:TOS 1.17 The Squire of Gothos
A mediaeval castle, leaning a bit too much toward the Disney model, and an overacting Squire that plays with the Enterprise crew like a kitten with a ball of wool.
Just when things were getting good, it’s back to crazy omnipotents again. Ugh. It’s fun for a little while, but the puerile behaviour of The Squire begins to wear you down after a while.
0 Redshirts Dead - Omnipotent...
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ST:TOS 1.16 The Galileo Seven
Spock’s lack of emotions and reliance on logic upsets everyone when they get stranded on a planet in their shuttlecraft, The Galileo. There are giant bronze-age people throwing spears and rocks at them. Especially the black guy from Planet of the Giants. (Why is Star Trek still so popular, but nobody wants to make a new version of the Planet of the Giants? That was an awesome show. Giant...
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ST:TOS 1.15 Shore Leave
Hilarious. After two decidedly dramatic episodes, this is crazy fluff. A planet where your fantasies come true (and sometimes beat or kill you). Alice, the White Rabbit, Don Juan, Kirk’s academy nemesis and an old flame, tigers, a jousting knight. Extreme silliness abounds.
Sulu goes missing in the park, and nobody knows where he is. Have they checked the toilets? He’s probably...
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ST:TOS 1.14 Balance of Terror
Another awesome one!
Enterprise versus the Romulans! It’s like a submarine attack movie. The Romulans are floating about in a cloaking field, and the Enterprise trying to shake them loose with proximity phaser blasts like underwater mines.
We get to see the Romulans on board their ship, and they are far from cardboard cutout villains; they have their own internal prejudices and fears...
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ST:TOS 1.13 The Conscience of the King
This is more like it! I love this one!
Kirk goes to a play with one of his old mates, who suspects that the dude playing Macbeth is in fact Kodos, the former governor of a colony that, 20 years ago, murdered half of the colonists in his charge. Kirk is not entirely sure, not even when his mate is found dead. The moral dilemma of whether to punish or prosecute the man, and how much proof is...
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ST:TOS 1.11 & 1.12 The Menagerie (Pts 1 & 2)
Okay, this is a two-part gip. They’ve totally pasted in their original rejected pilot and expect that we’ll eat it up like it’s some awesome new episode. Spock smiles at one point! As if! And don’t think I haven’t noticed Nurse Chapel with black hair as ‘Number One.’ Please. (Max just told me that she was married to the producer).
There is a green...
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ST:TOS 1.10 The Corbomite Manoeuvre
Yay! Shirtless Shatner! It’s always a good ep that starts with sweaty Shats. Scary glowing cube in space and a big light ball doodad. Guest appearance by Clint Howard, the unfortunately apportioned little brother of Ron, as an alien. As an adult, he played a Ferengi, and how appropriate.
Not much goes on, really. Sulu insists on reading out a clock for about ten minutes. (Anal. Gay.)
...
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ST:TOS 1.9 Dagger of the Mind
The rich girl’s dad from Girls Just Want To Have Fun (80’s dance movie with Helen Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker see X-Files 1.09 Space) stows away in a box from a penal colony. Turns out, boss of the penal colony is doing wacko science experiments on prisoners’ heads. Kirk and a psychiatrist head down to check things out and become embroiled in mind-altering nonsense and...
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ST:TOS 1.8 Miri
Okay, this one is a little peculiar. A planet of children, where adulthood comes with a plague-like affliction. Kirk meets a girl on the cusp of puberty, and as far as I can tell, starts grooming her like a paedo, until she falls in love with him. Creepy. They keep pointing out that the children are all three centuries old, as if that makes it okay. At the end, when Yeoman Rand points out that...
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ST:TOS 1.7 What Are Little Girls Made Of?
More double Kirk! Kirk and Nurse Chapel pop down to a planet to visit her fiancée. Kirk is attacked by a giant robot in the shape of Lurch from The Addams Family, Kirk pashes a lady robot, and a robot duplicate of Kirk calls Spock a half-breed. The lady robot wears the most suggestive and revealing overall of all time. The two Kirks are naked! This is a fun episode! I hope there’s more...
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ST:TOS 1.6 Mudd's Women
Space hookers. Harry Mudd is a pimp and he has three tarty molls that he drags around the galaxy to sell to men. He also has a plastic surgery pill that he gives them when they start to look haggard, and it makes them look dewy and shot through a foggy lens. Kirk is blackmailed by Mudd and some lonely miners into swapping the barely-dressed bimbos for dilithium crystals (apparently they’re...
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ST:TOS 1.5 The Enemy Within
Shatner-rific Kirk-aganza! Two Kirks!
Kirk gets split into two people by yellow muck clogging up the transporter. One of them is useless and wracked with indecision and the other is full of passion and a little bit rapey. (Poor Yeoman Rand cops the brunt of Kirk’s grabbiness) There are teethmarks in some of the polystyrene walls from Shatner’s outrageous scenery-chewing...
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ST:TOS 1.4 The Naked Time
The Enterprise gets smashed. Some fruity science malarkey means the water in their bodies is fermented and being pissed gets passed on like the flu. Sulu swans around without his shirt on fiddling with a fencing sword - how was anyone surprised when he came out of the closet?
Kirk wants to get grabby with his yeoman, but eventually declares his undying love for the ship. He probably wants to be...
