Tom Salinsky

TAS S01E12 The Time Trap () brings us to the Bermuda Triangle in space, whereupon the ship’s sensors immediately go berserk (so how is that this region of the galaxy has never been properly investigated before now?). Seeing a lot of new ship designs is fun for trainspotters but doesn’t make for riveting drama. Similarly, there are lots of alien races but they’re all just sitting around a conference room and talking for much of the running time. The subterfuge with the Klingons just falls flat in this medium and there’s an awful lot of padding – including the crew pausing to watch a floor show before they attempt to make their escape. For once, they can’t get the actor when they bring back a familiar face, so Doohan plays Kor instead of John Colicos. Nichelle Nichols’s versatility is also stretched to breaking point.

TAS S01E13 The Ambergris Element () is set on a water planet – again, not easy to do in live action, but easy in limited animation – and lo! before long, the landing party’s submersible is flung across the screen by a many-tentacled monster. And then a mysterious force makes Kirk and Spock go all fishy – which screams “reset button”. Fish-Kirk and Fish-Spock happily chatting away to McCoy from inside their aquarium, with only an optical ripple suggesting their watery fate, suggests that nobody is really thinking this one through. It remains ridiculous rather than shocking, and again, Shatner’s flat line readings a lot of the drama out, but the alien environment is worth an extra star. The planet is called Argo, like Jason’s ship, but I don’t know why.

TAS S01E14 The Slaver Weapon () was written by Larry Niven no less and brings us a snazzy redesign for the Enterprise shuttle craft. This Kirk-less episode revolves around a stasis box, in which time stands still, and features some uncharacteristically poor judgement from Spock who remonstrates himself for pursuing his curiosity. TOS sexism is given a tiny wrinkle here. The alien Kzinti will underestimate human females which might give Uhura the upper hand – but nothing really comes of this. That said, this features a novel location, exotic aliens (appearance and culture) strong focus on just three characters, has high stakes and is decently paced with some really strong science-fiction concepts. It all escalates nicely into a destabilising super weapon, hand to hand combat and an intelligent war computer. Probably the highlight of the series, and one that it wasn’t possible for Shatner to ruin. It’s also, I believe, the only episode of TAS which features a character’s death

TAS S01E15 The Eye of the Beholder () begins with familiar stuff – the crew investigating a missing research team – and continues to even more familiar stuff – they are in an artificial paradise which turns out to be an alien zoo. As noted, the characters have been ironed flat in these episodes and Spock is usually reduced to a single joke in which he recites a paragraph of gibberish from a Thesaurus, another character says “Do you mean XYZ?” and he replies “I believe that is what I said.” It’s a ten-year-old’s version of the character. So, if this feels like Star Trek in a way that the sillier animated episodes don’t, that’s largely because most of it is patchworked together from elements of live action episodes.

TAS S01E16 The Jihad (). The title alone is enough to elicit from me a cry of “Yikes” but this turns into a secret quest to find a magical tchotchke with random assortment of fantasy characters. The polar opposite of the previous episode, this feels like a generic Saturday morning cartoon rather than Star Trek but at least it doesn’t feel like a rerun. In fact, it’s so unlike Star Trek that the foxy chick is cracking on to Kirk who politely rebuffs her advances.