{"id":2825,"date":"2022-03-02T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2825"},"modified":"2023-03-06T11:09:21","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T11:09:21","slug":"trekaday-011-spocks-brain-the-enterprise-incident-the-paradise-syndrome-and-the-children-shall-lead-is-there-in-truth-no-beauty-spectre-of-the-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2022\/03\/02\/trekaday-011-spocks-brain-the-enterprise-incident-the-paradise-syndrome-and-the-children-shall-lead-is-there-in-truth-no-beauty-spectre-of-the-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"Trekaday 011: Spock’s Brain, The Enterprise Incident, The Paradise Syndrome, And the Children Shall Lead, Is There in Truth No Beauty?, Spectre of the Gun"},"content":{"rendered":"

TOS S03E01 Spock’s Brain <\/strong>(\"0.5) is an infamously dreadful instalment, so let\u2019s get started with some of the good stuff. The new uniforms look very nice and evidently fit much better than the velour ones. And this is the first mention of a character\u2019s name in the episode title, so maybe I\u2019ll be able to remember which story this is.<\/p>\n

Well, a chick in purple appears on the bridge to the sound of lush strings, but she incapacitates the entire crew with a single touch of her wrist-computer (nice fall from Majel Barrett). \u201cThat girl!\u201d deduces Kirk. Are we to assume that nobody did anything to find her or figure out what was going on after they all passed out? Star Trek<\/strong> has always been slightly absurd, but this is virtually a parody, and the cast\u2019s po-faced delivery makes it hard to laugh along with the joke.<\/p>\n

A major problem with this episode of course is that Spock isn\u2019t in it. True, Nimoy\u2019s participation was in doubt as he wanted more money, but this doesn\u2019t feel like how they\u2019d write him out, so we don\u2019t get the benefit of his laconic wisdom, but nor does it really feel like sky-high stakes.<\/p>\n

Those multiple shadows on planet Sound Stage are back. I haven\u2019t noticed them since early in Season One. And Scotty\u2019s hair is now swept back like he\u2019s cos-playing as Lt Data. Then as if things couldn\u2019t get stupid enough, McCoy builds a remote-controlled robo-Spock.<\/p>\n

Kirk apparently picked the first planet he found despite the lack of any evidence of an advanced civilisation. But lo! there\u2019s Little Miss Wrist Computer who whammies everybody. So, this isn\u2019t a committed telling of a compelling tale based on an absurd premise. This is sloppy and ridiculous all the way down the line, from Spock\u2019s catatonic stare, to Kirk\u2019s needlessly precise countdown to famously inept dialogue like \u201cBrain and brain! What is brain?\u201d<\/p>\n

TOS S03E02 The Enterprise Incident <\/strong>(\"4.5) begins when a very grumpy Captain Kirk steers the ship into Romulan territory without explanation, from where we are oddly told that a sub space message will take three weeks to reach Star Fleet. The Romulans don\u2019t want a Zoom call, it has to be face-to-face and the Romulan commander is a slinky female, so the stage is set for plenty of subterfuge, double-crossing and espionage \u2013 because of course this is a secret mission for the Federation.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, having Kirk keep a secret is fun and novel but it feels like fake jeopardy because we are being kept in the dark by the writers. If you can get over that that, there\u2019s lots of great stuff here, most notably Spock\u2019s relationship with the Romulan commander. And, yes, the end is the same gag as Amok Time<\/em>, but at Spock\u2019s hand instead of McCoy\u2019s but it still works. After last week\u2019s car crash, this is very confident stuff with lots of good universe-building to go along with the intrigue.<\/p>\n

TOS S03E03 The Paradise Syndrome <\/strong>(\"3.5) would love to be as detailed and as affecting as The Inner Light<\/em> but TOS<\/strong> didn\u2019t have top-shelf TNG <\/strong>to inspire it. So, this starts pretty poorly, with Kirk musing about what the odds are of such duplication of Earth cultures on alien planets (Well it happens every other week, so\u2026) And the patronising depiction of alien tribes is actually modelled on native Americans \u2013 yikes! But actually, this plays out with a degree of sensitivity, some lush location work (something we\u2019ll be starved of this year), and a nifty bit of set design for the monolith.<\/p>\n

On the negative side, this doesn\u2019t play to Shatner\u2019s strengths, alas, and once Kirk gets one of the locals pregnant she has to die because otherwise he either takes her with him or abandons his unborn child, whereas this way he\u2019s off the hook.<\/p>\n

TOS S03E04 And the Children Shall Lead <\/strong>(\"1.5) opens on the planet Sound Stage, where everyone\u2019s dead outside and in their jammies. There has been a mass suicide which spares only the kids. While never as blitheringly stupid as Spock\u2019s Brain<\/em>, this is one of those episodes which requires the crew to turn their backs and count to ten to allow the alien intruders of the week to get on with their dirty work \u2013 or in some cases don\u2019t bother to do even that: when Tommy puts the whammy on Sulu, Chekov and Uhura the security guard just stands there benignly and watches it happen.<\/p>\n

And the moral of this story is: evil is ugly so you better not trust it. This is immediately contradicted by the next, vastly superior story. But the worst part of the episode is undoubtedly when Kirk just straight up beams two redshirts into deep space \u2013 surely there should be some safeguards to prevent that kind of thing??<\/p>\n

TOS S03E05 Is There in Truth No Beauty? <\/strong>(\"4.5) begins with some pretty standard TOS <\/strong>nonsense. The Medusans are so revolting as to cause madness on sight. A woman beams on board and the music goes bonkers. But \u2013 hey! \u2013 It’s Diana Muldaur again!! And as a human telepath who has studied on Vulcan, she shines a very interesting light on all of the Big Three. In fact, she\u2019s almost too good a character: her takedown of Kirk makes him seem like a chump.<\/p>\n

That the Medusans can\u2019t be seen by any humanoid is kind of the Star<\/strong> Trek<\/strong> version of the funniest joke in the world from Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus<\/em>, but this isn\u2019t just another Space Whoosit Makes The Crew Go Nutso For Forty Minutes episode. First comes the brilliant revelation that Pulaski<\/span> Miranda Jones is blind. Then we get Spock\u2019s body inhabited by one of the Medusans \u2013 and then Spock himself goes nutso. This is excellent stuff which kept me guessing to the very end.<\/p>\n

A nearly redundant scene heavily features a Vulcan pin because Roddenberry hoped to sell copies of it to fans. It was never seen on the show again.<\/p>\n

TOS S03E06 Spectre of the Gun <\/strong>(\"3) is another one I remember from James Blish, but \u2013 agh \u2013 it was so much better on the page\/in my head. The lack of money is really starting to show as the crew beams down to the planet Dry Ice VI. They didn\u2019t even have the cash for the transporter effect. Once there, they are supposedly in a re-enactment of the gunfight at the OK Corral, the Melkotians plan being to kill the landing party in the most entertaining fashion they can think of, rather than the most effective. So, this is essentially a holodeck episode (in fact it\u2019s a specific holodeck episode, A Fistful of Datas<\/em>).<\/p>\n

But the script keeps trying to insist that they are stuck in the past and that everything feels completely real, while the impoverished set design is stuck merely suggesting saloons and shops with a few bits of flattage. This completely undoes the power of the ending in which our heroes have to believe that the bullets can\u2019t harm them, which seems trivial when they look like they’re standing in a low-rent Edinburgh Fringe play. This isn\u2019t just a dodgy looking giant rat or tin-foil alien. This is a budget cut which gets written into the story heedless of the damage it does. So, there\u2019s good stuff here, but on the production side, there\u2019s a distinct feeling of \u201cwill this do?\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, it\u2019s the Arena<\/em> ending again, and it\u2019s still great, but hardly a surprise at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TOS S03E01 Spock’s Brain () is an infamously dreadful instalment, so let\u2019s get started with some of the good stuff. The new uniforms look very nice and evidently fit much better than the velour ones. And this is the first mention of a character\u2019s name in the episode title, so maybe I\u2019ll be able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[19,79,534,528],"class_list":["post-2825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-tos","tag-trekaday"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Jz","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2825"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2849,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}