Exasperated Calculator

Once again, it is very clear that the Enterprise very clearly needs a sexual harassment contact officer. Sexual Harassment Panda perhaps? But senior officers in love with junior officers just feels ‘icky’ today.

Otherwise yet another Season 3 episode in the ‘dull’ column. Nothing much of interest here. Even Scotty’s ‘romance’ is just flat – neither lovelorn nor entertainingly stalker-ish.

73 down, 664 to go. And stay tuned later tonight – I’ll be live blogging as I watch what GEOS thinks is the second worst episode in all of Star Trek.

Any episode that starts with a reference to ‘the fifth interstellar geophysical conference’ has a fair way to go before it reaches ‘fun’ or even ‘tolerable’.

Ten minutes in, the direction is clearly ‘downhill’ – there’s a one minute montage of people scanning plants with tricorders. And the climactic moment of tension? Mr Scott with a button that’s stuck. Well, unless you count the game of ‘ring around the rosie’ Kirk, McCoy and Sulu play.

Everyone seems to have taken their cranky pills this week. Especially Spock, who is acting very inconsistently with his previous behaviour. Refusing to say ‘Thank You” just makes you look like a dick.

So no, not very good.

No red shirts (the transporter officer doesn’t count, he didn’t beam down. And the geologist doesn’t either, he was wearing blue). It’s been a while: 20 episodes or so

72 down, 665 to go.

So having dealt so deftly with racism (cough not), Star Trek moves on to Abortion.

A little less heavy handed, perhaps because the answer is a lot more complicated than in the case of racism. More potential than actual achievement, as the episode itself just doesn’t quite do anything with it subject matter. The idea of Kirk wandering around an abandoned Enterprise is an interesting one, but the show makes very little of it really.

As an aside, Season 3 is really seeing the ‘Kirk the horndog’ thing. Kirk has ‘gotten the girl’ in some way in five out of the past six episodes.

71 down, 666 to go. Just 8 episodes left in the The Original Series now. Technically I’m 7 episodes behind, but by minutes I’m back on track again.

Star Trek’s infamous ‘racism’ episode.

The problem with this episode isn’t just that it takes its moral and beats you over the head with it until you plead ‘enough’. No, in addition to that it has some pretty bad acting from one of the guest stars (Loki, I thought the Commissioner was mostly OK), some dreadful directing decisions (particularly the ‘zoom in and out on the red alert’ choice, which the director felt was so important he had to do it twice), and a script which clearly didn’t have enough leading to some dreadful ‘fill’ scenes (Scotty decontaminating the planet is the most obvious suspect there).

But it does at least have a relatively late ‘first’ for classic Star Trek – the first self destruct sequence.

70 down, 667 to go.

Now that’s more like it.

The Enterprise goes back to a high security facility (q.v. Dagger of the Mind), but they learnt from last time and so there are some effective security restrictions in place.

In a lot of ways the plot of this episode is very similar to that of Plato’s Stepchildren just a few episodes ago. The difference is that this time the guest star has a nice sense of menace and insanity, which makes all of the business between Kirk being made prisoner and finally defeating everyone a lot more enjoyable.

69 down, 668 to go.

Blerk. OK, let’s see if I have this straight – fierce women are bad, and they can be tamed only by Captain Kirk.

Not a good episode. The actress playing Elaan never really worked out what the part was meant to be. Kirk never really seemed to be in love with her when the plot called for that. And the Klingons seemed largely superfluous.

68 down, 669 to go.