Script: Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David
Story: Oliver Crawford
Director: Robert Gist
Producer: Gene L. Coon
This is an episode of firsts. It's the first appearance of the Enterprise's shuttle bay and shuttlecraft (after being mentioned last episode). It's the first appearance of an obnoxious galactic government bureaucrat standing over Kirk's shoulder reminding him he has other responsibilities. And it's also the first episode-long investigation of the character of Mr. Spock.
Spock was unquestionably the show's breakout character. His "fascinating" and complex character made him a favourite of writers as well as the audience, especially as Leonard Nimoy's varied and nuanced performance brought so much of the character to life.
So this episode finds Spock in command of six other crewmembers on a shuttle dispatched to investigate a notable spatial phenomena. So of course, the shuttle gets caught in the anomaly and as a result crashes on an unknown planet, which means that the first shuttle episode is also the first shuttle crash episode.
Stranded on the surface, Spock must learn to make the command decisions necessary to keep the crew alive. In addition to the standard problems of "not enough fuel to lift off", and "too much weight, we'll need to leave someone behind," there's also a primitive race of giant fur clad ape men flinging spears at the landing party.
It'd be difficult enough for anyone, but Spock approaches it with his usual irrefutable logic. It gets mixed results. When things look disastrous, he offers that there are always possibilities. But when one of the crew is endangered, he reasons the needs of the may outweigh the needs of the one, and thus doesn't wish to risk a rescue. Eventually, his insistence on logic over feeling not only earns him the ire of the officers under his command, but actually contribute to disaster at multiple turns, turning the situation more and more dire.
With Spock are McCoy and Scotty, with McCoy continuing his role as Spock's foil, and Scotty getting to demonstrate his pragmatic amazing competence (is this his first appearance since "The Naked Time"? Geez, more Scotty please!). Meanwhile the other four are two command division officers who should've been security because they both die, a rather pointless female yeoman (are all yeoman women now?), and finally Mr. Bomer, a science officer who is intelligent, passionate, and one of Trek's best one off crew members. And it's important to remember that for a 1967 audience, the fact that he was black would have been very significant as well.
Meanwhile, all the scenes aboard the Enterprise in this episode are largely pointless. They all consist of High Commissioner Asshole telling Kirk he only has so much time left to search for and rescue the Galileo shuttle crew, and Kirk getting more and more frustrated. Honestly, needing to deliver medicine to plague victims is pretty important, so the bureaucrat has a point, but the actor in the role overplays it so hard, turning this guy into just the most callous, dick-waving blowhard. And none of these scenes have really any more significant information, they just remind us that Kirk and the Enterprise exist, that they're searching for the shuttle, and that there's a time limit on the search, adding a ticking clock element on top of the already existing problems on the planet.
The climax, where Spock finally gets the shuttle crew rescued through an act of "emotional" desperation, is a fantastic moment for Spock, who gets a great examination and arc over the course of the hour. It also leads to the first of many Trek endings where the bridge crew get to laugh uproariously about Spock's alien nature.
If anything really strikes the episode down a notch - it's the aliens on the planet. I give this series a lot of leeway for its effects, special and visual, given it's unique nature at the time of production, the vintage of its production and it's limited budget. I largely think it's unfair to moan about the effects. But the Tarsus IV barbarians are, even with this leeway, utterly unconvincing. The props are bad, the costume is bad, their size and scale relative to our characters is completely inconsistent. It just doesn't work, which explains why they're largely kept offscreen. Still, it's a mark on an otherwise great episode because they always take me out of the show when they show up and start lobbing spears at people.
Rating: 3 out of 4
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