Writer: Robert Bloch
Director: Joseph Pevney
Producer: Gene L. Coon
Star Trek got a second season by the skin of its teeth. It was expensive, and the first season hadn't done well with ratings, but NBC parent company RCA thought the show was effective at selling colour TVs, which bought the show a reprieve, granted at a reduced budget. However, even with a reduced budget, stars like Leonard Nimoy got pay raises, DeForrest Kelley got pumped up to opening credits status, Engineering got a new set, the opening credits were redone, episode credits were polished up, visual effects were recomposited in better quality and less rushed, and the series brought on a whole new regular cast member.
The PR lie was that Pavel Chekov was added to the cast to represent the Russian accomplishments in the space race, and show a future where American and Russia had worked out their differences and now worked together. The truth was that Walter Koenig was hired to be young and cute and have a Monkees style moptop to try and appeal to teens and girls and young people and draw in more viewers to Star Trek. What's funny is it took him a while to grow out the right hairstyle, so in these early appearances he's wearing just an awful, awful wig.
"Catspaw" was filmed first in the season but held back to air in October as, essentially, the show's Halloween Special. Essentially, the Enterprise explores a planet that seems to play host to witches, castles, dungeons, black cats, turns the crew into zombies (the old-fashioned kind), and is controlled by a sorcerer and sorceress. It straddles that spooky/silly line that the kids today call "spoopy" for a while until we get the answer - the seeming magicians are in fact aliens from outside our galaxy, (sent by the "Old Ones" in another Robert Bloch Cthulhu Mythos reference) using their technology to create illusions and facsimiles of these things. They probed the human mind to try and create familiar environments, but fucked up and only got the subconscious and hit on all the scary folkloric "Trick or Treat" imagery.
Conflict arises when the female of the two aliens decides she likes having a human woman's body, as on their world there are no physical sensations. She decides she likes clothing, riches, food, power, lust, greed, etc, and turns against her ally. Ultimately it's Kirk's manipulation of her greed for sensation that saves the day, destroying their tech and revealing them to be small puppets made of multi-coloured pipe cleaner (admittedly a good idea and design for something "totally alien") that die quickly.
"Catspaw" lives or dies on how fun you think seeing our characters put through a haunted house is, and how much tolerance you have for spoopy shenanigans. It's definitely fun, although it perhaps wears thin by the end. The ideas of aliens from beyond the galaxy with no knowledge of physical sensation, who grow hungry for it unexpectedly and whom Kirk can defeat basically through seduction, is interesting but basically a secondary sci-fi idea to all the faux-horror trappings going on. There's nothing really wrong with the episode, there's just not a lot here. Worth seeing, but maybe not a second time.
Rating: 2 out of 4
Next Voyage:
No comments:
Post a Comment