Writer: Max Ehrlich
Director: Joseph Pevney
Producer: Gene L. Coon
Now, this episode is just kind of silly. In many ways, it's a remake of the basic idea of "Return of the Archons" in a new setting, with the addition of a Genesis metaphor and some vaguely Roddenberry-esque anti-religion sentiment.
The entire first act is more or less filling time. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekov, a pretty blonde yeoman, and like a whole platoon of redshirt security men beam down to a jungle-like planet that everyone remarks on as being super beautiful despite its glaring angry red sky. Pretty much right after remarking about what a paradise the place is, all the redshirts are horribly killed in ridiculous ways - poison dart throwing plants, landmine rocks, literal lightning strikes from heaven.
The landing party can't beam up because something on the planet is draining the Enterprise's power, which in turn means the great ship is gonna lose orbit and burn up in atmosphere if something isn't done. There's a lot of good interaction between Kirk on the planet and Scotty aboard ship in this episode, regarding this perilous situation.
Eventually the surviving members of the landing party discover a primitive society of simple people who don't know violence but also don't know love (or even sex -- there are no children), whose needs are entirely provided for by Vaal, a big papier-mache snake head idol emerging from a big cave. Kirk and Spock figure out this ersatz god is in fact a computer (built and put here by who? For what purpose?) that is keeping the people in this docile state of primitive society, being "fed" by the people to sustain its power banks. It's controls the whole planet seemingly, so it killed all the redshirts and is affecting the ship above.
So Kirk decides fuck the Prime Directive (with much the same rationale as he used in "Archons") and prevents the people from feeding Vaal, draining its power enough to use the ship's phasers to blow it up. Then he happily tells the people they can now start killing and fucking as nature intended, and beams back to his ship. When McCoy questions that Kirk may have played the role of Satan in giving these people "the apple" and forcing them out of Paradise, Kirk jokes that Spock looks more like Satan. Hahaha.
This episode isn't terrible, but it is predictable, and a bit light on making sense. It's another case of Kirk deciding he knows what's best for some random planet he'll never come back to, because altering their entire society is the only way to save his ship. It's another episode where God turns out to be a fraud and getting rid of Him is for the best. Except unlike other episodes we never really learn what's going on here or why.
It's silly and bizarre. It's also, honestly, quite a bit of campy fun. The episode is a fun time to watch, it's just not as "intelligent" as it likes to think it is, or Star Trek tends to be in general.
Rating: 2 out of 4
Next Voyage:
No comments:
Post a Comment