Writer: John Kingsbridge (aka John Dugan)
Director: Ralph Senensky
Producer: John Meredyth Lucas
It's hard to get a good reading on this episode. It shifts tone a lot, and it doesn't always seem intentional. It spans the gamut from high concept sci-fi, court intrigue, pretentious, philosophical, religious, and campy. It's got a bit of everything. And a lot of what it has is fairly likeable.
The basic premise is there are some superpowerful aliens who claim to have spread their genetic material across the galaxy eons ago and thus fathered humanoid life, and now exist solely as disembodied consciousnesses in a vault. They reach out to our heroes for help, they want to take over the bodies of Kirk, Spock, and Starfleet officer babe Dr Anne Mulhall (played by probable Roddenberry mistress Diana Muldaur), and use them to build android bodies which they will then inhabit. With their ancient and advanced knowledge, they could help the Federation to a great degree.
So that moves us to the intrigue part of the episode -- the three aliens are Sargon, a righteous do-gooder, his wife Thelaysa, and his enemy Henoch. They go into Kirk, Mulhall, and Spock respectively, and one of the purest joys of the hour is seeing Leonard Nimoy finally get to put his devlish looks to use and play a real smarmy bad guy. He's so well suited to it! Henoch plans to destroy Sargon and keep his superior Vulcan body instead of transfering to the androids, in the most predictable betrayal of all time. He also corrupts Thelaysa to his side since the human bodies experience sensations the android bodies cannot.
With the aliens in our heros' bodies, their consciousnesses are stored in "receptacles." Very soon the episode gets wrapped up in the mechanics of who's mind is in what body. Sargon is presumed destroyed when Kirk's body is killed, and Spock assumed killed when Sargon destroys the receptacles to prevent Henoch from fleeing anywhere -- Sargon himself having possessed the Enterprise itself. Then through further intrigues, Henoch is forced out of Spock's body and having nowhere to go, goes into oblivion. Then Sargon and Thelaysa willingingly go into oblivion as well, revealing Spock's consciousness was in Nurse Chapel's body all along!
There's a bit too much of the back and forths, traps and counter-traps, by the end of the hour, but the episode does contain a few real joys. As mentioned before, there's Nimoy as Henoch in Spock's body. Then there's the scene in the briefing room where Kirk gives an impassioned speech in favour of the risks of progress, speaking right to the heart of what Star Trek is all about. Shatner overacts the hell out of the speech, but that doesn't mean it's not a good speech.
Rating: 2.5 out of 4
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