Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are transporting Nancy Hedford (Elinor Donahue) back to the Enterprise after she comes down with a severe case of Plot Device while in the midst of crucial negotiations to stop some vague war between somebody and someone. Nevermind the details. The point is, she's very sick, so sick that McCoy can't miraculously cure her, and our three leads are on a shuttlecraft with her, flying through distant space...
...Making it inevitable that a mysterious cloud will force them to crash on a small planet. There, they encounter a sole human castaway who turns out to be Zefram Cochrane (Glenn Corbett), the legendary engineer who pioneered warp flight for humanity. This would seem to be impossible, since Cochrane disappeared as an old man and was presumed dead, well over a century ago. It is Cochrane, though, rejuvenated to youth through the power of The Companion, the cloudlike entity that pulled the Enterprise crew here. The entity was responding to Cochrane's need for human companionship. Now it will not let any of them leave. With Nancy getting sicker all the time, if Kirk and Spock cannot find a way to get the creature to let them go, then she will surely die!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Kirk: Retains a low threshold for fussy bureaucrats, as his often impatient responses to Nancy demonstrate. He also retains a strong sense of duty, absolutely determined to get her back to Enterprise for treatment so that she can stop the MacGuffin Wars. Kirk is fairly ruthless at the midpoint, entirely willing to kill the Companion to achieve his freedom. His ability to reason and argue his way through a stubborn adversary's defenses shows itself again. When he argues with the Companion at the end, he tries multiple tactics. He begins with reason, then moves to emotion as he hits on a key point that gets the Companion to let him and his people go.
That Vulcan Voodoo You Do: Spock's mindmeld abilities grow in this episode - for what I'm pretty sure is the first time - to include non-corporeal life forms. He mindmelds with the Companion, gaining crucial insights that allow Kirk first to fight it, then to reason with it.
Annoying Hot Space Bureaucrat Babe of the Week: Elinor Donahue provides a solid acting performance, as well as a highly attractive presence, as Nancy Hedford. Since she fulfills the roles of both "Annoying Bureaucrat" and "Babe of the Week," she gets to be considerably more sympathetic than her bureaucratic counterparts in A Taste of Armageddon and The Galileo Seven. Still, she spends the early part of the episode aggravating Kirk, McCoy, probably Spock, and certainly the audience with her pointless whining about a course diversion that it is clear cannot be helped. Once she establishes a connection with Cochrane, she becomes less bombastic... though at this point, most of her dialogue turns into bleating about love. The role is fairly badly written, but Donahue manages to escape with her dignity intact.
THOUGHTS
Metamorphosis is an episode that I had no memory of. Every other episode to date, I've either vaguely remembered or had bits and pieces come back to me while watching. That did not happen here. Since I probably saw every TOS episode at least four times as a child, that indicates exactly how much of an impression it made on me.
That isn't necessarily damning. I've found, many times, that episodes that made little impression as a child have played better when revisited as an adult. Unfortunately, the script, by the usually superb Gene Coon, simply isn't memorable. The idea of an energy creature falling in love with a human has potential... though I suspect that potential would probably have been better exploited in a 25-minute Twilight Zone episode. As presented here, the story is too thin to stretch comfortably across 50 minutes.
Zefram Cochrane is, of course, a splendidly memorable character. However, only when portrayed, decades later, by James Cromwell. Glenn Corbett's Cochrane is a bland pretty boy, who never convinces as a pioneering genius.
His choice at the end makes particularly little sense. This is a man who, on his deathbed, insisted on flying out into the stars one last time. Given "love," he chooses to maroon himself and his new "love" on a planet, and begs Kirk not to tell anyone about them? OK, you get to have lots and lots of sex with the admittedly hot Nancy/Companion hybrid - yay! That should carry you happily through about two years, give or take, before you start to get restless and realize that you are still marooned on the same planet that's been your prison for more than a century. Only now you get to age, and get sick, and all that fun stuff, on top of being marooned. Not to mention an echo of one of my complaints about the Babylon 5 short story, Space, Time, and the Incurable Romantic. Namely, any offspring Cochrane and Nancy/Companion have together will effectively be damned to incest. The Adam/Eve thing must have been a fantasy of Gene Roddenberry's, as it's recurred a few times in Trek, starting with the original pilot - but that is rather the dark side of the Adam and Eve story, that any family tree originating with one Adam and one Eve quickly resembles the punchline to a bad Louisiana redneck joke.
I don't want to be too hard on the episode, however. It's not very good, but neither is it very bad. The weaker elements are offset by the intriguing notion of the Companion itself, and by the very strong way Kirk is characterized in dealing with it. At the start, Kirk deals with the entity ruthlessly, as an enemy. He is willing to hurt it, to kill it if necessary. When military force fails, he falls back on communication and diplomacy, to negotiate a release. Again, Kirk starts with reason. When reason fails, he shifts to emotion. It isn't long before he hits upon the emotion that is the creature's vulnerability - love. It's easy enough to laugh at some of Shatner's more, ah, emphatic line deliveries. But the actual argument is well-written and well-structured, as we see Kirk probing to find a weakness, then exploiting it.
And if the MacGuffin wars between the Whoositzes and the Whatsits are left to take care of themselves? Well, the episode isn't terribly concerned about that. Why should we be?
Rating: 5/10.
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This is a poor review. It's a really good episode. I didn't like the later portrayal of Cochrane - making him out to be no better that a piss head.
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