OK, third season episodes in the can at the point at which this was filmed included The Enterprise Incident and Spectre of the Gun. And yet, somehow this was chosen as the episode best suited to open the curtain on Season Three.
Kind of makes you think the season was doomed from the start, doesn't it?
THE PLOT
The Enterprise is just flying through space, minding its own business, when a beautiful woman in a mini-skirt beams onto the bridge. Before Kirk can check to make sure that this isn't just his recurring dream, the woman presses a button on her wrist-band and sends the entire ship's crew to sleep.
When they wake up, they discover that Spock has been taken to sick-bay... and that the mini-skirted woman has absconded with his brain! McCoy decides that "24 hours" is a nice, round figure, so he tells Kirk that they have 24 hours to restore Spock's brain before his body dies.
Kirk follows the ion trail to a star system, in which there are three planets capable of sustaining human life. Uhura detects vibrations coming from one of them, so Kirk decides to beam down there. On the surface, he encounters brutish men who live in fear of "the givers of pain and delight." Kirk and McCoy find a cave, which is actually an elevator, and use it to descend to the generic space colony hallways below, where they encounter mini-skirted women and their male slaves, and communicate with... Spock's Brain!!!
Kirk also gets to twitch and kowtow, but since he's on a tight schedule, he doesn't actually find time to get his shirt off and abscond with one of the alien women. Still, McCoy finds a neat hair dryer, and Scotty gets to practice fainting, so it isn't a total loss...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Ham: William Shatner gets to really go for it when his custom-made green pain belt goes off, allowing him to twitch spasmodically and blow out his mouth like a fish. It's a fairly hammy performance in general, though one suspects that there was no reasonable way to play some of the scenes in this episode. "Spock's brain... is gone," he intones leadenly upon being informed that exact thing (in those exact words) by McCoy. "Oh, great leader!" he cries to Kara, literally getting down on his knees and kowtowing to her. Genuinely hilarious ham, definitely to the episode's benefit.
Spock: Reacts to being a disembodied brain by being detached (appropriately, I suppose) and intrigued at the sensation. His concern for his shipmates dictates that he actually resist their efforts to save him, given that he sees no real chance for success. Leonard Nimoy impresses in his performance as the walking husk that is Spock's radio-controlled body. He successfully displays no glimmer of expression at any point, which creates a rather eerie effect as McCoy, Scott, and Kirk take turns piloting the "radio-controlled Spock."
Dr. McCoy: DeForest Kelly manages to escape with some dignity intact, managing to play straight some ludicrous dialogue. "It's no use, Jim. She has the mind of a child." "It's no use, Jim. She genuinely can't remember." Kelly's look of horror and intense concentration when McCoy begins to forget the brain-connecting procedure mid-surgery is quite a good bit of nonverbal acting, and he once again emerges as probably the strongest of the regulars.
Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: Marj Dusay is Kara, the woman who beams aboard the Enterprise and steals Spock's brain. She fills out her outfit nicely, and to her credit, shows genuine responsiblity for her people. She knows it is not really in her people's best interest to go to the surface, and resists Kirk's efforts to retrieve Spock's brain at every turn. Also to her credit, she seems less than thrilled when Kirk more or less suggests that she and her people can work with the men by prostituting themselves (and I guess any ugly women in the underground society will just have to fend for themselves... Then again, in Kirkland, ugly women don't count anyway).
THOUGHTS
Written by Gene Coon under a pseudonym after he officially left Star Trek, this is the infamous "worst episode ever" of the original series. In my opinion, it's quite far from deserving that title. Coon is a pro, and even when he's banging out what may well have been intended as a gag script, he has a firm grasp on basic storytelling structure. The utter incompetence of something like The Apple is entirely absent here. A sprightly pace and a certain good-natured goofiness pervade the episode, making this a great deal more fun to watch than The Alternative Factor or And the Children Shall Lead.
It's still fairly poor, though, and there's little to do but sit back and laugh at dialogue such as, "Brain and brain! What is brain?" Or Sulu recording an earnest log entry that, "Captain Kirk's hunch that Spock's Brain is on this planet appears to be correct" (whether it's planet 6 or 7 appears to be something the crew members cannot agree upon). Or the wonderfully straight-faced dilemma of which planet they should search, when on a ship of 400+ crew members, surely search parties could relatively easily be dispatched to each of the three planets. Or - yes - Kirk basically proposing that the women will be better off if they prostitute themselves to the men on the surface.
But it's sort of a good poor, if that makes sense. It's tacky and foolish, and so absolutely and utterly '60's in the genuine horror the (male) leads express at the women being in control. I was looking about for a James Coburn cameo as Derek Flint. It moves along from one loopy incident to the next in such a way that few viewers are likely to be bored. Bemused, perhaps, but not bored.
As such, I find myself inclined to give this admittedly very stupid episode a still nearly-passing grade of...
Rating: 4/10. Almost a "5," for sheer nutty fun factor, but - well - "You hurt Luma!"
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"Spectre of the Gun" had probably been planned to be shown at Halloween (like the first episode filmed for the second season) which is why it wasn't shown earlier.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is far from the worst episode. It's stupid, but it's fun, which puts it far, FAR ahead of "The Alternative Factor."
ReplyDeleteNimoy impresses me in every episode, and I wish I could go back in time and hug the poor man for doing so well in spite of his embarrassment during this episode.
I read somewhere that NBC didn't understand very much about Star Trek, but they did know that Spock was popular, so they chose to lead off the third season with this episode simply because it had Spock's name in the title.
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