THE PLOT
The Enterprise investigates a planet with an Earth-like atmosphere, whose very existence appears to be impossible. Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and Geologist D'Amato (gee, I wonder what's going to happen here...) beam down to the surface. Before they leave, they observe Losira (Lee Meriwether), a mysterious woman, appear from nowhere and kill the ensign operating the transporter.
After they beam down to the planet, there is a severe tremor. When it subsides, the Enterprise has vanished. Now Kirk and his landing party must find a way to survive on a world with no apparent sources of food or water. Meanwhile, the Enterprise - hurled a substantial distance from the planet - must set course back to where they started.
When Losira reappears both on the ship and on the planet, leaving a trail of bodies in her wake, it becomes apparent that both the ship's crew and the landing party will have to fight for their very survival!
I suspect I've made it sound a lot more exciting than it actually is...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Ham: "Something... or someone... killed him," Kirk declares over the body of a dead redshirt (OK, blueshirt). Brilliant deduction, captain. Kirk spends the episode largely just trying to find a way for himself and the rest of the landing party to survive. He does earn some mild tactical points by playing Human Keep Away with Losira later on. Even so, there's nothing new or particularly interesting here for Kirk. At least he doesn't suffer outright character assassination, unlike...
Spock: Written to be as annoying as humanly (or Vulcanly) possible. He prances about the bridge, ramrod poked perpetually up his backside, correcting estimates about how many minutes are left ("14.87 to be precise"). Long before the point at which he berates Scotty for daring to speak figuratively, I found myself actively wanting to reach into the screen and slap him. This script seems to have been written by someone who has no idea who Spock is, and the result may just be his worst characterization in the entire series.
Scotty: After the ship is thrown off course, he is the one who notes that it "feels wrong" - earning him a chastisement from PodSpock. Once the ship has been sabotaged, Scotty volunteers to go into the Access Tube of Death to attempt to override the sabotage. Gets one of the few good lines of the episode when, in response to Spock's ongoing countdown, he grumbles that he doesn't "need a bloomin' cuckoo clock."
Sulu: When he beamed down with the landing party, I had hopes that we might actually get some decent Sulu scenes, for possibly the first time since Mirror, Mirror. This was not to be. Sulu stands around uselessly in the background, delivering such illuminating lines as that a shipmate suffered "a terrible way to die" (Kirk's rejoinder, equally pithy: "There are no good ways").
Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: Lee Meriwether is Losira, the lethal projection which selectively kills anyone viewed as an invader. Garbed in a ridiculous harem gear, Losira is hard to take seriously as a threat. Still, Meriwether gets a certain amount of mileage out of the projection's regret over killing, and it's an effective moment when we see the recording of the "real" Losira at the episode's end.
ZAP THE REDSHIRT!
Redshirt Count: Three. The transporter operator gets to lead us into the teaser by being fatally touched by Losira. Geologist D'Amato (Arthur Batanides) lasts a full 15 minutes... but as the only non-regular to beam down to the planet, his fate was inevitable, and his prone form leads us into the next commercial fadeout.
Finally, Crewman Watkins sees the mysterious woman, and it's curtains for him. Still, if his name and position title really did amount to "everything about (him)," as he says when the woman identifies him, then I suppose it wasn't much of a loss.
THOUGHTS
After a run of fairly strong, or at least entertaining, episodes, I suppose it was time for another episode in which the third season would live down to its name. That Which Survives is an episode which resorts to having Spock do a running countdown in order to try to milk tension out of a situation that we know the ship is going to survive. The script characterizes even the series' leads in only the broadest of strokes. The treatment of Spock is appalling, but Kirk and McCoy fare better only in that they are written blandly instead of outright badly.
The story lacks any substance. It's difficult to find anything interesting that Losira and her artificial planet are standing in for, or any message being given here. That isn't in itself a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with a nice, creepy episode simply being a nice, creepy episode. But even on that basis, the episode is a failure. It's bland and lacks any atmosphere at all. Cheap and tedious, this isn't even bad enough to be funny. The episode is just sort of... there.
It all leads to a limp ending in which Spock and an anonymous security guard blast a disco cube, followed by the regulars pontificating about whether or not "beauty survives." As the end credits rolled, I had no trouble seeing why this was an episode I barely remembered. I suspect that by this time next week, I will have forgotten most of it all over again.
Rating: 2/10.
Previous Episode: Wink of an Eye
Next Episode: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
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