In the immortal words of the inimitable Dr. Zachary Smith, “Oh, the pain, the pain.”
It is difficult to write this review. It is painful to have to think about this episode. I feel those responsible should be punished. And even if most are already dead, I feel something must be done to punish them. Perhaps grave robbery might make sense. I don’t know, maybe that’s too much.
The general sense of the plot is that Kirk, McCoy and Spock visit planet blah blah blah where people dress as ancient Greeks who have enormous telekinetic powers but need a doctor to cure gangrene caused by a paper cut. Once McCoy does the trick, the toga people want to keep him permanently. The Enterprise landing party refuses and the toga club starts messing with them to make them change their minds. They have Kirk and Spock reciting lines from Alice in Wonderland (Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee). Kirk is forced to slap himself silly. They make a dwarf ride Kirk like a pony. Spock does a flamenco dance around Kirk’s head. Spock and Nurse Chapel and Kirk and Uhura are forced into a make-out session. And as the finale Spock and Kirk are getting ready to put on some kind of torture session with the girls using a bull whip and a branding iron.
Of course, the brilliant counter-plan gives Spock and Kirk even greater telekinetic powers than their tormentors in the nick of time and they turn the tables on the “Platonists.” They give the kooky supermen a stern warning about bullying spacemen. And then just to show they mean business they take away their dwarf.
This has to be one of the bottom three episodes in the whole series. It has to be. The dialog between Spock and Nurse Chapel and Kirk and Uhura is beyond embarrassing. The ham acting by Shatner and Nimoy is startling. The only decent performances are by the lead male and female Platonists. Their cool detachment and excellent enunciation were the only parts of the episode that weren’t awful.
Of course, all this also means this episode has the highest Shatner mockery factor imaginable. I’m tempted to give it an eleven in that category but that would be wrong.
I’ll call this episode and 3 // 10.
Best thing I could say about this episode is that Barbara Babcock looked great in that toga.
Other than that, the story was like a bad “Lost In Space” episode.
I know. Babcock and Liam Sullivan who played Parmen both seemed like real actors who had been sentenced by a court to serve time in a Star Trek episode to pay for flubbing a line in a real movie or something. Barbara really did have a classically beautiful face and an excellent voice.