Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 21 – The Cloud Minders

For the second episode in a row, the Enterprise needs to get a mineral to cure a plague.  Go figure.  The planet with the mineral has an elite that lives in a city floating in the sky called Stratos.  The common people are called troglytes because they work in the mineral mines.  Kirk and Spock beam down to the mine entrance to pick up the mineral but the troglytes are in revolt and they try to capture Kirk and Spock for hostages but Plasus the leader of Stratos saves them and brings them to the city.  Plasus’ daughter is this incredibly skinny blonde model-looking girl who has the hots for Spock.  Anyway, we find out that the trogs are angry and stupid because the mineral they dig gives off stupid gas.  The rest of the episode is about Kirk trying to convince the cloud people and the trogs to wear masks in the mines.  Finally, Kirk traps Plasus and the head of the trogs in a mine and when they all start becoming homicidally angry, they finally realize the truth about the stupid gas.  Kirk gets the mineral.  The trogs and cloud people continue to hate each other but with a little more clarity and Spock and the emaciated blonde agree that she should go down to see the mines for some reason.

This is a social justice episode.  The poor oppressed masses are being held down by the fat cats living in Stratos.  How original.  But it wasn’t as bad as some other episodes I’ve just watched.  Kirk is kind of amusing when the gas made him irritable.  I think he yelled at Scotty at one point so that was good.

Point of interest.  Plasus is played by Jeff Corey who was the outlaw that Rooster Cogburn is hunting in the original version of True Grit.

I’ll call this a 5  //  5.

I apologize for the brevity of this review.  But I’m really running out of patience with this series as it runs out of merit.  The least they could have done was blow up a planet or something to keep my interest.  But all we get are whiny aliens and social justice.

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Chemist
Chemist
1 year ago

Even as a pre-teen I felt I was being hit over the head with the social justice. And, again, Trek chose to ignore its own tech. The civilization with the ability to travel faster than light, send people to planets by teleportation and has a box capable of analyzing everything from an alien lifeform to a bad cold was unable to detect a toxic gas? FFS, coal miners in the 1800s may not have known what methane was, but they knew enough to bring a canary along. The floating city was the high point for me. That was very cool… Read more »