The Fat Man who is a hyper-vigilant researcher of all things Shatner sent this in to me. Imagine his horror when another of his idols, Peter Thiel, mocks the great one! Watch starting at 10:00.
Oh the horror. Utter blasphemy.
Landreau, coordinate!
Category: Star Trek
My reviews of the original television series Star Trek
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 9 – Dagger of the Mind
The plot of this episode is a variant of the “mad scientist theme.” The Enterprise is transferring supplies and receiving freight from a penal colony Tantalus V. An escapee hides in a crate and is loose in the Enterprise. When he is captured it is discovered that he is part of the staff named Dr. van Gelder. The director of the penal colony, Dr. Adams, claims that van Gelding was driven mad through exposure to a device called the neural neutralizer that is used for therapy on the mentally ill.
But McCoy has suspicions and recommends that Kirk go to the planet and investigate the real reason for van Gelding’s madness. McCoy selects a young woman named Lt. Helen Noel to accompany Kirk down to the surface. Noel and Kirk had a romantic episode during the “Christmas Party” the previous year.
While investigating the neural neutralizer, Noel plants a suggestion in Kirk’s head that their little encounter was really a serious romance. But immediately after this, Dr Adams has Noel restrained and uses the machine to convince Kirk that he was madly in love with Helen Noel. After the session, Noel and Kirk are returned to his room and once Helen convinces him that his romantic impulse is a false memory produced by Dr. Adams through the neural neutralizer, he helps her into the HVAC duct with the intention of turning off the force field to allow communication with the Enterprise.
While she approaches the power plant Kirk is brought back by Dr. Adams for a more painful treatment meant to make Kirk a compliant victim of Adams’ plans. Finally, Noel shuts down the power and Kirk overpowers Adams. Spock comes to the rescue with a security theme but when the power is restarted Dr. Adams overdoses on the neutralizer that suffuses his unconscious body and dies.
Parts of the episode were interesting, parts were ridiculous. I enjoyed the silly banter and embarrassment between Kirk and Helen Noel. It was slightly clever. The fact that they mention a Christmas Party instead of the politically correct term Holiday Party was refreshing. The plot was fairly predictable but not terrible. The actress playing Helen is definitely a babe. As a regular story it would earn a 6. As for the mockability index, there are several notable moments. Whenever van Gelding tries to tell McCoy and Spock about things that the neutralizer compels him not to talk about, he writhes in agony and makes the goofiest faces imaginable. And in this episode Spock performs his first “Vulcan Mind Meld.” Melding with van Gelding he becomes practically weepy which is truly embarrassing to view. So, I would give the overall score as 6//5.
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 8 – Miri
So, the set-up is the Enterprise hears a Morse Code distress signal out in space (somehow) and follows it back to a planet that is identical to Earth. The landing party includes Kirk, Spock, Bones and, for no explicable reason, Yeoman Janice Rand. I’ve got to stop here for a moment, and comment on the fact that even though we’re only a quarter of the way through season one it should be noted that finding themselves on a planet that inexplicably resembles Earth and responding to a distress signal, which implies danger, the Chief Medical Officer, the First Officer and the Captain are being sent down into an unknown and possibly lethal emergency. But at least they brought the pretty girl with them for back up. Okay, end of rant.
The upshot is that a virus that was meant to bestow practically endless longevity to the whole population instead killed everyone but the prepubescent children. Three hundred years later the Enterprise crew finds the “children” still young but terrified of grownups that they call grups. Apparently, the dying adults went crazy and attacked everything in their path as they were dying. The children call themselves “onlies” but as each of the older children eventually reaches puberty the disease covers him in hideous sores, rapidly ages him, drives him mad and kills him. The Enterprise landing party is infected immediately and has a week to find the cure before they will die on the planet quarantined from the Enterprise. Only Spock is immune because of his green blood.
They find a teenage girl named Miri, played by True Grit actress Kim Darby, who has a crush on Kirk and in typical Kirk fashion he creepily smirks as she moons over him. It’s pretty bad. The other onlies are a weird collection of random children and stunted former child actors, one of whom, Michael J. Pollard, was closing in on thirty years of age. The actor who played Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” John Megna, is in the cast as a supposedly little kid but he was fifteen years old and although he was still extremely short his head had grown disproportionately so his appearance was truly disconcerting. Anyway, the sympathy we’re supposed to feel for the onlies doesn’t happen because they are creepy and vicious and weird looking.
The kids steal the communicators from the landing party and this hampers the search for a cure. Kirk, Bones and Janice begin to show signs of the disease and they become extremely short tempered with each other. One particularly embarrassing scene has Janice Rand pulling back the collar of her blouse to show a sore on her chest and then admitting to Kirk that she has always wanted him to notice her legs but now they were disfigured with sores. Careful Janice, those kinds of things can’t be unsaid and Kirk doesn’t forget.
Finally, Kirk gets Miri to bring him to the onlies. She adds her voice to his story that they are all in danger. At first the onlies attack him and beat him with large crescent wrenches and odd-looking clubs. Kirk makes some of his patented looks of pain. But eventually he convinces them to return the communicators and trust the Enterprise crew to help them.
Meanwhile Bones throws caution to the wind and injects himself with the vaccine. He immediately keels over and we have to wait as his unconscious body slowly fights off the virus and the sores on his face mercifully disappear.
As an epilogue Janice tells Kirk that Miri really was in love with him and he agrees but gives a creepy leering smile which probably should have been reported to the FBI’s Pervert Investigation Unit for evaluation.
Okay, so the scene where the onlies beat up Kirk is kind of funny and Janice’s comment about her legs is wonderfully embarrassing but other than that, meh.
Let’s rate it 5//5. Right in the middle on both axes.
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 7 – What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Here we are at episode seven of Season One and certain trends are already appearing. Hopefully this will allow me to formulate a number of postulates as I did with the Twilight Zone. For instance, whenever Kirk is replicated either by transporter mishap or incursion into an alternate universe or by action of a mad scientist hilarity is bound to ensue.
And such is the case in this episode. The Enterprise is sent to a frigid ice world to locate Dr. Roger Korby who is not only the Louis Pasteur of archaeological medicine but is also Nurse Chapel’s fiancé. In fact, mention of Korby’s preeminence as a scientist elicits the first utterance of the dreaded phrase, “his textbook was required reading at the Academy.” Now we’re never told why a military officer needs to be versed in archeological medicine and in fact we never really find out what the hell archeological medicine is. Anyway, by the fact that Nurse Chapel is his fiancée we know this guy is a loser.
When they reach orbit Korby communicates to them that they are to only send Captain Kirk down alone. But when he finds out the that Chapel is aboard; he allows that she should join the captain. We find out that Korby is really a robot with Korby’s mind implanted in it. He is assisted by other humaniform robots who were created by a robot that was left by the “Old Ones.” This robot is named Ruk and is played by Ted Cassidy who was Lurch on the original Addams Family show from the 1960s.
Korby’s evil plan is to substitute robots for humans throughout the galaxy and allow them to assume control and thus bring forth a logical new civilization. Of course, it swiftly devolves into a murder spree wherein red shirt after red shirt is killed by Ruk. To put this plan into action Korby duplicates Kirk with a twin robot.
And here the hilarity ensues. Kirk is naked on a spinning table with only a metal console hiding his nethers. The other side of the table has a sort of formless dummy that is the future home of Kirk’s mind in Robot Kirk. As his mind is being copied into the Robot Kirk, Meat Kirk keeps repeating over and over, “Mind your own business, Mr. Spock. I’m sick of your half-breed interference!” Meat Kirk is implanting this racial hatred in the mind of Robot Kirk to tip Spock off that Meat Kirk had been replaced. We are treated to the Kirks verbally with sparring with each other. I’ll have to say Robot Kirk seemed to get the better of it.
One of the robots is Andrea. She is a very attractive young woman wearing a form fitting and meager outfit that improves the show substantially. Nurse Chapel’s reaction to Andrea’s relation to Roger Korby is very entertaining. When he assures Chapel that Andrea is just a robot and there cannot be any question of an emotional attachment Nurse Chapel does not appear either convinced or comforted by the story. Later on, Meat Kirk is able to overcome Andrea’s lack of emotional or sexual capability by vigorous kissing. She is somehow transformed into a woman and when later on Robot Kirk refuses her romantic advances, mistaking him for Meat Kirk and resenting his refusal, she disintegrates Robot Kirk with a phaser.
Finally, when it is revealed to Nurse Chapel that Roger is a robot and she rejects him for not being human. He despairs. And when Andrea then turns her romantic attention to Roger and kisses him Roger triggers the phaser and disintegrates himself and Andrea together. So sad.
Okay, this is a lot of stuff. Nurse Chapel is one of the really awful parts of Star Trek. She always has some horrific hairdo or wig, she’s kind of homely and she’s a terrible actress whose character is always annoying. But when she’s jealous of Andrea and angry at Roger it’s kind of hilarious.
Kirk has one pretty good shoulder roll in the episode and Ruk does pick Kirk up and pins him on the top of a wall at one point. And passionate Meat Kirk grappling with Andrea and reprogramming her with his Kirk lust is funny. And when she disintegrates Robot Kirk for spurning her that was funny too. But all in all, naked Kirk spinning around at two hundred rpm is probably the highlight of the show.
As a story it’s passingly interesting. Robert Bloch, the writer of Psycho wrote this episode so it’s not completely boring. In terms of mockery this is one of the best. For those two measures of the value of the show I will institute a binary marking scale and to give it a pseudoscientific aura I’ll use numbers instead of letters. In each case the value is out of a possible 10. This is a 5//9.
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 6 – Mudd’s Women
This episode is notable in that it introduces the character Harcourt Fenton (Harry) Mudd who returns in the much more enjoyable later episode “I, Mudd.”
The Enterprise detects a transport ship that is travelling without its identity beacon. Pursuing it into an asteroid belt The Enterprise is forced to overload its own engines while protecting the transport ship from destruction. Harry Mudd and his cargo of three women destined to be sold as wives to rich lonely miners are transported onto the enterprise just before the smaller ship is destroyed by an asteroid.
The women are repeatedly described as incredibly beautiful (meh) and have an hypnotic effect on the male crew. Interestingly, other than Uhura we don’t see any of the female crew members during the episode. The Enterprise is crippled by the destruction of its lithium crystals (apparently the term di-lithium crystals was coined later in the series) during the asteroid belt maneuver and the ship must head to a planet where lithium crystals are mined to replace them. Mudd finds out about this and communicates with the miners and they cook up a scheme whereby the miners will refuse to provide Kirk with the crystals unless he allows Mudd and his women to go to the planet’s surface for a meet and greet with the miners.
Things move forward on the plan but one of the women, Eve, is disgusted with the whole plan because of their guilty secret. The women are only artificially beautiful. They take a drug that makes them attractive. If they stop taking it, they become homely. Anyway, the miners find out about the secret and become angry but then we see that Eve becomes beautiful again due to the placebo effect of thinking she took the drug. Now she’s beautiful because she’s self-confident. And the miners are happy again because she has a heart of gold.
Mudd is taken back on the Enterprise where he will be put on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Federation and the Enterprise is back to just having Yeoman Rand to maintain their hormonal balance.
Other than the slightly amusing acting of Mudd and the revealing costumes of the three women the only scene that I found engaging is when Eve and her miner are shown in bickering domesticity. She makes him breakfast and they spar about the value of female versus male housekeeping. I detected a spark of honesty in the portrayal which is highly unusual in anything Star Trekian.
But that’s it. Watching Bones, Scotty and Kirk salivate and gape at the women wears thin very quickly and cannot manage to fill out the hour while Mudd enacts his brilliant scheme. Kirk doesn’t do any shoulder roles or pontificate about life. It’s not very good. This episode is sub-par on both a conventional dramatic scale and with respect to Shatnerific bad acting.
ShatnerKhan 1 – Part 4 – Conclusion
After reviving ourselves again with refreshments we estimated that we had time for one last course before exhaustion would set in. Almost at random we selected Mudd’s Women. It was a mistake. What we thought we were going to watch was the episode called I, Mudd. This one is about Mudd selling women that he artificially beautifies with a drug. It’s boring and meaningless. At the end the women are seen to be beautiful without the drug because they’re self-confident. Yeah sure, and I’m Brad Pitt.
Anyway, this poor episode angered the delegates and disrupted the complacency that the massive junk food binge had produced. We set to work repairing the situation with mass quantities of supplies. Once we had re-established our equilibrium, we decided to quickly bring the ShatnerKhan to a rapid close. But we did ramble on about what we had learned and vowed less poisonous food at ShatnerKhan 2.
So, what did we learn?
- William Shatner is indeed a demigod of bad acting. Series television, made-for-tv movies, big studio major motion pictures, even minor awards ceremonies; none of them are proof against his patented lousy acting skills. He is a ham for all seasons.
- As lousy an actor as Shatner is, he is definitively the best part of the original Star Trek series. His character possesses almost the only heroic characteristics to be found on the show. The rest of them are even bigger weirdos and losers than he is.
- Shatner actually seems to be a decent comic actor. He is able to perform self-deprecating routines quite skillfully. We decided not to hold this against him.
- Much more study will be needed and a much higher grade of food supplies will be needed for future ShatnerKhan events. I personally advocated for deli, others spoke of Thai food and barbecue. These questions will be sorted out in committee.
But all agreed that ShatnerKhan 1 was a roaring success both academically and gastronomically.
All hail William Shatner, long may you endure as a shining beacon of terrible acting.
Star Trek – The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 5 – The Enemy Within
As I delve deeper and deeper into Season One, I find myself amazed at just how much awful acting there is. Whereas in most Star Trek episodes just one Jim Kirk is enough to satisfy anyone’s appetite for bad acting but in “The Enemy Within” we get two! A malfunction of the transporter causes anything sent through to be divided into polar opposites. A dog with a horn on his head and a really fake looking fur coat is split into a calm docile version and a rabid psycho version. And when Kirk goes through the machine, he becomes polar opposite twins too.
And this pair of Kirks is very special indeed. One of them is Castrated Kirk. The transporter has neutered him. He is indecisive, confused and unmanned. He is constantly reminded by Spock that his Evil side is responsible for his ability to command the ship and therefore Good Kirk while intelligent and principled is unfit to run the ship, a capon and a big loser. Spock really rubs it in. It seems like he’s angling for the job.
The other Kirk is Satyr Kirk. He attempts to rape Yeoman Rand. I suspect given time he might have humped the entire female crew. He berates Bones and orders him to hand over the Saurian Brandy which he wanders around swigging from the bottle. And he beats up various members of the crew whenever the chance offers itself. Later on, when he takes the Helm, he orders the crew to abandon Sulu and the landing party to their frozen deaths. This did actually endear him to me. I think they should have given him a chance. I liked his instincts.
Watching Shatner portray the complementary fragments of Kirk is a thing of grotesque beauty. The feral lascivious leer of Evil Kirk is wonderfully overdone. The fretful womanish whining of Good Kirk is annoying and pathetic.
As a secondary pleasure in the episode, due to the malfunctioning transporter, the landing party is trapped on the planet as the temperature heads down into negative triple digits so we get to watch Sulu slowly freezing to death. Very satisfying.
The climactic scene for each of our demi-heroes comes when Good and Evil Kirk have their showdown on the Bridge. When Evil Kirk submits to Good Kirk’s leadership he cries out in a panicked voice, “I want to liiiive, I want to liiive!” Pure schmaltz, marvelous. Then as both Kirks are standing on the transporter plate waiting to see if the transporter can meld them back into a composite of bad acting, Good Kirk is supporting unconscious Evil Kirk and just before the mechanism is activated Good Kirk hugs his Evil half in a loving embrace. It’s quite nauseating. Truly wonderful.
Obviously, this is a Star Trek must-see episode. Seeing the two polar opposite Kirks you realize that up until this episode, Shatner has been restraining his acting style. We get to see Shatner unbound and it’s not pretty. But it’s important for us to know his true range. It’s good to know that there is more Shatner in there if it’s needed. Well done Bill, well done.
ShatnerKhan 1 – Part 3
As stated at the end of the last post we settled on Star Trek episode “Space Seed” as our next course. And there it all was! Ricardo Montalban and William Shatner battling to settle the question of who could chew up the scenery faster. Khan proves to be an even more persuasive lady’s man than Kirk. He convinces a lady scientist to turn traitor to the Enterprise and assist Khan in taking over the ship. Of course, the most absurd part of the story is that Kirk provides Khan with the ship’s technical manuals that allow him to figure out how to selectively flood most of the Enterprise with knock out gas. Could there be any logical reason to provide a known megalomaniac with the details of these most sensitive technical secrets of the ship? Of course not. While he was at it, he might as well have given Khan his social security number and his bank account PIN.
There is a great scene near the end where Kirk and Khan are fighting mano a mano. Khan starts out by snatching away Kirk’s phaser and twists it in half with his bare hands. Kirk gets tossed around like a rag doll but at the critical juncture he grabs hold of a solid metal bar and clonks Khan over the head a few times with it and shows that even a super-strong super-genius should go for the quick kill instead of ending up having the tables turned on him like some kind of super villain in a James Bond movie.
Watching the final scene where Khan and his colony agree to be exiled on a world of their own is of course ironic. We know that in the future the Wrath of Khan is awaiting Kirk and the rest of the crew. This was discussed heatedly. What should have been done. Should Khan have been handed over to a re-education camp. Should Kirk have checked to see if Ceti Alpha was a stable star that would permanently support a colony? Should such dangerous genetically superior individuals have been liquidated, for the safety of all humanity? What, precisely, was rich Corinthian leather? The answers to all of these were debated endlessly and then abandoned because we got hungry again.
But certain things were agreed on. Kirk and Khan are both hounds and neither Shatner nor Montalban believed in understated performances. And these two things were linked with the fact that this is one of the most popular episodes of the series. Shatner and Montalban are over the top ham actors. The characters they are playing are out of a comic book. But they are fun. They are motivated by the things that men are interested in; women, adventure, honor. This makes them about a trillion times more fun and interesting than Spock or Picard or any of the other “futuristic” characters. Shatner taking shoulder rolls and bouncing around under pretend Khan pummeling is laughable and sophomoric but it’s still the best thing Star Trek had in this episode.
So this is the revelation. Kirk is the best part of the show because he provides the only example of a normal man doing normal manly things. He doesn’t do them well or convincingly but he’s all there is. So we gave one cheer for James Tiberius Kirk and took some time out to eat some more food.
You may think that there was an inordinate amount of time taken away from the proceedings of ShatnerKhan to eat junk food. You would be correct. The plain truth is that all the delegates there were taking the opportunity to eat types and amounts of food that their wives would normally prevent. In many ways it was almost as if ShatnerKhan was an excuse to pig out. Once again, you would be correct. But we justified this by pointing out that Shatner himself always looked like he could lose about thirty pounds and we perceived something heroic in men of a certain age throwing caution and wifely warnings to the wind and seizing the day and the Dorito (as it were).
In the final post we will look at the concluding viewing content and then our final thoughts on ShatnerKhan 1 and the prospects for later editions.
ShatnerKhan 1 – Part 4 – Conclusion
Star Trek: The Original Series – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 4 – The Naked Time
This episode leaves me very conflicted. Because of the enormous amount of awful acting by a plethora of characters this should be and is a highly rated episode on the mockery index. But having to sit through it is challenging. There really is a limit to how much insipid tv you can watch before your skin starts to crawl.
Let’s dispose of the plot, such as it is, first and then look over this train wreck. The Enterprise has been sent to Psi 2000, a planet whose star has “gone dark” and is now apparently collapsing in on itself from the cold. They are tasked with rescuing a crew of four scientists that, for some inexplicable reason, were left in a highly dangerous and unstable environment and after the rescue they are to observe the collapse of the planet at extremely close range in a highly unstable and dangerous orbit. Sure.
Spock and Lt. Joe Tormolen (hint, hint, dead man walking) beam down to the surface in isolation suits and find that the scientists seem to have died violently from the effects of insanity. Tormolen’s nose is itchy so of course he takes off his glove and immediately becomes infected with what ever strange infection killed off the scientists. Tormolen spreads the infection to the ship and for the rest of the episode the whole cast except McCoy engage in random acts of imbecility that somewhat mimic drunkenness. Of course, the ship ends up in great danger of crashing into the unstable planet and a last minute “Hail Mary” by Spock and Scotty saves the ship but hurls the ship three days back into the past and then the show ends. That’s not much of a plot.
Okay, so this is kind of a stupid plot but what is truly notable is how many creepy behaviors are on view by the crew. Sulu takes off his shirt and swash buckles around the ship menacing the crew with a fencing sword. Nurse Chapel starts whining at Spock declaring her empathy and love for his poor neglected emotional life as a half-Vulcan. She even starts pawing at him and infects him whereupon he also starts blubbering and whining about how sad he was as a child. Spock infects Kirk during a fist fight and then Kirk starts describing his unrequited love for the Enterprise. All in all, it’s a nauseating spectacle but Spock and Nurse Chapel crying together and then Spock crying by himself in his cabin has got to be the low point. It has to be seen to be believed.
There is an important scientific moment. When the shut down engines won’t be available soon enough to save the ship if a normal start up is used, Kirk orders Scotty to engage in a full power restart, to which Scotty exclaims apoplectically, “ye canna mix matter and anti-matter cold!” I fully expected him to preface it with an exclamation like, “Are ye daft man?”
Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Chapel was Gene Roddenberry’s main squeeze and soon to be wife. But she is just such an annoying character that she comes close to making the episode unwatchable. The hair style or wig she has in this episode is weird and off-putting. The hair on the back of her head is dark and the front is grey and the whole thing is sort of swirled around. It looks like something went terribly wrong during the hair and make-up prep.
So, my verdict is this is a must see because of just how heinous the acting is. But at the same time make sure you aren’t in a weakened state during the viewing. It will lower your vitality and it’s entirely possible you will break out in hives. And it is completely out of the question for the mentally unstable.
ShatnerKhan 1 – Part 1
On the 27th of October 2019 word spread that an opportunity existed for ShatnerKhan 1 to occur on November First. I scrambled to confirm that the resources were in place. I searched for any conflicts that could interfere with the operational excellence needed for such a critical mission. ShatnerKhan 1 was a go!
So much had to be done in such a short window.
- Venue reservations
- audio-visual equipment rentals
- purchase of archival quality motion picture and television recordings
- intellectual property rights agreements
- hotel accommodations
- security staff and clearances
- media announcements
- insurance waivers
- local permitting
The time it took to N/A each of these items on the public domain occasion planning list that I downloaded from a random website was time taken away from the planning of exactly which Shatner masterpieces would be included and which would have to be sadly excluded due to time constraints from ShatnerKhan 1.
When I arrived home that fateful night ShatnerKhan 1 had already kicked into high gear. The delegates, some of whom had travelled from locales almost as far a way as the Andorian, Tellarite and Coridan systems, were attempting to regale Camera Girl with droll anecdotes of their exploits on their far-flung travels. She on the other hand, being a woman and therefore of a practical nature, was more interested in when they intended to leave.
I bounded into the gathering full of enthusiasm and the bright good spirit of camaraderie and feasted on a sumptuous repast of not only wonderful chicken chop suey, marvelous won ton soup and priceless egg rolls but also a mysterious dessert that attempted to predict my future! O Brave New World!
And now sated of our ravenous hunger and perfectly receptive to the cinematic delights we were about to experience we discussed the program. What would be included in this inaugural edition of ShatnerKhan? What would have to be postponed for a subsequent occasion? And what order would we arrange the included courses? I proposed to start off the evening with “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” This seemed a safe and non-controversial strategy. But surprisingly, the delegates were opposed. The attitude of the room was that this was too tame, too familiar. They demanded a more challenging, a more esoteric choice. I knew that some of the delegates had not delved as deeply as I into the less well-known strata of Shatneriana. I resolved to stagger them with something they were surely unprepared for. I played Rocket Man.
For those who had not seen it before, the effect was devastating. By the time the third Shatner appeared there were howls of pain emanating from the audience and shouts to stop the show. I refused. They had sown the wind now they must reap the whirlwind. When the last “long, long time” died out into merciful silence I could see that those who had revolted against the safe choice of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” were now sadder and wiser. They probably wished they could go back in time and undo that revolt. But no one can unsee “Rocket Man.” Their innocence was shattered. Like the victims of a Lovecraftian eruption of eldritch horror, the image of the tuxedoed Shatners was seared permanently into their souls. I contemplated describing here the experience of watching “Rocket Man.” It can’t be done. The experience is inexplicable. You’ve either seen it or you haven’t. It’s like trying to describe green to a blind man. Suffice it say that it is Shatner at the height of his powers, confident, almost arrogant. In complete control of the audience and his cigarette.
We stopped to revive ourselves with licorice and pretzel rods.