The setup, such as it is, has Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov and some female red shirt beam down to Gamma Hydra IV to perform routine physicals on a colony of typical victims.\u00a0 They find all but two of the colonists dead of old age and the two remaining ones already extremely elderly, this despite the fact that chronologically, they were all under thirty years of age.<\/p>\n
When they get back to the ship the last two colonists expire and the landing party, except for Chekov begin aging at the rate of thirty years per day.\u00a0 This is discovered when Kirk feels a back ache and instead of it being a muscle pull McCoy diagnoses advanced arthritis.\u00a0 Next, we see Scotty walk into the sick bay completely gray haired and covered in wrinkles.\u00a0 Kirk\u2019s hairline starts receding and McCoy is soon sporting an enormous gray-haired wig that\u2019s obviously plastered on top of his real hair.\u00a0 At first, they barely give Spock a few gray hairs because Vulcans are more long-lived but by the end Spock gets a good set of facial wrinkles and some decent gray coverage.\u00a0 And all of this make-up is hilarious but it\u2019s the acting that makes this episode so great.\u00a0 There is another of a long series of Commodores who is being transported to Star Base blah blah blah and is impatient to get there.\u00a0 And once he witnesses Kirk forgetting the password for the bridge screen Twitter feed Commodore Busybody convinces Spock that it\u2019s his duty to convene a competency hearing.\u00a0 Of course, Kirk embarrasses himself and is packed off to assisted living or sick bay anyway.\u00a0 The Commodore takes command and decides to cut across the Romulan neutral zone in order to get Kirk and the others to medical attention as quickly as possible.\u00a0 He assumed the Romulans would be impressed with the humanitarian aspects of the mission.\u00a0 Hah!\u00a0 Now while the ship is being attacked by a dozen Romulan birds of prey, Kirk is berating Spock and calling him a traitor.\u00a0 But in order to save the ship they pool their dementia-riddled brains and try to figure out how to reverse the aging disease.\u00a0 They remember that Chekov was frightened down on the planet and McCoy remembers that adrenaline is present in the bloodstream during an acute fear reaction and that it is effective against certain radiation sicknesses which was the cause of the disease they are suffering from.\u00a0 Miraculously they formulate a medicine and use it to reverse Kirk\u2019s condition in time for him to boot the Commodore out of the Captain\u2019s Chair and use the corbomite bluff (again!) to escape the Romulans.<\/p>\n
I love this episode.\u00a0 The titanic awfulness of the acting, the cheesy plot devices and the emotional interactions are highly entertaining.\u00a0 Kirk and McCoy are just so wonderfully bad and they are at the very maximum of Kirkness and McCoyness so that a true fan of Star Trek could not ask for better.\u00a0 At one point when Spock goes to the Kirk\u2019s cabin to tell him he\u2019s been relieved of duty Kirk calls him a traitor and accuses him of stabbing him in the back the first chance he got.\u00a0 His whiny geriatric petulance is truly a Star Trek high point.\u00a0 Shatner embodies in that scene the full limited emotional range that the series affords.\u00a0 This is his \u201cyou broke my heart Fredo\u201d moment.\u00a0 It\u2019s wondrous to behold.<\/p>\n
At another point when Spock goes to McCoy complaining of hypersensitivity to cold and asks for a treatment, McCoy says, \u201cI\u2019m not a magician Spock, I\u2019m just an old country doctor.\u201d And Spock says, \u201cIndeed, as I always suspected.\u201d\u00a0 This is the essence of the Spock\/McCoy relationship.\u00a0 And finally, when McCoy drags up the word adrenaline from his failing memory, as the name of the sought-after cure, he sounds like he might have expectorated in the face of anyone within range.\u00a0 At each of these moments you know that this is the most fully realized that Star Trek ever was.<\/p>\n
There are other touches.\u00a0 Chekov gripes to Sulu about all the testing and blood samples they subject him to.\u00a0 Kirk somehow has an old girlfriend on the ship who by some amazing coincidence is an endocrinologist and still has the hots even for geriatric Kirk.\u00a0 I will say that even old Kirk looks like he could have done better.\u00a0 Sulu questions a couple of Kirk\u2019s repeated helm commands which sets Kirk off on a rant about questioning his orders.\u00a0 And even the cute blonde yeoman (played by Carolyn Nelson) lets Kirk know he is asking to review a report he already signed a few minutes before.\u00a0 Uhura has a larger than usual part.\u00a0 She gets to testify against Kirk that he forgot that the Romulans had cracked the Federation Message Encryption Code 2.\u00a0 And later on, while the Romulans are pummeling the ship with photon torpedoes, and the Commodore questions her why the Romulans aren\u2019t answering his message to them she reminds the Commodore that Romulans are notorious for ignoring explanations.<\/p>\n
Ah, it\u2019s a fabulously ripe second season episode.\u00a0 Kirk\u2019s angry, confused portrayal falls perfectly into Shatner\u2019s wheelhouse.\u00a0 There isn\u2019t any Shatner physicality but his angry blustering attacks on Spock gives this a very high Shatner mockery score.\u00a0 Highly recommended for the connoisseur.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a09 \/\/ 8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The setup, such as it is, has Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov and some female red shirt beam down to Gamma Hydra IV to perform<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,244,2149,240],"tags":[2150,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,2608,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-11672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-star-trek","category-tv-reviews","tag-gene-roddenberry","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-the-deadly-years","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner"],"yoast_head":"\n