Kirk, Spock and some red-shirts are on a planet searching for unobtanium.\u00a0 Suddenly Kirk starts smelling gas.\u00a0 Apparently, he recognizes a sickly-sweet smell from eleven years earlier when he was on the USS Farragut and it was attacked by a hemoglobin drinking gas cloud.\u00a0 During this present mission the cloud kills off all the red-shirts.<\/p>\n
This smelly gas cloud is Kirk\u2019s white whale.\u00a0 He is feeling guilt over having hesitated firing a phaser that might have saved his Captain\u2019s life back eleven years ago.\u00a0 By coincidence, the son of the late captain, Ensign Garrovick, is in the Enterprise\u2019s crew and Kirk takes this young man down to the planet\u2019s surface for another chance to kill the cloud.\u00a0 Garrovick hesitates for two seconds when surprised by the cloud and more red-shirts are killed.\u00a0 Kirk blames Ensign Garrovick for the death of the men.\u00a0 Now the creature flees the planet and the Enterprise pursues at Warp 8.\u00a0 Eventually the creature turns to fight.\u00a0 Phasers and photon torpedoes do nothing and the creature manages to enter the Enterprise where it kills a few more men.\u00a0 The creature attacks Spock but his copper-based globin is inedible.\u00a0 Suddenly the creature leaves and heads off at Warp speed.\u00a0 Kirk figures it\u2019s going back to where it attacked the Farragut and that it\u2019s going to spawn a multitude of offspring.\u00a0 Spock tells Kirk to use an \u201counce of anti-matter\u201d to destroy the creature.\u00a0 Kirk and Garrovick become bait for the creature and at the last second, they are transported away and the anti-matter is unleashed.\u00a0 The blast interferes with the transporter and Spock and Scotty barely get the two men to rematerialize.<\/p>\n
This episode features Kirk obsessed with destroying the creature that killed the captain that he admired coming out of the Academy.\u00a0 Bones and Spock get to question Kirk\u2019s judgement but eventually understand the danger of this creature.\u00a0 There is a scene where Ensign Garrovick and Kirk fight over who would stay last while the creature is lured to the anti-matter.\u00a0 Several times in the episode Kirk loses his temper.\u00a0 This is a so-so episode.\u00a0 Let\u2019s call it a 5\u00a0 \/\/\u00a0 4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kirk, Spock and some red-shirts are on a planet searching for unobtanium.\u00a0 Suddenly Kirk starts smelling gas.\u00a0 Apparently, he recognizes a sickly-sweet smell from eleven<\/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":[237,4,244,2149,240],"tags":[2150,2617,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-11765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-star-trek","category-tv-reviews","tag-gene-roddenberry","tag-obsession","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner"],"yoast_head":"\n