We\u2019re now deep, deep into Season 2 and the amount of \u201chumor\u201d employed by some of the principal characters is obvious to see.\u00a0 And the costume department has obviously run out of ideas.\u00a0 In this episode the aliens are dressed as if they found their clothes in a dumpster behind a second-rate department store.\u00a0 The men are wearing some kind of polyester leisure suit-like apparel while the women are wearing jump suits from which the backs have been cut off from the waist up.<\/p>\n
The Enterprise is summoned by a distress signal to an uninhabited planet.\u00a0 Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two red shirts beam down to the planet.\u00a0 There they find a man and a woman, Rojan and Kelinda, who claim they are creatures from the Andromeda Galaxy seeking new worlds because their own galaxy will become uninhabitable within ten thousand years. \u00a0They announce that they will commandeer the Enterprise to return home in order to begin an invasion of our galaxy by their people, the Kelvans.\u00a0 It will be a multi-generational voyage taking three hundred years even at Warp 11 speed.<\/p>\n
And using their neural paralysis field devices they disarm and capture the landing party while the other three Kelvans beam aboard the Enterprise and take over the ship.\u00a0 In addition to the paralysis field, they can also freeze dry humans down into polyhedral bricks, about the size of a softball, made of what appears to be poorly made porous Styrofoam.\u00a0 When the landing party attempts to escape Rojan has one of his associates turn the two red shirts into these efficient and stackable human pellets.\u00a0 Rojan then crumbles one of the blocks with his bare hands and restores the other one to inefficient but mobile form.\u00a0 We then find out that the crumbled crewman was the pretty young girl.\u00a0 When he realizes this Kirk appears devastated.\u00a0 Apparently, he hadn\u2019t yet had a chance to put the moves on this yeoman and now he never would!<\/p>\n
Back on the ship, the whole crew except for Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty are freeze dried for easy storage.\u00a0 It\u2019s especially pleasurable to see Uhura and Chekov singled out for treatment.\u00a0 In one scene Kirk rounds the corner in a corridor of the Enterprise and sees the blocks strewn along the floor along with the odd computer tablet and i-pod.\u00a0 When Spock had unsuccessfully attempted to mind meld with Kelinda in a scene that I have left out of my plot summary he got an image of a huge hundred-tentacled creature that is the true form of the Kelvans.\u00a0 Realizing that the Kelvans were unused to sensory stimulation or emotions in their original forms he speculates that if the humans can overstimulate the Kelvans\u2019 senses and emotions they might become vulnerable to attack.\u00a0 And so much hilarity ensues during this plan.<\/p>\n
Scotty takes one of the Kelvans, Tomar, to his cabin and starts introducing him to the wonders of grain alcohol.\u00a0 Eventually Tomar becomes stupefied and collapses, as does Scotty.\u00a0 McCoy takes another of the Kelvans, Hanar, aside and under the subterfuge of a medical examination starts giving him \u201cvitamin\u201d injections that are actually some kind of stimulant that raises his anxiety levels to monumental levels.\u00a0 This has him complaining bitterly to Rojan about the incompetence of that commander\u2019s plan.\u00a0 This gets him confined to his cabin.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Kirk makes a beeline for Kelinda and starts pouring on the old Shatner charm.\u00a0 He\u2019s pawing her and kissing her all around the rec room.\u00a0 I forgot to mention that Kelinda is played by Barbara Bouchet who is a very attractive looking actress.\u00a0 She played Miss Moneypenny in one of the Bond films and is at the very high end of attractive female Star Trek guest stars.\u00a0 While playing three-dimensional chess with Rojan Spock mentions that Kirk is putting the moves on Kelinda and this really ticks Rojan off.\u00a0 So, he hunts them down and gets into a really spastic fistfight with Kirk.\u00a0 During the fight Kirk keeps up a line of argument to the effect that by the time the three-hundred-year voyage to the Andromeda Galaxy is complete, the descendants of Rojan and his crew will no longer be Kelvans.\u00a0 They will be completely human and have no desire to help the Kelvans.<\/p>\n
He convinces Rojan to give up their voyage to Andromeda and allow the Federation to find uninhabited worlds in our galaxy for the other Kelvans to colonize while Rojan and Kelinda and the other three Kelvans will somehow form a very small colony on the uninhabited world that the Enterprise found them on.\u00a0 The fact that there are only two female Kelvans and three male Kelvans is not explored further on this episode.\u00a0 But to my way of thinking there is bound to be trouble in that very small paradise.<\/p>\n
To my way of thinking the two highlights of the show are Rojan crushing the polyhedral salt lick made out of Yeoman Thompson with his fingers and Scotty hugging his empty centuries-old bottle of Scotch whiskey to his face and crooning to it, \u201cwe did it\u201d after Tomar collapses in a drunken stupor.\u00a0 And one small note, in the new enhanced graphics of the DVDs I have the Andromeda Galaxy image is very nice.<\/p>\n
Now that nuttiness and hilarity is the order of the day on the Enterprise it\u2019s much easier to enjoy the episodes.\u00a0 Hopefully the people making the show are going along with the joke because adventure certainly isn\u2019t the point.\u00a0 Kirk wrestling with the pretty alien and McCoy and Scotty providing comic relief sort of works.<\/p>\n
As far as Shatner mockery points, he gives some of his patented pathos when the yeoman is crumbled but it isn\u2019t very extreme.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give this episode an\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 8\u00a0 \/\/\u00a0 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019re now deep, deep into Season 2 and the amount of \u201chumor\u201d employed by some of the principal characters is obvious to see.\u00a0 And the<\/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":[2814,2812,2150,38,1355,44,309,265,2813,1691,293,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-12991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-star-trek","category-tv-reviews","tag-barbara-bouchet","tag-by-any-other-name","tag-gene-roddenberry","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-scotty","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner"],"yoast_head":"\n