I\u2019ve mentioned this before but I think it\u2019s necessary to reiterate that the third season episodes are truly awful.<\/p>\n
Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet that will be struck by an asteroid within a couple of months.\u00a0 It is inhabited by American Indians.\u00a0 Spock immediately chimes in that they are made up of a population that is a combination of Navajo, Mohican, and Delaware tribes.\u00a0 Now, how in hell he\u2019d know this looking at them walking around on the edge of a lake is a complete mystery to me.\u00a0 And just to make the plot more absurd they have less than thirty minutes to get back to the Enterprise and travel at Warp 9 toward the asteroid before it\u2019s too late to deflect the asteroid from its collision course.\u00a0 So of course, while Spock and McCoy are doing whatever, Kirk manages to get lost.\u00a0 He\u2019s standing in front of an alien obelisk and when he communicates with the Enterprise it somehow activates a hidden trapdoor on the spot Kirk is standing and he falls into the hidden chamber where he manages to get electrocuted by the alien mechanism and loses his memory.\u00a0 As an aside, for the \u201cShatner Mockery\u201d rating of this episode it must be noted that Shatner performs one of his most spastic instances of the pain face.\u00a0 This is the one he does when he\u2019s really suffering badly.\u00a0 \u00a0It\u2019s hard to compare these things but I\u2019d say it\u2019s one of his all-time worst occurrences.\u00a0 This will earn him high marks for this episode.<\/p>\n
Because Kirk is hidden inside of the obelisk Spock and McCoy waste precious time looking for him.\u00a0 When they finally return to the Enterprise without him, they are already too late.\u00a0 They reach the asteroid but neither their deflector beam nor the phasers are able to neutralize the threat of the asteroid.\u00a0 In addition, the overloading of the Enterprise\u2019s engines by the phaser bombardment destroys the warp drive and now the Enterprise, on impulse power, is barely able to stay ahead of the asteroid as they both head back to the planet on a trajectory that will take about two months.\u00a0 Apparently, the crew will be barely a few hours ahead of the asteroid and will need to locate Kirk and attempt to find a way to save the planet.\u00a0 As an aside while the Enterprise engines are being destroyed Scotty is lamenting their fate, moaning, \u201cOh my poor bearings!\u201d\u00a0 Apparently, the warp drive has ball bearings.\u00a0 Who knew?<\/p>\n
Meanwhile back on the planet, Kirk awakens inside the obelisk but he can no longer remember who he is or why he is there.\u00a0 He wanders out of the obelisk and is immediately declared the first wizard deluxe (or at least a god) and assigned the task of stopping the darkening of the sky which is clearly the approach of the asteroid.\u00a0 We find out that the Indians were placed on this planet by an advanced species that liked moving humanoids around the galaxy.\u00a0 The obelisk is actually a very powerful deflector beam that is supposed to be controlled by the medicine man of the tribe.\u00a0 But the present medicine man\u2019s father died before passing the training down to his son.\u00a0 Now seeing that Kirk (or Kirock as he painfully named himself while trying to remember his own name) is a god they make him the medicine man and give him the priestess, Miramanee to be his wife.\u00a0 This supremely ticks off the medicine man because he\u2019s not only lost his job but also his main squeeze.\u00a0 The medicine man attacks Kirock with a knife and finds out that Kirk can bleed.\u00a0 He taunts him with the phrase, \u201cBehold the god that bleeds!\u201d\u00a0 This is one of two plot devices that this episode stole from classic movies.\u00a0 This same device of the bleeding god occurs in the book and movie \u201cThe Man Who Would be King\u201d by Rudyard Kipling.\u00a0 The other theft occurs when Kirock is being considered for godhood.\u00a0 A boy is brought into the wigwam by the women and they tell the chief that he was trapped under water and drowned.\u00a0 The medicine man declares him dead but Kirock performs artificial respiration and saves the boy.\u00a0 This clinches his inclusion in the pantheon of useful deities.\u00a0 This scene is lifted from the movie, \u201cThe Treasure of the Sierra Madre where the old prospector, Howard performs a similar resuscitation on a Mexican Indian boy.<\/p>\n
So Kirock and Miramanee are shacked up and she is pregnant with James Tiberius Jr.\u00a0 But the asteroid arrives and Kirock is dragged to the obelisk and is told to take care of the asteroid.\u00a0 He stands there with his arms in the air telling the asteroid to go away.\u00a0 When that doesn\u2019t work the medicine man goads the tribe to start pelting Kirock with foam rocks about the size of cabbages.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny to watch them bouncing off of him.\u00a0 Miramanee runs to protect him and is stoned too.\u00a0 Just then Spock and McCoy beam down and the natives scatter and run for the hills.\u00a0 Spock uses the Vulcan mind meld on Kirock to remind him that he\u2019s Kirk.\u00a0 Also, Spock has figured out that the entrance to the obelisk is sound activated so Kirk recreates his call to the Enterprise at the beginning of the story and the trapdoor opens.\u00a0 Spock pushes a button and the deflector beams takes care of the asteroid.\u00a0 Easy peasy.<\/p>\n
But the highly advanced medicine of Dr. McCoy, the vaunted surgical techniques that could reattach Spock\u2019s brain in the last episode, somehow are unable to repair or replace the damage that Miramanee sustained by being pelted with cabbage sized foam rocks.\u00a0 So, she dies the beautiful death in Kirock\u2019s manly arms.\u00a0 A last note, the actress who played Miramanee is indeed a beautiful young woman.<\/p>\n
The End.<\/p>\n
This was even worse than it sounds.\u00a0 Shatner turns his powers of bad acting up to eleven.\u00a0 It\u2019s all there.\u00a0 Shoulder rolls and some kind of a stripper pole swing kick during his fight with the medicine man.\u00a0 There are frequent expressions that are supposed to be painful struggles against amnesia but more resemble a case of constipation.\u00a0 And when Kirock is semiconscious on the obelisk steps after being stoned he keeps calling out Miramanee\u2019s name and it is truly maudlin.<\/p>\n
So once again we have an episode that rates a very low number as a dramatic story but as an example of Shatner\u2019s ham acting is a stellar sample.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s say 2 \/\/ 10.<\/p>\n
Season Three does it again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve mentioned this before but I think it\u2019s necessary to reiterate that the third season episodes are truly awful. Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down<\/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":[2150,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,3280,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-16084","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-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-the-paradise-syndrome","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner"],"yoast_head":"\n