The Enterprise is on a mission to find and aid a missing starship, the USS Defiant.\u00a0 They locate the ship but it appears to be slipping in and out of some kind of interface between our universe and another.\u00a0 So, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov beam aboard the Defiant wearing space suits.\u00a0 They find the ship filled with dead crew.\u00a0 It appears that they went mad and killed each other.\u00a0 But the ship begins dematerializing so Kirk tells Scotty to beam them back to the Enterprise.\u00a0 But only three of the transporter stations are functioning so Kirk stays while the others are beamed over.\u00a0 When Kirk\u2019s turn comes, he is halfway to being beamed over when the Defiant completely vanishes into the interface, never to be seen again in our universe.<\/p>\n
Now Kirk is trapped between universes and won\u2019t be close enough to rescue for a couple of hours.\u00a0 Meanwhile Chekov goes mad and attacks Spock on the Enterprise bridge and has to be restrained in sick bay.\u00a0 He is suffering from the same madness as the crew of the Defiant.\u00a0 McCoy theorizes that the distortion of space-time where they are located is slowly damaging the brains of the humans exposed to it.\u00a0 And one by one members of the crew go insane and have to be restrained.\u00a0 McCoy begins trials to find a medicine that will halt and reverse the effects of the space-time rift on the crew.<\/p>\n
A ship of the Tholian race approaches the Enterprise and informs them that they are trespassing.\u00a0 Spock explains that they are waiting to retrieve a crew member who is trapped in an interface between universes and the rescue won\u2019t occur for about two hours.\u00a0 The Tholians agree to wait exactly that amount of time before attacking the Enterprise.\u00a0 When the estimated time occurs, the transporter attempts to lock onto Kirk but he\u2019s not there.\u00a0 Spock speculates that the appearance of the Tholian ship disrupted the local space-time and offset Kirk\u2019s location.\u00a0 Spock speculates that it will be twenty more minutes before Kirk shows up.\u00a0 Meanwhile the Tholian ship begins attacking the Enterprise and Spock orders a phaser bombardment.\u00a0 This forces the Tholian ship to break off its attack.\u00a0 Now a second Tholian ship shows up and docks with the first ship.\u00a0 Afterwards it is seen that the two ships begin spinning a web between their ships to form a cage around the Enterprise made of energy.\u00a0 Spock estimates that the cage will be complete at exactly the time that Kirk might show up again.<\/p>\n
Not knowing if Kirk would return from the other universe to be rescued Spock convenes a ceremony for the crew to memorialize Kirk\u2019s life. \u00a0Afterward McCoy berates Spock for not moving the ship out of the area before the Tholians attacked.\u00a0 Spock basically tells him to mind his own business and find a cure for the madness.\u00a0 But McCoy insists that before anything else he and Spock were duty bound to listen to a recording that Kirk had left for them.\u00a0 It was instructions to them on the occasion of his death.\u00a0 In the recording Kirk counsels Spock to go to McCoy whenever pure logic is insufficient to determine the right decision in a desperate circumstance.\u00a0 He tells Spock to listen to McCoy\u2019s advice and use his own judgement on its soundness.\u00a0 And Kirk tells McCoy to advise Spock but never to forget that ultimately the captain had the responsibility to make the command decisions.<\/p>\n
Now Kirk starts appearing inside the ship as a sort of phantom.\u00a0 When Uhura sees him in her cabin she runs out and tells McCoy.\u00a0 But he assumes that the madness is starting to affect her mind. Shortly afterwards McCoy comes up with a cure for the madness and gives it to the crew. \u00a0Now Scotty has a similar sighting of Kirk and based on this Spock prepares to enact a plan to lock a tractor beam onto Kirk and then throw the Enterprise into the time-space rift in order to escape the Tholian Web.\u00a0 And it works.\u00a0 The Enterprise is hurled blah, blah parsecs into space and when Kirk\u2019s phantom appears in the bridge viewscreen Spock orders the transporter to capture Kirk.\u00a0 And that works too.\u00a0 McCoy is there to give Kirk an emergency oxygen blood boost and he quickly recovers his usual Shatnerian presence.\u00a0 When he asks them afterward about listening to his \u201cdeath tape,\u201d Spock and McCoy lie and say they were too busy to listen to it.<\/p>\n
Okay, so what about all that?\u00a0 Well, for season three this has to be considered a pretty good story.\u00a0 Sure, there\u2019s some hokey stuff.\u00a0 But the story is relatively coherent.\u00a0 There actually is some dramatic tension around the menace to the ship versus losing Captain Kirk.\u00a0 And the relationship between Kirk and his friends Spock and McCoy is handled in a clever and somewhat moving way.<\/p>\n
The goofier aspects should be noted.\u00a0 Chekov\u2019s berserk attack on Spock and the howls he lets off once he\u2019s restrained in sick bay are pretty weird.\u00a0 And the phantom images of Kirk floating around the Enterprise in his space suit making spastic faces at the crew is pretty dopey looking.<\/p>\n
But all things considered this is a solid episode and I was pleasantly surprised by it.\u00a0 I\u2019ll give this one a 7 \/\/ 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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