In the immortal words of the inimitable Dr. Zachary Smith, \u201cOh, the pain, the pain.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is difficult to write this review.\u00a0 It is painful to have to think about this episode.\u00a0 I feel those responsible should be punished.\u00a0 And even if most are already dead, I feel something must be done to punish them.\u00a0 Perhaps grave robbery might make sense.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, maybe that\u2019s too much.<\/p>\n
The general sense of the plot is that Kirk, McCoy and Spock visit planet blah blah blah where people dress as ancient Greeks who have enormous telekinetic powers but need a doctor to cure gangrene caused by a paper cut.\u00a0 Once McCoy does the trick, the toga people want to keep him permanently.\u00a0 The Enterprise landing party refuses and the toga club starts messing with them to make them change their minds.\u00a0 They have Kirk and Spock reciting lines from Alice in Wonderland (Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee).\u00a0 Kirk is forced to slap himself silly.\u00a0 They make a dwarf ride Kirk like a pony.\u00a0 Spock does a flamenco dance around Kirk\u2019s head.\u00a0 Spock and Nurse Chapel and Kirk and Uhura are forced into a make-out session.\u00a0 And as the finale Spock and Kirk are getting ready to put on some kind of torture session with the girls using a bull whip and a branding iron.<\/p>\n
Of course, the brilliant counter-plan gives Spock and Kirk even greater telekinetic powers than their tormentors in the nick of time and they turn the tables on the \u201cPlatonists.\u201d\u00a0 They give the kooky supermen a stern warning about bullying spacemen.\u00a0 And then just to show they mean business they take away their dwarf.<\/p>\n
This has to be one of the bottom three episodes in the whole series.\u00a0 It has to be.\u00a0 The dialog between Spock and Nurse Chapel and Kirk and Uhura is beyond embarrassing.\u00a0 The ham acting by Shatner and Nimoy is startling.\u00a0 The only decent performances are by the lead male and female Platonists.\u00a0 Their cool detachment and excellent enunciation were the only parts of the episode that weren\u2019t awful.<\/p>\n
Of course, all this also means this episode has the highest Shatner mockery factor imaginable.\u00a0 I\u2019m tempted to give it an eleven in that category but that would be wrong.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll call this episode and 3 \/\/ 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the immortal words of the inimitable Dr. Zachary Smith, \u201cOh, the pain, the pain.\u201d It is difficult to write this review.\u00a0 It is painful<\/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":[2150,3433,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-16851","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-platos-stepchildren","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