Original Image via Wiki Media Commons
Welcome the third installment of my Star Trek watch through! You can find other posts in this series linked at the bottom, and the original post – including my watch order – here. I’m still not obsessed, but the show is going pretty well so far. I’m getting to know the characters very slowly, but it’s been interesting to see who will become more prominent as the series goes on.
Episode #4 – “The Naked Time”
This episode starts with space suits involving some mix of chicken wire and bubble wrap. So that’s cool. Then we get a strange bio-weapon that at first looks like blood and quickly has all the crew members acting like Lady Macbeth, and losing all of their inhibitions. This episode was full of opportunities for great acting, and everyone did wonderfully. I especially enjoyed O’Reilly’s singing and Irish pride. “You know what his mistake was, sir? Not being born an Irishman.” is just a great line.
Not a lot happens until the very end, when Scotty discovers that O’Reilly has turned the engines off completely and they must attempt starting the engines at full throttle from scratch, which has only ever been done in theory. The resulting implosion, rather than pushing them away from the dying planet they’ve been orbiting, sends them into a time warp. Which basically means they’re moving so fast that time actually runs backward, and when they come out of the time warp, they are three days earlier in time. It was only a moment of time travel, but Spock and Kirk agree that they might want to test that in the future.
The crew wiping their hands on their clothes and basically reenacting the “Out Damn Spot” scene from Macbeth was pretty entertaining, as was an uninhibited Spock, crying over his shame at having feelings. Great acting all-around made up for the lack of forward-moving story in this one.
The only downside to this episode is that the title makes no sense. No one is naked. Only Sulu takes his shirt off. I’m just confused.
Episode #5 – “The Enemy Within”
The crew of The Enterprise is visiting a planet where the temperature hits -120 (Fahrenheit?) at night, and contains strange magnetic yellow dust. Their inspection of the planet is going well, and they’ve found an animal (read: A puppy in a monster suit) they want to test further, when one of the crew injures themselves in a rockslide and must be sent back to the ship. Upon arrival, the transportation beam nearly burns out, but Scotty fixes it. Captain Kirk beams up soon after and doesn’t look so hot himself. It is only later when they beam up the ‘dog’ that they realize the transporter is malfunctioning and creating duplicates of everything that gets beamed up or down.
After a horrible moment in the life of Yeoman Janice Rand, we find out that Kirk was also duplicated. The rest of the episode is spent trying to catch the duplicate, and once it is determined that they’re not duplicates but halves, figuring out how to put them back together and prevent more people from getting split before the crew remaining on the planet freezes to death.
This episode is basically a montage of William Shatner, with Yeoman Rand, Spock, Scotty, and McCoy thrown in for variety. I can’t say that I loved it, but it was an interesting scenario at least. The previous episode allowed for much more breadth of acting. To be completely honest, this felt like Shatner wanted an episode where his character has a mixed up personality because everyone else got to do it in the previous episode and he felt left out. When in reality all he did to differentiate was to make Kirk-1 really boring and forgetful and Kirk-2 really mean and creepy. Kirk-2 has a terrifying gleam in his eyes that there is only one word for: rapey. And guess what almost happens to Yeoman Rand?
Kirk-2’s need for power and control is completely psychopathic, and while they tried to write off Kirk-1’s lack of decision-making skills on his lack of an evil side, I think it was more along the lines of confirming that Kirk is probably a creep deep down, and only through rigorous practice manages to keep the creep-vibes from showing while he is piloting the ship. As we saw in the previous episode, he wanted to take Yeoman Rand for a walk on the beach and go on a date, etc… but felt tied to the ship like he was married to it and not allowed to look at other women.
So far, the only consistent thing I’m disliking… is Shatner. And I feel kind of bad about that, but I’ve also never been a huge fan of him, so I’m not really all that surprised either.
Until next time,
Amanda
Other posts in this watch through: Star Trek: The Original Series “The Cage” and “The Man Trap” “Charlie X” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (COMING SOON)
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