I’d like to remind everyone this scene was animated. By Filmation.

“Entrapment” is the key word here, on multiple levels.

While exploring a region of space known as the Delta Triangle, where starships have been reputed to go missing for eons, the Enterprise comes under attack by the Klingon battlecruiser Klothos, captained by the crew’s old enemy Commander Kor. Suddenly, the Klothos vanishes into nothingness: Suspecting a trap, the Enterprise immediately warps to its last know position and follows it in before the commander of the Klothos‘ sister ship can press war crime charges. Both crews find themselves in a starless void where starships from centuries of spaceflight history aimlessly drift about. Kirk and Kor are then transported to a gigantic council chamber, where representatives of the crews from all the other ships welcome them to a world they call Elysia, a pocket universe where time does not exist that they have transformed into an ideal society where everyone relies on and respects everyone else, because there’s no way to escape. The Elysians also warn Kirk and Kor that violence is strictly prohibited, and that they will be held responsible for the violent actions of any of their crewmembers by being frozen forever in a stasis field.

Elysium, naturally, is the most interesting thing on display here, though deceptively so: It’s an effective and memorable concept on a number of different levels. Though writer Joyce Perry originally only came up with the idea of a Sargasso Sea-type area of space that Kirk and Kor would be forced to work together to escape from (which is in fact what ends up happening here: The Enterprise and the Klothos can only escape by combining their warp cores into a kind of Super Warp Drive), the actual final product is wonderfully oversignified. Firstly of course, Elysia is not only compared to the Sargasso Sea in the script, but to the nearby and contiguous Bermuda Triangle as well, and both very explicitly so. In Forteana, triangles, or to be more precise triangular regions of physical space, have always held special significance as areas that act as a kind of lightning rod for strange and unexplained activity. The Bermuda Triangle and its disappearing ships and aircraft is the most famous of course, though equally worthy of note, yet lesser-known, such places include my personal favourites, the Bridgewater Triangle in Southern Massachusetts and the Bennington Triangle surrounding Mount Glastenbury in my own home state of Vermont, the latter of which was also chronicled in an episode of William Shatner’s as-of-this-writing current Discovery Channel docudrama series Weird or What?.

But even the famous Triangle is a bastion of a truly fascinating sort of weirdness that doesn’t always show up in the stereotypical pop culture accounts of it. The Bermuda Triangle isn’t just a place where ships vanish into thin air, it’s a place where blatantly unnerving and otherworldly things are said to happen. Arguably the best-known (or at least one of the best-known) of the Bermuda Triangle incidents is the case of Flight 19, a bombing squadron that, while flying through the aforementioned area on a practice run, suddenly began to experience widespread instrument malfunction while its crew suffered from extreme and immediate onset confusion and disorientation.…

Continue Reading

I’m really running out of Godzilla jokes to make here at this point.

The first, most immediately startling thing about “The Terratin Incident” is that it was written by Paul Schneider. The same person behind the flagrantly and angrily anti-war “Balance of Terror”, “The Squire of Gothos” as well as the first draft of the equally anti-authoritarian “Patterns of Force” is now penning a story where the Enterprise crew gets zapped with cosmic rays and shrunk down to less than an inch tall in order to rescue a civilization of equally miniscule individuals.

This is, obviously, not at all the sort of thing we would expect from Schneider. It’s also his weakest contribution by far, and as tempting (and easy) as it would be to chalk this up to good writers having bad days and leave it at that, the fact is, like so much of the Animated Series, “The Terratin Incident” isn’t actually bad. It has a few especially egregious moments, but there’s actually a few interesting things going on here. It’s another example of an episode indicative of the positive direction Star Trek is heading in.

The key here is in the final shot where Kirk describes the Terratins, descendents of a colony of Earth explorers who have evolved into a new species thanks to prolonged exposure to the stature-diminishing rays of the planet their ancestors landed on, as Lilliputians. The entire episode is a version of Gulliver’s Travels with a great deal of science fiction shenanigans thrown in for good measure. This makes sense, as Schneider and D.C. Fontana built this episode around a one-paragraph brief from Gene Roddenberry, who was well known for his admiration of Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece, as well as for his cataclysmic misunderstanding of said masterpiece.

Roddenberry frequently described his ham-handedly didactic version of the original Star Trek as Gulliver’s Travels in Space while Swift’s original is well known as a work of political and social satire. The hook of the original novel is that Gulliver espouses a different viewpoint of the inhabitants of the land he visits in each section, which is then mirrored and exaggerated by the inhabitants of the land he visits in the next section. So, for example, while Gulliver sees the Lilliputians as inherently aggressive, the Brobdingnagians he visits in the next section (who are giants compared to Gulliver) sees humanity as equally aggressive. The joke then being, of course, any good idea or plan can go bad at some point and humans are inherently shitty at organising themselves, also evidenced by Gulliver’s growing hardness and cynicism throughout the book. The hook of Gene Roddenberry’s version of Gulliver’s Travels is that the Enterprise goes around and runs into a bunch of civilizations based around one single gimmick and then tells them why blind adherence to that gimmick is self-destructive and unnatural and how everyone would be better off living under a Western-style representative democracy.

But while “The Terratin Incident” may be a *literal* Gulliver’s Travels in Space, as has become the norm for the Animated Series this is considerably played around with to an intriguing degree.…

Continue Reading

“Hey, baby.”

Maybe Harry Mudd just doesn’t work.

I would make the argument that when you reach the third of three appearances of a character and still come up with something that can charitably be descibed as a “non-starter”, this might perhaps be the time to call into question whether the character and his signature plots were ever really a good idea to begin with. Except, of course, for the fact that I’m in the minority here. Harcourt Fenton Mudd is one of the most beloved characters from the original Star Trek era despite never once appearing in a halfway decent episode. If I’m tipping my hand early, it’s just because “Mudd’s Passion” is extremely difficult to work up any enthusiasm for. It’s probably the second-weakest episode of the Animated Series I’ve seen yet, trailing behind “The Lorelei Signal” only because it’s not a grotesque train wreck. It’s simply bad in a ponderously mediocre way and is, ironically enough, utterly dispassionate.

“Mudd’s Passion” begins with a dutiful recitation of Harry Mudd tropes that have already become worn and tired. The Enterprise is once again playing Space Cop and is sent to the Arcadian system to investigate Mudd, who is once again running a scam operation to peddle false promises of romance to horny miners. The script even tries to recycle the “he STOLE a SPACESHIP” joke from “I, Mudd” and to say it didn’t work would be being kind (if for no other reason then it gives the key line to Leonard Nimoy instead of William Shatner: Spock is absolutely the wrong person to be the second half of that kind of double act). This time Mudd is selling a love potion he promises is infallible. He gives himself up to Kirk when the miners start to revolt, but once on the ship he tries to sweet talk Nurse Chapel into releasing him from the brig by bribing her with a sample of the love drug for her to use on Spock. So naturally, like an idiot, she agrees. Mudd then mugs her, steals her ID card and takes her hostage as he hijacks a shuttlecraft to escape to a binary star system the ship just discovered. And this one’s by the same writer as the Original Series Mudd stories, so we can’t lay the blame on someone else not understanding the source material.

At this point, the episode stops being a half-baked rip-off of “Mudd’s Women”…and becomes a half-baked rip-off of “The Naked Time” instead as the love potion somehow manages to get into the Enterprise‘s ventillation system and everyone in the crew starts falling in love with each other. We get a token “we must learn to control our emotions” speech from Kirk after he beams down with Spock to rescue Chapel right in the middle of being chased by Giant Rock Beasts (who are, again, far and away the most interesting things about this episode). This is no more captivating or less problematic than it was last time we saw it, or then it will be in any other of the bafflingly at least three more times Star Trek attempts this story.…

Continue Reading

“Time is an illusion. Lunch!Time doubly so.” “Ho ha ho.”

The three little sisters named Alice, Hedda and Tertia sat in a circle on their island. Alice was considering in her own mind (as best she could) whether the pleasure of tuning the cosmic fugue would be worth the trouble of climbing another tree to harvest more coconuts from the Earth-bones when suddenly a thought rang out.

“Please tell us another story about the spacemen,” said Tertia.

“Very well,” Alice replied. “Gather ’round, sisters, and I shall tell it to you.”

This is a story from the days of our future ancestors.

Captain Kirk was beginning to get very tired of gallivanting around the universe’s sex-birth-death. Time had been acting very peculiarly and, because he was not especially interested in associating with it until it started behaving itself again, Captain Kirk asked the Glittering Skyship to take him and his friends once more to the multiplex planar realms of invocation for a vacation (the multiplex planar realms of invocation being well known, of course as hospitable and generally agreeable places to take a holiday). The Glittering Skyship felt sorry for Captain Kirk and his friends, so she brought them to the World-Stage.

Captain Kirk thought the World-Stage would make a fine place to film a movie, so he got all his friends together and asked if they would play parts in his movie. They all thought this a grand idea, so they gathered at the World Stage and tried not to Break the World again. Now, Doctor McCoy was the first actor onstage (he really ca’n’t resist it, you know, because he is thus invoked and it is his will) and he began to mime his part in earnest.

“This is where we come in, is’n’t’ it?” Tertia asked.

“It is indeed, as you well know” Alice replied. “This is the time Time always knows it’s time for me to show up. But this is not a story about me.”

Now, this particular world-stage was upset because it thought it was the best of all the world-stages and did’n’t take especially kindly to a bunch of spacemen stomping around on it. So it changed the story (which was OK because we all know that story by now anyway: It re-played itself out like a gazillion times more in the reruns).

“I’ve heard this one before,” said Hedda “At least, I think I have.”

“I know,” said Alice. Then she continued.

So basically the actors used the World-Stage’s ambition to fashion themselves into Gods. What constitutes a God, I ask? Well, I’ll tell me: A God is a ruler who perceives the Waking-Dream but not the second Dream. Captain Kirk is pretty good at defeating Gods, but it does tend to be rather a pain in the ass for him. So the first God who showed up was the First Queen (because of course it was the First Queen) who put on a right show of a performance (she thought she was still in the House of False Love, you see).…

Continue Reading