TOS Season 3

Yes, this is Kirk and Spock. Yes, they’re holding hands. Fanfic writers, start your pencils.

There’s a sense of poetic justice in having Star Trek go out on an episode that names “the Enterprise family” just as it threatens to destroy it because it doesn’t respect women.

This was an episode I always consciously avoided: Partially because I have sort of an instinctual reticence towards big emotional finales, and while “Turnabout Intruder” certainly isn’t that, it’s still very much the end of an era and I can sometimes have a hard time dealing with that: I guess its because I don’t like the idea of my stories having to end, or being forced to say goodbye to characters I’ve grown so accustomed to over the course of several years. I always needed to know there were more adventures, or at least the potential for more adventures.

That said, the biggest reason I avoided “Turnabout Intruder” was because it looked like utter crap. This episode is famously bad, and there are certainly no more ominous signs and portents on the last bow of the Original Series than the credit “Teleplay By Arthur Singer. Story By Gene Roddenberry”. So, I went into this episode absolutely dreading having to watch it. Happily, it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I expected-It’s certainly not the worst effort from either of its two co-writers.

Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s actually any good either.

Answering a distress signal from an archaeological excavation on Camus II, Kirk, Spock and McCoy encounter Kirk’s old lover, Doctor Janice Lester, now the head of the expedition, who is suffering from severe radiation poisoning. As Spock and McCoy go to investigate a cry for help further down the dig site, Lester and expresses resentment towards Kirk over the fact their relationship never worked out and her inability to fulfill her dream of becoming a starship captain as Starfleet prohibits women from holding command positions. Suddenly, Lester reveals her illness is a ruse and traps Kirk in an ancient consciousness transference device and transplants her life energy into his body, intending to command the Enterprise in his name…and then to kill him and her old body. This all happens in the teaser, mind you, and the entire remaining forty-eight minutes or so is dedicated towards watching Lester attempt to keep cover on the ship as her increasingly erratic behaviour starts alienating her from the rest of the crew, culminating in her attempting to execute the entire senior staff on mutiny charges.

“Turnabout Intruder” has, clearly, quite a number of rather significant issues. Let’s tackle the really obvious one straight off: This episode has serious gender problems. Getting cited as the premier example of reactionary sexism in Star Trek by the Star Trek fans themselves probably counts for something. This episode is typically seen as a slap in the face to feminists, and it’s absolutely easy to see why it has that reputation: Lester is a megalomaniacal, murderous woman who wants to usurp a man in a position of power and, once she gets there, she slowly starts to become unhinged and cracks under the pressure, eventually culminating in a massive meltdown (that Scotty even literally describes as “hysterical”), indicating she’s incapable of handling the duties and responsibilities such positions of leadership require.…

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“I knew it was a bad idea to install that survival mod.”

“All Our Yesterdays” is the second, and final, submission by Jean Lisette Aroeste, whose previous credit was “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”. It’s also the final official fan submission in Star Trek for awhile, the last in the Original Series not to mention the second to last episode in the Original Series overall. Suffice to say, there is a distinctly funereal air about the general proceedings, which isn’t at all helped by how stupendously uninspiring this episode is.

It is, however, significantly more coherent than the previous episode made out of an Aroeste script at least. While on a mission to ensure the planetary civilization of Sarpeidon evacuates in time to avoid the imminent supernova that will engulf their solar system in three hours (how exactly Starfleet was planning to evacuate an entire planet in three hours is not explained), the Enterprise finds the planet now entirely free of inhabited life. Beaming down, Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves in a gigantic library curated by an enigmatic man named Mr. Atoz, who runs the installation all by himself with the aid of his many duplicates (how the Enterprise failed to pick up Atoz’s life signs is similarly unexplained). As the landing party peruses the discs that archive Sarpeidon’s history Kirk hears a scream from outside and goes through a doorway to investigate, only to find himself on a city street in what appears to be England in the 17th Century. Spock and McCoy follow, but find themselves in a frozen arctic landscape from Sarpeidon’s ice age. Spock and McCoy are rescued by a woman named Zarabeth, who confirms that the purpose of the library was to tie into a time portal, which allows people to travel back in time to any period in Sarpeidon’s history, and that the planet’s entire populace must have done so to avoid the supernova.

Reading this episode becomes pretty straightforward once you realise Aroeste was the librarian at UCLA. “All Our Yesterdays” seems quite overtly about the idea that books in a library can transport you to other places and times, especially in Aroeste’s original brief, which had a lot more time travel shenanigans. Entitled “A Handful of Dust”, Aroeste’s original story featured Spock and McCoy trapped in a desert suffering from heat stroke before encountering a band of mutant humanoids. Kirk ended up in a period reminiscent of Barbary Coast-era San Francisco where he encounters another time traveller, who helps him return to the library and rescue Spock and McCoy. Kirk and his fellow time traveller destroy the portal and escape just in time to watch everything crumble to dust in their hands.

Once again this is an instance of an episode that was considerably monkeyed around with and for which the original submission seems considerably more interesting, so I’m going to be talking primarily about that. But first, a few major things changed between “A Handful of Dust” and “All Our Yesterdays”.…

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Seriously, you guys. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You thought I was kidding.

“The Savage Curtain” marks the return of Gene Roddenberry to Star Trek as an actual creative figure for the first time since “The Omega Glory”, and it’s apparent pretty much right from the start. The whole teaser is made up of unrefined methodology porn, as the bridge crew mulls over conflicting sensor reports from the planet Excalbia, which the script attempts to convey by having Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhura shout random bits of starship operations procedure. Almost the entire first half plays out similarly: I feel like I’m watching “The Cage” all over again. Roddenberry genuinely seems to think it’s a good idea to devote lengthy chunks of his script to having his characters robotically quote regulations and jargon. This isn’t even technobabble, this is Roddenberry reveling in his show’s cod-military structure and pedigree. This isn’t writing, this is feeding an academy cadet training manual into a paper shredder placed over a bin full of old Star Trek scripts. We’re not even five minutes in and this is already the worst the show has been in months.

And then suddenly Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

That’s not an exaggeration. Out of nowhere, a bad transition fade appears on the viewscreen, spiraling around and around before materializing into full-on Abraham Lincoln, sitting on the Lincoln Memorial to boot like it was Wan Hu’s mythical Rocket Chair, except powered by very poor 1960s visual effects. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. And look, I’m not one to ridicule weird and quirky ideas, especially in a speculative fiction show ostensibly designed expressly for the purpose of exploring them. I’m really not. Nor am I one to make fun of outdated VFX technology, especially on a show that’s been starved for funding all year. Honest. But come on. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You look at him and just laugh. There’s no way not to, and even though over the course of the past five years on this show we’ve seen Alien Neanderthal Bigfoot, Actual Lizardmen, sentient lumps of silicon, animate balls of fluff, Poisonous Snow White Monkey Unicorns, a Giant Space Amoeba, Space Spriggans, Half Moon Cookie Aliens and a community of energy beings powered by Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, I’m pretty much going to have to draw my line at Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

Especially when he’s used to tell a painfully damp squib of a story. It turns out that Flying Space Abraham Lincoln has been either resurrected or conjured up out of Kirk’s thoughts (it’s not clear which), along with Surak, the founder of modern Vulcan philosophy, to side with Kirk and Spock in a deathmatch against history’s greatest villains, namely Genghis Khan, Kahless (the founder of Klingon society) and dictators Zora of Tiburon and Colonel Green (and yes, Genghis Khan and Kahless are made of concentrated racism. Did you have to ask?). None of these other characters, it should be noted, seemed to feel the need to make their presence known to the Enterprise by flying through space on rocket chairs.…

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“Hi there. This is Flint, for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation…”

“Requiem for Methuselah” is an episode I feel like I should probably like a whole lot more than I did. It’s got a knowingly overreaching central premise, sublimely poetic dialog, and strong, moving acting. Furthermore, it also has that signature hallmark of the very best budget-starved speculative fiction TV around: The main characters sitting around in a room debating philosophy with the guest stars. Somewhere in here is a tragic story about human frailty and the human condition: In some ways it does 1970s Gene Roddenberry better than Gene Roddenberry. It’s also Jerome Bixby’s final Star Trek contribution, and, judging by his later work, a story that meant a great deal to him.

And here I am trying to figure out what to say about it.

I guess a plot summary is in order. After an outbreak of lethal Rigellian flu renders the Enterprise a literal plague ship, Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet on an emergency mission to acquire a sample of a rare element from which McCoy can derive an antidote. If they don’t return to the ship in two hours, everyone aboard will perish. On the planet they meet a mysterious man named Flint, who claims to have fled Earth to escape it’s neverending barbarism and conflict. After a “test of strength”, Flint offers to have his robot servant collect the ore McCoy needs to craft the vaccine, and invites the landing party to his house, a sprawling mansion lavishly adorned with an impossible array of collectibles, including a first edition Gutenberg Bible, first drafts of William Shakespeare’s plays and what appear to be brand new, authentic works by Brahms and Leonardo da Vinci. But his biggest surprise is his adopted daughter Rayna, whom Flint claims is educated in centuries of art, music and science…and who immediately captures Kirk’s heart.

The first half of the episode seems to halfheartedly play with doing another critique of Star Trek‘s claim to utopia, having Flint debate with Kirk, Spock and McCoy about how and by what standards humans consider themselves advanced, but this largely takes a backseat to the primary sci-fi mystery: Who Flint is, why he behaves so erratically and what his sudden interest in the Enterprise crew is. The problem is the mystery is painfully easy to guess, and this is clear to everyone except the actual characters from about ten minutes into the runtime. I’m just going to go ahead and spoil “Requiem for Methuselah”’s big trump card right now, because it’s pretty much the script’s only actual idea and the fact it holds it to the climax makes the whole episode feel tortuously padded: The reason Flint is able to amass such a collection and has the money for his enormous compound (and so apparently we’ve decided money does exist in the world of the Original Series then?) is that he literally is Brahms and da Vinici, as well as Alexander the Great, Lazarus and Methuselah, as well as a whole host of other major historical figures.…

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“Far Out.”

Well, it’s not quite as youth-hating as “And The Children Shall Lead”. I can at least say that much for it.

Yeah, this one was never going to be any good. You know the routine by now: The Star Trek team (or what remains of it) digs up an old story pitch, it gets turned into a teleplay by one or more writers who had nothing to do with the original submission, the original idea having been extensively rewritten beyond the point of recognition in the process and then this becomes the framework for the finished episode we see onscreen. Last time the show got lucky: Margaret Armen and Oliver Crawford turned Dave Gerrold’s submission into something that wasn’t quite his original idea, but worked almost as well, if not better in some respects (thanks, surely, in no small part due to it keeping Margaret Armen as far away from anything having to do with race politics as is humanly possible). This week, well…it doesn’t.

“The Way to Eden” is loosely (and I mean extremely loosely) based on an old D.C. Fontana pitch entitled “Joanna”, which would have featured Doctor McCoy’s estranged daughter, the titular Joanna, coming aboard the Enterprise and beginning a relationship with Kirk, thus creating tension between him and her father. Despite being one of the more famous unused story ideas for the Original Series, I wasn’t able to find a lot of information on plot details or anything like that, so I’m actually going to keep Fontana out of the discussion for “The Way to Eden” for the most part (and after all, she did dislike the finished episode enough to request credit under her pseudonym): Supposedly Joanna was the character who eventually became Chekov’s love interest Irina Galliulin, but if she were indeed going to be one of the Space Hippies, my guess is that it probably would have played out a lot like “Journey to Babel” where the plot is largely a basic skeleton upon which to frame a character piece (which in this case would have been about McCoy’s relationship with Joanna and Kirk) and it wouldn’t have gone any further than that. And anyway, unlike Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana’s thankfully not going anywhere anytime soon so we’ll have plenty more opportunities to talk about her. This isn’t her final bow in Star Trek, this is, for at least us, the point where it becomes clear who the next showrunner is going to be.

So let’s talk about Space Hippies instead. “The Way to Eden” concerns a group of free-spirited youths who have formed a movement built around peace, brotherhood and an aggressive rejection of modern technology and political structures in favour of a return to an idealized pastoral lifestyle. The youths think that they are destined to travel to the mythical planet Eden, supposedly a tranquil unspoiled paradise where they can live out their lives free of technology and on their own terms. Inconveniently for pretty much everyone, the travellers believe Eden resides in Romulan space.…

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“My beloved, let’s get down to business/Mental self defense fitness”

Well. This, I did not expect.

There are quite possibly no bedfellows stranger than Dave Gerrold, Oliver Crawford and Margaret Armen. Gerrold is at this point still an energetic young Star Trek fan and beginning writer, albeit one who, with the help of Gene Coon, penned arguably the single greatest episode of the Original Series. Crawford was an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who miraculously recovered his career after being blacklisted for refusing to disclose names of supposed communist sympathizers, but his only Star Trek credits have been co-writing “The Galileo Seven” with Shimon Wincelberg and somewhat misreading Gene Coon in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. Armen, meanwhile, is one of my least favourite writers in the entire series and a compelling candidate for one of the worst as well, with the two spectacular turkeys that were “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” to her name. The prospect of a story jointly written by all three of these wildly disparate talents is quite frankly inconceivable. But hey, we got Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop last week, so stranger things have happened.

Actually, “The Lights of Zetar” is a good point of comparison because like it, “The Cloud Minders” is absolutely a flawed masterpiece, which took me completely by surprise: This one is properly excellent. I mean, it’s not perfect-It has some worryingly serious flaws which, although customary for the third season, are still really annoying and keep “The Cloud Minders” from completely going the distance. But there are moments of genuine greatness in this story, and it crackles with an energy and passion the show hasn’t seen since John Meredyth Lucas was running the show. This is most likely the part of the episode inherited from Gerrold, who wrote the original story pitch, entitled “Castles in the Sky”. Thankfully from my perspective, Gerrold gave a quite lengthy and detailed comment about the differences between his story and the episode that made it to air in his book The World of Star Trek, which both gives me ample fodder for discussion and saves me having to summarise the plot:

“It was intended as a parable between the haves and the have-nots, the haves being the elite who are removed from the realities of everyday life – they live in their floating sky cities. The have-nots were called “Mannies” (for Manual Laborers) and were forced to live on the surface of the planet where the air was denser, pressure was high, and noxious gases made the conditions generally unlivable. The Mannies torn between two leaders, one a militant, and one a Martin Luther King figure. (Mind you, this was in 1968, shortly after King was assassinated, and just before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

In my original version, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were captured by the Mannies when their shuttlecraft was shot down by a missile. (The Enterprise desperately needed dilithium crystals. This planet was one of the Federation’s biggest suppliers, and Kirk’s concern was to restore the flow of crystals.

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“This is the song that doesn’t end/Yes it goes on and on my friend…”

“The Lights of Zetar” is Ron Moore’s least favourite episode of Star Trek. Naturally, as part of my apparent mission to disagree with one of the greatest writers in the entire franchise on absolutely everything, I found it thoroughly fascinating. It’s not especially great, and the usual season three problems submarine it, but it’s one of the most enjoyable and provocative episodes, at least in theory, we’ve seen in awhile. Quality-wise it’s at least on par with the last month of scripts.

It even opens on an enchanting note. Kirk’s log entry begins

“Captain’s log : stardate 5725.3. The Enterprise is en route to Memory Alpha. It is a planetoid set up by the Federation as a central library containing the total cultural history and scientific knowledge of all planetary Federation members. With us is specialist Lieutenant Mira Romaine. She is on board to supervise the transfer of newly designed equipment directly from the Enterprise to Memory Alpha.”

Kirk then goes on to explain how Scotty has fallen in love with Lieutenant Romaine in one of the most captivating and poetic bits of dialogue in the entire show:

“When a man of Scotty’s years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship’s engines. He could talk only to the ship. Now he can see nothing but the woman.”

And naturally, William Shatner delivers a grand slam of a reading. Unfortunately, this is the most interesting Kirk is in the whole story, and this is a decent microcosm of “The Lights of Zetar”’s problems.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the episode’s background a bit. For the first time since Harlan Ellison and “The City on the Edge of Forever” (and arguably Robert Bloch), we have a celebrity writer this week: Shari Lewis, famous for her television puppet shows from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s starring herself and her puppets, the iconic Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy. Although the episode is credited first to Jeremy Tarcher (her husband) the overwhelming majority of the episode, at least the basic story, is quite obviously Lewis’, and it’s her positionality that really clarifies what “The Lights of Zetar” is about. I must confess I did a bit of a double-take when I learned Lewis was behind this script: There are some things that simply cannot cross in my mind, no matter how open I may try to keep it. Lamb Chop and Star Trek are two of those things.

Although upon closer examination, they really do turn out to be a solid match for one another. Firstly, Lewis was an enormous fan of Star Trek, and it was a dream of hers to write for it. And furthermore, though her routine was ostensibly a variety act for children, Lewis always had higher aspirations: She performed for children sadly more often than not because children were the only ones who would watch her.…

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“‘Oh, I wish it could stay like this forever!’ ‘So do I.'”

“The Mark of Gideon” is not one of the original Star Trek‘s finest hours. But you expected this. It has the makings of a great example of the show’s newfound direction, but it ultimately ends up proving the show is just drifting at this point, painfully obviously out of steam.

It tries though, it really, truly does. For an episode very clearly produced solely so the show didn’t have to build any new sets, “The Mark of Gideon” does the self-evidently correct story to make with that brief: Having a crewmember be mysteriously transported an eerily empty starship. It’s a novel concept, though it would be perhaps more novel if the show hadn’t pulled similar tricks in both “The Tholian Web” and “The Doomsday Machine”. So novel in fact it’s done again in the similarly resource-challenged second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (albeit to a much more effective extent) and one of the most frequently overlooked virtues of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was it’s ability to knock out world-class science fiction on a weekly basis while consistently only using one set.

This time though it’s Kirk who, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to a notoriously reclusive and xenophobic civilization, beams down only to find himself apparently where he started, on the transporter pad of the Enterprise. Only now it seems like he’s the only one on the ship. To make matters worse, he has a mysterious bruise on his arm and nine minutes of his life, the period of time between when he beamed down and beamed back up again, are a blank to him. Soon though he realises he’s not alone when he meets a mysterious woman named Odona who claims to have been abducted from her home planet. Although she doesn’t remember much about it, she says it was extremely claustrophobic, and that thousands upon thousands of faces were constantly staring at her from every direction. Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scenes on the very much populated Enterprise as Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura try to determine why Kirk has disappeared into thin air and trying to navigate diplomacy talks between Starfleet Command and Gideon, the latter who are clearly hiding and withholding information.

This part of the episode is actually brilliant. There is a palpable sense of mystery surrounding the proceedings, keeping us constantly wondering about whether or not Kirk has been transported to another dimension or perhaps into his ship’s own past…or perhaps its future. It slowly builds tension and unease over the course of a full half-hour up until the moment Kirk and Odona look out of the portholes and suddenly see the stars transform into thousands of faces staring back at them, a scene which is genuinely unsettling to the point of actually being disturbing. Furthermore, just like the subtle Forteanism of “The Tholian Web”, the Fairy Myth overtones in “Wink of an Eye” and the supernatural horror of “That Which Survives”, the first half of “The Mark of Gideon” is yet another example of Star Trek shifting its approach to science fiction from the pulp and Golden Age tradition to the more fantastic trappings that come to define the genre from here on out, and indeed that the franchise is capable of making this kind of shift at all and living on after Apollo 11.…

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“A cat may look at a king…”

“Whom Gods Destroy” is famously bad. It is also famously unapologetically repetitive, reiterating the exact same plot of the first season episode “Dagger of the Mind” down to reusing the same chair prop that was central to that episode’s climax. It is also, like the vast majority of third season episodes, riddled with plot holes, logic lapses and inconsistent characterization: In terms of basic narrative structure and coherence, it’s once again a mess. “Whom Gods Destroy” seems to be a particular bugbear for Leonard Nimoy, who spent the entire week writing memos and complaints about it to anyone who would listen including, but not limited to, Fred Freiberger and Douglas C. Cramer, the Paramount Studios production executive.

While the laziness and sloppiness are painfully apparent, I’m not especially inclined to tear into them here for a few reasons. One, exasperating as it is, this is not really unusual for this season, and really I’d go so far as to say it’s standard operating procedure for the show at this point. Secondly, even if it hadn’t been officially stated yet, it’s pretty clear Star Trek‘s time is just about up. We’ve had our bonus year, and the show has about two months left before it’s put to bed for good. It’s rather pointless to get too worked up about structural problems now. While it’s possible we might get one or two late-stage minor classics along the lines of “Wink of an Eye” or “That Which Survives” in the remaining stories (I have little to no recollection of the next batch of episodes except for the really blatantly obvious ones), the show is for all practical purposes done and we’re just killing time before the inevitable sits in. This run of episodes is the word death of the Original Series.

“Whom Gods Destroy” isn’t even all that bad given the standards of the 1968-1969 year. It manages to on the whole avoid being as incensing as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Paradise Syndrome” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, though it does have a few ethical issues of its own. And, while it’s not as much of a B-movie pleasure as “Spock’s Brain”, there are certainly parts that are genuinely entertaining in a way only the most gloriously trashy science fiction can be. Indeed, though “Whom Gods Destroy” is certainly nowhere near as thought provoking as “The Tholian Web”, “Plato’s Stepchildren” or “Wink of an Eye”, it does actually manage to occasionally drunkenly stumble into one or two genuinely captivating concepts. What we have here is probably Star Trek’s first Curate’s Egg: It’s a disaster, but parts of this disaster are quite excellent.

Let’s square away the obvious issue right away. “Whom Gods Destroy” is literally a retelling of “Dagger of the Mind”, and a shitty one at that. This time the story follows the almost cartoonishly stereotypical plot of having the inmate running the asylum have a Napoleon complex, on which I’ll have more to say a little later.…

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“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.”

Personally, I’ve never been drawn to the idea of casually “marathoning” a television show. The idea of spending days locked inside watching every single episode of some TV show sounds to me like some heretofore unknown circle of Dante’s Hell. I’ve never felt the need to be completionist about television because I’ve always understood the realities of day-to-day, ’round the clock production inevitably mean not every episode is going to be a classic, and I see no need to force myself to sit through obvious misfires in what’s supposed to be my downtime.

Now for a project like this I do, of course, have to watch every episode, or at least almost every episode, because the point here is to get a relatively comprehensive understanding of the history and evolution of Star Trek. But if I were to just watch this show casually, I’d have no hesitation to skip over huge swaths of it because frankly the idea of watching “The Paradise Syndrome”, “Elaan of Troyius” or “Space Seed” again is the antithesis of entertaining to me. My point being I was long under the perhaps mistaken assumption that other people might have a similar viewpoint to mine here, so whenever I’ve been asked by someone to introduce them to a show, I almost always give them a truncated episode list of recommendations instead of flopping a twelve-disc DVD box set on their table. I figure if a friend, who presumably shares at least some of my taste and habits, is asking my advice on Star Trek they’re not likely to find “A Private Little War” any more enjoyable or engaging than I did. So, when a few years back my sister wanted to get into the Original Series, of which she had no prior familiarity, I gave her a crash course on the show, and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was the place I suggested she stop.

I hadn’t seen the Original Series in quite awhile when I made that list, and were I to do it again today I would have done a number of things differently: I’d have taken one or two episodes out and put a great deal more in (mostly from this season, interestingly enough), so apologies for that if you happen to be reading. I’m not sure if I would still have put the cutoff at this episode, because I have not, as of this writing, seen the last few episodes of the third season, though I at least feel I’d be justified in calling it quits here if I were so inclined (and yes, don’t worry, we’ll see the old lady all the way through “Turnabout Intruder” to port, no matter how painful it might be). “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” marks a number of endings and lasts of its own: It’s the last really iconic episode of the Original Series, mostly due to Bele and Lokai, though there’s something to be said about the art design on “The Cloud Minders”, I suppose.…

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