Take note: This is what a sci-fi planet should look like.

Like so many other stories like it, “The Slaver Weapon” is a not-actually-terribly-good episode that still manages to set in motion events that will change everything we thought we knew about the world of Star Trek and call into question the franchise’s closest-held tenets and ideals.

It has an interesting pedigree though. We’ve heard a few hints and clues about the Kzinti and some hostilities with them before, but this is the first time we’ve actually seen them: An aggressive race of catlike people who have persistently attacked settlements, who make war to eat those they defeat in battle and who are so misogynistic they’ve literally bred intelligence out of their women. They are a frighteningly unlikable adversary for this series, and if they don’t sound like typical Star Trek villains that’s probably because they’re not, in point of fact, from Star Trek at all. The Kzinti actually hail from the self-contained Known Universe, encompassing the collected work of noted science fiction author Larry Niven, and this episode is actually a straight translation of his short story “The Soft Weapon” for Star Trek. The reason it’s here is because D.C. Fontana was a huge fan of Niven’s and personally requested he contribute something for the Animated Series. The two approached Gene Roddenberry with the idea, and while it was thought many of Niven’s pitches were too violent for the show, Roddenberry eventually suggested adapting “The Soft Weapon”.

As a result there’s not a whole lot to say about the episode as aired, because it straightforwardly, literally *is* “The Soft Weapon”, only with the names changed. An interesting consequence of this is that the episode features exclusively Sulu, Uhura and Spock in starring roles, standing in for the original story’s protagonists (a human couple and a vegetarian alien scientists named Nessus), and thus none of the other regulars appear. This sadly doesn’t help the episode much though, because while it’s nice to see Sulu and Uhura get really meaty roles again, it’s painfully clear “The Soft Weapon” had a rather blatant Pulp structure, so we get to see many riveting scenes of our heroes getting captured by Kzinti pirates, escaping said Kzinti pirates and being recaptured about ten seconds later. And of course, the female character has to be abducted and held for ransom.

There are, however, two main aspects of this episode that remain quite provocative. The first is, of course, the Kzinti: Despite being canon expatriates, the fact remains having a concept as shocking as the Kzinti here does change the game rather decisively for Star Trek. Trying to weld established Star Trek mythos with Niven’s Known Universe has some really bizarre consequences that, thanks to a happy accident, wind up adding a lot more nuance to our franchise. The biggest bomb comes about when you try and reconcile the supposedly pacifistic and utopian Federation with the nasty history of the Earth-Kzin Wars: The implication of this episode then becomes that at some point prior to the foundation of the modern Federation, Earth and its allies were engaged in a series of horrific and consecutive wars where they absolutely decimated the Kzinti armies.…

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“…part of your wooooooooooooooorld…“

Some episodes I have a really hard time building a post around. It’s not that they’re especially terrible, it’s just there’s not a lot of content there for me to really grab hold of or find new and interesting things to say about them. Thankfully, Margaret Armen wrote this one so that won’t be the case here.

And I really wanted to like this one too. When I was planning this project I did a cursory scan of all the episodes I hadn’t seen or didn’t remember all that well, and this one looked fascinating. The Enterprise is conducting research on a planet that’s almost entirely ocean due to persistent underground tremors causing the continents to fall into the sea. The crew hope they information they gain will be helpful in providing aid to other planets with similar geological activity. One of the things I love most about science fiction is its ability to depict wondrous and fantastic spectacles of worlds that exist far out in the deepest realms of outer space. It goes back to things like Georges Méliès, the hauntingly evocative spacescapes dreamed up by the Golden Age science fiction artists and the fist glimpses we saw of the Lunar surface from the Apollo missions. Few things stir my imagination quite like a well-done bit of space art. Indeed one reason, if not *the* primary reason, I don’t despise Star Trek is how fantastic Star Trek: The Next Generation and early Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were at evoking this kind of imagery: The visual design alone is enough to get our minds racing to imagine what life in the sort of world those shows depicts must be like. And animation is a medium essentially custom-tailored for precisely this.

One of my greatest loves, obviously, given the way I’ve structured this project, is the ocean. When I was young one of the things I thought I might grow up to be was some kind of oceanographer or ocean explorer. I developed my love of the ocean and my love of outer space roughly at the same time, I suppose because both seemed like universes unto themselves and we knew next to nothing about either. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense given the Polynesian belief in the intertwined world, with the realms of the Earth, Sea and Sky all interconnected. Many variations of the Polynesian creation myth even claim that the world was created out of the sea, and often that the world exists within a giant clam shell in the middle of an even larger cosmic ocean.

At one point, I naively fancied myself some kind of professional astronomer and was involved in a project to detect extrasolar planets. It was my unspoken hope that at some point I’d be able to see a planet like the one described in this episode: One comprised almost entirely of ocean. I’ve also long had a fascination with Neptune in our own solar system: Although it’s named after a Western sea god, Neptune is in fact a gas giant and even though it’s thus more properly described as a planet made entirely out of sky, I still think it would be an incredible sight to visit a place like that.…

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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.…

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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.…

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