So far the animated series seems better about this than the main series. In a full hour long episode, you might have seen a scene like that, but it would have been undercut by weird changes in tone and maybe a scene at the end of McCoy and Kirk teasing Spock about having a gas take over his body.
Great idea. I’m old enough to have watched the show on its first run.
Can’t decide between this or continuing with the Expanse…
“The Lorelei Signal”
Ugh. This one was a slog to get through. I’m going to blame this one on Margaret Armen, who is displayed as the writer for this episode.
Apparently the Star Trek universe has a Bermuda triangle of sorts. Every few years at a certain time in a certain region of the galaxy, any ships disappear, never to be heard from again. So the time is nigh, and the Enterprise confidently goes there to investigate. When the appointed time comes, they receive a signal.
So given that something clearly happened to all the previous ships caught in the Bermuda triangle, does Kirk play it safe and have the signal analyzed? No. He asks Uhura to put it on the comm so the whole ship can hear it!
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I can’t even. Man, fuck the rest of this episode too, I don’t even want to talk about it. But fine, I’ll talk about it a little bit.
It’s a siren call. These women send out the signal, the men all feel safe and attracted to it, and they go down, the women suck their life energy. That’s the secret to the Bermuda triangle. But these women weren’t prepared for the Enterprises’ amazing women, who save the day by using phasers and forcing these Sirens to stop what they’re doing.
The one saving grace of this episode for me, which was also in equal parts extremely aggravating, was the extremely long scenes where we’re shown the Enterprise slowly cross the scene in orbit as first Kirk and then Scotty slowly meander towards completing their logs. I was fascinated, and also I wanted to punch a cat. Very interesting, experimental, surreal television that.
Edit: Oh yes, and I want to further point out, the limitations of the animated medium really show themselves here. If this was an episode of actual Star Trek, which has amazed me with its pick of beautiful guest star actresses and wardrobe choices for these actresses, this show would have been, no doubt, a visual treat at least. Instead it was just a cartoon.
Oh dear. Well, this one kind of sucked. But at least my wife and I were entertained. It was all so stupid, you couldn’t help but laugh. Rock8man gave a good synopsis so I’ll just go into my highlights:
They reuse a lot of shots in this series due to the limited animation budget. I think they used this one about 30 times:
I did like that Uhura got to take over the Enterprise. You’ve come a long way, baby.
I actually really dug the part where Scotty was singing.
Spock doing a high-pitched yodel to turn on the computer… too funny.
This moment in a fight scene where on of the Sirens picks up McCoy. The animation was so bad.
Kirk and friends hide out in a huge urn. The Sirens are all standing around it thinking: “I guess they must have escaped.” Look in the goddamn urn, you idiots.
Uhura threatens to destroy their temple and starts by vaporizing a tasteful green vase. Ok.
Spock communicates with Nurse Chapel through telepathy? Whatever.
It starts to rain and the huge urn fills up with water amazingly fast.
And the solution to the aging problem was the Transporter Pattern Buffer? 99.7% chance of failure, but miraculously, it works!!! I know they did some pattern buffer shenanigans in TNG. Is this the first time they use it to restore someone? Or maybe it was “The Enemy Within” from TOS. Dunno, but it was nice to see an tiny bit of science fiction in the this episode even if it was ham-handed.
This was the first real stinker.
In TNG the transporter accident accidentally lead to two Will Rikers. I like how original Star Trek and TNG skirt around and toy with this dark idea of what’s really happening with the transporter is basically what’s happening in the movie The Prestige. You’re creating a copy of the original person every time you transport, and you’re killing the original so that there’s not two of them running around. That’s the transporter. But I did like the transporter as a solution in this episode. They already had backup copies! Kill the old defective copies!
Yeah, that was great. And she figured out what was going on pretty early and was assembling an all-woman away team. But then Spock got away from this captors just long enough to communicate with the enterprise and ask her to send an all woman away team. I really like that she didn’t rub that in his face in that moment by saying “well duh”, instead she pretended like “Yes Sir, I’ll get right on that for you”. Uhura rocks.
Yes, one of the worst. I especially hated the “nobody thinks to look in the urn” and “damn but that urn filled with water fast.”
Agree also that the animation seems even worse in this episode than most. I think there’s about 9 minutes of actual animation, and then just same frames over and over again.
Pretty dreadful. Plus the plot /shudder.
This looks like Sheerah.
Hey, I’m caught up. I appreciate that this series doesn’t feature Kirk’s icky sex antics.
One of our planets is missing is a pretty nice adaptation of a fun golden age of sci fi Fred Hoyle novel, The Black Cloud, in which our solar system is invaded by a Jupiter-mass gas cloud and intrepid scientists figure out first that it is alive, and second that it is sentient, and eventually establish communications with it.
“More Tribbles, More Troubles”
I quite like the TOS tribble episode. so I was cautiously optimistic about this one. But honestly, with the exception of one or two things, the episode was lacking.
The biggest problem here is the familiarity with the whole premise. Once again, the Enterprise is en route to Sherman’s Planet because apparently they can’t grow shit and need another shipment of quadrotriticale (yes, I had to look up how to spell that).
And once again, the Kilngon’s are up to no good. Kirk and crew encounter them chasing down a small craft. There’s a nice bit throughout the episode dealing with a new Klingon weapon that can completely immobilize the Enterprise. And the way Kirk and Spock use the freight vessels they are escorting to counter this was pretty cool.
They intervene by beaming aboard the occupant of the craft - none other than Cyrano Jones. And he’s got more tribbles with him. But this time, they’re mostly harmless as they’ve been genetically altered to be sterile.
However, their appetites remain intact and their incessant eating (of the grain that’s conveniently on board the Enterprise) result in some big-ass tribbles… sort of. I assume the whole premise here is taken from a couple of lines from the original episode:
MCCOY: What do you get when you feed a Tribble?
KIRK: A fat Tribble.
And that’s indeed what they get here. The solution appears to be a tribble predator called a Glommer that Jones swiped from a Klingon planet. A planet that Jones infected with tons of tribbles. The Glommer was genetically engineer by the Klingons to feed on Tribbles, but it’s currently the only one.
I don’t think we ever find out why Jones stole the glommer. Was he just being a dick? The Kilngons are kind of in the right here. This dude really fucked up their planet.
The Klingon’s essentially plead their case and Kirk’s answer is to beam them over the Glommer along with a bunch of giant tribbles. And here’s where it gets weird. Turns out the tribbles aren’t actually big, they’re just made up of smaller tribbles, so when the Klingon’s shoot the big tribble, it explodes into dozens upon dozens of tiny tribbles.
So, “Ha Ha” stoopid Klingons. Joke’s on you.
Kirk gets caught in an avalanche of tribbles and then smirks at the camera.
But there was one part that actually had me in stitches. Throughout the episode, a tribble keeps appearing in the Captains chair, and Kirk tosses it out before sitting down. And each time this happens the tribble is larger and larger. It was a pretty funny sight gag.
Not the worst episode, but not one of my favs.
Yeah, you touched on all the major points Greg. I enjoyed the combat with the Klingon vessel a lot. How does Kirk fight back when the disruption weapon has completely disabled his ship, including the phasers people carry against boarding parties. His solution is to use the two grain ships they are escorting, and put them on a collision course with the Klingon ship. There’s also a lot of details here in the combat scenes about how much power the Klingon ship is using to fire that weapon, and how long it takes to recharge, and how much power the Enterprise is taking when the Klingon ship comes in a second time to disable the grain ships and the Enterprise has to waste power in using the tractor beam. It made for a nice geeky detailed combat scene, which was the best part of the episode.
It also re-framed the original Tribbles episode in my head. The original Tribbles episode, it turns out, was not a Tribbles episode, it was a Klingon episode. And so fittingly, this episode is also a Klingon episode.
Ah, it’s a shame we don’t have Chekov in this series. I only remember Chekov from the original series for two things: 1) Screaming like a little girl at finding a dead person and 2) quadrotitricale.
Note that this is *quinto-*triticale. They specifically mentioned it was a new five-lobed grain at the beginning.
Fun episode, but DS9 did the better Tribble sequel.
“The Survivor”
So the Enterprise is driving near the Romulan Neutral Zone, as it tends to do, when it finds the damaged ship of Carter Winston, who went missing five years ago. They beam him aboard, and everyone knows who he is. This must be before the Federation became a society where materialism stopped mattering, because apparently this guy is really rich, and he used his personal wealth to save a colony from starvation. Not a story you’d see in The Next Generation Trek.
Anyhow, Spock asks for his identity tapes and a medical exam to confirm his identity, which greatly offends McCoy’s sensibilities for some reason, I guess because you’re supposed to believe Philathropists and take them at their word. Because he’s a Gentleman. Shut the fuck up McCoy.
Anyway, he turns out to be an alien posing as the famous Carter Winston, of course. He breaks up with his fiance, who happens to be a crew member aboard the enterprise. Then he subdues Kirk and goes to the bridge and gives the order to go into the Romulan neutral zone. And he actually comes up with justifiable orders this time, saying they are going to a planet to rescue someone, and that it’s a matter of life and death. This contrasts nicely with a previous episode in the original series, anyone remember which one I’m talking about? I think it was the one where that woman was posing as Kirk, and she gave questionable orders and didn’t bother justifying them very well.
Anyway, this shapeshifter’s smarter than that. The Romulans say “hey, what’s up fellas? Treaty says you’re in violation and we get to take your ship”. Kirk then deduces that the shapeshifter must have been sent by the Romulans exactly for this reason so THEY are the ones violating the treaty by sending an imposter. I loved that exchange. I also liked the short fight between the three ships. The Animated Series so far has done a far better job with space battles than the original series did.
In the end, love is our savior, because isn’t it always? The episode ends with a comedic put-down where McCoy gets a well deserved verbal slam by Spock. Take that McCoy, you idiot doctor.
Overall an okay episode. I’m not a fan of love being transformative being a magic solution. If they were going to do that, it would have worked much better on the live action original series with more actors actually acting and emoting, rather than stiff animations of two people’s faces trying to express emotions only through voices. It felt weird.
One fun thing about the animated series is the variety of aliens. You can only do so much with forehead ridges and plastic ears.
But yes, the main thing that stood out for me in this episode is “WTF do you need money for?” It would have been easy enough to introduce somebody famous without it having to involve filthy lucre!
I ended up liking this one quite a bit.
One thing I’m noticing about these episodes is they play against our assumptions as an audience. Here we have a shape-shifting being who is being used by the Romulans for nefarious purposes. It would have been easy for this alien (called a Vendorian) to be just some stock villain. And even the Federation doesn’t appear to trust them. They are an “off-limits” species due to their ability to assume any form. But it turns out that this alien merely wanted a better life for himself and that’s just what the Romulans promised in exchange for his assistance.
And that got me thinking about how quick the Federation is to judge other species. Can’t trust those filthy shape-shifters.
Anyway, here are a couple of highlights:
Kick and Spock realizing that the McCoy is the Vendorian because he doesn’t get all snarky with Spock.
Kick threatening a bed in sick bay with a bottle of mustard.
So glad ascots are back in style!
If it were live, that role would be played by Michael Caine.
" The Infinite Vulcan"
An episode written by Walter Koenig! Is that how you spell his name? Anyway, the Enterprise is exploring a planet. Yay for exploration! It turns out there’s a mobile plant species here. One pricks Mr. Sulu, who is about to die, when other plants show up with an antidote. A whole advanced race of plant people! They invite our landing party indoors and it turns out to be a trap. These Pterodactyl-like annoying screeching plants take a hold of them and take Spock away from them.
So remember how we were just impressed with a whole plant species and their advancement? Well, it turns out they’re being ordered around by a giant human. Bleh. This episode felt like it was going to be so progressive, reminding us not to be so animal-centric, but it turns out plants just want to be ordered around by animals.
The giant human is from Eugenics Wars (Khan era), who wants Spock as a perfect species who will go around forcefully bring peace to the galaxy. Kirk rightly points out how idiotic that whole idea is and Spock’s new clone agrees, because he’s like Spock. And then he praises Kirk for being logical and the other giant man apologizes and the screeching pterodactyl plants continue to be annoying and the humanoid plants continue to be subservient because plants, am I right?
Yeah, the plant episode was rather florid, over all…
One interesting seed planted by this story, if you consider it continuity, is that during the TOS era there’s still a 40-foot-tall Spock clone with all his memories running around out there.
You’d think that would have come up during Wrath of Khan. ‘Bummer about Spock, but hey let’s go get that 4-story clone of his for our new science officer.’