Plot Summary: Commodore Robert April, first captain of the Enterprise, is being taken in his onetime ship to his retirement ceremony along with his wife Sarah April, the ship’s first chief medical officer. Neither is happy about Starfleet’s mandatory retirement age of 75. An alien ship appears on scans traveling at the incredible speed of warp 36 directly at the Beta Niobe nova. Unable to communicate with the pilot because she seems to be speaking backward, Kirk orders the ship held in the Enterprise’s tractor beam to stop it from destroying itself, but the beam tows the Enterprise into the nova along with the alien vessel. Both ships emerge in an alternate universe where space is white, the stars are black, and time runs in reverse. The captain of the alien ship introduces herself in now-reversed English as Karla Five and says she had to fly into the nova to return to her own universe, a journey endangered by the Enterprise with its tractor. Because the Enterprise is now trapped, Karla leads it to Arret, where she and her son Karl – who is older than she is – theorize that if they can trigger a nova in their universe at the parallel spot to a nova in Kirk’s universe, then the Enterprise will be able to return home by reversing the process that brought it to Karla’s universe. She sacrifices her ship to aid their return, but the Enterprise crew is aging in reverse; first Sulu, then Uhura, then others lose the ability to control their instruments. Soon only the Aprils and a teenage Spock are capable of taking the Enterprise through the nova. The Aprils use the transporter to restore everyone to correct ages and Sarah considers remaining young, but Robert persuades her that their lives have been satisfying already. En route to the retirement ceremony once more, the Aprils learn that because of their heroism, Starfleet is reviewing its mandatory retirement policy and they may be allowed to continue to serve.

Analysis: Star Trek: The Animated Series ends on a high note with “The Counter-Clock Incident”; though the science is ludicrous, it’s not particularly out of sync with the chronometers running backward in “The Naked Time” and it’s an increasingly rare example in science fiction of age and experience trumping youth and strength. The notion that Starfleet ever had a mandatory retirement at age 75 now seems hopelessly antiquated – how old was McCoy supposed to be when he appeared on the Enterprise-D at the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation? William Shatner is over 75 and hasn’t slowed down a bit, and I don’t doubt that if Kirk had lived (or returned from the dead), he’d have insisted on working as well. The Aprils are a delightful couple and I’m only sorry they didn’t turn up earlier in the franchise so we could see more of them. I love working couples, and from what we hear after the fact, these two had a very long personal and professional collaboration; I wish we could have seen it in action, rather than at the end when his more glorified position as captain is about to be taken away from him and he’s giving her little orders when he can.

“The Counter-Clock Incident” is one of few episodes with a sustained metaphor underlining the theme, in this case a Capellan flower that has a life cycle of only a few hours. When she’s first complimented on its beauty, Sarah regretfully explains that the bloom is already dying, but when the ship enters the parallel universe where time runs backward, it ceases to wilt and becomes a bright blossom before it begins to devolve into a seed. Robert and Sarah (voiced somewhat obviously by James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols) hardly seem to be wilting – neither is infirm and both are mentally acute, if unhappy at the phase of their lives which is ending – but like the flower they return to their prime in the alternate universe, with Robert very much resembling Kirk. It doesn’t make any scientific sense that gray hair would abruptly turn brown and aging skin would instantly slough off to reveal smoother young skin, though that’s easier to swallow than the idea that one’s descendants can be born before oneself and one’s ancestors after oneself – how does that process of birth work, exactly? Will Karla 5′s father become a fetus as he de-ages, and where will he gestate? Then there’s the concept of black stars in white space, where it’s never explained whether the change is to the nature of space and energy or to human retinas and how those are perceived. The physics and metaphysics receive very little attention, and in fact, to my recollection, Alan Dean Foster rewrote them entirely in the novelization of the episode for the Star Trek Logs series because it turned out that the negative universe was a fake.

But the science isn’t what’s important here. We end the animated series with a glimpse into early Star Trek history (in a real-world sense as well as fictional, because April was Gene Roddenberry’s original name for the captain in “The Cage”). It’s evident that Kirk and his crew are familiar with the Aprils and their accomplishments; McCoy even reveals that Sarah designed a lot of the instruments now standard in sickbay. April’s retirement ceremony is due to take place on Babel, the planet we already know to be a center for Federation diplomatic activity, and April is aware that Kirk was present when Beta Niobe began to supernova, just as Kirk is aware that April was present when the Enterprise was being built. To add to the sense of nostalgia, we get to see animated representations of the crewmembers as teenagers and children, including a Spock who’s beginning to look like the boy from “Yesteryear” when the ship travels back to its own universe. It’s a boon of animation that so many characters can be shown de-aging. Thematically, this development is a lot like the Next Generation finale “All Good Things” in which Picard, leaping through eras of his own life, must come to terms with his mortality and at the same time solve a major scientific problem.

It’s a bit sad that in this last animated episode (and last original series installment before the films), the focus is not on the regular characters, yet it’s very much in the spirit of Star Trek to display the sort of continuity that looks back at a previous crew and gives them one more chance to excel. Given the choice to remain a young man and continue his remarkable career, Robert April declines, feeling that since he has no regrets, he doesn’t want to risk the happy memories of the career and life he has already shared with Sarah. This isn’t a man who’d be happy with illusion or remain in the Nexus…a worthy predecessor to Pike, Kirk, and Picard. And if his wife has a moment of wavering, one gets the impression it’s because even in her century she’s been regarded too long in her husband’s shadow; her own successor, McCoy, isn’t aware of all her contributions until she arrives on the ship. This universe and its parallel are places where families work together, leaders risk their lives to save strangers, scientists sacrifice their ships to help others, and officers readily give up command for the good of others. “The Counter-Clock Incident” encapsulates much that is good about Star Trek – not just the animated series but the entire franchise.

Plot Summary: Starfleet dispatches the Enterprise to follow an ancient space probe which scanned Earth, sent data about the planet into deep space, then self-destructed. The probe has left a propulsion trail which leads the Enterprise to a ship that uses a force field to take the form of a winged serpent. Ensign Walking Bear identifies the shape as that of the ancient Mesoamerican god Kukulkan, who appeared to the Aztec and Maya civilizations. A disembodied voice announces that the god is pleased to be recognized but that humans must face a test to ensure the survival of their race, which appears to have forgotten their ancient benefactor. Moments later, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Walking Bear are transported from the Enterprise to what appears to be a massive city with elements from many ancient Earth cultures. The officers conclude that they are meant to summon Kukulkan using a crystalline device atop a pyramid, which they activate by redirecting sunlight. Kukulkan appears, but is angry that the Enterprise fired on his ship and has not forgiven humans for forgetting that he is their master and they should practice peace. He takes the crewmembers to his collection of alien specimens from the worlds he has influenced, kept happy in cages that function as holograms to distract them. Meanwhile, Spock has the Enterprise fire on Kukulkan’s ship to free the Starfleet officers. Seeing Kukulkan distracted, Kirk’s men free a Capellan power cat from its cage to give the Enterprise and the away team an advantage. Kukulkan is forced to accept that his children have outgrown his wish to oversee them. Reluctantly, Kukulkan lets them go.

Analysis: Take “Who Mourns for Adonais” and “The Menagerie” smashed together with a bit of “The Apple” and some sloppy prehistory, stick in a Shakespearean quote like “The Conscience of the King” and toss in a Native American crewmember in the name of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, and you end up with “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth,” which has entertaining visuals but not much else going for it. I don’t much like science fiction stories which human breakthroughs are credited to alien intervention, particularly on a show like Star Trek which has always insisted that human willpower has been a driving impetus for innovation and intellectual development rather than a brute force that needed a benevolent deity to rein it in. So I’m not predisposed to like Kukulkan in the first place, particularly since this isn’t the Mayan deity associated with the sun god but a mishmash of dragon legends taking credit for nearly all of humanity’s early triumphs. I understand that the writers didn’t want to commit the bigoted slight of suggesting that Native American pyramids couldn’t have been built without divine intervention while other architectectural wonders might have arisen purely from human efforts – the much more recent fourth Indiana Jones film is infuriating in this regard – but in an effort to make the divine intervention universal, the show erases everything that’s unique and interesting about the Mesoamerican cultures to whom Kukulkan was important.

The same problem occurs with Ensign Walking Bear, who is in many ways a prototype for Voyager‘s Chakotay. In an effort to represent more than one Native American culture, the show really doesn’t present any; we’re told that he’s a Comanche and a student of ancient Earth history, but he doesn’t tell us where his own name comes from, let alone what appealed to him about joining Starfleet and practicing the problematic Prime Directive as an outsider approaching indigenous populations. The character’s role could just as easily have been filled by Sulu, who might know something about ancient Japanese dragon legends because of the interest in ancient Japanese culture we were shown in early original series episodes. It’s aggravating that Scotty’s Highland heritage and McCoy’s Southern pride remain entirely recognizable from their 20th century stereotypes, but we know more about Vulcan culture of the future than we do about African, Asian, or Native American regional differences and developments. Given Kirk’s apparent ignorance of all South American mythology, though he was familiar enough with Apollo, it seems likely that Kukulkan knows more about Ensign Walking Bear’s heritage than most people on Earth. I’m surprised none of the historians and anthropologists on the Enterprise want to stay and study this influential alien, to learn how prehistoric meddling without any sort of Prime Directive affected the course of Earth’s development.

I’m not going to deny the appeal of a giant serpent-shaped ship, and the pseudo-Mayan elements on the dragon and pyramid are nicely done. There are references to the Mayan calendar with the infamous end of the world date that will have passed by Kirk’s era, and to the unique features of Mesoamerican building which Walking Bear believes mean the Mayans came closer to any other humans to building a city according to Kukulkan’s specifications, though his fantastic holographic city also includes Egyptian and Japanese elements. Still, I don’t understand why Kukulkan tries to goad their hate when he claims he only taght them peace, and I’m completely mystified that he thinks it’s a good idea to show them his zoo collection of specimens from other worlds. After all that multiculturalism, we’re left with a quote from King Lear about thankless children and another god defeated by Kirk, plus a maybe-joke about how aliens who visited Vulcans left the planet much wiser. I wish “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” felt more like an homage to the various Star Trek episodes from which it borrows rather than a recycled pastiche; I know that it won the animated series an Emmy Award, but the serpent in space is the only aspect I really enjoy remembering.

Plot Summary: After thanking the Enterprise crew for delivering medical supplies, Dramian authorities arrest Dr. McCoy for causing a deadly plague on Dramia II when he visited 19 years previously. The disease causes changes in pigmentation followed by lethargy and death. Kirk is told that a mass inoculation program led by McCoy killed nearly the entire population of the sister planet. Leaving McCoy in a Dramian prison, the captain takes the Enterprise through a colorful aurora to Dramia II, pursued by Dramian Commander Demos who is determined to see McCoy punished for the plague. The group finds Kol-Tai, a survivor of the plague who says McCoy saved his life, but soon Kirk, Demos, and nearly everyone else on board falls ill. Immune, Spock puts the Enterprise under quarantine and goes to work studying the plague. When the Dramian authorities will not release McCoy to search for a cure, Spock rescues McCoy from prison. McCoy realizes that the colorful aurora preceded both plague outbreaks and guesses that the color changing effects come from that, not from the disease itself. Because the treatment for a Saurian virus kept Kol-Tai alive, McCoy treats the crew and the Dramians with it, saving all their lives. Instead of prosecuting McCoy, the Dramians give him an award for his work in interstellar medicine, though Spock taunts McCoy about having been absent from duty while in prison.

Analysis: I’ve always wished that there were more McCoy-centered episodes of Star Trek, yet most of the ones we did get didn’t tend to be the most exciting – “The City on the Edge of Forever” may start out as his story, but it quickly becomes Kirk’s, and “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” gives us McCoy less as doctor than patient. So I appreciate “Albatross” just for showcasing McCoy’s heroism, though he spends an unfortunate amount of time in an alien jail while Kirk and Spock head off to clear his name. The title of the episode has always puzzled me; I had assumed it it referred to the fact that albatrosses will peck open their own chests to feed their young if they are starving, the way McCoy will risk his own life to cure his dying crewmates, but I just looked it up and in legend it’s the pelican, not the albatross, that does that. So I guess the title refers to having an albatross around one’s neck, but the metaphor seems strained because McCoy did not kill the proverbial beast in the first place – he tried to save people from it – and he didn’t know for 19 years that the Dramians blamed him for their plague, so it’s not like he dragged his guilt around with him for a long time. It’s rather confusing.

I wish this had been a live-action episode, because I doubt blue face paint would have been much cheesier than the animated monotonous blue skin on the plague victims and the Dramians couldn’t look any sillier if their robot monkey skull faces were created with what limited prosthetic makeup was available while Star Trek was filming. We get no glimpses of Dramian culture and not enough exposure to begin to get a sense of the depths of their grief at having lost the population of an entire planet; indeed, it seems inconceivable that they waited until the end of a diplomatic mission to arrest the man they blamed for slaughtering thousands of people. We don’t find out whether Demos pursues the Enterprise from a personal or social sense of justice or because he personally suffered devastating losses in the plague. Nor is there time for Kirk to work up a verbal defense of McCoy before he must race off to look for ameliorating evidence (which, due to the time constraints of the episode, he finds with absurd ease). The fact that the Dramians still want assistance from Federation doctors, and that they didn’t report their accusations against McCoy to the Federation until just before the Enterprise returned – since Kirk says the warrant is in order, I assume there must be a reason the Federation didn’t advise Starfleet to relieve McCoy of duty before letting him go to Dramia – just makes it seem more arbitrary. You’d think Dramians would have been trying to hunt McCoy down for nearly two decades.

Of course, I love all the character interaction – Kirk’s rage at Dramian “kangaroo justice,” McCoy’s fear in the face of Spock’s logic that his inoculation program might have set off a catastrophe, Sulu stoically reporting that the ship must self-destruct if the plague can’t be contained, Spock replying to McCoy’s “This is a jailbreak!” accusation by saying that the doctor can stand trial after he cures the plague killing everyone on the Enterprise, except of course that the doctor will die as well if he’s unsuccessful. And the lovely bit at the end, in which Spock complains that McCoy hasn’t been dispensing regular vitamin rations to the crew because of his recent dereliction of duty – “Hippocrates would not have approved of lame excuses” – which inspires McCoy to say that if he’s ever in jail again, he’d rather be left to rot than rescued by “that Vulcan.” It’s worth watching “Albatross” for those bits alone.

Plot Summary: While surveying an asteroid field, an unexpected attack by three Romulan warships drives the Enterprise into an unknown energy field. Soon afterward, diners find that their cups have holes and Spock finds a new microscope that gives him black eyes. Kirk soon shares Scotty’s anger that someone on the crew is using the computer to play practical jokes, but when the computer itself bursts into laughter, Spock realizes that the computer alone is responsible for the pranks, having been corrupted by subatomic particles from the energy field. Minor gags like a food-tossing replicator are followed by more dangerous ones, like laughing gas replacing the ship’s oxygen and several crewmembers being trapped in a holographic simulation that subjects them to extreme climate changes. When Scotty tries to reroute ship’s systems, the computer turns off the artificial gravity, then taunts the Romulans by tricking them into attacking a giant balloon. Kirk announces that he is terrified of returning to the energy field in which they hid from the Romulans before. Seeing an opportunity for another prank, the computer heads into the field, but the joke is on the computer, for upon returning to the energy field, the subatomic particles leave the Enterprise, restoring the computer to normal. Meanwhile, the pursuing Romulan ships become infected with the same subatomic particles, and as the Enterprise flees, they hear over the comm that the Romulans are knee-deep in food.

Analysis: While there are no scientific or speculative virtues to “The Practical Joker,” it is a favorite of many viewers for two reasons: it features the first canonical appearance of a holodeck in the Star Trek franchise, and it shows our handsome, confident captain wearing a “Kirk is a Jerk” shirt. So most of the other pranks are at the level of 10-year-old humor…who cares? At least their aren’t exploding toilets, though one rather wishes that Scotty had laughed appreciatively at M’Ress and Arex when he thought they were responsible for a replicator tossing food at him instead of getting cranky and blaming them. As is typical, the crew’s annoyance only encourages the practical joker’s efforts, which then escalate to create real dangers like an ice field on one of the Enterprise’s decks.

Okay, so there are big plot holes like the fact that we never find out why the Romulans were waiting to ambush the Enterprise, and it’s unfortunate that the holodeck malfunction is introduced in the very same episode that introduces the holodeck because Star Trek: The Next Generation used that plot device long past its entertainment value. Wouldn’t it have been joke enough to have McCoy, Uhura, and Sulu goofing off in some exotic locale without ever being able to hear the summons as medical, communication, and tactical crises arose all over the ship? Instead it’s Arex who’s on the bridge when the laughing gas comes through the air ducts, which isn’t as funny as it would have been to see Sulu and Uhura doubled over in hilarity as Spock tried to save them.

I readily admit that I love hearing the computer demand that Kirk say “pretty please” and replying to his questions with answers like, “That is for me to know and you to find out.” Majel Barrett does a lovely job with the computer voice, which still sounds stiff and mechanical enough to be quite funny when it’s making outrageous statements, and Kirk’s sputtering fury just makes it funnier…though I do wish Spock had tried to debate logic with it when it goaded the Romulans, since the destruction of the Enterprise would have had an adverse affect on its systems and since I’ve no idea what it would have done with “Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow.” No, there’s not a lot of depth, and arguably it was a poor choice to air “The Practical Joker” so close to “Bem” considering that the latter featured a prankster of sorts as well, but who cares? “Kirk is a Jerk,” indeed.

Plot Summary: Commander Ari bn Bem is visiting the Enterprise as an observer from Pandro, but he has chosen mostly to remain in his quarters and resists following orders. When the ship arrives at Delta Theta III, Bem demands to join an away team even though Kirk believes this mission may be too dangerous, since the civilization on the planet is primitive. Kirk and Spock beam down with Bem into a lake, where Bem – who is, unknown to the crew, a colony creature whose body can separate into functioning parts – steals their phasers and communicators, replacing them with non-working duplicates. Then Bem runs off after a group of native Delta Thetans, who resemble dinosaurs, forcing Kirk and Spock to pursue him. When the Enterprise detects an unknown energy pattern nearby, the crew finds that they cannot contact Kirk or Spock, who find Bem imprisoned in a crude cage and insisting that he does not need their help to escape. The Starfleet officers insist that Bem is their responsibility and are soon imprisoned as well for trying to free him. Bem says he took their equipment to stop them from harming the natives, then escapes by splitting his body into pieces to leave his cage in order to bring them the communicators. However, once they escape, a paralysis field envelops the landing party, and a disembodied entity reveals that it is the guardian of the reptilian natives. The entity orders Kirk and Spock to leave, but Bem runs away because he believes that Kirk has bungled the mission. Insisting that he will not leave without the observer under his protection, Kirk tells the entity that he is responsible for Bem just as the entity is responsible for the natives. The entity lets the Enterprise crewmembers depart with Bem, who plans to disassemble into component colonies until the entity persuades him that he will not learn from his mistakes if he does so.

Analysis: Conceptually, “Bem” is a very interesting episode with a lot going on: a colony creature who’s also a cranky addition to Kirk’s crew, a group of intelligent but primitive dinosaur “aborigines” who build wooden prisons yet apparently speak a language too unusual for the Universal Translator, a godlike alien who finds Kirk arrogant, a bunch of volatile situations (an observer from a planet the Federation wishes to become a member, an accidental first contact with non-humanoid aliens). A lot happens in the short time span of the animated episode, and none of it feels recycled: both Bem and the situation on Delta Theta III turn out to be entirely different than one might have expected from previous episodes. It isn’t even Kirk who gets to make the big pedantic speech at the end, but the godlike entity to whom Kirk has had to apologize for his own hubris. Curiously, Kirk neither apologizes for nor explains the violation of the Prime Directive in making contact with the primitive Delta Thetans; I would have thought his first obligation would have been not to rescue the observer but to disguise him and get him offworld at all costs, even his life. After all the would-be gods with whom Kirk faced off, though, it’s very nice to see him meet a sort of benevolent goddess who seems less possessive than maternal, not even demanding the worship of the beings she protects. (I’m not certain from the script that the entity is supposed to be female, but Nichelle Nichols provides the voice and a quick survey of other web sites suggests that just about everyone refers to it as “her.”)

Yet despite the enjoyable pacing and some quick-witted dialogue, I don’t love this episode. It’s partly because so much of the regular cast gets short shrift – McCoy and Chapel are absent, Scotty and Sulu serve as plot devices, Uhura has little to contribute – and partly because a lot of technobabble is necessary to justify all the goings-on. Bem’s nature as a colony creature is introduced in a clever way when his lower body splits off to steal Kirk and Spock’s phasers, but the initial appearance of the entity on the Enterprise involves a great deal of technobabble that doesn’t make a lot of sense – a non-network sensory stasis anomaly that resembles a sensor field but without a scanning grid? Huh? And Kirk seems awfully willing to let Bem (who may talk like Yoda but clearly doesn’t have centuries-old wisdom) push the Enterprise around in a way that he never put up with from, say, Ambassador Fox in “A Taste of Armageddon.” How, after letting Bem get away with sulking in his quarters for months when he was supposed to be observing, did Kirk allow himself to be persuaded to let the commander beam down to a planet with a pre-warp culture of unknown strength and intelligence?

There are lots of giggle moments – Bem separating parts of his body to walk around logs and through prison bars, Spock saying “I’m only a Vulcan,” Scotty claiming the Loch Ness Monster couldn’t penetrate the anomaly, Bem scoffing at the idea that Kirk is the best captain in the fleet, Kirk wondering “How come we always end up like this?” from inside his cage, to name a few…my favorite is the exchange between Kirk and Spock in which Kirk says at times he thinks he should have been a librarian, only to have Spock say that it would be no less challenging, though perhaps less dangerous. There are several entertaining chase scenes, including one with dino-lizards carrying torches. Yet though this entity may be one of the least annoying godlike beings encountered by Starfleet, it’s still a frustrating plot device – Spock reveals that the life on the planet seems younger than he’d expect given the age of the star, but we never find out whether the entity has meddled or is in fact the reason there’s life in the first place. It’s not the most confidence-inspiring of entities and Bem must be reduced to a pathetic, suicidal state to make it look good, though it’s still a huge improvement on Apollo, Vaal, et al.

On the plus side, however, we get the first pronouncement of James Tiberius Kirk’s full name, not made canon until the original series movies. If there were no other reason to watch “Bem,” that would be enough.

Plot Summary: While the Enterprise is en route to Deneb V, Spock contracts choriocytosis, a disease that is treatable in humans but deadly to Vulcans because of their copper-based blood. The only known cure, a drug called strobolin, is very rare. Kirk arranges to have the Starfleet vessel Huron bring the Enterprise a supply of strobolin, but before the freighter reaches the rendezvous, it is attacked by an unidentified red ship whose crew steals both the strobolin and the dilithium that makes up the bulk of the Huron’s cargo. Because the strange ship has left a radiation trail, the Enterprise is able to pursue it into an asteroid field. Realizing that the thieves are Orions, Kirk negotiates to have the captain give him the strobolin to save Spock’s life, agreeing in exchange to let the Orions keep the dilithium without reporting the incident to Starfleet. But the Orion captain is certain that Kirk will report the theft, and plans to destroy both his own ship and the Enterprise by detonating a bomb on one of the unstable asteroids. Because Kirk suspects a trap, Scotty scans the Orions and detects the bomb, defusing it with the transporter and beaming both Kirk and the Orion captain aboard the Enterprise. Unable to destroy themselves, the Orions are taken in tow to Deneb V which Spock recovers from choriocytosis.

Analysis: “The Pirates of Orion” doesn’t have one of Star Trek’s more sophisticated plots – it was written by high school student Howard Weinstein, and aired while he was in college – but it has precisely the sort of character interaction that made the original Star Trek such a success. Comparisons to its prequel “Journey to Babel” are unavoidable – a Vulcan suffering from a Vulcan-specific illness surrounded by humans with few immediate options to help him, a threat from an unidentifiable assailant who turns out to come from a species that chooses suicide over failure – but this comparatively short story holds up fairly well as a follow-up, though it’s clear that the mythology of the Orions hadn’t yet been fully developed (there’s no mention of the irresistible green-skinned women and the aliens’ names are even pronounced differently than elsewhere in Trek canon).

Poor Spock. As a Vulcan, he’s such an anomaly in Starfleet that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to his good friend McCoy when relatively harmless choriocytosis swept through the human crew to prepare in case his one copper-based crewmember contracted the disease. McCoy complains, “Blasted Vulcan, why couldn’t you have red blood like any normal human?” Spock has to suffer through the indignity of collapsing on the bridge and fretting that he may be the reason the Enterprise misses yet another diplomatic mission – as Kirk said in “Amok Time,” not vital, but it could cost him his career if he makes a habit of going off to save his first officer instead. McCoy has a drug that can slow the effects of the disease temporarily, but Kirk makes Spock cut his work hours and McCoy calls Spock a pointy eared encyclopedia when Spock wants to get right back to work. Yet despite all the joking, the entire crew is willing to risk whatever is necessary to save Spock’s life, even a vicious attack by pirates. In the end McCoy is still picking on Spock’s green blood and Spock complains that the doctor is gloating. It’s classic original series stuff.

There are nice moments for all the regulars – Scotty promising to squeeze a bit more out of the engines, McCoy wondering what’s the point of being a doctor when he can’t save everyone, Uhura saying she can excerpt the audio from the damaged Huron logs – she even gets to be on the away team, a relative rarity on the original series – Chapel too going aboard the damaged ship to treat the wounded and working with McCoy to care for Spock without a single moment of weepiness. The Orions may be the pirates but Kirk’s crew does more out-of-the-box thinking, from Sulu and Arex who realize that they can track the mysterious ship to Scotty who defuses the bomb by beaming out its antimatter trigger to Kirk who figures out first that the unstable asteroids could be used as weapons. Kirk’s also quite a good and fair negotiator; it’s not his fault that his adversaries are liars and cheaters, cherishing a false appearance of neutrality more than the lives of those serving on their ships.

I just wish we got to see more of the Orions; given that this is animated and there’s no additional cost involved to build sets or use makeup, there’s no reason we couldn’t have a fuller exploration of the Orion command structure and smuggling operation. Quite a bit of time is spent instead showing the Huron trying to make heads or tails of their pursuer (with Doohan, Barrett, and Takei very obviously doubling on the voices), yet we don’t get to see the actual attack that injures the captain and takes both dilithium and medicine – something that would give us a stronger opinion as viewers of the relative evils of the Orions, whether they are an honorable enemy or mere vicious thugs.

Plot Summary: Kirk and Spock are summoned by the Vedalans for help in averting an intergalactic threat: the Soul of Alar, the late religious leader of the Skorr, has been stolen, and unless it can be retrieved, the Skorr will declare a holy war on all known races in the galaxy. The ancient Vedalan race has chosen experts to help track it down since three previous expeditions have gone missing on the unstable planet where the Soul has been hidden. A Gorn-like alien, a human named Lara, and a green insectoid join the Skorr representative Tchar, a birdlike being who flies ahead to scout the terrain. The group is threatened by lava, landslides, and a snowstorm, but eventually they reach a building that looks like Skorr temple. The insectoid is able to open the lock so the others can hide inside. Using Lara’s skills as a huntress and the reptilian Sord’s strength, they find the Soul, but Kirk has already begun to guess that the previous missions failed because of sabotage and that Tchar himself stole the Soul. Tchar indeed has a gravity neutralizer and forces the others to fight him in null gravity, but Kirk is able to grab the Soul while Spock holds Tchar’s wings. Tchar brags that he stole the Soul, explaining that the war to recover it will make his now-peaceful people great again. Lara contacts the Vedalans, who transport the group back with a promise to cure Tchar’s insanity. To prevent the risk of war, all records of the mission will be erased. Kirk and Spock reappear on the Enterprise only two minutes after they left, claiming that the Vedalans changed their minds about needing help.

Analysis: If you’re thinking that everything about “The Jihad” from the title on down sounds like a bad idea, I must agree with you. There are numerous “what were they thinking?” moments, even allowing for the fact that the animated series is nearly 40 years old, when cultural appreciation and cartoon aliens were presumably less sophisticated than they are now. We never get a rational explanation why Starfleet agrees to loan out Kirk and Spock for a mission about which they presumably know nothing to a race of aliens we’ve never heard of before, though we’re told that the cat-like species is the oldest known to have traveled into space. Nor is it ever clear that the Skorr represent a real threat to anyone besides themselves at present; even if they decide to launch a holy war to recover the preserved brain patterns of Alar, who is revered for bringing peace and civilization to the Skorr and would presumably loathe the idea of a war in his name, Tchar himself admits that his people have grown weak and lost their military prowess, so it’s going to be a long time before they can take on the entire known galaxy. Perhaps the Vedalans have seen into the future – since they seem to be capable of compressing time and altering memories, it’s not impossible, though I wish we knew whether they used unknown technology or something akin to magic to accomplish that and telekinesis – but we’re not given any solid reason that Kirk and Spock should risk their lives over the sort of religious fervor that Star Trek usually tries to defuse with logic and science.

Then there are the newly introduced aliens. I like that the Vedalans choose a group of beings with skills regardless of their positions in life – the insectoid is a thief, the dino-Gorn a thug – in fact it’s a bit reminiscent of the people Picard will later encounter doing archaeological work on The Next Generation. But come on, this is not only Star Trek but a kid’s cartoon! Whose bright idea was it to have the female tracker keep hitting on Kirk, so explicitly that his refusals become unintentionally hilarious — since when does Kirk, for whom no woman is typically too old or too green or too dangerous, let a little thing like work get in the way of a flirtation? Kirk appears utterly fixated on Spock, saying only “fascinating” and defending Spock when Lara announces that Vulcans are too cold for her taste and she finds Kirk attractive, then risking himself to save Spock while Spock goes on about how Kirk’s first duty should be to the mission. He turns Lara down again later when she suggests that they make some happy “green” memories in case they die on this mission, to which Kirk replies that he already has a lot of green memories. I wouldn’t want to be a parent trying to explain to my children why that woman seems more interested in being along with Kirk to make memories than in finding the artifact that she from all hunters in the universe was chosen to track down. It’s a lot easier to explain why the Vedalans picked a complaining weakling insect-thief.

I really don’t like the way “jihad” here has been warped to mean a vendetta over an artifact that is never fully explained – we know that the Soul contains the brain patterns of the Skorr holy leader, though not what that means, whether Alar’s thoughts are accessible in some way or whether the item is essentially a reliquary. Still, one can see the roots of several later Star Trek episodes in the storyline – the cloning of Kahless, the galaxy-wide hunt for the artifacts containing a message from the progenitors of many of the spacefaring races of the Alpha Quadrant – and the Skorr are sadly one of many species who have found peace and stability yet have members who long for their former warlike glory. It’s an awfully pat ending to have him declared insane with a promise to “cure” him, and there may be Prime Directive-related implications. I’m not sure whether the Vedalans are obligated to follow the same rules as Starfleet, but if Tchar really believes he’s fulfilling a religious obligation, rewiring him as a pacifist isn’t much of a solution, particularly if his peaceful people would truly be willing to toss off their current beliefs and go to war for the Soul, as both Tchar and the Vedalans believe. There are plenty of visuals in “The Jihad” that would have been impossible on the live action original series, yet both the ships and some of the aliens look recycled, and one longs for the sophistication of the original series writing even if the visuals might have been impossibly cheesy.

Plot Summary: The Enterprise visits Lactra VII to investigate the disappearance of the science ship Ariel. On the deserted vessel they find the ship’s captain’s log, which reveals that three crewmembers disappeared on the surface and he beamed down with the remaining two crewmembers to find them. Since that was weeks ago, Kirk decides that he, Spock, and McCoy must risk traveling to the surface. They are attacked by a red water dragon and a huge gray dinosaur, but are relieved to receive a signal in response to their communicator hail, indicating that thye landing party might be receiving them. When they follow the signal, however, they are captured by large slug-like aliens who imprison them in a walled city that Spock quickly realizes is a zoo with specimens from all over the galaxy. The three survivors of the Ariel are there as well; they have discovered that the Lactrans are telepathic, but they consider humans so inferior that they have no qualms about keeping them as specimens. Kirk manages to trick a young Lactran into giving him back his communicator, but Scotty accidentally beams up the Lactran instead of the landing party. The adult Lactrans are furious and threaten Kirk, but Scotty is able to convince the young one that humans are intelligent and beams down with it. The child tells its parents that humans are evolving and should be allowed to return in a few dozen centuries when they have matured.

Analysis: Star Trek: The Animated Series‘s “The Eye of the Beholder” – not to be confused with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Eye of the Beholder” – feels redundant throughout, with a plot borrowed from “The Menagerie,” aliens swiped from several previous cartoons, and the crew once again using the “fake an illness” ploy in an escape attempt. It’s an entertaining episode visually, since the Lactrans keep changing the landscape to manipulate the crew into going where they want them, so that the scenery changes from something that looks like Yellowstone National Park to something that looks like Death Valley to something that looks like the Olympic Peninsula Rainforest, and the gigantic zoo is fascinating to see – it’s like a child’s Colorforms set where some kid has accidentally put the people instead of the animals into the cages. But the plot and characterization are a mess, and what should be a highlight – Scotty convincing the young Lactran that humans aren’t pets, something not even Spock could do – doesn’t even take place onscreen. It’s pretty obvious that things are off from the very beginning, when Kirk – Kirk? – objects that Commander Markel of the Ariel didn’t follow regulations when he chose to beam down with his remaining crew to find his missing officers. McCoy argues that it was an emergency and Markel must have been desperate, only to switch roles moments later when Kirk – Kirk! – announces that of course he will be leading the Enterprise landing party to figure out what happened.

It’s relatively easy to forgive the crew in “The Cage” footage from “The Menagerie” for making foolish decisions; they are, after all, being misled by the Talosians right from the beginning. The crew has no such excuse in “The Eye of the Beholder,” for although the Lactrans are manipulating the landscape, tossing such absurdities as sea monsters and dinosaurs at the landing party, the crew seems to have forgotten how to use any of their resources. The communicators work, so why not contact the ship when an unconscious dinosaur falls on top of McCoy to have him beamed to safety? The scanners work, so why not take a reading to see whether any big dragons are approaching? Even Spock is not thinking terribly logically, suggesting that they race off in the direction of the communicator signal instead of having Scotty scan the area or beam them there directly. (Spock also measures the distance in kilometers while McCoy is saying they’re lucky they didn’t materialize a few yards over; I am willing to overlook the fact that McCoy is still using yards in the 23rd century, but consistency within a single episode would be nice.)

So super-intelligent telepathic aliens that look like adorable elephant slugs show up, and carry the crewmembers in their tentacle trunks “for hours” to their city. You’d think that creatures that could build such a sophisticated zoo would have quicker, safer means of transport for their specimens. (I also harbor the delusion that a really advanced, telepathic species would be sensitive enough not to transplant and keep zoo specimens in the first place, but I suppose that when this episode was written, that was a fairly new concept.) Nor do the creatures seem aware that one of the Ariel crewmembers is seriously ill until Kirk, Spock, and McCoy come along with a plan to concentrate telepathically on the need for a medical kit. The super-sophisticated aliens aren’t very clever about examining the Enterprise crew’s toys, either, not understanding how the communicator works even though Kirk sent a signal to the captured one from the Arial before he was captured as well. One rather expects the Lactrans’ arrogance to be their downfall, but they’re saved by one of their children, though the little one has quite a tantrum aboard the Enterprise before realizing that it can learn from Scotty.

Many of these cartoons for kids have some little moral or message at the end, and “The Eye of the Beholder” seems like a perfect place for pointing out that different intelligences work in different ways and mutual respect is preferable to condescension. But after all the unnecessary business with the diseased crewmember and the trip to the city carried in alien tentacles, there’s no time to show what may be Scotty’s finest moment. I don’t blame the scientific contact team from the Ariel for being upset at how little they learned about the aliens, given that they apparently haven’t even interviewed Scotty. Will this planet that doesn’t want to see humans for another 20 or 30 centuries be put under General Order 7, the only death penalty that had been left on the books, so that the Lactrans can’t take any more humans into their zoo? Since we’ll never hear of it again in the animated series or even in subsequent installments with similar titles, it feels a bit irrelevant. I wouldn’t mind having a stuffed baby Lactran, though.

Plot Summary: Spock, Sulu, and Uhura have taken a shuttlecraft to bring an extremely rare Slaver stasis box to a starbase when the box begins to glow. Spock and Uhura discuss how the Slavers conquered the known universe nearly a billion years earlier, but died in the same war that killed their conquests. Spock adds that because time stands still inside a stasis box, any artifacts left remain precisely as they were millions of years earlier. He decides that they must risk diverting from their course to see if another box in the area has made theirs react. On a frozen world, they detect a stasis box beneath the ice, but it is a trap laid by the Kzinti, who originally discovered the box now held by the Enterprise crew. Though the Kzinti box is an empty museum relic, they use it to open the other and find what appears to be a weapon. Sulu reminds the Kzinti that they lost all their previous battles with humans but the Kzinti are determined to learn how to use this new weapon to destroy humanity. Because Uhura is a woman and Spock an herbivore, the Kzinti do not consider them threats, which allows the crewmembers to escape. The weapon has several innocuous settings and one deadly one, and when the Kzinti try to force it to destroy their enemies, it instead self-destructs, destroying the Kzinti raiders and their ship. As the officers return to the shuttlecraft, Sulu says he’s sorry the device can’t be studied, but Spock calls the weapon too dangerous, observing that a relic from an ancient war nearly sparked a modern war.

Analysis: “The Slaver Weapon” is quite a famous episode among science fiction fans because it incorporates writer Larry Niven’s Kzinti, who were created in Niven’s Known Space series and shared among a group of science fiction writers all interested in the fictional conflict between humans and the Kzin. I didn’t read much of the Known Space material – you can imagine my disgust toward a race whose females are considered “dumb animals” and who are slaughtered as little girls if they reveal intelligence – so I can’t evaluate the episode’s contribution to Kzinti lore, only to the Star Trek universe, where I’d have to describe it as okay but not great. It’s certainly better thought out than “The Lorelei Signal” or “The Magicks of Megas-tu,” and it’s enjoyable to see Spock in command of a relatively successful shuttle crisis while Sulu and Uhura get to have some fun off the bridge, but there’s no interesting development of the regular characters and we get only a teasing glimpse of the great ancient civilization of the Slavers, from whom one would rather expect more interesting artifacts than turn up in the particular stasis box opened by the Kzinti.

Though the Slavers are new to the Star Trek universe, they are made immediately relevant as we’re told that their technology from stasis boxes enabled the development of the artificial gravity used on starships. Since the inertial dampers are one of many near-magical devices impossible to current science that the crew uses constantly, like the transporters and replicators, this is actually a reasonable explanation for how humanity achieved so much and became a dominant species in the galaxy in just a few hundred years: we didn’t invent everything, we found it and adapted it from someone else! Unfortunately, of the two Slaver boxes mentioned in this episode, the contents of one is missing while the other contains only poisoned meat, the first-known-to-Starfleet photo of a Slaver (one-eyed and green), and the odd device that everyone seems sure must be a weapon though it has several other uses as well: it can be converted into a telescope, it can fire a harmless laser, it can be used as a jet pack, and it can suppress energy fields, which allows Spock and his team to escape while the Kzinti are busy trying to figure out where the higher settings might be. Sulu makes the rather clever assumption that the weapon must have been designed for espionage, since it has settings that would be useless to a soldier, which makes Sulu and Spock guess that the device likely has a self-destruct setting. Although Spock gives lip service to the fact that he thinks Uhura is intelligent even though the Kzinti treat women like animals, she gets shot twice and taken hostage when Spock and Sulu could otherwise have made it into space with the weapon, and other than recounting some Kzinti history, she doesn’t get much to do besides lament the cold and her failings as a sprinter.

We get some tantalizing glimpses of Kzinti society, such as the fact that some Kzin are mind-readers but those don’t appear to be the ones with the most power since they tend to be neurotic, and that they’ll have more respect for Sulu if he flaunts the fact that he’s a meat-eater. They admire his bravery when he doesn’t flinch from the Slaver laser, not realizing intially that it’s because he can see at once that it’s not a serious threat. It’s hard to get a sense of how dangerous the Kzinti might be in combat, since Spock disables their captain relatively easily and since they appear in animation as large purple bipedal cats, but they certainly don’t seem very bright; the Romulans could eat them for dinner if the Romulans ate bipedal cats. Apparently Kzinti honor works rather like Klingon honor in that their captain can’t call for reinforcements because Spock kicked his butt in combat, so his priority is not even retrieving the weapon (he makes no serious threats to Uhura to make this happen) but challenging the herbivorous pacifist to a duel, which Sulu is clever enough to reject. The crucial deadly setting on the Slaver weapon, which Spock says completely converts matter to energy, creates an explosion that looks like a nuclear detonation yet apparently creates no radiation since he witnesses it without ill effects.

“The Slaver Weapon” feels like part one of something – or maybe more like part three of something, since we get the human-Kzinti wars summarized in two sentences and never get a full picture of when people first discovered the Slaver stasis boxes or what they’ve allowed us to do. It’s interesting – at least, if you aren’t too infuriated to learn that there’s a species out there who make the Ferengi, Klingons, Orions, et al look like radical feminist societies – but there’s lots of exposition dropped in dialogue by the only three crewmembers who appear, and it ends very abruptly and violently, with all the Kzinti apparently dead. I’ll tell the truth: I’d rather have a more fluffy episode with Kirk and McCoy around to provide occasional comic relief.

Plot Summary: The Enterprise visits the planet Argo to study how quakes have left most of the planet’s surface underwater. A specially designed shuttle takes an away team to the largest land mass, but a huge red sur-snake attacks the shuttle, dropping Kirk and Spock into the water. When a search party finds them face-down in puddles, McCoy is shocked to see that they have mutated to breathe water. Since the doctor is unable to reverse the hormonal process that caused the changes, Kirk and Spock return to Argo, convinced that an intelligent life form must have altered them. They discover a sentient race living underwater, but the Aquans were attacked by air-breathers in the past and fear that Kirk and Spock have returned to harm them. With the help of a young Aquan woman, the humans escape a death sentence, only to learn from Scotty that a large quake is expected to destroy the Aquan city. The young woman tells them that there are hidden records in the ancient ruins that might help reverse their mutations, so Kirk and Spock track down the records, learning that they need sur-snake venom to breathe air again. With help from sympathetic Aquans, they obtain the venom and McCoy changes them back just in time for the Enterprise to save the Aquan city by using phasers to disrupt the massive quakes. The Aquans are grateful to the air-breathers and agree to allow their children to explore the ancient city, now raised above sea level from the seismic activity.

Analysis: “The Ambergris Element” provides a good argument for animating Star Trek: it would have been cost-prohibitive, not to mention cheesy, to try to create an underwater city and put webbed feet and hands on William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. It’s not one of the animated series’ more inspired storylines – like so many Star Trek episodes, it involves stuck-in-their-ways elders, rebellious youth, a distant Federation crisis acting as a catalyst for the action, and an abrupt turnaround by the suspicious aliens when the crew saves them from an approaching cataclysm. But it’s typical Trek in its attitudes: the Enterprise is on a crucial scientific charity mission to help the inhabitants of a planet suffering similar quakes to Argo’s, the senior officers all leave the ship with the first away team with only one security officer and no real knowledge of the dangers, Kirk and Spock react to major physical violations not with anger but a calm desire to figure out why they were so altered, a death sentence is dismissed as a simple misunderstanding and the Enterprise saves the civilization that issued it. It works perfectly for what it is, a short story set on an exotic world with beings that would have been either impossible or ridiculous on live action television.

Which is not to say that the opening battle with the sur-snake (which my family keeps calling the Fail Whale) is not hilariously goofy. One minute everyone’s sitting in the shuttle discussing whether and where to submerge, and the next, the shuttle is being crushed in the teeth of a gigantic red Godzilla-looking thing that waves it around, tosses it against rocks, crushes and shatters it, yet manages to plop Kirk and Spock into just the right place in the shallow water while McCoy and a red-shirt somehow emerge unscathed. The Aquan civilization, too, seems surprisingly uncreative. Why would people who live underwater hold themselves upright in chairs at council meetings, rather than hanging suspended in the still chamber? How come the Aquans seem to prefer standing underwater instead of swimming, treading, floating, and all the rest of the things I imagine I’d do if I had gills and webbed fingers? I’m sure the animators didn’t have time to work up a full underwater city, so I can forgive the spare cave-like backgrounds and the obviously human Greek influences on the sunken city, but I wish more thought had been put into the Aquans themselves and how their physiology would work. (I will not even think about the women’s miraculously un-floaty dress material.)

We get to see the magic life support belts that take the place of environmental suits on the animated series again here – instead of bulky contraptions that obscure the characters’ faces, we see them with only a glowing force field that apparently allows them to breathe and keeps them from getting the bends underwater. We get to see a couple of nifty new ships, not just the modified water shuttle but a motorboat-type vessel that can presumably be fit inside a larger shuttle for transport to the planet. I find it a little disappointing that the crew goes swimming in uniform – if the water was cold, I’d expect them to be wearing thermal suits, and if it was warm, I’d expect a classic shirtless Kirk moment – I hope their skin mutated along with their fingers and lungs and eyelids or they’re going to have some terrible rashes. To think I thought ambergris was only desirable as a perfume fixative. At least they can get the venom from the sur-snake with considerably less violence than a whale hunt. Some sort of environmental message would have made a nice addition to the episode – if the air-breathers had done something that caused the seas to rise and the quakes to start – but it’s an amusing enough story as is, if not all that inspiring.