Wink Of An Eye

Several Star Trek stories really grabbed me as a kid. The Galileo Seven was one. The idea of being trapped with hostile monsters who wanted to do nothing except kill you and all your friends gripped my imagination. Although probably not in the way Gene Roddenberry intended. He would have sat me down and given me a talking to about infinite diversity in infinite combinations if he'd seen me playing Enterprise crew vs hideous space monsters. That's the problem with coming back to programmes you watched as a child. Your quality criteria is totally different. The Alternative Factor was spooky, and the idea of spending eternity imprisoned, "with a madman at your throat," was something I didn't really understand but I found it haunting in a way I couldn't articulate. Now The Alternative Factor is just bad Star Trek.

Wink Of An Eye was another story that I loved and it's easy to see why. The idea of being speeded up to a point where your friends appear like statues, and you are moving too fast for them to see and hear, is irresistible. It was like the programmes you would sometimes see on television where people were speeded up until just doing something as basic as walking became funny, or things were slowed down until water appeared to flow like treacle. A sign that you've engaged with a programme is when you find yourself thinking about what you'd do if you were caught in the same situation. I remember wondering what I would do if I was speeded up like Captain Kirk and how I would try and contact my friends? I also remember not really understanding why Kirk couldn't just stand on one spot for a long time until someone else saw him. And, although I didn't get it at the time, that's the problem with Wink Of An Eye. Its plot is a cheat.

The whole idea of hyper-acceleration as presented in the script just doesn't work. The logic of the plot actually works against itself. Kirk is meant to be moving at a vastly increased speed compared to the Enterprise crew but Kirk's story line and that of the Enterprise crew run simultaneously, and we cut between them as if events are happening at the same time. When Kirk is first accelerated he meets Deela and leaves the bridge to investigate the mysterious device in Life Support. We cut back to the bridge crew reacting to Kirk's disappearance and then to Kirk arriving at Life Support as if the time it took for the bridge crew to react was also just enough time for Kirk to race through the ship.

For obvious plot logic reasons it's never clearly stated on screen exactly how much faster the Scalosians live. Phil Farrand in his book The Nitpicker's Guide For Classic Trekkers once calculated that one minute of real time equals at least 840 minutes of Scalosian time; that's one minute of our time equalling 14 hours of their time. That's pretty fast. The bridge crew's discussion of Kirk's disappearance lasts 20 seconds. Unless my maths is completely shot, which is not impossible, that's around four and a half hours in Scalosian time. The Enterprise is a big ship but it seems unlikely that it would take four and a half hours so get from one area to another, even if you couldn't use the turbo lifts (from Kirk's perspective they'd be moving too slowly to be practical, you could wait several hours just for one to arrive). Kirk's story line and the Enterprise crew's story line should very quickly drift out of sync but they can't because this episode is trying to tell a logical and ordered story.

[Actually all this works if you pretend being hyper-accelerated actually means the Scalosians are slightly out of phase with our universe. They could be in a dimension extremely close to ours which somehow allows them to interact with our dimension but in a way that makes our time seem impossibly slow and theirs impossibly fast. Unfortunately this goes against the intention of the script which clearly states the Scalosians are just moving very very quickly.]

Don't get me wrong. The story is fun, in the same way an episode like The Gamesters Of Triskelion is fun. It's made by a production team who are still putting in as much effort as they can. There are visually effective sequences like Deela dodging a phaser beam, or little moments like Kirk's hair being ruffled in sickbay, or the dutch camera angles used in the hyper-accelerated world to make it visually distinct from the regular Enterprise; watch the sequence where Spock drinks the Scalosian water and see the way the camera tilts as the water takes effect, and then untilts in a single shot to show McCoy and Nurse Chapel reacting to Spock's disappearance.

It's because of episodes like Wink Of An Eye that Star Trek often gets lumped in with 60's camp like Batman and Lost In Space. Individually episodes like this are fun, but cumulatively they distort the memory of the series. Deela's introduction seems deliberately designed to be as silly as possible. Kirk explores the frozen bridge when a voice behind him says, "Captain." Kirk turns to see Deela, and he walks towards her across the bridge.

KIRK: Would you mind explaining [she grabs him and kisses him passionately. Kirk pushes her away] Who are you?

DEELA: Deela. The enemy.

[Fade to adverts]

The whole aesthetic of the series has changed. Star Trek started dabbling with comedy when Gene L. Coon arrived as producer, but recently the tone has changed; and recently means since Spock's Brain. It's the difference between laughing with and laughing at something. It's now as if the production team are talking to us directly over the series going, "we know this is silly, and we know you know this is silly, so let's have some fun." The audience is presented with stories which involve a threat to the Enterprise and her crew, but that threat is made as frivolous as possible so the audience can laugh at the Enterprise crew for taking it so seriously. Maybe it's unfair to ascribe such cynical motives to the production team. Batman had just been cancelled by ABC but was offered a fourth season on NBC. If that deal had worked out the fourth season would have aired across 1968-69 with Star Trek's third season. Other programmes being made at the time include Lost In Space, Bewitched, and The Flying Nun. What we could be looking at is a production team doing their job of keeping Star Trek on the air by tweaking it to appeal to contemporary taste, and if contemporary taste leans towards self-mocking, frivolous and light-hearted then that's the direction the series will take. 

Enterprise crew deaths: Compton who is hyper-accelerated and then aged to death when he suffers "cell damage."

Running total: 49

A Piece Of The Action

“From here on in there is a new producer in charge, and it remains to be seen how this new order will change things.” Those prophetic words ended the review of The Gamesters Of Triskelion, and clearly demonstrate I should never go into the soothsayer business. The next episode is of course A Piece Of The Action with a joint teleplay credit for David P. Harmon and departed producer Gene L. Coon.

[This also seems to be an appropriate point to confess my error in the second to last paragraph of The Gamesters Of Triskelion review. Talking about the difference between stories produced by new producer John Meredyth Lucas and Gene L. Coon I mentioned Obsession, and implied it was produced by Gene L. Coon.

Oops.]

A Piece Of The Action sees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy visit Sigma Iotia II; planet of the Chicago gangsters. Putting the regulars into a story from a different genre, and seeing how they interact with the world, is a storytelling technique used before on Star Trek. The Conscience Of The King is Star Trek does Shakespeare. Kirk dithers like Hamlet, Lenore goes mad like Lady Macbeth, and within the episode itself we see the characters watching extracts from plays which mirror the plot. It's a common technique in television. Buffy The Vampire Slayer took the idea to its extreme with the musical episode Once More With Feeling. Futurama has the superhero episode Less Than Hero and, appropriately, Where No Fan Has Gone Before. Doctor Who used it in the early days to tell adventures in history. The Reign Of Terror is Doctor Who meets the French Revolution (a mashup of A Tale Of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Pimpernell), and The Romans is Doctor Who goes to Rome (assorted historical and biblical epics).

Doing a story from a different genre has its advantages and disadvantages. It allows a cash strapped production to raid the costume store, and save money by using pre-existing sets from other series; A Piece Of The Action uses the Paramount backlot for location filming. The downside is finding a good reason for all the characters suddenly wearing zoot suits and trilby hats. Do it wrong and the result is Miri where much amazement is expressed over a planet which looks exactly like Earth, but no explanation is ever offered for this coincidence. 

This is where Doctor Who has a built in advantage over Star Trek: time travel. To do a story about the Mongols, or the Great Depression, or Nazis the Doctor only has to travel to the appropriate year. For Star Trek to do the same the series has to invent an alien race which is like the Mongols, find a method for the Enterprise crew to time travel to the 1930s, or go to a Nazi planet. It's possible to use any of these techniques a couple of times, but repeated use is going to start pushing the limits of suspension of disbelief. Obviously this is one of the reasons behind the invention of the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that's a solution which carries its own problems. Imagine A Piece Of The Action done as a holodeck story. For starters you need a reason why we are watching Kirk and co. play dress up rather than going where no man has gone before. Secondly it removes all jeopardy from the story. Those scenes of Kirk being held at gunpoint have no dramatic tension if Kirk can shout, “computer end program at any time.” The only real way to resolve this problem is either to have Kirk not realise he is on the holodeck, or have a reason for it to break down. Again.

Attila the Hun, Professor Moriaty, Jack the Ripper, and Evil Lincoln. "The Holo-Shed's on the fritz again! The characters turned real!"," Damn. The last time that happened I got slapped with three paternity suits."

A Piece Of The Action's solution to having a planet just like Earth history is inventive. The inhabitants of Sigma Iotia II are bright but highly imitative; in itself a good solid science fiction concept. 100 years ago the crew of the space ship Horizon left behind a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and the Iotians mistook it for a social instruction manual. It's a funny idea but also one which is quite pleasing, and if you are prepared to run with the concept then it's easy to imagine the impact of the Horizon's visit on the Iotians; their first contact with an alien race. If the crew of the Horizon left a stack of technical manuals, plus Chicago Mobs of the Twenties by accident, and made some throwaway comment about the books containing everything the Iotians needed to advance their development then its easy to imagine how the cultural contamination began.

So, a funny concept is at the core of what is for some people the funniest Star Trek story. Right from the start this is an overtly comedic episode and the teaser has a lighter and more comedic feel than The Trouble With Tribbles. In that story the jokes in the teaser come from the characters and their interactions while the situation, at least in the beginning, is treated seriously. In A Piece Of The Action the audience is expected to share Kirk's amusement at a planet leader with the title boss, and his landing site instructions, “there's an intersection just at the end of the block, near a yellow fire plug.” In between these two moments, Shatner sits in his chair and slowly rotates it in a semi-circle first one way, and then the other (some nice direction from James Komack who moves the camera with the chair to keep Shatner facing the camera), as he struggles to explain why it's taken 100 years for a radio message to reach the Federation, and the function of the transporter. Then as Spock and McCoy come onto the bridge Kirk walks between them, and spins them round on the spot leading the pair back into the turbo elevator. Possibly this lighter tone is designed to stop the audience thinking too much about the concept. If they view the story as funny, they are less likely to sit there picking holes in the idea. Scattered through the episode are some very good character based lines, such as Spock's valiant attempt to avoid telling a direct lie when Kirk asks him for the odds of a royal fizzbin, “I have never computed them, Captain,” but the downside of the script is the same as Robert Justman's concern about The Trouble With Tribbles. “Although the concept was amusing, the story was just too cute. I feared that... it would lead to a loss of believability. Kirk, Spock, and the others were real people, and real people just did not behave that way; our finely drawn characters should never parody themselves.”

There's a quote from Douglas Adams which sums up very well the pitfalls of doing an obviously jokey script. “A danger one runs is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks 'oh well we can do silly voices and silly walks and so on'.” Essentially that's the problem here. Everyone is having a wonderful time being silly. Particularly William Shatner who is occasionally allowed to get away with a performance which comes dangerously close to breaking character.

When Kirk is forced into a car by Zabo we get some lines which are a good pastiche of hardbitten gangster dialogue.

ZABO: Hold it! Okay, pally, we're going for a ride.
KIRK: If you don't mind, I'd rather walk.
ZABO: Listen, pally, this could either be a taxi or a hearse. You know what I mean?

Then as Kirk climbs into the car William Shatner uses a massively over the top worried expression, complete with furrowed brow and chewed lip. It's the sort of my-character's-worried emoting which might be expected from a drama student. He's worse while explaining the rules of his made up card game fizzbin. His tone of voice is all over the place on the lines, “oh, look what you got, two jacks. You got a half fizzbin already,” and “oh, look at that. You've got another jack. How lucky you are! How wonderful for you.” It overplays the comedy of the scene. Even Leonard Nimoy isn't immune to what must have been a great atmosphere on set, and his usually iron grip on the character wobbles during the car driving scene when he also starts fishing for laughs. “Oh. I believe they had a device known as a clutch. Clutch, Captain. Perhaps one of those pedals on the floor,” is a moment when he plays Spock far to broadly. Nimoy's Spock is normally very still, and his moments are considered, but here he's all jerky body movement and emphatic head nods. Oddly, Shatner is more tolerable later in the story, when Kirk adopts a cod-Chicago accent and starts using slang; asking Scotty, “can do, sweetheart?” Partly this is because his performance never reaches the extremes it does in acts one and two, but also because this fits the concept of the episode. If Kirk is going to put Sigma Iotia II back on track he first needs to out mobster the mobsters.

A Piece Of The Action looks amazing, nothing beats seeing Kirk and Spock in sharp suits and hats, driving period cars, and packing heat. The episode feels fresh if only because it looks completely different to anything which has gone before. There are no metaphors, or analogies, or moral lessons to be learned. The plot is fairly sparse. Kirk and Spock run around being captured by, and capturing, gangsters, but it's packed with incident (gun fights, fist fights, the car driving scene, the fizzbin rules, characters being phasered) and never gets dull. When the episode doesn't go too far in its quest for laughs it's great fun; and your definition of going too far will depend on your tolerance for William Shatner being allowed to indulge himself.

Enterprise crew deaths: None. 
Running total: 43

The Gamesters of Triskelion

Written down The Gamesters Of Triskelion looks like it should be the worst ever episode of Star Trek. Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura are kidnapped, and forced to fight for the entertainment of multi-coloured brains. The story is painfully generic, change the character names and this could easily be Blake's 7, or Battlestar Galactica. The message is trite, “slavery is bad” (not good like you thought). The peril is reduced to the bare minimum, and no one is likely to be surprised when after 47 minutes the Enterprise crew do escape from their seemingly hopeless situation. Also, William Shatner spends far too much of the episode shirtless.  

If those reasons aren't enough to send The Gamesters Of Triskelion to the bottom of the quality pile then it's not difficult to supply more. The woodenness of Angelique Pettyjohn the actress playing Kirk's drill thrall Shahna. While there's something endearing about the way she always stands hands on hips, she has essentially mistaken being expressionless for being stoic; in fact her performance goes a long way towards demonstrating how unbearable Spock's lack of emotion could have been in the hands of a lesser actor. Then there is the moment when Lars tries to force himself on Uhura at the end of act one. Not the attempted rape itself which is a valid way to show the unpleasant brutality of life on Triskelion, but what tips the moment into exploitation is the way it is used to end act one. Will Uhura be raped? Stay tuned to find out! Then there's the awkward gear change into the comedy moment three minutes later when Chekov has to deal with the unwanted advances from Tamoon. Complete with ironic 'sexy music' as the yellow-skinned and deep voiced female tries to hit on him.

Characters have names like Galt, Tamoon, and Kloog. There are horrible made up sci-fi terms like master thrall, collars of obedience, and quatloos, the currency of the providers. There's a lengthy sequence where Kirk is whipped, and another where he seduces Shahna by talking to her about kissing and love, “the most important thing on Earth.” It's as if writer Margaret Armen was given a big book of science-fiction clichés and somehow mistook it for a to-do list.

Yet The Gamesters Of Triskelion is a long way from being the worst episode ever. It's certainly not good, but the end result is one of those episodes often described as a guilty pleasure, or so bad it's good; a useful critical shorthand for anyone who likes something but can't quite put their finger on why. It's easy to say why The Gamesters Of Triskelion isn't good. Any of the reasons listed above will do, and someone who hates the episode will be able to supply lots more. What's trickier is explaining why it isn't as bad as The Apple, or this blog's whipping boy The Alternative Factor.

“The strange thing about The Alternative Factor is that everybody concerned seems to have given up simultaneously. As if all the accumulated stress of making the whole Star Trek series was dumped on this one episode.” That's how this blog described The Alternative Factor. The Gamesters Of Triskelion and The Alternative Factor are made at roughly the same points in their respective seasons (The Gamesters Of Triskelion is the 17^th episode of the second season, The Alternative Factor is the 20^th episode of the first) but what separates the two is that The Gamesters Of Triskelion still has a spark of life. The Alternative Factor looks like an episode made by an exhausted production team. The Gamesters Of Triskelion is an episode made by a team who are still trying.

This is an episode packed with small details. Lars reaches over to Chekov's belt and grabs his phaser while Chekov is distracted by Galt, the master thrall, appearing out of thin air. Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura make an escape attempt when first taken to their cells. The attempt is thwarted by Galt and his telepathic activation of the collars of obedience the trio have been forced to wear. What's nice is the way none of the escorting thralls make any move to block the escape. They simply stand and wait for Galt to take care of it, which demonstrates how utterly conditioned the thralls are to their life on Triskelion, and also shows the lack of initiative which makes the providers sceptical about the thralls ability to govern themselves. Once Kirk has fought Kloog, and the providers start bidding on the new arrivals, Chekov walks over to stand next to Kirk. Tamoon, who was next to Chekov, does this weird, floating hand gesture. As if she now knows Chekov will not be “selected” for her, and is waving him goodbye. Best of all may be the moment when Galt appears just after Kirk has snogged Shahna. At the point where Galt appears she sits rigid with embarrassment, like a naughty schoolgirl caught doing something inappropriate by the headmaster. She uncrosses her legs, straightens her back, puts her hands flat on the floor, and looks down. Then when Galt says, “ there will be no punishment,” she looks up as if she can't believe what she is hearing.

Obviously small details are not enough to salvage a script. It takes more than some nice background action to do that. Still, the actors are thinking about their characters and how they should be reacting. The actors are putting in some effort, not just coming in to say their lines, and hit their marks. We are a long way from The Alternative Factor where McCoy's commitment to patient safety is so low he allows Lazarus to wander out of sickbay, and justifies his lack of care to Kirk with the line, “ I don't know, Jim. This is a big ship. I'm just a country doctor.”

New director Gene Nelson might be responsible for the attention paid to the actors' performances. He's certainly putting in a lot of effort elsewhere. He makes interesting use of a hand held camera, especially in the escape attempt sequence when the cameraman rushes from a close-up of Kirk's face, to Chekov in one unbroken shot. There's also a lovely moment of direction during this exchange.

MCCOY: ...It's still a fancy way of saying that you're playing a hunch. well, my hunch is that they're back on Gamma Two dead or alive and I still want another search.

SCOTT: Doctor McCoy speaks for me, too, sir.

SPOCK: I see. Gentlemen, I am in command of this vessel, and we shall continue on our present course. Unless it is your intention to declare a mutiny.

SCOTT: Mister Spock!

MCCOY: Who said anything about a mutiny, you stubborn, pointed-eared...

On screen the line appears like this

[A three shot, Spock seated in the captain's chair in the foreground, McCoy standing facing him in the middle, and Scotty standing at the back].
SPOCK: I see. [He pauses, stands, and walks to stand next to Scotty]. Gentlemen, I am in command of this vessel, and we shall continue on our present course. Unless [he lowers lowers his voice and leans forward, this action makes Scotty, and McCoy lean forwards as well; at the same time the camera zooms in] it is your intention to declare a mutiny.
SCOTT; Mister Spock! [the camera zooms out, and the three straighten up]

The simple act of zooming the shot, and getting Nimoy to lower his voice, makes the routine Spock/McCoy bickering appear conspiratorial, and intimate, as if the audience is eavesdropping. This exchange, in fact nearly the whole of the scene, is played as another unbroken hand held camera shot which starts with an interesting, and unusual, angle on the big yellow dial between the helmsman and navigator chairs. Sadly, this episode seems to have been Gene Nelson's only work on Star Trek, it would have been great to see what he could do with a different script.

Also working hard is James D. Ballas, the film editor, who drops a little humour into the editing via some jump cuts. Galt's line to Kirk, “I have been sent to welcome you,” is immediately followed by a shot of Shatner gurning as Kloog grips him by the throat, and forces him into a collar of obedience. Ballas also cuts together an excellent sequence of shots for Kirk, Chekov, and Uhura's abortive escape attempt. A quick cut sequence showing a big close-up of Kirk, then Chekov, then Kirk again pretending to walk into the cell before he wallops Kloog, and the three begin to run. Then we cut to Galt, whose eyes glow, and we immediately cut to another big close-up of Kirk clutching his throat, his eyes bulging, as Uhura screams, and the three fall to the floor.

Also worth praising is the simple ruin set used for Kirk and Shahna's training run. It would have been easy to cut this set to save money. The scene which takes place here could have played out largely unaltered on the main arena set. It's really pleasing that no one did cut the set, and Walter M. Jefferies was able to reuse the ruins from The Man Trap. Getting away from the other Triskelion sets, even for a little while, opens the whole episode up, and makes Triskelion feel a little more like a real world. Also helping with the world building is the use of an Andorian costume during the final fight. Like the ruin set it would have been easy to have replaced the Andorian with something requiring less time consuming make-up, but the production team put in that little extra effort, and used a familiar alien. The presence of the Andorian is never commented on, but just the fact that he is there implies the providers have been snatching races from across the Star Trek universe.

The Changeling feels like the closest relative to The Gamesters Of Triskelion. Both episodes have quite simple plots, and a single threat is used to push the narrative through to the finale; Nomad in The Changeling, and the threat to Kirk of spending the rest of his life as a thrall in The Gamesters Of Triskelion. Compared to some of the stories Star Trek has delivered recently The Changeling and The Gamesters Of Triskelion both feel narratively pared down. There are no parallel story lines as in The Trouble With Tribbles. No attempt to create new back story, as was done to Kirk in Obsession. There's not even an audacious plot twist like the Jack the Ripper reveal of Wolf In The Fold. John Meredyth Lucas who wrote The Changeling, and produced The Gamesters Of Triskelion, is the connection between the two stories.

Gene L. Coon's last story as producer will be the as yet unbroadcast Bread And Circuses. The Gamesters Of Triskelion is John Meredyth Lucas' second broadcast story as producer (the first was the Spock centred Journey To Babel which has much more the feel of a Gene L. Coon episode). From here on in there is a new producer in charge, and it remains to be seen how this new order will change things.

Enterprise crew deaths: None. After the events of Obsession, it's been a nice couple of quiet weeks for the Enterprise crew.

Running total: 43

Space Seed

What made Khan Noonien Singh so appealing to Harve Bennett when he was developing the second Star Trek film? One answer comes from listing all the obstacles (people, aliens, concepts) Kirk has overcome in the episodes aired up to Space Seed. Take out all the ones obviously unsuitable as movie baddies (space drunkeness, the children on Miri's planet, the world where imagination becomes reality, etc), and the ones who end their episode dead (salt vampire we hardly knew ye), and you are left with Charlie, Harry Mudd, Balok, the Talosians, off-screen Romulans, Trelane, the Gorn and the Metrons, and Khan. Eight individuals from the 22 episodes aired. Anyone who crosses Kirk doesn't often survive.

By the time Turnabout Intruder airs this list will be longer but a story in which Janice Lester teams up with the brains from The Gamesters of Triskelion to make Kirk, Harry Mudd, and Balok compete in a tranya drinking match is almost certainly not going to make a great film. More seriously, someone like Charlie could return but it would take a lot of care to avoid writing a script which did not simply rehash that episode. A lot of characters are one shot concepts designed to illuminate a specific theme the writer wants to discuss. Fear of the unknown in The Corbomite Maneuver, or the painfulness of adolescence in Charlie X. Take these characters out of the context of their story and they don't work, or have to be changed so much it negates the point of bringing them back. Others, like specific Klingon or Romulan officers, could come back as part of their military regime but simply going, “let's do a film with Klingons or Romulans” won't move the film development process forwards.

Harry Mudd is an exception because his character is written so broadly; effectively a prototype for what the Ferenghi will become. He could just keep coming back. All that's required is a con or caper to involve him. It's even possible to imagine slotting him into existing episodes, The Trouble With Tribbles, wouldn't be massively different if he replaced trader Cyrano Jones. However, just because it's easy to shape a story around Harry Mudd that doesn't make him a character you could use at the dramatic heart of a story.

Khan is another exception. (Trelane may be a third. The similar character Q shows the concept of a god-like alien tormenting the Enterprise D crew can support a lot of different stories. Still I'm not completely certain Trelane, as originally imagined as child god, would work. He doesn't easily fit into a story which doesn't involve him playing games with the Enterprise crew until Kirk outwits him. How many times could Kirk do this before the god-like alien starts to look ineffective?). Khan genuinely has built in sequel potential. At the most basic level his massive arrogance means his defeat by Kirk will rankle, and he'll always be looking for a chance to even the score. Plus, Kirk leaves him on a planet to build a civilisation in his own image. Spock even speculates about returning to Ceti Alpha V in 100 years to see what Khan has done. Both Khan's character, and the situation he finishes the episode in are open ended. In fact his sequel potential is so obvious I can't help wondering if one of the writers, Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilber, was thinking along these lines at the time and, rather like the time travel ending of The Naked Time, was discretely setting events up for a second story which never happened.

It also helps that Khan is expertly played by Ricardo Montalban. As in Charlie X, and The Squire Of Gothos, we have an actor taking a part and running with it. Montalban brings an already well written character to life, and gives him the power, charisma, and magnetism the role needs. And the script needs Montalban's input. Not because it's bad, it isn't, but because it's incredibly wordy. One of the unusual things about Space Seed is the lack of action. A story about a genetic superman taking over the Enterprise could reasonably be expected to be very physical, full of fist fights and action sequences, but it isn't. Anyone could make the part of Khan work if it was a Darth Vader-like role involving picking people up by the neck and flinging bodies around but Montalban has to sell us on both Khan's physicality and intellect, and he does it so well it's easy to see why Harve Bennett wanted Khan for the second film.

Slightly less successful is Lieutenant Marla McGivers, who falls for Khan in a big way, and helps him in his attempt to take over the Enterprise. The problem is she's a bit of a wet fish. Her character is nicely established as someone who fantasises about strong historical figures -Napoleon, Richard the Lionheart, Leif Ericson- but it's harder to spot what Khan sees in her. She mainly seems to spend her time looking doe-eyed at Khan as he psychologically bullies her. Perhaps this is what Khan wants? Presumably the female genetic superwomen in his group would share Khan's arrogance so maybe he's on the lookout for someone he can dominate rather than to have children. Kirk also seems to have very little time for McGivers, and isn't worried about criticising her in front of the bridge crew, “here's a chance for that historian to do something for a change,” he says as he prepares an away team to board the SS Botany Bay. It's not clear exactly when McGiver's recognises Khan although after he storms out of a formal dinner she goes to his quarters and worries him by saying, “I know who you are,” but he's been on board for hours by this point. McGivers seems to be a pretty solid historian. She's studied great men of history. She identifies the sleeper ship, knows when it was in use, and knows how the revival process resuscitates the leader first. Either she knows who Khan is from more or less the moment she first sees him, or at least that's the point where she begins to hope this mystery man might be Khan. Put it this way, if you were a historian who discovered an 200 year old ice packed figure, wearing a bicorne hat, with his hand tucked into his jacket, frozen alive on a French Frigate called the Elba wouldn't you at least wonder if he might be Napoleon?

The first 30 minutes of the story pass quickly. It's a surprise to get to Khan's takeover of the Enterprise and realise the episode is already more than half over. The hijacking of the Enterprise is a good example of how to write an exciting sequence which contains no action. The whole scene is set on the bridge and begins with security alerting Kirk to Khan's escape. One by one Kirk's orders to the crew fail because Khan has already anticipated them; communication channels are jammed, atmospheric controls are cut off, neural gas cannot be used to knock out the hijackers, and the turbo elevators are inoperative. Kirk comes to a surprised halt as the elevator door fails to open, and it's surprising how effective this one simple visual is to an audience who have got used to doors swishing open automatically. Several things impress about this scene. Firstly we get a sense of the effectiveness of the bridge crew as they switch from relaxed routine to dealing with the emergency. Secondly, although the scene is short it sells the idea that hijacking the Enterprise is really difficult. And, thirdly, it's confirmation of everything Khan has been saying through the episode. The bridge crew are good, but he's better.

While the script is enjoyable it's not perfect. The climax particularly disappoints. Up to now the dialogue has been really good, with Kirk and Khan jabbing at each other with words, so it's more of let down when the stunt doubles run in and begin exchanging punches. Worse this fight comes after a whole episode of being told Khan is superior to regular humans, including an awesome scene in which Khan first pulls open the locked door to his quarters by hand and then knocks a stuntman flying (Montalban sells the scene where he pulls the door open, and the stuntman does a fantastic backflip as Khan catches him under the chin). The idea Kirk could go toe to toe with Khan just doesn't work. Especially not with Kirk fresh out of a decompression chamber. Still, the ending does provide a character point. Kirk wins by cheating, he clubs Khan with some sort of tool he pulls out of the engineering panel. It must grate with Khan that the superior man was beaten in an unfair fight. Two episodes ago Court Martial ended in engineering with Kirk fighting Finney in a race against time to prevent Finney's sabotage from destroying the Enterprise. Now, Space Seed ends in engineering with Kirk fighting Khan in a race against time to prevent Khan's sabotage from destroying the Enterprise. Court Martial was made as episode 14, and Space Seed as episode 24, so it's unfortunate that when aired only one episode separates two stories which end so similarly.

When Khan is revived he wants to know how long he has been asleep, “two centuries we estimate,” Kirk tells him. Along with the “I am going to lock you up for two hundred years”/ “That ought to be just about right” joke from Tomorrow Is Yesterday this pretty much confirms that, whatever the consensus now, the sixties production team thought Star Trek was set in the 22^nd Century rather than the 23^rd. It's also odd to hear characters talking so glibly about the terrible history of the 1990s. “A strange, violent period in your history,” Spock says. “Your Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence.” It's difficult to believe these dates were chosen at random. If Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilbur wanted a more futuristic feel they would either have been less specific about the years Khan ruled, 1992 to 1996 as Spock tells us, or they would probably have gone for a date after the millennium. The 1990's represent a time the Star Trek target audience could reasonably expect to see, Carey Wilbur died in 1998 aged 81. These dates have the double advantage of allowing the audience to hear the characters talk about their personal future as if it was the ancient past, and giving the audience a frisson of excitement in much the same way James Cameron gives the date of Judgement Day as August 29^th 1997 in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Crew deaths: None, again. Assuming the security guard Khan hits is just knocked unconscious.
Running total: 25

The Naked Time

There's an episode of Blake's 7 called Ultraworld where the spaceship Liberator is trapped by the Core, a living planet. Servants of the Core, the Ultras, want the technology of the Liberator and the crew will be added to Core's collection of brain prints. After Cally and Avon have their minds drained Tarrent and Dayna must prevent their crewmate’s bodies being fed to Core, restore the correct mind to the correct body, and then escape.

It's not difficult to imagine this as Star Trek. Substitute the Enterprise for the Liberator; Scotty and Yeoman Rand for Avon and Cally; Kirk and Uhura for Tarrant and Dayna (the Ultras want knowledge of “human bonding” added to Core's databank so there's even a “so tell me about this Earth thing called love” scene when they try to get Tarrant and Dayna tupping). Judged on its' own as a piece of television it's not bad. The story is exciting, there are some good jokes, some nice effects, and Cally nearly gets fed to a giant brain; an image guaranteed to grip the imagination of any seven year old watching. But it's poor Blake's 7 because it fails to engage with the characters, or use the elements which make Blake's 7 unique.

Likewise Star Trek has episodes which, while enjoyable, could easily belong to another series. In The Gamesters of Triskelion Kirk, Uhura and Chekov are kidnapped and forced to fight aliens for the entertainment of three multicoloured brains. Again not a bad story but not one to use as an example of Star Trek firing on all cylinders. Swap Kirk for Commander Koenig, Uhura for Doctor Helena Russell, and Chekov for Nick Tate and you've got a perfectly serviceable episode of Space 1999.

The ease with which you can visualise transferring an episode of one series to another isn't a foolproof way of spotting poor scripts -both of the examples above are at least good fun- but it is a starting point. If a writer is just going to squash established characters into his own plot, and fit the characters to his ideas rather than vice versa then even in the hands of a skilful writer an episode will struggle to be better than average, at most. And of course, generally speaking it's not going to be the skilful writers that cram Kirk, or Blake, or Commander Koenig, into their story, because they wouldn't be skilful writers if that was how they wrote scripts.

The Naked Time is the one glorious exception to this rule. It's the ultimate plug and play story. You have a concept, weird alien water causing space-drunkeness, and you fit the characters in around it. This could be an episode of any science-fiction series; Blake's 7, Doctor Who, Star Cops, Space 1999, Babylon 5, Star Trek: Voyager. Make the water demon blood and it's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It doesn't matter because the emphasis stays firmly on the characters, and how they react, and what we learn about them. What do we learn about Kirk in The Gamesters of Triskelion? That he thinks it's bad to be kidnapped and forced to fight aliens for the entertainment of multicoloured brains. Well gosh! What do we learn about Kirk in The Naked Time? Loads.

We get to see him fret, and snap at Uhura when she is unable to switch off Lieutenant Riley's endless intercom performances of I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. He is a man struggling to remain composed even as his command falls apart in bizarre circumstances. Kirk, and Shatner's, best moment comes when he gets increasingly angry and hysterical before realising he too has also been infected by the alien water. We also get some insight into his character with a speech about how as Captain he is only allowed one love, the ship, but the impact of this scene is undercut by following too quickly on the heels of a similar speech from Spock about his mother. Leonard Nimoy also gets a very good scene where Spock has a private breakdown in the briefing room. In an unusual editing flourish the scene runs as an uninterrupted single shot for almost 90 seconds; a long time without a cut for Star Trek

If Spock is, metaphorically, the person who goes to a party and ends up sitting alone on the stairs at 3am crying then Sulu is the one who gets all hyperactive and overexcited. Sulu has the most memorable scene in The Naked Time. D'Artagnan in space, sword fighting down the Enterprise corridors. George Takei's enthusiasm and energy sell the scene and also provide cover for a nifty bit of character redirection. Up to this point Sulu has been Head of Astroscience (Where No Man Has Gone Before) and seen working in the botany section of the Life Science Department (The Man Trap). Here, suddenly, he's helmsman with this change of career covered by a single line from Lieutenant Riley “last week it was botany he was trying to get me interested in...” as if what we've seen Sulu doing previously is him flitting from hobby to hobby rather than another job. Someone on the production team has rightly realised it will be easier to get Sulu involved in plots if he is always on the bridge. Sulu's bout of space madness also leads to a brilliant joke in the next episode preview. Kirk's line,”question, could what happened down there to those people create any danger to this vessel or crew?” is followed by a jump cut to Sulu, half-naked and sweating, leaping forwards holding a sword. Kudos to Associate Producer Robert Justman and Assistant Film Editor Don Rode who were in charge of these previews.

The ending is the one part of the episode that disappoints. The build-up to the antimatter implosion necessary to break orbit is tense but the resolution, that the Enterprise has somehow also travelled back in time three days, feels like it has wandered in from another episode. It seems to be there to prime the audience to the idea of doing time travel stories but the audience has already accepted four episodes of other concepts without similar prompting. It's an unusual lack of faith in the audience from the production team.

Enterprise crew deaths: 1, Lieutenant Junior Grade Joe Tormolen.

Running total: 17

Misc:

The camera pushes forward as Scotty finishes cutting open the door to Engineering and as it does there is a nasty judder, and an audible thump. The camera's obviously rolled over something, or got caught, but the shot must have been deemed acceptable. It may have been the only take as it involves a pyrotechnic which would eat up time being reset. I guess the producers hoped it would be mistaken for turbulence from the collapsing planet or not spotted at all.