ST:TAS Season Two, Episode One: The Pirates of Orion

"The Pirates of Orion"
Air Order: 17
Star Date: 5683.1
Original Air Date: September 7, 1974

Whoa, a second season. Yeah, sort of? It looks like animated shows are done as sixteen weeks rather than twenty-four. So that rinky sixteen episodes that we got for season one actually counts as a whole season. The ratings sucked, because the show was a bit too cerebral for your average Saturday morning watcher, even though Gene Rod claimed that it was family fare. So why that second season? Because the show won a Daytime Emmy (the first award for the Star Trek franchise), and the network decided to "reward" them with six more episodes (not a full season, but whatever, I guess). Interestingly, this is the only show made by Filmation that got more than one season.
Either way, sixteen episodes seems like too few to cover a season overview, and season two is only six episodes long, so it makes more sense to me to do one series overview after the last episode in the animated series.

*******

Kirk's Log 6331.4: "On our way to dedicate a new science academy on Deneb V. We had an illness on board for a bit, but Bones took care of it, and says we're good to go."

So they're on course, and Spock reports that everything is great. Kirk makes some small talk with him, but then Spock's face screws up, and he collapses on floor. Kirk calls sick bay on emergency. 

Down in sick bay, Bones says that Spock has that illness that everybody else had, and that while it isn't anything much to humans with their iron-based blood, it's fatal in Vulcans. Apparently, the infection gets in your bloodstream and encases the cells so they can't carry oxygen.

"So Spock suffocates," says Kirk.

"Yup," says Bones.

He says there's a medicine Spock can take that will cure him. It's called strobolin, and it only grows on certain planets. Kirk checks the computer, and it says that the nearest planet that grows strobolin is four days away at max warp. But Bones says that Spock will die in three, because of course he will. Not enough drama in Spock being sick. He must be fatally ill, and the medicine must be just a little bit too far away.

Then Bones comes up with a brilliant idea that hasn't really been proposed on this show before now: they can cut their travel time to the strobolin by quite a bit if another ship gets it and they rendezvous with it.

It's a good thing Bones came up with this plan, because I was starting to lose faith in him. Here he was, treating a bunch of crew members for this illness, and in his research and treatment of the illness, never once did he find out that Vulcans are killed by it? Because it seems like that kind of info should be filed away with that illness.

"Choriocytosis: Ain't no thang in yo' regular-type humans, but it'll kill yo' Vulcans stone-dead."

Also, once other crew members had contracted this disease, however light in Terrans, why did they not go to the trouble to procure the strobolin "just in case"? Not everyone reacts to illness the same. Earlier, they refer to it as being "no longer even as serious as pneumonia." Dude, people still die from pneumonia. People still die from the fucking flu! 

C'mon, Bones. You couldn't get the meds and maybe inoculate the first officer against it? How about warning him? "Hey, head's up, Spock - got a Vulcan-fatal disease onboard, so maybe buy yourself some medical masks"?

Kirk's Log, supplemental: "Called in some favors, and we're getting the meds from the SS Huron, who is getting them from the Potemkin, who is near the right planet."

Kirk and Bones are in the briefing room talking about Spock's symptoms, and what to expect while they're waiting for the meds to show up. Then this scene goes wrong.

First, there's a knock on the door.

Read that again.

Someone is knocking on a door that's designed to slide open when you approach it. By rights, when you step close enough to knock on the door, there shouldn't be a need, because the thing has already slid open to admit you. What if it's locked? Good point. Sometimes they are locked. In which case, they have chimes. they have door bells.

WHY THE HOLY HELL IS SOMEONE KNOCKING?

When Kirk calls "Come," guess who walks in?

It's the fatally ill Spock, who has been summoned there by Kirk. Um, why is he not in sick bay? And why could Kirk and Bones not have talked to him there?

Anyway, trooper as ever, Spock is glad to hear that their rendezvous with the Huron to collect his life-saving meds is not going to affect their timetable in getting to the ribbon-cutting ceremony or whatever shit they're going to on Deneb V.

Then Kirk is all, "I've cut your duty hours in half."

Ex-squeeze me? He's still on duty? What the fuck kind of plague ship is this?

Yeah, I know the guy is dedicated to his job, and if he's feeling up to the tasks at hand, then he wants to be able to do his job as usual. I also know that Bones gave him a shot of some kind of weaker med that keeps the illness at bay for two days. But in the meantime, dude is walking around the ship, possibly contagious, and maybe fainting at his station.

If he wants to keep working, quarantine his green ass in a sick bay bed and have his station transferred to that bed.

God, no wonder you guys had an outbreak of this shit.

So we get our first look at the SS Huron (SS stands for "space ship," I guess?), which is a freighter. I know these are not built for speed or anything, but still: why the hell are they so clunky and weird-looking? Also, while we're at it, why is a freighter a part of this chain at all? I can't imagine their top speed being spectacular, but they need these like yesterday, right? There was really nobody else in the sector who could do a drug run for the Enterprise?

Anyway, we get a small scene with the crew of the Huron, which probably has more than three people onboard, but because we never get to see an expanded view of the bridge or anyone else, it's easy to assume that this is it. 

Through bridge chat, we find out that the freighter is two hours away from the rendezvous point, and that they typically haul dilithium. A ship appears on their sensors, and they wonder if it's the E arriving early.

We switch back to the E bridge. Bones calls to say that it's time for Spock to get another shot, and when Kirk turns to Spock to relay the message, Bones has mysteriously appeared next to the captain's chair. When we come back to Kirk again, Bones has disappeared.

Check it out: this cheap-ass show has decided to cut corners by re-using footage from that first scene, where Spock faints. All they did was switch the vulcan's positioning in the second shot. Minus points to you, Budget, for blatant continuity errors. You only get praise when your clever tricks work.

So Kirk tells Spock that it's time for his meds, and Spock gives Kirk this super-stoned look.

"I'm conserving energy," he says, trying to cover up the fact that he's completely out of it.

Nobody buys it. Dude is a walking petri dish, and needs to be in his quarters or sick bay, but they're keeping him up front where he can wipes his germs on everything.

And back to the Huron, where we can finally see the ship that's on the sensors. The Huron's crew hope they'll reach the E before the mysterious ship reaches them. Dramatic music! No commercial break!

Down in sick bay, Bones is preparing the hypospray, and we get a nice Spockoy joke:

Bones: "This won't hurt a bit, Spock."

Spock: "An unnecessary assurance, Doctor, in addition to being untrue."

Bones: "That's the last time I waste my bedside manner on a Vulcan."

Man, I really miss Spockoy, you guys.

Bones makes him lie still while he and Christine watch this thing that I swear to god is a heart monitor. The thing actually freaking flat-lines, and I go, "Oh, God, did Spock just die?"

Nope. Apparently, that thing that is really, actually a heart monitor is really, actually just some machine that tells you when medicine has been absorbed or something.

They send him back to work, and as soon as he's out of earshot, Christine says, "The medicine has stopped working."

"Yes it has," replies Bones."

Gonna repeat that: the medicine they have been giving Spock, which has been keeping his raging infection in check, has stopped working. And they sent him back to work.

The next day, Bones receives some space mail from the Intergalactic Center for Disease Control, asking him what the fuck he thinks he's doing.

We get another brief scene on the Huron, where the crew tries and fails to communicate with the aliens. They admit that they have a full cargo hold of dilithium. Finally, a message for them comes through that they need to surrender and give the aliens their cargo, or they'll die. The Huron captain O'Shea orders his crew to make an emergency call to the Enterprise.

Uhura gets the message, but isn't able to rouse the Huron to answer. Spock reports that the Huron had not yet made it to the rendezvous point... then he faints, because what the hell else is he going to do? Dude is dying. Why is he at his station? He's taken to sick bay and all that happens, is that he repeats what we already know: the drug he was giving Spock has stopped working, and now they need the real thing.

Then he delivers a weird line: "Blasted human. Why can't you have red blood like a normal human?"

Because he's Vulcan, you idiot.

They reach the Huron, and the engines are dead. Life support is minimal. Kirk takes an away team over to check things out, because they still can't make contact with the Huron's crew. Dude, check it out: an away team that includes Uhura and Christine! The last time that happened was on "The Lorelei Signal". Neither of these women ever get to go on away missions, but that's actually pretty weird - Uhura, as communications officer, probably communicates better than Kirk and everyone else on that ship; and who the hell doesn't need a nurse on an away mission? Bones is often selected instead of her, but why? Tactically, it makes more sense to send your nurse rather than your head doctor.

Everybody gets a job, and does them. Scotty reports that there's nothing in the cargo hold. Uhura says that the Huron's communications are down, but they can take the log tapes back to the E and play them there. Christine reports that O'Shea needs surgery right away, but should be fine quickly.

Bones laments that, without the meds, Spock will die. Kirk has 20 hours left in which to get it.

Kirk's Log 6335.6: "The Huron is space junk now, and O'Shea has no idea who attacked his ship."

Arax looks at the Huron's tapes, and plugs the alien ship into the database. It's unknown, but conveniently, it leaves a nice radioactive trail in its wake, so they can follow it.

Kirk goes down to sick bay to check on Spock. Bones is thinking of putting him on a respirator. he Hamlets a bit about the frustrations of being a doctor, unable to cure his patient, and being "only as good as our drugs and technology make us." Kirk gives him a loud bro hug to bolster him.

Later on the bridge, it is discovered that the trail ends in the middle of an asteroid belt, and that the asteroids are made of some volatile material that explodes when the asteroids come into contact with each other or anything else, including star ships. They fly E in and encounter the ship. Arax says he recognizes the markings, which is surprising, considering that the database could not figure out where that ship was from.

"It's an Orion," he says.

Bet you didn't pronounce that in your head the way he said it.

Here on Earth, that word is pronounced "Oh-RYE-yun."

In every other episode of Star Trek, it's pronounced "Oh-RYE-yun."

In this episode only, everyone onboard the Enterprise pronounces it "OR-ee-ahn."

Go ahead, say it out loud. It sounds weird because that is not how your brain recognizes that pattern of words phonetically. And there's no explanation given for this odd new way of saying it. I thought at first that maybe it was spelled differently in the script, and the people who run the closed captioning had simply chosen to spell it this way. But then I remembered that the word Orion is in the title. It's on the title card for this episode.

WTF, Star Trek?

Anyway, Sulu checks out the alien weapons being fired at them and reports back that the OR-ee-ahn's shit is weak. Uhura reports that the OR-ee-ahns are calling, and the call goes on the viewscreen.

Oh, my holy hell.

They look like Ninja Turtle villains.

And this is where some shit goes down.

The OR-ee-ahns tell Kirk that they're from a neutral planet and only fired phasers at them because they weren't sure that the E was "non-hostile." Kirk loses his shit.

"Bitch, what do you mean neutral?" And he launches into some rants that includes quoting treaties and Starfleet regulations and basically calling them liars.

"Y'all, we don't have any Federation cargo," returns the guy who must be the captain, due to his having the most impressive hat.

Kirk cuts the transmission to ask Sulu to scan their ship. Sulu finds the dilithium, but says the medicine is too small an amount to pick up if it's there.

Uhura turns the sound back on, and Kirk tries to make a deal.

"Okay, Captain Not Shredder, you probs have this medicine we need. I'll make a shady side deal with you if I can have it. You can keep the dilithium that you stole, plus I'll give you more as payment for the medicine, PLUS I won't tell Starfleet or the Federation that you assholes robbed the Huron."

"Um... maybe?" says the captain. "Our planet can remain neutral and we won't get in trouble? I want time to think." And he cuts the transmission.

For a pirate, this guy is surprisingly concerned about his planet's neutrality in the eyes of the people he's robbing.

 

While the OR-ee-ahns are considering, Kirk calls sick bay to learn that Spock has less than an hour. In case you were wondering, Spock's failing health is part of this week's Disable the Ship. Having less than an hour before Spock "blows up" adds to the drama, doncha know?

The OR-ee-ahns call back to say that they don't trust Kirk, and they want to meet face-to-face to exchange the meds. they don't even want the extra dilithium. The captain suggests that they meet on the nearest asteroid.

Kirk had a conference with Bones and Scotty. Why Scotty, I don't really know. I guess he's just the next most-senior officer.

"It's a trap!" says Admiral Bones when hearing about the face-to-face exchange.

"Yeah, but we got no choice," says Kirk. "Gonna leave the comm line open so you guys can hear everything, and I want Scotty to keep the transporter focused on me."

We skip back to OR-ee-ahn ship, where the lieutenant tells the captain that they are out-gunned for sure. The captain replies that he doesn't trust Kirk to not tattle on them to Starfleet. Again, these a-holes a really concerned about their planet's neutrality.They reach the conclusion that the only way to ensure that Kirk will keep his trap shut is to destroy the E, and the only way their weak-ass weapons can do that is to destroy themselves. The lieutenant suggests that they rig a bomb on the surface of the asteroid when the two captains beam down to exchange the meds. The captain will set off the bomb, the asteroid will blow, and everyone will die. he wants to see the look on Kirk's face when he is told that he and his crew are going to die, because this guy is some kind of kamikaze douchebag.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Awesome establishing shot of two ships in an asteroid field!

So another fifteen minutes is wasted because the captain insists that they beam down at a certain time. Normally, this is fine, but again, remember that Spock is our ship-disabler this time, and we want to inject him with medicine right in the split-second before he dies.

They beam down and Kirk scans the medicine to find that it's the stuff they need.

But then Captain Bring-Down announces that he's actually going to blow them all to hell because of that fucking neutrality that he can't let go of.

"What the hell?" demands Kirk, on behalf of the audience, who just is really not getting why neutrality is worth dying for.

"Unsuccessful OR-ee-ahn missions end in suicide," the captain explains.

And the audience finally goes "Ohhhhhhh..."

Because seriously, "give me neutrality, or give me death"? That shit is stupid.

The E bridge crew, who has been eaves-dropping this whole time, has noticed that the scans say there's dilithium on the surface, and by listening to the convo, they have heard that it's part of a bomb.

Kirk dives for the OR-ee-ahn, and we get this fabulous super-hero-and-villain-comic-book-fight stance.

Scotty has the transporter tech beam the dilithium crystals out of the OR-ee-ahn's backpack, then Kirk grabs him again, and calls for a transport. Kirk and the OR-ee-ahn captain materialize on the transporter pad. I have to guess that at this time, Kirk handed the medicine off to someone from sick bay, who rushed it to Spock's bedside, because we immediately cut to Kirk on the bridge with the OR-ee-ahn. The OR-ee-ahn tries to take a cyanide capsule or something similar, but he is prevented from doing this. Kirk calls the other ship and tells the captain to inform his guys to not blow up their ship.

"You're standing trial," say Kirk in his harshest voice. "And we're gonna end your little game of piracy and neutrality." Odder word pairings were never spoken.

Defeated, the OR-ee-ahn captain tells his people to stand down.

Kirk's Log 6336.2: "Awww, yeeaahh. Kicked some ass, took some names. Guys in my brig, towing their ship. Back on schedule for the ribbon-cutting thing, and my boyfriend is better."

Down in sick bay, Spock is looking like himself, and he and Bones are arguing over whose physiology is better.

"Things are back to normal," says Kirk.

"He's as stubborn as ever," grumps Bones.

Then Kirk makes this face that I'm thinking is supposed to be amusement, but looks more like game-show host meets skeevy pick-up artist.

And Bones laughs, and they fly off to Deneb V.

Trivia and Stuff:

 A few weeks ago, the crew of the Ariel was featured, and their insignia appeared to be the same as the Enterprise, so I wondered if they had moved forward on the idea that every crew member of every Starfleet ship would get the same insignia, something they had done with the films and beyond. Noop. Turns out, the Ariel insignia is similar, but doesn't read well on the small screen.

The crew of the Ariel

Huron, center row left, Ariel next to it on the right

Anyway, there's your lesson for the day in "Recognizing Starfleet Insignia." Hope that it was as thrilling for you as it was for me.

I never was able to figure out why the weird pronunciation of Orion occurred. The only answer I was able to find (and it's a lame one) is that most Star Trek scripts contained a guide on how to correctly pronounce certain words, and this script lacked that guide. I'll say that again: our group of very smart actors had never heard the word Orion before, even though they're said that word correctly in half a dozen other episodes. Also, if there was no guide, I would expect this to happen with one actor only. According to the sources I've checked thus far, only the first few episodes were recorded with the whole gang present. The remaining episodes had the actors come in separately to record their lines. So in order for everyone to say that name wrong each time, the first person had to eff up that name every time, and each following actor would have to be instructed to say it that way as well.

So here's a weirdness that I have trouble wrapping my head a round: because of the odd pronunciation, I don't even consider these guys to be the male counterparts to the dancing girls we've seen. Seriously. Same race, supposedly. The girls weren't referenced at all, but they both come from Orion (again, supposedly) and they're both green. Does anybody else feel like this was some kind of blind date? 

"You're single, and you're single, so it must be a good match!"

"Well, you're green, and you're green, so you must be the same race!"

Does not compute.

*******

I finally up and consumed that other Tea Forte pyramid that Roomie brought home all those weeks ago. This one was clearly marked as "Sunrise Breakfast," and because my tea consumption does not care what time it is, I drank it at night.

Much like the mispronunciation of the word Orion, when I went looking for this tea online, it had disappeared, and the information remained a mystery. Tea Forte's website does not list it anywhere, and search results yielded nothing. I'm actually fairly sad about this, as the tea was really good, and I would recommend it to others.

It's a black ceylon base with floral notes, though not in an overpowering way.

I guess the best I can say is, both of the flavors of Tea Forte teas that I've had have been very good, so I feel like I can recommend the brand as a whole... even if the tea I had today is no longer available.

My Chewie mug has a Groot problem

https://www.teaforte.com/

ST:TAS Season One, Episode Fifteen "The Eye of the Beholder"

"The Eye of the Beholder"
Air Order: 15
Stardate: 5501.2
Original Air Date: January 5, 1974

This is my new favorite thing, you guys. I love, love, love when fictional characters and situations are dragged into the "real world" via advertisements, PSAs, travel posters and the like. It's probably because I make my own fan work like this, but it's so awesome when I see it done by others. I was fishing for the artist credit via Google (it's really freaking hard to find artist credits sometimes) when I stumbled upon this one as well:

Check out the Archie comic-styling paired with the WWII poster slogan! Plus, instead of a hapless Red, this crewman is in command gold!

(I'm seriously not about slut-shaming Orion girls here, though. I'm just really digging the fan work with the retro STD PSA vibe.)

*******

Kirk's Log 5501.2: "Orbiting Lactra VII. A six-man science crew is missing, and we beamed some guys aboard the other ship to see if there was anything that could point us in the right direction."

I guess they grabbed the captain's logs because we see our boys of the E gathered around the viewscreen in the briefing room a moment later, watching some logs being replayed. The guy on the screen, Lt-Commander Markel, says that they sent out three guys who never returned, so he and remaining two plan to beam down to the surface to find them. We never learn what happens next, because Kirk switches off the log in the middle of the sentence, and bitches about how Markel went down to the surface against orders, and that one should always follows orders, and blah, blah, blah.

Fuck you, Kirk. You disobey orders constantly. I bet Tiberius is Latin for "screw you, I'll do what I want,"

"Meh," says Spock in response, "Humans don't always follow the rules."

Therein follows a quick tirade from Bones that's mostly insults about Vulcans. Kirk tells him to STFU, because he isn't helping at all.

Spock reports that Lactra VII is very similar to Earth, but what's known about it is what the other ship was able to collect six weeks ago when they arrived. They don't know anything about any possible life forms. He says that Arax is doing further scans and will report on what he finds.

"Naw, that'll take too long," says Kirk. "We should just beam down to the last coordinates they used."

"That's dumb," replies Bones, surprisingly the voice of reason here. "Two parties of people disappeared from there and we don't know why."

Kirk shrugs him off, because again, Kirk does what he wants.

So our intrepid trio beams down to the surface, right after Scotty has let them know that Arax discovered several life forms, but no big groups or cities. They beam down next to several boiling lakes, and Bones complains that they might have been cooked upon beaming. Query: wouldn't the transporter chief see that that was there, and adjust for it? Or is Bones just being his usual dickish self about beaming procedures?

Spock things it's weird that the lake even exists in that climate, but then Kirk notices that they have company, and I have the same reaction here that I did to the space kraken on the Aquaman episode: "Haha, sweet!"

It comes toward them, and Kirk gives the order to stun it. But the phaser fire only seems to irritate it. Rather than being stunned, it dives into the water to get the hell away from the rude little snacks on shore.

A little ways away, Kirk takes out his comm to try to call the crew members of the Ariel, the other ship. They get some static, which Bones takes for an answer, if not a verbal one, and they head off in the direction from which they feel the answer came.

Oops, they encounter another monster. Man, I love these things. They're ridiculous, and I laugh when they appear onscreen, but they're awesome as hell.

This one also appears to be pissed off when they stumble upon it. So what do they do? Shoot it. Does this help? Of course not.

"I think it's feeding off of the energy that we're shooting at it," suggests Spock.

So does Kirk bring a halt to the phaser fire? Noop. 

"MOAR SHOOTING!'

Then there's this weird animation effect thing that they try that could either mean one of two things: 1) the monster was further away from the rocks than we thought, and it moves closer when they continue shooting; or B) the  monster somehow converts the phaser energy over into some kind of growth hormone or movie monster radiation, and it grows to like, double its size.

Anyway, the thing eventually ends up being stunned, only it falls on Bones and they have to dig him out. It's kind of this awesome Wizard of Oz moment.

Spock says they still have 1.1 kilometers to go before they get to the spot where the comm signal originated, and Kirk acts like it's the end of the world, and it's so far, and maybe there are more unarmed monsters to shoot and however will they make it? For those of you not laughing at this already (ie, my fellow Americans who do not use the metric system), Kirk is whining about having to walk a little more than half a mile.

As they go along, Kirk and Spock discuss how the last monster that they fought was very much like a monster-thing on this other planet, light-years away, and how the desert region that they are walking through at the moment is similar to that other planet as well. Bones breaks in with a random comment about how his boots are full of sand.

"Bitch, who asked about your boots?" asks Spock. "We're sciencing over here, and you're talking about fashion."

"Come say that to me in my medical lab," retorts Bones.

They walk into a jungle area, and are confused how the landscape could change so rapidly. Kirk calls Scotty, and the show saves money on animation by showing static shots of the E in orbit while they play a voice-over of the convo. Arax, Scotty reports, has found some kind of city or something 98 kilometers away, in roughly the same direction as the signal came.

Spock is weirded out that the pond they have stopped next to is filled with water that is "too pure." He thinks that a rain forest has no right to be sitting next to a desert, and proposes that the landscapes they have seen so far have been created rather than actually growing that way. There's a brief discussion about terraforming, but Spock doesn't think this fits the bill.

Ugh, we haven't landed on the shore leave planet again, have we? I'm so over that shit.

He and Bones exchange some more barbs, and then they're attacked by dragons.

"MOAR PHASERS!" yells Kirk.

The dragons fly away, but Spock thinks they hit some kind of invisible force field, rather than being driven away by the phaser fire.

They're paying too much attention to notice that they're now being taken hostage by giant slugs or legless elephants or something. Which are pink. Ten bucks says they were supposed to be grey.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

When we return, the elephant-slugs are carrying our boys someplace, and Kirk reckons it's toward the northwest area where the signal was coming from. They've apparently been letting these things carry them for hours, and I guess Kirk hasn't tried to shoot them. So we get to the city, and it looks like a stack of weird pancakes or a peppermint. Not my favorite alien architecture on this show, but they're trying something new, so I'll give them credit for that.

Once inside, our boys are deposited in some building that has an archway with a force field. Spock is pretty sure that they're telepathic. he starts forming a hypothesis of what's going on: the pink elephant-slugs are so advanced and so intelligent, that he can't actually capture their thoughts, because they think too fast. He makes the comparison of humans to ants, with themselves as the ants. Then he goes on to surmise that the monster things they saw earlier are not just really similar to animals that they've seen on other planets, but actually those animals from those planets, in landscapes created on this planet for them.

Bones points out that their tricorders, comms and phasers were taken from them, and it's debated whether they were taken to study or to keep from being harmed. Frankly, if they were watching Kirk shoot at everything under the sun, then my guess is the latter.

After a few minutes of debate in the little cell, the elephants take them to a new enclosure that contains grass and trees and a building. Once again, they're sealed behind a forcefield.

"A human habitat, and now they're safe from us," muses Spock.

A dude approaches them. He's Lt-Commander Markel from the Ariel, and he has Randi Bryce, the biologist, in tow.

Markel explains that they weren't able to beam down in time to save the original three crew members, but the third of their group is in the house, sick. he says they've been expecting our intrepid trio, ever since they heard the comm signal. Apparently, the aliens have taken all of the equipment, and it's sitting on a table outside of the force field, so they couldn't call ahead and warn our boys not to come. He confirms Spock's suspicions that this is a zoo.

Let's pause for a moment and recap, shall we?

A ship is missing, so the Enterprise is sent out some time later to investigate.

The ship is found with just a few survivors on the surface. The captain beams down and encounters hyper-intelligent aliens that communicate telepathically.

The captain is taken prisoner and is tossed into an alien zoo.

Any of this sound familiar?

I'l give you a hint: do you have the strangest feeling that this girl might show up soon, but you're not certain why?

Dingdingdingdingding!

You're right, this is pretty much the same story as "The Cage," later re-packaged as "The Menagerie". I have to wonder how often a script would show up at Star Trek and they'd approve it, only to have someone point out that it's really, really similar to an episode that they've already done (sometimes more than once!), and the Powers That Be shrug and say, "Meh, it's different enough."

Anyway, the aliens come to the forcefield, and our boys walk forward with Markel. Kirk tells Spock to communicate telepathically with the aliens, and he tries, but all they do is shake. Spock reports back that is having trouble communicating with them, and that he thinks the shaking is them laughing at him and his efforts.

They go inside the little house to have a look at the sick Red. Bones is pretty sure she has malaria of some kind, but he can't do anything for her without his medikit, which the aliens have. Kirk asks about food, and Bryce says that they bring some to the table with their equipment about once a week. Bones surmises that if they ask about the medikit, it may be returned to them based on the fact that it would be used to heal one of the "zoo specimens" rather than harming anyone. He concentrates on asking for help with the medikit, but the Lactrans send food instead. Later, they all go out to the forcefield and think real hard about the medikit, which one of the Lactrans hands over.

Bones leaves to treat the sick Red, and Kirk talks to Markel about escaping. Markel says they've tried it all, and Spock butts in to suggest to Kirk that he start thinking about how they are fully trapped here in this zoo, and that every possible escape route will have been thought of and planned for. 

That probably sounds pretty bleak, but it makes sense - if the Lactrans can sense that all of their humans are trying to think of ways to escape, then they'll head them off at every pass.

Later, they are hanging out in the courtyard area of the human enclosure, and they notice that they are getting a large crowd. Bryce asks Spock if he has learned anything about them through telepathy, and Spock replies that they are far too intelligent for the likes of him, but that he's pretty sure the kids are afraid of them, and that the females find them ugly. Important things to know about your captors, I guess.

He brings up the E, and the possibility that Scotty could beam down a rescue party, but Kirk says he told Scotty not to do that. Spock suggests that they get the comm back from the Lactrans, and he puts forth the idea that they do a spin-off of the ol' sick prisoner trick. Has this trick ever worked outside of television? Because I'm thinking that the answer is no.

So Kirk lies on the ground pretending to be sick, and the others think "communicator" real hard at one of the little Lactrans, who approaches Kirk with the comm. Kirk suddenly calls Scotty for a beam-out, and realizing that he shouldn't have given Kirk the comm, the baby Lactran snatches it back.

Oops.

This crappy, unintended consequences. Not only is Scotty left at a loss as to what to do with this baby Lactran, but Spock reports that its parents now blame Kirk for making the baby disappear. They think he harmed it. Kirk crumples to the ground in pain, bombarded with the thought "what happened to the baby?" At first, this sounds like a good idea. The Lactrans can read Kirk's "primitive" mind, and find out where the baby is, and that it's unharmed. But then Spock points out that the Lactrans think too quickly, and that Kirk's mind is overwhelmed, so he tells Kirk to fight the intrusion.

Scotty is hustled onto the bridge by the baby Lactran, and he tells them to clear off. he's decided to let the baby take the helm or something. Yes, you should let the baby steer the ship. Unfortunately, the ship goes wonky and out of orbit, and he shouts at the baby for making it do that.

Downstairs, the Lactrans have decided that they can't break into his mind individually, so a bunch of them are going to tag-team him. Spock suggests that all of the humans think about Kirk, and that way, they can form a mind-shield. Umm, treading close to scientific crap again, Star Trek. Thinking real hard about a guy will keep someone else from breaking into his mind? Really?

Fortunately for Kirk, it doesn't matter either way if it's crap or not, because Scotty and the baby beam down into the enclosure just then.

"This thing made contact with me," says Scotty to his baffled crewmates. "It's only six, but it's IQ is in the thousands, It soaked up the ship's databanks and it took the ship for a joyride. I managed to convince it that I wasn't a cool pet, and we got in the transporter to come back down."

And because these aliens think real fast, the baby has already communicated the entirety of the history of the Federation to its parents. They've decided that the humans are simple creatures now, but evolving, and are where the Lactrans were tens of thousands of centuries earlier. The Lactrans don't want the humans in their zoo anymore, and they're free to beam back up to the ship and leave.

Upstairs, the E is leaving, and Markel is bitching about the fact that he was part of a scientific fact-finding mission that didn't really get any facts.

"Meh, who cares?" asks Kirk. "We learned they're hella smart, and if we got there again, we may get dumped in a zoo."

Spock gets one last telepathic message from the Lactrans, saying that they will be welcome to visit again, in 20 or 30 centuries.

Here comes our closing joke. Ready?

"Is that our centuries, or theirs?" asks Kirk.

"Theirs," replies Spock. "And it's going to take a hell of a long time for me to calculate that difference."

"Either way," says Kirk, "it isn't our problem."

These jokes are terrible, you guys. It's like dads in space. Ugh.

So while this episode kind of blatantly stole the plot from the unaired pilot episode of its predecessor, there were also good parts. I liked the fact that Scotty briefly made a little buddy from the young Lactran. There wasn't enough time in the episode to show it, but it was nice all the same.

I wondered, going into the animated series, how it might differ from the original series. Half the time for the story, and I mused on what might get cut from the scripts in order to make that twenty-five minute run time. As it turns out, a lot of what didn't transfer over, simply because of time constraints, was inter-personal relationships. In the animated series, Spock and Bones trade almost no barbs. They simply don't have time to squeeze those moments in because they have to devote everything to telling the same kinds of Star Trek stories in a shortened time frame. And I'm finding that I've missed it. For all the crappy effects and the budget-cut scenery and the science that's really more fiction, the thing that holds it together are those inter-personal relationships. Here, we get just the tiniest taste of it again. Maybe the plot wasn't long enough and they needed some filler. 

Or maybe they recognized that we needed to see more of it every now and then.

Weird, quasi-trivia: the crew members from the Ariel are wearing arrowhead insignia. In TOS, every ship gets a different insignia, and the arrowheads are designated for the use of the Enterprise. By the TOS films, it had been decided that all ships in the Federation should carry the arrowhead insignia, rather than having different ones for different ships. The guess is that by that later stardate in the first film, they had changed how things were done. But here we have Ariel crew members wearing the Enterprise insignia. Had the writers changed their minds while writing for TAS, and the idea transferred over to the film writers (probably many of the same people)? Or did the animators screw up and paint the wrong ship's insignia on their uniforms?

*******

So I noticed that Jack in the Box has flavored teas now. (Not gonna lie: I now notice when anyone has flavored teas.) If I recall correctly, the flavors are raspberry, peach, and mango. While raspberry is almost cliche in a flavored tea at this point, and peach is generally my tea spirit animal, I decided to be different and get the mango.

A word from the wise: flavored teas are like martinis and must be either shaken or stirred. Seriously. When you get a flavored tea from a restaurant, they tend to pour the syrup in first to measure it in the cup/glass, then fill the rest with tea. Then you know what happens next: you take a sip and get a mouthful of syrup. Somehow, I always forget to mix.

"This tastes like a mango smoothie," I thought on first sip. "How is this tea again?"

It would be nice if Jack in the Box gave their employees long-handled spoons to mix their tea with, but I guess that might eff up their dive-thru and order times, so I just admit that I'm freaking lazy, and let's face it, I can do that shit myself. 

Once properly mixed, the mango tea was pretty good. Sometimes, the syrups in flavored teas overwhelm the tea flavor, and then the tea just becomes a vehicle for the syrup. In those cases, why have tea? You're not getting any tea flavor, and you might as well just have poured the syrup into some soda water. But again, once I had mixed it, the tea was more evident, and it blended nicely with the mango.

The price for what you get isn't terrible, either. It was $2+ for the flavored tea versus the tea you buy as a fountain drink, so you know you're probably paying for that syrup. But the smallest size they offered was at least equivalent to a medium-sized drink, so you're at least getting a good amount. Better value than the $3-4 that Starschmucks charges, anyway.

According to the website, they don't have these flavored teas in every restaurant, so you might want to check ahead to see if they have them before trekking all the way out to one specifically for tea.

Moe in the sun