ST:TAS Season One, Episode Eleven: "The Terratin Incident"

"The Terratin Incident"
Air Order: 11
Star Date: 5577.3
Original Air Date: November 17, 1973

Sorry for this late posting. My schedule last week filled up in such a way that I wasn't able to find time to do my write-up. Then I got freaking food poisoning. Yaaaaay.

*******

 Kirk's Log 5577.3: "So the mission this week is to check out some burned-out super nova called Arachna. We're gonna map it and stuff."

While prepping to chart the gas cloud Arachna, Uhura gets a call in that she can't decipher. She puts it on speaker, and Spock reports from the science station that it's just random noise, but then he interrupts himself to say that he is picking up a pattern in a code that hasn't been used in two hundred years. The one word that he can make out of "terratin." Uhura says that the code is being broadcast from Cepheus, a planet nearby that hasn't been explored. She attempts to answer back, but the signal isn't being acknowledged. Kirk decides to go to Cepheus to check it out. Bones tells him it's a damn waste of time to walk away from their mapping project to check out a noise in the dark. Kirk replies that he's going anyway.

Spock does some quick research and finds a little bit of info: basically, it's a class-M planet, and there are crystals everywhere on the surface. When they get in front of the thing, Kirk orders Sulu to put them into orbit. But before he can do so, they receive a very light impulse from the surface. We get a weird bit here and I can't figure out if they're killing time in a short episode, or if they're establishing how the ship works as a whole: Kirk asks around to make sure everything is still functioning normally. The various stations on the bridge check in, so Kirk calls engineering and sick bay. Scotty says his engines are "purring like kittens" and Bones reports back that all is well with the animals that they're experimenting on, which are apparently the ghosts of the mice from The Secret of Nihm.

Christine also chimes in to say that their "halo fish" is doing well, which means that things are okey-dokey, because the halo fish will change color if the environment changes. I guess this is the whole reasoning behind checking in with everyone after that very minor impulse - we have to establish that there is a fish tank in sick bay. Spoiler alert: someone falls into the fish tank later. Spoiled spoiler alert: it's Christine.

Determining that everything is fine, Kirk once again asks that they go into orbit around Cepheus, and that they do scans and sweeps and all that other crap that they do when they show up someplace randomly. Arax starts doing these tasks, and while reporting about lava flows and crystalline structures, there is a steady beam of light aimed at the E, and Arax yells out because he was looking directly at it.

So I guess that beam of light killed them all, because there's a lot of Dramatic music! and everyone becomes a flashing ghost.

Naw, just kidding. Everyone is fine. Kirk does another round of asking about the status of things, and all reports come back okay, but Scotty says the dilithium crystals are completely FUBAR. Kirk and Spock go down to check it out. The crystals look weird, and Spock says that they are falling apart in a spiral pattern. Some woman named Briel in the mess hall calls out over the com system that the people there are now much smaller than the chairs and tables. And then there's this super-sexist line:

Okay, we get it. Shit in there is big. Why isn't it "People are losing rings, hairpins. Some are near panic"? While it's less likely for a guy to lose a hairpin than a girl, anybody can wear a ring, and anybody can panic.

It's the same when Kirk and Spock reach the bridge. They argue whether the ship is expanding, or they are shrinking.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Kirk's Log 5577.5: "Well, we're screwed now. We tiny, getting tinier, and we don't have enough steam to get out of here."

Uhura can reach her controls and is having to crawl over the panels to work her station. Kirk calls Bones to see if the good doctor knows what the hell they're looking at. Bones suggests that he come down to sick bay to check out his research on it. I want to briefly call BS on this request: things are going to be easier if Bones just tells them what he has to say over the comm system. If the bridge is at the top of the ship, and sick bay somewhere roughly around the middle, then it will take them some time to get there at normal height. At the severely diminished height they are at, it will take them much longer to get there, and much longer to get back. They have to take a lot more steps in order to get the same distance. They'll take the lift, which will cut out a bunch of that distance, but not all of it.

Anyway, they cut the travel time out of the episode and merely show the trio standing on top of one of the medical tables.

So they hand out some explanation about how everything is the same physically with them, but the space between the molecules is shrinking, which is why they are smaller now. Bones says that weight and mass are the same, and the science here goes over my head, but someone on IMDB who sciences more than I do says that this is crap, because the characters are shown moving dials and levers, and there's a bit about weight and mass and stuff. I dunno. All I know is, some of the science on here sounds like pure BS, and some of it sounds do-able. I do know that writers were encouraged to contact actual scientists to make sure something sounded feasible, but this was the early seventies, so the science may have been incorrect then. It's also possible that writers just shrugged that shit off and figured that the fiction part of science-fiction would save their asses. "Nobody will notice the inaccuracy if it's entertaining... unless some dick-ish blogger comes along in forty years and calls me out on that."

*smiles and wiggles fingers at writers in most white girl way ever*                                      

So because everything that's living is shrinking, Christine points out that the caged animals are now too small to fit in the cages, and that the halo fish is now the size of a tadpole, which is a weird way to compare sizes. If I said to you, "That tiger is the size of a sofa," it would work. If all of us shrank down, tiger included, and I said, "That tiger is the size of a house cat," then yeah, that tiger really could be the size of a house cat. But relatively speaking if we all got smaller at the same rate, that tiger to us would still be the size of a sofa.

"Look how small the mice are!" she says, holding the mouse in her hand. The mouse always fit in your hand, Christine. This is not astonishing that you are relatively larger than said mouse.

You know what I actually really like about this episode? The clothing issue is addressed. In pretty much every show or movie or book or whatever where someone either grows or shrinks to crazy proportions, the clothes grow or shrink with them. It's a crapshoot as to whether or not accessories grow or shrink with them. Bruce Banner's clothes shred from his body when he becomes the Hulk, but amazingly, those pants seem to grow with him in the important area, so I guess those are magic. Here, Spock points out that their clothes are made of some kind of organic material, so they shrink at the same rate as the people wearing them. My God, was that so hard to come up with? Take note, other "incredible shrinking whatever" plots: it is possible to address this in logical ways. This is also the reason given for the non-shrinking metal accessories, like the hairpins and rings in that earlier comment.

So now we know that the shrinking thing only affected organic matter, and they explain this with the spiral thing that Spock was talking about in engineering. The spiral thing that was happening to the dilithium is happening to their DNA, which is a double-helix. Bones says that eventually, the DNA will stop winding, so Kirk is confident that they can figure out how small they get if they keep shrinking down.

I awarded points to Star Trek for coming up with that organic clothing thing, but now I must take them away. There is no travel time involved in any of this. First they were on one of the medical tables. Then they were on the floor. Now Spock is standing on the table with the fish tank. At no point in time did they stop their conversation to scale any furniture. Fuck, dude. Hasn't anybody on this show watched anything where the characters shrank?

But then in the very next scene, they take care to show Spock and Kirk on the bridge, and Spock scales his science station chair to get at the console.

Kirk's Log 5577.7: "Shit, son. We're gonna lose control of the ship in 32 minutes, when we become too small to run the controls."

Sulu starts to lose his shit. He insists that if they set the controls right, then they can fire the phasers at whatever on the surface is sending the shrink-ray wave-thing up to the ship. He tries to set a dial to do so, but the arm on the face of it swings around and knocks him off the console, breaking his leg. Despite the fact that everyone else was on other consoles on the other side of the bridge, they manage to dash to his side by the next frame.

So they splint Sulu's leg, and even though we get more time issues, we also get more logical problems that stem from being tiny: they help Sulu to the lift to get him to sick bay, but are now too small to be detected by the sensor that opens the lift doors. We'll ignore the fact that they probably would've wasted most of their remaining 32 minutes getting Sulu across the bridge. Also, the fact that gripping the handles inside the lift makes it go, and there's no way for them to have been able to climb the smooth, rounded walls to activate them.While we're at it, let's excuse the fact that they somehow had to climb onto the medical exam table with an injured man. Let's just skip straight to the part where Christine suggests that the best way to heal Sulu's leg is to use the bone knitter that's designed to be used on the middle ear.

Yes! Yes, yes! A regular bone knitter would probably be too big, but one designed for precision... awesome. Also, it was suggested by Christine, who is hella smart, but who only gets lines like "Yes, doctor" and "Right away, doctor." Two points, Star Trek!

She volunteers to get it, and while there isn't enough time for her to climb down, cross the floor, and climb another piece of furniture, we do see her making a bit of a journey amongst unidentified large objects. She grabs a thing that looks like a washer, but on her way back, she trips and falls into the fish tank.

Lots of dramatic music, and Christine yelling for help, despite the fact that she's at the bottom of a fish tank and her mouth is full of water. Hero Kirk somehow makes the journey to her in a split-second, and he tosses some string into the tank for her to grab ahold of before hauling her out. Miraculously, the laser bone knitter thingy is fine to use, despite taking a dunk in the fish tank. Sulu's leg is fixed.

Spock says that he has completed some calculations, and has determined that they'll probably stop shrinking around one-sixteenth of an inch, which is way too small to be able to run the ship.

Kirk decides that he should beam down to the planet's surface to see if he can stop the shrink-ray wave-thing before they become too small. Spock estimates he has twenty minutes left. I guess I'll go ahead and label that as Disable the Ship, but the timing in this episode is completely out of whack, so does it really matter? Kirk uses a huge comm device to call Scotty and request a team in the transporter room.

Kirk's Log, supplemental: "Rehash on the decision I just made. Beaming to the surface because I really don't have any other ideas right now."

Spock has thrown together a communicator that fits in Kirk's hand, and they ask Scotty to do an automatic beam-back in ten minutes. Spock mentions that the transporter has his original physical composition programmed in, and wonders aloud if it will restore Kirk to normal size when he beams down. Kirk is not certain. Scotty has a whole team of guys working the controls on the transporter panel, and they pull as one on the buttons to beam Kirk to the surface.

The hunch that Spock suggested was correct, and Kirk beams down full-sized, with a tiny communicator in his hand. I'm gonna be bitchy here and point out that that communicator should be much, much smaller.

Kirk calls the E and tells Spock that he was right about the transporter keeping his height and everything on file, then he gets a good look around. Shrink-ray beams, outcroppings of crystals, and exploding volcanoes. Spock lets him know that the shrink-ray wave-thing has stopped bombarding the E. There's an earthquake as a nearby volcano explodes, and Kirk is thrown backward. His comm device is eaten by lava, because of course it is. It's a bit of lame danger, though, as the transporter is set to bring him back in ten minutes. He didn't actually need it.

He runs toward the shrink-ray beams, and what the holy hell? A tiny city!

A few moments later, the automatic beam-back goes off, and Kirk returns to the E, full-sized. No one is in the transporter room. He ventures up to the bridge. Empty as well. Then he spots Scotty and three Reds on the floor near the helm. Scotty yells at him not to talk so loudly. Hmmm, points for noticing that a full-sized person would be exceptionally loud to someone with ears that tiny, but points off for not realizing that those Reds could not speak loudly enough to be heard by Kirk unaided.

Scotty yells up to Kirk that everyone is fine, but the bridge crew were transported off the ship a few minutes ago. Kirk sits at communications and tries to contact the tiny city. He's pretty pissed off that his bridge crew were taken, so he issues a threat: return his crew members, or be phasered off the surface of the planet. As a demonstration of his awesome powers, he disintegrates a crystal near the city.

The viewscreen turns on, revealing a dude and a bunch of other people. "Hey," says the dude. "I'm in charge of the Terratin people. Don't phaser me, bro. We have dilithium here for you. Sorry about the mess we made of your ship. We tried talking to you, but our communications are damaged, so we used our shrink-ray thing on you, hoping that you'd get our message. Our planet is dying."

"Yeah, that's awesome," says Kirk, waving them off. "Where are my people?"

"It's all good," says Arax, appearing on the screen. "The Terratins beamed us down. We're here in the city."

"So the Terratins are this lost Earth colony," exposits Spock from the surface. "Terrans called this planet Terra Ten, which is how that name came about. Their ancestors settled this planet, but the shrink-rays occur here naturally, and they were shrunk down to one-sixteenth of an inch high. Now it's just a genetic trait. That means that when Terrans swung by later to check in, they couldn't find the Terratins."

"We kind of screwed here," says the guy in charge. "The planet is dying, and we had no other means of contact. We're hoping you can help us out."

"Yeah, well, you screwed me," says Kirk. "You shrunk my guys, screwed up my fuel, then you kidnapped my bridge crew."

"It's cool, be cool," says the Terratin dude. "I'll send up your people with dilithium. When everything is good, will you help us then?"

So the bridge crew beams back on board with some crystals, and Kirk orders the remaining crew to beam down to the surface and back again in groups, to restore them to regular size.

Downstairs, the ground is cracking all around the city. The guy in charge asks the final batch of crew shrunken members if they will ask Kirk if he's going to save them or not.

Ex-squeeze me? Kirk has been using their transporters to make his crew right size again, and he hasn't even given the Terratins a straight answer as to whether or not he'll save their entire society, or even any of it at all? Damn, that's pretty douchey. I know he's pissed off, but shit, dude.

Up on the bridge, Kirk has the helm set course for Starbase 23, which instructions to get them the hell out of there.

"Um, hello?" asks Spock. "Tiny people on the surface, depending on our kindness? Hello?"

"Phaser the city," Kirk tells Sulu.

So we see phaser fire going off around the area surrounding the city, then it disappears, and reappears on the transporter pad. Kirk and Spock have miraculously made it down to the transporter room by the next frame, and Spock has had time to set up a macroscope.

Kirk uses the macroscope to tell the Terratins that they have a new planet picked out for them, ten days away.

"Cool, thanks," says the guy in charge. "We'd like to name your crew members honorary Terratins for helping us."

"We came pretty close to it being permanent rather than temporary," notes Spock.

"Yeah," says Kirk. "About..."

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

"...one-sixteenth of an inch close."

Ba dum tissssss.

Kirk's Log, supplemental: "Random rehash of everything that was just said in the previous scene, because the episode was a few seconds short."

This episode was kind of boring, to be honest. Normally, I enjoy a good miniaturization story line, but this was not terribly interesting. The good parts of those kinds of stories generally come from seeing the characters very tiny amongst things that are supposedly normal-sized. And frankly, an animated series is perfect for this kind of story, because no new sets need to be built. They can actually use background shots and stock footage from other episodes, then add the tiny characters on top. The thing is, part of the style of Star Trek is to do a lot of close-up shots, most likely in order to hide the fact that their budget was microscopic, and they were forced to phone it in on more complicated shots. So even though what you want to see in this episode is tiny Kirk against a backdrop of huge furniture, you're not going to get as much of that as you'd like.

Tiny Christine walks among the supplies on the shelf. What those
supplies are, we never learn. They only appear as giant orange columns.

Kirk in his chair at a half-way point.

The most interesting part of this episode came near the end, when we find out about the Terratins and their plight. I was really more interested in that story than the "how do we cope with this shrinking thing?" scenario. So out of a twenty-five minute show, I got about twenty minutes of "why are we shrinking?" and five of "this is why, and also lost colony of tiny people, and please relocate us." It was kind of along the lines of "bored, bored, bored, oh cool! Wait, it's over." Maybe it's the amateur archaeologist in me, but when Star Trek gives me an ancient civilization and then forces me to walk away immediately, I get annoyed.

"Hey! I was enjoying that! No, don't roll the credits - tell me more!"

Also, did anyone else notice a weird plot hole with the transporters? Maybe we were meant to fill in the blanks ourselves, or maybe it was explained in some earlier draft of the script and then eliminated, but when Kirk beams down to the surface, the transporter automatically corrects for his size, and beams him there at normal height, right? Not so for the bridge crew. The Terratins beamed them from the E into their city, at that one-sixteenth height. Are we supposed to fill in the blank, and assume that they had adjusted for the height differences ahead of time? And assuming that this was the case, what about all of the other crew members? They would have to be beamed from the E's transporter room onto the Terratin transporter pads rather than allowing the E's transporter chiefs to do it. Kirk set a whole crew in the transporter rooms once the bridge crew returned, so were they just there to supervise? What's more, it would have taken a chunk of time to restore the full crew to size. A complement of 430 crew members, around four transporter rooms with six pads in each room... that's 18 groups of people passing through the transporters, not once, but twice, and with dilithium in tow on the return trip. Seems like they should have run out of dilithium, time or both.

Lots of science this week, but with an extra dose of fiction to round it out.

Bratty discovers the joys of the heating pad.

ST:TAS Season One, Episode Four: The Lorelei Signal

"The Lorelei Signal"
Air Order: 4
Star Date: 5483.7
Original Air Date: September 29, 1973

Kirk's Log 5483.7: "Going into an unexplored area of space. Over the last 150 years, A bunch of starships have disappeared here over the last 150 years, like once every 27 years or so. That won't happen to us, though, because I'm Kirk, and this is the Enterprise."

"We have twenty seconds left until something happens, and we fall off the map," says Spock.
"Okay," says Kirk. "Let's do yellow alert."
Spock counts down, and when he gets to one, Uhura reports a sub-space radio message that's actually just one long tone when played through the PA. We get some shots of the tone emanating through the speakers all over the ship, which makes me wonder: when they put subspace messages on "speakerphone," does it always broadcast through the ship like that? I thought it was only on the bridge. If they put Kor or Kang from the Klingon Empire on the viewscreen, can people in engineering eavesdrop in on the conversation?

Spock reports that they are being scanned from a star system twenty light years from their position.

"Damn, that's a long probe," says Kirk.

The guys on the bridge all think the sound resembles a summons.

Uhura says it doesn't sound like a summons to her. Kirk kind of waves her off.

They dutifully turn the ship in the direction of the signal.

Uhura pages Christine to the bridge. "All of the guys are acting weird."

They're all just kind of standing on the bridge, staring off into actual space, and acting... I dunno, super-high? Spock says that the sound reminds him of Vulcan mating drums. They show some transparent girl playing a drum over animation of Spock's face. And they use that wavy "viewing things underwater" filter-special effect thing on her, like it's a mirage or something.

He says he's hallucinating. Kirk says the same, and a wavy girl appears over a shot of him as well.

"Um, what are you guys on?" asks Uhura. "Cuz we sure as shit don't see anything."

Kirk asks Uhura to call Bones, but Bones doesn't answer because he also appears to be sitting in his office, high as a kite, muttering about magnolias in bloom.

There's some wavy-filter animation, and a planet appears on the viewscreen ahead of them.

A quick fangirl moment here: there's this animation technique that I've seen them use a few times before, using this red-orange planet. They watercolored the planet surface in vertical striations, then moved the watercolored paper behind the black background, through an unpainted circle. The striations moving across the open circle make it appear as though the planet is rotating. It's so ridiculously cool I think I made a squeaky noise the first time I saw it.

Scotty's Log 5483.8: "So we're in orbit over the second planet in the Taurean system, and it looks like there was once a really cool civilization here. We got some weird readings, so Kirk and them are checking it out. In other news, I'm hallucinating some chick's face in a flower. She's pretty hot."

So while all the guys are busy in bonerland, Uhura and Christine are checking out the sensor scans. Apparently, what Spock reported to Kirk is not what is showing up on the screens.

On the surface, Kirk is hanging out with Spock, Bones, and some random Red named Carver.

"Hey," says Spock, taking a scan, "my beeping box says our troubles may increase if we go into that building, where there are life-forms. We should not do the thing."

"Man, screw you," says Kirk. "There's non-dangerous poontang in that building. We are so doing the thing."

So of course they do the thing.

They get inside, and we learn that this is the much-touted "Star Trek meets She-Ra, Princess of Power" episode. (Fun fact: Filmation did the anmation for She-Ra as well. Color me surprised.) The head chick is named Theela, and because we have only two female cast members on this show, all of the women are voiced by Majel Barrett. I'm having flashbacks of that scene in Austin Powers with the fembots. Everyone is blonde, everyone has the same voice, they must all be the same girl, duplicated over and over again.

The girl behind Theela's left shoulder seems to have a disease that
afflicts female cartoon and graphic novel characters. It's called
"There's Not Enough Room In My Torso For Actual Organs."
Amazingly, it is not fatal.

So Theela greets all of the guys by name except for Carver (rude), and Spock scans them (rude) and reports that their physiology is different (also rude - they're standing right there!), and that they have some kind of psychokinesis as part of their body function.

"First time I've ever admired a body function," quips Bones. Rude.

Kirk asks Theela how he knew their names, and she says that the "opto-aud" told them (I'm guessing that means optical-audio, because it's basically a freaking closed-circuit tv). Then she turns to this thing that looks like the Guardian of Forever, and she makes a humming noise at it, and it turns on and shows them the E bridge, with Scotty sitting in the captain's chair.

Spock admires the fact that the opto-aud opens with a tonal lock.

Theela says they have lots of things to discuss, and that they are having a feast in honor of their new visitors.

And because we can't have a commercial break without dramatic music, they play some right after Theela says she is going to feed them. Are we assuming the food has been poisoned? Or did Theela just admit that she's a shitty cook?

Kirk's Log 5..4..8..3 point...9?: "I'm pretty baked, and so are my friends, but these chicks are super bangable, so who cares? You know what would be fun? We should take them to Amsterdam."

Everyone is enjoying themselves at the feast when Bones asks where all the dudes are at this taco fest. Theela says they're somewhere else.

"That makes sense," reasons Kirk, in that same voice that your best guy friend uses when he's trying to justify his girlfriend's crazy level against her hotness level.

One girl tosses to Spock what appears to be a huge ruby. When he stands up to catch it, he collapses. The rest of our boys try to help him, but end up collapsing themselves.

"You should go to the rest chambers and sleep," suggests Theela.

Our boys are dragged off to sleep, and Theela lets one single tear slip, because this show hates me.

A little later, Bones and Spock stumble into Kirk's resting chamber. They are now both wearing fashionable tiaras, and they've aged considerably. Kirk wakes up, sees them, realizes without a mirror that he is now also much older, and cringes.

Upstairs, Uhura and Christine have correctly identified that males are of little use at this point, and they've been investigating this weird-ass planet and inhabitants using an all-female science team. Because Majel is doing all of the voices for the females on the planet, Nichelle has taken all of the voices for the female crew members, as well as the voice of the computer. Nichelle actually does a pretty good job, changing her voice and accents slightly to make it seem like a much bigger cast was involved.

Anyway, the computer says that the probe that the planet launched at the ship affects the males onboard in such a way that they will eventually lose all energy and die.

Uhura calls for Security Red Davison, and tells her that she wants all-female crews of Security Reds at each transporter, and that no one is to be allowed to transport down.

"The hell?" asks Christine.

"Yeah, I'm taking over the ship," says Uhura.

YAY! About freaking time! When Kirk comes back, can we just stick him in engineering, or something?

Down in the throne room, Theela is sitting on her skinny ass while our boys tell her that they must leave and go back to the ship.

"You can't go," she replies. "We need you here. Pretty soon, all of the men on your ship will come to us."

"Naw... we have to go," mumbles Kirk.

"Obstruct them!" yells Theela. (No, really. She says "obstruct.")

And a bunch of girls come forward and literally toss our boys into a heap in the corner.

The next scene is awesome. It's just the E slowly, slooooowly drifting across the screen, while Scotty sings drunkenly in Gaelic. Seriously, if you're going to watch this episode for anything, watch it for this scene. You won't be disappointed.

When we actually go to the bridge, Uhura informs Scotty that she's relieving him of duty and taking over. She promptly records an acting captains log that says she's taking over because Scotty is off his rocker.

He responds with "Very thoughtful of you, love."

She then puts Christine in charge of sick bay. Lt Uhura: kickin' ass and takin' names.

So for whatever reason, the Majel clones have allowed Bones to keep his med kit, and he gives the away team all shots of some strong stimulant. I have no idea where any of the women have gone, or why they left the boys alone, but it happened, so now the boys are going to shoot themselves up. They manage to escape out the front doors, but not before Theela discovers them leaving.

Everyone runs out into the garden, and Kirk suggests that they hide in a giant urn that looks like a fancy termite mound.

Once they're hidden, the women search that part of the garden, and the tiaras on the boys glow yellow. When the women leave to search elsewhere, the glowing stops.

"Y'all, I have a theory," says Spock. "The tiaras are how the women sap our life energy. They are taking it for themselves. So they get stronger in our presence, as we get weaker. Remember how, when we first met them, they were kind of listless?"

No dude, because they were never animated that way. They're been the same, start to finish. Sure, Theela shouts a little more enthusiastically now, but there was no reason for her to shout earlier, so you can't reasonably say that she is no longer acting in a listless manner.

Anyway, we're just going to have to buy whatever it is that Spock is selling, because without that, the rest of the episode doesn't make sense.

He predicts that they're aging about ten years per day, and Bones exclaims that they'll be dead in four. So then Kirk jumps in to say that the women will need to replenish their supply of dudes with the rest of the men on the Enterprise. Spock finishes the conversation by volunteering to get the comms, because he, as a Vulcan, has a longer life and more strength. Kirk agrees to let him go with the most pronounced nod ever animated.

Back inside the castle-thing, Spock realizes that he has no clue where to look for the comms, so he decides to ask the opto-aud. He closes his eyes, and they use Christine's earlier voice work to make the sound that turns it on. How do I know they used Christine's voice? Because Leonard Nimoy's voice is too deep to make that sound.

He asks the opto-thingy where the comms are, and it shows him that they are inside the ottoman at the base of the throne. Spock crawls up the stairs, procures the equipment, and calls the E.

"Enterprise," answers Uhura. "Captain Badass speaking."

"Need...rescue team," Spock struggles. "All-female..."

He collapses on the dais, repeating the words "all-female" over and over, while the blonde bitches surround him.

Because she's classy like that, Uhura continues to put together an all-female rescue team, rather than answer "Took you long enough to figure it out, Ear Boy."

The away team beams down, mostly female security officers (have we actually seen any female security Reds before?), and oops, some painter has reassigned Christine to Ops. There's a brief catfight moment where Theela welcomes them to the still-nameless planet, then instructs them to GTFO.

"Yeah, no," says Uhura. "Those are not the hell your boys."

Theela points at the away team like she's directing her bitches to seize them or something, but the away team just stuns their asses. Then Uhura orders the team to split into groups of two and conduct a search.

In a resting chamber, Spock senses or hears the away team or something, and he decides to call to Christine telepathically.

Hold up: can he do that? I mean, I know the dude is an alien, but you can't assign every super power to him and just explain it away as him being Vulcan. I've never seen him communicate telepathically before last week, and then he had made some sort of by-proxy mind-meld thing with a cloud. Here, he's just calling out to another crew member. I mean, I guess it's canon now, but it's awfully convenient when you make something mildly impossible into canon, just to solve a minor problem like, "Where are you?" This is why Lady Archon prefers comm badges to communication devices - she could have tapped her comm badge and been "Christine to Spock" and he would have been like "Yo, I'm in the rest chamber to your right." Okay, I know that that means that any hostile can just snatch the comm badge off your chest, and you'd be in the same pickle, but as we've seen, not everyone is smart enough to realize that it's a comm badge and not just some brooch, and those communication devices are very obviously tools. But it's a hell of a lot better than saying, "Let's just make him telepathically tell her where he is."

Anyway, he calls out "Miss Chapel" and she tells Uhura that Spock is calling to her, and then he calls her Christine, which is pretty forward for a Vulcan, especially when he rarely ever calls his best friend by his first name, either.

She figures out when he's calling to her from (how, I wonder?), and realizes that she's standing right next to a panel in the wall, which, when opened, reveals Spock laying on the bed.

SHE HAS A RED SLEEVE NOW? WHO THE HELL IS QUALITY-
CHECKING THIS SHOW?!

They run in to him, and something has happened to make him age like Yoda.

Seriously. he wasn't that old when they caught him on the dais a few minutes ago, and if he looks like that now, what must the guys in the urn look like?

It starts raining outside, because of course it does. The men being kind of incapacitated didn't make enough of a difference, because there are enough women crew members to run the ship without them. Girls in Charge is not an adequate Disable the Ship sub-plot. (Thank Zod for that, I would have had to punch somebody if it was.) So the away team drowning in an urn in the garden is our new Disable the Ship for this episode.

Unable to locate the rest of the away team, they transport Spock up to sick bay. There, Christine removes his tiara, and he tells her raspily that a female engineer needs to divert all energy to the shields to block out the signal. She protests that they had tried that, but he reiterates that it must be all power, and not just a lot.

Downstairs, Uhura is tired of Theela's shit. She uses a phaser to disintegrate a vase, then pretty much tells Theela that she's gonna bust up the place if she doesn't get some answers. Seeing she's at a loss, Theela opens the opto-aud, and gives Uhura the PowerPoint presentation of her people's history.

So Theela's people emigrated to this planet when their own planet died, and things for fine for a hot second, but then the men started getting and dying at a crazy-fast rate. Turns out the planet itself beefed up some gland that the women had, making them stronger and kind of immortal. They have powers to control men's emotions, but it kills the men. Every 27 years or so, they have to get a new supply of fresh men, be it human, Klingon, or Romulan. They're essentially trapped there, unable to die, and unable to procreate.

"Okay, that's nice, but where's my men?" demands Uhura.

They decide to ask the opto-aud, and ignore the fact that they might have done so earlier, when the away team escaped into the garden in the first place. The opto-aud shows the team up to their chests in water.

They run out into the garden and destroy the urn with phasers. I have to wonder why, when the urn was full enough, they didn't just climb out. I mean, I know they were too weak to climb out because they were old and weak, but nothing was keeping them from floating in that urn. Ah, well. Whatever. Uhura and the very capable away team get the guys out of the urn, and back to the E.

Up in sick bay, Christine and some others try to restore the away team to their original ages, to no avail.

"I think we should try the transporters," rasps Spock. "They hold our original DNA sequencing, and maybe going back through the transporters again, set in a specific way, would reverse this. The odds are pretty much astronomically against us, even though everything we try has never been tested before, is almost guaranteed not to work, but always ends up working anyway."

"Yeah," says Kirk. "Enterprise FTW."

So they beam the boys down to the surface again.

"Beam us up, Scotty," says Kirk, which is actually the closest to that iconic bumper sticker that the show's dialog ever gets. (Nope, Kirk never says, "Beam me up, Scotty." Not in the shows, not in the films.)

This time, with adjustments, Kirk & Co come out as planned.

We're back on the surface again, and it's Uhura who has once again taken charge. Theela destroys this round thing on a pedestal that turns out to be how they were broadcasting that signal. She tells Uhura to let know that they did as they agreed they would do, and Uhura tells them that a ship with an all-female crew will be back to pick them up and take them to another suitable planet. These girls are super-stoked and want to know how quickly they'll go back to being normal. Uhura says that Bones says it'll be a few months.

"Awesome," says Theela. "Immortality seriously blows."

And the E leaves orbit.

So despite some issues, this episode had some good stuff going for it. For one, there was brief discussion about how immortality sucks ass. You've probably seen Highlander or Doctor Who, so you know how it goes: you stay the same, while your loved ones grow old and die, and you're forced to either move on after a while, or rewatch the same dance over and over. As a race of people who like to dream about the impossible, we were forced to face facts that immortality comes with it's own set of issues. Queen is right: who wants to live forever?

But who is this Lorelei chick? The main girl's name was Theela.

Star Trek is getting clever on us again. Lorelei are the name of the sirens in German mythology who lure sailors to their deaths, just like their Greek cousins.

The best part of this episode is that when the chips are down among the men, the females can pick up without blinking, and nobody questions it. Uhura didn't hem and haw and Hamlet like Kirk sometimes does. She picked up a phaser, pushed Scotty out of the captain's chair, and began issuing orders. She took no crap, and got the job done quickly and efficiently. I have no idea how this episode was met critically, being that it was broadcast on Saturday mornings at ten am, but it's cool to think about - a POC female took command of the Enterprise, several years after that Number One debacle. Does it help that this episode was written by a female? Maybe. (Margaret Armen also wrote "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (ugh), "The Paradise Syndrome" (noooooo), and the teleplay for "The Cloud Minders", which was actually pretty good.) What's most awesome is that no one bats an eyelash at Uhura taking charge. She's treated like any other crew member who is next in line for command and takes it.

It's not a huge part of the episode, but I'd like to give a command gold star to the writers for solving a problem with good science fiction rather than the crappy kind. The suggestion of sending them back through the transporter was excellent, because it has already been established that each person who uses the transporter has their original DNA pattern stored in the pattern buffer. There's no magic wand waved, no new machine used that we will never see again, no potion that Bones must pull out of his ass at the last minute, which will make them young and whole again. No, they return to the transporter, set it for their original DNA sequencing, and run them through it again. This is awesome! Science fiction (and Star Trek) had already established that when is transported, one is actually destroyed at the entry point, and then remade again at the destination. Science has established that, too! Good for you, Star Trek.

*******

HOLD THE MOTHERFUCKING COMM BADGE: I think I found a chai that I actually like.

So Roomie (who claims that she does not pilfer things) pilfered some more tea from somewhere, and she brought home these little elongated pyramids with leaf tags that say "Tea Forte." They're actually really cool-looking, and upon further research, I discovered that the founder got himself some learning at RISD. Nice!

The tea itself is spicy, a bit heavy on the cinnamon, but some honey took the bite off it.

You want to know the shitty part? Roomie has not been able to tell me which chai it is. She took the little jacket off the bag, and now I have no idea what I drank. I tried looking it up online, but their website lists like, five thousand chais. So now I might have to Cinderella that shit, trying cup after cup of a blend that I don't normally like, all to find the one that I do.

Blergh.

Anyway, you might want to give these a shot. They seem to make a good-quality product, and the one I tried was really good, despite the fact that I have zero clue as to what it was.

Edit: After some sleuthing and educated guesses, Agent K and I have decided that it probably Winter Chai.

https://www.teaforte.com/

Mass hysteria!