As those of you who will have read Jackson’s Star Trek review will one day know,¹ this year J.J. Abrams brought us a pretty impressive film. I was even able to rise above my childhood Doctor Who versus Star Trek rivalry to enjoy it. Perfectly paced, funny, exciting, moving.

It’s just out on DVD, Blu-Ray, and iTunes as well. May I caution you as an aside; do not just buy it on iTunes. It’ll cost you $25 there, but for an extra $5 you could get the blu-ray edition which comes with its own digital iTunes copy. Even if you don’t have a blu-ray player, one day you might. Think about it.

Anyhow, that’s not the point, as you may have guessed from the picture up in the top left hand corner.² What people often rightly applaud Star Trek for is its agenda of social progress and togetherness and the triumph of humanity against its base urges. The first inter-racial kiss on television. The first romance between a cyborg and an artificial intelligence.³ So it surprised me somewhat to be watching the scenes deleted from Star Trek and to find a pretty ropey scene between our hero Kirk and an Orion woman. Allow me to paraphrase:

KIRK: I’m really sorry. I realise it looks like I used you shamefully but I won’t actually come out and say that I did. I’m very awkward right now. I’m even a bit reluctant to make eye contact with you but I clearly have on several occasions in this sentence.
…pause…
You’re not Gaila, are you?

For those playing at home, that’s a joke about how all girls with green skin look the same and how Kirk can’t tell them apart. And we’re not talking about girls he’s barely met. We’re talking about girls he’s slept with. Take a moment to think about just how that’d play if, say, Kirk had the same issue but with Uhura and another girl of similar skin colour.

Luckily, it didn’t make it to the film. But not because it was in bad taste — in fact, J.J. and his crew still seem to think it’s really funny. It’s all a bit weird. How tragic that on the same day that I note that anti-robot stereotypes are on the decline, we see once again the ugly face of intergalactic racism. Truly, equal rights in genre movies is an ongoing battle.

1. Patience my children. Remember the parable of the Not Fade Away review.
2. I reserve the right to one day change the layout of this website and not update this sentence.
3. Well, almost-romance. Curse you, Voyager!

The most striking thing about ‘Miri’ is the moment you realise — possibly in the pre-titles sequence — that they’re actually going to do something a little bit different this week. No strangers impersonating members of the crew. No humans becoming super powerful! It’s a brave new world!

Oh, alright, the crew does start acting irrationally later, but it’s not particularly important. More disappointingly, the interesting “we’ve found a copy of Earth” angle isn’t particularly developed. In fact, it isn’t so much as referred to ever again. This is a planet which has exactly the same continents as Earth, and yet no one seems particularly interested in how it came to exist.¹ For people on a mission to seek out new life and civilisations, they’re surprisingly lacking in curiosity. I bet if they invented a time machine, they’d just store it away in the hold and never use it. Ahem.

The real story this week isn’t about parallel Earths, but instead about pandemics and kids growing up. Earthesque, for want of a better word, is a planet devastated by a crazy virus that has left only children alive in its wake. Miri is one of those kids, and she’s about to get the disease — as are Kirk and his team. Will they die before they find a cure? Will Yeoman Rand explain why she’s on the away party? Will the adults be able to cross the generation gap and communicate with a bunch of ratbag kids?

Disturbingly in a story filled with youngsters, it’s becoming apparent that Kirk’s flirtatiousness is getting out of hand. This week, he starts hitting outrageously on a 16 year old. He doesn’t even seem to realise he’s doing it any more. Luckily for him, Miri turns out to be 300 years old and thus totally legal. This sparks a love triangle between Kirk, Miri, and perpetual victim Janice Rand, during which Rand tearfully talks about how she keeps trying to get Kirk to look at her legs, and Miri tries to get her friends to kill the Captain. It’s all very entertaining.

Finally, let’s run down the checklist. Kirk’s shirt does get torn this week, but in a new and exciting way as he rips open his sleeves. The Enterprise crew continue to be varying degrees of incompetent; the usually logical Spock this week displays tremendous negligence, leaving the irrational McCoy alone in a room with a potentially fatal concoction — a concoction which McCoy has just told Spock he wants to try. You’d think the much-vaunted Vulcan logic might have helped him predict what would happen next. Bad Spock. Most disappointingly, a man dies in front of McCoy and Kirk, the doctor examines him, and simply reports: “Dead”. The victim is male. McCoy is talking to Jim. And yet: “Dead”. If I were playing a drinking game, I’d feel cheated.

1. Well, no one except the writers of spin-off novels, including Shatner himself, according to Memory Alpha.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great intellect must be destroyed before he destroys us.

It’s becoming clear that Star Trek is being very gentle with us. We kept the weirdo on the ship for the last two stories, but in the second we made him super-powerful. This week we’re on a different planet, but to keep us comfortable, the crew are still dealing with super powerful weirdoes. Specifically, it’s one of Kirk’s oldest friends, a low-level telepath called Gary Mitchell, who gets his brain expanded and gets to stare into space for large stretches of time.

Happily, there’s another weirdo, who manages to be both female and not quite a victim simultaneously. Elizabeth Dehner is pretty exciting stuff for Star Trek — she’s clever, in control (well, initially), and even gets to wear pants.¹ Meanwhile, both her not particularly sneaky rescue of Mr Loonie and her ultimate competence once again highlights just how useless the crew of this ship seem to be.

I’ll give Spock props for being right about killing the genius from the get-go, even if it does seem like it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.² But then they all seem happy to leave the only other psychic exposed to the whosawhatsit in charge of guarding the one they’re currently terrified of. In fact, despite Dehner having clearly been exposed to the same stuff as Mitchell, no one seems to give a shit about her. Their sexism may have been amusing previously, but now it comes close to getting them all killed.

Despite this, the story’s undoubtedly the most involving so far. Part of this is the heightened action; Kirk gets all heroic and refuses help as he attempts to sneak up on his omnipotent friend. Oddly for such a seemingly stupid plan, he’s successful; or at least, he manages not to fail before someone else helps him. Crucially, he gets to show off his manly chest for the second week in a row when his shirt gets torn during the battle. Let us not forget Sun Tsu’s wise words: “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected, remove your clothes whenever you can feasibly do so.”

1. Actually, all the girls wear pants this week, and apparently it’s because this story was made first. It would seem that the network was offered copious displays of space-legs to lull them into ordering a whole series.
2. The crew continue to act oddly surprised every time he acts typically Vulcan. McCoy might as well keep on saying “My god, you’ve still got pointy ears!”

How do you follow up a classic “weirdo wanders the regular sets, spooking the main characters” episode like ‘The Man Trap’? Clearly, you don’t want to alienate the viewers. Star Trek wisely chose to continue the theme by inviting yet another loopy creature prone to staring anxiously into space on board.

Charlie is a peculiar young boy, the sole survivor of a spaceship crash, left to his own devices for 14 years. His awkward attempts to fit in on the Enterprise at first seem to be typical adolescent mishaps, but it becomes apparent that he’s got bigger issues than talking to girls and sucking at chess — he seems to be turning into some kind of god…

The idea of a moody teenager with absolute power over everything and everyone around him may seem quite scary to you, but that may only be because you’ve never seen Captain Kirk walking about in the tightest of tight red leggings.¹ When Kirk isn’t showing off his visible panty line to young boys, he’s giving young Charlie awkward advice about human relationships. These scenes — and the ones in which McCoy forces Kirk into acting as role model in the first place — are probably the best of the story, along with the surprisingly unheroic ending.²

A lot of the episode though is as awkward and peculiar as Charlie himself. There’s a rather unexpected musical number from Uhura and Spock. There’s a set of apparently rational crew members who don’t object to Charlie’s clearly impossible magic tricks. The crew are relieved when the not-in-fact-dead Janice reappears at the end, but no one seems interested in checking that Chuckling Sam from the gym has managed to recorporealise. Meanwhile, we actually have girls getting to wear pants this week, but in an effort to balance the universal scale of fashion victims, the ear-mounted receiver used by Spock is a giant freaking antenna that sticks horizontally out of his ear.

Things are a little faster paced and a little funnier this episode, which is nice, and Kirk, Bones and Spock get to discuss something a little more interesting that the Monster Who Came For Your Salt. Perhaps the next episode will depart a little from this weirdo theme…

1. The original Captain Tightpants, if you will.
2. I didn’t immediately think “sequel!” when I watched this story, but apparently a whole bunch of Star Trek alumni did.

A brief explanation. I was in JB Hi-Fi the other day, and what should I find but remastered, blu-ray editions of Star Trek‘s original series. Having never seen them before, my curiosity got the better of me. And here we are.

It’s stardate 1531.1, and the Enterprise is visiting a tiny scientific outpost to check on the health of the two scientists living there. They arrive to find Dr McCoy’s ex-girlfriend Nancy has a strange propensity for looking like different women. It’s only after they let her wander about the Enterprise that they connect her to the peculiar salt-draining deaths that have been happening since they arrived. Nice work, guys.

At first, ‘The Man Trap’ almost feels like it’s going to be the ‘sex’ episode. Nancy appears to McCoy exactly as he remembers her at 25, and to another crew member (who by all rights should have been wearing a red shirt) as a cute girl he met on some other planet. But then, for some reason to Kirk she looks exactly like she does to her new husband, Professor Crater.¹ If you’re going around seducing spacemen, why skip Kirk? I’d take offence if I were Jim. It seems an odd episode to start with; unsurprisingly, it wasn’t actually made first, or supposed to be shown first. Some things never change.

I was expecting Star Trek to be a bit faster paced than Doctor Who of the same time, simply because they didn’t have serial episodes. I was wrong, it seems. About a quarter of the running time of this story is spent watching our peculiar, silent threat wander about the corridors of the enterprise, pressing its finger to its mouth in over-the-top concern, and unsettling some of the least interesting crew members. Nancy the shapeshifter wants salt, but while she’s unwilling to steal salt-shakers from people, she quickly decides that she can get away with the occasional murder. These developments are followed up with some bizarre violence from Mr Spock, and long, arduous close-ups on the drugged Dr McCoy, as he has to struggle to make sense of the ridiculous plot unfolding before him, and work out which crazy person to shoot.

Just one more curiosity to note before I wrap up.² Janice, one of the Enterprise’s Yeomen, was eating from a tray whilst standing around in a corridor. How odd, I thought. Perhaps ‘stable tables’ had just been invented in 1966, and George Clayton Johnson was merely using science fiction to explore the infinite possibilities they seemed to offer? In fact, it turns out that the tray isn’t for her; in the future, the female crew will bring food on trays for their male co-workers, when they’re not getting bored of their job and trying to flirt with the first officer. I have a feeling that a large part of the joy and horror of watching Star Trek will come from games of ‘spot the sexism’. This sort of thing will date any TV show, but Trek‘s far future setting makes it especially unfortunate. I live in desperate hope that in a future episode we’ll meet a male Yeoman.

‘The Man Trap’ is weird, and slow, but one thing is apparent right from the start: even if all else fails, William Shatner is worth watching. I’m developing a theory that he’s America’s Tom Baker.³

1. Disappointingly, Crater is not an expert on meteorites.
2. I don’t want the reviews to get too long, or I’ll never get through the whole thing.
3. This theory may not stand up to scrutiny. Don’t push it too hard.