“Albatross”
Air
Date: September 28, 1974
Mom
Title: “McCoy Infected a Planet?”
Considering that the Big
Three tell each other if they’ve heard of a planet before, it’s startling that
Bones doesn’t mention he’d been to Dramia.
Then again, this is a tight lipped outing. The Federation gave Jim absolutely no warning
that they had signed off on an arrest warrant for his chief medical
officer. I smell an ambassador’s
involvement.
Holy Cow! There’s text on a screen in this episode that
doesn’t look like a Polaroid of a book!
Technology advances.
The multiple ship travel
scenes padsout the narrative. That’s a bad sign in the already short Animated
world.
Still, with this crew,
there are always great character moments.
Despite risks to his safety and career, McCoy
answers the call with what we learn is the most important part of his catch
phrase.
“I’m a Doctor.”
Interesting Starfleet
protocol information:
General Order Six states
when all life aboard a ship is dead, it blows up.
Man, does every General
Order have to do with death or destruction?
With all the derelict sister ships the Enterprise has met on her
journeys, this must be more of a guideline.
“How
Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth:
Air
Date: November 5, 1974
Mom
Title: “Museum of Destroyed Civilizations”
It’s an alien with a
green glow that used to be an earth god with a giant ship and advanced probes. To borrow from Richar Pryor, “Get him, he’s
all of them!”
Yet another old, lonely Andromedan
posing as a deity promises a safe and content existence in his zoo, waited on
by his machines, if the humans will worship him again.
Kirk fires off one more,
“We don’t need gods” speech.
Considering how much of
this episode is a rehash of old ideas, you’d think they’d have made less
blatant mistakes?
Kukulkan’s existence
explains why ALL cultures have legends of dragons?
I think Walking Bear
isn’t the only confused one.
Perhaps the animators
and writers were too busy going nuts with creatures and locations that could
never be done in live action that they stopped paying attention.
I’m also not entirely
sure how they climbed those smooth obelisks as part of the plan either
My favorite line in this
outing was the excessively Ghostbusters
like: “Listen, we’re being watched.”
However, a close second
is Spock’s jab at his human crewmates learning about yet another alien being
worshipped by, and teaching, their ancestors:
"Vulcan was visited
by alien beings. They left much wiser."
The
Counter Clock Incident
Air
Date: October 12, 1974
Mom
Title: “Crew Gets Younger”
The series signs off
with a giant pile of references, as the Enterprise heads back to Babel. Before it gets there, we see a flower from
Leonard James Akaar’s world, and the supernovas from Gem’s and Zarabeth’s worlds.
There’s an on screen
admission of the “Universal Language” everyone speaks, explaining why most of
the aliens spoke English for the last five seasons.
I wonder if the reverse
aging world of Arret inspired the life cycle of Orkans or at least the Red Dwarf episode “Backwards.”
I realize the short
animated episode air time meant falling back on the transporter regularly to
repair any physical changes was their only option. However, the way they
presented it in this story, not as undoing a change but as reverting to a past
setting, anyone who beams during their life could be de-aged at the push of a
button. HOLY CRAP!
…and that’s the end of
the original crew “boldly going where no man has gone before” on the small
screen.
Luckily for everyone
involved, the success of Star Wars
would push the floundering Phase II series plans in the direction of Motion Pictures.
On the big screen is
where we’d finally see the culmination of the Extra Galactic Energy Being
Invasion plot that ran through three live action and two animated seasons,
without even the writers and cast knowing about it.
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