Really, it was. In a good way. Well, it reminded me vaguely of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies, anyways - is that good?
The Enterprise happens upon a planet that is a nearly exact replica of Earth. "Contemporary" Earth in quote-marks as large as the skies, since it's Earth in the '60s. This is amusing, because Star Trek is, mostly, timeless. It's the far future, and so it looks like the far future was supposed to look in the '60s, which is very close to what the far future looks like in the '00s. But the desolated post-apocalyptic Main Street that features in this episode looks like... the '60s. In the '60s, it would have looked like "today" but watching it now, it looks like twenty years before I was born. Kind of a neat mental weirdness.
Anyways, right, it's like Earth, and it's broadcasting a distress signal. Kirk, Bones, Spock, Blonde-Yeoman (is she someone I should know? She's in a ton of these early eps, so far, but I don't even know her name), and two nameless security guys teleport down. They note that the place looks like '60s Earth, then a wild blue-skinned creepy guy attacks them for no reason, after they mess with a rusted tricycle embedded in the wreckage.
Interesting thing: Despite the fact that everyone is armed with a phaser, they don't 'stun' the guy with a phaser, they beat the fuck out of him. To the point that Spock and Kirk hold him and punch him until he falls down. After Kirk had already beaten him to the ground a couple of times. That struck me as bizarre, considering how humane the Federation is in its current incarnations. I get that sometimes, you have to react instantly, but this is one guy, who is way less coordinated than the SIX guys beating him to a pulp. Seemed weird.
After they knock him to the ground that last time, he dies, and they're all "Shit, why did he die?" which is fair because, while they ganged up on him and punched him a lot, I'm pretty sure most people would have survived that. It turns out, there was some weird accident with an anti-aging vaccine a few centuries ago, and outside of poor-beaten-up-guy, there's no one left but some tricentenarian children.
Good episode. Though I may just be giving it too much credit because, at this point, any episode that isn't overtly ironically referencing the Iron Curtain and dissing feminism is something unique. Anyways, I enjoyed it. It was good, solid, hard sci-fi in that, while its scientific basis may not have been all that sound, it had a crux and it went with it, and it all got worked out in the end.
Random stats: 22 ounces of Legend Brown Ale, 1 Blue Moon, 2 Amstel Lights, and six Natural Lights, because I was at a killer show (Billy Joe Shaver was awesome! and Horsehead was, as always, pretty awesome...), 1 line sampled, 1 ridiculously old looking "child", 2 chicks who really want to bang some Captain Kirk, and I'm infinitely too late awake.
No comments:
Post a Comment