Season 1 Episode 18 ('The Squire of Gothos')

The title to this one sounds very Shakespearean. I meant to look it up and see if it was, but I never got around to that, and now I've started writing this, so I guess I will just leave it, for now.

I begin to tire of superior beings with 'technology so advanced it is indistinguishable from magic' or whatever that Arthur C. Clarke quote is. This is yet another of those episodes. I grumble a lot about the show repeating itself; maybe I'm being too hard on it. But these races of super-beings just seem so indistinguishable from one another. I guess it's sort of like the whole problem with trying to understand god's motives, to jesus-loving folks. If we are as ants, then we can't really see the differences between the beings who are as humans to us and the beings who are as apes to us, and the beings who are the little green men from Mars Attacks! to us. They're all just really big things that occasionally step on us.

That might work for religious people, but I think it falls apart for me, especially when it comes to TV shows, because they're written by people who are as people to us. So, upon further reflection in this silly digression, I declare it to just be lazy writing on the part of the Star Trek guys.

Anyways, the episode: The Enterprise finds a planet where none should be and - for once - declining to investigate, cranks up their sensors to pick up data while they fly by it, and heads off to do their important delivery mission (jesus, people complain about MMO fetch-quests - do they realize that that is apparently 90% of the genre-fiction that most MMOs are based on? What is the Lord of the Rings but one long delivery mission, I ask you?). Sadly, they find themselves unable to do so, because before Tsulu can plot their course away from the planet, he disappears. Then Kirk runs over to where he was, and he disappears too. Damned annoying, that.

Spock sends Bones (after declining to go himself, or let Scott go, because they are indispensable, which is pretty catty to Bones, really) and a presumably-senior security-person I was unfamiliar with down to the planet to investigate, which leads to a number of surprises, starting with the climate and culminating in a Napoleonic-era castle-type-thing furnished to the nines.

You could probably guess from the intro: it turns out that castle is populated by a dude who's totally super-powered and moreover, kinda megalomaniacal as so many of these superior beings are wont to be. The progression of the plot is fun, so I won't spoil it or anything, and it was basically a pretty decent episode, but it ends with a silly sci-fi cliche where painful-interactions-with-stupefyingly-powerful-races are concerned. All in all, a jolly good romp, but just a bit too old-hat to really be all that fun.

Random statistics: Three shots of Jim Beam Black, which contrary to popular opinion, I do not find to be superior to Jim Beam Normal, and not much else because I'm trying to do some other shit before I go to bed.