by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek has occasionally been dabbling in New Wave-style science fiction in the third season, but what we got last week was an episode based on solid traditional SF concepts. But if you're going to write a hard-SF story, you need to make sure the science backs it up. When the story you write isn’t even internally consistent—when it doesn’t play by its own rules—it’s not good storytelling and it’s not good SF.

The story opens with Kirk and a team investigating a distress signal. Strangely enough, even when they stand right where the signal is coming from, there’s no sign of the distressed parties. Even more strangely, one of the team vanishes before their eyes after sampling the local water.

A victim of post-production editing…

After they return to the ship, the Enterprise suffers a series of mysterious malfunctions, each corrected almost immediately, but nevertheless concerning. This sequence isn’t bad, as it builds the mystery of what’s going on. By the time Captain Kirk concludes, “Something has invaded the ship,” we are fully ready to agree. When Kirk and Spock discover that an alien device has been connected to the ship’s life support system, they have tangible proof of the invasion, though they cannot touch, disconnect, or destroy the device.

"Have these been put in all of the restrooms, Spock?"

Kirk returns to the bridge. He touches his mouth as though puzzled, and when he isn’t looking, his coffee bubbles for a moment. He takes a sip and everything and everyone around him seems to slow to a stop. Suddenly he’s on the bridge with a bunch of statues—and a beautiful woman who wasn’t there before.

"Again with the kissing!"

This is where the episode begins to fall apart. Deela, the woman, explains to Kirk that he’s been ‘accelerated’. She and her fellow Scalosians were exposed to a substance that caused them to live at a speeded up rate relative to humans. They’re so fast that humans can’t see them at all, and can only perceive them as an insect-like buzzing.

Kirk tries to shoot her with a phaser and she casually steps out of the way of the slow-moving beam. Wait, don’t phaser beams move at the speed of light? Does this mean that she’s moving faster than the speed of light? There are quite a few reasons that shouldn’t and can’t work. For one, the Scalosians wouldn’t be perceptible as a high-pitched whine. Wouldn’t they be followed by sonic booms everywhere they moved? How would they even touch anything without crushing it?

Well, let’s set that aside. Maybe phaser beams don’t actually travel at the speed of light. Maybe they fire some glowing plasma substance.

"Missed me! Now you have to kiss me!"

Moving on, Deela tells Kirk that he will soon grow docile and happy with the situation. When they encounter the missing crewman, Compton, this appears to be true. Compton declares that Kirk is no longer his commander and that he’s working for the Scalosians now.

"That's mutiny, Mister!" "Yes sir.  It is."  "NOT ON MY SHIP!"

This effect of the acceleration is never explained. Perhaps rather than docile and accepting, the people who have been captured and enslaved become hopeless and filled with despair. Not only are those who’ve been accelerated prone to die after the slightest injury—as we see when Compton dies and his body ages rapidly—but after being held by the Scalosians for a time they would realize that their friends and family must be aging and dying without them.

But no such poignant explanation is forthcoming.

Instead Deela details a horrific plan that will turn Captain Kirk into breeding stock and keep the rest of the crew of the Enterprise in suspended animation until such time as they will be used as breeding stock as well (at least, the men will. It’s not clear what will happen to the female crewmembers).

As all this is going on, the crew begin working to discover what happened to Captain Kirk, correctly deducing that it had something to do with the coffee he drank.

"Some sort of Benzedrine derivative is indicated…"

Kirk manages to leave an explanatory message tape in the medical lab. Then, stalling for time, he sabotages the transporter and seduces Deela (or perhaps more accurately, agrees to be seduced by her). To show the passage of time and, er, other activities, Kirk is shown pulling his boots on afterward. Quite suggestive for television!

"Sure glad to get that rock out of my shoe!"

Meanwhile Spock figures out what the ‘whine’ they keep hearing is by speeding up the message tape of the distress call until the images are a blur and the sound nothing but a high-pitched buzz. McCoy discovers Kirk’s message tape and brings it to the bridge where the bridge crew watch it together.

Rael, Deela’s subordinate, finds her with Kirk and takes a swing at the captain. Deela stuns him before he can hurt Kirk. Up until this point her behavior has come across as childish, but she delivers the next lines with a maturity and a gravity that earn the episode a whole extra star from me:

I don't care what your feelings are. I don't want to know that aspect of it. What I do is necessary, and you have no right to question it. Allow me the dignity of liking the man I select.

"And grow up, or I'll shoot you again."

After Rael leaves, Kirk pretends to be docile, then manages to steal Deela’s weapon.

In the lab, Spock and McCoy have apparently been working together amicably to craft a ‘cure’ for the acceleration—something Deela claimed was impossible. (Maybe she was lying? McCoy had to have come up with it incredibly quickly given the time scale of this episode.) Once Spock is relatively sure the cure will work, he drinks the Scalosian water and accelerates himself.

Kirk and Spock encounter each other on the way to the Life Support section of the ship. It’s a nice moment, as neither of them seem surprised. Together they destroy the unit that would have turned the Enterprise into a giant deep freeze. Then they send the Scalosians back to their planet, presumably soon to die out as a race, or at least, so Deela thinks. Once the invaders are safely off the ship, Kirk drinks the ‘cure’, which fortunately works. Spock stays accelerated a little longer in order to effect repairs and fix all the things the Scalosians changed. The bridge crew reacts with startlement and awe as their equipment almost seems to magically repair itself.

"Did Spock take care of my leaky faucet, too?"

After Spock returns to normal time, Uhura accidentally presses the button to display the distress call they received. Kirk bids goodbye to the Deela on the screen.

Written out like this, it sounds like an exciting episode. The problem was, the time scale never quite lined up, either visually or in terms of plot. His crew were completely frozen from Kirk’s perspective. Scotty is perpetually in the doorway of the transporter room across multiple scenes, apparently not having moved at all. (This could have been solved by having him standing behind the console, as though waiting for orders. By having him perpetually in transit, it ruined the illusion entirely.) Even if we arbitrarily say that one minute passes in normal time for each hour that passes for the Scalosians (a 1:60 ratio), either the crew had to have worked very, very fast or the Scalosians spent a lot more time on the ship than was shown or implied. Even if all of the bridge scenes, receiving Kirk’s message, and the development of the ‘cure’ took place over the course of only a single hour, that’s still 60 hours, or two and a half days, of accelerated time.

In the end, we're left with more questions than answers: Why didn't the transporter detect an anomaly when it beamed up at least four extra people (Deela, Rael, Compton, and the girl Compton fell for)? How did the Scalosians time the sending of their distress call such that they weren't years older by the time the Enterprise received and responded to it?

A lot of the same plot effects could have been accomplished by simply having the Scalosians as ‘out of phase’ with our reality, able to affect it but not be affected by it. This would have allowed things like Kirk and Spock getting shoved away from the deep freeze device without the audience asking, “why didn’t they smash into the wall?” (Think of shoving a person standing still while you’re on a speeding car and you’ll see what I mean.)

I could say even more about why the episode just doesn’t quite work, but I need to leave some room for my fellow contributors.

2 stars.

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By Any Other Name

by Gideon Marcus

A lot of folks have complained about the reusing of plots this season.  That doesn't really bother me as often the "remakes" are better than the originals (viz. "…and the Children Shall Lead" vs. "Miri"; "Day of the Dove" vs. "Wolf in the Fold.") This time around, we've got a remake of "By Any Other Name", which wasn't terrific to begin with, and this one does not do the theme justice.

Sure, there are cosmetic differences, but ultimately, it boils down to five people (three men and two women, one of them a blonde who romances Kirk).  We have jealousy between the blonde and the head man.  We have a takeover of the Enterprise, and I think there was an indestructible gizmo in "By Any Other Name", too.  Maybe the episodes are just so similar that I'm conflating them.  We have the same empty hallways, but the dodecahedronizer was a much more chilling method of accomplishing that than time shift.  And really, the corridors should have been filled with frozen crew that Kirk and the Scalosians had to dodge around.

The tape Uhura was tracking must have been about a month long for it to be going all the way from discovery through the beam down of the landing party.  How she couldn't tell it was a recording is beyond me and a bit insulting.

There's plenty of nonsense in this episode, which my colleagues are covering, but the worst is that, for a story that deals with super-speed, it sure moves awfully slow.  When Kirk started narrating what we'd just learned five minutes before, taking about five minutes to do it (I recognize the narrative necessity, but that scene could have been three seconds long), I began pounding the floor in frustration.

"Captain's Log, supplemental: in lieu of a formal report, I will simply read the script again from the beginning… 'These are the voyages of the…'"

I did enjoy two scenes, however.  When Deela confronts Kirk after the latter has broken the Transporter, Shatner plays it cute and coy, which was a lot of fun.  Also (as with Janice), when Deela tells Rael to stop being a prude and ordering her around; she's a grown woman, a queen no less, and she at least should get the privilege of liking the person she chooses for breeding stock.

Other than that, though, the direction is pretty feeble.  Nimoy speaks too loudly and woodenly, particularly in the first scene.  Shatner hams it up for the first time this season (except for the other Jud Taylor story, "The Paradise Syndrome".  Everyone else is given precious little to do, particularly Scotty, who gets to stand in a doorway for three days.

Two stars.

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Blink a few times—it'll still be there

by Lorelei Marcus

Rarely does an episode start with so much promise and then fails to deliver so badly.  "Wink of an Eye" wastes no time jumping into action, a new technique of Season 3 episodes I'm enjoying a lot, and it continues at a breakneck speed.  Some of the setup information is thrown around so fast, it really is blink and you'll miss it.  Respite comes at the point of beam-back to the Enterprise, which would be fine, except, like the incessant buzzing in the crew's ears, it never ends.

I don't mind an episode that likes to take its time, but this show just drags on and on.  I think partly it's a psychological thing: the time dilation causing the characters to move through time slowly also makes us perceive the slow moments of the show more acutely. The length of an exchange between Kirk and Deela is quite exacerbated when Scotty is stuck stock-still in the background.  How are we supposed to expect the plot to move when the characters themselves can't?

Madame Toussaud would like her Doohan back.

This episode also suffers from a bit of the Land of the Giants syndrome, where the special effects take precedence over every other aspect, to the overall detriment of the show.  I suspect some of the stiff, uninteresting staging and poor pacing are symptoms of trying to stimulate the time dilation.  Scenes could not easily be shot on a rolling camera or from multiple angles for fear of slowed crewmen jumping around to slightly different spots in editing.  Even with all the care, the effect is still internally inconsistent as anyone's speed is relative to whichever scene they're in.

I think I've also given director Jud Taylor too much credit.  Between "Paradise Syndrome" and "Wink", it's clear he has trouble reining in Shatner's eccentricities, and he consistently has difficulty with pacing.  I suspect "Wink" would have been a much more compelling episode with someone like Ralph Senensky directing it.  Imagine a rolling camera leading Kirk as he marches briskly through the hall, crewmen stock-still in comparison all around him.  Then, more static, but creatively staged dialogy shots, where Kirk always remains in front of a slow-moving crewman who is doing the same three motions such that, in post, the actions are seamless and consistent.  I think with a little more vision, it could have worked. [They actually do this in the scenes on the bridge and in the confrontation with Compton, but the corridor walk would have quite effective, similar to what they did in "By Any Other Name" (ed)]

Sadly, this is the version we received.

Two stars.

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Brief Lives

by Joe Reid

“Wink of an Eye” is the latest episode of Star Trek from the good people at NBC.  I have a few thoughts on what I just witnessed, and I feel it is best this week to lay my cards on the table before I explain how I arrived at my conclusions.  First, it was intelligently written up to the point that intelligence became inconvenient to the narrative.  It had intelligent characters up to the point that the desired conclusion was endangered.  Lastly, it had a credible threat that lost all credibility when examined.  If I were to provide a one sentence summary for this entry, it would be “Pride, lust, and expedience bring ruin”.

The episode started with a mystery.  Kirk, McCoy, and Spock, along with some others are on an uninhabited alien world, where they expected to find people who were in distress and in need of help.  There were no people to be found, but plenty of invisible insects.  The insects turned out to be the baddies of the week: a small group of people that move so fast that they are invisible to those moving at normal speeds.  After capturing and converting a sole crewman to their side, the beautiful queen of the aliens, Deela, captured Kirk because she was enamored with him.  Speeding him up to her own speed, she traps him in her accelerated world while she and her countrymen carry out a plot against the crew. 

Also, who could compete with these stylish outfits?

At the beginning this plot and the thinking behind it seemed smart and inscrutable.  How in the world could Spock and the others defeat an enemy that moved a hundred times faster than them?  As the episode progressed the narrative kept switching back and forth between the people moving at accelerated speed and the people moving at normal speed, and that is where the problem lay.  An advanced alien race moving so fast that they rendered normal people as statues would always have the advantage.  Spock and crew would never be able to mount a defense against a threat from them.  The notion that the crew of the Enterprise would be able to fight back against such a threat, to provide a way for the good guys to win, weakened the story.

My second thought was regarding Deela and her people.  She was prideful and calculating.  She had every right to be.  Deela possessed an overwhelming advantage over the crew, and she reveled in it.  She even allowed Kirk to shoot at her with his phaser to prove the utter futility of his situation.  She loves that Kirk, fighting as he did, could not overcome her well-thought-out plan.  A plan which was short circuited not only by the aforementioned plot device which allowed the crew to fight back against a much faster enemy, but also by Deela’s lust and desire for Kirk.  She kissed him repeatedly before he even started moving at her speed and kissed him passionately at their first meeting.  Her irrational feelings for Kirk allowed him to manipulate and sabotage her plans to the degree that it allowed the crew the months of subjective time needed to mount a defense against them.

Lastly, there was the credible threat posed by Deela to the crew: that they would be frozen to be used at human chattel for the aliens when needed.  The device that was installed on the Enterprise was unable to be touched when defended in person by the aliens but was easily blown to smithereens when Kirk and Spock shot it with their space guns.  This third and final failure of this story to save the narrative left a story that started so strong and intelligent as a sad, weak, and uninspired tale turning Deela from a prideful and powerful queen to a horny teen that let a boy trick her into a tryst that ultimately defeated her people.

At the end of the day, the crew should never have been able to outrun an enemy moving a hundred times their speed.  Also, the aliens should have lived such brief lives that they would have never met in the first place.

Two stars

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