Star date: 2821.5
Summary: On its way to deliver urgently-needed medical supplies to Macchus 3, the Enterprise stops to investigate Murosaki 312, a "quasar-like formation". Spock commands the Galileo shuttle with 6 other crew members aboard, including McCoy and Scotty. An ion storm sucks the shuttle into the formation, causing them to crash land on a planet at its center. The task of finding the shuttle is made nearly impossible by the ionization effect, which prevents communication, use of the transporter, and detection of the lost shuttle by the ship's sensors. If the shuttle crew are not recovered in 2 days, a bureaucrat traveling with the Enterprise will use his authority to take command of the ship and order them on to Macchus 3, stranding the shuttle crew.
On the surface, Spock and crew try to repair and re-launch the shuttle, while fending off giant, primitive furry creatures who attack with spears and rocks. The crew grow frustrated with Spock's refusal to employ or consider emotion in his command decisions, and are angered by his lack of an emotional response to the death of one, and then two of their party. Complicating matters is that the only way they can get enough power to launch the shuttle is to drain their phasers, thus leaving them defenseless against the giants.
Shortly before Scotty has them ready to launch, Spock relents and agrees to help McCoy and a crewman named Boma bury one of the men who died. While they are out burying the body, the giants attack again and pin Spock between two boulders. Despite Spock's orders to leave him behind, McCoy and Boma rescue Spock and bring him aboard. The shuttle launches, but after the Enterprise has begun its departure to Macchus 3. In a desperate attempt to be found, Spock releases the rest of the shuttle's meager fuel supply and sets it on fire, hastening their fiery descent back to the surface, but leaving a bright green trail visible to the departing Enterprise. The Enterprise quickly returns and beams the surviving shuttle crew aboard just as the shuttle bursts into flame. Later, the folks on the bridge have a good laugh at Spock's expense, because the man who famously values logic so highly was forced into a desperate, hence "emotional" act when all seemed lost.
This show wasn't that bad; it just wasn't that good. There's only one really obvious mistake in this episode, but somehow the desired tension of the ticking clock just wasn't there. Maybe the wooden acting on the part of everyone other than Spock, McCoy, Scotty and the crewman named Boma was just too much to take. Maybe Spock's insistence on a logic-driven life, which is usually played for a joke, is merely irritating in the context of a pressure situation.
Maybe the awful special effects surrounding the giants and their lazily-lobbed spears were just too bad for anyone to take this episode seriously. Whatever the reason, it just didn't work.
I only have two specific criticisms of this episode. First, after one crewman has already died on the tip of a giant's spear, Spock goes out with two others (Boma and Gaetano) to scare off the other giants with a show of force. Spock is quite clear that he doesn't wish to kill the giants; merely scare them off so they no longer threaten his crew. So on Spock's orders, Boma and Gaetano fire their phasers near the giants, but not at them, demonstrating that they have the superior technology. This seems to work, but then Spock orders Boma to return to the shuttle with him, and orders Gaetano to remain behind.
Now, I've never been in the military, but I'm going to guess that it's standard practice in just about any military anywhere in the world that, if you're in unfamiliar territory with known threats in the area, you NEVER LEAVE A MAN ALONE. So, this is both unbelieveable and stupid. The fact that Gaetano is predictably killed in one of the most poorly directed and acted scenes in the series so far is just stupid icing on the stupid cake.
My second criticism is that Spock is not only unemotional (understandable), but also acts as though he's unaware that emotion motivates others. For example, he fails to anticipate that a show of force might anger the giants, rather than scaring them off. And he fails to understand that in his role as leader, the people under him expect him to follow cultural norms and, for example, bury the dead, even if such an action is not logical by his estimation.
Spock isn't a machine. He is highly intelligent and highly educated, and so to write this show as though Spock doesn't understand these things is ridiculous.
Other observations about this episode:
Yet another female yeoman.
At one point, Spock insists that three of the (at the time) seven shuttle crew will have to remain behind so that the other four can escape safely. As it turns out, he never has to make this decision, but it's kind of interesting to think about who Spock would leave behind. The Yeoman is obviously expendable; McCoy and Scotty obviously are not. I wonder who the other two "chosen ones" would have been?
No one seems to consider stunning the giants; the only choices discussed are killing them or not killing them (scaring them).
Although the special effects for the giants were laughably bad, the outer space special effects --- of the Murosaki 213 quasar-like effect, and of the flaming fuel coming out of the Galileo shuttle at the end --- were quite good. I wonder how they were done. I'm pretty sure computer-generated effects didn't exist in 1966; were they hand-painted?
When the shuttle has been re-launched, and it looks like they're doomed to burn up on re-entry, Spock is reminded that he had earlier said that there are always alternatives. Spock replies: "I may have been mistaken," to which McCoy responds: "Well, at least I lived long enough to hear that."
In this episode we see the Enterprise has not one, but two shuttles (at least until the Galileo burns up at the end of the show). On Star date 1672.1, during "The Enemy Within", it appears they had none.
Conventional wisdom holds that the characters who die in any Star Trek episode are the crew members who wear red shirts. It's worth pointing out that in this episode, the two crewmen who die were wearing yellow.
The Moral of the Story: One does not live by logic alone.
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