Following on from The Survivor, this was a kick in the head.  I just got the idea that we were heading into new territory, doing cool new things, only to have a mad scientist creating a species of intelligent plant a week later.  What a letdown!   What’s so disappointing about this is that Walter Koenig (Chekov) wrote this one.  And if you jump into Land of the Lost, a contemporary show, it’s Koenig’s episode that elevated the whole series.  So what made this one so bad??

Let’s start with our favorite medical officer who spends most of his time away from sickbay.  Dr. McCoy, our medical miracle, says Sulu has a minute to live, then injects him with a substance that he thinks might help.  It doesn’t.  Yet Sulu ends up living!  Is this because McCoy isn’t a good doctor and can’t diagnose a decapitation from a splinter?  I begin to wonder.  Blame Roger – he tainted the image of McCoy for me.  I always thought of him as the crotchety comic pairing to Spock!  

I confess I can’t fault Koenig for my next complaint but the animation around the giant is… well, let’s put it this way: had it been a female, the camera would have gone into soft focus, sexy jazz music would play, and before long, Kirk would be snogging her.  Since the skirt wearing giant is male, however, all I could think of was how difficult it would be to keep a straight face in a live action version of this.  I suppose most giants don’t go into showbiz, so maybe the limitation would be on the actual giant, but in the context of the animation, a giant wearing a short skirt made me think the cast would all be trying not to stand too close.  How do you take a threat seriously when it flailing its bits and bobs at you from a short skirt?  

Kirk is the next failure here.  When he sees the giant man, who looks like a man… in giant size… you know, like a giant man would?… he asks “another plant?”  Had he been asking that about McCoy, I might have accepted it as a dig against Bones’ medical abilities.  Since he walks up to a person and asks that, I have to wonder what Jim gets up to in his free time.  Why Spock doesn’t offer to teach him the finer points of his mission, I’ll never know.     

Spock’s failure is not his own; it’s his giant double that leaves me wanting!  This had to be an attempt by the animators to show the value of animation by showing that you could have giant versions of the characters without taking the viewer out of the episode with some terrible special effect.  

Despite all this, if I’m being honest,  the episode was not bad, it just has a lot more cringe-inducing moments than some of its predecessors.  In many ways, it really is a success for showing what an animated show can do that a live action one couldn’t. I also loved the look of the plant creatures because we can have some really weird creatures without looking like pancakes on strings (Operation: Annihilate!).   I also love that there are homages to the original series with references to the Eugenics War and IDIC symbol. Most of all, it’s truly Trek when Kirk is able to use logic to get through to Spock the Tall.   He has to convince both Spock and the evil scientist that galactic peace had already been achieved and that does the trick.  An interesting take and it sure beats Kirk talking a robot to death!  

Not the best the series had to offer but, as a friend of mine perfectly stated: it has a plausible premise and very creative alien worldbuilding, with dangers from both the environment and the intelligent life. Just the stuff of dreams that wowed us all as children.  I don’t think this will rock anyone’s world by today’s standards, but I do credit it for what it did back in the 70’s.  ML