Star Trek 3x10 "Plato's Stepchildren"

rating: ****

Memory Alpha summary

There are perhaps as many reasons to loathe this episode as like it.  Reasons to loathe first:

• Guest aliens forcing our characters to do silly things.
• The overly-familiar template of guest aliens having a society our characters need to set straight.
• The overly-familiar template of guest aliens just happening to have patterned their society after something in Earth's past.
• Plato not even particularly being well-represented, so really, what was the point of using him at all?

All that being said, there's at least one great reason to watch "Plato's Stepchildren," and it looks like this:

via CNN

That would be Uhura kissing Kirk, the first interracial kiss seen on television (the Memory Alpha link provides some clarification, but the point stands), an historic event for which this episode, and indeed the whole series, will forever be known.  Sucks that it has to be under the auspices of alien control and all that, but there it is.  It happened.  Glad Star Trek made history like that.

That alone makes the episode must-see for its cultural significance, but there are other reasons, too.  There are franchise-specific reasons, parallels to be accounted for, trends to follow (eugenics, as in Khan; emotional transference, as in Lwaxana Troi in Deep Space Nine's "Fascination").

There's also the plight of Alexander, which becomes the crux of the story.  Alexander is one of the guest aliens, only he's considered inferior to the others.  Our characters end up spending their time not so much fixing the society as fighting for Alexander's rights.  If you like, this might be considered another level of the general Civil Rights push of the episode along with the kiss.

The good, in the case of this episode, easily outweighs the bad.  A real argument could be made for "Plato's Stepchildren" representing not only the third season but the series as a whole, the reason why something that seemed doomed to be lost and forgotten instead became a global phenomenon.  

That's easy to call a classic in my estimation.

four quarter analysis

franchise * series * essential * character

notable guest-stars:

Babara Babcock

Majel Roddenberry

Star Trek 2x26 "Assignment: Earth"

rating: ***

Memory Alpha summary

"Assignment: Earth" may be the most interesting piece of Star Trek trivia ever.  If it had succeeded in what it set out to do, Star Trek as we know it wouldn't exist.

By the end of the second season, the series was on the brink of cancellation.  It seemed even Gene Roddenberry was resigned to that fact.  He originally pitched this episode as the pilot of a completely new series.  Instead it became the season finale.  That's why it seems to be such a dramatic departure from virtually every other episode ever.  It's about as standalone as you can get, but it's of significantly higher quality than usual, because of course at that point being a standalone episode was par for the course.

Enter: Gary Seven.  Basically a human drafted into being an agent of an alien species, Central Intelligence Aliens if you will.  "Assignment: Earth" is very blatantly far more his story than our crew's.  The first and last time that ever happened.  If he'd ever appeared again, I might have been given the excuse to recommend it on all four of my qualifiers and therefore certify it as a classic.  I contend that the episode could very easily inspire more onscreen material.  If and when that happens, consider the upgrade immediate.

via Trek Core.  And he kind of looks like Gene, too.

Gary's mission was to stop humans from crossing the brink of nuclear war.  He succeeds, by the way.

Our crew does factor into the episode.  The other great distinction of "Assignment: Earth" is that it's the only casual instance of time travel in franchise history.  The crew visits 1968 in order to resolve a riddle in the records.  Later franchise lore would establish Starfleet having, y'know, rules about time travel, but that doesn't exist yet.

All around, this is a fascinating episode.  If this is the first time you hear about it, then consider yourself initiated.  There are comic books and prose books that feature Gary Seven, but of course he never again appeared onscreen.  If Star Trek had turned into a Gary Seven experience, we certainly wouldn't have anything that we know today.  The third season, although routinely creatively maligned, gave fans probably a better experience than they'd had in the latter third of the second season, but more importantly a full extra season to remind them of why they loved the series to begin with, and it looked nothing like Gary Seven.

But watch this episode and ask yourself, this guy could have developed into a cult phenomenon, too, couldn't he?  And chances are if he'd stuck around, Kirk would have come back eventually too, right?

Anyway, that's speculation.  Take it for what it's worth.  Bottom line is, even if you know none of what might have happened, "Assignment: Earth" is a unique experience, a standout episode, one that turned around the fortunes of the late second season at the very last moment, and even on that note probably helped invigorate the creators for the final season.  And that's worth celebrating, too.

four quarter analysis
franchise * series * essential * character

notable guest-stars:
Terri Garr
Barbara Babcock

Star Trek 1x23 "A Taste of Armageddon"

rating: **

Memory Alpha summary

This is the first of one of Star Trek's most famous recurring themes: moralizing on the nature of war.  It's a famous example, too, even if you don't realize it by the title alone.  "A Taste of Armageddon" is the one where a planet runs its wars by computer (but expecting populations to accommodate them with real sacrificial victims).

Also, it's the first instance of Starfleet patronizing the natives, assuming it can fix something because it believes it's wrong.  Something something *cough* Prime Directive *cough* maybe?  Who knows?  It happens in so many other episodes, apparently the writers never really draw a line between the distinctions of talking about war and general cultural interference.

But it's still extremely relevant, important to the series and franchise as a whole, although I will limit my viewing recommendation to only the series rather than inflate the episode's importance to something other than a strictly historical nature.  It's important to acknowledge, but you don't need to go out of your way unless you really want to be a completist.  That's to say, "Taste" is only as significance as the precedence it sets.  It doesn't have a ton of memorable value outside of that.

Still, because the notion of a society being so coldly pragmatic about the nature of war (and not, incredibly, turning out to be related to Vulcans) is so striking a concept that for a change, the story alone really might be the hook, though it's not liable in itself liable to convince someone to like Star Trek in general (that's the reservation I hold for higher rankings, at least as a working theory; fans themselves have dismissed out of hand some of my selections for new classics, but I'm not making this survey strictly for existing fans, but rather as a window for new ones).

franchise * series * essential * character

notable guest-stars:
Barbara Babcock