Review

This episode was, of course, a bottle show. No guest stars and no special effects other than stock footage. There's no fighting and no weapons fired. Not even the Organians entering and leaving people's bodies is animated. Instead of all this eye candy, we get marvelous performances from all actors involved. Another nice detail was the portrayal of the Organians themselves. All throughout the episode we're given the impression that they're vastly superior to corporeal species in every way. Not in a cheesy direct manner either. Subtle things, like the Chess scene at the beginning or the way they so easily manipulate corporeal bodies were all we needed. All of this put a marvelously different spin on the episode, telling us the story from the Organian perspective. The audience is just as detached as the the observing Organians. What annoys me about this episode is that the Organians shouldn't have been used as the aliens here, as it fouls up continuity with TOS: Errand of Mercy. It could be argued that the Organians went through a radical behavioral change in just 100 years, but given their absurd time frames to exact any kind of change and their radically different behavior in the TOS episode, this doesn't seem likely. A better choice would have been Q. No, seriously. Q, or a group of Q could have easily filled in this role and used the same memory wiping trick. We know how quickly their opinions on things can change. We could have even gotten a cheesy line at the end from Q about visiting in 200 years to see how far humanity has progressed, kind of like the line Arik Soong made about wanting to study Cybernetics at the end of Ent: The Augments. In the end, this was a marvelously well played episode, but for the blunder regarding the Organians, I must strike points.