Review

No matter how tragic it may be for the society in this story to have been locked into this terrifying "neat and painless" war for so many centuries, the greater tragedy is the profound stupidity of their society in the first place for inexplicably denying itself the obvious solution to their centuries-long problem. Instead of fighting a real war until peace is attained through annihilation of their enemy or through treaty negotiations brought about by fear of said annihilation, both sides have decided without a credible reason to just volunteer casualties at regular intervals; the numbers decided by a computer program. The resultant status quo is more terrifying than any real war could possibly be and this society's inability to see the plain obviousness of that is staggeringly hard to swallow.

Underscoring their profound stupidity is the fact that in a single day, captain Kirk single handedly ends their centuries-long war merely by blowing up the computer they used to make pretend warfare. Setting aside simple questions such as why there aren't backup computers or why they don't just equip all citizens with some sort of instant-vaporization collars rather than employ a limited number of vaporization chambers with clearly insufficient capacity to meet their "quota" given even the most minor disruptions, I can only wonder why Kirk's simple idea hadn't occurred to at least one person across those two planets in the last 500 years. Perhaps their entire race is genetically predisposed to poor critical thinking skills, despite their conspicuously unexplained resemblance to humans.

The aliens of the week aren't the only thing to pick on though. Ambassador Robert Fox continues the conspicuous trend of Federation officials tending to be unreasonably difficult to deal with and Kirk's own actions in destroying the war computer would seem to be in violation of the Federation's Prime Directive non-interference policy. Moreover it's never quite explained just why establishing a port in this vicinity is so important. Ambassador Fox does mention that thousands of Federation lives have been lost over the last 20 years in this region, but he doesn't bother mentioning why. We're apparently supposed to believe that the Federation having a friendly port in the region would somehow prevent that. But why? It couldn't be due to the war because all a ship has to do to escape the war is get to a higher orbit, as is demonstrated by Scotty.

Speaking of Scotty, his time in the big chair during this episode was fantastic. Scotty in command was a delight to watch and I greatly enjoyed seeing how his dealing with McCoy's signature badger-the-man-in-command routine differed from that of Kirk and Spock. Likewise, despite the writing of the aliens making them out to look terribly stupid, it gave Kirk several opportunities to deliver lines that were quite profound. It would have been nice if the writers had earned Kirk this distinction without it being at the expense of the authenticity of the aliens, but many of Kirk's lines were nevertheless insightful. My favorite was "I've given you back the horrors of war." In fact a great deal of this episode is a joy to watch in spite of its half-baked premise. As such, perhaps the best way to describe this episode is as a well executed bad idea.