Review

Captain Kirk becomes Captain Ahab in this mostly charming story. While attempts to temporarily relieve Kirk of command seem to be becoming a cliche by this point, just about every detail of the story related to Kirk's personal quest had plenty of dramatic appeal, including Spock's and McCoy's perhaps too familiar conspiracy to relieve Kirk. The noticeable change in Kirk's behavior was well played. After having seen this many episodes we've seen a pattern to Kirk's typical behaviors which is clearly broken here. Kirk quite deliberately acts out of character in this story to service his incredibly unusual mood.

The suspense and build-up is well played too. It takes a full 14 minutes into the episode before we even have complete context as to why Kirk has instantly snapped into being such a mad man, during which time subtle clues are dropped in front of the audience, keeping us guessing. Normally it's annoying when the plot fails to get to the point and reveal to full nature of the danger to the audience, but this episode manages to succeed where similar episodes have failed. The audience has just enough information about what's going on to not be annoyed while still remaining curious about the full context of how Kirk could have such intimate knowledge of the evil entity of the week. It's clear Kirk is familiar with the entity from some prior experience with it, but we're fascinated to know precisely what experience Kirk is drawing from.

When the full context and origins of Kirk's obsession are revealed, the backstory delivers on its promise to substantiate Kirk's errant behavior. It makes sense that on Kirk's first Starfleet assignment that if he were to make a mistake that cost the lives of 200 people, that he would carry that guilt with him for a considerable time. Ensign Garrovick succeeds in acting as a metaphor for Kirk's past and the fact that Garrovick is the son of Kirk's old commanding officer from the very ship that suffered at the hands of this entity was a nice touch.

Garrovick was indeed a conceptually great character, but the execution could have been better. The facts surrounding who he was and what he represented were what made him compelling. Strictly speaking, nothing he actually did made him interesting. A better character would have been more than a window into Kirk's past. Likewise, both Garrovick and one or two of the other security officers had very clear shots at the entity which they didn't take. I wouldn't be as forgiving as Spock was. Their reactions weren't forgivably natural, they were incompetent. Either Starfleet's training of its security personnel is terrible or these officers haven't learned to suppress their fear in a combat situation. Either way there is a competence problem somewhere, regardless of whether or not phaser fire actually was effective.

Regarding the weapon that actually was effective, the antimatter bomb was perhaps the most annoying part of the story. The yield from an antimatter explosion triggered by a reaction of a single ounce of fuel would most certainly not produce an explosion of the magnitude the episode so explicitly and repeatedly goes out of its way to indicate. Worse yet there was no reason why both Kirk and Garrovick had to risk their lives by personally detonating the bomb or acting as bait, especially if the yield was large enough to leave a giant crater on the planet.

Strictly speaking, the ship should have been able to fire the bomb at the entity from orbit and there should have been no need for human lures with a bomb of that scale, given that it was clearly a weapon of mass destruction. Finally, they never even bothered to scan to see if the entity was really dead before trotting off back into the stars.