Review

This episode is a rehash of The Doomsday Machine, but considerably less entertaining, mostly due to the fact that it's slower paced and lacks the subtleties, intrigue, and overall dramatic appeal that The Doomsday Machine had in spades. To fill the time, the episode is laced with useless filler scenes depicting Kirk making all hands announcements or log entries, despite the fact that they only have a short time before the ship is destroyed by the giant space amoeba. Likewise, the scenes with loud, high pitched sounds generated by probe telemetry certainly didn't help the episode's entertainment value either.

The only redeeming quality of the story is McCoy and Spock competing over which of the two shall go on the suicide mission. Their valor combined with their their posturing and mock(?) contempt for one another was rather amusing, although it isn't terribly well established why a probe or even the shuttle itself couldn't have been remote piloted into the center of the space amoeba to mitigate the danger. Likewise, the whole technobabble scene that rambled on about "anti-power" and "everything in reverse" so Kirk could conclude that they needed to detonate an antimatter bomb at the center of the space amoeba was unnecessarily incoherent.

Overall while this episode had some potential despite its unoriginality, it failed to deliver on most of it. What's left is a sombre, depressing, slow, and tired story with no subplots. It reminded me quite a bit of The Corbomite Maneuver for all the wrong reasons.