Review

In this leg of the Enterprise's five year mission while having traveled hundreds of light years farther than any Federation starship has ever traveled before, Captain Kirk and his crew happen upon a most unusual discovery: the remnants of an alien race which colonized the galaxy 600,000 years ago, possibly even seeding life itself on both Earth and Vulcan! This little bit of exposition goes a long way towards rationalizing the problem of why so many aliens look so much like humans on Star Trek, so as you might imagine this episode has earned some bonus points from me for that. Unfortunately, the crew regards this bit of exposition with little more than a "gee whiz" response, so the impact is somewhat less than what I'd have preferred, dramatically. Nevertheless, the episode's main focus still has much to offer.

At first glance this episode seems to start off as yet another "godlike alien takes the crew hostage" story, but fortunately the episode rises above this cliche rather quickly by establishing these particular godlike aliens as remarkably benevolent. All except for the amusingly evil one that inhabited Spock, anyway. Shortly after the first encounter, I couldn't help but join in Kirk's enthusiastic optimism for aliens of the week that were outwardly cooperative and not hostile during his motivational speech to the crew, soliciting volunteers in extending a helping hand to the aliens in the hopes of forming a fruitful alliance. In a universe where godlike aliens seem overly plentiful and nearly always mad with power, this was a refreshing change of pace.

Likewise, at first I was worried that the evil alien inhabiting Spock would ruin the overall likability of the aliens of the week, but thankfully Leonard Nimoy's delightfully Machiavellian performance and the refreshingly amoral writing for the character saved the day by at least making our cliched antagonist suitably amusing, while giving rise to well utilized opportunities for the plot to exploit Chapel's attraction to Spock for both comic relief when inhabited Spock compliments the poor nurse as well dramatic appeal when Spock's consciousness is literally hidden within Chapel's body, much to her overt satisfaction.

Unfortunately, at least one too many such misdirections pile up by the end of the episode. Combine that with the fact that the "godlike alien takes the crew hostage" premise rarely yields a very good story to begin with no matter how well executed it is and the fact that the ending wrapped things up way too quickly and cleanly given the stakes and you end up with a bit more of a mixed bag of an episode. It's never well established why the two remaining aliens couldn't simply resume their efforts to build android bodies now that their evil colleague is out of the way; all that rhetoric about temptations being too great seemed merely like a weak excuse to push a reset button and end the story as quickly as possible. Oops, so much for that potential alliance! That said, however, this is certainly an above average outing.