Review

This episode is essentially Miri without the absurd technical problems. That, however, does little to enhance a blatantly bad premise. The slow, plodding plot just makes most of the main characters look stupid, as it takes 39 minutes into the episode before it finally dawns on Kirk and Spock that the children must be having some kind of mind control effect on the crew and thus must be neutralized in order to regain control of the ship.

Ten minutes before that scene, I was already shouting "just phaser the damn kids already!" at the screen, as by that point the crew had more than enough evidence to draw that conclusion themselves, not the least of which was the scene when the children summoned the entity in front of the entire bridge crew, prompting him to rattle off his entire secret plan to all the main characters. That's the moment when I'd have phasered the kids right there.

But we didn't even get that moment, as all it took to neutralize the children was to show them a video of their bizarre behavior from the beginning of the episode so that they'd finally face the fact that their parents are dead, start crying, and deprive the entity of its power over them. McCoy had been clamoring for them all to do something like that since the beginning of the episode, and yet nobody ever bothered to try the video thing until Kirk got desperate. No wonder McCoy was insisting that they take the kids to a starbase for a proper psychological examination. Maybe they've got counselors over there worth a damn.

But thanks to the converging interests of both Kirk and the evil entity, neither of which wanted to go to the starbase for no coherent reason, they never did. Kirk should have authorized going to the starbase to gain access to the child specialists that were there. The entity should have authorized going to the starbase to attempt to fool the specialists and to gain false legitimacy so the children could less conspicuously request transport to a Federation colony. A better story would have shown us these competing tactics, but alas, that would have required more sets, more characters, and more entertainment value. We can't have that.