Saturday 7 June 2008

Star Trek: TOS 2.4 - Who Mourns for Adonais?

Review 32 - Episode 33

The One with the giant hand

I can't deny the image of a giant hand coming towards the enterprise isn't startling and it gets your attention but it still must be one of the silliest openings to a trek episode. Unsurprisingly, a being with "God like powers" , in this case Apollo, captures the Ship and wants the crew to worship him. Kirk, Bones, Chekov, Scotty and random love interest Palamas are trapped on the planet, whilst Spock, Uhura and occasional regular Kyle try to break free.

This is all very predictable and normally God like episodes really get my goat, but this has a few things to recommend it. Firstly, there is some great dialogue for Kirk, especially at the start with McCoy talking about Palamas being married off. Chekov also has some nice one liners and Bones is thankfully back to his normal self and not moaning about ridiculous things. Also there is a rare love interest for Scotty, though he is a bit OTT everytime she disappears.

Spock and Uhura rarely interact with each other with any meaningful dialogue, so it was nice to see Spock complimenting her and Uhura doing some engineering work. Nice change. Sulu is unfortunately doing his thing.

Finally, the actual end scene of Apollo beaten and confused, with Kirk feeling genuine sympathy for him was a surprisingly emotional scene and caught me off guard. Lovely last line as well.

Of course, when all is said and done, there's still a dirty big hand in space and the girl once again falls in love far too fast, but the final act and some unusual groupings make this quite watchable. However, the amount of Reality shifting/God like being episodes is beyond the joke, so I'm going to start a running total and see how many more we get. God I hate them.

3/5

Overall Star Trek Franchise Rating so far: 93/160

Number of episodes involving God Like beings or reality shifting powers: 10

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