Monday, September 5, 2016

The Infinite Vulcan

WHY AM I WATCHING THE INFINITE VULCAN?

In which there are a lot of good ideas, until there aren't. 

"Captain, maybe we could let Chekov come just this once"
"He knows what he did,"

Man, this one started so good too. The crew beams down to a planet that appears to be abandoned, but the sensors are showing a bustling city. Sulu goes to pick a flower. The flower poisons him and runs away. Yes, this is a planet full of sentient plants, which is a pretty neat idea. We probably should have seen that coming when the planet was named Phylos, but it is a cartoon for the smallest of children. Anyways, some asparagus looking dudes show up and give Sulu an antidote.

The Phylosians explain that humans had visited their planet before, but they ran around spraying Round Up everywhere because now the Phylosians are a species on the brink of extinction. But there's no time for that, because everyone gets attacked by giant phallic looking monsters with wings. Oh no! Dickbats! The dickbats grab Spock with their tendrils, and somebody learned they had a fetish that day. It turns out this has all been a clever trap, because the Phylosian's master needs Spock for his own sinister purposes. Kirk is not happy about his best friend getting kidnapped, so he looks for the Master himself. And finds him! The Master is Dr. Stavos Keniclius 5, a very tall human. Like, twenty five feet tall. So there's that. He declares that he's keeping Spock and sends the rest of the crew back up to the Enterprise.

Uhura finds out that Keniclius was a scientist during the Eugenics Wars of the 1990's (remember those?) Yes, the same War that brought us Kahn Noonian Singh, the genetically perfect dictator, also gave us this evil master of cloning. Proving once again that Star Trek has no idea what eugenics means. He's been cloning himself for the last 300 years, and increasing his size each time, I guess. Armed with this new information, Kirk returns to the planet where the episode goes off the rails pretty quickly.

Keniclius has already cloned himself a giant Spock because why the fuck not. He's transferred Spock One's tiny brain into Giant Spock (Which, sadly, there is already a precedent for.) and Kirk has to convince him to put it back before Normal Sized Spock dies. I think the dickbats come back, too. After several tedious minutes, Kirk convinces the tall Vulcan with the most logical statement heard on Star Trek. "Spock's death is meaningless if it's only to create a giant version of himself." Wise words indeed. So Large Spock mind melds with Small Spock and the day is saved. The two large scientists vow to put their giant brains together to create "a good master race" Then there's some casual racism towards Sulu and we all have a good laugh. What the fuck, Walter?

This... this fucking show, man.


THE RANDOM THOUGHTS
  • So, yeah. This is the episode written by TV's Walter Koenig, AKA The Guy Who Played Chekov, AKA The Worst Thing To Happen on Original Star Trek and Yes I'm Including The Apple.
  • There's a reason Chekov was not invited to be on the cartoon. 
  • For the other times we dealt with Augments see the TOS episode Space Seed, the movie Star Trek II, the DS9 episode Statistical Probabilities, the ENT three part episode starting with Borderland, and if you must, Star Trek Into Darkness
  • I really hate Chekov. Old Chekov, that is. New Chekov is pretty great.
  • Speaking of which, Star Trek Beyond was pretty great.
  • Speaking of which, Star Trek is pretty great.

The important thing is, Walter won't get any royalty checks.

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