3.9 — “The Tholian Web”

3.9 — “The Tholian Web”

Plot: On a mission to investigate the disappearance of the U.S.S. Defiant, the Enterprise crew encounters distortions in the fabric of space, which threaten the safety of the ship and cause Kirk to become lost in a dimensional rift. Attempts to rescue him are complicated by the arrival of the Tholians (bad-tempered xenophobes), and the fact that proximity to the rift triggers a progressive tendency towards homicidal insanity among the crew. These events form the backdrop for internal conflict between Spock and McCoy over command decisions made in Kirk’s absence.

Thoughts: By most lights, this episode is terrible. Did no one on staff think to try rewriting (or rejecting) the script? You’ve got the kitchen sink in here: dimensional rifts, the crew going insane (surprise! Chekov flips out, again), Kirk as a ghost, and wacky, trigger-happy Tholians.

Tholians! Are they rageaholic fussbudgets, or intergalactic basket weavers? These guys pop up as unexpectedly as the Spanish Inquisition, and with equal clear-headedness (I mean the Monty Python version, of course) .

All of this craziness is treated as throwaway material, so that the episode can spend its time focusing on a trumped-up conflict between Spock and McCoy, centering around McCoy questioning Spock’s fitness to command the Enterprise. Are we really going all the way back to “The Galileo Seven?” Please, let us have more scenes of McCoy abandoning his post during a medical emergency just to rant at Spock for supposedly not doing his duty, while preventing Spock from doing his duty. The writing here is terrible. We’re supposed to believe that McCoy is the one ready to write off Kirk as a lost cause, while Spock is inclined to take illogical chances and play out hunches? Riiiiiight. 

It was cool, I guess, to see Spock lead a memorial service for Kirk, but I didn’t believe for a second that the ship would stop to attend to this during a red alert (let alone on Spock’s orders). During such a circus of disasters, Scott should have been in Engineering, McCoy should have been in Sickbay, and Spock should have been on the bridge. Later, all these terrible conundrums are resolved by… hand-waving! hand-waving! Whatever! The hour is over! Haven’t we suffered enough?

The Defiant phasing in and out of a dimensional rift is such a cool premise, however, that it stays with you even as the rest of the dreck rapidly fades. This premise needs a payoff, and it gets two of them that I am aware of. First, the story of the Defiant is revisited and its fate revealed in a two-part fourth season episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, “In a Mirror, Darkly,” (2005). Also, there can be little doubt that this episode inspired J. Michael Straczynski in writing “Babylon Squared,” one of the best episodes of the first season of Babylon 5 (relating to the fate of the space station Babylon 4), with a big payoff in the show’s third season.

The web constructed by the Tholians never pays off in the script, but at least it’s visually interesting. So are the new space suits! Also Uhura’s quarters and choice of off-duty garb.  

I like the semblance of real lab work being done in sickbay. This, plus the multiverse aspect, makes me wonder what our resident MD/astrophysicist Randi Cohen  will have to say about the technical details. 

IMDB has this interesting note about the episode (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708479/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv):

When Chekov asks if there’s ever before been a mutiny aboard a starship, Spock responds by saying that there are absolutely no records of any such occurrence. This cleverly avoids answering the question directly. While there may be no mutiny “on record,” Spock well knows that there’s been at least one, which he himself took part in, during “The Menagerie” two-parter from the first season.

IMDB also claims that this is the only TOS episode with no guest stars. There sure are a lot of extras, however. The scenes in the Defiant are quite gory.

This is the third time, by the way, that the Enterprise has found a derelict Constitution-class Federation starship with the whole crew dead. The other instances were episodes 2.6 — “The Doomsday Machine,” and 2.23 — “The Omega Glory.” Star Trek had to crank out a lot of episodes, so they rarely let a good idea go to waste by using it only once.

When Kirk is stuck in the dimensional rift, does he meet Lazarus? I guess the postscript to this episode settles the question of whether Vulcans can lie or not.

I can’t give this more than 1.5 of 5 ghosts in the bedroom mirror.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tholian_Web