{"id":5523,"date":"2014-08-07T05:51:48","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T05:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/21-The-Pirates-of-Orion"},"modified":"2014-08-07T05:51:48","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T05:51:48","slug":"21-the-pirates-of-orion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relivethemajesty.com\/index.php\/2014\/08\/07\/21-the-pirates-of-orion\/","title":{"rendered":"2.1 — \u201cThe Pirates of Orion\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n

2.1 — \u201cThe Pirates of Orion\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Plot:<\/strong> After contracting a space disease, Spock\u2019s life depends upon administration of a specific drug within 72 hours. The drug must be delivered by freighter from a star system too distant for the Enterprise<\/em> to reach within the allotted time. With Spock\u2019s life in the balance, the freighter is waylaid by Orion pirates, whose only mission is secrecy and self-preservation (in that order).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thoughts:<\/strong> It doesn\u2019t feel like exercising critical judgment if you just like everything, but dang–despite my lukewarm feelings for “The Jihad,” it feels like TAS is on quite a run here. “The Pirates of Orion” is another episode that I like very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s not that the episode is unpredictable, or deep, but we have a very well managed countdown clock, and some really excellent drama between shipmates. There are especially great character moments with McCoy, that reveal the heart of Bones, in his compassion for Spock, and frustration at his own helplessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Star Trek is often at its best when Kirk is in a tense standoff with an enemy ship for unpredictable stakes. The Orion pirate men, even thought they dress a bit like rejects from The Tick<\/em>, are great little villains. They have their own point of view, dilemma, and ability to wound. There’s more than just slave girls in that system, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Plus, there are the callbacks to one of the great TOS episodes, 2.10 \u201cJourney to Babel,\u201d in which an Orion spy attempts an assassination and commits suicide. The exposition here brings closure to loose plot ends from that episode, and brings another interesting group of antagonists into the Trek universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s too bad that Rodenberry\u2019s messaging about The Animated Series muddled its status, so that its episodes have only recently been recognized by the rights holders as canonical. I think TNG and other Trek series could have made good use of these characters. They\u2019re slouchy pirates, who don\u2019t want to be seen, and have no honor or ambition–just the opposite of Khan and his superior humans. When you catch a male Orion’s hand in the cookie jar, he\u2019ll say \u201cNo it wasn\u2019t\u201d and cast about for a diversion so that he can run away, producing, as the Orion ship does, a unique trail of radioactive waste. But they\u2019ll still always come back to the cookie jar, because they love cookies. They are almost cute, which makes you almost forget that if cornered, they can be extremely dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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4 out of 5 academy sanctioned oxygen deprivation tests.<\/p>\n\n\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/How_Sharper_Than_a_Serpent%27s_Tooth<\/a>