Nah, not really. It's just a couple of guys in colored jumpsuits. They look like the wardrobe department dressed them in outfits scavenged from some dead henchmen in a James Bond villain's volcano lair, but they do make me suddenly wonder why there are almost never any animals on any of these planets, and when there are it's always a beagle in a false mustache or a roller-skating monkey with a spike glued to its head.
Speaking of things glued to heads, it turns out the plot this week is thinner than William Shatner's hair. The guys in jumpsuits are a bunch of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the galaxy of Andromeda who want to commandeer the Enterprise to fly back home. To prove they mean bidness, they turn the two Red Shirts into a couple of McDLT containers. We don't have time to learn if in the future the hot side stays hot and the cold side stays cold, because the leader of the blancmanges crushes one of the McDLT containers as a warning to Kirk to eat at Wendy's.
So another Red Shirt is dead this week, and I'm wondering now if Red Shirts are Starfleet's version of kamikazes or if academy graduates are issued their shirts only after they're on their ships and it's too late to jump out the window.
Kirk and the boys are locked in a Styrofoam cave and Spock mind melds through the wall with one of the alien babes. He learns that the aliens are really giant octopi with one hundred limbs capable of executing a hundred separate tasks. So on their home planet they can expound on binomial theorem up at the chalkboard to a classroom full of little octopi while eating an ice cream cone, scratching their rear ends and holding ninety-seven umbrellas.
Spock says it makes sense they're octopi because meeting humans from another galaxy is unlikely. Um, excuse me, Commander Braniac, but that's ALL you meet. Taking into account the fact that every "alien" the Enterprise encounters is a human with a bump glued onto his nose, plus the recent Nova show I watched on multiverse theory, I wonder if Spock's Starfleet Academy diploma was the prize at the bottom of a box of Sugar Frosted Tribble Flakes.
Kirk karate chops the alien babe and they escape from the Styrofoam cave only to have the head alien in an orange jumpsuit press a button on the transistor radio on his belt which freeze-tags all the good guys. The head alien is named Rogaine.
On the ship, Rogaine has everyone but Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty turned into McDLT containers and stored in the walk-in cooler near the special sauce for the trip back to the Andromeda Galaxy. He's already said his octopus buddies plan to take over our galaxy, so why he doesn't toss everybody into the Dumpster out back with the empty Shamrock Shakes cups is a mystery even Officer Big Mac and Mayor McCheese couldn't solve.
Ya want fries with that?
I notice yet again that these super-duper, high-definition, ultra-clear digital updates of the original episodes really bring out the detail at the edge of William Shatner's hairpiece.
The aliens make the Enterprise go really fast and plow right on through the barrier at the edge of the galaxy. It looks like the barrier the Enterprise flew into in that terrible movie where elderly Scotty did a comic pratfall and elderly Uhura did a bone-chilling naked fan dance.
An alien guy in a pink jumpsuit eats a plate of blue ribs and multicolored Styrofoam chunks and, since he enjoys it, the gang realizes that the aliens are turning more human as time goes on. Kirk says they have to stimulate the aliens' senses. In the future, this apparently doesn't sound incredibly creepy at all.
Bones juices one of the aliens with Pfizer's AngriDrug to make him mad, since pharmaceutical companies in the future have found that there's a big market in artificially inducing the emotion you get when you accidentally drop a hammer on your toe or watch Bill Moyers on PBS. Scotty gets one of the aliens loaded and Kirk makes out with one. Kirk apparently lucked out and just happened to draw the straw for one of the babes. Whew, that was close. I thought he'd be Frenching one of the boys for sure. Spock tells Rogaine Kirk is making out with his octo-chick, and Rogaine tosses Kirk around the mess hall.
Rogaine realizes that getting mad makes him human and he decides to settle his people back on Planet Groo. He turns control of the ship back to Kirk and all is forgiven including Rogaine's cold-blooded murder of the lady Red Shirt McDLT container from the beginning of the show.
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