Actually, it isn't a framed photograph at all, it's a static image on one of those super high-tech bridge screens and only looks like someone glued a big picture to the wall. Apparently in the future you don't need screen savers, which is good because it gives everyone in the audience time to get a good, long look at the photo of the old man, like when the Stooges used to lock the camera for five minutes over those maps with the crazy names like Giva Dam, Hot Sea, Tot Sea and Bay of Rum.
The old man is John Gill, and he was sent by the Federation to observe a system with two planets. Planet Echo is primitive and violent, planet Zion is peaceful and technologically advanced. Planet Echo, the primitive one, launches a nuke -- technology it shouldn't possess -- at the Enterprise. Uh-oh. Who got chocolate in my peanut butter? Who got peanut butter in my chocolate? Two great tastes that together make...Space Nazis!
So we've finally reached Planet Nazi, but Kirk doesn't find out it's with Planet Nazi until they beam down. The Enterprise can leap from star to star, but apparently Google Earth technology was one of those things lost in the nuclear wars of the 1990s. I'm glad the Nineties are still in the far-off distant future, because I'm sure not looking forward to them.
Kirk is a decade off, so he's disguised as Ralph Kramden. Spock's disguise is, as usual, a hat. Four hundred crewmen onboard the Enterprise and when Kirk is picking teams, he skips over the 399 who will blend right in anywhere they go and always picks the guy with the rubber devil ears first.
They beam down to the Paramount backlot which looks, unsurprisingly, very much like the Paramount backlot. Spock says that it makes sense that the architecture would be similar to a 1960s TV studio backlot, but when the Space Nazis show up a minute later, Kirk and Spock agree that it's virtually impossible that another Nazi Germany developed somewhere else. Really? So the architecture can develop to be identical to our own and that makes perfect sense to these guys, but the culture that developed the identical architecture can't develop identically to any culture on Earth? Not to mention the fact that all they ever beam down to everywhere they go are planets identical to one period or another from Earth history. Look, it's Planet Revolutionary War! Hey, over here! Get a load of the flappers on Planet Roaring Twenties!
Some Space Nazis try to capture them, and Kirk and Spock knock them out and have the great, brilliant, all-new, all-original, no-one's-ever-thought-of-something-so-clever-before idea of dressing in their uniforms. They should probably patent that idea before somebody steals it.
They get nabbed in full Nazi garb trying to sneak into the headquarters where Gill is hiding out, which shouldn't surprise them. Obviously someone knew they were coming or they wouldn't have had that nuke launched at them before the opening credits. Although this fact doesn't seem to occur to Kirk, Spock, the Space Nazi who captures them or the episode's writer and director.
Apparently Gill, the Federation guy, has taken over as Fuhrer of Planet Nazi, but he's like the Wizard of Oz: no one ever sees him, and a guy named Mallomar runs the show. I scarcely have time to wonder why they didn't have themselves beamed directly into the building or at least try to sneak in through the kitchen door out back disguised as Italian waiters, when they're whisked off to be tortured.
Kirk doesn't seem too worried about the brutal scourging, and I wouldn't either if a vicious beating with a cat-o'-nine-tails only drew pretty pink Kool-Aid stripes on my back and didn't even manage to break the skin.
Before they left the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock were both injected with tracking devices. So they finally developed the technology we've got right now to track dogs, but it doesn't matter because Kirk rips them out to make a laser with a 40 watt light bulb to zap open their prison cell door. It seems pretty convenient to me that this technology never existed in the show before and, as far as I can recall, is never used again, and only happens to show up this one time just when they need it in order to escape these specific circumstances, but I guess even Houdini probably had a convenient key hidden up his rear end just in case.
Luckily, this version of Berlin -- which is the Berlin that runs a whole planet -- has only one street and about ten people living in it, so there's no sweat that Kirk and Spock and the underground guide they've freed will be recaptured until the plot says so.
They're taken to meet with the local underground, and I wonder if the Star Trek writers understand that when we say "underground" we don't actually mean "under ground." This underground operates under ground in caves with perfectly level floors and Reynolds Wrap on the walls. Eva Braun shows up and tells them she'll take them into HQ for a pair of nylons and a Hershey bar.
Scotty, beam down two schnauzers, a case of pickled herring, a Hitler costume (extra husky) and a St. Pauli Girl dress in Mr. Spock's size! We've got a war to win!
Once inside Nazi headquarters, they see through the convenient window in Space Hitler's door that the head honcho of Planet Nazi looks drugged, so they call in their expert. Kirk has Bones beam down into a broom cupboard. If he and Spock had done that earlier, they could have ended the episode in the second act. Apparently the transporters work like the Bat-poles on the Adam West Batman series, because Bones materializes in full Nazi garb but still asks, "What in blazes is this?" He couldn't guess, or did he think when they stuffed him in that Luftwaffe uniform up on the ship that he was beaming down to Planet Samurai?
Space Hitler gives a TV speech with the microphone strategically placed over his mouth and not one person on all of Planet Nazi notices that he doesn't so much as twitch a single facial muscle. Even Mortimer Snerd's face moved when he talked. After the camera is turned off on the prerecorded speech declaring war on Planet Zion, Bones wakes up Gill who tells Kirk that he thought he could do the whole Nazi thing, but for their cuckoo clock-manufacturing efficiency and not the whole evil thing. He thought he could make Nazis benign this time around. This guy's supposed to be a history bigshot, so I'm not sure how he squared that circle, but for some reason he also thought his benign Nazi planet needed the uniforms, right on down to the swastika armbands. That's probably the first thing that I'd get rid of if I was trying to soften up the whole evil-monster-race-hatred Nazi image.
Gill says Mallomar took over and that's when things took a Reich turn. Sleepy Gill gets back on the air and tells everyone to live in peace and harmony, so Mallomar shoots him through his picture window. Mallomar gets shot, too, and we're treated to the bizarre, eccentric, bug-eyed death of a villain who had barely five lines in the whole show and who I could have easily missed if I hadn't waited for a commercial to run out and grab that bag of M&M's.
Spock suggests that Planet Nazi will eventually make a "fine edition to the Federation." On Earth, our Nazis didn't stop the goose-stepping slaughter until the free nations of the world united and kicked the holy living crap out of them, but Commander Sciencepants thinks these Space Nazis will go cold turkey from the whole genocide thing just like that because an old man who's now dead told them to. That sounds pretty illogical and like a huge leap of faith to me, but what do I know? I'm only human.
Back on the bridge, Spock and McCoy begin to argue and Kirk cuts them off with a cute joke about not wanting to go through another civil war. Hah-hah-hah!
Wait, how many innocent people are dead because of Federation interference again?
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