Kirk orders Spock, McCoy and Lt. Expendable to beam over to the derelict ship with him, and they find a bunch of uniforms lying around the floors. Knowing the way Kirk molests every female crew member on the Enterprise I assume the captain on the other ship has instituted a clothing-optional day to make Starfleet's rampant sexual harassment that much easier.
The empty uniforms are spilling rock salt from their neck holes and McCoy says humans are 96% water and that a couple of pounds of crack cocaine is all that's left once you've sucked all the water out. I'm pretty sure 96% is an astonomically high figure but I, just like all Star Trek writers, have forgotten most of my grammar school biology. Unlike Star Trek writers, I'd probably check an encyclopedia before I pulled percentages out of my rear end and passed them off as facts.
Kirk tells Spock to see if there are any log tapes. You can't take a leak behind a Dumpster these days without inadvertently winding up in a three camera shoot, but state-of-the-art starships don't even have those shoplifter ceiling bubbles with cameras in them like at Kmart, so they have to rely on the hope that someone's made a Starfleet's Funniest Home Videos to tell them what happened.
Luckily the ship's doctor made a tape warning anyone seeing his message to get down to the planet pronto because anyone looking at his recording has already contracted a virus just by being on the Exeter. On the ship they'll die, but on the planet they'll live. It didn't occur to anyone on the dying ship to raise the shields to prevent people from getting in there in the first place, or to crash the ship into the sun or to at least hang a big "Keep Out: This Means You" sign on the radar dish out front in order to warn people away. If the Klingons had been first to fly through the neighborhood they would have captured every Federation secret without firing a shot because there are apparently no protocols in place to deal with pretty much the same situation that happened on the show a couple of weeks ago. I suppose the inability to adapt quickly is what happens when you rely on a distant, sclerotic central bureaucracy to set policy for every far-flung corner of a society. Good thing we don't have to worry about that in 21st century America.
Kirk and co. beam down to planet Mongolia where they find Captain Ron Tracy hanging out with a bunch of extras from that scene in Marion's bar in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They learn from Tracy that there are two groups on the planet: the Yangs, who are savages, and the Cooms, who are Chinese but from outer space.
Tracy is the only member of his crew who survived the virus that turned everyone else into rock salt, and he tells Kirk that the planet has some mysterious fountain of youth property that kept him alive. No one bothers to ask why he didn't order the whole crew of the Exeter to beam down so they could enjoy not-dying too, or why they didn't just do it on their own after the first hundred of them had turned into the stuff I throw out on the back steps in January.
We learn that the civilizations that once lived on the planet had the same kind of bacterial warfare we had here on Earth back in the 1990s. That was some decade. What with the Eugenics Wars, the nuclear war and the bacterial wars, it's a wonder we found time to invent Beanie Babies and Tickle Me Elmo.
Captain Tracy has gone bad, which might have something to do with the fact that he has a girl's name. The last starship captain Kirk met was nuts, this one wants to use this planet's fountain of youth to get as rich as a P. Diddly-Doo-Doo Combs, that rappy man with all the bad rhyming and tacky gold jewelry. Do they do any psychological screening whatsoever at Starfleet Academy or do they just rock-paper-scissors the command assignments?
To demonstrate he means business Tracy kills Lt. Expendable, who lived at least two times longer than most Red Shirts but still 500 times less than some fruit flies.
Tracy contacts the Enterprise but doesn't bother to do it in another room, giving Kirk the opportunity to yell something to Sulu before a Space Mongolian knocks him out. Tracy tells Sulu that Kirk is sick which is why he yelled, and then says "landing party out" in a tone so evil he might as well have been cackling and twirling the end of his handlebar mustache. Sulu doesn't find anything suspicious at all and doesn't immediately send help which probably explains why it took three seasons and six movies for him to finally get his own command.
Kirk is locked in a cell with a Yang man and woman who are dressed in caveman Halloween costumes. The girl has plastic chicken bones around her arm and the guy is wearing a mink coat that would get red paint thrown on him in Manhattan. The caveman is upset that Kirk says "freedom," which is one of the sacred Yang words along with ni, peng and neee-wom. The two of them team up to pull the bars out of the cell window, and the caveman says thanks by whacking Kirk so hard on the back of the head with a hunk of rebar that it should have sunk his toupee halfway to his socks but only knocks him out.
According to Spock, who is manning the stopwatch in the next cell, Kirk is out for seven hours and eight minutes. Good thing Mr. Superhuman Strength used his giant brain counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" instead of figuring out a way out of there.
When Kirk wakes up the next day, rested, relaxed and somehow miraculously without brain damage or so much as a drop of blood on his yellow pajamas, he sees a convenient set of keys that has been sitting on the floor the whole time. Did I mention Gene Roddenberry wrote this episode? It's too bad they waited until he died to launch him into space.
In the meantime, McCoy is across town working in a lab but takes time out to leer at the Space Chinese chick who delivers his pu-pu platter. These guys should thank God that Gloria Allred died in the bacteria warfare wars way back in the 1990s.
Kirk and Spock show up in the lab but neglect to stick a chair up under the doorknob and for the third time this episode Captain Tracy jumps through the door and yells, "Aha!" No kidding, have they never heard of a doorstop?
Tracy shoots Spock, but lucky for Spock he's not wearing a red shirt so he's only stunned. Kirk and Tracy get into a fight outside and Kirk is saved only because Tracy's phaser happens to run out of bullets at the precise moment he finally gets the drop on Kirk. (Gene Roddenberry, you national treasure, you.)
There's been a big battle between the Yangs and the Cooms, and the Yangs have won. They show up with spears while Kirk and Tracy are wrasslin' and take everybody captive. They bring them back to Yang HQ where guys wear green Ramada Inn hand towels over their pants as loin clothes and the screaming outside sounds like that cowboys & Indians movie Arnold the pig used to watch every week on Green Acres.
Well, yeah, we're a
million light years from Earth yet it's still written in English and in
Thomas Jefferson's handwriting. What, you thought the scripts would
somehow get less ridiculous after Planet Nazi?
Someone brings in an American flag and Kirk says the Yangs are Yankees, the Cooms are Communists, and they fought the war we didn't fight on Earth. This contradicts not only the bacterial wars stuff from earlier in the episode, but all the other wars Star Trek was always saying we fought because we are unenlightened barbarians, not like sophisticated Hollywood wife-swappers and cokeheads, but okay.
So apparently this is Planet United States because they not only have the flag but the Constitution. They also have a bible and a frantic Tracy tells the Yangs that Spock is the devil, and when they look it up --whaddaya know? -- there's Spock. Because of this, for some reason Kirk and Tracy get handcuffed together like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones and have to fight over a kitchen knife.
Spock uses an old Vulcan bar trick to hypnotize a chick to open a communicator and signal the ship, Sulu finally figures out something is wrong and beams down, and Kirk beats evil Captain Tracy but -- in a shocking twist that I never saw coming -- lets him live! He then reads the entire preamble to the Constitution with the exception of, curiously, the "for the United States of America" bit at the end.
Kirk sets the savages on the path to a representative republic that interferes with the natural growth of the society at least as much as what Captain Get-Rich-Quick Tracy was doing, although without the bloodshed, but Kirk's the good guy so his egregious assault on Starfleet's noninterference directive is passed off with a wink.
Canadian William Shatner smiles at the American flag, and back up in space the Enterprise flies off alone, apparently leaving the Exeter in permanent orbit as a special present to the cavemen of Planet United States when they finally get around to rebuilding NASA.
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