Lt. Expendable calls to say he's beaming back home alone, and when Kirk goes to holler at him for staying out all night without so much as a phone call, Lt. Expendable pratfalls off the transporter platform and dies. From his dead mouth issues a warning: "Leave this place or you will all die!" Cryptic warnings from dead crewmen are probably scarier when the extra doesn't have a big chunk of corned beef from the Paramount commissary stuck to the corner of his mouth.
With two of the ship's most senior officers still missing under creepy, fatal circumstances on a mysterious, uncharted planet that is supposed to be uninhabited, naturally the three highest ranking officers immediately go down looking for them. It's just like all those times during World War II when General Eisenhower took off with Patton and Omar Bradley to find Hogan and Kinch.
Kirk, Spock and Bones arrive on the planet and are immediately surrounded by 100% of this week's special effects budget. 98.5% went to dry ice, and the remaining buck-fifty went to three spectral apparitions who say things like "Go baaaaaaaaak!" and "Caaaaaaaaptain Kirk!"
Yes, it's Planet Halloween! Scary stuff, kiddies.
The three ghostly witches float and howl and are supposed to be scary but don't even look as frightening as Priscilla Presley post-plastic surgery. Plus I'm pretty sure one of the outer-space Weird Sisters is a transvestite, but they disappear before I can get a good look at her Adam's apple.
Bones notices a spooky house sitting in the middle of the plastic rocks surrounded by so much smoke I wonder if someone left the door to the writer's room open. If so, the contact high explains everything that happens from here on out.
Inside the house, a black kitty cat leads our heroes over a hole in the floor and they fall into a dungeon with plastic skeletons glued to the walls. Spock suggests everything they're seeing "terrifies man most on an instinctive level." Phony fog and Halloween decorations don't scare five year olds now, but in the future some alien reads Kirk's mind and discovers a couple of marked-down party supplies is what scares a starship captain? Right now the Klingons are kicking themselves for spending a bundle on all those huge ships, dangerous torpedoes and zappy laser beams when they could have taken over Earth with a pair of headlight glasses and a boomerang bowtie.
Scotty and Sulu show up to free Kirk and the others from the dungeon. I just thank goodness that whoever killed Lt. Expendable knew that Scott and Sulu were regular supporting players or they'd be dead now too!
Kirk realizes that Mr. Scott and Mr. Sulu have been hypnotized, but before he can take his shirt off and give them a flying kick they are all suddenly standing in a cheesy throne room set with cheap curtains on the walls and Mr. Clean in a bathrobe sitting on a throne on one side. But not the kind of throne you'd naturally associate with Mr. Clean; the Queen of England kind.
Mr. Clean talks to the kitty cat and offers Kirk a plate of prop costume jewelry to eat. Kirk says he ate fake rubies for lunch, and besides he can make cheap costume jewelry on the Enterprise, and that Mr. Spock sometimes models it on those long stretches between stars when the three-dimensional chess set is on the fritz. The kitty cat turns into a chick with a huge Lily Munster wig and I start to think this episode is getting kind of weird.
Speaking of bad wigs, up on the ship Chekov is wearing the most bizarre wig he's ever worn, and that includes that sleeping possum he's wearing on his cueball head somewhere out in a Los Angeles soup kitchen right now.
This episode stiiiiiiiiiiinks! Stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks! Go back and rewriiiiiite it! It needs maaaaaajor script chaaaaaanges! Maaaaaaaajor! Ooooooo!
Mr. Clean floats the Enterprise model in a cube of clear Jell-O like a chunk of suspended banana. Up in space the real ship is suddenly in a Jell-O force field.
William Shatner mispronounces "telekinesis" so badly that everybody is forced to surrender.
Sexy music plays as Kirk romances the Lily Munster kitty cat lady while Mr. Clean watches for tips on how to woo kitty cat space ladies through a huge hole in the wall.
Lily Kittycat gets mad when she realizes Kirk is only making out with her to satisfy his own selfish desires, which is so completely unlike any man in the universe that he should be drummed out of Starfleet for ungentlemanly conduct immediately. Shame on you, Captain Kirk.
Mr. Clean releases Kirk and Spock from the dungeon with the plastic skeletons and a Styrofoam door falls on him. Kirk picks up the stick with the Christmas ornament on the end that Mr. Clean dropped, and he and Spock take off.
The kitty cat lady turns into a giant kitty cat that runs through miniature versions of the hallways and makes mountain lion noises. I realize that, yes, this episode is definitely getting a little strange.
Hypnotized Mr. Sulu shows up to fight Kirk and naturally he knows karate because he's Asian. But since it's the 1960s this isn't racist. Later, he gets into a good school on merit alone and does complicated math equations in his head.
The kitty cat lady wants Mr. Clean's stick, but Kirk breaks it and the spooky house disappears. Mr. Clean and the kitty cat lady turn into tiny little blue yarn puppets on strings and then die. These yarn puppets killed a crew member, were from another galaxy, read minds, controlled a starship in orbit and could rearrange matter with a magic stick. I'd think Kirk would want to stick one of them in a jar so they can poke around at it with tweezers, but they leave both of them on Planet Spooky Halloween and take off, probably to go fight a super-smart computerized turkey monster on Planet Thanksgiving.
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