Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"

I once saw a low-budget horror movie where a guy kept his monstrous midget Siamese twin troll brother locked in a box from which he'd escape and sneak around the neighborhood gruesomely killing people.  This week's Star Trek was a little like that only nowhere near as artfully plotted and executed.

The Enterprise Taxi Service, Inc. of the Greater Milky Way and Points West is flagged down at the curb outside a ritzy hotel planet by a woman who needs the crew to schlepp her and her suitcase to the airport.  And step on it, young man, I'm in a hurry.

Inside the little suitcase she's stashed away the Medusan ambassador, a creature so hideous to behold that one spring of his latches drives a human as insane as Margot Kidder hiding in the bushes.  So I'm guessing the Medusan ambassador has kind of the effect that seeing Rosie O'Donnell has on me, if 900 pounds of solid crap could fit in a ten pound American Tourister carryon.

Spock, being only half-human, is allowed to peep in the box provided he wears a pair of elderly James Garner's giant ski goggle sunglasses.  Somehow a red lens on the camera turns the whole room red and makes Gorgons not crazy-inducing, which is nice.  Frankly, I wish they had a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary for this episode, because I'd love to know exactly how the clever technicians in the special effects department figured out how to hold that piece of see-through red plastic in front of the camera, but maybe some TV magic should just be left to the imagination.

The lady with the Rosie O'Donnell mini-monster in her toolbox luggage has brought along a guy named Larry who wants to make out with her and later Scotty wears a dress to supper.

The lady doesn't want to make out with Larry because she likes Rosie O'Donnell in the suitcase --  even though he's just a bunch of flashing green lights, so what would their kids look like? -- so Larry goes to shoot Rosie O'Donnell who, as you recall from earlier in this sentence, is just a bunch of flashing green lights.  So Larry thinks he can shoot flashing light.  You know, just like you can shoot the light coming from the sun with a gun.  I think Larry is kind of nuts already.

Even though he has no arms, somehow the Rosie O'Donnell monster opens his suitcase lid just in time and Larry beholds Rosie's hideous visage.  Larry shows us he's gone nuts by jumping around the suitcase's room like Pee-Wee Herman when he first gets up in the morning in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Larry runs down to engineering and makes the ship fly so fast that it flies clear off the script and lands in the groovy kaleidoscopic opening to Family Affair, which I hated but which I got stuck seeing the opening credits to sometimes because my sister was bigger than me.

Once he's stranded them in the Family Affair credits, Larry dies of bad acting.  If that's fatal on the Enterprise now, Shatner and Sulu better run down to sickbay for immunizations, pronto!

Rosie O'Donnell in the suitcase is an expert at navigation, naturally, so Spock decides to mind-meld with it in order to help the ship escape from the cheesy 1960s sitcom opening.  Kirk decides to do his part by distracting the box's chick friend who is in love with the inside of her suitcase by sexually harassing her in the back of the ship.

While Spock goes to the suitcase's bedroom, Kirk takes the woman down to the room where they keep the leftover flowers from some of William Shatner's weddings. 

Kirk woos the lady with all the subtlety of Teddy Kennedy chasing a terrified waitress around a restaurant table with his pants down around his ankles.  The lady suddenly senses that Spock is trying to swipe her luggage upstairs.  Didn't I mention she was psychic?  That's okay, though, because the script forgot to mention that she's blind until now, too, so she can see without sight the beauty of the glowing green vomit light show that is the ghastly Rosie O'Donnell midget hidden inside her carryon bag.  If only the Star Trek writers had tried to convey some diabolically clever observations about our shallow human perception of true beauty, this episode would have had a whole other layer of meaning beyond ugly monsters hiding in your luggage and Kirk's attempted date rape in the Enterprise's flower shop.

I have something so hideous, so terrifyingly ugly in this box that it makes Cher look like...okay, bad example.  But, mister, it ain't pretty.

The suitcase is brought to the bridge and put behind a shield so Rosie O'Donnell can change into a bikini without driving everyone as nuts as whoever wrote this episode.  Spock goes behind the shield wearing his giant James Garner sunglasses and comes out laughing.  At first I'm afraid that he's gone bad-acting crazy like poor Larry, but then I realize that Leonard Nimoy is just as crummy an actor as Shatner always was, he just lucked out that his character didn't require him to act outside of one dimension every week.

Spock is now possessed by the hideous luggage monster who, remember, is conveniently a whiz at navigation, and together they manage to back the Enterprise out of the parking space in Family Affair's opening credits and get them back onto the highway and into this week's Star Trek episode.  I begin to think maybe they'd have been better off hanging out with Brian Keith and his live-in boyfriend, that fat English butler with the beard.

Once the Enterprise is safe, Spock goes back behind the shield to slip into something more comfortable, and Sulu realizes too late that Spock has left James Garner's giant red sunglasses on the navigation console.  Spock gets a full-on look at Rosie O'Donnell in all her ghastliness and he catches the worst case of bad acting on Star Trek since Kirk danced around hugging himself dressed as an Indian in that episode where he had amnesia and thought he was Tonto.

The psychic lady is the only one who can cure crazy Spock because she's got amazing psychic abilities that somehow also can cure people -- with, apparently, the exception of people named "Larry" -- but she's jealous of Spock for looking in her luggage and seeing her dirty underwear and that old busted-open tube of traveling toothpaste she never cleaned up properly.  Kirk decides the best way to get her to save his pal is the "shake, yell at and insult" method, which is the same method he employs with the stewards down in the galley to ensure that his creamed corn isn't laced with spit.

The lady saves Spock who for some reason at the end of the show is wearing an ugly medal with a megaphone glued on it on a giant chain around his neck.  Spock and the lady talk about the medal like I'm supposed to know what the crap they're talking about but I have no idea what they're talking about.  Spock is wearing James Garner's sunglasses again as he beams the lady and her Rosie O'Donnell luggage monster off the ship to Planet LAX. 

It's a good thing Spock remembered to wear his giant sunglasses, because Kirk is standing next to him in the room watching the whole thing without wearing a pair of protective red sunglasses, so Spock will need to be in top form once Kirk, as has been established multiple times throughout the episode, goes crazy and dies in a couple of minutes and Spock is forced to take command of the ship.