The episode begins with the Enterprise answering a distress call on a mysterious planet. Kirk, Bones and Spock beam down to the surface and Spock says the planet is rich in Clearasil deposits. They find a thriving civilization of thirty-seven men in dresses and a midget, none of whom have pimples.
In a tacked-on voiceover we learn that the people are spacemen who hung around ancient Greece 2000 years ago then relocated to this planet because Socrates was keeping them up all night with his endless pacing and Archimedes kept sticking levers under the house and scaring the cat.
The midget Kirk befriends is the evil scientist from The Wild, Wild West who apparently created a diabolically clever device to transport him from one ridiculous genre show to another. He's just lucky he set the dial right or he might have ended up crushed by that huge telephone on Land of the Giants or run over by Fleegle's Banana Buggy.
The boss of the planet is named Parmesan and he's dying from a deadly infection that's the result of a cut on his leg. The boo-boo went untreated since the Space Greeks have no doctor, and the only thing rubbing Clearasil on it did was clean up the zits on his thigh. So this tiny handful of people has been on this planet for over two thousand years and in all that time apparently no one got so much as one sliver in their finger or stepped on a rusty nail sticking out of a board, let alone got an abscessed tooth, tinnitus, dandruff, a headache, cancer or gotten a compound fracture from slipping and falling off one another in the communal baths. That seems pretty unlikely to me, but later in the episode Nurse Chapel is presented as a sex object so this week we're talking the Golden Gate Bridge of disbelief suspension.
Bones tries to cure Parmesan, but the Greeks on Planet Greek are telekinetic and so in his crazed, leg boo-boo state Parmesan makes all kinds of cheap props fly around and smash all over the room. He also makes Kirk wrestle the midget, which is nowhere near as funny as it sounds.
Bones employs the medical technique of shaking his patient like a bucket of paint in a Home Depot paint mixer, and Parmesan stops smashing the $1.25 props.
Parmesan makes an amazingly rapid recovery for a guy who was at death's door just before the previous commercial break, and Kirk tells him that since he's on the mend that he and the others are leaving Planet Greece. Parmesan shows how great his mental powers are by making Kirk play a long-distance game of "stop hitting yourself."
Later, Parmesan claims he feels bad about making Kirk slap himself, so he brings the boys in for some lovely parting gifts. Kirk gets a big hubcap, Spock is given a giant wishbone, and McCoy is handed a roll of paper towels with most of the sheets of Bounty missing.
Parmesan says Bones has to stay just in case he steps on a bottle cap when he goes to the beach and needs a tetanus booster. Kirk says no dice so Parmesan makes Kirk and Spock put Christmas wreaths on their heads and riverdance around the room.
Apparently the Greeks on Planet Greece have the kind of telekinesis that doesn't just toss Paramount props around the room, they can make people say stuff too. Kirk is forced to sing, but no one can force me to listen. Thank Zeus for the mute button.
Kirk is forced to lay down on the floor and I'm a little alarmed that we're going to get into some real, old-school Greek stuff -- you know what I mean -- but instead Spock's stand-in does a rapid-step flamenco dance around Kirk's head. It's very impressive for the simple fact that I imagine flamenco dancing wasn't much practiced several thousand years ago on Earth before the spacefaring ancient Greek diaspora, so how do the space Greeks know about it?
Spock cries. Maybe he just got around to reading the rest of the script and found out he was going to have to spoon Nurse Chapel. Run, Vulcan, Run.
Kirk is forced to act like a horsie with the midget riding his back, and now we're way down the path to the kind of stuff that got Alexander the Great banned from coming within a hundred yards of every Macedonian grammar school.
After the most well-placed commercial break in television history, Spock is mad that Parmesan made him display emotion, and to prove it he breaks a prop goblet made of painted sugar. The Wild, Wild West midget is pretty ticked too, probably because he's a better actor than the guy he had to ride like a horse in the previous scene, so he breaks a planter and says he's going to go stab Parmesan with the hunk of papier mache, but Kirk gets him to hand over the chunk of planter by talking down to him in every usage of the phrase.
Here and at several points during the episode, Kirk talks to the midget as if he's a two year old and not an adult human being. The guy has two thousand years of pent-up rage because of the way Parmesan and the other Greeks have been mistreating him. The way Kirk patronizes him, Kirk is lucky he doesn't get a head-butt to the crotch and his wig stuffed down his throat.
Bones says that there's a high concentration of curare in Parmesan's blood but not in the midget's, and figures out that's what is giving the Greeks their super telekinetic powers. Kirk asks the midget how long their abilities started to manifest after the Greeks arrived on the planet. I can't remember what I had for supper last week, but the midget can remember after two and a half millennia how long the supplies on their ship lasted and how long it took for their powers to show up after the Greeks started eating the local food. What I really want to know is if Parmesan had a Sprite or a Fresca on day 172 and how much salt he used on his burger on day 400, but Kirk doesn't ask that important stuff.
We take for granted that tomatoes and grapes won't kill us. That is accumulated civilizational knowledge based on thousands of years of trial and error by our ancestors. A lot of ancient humans died testing out stuff that turned out to be poisonous. Yet on Planet Greece, only thirty-seven people showed up, picked and ate whatever they wanted willy-nilly, and not only were there no fatal consequences, they wound up developing superpowers. Then they sat around picking on a midget for over two thousand years until one of them finally stepped on a rusty fishing hook and wound up with an infection that brought the Enterprise there at the start of the episode. Frankly, I don't think this episode was very well thought out.
How do we separate the men from the boys in Starfleet? With crowbars! Hah-hah-hah-hah! Seriously, though, I can put you in the cabin right next to mine.
Bones gives Spock and Kirk injections of curare and says that they'll develop superpowers too, but it could take anywhere from a little bit of time to a very long time. Since it's about 45 minutes into the episode, I'm guessing Kirk's superpowers will show up in about....ohhhh.....five years.
Bones says that the midget never developed superpowers because of the same problem with his pituitary gland that kept him from growing. But, hold on...if the local food hasn't given him the superpowers of the others, how come he didn't die 2,300 years ago? Wait! Don't think about logical stuff! Quick! Look over there! Uhura and Nurse Chapel just beamed into the room and marched away. Ooo, what's that all about?
Parmesan and the other Greeks brought the gals down to join in the fun. Spock sings to them. I take a moment to slaughter a goat as thanks to all the gods on Olympus that Uhura isn't inspired to perform an impromptu fan dance.
Spock is forced to make out with Nurse Chapel. I would've used the Vulcan death pinch on myself.
Kirk makes TV history and makes out with Uhura. At least I think TV history was going on. I was too busy looking at Uhura's fingernails, which look like the ridiculous giant silver fingernails on the woman who waited on me at the bank the other day. How do those bank tellers eat a sandwich without slicing off their face like that guard whose face Hannibal Lecter peeled off to escape police custody?
Just when things seem most bleak, Kirk develops superpowers. I was way off with that five years guess.
Maybe Kirk was motivated to get his powers faster before the Greeks made him make out with Nurse Chapel too.
With his new powers, Kirk threatens Parmesan with a rubber knife-wielding midget. He tells Parmesan to watch it or Starfleet will superpower his flabby Greek rear-end all over the planet. I thought they had some rule or something about interfering in other cultures. Maybe that doesn't apply when you use superpowers and a midget with a knife to your dirty work for you.
Kirk leans down to the Wild, Wild West midget and calls up to the ship with a big smile on his face to tell Scotty, "I have a little surprise." That's when the scene cuts, so we're spared Kirk winking and telling the guy that it'll be "a short trip," "a small leap," and "a tiny hop" to the Enterprise. Unfortunately we're also spared the sight of Kirk being strangled to death by an irate midget.
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