Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "For the Earth is Hollow..."

This week's Star Trek begins with Kirk racing onto the bridge, urgently pasting down his wig and sucking in his gut.  Someone has launched a bunch of glow-stick bombs at the Enterprise and apparently a bridge full of highly trained Starfleet officers can't figure out which button to push when a half-dozen missiles are about to blow their ship out from under them.  Kirk turns the headlights on and the glow sticks explode.

Spock tracks the glow sticks back to a giant spitball floating in space.  In the meantime, Kirk goes downstairs and finds out that Bones has a terminal case of zenon-polyplatypus-thermia.  Maybe that explains why he's always looking at the tops of people's heads instead of their eyes when he's talking to them, occasionally bugging out his own eyes for no reason, why he's always doing that weird chewy thing with his mouth, and why he never seems to know what to do with his hands.  Those aren't bad actor tics, they're symptoms.  Now I feel guilty for making fun of him all these years.  Poor Bones.  He'll be dead in 57 minutes and I never told him I loved him.

Upstairs on the bridge, Spock's figured out that his giant space spitball is hollow and he determines that there is oxygen inside.  He also says that it's on a collision course with Darren 5, which surprises me because I didn't think Bewitched burned through that many Darrens.  Probably the AIDS.

Kirk, Spock and Bones beam inside the giant spitball and find an exotic 20 by 30 foot land of pool sand, Styrofoam rocks, red sky and a bunch of upright cement sewer liners that have been spray-painted pink.  Spock says the place is lifeless, but the minute they get arrive some doors swing open on the sides of the sewer caps and a bunch of guys wearing tights and ugly picnic tablecloth ponchos run out with swords and whack McCoy over the head.  Because, of course, the preferred weapon of a brilliant space-faring race that is technologically capable of building a giant, inhabited floating spitball would naturally be the broadsword.

The lady boss in a green Christmas wrapping paper dress shows up and orders Kirk and the others taken below.  One of the guards holds up the back of his hand in the traditional "why you, I oughta" gesture that signifies the universe over that this wiseguy means business.  The Enterprise men go downstairs with the tablecloth-wearing goons into the spitball's basement.

The boss lady takes them to her "oracle," which is a gravy stain on the wall with a flashlight stuck in the middle.  Kirk says he wants to be friends, so the gravy stain zaps him because it doesn't swing that way, no matter what the other gravy stain flashlights or Darren #2 says.  Kirk and the others are briefly turned into bad Kodak photo negatives of themselves before they pass out, and I'm thinking maybe the gravy stain is overcompensating for something.

Kirk and the others wake up from their electrocution and an old caveman in a fright wig and groovy poncho lets them lick special herbs from his hand.  Far out, Yoko.

The old hippie caveman says he knows that they're all inside a spitball in outer space because one time he climbed a mountain and rapped his knuckles on the sky.  When he tells Kirk this, a glowing pimple erupts on his forehead and since there's no acne cream on board the spitball, he dies of embarrassment.

The old man had some alien electric dog fence technology implanted in his head, and the gravy stain oracle killed him when he started blabbing about all the catwalks and gaffers living up in the sound stage sky.  It seems odd to me but apparently not to the writers that the old man wasn't punished way back when he actually climbed the mountain, or that he's punished for telling the truth to three guys who beamed over from an alien spaceship and so clearly already know that the spitball is a giant hollow spaceship.  Or that in the 10,000 years that we later find out the spitball has been in space, he was the only guy in countless generations of spitball inhabitants who left the sewers to take a look around the place.  Maybe these people deserve to have a splatter of gravy on the wall in charge of their destiny.

 Screen legend Bette Davis on The Mike Douglas Show, circa 1977

The babe shows up and says, "It is time to refresh yourself."  Why can they always speak English up in space but they can never just say, "Hey, you guys want a grilled cheese or maybe some tuna or something?"

The babe thinks she's on a planet called Yomama and not inside a floating spitball, and she looks like she uses the cardboard tubes inside the toilet paper rolls for curlers.  She asks Bones to stay on Yomama as her "mate," and he looks at the top of her head, bugs his eyes, does some weird chewy thing with his mouth and doesn't know what to do with his hands, which I guess means he accepts her proposal and agrees to be her wife. 

While Bones and the curler babe are picking out China patterns, Kirk and Spock sneak into the gravy stain's bedroom.  Spock says the writing on the wall is from a planet called Febreze, which was wiped out when its sun went supernova 10,000 years ago.  It seems odd to me that there would be any examples of writing left from a planet that was most likely blown to bits along with its exploding sun, but I'm sure the Star Trek writers thoroughly researched the effects of a supernova and found out that textbooks would not only survive the explosion, but would float in the icy heart of a dead solar system for ten thousand years until they could be discovered so that Spock could go through the trouble for some reason to learn the useless dead language of an extinct race that no one in the universe had spoken for millennia.  What?  It could happen.

Spock further confirms that the spitball ship must be from Febreze because of a picture on the wall depicting a solar system with eight planets.  Forget that some if not all of those eight planets would have been wiped from existence 10,000 years ago when the sun went boom, I'm struck by the fact that apparently in the vastness of creation only the Febreze solar system had eight planets.  But, hey, they downgraded Pluto so that there are only eight planets in our solar system.  So by Spock's brilliant logic, ours is the Febreze solar system.  Did this guy just claim he was some big science expert and everyone believed him because of those ears?

So the dying planet of Febreze sent the Yomama spitball into space to colonize another planet a quadrillion miles away that it somehow knew about even though the Febrezians had never been there, because a 10,000 year trip ain't a quick run to the post office, and they assumed this new planet would still be there in 10,000 years even though their own planet blowing up should have proved to them that things aren't so permanent in the universe, and they apparently rounded up the biggest morons on their world and didn't tell them they were on a spaceship or what their mission was or where they were going and expected that the idiot descendants of the original morons would be smart enough to rebuild their civilization based on a book hidden in a wall safe behind a spot of gravy on the wall.  Maybe all civilizations, no matter how many high-tech gizmos they can put on the Best Buy MasterCard, inevitably become just too plain stupid to survive.  Now where's my cell phone?  I want to text a pizza to my plasma screen TV.   

Kirk and Spock get zapped by Kodak again for being a couple of little snoopypants, and are sent back to the Enterprise without supper.  Bones stays and gets an electric dog zapper installed in his head.

The gravy stain officiates at McCoy's wedding to the curler babe by talking out its flashlight at them.  The curler babe shows McCoy the book hidden in the wall safe that tells all the secret odor-fighting recipes from ancient Febreze.

McCoy calls Kirk on the phone and tells him about the book, but gets zapped in his head pimple and falls down.  Kirk and Spock show up and remove the electric dog zapper and McCoy's wife gets ticked, but then McCoy removes her pimple and she's free of the control of the gravy stain for the first time in her life.  Her first act as a free woman is to demand that McCoy tell his friends to leave, and she wants to go out to a real restaurant and when is he going to clean out the damned garage?  McCoy begins to have doubts about this wedded bliss stuff.  Thank God for that incurable, killer, dead-by-the-end-of-the-episode terminal illness.

For some unexplained reason the all-powerful gravy stain suddenly loses the ability to zap strangers like squirrels on a power line.

Kirk and Spock get the book from its safe and use it to fix Yomama's guidance system, thus saving all the Derwoods on Darren 5.  By an amazing coincidence that I didn't see coming at all, Spock finds a secret store of medical knowledge that miraculously includes the cure for what ails Bones. 

Back on the Enterprise, Bones is given the cure and as soon as he finds out he's no longer dying, he hightails it away from the giant spitball as fast as his little warp nacelles can carry him, leaving his wife of five minutes to stand on top of the old man's mountain banging a rolling pin against the sky and demanding that he get back home or she's going to toss the burned pot roast in the trash.