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Sunday, January 6, 2013

Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Elaan of Troyius"

On this week's Star Trek, the Enterprise is turned into the Love Boat, with Captain Kirk as Captain Murray from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Chekov as Gopher and Bones as Doc Siegfried.  Hello, I'm Uhura, your cruise director, and welcome to the USS Interstellar Princess.  Romance is in the air, but remember to hide your dilithium crystal necklaces from zany Klingon jewel thieves Tom Bosley and Bob Denver!

Kirk has been ordered to the Rodney King Star System where the inhabitants of two populated planets just can't get along.  Planet Elastic is always playing its music full blast in the middle of the night and won't turn the stereo down no matter how much Planet Troyius bangs on their moon with a broom handle and hollers for them to knock it off because they've got a population of three billion that has to get up early for work in the morning.  Planet Elastic, on the other hand, is ticked at Planet Troyius for hogging all the best sunlight in the solar system. 

Ambassador Petri from Troyius tells Kirk that the grand diplomatic solution is an arranged marriage between the chick Doorman of Elastic and the top muckety-muck on Troyius, who we never meet but who I naturally assume is Troy Aikman.  I wonder if Ambassador Petri is a descendant of Rob Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show or of the guy who invented the dish.  Also he looks like a Smurf.

The Doorman of Elastic shows up with her three male bodyguards who are wearing miniskirt outfits that look like they were cobbled together from a bunch of kids' plastic shovel-and-pail set and a couple of Frisbees.  The Doorman is wearing a purple bikini, so maybe they were playing beach volleyball at the equator when the Enterprise beamed them up.

The Doorman is given Uhura's quarters for the trip over to Troyius, but she doesn't like them so she starts tossing around all of Uhura's silk pillows and Johnny Mathis records.  Too bad she doesn't find and smash Uhura's copy of "Learn Geriatric Fan Dancing in 30 Short Years!" before Star Trek V.  I still get night terrors.

The title of the episode is Helen of Troy with a French accent but the plot is Taming of the Shrew.  Kirk doesn't have time to play Petruchio, so he leaves Ambassador Smurf downstairs to smack Kate around and teach her some manners while he exeunts turbolift left.

On the bridge, Spock says he saw a sensor ghost following the ship but it's probably not Banquo's because they're not ripping off that play this week.

Downstairs, the Doorman gets ticked at the Smurf ambassador for telling her not to eat her peas with a knife so she sticks it in his back.  In sickbay, Nurse Chapel asks injured Ambassador Smurf why men are so attracted to Elastic woman.  He says there's some kind of love potion in their tears.  Too bad for Chapel it only works for Elastic women because she could bawl a river and I'd drown myself in it with a cinderblock tied around my neck before I'd ask her to the prom.

Back in Uhura's quarters, the Doorman is eating some green chicken and multicolored Mattel blocks and wearing tinfoil space seashells to cover her modesty.  She smacks Kirk.  Kirk smacks her back.  She throws a knife at him.  Kiss me, Kate!

Kirk tells Spock that Vulcan is the only planet in the universe where women are logical, and the Doorman throws a temper tantrum and locks herself in the bathroom, then burns a pot roast and jumps up on a chair when she thinks she sees a mouse in the corner.  Then Betty Friedan marches over to Gene Roddenberry's house in her combat boots and busts his jaw with a symbolic frying pan.

The Doorman starts crying and Kirk wipes her tears with his fingers, even though Captain Dumbass was standing right there when Ambassador Smurf said her tears are as potent as the love candy that made that gorilla fall in love with Curly when the Stooges were making a movie in the jungle.  The Doorman asks Kirk to spank her for being naughty and setting fire to Castle Anthrax's grail-shaped beacon, and I'm thinking Star Trek is about to lose its G rating.

Meanwhile, one of the Doorman's bodyguards, still wearing his plastic toy shovel miniskirt from the Ming the Merciless Summer Fun Beach Collection, is down in engineering pulling out spark plugs.  Only one crewman is on duty to interrupt him, and he breaks the engineering guy's neck by -- at least by the looks of it -- aggressively trying to make out with him, sort of like Lennie with that farmer's daughter-in-law babe in Of Mice and Men.  The camera cuts back and forth from the saboteur to Kirk upstairs a couple of times, and it sure seems like he's left alone down there for hours on end.  McDonald's has more staff working the night shift fryolator than the Starship Enterprise has manning its engineering room.

Kirk bangs the Doorman, which seems like kind of a faux pas to me, but I'm not versed in the intricacies of interstellar diplomacy vis a vis banging the soon-to-be wives of the leaders of war torn planets.  What I do know is that this guy must spend half his time setting his phaser on penicillin to shoot at the eight-legged space herpes that are chasing him from one Enterprise bedroom to another.

The Doorman tells Kirk that he should use the Enterprise to wipe out Troyius and then he can rule the system as King Penguin, but Spock and Bones walk in and squirt them with a hose to separate them.  Kirk tells Bones that he needs to find a love potion antidote.  I figure hanging a photo of Nurse Chapel on the headboard should do it, but Bones probably doesn't want to risk permanent impotence so he decides to do it the hard way with test tubes and stuff.


"Oh, I don't know.  Maybe it's this endless war with Elaan, or maybe it's just being stuck out here in the vast emptiness of interstellar space, but lately I've been feeling a little blue."

The sensor ghost Spock saw earlier is a Klingon ship, and the Enterprise can't shoot at it or warp away because the guy in the plastic miniskirt caused too much damage during the 17 1/2 hours the engineering crew were down for nap time.  Kirk wants to take the ship out of the star system for "maneuvering room," because you know how crowded it is inside a solar system.  Why, just look at ours, what with all the planets always bouncing off each other and with the gas giants dropping into that corner pocket black hole left and right.

Scotty says they can't do nuthin' because all the dilithium crystals that power the ship were fused when Ming the Merciless, Jr. stuffed his used gym sock up the Enterprise's tailpipe.  I wonder yet again why starships don't carry a couple of spare dilithium crystals in the glove compartment since the things are always burning out or fusing together or getting launched out into space.  Scotty says shields will soon fail and phasers won't work.  I wonder like I always do why they never think to fire photon torpedoes in these situations but maybe, just maybe, there's finally an utterly moronic and implausible explanation coming up in a couple of minutes.  I'll just have to wait and see.

In the midst of the heated battle, Spock says that he's detecting unusual energy readings on the bridge, and he uses McCoy's whistling lipstick to find a bunch of spare dilithium crystals hanging on the necklace around the Doorman's neck.  It's a good thing Tom Bosley didn't get his hands on that necklace the previous day down by the swimming pool while Bob Denver was pretending to drown but then almost really did drown and had to be saved by Isaac the bartender!

So it turns out the Klingons are interested in Elastic because they have so many dilithium crystals lying around on the ground that the Elasticians are turning them into cheap costume jewelry.  Which makes me wonder why the Klingons would need to risk interstellar war when all they need to do is beam down to every gift shop on Elastic and buy out all the necklaces on the planet and claim they're just picking up something nice for their girlfriends.

The engines start to work again and now the photon torpedoes work and so I finally get my answer.  Nothing works on a starship when the check engine light comes on, not even torpedoes which -- since there is still some power and they are basically ready-made bombs that just need to be shot out the torpedo tube -- seem like they should work independent of the juice that feeds the shields and the phasers, but don't.  Don't they have news magazine shows in the future to expose dangerous incompetence like this? 

"Coming up on StarDatelineNBC, Engineered to Kill!  What the Federation doesn't want you to know about its deadly dilithium dilemma!"            

The Doorman sees that Kirk doesn't finish off the Klingons once he gets the upper hand, and suddenly she's all about compassion and submission and doing her duty and hanging around the kitchen barefoot like a good gal.  She beams down quietly to Troyius for an unhappy marriage and a couple of kids and a lifetime of dutiful misery, while on the Enterprise McCoy finally bursts in with the antidote for the Doorman's love-potion tears.  Spock tells him that Kirk was infected by a love potion that was even stronger before he even met the Doorman

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