At the start of this week's episode, the Enterprise is on a mission of mercy to planet Airy Anus. Someone there caught a cold and now all the inhabitants have weepy brown eyes, so the Starfleet CVS has ordered Kirk and crew to schlepp over a bottle of Purell and a box of Kleenex.
A ship appears in their path and the pilot is flying all over the place, which means it's probably one of them crazy women drivers and she's dropped her lipstick under the warp drive pedal again.
They see that it's a shuttle craft that was stolen from the Federation parking garage when some careless ensign left the keys in the ignition. In the future, spaceships look less like our space shuttle and more like our boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes with a couple of cardboard paper towel tubes glued to the bottom.
The shuttle craft is hauled onto the Enterprise and a guy whose face is painted half black and half white falls out. Oh, boy, get ready for the launch of the heavy-handed race lecturing in T-minus ten seconds...nine...eight...seven...
I notice that the guy is wearing gloves which either means he doesn't want to catch the Airy Anus pandemic or the makeup department ran out of paint for his hands. He also looks like he mugged his silver pajamas off a street mime. Before he can get crushed in an invisible box or walk against the solar wind, he passes out.
Kirk brings the guy to sickbay where the first thing he sees when he wakes up is Nurse Chapel. I'm wondering now if the writers are subtly saying that Kirk is racist and is trying to erase the alien's black half, because I'd turn whiter than Casper's bleached bed sheets if the first thing I saw when I woke up on an alien ship was Nurse Gargoyle staring down at me.
The alien says his name is Loci, but tells Kirk that he's too tired to answer any other questions. He proves how tired he is by practically doing jumping jacks in his bed while he hollers at Kirk about how tired he is.
Kirk goes back to the bridge where everybody's marveling at an invisible ship that's flying circles around them. They talk for fifteen minutes about the wonderful technology of the invisible ship, which is not so invisible that they didn't detect it, so why the need for it to be invisible? All that talkety-talking about the incredible invisibility of the invisible ship finally manages to wipe away my suspicion that Star Trek didn't have money in the budget that week to spray paint a toilet paper tube with silver glitter and dangle it on a string in front of the window.
The invisible ship blows up invisibly and deposits a visible alien on the bridge. He's half-white and half-black too, but look out! It's that nefarious ne'er-do-well the Riddler! What criminal conspiracies does this treacherous trickster have in store for the citizens of Starfleet? Beats the crap out of me. It's just too bad they blew up green Batgirl in last week's episode.
To prove how exciting things have just gotten, the camera bounces like a rubber ball on a close-up of the red alert light flashing on the wall. It doesn't seem exciting to me so much as a precursor to those Japanese cartoons with the flashing lights that put those kids in comas. Or maybe I'm suddenly falling violently ill because I remember the ham-handed moralizing I'm about to be subjected to.
The Riddler is wearing silver pajamas and a dog collar and says his name is Veal.
Kirk gets the Riddler and Loci together, and we're told that they are different because Maaco reversed their spray paint job. Instead of embracing as brothers under the skin while celebrating the wonderfulness of their differences and the unique superness of their awesome individual spectacularness and what that individual differentness can bring to the universe, it turns out they don't like each other too much. It's the whole "reverse spray paint" thing. Gosh, if only I could figure out a way that we could apply the lesson of these foolish far-off distant space aliens to our own era, which is the retro 1960s, but I'm stumped.
Each paint-job says the other is a criminal: one for being an oppressor, the other for being a violent revolutionary. Nope, I'm still not getting what the Star Trek writers are trying to say here. I do, however, see that they're both lucky that full-throated, overacted moralizing isn't a crime in the future or they'd each get the chair.
For a few seconds the Riddler stumbles and forgets the name of his planet, teaching us the first important lesson of this episode: in the 23rd century there are no retakes.
I hate people with reverse colors so much that I repeatedly kick myself in the crotch every morning while shaving. True story.
All of a sudden the Enterprise is off course. I'm hoping that it's heading for a less preachy plot. What direction do those little cooing fuzzballs live in?
The camera bounces all over the red alert sign again, not once this time, but twice. By now I'm praying for the sweet release of a Japanese cartoon-induced epileptic seizure.
There's some more overacting by everybody on the bridge, but I really can't blame them this week because they're doing all they can to prop up the flimsiest plot since the one where the war-painted alien idiot-men in fright wigs tossed bananas down a papier-mâché head.
The Riddler says he now controls the ship with his mind and that instead of going to Airy Anus they are going to his home planet of Charon to prosecute Loci. Phasers don't work against him because I guess his silver pajamas have the same kind of shields that the Enterprise has. But -- wait -- Kirk knows that Bones was able to inject the other guy earlier, so I'd at least stop aiming at his pajamas and try hitting him over the head with a fire extinguisher. Instead, Kirk decides to take a less drastic course and blow up the ship.
I notice that the Enterprise utilizes the exact same destruct codes that it did in one of the movies twenty years later, which means both of these aliens -- who survive at the end of the episode -- and I could've blown up the ship whenever any of us felt like it during that twenty year period. I change my online passwords more than Starfleet changes its destruct codes.
The Riddler blinks first and stops the ship from flying to Charon, and Kirk stops the auto-destruct with only five thrilling seconds to spare by giving the com-pu-tore 17 1/2 minutes of instructions.
Kirk lectures the Riddler that violence and force are never necessary as I wonder how many tiny little Romulan ships are stenciled to the side of the Enterprise's cockpit.
Kirk makes the brilliant decision to let a guy who stole a Federation shuttle craft and a guy who just hijacked the Enterprise, each of whom wants to kill the other, have free reign to wander around the ship. What can go wrong? Actually, nothing this week because the script doesn't call for it, so rest easy, ghosts of all the red shirts who haunt engineering where you died when some alien strangled you, beat you over the head, slammed you against the wall, or zapped you with laser guns or crazy alien mind powers before taking over the ship.
The Enterprise arrives at Airy Anus, and Kirk has Scotty fly around the planet spraying Lysol on all the doorknobs. I'm surprised they don't circle Airy Anus looking for Klingons, but maybe they were never 13 year old boys so they didn't hear that joke.
The Riddler takes over the ship again, and this time sabotages the self-destruct so Kirk can't blow up the ship. Kirk also mispronounces "sabotage" the same "succotash" way he does in that famous behind-the-scenes audio clip for that 1970s margarine commercial where he yells at the guy who corrects his mispronunciation.
Shatner is so busy mispronouncing words again that he doesn't think that maybe he can just beam troublemaker mime-Riddler off his ship.
We were told earlier in the episode that Charon was on the other side of the galaxy but, hey! Look out the window, 'cause there it is! So it turns out Charon is pretty much right next-door to Airy Anus, so all that hijacking stuff that padded out the episode wasn't really necessary after all.
There was a race war on Charon while the Riddler and Loci were on vacation, and somehow everybody managed to kill everybody else. Can't we all just get along?
Apparently not, because the paint-job aliens run off the bridge like loons. Kirk says not to alert security because -- you know -- it's not like these guys have posed any kind of risk to his ship and crew or anything.
Kirk gives a hammy speech about what we all learned in the previous hour, but at least he doesn't mispronounce "sabotage" again or yell at a Promise margarine commercial director, so it could be worse. In the meantime, Itchy and Scratchy beam off the ship one by one to return to the surface of their planet to strangle each other in their silver pajamas in the ruins of their civilization as the Enterprise soars off to wag its finger in some other poor unsuspecting alien species' grease-painted face.
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