We are told that in only a couple of hours the entire crew will be dead, so time is of the essence. Remember this later when Spock is doing his Liberace impersonation at the piano and Kirk is chasing sexy robots through the parlor with his pants down around his ankles.
Right off the bat I wonder why they need to go down to the planet at all. They've located the stuff they need from space, and they have that beamy thing. Can't they just zap a pile of rocks directly to the ship? Tech Sgt. Chen could.
As soon as they materialize on Planet Vitalis, Kirk and the others are attacked by a floating colander glued to a tin mixing bowl and floating on a string. Then a guy in a cape and tights shows up. Then in a little while the show starts to get a little weird.
We find out that the guy in the tights didn't show up on the Enterprise's instruments because he has special shields to avoid detection. Which means that if this guy lives on Planet Vitalis's version of North America, and with an entire planet to beam down to, instead of beaming to Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, South America, Central America, a couple of poles, or countless islands and atolls, or even on the other side of the exact same continent, Kirk and his pals just happened to beam into this guy's backyard while he just happens to be out for a romantic stroll with his floating kitchen utensils. What a lucky break for us, since if they had beamed down just five miles away they would have beamed back up ten minutes later with their Vitalis and never met the guy in the tights and we'd have no exciting episode with sexy lady robots. What are the odds?
According to McCoy's whistling purse, the guy in the tights and cape is an Earthling from the old home town. Judging from his getup, I'd say that town was San Francisco. He says his name is Flynt, but he's not in a wheelchair so he's probably not that one.
Kirk tells Flintstone that his crew has jellybean fever and that eating the magic rocks from this planet is the only thing that'll settle their tummies. I guess the leaches and bloodletting didn't work. Flintstone reluctantly says they can collect their rocks but not to touch anything on his planet because he just got all the mountains arranged exactly the way he likes them.
Flintstone lives in a massive matte painting palace that only has three rooms, with no evident kitchen or bathroom.
The floating colander comes into the house on its string carrying a bag of purple gumdrops, then Spock drinks some brandy and looks at some paintings with his whistling purse. Then the babe who is really a robot shows up, but that's still a secret. The music likes her a lot, because the soundtrack starts screeching like the sound guy dumped his coffee in the mixing board.
They all have a nice long chat and play pool while another eighty crew members drop dead upstairs.
Bones goes to the lab where the flying colander is processing the rocks into aspirin. The colander floats behind a screen to work, so I don't actually see its glued-on spatula arms but it probably has them. Bones admires the colander's well-stocked lab, where in the future all pharmaceuticals are colored water that is kept in six giant unlabeled glass bottles.
In the next room, Spock plays a Wagner waltz on the piano while Kirk and the robot lady, who he still doesn't know is a robot lady, dance around and Flintstone leers at them. Then the script says the chick has no more lines so she just vanishes with no explanation, probably to change her oil at the craft services table.
Bones says the colander messed up the drugs like that old pharmacist in It's A Wonderful Life. I don't know if the colander got some bad news about his son the measuring cup who died of influenza, but now they have to start all over with another bag of purple gumdrops. At this point my decision as captain would definitely be to take the new batch of gumdrops to the ship and let Bones process out the Vitalis, but Kirk thinks it's a better idea to give a strange floating colander that screwed up once already a second chance. Besides, there's maybe some more idle chitchat they haven't engaged in yet while everyone on the Enterprise dies and there might be a robot hootenanny later on, and who would want to miss that?
Beep-beep-whoop!
Collect rocks. Beep! Kill intruders. Beep! Strain macaroni. Beep!
Put myself in dishwasher. Whoop! End transmission.
Kirk makes out with the robot chick and the floating colander leaps out from behind the door on its string and says beep-beep-whoop! menacingly at him. He tries to shoot it but the colander, like everything and everyone else they ever meet, disables his phaser. Those things are the most useless pieces of equipment since post-op Chastity Bono's. Hi-yo!
Spock's ray gun still works and he jumps out from behind another door and shoots the colander's string and it falls on the floor and breaks back into a colander and a giant stainless steel mixing bowl. Then we find out that Flintstone is actually 6000 years old, so maybe he's that Flintstone after all. Yabba-dabba-crossover.
Later, Kirk continues to be obsessed over the chick he met five minutes ago. We know it's five minutes ago, because they keep giving us the time in captain's log voice-overs and it's always just about two hours before everyone onboard the Enterprise is scheduled to drop dead. But when Kirk talks to the ship, Scotty and Uhura look fine. Come to think of it, Kirk, Spock and McCoy look pretty healthy too. If you or a loved one were misdiagnosed with jellybean fever by an incompetent Starfleet doctor, you may be entitled to compensation. Call the law offices of Jetson, Skywalker and Sokolove today.
What is Kirk recording all of these captain's log voice-overs on if he's not on the ship?
Kirk tells the sexy robot chick (who, remember, he doesn't yet know is a sexy robot) to run away with him because, he tells her, she loves him. Why wouldn't she? She's known him for all of twenty minutes. I'm surprised this guy's ego is small enough to fit in outer space.
Kirk makes out with the sexy robot while pervert Flintstone watches on TV. Maybe he is that Flynt after all.
Kirk and Spock find a secret room with all kinds of sexy robots lying under sheets. So he is that Flynt after all.
Flintstone says he needed Kirk to jump-start his sexy robot's emotions so that she'd have the hots for him and he can get down and dirty with some hot robot lovin', and now that he doesn't need Kirk as a surrogate anymore he shrinks the Enterprise down and puts it on the coffee table between the ceramic kitty cat and a copy of The Wonderous Waterfalls of Yosemite.
Flintstone plans to leave the Enterprise there for the next million years with the crew in suspended animation, then he'll let it go. Kirk looks in the window and sees everyone on the bridge is frozen, but all the lights are still blinking which means when they're thawed out in a million years the ship's battery will be dead and they'll have to call Triple A.
Kirk and Flintstone's stunt doubles fight while the actors grab a sandwich off-camera.
I notice that there's a massive still for making moonshine in the background, maybe for Flinstone to get his sexy robot drunk so she'll like him. That might work for a night but does he really think that can be the basis for a long-term 6000 year human/robot relationship?
The sexy lady robot overheats, but not in the way Kirk or Flintstone wants. Then she dies.
Back on the unshrunk Enterprise, Kirk is moping over the robot he loved for the most romantic eight minutes of his life, and Spock feels so bad that he sneaks up behind him in his bedroom and the audience braces for the most uncomfortable scene in Star Trek history.
Instead, Spock sticks his finger in Kirk's ear and tells him "forget," which, I guess, means he's going to forget about the sexy robot. But that means he'd have to forget about Flintstone, too, because their stories were intertwined.
Which also means he'd have to forget about going down to Flintstone's planet because he would have no memory of collecting the lifesaving Vitalis since the floating colander did all that work.
Which means he'd have to forget about the fact that his entire crew was sick with jellybean fever.
Which means that all those captain's logs he somehow recorded will have to be doctored or deleted entirely to remove all references back to the point where the crew started exhibiting signs of jellybean fever.
Which means the entire crew would have to be made to forget or involved in a conspiracy to shield their captain from his own perverted robot love life.
Which means there is no explanation for the crew members who we were told had died of jellybean fever at the start of the episode.
Which means Kirk won't know what to write in the letters back to their families.
Which means that if Starfleet asks him any questions about the events of the past couple of days he will have no memory of them.
Which means he'll be removed from command and never make it to the end of the season, which at this point is probably just as well.
I wish Spock could make me forget too.
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