At the beginning of this week's Star Trek we're told that the Enterprise
is once again the only ship in the neighborhood for the crisis du jour,
and I'm beginning to wonder if there really is an actual fleet in
Starfleet or if it isn't all some elaborate Potemkin village to keep the
Klingons from invading Fisherman's Wharf and stinking up all the cable
cars.
This week's catastrophe is the end of all plant life on planet Madonna. Apparently some space crabs escaped from the material hag's leather panties and are chewing up all the forests, back lawns and seaweed all over the planet. I'd just target the spiked points of her metal brassiere from space and put the ropy, rawhide old bag out of the galaxy's misery, but Sulu is a huge fan and he was crying simply gobs of mascara. Sigh.
To kill Madonna's rampaging lap fungus, Kirk has to pick up some Xena, which is a special rock found at the CVS on only one planet in the whole wide universe. Amazingly, it's just around the corner and not clear on the other side of the galaxy which is almost as incredibly lucky as it is coincidental. Were I in charge of Starfleet I'd keep a supply of this miracle fungus killer on hand at all times -- I have leftover tomato fungus killer in the basement every winter -- but apparently Federation policy is to wait until all plant life on a planet is threatened with global extinction before grabbing up the keys for a quick trip to the Kmart Garden Center.
The miracle fungus killer is mined from a planet that has a two-tiered social class. Up top there are the High Poobahs who live in a floating cloud city and like to paint, sculpt and contemplate existence. At the bottom are the Troglopoops who are stuck on the planet below throwing rocks up at the floating snootypantses and their city that casts a shadow more massive than Rosie O'Donnell's and is giving everybody down below rickets.
The Troglopoops are annoyed that the High Poobahs are always tossing their beer cans and other trash off their floating city. A Twix wrapper dropped from 60,000 feet can cave in a skull, plus the high school football team thinks it's funny to whiz off the side of the town after every big game.
The Troglopoops should be most upset that there are apparently only three of them to work one hole in the ground to supply the entire universe with Xena. Their mine is a crooked Styrofoam cave entrance. There are no trucks, railroad tracks, carts, buttresses, highways, Loretta Lynn songs, picks, helmets with little lights on them, elevators or drills. The mining of an entire world is one hole, three people and no tools. I'm not exactly the whinging pinko Norma Rae type, but even I think management could at least drop a shovel and a canary off a balcony.
Kirk and Spock bypass the cloud city and beam directly to the planet to pick up the Xena rocks. As soon as they get there, they are lassoed by Devo.
Kirk does a flying kick while Spock beats the crap out of a girl. Then some soldiers wearing chef hats and pillow case miniskirts show up from the cloud city to break up the fight.
The High Poobah takes Kirk and Spock up to the cloud city and introduces them to his daughter, Dropsie, who wears baby crib mobiles hanging from her ears and a double-barrel hooter-sling. She suggests that Kirk and Spock go to a "rest chamber" which, I'm guessing, is outer space lingo for "library" or something to do with books.
Oops, my universal translator is on the fritz. It means "bedroom."
Spock sits in a chair and watches Kirk sleep. As if that isn't creepy enough, he has a bizarre interior monologue that recalls events in flashback that just happened two minutes ago. It's like me stopping and flashing back to the sentence I just wrote about Spock remembering things he just did while my internal camera superimposes images of me typing the previous sentence about Spock remembering things he just did. Fortunately, real life doesn't need to get padded up to 60 minutes, minus commercials, or we'd all be like Spock, flashing back to rinsing the dishes in the sink as we're putting them in the dishwasher while we recall how sudsy the water was before the bubbles have even popped.
Spock goes out to canoodle with Dropsie. They talk about his Vulcan libido, which we were told many episodes ago was private and not discussed outside of Vulcan. I guess in the time since then "Horny Vulcan Fights Hornier Captain" has become a YouTube sensation all over the galaxy. Spock also brags about how great his Vulcan hearing is. In the meantime, the Superman of Vulcan hearing misses the dame tiptoeing eight feet behind him into Kirk's rest chamber.
The woman tries to kill Kirk with one of those cake spatula things, which is also good for lifting pie slices but not so good for murder. She should have grabbed a plain old butcher knife on her way through the food preparation chamber.
Kirk wrestles with the woman, who turns out to be one of the miners in the Devo Halloween costumes from earlier in the episode. He knocks her cake spatula out of her hand and then wiggles around on the bed with her. My eyes! For the love of God, where's the Hays Office when you need it?
For the first time ever a woman on Star Trek is quite sensibly creeped out by the hamfisted advances of Starfleet's potbellied Don Juan. Since she doesn't actually have any cake or pie on her, and since Kirk left his roofies back on the ship, he turns her over to the High Poobah for some light torture.
Light torture in cloud city is actually torture with lights. The High Poobah turns some disco strobes on the Troglopoop woman, and when Kirk warns him that K.C. and the Sunshine Band is against the Geneva Convention, the High Poobah orders Kirk to go to his rest chamber on the Enterprise without any cake.
In the meantime, Lando says he just made a deal to keep the Empire off their backs forever, and then the door opens and Darth Vader is sitting at the table!
Wait. I mixed up my cloud cities.
Up on the ship, Bones has made the important discovery that gas in the mines makes people stupid. I wonder how long the writers stayed down there to produce this episode.
This week's catastrophe is the end of all plant life on planet Madonna. Apparently some space crabs escaped from the material hag's leather panties and are chewing up all the forests, back lawns and seaweed all over the planet. I'd just target the spiked points of her metal brassiere from space and put the ropy, rawhide old bag out of the galaxy's misery, but Sulu is a huge fan and he was crying simply gobs of mascara. Sigh.
To kill Madonna's rampaging lap fungus, Kirk has to pick up some Xena, which is a special rock found at the CVS on only one planet in the whole wide universe. Amazingly, it's just around the corner and not clear on the other side of the galaxy which is almost as incredibly lucky as it is coincidental. Were I in charge of Starfleet I'd keep a supply of this miracle fungus killer on hand at all times -- I have leftover tomato fungus killer in the basement every winter -- but apparently Federation policy is to wait until all plant life on a planet is threatened with global extinction before grabbing up the keys for a quick trip to the Kmart Garden Center.
The miracle fungus killer is mined from a planet that has a two-tiered social class. Up top there are the High Poobahs who live in a floating cloud city and like to paint, sculpt and contemplate existence. At the bottom are the Troglopoops who are stuck on the planet below throwing rocks up at the floating snootypantses and their city that casts a shadow more massive than Rosie O'Donnell's and is giving everybody down below rickets.
The Troglopoops are annoyed that the High Poobahs are always tossing their beer cans and other trash off their floating city. A Twix wrapper dropped from 60,000 feet can cave in a skull, plus the high school football team thinks it's funny to whiz off the side of the town after every big game.
The Troglopoops should be most upset that there are apparently only three of them to work one hole in the ground to supply the entire universe with Xena. Their mine is a crooked Styrofoam cave entrance. There are no trucks, railroad tracks, carts, buttresses, highways, Loretta Lynn songs, picks, helmets with little lights on them, elevators or drills. The mining of an entire world is one hole, three people and no tools. I'm not exactly the whinging pinko Norma Rae type, but even I think management could at least drop a shovel and a canary off a balcony.
Kirk and Spock bypass the cloud city and beam directly to the planet to pick up the Xena rocks. As soon as they get there, they are lassoed by Devo.
Kirk does a flying kick while Spock beats the crap out of a girl. Then some soldiers wearing chef hats and pillow case miniskirts show up from the cloud city to break up the fight.
The High Poobah takes Kirk and Spock up to the cloud city and introduces them to his daughter, Dropsie, who wears baby crib mobiles hanging from her ears and a double-barrel hooter-sling. She suggests that Kirk and Spock go to a "rest chamber" which, I'm guessing, is outer space lingo for "library" or something to do with books.
Oops, my universal translator is on the fritz. It means "bedroom."
Spock sits in a chair and watches Kirk sleep. As if that isn't creepy enough, he has a bizarre interior monologue that recalls events in flashback that just happened two minutes ago. It's like me stopping and flashing back to the sentence I just wrote about Spock remembering things he just did while my internal camera superimposes images of me typing the previous sentence about Spock remembering things he just did. Fortunately, real life doesn't need to get padded up to 60 minutes, minus commercials, or we'd all be like Spock, flashing back to rinsing the dishes in the sink as we're putting them in the dishwasher while we recall how sudsy the water was before the bubbles have even popped.
Spock goes out to canoodle with Dropsie. They talk about his Vulcan libido, which we were told many episodes ago was private and not discussed outside of Vulcan. I guess in the time since then "Horny Vulcan Fights Hornier Captain" has become a YouTube sensation all over the galaxy. Spock also brags about how great his Vulcan hearing is. In the meantime, the Superman of Vulcan hearing misses the dame tiptoeing eight feet behind him into Kirk's rest chamber.
The woman tries to kill Kirk with one of those cake spatula things, which is also good for lifting pie slices but not so good for murder. She should have grabbed a plain old butcher knife on her way through the food preparation chamber.
Kirk wrestles with the woman, who turns out to be one of the miners in the Devo Halloween costumes from earlier in the episode. He knocks her cake spatula out of her hand and then wiggles around on the bed with her. My eyes! For the love of God, where's the Hays Office when you need it?
For the first time ever a woman on Star Trek is quite sensibly creeped out by the hamfisted advances of Starfleet's potbellied Don Juan. Since she doesn't actually have any cake or pie on her, and since Kirk left his roofies back on the ship, he turns her over to the High Poobah for some light torture.
Light torture in cloud city is actually torture with lights. The High Poobah turns some disco strobes on the Troglopoop woman, and when Kirk warns him that K.C. and the Sunshine Band is against the Geneva Convention, the High Poobah orders Kirk to go to his rest chamber on the Enterprise without any cake.
In the meantime, Lando says he just made a deal to keep the Empire off their backs forever, and then the door opens and Darth Vader is sitting at the table!
Wait. I mixed up my cloud cities.
Up on the ship, Bones has made the important discovery that gas in the mines makes people stupid. I wonder how long the writers stayed down there to produce this episode.
I'll tell you whatever you want to know, for the love of God just get Scotty's cup off my face.
Kirk beams to the prison cell where the Troglopoop woman is being held.
He tells her that her people are stupid, which as a method of winning
someone over to one's side is certainly unique. If that doesn't work I
figure he plans on telling her she's a lousy cook and that the miniskirt
wedding dress she's wearing makes her look fat.
She promises to not try to kill Kirk anymore if he helps her escape. He gets her down to the planet where she immediately takes him hostage. Who's stupid now, fatty?
Kirk demonstrates the usefulness of the most impractical gas mask in the history of creation, and he looks the dumbest he's ever looked in any episode ever, even the one where he had to wear a short Annette Funicello skirt or the one where he was pleading for his life to a giant Trouble board game popper thing while wearing a dog collar.
Instead of the tried and true "string around the back of the head" method, Starfleet's engineering geniuses have come up with a contraption with a giant hook that goes up the face and over the wig to the back of the head. The hook is solid, not soft like string, so every time Kirk talks it shifts and you can see his mouth. So I guess the Troglopoops will only be half-retarded, which makes them twice as smart as the producers. The band that goes straight up the wearer's head would also draw the wearer's eyes inward, making them cockeyed. I know that because it happened to Carl Reiner with the Opti-Grab in The Jerk.
The chick sends the guys guarding Kirk away and he takes his chance alone with her to roll around on top of her for the third time this episode. Instead of a gas mask, she should have asked for a can of mace.
Kirk gets his gun back and orders Scotty to beam the High Poobah down to the cave where, after an hour of breathing the gas that makes you stupid, Kirk and the Poobah's stunt doubles wrestle around a little and fight over some cake spatulas.
In the end, Kirk has proven that all three miners need Opti-Grabs and, since the entire economy of the planet relies on those three miners and that one Styrofoam hole in the ground, the High Poobah agrees to float the city out over the ocean on trash day.
Spock says that they still have two hours and fifty-nine minutes to deliver a couple of pots of soot to Madonna's plant-munching crabs, and the Enterprise flies off into the sunset having broken for the ten-thousandth time that unbreakable rule about interfering with the internal governments of other worlds, or maybe that rule doesn't apply to planets that have ripped their whole civilizations off from H.G. Wells novels.
She promises to not try to kill Kirk anymore if he helps her escape. He gets her down to the planet where she immediately takes him hostage. Who's stupid now, fatty?
Kirk demonstrates the usefulness of the most impractical gas mask in the history of creation, and he looks the dumbest he's ever looked in any episode ever, even the one where he had to wear a short Annette Funicello skirt or the one where he was pleading for his life to a giant Trouble board game popper thing while wearing a dog collar.
Instead of the tried and true "string around the back of the head" method, Starfleet's engineering geniuses have come up with a contraption with a giant hook that goes up the face and over the wig to the back of the head. The hook is solid, not soft like string, so every time Kirk talks it shifts and you can see his mouth. So I guess the Troglopoops will only be half-retarded, which makes them twice as smart as the producers. The band that goes straight up the wearer's head would also draw the wearer's eyes inward, making them cockeyed. I know that because it happened to Carl Reiner with the Opti-Grab in The Jerk.
The chick sends the guys guarding Kirk away and he takes his chance alone with her to roll around on top of her for the third time this episode. Instead of a gas mask, she should have asked for a can of mace.
Kirk gets his gun back and orders Scotty to beam the High Poobah down to the cave where, after an hour of breathing the gas that makes you stupid, Kirk and the Poobah's stunt doubles wrestle around a little and fight over some cake spatulas.
In the end, Kirk has proven that all three miners need Opti-Grabs and, since the entire economy of the planet relies on those three miners and that one Styrofoam hole in the ground, the High Poobah agrees to float the city out over the ocean on trash day.
Spock says that they still have two hours and fifty-nine minutes to deliver a couple of pots of soot to Madonna's plant-munching crabs, and the Enterprise flies off into the sunset having broken for the ten-thousandth time that unbreakable rule about interfering with the internal governments of other worlds, or maybe that rule doesn't apply to planets that have ripped their whole civilizations off from H.G. Wells novels.
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