Kirk orders the ship to take off, but floating Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair is blocking the exit.
You know how I said recently they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for stories? It's possible that the bottom of that barrel might have just opened up and dropped another hundred million billion feet.
Floating Abraham Lincoln in a chair says he's floating Abraham Lincoln, and that he's real and down on the planet where I guess he landed after the Union launched him into outer space with the famous light-speed rocket cannon that turned the tide at Vicksburg.
Lincoln says he's twelve minutes away and asks if they still measure time in minutes in the future, and Kirk says they can figure it out. A minute is one-sixtieth of an hour and an hour is one-twenty-fourth of a day which is based on Earth's rotation around the sun. You come from Earth, Captain Stupid, you know what a minute is. It's about six times as long as the makeup department took to glue that wig of yours on sideways.
Kirk requires everybody to wear dress uniforms for Lincoln's visit to the ship. Scotty mistakes the order and shows up in an actual dress. Hey, laddies! For a bonny time call ENT-1701 and ask for "Mistress Montgomery."
At the end of his tour of the ship, Abraham Lincoln calls Uhura a "charming Negress."
Why is it so dark all of a sudden? And where did all this dust and that old Scrabble board come from? Oh, I see. I'm hiding under the couch.
As I crawl back out, Lincoln is saying he's sorry if he's said something offensive, and Uhura tells him not to worry because words are just words and don't bother people in the 23rd century. So good news, folks: sometime between here and two hundred years from now Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson drop dead. Consequently, the Great Emancipator doesn't have to worry about being picketed while delivering the Gettysburg Address II, being relentlessly tormented nightly by David Letterman for being racist, having his grocery store set on fire or being shot again.
The big discussion becomes whether or not to take Lincoln up on his invitation to beam down to a patch of solid ground within an oxygen bubble that has just appeared on the surface of the planet. Is it a trick? Is the oxygen really there? Will they be beaming into a lava river?
Those are some good questions. I have some of my own.
Are all the shuttles up on cinder blocks in the front yard with the hoods up and cats dropping litters in the engines? Was there a manufacturer's recall on all the ship's probes? If nothing else is available, why not tie a rock to Spock's whistling purse and toss it out the window as you fly over the oxygen area? It seems there are a bunch of options available other than trusting the word of some politician, no matter how many pennies his head is on. Oh, yeah, and he's been dead for three hundred years, so there's that too.
Spock and Kirk beam down to the planet with Lincoln but their phasers don't go with them, but that's okay because some omniscient being passing through the celestial neighborhood would have rendered them inoperative anyway. Those things work about as well as Sulu's junk at the Playboy Mansion.
On the planet, Spock meets his Vulcan hero, a guy named Soreass who invented logic years ago when he was working late in a lab and accidentally mixed two beakers containing illogic and antonym. The resulting explosion gave him superlogic powers and the most tobacco-smokin' voice since Suzanne Pleshette.
From the ground in front of the landing party rises a vile, massive, disgusting, steaming creature hideous beyond human comprehension. It kind of looks like Kirstie Alley, only prettier.
The Kirstie Alley/Lava Rock Monster says it wants to understand the nature of good and evil. Here's a quick cheat sheet for you: Cheers before you were on it, good; the rest of your career except Star Trek 2, evil.
Steaming Kirstie Monster suggests a battle between the two opposing forces to see which concept is stronger, and it introduces Team Evil like contestants on The Dating Game.
He's a genocidal madman whose most infamous tactic was attacking his opponents during peace negotiations, let's have a big round of applause for Colonel Green!
She's a chick wearing a pile of fur coats who looks like Andrea Martin playing Mojo on SCTV's The Days of the Week. Give it up for Zero!
He's a bloodthirsty Klingon who's been sprayed with blackface, but it doesn't matter because Sharpton ain't here, please welcome Payless!
And that's Genghis Khan.
Let's play the game!
The Star Trek producers assume everyone knows who Genghis Khan is, so the only real guy there gets an "and the rest" Gilligan's Island introduction. I guess they voted down including a more recent real-life Earth lunatic, but maybe it'd be a bridge too far having Hitler goose-stepping around an alien planet telling Kirk how history vas wrong while poisoning dogs and having Spock tinkle on him (that's a real thing...bet you didn't think that little paperhanging runt could get any sicker, did you?).
For some reason Colonel Green gets away with voting himself the big cheese of the League of Space Evil, and the other ruthless villains just quietly acquiesce. Payless the Klingon in charming blackface goes along because he's up for the lead in an LA County community theater production of The Al Jolson Story and doesn't want to get a reputation as difficult, and Mojo and Genghis have to be quiet because they have no lines and if they make waves they'll be replaced by whatever stunt men fit into their crummy three dollar costumes.
Colonel Green wears a Mork from Ork red jumpsuit and he tells Kirk that he wants to negotiate for peace. Shazbot! I remember hearing something about a guy who famously attacks his opponents during peace negotiations, but for the life of me I can't remember...LOOK OUT, ABRAHAM LINCOLN!
Lincoln fights Payless while Spock kicks the crap out of a girl again this week. Somehow Spock forgets yet again that he can shoulder-squeeze people unconscious. The bad guys run away between the papier-mâché rocks and Kirk gets mad at Kirstie Lava Monster and shoves it in the chest.
What's that delicious smell, kind of like sizzling Canadian bacon?
Kirk -- who is, mind you, the captain of a spaceship and in command of hundreds of men -- discovers that shoving lava is bad.
Kirstie has been on Jenny Craig for ten weeks and only gained a hundred and eighty-seven pounds!
Kirstie Lava Monster says that Kirk isn't playing the game right, so from the planet it magically makes the Enterprise go on auto-destruct. The ship will blow up in four hours according to Mr. Scott, and the glowing red cartoon drawing of an engine room wall agrees with him.
Soreass says that on ancient Vulcan when he negotiated for peace, he sent emissaries who were killed. Then he sent more emissaries who were also killed. The third wave of emmissaries burned down, fell over then sank into the swamp, but the fourth ones brought peace and harmony and smugness to Vulcan. Soreass volunteers to try to negotiate peace with Mr. Green Jeans, which couldn't possibly go wrong. Except...wait. I remember hearing something about a guy who famously attacks his opponents during peace negotiations, but for the life of me I can't remember...LOOK OUT, SOREASS!
At least dead Soreass proved once and for all that misplaced trust and sissy appeasement are illogical up the yin-yang. If only we could apply the example of Soreass to our own age, but I can't think of a case where it'd come in handy. Maybe you can give me a suggestion, Mohammed M. Mohammed...LOOK OUT, AMERICA! Shazbot, Akbar!
Kirk and his pals are making pointed sticks, probably because they were unable to fashion a rudimentary lathe, and I wonder how the plastic leaves exist on a molten lava planet with a poisonous atmosphere. That's kind of stupid, don't you think, Abraham Lincoln?
Soreass screams like a little baby girl for help, and Kirk and Spock lead a frontal assault against Colonel Mork while Abraham Lincoln sneaks around to save dead Soreass. Colonel Mork captures Lincoln, then it's Lincoln who Kirk suddenly hears screaming for help. It turns out the Klingon in blackface (whose silly name I've been calling him I forget) is like the Rich Little of outer space. Luckily, the real Lincoln comes staggering out between the Styrofoam rocks with a spear in his back and warns Kirk away before dropping dead. Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
There's one last fight in which Spock forgets that he can pinch people night-night again and the bad guys run away.
Steaming, molten, massive Kirstie Alley Lava Monster says good and evil are the same and Kirk gives some hoity-toity speech about how swell goodness and niceness and probity and all the cardinal virtues are. Kirstie admits defeat and adds another fifty pounds of molten goo to her ass but this time it's lava instead of chocolate and gets fired by that diet company for whaling up again and lets Kirk go.
On the Enterprise, Scotty is so excited to see Kirk that he temporarily misplaces his accent.
Kirk says it was hard to see Lincoln die again, which implies that he was there the first time. Spock doesn't have a chance to say, "No way, Jose" because suddenly time-traveling Jesse Jackson jumps in and extorts a quadrillion bucks from Starfleet and gets his crooked kid installed on the Federation council and puts them out of business, and then the robot Al Sharpton shows up and incites a mob to set fire to the bridge for all that "charming Negress" and blackface stuff.
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