At the start of this week's Star Trek, a spaceship pulls right out in front of the Enterprise without signaling and starts swerving all over the road. You usually only see driving this bad from a taxi, a kid delivering pizzas, a police cruiser, Mr. Magoo or a woman in an SUV with a cell phone glued to her ear. The ship bangs up both fenders on a couple of asteroids and rips off the bumper on a muon before crashing into a black hole.
It turns out the ship is stolen and the son of the Craptacular ambassador is onboard, so Kirk is told that all the felons and vandals aboard the stolen, blown-up ship get a free pass. So in the far-off distant future, children of privilege aren't even given a slap on the wrist for stuff that would get common, everyday folks thrown in jail for life. Shame, shame, Starfleet. Somewhere in Earth's ancient past, Ted Kennedy is spinning in his grave.
Just before the stolen ship blows up, Scotty beams everyone over to the Enterprise where they immediately don't want to work, demand Starfleet handouts, refuse to bathe, won't wear shoes, raid McCoy's medicine chest, and wave their stoned, sanctimonious fingers in everybody's faces. That's right, we sat through space gangsters, suffered through space cowboys and whooped it up with woo-woo! space Indians. This week we've finally reached the infamous bottom of the writers' room empty idea barrel:
Hippies in Space!
America's debt has already bankrupted us and I have a huge problem with the broken stationary bicycle the space program became in the past forty years, but screw insolvency, soup kitchens and bread lines. If we're going to start launching hippies into space, let's hurry up and sell Mount Rushmore to China and paint a bull's eye on the sun. Just let me be the one who gets to light the rocket.
The Craptacular ambassador's son has half-a-fake bald head, a fringe of purple Larry Fine hair and wears an orange dress. Every Space Hippie is draped in disposable plastic picnic tablecloths and cheap motel curtains. Believe it or not, they look less stupid than real-life hippies in those bellbottoms, love beads and those filthy bandanas they wrapped around their greasy hair that I'd like to wrap around their necks and squeeze until their psychedelic eyes pop out of their LSD-polluted heads. God, how I hate hippies.
Here's an interesting sartorial twist. For some reason hippies in the future all wear poached eggs pinned to their tie-dyed space smocks. At first I think that it's kind of stupid they pin breakfast to their ponchos, but then I realize it's about a billion times less stupid than George McGovern buttons.
The head of the Space Hippies is Mr. Clean with giant, half-melted rubber Dumbo ears. Hippies can't keep themselves clean, I'm supposed to trust this guy to get my countertops sparkling white? If you want to get the water in a clogged public toilet dirtier, stand a hippie in it. How do you get a hippie to pick up a bar of soap? Tell him you hid his joint under it. How do you get a hippie out of the neighborhood? Give him a bus ticket to Canada and go to war in Southeast Asia. God, how I hate hippies.
Chekov knows one of the hippie chicks from the academy. She tuned in, turned off, dropped out and joined Mr. Clean's groovy space commune. The Star Trek writers paint her sympathetically. Yeah, three cheers and a big Helter Skelter for Squeaky Fromme.
Chekov is wearing more eye makeup than Space Squeaky. He's also got that giant lady's wig of his he's always parading around in. You know, I'm starting to wonder exactly what goes on on the starship Enterprise during those long stretches between planets. Maybe Starfleet finally passed out rape whistles to all the yeomen in miniskirts Kirk has molested, and Chekov has been forced to pick up the slack as a one-man USO show, if you know what I mean.
We learn that the Space Hippies are searching for a planet called Eden where the weather is always perfect and they never have to work and everything is given to them and they can just sit around doing prescription marijuana and eating Doritos all day long. Back here in Earth's far-off distant past, we call that planet "California."
Kirk is going to dump the Space Hippies at the nearest star base, so they all start yelling "Herbert!" at him. Spock explains that Herbert was an uninspiring and straight-laced bureaucrat who lacked imagination. If some batch of dirty-footed ragpickers mocked me as a "Herbert," the first thing I'd do is seek out this Herbert wherever he was and pattern my entire life after him, but Kirk is actually wounded and says he'll work on being so rigid. It's a good thing they didn't say "nanny-nanny boo-boo" at him or he'd toss his boots out the nearest airlock and order Scotty to paint cartoon daisies on the hull.
So the Space Hippies don't like Kirk, but we find out that they think Spock is just plain groovy. Kirk breaks orders left and right and has free-love bed-hopped his way from here to Orion's belt, while Spock is a rigid, by-the-book stiff who gets horned up only once every seven years for the same dull chick back home. Maybe you should put down the peace pipe and clean off your grannie glasses, Doobie Brothers.
McCoy says that Mr. Clean with the Dumbo ears has a bad disease as a result of exposure to technology. I assume he got his hands on Kirk's robot love doll from last week. It's called cockadoodledo virus, and now everyone on the ship has to be immunized. Lucky for Bones he has lots of practice injecting the crew from all the exotic pants diseases Kirk brings up to the ship every week. Kirk also has lots of practice injecting the crew, but only half of them and that's usually just suggested with sexy music and subtle editing.
The hippies plot to take over the ship by singing bad songs that sound like fifty year old 1960s Hollywood TV writers trying to sound like swingin' twenty year old cool cats. Their plan just might work because after only one horribly dubbed song I was running like mad for my remote-control escape pod.
Mr. Clean gets thrown in the brig, but the rest of the hippies -- who, remember, have already stolen and blown up one ship -- are allowed to wander all over the Enterprise. One walks into Spock's room where there's a smoking gargoyle water fountain in the corner and some weird space harp that looks like Dr. Jekyll's G-clef after it drank the Hyde formula. The hippie -- who is the guy with the huge jaw who played a bad guy on a million Stephen J. Cannell shows -- asks Spock to groove with his outer space combo, and Spock says that'd be, like, swell, daddy-o. Just shoot me now, please.
Uhura looks pale in this episode. I hope she isn't sick.
We're told that the Enterprise can't drop the Space Hippies off on just any old planet because the Federation won't let criminals colonize a planet. Forget the fact that this is exactly what they did with Ricardo Montalban a couple of seasons ago and got the best movie of the series out of it, because it's time for a hippie jam-fest!
Spock plays his weird Vulcan harp, this one crazy chick plays the spokes on a ten-speed bike rim, another guy plays a T-bar with strings on it. It's, like, the wildest scene since Altamont, man. Please, God, let Scotty snap and go Kent State with a phaser on all of them.
You are indeed a rockin' chick, Starflower, and it is illogical to think your rack is not the grooviest, but my next "summer of love" is six years away.
The groovy hippie concert is somehow playing over all the speakers on the ship. The cool cat prison guard outside Mr. Clean's cell is so busy rocking out to the mellow sounds of Space Phish that he doesn't notice the gang of hippies climbing up the elevator shaft two feet away from him. The hippies knock out the one guard guarding their hippie king and open the cell. You'd think what with all the prisoners who are always busting out of space jail and taking over the ship that Scotty would rig up a secret passcode or something, but all they ever have to do is press one button and the fluorescent bulbs around the door go out. My old bike padlock when I was a paperboy was harder to crack than a prison cell on the Federation's flagship.
Wait, that's not Uhura, it's a different actress and she's white.
Chekov is feeding crackers to his computer to try to get it to tell him where this Eden planet the Space Hippies are looking for is, but all the computer will do is whistle, bob its head and repeat swear words.
Chekov explains absolutely everything about the auxiliary control room to the hippie chick. Why not? It's not like these people just stole a spaceship or something.
In a twist no one could have seen coming, the hippies steal the ship using auxiliary control!
The crazy Space Hippie leader uses high-pitched sound to try to kill the whole Enterprise crew with overacting. Kirk and his pals shoot a hole in the wall of auxiliary control, but apparently high-pitched sound can't travel through holes in walls so Mr. Clean Dumbo ears and his groovy followers are safe.
The hippies steal a shuttle and fly down to planet Eden and Kirk and the others beam down after them. They find that the guy with the big jaw from Rockford Files and The A-Team had some space fruit (insert Sulu joke here) and died. He's not entirely dead though, because I can see his hand is still moving.
Chekov screams off-camera, and says he tried to pick a flower that burned him. He shows McCoy that his entire palm is burned. Chekov picks flowers like the Boston Strangler picked dates.
We find out that all the plant life is like sulfuric acid to human skin and can't be touched. The barefoot hippies are stumbling in pain all over the place. So they are literally tripping on acid.
Mr.Clean commits suicide by grabbing some fruit and (insert another Sulu joke here).
Back onboard the Enterprise, the Craptacular ambassador's son with the purple Larry Fine hair and the rest of the surviving Space Hippies are free to go, even though they've added kidnapping and attempted murder of the entire Enterprise crew to their original charge of grand theft spaceship, and they also could have sparked an international outer space incident when the stole they Enterprise and flew it into Romulan space.
Kirk lets Chekov make out with the Starfleet Academy dropout on the bridge, which seems pretty inappropriate to me, but I'm a devout follower of Herbert so what do I know from groovy?
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