Hello, fellow Federation citizen! You may be wondering what to tell your inquisitive female child when she asks why only men are qualified to serve as captains in Starfleet. We're here to help! Included below is some instructive dialogue just in case the subject comes up as you're tucking your little one in for the nightly sleep interval.
LITTLE GIRL: Daddy, why can't girls be Starfleet captains?
FATHER: Because, honey, Sulu says their honkers get in the way when they take that sharp turn for Uranus.
Hopefully she'll understand, but since she's just a girl be prepared to repeat.
END STARFLEET YELLOW INFORMATION CRACKER.
At the start of this week's Star Trek, the very last episode in the original series, the Enterprise shows up at Cannabis 2, which could also be Cannabis squared, which either way goes a long way to explaining the writing, acting, directing, producing and groovy special effects, man.
On Cannabis, a bunch of scientists led by Janet Lestoil are studying the ruins of an ancient civilization, which look a lot like a Paramount junk-clogged warehouse with three seasons worth of Star Trek crap piled out in the hall. All the scientists are dead from a fatal unnecessary plot device, and Lestoil and one other guy are all that remain. It isn't explicitly stated, but I have to assume they saved themselves by hiding out behind the rubber lizard suits and gladiator costumes from seasons past.
Kirk once dated Janet Lestoil, which in this final episode of Star Trek means he's finally got the complete set and has now banged every single woman in the galaxy. If they'd had a fourth season he would have had to start all over again with something new. Maybe that's why Sulu is still so mad at William Shatner after forty years.
We learn that Janet wanted to be a Starfleet captain, but wasn't allowed to because she's a dame, and Starfleet ain't no place for no broads, see? To get her revenge she engineers an amazing parlor trick with a garage door remote control and the body-switching machine that turned Yogi Bear into a chicken.
Somehow Janet knows that Kirk is going to walk across the room from where she is faking being sick and climb into the cockpit of the machine that switches your brain with a chicken's. It seems pretty unlikely to me that she'd know this, but she did used to go out with him. So I guess she knows stuff like how he doesn't like lima beans and that he has a particular obsessive compulsive disorder that makes him climb inside ancient alien gizmos that might be giant garbage disposals.
As soon as Kirk is in position, Janet zaps him with the garage door remote control, then races across the room, puts a pair of tin cups on their heads and flips the "on" switch. In the most amazing, dazzling special effects sequence in the history of Star Trek, a cartoon silhouette like the one I drew of my head in kindergarten floats out of each of them and switches places. Which means that Kirk is now a woman in Kirk's body, so maybe Sulu will get that wish after all.
Lady Kirk brings Real Kirk, who is now a lady, over to the bed where he plans on strangling her to death, thus killing the chicken and getting rid of Real Kirk and, I guess, probably Yogi Bear, too, forever. Unfortunately, the body switch has somehow made Lady Kirk as hammy as William Shatner and he-she takes so much time chewing the scenery that Spock jumps out from behind a rack of old gangster costumes and shouts "aha!"
They all go up to the Enterprise, where Lady Kirk, who everyone thinks really is Kirk, starts marching around the hallways ordering yeomen to tell her if Kirk's shirt makes her look fat.
In the meantime, Kirk wakes up in a woman's body in sickbay, which is pretty much like every drunken Saturday night for him on that stupid ship.
Kirk, who is trapped in a lady's body, says, it's a "bad dream." It is also bad writing, acting, directing and producing.
In a voice-over captain's log, Janet using Kirk's voice spells out everything she's done and says that by studying the schematics of the ship she knows everything there is to know about it. Apparently Sulu and Chekov came with the ship along with the cigarette lighter and AM/FM radio, because she knows each of them by name. Those are some swell schematics. Also, where is she recording this captain's log; into her hand like the nut who used to peddle around my town on a bike and pretend he was a cop, who's a cab driver now who almost killed me last year? Because if she plans on turning these logs over to Starfleet, which I assume is what's done once a five year mission is over, I think they'll probably figure out what happened vis a vis Kirk and Janet Lestoil what with her detailed confession and all. Maybe dames are too stupid to be starship captains after all.
Lady Kirk orders Sulu to throw the ship into reverse. They were supposed to rendezvous with the Battleship Potemkin and then fly over to planet Batty Origami, but instead she-he wants to take crazy Janet Lestoil to the crappiest medical facility in the universe which, I assume, means time-traveling back to anywhere in America in about three years from now.
Kirk swishes around with his hands on his hips, asks that a fainting couch be brought up to the bridge and demands to know who keeps leaving the toilet seat up in the officers' men's room. Bones finds his behavior slightly weirder than normal, since by now he'd ordinarily have knocked up three yeomen and gotten two cases of space clap, so he demands that fake Kirk sashay into sickbay for an exam.
Downstairs, Kirk wakes up in a lady's body again, but still not in a good way, and makes his own voice-over captain's log, probably into his pillow because he's not the captain anymore and hasn't gotten out of bed since he was brought up to the ship from the planet as a lady.
I have to wait THIS many years for another acting job?
Lady Kirk escapes from sickbay, says that he's really Kirk in a lady's body and gets heroically punched out by big, strapping Kirk who, remember, has a lady possessing his body. I notice that the woman who is playing Kirk in this episode actually is a better actress playing Kirk than Shatner is an actor playing a.) Kirk b.) a lady possessing Kirk and c.) T.J. Hooker. Maybe Starfleet would have been better off letting broads be captains.
Bones puts Kirk in a tanning booth while Spock sneaks off to question the lady who is really Kirk. Spock tries the old "hey, your shoe's untied" trick on one of the guards, but somebody in Star Trek finally doesn't look and so does not fall for that stupid, inevitable shoulder pinch.
Spock cops a feel off lady-Kirk's face, which is kind of creepy but no more so than every other time he's caressed another guy's nostrils. Creepier is downstairs where Kirk, who is a lady, is crossing the final frontier squeezing the shoulders of some scientist guy. Somewhere, poor bawling Sulu is making a "captain's log" into his own pillow.
Spock gets arrested for mutiny and put on trial, where Janet Lestoil in Kirk's body acts hammier than Janet Lestoil when she was in her own body, but somehow mysteriously pretty much just as hammy as William Shatner acts in everybody's body. She gets so mad that for a minute she and Kirk get body-switched back where they belong in an amazing special effects shot that looks like somebody ran into the room and held her picture up over Kirk's head.
During the trial we keep getting bizarre silent reaction shots from Sulu and Chekov who look like they've been spliced into the scene from the bus stop out in front of Paramount Studios where the two of them will be sleeping for the next decade until Star Trek: The Movie #1.
Janet Lestoil in Kirk's body goes nuts at the trial, orders executions all around, and has Kirk in Janet Lestoil's body locked up with Kirk's pals in a cell that is more poorly guarded than the tilt-a-whirl in a traveling supermarket parking lot carnival.
Up on the bridge, Janet Lestoil in Kirk's body gets mad that Sulu won't let her stick her hand out the window at warp 8 so she can dry her fingernails, plus she almost runs into an asteroid because she's yapping on a communicator with one of her girlfriends and not watching the road.
Suddenly she almost body switches with a chicken again, so she runs downstairs like a hysterical girl, probably because she's got the monthlies.
Janet and the real Kirk body switch back and everything is back to normal except Kirk is disappointed that he'll have to wait another twenty years before he finally winds up with as big a rack as a man as he had as a woman.
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