The Enterprise circles XO III a few times knocking on the clouds but nobody's at home. They're about to pin a note to the subcontinent when Chapel's runaway fiance shows up at the door wrapped in a towel and claims he was taking a meteor shower.
The scientist's name is Dr. Corby, and he says he just mopped the ice outside his cave so only Kirk and Nurse Cigar Store Indian can come in, but they have to wipe their feet on the taiga first.
When Kirk and Chapel show up, Corby isn't there so Kirk calls up to the ship and orders down a pair of corpses. Spock sends down two Red Shirt crewmen instead, and Kirk figures there's no sense returning them because they'll fit the bill soon enough.
Some other scientist shows up and turns a spotlight on Kirk, but instead of singing "Hello, My Baby!" Kirk wets his space pants.
The other guy takes Kirk and Chapel down to Corby's lair. As soon as they're gone, Lurch from the Addams Family shows up wearing one of my mother's old housecoats padded with Joan Crawford's NFL shoulder pads and shoves one Red Shirt into a bottomless pit. Then Lurch performs an improvised version of the Heimlich by sticking his hand down the throat of the other guy and pulling him inside out. He's altogether ooky.
We find that planet XO's entire population moved into caves at some point in the distant past because it's cheaper than filming outside. If the room Kirk is taken to is any indication, they were masters of picnic table technology and the first civilization in the galaxy to come up with the concept of the "break room." Corby shows up and shows how advanced they were by pointing out some ancient sandwich vending machines, condiment carousels on the tables, and softball sign-up sheets on the bulletin board. Then he has to carry out the most vile, revolting task in the universe that no man should ever be forced to perform.
Once Corby is done kissing Nurse Chapel, Corby's buddy scientist gets into a fight with Kirk.
There's a dame scientist there too, and Chapel keeps glaring at her like the gift a neighbor's dog has left on her front lawn. While Kirk is fighting the other guy, he bravely hides behind this other chick like a human shield and shoots the other scientist until the radio parts in his stomach fall out all over the floor.
It turns out the other scientist was an android and that this is Corby's great big exciting secret. Then Lurch runs into the room and bangs Kirk's head into the ceiling and William Shatner's toupee sticks to the smoke detector.
Lurch mimics Kirk's voice to talk to Spock to tell him everything's okay down here and that he'll be a little late and to put out the cat and tape Survivor: Orion's Belt for him. Then Lurch mimics Nurse Chapel's voice. Lurch is prettier.
The robot dame is wearing a couple of crisscrossed mini-hammocks across her rack, and on orders from Colby she alternately makes out with then slaps Kirk, thus demonstrating the course of a ten-year marriage in the span of ten seconds.
"This is how you make an android," says Colby. I think I'd probably rather go android-less, since the process involves spinning Kirk naked on a roulette wheel next to a pile of damp papier-mâché. It also involves some deeply technical stuff like turning a couple of unlabeled Fisher Price knobs and making bloopity-bloop noises. Whatever you do, don't let junior say "bloopity-bloop" next to the Play-Doh while he's playing with his Fisher Price Lil Mechanic's Kit or you might wind up with naked golem William Shatner clomping around the nursery.
Sure enough, the damp papier-mâché turns into a tubby replica of Kirk, but not before Kirk repeatedly yells "shut your pointy-eared Vulcan pie-hole, Mr. Spock!" at the top of his voice in front of Colby, the robot lady, Lurch (in my mother's old housecoat), and Nurse Gargoyle. I'd assume that he was trying to implant a false impression of his everyday interaction with Spock on the papier-mâché version of himself, but I'm not a super-smart scientist or genius alien robot, so what do I know?
By the way, how many duplicate Kirks does this one bring the total to? I think it's a billion-and-eight, but I lost count somewhere in the mid-700,000s.
Nurse Chapel says she can't tell the difference between the two Kirks. They just spun around at a million miles an hour for five minutes. If this were anything like reality, she'd be able to tell the real Kirk by the simple fact that he'd be puking up his lunch of multicolored cubes and his wig would have flown off and done a soggy tarantula-splat on the wall in the first minute.
Back in the break room, the real Kirk is now wearing a pair of space pajamas that are different from the yellow pajamas he usually wears. That's because the fake Kirk has put on his uniform because, naturally, in the future it will be easier to duplicate living organisms down to the last detail including memories than it is to stitch a yellow pajama top and a pair of black pants.
Kirk gets Colby to banter while he surreptitiously unties a convenient rope that happens to be tied to his chair for no reason whatsoever while Lurch and the robot chick stand two feet away looking right at him doing it. He then uses the rope to escape somehow. I forget how, because it was stupid. Maybe he plays some snake charmer music and uses it to climb up to the Paramount sound stage catwalk. If the total disinterest for him untying the rope is any indication, everybody there would just stand around as he put on a swami hat and hauled out a wicker basket like Bugs Bunny.
Out in the caves, Kirk busts a hilariously shaped stalactite from the ceiling and lies in wait for Lurch, who I guess he figures will die laughing when he gets one look at it.
It turns out that Lurch doesn't have a sense of humor, so Kirk instead tries to hit him on the head with the wang-shaped rock, but he winds up hanging off a cliff.
This is the last time I let Sulu plan my shore leave.
Robot Kirk goes up to the Enterprise for no real reason other than to yell at Spock to mind his own pointed-eared beeswax. This gets Spock suspicious enough to come down to the planet much later in the episode, but ultimately has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the story since Spock arrives after Kirk saves the day. I figure it's because Shatner made them rewrite the script so that he doesn't need saving because he's such a he-man hero, but they still had an hour to fill so Robot Kirk yelling racist stuff got left in there even though it matters not one whit to the plot.
Colby wants to go to a different planet with lots of raw materials so he can start mass-producing robots of all kinds of important people. Of course, he'd have to first get the important people to the planet to duplicate them. I doubt that plan would work, because if tons of the galaxy's bigshots started disappearing for two weeks and then showing up with bolts in their necks, someone would notice. Or maybe he plans on tricking them there by telling the president of Melmac that he's won an all-expense paid trip to Planet RoboCop(y).
Of course Real Kirk is too busy to do anything at that moment because he's making out with the sexy robot chick. She tells him to stop downloading his tongue into her mouth as smoke comes out of her panties.
Kirk somehow miraculously figures out without the aid of computer records, newspapers or even cave paintings that the dead civilization that built the robots was killed off by the very robots they created. He says this to Lurch who says he forgot all about the genocide. Apparently he's creepy, kooky and altogether German.
So Kirk very cleverly awakens dormant genocidal bloodlust in an eight-foot behemoth who's already murdered two of his crewmen before he remembered how evil he really was, plus didn't even get a headache when he got smashed over the head with a stalactite dong. Smart plan, Captain Genius. While you're at it, tell him he looks like Frankenstein's monster's homelier brother and that he dresses like a sissy.
Lucky for Kirk, Lurch first goes nuts on Colby who shoots him. Whew, that was convenient.
Kirk gets into a fight with Colby, who gets his arm caught in the supermarket door. The big surprise reveal? Colby is a robot too! What a shocking twist. Why, I never saw that one coming!
The dame robot with the hooter slings finds a ray gun on a fuse box and asks Kirk to make out with her. He says making out does not compute, so she shoots him. She then marches into the break room and says Kirk escaped but she is shocked to find that she shot Robot Kirk by mistake. I'm shocked too. Will these crazy, unexpected twists never end!?
The robot dame says she loves Colby, even though the real Kirk is standing right there and she shot the fake one out in the hall two seconds ago because he wouldn't help her change her knobs back to their factory presets. Then she shoots herself and Colby.
Spock shows up to save the day, which has already been saved by the actions of his heroic captain, who I'm sure set his tantrum to the producers on "maximum tirade" when he found out he'd have to be saved by his second fiddle first officer like Pearl White tied to the railroad tracks in The Perils of Pauline.
Back up on the Enterprise, Spock is smirking all over the place and complaining that Human Kirk tricked Robot Kirk to be mean, and Nurse Chapel says she's decided to stay on the Enterprise for the free plastic surgery coupon that comes at the end of every five year mission.
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