What, you mean this is really Star Trek and those sitcom-looking Air Force sets and uniforms are supposed to be for real? Shatner's hair is more believable.
It's 1967 on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, so those miniskirts and beehive hairdos suddenly make a lot more sense. Kirk says in the narration that they ran into a black star that threw them back in time. I wonder if it was Wesley Snipes, because now they can tell him to pay his taxes.
Isn't it interesting that they just happened to get tossed back in time to the exact year the show was on the air? It's sort of like in that other episode where they got tossed back in time to the exact year the show was on the air. Not to be confused with the movie they made twenty years later where they got tossed back in time to the exact year that the movie was released. Maybe time isn't linear at all, maybe it has to do with complicated stuff like the copyright dates that appear at the end of our closing credits. "Y'all come back now, y'hear?" suddenly sounds a lot more sinister.
The sitcom Air Force sends a jet up to look at the spaceship that is wobbling around in Earth's atmosphere like a rubber ducky getting splashed around in a bathtub and not like it weighs 500 million billion tons. And that's just Uhura and Scotty.
Kirk has a tractor beam lock on the plane which is somehow able to follow a ship that can travel faster than the speed of light. The plane breaks apart, so naturally rather than beam the rescued pilot directly to an unpopulated stretch of interstate down on Earth and let everybody down there figure it out, they beam him to the Enterprise. Jeannie!
The sitcom Air Force pilot arrives in the beamer room standing up. Which means the beamer can take you if you're sitting down and straighten you up in transit, but it still can't see when there's an escaped lunatic hiding in a box like in that other episode where an escaped lunatic was hiding in a box.
Spock says that they have to keep the sitcom pilot there. He says that the glimpse of the future they've given the guy means that he could manipulate stocks, industries and nations. And exactly how is he going to do all that from one elevator ride? If I get taken aboard a spaceship that's been tossed back in time from two hundred years in the future and they make me ride up and down in their elevator for a whole day, how exactly is that going to tell me what pony to bet on in the 4th at Santa Anita a week from Tuesday? Did this junk science officer actually study anything on that famous logic planet, or is Vulcan populated by a bunch of morons everyone assumes are smart because they don't use contractions and have deep cigarette voices?
A sexy lady computer voice embarrasses Kirk in front of the sitcom Air Force pilot, and he says that they put in for a computer overhaul on a planet dominated by sexy dames who took three weeks to break the computers. So apparently at no point during the overhaul did he or his computer-genius first officer bother to switch on Windows to see what exactly the alien mechanic dames were doing. Shouldn't Kirk have gone into the garage at least once to shake his fist at the alien dames in their greasy overalls and shout that it's taking too long, the bill is outrageous, that ding wasn't on the Enterprise's rear quarter panel when he brought it in, and that somebody screwed around with all the radio preset buttons?
If it's going to take three weeks to get some chicks to wreck your old computers, it would probably be easier and more cost effective to just swing by Best Buy and pick up some new ones. Gene Roddenberry's miraculous vision of a spendaholic government blowing through tax dollars like drunken maniacs was only two hundred years off. Maybe the Federation can borrow a few quadrillion from the Chinese Klingons and stick the 24th Century with the bill.
Kirk allows a prisoner to wander freely around his ship, and for the millionth time the prisoner beats up a guard and steals his gun. At this point they should probably just give every prisoner they beam aboard a lei, a coupon for one complimentary blue drink, and a phaser. They're going to get them anyway, and it'd cut down on all those guards staggering into the infirmary with Karate Chop Neck every week. (So many of our returning Starfleet veterans suffer in silence from moderate to severe KCN. Won't you give generously to the Karate Chop Neck Foundation today?)
Spock, who was so worried about an elevator ride changing the future, tells the Air Force guy that they have to return him to Earth because he will one day have a son who's going to be important. It seems to me that this information has the potential to change the future infinitely more than one elevator ride, but my ears are round on the top and I don't smoke, so what do I know?
So as to be completely inconspicuous, Kirk and Sulu beam down to an Air Force records room wearing yellow pajamas.
We're told that there was recording equipment on the plane that got blowed up in the tractor beam, so the captain of the starship Enterprise, which is in a super-major crisis because it is lost in time with no way to get home, decides now is a good time to get out and stretch his chubby legs.
This episode is slightly less stupid when watched this way.
So Kirk and Sulu are prancing around a military base dressed for a slumber party and it doesn't occur to either of these two genius officers to so much as jam a chair up under the doorknob of the records room. Naturally, a guard wanders in and says stick 'em up.
Rather than have the guard beamed out to the parking lot, Kirk has him beamed up to the ship with his gun drawn and ready to fire. Luckily, the guy stands in a comic cartoon crouch -- (because for some reason the beamer didn't correct his posture in transit like it did the pilot's) -- and he lets McCoy wander over and tug the gun out of his hand. Good thing it wasn't me, because I would have shot holes in everybody in the transporter room and run screaming to the nearest window to make a jump for Ft. Lauderdale.
Kirk is captured because for the second time that episode he again gets confused by 20th Century door technology and shuts a door with Sulu on one side and himself on the other where there are a bunch of guys with guns who wouldn't have seen him if he'd just shut the door with himself on the other side. No kidding.
Up on the ship, they can't beam up Kirk because he doesn't have his communicator pinned to his sleeves like mittens anymore. Their communicators get taken from them so frequently you'd think someone back at HQ would have thought to stitch some kind of beacon into their uniforms. Even Maxwell Smart had a phone hidden in his shoe, for crying out loud.
I wonder briefly if they're going to get lost in time over on the Get Smart set once they're finished with I Dream of Jeannie.
A plastic cracker inserted into the transporter room wall makes chicken soup.
Kirk gets questioned in a zany comic scene, Spock shows up in his pajamas along with Major Healey. Major Healey double crosses them and gets the drop on everybody before the commercial break, but Spock wanders up behind him after the commercial break. Then they go back to the ship.
The big idea to get back to the 23rd Century is to fly around the sun really fast until everyone is dizzy, then sail for home, an idea that was stolen from Captain Redbeard Rum in Blackadder. Along the way through time they will beam Major Healey and the guard with the gun back inside themselves, which is an idea that was stolen from Sulu's last shore leave.
So Major Healey will be beamed back inside Major Healey before his plane blows up, thus erasing his memory of the elevator ride. The guard from the base will be beamed back inside the guard from the base before he gets comically beamed up to the Enterprise. How two objects will occupy the same space at the same time without some kind of huge nuclear explosion that will take out half of North America while simultaneously erasing the events of the past few hours from the two guys' brains isn't clarified. I blame the sea otters.
The plan goes off without a hitch, except Major Healey sees the Enterprise again and, even though it vanishes in the next second, we were clearly told that he had recording instruments on his plane, which is why Kirk went down to the base in his yellow pajamas, so all the comic shenanigans everybody went through in the episode to set everything right just got undone in the last five seconds of the show.
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