Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Space Seed"

At the start of this week's Star Trek, the Enterprise finds an old derelict ship from the 1990s adrift in space.  You remember all those spaceships we were always launching out hither and yon in the Nineties.  We had plenty of time for space exploration in that very serious decade because it's not like we were busy with the O.J. trial hosted by Judge Ito, poor little JonBenet Ramsey, and brushing the luxurious fringe of hair on our Slobodan Milosevic dolls.

We're told that the last world war ever was also apparently in the Nineties, which is nice because the one I figured would be along any day now apparently never materializes.  It's funny that I don't recall the world war we had in the 1990s, because that's the sort of thing I usually remember.  Or maybe I was distracted by all the Lady Di coverage.  She was a candle in the wind, you know. 

Kirk orders historian Lt. MacGyver to come over to the derelict ship, and she comes over after she builds her own transporter from two rubber bands and a discarded popsicle stick.

The floating ship is called the Botany Bay, and there's a frozen chick onboard wrapped in bubble wrap so that she doesn't get damaged during shipping. 

We learn that 2018 was when warp travel will be invented, and this sentence is grammatically correct even though it isn't.

There are other people on the Botany Bay wrapped in bubble wrap, and the landing party finds Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island in one of the giant fish tanks but, sadly, Tattoo isn't in a little fishbowl on the floor next to him.

Ricardo Montalban is Mexican, and historian Lt. MacGyver identifies him as Indian and says that Sikhs were the best warriors of that age, proving in the first five minutes of the show that history isn't really her strong suit.  Maybe she'll be better at...oh, I don't know -- just off the top of my head -- mutiny, maybe?  We'll just have to wait and see.

Lt. MacGyver, who has cut off her 1980s mullet, says that Ricardo Montalban is "magnificent" and drools all over his fish tank. No, she definitely won't be a problem later on.

Ricardo Montalban actually was magnificent.  He sent me a whole bunch of autographs to give to family and friends just before Christmas many years ago.  This doesn't have anything to do with this week's episode, he was just a very nice man.

Scotty does a scan and says that 72 of the people are alive and that 30 are women.  What the crap difference does that make?  Did he count 60 knobs and divide by two?

Ricardo Montalban, who is Mexican, is named Khan and apparently isn't Mexican after all.  Boy, is my face is red, which means Lt. MacGyver would probably identify pasty Irish me as an Apache.  How, kemosabe.

Khan is brought over to sickbay on the Enterprise where Bones has a whole bunch of butcher knives hanging all over the wall.  I'm not sure why, since the only surgery he ever seems to do involves floating a transistor radio over a patient's chest while it goes woobidy-woobidy-woobidy.  (The transistor radio, not the patient.)  Khan wakes up and grabs one of the convenient knives hanging on the wall and threatens Bones with it.  I never saw that coming.

Kirk comes in after Khan doesn't O.J. Bones, but Khan won't answer questions because he says he's too sleepy.  So Kirk leaves him to nap, but not before opening up the ship's library to him and letting him read every possible technical manual and yellow schematic cracker he can lay his hands on, including How to Take Over Starships for Megalomaniacal Dummies.  Just like with the knives hanging on the wall in sickbay, I see no problems that could possibly come of this.

Bones says that Kirk felt Khan's magnetism.  I hope that doesn't mean what I think it means, or hornball Kirk finally has crossed the final frontier.

In Star Trek in 1993, genetically superior supermen seized power in forty nations.  In real life in 1993, flabby genetic messes Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and Helmut Kohl were busy seizing interns, booze bottles, loose cash, and everything they could grab from the dessert trolley.

That history dame shows up in sickbay and brings her sexy Lauren Bacall lighting with her.  Khan fusses with her hair and says it should be "soft, natural, simple."  Then he teases it, sets it and sticks her under the hair dryer for forty minutes while he does her nails and dishes all the latest hot celeb gossip.

An interesting monster should have an interesting hairdo.

Khan makes out with MacGyver then goes to a party where he drinks some blue booze and lets it slip to everybody that he's a maniacal, bloodthirsty dictator from Earth's history.  In blue booze, veritas.

Back in his quarters, Khan tosses lady MacGyver around, squeezes her hand and tells her he's going to take over the ship.  She says okay, which is exactly why I always say dames should be home in the kitchen baking futuristic pies and not serving in Starfleet.  I'm calling my space congressman.

Kirk looks at Khan's yearbook photo, or maybe it's his mugshot from when he was picked up for public urination on West Cow Street in New Delhi after punching that snake charmer in the throat.

Apparently from 1992 to 1994 Khan controlled one-quarter of the Earth.  You now, I really swear I'd remember all this.  Or maybe I was just too wrapped up in who killed Laura Palmer to have paid enough attention to all these big world events.

There are no clothes on the entire Enterprise other than Starfleet uniforms, so they stick Khan in one even though he came aboard wearing his own clothes.  It's just like how in real life the Navy is always picking up those bedraggled guys with the long beards on the homemade rafts that look like they've escaped from a Sergio Aragones comic in Mad magazine and dressing them up like Admiral Nimitz. 

They also put only one balding guard outside Hitler's door, so naturally the story ends here because Khan clearly will be stuck inside for the rest of the episode because how on earth could a brilliant genetic superman beat the crap out of Elmer Fudd and escape?

Uhura REALLY should wear pants.

In a shocking plot twist, Khan escapes and takes over the ship.  He shuts off all the power to the bridge, and since it didn't occur to Starfleet's genius engineers to install an emergency beamer, spiral staircase or even a rope ladder even though the ship gets taken over and the bridge locked up every third episode, Kirk and everybody else passes out.

Khan tells Spock and all the others to join him, and to prove he means business he sticks Kirk in the washing machine.

Everybody is in a conference room watching Kirk on the rinse cycle on TV, and the history dame says she doesn't like that program and since Khan won't give her the remote control to switch over to a Valerie Bertinelli movie on Lifetime, she says she's going to stay with her mother and leaves.  Of course brilliant Khan doesn't suspect that she ran out of the room at that precise moment in order to save Kirk before the spin cycle kicks in, because he implicitly trusts her since it's not like she arbitrarily switched loyalties to anybody else in the past forty-five minutes.

The TV in the conference room mysteriously switches off a minute after history dame MacGyver leaves the room, but no one finds it suspicious because they are so distracted by Uhura's hammy, horribly acted overreaction to Khan's announcement that Kirk is dead, which is probably the absolute worst bit of acting in the entire history of the Star Trek franchise including everything from the guy who played the robot every time he tried to act like anything other than a robot in the New Generation series.   

The dame lets Kirk out of the washing machine and he puts a stink bomb in the vents, and everybody passes out except Scotty, Spock and Khan.  So with an escaped lunatic running around the ship naturally Scotty announces to Spock over the supermarket intercom that store manager Kirk is on his way to the produce department to grab the Mexican Sikh who's eating all the grapes without paying for them.

In engineering, Khan jumps out and tells Kirk that he has five times Kirk's strength.  He takes Kirk's phaser and crushes it in his bare hands, proving how crazy he really is since a genuine Original Series phaser would bring in a fortune on eBay.

Kirk's and Khan's stunt doubles fight, and Kirk's stunt double would surely have lost if not for the fact that engineering consoles in the future have enormous plastic clubs built into them that you can pull out and beat the hell out of people with, so at least Starfleet's engineers got one thing right. 

Kirk decides to maroon Khan and his followers, including the mutinous history chick who I'm not sure is that other MacGyver after all, on a planet where they can live in the dust storms and get bugs in their ears, and Khan says that'd be just swell.  Also, Scotty's accent briefly disappears.  Maybe he was thinking back to the thirty unconscious dames he was fondling as he was counting all sixty of them back at the beginning of the episode.

Spock says it would be interesting to revisit Khan's new planet in another 100 years.  Say, this gives me an idea.  This was a pretty okay episode.  If they ever decide to make Star Trek movies in the way-off distant future of the 1980s, they could make a movie sequel of this one episode and then milk all the various plot elements from that sequel to death from about 1994 to 2013 and probably beyond, but with each subsequent entry making less sense, utilizing increasingly louder explosions and marginalizing Dr. McCoy's character so they can pack in more nuded-up broads.  That'd be cool, dude.

Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "The Devil in the Dark"

This week's Star Trek begins on planet Janice 6, where a bunch of miners in multicolored jumpsuits are afraid to go to bed because a scary monster might eat them.

Fifty miners have already been killed according to a New York gangster who Desilu Productions apparently brought over to work on Star Trek after The Untouchables went off the air.  "Youse tink dat monster's gonna get a piece-a dis?" the guy asks.  Then he guzzles some hooch and makes time with some floozy B-girl, I tells ya.

The head of the Janice 6 mining facility says wiseguy guards have to be stationed around the joint so's to keep them Feds away from this here loot.  "Especially that no-good G-man Ness, see?" he sneers, all tough guy-like

The minute he's left alone, the goombah on guard duty gets attacked by a raging blancmange that melts him into nothing but a steaming silhouette on the floor.  It's a sad loss to henchmankind, but at least it'll be easy for the coppers to stick down some tape around the body.

The Enterprise shows up, and Kirk says Janice 6 has important per diem deposits.  It is never explained through the whole episode what exactly per diem is or what its uses are.  The miners on Janice 6 might as well be digging for deposits of widgets, veeblefetzers or MacGuffins.

The head of Janice 6 is named Van de Kamp, but he doesn't offer to put any fish sticks in anyone's mouth, which upsets Sulu for some reason so he hides in his cabin and sulks for the whole episode.  Van de Kamp tells Kirk that equipment has been burned, men melted, women stampeded and cattle raped.

Bones checks the body of the gangster who was killed in the opening act and says he looks like he was thrown in acid, kind of like Tommy Lee Jones.

Spock examines the rubber kickball on the head guy's desk, and then the lights blink.  The monster that excretes acid has sabotaged the reactor room and stolen the giant spark plug that makes the whole planet run.  How a monster understood exactly what part to unplug to get the lawn mower to stop working is left for the imagination of the viewer.  I'm too busy, however, imagining how it managed to haul the thing off in one piece without melting it, since it pisses acid and has no hands, teeth or pockets to carry the thing in.

Spock speculates that the monster might be Styrofoam and not carbon-based, and Bones pooh-poohs the fanciful notion.  I don't know why.  Half the universe looks like it's made of Styrofoam, if the cave they're standing in and every rock that has ever gotten tossed at Kirk on every planet they've landed on is any indication.  According to Star Trek, the Milky Way Galaxy is practically one giant McDLT container.

A whole squad of Red Shirts beams down to the planet.  I'm sure they'll all be just fine, but maybe it'd be a good idea for them to make sure their life insurance is paid up.

Red shirt down!  Red shirt down!  Oh, the humanity!

I won't ask you men to do anything I wouldn't do, except die horribly one at a time instead of myself and Mr. Spock as the crisis escalates.

The fact that a Red Shirt was killed two seconds after arriving on the planet was a complete shock.  I was hoping Crewman #6 would become a regular member of the crew, laughing it up with Chekov and Sulu on the bridge and appearing in all six movies, with one fan-pleasing guest appearance on The New Generation TV show with the bald English captain who has a French name for some reason. 

The Red Shirt didn't even fire when the blancmange attacked.  Kids raised on video games are quicker on the draw than Starfleet's best space soldiers.

We finally see the blancmange monster, and it looks like a giant dirty floor mop.  Kirk and Spock shoot it, and it Swiffers itself the hell out of there.

Spock determines that there is only one of the Swiffers tunneling around the planet, and he says it would be a crime to kill the last of a species.  So let me get this straight.  If Earth is wiped out and somehow I'm the last human in the universe, I'd get to rack up a greater body count than Ted Bundy and Mr. Science Genius would say strapping me in the electric chair would be "a crime?"  I wonder if there was a time travel episode that never aired that put this dummy and his redefinition of the word "crime" with the rest of the eleven pinheads on the O.J. jury. 

Kirk wants to send Spock off to help Scotty work on patching the hole where the spark plug goes.  He says it's too much of a risk for the Enterprise to lose both its captain and first officer if the monster attacks.  Spock says the odds of both he and Kirk being killed are over 2000 to 1 against.  Not if you're standing next to each other, Science Officer Stupid.  If the glove don't fit, you must be a moron.

All this time they assume the missing piece of the reactor is still in one piece and they'll be able to pick it up and bring it back.  I have no idea why.  I'd have figured that a monster that has murdered more than fifty people and excretes acid wouldn't think twice about taking the big spark plug out behind a Dumpster and taking a leak on it.

Kirk and Spock separate and the giant Swiffer knocks the Styrofoam ceiling down on Kirk and kicks a couple of purple kickballs around in the process.  This is interesting, since later on we find out that the kickballs are its eggs that it is protecting by killing people and stealing their spark plugs.  It protects them, apparently, by knocking ceilings down on top of them and kicking them all around the room.  The last Swiffer in the universe has the maternal instinct of that chick who drove her kids in the lake.

Spock runs in the room and offers to mind-meld with the huge filthy mop stinking up the floor.  He yells, "Oh, the pain!  The pain!" in the lousiest impersonation of Dr. Smith I've ever seen.  Then the Swiffer urinates "NO KILL!" on the wall, which sounds impressive but since it pees acid it's pretty much just writing its name in the snow.

Speaking of its name, it calls itself a Horton, but I don't know if it hears any Whos.  It says it slaughtered all those innocent men because it was protecting its kickballs which, like I said, are actually eggs.  Since it's intelligent and understands English, couldn't it have just pissed all that on the wall a week ago and saved everybody a lot of trouble, particularly the half-a-hundred men it murdered?

The Red Shirts who weren't melted to puddles get the crap beaten out of them by miners with clubs, since the genius miners think that shooting the thing with lasers didn't hurt it but hitting a living rock with a big stick might.  Has someone checked to see if the canary is dead in its cage, because I think there's a whole bunch of moron gas venting out in the per diem chamber.

Kirk gets the miners to agree to let the million kickballs hatch into Swiffers, even though just one of the things killed fifty of them.  The Horton thinks this is a swell deal and promises that it and its kids won't kill anybody else, honest Injun, as it looks around real shifty-like and crosses some of its dirty mop fringes behind its back, so Kirk flies away because nothing else could possibly go wrong.