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Monday, September 2, 2013

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.

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