Star Trekkin'

Sometimes Star Trek episodes were based on whatever junk the props and costume departments managed to scrape up in the Paramount warehouse.  There was Planet Nazi, Planet Bonnie and Clyde and Planet Cowboy.  If the show went to four seasons we would have eventually been treated to Planet Busby Berkeley, with Spock and Kirk performing water ballet in one-piece bathing suits.  Tonight was Planet Rome. 

If it had been our modern Rome, Kirk, Bones and Spock would have had their pockets picked two seconds after they beamed down and then spent the next fifty minutes skating around on pigeon crap looking for the Klingons who stole their rented Vespas.  Instead, they landed in ancient Rome brought into the modern age.  So there were gladiators on TV and ads for Neptune toothpaste. 

Kirk and the others are there to find the crew of a ship that went missing six years before.  When they first arrive it's explained by some runaway slaves that the society's slaves just got happily content with the idea of being slaves because the government gave them social security and free health care.  I hate it when science fiction is so unbelievable, don't you? 

Kirk and his pals are captured by some guards out of a Zucker brothers comedy wearing white motorcycle helmets.  That whistling box Spock carries is able to detect cities over the horizon but not four guys hiding behind the bushes.  The landing party is stuck because their stuff is taken from them and the Enterprise can't find them without their communicators.  Right now on Earth you can go to the vet and get a tracker injected in your dog, but apparently that technology was lost to the 24th century back during the 1990s nuclear wars.  (Damn you all to hell!) 

Kirk, Spock and Bones are made to fight gladiator-style on TV, which involves blue plastic shields and cardboard Doric columns on a set smaller than the dining area at Subway.  Then Kirk bangs a platinum blonde chick in a tinfoil dress who has nothing else to do with the story.  They escape with help from the captain of the ship they were sent to find, and he's stabbed in the back with a ketchup-covered knife.  The Zucker brothers guards in white motorcycle helmets try to shoot the Enterprise landing party but the good guys beam away in the nick of time, revealing in spectacular fashion advanced technology that Kirk said at the beginning of the episode they could not reveal to the natives under any circumstances.

Back on the Enterprise, Uhura tells them that Jesus visited this planet too and instead of saying, "Sweet holy flying crap!" and marveling at the theological implications, the bridge crew stands around chuckling at the 56 minute mark as their cartoon ship flies off into the spaceset past a pair of newly inserted CG moons.