Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "The Doomsday Machine"

This week's Star Trek begins with the Enterprise crew in an asteroid field searching for their sister ship, the Constellation.  The asteroid field is brand-new, and exists because a bunch of planets have just been destroyed by some great, unknown something-or-other.  In the middle of the computer-generated rocks is the Constellation, wrecked and adrift.  Spock pulls out that massive brain of his that impresses all the outer space babes and suggests that whatever blew up all the planets probably smashed-up the Constellation as well.  Really, Commander Sherlock?  I'm guessing that chick with the black beehive hairdo in the background could have guessed the same thing just by looking out the window.  How much are they paying this guy to be the big science genius on this ship, because I saw a border collie on Nova once that was just as good at deductive reasoning and nowhere near as smarmy.

Kirk, Bones and Scotty beam over to the Constellation.  As smashed-up as it is, it's still got lights and oxygen aplenty, but you can tell it's beat-up because in front of every door is a giant crooked drinking straw.  Kirk steps over one of the giant straws and finds the only guy left alive on the ship, Matt Decker.  Decker is a commodore, but I don't think he's one of the Commodores, because he's white.  But then he throws open his mouth and for a minute I think he's going to belt out "Three Times a Lady," but it turns out he's just acting crazy.

Decker has gone space-nuts because he beamed his crew down from the damaged Constellation to a planet that was then blown up by a space monster.  His performance when describing the thing that killed his crew is more eccentric than that of Tim the Enchanter describing the Killer Rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and should be sufficient to get him beamed into the nearest deep space rubber room.  This becomes significant later in the episode when McCoy says he needs to examine him before he can say he's crazy.  I'd say the tinfoil-lined Napoleon hat would be enough, but apparently in the future you can't certify an obvious nutbar until you've checked his tonsils. 

Okay, so forget crazy.  How about incompetent?  This guy marooned his entire crew on a planet after his ship was attacked.  It didn't occur to him to leave them even one shuttle so at least a couple of them could escape when the space monster started carving up the joint.  Clearly Commodore Decker should be shipped immediately to either the loony bin or the brig.  Instead, Kirk orders Bones to take him aboard the Enterprise, where Decker immediately takes command from Spock.

The space monster is back, and it turns out it's a giant metal highway cone with a highway flare stuffed up it.

Speaking of things stuffed up other things, Kirk pulls a whole big theory entirely out of his rear end, speculating that the highway cone is a doomsday device from beyond the moon created to do mean things to not-nice people.  It's an interesting theory that has not one bit of evidence on which to hang it.  For all he knows, it could be a giant sugar cone created by the Ice Cream Giants of Flabbercam V, sent off into the deepest reaches of space to search for chocolate sprinkles.  But since the episode is called "The Doomsday Machine," Kirk's fanciful, whole cloth theory is their story and they're sticking to it.

The highway cone is heading for the most densely populated part of our galaxy and, before it can reach Los Angeles, Decker decides to attack it.  Spock doesn't want to, but Decker has a pretzel glued to the chest of his yellow pajamas which means Spock has to do everything a disheveled, unshaven lunatic tells him to do.

The Enterprise attacks the highway cone, which I realize now looks more like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter.  The Sorting Hat belches fire at the Enterprise, which Kirk sees from the Constellation once Scotty gets the TV fixed.

Kirk gets Spock to take command of the Enterprise, and Spock tells a Red Shirt to take the commodore downstairs so McCoy can check his prostate to prove he's crazy.

If you want to be a commodore/The house for you is...Gryffindor!

 

In the hallway downstairs, Commodore Decker pretends to cough then socks the Red Shirt.  The Red Shirt starts to beat him up, so Decker pretends to be tired and socks the Red Shirt again.  This time he wins and knocks out the Red Shirt, so we're spared the old "your shoelace is untied" trick.  No wonder these guys get killed in the first five minutes of most episodes.  They're morons.

On the bridge, Sulu's Christmas lights tell him a shuttle is being stolen.  You'd think the doors would automatically shut on an unauthorized launch, but maybe that ship function is broken along with the tractor beam they were using earlier in the episode to pull the Constellation in tow but for some unexplained reason don't use now to retrieve the shuttle.

Up close, the inside of the Sorting Hat looks like the Eye of Sauron.  The commodore flies the one true ring inside, but the Sorting Hat doesn't die and the tower of Barad-dûr doesn't come down.

Sulu sees through his bridge View-Master that the Sorting Hat's power dipped when the shuttle went boom, so Kirk decides to fly the Constellation inside to make a bigger boom.  Scotty has fixed everything on the Constellation from the phasers to the cappuccino maker, but for some odd reason he's neglected to repair the transporter, so Kirk will have to rely on the Enterprise to beam him out at the last second.  Apparently Kirk has forgotten just like Decker that the Constellation has shuttles.

Scotty beams back aboard the Enterprise and breaks the transporter.  I think that if it can't take his weight now, wait'll it sees the size of the Scotty it's going to have to beam around the galaxy in twenty years.

Kirk flies the Constellation into the Eye of Sauron, and we see that the interior of the Sorting Hat is lined with groovy wallpaper.  Scotty fixes the transporter and beams Kirk out just in the nick of time.  The Constellation explodes, the Sorting Hat belches liquid Tide and dies, and on the bridge of the Enterprise Kirk cracks wise, since in the future it's apparently no big deal to lose a ship, its crew, a crazy commodore with a pretzel on his pajamas, and a couple of piddling little solar systems.