We find out in some voice over narration that Scotty has the hots for the new librarian, but I'm more interested in the bird's eye camera angle that looks down directly at the top of William Shatner's toupee. I can see why they call it a bird's eye view because from above it looks like something terns would lay eggs in.
The librarian's name is Romaine Lettuce, and she's on the bridge haranguing Sulu about his overdue men's muscle magazines when a floating space jellyfish wearing a fireworks tuxedo attacks the ship.
The space jellyfish makes some fireworks explode in Romaine Lettuce's eyeball and she passes out and starts making Satanic belching sounds like the kid in The Exorcist. Scotty plays like Gene Hackman's oblivious blind monk in Young Frankenstein and says he didn't quite catch what the monster possessing her was saying. I don't exactly sing as sweetly as the birds nesting in William Shatner's Woolworth's hair, but I'd like to think that even total strangers might notice if I caught eye-fireworks then started belching Apocalyptic baritone horrors. On the Starship Enterprise, it just gets the librarian taken down to sickbay to take her temperature and later, if she's a good girl and doesn't try to take over the ship and kill everyone aboard, she'll get ice cream.
The library where Lt. Romaine Lettuce is supposed to shush unruly space kids is called Memory Alpha, and Spock says it's the only spot in the galaxy where all of the knowledge Starfleet has accumulated has been archived. So if you need to know the treatment for poison ivy or how many Friday the 13th movies were made, you're out of luck in the 23rd century because there's no more Google. In the future there's no looking up oatmeal cookie recipes at home in your underwear. It's much more convenient to book a flight on a spaceship and fly a billion light years away to get Dolly Parton's complete discography. Yes, Virginia, the future is run by Washington bureaucrats.
Before the Enterprise can get to the library, the opening credits to Love, American Style show up and fireworks everyone there to death.
Kirk and his pals arrive at Memory Alpha and find everyone dead, including Eddie Munster's werewolf doll and that blue-headed guy with the antennae who I'm beginning to think is like the Alfred Hitchcock of Star Trek for the number of episodes he's shown up in. I think I saw him getting on a bus in the background with Tippi Hedren in the one with the space gangsters.
One space lady is left alive, and her head changes Skittles rainbow colors as she makes growling monster noises like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters when she was possessed by the Zuul. Then she dies.
Then she tried Proactiv and started seeing a difference in just three days!
Romaine Lettuce now has some psychic connection to the fireworks and she says they're on their way back because they're not sure if they killed everybody completely dead, so Kirk leaves Eddie Munster's werewolf doll, Mr. Blue-Head and Gozer's Gatekeeper in the library and he beams everybody back to the Enterprise.
The space jellyfish does some fireworks behind the ship and everyone goes "ooo" and "aaah" and applauds, but then Kirk tells the flashing lights that, while they are very pretty at a distance, physical contact with fireworks kills humans. This has been a Star Trek public service announcement aimed at all of you dummies who blow up your propane grills and set fire to your porch roofs every 4th-of-damn-July.
As soon as Kirk informs them that they can kill people by touching them, the jellyfish fireworks move out in front of the ship. After telling an enemy that has killed before their great advantage over humans, Kirk decides that this is a genius moment to leave the bridge and go sit around the dining room table to talk about all the interesting things that have happened in the show so far, like fireworks jellyfish and Scotty's romance with the sexy librarian, and why Romaine Lettuce can see what the jellyfish fireworks are up to inside her psychic head. Then everybody has a light supper and a nice long nap so they'll be nice and refreshed for when they all get murdered.
Spock puts crackers in the com-pu-tor! and McCoy's Lite-Brite agrees that something ain't quite right with Romaine Lettuce's brain waves. Probably it's because she was possessed by some jellyfish fireworks in the first act that made her eyes explode and made her talk like my garbage disposal when I grind up incubuses, but I'm not a genius Vulcan scientist or a brilliant Federation doctor so I'm not sure.
Kirk orders the ship to go at warp eight and the jellyfish winds up inside. What a shock. If you drive your car eight times the speed of light into that insubstantial space cat with the fireworks fur that's in the road up ahead, there's a pretty good chance kitty will end up next to you in the front seat.
Romaine Lettuce begins belching guttural obscenities, so naturally they stick her in the washing machine.
We learn that the fireworks have been floating in space for 1000 years looking for a body to act as host. Luckily, an alien race that can float around in the vacuum of space for a millennium and permeate the shields of a mighty Federation starship can't get out of the Whirlpool's rinse cycle.
Scotty's sideburns are outrageously big in this episode.
The jellyfish fireworks are dead by the time the washing machine hits "spin." Wisk around the collar beats alien jellyfish around the collar every time.
Kirk says that they're going to bring Romaine Lettuce to the library after all because she has "a lot of work to do." What work? Spock said when they beamed down earlier that the computers were wiped. Everyone's dead on Planet Library, so there's no one to give the bathroom key to or vagrants who smell like pee to turn out at nine p.m. Maybe she's just supposed to fiddle with the card catalogue and haul bodies out by the curb for the trash man the great USS Enterprise will be charged with bringing out next week.
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