Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?"

At the start of this week's Star Trek, a new dame lieutenant is wandering around the bridge and apparently we're supposed to imagine she's so sexy that Scotty has to spool his tongue up off the floor every time she and her beehive hairdo sashays by.  She's actually sexy only in the 1960s sense, which is to say that in the far-off future of, say, 2013 she'd be lucky to get as close to Hollywood as a TSA worker at LAX.  She also has a huge pimple on her chin for most of the episode, but unfortunately in the distant future of 1968 Proactiv hasn't been invented, so the makeup department has cleverly concealed it with about eight pounds of pancake makeup.  It's so pointy that if she turns fast, she could pop Uhura.

Lt. Beehive tells Kirk that Polyps 5, the planet they've just checked in on, is stupid.  We learn that, in fact, the entire region of space they're flying through is stupid.  I knew all those episodes of Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother we've been beaming out into space would have to land somewhere.

The Enterprise flies up to Polyps 4, where a giant floating green hand appears and grabs onto the ship. 

Yeah, you read that right.  I'd maybe try to say that a different way, but there's no way to write it without it sounding as stupid as it looks.  Speaking of looking stupid, Chekov's wig looks like the rats it's stitched out of got in a turf war over who owns the sideburns.

A big head floats up on the viewscreen wearing a laurel, but doesn't offer a hearty handshake.  The big floating head tells Kirk to come down to the planet, but Kirk says he's busy having his hair dry cleaned.  I thought they were supposed to be going boldly and exploring strange, new something-or-others.  I figured giant floating heads and huge green hands that can grab onto his ship like it's a Frisbee would qualify.  What, is something good on TV he doesn't want to miss?  I know it can't be Two and a Half Men.  Good Lord, even the commercials for that show are horrible.

The floating head makes the floating green hand shake the ship, and Uhura squeaks like a mouse.  Or maybe that's just a Crips rat in Chekov's wig getting a shiv in the tail.

Kirk beams down to the planet with Bones, Chekov, Lt. Beehive and Scotty.  I'm sure there will be no complications due to the fact that Scotty is sweet on Lt. Beehive, and that the floating head will keep his remaining big green hand to himself.

The floating head is actually a guy who says he's the Greek god Apollo, and to prove he means business he's got his voice permanently set on reverb, which is something all the ancient Greek gods did according to the Iliad. 

Apollo breaks Kirk's communicator by looking at it, because that hasn't happened in two whole planets.  Those things are so unreliable, Kirk would be better off climbing to the top of the nearest mountain and hollering up at the ship.

Apollo starts listing god names from the index of the copy of Bulfinch's Mythology that Gene Roddenberry obviously checked out of the Paramount library for the afternoon. 

Bones surreptitiously examines Apollo with his swirling lipstick while Chekov checks him out with a transistor radio he lifted from Beach Blanket Bingo.

You know, it's a good thing they spoke modern English in ancient Greece, otherwise nobody would understand what anybody else was saying.

In order to demonstrate his godliness, Apollo grows really big using high-tech 1960s TV technology that superimposes one image over another in the most amazing special effect since the Enterprise first bounced up to the tennis ball planet utilizing something the visual effects crew calls "string."

 

Oh, yeah, like you've never seen a god's junk before.

"You seem wise for a woman," Apollo tells Lt. Beehive, and makes her uniform turn into some backless fiberglass gown.  Instead of screaming bloody murder, she giggles, says, "Oh, it's beautiful," fetches his slippers and cooks him a pot roast.  No, there definitely won't be a problem between him and Scotty. 

Why is it that every female officer on the Enterprise is fiercely loyal to Starfleet only up until some spray-painted god with fat rolls around his waist magically sticks her in some gauzy evening gown, at which point they all immediately turn into blushing Geishas who start shuffling around happily picking up laundry and ironing the togas?  I knew this would happen when they started letting dames into Starfleet, but nobody listened.

They try using phasers on Apollo, but he winks and they stop working too.  Why do they even bother carrying those things down to planets?  I'd put a rock in my holster instead, but if the Federation issued it it'd probably turn to sand before I could throw it at a Nazi on Planet Nazi.

Scotty tries to attack Apollo a couple of times, even though Kirk orders him to keep it in his pants, and he gets smacked and zapped for trying to defend the honor of a tramp who obviously doesn't have any.  Yeah, no guy knows what that's like.  Apollo also strangles Kirk a little, but fades away in embarrassment when he sees Shatner's over-the-top performance. 

Apollo starts listing god names from Bulfinch's again.

Apollo makes out with the dame and either his awesome Olympian powers or the camera angle make the pimple on her chin miraculously disappear.

Every time Apollo strangles Kirk or beats up Scotty, he fades and disappears.  Kirk assumes he's getting weak and has to go off and sit on a battery recharger.  It doesn't even enter into his toupee that Apollo might just be going off to yon porcelain Argo to pincheth a Herculean loaf, forsooth.

Kirk's big idea is that they should all yell mean things at Apollo when he gets back, which is basically the same idea Sir Bedevere had for the French taunters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and even Graham Chapman thought it was stupid.  Kirk figures Apollo will get weak and they can kick him in the crotch or something and then run into outer space and climb in an open window on the Enterprise.  I mean, I figure that must be his plan since Apollo is still in control of the ship, the phasers, the communicators, and everything on the planet.

As stupid plans go, this one would probably take the blue ribbon at the state fair.  I'd think the amount of effort Apollo would have to expend on four hecklers would be insignificant compared to whatever juice he's putting out to hold a starship in orbit in the grip of a giant green floating hand.  Charlie Callas put up with worse from the front row of the Sands on any given Saturday night, circa 1975.

Apollo shows up from his nap, and Kirk, Bones, Scotty and Chekov start yelling mean things at him.  He's about to smite the crap out of them, but before he can turn them into four burned patches and two smoking wigs on the ground, Lt. Beehive intervenes.  She insists that Apollo is kind.  Let's take stock, shall we?  He rattled a ship full of people like dice in a plastic Yahtzee cup, strangled Kirk, beat the crap out of and electrocuted Scotty, is holding the landing party hostage and is threatening to kidnap and enslave the entire crew of the Enterprise.  Yeah, he's a real sweetheart.  Maybe you should lay off the ambrosia, zit-face.

The pimple chick talks in that 1960s sexy way that isn't sexy at all, like that fat bleached broad singing "happy birthday, Mr. President."  She insists that she loves Apollo.  Yeah, they've been down on the planet for about 20 minutes, so it's about nineteen and a half minutes past Stockholm Syndrome setting in for your average female Starfleet officer.  If she can't have Apollo, maybe she can get into one of those correspondence romances with a nice serial killer on death row.

Meanwhile, Mr. Spock is upstairs figuring out a way to make a hole in the giant hand that's holding onto the ship.  Once he clips its fingernails and phasers a little stigmata, he's able to holler down to Kirk.

Kirk tells Lt. Beehive to be mean to Apollo, and she does in spite of all the sweaty Harlequin Romance bosom-heaving she's been getting up to with him.  Apollo gets so mad that he shows her some stock footage of lightning with his floating head superimposed on it to show her what she's missing out on.

While Apollo is distracted threading the projector to run some stock footage of a blizzard tying up traffic in downtown Chicago, Spock shoots Apollo's gazebo.  The gazebo glows and then turns into Styrofoam rubble, and Apollo gets so mad that he holds his hand to his chest like Fred Sanford and tells Hera and Elizabeth that he's a-comin'.

You'd think a guy who patiently waited on an unrealistic outdoor set with felt grass for 5000 years for some humans to finally fly out and find him wouldn't give up so easily after meeting only five people out of untold billions for a half-hour.  I've had longer conversations with strangers in doctors' waiting rooms.  And if he took just two seconds for a little introspection he'd maybe realize he was the one who was being a big jerkwad, what with all the strangling and giant, ship-fondling green hands.  Instead, he fades away and dies, leaving nothing behind but Roddenberry's copy of Bulfinch's and an episode title which I'm sure is supposed to be clever but which I don't know what the crap they're even talking about.

After another nightmarish day of toiling in a yard that somehow went jungle over the summer...sore, sweaty, cold...it's nice to stumble in from working well into the dark of night to find this warming little ray of light.

Click here to go to Reader's Favorite review of Royal Flush.

 

On the Government Shut-down

I still don't get how you close a mountain. Hasn't a government that thinks it can close a mountain -- and does -- gotten just a smidge too big for its britches? I have this image of a Terry Gilliam cartoon where some guy in a trench coat unplugs the Rockies from the horizon, sticks them in a briefcase and walks off grunting angrily. When real life has become a Terry Gilliam cartoon, something is desperately, fundamentally wrong with real life.

On Horror Movies...

I don't do horror movies. While I wholeheartedly approve of teenagers being hacked to pieces by masked maniacs, I find the actual eviscerating depressing to watch. I DO sometimes do comic horror movies, although rarely and I hadn't seen a good one in many years. (One of my favorites from years ago was Fright Night, made on the cheap but clever and a lot of fun with a great performance by Roddy MacDowell.) If anyone cares, I recommend Zombieland, which is a couple of years old but which I only just recently saw. A smart movie on a shoestring budget, and not too gory after the first ten minutes or so, once the premise has been established.

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.

Goofball Review of Goofball Star Trek Episode "Court Martial"

On this week's Perry Mason, the tubby barrister defends a chubby starship captain in a thrilling outer space court martial whodunnit.  Will Perry get James T. Kirk off?  If not, he'll be the only one in Star Trek history who doesn't.  By Erle Stanley Gardner, Inc.

The excitement beings when the Enterprise pulls into a service station to get some dents pulled out of the bumper after passing through an ion storm, which is a phenomenon that occurs when you accidentally leave on syndicated rerun station "Ion Television" too long and all those crummy episodes of Ghost Whisperer and Without a Trace get broadcast out into space.

For this single Star Trek episode only there is some special pod in the ship that has never been there before and never will be again which monitors episodes of Ghost Whisperer for Kirk, probably because of the big rack on the dame who stars in it.  Kirk says to the commodore on the base where he's parked the Enterprise that the ship went on red alert and he had to jettison the pod with his TiVo and Lt. Albert Finney still aboard, so he missed the season ending cliffhanger that had something to do with a spooky ghost and the broad with the big knobs running around in a nightie.

The commodore says that Kirk jettisoned the pod not during a red alert, but during a yellow alert, and so he puts Kirk on trial for killing Albert Finney and losing all those episodes of Ghost Whisperer, including the one the commodore really wanted to see with the spooky ghost where the main broad with the big knobs was running around in a nightie, but not the one I mentioned before, a different one.

Finney's daughter yells that Kirk is a murderer while wearing a miniskirt made of strips of torn Reynold's Wrap.

A man walks into a bar with a duck on his head.  The man is William Shatner and the duck turns out to be his wig. 

Some guys in the bar are mean to Kirk, so he races from the room with his mascara running just as a sexy version of the Star Trek theme starts to play.  A dame wearing green curtains and stained glass earrings walks in accompanied by the sexy music, and Bones -- thinking he's got it made because Captain Sexual Compulsive isn't there -- tries to pitch some woo.

Later on, the dame gives Kirk all kinds of legal advice.  Then she tells him at the end that she's going to be the prosecutor in his case, so if Kirk isn't a complete imbecile he'll ignore her advice and insist she be removed from the trial and possibly disbarred.  Instead, the defendant takes the advice of the prosecuting council. 

Kirk comes back to his apartment, which is strange because he's got a ship up there with his own bed that he can go to.  Or maybe it's finally reached maximum capacity of yeomen with beehive hairdos.  Instead of the usual sexy dame waiting for him, there's an ugly old man with a bunch of books.  For the love of God, don't let one of them be the Kama Sutra.

The old man is Kirk's lawyer, and he says he prefers books to the Lite-Brite that most outer space lawyers use.  I can understand why, since it seems like it would be hard to look up Marbury v. Madison on a computer that is just a bunch of blinking lights and has no monitor.

In court, the com-pu-tore! reads all the charges and when it's finished Kirk says "not guilty" and there's a great big dramatic chord like it was unexpected.  I can see why the soundtrack would get all excited.  I agree.  I mean, I was sure he was going to say guilty and spend the rest of the series making little moon rocks out of big moon rocks in space jail.  What a shocking plot twist.

Kirk wears a dazzling Christmas tree brooch and a ridiculous society dame hat to impress the jury. 

Wait a second. 

Never mind.  That last thing was his wig.

The sexy prosecutor asks the Enterprise personnel officer if they're talking about the "Captain Kirk who sits in this courtroom," and the personnel officer has to look all round to make sure it's the same one.  What, she didn't notice her tubby captain sitting there in his pretty Christmas tree brooch when she walked through the shushing door?  There are only seven people on that ship who manage to not get killed week after week, you'd think Julie the cruise director would have an easy job keeping track.

The footage played in the courtroom shows different angles on the bridge of the Enterprise, almost like it's from a TV show.  For some reason, despite all the pans and close-ups and cuts and different camera angles, it doesn't have any footage at all of anywhere else on the ship other than the bridge, including this super-important pod Albert Finney was in that was never used before or after this episode.
 
The commodore says that we've listened to three witnesses and that in "neither" case did something or other blah-blah.  I lost interest in whatever he was talking about after the bad grammar.  "Neither" is two people, not three, Commodore Stupid.

According to this, you are guilty of negligence.  Also, that the fine people at Keebler are guilty of deliciousness.  New Keebler Cheezie Crackers...great for family, friends and fun!

Kirk's lawyer makes an impassioned TV lawyer plea about Kirk being able to face his accuser, which in this case is the computer on the Enterprise.  He mentions the Magna Carta, the U.S. Constitution, the Martian Bill of Rights and the Flimflammer Incorporations of Poopnagle 7.  I hope those last two things last longer than the first two did.

Spock plays chess with the computer to prove that it's broken in order to demonstrate that the computer can't be trusted at Kirk's trial.  He's figured out that if it's been tampered with, it won't play chess too good no more.  Why?  Why would tampering manifest in, of all things, chess?  If the com-pu-tore! runs everything on the ship, and if tampering with the computer impacts the entire system, wouldn't the doors open wrong and all the toast burn?  Everyone on that ship uses computers for stuff all day every day.  Wouldn't somebody have noticed things were out of whack?  I mean, obviously not Julie the personnel director, who is so coked-up she doesn't recognize her own captain, but somebody.

Kirk's lawyer assumes Albert Finney is still alive.  I'm not so sure, because I don't think he's been in anything since Wolfen.

(Hey, if Finney was in this pod, couldn't Kirk have had him beamed him out?  Wait, that makes sense.  Forget I said it.)

It seems a pretty big leap to go from a com-pu-tore that can't play chess to Albert Finney still being alive, but I guess they got a moron jury to believe O.J. cut his hand chipping golf balls in the dark, so why not?

The whole party moves up to the Enterprise, and Bones runs a Mr. Microphone across everybody's chest.  "Hey, good lookin'!  We'll be back to pick you up later!"  (This dated reference would be absolutely hilarious if this were still 1994.)

The Mr. Microphone shuts off heartbeats one at a time, which would be mass-murder except it only does it on the Enterprise's Bose speakers, so Bones won't be on trial next week.

There is one heartbeat left on the ship once Bones is finished, and they realize it must be Albert Finney, so Kirk runs downstairs in his slippers and bathrobe to shoot the prowler.  In the meantime, Kirk's lawyer and Albert Finney's daughter (who had been sitting in court) have suddenly disappeared entirely from the story for some reason, and they never appear again for the rest of the episode.  Someone must have noticed in post-production, and so some bizarre narration for Kirk has been tacked on to say that they ran off together to start a mushroom farm on Uranus.  Yes, this is a lie, but it makes exactly as much sense as the actual narration.

(Hey, if Finney is hiding down in engineering, can't Spock just beam him out?  Wait, that makes sense.  Forget I said it.)

Finney raves on the intercom that he has rigged the ship to crash, so Spock tries to get the commodore and the rest of the judges off the bridge and back down to the planet.  The commodore says that court is still in session.  It's over, you moron, since it was a murder trial and the "murdered" guy is still alive, ranting like a madman, and is about to murder you and a whole bunch of other people.  Apparently neither of those three things am being reason for Commodore Stupid to be leaving.

Down in the engine room, the guy playing Albert Finney is such a wild-eyed loon that Bones should be put on trial after all for not recognizing that one of the ship's crew was a crazy, sweating, bug-eyed, psycho maniac.

Fight!  Fight!  Fight!  Fight!

Kirk rips his shirt again.  At this point I think those things must be made of paper.  He also wins because Scotty has very conveniently left a giant wrench lying out for Kirk to beat some guy senseless with again.

There is another bizarre bit of voice-over narration in which Kirk tells the audience that Albert Finney told him how he sabotaged the ship, so Kirk can save it.  I guess it's cheaper and less time consuming than filming the actual scene where this takes place.  Maybe next week they can just have Shatner and his ego sit in a chair and read the whole script at us.

There is no explanation for why a psychotic who held a grudge against Kirk for something that happened years ago and came up with an incredibly elaborate scheme for revenge that included multiple murders, the destruction of a starship and his own suicide would abruptly change his mind and tell Kirk everything he needs to know to save the ship.  Oh.  I guess that's why they couldn't film that scene.

Kirk saves the Enterprise, and as a reward at the end gets to make out with the lawyer on the bridge.  Thank God it's not the old buzzard.