“Spock’s Brain”
Written by Lee Cronin
Directed by Marc Daniels
Season 3, Episode 6
Production episode 60043-61
Original air date: September 20, 1968
Stardate: 5431.4
Captain’s log. The Enterprise is being pursued by an unidentified ship with unique technology. They’re not responding to communication, and the ship is on alert with weapons standing by. There’s only one life form on board.
Said life form suddenly transports on board the ship, a woman named Kara. Two security guards enter the bridge, at which point Kara touches a control on her wrist, which knocks out both main power and the entire crew. (In sickbay we get a great shot of Chapel’s underwear as she tumbles to the deck.) She then goes right for Spock.
When the crew awakens, power is restored, and everyone wakes up right where they fell—with one exception. Spock is in sickbay, laying on a table, with his brain completely missing, having been expertly surgically removed. McCoy and Chapel are able to put him on life support, but that’s a temporary stopgap.
Kirk is determined to find Spock’s brain, which had to have been taken by Kara. McCoy points that putting the brain back in is a surgical technique way beyond his ability, and regardless they only have 24 hours before Spock’s body will die, even with the help of sickbay’s technology.
Sulu is able to track the trail given off by the ship’s ion propulsion design. The trail ends at Sigma Draconis, which has three Class-M planets. Kara’s ship had an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, so she probably went to one of them. Two of the planets have civilizations, one at about a 19th-century level, the other at a 21st-century level, neither of which are advanced enough to create that ion propulsion drive. The third is an ice-covered world with only primitive life—but Uhura is also detecting energy pulses that are far too consistent and regular to be natural.
They blew 15 of the 24 hours they have just getting to Sigma Draconis, so they really only have time to try one planet before Spock’s brain-free body fails. On a hunch, Kirk tries the third one, Sigma Draconis VI.
Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, and two security guards beam down. Kirk asks “Mr. Spock” for life form readings out of habit, and Scotty is graciously unoffended. Five caveman-types try to ambush the landing party, but thanks to their tricorders, they ambush the ambushers, and thanks to phasers, they win the fight, since the big dudes only have clubs (which they throw for some inexplicable reason) and rocks (which they also throw, but that, at least, make sense).
After stunning one, the other four engage in the run-away! maneuver, and Kirk and Scotty interrogate the one they stunned, who is confused by the landing party, thinking they’re like the others, the givers of pain and delight, because they’re so small. He’s also completely confused by the notion of females.
Chekov has found readings indicating an underground city buried deep. Scotty has found a cave with food and forged weapons, which seems to be a lure to trap the big dudes. Kirk has McCoy and a remote-controlled Spock body beam down. Chekov stays behind with the security detail while Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Spock’s body spring the trap. It turns out to be an elevator that goes straight down.
As they go down, Scotty reports that he’s picking up the power source Uhura got from the ship. It’s either a nuclear pile a hundred miles long or ion power. Jackpot!
They arrive and another woman dressed the same as Kara is waiting for them. Consternated at their arrival, she goes for the control on her wrist, and Kirk stuns her before he can zap them. McCoy revives her. She’s just as confused at the concept of “him” as the big dude was at the concept of “her,” and she knows nothing of Spock’s brain (lucky her).
The woman is named Luma, and she is confused because they are neither Morg nor Eymorg. McCoy explains that she has the mind of a child. Spock’s voice comes through the communicator, to everyone’s delight, and they try to figure out where his brain is hiding. But then they encounter Kara, who zaps them.
They wake up in a conference room, belts attached to them (even Spock’s body). Kara has no memory or even understanding of the notion of beaming on board the Enterprise. In fact, she doesn’t understand anything about how the place works or what a brain is or anything like that. But soon they realize that the Controller is what they want—somehow Spock’s cerebellum is now the Controller, but the Controller is apart and alone, and none may see it.
Finally, Kirk gets down on his knees and begs overdramatically to see the Controller. Kara zaps them again, which is the only sane response to William Shatner’s overacting. She’s convinced that they’re there to steal the Controller and destroy them.
They’re left alone with two guards, as well as all their equipment laid out on a table. It’s obvious that whoever built the underground city is long gone. Neither the Morg nor the Eymorg have the cranial capacity to invent all this stuff.
Kirk, Scotty, and McCoy take out the guards with manly manly fisticuffs, and then use the communicator to again contact Spock’s medulla oblongata. Spock thinks they’re crazy to risk their lives to restore him, as the ability to do so is beyond McCoy’s surgical skills.
But Kirk insists. Spock manages to beam out a signal from wherever he is to lead them to him. Along with Spock’s RC body, the foursome follow the trail. After a rather endless scene of the landing party walking through corridors, they get to a door.
Inside is Kara and a large computer. Kara zaps Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty with pain, but it doesn’t affect Spock’s body, so Kirk manages to use the remote control (while contorting in pain) to walk Spock’s body over to Kara and deactivate the pain belts.
Kara insists that they must have the Controller. The last one is dead, and they must have this one or they will all die. They finally determine how Kara did what she did: the Doofy Helmet Of Smartness that contains all the knowledge of the builders. But it can only be used under proscribed circumstances.
Kirk, however, is in no mood to argue, so he puts Kara under the helmet to get the knowledge needed to put Spock’s cranial matter back into his cranium. Once she has all the teacher’s knowledge, she becomes much more ept, speaking more intelligently—and more nastily, especially when she whips out a phaser set to kill and points it at Kirk.
Kara insists that they keep Spock’s brain, as her people will die without it. Kirk manages to get the phaser away from her, but she still refuses to help. However, McCoy thinks he can put the Doofy Helmet Of Smartness on and get the mad surgical skillz. Spock cautions that it might cause irreparable damage to McCoy, but the doctor thinks it’s worth it in case he retains what he learns–he could advance surgical techniques in the Federation.
Sure enough, once he’s worn the magic helmet, he realizes how easy this is and he goes at it. Kirk assures Kara that the Eymorg and the Morg will be able to coexist. Kara is not so sure that they can work with the Morg without the pain belts, but Kirk assures them that they can, and the Federation will help.
As the operation progresses, the knowledge fades from McCoy’s mind, but he reconnects Spock’s vocal abilities so Spock can talk him through the rest of the operation. McCoy grumbles about Spock having to tell him how to do his job, and when it’s over he has no idea if he’s done it right, but Spock wakes up and moves around all on his own, and then immediately starts in in a lengthy lecture about the history of the planet. McCoy grumbles that he should never have reconnected his mouth, which barely even slows Spock’s lecture down…
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Whoever built the machinery on Sigma Draconis VI built it so that the people didn’t have to be smart, they could just have whatever info they needed downloaded temporarily into their brain meats. And the computer lasted 10,000 years before they needed an upgrade, which puts it several up on Microsoft…
Fascinating. Easy week for Leonard Nimoy, who mostly gets to wander around slowly while staring straight ahead, 90% of his dialogue ADR’d in later.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy is willing to risk his own sanity to save Spock and bring medical awesomeness to the galaxy, though the latter goal is not met, and he keeps being a smartass throughout.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu manages to trace the ion trail of Kara’s ship to Sigma Draconis. He’s also left in charge of the ship when Kirk’s landing party beams down, and he gets to record a log entry and everything!
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura picks up the energy emissions that lead to Kirk deciding that Spock’s cerebellum must be on the sixth planet.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov betrays his Russian heritage by saying that a place with high temperatures of 40 degrees is “livable.”
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty comes up with the RC Spock—one assumes, anyhow, since that’s an engineering thing, and it’s the only way Kirk’s instruction to Scotty to help get Spock ready makes any kind of sense.
Go put on a red shirt. Amazingly, both of the redshirts survive this episode. It’s a Christmas miracle!
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. The Morg talk about the givers of pain and delight. We see the Eymorg give pain, and the delight is assumed to be related to their skimpy outfits…
Channel open. “I should never have reconnected his mouth.”
“Well, we took the risk, Doctor.”
McCoy and Kirk’s commentary on Spock’s running off at the mouth the minute his brain is restored.
Welcome aboard. Marj Dusay does an excellent job doing both the childlike and smart versions of Kara, a perfect transformation following the donning of the Doofy Helmet Of Smartness. James Daris and Sheila Leighton create no impression at all as the Morg and Luma, respectively.
And we get recurring regulars George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and Majel Barrett.
Trivial matters: As with “Amok Time” last year, this Spock-focused episode was aired first due to Spock being the jinkiest. Unlike last year, this was not putting the show’s best foot forward…
This is the last episode directed by Marc Daniels, one of the show’s most prolific directors.
During the filming of this episode, the famous psychologist Dr. Benjamin Spock was sentenced to prison for encouraging draft-dodging. A gag picture was taken of Leonard Nimoy in full makeup and costume, and also in handcuffs with a gun being pointed at him, holding a newspaper with the headline “SPOCK GETS 2-YEAR PRISON TERM, FINE.”
The planet in the episode is referred to as Sigma Draconis VII in both Kirk and Sulu’s log entries, rather than Sigma Draconis VI. Kirk also flips the numbers of the stardate in his second log entry.
In their guidebook Star Trek 101, authors Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann gave a “Spock’s Brain” award to each episode of each series that they considered the nadir. The awards went to “The Lorelei Signal” for the animated series, “Genesis” for TNG, “Profit and Lace” for DS9, “Threshold” for Voyager, and “These are the Voyages…” for Enterprise.
To boldly go. “Brain and brain, what is brain?” In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, dubbed the Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space the worst movie ever made. Since then, the notion that Plan 9 is the worst movie ever made has taken root in the popular consciousness.
Here’s the thing: it’s nonsense. Not only is Plan 9 from Outer Space not the worst movie ever made, it’s not even the worst movie Ed Wood ever made! Have you seen Glen or Glenda? I mean, at least Plan 9 has a cohesive narrative plot structure. Not a very good one, mind, but it’s got it! Glen or Glenda is just a series of bizarre and barely connected images of buffalo stampeding, cross-dressing, angora sweater fetishes, and so on, all unconvincingly linked by Bela Lugosi sitting in a chair crying out, “PULL DE SHTRING!” at the top of his lungs for no compellingly good reason. Plus there are lots of other movies that are way worse: Evil Brain from Outer Space, Sextette, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (a movie surprisingly short on zombies and surprisingly long on musical dance numbers), Can’t Stop the Music, Mac and Me, Manos the Hands of Fate, the 1998 Godzilla, and so on.
But thanks to the Medveds’ silly book, everyone just assumes that Plan 9 is the worst movie ever.
So too with “Spock’s Brain.” I mean, look, I’m not gonna say it’s a good episode by any means, but the worst? Each season has something more painful to watch: “The Alternative Factor” in the first, “The Omega Glory” in the second, and “Plato’s Stepchildren” upcoming in the third.
Besides, there’s one thing that this episode has that it doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit for: the scene on the bridge where Kirk, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov put their heads together to try to figure out where Kara has taken Spock’s gray matter. Usually when stuff like this has to get done, it’s just Spock sucking all the air out of the room and doing it himself while the rest of the crew sits there and pushes buttons and says, “Aye aye, sir,” a lot. This scene, though, does a wonderful job of showing the teamwork of the crew that’s been in rare evidence since the earliest days of season one—and it’s also an interesting preview of the more ensemble-directed spinoffs.
The biggest problem with the script—well, okay, besides the title, because honestly, the fact that it’s called “Spock’s Brain” is half the reason nobody takes this episode seriously, which the script doubles down on by using the phrase “Spock’s brain” fifteen times throughout the hour, and you keep waiting for them to use the words “they saved” right before it—is that it doesn’t have enough story to fill the hour. The episode opens with about seventeen establishing shots (half of which are stock footage, of course), scenes drag on endlessly, from the wandering around the planet’s surface to Kara’s repetitive interrogation of her prisoners to the landing party wandering around the corridors to the endless brain-restoring surgery scene. And I honestly think that this episode is where Shatner got the outsized reputation for overly dramatic pauses, because he takes more of them than normal in this episode in what is obviously an attempt to actually make the running time.
Yet, hilariously, it also skimps on the actual story of the Morg and the Eymorg, which could actually be compelling, but we don’t even get the whole story until Spock’s infodump at the end, which is interrupted and superseded by Kirk and McCoy making fun of their friend.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges folks to support the crowdfunding campaign for Altered States of the Union, an alternate history anthology being put together by Crazy 8 Press and ComicMix, featuring a story by your humble rewatcher about the Conch Republic of the Florida Keys, as well as stories by Trek scribes David Gerrold and Michael Jan Friedman, as well as Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald, Brendan DuBois, Malon Edwards, G.D. Falksen, Alisa Kwitney, Gordon Linzner, Sarah McGill, Mackenzie Reide, Ian Randal Strock, Ramon Terrell, and more besides! The book will launch at Shore Leave 38 in July.
Wow, a review that doesn’t poo liberally all over the episode because that’s what everyone does when they review it.
An episode with plenty of padding that doesn’t work enough on the back story, fair review, not the worst episode of Trek there is.
This episode just goes to show how awesome Leonard Nimoy is. Spock is sooooo cool that he can have his brain removed – AND NOT EVEN MESS UP HIS HAIR!!! I can’t comb my hair without screwing it up…
For the record, the real worst movie ever made is Filipino horror movie The Killing of Satan.
My kids aren’t Trek fans (yet!), but we enjoy playing the TOS Monopoly that came out 15 years or so ago. They always like it when we draw the “Captain’s Log” (Chance) card that reads, “Spock’s Brain is Removed! You Inherit Pain, Delight, and 100 Credits.”
I haven’t watched this one in a long time, but have no trouble affirming it as not-good-but-not-the-worst, as Keith argues. But it is an easy target. Even I can always get a laugh out of impersonating McCoy’s line, “Jim — his brain is missing!” (Although the laugh may be directed as much at me for being “a fan of that stuff” as it is the show itself…)
I agree — this episode is far from the worst TOS had to offer. Rather, it’s just the most entertainingly dumb episode. There are other episodes that are a complete drag to endure, but this one has a lot going for it. It’s a silly idea that’s very well-made. It’s got good production values, like the rare use of a rear-projected bridge viewscreen (and I agree, the scene of the junior officers getting to contribute meaningfully is fantastic). Fred Steiner’s score is his finest for the entire series, in my view — he really pours on the drama as if he’s trying to compensate for the weaknesses of the script. The music when McCoy uses the Great Teacher is perhaps my favorite single cue of TOS music. And DeForest Kelley’s performance in that scene is magnificent. He totally sells it.
Still, it could’ve been a much better story than it was. This is one of a number of third-season episodes that made a lot more sense in outline, then had much sillier aspects added in the script phase. Here’s Dave Eversole’s summary and analysis of the outline. No Morgs and Eymorgs, no Great Teacher, no puppeteered Spock body (a change that was surely mandated to give Nimoy more screen time).
There are a number of credibility issues people tend to raise about the episode that I don’t have a problem with. The biggest one is the perennial question, “How could they take out Spock’s brain and put it back in without mussing a hair on his head?” Well, I think the answer is obvious: Transporters and nanotechnology. They beamed it out of and back into his skull, and McCoy reattached the neurons using teleoperated nanites.
The remote control for Spock’s brainless body is also pretty silly, but I tend to assume it’s an outgrowth of Sargon’s android technology, reverse-engineered by McCoy and Scott after it was left behind in “Return to Tomorrow.” And it’s probably a forerunner of the motor-assist bands seen in episodes like TNG: “Ethics.” Then there’s the question of why “ion power” is seen as so impressive, when ion rockets are a technology we have today and are really only suited for very low accelerations. But Voyager‘s “Time and Again” posited the existence of a dangerous, high-energy power source called polaric ion power, which had been banned by a treaty between the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans in 2267 — which was only a year after “Balance of Terror” and the same year as “Errand of Mercy,” so it must’ve been a really nasty threat if it would bring those powers to the table so quickly. So if the Eymorg’s “ion power” is actually polaric ion power, that could explain why Scotty is so amazed that they’ve managed to harness it practically. Though one has to wonder why the Federation wasn’t able to reverse-engineer the technology when they helped the Sigma Draconians rebuild.
I also wonder about the other two inhabited worlds in the Sigma Draconis system. What an amazing situation that is, a single star system with three different civilizations at different levels of development! There could be some fascinating stories to tell there — and all we get is this.
This is the only TOS episode with a series regular’s name in the title. Spock will get this honor once more, in The Search for Spock. TNG did this only once, with “Data’s Day.” DS9 did it the most, with “Dax” (the only one where a series regular’s name is the entire title), “The House of Quark,” “Our Man Bashir,” and “Doctor Bashir, I Presume.” None of the other series did it, unless you count VGR’s “Tuvix.”
Um, TNG did it several times: “Datalore,” “A Fistful of Datas,” “Elementary, Dear Data,” and “Menage a Troi.” More if you count Q as a regular………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“Switch on the box Mr. Spock is on the table
Dr. McCoy is unable to connect his brain
Sweatin and strainin
Well it seemed so simple at the time”
– Semisonic ‘Never You Mind’
Talking about padding, the rest of this song is about a relationship, then this is the last verse… And it starts playing in the back of my head whenever anyone mentions Spock’s Brain… :
I’m relying on the synopsis and haven’t seen the episode in years, but it strikes me that there’s a problem similar to “Paradise Syndrome” where Keith pointed out that nobody suggested leaving search parties behind to look for Kirk.
The ship has 430 people on it, right? So send Kirk and co. to the most likely planet, then some of those other people to the other two planets just in case. Even if you want to leave the 1701 parked around VI, the other away teams can just take shuttlecrafts. Worst case scenario, they end up doing some exploration which, while not directly relevant to their immediate problem, is what they’re supposed to be doing anyway. A couple of lines about this could have filled up some screen time and also created the illusion that more than ten people live aboard the Enterprise in season 3. Ah well…
No, “Spock’s Brain” is not the worst episode of TOS. I’d give that dishonor to “The Alternative Factor.”
I don’t think “Genesis” is the worst episode of TNG either. That at least has some nice monster effects and haunted house suspense going for it, despite the wonky science. “Code of Honor” is much worse, and offensively so. And remember “Shades of Grey”? It’s a bloody clip show for crying out loud.
Oh, and Krad deserves a raise for making reference to “What’s Opera Doc?” That made my day.
So, if the women are too stupid to know what men are, etc., how do they have enough brainpower to know when and/or how to use the Helmet of Smartness?
@6/krad: Oh, right, how did I miss those? I had a mental hiccup somehow while going through the episode lists. I don’t know how that happened.
Voyager also had “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy” and ‘Doctor’ (along with all the other words) definitely refers to the Doctor. I guess that one is kind of debatable, though…
@12/dunsel: I left out titles that referred to main characters by things other than their given names, since there are simply too many of those (e.g. “The Infinite Vulcan,” “Captain’s Holiday,” “A Man Alone,” “The Visitor,” etc.). The Doctor never actually had a name per se; if anything, his formal designation was Emergency Medical Hologram Mark I, and “Doctor” was more his job title. And in the context of “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy,” it’s being used more as a description of one of his roles than as a given name.
It should be noted that Lee Cronin was a pseudonym for Gene Coon, who had taken over as producer during season 1 but quit during season 2 and moved on to produce It Takes A Thief. He thus wasn’t allowed contractually to write for Trek during season 3, hence the nom de plume.
There’s no way an episode as unintentionally hilarious as Spock’s Brain could ever be considered the worst Trek’s ever offered. Everyone has already mentioned worse episodes from all of the Trek shows. I’ll add TNG’s Unnatural Selection, Masks and also last week’s And the Children Shall Lead.
I first learned of the episode’s existence through Shatner’s Star Trek Memories. I’m one to admit the title was a factor that kept me from watching for years. And yet, Brain is surprisingly watchable compared to many season 3 entries. Not surprisngly, you can credit Marc Daniels for much of that end result.
Still, I can’t fault Coon for using a pseudonym on this one. Dumb isn’t even the episode’s worst sin. It’s the pacing. Although better than last week’s Children, Brain still languishes at times, repeating its “themes” over and over.
Some of the lines really crack me up just thinking about them, most of them coming from McCoy:
MCCOY: His brain is gone!
MCCOY: His body lives. The autonomic functions continue……<dramatic pause>……but there is no mind!
MCCOY: That incredible Vulcan physique hung on till the life support cycle took over.
KIRK: What have you done with Spock’s Brain?
Coon had to know he was writing a comedy when he came up with these lines.
@8: I would guess that the Enterprise engines, being more powerful, provide a speed advantage even at impulse speeds over shuttlecraft.
“Spock’s Brain” is entertaining fluff. I put it at #50 of the Original Series. I would only call a dozen episodes terrible overall.
All I can think of when I see the Teacher is “put this on for half an hour and your hair will be curly!”
Confession time: I know the warp factor rating is the least important part of the rewatch, but I skipped ahead to see what it was. Admittedly I was surprised that it got as high as a “4,” but I do say that the episode falls into the “so bad it’s (almost) good category. I actually asked for the video for Christmas one year, just for something to watch when I need a laugh.
I do find it ironic that producer Fred Freiberger reportedly took David Gerrold to task for the comedic nature of “The Trouble with Tribbles” (“Star Trek’ is not a comedy”), then allowed this (okay, unintentionally) hilarious episode to appear on his watch. Controversial question for the week: who is the most maligned/controversial producer in SF television history: Fred Freiberger or John Nathan-Turner?
If there is something to discredit this episode vis a vis its place in the show’s canon, I think it’s less its quality per se, and more that it was one of the first of several embarrassing “Planet of Women” episodes; TNG’s “Angel One” and VGR’s “Favorite Son” go down similar roads, and arguably do a worse job!
For a being who prides himself on logic, Spock does have trouble holding onto his Marbles, doesn’t he? This is the first of two installments of “Trek” in which he needs to be reunited with his mind!
I agree, a mightily implausible episode, but at least comprehensible and entertaining in places. In comparison to something like “The Alternative Factor,” which manages to be incomprehensible and dull, along with implausible.
no puppeteered Spock body (a change that was surely mandated to give Nimoy more screen time)
I totally agree that bringing him along was probably done because TPTB wanted to make sure Spock got the screen time. I haven’t rewatched this episode in years, but puppet Spock is what I remember most about the episode and it’s silly. That image accompanies the “common knowledge” that Spock’s brain is the worst episode.
Worth noting, by the way, that James Blish’s “Spock’s Brain” adaptation leaves out the puppeteered zombie Spock altogether, and has the characters go back to the Enterprise to perform the surgery in sickbay. Although it’s unclear whether this means that the addition of zombie Spock came later than the script draft Blish was sent, or that Blish changed it because he thought it was silly as written. He did modify some of the stories when he adapted them.
I prefer the other third season episodes we’ve covered so far. Though I still like this one better than The Alternative Factor, Wolf in the Fold, The Omega Glory or The Apple.
Once again, Spock is the expert on everything – he can even tell McCoy which instruments to use for surgery.
@10/ragnarredbeard: They know what men are, they just don’t perceive the landing party as men because they’re too small and wear colourful clothing not made out of leather. Apparently that makes them look androgynous.
Speaking of great McCoy lines, my three favorite were:
“Call Chekov and tell him to send my stomach down!”
“I’ll never live this down, this Vulcan is telling me how to operate!”
“I knew it, I shouldn’t have done it! I should have never reconnected his mouth!”
While it has already been mentioned how stupid the title “Spock’s Brain” is, nobody has suggested a better one, so I’d like to do so, albeit decades too late. The title “Control” would be appropriate on several levels. One: the role of the brain as the controller of the body (what McCoy originally thought the word “controller” meant); two: the role of Spock’s brain as the Controller for the underground complex; three: the remote control used for Spock’s body; four: the control that the women exerted over the men; and lastly, five: the control that the designers maintained over the uneducated inhabitants even after they were long gone.
I also considered “That Which Controls” but quickly threw that idea out.
@23/richf: I dunno, that kind of simple, generic, one-word title is more Voyager‘s bag than TOS’s. A TOS-worthy title should be something more poetic, like “The Weight of God” (from Emily Dickinson) or “Children of the Brain” (Jonathan Swift’s description of books).
Come to think of it, “Spock’s Brain” is itself probably a literary allusion, specifically to the 1942 Curt Siodmak novel Donovan’s Brain, which had been adapted for the screen three times between 1944 and 1962.
One of the *more* coherent Star Trek story-lines, IMO…
What’s a better title for “Spock’s Brain”?
“A Piece of the Gray Matter”
“The Savage Headache”
“The Spock Machine”
“For His Head is Hollow and We’re All Out of Ideas”
“The Search for Spock’s Brain”?
This episode… It’s so goofy that it’s impossible to outright loathe. I’d take it any day over the spinning newspaper effect and same musical cue used ten times in The Alternative Factor. Or, for that matter, the baleful Omega Glory. It’s not the worst episode of the classic series; it’s not even the worst episode in its season. There are several Beast(s) of Yucca Flats or Monster(s) a Go-Go! to its Plan 9.
I’ve wondered if Kara’s planet wasn’t the original homeworld of the people on the other two planets. When things were going bad, one group retreated beneath the surface, and the others attempted to colonize the other worlds. Obviously, things went bad, and both colony worlds lost most of their technology and had to rebuild the hard way (if one’s at a 19th century level and the other is 21st).
If ion drives are that dangerous, it might explain things. Or they could have had a war that blasted all of them back to the stone age (or partly, in the Eymorg and Morg cases).
It may be that the “Controller” needed to be more frequently replaced than once every 10,000 years. Spock is just the latest to be put in. I’m guessing the programming forbids Kara to use one of her own people if others are available and that this includes the Morg and the people on the other two planets.
I suppose Kara must have set rules on how often she has to interface with the device. It probably needs constant updates on what’s going on. Maybe all the Eymorg do that (and maybe that’s why they’re so less-than-bright, having their brains constantly zapped with information that auto-deletes).
Am I the only one who cracks up over the Morg mistaking Kirk for a woman? Does it make me a bad person that I wish they’d spent more time on this? And the Eymorg leader, who didn’t fall for Kirk the way female leaders usually did, could have gone further. Kirk and his men could have woken up dressed up in Eymorg dresses and found themselves getting makeovers while Kara and Luma try to figure out what they can do with their hair. . . .
The episode is quite right in having the class-M planets at Sigma Draconis, which actually is a relatively nearby and broadly Sun-like star. They got that right.
In everybody’s comments about the so-bad-they’re-awesome lines in this one, nobody’s mentioned the arguably-single-best/worst-line-in-television-history:
Brain and brain! What is brain?
Being a sometime Presbyterian preacher, I’d want any alternate title for the episode to be one of Trek’s relatively few usages of a biblical allusion. Because sci-fi sermon illustrations? I’m always up for those.
So how’s about…
“And Here is the Mind Which Hath Wisdom” – That’s really wrenching Revelation 17.9 out of context, but seems a pretty fair description of Spock’s brain with that caveat. Plus, it has that poetic quality, thanks to the King James English.:)
I just noticed how much this episode reminds me of The Gamesters of Triskelion – ridiculous alien society, disembodied brain(s) controlling said society, cartoonish cavemen outfits, pain-giving fashion accessories.
@29/Ellynne: That’s a better backstory than this episode deserves.
Incidentally, female leaders don’t usually fall for Kirk. There’s Edith Keeler and Elaan, but they don’t fall for him immediately, they first get to know him. Deela merely thinks he’s pretty. The only two cases where a female leader falls for one of the main guys almost immediately are the Romulan commander and Natira, and they fall for Spock and McCoy, respectively.
@32/Mike: That definitely has the required poetic quality! It would also make it the second-longest TOS episode title. With a title like that, it probably wouldn’t have become the proverbial bad episode, because no journalist would have wanted to cite that.
Possible title: “In Search Of… Spock’s Brain”
@33/Jana – Ha! Or it would get an instantly recognizable acronym: “In the third season episode AHITMWHW, Spock…” :)
@34/wiredog – I like what you did there! Some of Nimoy’s “In Search Of” episodes really freaked me out. I wrote about it for the “Spocktober” celebrations on Kevin C. Neece’s “Undiscovered Country” blog a while ago, and you can find the piece in the “Spocktober” book he published, if you are interested.
@30/Randy McDonald: True, Sigma Draconis is a fairly good candidate star with a wide habitable zone. It’s only 19 light-years away, so you’d think it would’ve been visited by Starfleet before, but the episode doesn’t entirely rule that out, since they do have pretty good info about two of the three planets. Presumably past Starfleet probes mostly ignored the glaciated planet and its scattered primitives, and never detected the advanced civilization underground.
Those cavemen have the most well groomed nails and hair ever seen in cavemen. And is it me, or is Scotty’s hair unusually long or un-slicked? He looks weird.
And yes, the episode is silly, but as you say, nowhere as nearly bad as other episodes.
@34 – Wiredog: Good one!
I find this episode to be underrated. The concept is solid even if it borders on 50s style B-movie tropes at times, and in particular the alien society has a very Eloi and Morlock vibe to it. Hell, I’m surprised no one has picked up on the idea that outsourcing our intellect to machines as we do with smartphones and computers could potentially lead us in a similar direction. Why think when the machines can do it for you and you can spend your time in mindless leisure and pleasure? Even today I can see a majority of the American population choosing that option!
Has anyone seen the episode of The Wonder Years where Kevin watches this episode and then has a dream in which he and his friends are re-enacting it? (The theme is that to a 7th-grade boy, girls are incomprehensible aliens.)
@38 – Han: “[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” – Socrates via Plato, The Phaedrus
Basically people have been warning about that for literally all of history and it’s never happened, so statistically it’s not likely to happen now. :P
Julie: Yes! I loved that bit, especially Fred Savage’s perfect impersonation of Shatner’s cringe-while-holding-his-arms-vertically-in-front-of-his-chest maneuver………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks, Julie! I just got to watch that bit on YouTube–my laugh for the day.
@17/Don S. – I don’t think Keith has ever given an episode a “so bad it’s good” rating, he’s pretty straightforward with the numbers. I think this episode just isn’t as bad as its rep would indicate. It has issues, yes, but fundamentally it’s not an awful story.
Yeah, agreed.
I’m so pleased to find that this review series is in the midst of production, and that I managed to catch up in time to comment! I’m watching TOS for the very first time, and it’s been fantastic having these reviews to accompany me in the process. Thanks krad!! You’re helping new fans get started and I am grateful for your work.
I’m with everybody on this one. I can’t possibly call this the worst episode ever, simply because it’s too amusing for that. My own least favourite (so far) is “The Alternative Factor”. SO boring.
After watching this one, I really wanted to go back and record how many times they said “Spock’s brain” in the episode. Was it really 15? I became more incredulous each time they said it, until I finally concluded that this entire episode was made to be ridiculous intentionally. Unless that’s just my 21st-century sense of humour seeing things in 20th-century writing!
Sorry, Keith, you’re not allowed to slag the 1998 Godzilla around me.
It may not be a good Godzilla movie, but it starred Matthew Broderick. ;)
@46/Lance Sibley: The thing about the ’98 Godzilla movie is that, if you look closely, it doesn’t actually purport to be a movie about Godzilla. It’s a movie about a newly developed lizard creature that’s mistaken for Godzilla. A Japanese fisherman identifies it as “Gojira” because it reminds him of a pre-existing creature of that name from Japanese lore. Harry Shearer’s character refers to Gojira as a dragon from Japanese legend, but he’s not exactly the most reliable journalist. And three years later, the Japanese movie Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah had a military briefing scene where it was mentioned that there had been a reported Godzilla sighting in New York several years earlier, but that the identification was questionable. It was meant as a humorous dig at the TriStar movie, but that movie actually fits quite well into GMK’s continuity (it’s set in a reality where Godzilla hasn’t been seen since 1954 and the details of that attack were classified to keep the Self Defense Force from looking bad, so people don’t have a good sense of what Godzilla looked like, and Baragon is mistaken for Godzilla at first).
So yeah, it’s easier to appreciate the movie if you just approach it as a movie about a new creature that’s just named after Godzilla. And really, it’s much more of a remake of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms anyway. Although I’d hardly call it a good movie. It’s nowhere near as bad as Keith says — there are actual Godzilla movies that are much worse, like All Monsters Attack and Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla — but its characters are shallow and one-note, and it tries too hard to be funny and fails at it. The animated series based on it was much, much better.
I have never understood how this one ended up being considered “the worst Star Trek episode evar”. Did this come from a particular fan publication it the early days of Trek fandom or did it just kind of culturally gel? Because while I’m not going to say it’s good, did anyone considering this one to be the worst ever see The Omega Glory? (With it’s utterly stupid ideas of parallel cultural evolution and ending with Kirk reciting the preamble of the US Constitution it’s horrible, and it has no redeeming qualities at all – it isn’t even entertaining).
What could be so bad about Spock’s Brain to make it anywhere comparable? The removal of the brain is silly, and puppet Spock is silly. So I guess it gets dinged for silliness where “The Omega Glory” is just stupid?
@48/Jer: Like I said, I think it’s like Plan 9 from Outer Space being voted the worst movie of all time even though there are many worse — it’s not really that it’s the worst movie or episode so much as it’s the most memorably and entertainingly bad movie or episode. It’s one that people can enjoy thinking about and rewatching and making fun of, as opposed to one that’s just tedious and arduous to endure.
I think of that scene in “The Wonder Years” every time I see or someone mentions this episode. So there’s no way I could hate this episode. Hell, just the scene on the bridge with Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov advising Kirk redeems this one for me. It’s so silly and doofy you can’t help but be entertained, which was not the case last week with “And the Children Shall Lead”. Worst episode ever? Not by a long shot.
I was trying to hear as much as Spock as I could before the dumbness of Oh, I shouldn’t have reconnected his mouth, ha ha ha, because I would have liked to learn about this planet, and that was the only moment, interrupted for “comedy’s” sake. Dumb!!! But otherwise a surprisingly hilarious hour.
Surprisingly, yes.
Either Krad actually counted them before writing is post, or this is one **** of a coincidence.
Krad obviously counted them.
Of course I counted them. This is a serious blog, dagnabbit!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Still catching up on the rewatch, folks…a few questions and thoughts…
I’ve always been stumped at the Industrial scale (never mind the one that used numbers, like Scalos is a 7).
The third planet in the system is rated letter B, and contrary to what some are posting, Kirk says that’s the equivalent of 1485. Not 19th century but well before that.
If G is 2030, that means 20th century Earth was an F? (a failing grade?)
And if we work backwards, each letter represents a jump of about 110 Earth Years so letter A is 1375? Is that considered the beginning of the Industrial Era? I honestly don’t know; my knowledge of history is scant at best. I barely know CANADIAN history.
Further, in Kirk’s era/age/time, we are assuming around the mid-to-late 23rd century, Earth would then be just past the letter I. Unless this is a musical scale, how can one justify classifying planets (or anything else) this way? What is Class M (I know, this are potential false equivalents), a planet in the 27th century? What would a rating of R or X (just kidding folks) or Z even look like?
Lou, Class M is an atmospheric/environmental designation. Class M planets are Earth-type, regardless of their technological advancements or lack thereof.
@55/MaGnUs: Yes, “Class M” is usually used as an environmental label, but “Spock’s Brain” established a letter scale for cultural/technological development as well, so logically it would have its own “class M” meaning something different. (Just as there is such a thing as an M-class star in real scientific usage.)
@56, Did they ever use the letter grade for cultural/technological development again? Every other time I can remember them using a letter designation for a planet it is in reference to its environment. Especially in the later series, with Enterprise going so far as to call them “Minshara Class” planets. Is this the only time they used it for this in 30 seasons of television?
@57/Jason: “Wink of an Eye” also used an “industrial scale,” but using numbers instead of letters. And “Errand of Mercy” had an oddly named “Richter scale of culture” that also used letters, but it didn’t seem to be specifically for industrialized cultures and it seemed to use different values than the “Spock’s Brain” scale (since the seemingly pre-industrial, agrarian Organians were called D-minus on that scale, while the other scale assigned a B value to the equivalent of Earth in 1485 (although it’s odd to say “Earth” when different cultures on Earth were at different levels — perhaps that means the most advanced civilization on Earth as of 1485, which would probably be China, although I’m sure the writers were ethnocentrically assuming Europe). Although it’s odd for an “industrial scale” to include something corresponding to the 15th century, since the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen until the 18th century.
Oh, I didn’t remember they used it here for cultural development.
As bad as this episode is (and it is bad), I definitely don’t think it’s the worst episode of Star Trek, even though it often gets referred to that way. When compared to episodes like “The Omega Glory”, “Spock’s Brain” doesn’t seem nearly as bad, by comparison.
I think the reason people consider “Spock’s Brain” worse than “The Alternative Factor” is that most people have not seen either of them.
Consider “The Alternative Factor”: Other than Lazarus’ beard, what’s so bad about the episode? The plot makes no sense; characters seem unconcerned about the stakes involved; that’s not how anti-matter works; characters make nonsensical decisions and jump to strained conclusions; things seem to happen for no real reason and with little real consequence. These are things you have to watch the episode to realize. The episode isn’t dumb so much as poorly realized.
Contrast that with “Spock’s Brain”: The plot mostly makes sense, it’s just a stupid concept; Kirk flailing around; RC Spock; “brain . . . brain . . . BRAIN!” These are things that become evident with even the shortest of clips pulled from the episode. That is, with the exception of a scene or two, the awfulness of this episode is on full display, no matter which way you look at it.
But unlike other people, I don’t get my jollies by laughing at bad television. “Spock’s Brain” is completely unwatchable to me. I’d much rather watch “The Alternative Factor” because with that one I can ignore the plot (since it makes no sense anyway) and enjoy watching Kirk, Spock, and McCoy do their thing. But “Spock’s Brain” is so plot-driven that I can’t ignore it, McCoy is completely over the top, and Spock might as well not be present; the show has no rewatch factor to me.
So while it may not be the worst episode of the series, I can’t see any possible reason to give this bowel movement more than a 2, and that’s being extremely generous IMO.
Why did the Draconians target and take Spock’s brain as opposed to anyone else’s brain on the Enterprise? This has baffled me for a good 40 years.
@62/Paladin: Because Spock was the smartest guy on the ship, of course.
@63/CLB: But, how the hell did the Draconians come to know that?
@64/Paladin Burke: According to Gene Coon’s original outline, when the original (volunteer) Controller brain suffered an accident and started to die, “A brain of equal capabilities had to be discovered, and put into the machine. Spock was discovered, studied from a distance, proved satisfactory… which is why he was waylaid and his brain taken.” The outline is profoundly different from what we ended up with (no Morg/Eymorg divide, no Great Teacher), but that part still works. The Eymorgs had extremely advanced technology, so presumably that included long-range sensors keen enough to identify the most suitable brain.
@64/CLB: Thanks for your insight.
The episode so bad that it’s good! But in actuality, I think there’s half of a legitimately good episode here. I agree with krad that the scene on the bridge of everyone having imput, was a highlight. The solar system map and Chekov doing the proverbial weatherman thing was really cool. At this point in the series, it was such a relief to see some analysis grounded in reality instead of just having someone lean over the science scope and give exposition. The exploration of the surface, the encounter with the Morg and the discovery of the underground installation was fairly pedestrian, but logical. After that is where things started to slip consistently into the realm of the absurd, but as I said, it was “so bad it’s good!”
@5/CLB
The devices Nog used to reanimate Kivan in “The Magnificent Ferengi” could also have been derived from that technology. I’m not sure they were supposed to be exactly the same devices as in “Ethics”, since Nog called them ‘neural stimulators’, but surely they were related. I also wonder if remote controlled Kivan was a deliberate hommage to remote controlled Spock.
A few things…
Scotty’s exclamtion that he’s never seen anything like the Eymorg ship made me laugh. He was looking at a Saturn V rocket in “Assignment: Earth” and the Eymorg ship simply looks like a rocket ship! Obviously he was speaking about the engines specifically, but it was still kind of funny to me. I know in the remastered episode, the design of the ship was completely changed which made Scotty’s line less laughable.
Random nitpick: After the decision was made regards to which planet to search, Kirk asks Uhura to inform the transporter room to get ready. Apparently she needed to stretch her legs because she gets up from her station and leaves the frame, presumably to get into the turbolift. Couldn’t she have just buzzed down to them from her console?
I shouldn’t laugh at the cavemen running for their lives after seeing one of their number go down by a flash of light, but damn if them running away isn’t funny! I guess it’s the sound they make, which was ironically identical to their battle cry, haha.
I really really don’t buy the idea of Spock having to walk McCoy through the last stage of reconnecting his brain. He’s not a brain surgeon and can’t even see what’s going on! However, I guess I’m nitpicking in a vacuum considering how ridiculous the whole process of his brain removal and reintegration is in the first place.
@67
It looks like Uhura starts the scene at her console, but is at a different station when she finds the energy pulsations. Once ordered, she moves to return to the communication console.
The Medveds had never heard of Wood or Plan 9 when their 50 Worst Films of All Time Book was published in 1978 – a book that had entries on The Omen, Last Year at Marienbad and Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, but not Wood, who did the same year.
It was the subsequent reader’s poll, which named Plan 9 as Worst Film Ever with Exorcist II as runner up, that led to them acting in the next book The Golden Turkey Awards as though they’d always known about Wood!
Killer Meteor: Thank you for that bit of trivia, which makes me respect the Medveds even less (which I wouldn’t have believed possible…..)!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Totally agreed with Keith here; “Spock’s Brain” is nowhere near my least favorite of Trek so far. Kind of stupid, yes, but it just doesn’t stand out to me from a great many of the episodes of this series. It’s a bog-standard episode and nothing more or less to me.
One of the funniest bits for me was the quick cycling of reaction shots as various things happen. For some reason they keep including Spock’s animated body in the mix and, surprise, no reaction every time.
This is another one of those episodes where I like the premise but as written it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I always wondered if an advance society created the Controller and saved the primitive Eyemorgs. But watching it now, I realize the society created it but then regressed. The male-female schism is intriguing though I wonder why it was decided the morgs had to survive outside. I guess there was only room underground for so many and it was decided that males are more adaptable to to the harsh weather.
BTW, back in high school, I watched a soap opera called Capital (this would’ve been in the mid 1980’s). One of the female leads was Marj Dusay who played the villainess ex wife. So, when I saw this episode back then I was “Wow! There’s Marj Dusay when she was younger!”
BTW, I’m reading the Rise of the Federation novels now so when I watched this I thought “That’s sort of like Ware technology!” (Which, of course, came from the ENT episode “Dead Stop”)
Of course, this is more sophisticated since the Ware couldn’t separate the brain from the body.
A risibly awful episode.
I can’t believe I’m the only phishead here
The name of the song… but not really any connection to either the series or the episode…
(fans did vote for the name though…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5aiZRQhmyM
(not the best sounding video, this one sounds much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9aXvuKDE7s)
No way was this the worst episode of Star Trek… not in a timeline where such drivel as “Mudd’s Women” and “And The Children Shall Lead” exist. While the notion of Spock’s being being removed and restored with no ill effects may be rather silly, consider the social commentary that has always been part of Star Trek. What *IF* a climate change situation forced half a planet’s population to seek refuge underground? What if a schism developed between a planet’s gender to the point where each viscerally HATED the other? And, what if the two scenarios came to pass within the same timeframe? Considering recent trends in American public opinion, I would argue “Spock’s Brain” is more relevant in the 2020s than it was in the 1960s.
I like Mudd’s Women – because it has Harry in it. He’s a hoot!
I had a hilarious thought the other day. Star Trek Beyond reveals that Spock Prime has died but doesn’t say how he died. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the Kelvin timeline’s Kara found Spock Prime, removed his brain and brought it to Sigma Draconis VI to serve as the new Controller? And without anyone present as determined to find the brain as Kirk Prime was, Spock Prime’s body would have passed away within 24 hours. That would be a much better outcome for the civilization on Sigma Draconis VI (or at least for the women) than in the Prime timeline, and Spock Prime (who never seemed all that bothered by becoming the Controller anyway) would live on, in a sense, offscreen for another 10,000 years!
So what is to stop the Eymorg from getting in their fancy ship and finding another brain? All Kirk did was tell them what they ought to do… are we supposed to believe that the Federation will interfere because he tells them to?
@80/Fresnel: Remember the precedent of “Return of the Archons” and “The Apple,” where it was treated as a given that Starfleet would send teams of experts to help the cultures get back on their feet and teach them self-sufficiency again. That wasn’t considered interference in the 23rd century. TOS had the 1960s Peace Corps mentality that sometimes you have to give other cultures a leg up and teach them to take care of themselves so they can be independent afterward.
Yes, but I’m those episodes Kirk had destroyed their war machine/ god machine, and they needed help. Here he only lectures them, and apparently their braincentric infrastructure is still intact. I suppose it’s against interplanetary law to go around stealing brains, though, and Starfleet might want to enforce that.
@82/Fresnel: “apparently their braincentric infrastructure is still intact.”
No, it isn’t. As Kirk said to Kara, “You’ll be without your Controller for the first time, but you’ll be much better off, I think… you’ll live and develop as you should have.” Withough a brain in the Controller, it can’t operate, and it can’t give the Eymorgs the knowledge infusion they’d need to steal another. (I assume the old Controller brain lived long enough to arrange for their replacement.)
Thanks, that makes more sense. That sequence of events never occurred to me- I always thought that the previous Brain died, and then Kara used the recorded information in the Teacher to find and install a new one.
I just watched this episode for the first time in years, and boy howdy is it hilarious. I started laughing when Kirk said he was taking Spock “in search of his brain” and then pretty much every time afterwards when Spock’s brain was mentioned (the first time Kirk says “What have you done with Spock’s Brain?!” gave me the biggest laugh). I also had a hard time keeping it together watching brainless Spock being driven around. Then there was all the ridiculous dialogue given to the guests.
Of course, there’s plenty of intentional comedy as well, but it’s not as funny.
Sure it has things going for it, like the aforementioned score, the aforementioned production values (I wonder why the remastered edition so drastically changed the design of the pursuing vessel) and the aforementioned involvement of the whole cast. In several ways you could argue that the show really was putting its best foot forward for the season premier, just not the most important way.
@85/David Pirtle: “(I wonder why the remastered edition so drastically changed the design of the pursuing vessel)”
Because the original “rocketship” design looked antiquated for what was supposed to be a super-advanced starship.
https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/06/image-from-remastered-spocks-brain/
I can just imagine the behind-the-scenes hilarity of the actors having to perform their scenes in this episode. Or perhaps they were horrified by the downturn in story quality. Or perhaps it was a mix of hilarity and horror. I wonder if the various actors’ autobiographies go into any detail on the making of this episode.
@86. Yeah I guess that makes sense. I still think the original looks pretty nifty.
@87. Leonard Nimoy said it was the first time he was embarrassed to play Spock – but not the last.