“Wink of an Eye”
Written by Lee Cronin and Arthur Heinemann
Directed by Jud Taylor
Season 3, Episode 13
Production episode 60043-68
Original air date: November 29, 1968
Stardate: 5710.5
Captain’s log. The Enterprise responds to a distress call on Scalos. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two security guards beam down to the location from which Uhura is receiving the distress call. But while the locations match, Kirk sees nobody at the beam-down site, and Uhura still only sees the Scalosians in the broadcast of the distress call. McCoy isn’t picking up any animal life at all, though Kirk hears what sounds like an insect buzzing.
There is an abundance of art and literature and architecture, and some of the latter was obviously occupied recently, though other parts were abandoned.
Suddenly, Compton, one of the security guards, disappears, right after he took a sip from a fountain.
The remainder of the landing party beams back and is checked by McCoy in sickbay. Uhura plays a recording of the distress call again, in which the five remaining survivors of Scalosian society plead for help. Since there was no sign of them, it’s possible that that was a recording all along. (In addition, Uhura detects a malfunction in communications, though it corrects itself, and Sulu reports an issue in the hangar bay and the deflector controls frozen. This will probably be important later.)
Kirk reports to sickbay for his post-landing-party checkup. Chapel mentions that all the cabinets in sickbay had been opened and closed, and everything inside them disturbed. But nothing was taken or tampered with.
Once again, Kirk hears the insect-like buzzing. He calls the bridge, but there’s nasty interference on the intercoms. Spock detects an issue in life-support, and he, Spock, and two security guards investigate, only to hit a force field. However, while the force field keeps the guards out, it lets Kirk and Spock in. They find that a device of alien origin hooked into life-support, though the system is still functioning. But they can’t touch it—another force field—and when they try to fire on it, their phasers disappear and they are physically shoved backward.
They return to the bridge, where the computer’s analysis is less than helpful. Kirk hears the buzzing again, and doesn’t notice something being put in his coffee. After he drinks it, the entire bridge seems to slow to a crawl around him—but there’s someone else on the bridge. It’s one of the Scalosian women from the distress call, who kisses him and introduced herself as “Deela—the enemy.”
Deela explains that nothing has happened to the crew—it’s Kirk who’s changed. She and he are now accelerated, moving so fast that the rest of the crew can’t even detect them except as occasional insect-like sounds. Deela’s intent is for Kirk to be king to her queen, ruling the Scalosians. She kisses him again for good measure. It’s obvious that this is far from the first time she’s done this.
Kirk leaves the bridge, heading for life support, only to find Compton who has been suborned by the Scalosians. (Subjectively, he’s been with them for days…) However, Kirk refuses to go quietly, and while Compton is unwilling to follow Kirk’s orders anymore, he’s not willing to stand by while the other Scalosians hurt him. He’s killed defending Kirk (he’s only cut a bit, but any cellular damage results in death by rapid aging).
Back on the bridge, Uhura and Sulu see Kirk disappear. Spock examines the coffees that Sulu, Scotty, and Kirk drank, and detects something odd with Kirk’s. He takes all three to the lab.
Kirk wakes up from being stunned and asks what the thing attached to life support is. They don’t actually tell him, and Rael, one of the other Scalosians, tells Kirk that Compton died from Kirk’s struggle with him.
Kirk heads to the medical lab and records everything he knows in the hopes that Spock will find the recording and slow it down enough so that he can listen to it. Deela joins him and even helps him explain the situation for historical research. The Scalosians suffered a cataclysm that not only accelerated them, but left them infertile. They have had to kidnap people from passing spaceships in order to procreate. (How that works when they’re a different species and infertile is left unclear.) They’ve tried to slow themselves down, but every attempt resulted in death. The device hooked to the Enterprise will put the ship into suspended animation, so that when Kirk inevitably burns out they’ll have four hundred replacements.
Rael tells Deela to bring Kirk to the transporter room. Kirk moves the recording he made to the reader in front of Spock, and then runs ahead to the transporter room, barely sabotaging it before Deela can arrive. He insists when Deela fails to beam Kirk down that it’s some kind of malfunction. Rael is tasked with trying to fix the problem, while Deela takes Kirk to his cabin. This time, Kirk doesn’t resist kissing her.
On the bridge, Spock watches the distress call again, this time playing it at high speeds, which sounds exactly like the buzzing they’ve been hearing since arriving at Scalos. McCoy then finds the tape Kirk left behind, and Spock now knows to slow it down, and they learn everything Kirk knows. Spock knows they can’t fight them at their own speeds, so they must find a way to do so at the Scalosians’.
Rael cannot determine what’s wrong with the transporter, and when he tries to contact Deela, she doesn’t answer. Cut to Kirk putting his boots on while sitting on the side of his bed, so now we know why she wasn’t answering the phone. Rael shows up in a jealous rage. Kirk has to avoid even being injured a little bit, as that could kill him the way Compton was killed. Deela stops Rael, barely, and sends him back to work on the transporter some more.
After he leaves, Deela explains that Rael loves her. She loved him once, as a child, but no longer. Kirk, though, appears to have finally drunk the Scalosian Kool-Aid, wanting Deela’s approval, completely adjusted to the Scalosian side of things.
McCoy is able to come up with a method of reversing the acceleration, but the only way to apply it to the captain is to be accelerated also, so Spock drinks the Scalosian water and is now also accelerated.
Rael fixes the transporter and beams the other three Scalosians down, then heads to life support to activate the unit so the Enterprise will be frozen. But Kirk was faking it; he takes Deela’s weapon, heads to life support—where Spock already is present—and the pair of them destroy the unit, then beam Rael and Deela down. Only then does Spock reveal that he has a cure for the acceleration. Kirk takes it and is back to normal, while Spock effects repairs at ludicrous speed. When he’s done, he drinks the antidote, and everything is back to normal.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Somehow, volcanic eruptions turned the Scalosians into people who lived at super-fast speeds. And are apparently immortal, since the impression is that they’ve been doing this for a while, and they haven’t died yet, even though they’re subjectively several centuries old at this point.
Fascinating. It’s unclear how Spock figured out that the Scalosians were accelerated. He just wandered from the medical bay, went to the bridge, hit fast forward, and that was that.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy figures out how to reverse the acceleration. Because he’s just that awesome.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu gets to report on a lot of malfunctions. Oh, and he somehow reports to Spock exactly what happened to Kirk despite having his back to Kirk at the time.
Hailing frequencies open. At the end, Uhura accidentally plays the tape of the Scalosians’ distress call. She apologizes and intends to take it off, but Kirk tells her to keep it up so he can say goodbye to Deela.
I cannot change the laws of physics! After they play Kirk’s tape, Spock sends Scotty to the transporter room, but he never makes it through the door—yet in that same amount of time, Spock and McCoy are able to synthesize a cure for the acceleration. Obviously, the engineer walks really slowly…
Go put on a red shirt. Poor Compton. He gets accelerated, suborned, and then dies defending his captain, whose only way to eulogize him is, “He was so young!”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Deela and Kirk very obviously have sex, as we see Kirk pulling his boot on while Deela’s combing her hair. Broadcast Standards and Practices were obviously asleep at the wheel that week.
Channel open. “You’re married to your career, and you never look at another woman.”
“Well, if she’s pretty enough, I’ll look.”
Deela being only half right about Kirk and Kirk being overly modest.
Welcome aboard. Kathie Browne plays Deela, Jason Evers (who was the lead in The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, one of the great B-movies) plays Rael, and Erik Holland plays Ekor. Geoffrey Binney as Compton gets to be a prototypical redshirt, and we’ve got recurring regulars George Takei, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett.
Trivial matters: The Voyager episode “Blink of an Eye” was originally titled “Wink of an Eye” and was also about a people who lived time at an accelerated rate, though in that case it was the entire world. Once somebody remembered this episode, they changed the title to the homonym.
This is the first of three scripts by Arthur Heinemann, who will return to script “The Way to Eden” and “The Savage Curtain.”
When we saw characters in accelerated mode, director Jud Taylor tilted the camera, a technique also used on the contemporary Batman series for scenes in bad-guy lairs.
To boldly go. “I found it an accelerating experience.” The story for this episode is by Gene Coon, under his third-season pseudonym of Lee Cronin, and the story has all the hallmarks of a solid Trek episode. The Scalosians start out as bad guys—I do love Deela introducing herself as the enemy right before she kisses Kirk—but turn out to be victims of a disaster who are trying to make the best of it. And Kirk does his usual attempt to get Deela to simply ask for the Federation’s help.
Unfortunately, while that story would’ve made a good Star Trek episode, Arthur Heinemann’s script isn’t it. For one thing, everything is so perfunctory. There’s no sense of urgency or danger at any point, making it hard to appreciate the stakes.
Worse, McCoy comes up with a cure for the acceleration, and at no point does anyone think to mention this to Deela. Spock doesn’t even say he has it until after Deela and Rael beam down. Which makes you wonder what, exactly, Kirk intended to do with himself and Spock for the rest of their lives while functioning at high speeds. But more fundamental than that, why didn’t anyone mention this possible cure to the Scalosians, which might have solved at least some of their problems? The best way for this episode to end would be for our heroes to respond to the Scalosians’ attack on them with compassion and help. Instead, they just send them home with a finger-wagging.
The timing doesn’t work out hardly at all (see comment above regarding how long it takes Scotty to get to the transporter room). If the Scalosians are moving that fast, then there’s a lot of down time we didn’t see, and only some of it can be attributed to what had to have been a marathon sex session between Kirk and Deela.
And speaking of that, really? Kirk just gives in and has sex with her? He’s supposedly still trying to rebel and fight back, but not so much that he won’t get himself a nice piece of tail. (I’ve seen people—including more than one Trek novelist—argue that Kirk’s reputation as a womanizer is overstated, and while you can make the case if you only pay attention to the first season, episodes like this and “Bread and Circuses” make it abundantly clear that Kirk will gladly put his libido over the mission if the woman’s hot enough.)
Kathie Browne does a really good job as Deela, playing someone who’s very obviously disconnected from reality to some extent, having given herself completely over to the role of queen that her passion feels constructed, something she even kind of admits to. It’s more nuance than anyone else gives their role, as Jason Evers is bog-standard in the jealous-lover role that was already done better in “By Any Other Name” and “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” For that matter, the regulars all seem to be sleepwalking through their roles. Leonard Nimoy in particular seems to be uncharacteristically phoning it in, especially in the teaser where he sounds like he’s reading off a cue card badly.
Warp factor rating: 2
Next week: “That Which Survives”
Note: Apologies to all and sundry for the absence of rewatches the past couple of weeks, caused by a brutal combination of enforced apartment-hunting, moving, and tight deadlines. While the crisis has not passed (we’re still in the process of moving to our new place and not all the deadlines have been beaten into submission yet), things are calm enough that I can finally get back to this and the Bat-rewatch. Thanks, everyone, for your patience.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is glad to be back to rewatching. Sheesh.
My favorite part of this episode is Kathie Browne, who’s so fun and cheerful and sexy. My second-favorite part is her dress.
But there is so much about the acceleration that just doesn’t work from a physical or logistical standpoint. Logistically, how do they get around the ship? We actually see them going into the turbolift once or twice, and that would be singularly pointless under the circumstances. The physical problems are huge, though. If you were accelerated hundreds of times, then gravity would feel far weaker; from your perspective, it would take hundreds of times longer for anything to fall, including your own feet, and from the perspective of the floor, your feet would be hitting it hundreds of times faster and thus tens of thousands of times harder. So one step would send you flying into the ceiling. Except that the air molecules would move out of your way hundreds of times slower, so just moving through the air would be like pushing through treacle. Not to mention the difficulty of trying to draw that air into your lungs. Not to mention the subjectively slower speed of sound. The speed of sound through air is about 340 m/s, so if Kirk and Deela are accelerated 1000 times and are standing 3.4 meters apart, then it would take 10 seconds for Deela’s words to reach Kirk’s ears. They couldn’t even carry on a conversation in real time unless they stood really close.
Not to mention that their vision would be affected If their perception of time is accelerated 1000 times, then light frequencies would appear to be 1000 times slower and thus the wavelengths would appear 1000 times longer. Visible light would be redshifted into the infrared and they’d have to see in ultraviolet. And that’s not even considering relativistic effects.
@1
Killjoy.
Wow – the Scalosians have only been revisited once in the tie-in literature! Maybe for all the pesky science problems Christopher points out above. That’s kind of a shame, because even though this episode is not executed well, it is an intriguing premise, as Keith’s recap demonstrates. Appropriately “gosh-wow, sense of wonder” stuff. I haven’t seen the thing in years, but I remember getting a real kick out of Spock’s super-speed repairs to the ship at the end.
Mike: the mention in Crucible was too brief to even be worthy of a Trivial Matter, honestly……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido.
@1, I like the way Farscape dealt with a very similar problem in its obligatory shrinking episode. Someone raises all the problems and Rygel says, essentially, “I may not be as smart as you, but I know a fact when I see one. We’re shrunk. Moving on…”
McCoy really is a mad scientist waiting to happen, isn’t he? Between this week and last week’s episode, he can turn anyone into a telekinetic invisible supersoldier and back again with the stuff he has laying around sickbay and a soupcon of the water on this planet. The galaxy at large is really lucky he’s such a nice, albeit cantankerous, guy.
Excellent review as always. Good to have you back.
I have only vague memories of this episode, but I do remember the similar Voyager episode well and enjoyed seeing a culture develop over the course of an hour. Despite all the scientific kinks, it is a fun concept.
The idea of a blink and you’ll miss race is fascinating. It’s too bad the episode is so boring and uninteresting, and the idea itself is never given the proper treatment. The way I see it, if you don’t have at least some experience writing sci-fi concepts, it’s inevitable you’ll run into every potential plot pitfall with a plot like this, which this episode did. Had they relied on more competent writers than the likes of Arthur Heinemann and Arthur H. Singer, this might have worked. At least in theory, Coon’s idea had merit. Unlike Plato, this had real potential.
I’d actually forgotten about Kirk’s escapades this time around. Keith’s right. More than likely, Kirk spent a good portion of the episode in bed with her.
I’ve yet to watch Voyager’s take on the concept, so I might yet be surprised.
The ideas in this episode related to living at a vastly accelerated pace compared to those around you always seemed like a poor version of John D. Macdonald’s short story “Half-Past Eternity.”
I had always assumed that McCoy’s reversal treatment wouldn’t work on the Scalosians because they had been accelerated too long. Although maybe that’s just in my head.
The sex is very mercenary on both parts; Deela wants to seduce Kirk to her way of thinking, and Kirk is stalling for time so that Spock can play the tape.
@5, that’s awesome. Imagine what the Trek universe would have been like in DS9 (TNG was still too Roddenbery-perfect) if the writers (i.e. the Founders, or Section 31, or Bashir, or someone) had really made use of all the TOS discoveries. Plain water as a dangerous intoxicant. Instant telekinesis. Instant superspeed/invisibility. The ability to train a human to have super psychic powers or be a shapeshifter.
I’ve have always loved that dress. It’s in my Top 10, nay Top 5, TOS outfits. No.1 being, of course, the Romulan Commander’s fabulously mod off-hours dress.
When I watched this as a kid for the first time, and I got to the scene where Kirk and Spock send Deela down to the planet, I was certain that they had already cured her and her people between scenes. After all, it wasn’t necessary to show the scene where they help her – everybody knew that they always helped defeated enemies. I was disappointed when it turned out that they hadn’t helped them at all.
It doesn’t bother me much that the hyper-acceleration doesn’t make scientific sense. I see it as one of the third season fairytales. A realm where time moves either faster or more slowly is a classic fairytale element, and the fact that it happens in the characters’ home, on the Enterprise, is a nice twist.
Deela is a great villain – she is so sweet and so friendly and so self-centered. She talks about Kirk as if he’s her favourite pet. “Allow me the dignity of liking the man I select.” Right, and what about his dignity? It’s really enjoyable.
I also like the way Kirk and Spock work together even though they can’t communicate directly.
“[…] episodes like this […] make it abundantly clear that Kirk will gladly put his libido over the mission if the woman’s hot enough.” I disagree. I mean – what would you have him do? He sent a message to his friends, he sabotaged the transporter to buy them some time. The next thing he does is pretending to “adjust”. What else could he do when Deela doesn’t leave him alone? Sleeping with her may be part of the ruse, or stalling for time, or maybe even giving her what she wants, and having some fun while doing so. Probably all of the above. From the way Shatner plays him, I didn’t get the impression that Kirk particularly enjoys the whole situation. He seems a bit on edge most of the time.
All in all, I like this episode. If it weren’t for the ending.
In regards to references to this episode in the literature, I’m pretty sure there’s some Trek novel or story I did where I had someone think that another character was as hyperactive as a [some already hyperactive animal] on Scalos water, but I can’t recall which.
In addition to the problems mentioned earlier about acceleration, Kirk fired a phaser at Deela which was slow enough for her to move out of the way (if you can even believe that about light, but let’s leave that aside) and nobody on the bridge noticed a phaser blast apparently coming from nowhere. For that matter, Chris mentioned in @1 that the Scalosions would have to move around in the horrendously slow (for them) turbolift. The problem goes deeper than that. How could they even open a door, either the turbolift or a room on a deck, without at least one Enterprise crew member seeing a door apparently opening by itself?
This episode and Paradise Syndrome are the only certain Kirk!sex ones; Bread and Circuses probably.
Count me among the Kathie Browne admirers.
I hope the Enterprise at least offered the cure to the Scalosians, even if it is one they tried long ago but too late. But this is one of the many inconsistencies made for the plot, mostly unnecessary.
@13/richf: Phaser beams aren’t made of light, which is why they’re called phasers instead of lasers. (The TNG-era tech explanation is that they’re particle beams based on imaginary sci-fi particles called nadions.) Like most TV/movie ray weapons, their beams have routinely been animated as traveling slowly enough for their motion to be visible, which would actually have to be slower than a bullet. (Which is problematical, since many Trek space battles assume that phasers can somehow travel faster than light.)
As for why nobody noticed the phaser beam, or saw any kind of blurred image when an accelerated person was standing in one place for an extended period of time, I tend to assume that the acceleration wasn’t just a physical speeding-up but some kind of “out of phase” state where time ran differently, which could also help to handwave the physics problems I mentioned before.
The Scalosians have accidentally tapped into the Speed Force.
James Kirk has picked up some attributes of James Bond. He is quite wiling to sex up an adversary if it advances his agenda.
@14/sps49: “I hope the Enterprise at least offered the cure to the Scalosians […].”
I would like to think so myself, but at what point could they have done it? Kirk obviously doesn’t know about the cure when they beam Deela back to the planet. It has to happen afterwards, but afterwards they’re gone.
@16/Crusader75: “James Kirk has picked up some attributes of James Bond. He is quite willing to sex up an adversary if it advances his agenda.”
That started way back in the first season, in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, and reached its high point in the second season. If anything, I find that it’s much less pronounced here, because all he does is give in to Deela’s advances (or sexual harassment).
“ludicrous speed” should, of course, be capitalized, with an exclamation point.
JanaJensen: Spock should have brought up that they had a cure before beaming Deela and Rael down.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Yes, once again, McCoy fails to notice he’s a mad scientist.
The speed-up chemical might make an interesting story where someone had taken it to accomplish a life-or-death mission but knew that a single scratch while he was at it could kill him.
As for the Scalosians, since only a handful seem to be alive, it’s possible that they made an adjustment to whatever caused them to speed up or be out of phase that most didn’t. It allows them to survive the kind of injuries that killed Compton but resulted in male sterility. In that case, the cure that worked on ones who hadn’t made that adjustment might not work on them. But, it would be worth a try.
I checked the dialogue, and Deela actually did say, “We’ve tried to make the transition to your level. Some of us, that is. Those who made the attempt died.” So I figure the difference is that they were born accelerated — as Deela said, their people had been stuck like this for generations and she was following the traditions set down by her parents and their parents — and so the antidote wouldn’t work on them, and would even kill them. Indeed, it stands to reason that if Spock and McCoy could whip up a solution in a few minutes, that was probably one of the first things the Scalosians came up with. After all, subjectively, they’ve had far more time to work the problem. It would’ve been more unrealistic if Spock and McCoy had succeeded in coming up with a cure for them in such a short time when generations of their own scientists had failed.
@19/krad: Oh, I agree. What I meant is – it’s difficult to imagine a missing scene where they tell Deela about the cure, because if there had been such a talk, Kirk would already know about the cure when they beam her down.
What Deela doesn’t say is if they died right away when they were slowed back down, or just died eventually. Is the trade-off one of immortality at high speed or mortal life at normal speed? And do the Scalosians die instantly from rapid aging with any cellular damage the same way that Compton did? If so, I’m surprised any are alive at all. I’m guessing there are enough differences between the Scalosians and everyone else that the cure of McCoy’s wouldn’t work for them.
If the slightest scratch is fatal to the Scalosians (which seems to be true, vis their development of “safe” weapons) as well as Kirk, then I expect the sex was probably not all that exciting…
Deela’s line was that “Those newly accelerated to our level are sensitive to cell damage. They age rapidly and die.” So it was only a threat to people like Compton and Kirk, not to the Scalosians themselves.
@18/wiredog – Oh, I like that it’s just a subtle reference. One of my favorite things about Keith’s rewatches.
@21/Christopher: On the other hand, McCoy and Spock have access to the medical knowledge of hundreds of civilisations, and that could enable them to find a solution the Scalosian scientists didn’t find.
But let’s say the cure wouldn’t work for the Scalosians and Spock somehow knew that and therefore didn’t mention it. In that case, they still could have repeated the offer of Federation help. Or set up a sperm bank for the Scalosians.
@24/StrongDreams: That’s still true if only one of the participants is so fragile.
#9 StrongDreams, I believe you meant to say the sex was “missionary”, not “mercenary”.
At least I hope so. I am not sure I have tried the mercenary position—and my girlfriend reminds me she is in such good shape that she could take me out.
@28 I believe Strong Dreams meant exactly that, the sex was mercenary in nature–there was little affection involved because each was trying to advance his/her own agenda.
@28 No, “mercenary” is an accurate description of an activity where each participant is trying to gain something unrelated to the intrinsic pleasure of the activity. He wasn’t talking about the physical position.
@29/J.P. Pelzman: I believe comment #28 is meant as a joke. (And I found it quite funny.)
@24, that’s a really good point. Per @25, the normal vaginal trauma associated with sex likely wouldn’t be a problem for her, but it seems like Kirk took a chance that he would bleed out from a microtear on his penis. “Risk is our business” indeed. What a way to go.
I didn’t like Kathie Browne as much as some did. While I did find her to be playfully evil and coquettishly seductive, I wish she’d had a bit more gravitas. Would have raised the stakes, I think.
@341 JanaJansen, bless you. I haven’t done standup in a few months and was starting to think I’d lost my touch.
@32dunsel, I’m sorry, “vaginal trauma”? Unless you are having particularly violent or Klingon-type sex, is there a risk of cell damage to either party? I’m not a doctor and I have yet to play one on TV.
35, I’m not a doctor either, but minor vaginal tears and related issues are a very common injury associated with sex. Microsopic tears that the woman isn’t even aware of are even more common, see e.g. http://www.gynogab.com/2012/04/can-sex-cause-vaginal-tears-or-bruises.html
In normal circumstances, they’re entirely self-healing. By the rules set in this episode, though, I would think it would be incredibly dangerous for a newly accelerated woman to have vaginal sex. So, you know, something to keep in mind if this issue ever arises.
Not to go COMPLETELY afield, but it’s rather ironic that vulgar slang for vagina has come to mean wimpy/weak/etc. They are, in reality, amazingly resilient.
@36/dunsel: Yeah, on the same lines, I’ve always despised the use of “balls” to mean strength and courage, as if those were exclusively male traits. I think women are the ones who really have to be strong and brave, especially in a society that constantly devalues them. Also, to come at it the same way as your example, it’s ironic to use such a vulnerable, easily injured body part as a metaphor for toughness.
@@.-@ – I wasn’t criticizing you for omitting it, Keith! I just got to wondering, “Hm, has no one ever revisited this episode?” Surely that’s some sort of record (Christopher, I bet you know)?
@12/Christopher – Posted my comment above before I saw yours. I knew you would know! :)
I’ve given some thought to the question why Kirk sleeps with Deela, and I think my first suggestion was the best one, it’s part of the ruse.
At that point, he has already bought them some time by sabotaging the transporter, and he may have found a way to contact Spock and McCoy, but he doesn’t know if his message has reached them, and if it has, if help will arrive in time. So it’s up to him.
He can’t do any more sabotage because Deela is keeping close tabs on him. He can’t set a trap for the Scalosians for the same reason. He can’t attack her because he’s physically inferior; any scratch will kill him. His best bet is to pretend that he’s come around to her point of view. But if he did that right away, she would probably see through it; he needs some time in between to make it believable. For Compton “this girl” he met was an important reason for switching sides, so giving in to Deela seems like a good intermediate step.
And it all pretty much plays out as planned, except for the interlude with the jealous boyfriend.
@40/Jana: Yes, I think that’s clearly the case. Kirk is pretending to have become docile like Compton did, in order to get the Scalosians off their guard.
@38 – Mike: Now, you’ll see come January that Discovery is based entirely around this episode.
@42/MaGnUs – As a great Vulcan once said, “Forbid! For–BID!” ;)
As I’ve already said, I like this episode. I think it’s even one of my third season favourites, because of its quirkiness, the awkward situation it puts Kirk in, Deela’s sweet, innocent egocentrism and the fact that the main characters manage to work together and even communicate despite being cut off from each other. But the ending has always bothered me. Perhaps they couldn’t help the Scalosians, but they should at least have tried.
Now I’ve come across a pile of papers that’s a “modern reproduction” of the script (according to the vendor), dated 9/9/68, and I was surprised to find that in that version, they actually do offer help. After Deela says: “And we will die and solve your problem that way – and ours”, there is this bit of dialogue:
Kirk: Will you accept help?
Deela: How can we be helped?
Kirk: Mr. Spock?
Spock: I do not have an immediate solution, madame, but I suggest experimenting with your water supply. There is a substance in that as you know which causes the hyper-acceleration. Perhaps with the water purified, the substance removed –
Deela: Our genes would not be changed. We would remain barren.
Spock: Madame, I respectfully suggest that as you are at rating number seven on the industrial scale and we ourselves have advanced well beyond that we may still be able –
Kirk: You don’t need to go into details, Mr. Spock.We may not be able to solve your problem, but we’ll try. The best people in Federation will work on it. Will you accept our offer and go in peace?
Deela: What have we to lose?
And in the final scene on the bridge, after Kirk makes his announcement to the crew, there’s this:
Kirk (to Uhura): Lieutenant, be prepared to send a message by subspace radio to Federation Headquarters, requesting urgent attention to a problem on Scalos – (Then Spock appears, and the rest of the scene plays out as aired.)
This really annoys me. Why didn’t they shoot it like that? From now on, I will imagine that this exchange between Kirk, Spock and Deela happened between scenes.
And that isn’t the only change. The whole last act is different. We actually see Kirk trying to sabotage the transporter. Then he hears Scalosians approaching, hurriedly breaks into the console and rips out some wiring. This gives him an electric shock, with the result that he’s half unconscious when Rael and two others enter. Rael sees the damage and tries to kill Kirk in a rage, Deela arrives in the nick of time and stops him, Kirk collapses and is brought to sickbay. When he wakes up, he pretends to have become docile.
I wonder why this was changed. Did someone think that Kirk should be more proactive?
@@@@@ 1.
I also love Deela, what I like about her is she is totally in command and no apologies. I am the QUEEN! I also like her dress, or rather the half a dress she’s barely wearing.
Although it’s science is wonky, this still is a fun episode. When I was a high schooler, I assumed that the Scalosians moved so fast that their subjective time had slowed down to a crawl. But, obviously, that’s plain silly.
I feel for Deela’s situation. If she wants to carry on her species she has to have sex with an alien, not a man of fhervown people with whom she can have a real relationship and build a family. Of course she knows this is no fun for Rael either but naturally she’s angry with him for making it worse with his tantrums. As for Rael there’s no excuse for his behavior. The kindest possibility is he’s finally snapped after watching Deela chose a breeding mate one time too many. He’s got a right to be unhappy but not to make a scene. No wonder she’s gone off him. As she says, must he begrudge her the small dignity of at least liking the father of her children?
I always figured the Enterprise handed off the cure and the problem to a combined medical and diplomatic team who took it from there with the Scalosians.
I just rewatched this episode. Most of my thoughts were mentioned in the comments, primarily that it was un-Star Trek for them not to help the Scalosians , would have been easy enough to say we will send a team of Federation scientists to work with you on a cure.
I did want to ask , were these planned re-watches? It seems everyone commented the same day back in 2016. I’ve recently been trying to dig up episodes to rewatch since I’ve been staying in so much and Discovery has been delayed. I also rewatched Tomorrow is Yesterday and the Voyager episode with Amelia Earheart.
@48/jmsnyc: There was no time to help the Scalosians. Assuming a humanlike lifespan and biology, they might have a maximum of 20-25 subjective years before Deela and the other surviving woman reached menopause, and maybe 50 subjective years of fertility left for the three remaining men. The rate of acceleration was inconsistently portrayed, but according to The Nitpicker’s Guide for Classic Trekkers, it was probably somewhere near a factor of 1000 at least, which would reduce those 50 years of Scalosian time to less than 3 weeks objective time. Given how interstellar travel times were portrayed in TOS, and given that Scalos was in “an outer quadrant of the galaxy,” 3 weeks wouldn’t be enough time for any kind of relief operation to be organized and sent back out, and certainly not enough time for it to find any answers. It might not even be enough time for Kirk’s report to reach Starfleet Command. This was the Scalosians’ last chance, and it failed. The only thing they could’ve done was to put the Scalosians in suspended animation, and Deela rejected that option.
jmsnyc: I don’t understand the question about “planned” rewatches. The replies are all the same day in 2016 when this post first went live on Tor.com. That’s normal.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Eh, not great but not terrible either. A serviceable enough episode even if it doesn’t make much sense. At least it was ambitious.
I know what you mean,but I just love Deela!
One of the silly things about this episode full of silly things, is Spock repairing the ship in the accelerated timeframe. Sure it makes for an amusing concept for the viewer, but what about poor Spock?! Wouldn’t it make more sense for the ENTIRE crew to fix the ship instead of forcing Spock to slave away? That is a cruel thing to do to someone, just to give the rest of the crew a holiday from their responsibilities.