Star Trek: What Is Brain?

[andraste]

Since I am, like much of fandom, in acute Star Trek: Discovery withdrawal, I have been treating the symptoms with the original series. (I've already seen the good seasons of TNG, all of DS9 and all the Voyager and Enterprise I care for, so I may end up with only the animated series for comfort before long.)

Since I have not watched the show in any organised way before, this has lead to many glorious moments, like the one where Kirk has a boring conversation with some aliens and then teleports back to the ship and SPOCK HAS A GOATEE OMG. This is almost as good if you don't bother reading episode titles as it must have been for people who didn't know what was going to happen in the rest of the episode.

This week I reached another milestone: Spock's Brain. It's notorious for being the worst episode of Trek ever made. I don't think I actually agree with that assessment, if only because The Omega Glory and Code of Honor and Threshold and The Q and the Gray are all things that exist. However, I do think it's the BEST bad episode of Star Trek I have ever seen, by a lot. It's like a perfect storm of everything that has ever gone wrong with a Trek episode!

The script is awful, the sets and effects and costumes are, um, special and there's all the background radiation of sexism and dumb racist assumptions about how civilisations develop that you find in sixties Trek. (And later Trek, alas, but usually with less frequency.) But I was too busy laughing to actually be bothered by any of that. Everyone being VERY SERIOUS while McCoy operates Spock's body with a remote control may be the single funniest thing in this Star Trek series or any other.

I spontaneously invented a drinking game while watching: sip every time someone says the title in a portentous voice, drink every time William Shatner pretends to writhe in agony, and drain the glass when the famous quote in the title of this post is spoken. The episode will still be terrible, but at least you will be making good use of it.

Comments

[lizvogel]

The Prime Directive was one of those high-minded ideals that interfered with a whole lot of potentially entertaining storytelling, so it got bent to a pretzel on a regular basis. The loopholes are that you can't interfere with the development (if it ain't developing, the rule doesn't apply) of a viable (if it is, or might be, headed for extinction, the rule doesn't apply) culture. And development and viability are so very much in the eye of the beholder....

I may have the wording off a little at this late date, but I believe Kirk himself makes that argument on more than one occasion. Usually right before talking some poor computer into blowing itself up. ;-)