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]

Goatees: The universal sign of evilness. ;-)

It's notorious for being the worst episode of Trek ever made. I don't think I actually agree with that assessment

Same here. "Spock's Brain" is merely very, very cheesy. "Omega Glory" is both stupid and boring. (AFAIR, anyway; it's been quite a while since I've tested that.) And really, if you can look past, well, pretty much everything about how it was done, the basic concept of using a brain to run a society's environmental controls & etc. isn't without merit. And of course, you'd want the best brain you could get, so....

[thawrecka]

Spock's Brain is definitely my favourite bad episode of Star Trek. I think I laughed so hard I cried the first time I saw it.

[feldman]

Having literally teethed on this show, I really love hearing the reactions of people discovering its weird sixties glory for the first time.

[labingi]

Ah, you make me want to watch OST again. I don't think I've seen "Spock's Brain" since I was a kid or maybe early teens. I barely remember it. I should go back and enjoy.