Elmofongo: But do explain what's your issue with the episode.
My obvious thought is why Uhura and Chekov is not in the episode.
Well, I'm not star-trek-trained enough to have noticed the lack of chekov character (though i kinda like him), but yeah, i wondered why uhura had gone all michael jackson in that.
But more to the point, I found the story very basic and vaguely nonsensical. Not better (marginally worse) that the "stories" we used to improvise and play out with our toys when I was a kid, and less consistent.
For instance (SPOILERS, RUN AWAY), the plot revolves around a big "death star" spaceship thingy shaped as a cone with a big wide open fire-breathing mouth on the front. It is armoured with supermetal, but can be destroyed from the inside of that "mouth" because there is no armour there. And what it takes to destroy it from in there is the explosion of a spaceship. So :
- You have a weird looking battle between a spaceship and that doomsday machine, face to face. Where the doomsday machine fires from its mouth at a stationarry spacehip, and that spaceship responds by firing from impossibly contrieved angles in order to hit the super-armoured cone "behind" that mouth-like opening. Just for the sake of "oh noes it is super armoured". It makes geometrically no sense, but serves the plot at that oment.
- The monster-machine weapon is supposed to slice planets easily, but it takes several shots to damage one spaceship.
- The monster-machine is supposed to have been destroying whole civilizations for ages (including the one that built it) while the energy of one rigged spaceship is enough to take it down, provided it explodes inside its impossible-to-miss-unless-scriptwriter-cheats wide open "mouth". Nobody ever managed to fire an actual missile in there, in the eternity of ever ?
I also have issues with the relative distances of the three protagonists (the two spaceshipsand the monster thingy), which I couldn't "feel" well, and that seemed arbitrarily plot-driven (cheaply and capriciously "close/far/slow/fast enough" as the plot needed it without any real coherence). Which is a common flaw in tv series (it gets pretty obscene in UFO, and, in their own way, in most movies that have a drive-to-arrive-in-time sequences). And, yeah, well, the rest are standard star trek stuff that just come with the package, so it wouldn't be fair to delve further in that (the hilarious shatner acting -i like to go 'whoosh' whenever he changes his pose- or the everybody-shaken-in-variable-directions-and-strengths scenes are just clichés that make the charm of the series, I suppose).
But all in all, the episode felt cheap and easy, to me. Like, written in five minutes. I was not impressed. I'm not against stories that feel like kids playing with toys (heck, I love John Carpenter), but I expected something a bit different, from a notoriously-best-episode-ever.
