STAR TREK
Day of the Dove

From Wikipedia:

"Day of the Dove" is the seventh episode of the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast November 1, 1968 and repeated June 17, 1969. It was written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Marvin Chomsky.

Overview: An alien force drives the crew of the Enterprise into brutal conflict with the Klingons.

More here.

Watch it here.

Notes and pics:

* Kick ass teaser, paced at that breakneck speed that usually typifies a rip roaring episode. Before you know it, Kirk is on his butt, put there by a Klingon smack on the chops.



* Written by Jerome Bixby, the guy who brought us "Mirror, Mirror."

* Kang is arguably the greatest Klingon of all time. Maybe STNG's Worf is better, but he had seven years to get it right: Kang had one episode.



* Kang (as though addressing the troops): "I shall torture you. To death. One by one. Until your noble captain cries, 'Enough!' Who will be first?" Yep, Kang's the greatest.



* I totally love it whenever Chekov freaks out.



* Where'd they get that agonizer? Bixby must love 'em.

* Nice c.u. of Kirk's communicator.



* Corridor outside transporter room: Kirk is totally in his element.



* I really like how they unceremoniously destroy the damaged Klingon ship, maybe foreshadowing the usage of low tech weaponry later in the episode, a sort of descent into barbarism.

* Klingon guy: "Four thousand throats may be cut in a night by a running man." Kind of fortune-cookieish, but I like this first attempt to establish a sort of warrior culture, complete with folk wisdom, among the Klingons.

* The unexplained brief appearances of the interfering alien entity off in corners and shadows starts getting weird after a while.



* Love Kirk punching Kane.

* Love the weird appearance of the swords.

* Fuck, I love the first sword fight, too!



* Oh yeah, warp nine!

* Sulu: "He doesn't have a brother; he's an only child." Not much dialogue for Sulu in the third season, but he makes the absolute most of it. I love Sulu.



* All right, McCoy's starting to lose it, too! Bring on the space madness...

* Kang's such a badass: "We must take these sections. First, engineering."

* Scotty with the swords. Burned in my brain since childhood. "A Claymore! You're a beauty!"



* Good fight in engineering.



* Hmm. The Klingon "victory" chant is kind of awkward.

* McCoy freaking out on the bridge: "Atrocities committed on their persons!"

* Kang over the intercom: "You will die of suffocation in the icy cold of space." Yeah, definitely the greatest.



* And there goes Scotty round the bend: "Then transfer out! Freak!" And Spock and Kirk, too. You know, I don't really think of this one as a space madness episode, but everybody's really tripping out here.



* Of course, Kirk uses grand rhetoric to cure everybody.

* Psychedelic close ups of Kirk, Scotty, and Spock with blurred instruments in background.



* Chekov skulking down the corridor.

* OMFG! He's going to fucking RAPE her! "Wedy beau-ti-ful..."




* ...and Kirk trips out on him: "What have I done?"




* Discovering the entity, good moment. Awkward, trippy music, good lighting.



* She calls her husband "commander."

* "Captain's log, stardate...Armageddon..."

* Scotty: "It's the alien that's done this. We're in its power, our people, yours!" He still seems a bit crazed here.

* Nice transporter gimmick, beaming to another part of the ship.

* Kirk versus Kang, this is what we've been waiting for! If you don't love this, you're not a real man.



* And now everybody's swashbuckling!



* More fabulous Kirk rhetoric: "In the head, in the heart, it doesn't matter where."



* Kang: "Klingons kill for their own purposes." This is the greatest of all Klingons. "This is Kang, cease hostilities! Disarm."

* Oh, I love attacking this creature with "good spirits."

* I love Kang's Klingon comedy theory: being a dick is funny.



* This is easily the best Klingon episode. Sure, "Errand of Mercy" and "The Trouble with Tribbles" are good, great even. But this one is a total immersion in Klingons, led by their very best. I mean, they fight it out with fucking swords. You don't get the cheap thrills of the hissing, growling, forehead cloven, warrior-wisdom spouting later version here, but you do get the definitive original series statement on them. And what a hootenanny it is! Five stars. Five fucking stars. This one's great.

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