STAR TREK
"That Which Survives"

From Wikipedia:

"That Which Survives" is the seventeenth episode of the third season Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast January 24, 1969 and repeated July 29, 1969. It was written by John Meredyth Lucas, based on a story by D.C. Fontana under the pseudonym Michael Richards and directed by Herb Wallerstein.

Overview: The crew of the Enterprise visit an abandoned outpost guarded by a mysterious computer.

More here.

Watch it here.

Notes and pics:

* "Senior geologist D'Amato..." We've never heard of this guy before. He's either a guest star or a red shirt in blue.



* Heh. Red shirt transporter tech goes pretty quickly. D'Amato's still alive.



* Who is this chick at the helm?



* Cool, Sulu's in the landing party.



* Is that Doctor M'Benga? Why didn't they use him more often? He's great.



* Who is Doctor Sanchez? Maybe that's him in the background above.

* Some of Spock's chatter on the bridge is pretty weird, almost self-parody, more like Next Generation's Data.



* Kirk seems a bit obsessed with the survival issue.

* Hey, it's Catwoman!



* "As though a door opened and closed." This line repetition isn't working to much effect.

* And there goes D'Amato.



* Nice no-dialogue sequence as Scotty tracks down his feeling of wrongness in the engines.



* Cool red shirt death in engineering, nice off screen scream.



* Sulu: "I don't want to have to kill a woman." At least he has standards.



* I do dig how she vanishes into a black line.

* So evil and beautiful says Sulu. There are some real clunkers in this one.

* You know, the plot back on the ship is totally uninteresting.

* And it's only marginally better on the planetoid.

* Okay, it is neat, in a sort of "Galileo Seven" way, to see Spock in charge, working with Scotty, but it's just not enough to carry the episode.



* It's almost as though they do the phaser-on-overload explosion to wake up the audience. Because they're asleep.



* Scotty in the anti-matter field is, of course, great fun to watch. Dig those dancing blue lines.



* These storylines have nothing to do with each other. You could paste them onto any other episode separately.

* What's with Spock's pointing?

* I like Catwoman's confusion and blinking.

* Why didn't they find this cave earlier?



* Now Kirk's pointing, too. Toward food and water. Everyone's just being too weird in this one.



* How long has Scotty been in this thing? The lighting on his face is cool.

* Scotty's giving a pretty darned good performance which is sadly wasted in a mediocre episode.





* Big sci-fi cube. Is it me, or is this kind of Godzilla-like in its aesthetic?



* Sulu's pretty good in this one, too. It's not really the acting that's the problem here.



* I love the 50s NFL looking red shirt guy who blasts the sci-fi cube.



* Catwoman's speech from the grave is actually extraordinarily cool, again wasted in an overall lame episode--this moment is loosely redone later in a Next Generation episode, "The Chase," I think.



* This one has, I must admit, lots of interesting ideas, but they just don't come together. It's clunky, poorly constructed, with weird dialogue, and moments that just don't seem all that believable. It's got some worth as a sort of Star Trek oddity, but not much more. For hardcore fans only.

Two stars.

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