I’m not looking for pity when I say this, but I’ve got a really swollen eye today. It looks like someone took violent exception to me, which is obviously a thoroughly preposterous notion. But anyway, given the state of my eye, I have to say that perhaps my viewing choice for the evening was not very sensible.
Yes – ‘One Of Our Planets Is Missing’, the next in my very very slow series of reviews of Star Trek: the Animated Series. It’s been nearly two years since I reviewed ‘Beyond the Farthest Star’, which is just about long enough for the awful memory to fade. I admit, in the intervening period I have watched the second episode of the Animated Series – ‘Yesteryear’ – but that was almost good, so I decided not to review it. It’s so much more fun when the subject of the review is awful.
‘One Of Our Planets Is Missing’ opens with the Enterprise en route to meet a mysterious red cloud which has just entered the galaxy. Distractingly, this episode appears to have been created with a really weird green filter on, so everything appeared as a strange shade of green. It made me worry that my eye was worse than I had thought. But no – when I turned the episode off at the end, all the colours were right again.
Minor quibbles about the colour aside, the episode is the very standard Star Trek plot of the odd space phenomenon threatening a planet, engulfing the Enterprise, then being persuaded to go away. On this occasion, the space phenomenon is the red cloud, which immediately envelopes a planet. I assume that this is the planet that the title suggests is missing, but it’s not missing – they know precisely where it is.
Anyway, the Enterprise crew watch the planet being enveloped and listen to Mr Spock report that the planet is reducing in mass now it’s inside the cloud. They observe the cloud turning towards another planet – this one inhabited – and then sensibly decide to enter the cloud themselves. Once inside, they mess about firing phasers and emitting random bursts of antimatter via the deflector shields, and coming gradually to the conclusion that everyone with half a brain could have seen coming the moment the red cloud was first mentioned: it’s alive!
In a curious departure from his usual attempts to appear benign, Kirk’s first thought is to find the cloud’s brain and blow it up. Doctor McCoy is surprisingly up for this, and it’s left to Spock to suggest another course of action. He can’t mind-meld with the cloud, of course, as that would require physical contact, but maybe he could reach out with his mind and communicate with the cloud that way. Amusingly, reaching out with his mind also appears to involve reaching out with his arms.
To nobody’s surprise, Spock manages to contact the cloud, and – through use of the rather amusing line, “There are many of me, we are very small, and we are inside you,” which taken out of context is really fucking ominous – persuades it to piss off back to its point of origin. He then smugly yammers on to Kirk about having perceived the wonders of the universe, which are absolutely incredible. At this point, the episode ends, presumably to cut out the bit where Kirk smacks him one for being an arrogant tosser.
Not a classic. Not even better than ‘Beyond the Farthest Star’, to be honest, which I had up to now considered to be Star Trek’s lowest point (yes, even worse than Threshold). However, the one redeeming feature in this episode is the bit in which the crew determine that they came in through the cloud’s mouth, are now in its digestive system, and decide that they can get out through “another opening”, without once attempting to give this other “opening” an anatomical name. Amusing in a juvenile sense, but otherwise, very rubbish indeed.
And seriously guys, what was with the green??? (Though in fairness, having gone on the internet about this episode to acquire the above pictures, I am forced to conclude that there is something wrong with my DVD.)