Star Trek 3.17 (That Which Survives)

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Star Trek 3.17 (That Which Survives)

Cast:
Kenneth Washington (John B. Watkins)
Brad Forrest (Ensign Wyatt)
Booker Bradshaw(Dr. M’Benga)
Naomi Pollack(Lt. Rahda)
Arthur Batanides(Lt. D’Amato)
Lee Meriwether(Losira)

Writers: John Meredyth Lucas, D.C. Fontana

Oh God.  Another really bad episode.  I almost can’t be bothered to go into detail, however…

Kirk, McCoy, Sulu and D’Amato beam down to investigate a very new planet.  The Enterprise is then thrown almost 1000 light years away.Seems this happened once before from the planet.  Then a mysterious female appears to people both on the planet and on the Enterprise, and the result is the same on both: the person she picks on (male) dies.Why she dosen't knock them and take prisoner is beyond me,but we need a conflict for this episode and this one's it.  First the transporter technician on the Enterprise, then D’Amato, then one of the engineering crew, then Sulu.  Luckily Kirk intervened when she went for Kirk so Sulu didn’t die, but the other three do.

The Enterprise heads back to the planet at maximum warp, lots of silly stuff happens (the ship is sabotaged to it won’t slow down and will warp itself into destruction, but as you can guess, they fix it before that happens).

This is another cheap episode.  As well as the Enterprise set, they use the standard soundstage of the always crappy rocky bouldery planet (there is an awful moment in the early part of the episode when there is a quake, and clearly different bits of the set are put on a gimble, but they shake in different directions and it just looks highly shit.

Eventually, the crew on the planet go into a cave thing.  This happens far too far into the episode for you to really care – we are into wrist slitting territory here.  Even the sequence where Scotty has to repair the ship against terrible odds, you know that he is going to manage, there is no tension at all (despite that dreadful bit of reused incidental music that desperately tried to ramp up the nonexistent tension).

The only good thing about this episode is that, in terms of my crew death count, this episode is a veritable bloodbath!  Three whole members of the crew!  In fact, this season has been quite reserved about killing the crew – it was getting a bit silly at one point, even now Kirk has lost over ten percent of his crew in less than three years!

Oh, and for the record, the women who killed the crew were controlled by another super computer.  And the original inhabitants of the planet have all died of a disease. Another pair of cliches in a totally crappy episode.

PS The only good bit was the second and final appearance by Doctor M’benga. But that doesn’t make up for the rest of it.

Crew Deaths: 3
Total Crew Deaths So Far: 49
Score: 2/10