“Operation – Annihilate!” is written by Stephen W.
Carabatsos and is directed by Herschel Daugherty. It was filmed under production code 29, was
the 29th episode of Star Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on
April 13, 1967.
The first season of Star Trek was and remains
to this day the longest season for a televised iteration of the franchise,
clocking in at 29 episodes. Finishing this
journey with this episode feels utterly fascinating as there have been ups and
downs, and oddly enough Star Trek Season 1 doesn’t end up sticking the
landing. Now, any episode that would have
to follow up an episode like “The City on the Edge of Forever” was always going
to struggle at least a little bit, much like the follow ups to “The Corbomite
Maneuver”, “Balance of Terror”, and “Space Seed” all had tough acts to follow,
but it can be done. Sometimes you need
something weird and utterly off the wall like “Shore Leave” and sometimes you
get something like “A Taste of Armageddon” which somehow continues the line of thought
of the previous episode, but sometimes you get “Operation – Annihilate!”. “Operation – Annihilate!” is an episode that
on paper has a lot of potential for drama and storytelling, some of which to
the episode’s credit is explored. The
central premise of the episode is that some sort of space plague has been
making its way through systems and devastating the populations, the Enterprise
being called in to investigate, quarantine, and stop it. The plague seems to be an infectious sort of
madness, something that feels in keeping with the fears of the world in 1967,
the space race being in full swing and with it the fear of mysterious illnesses
from space being prominent in fiction around this time. Kirk and company find that on the planet Deneva
the madness has already taken root and is spreading, infecting Spock whose
alien physiology means he can stave off the infection for a period of time.
If the episode was just this, it would be great. Not as good as “The City on the Edge of
Forever”, but there is the clear potential to explore themes of the spread of
illness and wishing to find a cure.
Again, nothing new for Star Trek, “Miri” already did a space
plague much earlier in the season but that episode had major issues that a writer
like Carabatsos, who had served as script supervisor earlier in production,
could have ironed out into his own interesting tale. Carabatsos, however, makes a series of very
odd choices in guiding the script in a way that feels incredibly out of date,
even for a show in the 1960s. To make
the stakes personal, after a pre-credits sequence where a ship from Deneva
hurls itself into a star for freedom in a sequence that suffers from Herschel
Daugherty’s glacially paced direction though is made up for in its script, it
is revealed that Kirk’s brother is stationed on Deneva with his wife and son. This sets up the episode to have the potential
to really explore Kirk’s personal history and backstory much like other episodes
have done, though this time going closer than Star Trek has ever gone
through his direct siblings.
Sam, however, is dead.
His wife is killed shortly after of infection. Their son is alive, but comatose and infected. Only Sam’s wife, played by Joan Swift, is
given lines, and those are not coherent nor do they establish her as a
character. William Shatner clearly tries
to emote and feel something at the death of these characters as Kirk would in
this situation, but the script really doesn’t support it. Shatner is almost directed to have as much
knowledge of Samuel Kirk as the audience does, and that’s just he’s Kirk’s
brother, a biologist, and is now dead.
Undercutting tension is something “Operation – Annihilate!” does at
almost every opportunity, the bulk of the midsection being the investigation
into the parasites, revealed to be fleshy, ray like creatures who can fly, and
that investigation is quite fun, if a bit dragged out by direction that feels
no sense of urgency even though Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and Majel
Barrett are all trying their best. When
the solution is discovered to be light bombarded at the creatures (which is
only discovered after radiation does not work which makes the scientist in me
cringe since light is radiation), Spock volunteers to have his entire body
bombarded to kill the parasite inside of him and it works leaving him
blind. Carabatsos tries to make this
even more bittersweet by revealing only a specific wavelength of light so Spock
needed to not be blinded. He then just
gets his sight back and the episode ends.
No, we don’t know if Kirk’s nephew survives.
Overall, “Operation – Annihilate!” at least has a good
potential and the performers are genuinely trying to make proceedings work, but
sadly it brings the first season of Star Trek to a close with a
genuinely underwhelming tale. Stephen W.
Carabatsos breaks several rules of writing when it comes to characterization and
tension building, and while he does succeed with interesting ideas and some
scenes scripted to work better, Herschel Daugherty’s languid directorial style
just brings everything down to an underwhelming episode. 4/10.
And as this is the end of the first season of Star Trek here are my picks for the Top 5 Worst and Best Episodes of the Season:
Top 5 Worst Episodes:
5. Mudd’s Women
4. The Menagerie: Part II
3. Operation — Annihilate!
2. The Alternative Factor
1. Charlie X
Top 5 Best Episodes:
5. A Taste of Armageddon
4. The Corbomite Maneuver
3. Space Seed
2. The City on the Edge of Forever
1. Balance of Terror
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