The Magicks of Megas-tu by: Larry Brody and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Magicks of Megas-tu” is written by: Larry Brody and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22009, was the 8^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on October 27, 1973.

 

Before I really do anything in this review I need to mention that George Takei plays a godlike alien in this one incredibly briefly because I have no idea how I’m going to fit that into any analysis of this episode, but it needs to be said because Takei knows how to go over the top.  Over the top is the best word to describe “The Magicks of Megas-tu” because the premise of this episode is that the Enterprise meets the literal devil incarnate.  Okay, he’s calling himself Lucien, he is an alien, and the climax of the episode features Kirk taking the stand to defend the literal devil.  This is Larry Brody’s only script for Star Trek: The Animated Series and being completely honest, it’s an incredibly creative script.  In many ways it feels inspired by folk horror films imported from the UK like The Wicker Man or The Blood on Satan’s Claw.  In terms of plot “The Magicks of Megas-tu” has a tendency to be on the thin side, it takes itself quite slow, mainly allowing James Doohan who is voicing Lucien to create the energy required for the performance of insanity, and is more concerned with the ideas of discovering a society that runs on what even the technologically advanced society can only interpret as magic.  Despite being a 25-minute animated piece, it manages to shift genres into a courtroom drama.

 

Perhaps it is because of the dialogue that really makes the episode work, Brody’s script is particularly punchy with lines involving Spock being compared to an elf and like I said at the top of the review anytime George Takei gets to go over the top with James Doohan.  This is also an episode where Shatner feels like he’s enjoying the material despite it being voice acted, the previous episodes of the series have had a tendency to see him underact without his general physicality to work off of.  What becomes especially surprising for the time period in which all of Star Trek was made is that “The Magicks of Megas-tu” is an episode that makes the attempt to separate religion out of the future.  It’s certainly an interesting conceit and one that was clearly an interest of series creator Gene Roddenberry, even if when religion popped up in the original series it often prioritized Christianity as good in episodes like “Bread and Circuses”.  Brody uses the back half to examine the rigidity of faith as the underlying cause of the Salem Witch Trials, Lucien’s people being willing to exterminate humanity due to their barbaric practices, but in saving humanity at the end of the second act Lucien is sent to eternal isolation and Kirk must defend him.  It’s a particularly great little twist on a theme to build to a defense, and to reflect on how humanity has progressed.  Now that progression may be too rose tinted in terms of what is actually progressed in humanity by 1973 when this episode was produced, but it’s genuinely a fascinating that there is some acceptance and movement away from superstition which is clearly what Brody and creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned for the future.

 

Overall, “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” is an episode that revels in its madness.  The background artists in particular work overtime to make it look gorgeous, up there with some of the best Star Trek: The Animated Series has had to offer thus far while the plot itself underruns enough that it feels there is more time for exploration of the ideas at the core of the episode.  It does mean the episode is a little slow to move along to the conclusion, but the ideas are fascinating and still end up making for a riveting episode.  8/10.

Carrie by: Stephen King

 

Stephen King’s Carrie is one of his many novels that has entered the public consciousness through cultural osmosis.  If you haven’t read it, you have likely seen one of its many film adaptations (or if you’re unlucky its infamous musical adaptation).  If you haven’t seen an adaptation, you likely have seen it parodied or referenced, or at least the 1976 Brian de Palma film version parodied or referenced.  Despite this, the novel, King’s debut, is markedly different in terms of style to much of his other work and by necessity how it possibly could be adapted into a different medium.  Carrie is a novel in the grand tradition of epistolary tales, mostly told through newspaper articles, interviews, and government reports, though interspersed with traditional prose to actually provide connecting tissue for the plot.  The story goes that King struggled with writing the early pages of the novel, threw them out in frustration, and his wife Tabitha is responsible for reading the early pages and convincing King to continue with the novel.  She was entirely correct to do so, Carrie in my estimation is a contender for one of King’s best and it was his debut.  That obviously isn’t to say that King peaked here, it’s more to say that King has always had the potential to write perfect pieces of fiction and execute them perfectly.  Despite writing this novel at age 27, King actually characterizes the teenagers incredibly well, he understands the cruelty that can be inflicted on those outside of cliques and how the adults in the situation have a tendency to make situations worse, often knowing they are doing so.  Carrie at its heart is a look into teenage life and King’s own views on religious fundamentalism, it being the main reason why Carrie the character is unable to properly socialize and become an outcast.  The cruelty to Carrie at the hands of her peers is very specifically due to the societal role that women have largely been forced into, especially in terms of body image expectations.

 

The style of the novel keeps the reader at a distance throughout, King writes formally, insisting on searching for the logical reason as to why there was so much death and destruction on that fateful prom night.  There is ever present narration explaining that telekinesis, often abbreviated as TK in the novel, is a relatively new phenomenon being studied, so the way Carrie’s telekinetic abilities are played almost undersells them until the climax of the novel.  The climax takes approximately half the novel’s page count, yet King pulls this incredible trick of making it feel frantic and almost impossible to follow exactly what form the destruction took.  King is careful to make it so the reader while placing Carrie responsible, wonders exactly how much of it was under her control.  It’s an extended sequence where every gas station in town ends destroyed and firefighters from forty miles away end up in town to clear away the rubble.  King is also particularly clear about how the aftermath effected the survivors, constantly questioned by the United States government trying to get to the bottom of events without ever really being able to understand what happened.  The ending of Carrie is particularly effective at leaving the ending unsettled.  A friend of mine interprets Carrie as not horror, but tragedy and he is partially right, but King is writing both tragedy and horror.  The ending is the ending of a horror story, it’s an uneasy ending.  People have to pick up the pieces and there is a hint that there will be more Carrie Whites in the world, her name became synonymous with unexplained arson and freakouts.

 

Overall, Carrie is such a standout debut it finds itself among my personal favorites of the works of Stephen King that I read.  It’s the novel that gave King his career for good reason, Tabitha King clearly responsible for assisting in the characterization of the female characters and saving the novels.  It’s a novel that hits deeply on the human condition of cruelty, dissecting in a way how children become outcasts in society propped up by the selfish adults with their own vision put towards their own interests.  It’s a novel that’s impossible to put down once you start, I read it in a single day.  10/10.

The Infinite Vulcan by: Walter Koenig and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Infinite Vulcan” is written by: Walter Koenig and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22002, was the 7^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on October 20, 1973.

 

“The Infinite Vulcan” is the result of Leonard Nimoy’s very important advocacy on behalf of George Takei and Nichelle Nichols allowing them to be cast as Sulu and Uhura in Star Trek: The Animated Series.  Mainly because hiring a constant cast of six, the show did not have enough money to engage Walter Koenig as Chekov, instead double casting James Doohan and Majel Barrett as two new characters, but Koenig was approached to write a script for the series.  “The Infinite Vulcan” is the first episode of any Star Trek show to be written by a cast member, and Koenig in production hated the experience.  This is an episode that underwent over ten drafts which is more than a standard 22-minute episode of television would understand, and it would be the only script from Koenig.  As a story, “The Infinite Vulcan” perhaps suffers the most from the several redrafts and the marks of a first time writer, yet it somehow becomes this incredibly entertaining episode to watch.  This is not a so bad it’s good episode, heck I wouldn’t even call the episode a bad episode since Koenig’s script actually goes with good ideas commenting on the ideas of a man creating a master race as a peacekeeping force and brainwashing a species of aliens to believe that he is right.  The villain of the episode is Keniclius, a doctor who survived the Eugenics Wars through cloning himself and transferring his consciousness into successive bodies.  It’s a brilliant idea and it almost works as an episode despite the tone taking itself to be incredibly goofy and weird.

 

Keniclius also decides to use Spock as the member of his master race while also making himself and Spock giants.  Yes, there is a giant clone of Spock that ends up draining the life from the original Spock, yet somehow this episode ends with the idea that both Spocks can live and the clone and Keniclius can live to rebuild the civilization of this planet.  As an episode perhaps the biggest issues here are the pacing, the first half of the episode in particular is incredibly rocky as Sulu gets poisoned by a plant and cured before Keniclius and consequently the conflict of the episode can appear, and the fact that the plot is a bit too derivative from “Space Seed” without the complexities of that episode.  There’s a lot that happens in “The Infinite Vulcan” but without nearly as much of the substance making the episode suffer from having too much that the ideas just don’t have enough time to be explored.  Walter Koenig of course isn’t a writer by trade and this is perhaps why these mistakes are here, or it could be the ideas Gene Roddenberry contributed in some of the rewrites.  Yet, despite all of this, this is still a particularly solid episode of television.  Koenig being on Star Trek for two years allows him to write a script understanding what makes an episode work on a technical level even if it isn’t quite as deep in terms of theming of what has come previously.  The real shame is that Koenig didn’t try to write anything else because of some of the rougher aspects of production.

 

Overall, “The Infinite Vulcan” works because instead of being ashamed of the general insanity of the premise it wholeheartedly embraces it.  The image of a giant Spock being cloned by another giant clone man is enough to really make the episode work on the whole, despite being an episode where the first half struggles with being too stuffed.  7/10.

Amorality Tale by: David Bishop

 

David Bishop’s debut Doctor Who novel, Who Killed Kennedy? was extensively an examination and deconstruction of the show between the years 1968 and 1973, the end of Patrick Troughton’s tenure and most of Jon Pertwee’s tenure in the title role from the use of the Master to the way companions were treated, to the general premise shifting to being based in present day Earth to ease the production.  Amorality Tale is his second novel and like his first Bishop uses it to analyze Doctor Who as a whole.  The title is the giveaway, this novel is a comment on the Doctor’s moral standing as a character, despite the help he does he is an amoral observer.  The inciting incident of the novel is the Doctor and Sarah Jane seeing a photograph of the Doctor with gangster Tommy Ramsey around the time of the Great Smog of London, something that we don’t actually see in the novel, Bishop structuring the novel over the course of the days delineating the chapters by the day specifically.  The Doctor as a character has never really shied away from name dropping controversial historical figures, Ramsey being a creation of Bishop’s but clearly represents one of these figures.  The Doctor throughout the novel positions himself as an outsider, only really here to discover exactly what Tommy Ramsey is up to and what will cause the man to have not aged in the nebulous ‘present’ that he and Sarah Jane have come from.  The eventual answer to that is fascinating, again Bishop adding a different layer to the amorality of the title by creating an alien race of conquerors whose own morality puts themselves above the rest of the universe.

 

Bishop’s great success with the novel is actually characterizing the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith’s relationship quite well.  Sarah Jane in particular is written to be almost entirely out of her element in the 1950s, she doesn’t fit into the idea of what a woman is supposed to be in this period but as a journalist she has enough intuition to engrain herself with the local politics.  Tommy Ramsey may be a gangster, but Bishop makes the effort to make him a very human character, much of the novel has him interacting with Sarah Jane and his own mother.  Adding this outlook towards women is another layer of morality of the period which is just icing on the cake.  The setting of the novel also largely contributes to Bishop’s point of being amoral: there are an estimated 12,000 who die in the Great Smog and the Doctor can do nothing to actually save them.  Amorality Tale is also a novel that easily could have been an examination of a pure historical which may have made it a bit too close in the end to The Aztecs with that serial’s importance on not changing history.  Be there one complaint it would be that when the alien threat is revealed, while the Xhinn are great with their larger sense of morality, Bishop almost stops the general commentary on the Doctor and the show’s relationship to history into writing a more standard Doctor Who alien invasion story albeit one still in the trappings of the 1950s setting and the gang warfare of the novel.

 

Overall, Amorality Tale is excellent, taking an era of Doctor Who that hadn’t really been explored in original prose and mastering what made Season 11 work: its Doctor/companion dynamic while overshadowed with the force of Tom Baker can bring out the best in the setting. David Bishop knows how to deconstruct Doctor Who as a concept, and this one just hones in on the history aspect by keeping the reader as an outsider with the Doctor making for a fascinating read.  9/10.

The Survivor by: James Schmerer and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Survivor” is written by: James Schmerer and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22005, was the 6^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on October 13, 1973.

 

James Schmerer was a writer who worked on several high profile shows of the 1970s and 1980s, and when watching “The Survivor”, his only contribution to Star Trek as a franchise, there is a sense of this script being commissioned because of the 1973 Writer’s Guild of America Strike.  The strike meant that writers could not write for live action series, but animation was exempt from the strike and this greatly increased the pool of writers submitting to Star Trek: The Animated Series for its 22 episode run.  You can tell Schmerer isn’t really equipped to handle a 22 minute piece of animation, this is an episode that opens with several minutes of exposition about Carter Winston, a philanthropist who used his fortune to guide people through misfortune when the Federation was unable to.  He has been missing for five years and his fiancé, Ann Nored, happens to be serving on the Enterprise and they can easily reignite their relationship.  Except they don’t, because this is Star Trek, something is wrong: the Enterprise is on the edge of the Romulan Neutral Zone and Captain Kirk orders a change of course into the Neutral Zone.  Carter is actually a shape-shifting alien called a Vendorian, Romulans show up threatening the Enterprise and Ann is able to convince the alien which has taken on some of Winston’s personality, saves the day.  “The Survivor” has the big problem of largely becoming a runaround on the Enterprise with very little of actual substance there.

 

Schmerer’s script tries to build this episode around the idea of this romance: there is a moment where Nored cannot bring herself to shoot the love of her life, even if she knows that it’s a shapeshifting alien.  Nichelle Nichols voices Ann Nored, and the voice she puts on for the role is particularly high pitch which while not grating comes very close to it.  Nichols is also trying to give something with the performance, but the material isn’t actually there.  The only amusement really comes when the shapeshifting nature of the Vendorian actually comes into play, turning into inanimate objects that would have been more effective in a live action setting and not the animation where backgrounds can be already inconsistent.  It doesn’t help that Schmerer’s characterization of the main crew, especially in tackling the Spock/Bones dynamic which is more antagonistic than ever.  The quips are particularly harsh and it really doesn’t feel like they work even as coworkers.  The exposition of the episode at the top also feels incredibly forced to fit into the format instead of letting it come out naturally.

 

Overall, “The Survivor” suffers from being an almost entirely uninteresting script from a one-off writer that has very little of substance.  The substance that is there is nothing that hasn’t already been done before on Star Trek and better elsewhere, coupled with uninteresting characterization makes for the first bad episode for Star Trek: The Animated Series. 4/10.

More Tribbles, More Troubles by: David Gerrold and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“More Tribbles, More Troubles” is written by: David Gerrold and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22001, was the 5^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on October 6, 1973.

 

“The Trouble with Tribbles” was one of the best episodes of the original series of Star Trek, so it isn’t surprising that David Gerrold revisited the idea for Star Trek: The Animated Series.  “More Tribbles, More Troubles” despite being aired fifth, was actually the first animated episode to enter production, something that makes sense when you think about it.  It’s a follow-up to a popular, light-hearted episode that could easily ease the cast into the work of voicing animated counterparts to their live action characters.  “More Tribbles, More Troubles” is Gerrold attempting a sequel to a story and it feels as if much of this one was mandated to have specific callbacks to the original episode: the ending included Kirk and a Klingon both in separate piles of Tribbles, the multiplication problem makes it slightly easier to animate how many of the Tribbles there are, and the tension between the crew of the Enterprise and the Klingons. This leads to an episode that could never really capture the same imagination or ingenuity of the original episode, as is often the problems with sequels.  Gerrold makes this a direct sequel, it’s got a similar setting and the Enterprise is also delivering grain to the same system as in the original episode, but at least now the Enterprise and the Klingons know that Cyrano Jones is a conman, Stanley Adams returning to the episode in the role which is a very nice slice of camp for the performance.  Gerrold is able to elevate the script by having Jones genetically modify the Tribbles so they won’t multiply and has apparently developed a Tribbles eater, a glommer.  Gerrold's script is honestly the best thing about the episode, despite being derivative it's perhaps the most engaging episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series outside of "Yesteryear".

 

This is clearly an episode where the Tribbles are going to be a problem, instead of multiplying they eat the grain and begin to get bigger.  No doubt this was done to save on animation as it is easier to animate a growing Tribble over the multiplying variety.  The animation in this episode, while still of the same quality of the other episodes I have discussed thus far, is actually quite suited for the outright comedic style of the script.  There’s this genuinely funny visual gag where Kirk cannot sit in the captain’s chair because a giant Tribble is there.  It also helps that like “The Trouble with Tribbles”, “More Tribbles, More Troubles” has a strong conflict with the Klingons, even if that conflict is only one Klingon character because of budget and cast constraints (he is played by James Doohan.  The big twist is that the glommer wasn’t developed by Cyrano Jones,  but the Klingons and Kirk’s decision to give it back is one motivated by its uselessness against the larger Tribbles.  Shatner is clearly having fun running circles around the Klingon, even if it’s also clear this was an early episode that was recorded.  In fact the rest of the cast while helping still has that sense of getting used to voiceover with even Leonard Nimoy being a little off.  Somehow it is actually DeForest Kelley as Bones who while is still in a supporting role seems to be understanding the type of comedy episode he is in.

 

Overall, what saves and ultimately elevates “More Tribbles, More Troubles” is not originality, but the sheer quality of David Gerrold’s script as a writer.  It does the basic need of moving a sequel episode forward while slightly over relying on the aspects that worked the best in the original episode.  It’s when the visual callbacks happen that the episode doesn’t work as well as it could have, because even with that Gerrold is a writer who just captivates the audience throughout the 25 minutes that I once again would have loved to see this as a live action episode.  8/10.

The Medusa Effect by: Justin Richards

 

Is there a name for the trope where characters become possessed by people from the past and are forced to reenact the circumstances of their death?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer employed this one in “I Only Have Eyes for You” in its second season and I’m fairly certain Supernatural probably did it at some point.  Yet before Buffy the Vampire Slayer attempted it Justin Richards wrote The Medusa Effect, one of the New Adventures novels featuring Bernice Summerfield, predating “I Only Have Eyes for You” by nearly a month complete with its own science fiction trappings.  Now, I don’t believe Richards is originating the trope, nor was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Stephen King’s The Shining, both the book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation, could be considered an adaptation of the trope to a degree and demonic possession stories dot human history in general, though William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist features the idea specifically.  The variation on the trope on effect here in The Medusa Effect, is a melancholic affair when all is said and done.  It concerns the reappearance of the experimental ship Medusa, a ship missing for twenty years after its maiden voyage, appearing back on Dellah empty as St. Oscar’s Advanced Research Department puts together a team to investigate the ship and discover what exactly happened twenty years ago.

 

The Medusa Effect is a novel where Richards is intentional in writing a novel where Benny is meant to feel out of place.  Much of the preamble of the novel to the point where the Medusa reappears is from Benny’s perspective and is used to really bring out how the Advanced Research Department is an organization that would clearly be under the thumb of Irving Braxiatel, except it isn’t.  Braxiatel is in the novel, Richards being the character’s creator means that he is characterized at his best, especially in the final pages of the novel where he and Benny have this utterly devastating conversation.  Brax is a character who clearly has his own agenda, but his care for Benny is genuine, in its own way and he doesn’t actually seem to like the ordeal she has gone through.  Benny herself is intentionally portrayed as the odd woman out on the expedition, is the one added last to the crew and the one outside of the ARD which is several red flags all at once.  There’s already a sense of things going wrong because of Benny’s position in the novel as on the back foot.  Richards doesn’t actually waste time by paralleling the two crews before the possessions start.  The possession trope is one of those things that really finds their way into the novel quite slowly.  Benny being a suitable replacement is one aspect of the novel that doesn’t work. Richards makes Benny being a match for original crewmate too close that the suspension of disability is just off.  The other characters work because they were hand selected and it’s implied moulded at points into their roles, but Benny as an outsider really needed Richards to show how different she actually was.

 

Despite the possession narrative driving the plot down the route of a murder mystery with Benny as detective, Richards also has the novel end with a stand-off with a villain.  The shift towards the more science fiction, genetic engineering elements of the novel that leads to Benny dancing with a skeleton as depicted on the cover.  The identity of the villain is fairly obvious, again Richards as a novelist has never been one for his great twists, but the motivation for the villain is a bit underwritten.  The villain is one motivated by a lost love and a knowledge of genetic engineering essentially trying to create artificial lifeforms out of the identities of those on the Medusa.  There is one particularly effective twist as to why there is an extra member of the new expedition in regards to the original crew of the Medusa, though again in hindsight it’s a fairly obvious twist that keeps in line with a lot of the book.

 

Overall, The Medusa Effect is a surprisingly effective novel.  Justin Richards actually manages to make a memorable read out of a science fiction murder mystery where the twists have a tendency towards the obvious.  What really works is the characterization that allows the main trope that’s the conceit of the novel to really work, the first third is devoted to characterization and it’s clear that Richards not having to just write Doctor Who, but a spin-off leads to some very solid work in this second Benny novel.  8/10.

The Lorelei Signal by: Margaret Armen and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Lorelei Signal” is written by: Margaret Armen and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22006, was the 4^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on September 29, 1973.

 

When I saw Margaret Armen was responsible for this episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, I was apprehensive to say the least.  Armen wrote multiple episodes of Star Trek before this of varying quality from the genuinely great “The Cloud Minders”, to the rocky but with potential “The Paradise Syndrome”, to the downright awful “The Gamesters of Triskelion”.  “The Lorelei Signal” is an episode that draws on Greek mythology for its plot, mainly The Odyssey and several of its escapades on temptation.  The temptation draws on the interpretation of the Sirens of mythology being beautiful women and only tempting towards men which is what you’d expect from an episode written in 1973.  The Enterprise investigates a signal that puts the male members of the ship under its sway, being sent out by a race of women who then force them to undergo transformations into older men.  The male landing party begins to age a decade in a day and it’s up to Uhura and Nurse Chapel to save everyone.  This involves Uhura taking command of the Enterprise which is the highlight of the episode, becoming clear that Nichelle Nichols is clearly having a ball in her voice role here.  This is also an episode where Nichols is joining James Doohan and Majel Barrett in the additional voices department, Barrett needing backup on the female aliens in particular.  While Nichols is great as Uhura and her character actually gets agency and a plotline, Armen’s script is particularly held back by the fact that the episode does keep cutting back to the planet where the male characters are captured.  This is largely for exposition to explain how they’re aging and how Spock is aging slower because of his heritage as a Vulcan.  Now, this doesn’t help that the Enterprise crew aging was already done in “The Deadly Years” which already was a fairly weak episode.

 

The episode has also aged poorly in terms of its plot, mainly because it essentially treats the sexes as two separate species and not two genetic expressions of the same species.  The inhabitants once were mixed in terms of sex, but the men died off while the women were able to evolve a secretion that allow them to overcome the aging effects of the planet.  The trouble here is honestly that Armen doesn’t really seem to have much focus in terms of what she is trying to say with the episode, is it about men and women learning to live in harmony or is she just using an all-female planet because it has the potential to be an interesting setting that then has little to do.  It could also be that Armen is not comfortable writing in the 25 minute format of Star Trek: The Animated Series, this is an episode after all that doesn’t quite reach the length.  There is a full minute where James Doohan as Scotty sings a song and our male characters are sitting in an urn in a rainstorm to drown because they’ve been lured to their deaths.  This is an episode where things happen and have very little in way of explanation, largely using the imagery of mythology because it seems like a cool idea.  It’s really only in the final minutes of the episode where Armen seems to go onto a point of being about living life to the fullest which feels tacked on.

 

Overall, despite everything “The Lorelei Signal” does have a lot to like, especially with Nichelle Nichols actually getting things to do in an episode and seeing a woman of color take command, albeit briefly, is a great statement that feels more progressive than many original series Star Trek episodes.  The trouble comes with the fact that it retreads some ground of previous Star Trek episodes without really setting things apart from those episodes, even if the shorter runtime means the aging works slightly better.  5/10.