“The Ambergris Element” is written by: Margaret Armen and
is directed by: Hal Sutherland. It was produced
under production code 22013, was the 13th episode of Star Trek:
The Animated Series, and was broadcast on December 1, 1973.
Sometimes there’s an episode of television that’s just
throwing whatever they can at the wall in the hopes of something sticking. That’s essentially what “The Ambergris
Element” does for 24-minutes and it’s honestly what I should have come to
expect from a Margaret Armen script.
This is the last thing Armen would write for Star Trek and it’s definitely
a low note to go out on, though not quite as bad as her debut “The Gamesters of
Triskelion”. This is an episode where events
just happen without any real connective tissue to knit everything back together
in the end. The premise starts out
strong enough, the Enterprise arrives at the planet Argo, a planet whose
ecology shifted into the past to be a water planet, on an exploratory mission
to study exactly how this happened as another planet is going through similar
seismic shifts that will become like Argo.
That should be plenty to drive an episode forward, since this is part of
The Animated Series the other planet could easily have been shown even briefly. The planet also has life on it that was not
detected, including giant sea monsters, again enough for an episode to really
be pushed forward to the length. Instead
the episode draws loose inspiration from the twist of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The
Shadow Over Innsmouth” and the idea of Atlantis, Kirk and Spock disappear and
become fish people. Okay, not literal fish
people, but they are mutated to breath underwater and have webbed hands, the
Filmation team obviously didn’t have the time or the budget to really alter the
models, the webbed hands only being shown in a handful of shots.
Trying to discover what happened to Kirk and Spock means
that McCoy actually gets things to do in this episode including getting a log
entry of his own, DeFroest Kelley also getting to actually give a performance for
the first time in a long while for Star Trek: The Animated Series. The episode shifts to the now fish like Kirk
and Spock going underwater where there are a race of intelligent fish people
played by James Doohan and Majel Barrett (and possibly producer Lou Scheimer). The Aquans are mistrustful and basically go
along age lines with the older generations not trusting them while the younger generation
wants to help Kirk and Spock, that generation being why the pair are now water
breathers. The episode then shifts into
a quest for Kirk and Spock to find the opposite of the titular ambergris
element, something that will reverse Kirk and Spock’s condition. There are also earthquakes happening so Bones
on the surface is in some danger, who doesn’t really contribute to the quest
for the anti-ambergris element (though to be fair the mutagens are not actually
called the ambergris element, it’s just likened to ambergris once in the resolution). The sea monsters end up factoring in the resolution,
they supply the mutagen in the form of venom, and then the episode kind of
ends. The two generations decide to live
in separate environments, because apparently the young wished to return to the
surface world for reasons that don’t make sense. The planet is covered in water so there isn’t
really anywhere for them to go, Armen just seems to think this episode needs a
moral and this is going to be it.
Overall, “The Ambergris Element” is an episode that
feels commissioned to fill a slot with an author who the team knew could have delivered
a script for production. Yes, it
certainly attempts to do more than what the original series could do, but it’s
an episode that doesn’t actually have a plot.
It’s a series of events where one moment just leaps ahead to the next
without any of the connective tissue that a story needs. Margaret Armen hinders herself by not really
having anything to say and just throwing as many things as she can into the episode
that it doesn’t actually say anything, not even telling a story just having
things happen. 2/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment