The Ambergris Element by: Margaret Armen and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Ambergris Element” is written by: Margaret Armen and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22013, was the 13^th 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.