The Eye of the Beholder by: David P. Harmon and directed by: Hal Sutherland

 

“The Eye of the Beholder” is written by: David P. Harmon and is directed by: Hal Sutherland.  It was produced under production code 22016, was the 15^th episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and was broadcast on January 5, 1974.

 

So you guys know “The Cage”?  You know, the original Star Trek pilot, written by Gene Roddenberry, directed by Robert Butler, most of its footage reused in the two-part “The Menagerie” as a budget saver.  “The Eye of the Beholder” is essentially Star Trek: The Animated Series remaking “The Cage” but instead of Roddenberry writing it’s David P. Harmon, a writer responsible for “The Deadly Years” and “A Piece of the Action”.  The former is a more hard line speculative science fiction of the Enterprise dealing with aging and the latter a pastiche of gangster films in space.  “The Eye of the Beholder” fits more with the former in terms of tone, it wants to be about the Enterprise stumbling upon a planet with its own thriving ecosystem and forms of life that are initially unable to recognize humanity as intelligent.  This is where “The Cage” parallels begin: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are put in a zoo because the inhabitants of this planet believe that they are animals in need of being protected.  That is where the thematic parallels to “The Cage” largely end, this isn’t a breeding experiment or even an experiment at all, it's more of a simple zoo.  The back half of the episode is our heroes attempting to communicate with the intelligent alien slugs, eventually getting Scotty to speak with one of the children to come to an understanding and leave the planet for several centuries.

 

Thematically, “The Eye of the Beholder” is an episode that should work.  Star Trek: The Animated Series came after man had landed on the moon and knowledge of the day was largely interested in the possibility of life on other planets not conforming to Earth life.  The aliens here are sluglike and the alien animals conform to being giant, unintelligent monsters to actually menace our heroes.  There’s also a previous Federation starship which found its way to the planet to allow more dialogue since this is a series whose strengths generally lie in dialogue heavy episodes.  The commander, sadly, is a character who delivers every line in a William Shatner like cadence.  There’s a good chance that after 15 episodes, James Doohan is breaking down from carrying this series on his back while the female officer is just Majel Barrett giving her usual performance.  The Shatneresque cadence is kind of emblematic of this episode’s issues, it's somehow one of the slowest moving episodes of Star Trek I have seen, despite being 25 minutes.  The aliens don’t actually get any characterization, even after they begin to telepathically speak with our crew, there isn’t much there.  Harmon does attempt to create some conflict that isn’t fighting aliens, largely built upon the aliens not understanding human speech or biology.  This is one of those ideas that could be brilliant under a different writer, Harmon has great ideas, but his previous scripts had only been weak: “A Piece of the Action” works because it was rewritten by Gene L. Coon.

 

Overall, “The Eye of the Beholder” has the seeds of greatness, but it’s an incredibly uneven episode.  There’s simultaneously too many and too few ideas populating the episode so the viewer can’t really focus on a singular theme or even a point.  Add that to what feels like more reused animation than is normal from a Filmation project, this leads to an episode that really doesn’t do much of anything.  It’s one that you’re likely to watch and then almost immediately forget exists.  4/10.