With “The Naked Time” I am four episodes into Star Trek, and thus far every plot has followed a similar formula. The crew gets some kind of unexpected visitor, someone starts acting strange in a way that is initially puzzling but innocuous, and then it’s realized that the safety of the ship and the crew are threatened so Kirk and the rest of the senior staff try to figure out how to save it all. Sure, at high enough level of abstraction, any pair of stories can be made to sound the same, but I feel like there’s been a fair amount of the “someone on the ship starts acting funny, and everyone slowly but surely figures out what’s happening” blueprint that’s been followed in these first four installments.
And yet, this is very likely the best of them. Sure, there’s some silliness and very Sixties elements of this. The Irish officer devolving into Irish stereotypes is kind of odd, and as fun and bonkers as it is to see Sulu gallivanting about the ship brandishing a foil, it’s pretty silly stuff. And the entire way the biological agent makes it onto the ship, with a doomed redshirt taking off his glove on an alien planet, is kind of dumb. (Though there was something legitimately unnerving about his attempt at self-harm.)
To boot, Star Trek still has a problem in its early going of holding the audience’s hand through all of this (notice how much time it spends in the first infection scene to make sure we know who got infected and how). There’s an overexplain-y quality to the show, where even when there’s a mystery, it telegraphs everything that’s happening or expected to happen.
But by the same token, this is the first time the show has really delved into some meaningful pathos or even real tragedy for its main characters. The scene between Spock and Christine was far and away the best of the series so far, with Christine (who I didn’t realize was Majel Barrett!) making a surprisingly compelling plea and account of her affections for Spock. You buy her description of him, and in less than a minute, accept the two of them as a legitimate, root-worthy pairing.
For his part, Leonard Nimoy knocks it out of the park, both in terms of Spock’s shocked, tempted, but still reserved response to Christine’s advance, but also in his tortured private moments of trying to maintain his Vulcan detachment while the infection takes hold. Maybe it’s just the way Spock has been mythologized in the fifty years after the show debuted, but seeing his stoicism fall, seeing him emotional, almost unstable, and talking to no one in particular about the difficulty in caring about people and not being able to express it was absolutely tremendous. (And serves as a nice forerunner to a similar bit with Picard and Spock’s father in TNG). Nimoy doesn’t get to show off his acting chops as much as Spock, or at least doesn’t get to be as showy about it, given the constraints of his character, but when let off his leash like this, the results are outstanding.
William Shatner is…not quite as good of an actor. That’s no big deal necessarily – and his scene-chewing overwrought qualities have been well-documented elsewhere. But I still like his character as written here, and the sense that, as loose and occasionally cavalier as Kirk may seem, at least by reputation, there are parts of himself and impulses that he holds in reserves, and feels as trapped as he does entranced by his duties as captain. It’s an interesting shade of the character that gives some added dimension that I appreciated.
Of course, the episode ends with Bones finding a cure and getting everyone back in shape before things get too too terrible. The ticking clock of the orbited planet collapsing creates some easy but solid stakes for Scotty to get in and take control of the ship back. That said, the whole time dilation thing seems like a pretty weird throw-in that doesn’t seem to accomplish much, but whatever.
Overall, this is an episode that scores higher marks that its similarly-tuned predecessors for showing new sides and depths in its main characters, throwing in some goofy sci-fi fun, and a particularly great performance from Leonard Nimoy. There’s still some cheese that takes some getting used to for me as a viewer in 2016, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-12-26T21:57:22Z
With “The Naked Time” I am four episodes into Star Trek, and thus far every plot has followed a similar formula. The crew gets some kind of unexpected visitor, someone starts acting strange in a way that is initially puzzling but innocuous, and then it’s realized that the safety of the ship and the crew are threatened so Kirk and the rest of the senior staff try to figure out how to save it all. Sure, at high enough level of abstraction, any pair of stories can be made to sound the same, but I feel like there’s been a fair amount of the “someone on the ship starts acting funny, and everyone slowly but surely figures out what’s happening” blueprint that’s been followed in these first four installments.
And yet, this is very likely the best of them. Sure, there’s some silliness and very Sixties elements of this. The Irish officer devolving into Irish stereotypes is kind of odd, and as fun and bonkers as it is to see Sulu gallivanting about the ship brandishing a foil, it’s pretty silly stuff. And the entire way the biological agent makes it onto the ship, with a doomed redshirt taking off his glove on an alien planet, is kind of dumb. (Though there was something legitimately unnerving about his attempt at self-harm.)
To boot, Star Trek still has a problem in its early going of holding the audience’s hand through all of this (notice how much time it spends in the first infection scene to make sure we know who got infected and how). There’s an overexplain-y quality to the show, where even when there’s a mystery, it telegraphs everything that’s happening or expected to happen.
But by the same token, this is the first time the show has really delved into some meaningful pathos or even real tragedy for its main characters. The scene between Spock and Christine was far and away the best of the series so far, with Christine (who I didn’t realize was Majel Barrett!) making a surprisingly compelling plea and account of her affections for Spock. You buy her description of him, and in less than a minute, accept the two of them as a legitimate, root-worthy pairing.
For his part, Leonard Nimoy knocks it out of the park, both in terms of Spock’s shocked, tempted, but still reserved response to Christine’s advance, but also in his tortured private moments of trying to maintain his Vulcan detachment while the infection takes hold. Maybe it’s just the way Spock has been mythologized in the fifty years after the show debuted, but seeing his stoicism fall, seeing him emotional, almost unstable, and talking to no one in particular about the difficulty in caring about people and not being able to express it was absolutely tremendous. (And serves as a nice forerunner to a similar bit with Picard and Spock’s father in TNG). Nimoy doesn’t get to show off his acting chops as much as Spock, or at least doesn’t get to be as showy about it, given the constraints of his character, but when let off his leash like this, the results are outstanding.
William Shatner is…not quite as good of an actor. That’s no big deal necessarily – and his scene-chewing overwrought qualities have been well-documented elsewhere. But I still like his character as written here, and the sense that, as loose and occasionally cavalier as Kirk may seem, at least by reputation, there are parts of himself and impulses that he holds in reserves, and feels as trapped as he does entranced by his duties as captain. It’s an interesting shade of the character that gives some added dimension that I appreciated.
Of course, the episode ends with Bones finding a cure and getting everyone back in shape before things get too too terrible. The ticking clock of the orbited planet collapsing creates some easy but solid stakes for Scotty to get in and take control of the ship back. That said, the whole time dilation thing seems like a pretty weird throw-in that doesn’t seem to accomplish much, but whatever.
Overall, this is an episode that scores higher marks that its similarly-tuned predecessors for showing new sides and depths in its main characters, throwing in some goofy sci-fi fun, and a particularly great performance from Leonard Nimoy. There’s still some cheese that takes some getting used to for me as a viewer in 2016, but it’s a big step in the right direction.