There appears to be a running theme throughout The Original Series when it comes to the demeanour of a certain captain of a certain Enterprise. More often than now, Kirk is portrayed as behaving erratic and unpredictable. To these podcasters, the captain of a Federation starship should be relatively put together and not prone to flying off the handle. But apparently, that’s not how T-Kirk rolls. Every other episode, he’s off on some rouge mission that may or may not be motivated by a personal vendetta.
Synopsis from “The Enterprise Incident”:
Captain Kirk becomes increasingly erratic and orders the Enterprise into Romulan space…where the ship is captured by a beautiful Romulan commander.
This particular episode might be the only time an Original Series can be compared to Ocean’s 11. In fact, we’ll go out on a limb and say it’s definitively the only time an Original Series episode can be compared to Ocean’s 11. In spite of the T-Kirk’s irascible mood, the plot reveals itself to follow a modern heist narrative, where the plane is revealed to the audience while it’s being executed by the crew. It must’ve been quite a fun, engaging episode when it originally aired. Deception and intrigue abound!
Playing right along with the heisty novelty, the main villain of this episode has the hots for Spock. We applaud the writers in their willingness to write a love interest for a character who isn’t Kirk. But in their quest in maintaining verisimilitude for Spock’s stoic and emotionless demeanour, the intercourse between him and commander T’all leaves something to be desired; that something being chemistry and charisma. No matter how off-putting Kirk’s game with the ladies can be, it could never be interpreted as dull. These exchanges between Spock and T’all ultimately slow down the pace of the narrative.
Speaking of pacing…
We both hypothesize this episode was never enshrined as an ahead-of-its-time romp through the stars with deception and intrigue abound because of its pacing. Television was an entirely different beast in the 1960s. Conditioned from years of star-stuffed, unnecessarily complicated casino robberies and missions: impossible, the more deliberate, at times languid pacing of ancient television has a tendency to hinder the experience. We can’t help but ponder the seam-splitting brilliance that might’ve been had this plot been executed in a TNG two-parter.
For a special treat, we end this episode with several bad impersonations of Scott Bakula. It’s much harder than you might think.
