Title: By Any Other Name
Airdate: 2/23/1968
Plot Summary
In By Any Other Name, the Enterprise sends an away team to investigate a planet when they are taken prisoner by the Kelvans, a race of weird monsters who have taken human form. They have very advanced technology that can freeze anyone in place and reduce a person to a cuboctahedron. (That’s what it’s called. Wikipedia is always correct, right?).
With everyone in the crew turned into a pile of Styrofoam except for Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty, the Kelvans take the Enterprise to the Andromeda galaxy where they come from. But taking human form comes with it a pile of human sensations and emotions. Can Kirk exploit this to overcome the Kelvans and save the crew?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk for his part kisses the female Kelvan Kelinda who is fairly confused by this and then spends the rest of the episode trying to find excuses to snog the crap out of him because he’s that awesome.
Logical
Spock just beats Rojan at chess and uses that to straightforwardly accuse Rojan of being jealous, which he totally is.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones uses his medical knowledge to inject his Kelvan Hanar with “vitamins” which really have the effect of turning him into a grumpy irritated asshole.
Helm Sluggish Captain
By Any Other Name does not feature Sulu.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov sits patiently and placidly waiting to be turned into a cube.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura at least looks a bit more worried before she assumes cube state.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty weaponizes his alcoholism against his Kelvan. Unfortunately, even though he drinks him under the table, he joins him under the same table about 75 seconds later. Amusedly during all this, Kirk remarks he hasn’t seen Scotty in hours.
Canon Maker
Spock uses the same technique he used in A Taste Of Armageddon to try to influence Kelinda, to disastrous results. It’s nice to have a direct call-back to a previous episode, this happened far too infrequently in this series.
Canon Breaker
The barrier at the end of the galaxy is breached again, also a reference to THE earlier episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before. However, I have a lot of issues with them being so close to it. Also, you can clearly see Andromeda which even at their enhanced speed, would not be visible. The barrier shouldn’t be so easy to get to. The delta quadrant is over 70 years away for example. Granted, this is within the galaxy, rather than at the edge, but I just don’t believe the alpha quadrant is that close to the barrier and so easily accessible, especially in their time.
This gets even worse for the movies as they head to the center of the galaxy which has a barrier as well. It shouldn’t have been so easy to get to either. So I’m calling the whole idea a canon breaker.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
Only one person dies, or at least permanently, a redskirt. She was turned into a cube and crushed. I feel bad for Kirk as the last thing he told her was it was going to be ok and then has to sift through her dust.
Technobabble
The Kelvans are able to encase their equipment in metal that even phasers can’t touch.
The Enterprise can be enhanced to go to Warp 13. It would take 300 years at the speed to get to Andromeda, give or take a decade.
I Know That Guy:
Julie Cobb plays poor Yeoman Thompson in By Any Other Name. She did a lot of TV for forty years, including a regular role on Charles In Charge.
Carl Byrd plays Lt. Shea.
Robert Fortier plays Tomar.
Stewart Moss returns, this time as Hanar. He was last seen in The Naked Time.
Warren Stevens plays Rojan. He was pretty busy on Broadway, movies and TV. But his almost last film role is in the ultimate classic Samurai Cop.
And finally, Barbera Bouchet plays Kelinda. The Kelvans don’t understand humans but they do seem to understand dressing their females in the appropriate level of vavoom. Bouchet played in the original Casino Royale as Moneypenny and a ton of Italian cinema.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I really love By Any Other Name, mostly because it sticks the landing so well in a Trek kind of way. The idea of an alien race from a different galaxy where possibly even the laws of physics are different enough that the beings are so weird, in order to come over to the Milky Way, they have to take on human form is an interesting one. Taking on those forms brings a whole new state of being for them that they weren’t prepared for.
Kirk and the crew show a bit of cleverness in By Any Other Name by essentially overloading the Kelvan’s senses and emotions to win the day. But it’s not done in a bad way. It’s not just “kill the bad guy” but instead they work towards a peaceful solution. When Kirk says to Rojan that they can take their problem to the Federation, Rojan’s bewildered reply asking if they would really do that for conquerors followed by Kirk saying: “No. But we would welcome friends.” is such a powerful statement on what Trek was really all about. It made the Kelvans far more interesting.
My only bone to pick that’s not this episode’s fault is we never followed up on them. Not even some non-canon fiction as far as I can tell.
My bone to pick that’s in this episode is the Scotty drinking scene. I know it’s supposed to be played for laughs but in the end, it had no bearing on the story and made Scotty look a little incompetent. He could’ve curtailed or faked his drinking, given how much was on the line. On the other hand, we do a great call back in TNG with the “It is green” observation.
Reducing a person to a hunk of styrofoam is suitably terrifying and the crushing of the cube effectively hammers the point home. I gotta admit it’s unnerving when Kirk rounds a corner to see a bunch of cubes haphazardly strewn about the corridor. It’s a nice visual reminder of constantly keeping the stakes at the front of the viewer’s mind.
All in all, the exploration of “What it means to be human” is nicely done here, along with other Trek tropes: Alien invaders, finding peaceful means of coexisting, Kirk smooches hot alien chick. It’s all here.
I never fail to enjoy this one and while there seems to be a bit of a split opinion on By Any Other Name from what I see out there, I’m firmly on the “recommend highly” side.
