Title: The Jihad
Airdate: 1/12/1974
Plot Summary
Kirk and Spock put on bomb vests and head to a jewish cafe.
Ha ha! Just kidding. Kirk leads a party to retrieve a religious relic that was stolen; however, he is faced with sabotage from within the group by someone who doesn’t want to relic to be found, which will trigger an intergalactic jihad.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is commanding as he should be, making decisions on the expedition, saving Spock when Spock said he should’ve been left behind, getting them out of a dangerous lava field, and figuring out who is the turncoat.
Logical
Spock helps M3 Green to rewire the land craft to speed it up in true Tim Allen fashion. More power! He also tags teams Tchar with Kirk to successfully take him down.
He’s Dead, Jim
No Bones!
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu has only one moment in the episode, wondering why Kirk and Spock beamed up only a couple of minutes after they left.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is not here either, mostly since the bulk of the episode was on the planet. Only two scenes were on the Enterprise, the beam down and beam back up a the beginning and the end.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty silently beams them down.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, Ya Fuzzy Face
Arex and M’Ress are also absent. However we do get a lot of aliens on the expedition. Tchar is the from the same winged species we saw way back in Yesteryear. Sord is a reptilian muscle who looks like a small dinosaur, EM/3/Green a master lockpick who describes himself as a coward for some reason, and Lara who looks like a cavewoman and is a great tracker. She calls herself human though it’s clear she’s similar but not. She spends most of the episode trying to hit on Kirk who has none of it.
Getting Animated
I mentioned all the aliens above. The animation however doesn’t do much to showcase their differences as they just shuffle around like any human would. Only Tchar gets to fly around which is nice.
The Vedalans have apparently been in space longer than any other species in the Federation. I suppose that could be a true if you limit it to Federation members but there’s been a lot of species that they’ve encountered that have been in space a lot longer. Of course they are never mentioned anywhere else so I’m guessing they, like the others we meet in this episode, are non-canon.
Technobabble
Apparently zero-g combat training is something Spock and Kirk do quite often. However Spock mentions that the last time he trained was with Kirk, last week. Does Kirk even need to ask the question?
Tchar’s plan to fight them on his terms, flying, by turning off the gravity looks understandable on the surface of it. They are all floating. But Tchar’s flying is clear based on typical bird’s ability to fly. Flying requires gravity, you can’t dive, get speed, achieve lift, and so forth. You actually need gravity to fly. Without it, it’s all laws of inertia which puts him at the same advantages and disadvantages as everyone else. Sure, he has wings and can probably get himself going a little easier that the rest but that’s the same way using flippers in water give you more forward motion than just your feet alone. It’s not as efficient as actual flying, what he was built for.
Of course he does seem to be one of those honorable warriors and respected them so maybe it was a deliberate choice to limit himself as well as make them equal.
Why does the GPS tracker explode? Not being able to find it or getting interference makes sense but exploding in the dashboard? Sabotage doesn’t make any sense as they want to find it. Maybe so Tchar has an excuse to fly ahead but he mostly does that for scouting ahead and he probably would’ve done that anyway.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
This is a hunt for the treasure episode that really falls apart under any analysis. A rag tag group that has to learn to work together plus a turncoat that is fairly obvious from the beginning. They need to find this “Soul of Skorr” and the only guy who would have any motivation to take it for himself is the lone Skorr in the group. I think they maybe try to throw you off the scent with the weird bug guy who claims he’s a coward but instead of EM/3/Green, he should’ve called himself Red/Herring.
They come together for their briefing on one planet only to immediately get beamed across the system, perhaps the quadrant, to another planet. Why not just meet at the planet the artifact is on? Then they not only get sent to the planet but with a helpful ground vehicle. It has a GPS and it immediately blows up when they switch it on. Instead of wondering why, they all just shrug and Lara will track it because she has super-tracking powers.
Who stole it in the first place? Tchar. Why? To start a religious war and get his people to stop being pacifists. Why put it on this planet and piss off? Don’t know. Why have the charade of this expedition? Don’t know.
The animation, which I’ve praised in being able to show things they couldn’t on the show, really lets it down. They walk in the building and the artifact looks like it’s just sitting there on the floor. But they can’t just walk across for… reasons. Later it shows it might be a little high up but it really doesn’t come across well. It’s also clearly reused footage from The Terratin Incident.
They claim they can’t find the artifact because it’s hidden on the planet but it’s a giant structure, the only such one on this lifeless planet that’s clearly visible from above. Don’t tell me some ship couldn’t have noticed it with their scanners and all. Oh gee, I wonder if it’s in that building, the only one on the planet.
Lara keeps hitting on Kirk and Kirk keeps brushing her off. It’s very clumsy. “We just tell men we like them. I like you. Let’s kiss.” Kirk refusing her may be one of the only times that happened. Calling Non-Canon just for that!
This artifact needs to be returned to Skorr to avoid a war. Ok. Then at the end, the Vidalans say no one will know you got it back and beam everyone back in time so it’s like they never left. But why? How are you going to prevent this weird war if no one knows it got recovered? Unless they are sending it back before it got stolen? It’s not clear at all. I guess the Skorr will just figure they couldn’t find it and just forget about the whole thing? They were preparing to declare war on the ENTIRE KNOWN GALAXY.
The way these types of episodes work is the conflict between the rag tag group. But there’s no conflicts at all and it’s all so boring. Not a great episode.
This will end season 1. There were only 16 episodes, and season 2 has only 6. It’s difficult to compare seasons with such a discrepancy in the number of episodes. But overall season 1 was better than I expected. It didn’t end on a great note but such episodes like The Slaver Weapon, More Tribbles More Trouble, and The Terratin Incident turned out to be nice surprises with Yesteryear being an excellent episode of television in general. But there’s also terrible stuff like Mudd’s Passion, The Infinite Vulcan, and this one. It’s definitely a mixed bag but I think there’s more hits than misses.
The animation is clearly limited even though models and artwork allow for more to happen, it can’t do as much because of how cheap it was. Sure you can draw a weird alien but he can only move his mouth and arms and the repetitive use of animation hampers the whole thing. The stories are better than your average Saturday morning fare in the 1970s but no one is going to go to this versus watching re-runs of the original series. As a piece of Star Trek history, it’s definitely more than a mere curiosity but not much more. Come for the storytelling, endure the limitations of the medium of the time.
