Title: Balance Of Terror
Airdate: 12/15/1966
Plot Summary
The Enterprise is alerted to an attack on a border outpost in the Romulan neutral zone. The Romulans haven’t been seen before by humans, as the war was a hundred years ago and the treaty was done by audio only. But now the Romulans have attacked and war may be inevitable. Are there enemies in their midst? The shocking secret of the Romulans creates distrust among the crew and Kirk must deal with that along with outwitting a commander whose skills rival his own.
Risk Is Our Business
This is all the Kirk show. We see why he’s such a superb captain. His cat-and-mouse tactics are great. He also shows restraint and leadership to his crew while making sure to listen to all opinions. When it’s time to make the call, he makes it and is successful. A great outing for Kirk.
Logical
Spock finds out the enemy is him. Or at least that Romulans and Vulcans are related. While this might be something that could cause concern for anyone else, Spock is steadfast in his loyalty to the federation, his ship, and his captain. In fact, he is surprisingly in favor of attacking. An interesting choice for someone who generally speaks of peaceful means of solving problems.
It’s also even more intriguing knowing that Spock would later go on to covertly infiltrate the Romulan home world in an attempt to begin unification between Vulcan and Romulus.
Of course, his mistakenly hitting the button to give away their position may give Stiles a point.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy shows up in the conference room and is the voice against starting a war, with Spock arguing for attacking. This does feel a bit like their argument about Genesis 16 years later. But his real moment is with Kirk in his quarters to give Kirk the advice he needs with his “Don’t destroy the one named Kirk” speech. It still works.
Canon Maker
The big canon maker here is the introduction of the Romulans, one of the big three powers of Star Trek. Making them basically Vulcans would have repercussions throughout all of Trek.
Some might call it a canon breaker as every time we see them fire phasers, we have to go down to the weapons room to see the phaser crew doing the actual firing. This was done to show something similar to a submarine firing torpedoes. But weapons and phaser crews would be referenced occasionally and I assume it wasn’t necessary to show all that, just like so many other things we don’t really see happen. They have a crew of 400, it’s obvious they are doing a lot of behind-the-scenes things that we don’t need to see to get the idea.
Canon Breaker
The cloaking device seems to make it so the Romulans can’t use their sensors, at least not well. This will never be a problem again. The disruptor weapon they use seems to be far overpowered, these will become equivalent power of standard federation phasers.
They also say that the ship uses simple impulse only. That makes no sense, without warp they’d take months just to go from star system to star system. Hard to say how far the Romulan homewold is from the neutral zone but you’d have to imagine it wouldn’t be right there on the border. This will not be a problem ever again for the Romulans as they will have plenty of warp ships in the future.
The phasers are first used here but look like a photon torpedo. They would become beams in later episodes but photon torpedoes wouldn’t be named until Arena.
Technobabble
The cloaking device also makes it so they can’t fire their weapons without decloaking first. This will become a big deal throughout Trek with it only overcome once in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
The weapon is able to completely turn Cast Robinium to egg eggshell-like like consistency. It’s probably why we never heard about the substance again.
I Know That Guy:
Paul Comi plays Stiles and does a great job being a voice of opposition to Kirk. He also has an axe to grind given his family history with the Romulans.
Lawrence Montaigne plays Decius without much impression. But enough that he would later play Stonn in Amok Time.
John Warburton plays the trusted advisor and friend to the commander with warmth and gravitas.
But of course the big star here is Mark Lenard, who would later play Spock’s father Sarek later in the series as well as 3 movies and 2 Next Gen episodes. Seems like it was more, he made that much of an impression to Trek fans. He was without a doubt the best actor to play a Vulcan save Nimoy himself.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
“He’s a sorcerer, that one.” Balance Of Terror is a good episode. So much was well done. From the casting of Mark Lenard, to the submarine cat and mouse game, to showing how good a commander Kirk is by making the Romulan commander as good as he is.
First the attempt to hide in a comet goes wrong for the Romulan but his realizing it makes Kirk the one on his heels. Then they try to fool Kirk with the debris to think they were destroyed. Kirk and crew aren’t fooled for a second but they are distracted enough to lose the motion of the Romulan ship. Then the Enterprise nearly gets nuked.
Should Kirk cross the neutral zone and start war? Can he afford not to? In the meantime you get a conflicted Romulan commander who not only respects Kirk but is not really warm to the idea of war. He does his duty, to his demise.
The moment between the two Captains is one of my favorite type of scenes, two warriors going at it to the brink of destruction but showing each other deep respect on the battlefield.
Sulu gets his moment, Stiles is a nice counterpoint, Spock and McCoy each shine, hell even Uhura gets to man the navigation station.
Even though the bookends of the wedding and the death of the groom are pretty cliché, it wasn’t then, and quite frankly still works for me. I especially like that the bride takes it stoically, true professional. As opposed to Discovery where they cry if the replicator doesn’t get their coffee temperature right.
The tense quiet moments really keep you on the edge of your seat. Balance Of Terror was the first truly great Trek episode and deserves every star I give it. If you had to give only 5 episodes to show your friends why you like Star Trek, this would be on that list.
