Title: Beyond The Farthest Star
Airdate: 9/8/1973
Plot Summary
The Enterprise is doing some star charting when they get a radio signal they begin investigating. After nearly getting dragged into a dead star, they find an incredibly old ship still in orbit. They beam aboard to find it still has power but only an automated signal. When they go to look around, they find that the ship has been there to keep an entity prisoner. It escapes after 300 million years and begins to get into the Enterprise systems. The crew have to get it out and escape before the thing can be set loose on the galaxy.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk puts his life on the line, taking quite a few hits from the whatever beam in the bridge ceiling from the thing. He doesn’t relent and the thing is forced to flee the ship since he believes Kirk is about to destroy the vessel.
Logical
Spock puts a static shield around the navigation controls so the thing cannot actually get the ship moving away from the dead star. How? Don’t know. He also is able to calculate the slingshot correctly in his head, though they do not go back in time. Something he would have to do again in Star Trek IV.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy has become considerably less grumpy and more philosophical since becoming animated.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu handles the helm with Arex and later on takes the conn.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura finds the signal and keeps an eye on it. She also somehow mans the transporter from her station because Kirk orders her to. She also has probably more dialogue in this episode than any episode of the regular series. It felt like they were trying their hardest to give Nichols more to do.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is not in any of TAS, henceforth this section becomes moot. We’ll replace it with the next section:
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, ya Fuzzy Face
We have two new crewmembers, though they don’t show up every time. Lt Arex, a three-armed navigator is our new addition, as well M’Ress, the cat-like relief communications officer. She’s not in this one but will show up later.
Arex mans the navigation station and is voiced by Doohan.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty loves this new ship, at least how it was built and constructed. He just can’t stop gushing over it. Later on he nearly gets squished by the core hatch, but thankfully he still had on his belt. Why? Don’t know. But thank goodness he did.
Getting Animated
Talking about canon with the animated series is really an exercise in futility. It was considered non-canon by Roddenberry himself; however, there are some little details that have managed to become canon later on. People will argue about it back and forth. Personally I don’t think it matters if it is or isn’t. The things that might clearly contradict established canon, I’ll point them out and those that become canon, I’ll point those out.
Here I want to talk about the medium of animation itself and how it was such a missed opportunity thanks to budget. The good? Having crewman like Arex that just wasn’t possible back then. Hell, it probably didn’t become cost-effective to do that until the last 10-15 years. The design of the alien ship was great, truly odd.
But boy does the lack of attention to detail, along with budgetary constraints really limit what might have been, as well as distract you constantly with all the silly mistakes. For instance, here, poor Scotty can’t feel his legs! Because they are gone!
To try to point out all the continuity and animation mistakes would make all these articles 100 pages long. Suffice to say, it happens a lot. From wrong colors to missing body parts to people being in one scene and gone the next. It’s something you just have to shrug and try to ignore.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
Here’s another one I’ll probably delete as no one ever died on this series. It was Saturday morning cartoons; they weren’t going to kill anyone.
Technobabble
The away team beams over to a ship with no air. They all are given life support belts which set up a field around them to keep them alive without having to use bulky suits. This was a pretty neat idea and might even have worked on the show as a budgetary savings device. But since they never went anywhere that really required it, probably suits weren’t a big deal. Also, later episodes of various series and movies would show that even in the 24th century, they still needed typical suits. So, I would say they are non-canon but pretty cool tech idea and doesn’t seem really too far outside the realm of Trek-tech that they couldn’t have had something like it.
I Know That Guy:
There were few guest stars on this show, rather most of the original crew doubled for various “guests.” Doohan and Majel Barret especially took on just about every other role when they needed someone for a male or female voice respectively. Here’s another that probably won’t get much use, so unless I have one I want to point out, I’ll probably remove this section.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Ok, so you guys voted and the results, though closer than I expected, are in. (Don’t ask me why the bar chart is so weird, just look at the numbers.)
So fine. Here we go.
When Star Trek started to get hot in syndication, Roddenberry decided to try out an animated series. The results were decidedly mixed. Much of what I mentioned above is the reason. While the stories themselves are hit and miss, they generally are decent sci-fi fare. But as a Star Trek show, you really have to hold your nose when it comes to being a Star Trek show. What I mean is that so much of the lore and what we know about the ship can go out the window, and you just have to go with it.
For instance in this episode, they introduce the life support belts with some sort of force field on it. Ok, cool, not a bad idea. Then Scotty gets trapped by a giant hatch in engineering we’ve never seen before. Not even sure why he was in it. But thank god he had that belt we’ve never seen before and really won’t be a thing in Trek ever again. It’s ok for the story I guess, but as a Trek guy who knows the universe and lore so well, it makes me itchy.
But ok, fine. Sometimes you gotta relax and enjoy things for what they are. And in that spirit, I’ll try not to get too caught up in the nitpicky details vs. what story each episode is trying to tell. Is it trying to capture the spirit of Trek, if not the details? In that mindset, I can definitely get on board because it does try hard.
The voice acting is not great with Doohan, Nichols, and Barrett doing the best work. Nimoy and Takei are serviceable while Shatner and Kelly sound like they are on valium. Reading their lines to a microphone is clearly not their strong suits.
So clearly there are some improvements and a whole lot of set backs in this new series from the original. Your mileage will vary a lot and it’s up to you whether or not you like this series. It is what it is.
As for this episode, how does the first one out of the gate do?
Not too shabby actually. The first half of the episode is really intriguing. The ship they run across is truly weird looking and would’ve been very difficult to do as a model, I imagine. Then it turns out the ship is 300 million years old. That’s interesting! What could the mystery be?
But then it turns out it’s just there to hold a monster. It gets out and is made of energy. So, it takes over the ship. At this point it began to feel a bit like the Redjack episode. Wonder why Spock didn’t just have it calculate pi.
Then to isolate the navigation station is nonsensical. There’s wires that connect it to the rest of the ship, how are you going to isolate that and yet have it work? Doesn’t make sense.
But finally Kirk and Spock hatch a plan and the thing gets pulled off the ship. Or leaves on its own, hard to tell dialogue notwithstanding. At the end though, it plaintively begged them to come back, it’s so lonely. It was a little chilling. Doohan provided its voice and damn good job on that.
But in the end, it’s just a bog-standard “get the monster off the ship” episode. It really wastes an interesting set-up with the ancient ship. Indeed, the ship just gets destroyed by the Enterprise when the monster has control of it and that’s the end of that. What a waste.
It’s not the worst episode, it’s not the best. Still, it does showcase pretty well what you’re in for in this series.
