Title: Elaan Of Troyius
Airdate: 12/20/1968
Plot Summary
In Elaan Of Troyius, the Enterprise is used to ferry the Dohlman of Elas to Troyius to take part in a wedding between the two worlds to create peace. But Elaan is a spoiled brat whose tears will bewitch men. Of course, she cries to enthrall Kirk. In the meantime, the Klingons are attacking, there’s a saboteur on board the ship who disables their main engines, and no answer to the mystery why this minor planetary dispute would warrant the attention of the Klingons and all this subterfuge.
Kirk must resist the tears, convince Elaan of her duty, and protect the Enterprise from a Klingon warship that will stop this peace treaty at all costs.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk telling the spoiled brat to get fucked, mollifying the ambassador, and joking with Scotty about being in a hurry are all great moments. He has to use various tactics to work with everyone’s various conflicts and handles them all great.
Also, tears of the Elaan are no match for Kirk’s love of the Enterprise. I mentioned that Deela was the only one one for sure that banged Kirk, but it’s pretty apparent he got some from Elaan as well.
All that being said, Kirk really puts on a master class of Captaining. He figures out what’s going on with the Klingons before he almost starts a fight, plays possum to fool them, and nails their ass to the wall when the weapons come back on line. He’s the best for a reason.
Logical
Spock wonders how Kirk knew how to handle Elaan, to which Kirk replies that the women of Vulcan are logical and that’s the only planet in the galaxy that can make that claim. Based.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy is able to find the cure for the Elasian tears that Elasians themselves haven’t been able to find in eons because he’s just that awesome. But Kirk is more awesome as he is able to just shake them off himself. There’s awesome all over the place in this episode.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu tries his best to maneuver the Enterprise at sublight, but as the title says, it’s sluggish without those crystals.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov fires the photons and plots courses.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura graciously gave up her quarters for Elaan and is a little offended to find out they are unacceptable to her. I would give 10 stars if Uhura and Elaan got into a chick fight, but that will have to be my upcoming slash fic.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty is not happy about going along at such a leisurely pace, but really gets offended at Elaan’s appraisal of his engines. Don’t shit on Scotty’s engines, you’ll have one mean Scotsman on your hands. Pray he isn’t drinking.
Canon Maker
This is probably the first time we have had the Federation doing some diplomatic stuff between two planets that are part of the Federation. It turns out that Klingons want the planets because they are rich in dilithium.
Canon Breaker
I’m not sure why either of these two planets are part of the Federation since neither of them has warp capability.
Elaan either likes to change clothes at the drop of the hat or someone thinks continuity is for pussies.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
One of the redshirt engineers is killed by Kryton. Security on this ship though, needs to be better, he shouldn’t be able to just walk into engineering.
Also, for some reason, the security guards all have black belts across their bellies. No idea why.
Technobabble
This pretty adequately shows the disadvantages of not having warp capabilities against another ship that does. I have to give a lot of credit to the updated special effects on this one, it really helps ratchet up the tension in the battle and clearly shows what is happening.
They want to go on impulse to take their time, as I mentioned earlier. However the speed of .037 seems really damn slow. So I did some calculations.
Now I have no idea how far Elaas and Troyius are from each other, so I decided to use the distance between Earth and Mars. It seemed like a reasonable comparison. From what I understand, full impulse will take you just up to the speed of light. Half impulse is half the speed of light, and so on. Using miles per hour, I find that the speed of light is 670,616,629 mph. Taking that figure multiplied by .037 and you get 24,812,815 mph. The distance between Earth and Mars is around 123,410,000 miles. So, taking that figure and dividing by 24,812,815 and you get 4.973.
So it would take about 5 hours to get there, even at that speed. So I appreciate that they did the math and came up with a speed that does make sense. I’m not quite clear on how long the travel time was, but given how much happened, it felt like a few days at least. Now they were dead in space for a bit when the engines conked out, so it might have been planned for 5 hours but ended up taking longer than expected.
On top of that, I don’t know how far apart the planets actually are. It could be 20 times the distance from Earth to Mars, which makes the whole thing work even better than what I calculated out here.
My point is that there was an effort to make it all work in Elaan Of Troyius, and none of my figures are out of whack from what they portrayed. I just like to point out attention to detail when I see it.
I Know That Guy:
France Nuyen plays the eponymous Elaan. She of course, has a long and distinguished career, with her starring role in the classic musical South Pacific in 1958 to the Joy Luck Club in 1993. She worked with Shatner quite a bit, at first on Broadway and then in the TV movie Horror at 37,000 Feet and an episode of Kung Fu. I’m going to guess that their collaboration for 500 showings in the play The World Of Suzie Wong they got to know each other quite well and it shows in their interactions with each other in this episode.
Jay Robinson played Ambassador Petri. He gained fame playing Caligula in The Robe and did a ton of work for the next 40 years on TV and film, including a part in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Tony Young played Kryton. He did a lot of guest stars in the 70s and 80s, but nothing especially of note.
Although he didn’t speak, we did get Dick Durock in a background role as a guard. Durock would go on to be in various films, including Any Which Way You Can, a rival Hulk in the 70s series, and the original Swamp Thing.
And finally, Victor Brandt as Watson. While he did nothing memorable on this episode, he would go on to do a lot of voice-over work including Emil Hamilton in Superman: The Animated Series.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I really expected to dislike Elaan Of Troyius but was really pleasantly surprised. One, it felt a lot like a template for a typical TNG episode. The Enterprise gets a few alien delegates to sign a peace treaty or be transported for an economic thing or whatever. We had a Troyian and an Elassian and some bodyguards with some rather unfortunate costume choices for the actors.
While the Taming Of The Shrew aspects were immediately tiresome, they didn’t overstay their welcome as much as I expected. Elaan takes a right hook across the face and immediately falls for Kirk. Oh beat me daddy! Ok it wasn’t quite that bad and the bitch was asking for it. And before you say there’s no excuse to hit a woman, maybe when she is throwing heavy objects at your head and hitting you first does she relinquish that “no excuse” thing. Besides, all things considered, Kirk was pretty restrained.
Ok, I can’t keep this up, the physical abuse on both sides was a little annoying. But I think I’m more repulsed nowadays because the internet has blessed us with so many videos of men AND women beating the hell out of each other for insane reasons, and I’ve just about had my fill of it. But in the context of the story, it really wasn’t that big of a deal.
What really intrigued me was the mystery of the Klingons’ interest in this whole thing. We have a turncoat who tries to sabotage the whole thing because he loves Elaan but can’t have her, echoing Marvik from Is There No Truth In Beauty? While I don’t see why he would be so in love with this hysterical tantrum-throwing child, her outfits convinced me.
Turns out the planet is rich in dilithium; you can’t walk around on the planet without tripping over it. Finding it on her necklace at the end and tying the whole mystery up with a nice bow was really satisfying and didn’t feel like a cop out or anything. Using the necklace to get the Enterprise working again after the turncoat sabotaged the whole thing was clever as well. Probably not realistic (yeah yeah in a story about warp drives and made up bullshit tech) to get the raw rocks to work so well but at that point I was able to go with it.
France Nuyen knew how far to take Elaan and when to properly pull back. Her taking a seat on the bridge and trying to help Kirk at the end felt really supportive in an odd way, and it was these little non-verbal cues she used to show Elaan’s turn in attitude that really sold it. Sometimes these guest actors don’t get enough credit, especially the ladies who are more than happy to let Theiss’s costumes do the work.
I hadn’t seen Elaan Of Troyius in quite a while, and my memory of it was really negative. I think because of her nasty behavior and having to watch her and Kirk shout at each other all the time. But it turned out to be much less annoying than I thought and a much better plot now that I was really paying attention.
However I got to deduct on the whole “tears that bewitch men thing.” It was a total non-starter with Kirk, and on top of that, McCoy is able to cure it even though the doctors on the planet haven’t been able to for thousands of years. Yeah, yeah, McCoy is that awesome, and he’s got federation tech. But then they even undercut that with Kirk just saying, “It’s cool, I’m over it.” Yeesh.
