Title: For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky
Airdate: 11/08/1968
Plot Summary
McCoy finds out he has an incurable disease and only a year to live. Meanwhile the Enterprise comes across a ship disguised as an asteroid. They realize the people don’t know they are on a ship and their leader, Natira falls in love with McCoy. He decides to live with the Yonadans, as they are called, to be happy with her until his time. But the ship is malfunctioning and it’s computerized leader won’t let the crew fix the issues. If they don’t, the ship will smash into a inhabited planet killing everyone on board and causing untold death on the planet it hits.
Risk Is Our Business
For once the girl has no interest in Kirk. He seems fine with it and is far more worried about stopping the ship as well as McCoy’s health.
Logical
Spock shows genuine concern for McCoy with a simple hand on his shoulder. It tips off McCoy that Spock knows but it’s a nice moment and illustrates that Spock clearly values McCoy’s friendship even if they argue all the time.
He’s Dead Jim
This is the McCoy show, he gets a chance to find happiness and love for once. Natira’s is a good match for him but of course it’s not to be.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu keeps pace with the asteroid and gets to smoke a few old style nukes.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is… there.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is also… there.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty might be there? Really the majority of the time was spent on the asteroid ship so none of the supporting cast got much screentime.
Canon Maker
A generational ship is introduced. A good concept and it was nice to see it here.
Canon Breaker
Kirk doesn’t even bother to talk the computer into committing suicide as the Oracle just kind of gives up. I’m so disappointed.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No deaths! And McCoy gets cured even.
Technobabble
The Oracle can keep someone in place with some weird electrical photo negative effect. Until the crew really needs to get past it, then it just tries to slowly bake them and forgets completely it has that freeze/shock weapon. Maybe that malfunction that affected the ship’s course affected the Oracle’s logic circuits.
I Know That Guy:
Jon Lormer plays the old man that says the ridiculously long title. This is his second appearance, we last saw him in The Return Of The Archons.
William Byron Morrow plays the Admiral who tells the Enterprise to move on and let some other ship handle the situation. He was also in Amok Time as a completely different Admiral telling the Enterprise to move on and not help Spock. Talk about typecast.
Finally Kate Woodville plays Natira. She had a lot of work in 60s and 70s in various TV shows but retired in 1979.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
First of all, this title is ridiculous. A microcosm of what’s wrong with season 3. Trek always had high concept titles, sometimes with a trace of poetry. But this is just turning it up to eleven and it becomes silly.
Secondly, McCoy having a disease really wasn’t necessary. He could’ve just been lonely and then changed his mind based on what he found on Yonada. In fact, having an arc like that would’ve improved this episode tremendously. Instead it’s just used as a catalyst to have him stay on the ship. Then a miracle cure is found almost as an afterthought to quickly clean up the episode’s loose end and get us back to status quo as quickly as possible. Sloppy. Very sloppy.
They beam down to the “surface” and immediately get attacked for no reason. Then they are treated like honored guests. Kirk is able to talk Natira into the truth far too easily, especially when the Oracle will use the pain implants to discourage any wrong think immediately.
And the Oracle, the supercomputer running everything trope is here but really badly implemented. It’s got to be the laziest one ever. It bellows and proclaims a lot of shit but then just basically gives up and doesn’t follow through on any of it. Why? So the story can finish. Either that or Kirk’s reputation of suiciding computers precedes him and it just decided it wanted to live.
I really like the concept of a generational ship and it’s been done much better in other forms of media. But here it’s just dumb. I can kind of buy the builders wanted to have the look and feel of a world. A generational ships that just feels like a cold, man-made object would probably have a debilitating effect on the populace over time. But having it feel like a world doesn’t mean you have to lie to the people about where they are. Indeed, it will just make the reveal that much more damaging to the future generations.
I do think it has just enough to warrant a revisit to the what happened to these people. I bet a Next Gen episode would’ve redeemed it.
As it is though, it has some interesting set up but a ton of poor execution. I just find this episode a miserable slog.
