Title: That Which Survives
Airdate: 1/24/1969
Plot Summary
In That Which Survives, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and D’Amato beam down to an asteroid only to be attacked by a beautiful woman who can kill with just a touch.
She also seems to have the power to send the Enterprise lightyears away. What is the mystery here and can the Enterprise get back before the landing party is lost?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk does his best to try to talk Losira out of killing them all and is able to get her to pause just long enough for the landing party to arrive and smoke the computer.
Logical
Spock feels like he’s taken a step back in dealing with humans. He makes obviously silly replies to questions, he smugly talks about logic, berates everyone for not being precise.
It’s weird, over the last few seasons it’s clear he’s learned how to deal with humans better, even cracking a wry joke here and there. But in That Which Survives he’s just being a jerk.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy mostly spends the time on the asteroid scanning with his tricorder. No “He’s dead, Jim,” he just goes right into cell disruption.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu gets to go on a rare away mission and nearly gets killed for it. He gets lightly grazed by Losira and half his arm gets disrupted.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov takes a powder. Although Kirk mentions that if he wanted a Russian history lesson, he would’ve brought him along to the planet.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura asks what happened after checking if Spock’s OK and he begins to tell her that he impacted his head on the back of his chair, much to her amusement. Later on when she asks perfectly reasonable questions and he goes full Spock, she’s less amused.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty lets Spock know the ship feels wrong. He also is the hero of this episode as he has to go into the energy flow in a cramped area to stick a magnetic probe to disrupt it. If it goes wrong, either he gets blown out and separated from the ship or the ship blows up. He performs his task perfectly because he’s friggin Scotty, that’s why.
Canon Maker
Nothing in That Which Survives makes canon per se but we do get a little bit more about how the engines work, including magnetic flow is very important for matter/antimatter reactions.
Canon Breaker
When Voyager goes to the Delta quadrant, they went 70,000 light years away. It’s established that it will take 70 years to get home.
Simple math states then they can go 1000 light years per year. Here they are thrown 1000 light years away and can get back in about 11 hours. The distances and speeds in the original series varied a lot sometimes and were whatever they needed it to be.
Then we got the issue of warp again. It’s said the Enterprise goes Warp 14.1 before they finally slow it down. I did a whole breakdown on that.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
We lose a proper red shirt in the transporter room, Watkins in engineering, and D’Amato on the planet. The last one was a blue shirt.
Technobabble
Losira bot can transport an entire ship a long ways away but it reverses the polarity. As you do.
Spock wanders around with the remote that Bones used to use him as a meat puppet in Spock’s Brain. I’m not sure what he was using it for but it was weird. Yes yes, I know it a prop for him to do sciencey shit with, but when you recognize it, it gets really weird.
I Know That Guy:
We get a return of Booker Bradshaw as Dr. M’Benga. It’s good to see that McCoy is not the only doctor on the Enterprise.
Arthur Batanides plays D’Amato. He played in a ton of stuff but probably is most known by us Gen-Xers as the father of Kathleen Kirkland in 4 Police Academy movies.
Kenneth Washington plays the doomed Watkins. He would go on to play Sergeant Baker on the final season of Hogan’s Heroes.
Naomi Pollack plays Lt. Rahda to drive the ship while Sulu is on the planet. Interestingly she is clearly Indian as the dot on her forehead would indicate. Nice touch. She played a completely different type of indian in The Paradise Syndrome.
And finally we have the lovely Lee Meriwether as Losira. Of course Lee is probably most known for playing Catwoman in the Batman movie from 1966. A lot of Bat-actors were out of work by this time and this marks the third to be a guest on Trek.
Meriwether also starred in the 70s show Barnaby Jones and was in the main cast in The Time Tunnel. She spent a lot of time on All My Children until 2011. And she played Lilly Munster on the revival series in 1988.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
That Which Survives is fine. It’s just a bog standard Trek episode. There are a few things that are interesting though.
One is that we get a different away team instead of just Kirk, Spock, and Bones. Spock stays aboard and Sulu goes, along with a blueshirt to do actual science stuff. Second is the mystery surrounding all this.
Why is Losira killing people? Why when she appears is she there just for one person? I found it interesting that maybe there was some weird DNA specific reason that her touch worked but only on the one she was built for. When three of them showed up, it made it even more intriguing.
I also appreciated the return of Dr. M’Benga. It felt like for once there were other people on the ship to do jobs when the main cast wasn’t around. Scotty’s grumbling at Spock when he’s hip deep in lightning helltube to try to fix the damn Enterprise was pretty priceless. I don’t blame him one bit.
But I have questions. If the entire Enterprise was out of phase and Scotty had to reverse the polarity on the magnetic flow to stop the immediate emergency, what about after that? I mean it appears the entire ship is all out of whack. Do we just gloss over that or do we do a Critical Drinker’s “Nah, it’ll be fine?”
Once they destroy the computer, how was it able to still play back the real Losira’s last tape? Seemed like it was controlling everything. It could clearly see what the Enterprise was all about, it was able to identify everyone by name, that would suppose that it either looked at the databanks or possibly some sort of telepathy. In any case, wouldn’t a “please keep off the grass” warning be sufficient?
I did love the effect of making Losira two dimensional, then she rotates into a line, then the line shrinks to a point and disappears. It’s effective and still looks decent today.
It was cool that the computer felt a little guilt but it was too aggressive for Kirk to be able to get it to commit suicide. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t playing nice, it knew what Kirk was good at. Overall it was nice little mystery and the two storylines helped keep the pace brisk.That Which Survives is a good, not great, episode.
