Title: The Cloud Minders
Airdate: 2/28/1969
Plot Summary
In The Cloud Minders the Enterprise heads to Ardana to get some Zenite for a botanical plague on another planet where they find a planet that has severe class separation. The Troglytes live on the ground and only mine the Zenite where the ruling class gets to live in the floating city Stratus in luxury. At first it appears the Troglytes are violent and really don’t have any other place but it soon becomes clear that things are not as they seem.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk pulls a trick that reminds me of one Superman did in his very earliest comics. Supes disguised himself as a miner whose owner hadn’t been doing a good job with little things like safety equipment and pay. Through a series of “idiot rich people decide to get a little dirty like the peasants for a lark” events, they all go down in the mine for their swanky party. Supes collapses the mine entrance unbeknownst to them so they can see what it’s like to deal with this shit on a day to day basis until the owner finally realizes what a prick he’s been and updates the mine properly.
Kirk does the same thing with the High Advisor Plasus so he can feel the gas and realize the Troglytes are not that dumb, just screwed over by fumes. Though he’s no Superman and nearly succumbs himself.
Kirk also is apparently kinda into getting nearly murdered by a hot woman. Everyone’s got a kink.
Logical
Spock gets to do some very clunky exposition in telling us most of what we’ve already been able to figure out. Perhaps his usual logic was faltering thanks to Droxine’s immensely long torso. Vulcan boners will not be denied.
He also is able to snap Kirk out of the zenite gas fugue.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy figures out the gas is the problem and comes this close to calling the Troglytes retarded. In all seriousness, he takes the most roundabout way to get to the point.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu’s absent.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is also absent.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura takes messages from Kirk to politely decline a formal greeting. Not sure why she didn’t get a message back explaining why Plasus wanted them to come to the city first.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty beams them up and down. He’s pretty tickled to kidnap a bureaucrat.
Canon Maker
Ponn Farr is referenced for the second time making it officially lore.
Canon Breaker
In Amok Time, Spock was completely loathe to speak about Ponn Farr, to the point of disobeying orders. But as soon as hotter than hot Droxine asks about it, he’s more than happy to spill the beans. I cannot remember any other time where Spock was clearly trying to get laid.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No one dies, but not for lack of trying.
Technobabble
To beam Plasus down to mine from the city, it required a quick layover on the transporter pad before reaching the final destination. This appears to be a limitation of early transporters as by TNG time, they could beam people directly from one place to another without having to go up to the ship.
I Know That Guy:
Diana Ewing plays the impossibly hot Droxine. William Ware Theiss outdid himself on that one.
Charlene Polite plays Vanna.
Fred Williamson plays one of Stratos’s guards. He didn’t do much here but I note him as an AFL/NFL star and later on did a ton of blaxpoitation films in the seventies.
And finally Jeff Corey plays Plasus. He’s been in tons and tons of stuff from the 40s all the way up to the early 90s. I’m sure you can all pick something but I’ll settle on his turn in Battle Beyond The Stars.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
This is a pretty good episode, if a little heavy handed. Once again I see something in 2025 that was much less apparent in the 70s and 80s. A ruling class of smug intellectuals living above all the people that have to do the real work? So certain of their superiority that they can’t even entertain the idea that there might be a reason why the workers are not quite as smart?
I look at the people in government, the legacy media, and academia and how much money they make to smugly tell us cavemen why we’re wrong all the time.. well this seems less far fetched now. Droxine at one point comes short of saying the Troglytes should eat cake for chrissake.
Meanwhile Plasus is the leader and of course corrupt as hell. He practically says shit like “trust the science” or the equivalent of it and just won’t listen to Kirk. And when things aren’t going his way he just resorts to telling his men to flat out murder Kirk. Well how many rules did the ruling class set on fire trying to keep Trump out?
Anyhow this episode has found new resonance with me thanks to the insanity of the ’20s.
But all that being said, there’s a few problems. One is the lame voiceover Spock does to tell us everything about the society in one information dump. Then we get it told to us anyway through his interactions with Droxine which though charming, are completely undercut by that nonsense exposition.
And while I get the parable, I just find it crazy that no one could find out with a little preliminary safety inspection that Zenite in its raw form has noxious fumes. This isn’t some backwater, it’s a full fledged member of the Federation. Surely they would’ve had proper equipment at their stage of technological development to find out such things.
For that matter, doesn’t the Federation vet these planets better before admitting them? No idea they had a slave labor caste? Might’ve been something you should’ve looked into before they signed on the dotted line.
Kirk getting turned on by Vanna attacking him was a little hilarious and a tiny bit disturbing. But I’ve never seen Spock so smitten. Though given Droxine’s outfit, I can’t really blame him.
And give them props for creating a city in the clouds 11 years before Empire Strikes Back.
It’s not a bad episode and some of it resonates more now while back then it was probably fairly novel. It makes it point fairly effectively.
Occasionally I wonder if someone remade the original series with the same basic stories but updated with a bit more realism and drama what they could come up with. This episode I think could be a prime candidate for a much improved remake. Of course that’s assuming you have someone of talent doing the writing and I’m afraid Hollywood is fresh out of those writers.
