Title: The Eye Of The Beholder
Airdate: 1/5/1974
Plot Summary
In The Eye Of The Beholder, the Enterprise crew go looking for the missing Ariel, a science ship. They track it to a class M planet. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down, and after passing through a series of oddly divided ecological regions, are captured by strange slug-like creatures. They are taken to a high-tech zoo where they meet the remaining three survivors of the Ariel.
They are exhibits in the zoo belonging to the Lactran slug-aliens, who are highly intelligent. The creatures are so intelligent that they don’t recognize the humans and Spock as intelligent. One of the Ariel crewmen is dying of an illness, and uniting their mental force with Spock, they manage to contact a Lactran child to give them the medical kit and a communicator.
The child snatches the communicator just as Scotty beams it up. While the adults concentrate their mental powers on Kirk in an effort to recover their child, almost driving him mad, the Lactran child takes over the Enterprise. After scanning its computers, it beams back with Scotty and lets the rest of the lactrans know that they are intelligent and should not be zoo animals.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is pretty good at figuring out the best way to manipulate the Lartrans but it backfires on him when the Enterprise accidentally beams up the kid. It does not go well for him. He also reminds Bones that while going down to the planet is a risk, that’s why they’re here. A subtle call-back to his Risk Is Our Business speech.
Logical
Spock does his best to telepathically communicate with the zookeepers, but even he can’t keep up with a race so far above him evolutionarily speaking.
He’s Dead, Jim
Poor Bones doesn’t move as fast as he used to and gets stuck under a stunned dinosaur’s tail.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is absent this episode.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is also not available. Too much work from the last episode, I bet.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty, of all people, is the one who gets through the Lactrans that they are intelligent, if primitive by the Lactrans’ standards. Not Spock, not Kirk, the alcoholic is the one who gets the job done.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, Ya Fuzzy Face
Arex and M’Ress are also absent.
Getting Animated
We have some truly alien creatures that are able to pick up the crew and carry them around. Once again, and I repeat myself, another example of what animation could do that the original series could not do.
We also get some slightly differently colored plant dragons which makes them totally different than what we saw before.
The Ariel was manned by a 6 member science crew. But it was commanded by a Lieutenant Commander which is bullshit. Any ship, even a small science ship, would have a full captain. I know Sisko was a Commander, but it was typical that space stations were headed by a commander, not a Captain. They only made him a captain when they gave him the Defiant.
Technobabble
Phasers get absorbed by some monsters unless you get them in the neck.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Eye Of The Beholder is your typical “humans are the zoo animals” story. I enjoyed the episode while I was watching it, but putting any thought to it, it turned out to have a lot of problems.
The Lactrans are apparently just soooo far above us that we can’t even comprehend their existence and way of thinking. Right, so advanced they make typical buildings and take their kids to the zoo just like we do. The Organians were really advanced and appeared to us as humans, just so the crew could interact with them. Even so, they didn’t treat the humans and Klingons like animals; they knew they were intelligent. Primitive maybe, but not animals.
They bring down tools, they have space travel, don’t tell me the Lactrans would’ve assumed they were nothing more than animals. Then they decide they aren’t not because Kirk accidentally beams away their kid with matter transportation, a highly advanced technology, but because the drunk Scotsman manages to convince the kid that beams onto the ship. Somehow. Maybe he gave him some beer or something.
These elephant slugs just don’t do anything other than are bigger and have a bit more technology to prove to me that they are just oh so far above us, other than Spock telling us they are. It’s all just not credible.
I kinda enjoyed the ride anyway warts and all but I can’t rate The Eye Of The Beholder very high, especially as this type of story has been done much better, both in and out of Trek.
