Title: The Naked Time
Airdate: 9/29/1966
Plot Summary
While investigating a space station outpost where all the people are inexplicably dead, the Enterprise also begins studying a planet that’s about to collapse. Unbeknownst to them, the away team brings back a disease that causes the entire crew to behave like drunken emo frat boys.
With no one to crew the shift, the Enterprise begins spiraling towards the planet with Bones in a race against time to find a cure before the ship smashes into the surface.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk really doesn’t like Riley’s singing and takes it out on Uhura. She gives it right back and both apologize to each other. He also goes from lucid to drunk in less than two seconds.
Logical
Spock loses his shit completely once the disease hits him, crying like a baby. However, he seems to get magically healed when he sees Kirk succumb.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy snarks about that green stuff Spock calls blood, not quite but pretty close to his “You green bloodied, inhuman…”
Canon Maker
This is the first time Spock’s blood is shown to be green. It also establishes the slingshot effect will throw you back and forth in time, which will be used on accident in Tomorrow is Yesterday, on purpose in Assignment: Earth and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Sulu is also shown to be a fencer. A minor hobby that JJ Abrams would turn into a superpower.
Nurse Chapel makes her first appearance, however Majel Barret already appeared in the first pilot, The Cage. Since it wasn’t aired, this would be the first time we see her, but amusingly she would appear in The Menagerie in that pilot role. This establishes Chapel’s crush on Spock, something that would come up again in Amok Time.
The Naked Time also establishes that Vulcans do have emotions but repress them. It’s a small but important distinction from the pilot which implied that Spock simply did not have emotions. It would go on to cement Spock and Nimoy’s portrayal of him as one of the greatest fictional characters ever created.
Canon Breaker
Apparently, there is only one way in and out of engineering and if you get locked out, you have to cut a hole in the wall in the shape of Texas to get back in.
For no reason, McCoy tears Kirk’s shirt to give him a hypospray even though it will be shown that it works just fine through clothing.
Man It Feels Bad To Be a Red Shirt
An entire outpost is found frozen, one person is in the shower. But they aren’t technically crewmembers so it probably doesn’t count.
Joe Tormolen accidentally falls on his knife in his drunk state. It’s not a bad wound but he simply gives up on the operating table, amusingly would rather die that way than the horrible ways others would die later. Also another blue shirt, not red.
Technobabble
The transporter chamber also doubles as a decontamination chamber. This is extremely practical so of course we’ll never see it used again. Its only purpose is to show that this is a sneaky disease. Then again it didn’t work so maybe they scrapped it.
You can’t start the engines of a ship from cold in less than 30 minutes due to the laws of physics, but Spock and Scotty wipe their ass with those laws.
I Know That Guy:
Bruce Hyde makes his first of two appearances as Lt Kevin Riley in The Naked Time. Stewart Moss plays poor Joe. He’ll return in season 2 episode By Any Other Name as a Kelvin.
What it means to be human – Review
The Naked Time is kind of an interesting episode as you get the crew acting all weird not to mention the ticking clock of the planet collapsing. In the end, it’s just a beat-the-clock episode with some interesting character moments that would resonate as traits for the entirety of the franchise.
Then going backward in time after they started the engines were tacked on for reasons… I have no frigging clue as it really didn’t mean anything. If they had used this episode as a setup for Tomorrow Is Yesterday, that would’ve been neat but it ended up meaning nothing.
In the end, there’s just not much to talk about with this episode. It’s not terrible, not memorable, it’s just there, a straight-down-the-middle Trek episode. If anything the antics served mostly as filler, this probably could’ve been a half hour. I have to give The Naked Time some credit for establishing so much lore in the series that would resonate throughout the franchise.
