Title: What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Airdate: 10/20/1966
Plot Summary
Christine Chapel’s long-lost beau Roger Corby is possibly on a dying planet. Shocked to find him alive and well, Kirk and Chapel begin investigating what happened to the expedition to the planet. It leads them to a sinister plot involving androids.
Corby wants to turn the human race into androids and begins with Kirk. He found an android named Ruk who was around for thousands of years, made by “the old ones.” Ruk has latched on to Corby as his new purpose for being but begins to remember why the old ones aren’t around anymore.
Risk is our Business
This is the second episode in three where Kirk gets duplicated and Shatner has to play double duty.
This is also the first time Kirk talks a computer into committing suicide, though in a bit of a roundabout way. He gets Ruk to turn on Corby to his doom.
He also kisses the female android Andrea so hard she spontaneously starts having emotions because he’s just that amazing.
Logical
When Kirk asks Spock if he thinks Corby is still alive, Spock simply turns off Corby’s image on the viewer. It’s a nicely done moment.
During the duplication, Kirk starts repeating the phrase “I’m sick of your half-breed interference.” When the duplicate says that to Spock, he’s immediately suspicious of what’s going on. Racism, is there nothing it can’t do?
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy is completely absent in this episode.
Canon Maker
We see the Type 1 phaser for the first time.
George Samuel Kirk, Kirk’s brother, is established as having a wife and three sons.
Canon Breaker
This will be somewhat contradicted later on as Sam will be shown with only one son.
When The Next Generation started, Androids were a very rare thing that could not be easily created. Apparently, they forgot about this planet. Perhaps Noonien Soong studied these androids to create Data?
Man It Feels Bad To Be a Red Shirt
Rayburn and Mathews both meet their end at the hands of Corby’s Lurch-bot. Mathews is shoved off a cliff to his screaming death, where they assume it’s an accident. Rayburn is just killed directly, probably with a snapped neck. At least they had names. And yes, both had red shirts of security.
Technobabble
The phaser design had the Type I able to detach from the more gun-shaped Type II. The Type II added some power to the smaller phaser when you needed more firepower.
The Androids are created from a human template by spinning them on a table real fast.
I know that guy:
Roger Corby is played by Michael Strong, Sherry Jackson plays Andrea, Harry Basch plays Dr. Brown. But the real star is Ted Cassidy as Ruk. Ted played Lurch in the Adams family and would later play the voice of the Balok puppet as well as the Gorn in Arena.
What it means to be human – Review
This is a weird episode. The gist is that Corby turns out to be a robot, whether his brain is in the robot or his essence was transferred to it is unclear. This sort of plot would be done much better in The Schizoid Man later on in The Next Generation.
But here, it’s really unclear what he wants to accomplish. He duplicates Kirk as an android but doesn’t seem to want to take over the ship. He can become an android but doesn’t seem to want to take over humanity. He seems to think if he just shows them the technology, people will laugh it off. I can’t imagine androids this sophisticated would just be shrugged at.
There is the idea that since this is all alien technology, they are unfeeling robots who can’t deal with their creator’s emotions. Except they develop their own emotions at the drop of a hat, so that doesn’t make sense. Maybe having to deal with the concept of emotion the first time might’ve been a way to go, but it really isn’t explored.
In the end, the episode meanders too much and really just becomes a “how to rescue Kirk and Chapel before no good very bad thing happens.”
There could’ve been several ways to go about this idea between man and machine but it really couldn’t settle on a particular thread so it just goes nowhere.
