Title: Wink Of An Eye
Airdate: 11/29/1968
Plot Summary
The Enterprise answers a distress call but finds an empty planet, or so they thought. (Hey, this is already sounding familiar.) It turns out the Scalosians are still there but have been hyper-accelerated to such a degree that they move so fast they can’t be seen. They immediately begin to take over the ship in an attempt to accelerate some of the crew members to use as breeding stock before they die out completely.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk gets accelerated halfway through the episode and gets to bang the pretty princess. Most of the cliche’s about Kirk were how much he was banging alien women, but it really wasn’t as prevalent as you might think. Here, though, they go all the way, having him put on his boots, clearly implying he was finishing dressing with Deela fixing her hair. It was a subtle moment, but for the 60s, the most overt.
Logical
Spock figures out what happened to Kirk and the Scalosians in general when he speeds up the tape to a buzz.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones watches Compton get accelerated right in front of his eyes. Later he’s the one who makes the compound that counteracts the acceleration because he’s frigging Bones McCoy and you’re not.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu mans the helm but doesn’t do much except notice that everything is getting fixed.
Nuclear Wessels
No Chekov this time.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura can’t communicate to anyone once the Scalosians break all her communications. After everything gets fixed, she accidentally hits the tape switch which lets Kirk see Deela’s image on the screen one last time.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty asks the question that if they can’t deal with the Scalosians on their level, can’t they deal with them on the Scalosians level to which Spock compliments his logical suggestions. A rather impressive compliment given who’s giving it to him. He also spends an inordinate amount of time in the transporter room doorway.
Canon Maker
Acceleration is a thing. So that’s interesting. Everyone can be the Flash if you so choose.
Canon Breaker
So much here doesn’t work. The phaser beam is shown to be so slow in the Scalosian’s state that they can merely step out of the way. But none of the time differences add up. For instance, it seems that the same amount of time seemed to pass for both the slow and the fast, as if this was all happening on the same day.
And what if they stay in one place long enough? I mean, when Compton died, his body lay there quite still, would it have become visible? I have so many questions.
Who the hell was taping the landing party when Compton disappeared? Nice of them to do shot blocking, edits, zooms, the whole nine yards. Seriously, that was dumb.
When Kirk first meets Deela in accelerated time, he fires a phaser and gets it knocked out of his hands. The phaser went at normal speed, wouldn’t someone on the bridge notice a phantom phaser beam? Or did you find the phaser lying on the bridge?
Deela mentions that the transporter is such a slow process, which tracks. But when they beam down the Scalosians at the end, it doesn’t appear any slower than normal.
Speaking of which, how did they beam up with the crew in the first place? The transporter needs to lock on to someone, did it even read them? Did they just stand real close like Gillian in Star Trek IV?
I can probably go on and on about the absurdities on this, but to be fair, sometimes you just have to go with it.
Man, It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
Poor Compton gets a scratch and dies of old age.
Technobabble
You can speed up any recording to near hypersonic levels. Of course, Spock must’ve been looping it since playing it that fast would only take half a second.
I’m not sure this was a breaker or just the way the tech works, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one: When Kirk records the message for Spock and Bones to find later, it seems he was just doing an audio recording,g but video was recorded as well. I’ll guess that 23rd-century imaging can do that pretty easily. We have zoom cameras that will lock in on a person automatically now. This was on the ship and not on the landing party, which is why I’m willing to accept it here but not there.
I Know That Guy
Kathie Browne plays Deela who you can make a case that she was the only woman on TOS that we can definitively say Kirk banged. She played in several TV shows throughout the 60s and 70s, including Rawhide and The Love Boat. Interestingly, she was married to Darren McGavin, the old man in A Christmas Story.
Jason Evers plays Rael. He was best known as the star in the 1963 drama Channing. He also had a small part in Escape From The Planet Of The Apes.
Geoffrey Binney played Compton, Erik Holland was Ekor, and Richard Geary played the other Scalosian.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Oh this episode has so many problems and it really pisses me off because it’s such a great concept. The idea behind it is so interesting. Getting sped up to a point that everyone else appears to be statues? Can you do hours of ship fixing in a matter of minutes? Awesome!
And I’ll give them credit for trying to sell it. The actors remain perfectly still in certain situations, or the normal blinking light panels not blinking or blinking very slowly. I also love the interactions between Kirk and Spock when Spock joins him in an accelerated state. First, Kirk just smiles with a mix of gratitude to see him and “What took you so long?” Then, when Deela mentions that Kirk is stuck like this, Kirk looks at Spock, who gives him an interesting nod, telling Kirk, “I got this, don’t listen to her.” Nice use of no dialogue moments.
But Wink Of An Eye really falls apart under scrutiny. Why does the acceleration screw up your mind and make you docile? Was Compton really messed up or was he just smitten with the other hot alien girl with half her outfit missing?
And cell damage will kill you? Just a scratch? How does that work? You can just lightly scratch your arm without any blood or anything and probably damage a cell or two. How about pulling a hair out of your head? Then you zoom up to 90 and die of old age in moments? What?
The Scalosian plan doesn’t make sense; mating with other species is a heckuva lot harder than trying to cure your own sterility.
But all that is logistical and technical oopsies that I can probably forgive. What I can’t forgive is how they handled it at the end. Ok, the Scalosians ain’t exactly the most honorable people, but they are desperate and it’s understandable, given their situation, why they are doing what they are. But then Bones comes up with a cure! So why don’t they give it to them?
Let’s take into account that the cure works on those who are recently accelerated only, not the Scalosians who are born with it. You could send a science team to speed themselves up, work with the Scalosians, and then come back down to normal speeds to work on the cures with the Federation. They can clearly go back and forth with little ill effect so certainly SOMETHING could’ve been worked out. At least try!
But no, Kirk basically just sends them back down to the planet, quarantines it and fucks off. Back when the Kelvins tried to take over the ship and turned most of the crew into cubes, Kirk worked with them to find a better way. The Scalosians arguably did less damage and deserved at least some offer of help.
Maybe Deela was a lousy lay.
In any case, I really enjoy most of this episode for the neat sci-fi concept, but I cannot forgive it for really betraying the core Trek values the rest of the show generally tried so hard to establish. It was really callous at the end.
