MR. SULU CHASES EVERYONE WITH A SWORD

Episode Title:  The Naked Time

Air Date: 9/29/1966

Written by John D.F. Black

Directed by Marc Daniels

Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk    Leonard Nimoy as Lieutenant Commander Spock             DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”              James Doohan  as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”        George Takei  as Lieutenant  Hikaru Sulu              Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura          Majel Barrett as Nurse Christine Chapel          Bruce Hyde as    Lieutenant Kevin Thomas Riley            Eddie Paskey as Lieutenant Ryan                 Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant Hadley     Frank Da Vinci as Lieutenant Brent                      Stewart Moss as Lieutenant (junior grade) Joe Tormolen             Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman First Class Janice Rand       William Knight as Amorous  Crewman            John Belleh as the Laughing Crewman

Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701

Planets:  Psi 2000

My Spoiler filled summary and review:  The Enterprise is in orbit around the planet PSI 2000, a world in a solar system whose star had gone dark.  With the absence of a warm sun the once Earth-like planet turned into a frozen wasteland, and now that frozen wasteland itself was about to collapse as the planet was on the verge of breaking up.  The Enterprise arrives to pick up some scientists who have been studying the phenomenon and to join them in observing the final stages of a world ending.  The dying planet’s shifting gravity is a danger to a starship trying to maintain orbit around it.  However with the crew is experienced and well-trained is the crew of the Enterprise they have this covered, unless of course the crew in large sections start getting unexpectedly drunk.

                The adventure begins when Mr. Spock and Lt. Tormolen beam down to the science station. When they materialize they discovered to their horror that everyone on the science station is dead! Not only are they dead but they died of the most bizarre, extreme, and unusual ways.  It was like their all overtaken with madness.  The engineer’s body was sitting at the station as if nothing was wrong, yet he turned off the life-support controls causing them all to freeze.  Prior to freezing however one of the scientists, a woman, was strangled and another was taking a shower fully dressed.  Spock and Tormolen investigate this disaster and while doing so Tormolen removes the glove of his environmental suit to scratch his nose.  He forgets to put back on right away and continues to work and unbeknownst to him a strange liquid like substance reaches out and sticks his bare hand.  At this point Mr. Spock comes out and warns him not to contaminate anything; showing that Spock while he is a master of many things timing isn’t one of them. Spock calls up to the Enterprise explains what they found.

I  really like how he places his glove right on the dead man's frozen head.

                As the two men returned the ship they go through the decontamination process then report the sick bay to be checked out by Dr. McCoy.  Both of which appear to be rather useless as the rest of the show will demonstrate.  As far as McCoy can see they’re both fine, and he teases Mr. Spock a little bit for his Vulcan anatomy which pleases Mr. Spock to no end.  The young Lieutenant is taken aback by the horror which he saw on the planet surface, and Kirk gives them some reassuring words and sends along his way.

                In the briefing room Captain Kirk and his the senior staff are trying to tackle the dual problems of figuring out what happened to this team of scientists and to safely monitor the breakup of the planet.  Although they have to be careful Scotty is confident that the engines of the Enterprise will have no problem being safe throughout this mission.  As far as the dead scientists go Spock theorizes this could be some form of space madness but they need to determine the cause.

                In one of the ship's cafeterias Tormolen is getting his lunch and still feeling depressed about what happened on the surface and his feelings are getting worse.  Although Dr. McCoy gave him a clean bill of health McCoy can only check for and guard against known conditions and Tormolen is infected by an unknown substance.   Lts. Sulu and Riley show up and Sulu is trying to get Riley to take up fencing, the two men try to involve Tormolen in their conversation but for the young man blows them off.  When they show concern he gets irritated reminding them that they don’t rank him they don’t have pointed ears they can’t tell him what to do.  At this point either Sulu or Riley could have said that they are full lieutenants while he’s just a JG so they in fact do rank him that he should show more respect.  But as caring officers of the Enterprise they don't do that and instead try to help him.  Unfortunately, Tormolen is it up for being helped instead he grabs a butter knife and threatens Sulu and Riley with it.  

"Please Joey, I know you feel guilty about using a frozen man's head as clothes hanger but we won't tell!" 

                Now in the 20^th century when this was made butter knives were not threatening weapons unless you tried to jam it into someone’s eye.  However by the time the 23^rd century the butter knives of the future have become incredibly more powerful and Riley and Sulu are immediately concerned.  They ask him to put down the knife but he aims the slayer of butter at himself.  Sulu and Riley try to stop him but they fail he stabbed himself with the common utensil  puncturing his chest as if it were warm butter—which really must’ve hurt considering it’s a dull butter knife—Riley calls in a medical emergency.  Both Riley and Sulu are now infected.

                Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel race to save the young man’s life, even though his surgery is going routinely well the young man’s vitals fail and he dies anyway.  McCoy later says to Captain Kirk that he can’t explain it, and he never lost a patient like he just lost Tormolen.  Kirk orders McCoy to keep investigating from both the possible and the impossible.  Which is kind of a point haired boss thing for Kirk to say but he felt he had to say something, and I guess it was his version of “work smarter, not harder.” To be fair if I was a captain and I was told one of my men killed himself with a butter knife I would start saying stupid things too.

                On the bridge Mr. Sulu, infected with the same virus, gets bored with doing his helmsman job and tries to get a Riley to sneak down to the gym with him.  Riley, whose infection has not yet caught up with him, refuses and Sulu sneaks off by himself while Mr. Spock’s back is turned like a little boy playing hooky.  This of course puts the ship in danger since the fluctuating gravity of the dying planet can threaten the starship and any moment.  As ship gets into danger Mr. Spock notices in time for the bridge crew to right the ship.  Mr. Spock’s reputation for timing has been restored from the start of the episode.  When Spock turns to Riley for explanation Riley now flush with Irish pride magnified by the space virus tells Spock that there is need no fear for he was here to save them and that as an Irishman he was worth 1000 Vulcans.  Spock then kicks Riley off the bridge and Riley happily leaves.

Riley standing up to Spock in a drunken manner.

                In this episode’s most famous scene, and the one that must be George Takei ‘s husband Brad’s favorite, Mr. Sulu is now running around the ship half naked attacking people with the sword, considering how dangerous butter knives are now a man with a sword is a serious concern.  Not to mention walking around shirtless and sweating helps spread the virus.  Riley stops in the sick bay to check on Tormolen, and ends up infecting Nurse Chapel.   Uhura gets reports from the ship of Mr. Sulu and his sword as well as other outbursts throughout the ship.  Kirk on the bridge tries to get a handle on the situation only to discover that Lt. Riley has lock himself in the engineering room and from there taken control of the ship.  He proclaims himself Captain, declares free ice cream for all, and a dance in the bowling alley.  (Which on a side note wish we could see the ships bowling alley, is bowling the same in the 23^rd century or has it changed like chess?)  Riley also wants the women of the Enterprise wear their hair down more and less make up.  He doesn’t say anything about the miniskirts so they're still cool.  Then he begins to sing his favorite Irish song, which was actually written by an American, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen!”    

Kirk leaves Mr. Spock in charge on the bridge and heads down to deal with his crazy navigator and take control of the ship back.  Riley must’ve done something to the engine room to prevent the use of the transporter from beaming anyone in.  That is the only thing I can think of to why they just wouldn’t just use the transporter to beam directly into the ship’s engine room.  Scotty realized they had to get in the old-fashioned way and cut section of the wall so that they can rig the engine room door to open.

One intoxicated man can take control of the whose ship from a single room! That is a design flaw.

At this time Sulu appears on the bridge attacking his fellow officers and nearly kidnapping Lt. Uhura, however Mr. Spock uses his famous Vulcan nerve pinch to take down the wild swordsman.  Spock order Sulu to be delivered to sick bay where Dr. McCoy is working furiously to find an antidote.  McCoy discovers that the virus has something to do with the water on the planet that’s about to die, it acts like a type of alcohol removing all inhibitions from its victims.  In other words everyone acting weird on the Enterprise is involuntarily deeply drunk.  McCoy needs to find a way to get everyone to sober up.  

Sulu vs Everybody!  This is no butter knife be afraid very afraid. 

When Spock comes to check on his progress, after getting Scotty to hurry up on the engine room door because is taking longer than they have, he is approached by the infected Nurse Chapel who full of virus courage makes a pass at him.  Spock becomes infected and his response to the virus is to go off and cry about heat how he never told his mother that he loved her.

Kirk and Scotty get into the engine room and detain Lt. Riley.  Then they discover the horrible truth not only did Riley take control the ship but he shut the engine down.  It takes thirty minutes to start the engine up from cold and they only have about twelve.  Kirk and Scotty talk shop for a minute and as the Chief Engineer continues it to insist that you can’t mix matter and antimatter cold and starting it up earlier is impossible, Kirk reminds him that instead of firing up for explosion they could instead do a controlled implosion.  Scotty reacts negatively saying is only a theory and I imagine Kirk suggestion would be the equivalent of the 20^th or 21^st century scientist saying “That’s okay let’s use Cold Fusion.”  Kirk points out is all they have and goes to find Spock to help out.

When he finds Spock, he finds the weeping Vulcan still upset over his mother.  Kirk decides a bitch slap the Vulcan a couple of times to get him to realize how silly he’s being, surprisingly after a few slaps Spock does regain his composure and realizes what has to be done.  Unfortunately Kirk is now infected from Spock slapping back and almost falls knees crying about how he doesn’t have a girlfriend and that how the Enterprise takes up his entire life.  He wants to find a nice girl to walk along the beach with.  Shortly however Kirk regains his composure through sheer force of will.

McCoy by this point is actually discovers a cure for the virus and is using it to bring the Enterprise crewmembers back to their senses.  It’s nice to see Dr. McCoy get to be the miracle worker to make up for him completely missing the virus.  He gives Kirk a dose just in case even though he was apparently fully recovered, although he does look at Yeoman Rand once longingly.  Spock and Scotty do their thing and the controlled implosion works blasting the Enterprise away from the planet.  However something else is happened.  They find out as the ship moved father way from the planet they were also going backward in time.  When they finally stop Spock notices that they went back in time three days.  He tells the Captain they have three days live again.  To which Kirk replies, “Those three days!?!”

Additional thoughts: Okay, I am going to talk about the end a little first.  The excitement of discovering a way to go back in time is cooled by the fact that this never really amounts to anything.  It was supposed to lead into another episode but it never did after all that would interfere with the whole episodic formula the series was using.  They start doing that they might have the start airing them in order.  Ultimately the crew of the Enterprise does time travel but they do so using alternative methods. 

                Despite Kirk’s concerns it’s a good thing they have those three days to live over again because if I were a betting man I would bet they did not take proper scans and readings of the breakup of that planet while they were trying to escape a starship nose dive with their lives. This way they can observe the planet breakup again and they can do the job right this time without having half the crew involuntarily intoxicated.  

                

Yes, some members of the crew are  just plain weird.

                 Of course it would’ve been a little bit nicer if they had not stopped when they did an instead went back in time a few more days.   Then they could’ve used McCoy’s formula to save the scientists on that station.  Kirk said they may use that time traveling formula again someday, well why not today?  I’m assuming the whole cold implosion thing is very dangerous and that’s why they don’t do it.  I also assume that this time travel method becomes really top-secret and that’s why we never see the method tried again and any Star Trek series; at least that I can remember.  It also would become a problem for the writers if every time the Enterprise encountered a tough situation they would just do a cold implosion and go back and fix it.  Of course they do later learn of more efficient methods of time traveling that doesn’t involve staring at the ships clock slowing move backward.

                This episode is a lot of fun.  There are shows that are made to be funny and the shows are made to be serious.  There are also shows that are serious but do have some funny moments of or at least have an episode that’s overly humorous.  Even “the Sopranos” had quite a few episodes and moments in it that made me chuckle. Star Trek is generally a show that serious science fiction but it does have it light-hearted moments and episodes like this which are of great humor.  It was fun to see the ship’s crew run around like they were chickens with their heads cut off.  I do like the fact that Kirk and Spock were able to overcome the virus by just being mentally strong enough to do so it says a lot for their characters.  Although Spock had to be bitch slapped a couple of times, and Kirk with his ladies' man reputation cry about not having a girlfriend. 

One benefit to the virus, Nurse Chapel gets the courage to tell Mr. Spock about how she feels.   

Infected with the same virus many men get the same type of courage that Nurse Chapel got, which means its long walk for Yeoman Rand to the turbo-lift.

                What was great was how some of the crew’s characteristics were able to come to the forefront from Spock’s pain about how his mother had to live without ever hearing the phrase “I love you” from her son to the more entertaining Mr. Sulu running around with a sword.  Slight note on Sulu, when you think about it of all the people on the Enterprise he is probably the best one to have as a friend.  He’s always sharing his interests whether it’s plants or sword fighting and always looking to include other people.  I don’t think Kevin Riley realizes how good he has it right now.  How many friends you have loses wants randomly want to teach you how to use a sword or show you a plant that can actually move and eat things you do not normally imagine plants eating.  

                In the previous episode we encountered a dangerous creature that was the last of his kind and on its way to extinction, considering the damage it did I think we’re left grateful that the universe no longer had to deal with them.  Considering the type of water that PSI 2000 produced we should be grateful that planet broke apart the way it did so no more burdens on the universe come from that little planet.

FINAL GRADE 4 of 5