Season Three Top Five

The third season has always got a bad rap from hardcore Star Trek fans, but despite the slashed budgets and graveyard slot the show was given there’s still much to enjoy. The departure of Gene Roddenberry from his own creation was a blow that it would have been difficult for any show to recover from. Nevertheless, much good work was done in Trek’s final year by such unsung heroes as producer Bob Justman and Dorothy Fontana, as well as the cast, before the decline and death of the series became inevitable, giving us such highlights as the overdue return of the Romulans as well as guilty pleasures like Spock’s missing brain and Abraham Lincoln on the bridge of the Enterprise.


Spock’s Brain
Stardate 5431.4
Inevitably voted the worst ever episode of Star Trek in fan polls over the years, this season opener seemed to confirm fears that the departure of Gene Roddenberry spelled disaster for the series. Yes, it is seriously daft – nattily dressed alien females beam onto the bridge and hit Spock where it hurts by abducting his brain! But, surgical implausibility apart, this is a hugely enjoyable episode. We get the horrible spectacle of a sort of remote-control puppet Spock being kept alive minus his grey matter by some weird contraption strapped to his head; the incredibly tense scene in which, having relocated the errant organ, Dr McCoy has to put it back in place (with a little help from Spock, his vocal cords reconnected, himself); and the immortal question from Eymorg Kara: “Brain and brain! What is brain?”


The Enterprise Incident
Stardate 5031.3
Another winner from the pen of Dorothy Fontana, in which a surgically altered Kirk (pointy ears and eyebrows) goes undercover on a Romulan ship in an attempt to steal its cloaking device. It was about time we saw the Romulans again (they hadn’t been glimpsed since Season One’s Balance of Terror) and it’s a nice surprise to find them a bit more egalitarian than Starfleet and boasting a formidable female Commander. She sets her sights on Mr Spock, believing him to be suitable consort material, and for a while her persuasive arguments and Vulcan-like lugholes seem to be winning the Enterprise’s First Officer over. It’s only when she goes off to slip into something more comfortable that we realise that Spock isn’t himself equally smitten…


Day of the Dove
Stardate unknown
Klingons on the Enterprise! When Captain Kang and his crew are taken prisoner and beamed aboard, a mysterious energy being sneaks into the ship and hitches a ride. Soon, the Enterprise goes out of control, heading for the edge of the galaxy, and traditional human/Klingon tensions are fuelled by the disappearance of all phasers and their replacement with swords; a right old ding-dong ensues. Just when it looks like all will end in a bloodbath Kirk figures out that something is using the fear and paranoia of both races to create an endless cycle of violence; now he and Spock must get Klingon Commander Kang on side if they are to put a stop to it…
A great episode which gives us our first look at a female Klingon (the feisty Mara) as well as a foretaste of where Klingon/Human relations will be in another 100 years time.


The Tholian Web
Stardate 5693.4
A weirdness-filled third season gem. First our heroes discover the USS Defiant floating dead in space and don environment suits for the one and only time in the series before beaming over to investigate. They find a crew who seem to have gone mad and killed one another, and the next thing they know is that the whole ship is somehow losing its physical reality and doesn’t show up on sensors. In fact, the Defiant is ‘phasing’ between dimensions – and this time it takes Kirk with it. Back on board the Enterprise, Chekhov goes nuts, Kirk’s space-suited ‘ghost’ appears to Uhura and, if all this wasn’t enough, the Tholians – a weird crystalline race – show up and start spinning an energy web around the ship.


Plato’s Stepchidren
Stardate 5784.2
More classics-obsessed baddies, this time a bunch of effete aliens called the Platonians who spent some time on Earth in Ancient Greece and liked it so much they’ve modelled their society on it. Despite having towering intellects and telekinetic powers, though, they’re rubbish at everyday medicine, so demand that Dr McCoy remains with them to sort out any future recurrence of leader Parmen’s gammy leg. When Kirk is none too happy the Platonians decide to teach the Enterprise away team a lesson, forcing them to perform silly dances and songs. Kirk is made to repeatedly slap his own face and Spock to cry, and when that doesn’t work Kirk is forced to snog Uhura (tough break) in what has often been touted as American TV’s first interracial kiss (apparently it wasn’t, but kissing an Hispanic was obviously not the same as kissing a black person – though Sammy Davis Jnr had planted one on Nancy Sinatra in her 1967 TV special). Here in Britain, we were unable to see the episode at all throughout the 1970s and 1980s; it was banned not because of that kiss, we were told, but on grounds of ‘mental cruelty’.