#TOS kirk bites and fights like a dog

[weerd1]

Star Trek TOS Rewatch, Stardate 1712.09: Missions Reviewed, "The Immunity Syndrome" and "A Private Little War."

If you don't call TMP a remake of "The Changeling" it is likely because there's a smattering of "The Immunity Syndrome" mixed in for good measure. (One might argue there's some "One of Our Planets is Missing" from the animated series as well, but that's for another time.) From across space, Spock feels the deaths of 400 Vulcans aboard the Intrepid. Additionally, contact is lost with billions of people in a nearby star system. When they go to investigate, the ship and crew for that matter are themselves drained of power as they approach an enormous void in space. Entering the null field they find at its center a single-celled organism: eleven THOUSAND miles across. Believing that he will die, Spock penetrates the amoeba to study it in a shuttle, but gets a clue to Kirk that this thing is going to divide and it is literally like a germ attacking their galaxy. Kirk decides to be the antibody by dropping a probe full of antimatter into the thing, and barely managing to free Spock before the amoeba's destruction. Interestingly, later on it will be canon that photon torpedoes are basically casings full of antimatter as a weapon, but rather than use those here, Scotty makes the point of having to create a magnetic bottle to contain the antimatter and secure it in the probe to make a bomb. Perhaps at that time the "photon" torpedo was indeed just that: weaponized light. At the helm this episode is Lt. Kyle, whom we previously only saw as transporter chief. He actually appears in 11 TOS episodes, and in "The Wrath of Khan" as communications officer on the Reliant. His character is in several TAS episodes, but he is voiced by James Doohan rather than the actor John Winston who plays him live. Doohan's son Chris who appears in the Kelvin Timeline films as a transporter tech claims he was THAT universe's Kyle.

"A Private Little War" is one of those episode I love to point at when people say something silly like "Star Trek never used to be political." In this episode Kirk returns to a stone age planet he had surveyed 13 years before as a young Lieutenant. This time though, one of the tribes has built a full village and is using flintlock rifles to hunt the Hill People. Things are complicated when a Klingon ship enters orbit, and Kirk realizes the Klingons are supplying one side of the conflict with advanced weapons. To keep things on track, he decides they have to provide the same flintlocks to the Hill People so there's a "Balance of Power." McCoy argues citing the proxy wars of the major powers in the 20th century "in Asia," a clear reference to Vietnam; Bones talks about how bloody and terrible they were but Kirk, reluctantly, still provides the weapons, sentencing this once peaceful planet to years of fighting, likely to be escalated by the interference of the two major powers in space. Anyone who argues the Federation would never have built the Vengeance in response to the Narada in the KT should remember that continuing a proxy war on a developing planet was on the table in the Prime Universe as a horrible, but necessary, evil. This episode also features the best Star Trek creature since the unicorn dog in "The Enemy Within," the Mugato. This unicorn ape with a poisonous bite, though spelled with an 'o' is repeatedly pronounced "Mugatu" by Shatner. Of course, he spent most of "Immunity Syndrome" calling Kyle, "Cowell" as well.

NEXT VOYAGE: The crew is possessed by advanced aliens who want to make their way home to a distant galaxy in their "Return to Tomorrow"!

Disambiguation:

Mugatu (L), Mugato (R).