Star Trek Volume 16
featuring the episodes Metamorphosis and Friday’s Child
So…the raggedy alcoholic Zefram Cochrane we saw in Star Trek: First Contact (and later, in more cleaned-up, respectable form in the series premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise) was once this vastly-more-presentable football champ of a young man? Ah, what the heck, I can just about buy that - I mean, Star Trek has given us Klingon kids who are in their 20s a mere seven years after being born. What I can’t buy, in the otherwise classic episode Metamorphosis, is how readily Kirk, Spock and McCoy 
acceed to the Companion’s insistence on usurping the identity and body of a Federation diplomat. Granted, the woman’s dying in a rush (to quote a movie I once saw torn to shreds on MST3K), but whatever happened to the sanctity of the human spirit and the identity and rights of the individual that pervades so much of the rest of the series? Other than that, it’s a neat episode, but I’ve always had that nagging problem with it.
Friday’s Child is another neat little episode, not quite the Starfleet-vs.-Klingons rumble that it’s built up to be, though it does have the dubious honor of featuring the least threatening Klingon ever in Star Trek history! Tige Andrews is a good actor, and does a competent job with the material at hand, but here we get a Klingon who’s balding and has an Abe Lincoln beard - he looks like someone’s Klingon Uncle Bob! This episode’s Redshirt Kill can also be seen coming from five miles away, but it wouldn’t be a proper Redshirt Kill if you couldn’t see it coming, now would it? All kidding aside, Friday’s Child has an unusual degree of charm for an episode that’s built up to be one big fight, and that misdirected expectation makes it all the more fun.