Star Trek Volume 39
featuring the episodes The Savage Curtain and All Our Yesterdays
“Kirk! Help me! Kirk!”
Yes, help me! I’m almost done revisiting the original Star Trek, and it takes the strength and resiliency of a dozen redshirts to make it through this volume. Well, okay, so maybe The Savage Curtain isn’t that bad, but in places it’s nearly Mystery Science Theater fodder (in fact, the MST crew was known to throw the “Help me! Kirk!” phrase out to point out examples of woefully wooden acting - or just guys who looked like Abraham Lincoln). A big rock critter lures the Enterprise crew to its planet to see if it’s even within throwing distance of the human concepts of good and/or evil, pitting Kirk and Spock - plus Abraham Lincoln and Surak, the father of modern Vulcan philosophy - against a fearsome foursome of fabled foes that includes Genghis Khan, Kahless of Klingon fame (though that particular character took on a whole different dimension in Next Generation lore) and others. It’s Celebrity Deathmatch, Star Trek style! And really, The Savage Curtain is an intriguing idea that might’ve been stellar in the first two seasons, but here falls victim to the third season’s marked lack of subtlety.
Speaking of a distinct lack of subtlety, we now arrive at the original show’s penultimate episode, All Our Yesterdays. I’ve always been fascinated by how much this episode was taken on board by the fans - for some reason, aside from Mr. Atoz and his library, there was something about Yesterdays which just rings hollow to me. Here we are, 70-odd episodes into the series, and instead of making a virtue of Spock’s emotionlessness, the writers are desperately trying to steer around it. I realize that the sub-genre of “Spock loses his emotional control / gets the girl” episodes is a minority in the overall body of classic Trek lore, but by this point it was like the “crewmember-gets-possessed-by-an-alien” schtick of Berman-era Trek - overused to the point that you could make a drinking game out of it.
Between All Our Yesterdays and the exercise in non-subtlety that was to follow in the series’ final live-action TV outing, maybe losing classic Trek only three years in was as graceful an exit as the show could’ve gotten.