1x24 This Side of Paradise

5.1/10. What’s the only thing better than an episode that serves as a thinly-veiled polemic against the scourge of space hippies? The answer is one that combines that dull sanctimony with a drippy harlequin romance. “This Side of Paradise” is the thinnest of episodes, with little in either its plot or romance department to recommend it, and absolute excruciating pacing to really seal the deal.

When Kirk beams down to check on a colony that should be wiped out by some obscure and deadly form of radiation, he finds the colonists are in perfect health (including one of Spock’s old flames). It turns out, however, that they’re all infected with some spores from an intergalactic weed that makes them happy but totally useless. It’s as pale and weak a jeremiad on hippies as you’re likely to find in sci-fi. But, as I like to do when an episode isn’t quite up to snuff, let’s start out by talking about the positives, or the few things that pulled this into “meh” rather than “awful” territory to me.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m tempted to praise William Shatner, or at least the writing for his character here. When Kirk is alone on the ship, there’s a desperation and resignation to his demeanor that strikes one of the few emotional chords in this episode. There’s a genuine melancholy to him sitting on the bridge all by himself, clearly lonely, commenting how he never realized how big the ship truly is. It’s Shatner, so he overacts a good chunk of all this, but it’s still an effective set of scenes, and one of the few that actually sells the import of the threat of the week.

By the same token, the scene where he taunts Spock in an attempt to break the spell of the spores (strong emotions, you see, cause the spores to go away for some reason) is pretty gripping, both because, despite the knowledge of Kirk’s good intentions, it’s shocking to hear him talk about Spock in these terms. Kudos to whoever in the Star Trek writers’ room came up with that string of insults because they’re truly devastating. And at the same time, Spock turning his Vulcan strength on Kirk adds real stakes to the proceedings. The closing exchange – where Spock says that striking a fellow officer is a court martial offense and Kirk demurs that if they were both in the brig, who would build the save-the-day device? – is nicely arch and the icing on the cake.

Even the romance, which proved to be the worst element of this, had its merits. The problem is that every time Spock would interact with his paramour, the show would play the sappiest music, it would shoot the two of them in the softest light, and the whole thing was set up for cheese from the beginning. Maybe that’s just how you signified love to a 1960s television audience, but to the modern viewer, it comes off as entirely cornball and unmoving.

But the core of the idea is a good one. While the whole spores thing is pretty silly, the notion that Spock’s Vulcan detachment is a cage to some degree, keeping him from real joys in his life, is a powerful one. It’s a lark to see Leonard Nimoy laughing and smiling while still in his Vulcan guise, but there’s greater force to the idea that this isn’t necessarily fulfilling him. The episode lays it on thick with the “can a man live without love?” business but the thought behind Spock turning down love and hurting someone because of his duty, and saying “for the first time in my life, I was happy” is appropriately tragic.

The problem is that the dialogue for every romance scene is terrible. That, frankly, goes for a lot of the episode, from the final exchange between Spock and his would-be old flame, to Kirk’s closing monologue about man’s need to scratch and claw rather than stagnate. I think longtime writer D.C. Fontana was going for poetic when he wrote these parts, but they come off as the sort of florid, purple prose that turns the scenes from real emotional moments into hacky melodrama.

And I haven’t even gotten to the space hippies yet! The premise of people who live on a collective, stagnating, but happy because they spend their days getting high on plant life is not at all subtle as to what Star Trek is referencing here. The social commentary is very loud and not very interesting, with Kirk pontificating to anyone within earshot why this is bad, and the implicit critique of the spores making even the devoted crew not want to do any work or anything really quickly turns the episode into a D.A.R.E. video. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing hippies, but this is about as subtle as a bong to the back of the head, and about as clever.

What’s more, it feels like we just did these storylines. The mysterious colony where everyone is oddly blissful and the crew are getting sucked into it any everything seems perfect and no one knows why is “Return of the Archons.” Exposure to a foreign substance that makes everyone unreliable and silly is “The Naked Time.” There might be something to the meat of the episode beyond the anti-hippie screeds if this didn’t feel like a rehash of things Star Trek had already done.

And my god, the pacing of the episode was excruciating. The mystery wasn’t interesting to begin with, but it took way too long to uncover, and once it did, the episode still devolved into a bevvy of wheel-spinning before Kirk discovered the implausible solution. I’m also pretty sure that I lost a year of my life during the long conversations between Spock and Leila Kalomi.

Overall, this is an imminently skippable episode, with really only a ten minute chunk in the final act or so to recommend it. It’s the combination of a weak plot, lame social commentary, an uninspired romance, and an awful pace that makes this one a slog.