Quite silly but built up to an exciting conclusion. How idiotic was the crew member at the start taking his glove off? I know that The Next Generation did a sequel to this and I always thought that was one of the sillier TNG episodes, but it's nowhere near the levels of this! Sulu running around with a fencing sword was pretty extreme, but Spock's breakdown was done well.
I'm assuming the timewarp formula figured out at the end is what Star Trek IV uses?
What begins as a straight forward two-part mission that entailed rescuing a team of scientists from a research outpost located in the doomed ancient world and documenting the disintegration of this planet ends up becoming a race against time to save the Enterprise and its crew from spiraling into certain death. The madness starts with one crew member, but quickly spreads to others that are in charge of critical tasks needed to complete the mission. Admittedly, things do become a bit silly and gaudy, but eventually build up to a remarkably tense and emotional ending, which would influence Star Trek adventures in decades to come. This episode also delves into the inhibitions and emotional conflict that some of the main characters struggle with, most notably Kirk and Spock.
Will they come back in any story from the previous episodes?
STAR TREK: THE NAKED TIME
WRITING: 50
ACTING: 65
LOOK: 60
SOUND: 50
FEEL: 50
NOVELTY: 80
ENJOYMENT: 55
RE-WATCHABILITY: 50
INTRIGUE: 60
EXPECTATIONS: 55
By now, the series is starting to repeat itself, with crew members acting strangely and causing havoc. We return to a slower, less tense pace. We are offered a plot that turns more and more bizarre as it goes on. At times bizarre, funny and annoyingly over-the-top.
58% = :heavy_minus_sign:
Amazing job by all of the actors involved! The plot kept me interested, and, all in all, I had a blast with this one.
Content Concerns:
Sex: Men flirting with women. 4/5
Nudity: Shirtless guy. 4/5
Language: Name-calling. 4/5
Violence: A slap fight; a guy nearly kills himself; someone writes on walls with blood (not graphic). 3/5
Drugs: It is said that the chemical that causes the crew members to act crazy is similar to alcohol. 4/5
Frightening/Intense Scenes: The writing with blood; another scene involving blood; some emotional intensity. 3/5
Score: 5/5
Although this episode shows us some interesting things about the characters of Kirk and Spock, I always viewed this episode as one of the weaker ones. Not just of the Classic series but of all Star Trek.
A barechested Sulu hunting Richelieu, "Captain" Riley singing and ordering ice-cream - well let's just say I find many things here rather weak even for 60s TV. Also the time it takes for the virus to influence the characters is very much dictated by the script. Some get it rather fast while others take longer but then instantly react to it. There is the interesting monologue from Tormolen that mankind has no business being in space and doesn't belong there. Which, funny enough, just now reminds me of what Q said about humans.
And then they throw in the short time travel at the end aaaaand just leave it there.
This plot will then be picked up by TNG and the story replicated, and also at the beginning of the show. Which I also think is one of the worst episodes.
Go figure.
A great story with an intriguing premise. Some of the science of the episode is wonky, even for late 60s understanding. Like how in the hell does a solid planet collapse and how does its mass fluctuate? WTF? That makes no sense at all. I can forgive a sun "going dark" as I don't think there was a model for main sequence stars going to supergiants and the subsequent nova that results.
I truly love Sulu. Such a magnificent character. He seems to have the most fascinating tidbits of knowledge, skills, etc. Sulu seems the most well fleshed out character of the crew. Takei does a wonderful job portraying the character.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-12-26T21:57:22Z
With “The Naked Time” I am four episodes into Star Trek, and thus far every plot has followed a similar formula. The crew gets some kind of unexpected visitor, someone starts acting strange in a way that is initially puzzling but innocuous, and then it’s realized that the safety of the ship and the crew are threatened so Kirk and the rest of the senior staff try to figure out how to save it all. Sure, at high enough level of abstraction, any pair of stories can be made to sound the same, but I feel like there’s been a fair amount of the “someone on the ship starts acting funny, and everyone slowly but surely figures out what’s happening” blueprint that’s been followed in these first four installments.
And yet, this is very likely the best of them. Sure, there’s some silliness and very Sixties elements of this. The Irish officer devolving into Irish stereotypes is kind of odd, and as fun and bonkers as it is to see Sulu gallivanting about the ship brandishing a foil, it’s pretty silly stuff. And the entire way the biological agent makes it onto the ship, with a doomed redshirt taking off his glove on an alien planet, is kind of dumb. (Though there was something legitimately unnerving about his attempt at self-harm.)
To boot, Star Trek still has a problem in its early going of holding the audience’s hand through all of this (notice how much time it spends in the first infection scene to make sure we know who got infected and how). There’s an overexplain-y quality to the show, where even when there’s a mystery, it telegraphs everything that’s happening or expected to happen.
But by the same token, this is the first time the show has really delved into some meaningful pathos or even real tragedy for its main characters. The scene between Spock and Christine was far and away the best of the series so far, with Christine (who I didn’t realize was Majel Barrett!) making a surprisingly compelling plea and account of her affections for Spock. You buy her description of him, and in less than a minute, accept the two of them as a legitimate, root-worthy pairing.
For his part, Leonard Nimoy knocks it out of the park, both in terms of Spock’s shocked, tempted, but still reserved response to Christine’s advance, but also in his tortured private moments of trying to maintain his Vulcan detachment while the infection takes hold. Maybe it’s just the way Spock has been mythologized in the fifty years after the show debuted, but seeing his stoicism fall, seeing him emotional, almost unstable, and talking to no one in particular about the difficulty in caring about people and not being able to express it was absolutely tremendous. (And serves as a nice forerunner to a similar bit with Picard and Spock’s father in TNG). Nimoy doesn’t get to show off his acting chops as much as Spock, or at least doesn’t get to be as showy about it, given the constraints of his character, but when let off his leash like this, the results are outstanding.
William Shatner is…not quite as good of an actor. That’s no big deal necessarily – and his scene-chewing overwrought qualities have been well-documented elsewhere. But I still like his character as written here, and the sense that, as loose and occasionally cavalier as Kirk may seem, at least by reputation, there are parts of himself and impulses that he holds in reserves, and feels as trapped as he does entranced by his duties as captain. It’s an interesting shade of the character that gives some added dimension that I appreciated.
Of course, the episode ends with Bones finding a cure and getting everyone back in shape before things get too too terrible. The ticking clock of the orbited planet collapsing creates some easy but solid stakes for Scotty to get in and take control of the ship back. That said, the whole time dilation thing seems like a pretty weird throw-in that doesn’t seem to accomplish much, but whatever.
Overall, this is an episode that scores higher marks that its similarly-tuned predecessors for showing new sides and depths in its main characters, throwing in some goofy sci-fi fun, and a particularly great performance from Leonard Nimoy. There’s still some cheese that takes some getting used to for me as a viewer in 2016, but it’s a big step in the right direction.