[5.0/10] Even for folks like me, who enjoy viewing wide-spanning works like television series or film franchises in big chunks to appreciate the way they hang together (or don’t), I occasionally wonder if I’m losing something for shows that originally aired weekly. For the most part, I watch Star Trek the same way many people did when it gained notoriety in reruns and syndication -- an episode a day, steadily making my way through the bulk of the series. But I wonder if leaving seven days between viewings, not to mention the usual breaks between seasons, would help combat that creeping sense of overfamiliarity.
That’s the sense that strikes me watching “That Which Survives.” It’s not a bad episode exactly. There’s a reasonably interesting threat for Kirk, Bones, and Sulu down on the planet, and a reasonably interesting corresponding problem for Spock and Scotty back on the enterprise. But it’s also such a combination of familiar, well-worn elements from past episodes that it’s hard to do much of anything but yawn at a dutiful construction of them.
The plot is fairly straightforward. Kirk, Bones, Sulu, and a doomed geologist plan to beam down to a mysterious planet. (It’s kind of murky why this planet is supposed to be so strange -- something about vegetation and atmosphere -- but the thrust is that our heroes are headed for Weirdsville.) A seemingly magical, scantily-clad (of course) woman appears as Kirk & Co. are beaming down, warning them not to go, and her touch seems to kill the transporter operator. Once they reach the planet, the away team realizes they’re stranded and investigates this planet where the woman keeps appearing and disappearing, while Spock and Scotty try to return the Enterprise, which has been flung a thousand light years away, to the mystery planet to rescue their crewmen.
It turns out that the mysterious woman, Losira, is some kind of robot who’s part of an old alarm and defense system, meant to protect the “station” there until travelers and refugees from the planet of the people who built her can arrive. Spock and Scotty manage to literally reverse the polarity on the Enterprise and fix the parts of the ship Losira damage, making it back just in time for Spock’s bagman to blast the alarm system, with enough time left over for Kirk, Spock, and Bones, to have the usual overdone philosophical reflection on the situation, replete with a cheesy line to go out on. (It was “beauty survives” for the record.)
The problem is that we’ve done pretty much all of this before. At a broad level of generality, you could probably but 75% of Star Trek into the “exploring strange planet while the crew back on the Enterprise works toward rescue” category. That’s not a big problem -- every series has certain formulas, particularly at this time. But getting more specific, we’ve done the “mysterious woman pops onto the ship, causes trouble, and disappears” bit before; we’ve done the “here’s the treknobabble answer to the problem that lets us get the ship where it needs to be just in time bit before; and I don’t know how many planets we’ve visited where some ancient, deceased species has set up some protective-to-the-point-of-dangerousness computer that causes our heroes trouble.
Repeating these tropes isn’t a storytelling sin in and of itself, but it means you have to find new twists and wrinkles on these sorts of narratives to make them feel interesting rather than tedious, and “Survives” doesn’t really do that.
We’ve played the seductive ladybot game before, and there’s not much to distinguish this from prior outings. Lee Meriweather (the second Catwoman actress to appear on Star Trek) is fine in a mostly-underwritten role. She knows (and announces) the biographies of each crewman she isolated, and that, coupled with her “I’m for you” statements add a certain creepiness. And the idea that her touch is deadly to the individual she’s trained on at the moment, but completely harmless to anyone else makes for a decent enough twist (and some amusing games of red rover with the away team). But for the most part, Losira is just the latest in the unfortunately long line of female characters on the show who’ve been in this same role, more or less.
That’s only worsened by the reveal that Losira was a semi-living security system for a doomed people. Apparently there are just scores of ancient aliens leaving advanced technology on distant planets and causing trouble for later generations. It feeds into the whole “survival” theme of the episode in a desultory fashion, but again, given how many times we’ve seen this, that last act unveiling doesn’t add much excitement to the proceedings.
Things should be a little better on the ship. Spock and Scotty is a pairing we don’t get very often, and so there’s some base-level intrigue in seeing the two of them play off one another. The rub is that Spock seems pretty out of character here, to the point where I wondered if part of the twist was that Losira was impersonating him or messing with his head or it was part of a feint of some kind a la “The Enterprise Incident.” He was rude, curt, and officious in a way that Spock, even in all of his Vulcan stoicism and logic, never is.
It’s a hard thing to put one’s finger on, but the script has him rebuking Scotty for speculation or a number of times, going to the “Spock interprets a metaphor literally” well too often, and all-in-all just has him seem more irritable and supercilious than unemotional and determined. There’s ways to go that direction with a character, and it’s not like you couldn’t show that side of Spock, but this just feels out of nowhere and off-brand.
It does, at least, turn out to be a nice outing for Scotty, who gets to have a hero moment in “Survives.” His willingness to go into that jeffries tube (though I don’t think they called them that yet) in order to try to fix the ship is a great character moment for the chief engineer. While the episode isn’t necessarily great at carrying out the tension of him trying to fix the problem while the helmswoman gives a countdown, but Scotty yelling at Spock to push the button that will jettison him and spare the rest of the crew is a great bit of selflessness from Scotty, and it’s a nice win for the both of them when Spock forebears and Scotty does manage to (again, literally) reverse the polarity in time (at Spock’s suggestion). It is, admittedly, a sort of nonsense solution to a nonsense problem, but it works well enough in the final moments.
That’s the best you can say for “Survives.” It’s a very functional episode, one that makes it through the standard Star Trek beats ably but unimpressively. Aside from Spock’s out of character qualities, the worst you can really say about it is that it’s a big heap of elements we’ve already seen without much new or different about them. Maybe going a week between episodes would have helped to mask that overfamiliarity, but watching this show every day, the similarities and repetition can start to wear, and particularly hurt episodes like “Survives” that lean hard on repurposed parts of older stories.
The visual effects are the best thing about this episode.
They are once again stranded on an alien planet. Once again they are isolated from the ship and must fight for survival. The stories get more repetitive with every episode, the space babes become hotter with every episode. It's ridiculous how beautiful this week's foe is. And she can be copied. Spectacular fade-out effect btw. It's not the worst episode though: the band of brothers down on the planet conveys some notion of comforting comradeship in a situation of great danger.
Fortunately, Spock illustrates his stunning skills as ersatz captain. He is intelligent, he's witty, he cares for his crew, he's calm, he even cracks a joke (not deliberately). He isn't a very likeable person but a respected person. That sort of rescues this episode. The B-plot ain't totally bad anyway. I like how Scotty trusts his gut feeling when monitoring the ship. I like how he repairs the engine. It's the first time in this show that I really feel like watching an engineering wizard.
In theory, there is a nice core: terminator robots defending a world no matter the fact that their builders have long vanished. It's classic Sci-Fi: the ethics and danger of autonomous killer robots! Of course, this is discussed only very briefly. It's more fun to watch Catwoman w/o contemplating philosophical issues. Cf. also the very similar The Arsenal of Freedom of TNG's first season.
PS: love how they go back to centigrade in the future. Bad news for Anders Celsius but it sounds very cool.
I remembered Lee Meriwether's character from this episode but nothing about the plot. Which tells you a thing or two. Lee has an incredible screen presence and she is drop dead gorgeous. Such a shame that the episode itself feels completely lifeless.
And they really went out of their way to make Spock extremely annoying, don't they ?
Ole Spock was a bit of a prick in this one eh
Shout by Bruce GeeBlockedParent2018-04-19T01:52:54Z
Cool effect for Lee Merriweather’s entrance and exit. Also fun to see Scotty crawling around in a livewire jeffries tube.