3x18 The Lights of Zetar

[5.1/10] With serialized television being the norm these days, there’s something that almost feels like a throwback when watching an episodic show like Star Trek. Sure, every once in a while Kirk will remember the Corbomite Maneuver or Sulu will remember the silicon creature they encountered, but for the most part you could watch this show in any order and it would make sense. That’s the advantage of shows that tell complete stories in 44 minutes.

But the big catch to that way of doing things is that it means events and developments that typically take a long time have to be compressed to fit into that mold. That means romance in particular is pretty well reduced to some combination of love at first sight, rekindling an old flame, or at best, some kind of montage to show affection growing over a longer period of time. Oftentimes the show needs its characters, Kirk in particular, to do grand things “for love” and it gets dicey when the audience just met the object of affection fifteen minutes ago.

“Lights of Zetar” gives Scotty the chance to play romantic lead this time, with Mira, a young researcher who’s on her first interstellar mission to be dropped off at Memory Alpha, the Federation’s Library of Alexandria. (As an aside, it’s a minor thrill for Memory Alpha to feature so prominently here, since it’s also the name of the Star Trek wiki, a great source for folks like me who want to know more about the background and behind the scenes details of episodes like this one.) The episode opens with the two making goo goo eyes at one another, and Scotty coming close to minor dereliction of duty to be with his lady love.

The strange thing is, it kind of works. It feels like there’s a bit of an awkward age gap, but Scotty’s such a devoted pup, so worried about Mira, that the relationship almost does what it needs to do in the story (sans Kirk’s overdone voiceover explanation of it). “Zetar” requires that Scotty and Mira be willing to risk death for one another, that the prospect of being together is enough for Mira to use the literal power of love to flush away the evil that possesses her. That’s more than a bit of a stretch, given how recently we met Mira, and it ultimately leaves the climax feeling a little empty, but on a scene-to-scene basis, it works well enough.

That’s the strange thing about these episodic stories -- sometimes they can get by on chemistry or storytelling necessity in the moment, but when you pull back and consider the “hey, they’ve only known each other for like a week” part, suddenly the magical abilities and unquestioned life-and-death devotion of their romance starts to feel a little far fetched.

There’s also a great deal of tedium in “Zetar.” I’m starting to understand why fans of The Original Series harp so much on the preponderance of boardroom scenes in The Next Generation. They’ve been scarred by the long, go nowhere scenes of Kirk and Spock reasoning things out in the TOS-era boardroom. The interrogation (for lack of a better term) of Mira where our heroes find out that she is, in fact, connected to the floating bubble of fireworks that’s been stalking the Enterprise and wiped out the librarians on the Memory Alpha planetoid, feels of a piece with the one in “Wolf in the Fold.” Both feature the main characters laboriously establishing the bona fides of the plot detail necessary to move the story forward.

At the same time, there is at least some creepiness factor in the episode. While the episode eventually goes overboard with it, the initial zoom in to Mira’s iris followed by the fireworks going off is a neat effect. By the same token, the folks talking in croaks and rumbles while their faces change color is a nicely unnerving image. And Mira’s conversation with the crew when she’s possessed by the Zetans is in line with the deep-timbred scares of The Exorcist.

“Zetar” also gets points for the novelty of the idea behind the episode, even if the execution is a little dull. Strange energy beings in space are nothing new for Star Trek, but the idea that this is a collection of 10,000 minds of a depleted society, looking for a vessel and probing the brains of anyone they come across to see if they’re a suitable host toes the line nicely between science fiction and horror. My natural thought, coming to this show backwards, is that the Zetans were clearly the inspiration for the Brainspawn of Futurama (right down to attacking a library), but there’s also a sense of the psychological horror and weirdness of Being John Malkovich too.

Still, the episode stumbles considerably from that same old Star Trek problem -- too much run time and not enough plot. The episode repeats the stakes -- that there’s a mysterious spark cloud attacking people, that Mira is having a reaction to it, that the Enterprise crew doesn’t know what to do -- without advancing things much until the very end of the episode. What’s odd is that the “Zetar” is also pretty sparse on music. I have to admit I chuckle more than a bit at some of the show’s dramatic musical stings or romantic swoons, but scenes can seem pretty barren, even flat, without that accompaniment.

That’s partly because when there’s no music on a pulpy show like Star Trek, it comes down to the actors and the writers to sell the entire emotional state of the episode. The actors who play Scott and Mira give it their all, and there’s some chemistry there, but it’s too much to ask them to sell the audience on the magnitude of a romantic pairing that only started at the beginning of the episode. “Zetar” never really shows us why Scotty and Mira are so deeply in love, or why they’d take such risks for one another, it just announces that they are and then expects that to be good enough. It’s not, and while the idea behind their devotion has some intrigue, as does the out there sci-fi premise of the story, that leaves “Zetar” feeling like one of the show’s lesser lights.