3x04 And the Children Shall Lead

[5.3/10] Oftentimes Star Trek is better at setting up and unwinding mysteries than it is at paying them off. Sometimes it gets tiresome, and you just want the show to pull the trigger already. Sometimes the payoff is just as good as the setup and you have a truly great episode. But even in some of the show’s cruddiest outings, the air of mystery and intrigue the show is able to create before the turn is impressive.

That’s definitely truly for an episode like “And the Children Shall Lead” which gets instantly duller and less interesting when the mystery is effectively resolved at the end of the first act. “Children” begins with our heroes beaming down to Triacus, another ill-fated Federation colony, and finding all the adults dead. The children, however, are still alive and seem blissfully unconcerned about their parents’ deaths.

It’s not much, but the episode gets most of its power from the eeriness of those disturbing, undisturbed children. There is a natural disconnect between the grim ends met by the colonist, and the cheery playful nature of their offspring, both on the planet and on the Enterprise. The kids express no grief -- something Bones heavy-handedly harps on -- and it becomes clear they had some part in their parents’ deaths.

The question of what form that took holds plenty of engrossing mystery to it, which gains strength from the disquieting notion of little kids participating in some kind of murder spree. The impulsive nature of the kids, their “busy bee” deflection at questions about what happened down on the planet, and their blaming the adults for “liking it down there” too much raise all sorts of unnerving questions about what they may have participated in.

But then, this Junior Planeteer collection of moppets does a standard Freddy Krueger-esque rhyme and summons Gorgan, the beast of stilted doubletalk and overwritten exposition. His “Wizard of Oz meets Wilson from Home Improvement presence gives us an easy answer -- Gorgan is giving the kids the power of psychic suggestion and goads them into using it to get him to someplace he can mentally capture even more people to fuel his evil.

The episode digs a little more into the lore of triacus. Gorgan is apparently part of some legend of some kind of ancient evil, and there’s a cave that gives Kirk massive anxiety, and spooky last tapes of the adults trying to warn others about what happened. But it’s all pretty paint-by-numbers “malevolent force” stuff, and it’s really just window dressing for the bulk of the episode, which quickly becomes a slog.

That would be the parlor tricks offered by the kids themselves as they slowly but surely take over the ship. Tommy and his cohort spend most of the episode making the “rock, paper, scissors” motion and causing the crew of the Enterprise to hallucinate various horrors or receive mental suggestions that set them headed to a neighboring, more populated planet so that Gorgan can work his evil.

It’s not a bad premise, but the episode lingers on it for so long with scenes that just drag and drag. We spend minute after minute of Sulu gawking at a vision of space filled with swords for some reason. We constantly come back to Uhura touching her face as she has to gaze upon the Monster of the Underfunded Makeup Department. (As an aside, there’s an unfortunate undercurrent to Star Trek where Uhura is characterized as being somewhat vain.) A redshirt lieutenant hears all of Kirk’s words backwards rather than forwards. They’re pretty silly demonstrations of the kids’ powers, and the episode repeatedly lingers on them to the point of doldrum.

It doesn’t help that Kirk and Spock basically act like idiots when sniffing out the kids’ ploy and trying to stop it. I’m not one to ding a show or movie too hard for having the main characters avoid a potentially straightforward solution in favor of one that’s more complicated but which has better storytelling potential. But here, the show’s main duo spend much of the episode just trying to shake the crew back to sanity, even after they realize the kids have powers and are not to be trusted.

They don’t take precautions. They themselves get hypnotized via the poorly-defined powers of the moppets. And they just wander around the ship, with the effect the kids had on them unclear, rather than turning toward obvious solutions, presumably to fill time. Why no one ever tries to hypospray the kids unconscious until things get back under control, or beam them to an isolated holding cell, or Vulcan nerve pinch them, or do any of the kinds of things Kirk always does to get out of a scrape is beyond me.

It all builds to Kirk summoning Gorgan and showing the kids video footage (which he, oddly, refers to as “some photos”) of them playing with their parents, and then of their parents being dead and buried. The script is murky about how and why this would work, but it ties into a weakly-developed idea that the kids were compartmentalizing their grief, and that only by releasing it, could they overcome their own issues and, coincidentally enough, escape Gorgan’s grasp. It ties into a weird and again, underdeveloped notion of humanity having to let go of fear and anxiety.

There’s some potency in these themes, but they’re at least a couple drafts away from being realized in any coherent or compelling manner. The episode still wrings some horror out of the admittedly creepy idea of innocent little kids being under the sway of a malevolent force, but most of the episode is so dull, so dumb, or so muddied in terms of what’s happening or what it’s trying to say, that it never gets very far in the effort.

There’s real mystery in the question of what would drive kids to do such a thing, and why they’re acting so strange, but as soon as it answers that question, “And the Children Shall Lead” simply plays out the string with uninteresting magic tricks and poor story choices for its leads. The creepiness suffices in places, but on the whole, it’s a thoroughly unsatisfying episode, particularly given its potential.