“Even worse” than “The Enterprise Incident”? By DC Fontana? With Joanne Linville as the Romulan Commander? This is a stone classic–one of the best of the season (along with “All Our Yesterdays”) and series.
I always found ‘The Apple’ to be a hilarious episode; in college we would MST3K it, before there was MST3K. Easy to do.
Surely you’re joking! :eek: :smack:
Second favorite moment: Kirk and Spock hugging trees while bolts of lightning fall all around them. How can Vaal zap a Redshirt but miss those two?!? :smack: 
I rather like The Enterprise Incident.
Illogical. :dubious:
My logic is…uncertain concerning the Enterprise Incident.
^:dubious:^
Apropos of nothing, I can’t believe that Joanne Linville and Kelly Bishop (of “The Gilmore Girls”) aren’t the same person. They look and sound exactly the same to me (except for the 16 year difference in age).
I may have said this before here:
After getting made up like a Romulan, Kirk beams over to swipe the new, improved Cloaking Device. Don’t the Romulans have shields? Are we to believe that they had them down for some reason, or that the ongoing arms race left Star Fleet with a way to bypass them? Either way, nothing was mentioned. And even if so, the three Ships would have been watching everything like a hawk. They couldn’t detect a transporter beam coming from the Enterprise? They couldn’t detect an outsider suddenly aboard?
Kirk grabbing the Device: Way too easy. Okay, maybe, just maybe, such a device would be light enough to carry, and even easily detachable. We still have Kirk way too easily getting past suspicious guards. I had just seen it again last Saturday on MeTV. It had just struck me (hmmmm!) that Romulans should also have 3x human strength. There was nothing convincing about how Kirk clobbered them. At least when he overcame Khan it looked initially supremely difficult, even hopeless, and then he prevailed by fighting dirty. Kirk could have carried an easily concealable stunning device for the possibility of trouble.
“Throw the switch, Scotty!” Enough said!
There may have been other flaws with the episode that are greater.
Joanne Linville. I’m not the best judge of acting, but I can tell bad acting, and it certainly was not. But great acting by all would not have been able to save such a bad episode, IMO.
D.C. Fontana. Yes, she is certainly good at writing, perhaps great. Many fans complained about the Spock/Romulan make-out scene. They even said, “Curse you, D.C. Fontana.” Actually, it was unfortunate for her to get panned over this. The scene was added to the script by someone else. ISTR this was described in “World of Star Trek” by David Gerrold.
Let’s leave details aside. The episode was made in the wake of the Pueblo Incident.
Had anyone told the average viewer, either before or after watching the episode for the first time, they would have assumed that the U.S. had prevailed!
Well heck, Friends, one cannot travel faster than light, so the whole thing couldn’t have happened. 
Besides, D.C. Fontana’s Poetic License is signed by Gene.
The first draft of the script had Spock raining down kisses on the Romulan commander, an embellishment added to the script by Gene Roddenberry. It was removed at Leonard Nimoy’s insistence. The script as written by Fontana had a single kiss and embrace with most of the passion being delivered by the Romulan commander.
Spock was smitten.
From Memory Alpha:
While escorting her to her quarters on Deck 2, Spock tells the commander that he regrets that she was unwittingly brought aboard the Enterprise.
** He confesses that his only interest was the cloaking device when he came on board her ship, but now he tells her that his interest wasn’t all pretend. **
She tells him the Romulans will soon develop a way to penetrate the cloaking field technology Starfleet now possesses. “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all,” he says. “I hope you and I have exchanged something more permanent.” The commander and Spock agree that what has passed between them will be their secret.
Fontana and Nimoy were right, of course. And the dimensions their interpretations give to Spock are great.
I could speak to some of the elements Find Friends mentions, but they’re really beside the point, either way. This is, foremost, a Spock character episode, and an essential one.
Also, the finger caresses were a good touch, in keeping with Sarek and Amanda in Journey to Babel.
The merits/demerits of “The *Enterprise *Incident” were thoroughly discussed in this thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=760234&highlight=cloaking+device&page=1
Things get really lively around the middle of Page 2! 
cochrane and carnivorousplant, I seem to have misremembered the details of what I read about script rewrite. Either that, or what I read was wrong.
terentii, thanks for the link to the 2015 thread I had missed.
BTW, has anyone found it strange that the Romulans were working hard just to keep up with or surpass the Federation’s Star Fleet? It’s arguable that they lacked internal sensors. Same with having shields the Fleet could transport through, perhaps because of their own Arms Race advantages, fleeting or not.
Even assuming such speculation is wrong, they certainly seemed to have been lagging behind prior to the two developments shown in “Balance of Terror”. Maybe that helps explain why they lost the earlier war, despite the advantage of surprise. And they still didn’t seem to have warp drive at the time of BoT. (Some have speculated that free-standing space shortcuts would explain how they developed an Empire. It could also be used to explain certain other inconsistencies in TOS.)
The space-faring proto-Romulans go back to a time Vulcans barely remember. With such a head start, plus their intellect, I would have expected more.
Okay, I get that Kirk had to act crazy to keep the Federation off the hook, and he had to play dead to keep the Romulans fooled.
It still makes no sense to surgically alter Kirk, of all freakin’ people (you know, captain of a starship and all, responsible for more than 400 lives and the success of the mission), in the slim hope that he can pass as a Romulan and somehow steal the cloaking device out from under their noses and make off with it back to the *Enterprise * (in the even slimmer hope it can be hooked into the deflectors; what tech manual did Scotty pull *that *out of?).
Why not just have another Vulcan secreted on board who might be able to pull this off—you know, like a trained special ops officer? Somebody like Stonn, f’rinstance, who probably got sick of married life and volunteered for hazardous duty in Starfleet just to get as far away from home as possible?*
Spock confronting Stonn as he goes off quite probably to die would have been at least as interesting as him getting it on with the Romulan Commander, who, in addition to being neither particularly bright nor pretty, was a slave to her hormones.
Even better would have been Stonn putting his life in Spock’s hands, so we could wonder: Is Spock going to save him from being captured by the Romulans, or is he going to let him be hideously tortured for espionage? (Of course, we all know Spock would never do such a thing. No. Oh, no. Never!)
*Yes, this is something of a rhetorical question; they would, of course, have had to hire yet another guest star, which would have cost way too much. But I can dream, can’t I?
UNH-HUH. And if STONN runs into a horny, female Romulan security guard…what the F**K is he going to do???
Granted Kirk didn’t…but he COULD have.
For Kirk, the ultimate distraction! :eek:
After having sampled married life, however, Stonn would probably just give her a nerve pinch.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Spock being seduced by a hard-as-nails Romulan woman dripping with exotic sexuality—THAT would make a great episode. Not by some whiny nitwit who’s easier to fool than the average American voter.
I watched it a couple of days ago. Besides the fact that the mission made no sense, the Romulan commander was just too soft. I just couldn’t buy her as a military commander.