I’ll grant you, Nimoy’s performance in “Incident” was the one good thing about the episode. On the other hand, I’ve never particularly cared for Joanne Linville (except when she was the murderer’s alcoholic wife in an episode of Columbo) and thought her character (the unnamed “Romulan Commander”) was both whiny and thoroughly inept. After she was repatriated (assuming she’d be foolish enough to agree to such a thing; I’d ask for asylum!), she was probably put to death by slow torture for allowing her female hormones to give the Federation one of the biggest espionage coups of all time (and seriously compromising the Empire’s national security).
Watching Spock be seduced by a hard-as-nails Romulan woman dripping with exotic sexuality—THAT would have made for a great story! Not sipping orange soda and doing that touchy-feely finger-stroking thing. (Yes, I know that’s “the Vulcan way,” but it’s still boring as hell to watch!)
I liked it anyway, thought it was kinda cool, though like any spy-mission thriller story, the plot has more holes than a Jarlsberg cheese warehouse after a machine-gun battle. If there’s any aspect of “Enterprise Incident” that annoys me, it’s that TNG-era writers seemed to think it established that Vulcans never lie, and used this as an occasional plot point. Even though Spock claims this is true, he’s lying about everything else, so obviously he’s lying about that, too.
I can just imagine some bigwig in the Romulan Senate turning to the guy next to him and saying “See? I *told *you it was a bad idea to put a woman in command of a warship!”
A big problem for any series like this is to explain why all the civilizations in the galaxy are close enough technologically to have interesting conflicts.
Since the galaxy is old, there should be races millions of years more advanced. In TOS the advanced races mostly want to be left alone, like the Organians, or are invisible in some way, like the “parents” in Charlie X. Q calls attention to this problem a bit much.
The other solution is to have all but humans stagnate. How could humans catch up with Vulcans so quickly given that Vulcans have had warp drive for a really long time?
“The Enterprise Incident” (inspired by the USS Pueblo incident, USS Pueblo (AGER-2) - Wikipedia) wasn’t the best episode, but it did give us the great line, “Commander, your attire is not only more appropriate [after she changed into something slinky], it should actually stimulate our conversation.”
Since others have given favorite-episode lists, I will too.
TOS
“The City on the Edge of Forever”
“Amok Time”
“Journey to Babel”
“Court Martial”
“The Conscience of the King”
“Shore Leave”
“This Side of Paradise”
“The Devil in the Dark”
“The Trouble with Tribbles”
“The Doomsday Machine”
TNG
“The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1”
“Family”
“Data’s Day”
“Ship in a Bottle”
“The Chase”
“Parallels”
“Cause and Effect”
“First Contact”
“Darmok”
“The First Duty”
“The Perfect Mate”
“Face of the Enemy”
“Tapestry”
“Timescape”
“Firstborn”
“Yesterday’s Enterprise”
“The Inner Light”
“11001001”
“All Good Things…”
Oh man! I watched Wolf In The Fold recently - it’s painful.
As ide from Scotty’s apparent enjoyment of a Planet of Women of Easy Virtue (SCOTT: You mean to tell me all these women, that all this is…
KIRK: Yes, yes, yes. The Argelians think very highly of their pleasure.)
the whole episode relies on the entire senior staff *actually believing *Scotty could butcher several women because a woman had the audacity to cause an accident that gave him a little bimp on the noggin.
I saw it more as, Scotty might have suffered some brain damage that changed his personality and made him irrationally violent. But yes, TOS could be pretty sexist.
Agreed on both counts. I mean, the lights go out for 5 seconds, and Scotty’s holding a bloody dagger. I’d suspect my own grandmother if she was holding a bloody dagger in that short space of time.
The moral of Turnabout Intruder is the wimmins can’t run space ships.
“The City on the Edge of Forever”
“Amok Time”
“Journey to Babel”
“Space Seed”
“Errand of Mercy”
“Arena”
“Tomorrow was Yesterday”
“The Devil in the Dark”
“The Trouble with Tribbles”
“The Doomsday Machine”
An episode written by someone with no knowledge of genetics or evolution. Even if they got seeded a long time ago, there was clearly time for all the races to evolve, and thus no reason they’d develop in lockstep.
