Star Trek 030: Operation - Annihilate!

30. Operation - Annihilate!

WHY WE LIKE IT: Good suspense and use of a location. And Spock's blinding is a classic moment.

WHY WE DON'T: The crew fights flying pancakes. That's hard to get over.

REVIEW: Sure, the Denevan parasites look fairly silly, especially once they start squeaking, but they do make an interesting and unusual monster. The story has a good pace, with plenty of danger and investigation. Kirk comes out as the best thinker in the bunch, and this story is made personal for him by his family being on Deneva.

I was worried about all the red herrings however. Oh, not in the investigation of the parasites per se, but in the storyline. Kirk's brother dies and gives him extra motivation to destroy the creatures, but the end of the episode seems to forget this, finishing on a much too light-hearted note. Similarly, Spock's blinding, while an excellent dramatic moment, serves no purpose. He need not have been blinded (the tests show that a minute after he's out of the tanning machine), he doesn't have to deal with his blindness for any real length of time, and then everything's neatly reset thanks to an inner eyelid. So why do it, except as a cliffhanger before going to commercial? There's always a danger of giving Spock too many tricks, and in this case, it crosses over into deus ex machina.

I'm not panning the episode though. It still generates interest, and the the production values are relatively high. I like how the parasites are destroyed at the end - great effect - and the location used (the TRW headquarters) looks convincing as a futuristic colony. Good idea too to let William Shatner play the body of Kirk's death brother. I *thought* they looked alike! The actors are good too, Spock twitching from the pain, Kirk grieving for his family and friend.

LESSON: Before blinding your first officer, why not wait the extra 2 minutes for the lab results next time?

REWATCHABILITY - Medium: It's too bad either tragedy (the death of George Samuel Kirk and Spock' blindness) wasn't more central to the story, which is one of the let-downs of an otherwise well-crafted monster story.