I'll be away both Saturday and Sunday, so here's tomorrow's ST review...71. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
FORMULA: By Any Other Name + The Alternate Factor
WHY WE LIKE IT: A decent and memorable fable about prejudice, and the first use of the auto-destruct sequence.
WHY WE DON'T: An invisible ship? Sheeesh. The well's really drying up.
REVIEW: Reevaluating all the episodes can sometimes be disappointing, I'm afraid. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was well remembered, but though it still has a lot of qualities, this season's penchant for science fantasy tries to ruin it. In science fantasy, things happen by magic, without the need for actual scientific justification. In this episode, for example, Bele flies an invisible ship (cheap!) that disappears upon delivering him to the Enterprise. He's able to command the ship with his mind, and make it fly at warp 10 (different scale than later explained, I hope). He and Lokai are tens of thousands of years old, and have skin pigmentation that defies standard biology. It goes on like that quite a bit.
In a sense, this is the series' most overt morality play. We're in fable land, pure and simple, and things happen just so they can teach us about the absurdity of racism. Though well acted, it's a bit heavy-handed. There are references to slavery, the civil rights movement, Vietnam and creationism vs. evolutionism. When Bele explains the difference between the two races, it's a good moment, and the make-up is very dramatic and effective.
The direction, for its part, is uneven. The auto-destruct sequence, played just on eyes and mouths, is very tense - I just wish Kirk had more reason to blow up the ship (when he couldn't do so in By Any Other Name). The final chase to Cheron looks silly, though the cross-fades to burning cities makes it more emotional. And I don't know if they were going for a hommage to Frank Gorshin (Bele)'s role as the Riddler on Batman with the red alert zoom-in-zoom-out camera action, but it's simply ridiculous and out of place.
Finally, though premise, acting and make-up all work quite well (as does the resigned and downbeat ending), this is a story where things happen just to drive the morality play forward. Aside from the things already mentioned, there's the fact Kirk knows Cheron is in an uncharted part of space (so how does he know?); that he can easily return from there at episode's end; that despite their long lifespans, Bele can't wait even a minute to get back there; that Spock can listen in on a conversation through a crack in the door; that the crew has heard about prejudice in the 20th century, but have no experience with it in their own lives, conveniently forgetting some of the comments made about Spock over the years, among others; that the destruct sequence gives Kirk a sizeable extention after the 5-second mark; etc. etc. These contrivences weaken the episode sizeably.
LESSON: If you haven't gotten it by now, you never will.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Could easily have been a High, but the emotional impact is softened by obvious speechifying and pulpit-thumping, as well as too many contrived elements in the script.
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