84. The Lorelei Signal FORMULA: Mudd's Women + The Deadly Years
WHY WE LIKE IT: The women of the Enterprise finally get their chance to be action heroes.
WHY WE DON'T: The singing is pretty bad.
REVIEW: The myth of the sirens is brought to the Star Trek universe with The Lorelei Signal, which really scans like a third season episode, what with the heavy-handed science fantasy. There's no real reason why a planet would emit radiation that would kill all males, but give females the powers needed to attract and subjugate other males from across the universe. No reason except to make this story possible. It's patently ridiculous, and the revelation comes as dull exposition towards the end.
That said, the incapacitation of all the male crewmembers gives the ladies a real chance to shine, and that's something I would have liked to see on the original series proper. Uhura is great in command of the starship (Nichelle Nichols being more engaging than most in her line readings), and Nurse Chapel gets something to do as well. I get a real kick out of seeing an all-woman security team blaze away with phasers. The all-female antagonists actually manage to look beautiful despite the often generic drawing style of the series, and their culture's architecture is successful too. A great alien look that could probably not have been achieved on the live-action series.
Marks off for the rather awful singing, not only the notes associated with the women's powers, but Scotty's ballad as well. Taurus II was visited before in The Galileo Seven, so that seems to be a bit of a nomenclature snafu. And again, it looks like more recent series mined from the cartoon, since the plot is very close to Voyager's Favorite Son.
LESSON: Female Starfleet officers are every bit as competent as their male counterparts... and much less prone to fall for a pretty face.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Loved to see Uhura in command (though I'm a big Sulu fan, Uhura may have surpassed him as my favorite original crewmember since I started watching the entire canon), but the story suffers from a harebrained premise.
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