97. The Pirates of OrionFORMULA: Journey to Babel + For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
WHY WE LIKE IT: Our first face-to-face meeting with Orion males, and the Kirk-Spock-McCoy friendship is central again.
WHY WE DON'T: Or-EE-on? That should be Or-EYE-un!
REVIEW: The Orions return, and this time, we get to see them in the flesh. You might remember that aside from a couple of slave girls, all we ever saw of the Orions in the original series was a ship effect (in Journey to Babel), and even that wasn't clear. They don't disappoint. The Orions themselves are a good design without being anything really special, but their ship is pretty cool. You can sort of believe it would be from the same culture that produced the spinning star design seen earlier. The SS Huron isn't as cool, looking more than a little bulky, but it's not an uninteresting freighter, and I did like the idea of Starfleet merchant marines.
What most impressed me about The Pirates of Orion, however, was the acting. William Shatner usually gives a merely adequate performance on these, never too emotional. But here, with Spock's life in danger, you can hear a sense of urgency in Kirk's voice throughout. It's on par with the live-action stuff. The original series became increasingly concerned with the friendship between Kirk, Spock and McCoy, but the animated series didn't make it as central. By bringing it back full force, the episode gets emotional weight it otherwise wouldn't have had.
Throw in some good action and some fairly adult politics, and you've got an episode I'd have liked to see be part of canon.
LESSON: The Animated Series didn't have a pronounciation guide attached to its scripts, apparently.
REWATCHABILITY - High: It does one thing wrong, really, and that's mispronouncing the word Orion. It does many things right, chief among them exploring the bond between the three stars of the show, and showing us what Orions are like, something we' d been denied during the original series.
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