WHY WE LIKE IT: Scotty!
WHY WE DON'T: Plot holes aplenty.
REVIEW: The Season 2 finale closes on a most frustrating cliffhanger, and that's even before you realize the current strikes in Hollywood will delay the third. But it's not the only frustration, unfortunately. As we'll see, this is an episode where things happen because the writers have decided they have to, not because they make sense or are organic to the story or characters. And some of the beats aren't very surprising because they've been telegraphed during the season - a conflict with the Gorn (see Secondary Watching for how I learned to stop caring about Gorn continuity) and Captain Batel surely being doomed. Which is not to say there aren't some exciting things on show.
The setting is a colony built on the "small town model", which is a neat wink to TOS episodes shot on the backlot. The Cayuga's there, and giving Chapel a ride to her fellowship, putting two of the Enterprise officers' romantic partners in deadly danger when the Gorn attack. It's not fridging, but the refrigerator door is definitely open. Further, the Enterprise can't approach the planet because the Gorn have drawn a line in space, a line that makes absolutely no sense. it shouid include the whole system, but cuts between the planet and its moon, which means things are going to pop in and out of "Gorn space" all the time. But we need the Enterprise to be very close by so it can pull off a rescue. We're meant to be afraid for Chapel since she returned to the now-destroyed Cayuga, especially since it appears she wasn't in the shuttle that crashed on the planet at invasion's start, but we know she has to survive to star in TOS. But more on her later.
Pike, Ortegas, La'an, M'Benga and Sam Kirk fly down hidden in debris, which would be more clever if they hadn't kind of done this in the season opener (but to be fair, the impressed Pike wasn't there). They find Batel who doesn't want to be found (as it turns out, she's unsurprisingly been infected with Gorn eggs) and at least a hundred colony and crew members. Plus the owner of the downed shuttle, once Lt. Montgommery Scott. So... I've been wary of SNW using too many TOS characters, but nothing contradicts his appearance here. Martin Quinn is quite a fun Scotty, somewhere halfway between James Doohan's miracle worker and Simon Pegg's comic relief (and actually Scottish, unlike these other gentlemen). Being here (and this useful) doesn't mean he'll stay on the Enterprise, but it seems likely, perhaps as a junior officer in Pelia's team (because they haven't really done that much with her, I'd hate to see Carol Kane leave).
And speaking of Pelia, she and Uhura come up with a crazy scheme to crash the Cayuga's saucer on the interference field transmitter that's preventing Enterprise from beaming up all the survivors, which requires Spock (and according to him, ONLY HIM, no real explanation given) to manually place thrusters on its hull so it appears to be falling debris. Here, possibly, is where things go off the rails. We soon discover that Chapel somehow survived aboard the saucer. No one else did (or if they did, they're killed by this scheme), and she didn't do anything special TO survive. It's just a massive coincidence and pretty impossible to believe. Like, sheesh, have more people survive, but die in the next few minutes, while Chapel finds a space suit, or whatever. Her hope is well played - when she sees the Enterprise out the window, when she sees Spock floating by - and they both come across an adult Gorn in a really cool spacesuit, do some Zero-G fighting, each get their licks in, kill it and escape as they are backlit by the crashing saucer. Nice eye candy, but it's hard to accept the premise. Also difficult to accept is that the saucer doesn't essentially NUKE the colony. Everyone's fine to beam back.
Or just the trio getting Gorn-spoofing tech out of Scott's shuttle and the pair who just evacuated the saucer. The rest have been beamed up by the Gorn, and nothing good can come of that. The cliffhanger hits with this bit of information imparted, Batel in sickbay about to "give birth", the Gorn attacking the ship, and Pike going from determined to disobey orders to save his crew and the colonists (not to mention his love) to befuddled, confused, and in shock, a moment I've heard some people really disliked, but that's really just an extended cliffhanger bit - I fully expect him to shout out a very decisive order a second later. Man needs to collect his thoughts in the wake of all this, y'know?
SECONDARY WATCHING: While we could just about believe interacting with Gorn younglings (and ships) fit with Arena's claims that no one in Starfleet had ever seen a Gorn, this episode very much contradicts it with Spock and Chapel both setting eyes on an adult. However, the only real bit of a dialog that points to Starfleet never having met the Gorn is that Kirk says the alien captain is something "apparently called a Gorn", as if the word is new to him, in which case, it's always been a contradiction. Otherwise, the "alien" ship is always too far for identification, and all Spock really says is that this part of space is uncharted (in other words, he can know the Gorn and not know they're behind the legends of aggressive aliens in these parts). It's all down to that small bit of Captain's Log (and, if you want to be more critical, the fact Spock, Uhura, Scotty, etc. don't mention recognizing the word or the beings). The interference field from this episode also features in Arena, as there too, something is interfering with coms (and possibly, with sensors).
LESSON: MacGuyver wouldn't have gotten good grades.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: Some very cool stuff happens, and you don't want to miss Young Scotty's debut, but boy, do things happen because the script says they should.
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