ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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This is the episode with a Garden of Eden like planet . . . with a few differences, like rocks that explode when you step on them, and absolutely no sex between the love guy and gals who live there.

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TOS episode #38 - The Apple

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_______________ TOS 2x05 'The Apple' Trailer


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Qualty wise, the 2nd season contained more entertaining episodes than even the first, and it also had more of those with awkward weaknesses which leaned towards silliness, whether due to the writing, directing and/or acting.

Shatner began to seriously overact around this time in a few of the episodes — he wasn't hamming it up in the first season. So, while we felt for him every time a crewmember was killed in 1st season episodes, here there's a tendency to encourage viewers to chuckle (the first doomed red-shirt gets it via a plant. Kirk/Shatner: "What'd somebody say? . . . That . . . Paradise! . . . must've looked like this?!" — oh, that angst).



The other weakness here is a rather truncated feel to the writing — many questions remain unanswered by the end. Why would there be land mines as rocks, for example, scattered around an otherwise idyllic world? So, the god-machine might have placed them there against . . . what? Visitors from space (in this case, red-shirts from space)?

And exactly who or what is this Vaal? How did it come to rule over these villagers? What do they feed it? It looked to me like they were carrying typical food down into the bowels of wherever Vaal resides. How would a machine gain sustenance from such food?

It just seems that much of the plot points are arbitrary, like the threats which are presented merely as a means to kill off red-shirts in various manners. Chekov, for example, couldn't care less about the dangers or his fallen comrades, as you can see above.



And yet, even with all these flaws there is still that loopy entertainment factor in place, enough to make this cheerful viewing on a Saturday morning, for instance. The scenery here, the recreation of some lush, exotic jungle, reminds me of some of the typical low budget sci-fi from the Golden Age of Sci-Fi Cinema in the fifties; or the better sci-fi kids shows in the seventies, like (Land of the Lost — remember that one?).

This episode also contains one of my favorite melodramatic proclamations from Scotty: rather than just telling Kirk that he can't beam the party back up, he stresses that not even a fly could be beamed up! That surely gets the point across!



Extra Trek Trivia: That is David Soul as one of the strange, eternally young natives of this planet; he went on to fame as one of the cops on the Starsky & Hutch TV series in the seventies; he was Hutch.

~ Saucer separation is mentioned in this episode; we would finally see a visual of this in the 1st episode of TNG.

~ This is also the episode in which Kirk actually fires Scotty. He rehired him at the end of the episode and Scotty made sure he had more creative solutions for Kirk in later episodes.

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BoG's Score: 6 out of 10


BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)