31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 2 (Still More Spooky Star Trek Episodes)

Captain's log, Stardate 75802.5. Once again we find ourselves analyzing whatever spooky-themed content we can get out of everyone's favorite non magical girl based-utopia, Star Trek. This time we're at least branching out a bit. Whereas the previous two entries focused specifically on The Next Generation, here we have a sample platter. Three episodes, each from a different Star Trek series, all spooky-themed enough to warrant inclusion here. As for the quality of the episodes... well. We'll just have to get to that as we engage with them. Hah. See, I did a thing. Let's start with...


STAR TREK TOS 2x07- CATSPAW

The short version: Boo! Haunted house! IN SPACE! Is what it should have been the whole way through.


I never expected to come to the original series on the blog like this. The original adventures of Captain Kirk and friends from back in the 60's. I watched a whole bunch of the original series off of TV sometime after my Enterprise project. Good ones were cherrypicked and enjoyed to a degree, but it didn't light my world on fire. I guess you have to had gone through the syndication run like five times before you start penning half of modern Star Trek to be 60's throwback references. Anyway, this episode was not among the ones I watched back then. I can see why. It opens strong, though! And by strong I mean it could have been a cheesy campy Star Trek Halloween special. There's fog, and floating witch heads in the sky warning of curses, and a spooky castle with a black cat! It could have been 50 minutes of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy getting spooked in a haunted castle in space. That would have been brilliant. Instead that vanishes 15 minutes in and we get some bald dude cosplaying as a wizard, and the black cat turns into a sexy 60's lady.


The episode briefly gets interesting when the cat lady performs "sympathetic magic", putting a little model Enterprise under a candle and fucking up the real one as a threat to Captain Kirk. Then the back half becomes this dire and trite affair involving the cat lady wanting to join with Kirk to understand humanity, and it's all played with weird sexual tension and Kirk gets to make out with her and oh GOD this doesn't play well. The climax is briefly goofy again with the spurned cat lady turning into a giant cat (really just the same black cat from before filmed in smaller corridors and bluescreened here and there) to chase everyone, there's a fight scene with possessed Enterprise members, Captain Kirk breaks a magic wand and everything vanishes. There's 20 minutes of spooky campy fun here mixed with 30 minutes of dire bullshit. So close to being great. Shame.


STAR TREK TNG 7x19- GENESIS

The short version: I turned myself into a spider, Captain! I'M SPIDER BARCLAYYYYYY!!!


Oh, Barclay. How I love you in episodes that aren't Hollow Pursuits. (And even there, he's not the problem of the episode.) The opening has him being his usual hypocondriac self in Dr. Crusher's sickbay, and he's just the best nervous little delight who's relatable. He also gets a shot here which kickstarts the episode. It's de-evolution gone mad. Shit takes a while to get going, but people are acting strangely on the ship. Worf melts Dr. Crusher's face with venom! I mean, you don't see her melted face but she's out of action for the rest of the episode and will need surgery, but her face got fucked up. 20 minutes in, Picard and Data come back from an away mission to find a survival horror sort of scene. It's effective enough stuff, and the makeup design on the de-evolved crew is on point. Troi is the fourth Battletoad, Riker's a caveman, Barclay's a fucking spider, and Worf is some nightmare hellbeast who chases Picard around in the climax. This kind of thing would have made me terrified if I saw it on broadcast. As of now, it's effective spooky monster bullshit. Perfectly fine with a good mystery attached, and probably the best episode of the three today. Let's finish with...


ENTERPRISE 2x23- REGENERATION

The short version: Blah blah blah resistance futile.

Hello, Enterprise! Haven't touched you since To Boldly Step Forward ended. A year and a half ago. That makes this the only Enterprise episode to date I have seen twice. Almost fitting it's this one, then. This is the Borg's one appearance on Enterprise, and it's a bunch of timey wimey nonsense which both ties into the second TNG movie, First Contact, and retroactively sets up the Borg's introduction/interest in humanity from the TNG TV series. There's a lot of interesting metaphor to be had regarding the Borg, relating to them being the dark mirror of Starfleet's mission. This episode just has them as big stompy assimilation robots to get shot. There's a brief moral dilemma with Captain Archer wanting to save them, but the episode goes nowhere with that and has him go "yeah they're fucked, blow 'em to hell.". Eep. The opening ten minutes are an effective pastiche of John Carpenter's The Thing, but beyond that it's about the NX-01 dealing with something from the future and trying to stop it. In a way, it's a perfect microcosm of the Borg and Enterprise the show. The Borg are introduced as frozen cybernetic assimilators at the North Pole, almost like the Cybermen in Doctor Who. The two alien species aren't equivalent in their origins or thematic resonances... except when writers dumb them down to big stompy assimilation robots. Oops. More to the point, we have Enterprise haunted by future continuity. This not only works in context with the Temporal Cold War story arc the show's first three seasons have, but foreshadows its last season when it becomes fetishistic TOS continuity/prequel porn for nerds who watched the 60's show all the way through on syndication five times over. Assimilation really was inevitable. Fuck. That'll do it for us in Star Trek land, I guess. Next time... uh, another spooky movie. Or game. I dunno yet! See you tomorrow for the answer.