The Naked Time

Question: what if everyone on the Enterprise got really drunk at the same time? Answer: this episode. Actually, the only really drunk people here were probably the ones who came up with this.

When the federation loses contact with an outpost, our heroes are sent to investigate. An odd scene awaits them. Everyone in the place is dead, and they appear to have died in bizarre ways, as if they’d all gone mad. This certainly should have suggested an infection of some sort, but naturally one of the guys on the away team removes his glove and immediately picks up a case of red goo.

The infection’s incubation period is just long enough to allow the guy to infect several other people before his symptoms manifest. McCoy later discovers that the disease affects the absorption of oxygen in the blood, basically making this a walking case of nitrogen narcosis. In other words, everyone who contracts the illness becomes so “drunk” that his or her inner self comes out.

That’s not so good when the inner self of helmsman Sulu is to take off his shirt and chase people around with a fencing foil rather than steering the ship. And even worse, the navigator turns into an off-key-singing, always-after-me-Lucky-Charms-brogue-speaking nutcase who takes over the engine room, shutting down the engines and plunging the ship dangerously close to the planet’s surface.

To be sure, this has a your-conservative-coworkers-letting-loose-at-the-office-Christmas-party quality to it. It’s bush-leagues fun to watch familiar characters behaving in unfamiliar ways (Sulu slashing, Spock crying, Nurse Chapel turning into a love-struck schoolgirl, and so on). But the novelty doesn’t sustain the running time.

Indeed, the writer seems to run out of story long before the episode concludes. So what we get as “filler” is one of the most annoying tricks in the screenwriter’s bag: wasting time by arguing about how we’re running out of time. Maybe it’s just force of habit acquired from teaching teenagers for a living, but several times during this episode I found myself mumbling, “If you’d quit bickering about how you’re running out of time and get back to work, you’d be less likely to run out of time.”

Episode rating:

Stardate: 1704.2

Episode type: Enterprise crew

Written by: John D.F. Black

Original air date: September 29,1966

Where No Man Has Gone Before / The Enemy Within

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