71 – The Mark of Gideon

Grade: D-

Summary

Kirk beams down to the planet Gideon all by himself, but suddenly finds himself stranded alone on the Enterprise. Meanwhile, Spock and crew don’t know what has happened to the captain, but the people of Gideon are apparently still waiting for him to beam down. Later, the captain finds a mindless blonde woman wandering around on the ship with him.

Commentary

Here’s another one of the worst episodes of this entire series. One of the biggest problems I have with it is how long it takes Spock to realize they have beamed down the Captain to different coordinates than it was reported at first. I’d expect one of the human crewmen to have accidentally transposed the last three digits of the coordinates, but not Spock. He can tell you exactly how much time has passed down to a tenth of a second. It’s extremely unlikely he would have made the mistake shown in this episode.

On top of that, why would this planet have gone to such extreme measures as shown, if all they needed was another host and new DNA? Wouldn’t they have just asked for it instead of spending all that money to construct this elaborate scheme to trick Captain Kirk? Obviously, they don’t realize that given enough time and enough pretty women, Kirk would only be too happy to provide some DNA samples.

The entire episode makes no sense.

Of Note

In this episode, Doctor McCoy makes some silly remark about Spock becoming a diplomat. Eventually, Spock becomes an Ambassador. Perhaps McCoy wasn’t joking after all.