TOS – The Apple

 

Plot – For the first third of The Apple the dangers that come aren’t particularly compelling and they come at a snail’s pace. The flowers of death, the fact they cannot beam off the planet, the man who is following them…these things play out in a very slow manner. What those early scenes needs is long shots and location work to try and sell it as a real world with deadly dangers. Instead we get the usual studio set with plastic flowers and not enough plants to make it feel like a jungle planet. It feels artificial, and so does the danger. We’ve waiting for the point where Kirk takes down the computer and makes a speech about the independence of the slaves, with a dreadful joke about love. Ultimately it feels like the entire exercise has been for the express purpose of making a joke about Spock looking satanic, as that was the reason why an exec didn’t want his character to appear on the show. It really wasn’t worth the bother.

Character – Chekov attempts to get close to the only female member of the landing party when Kirk breaks them up and says that is not why they have beamed down to paradise. I would punch the air at his observation if it wasn’t for that fact that that is exactly what Kirk gets up to every other week.

I thought it was very funny that Kirk should try and rouse Spock with the reminder ‘do you know how much time Starfleet has invested in you?’ It’s strange how Kirk falls to pieces over the death of one of his officers that we have never heard of before. Surely it is the Captain’s job to make these tough decisions and should people fall in the line of duty (as they inevitably do under Kirk) then he knows they walked into any situation understanding the risk. It takes Spock to snap him out of it and remind him that nobody has ever stated that Starfleet duty is particularly safe. Kirk seems to think that his men are dead because he let himself get distracted by the smell of flowers…or something. Kirk would go on to lose many more men before the end of three series and he wouldn’t even bat an eyelid. By the time he is threatening to get rid of Scotty if he doesn’t get the warp engines working, you have to conclude that there is something seriously off about him this week. After he makes his wrap up speech to the indigenous population at the end of the episode, I wish McCoy had mentioned that he was really out of character on this little jaunt. Oh, and how he has seemed to have forgotten about the men who have died.

Your standard Spock/McCoy philosophical battle ensues but I have seen it done far more effectively elsewhere. The best thing about this argument is the performances. Nimoy and Kelly make such an engaging pair when they are squaring off against each other.

Great Dialogue – ‘Would you mind being careful where you throw your rocks, Mr Spock?’

Terrible Dialogue – ‘If you can’t get those warp engines fixed…you’re fired!’ Poor Mr Scott, stuck between his defunct and damaged engines and facing career oblivion. I wouldn’t say this is Kirk’s best day for employee morale.

Production – They have made a valiant effort to provide the episode with the Eden that everybody seems to think this planet is. I don’t know if I would have gone for the blood red sky that gives the planet an oppressive feel. The giant snake head of Vaal is impressive (it is carved out of rock with smoke bellowing from its eyes) but it is also where a lot of the money of this episode has been spent and so it is obviously over exposed.

Worst moment – Surely that is record time for a redshirt to meet his demise? Two minutes in one of them explores the foliage on this world and is pierced by the pollen. When Kirk sends two nobodies called Mallory and Marple ahead but tells them to be careful he is basically sending them down the mine like canaries. I would have requested a sojourn back to the ship immediately.

Vaal is the worst computer that TOS ever featured because it doesn’t even have any kind of personality. It doesn’t speak or have a chance to get its point of view across, it merely has meek inhabitants of this world do its speaking.

I wish they hadn’t done that – It is irritating that the only observations that the Yeoman can make are about how frightening the situation is and questions about sex. Like those are the only things that would concern a female officer in Starfleet. This is salvaged slightly by the scene where she beats the crap out of several of the primitives.

The sequence of the two primitives watching Chekov and the Yeoman kissing and deciding they would like a bit of that feels really off kilter. I’m not sure who these scenes are aimed at or whether we are supposed to be titillated or disturbed. Watching aliens learn how to make love isn’t my idea of entertainment and we certainly aren’t invested enough in these characters to care about their relationships with each other.

A reason to watch this episode again – This might be an episode that would work for kids with the landing party beaming down to a jungle planet and the redshirts (everybody should know there is going to be a massacre because so many of them accompany Kirk) being bumped off in a variety of ways. Exploding rocks, plants that spit deadly pollen, lightning that strikes you down…it looks like Max Ehrlich had great fun trying to think up really silly ways to murder this bunch. As an adult it is very slow and unconvincing, taking an age to get to the point. Any excitement is purely superficial and by the end we are dealing with another enraged supercomputer with too many processors missing. How many times can TOS wheel out that old trope? An infinite amount by all accounts. The shifts in tone are quite alarming too. It takes a confident show to skip from horror planet to dining with primitives to philosophical debate hour. The trouble is these all feel like different episodes lumped together. It’s pretty jarring. It’s packed with TOS clichés and none of them are handled in a particularly clever way. When the red painted primitives start prostrating in front of a computer dressed up like a snake God you might find yourself looking over your shoulder and hoping nobody comes in and sees what you are watching. It’s one of those 60s episodes where I was watching the clock.

*1/2 out of *****