The Cloud Miners was the 74th episode shown and it aired on February 28 1969. Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet Ardana to pick up some Zienite. It's needed to stop a plant plague on another planet. The material isn't there when they arrive and our guys get captured by the miners. All the posh citizens live up on the floating city. Jeff Corey, the leader, comes to the rescue. They chase the miners off.
Jeff takes Kirk and Spock up to the floating city and shows them around. The society is very segregated. All the thinkers and policy makers live in the sky and all the miners are kept in the dirt. Turns out the miners aren't happy with their dirty lot in life. There's a revolution brewing and Kirk and Spock get caught up in that. They stop the revolution peacefully enough, Spock figures out the mystery of the mad miners, and the miners cough up some of the Zienite. Two planets saved on one trip. That's Star Fleet efficiency, huh? A plot close enough to some of the other episodes in the series not to get many points for originality but it was still ok to watch. Jeff Corey was good. He'd play a Shadow controlled character on Babylon 5 nearly 20 years later. I wondered if Joe S. remembered him from Star Trek when he was casting the part for B5.
In The Savage Curtain the Enterprise is looking at a planet with a lot of volcanic activity when Spock gets some odd scan readings. Abe Lincoln appears in the view screen, then comes on board the ship. Is he real? Everyone likes him and he convinces Kirk and Spock to beam down to the planet with him. They meet a Vulcan who introduces himself as Surak. He's the Vulcan who started the current Vulcan civilization. Spock is sure he's not real. A big rock guy appears out of a pile of rocks and tells them they have to fight four villains to the death. What a dick, huh? The rock guy represents a planet that wants to see which way is stronger, Good or Evil, so it's a Battle to the Death. You know how that's going to come out don't you. Some of these aliens sure aren't very imaginative. I guess it comes with being dicks.
On the planet Sarpeidon some of the guys get stuck in time in All Our Yesterdays. A sun is about to go supernova and the Enterprise stops by to see if they can offer help to the citizens. When they get there all the people are gone. There's only the black robed librarian who tells them he knows about the trouble with the sun, not to worry, he's leaving to join his family right away. What the landing party doesn't know is the planet's inhabitants have all gone back in time. They plan to live out their lives in different places and times on the planet. This is instead of leaving the planet and having their race continue. It seems like a dumb idea but who am I to judge.
Kirk runs right into the time machine when he hears a scream. You'd think Star Fleet would train his ass better but I guess the writers forget. Spock and McCoy, not trained any better, run right into the time machine. The guys get trapped in an ice age with Mariette Hartley. Spock reverts to the more savage Vulcan of his civilizations past and falls for her. Kirk, having wound up in a more recent past, saves a lady from some big hatted ruffians. He gets arrested and tossed in jail for wearing weird clothes. He meets a man from the future who fills him in on the time program and helps him return to the present. Kirk then helps Spock and McCoy return to the present. Poor Mariette has to stay in the past and poor Spock is all alone again. It's another sad episode that was still pretty entertaining.
Turnabout Intruder was the last episode and it was to air March 28th 1969 but President Dwight Eisenhower died that day. The episode didn't air until June 3, 1969 when the show returned to the air. Captain Kirk gets his body stolen by a woman who he had dated while they were in the academy. Dr Lester wanted to be a Star Ship Captain. She felt the fleet had a gender bias when she was turned down. Now she's got her chance but after taking over Captain Kirk's body she screws up one command decision after another. Eventually the crew figures out what's happened and revolts. The process is reversed and the Kirk unit returned to his own body again. It wasn't that great a note to end the series on.
There was a letter writting campaign for the renewal but the next season never happened until the fans started doing them. I'll be getting to those sooner or later. I guess I found the shows in the third season mostly watchable but not as good as the first and second seasons. Repeated plots would be my most common complaint. Sometimes the story was weak and the dialog the same. Without Roddenberry to watch over the day to day the end product suffered. Even with those are mostly minor complains. The episodes of Star Trek were more consistantly entertaining than the episodes of The Starlost that I had been watching recently. Seeing the shows nearly back to back made the weaknesses in The Starlost really stand out. There's no doubt that the likebility of the characters on Star Trek really helps gloss over the blemishes in any of the weaker episodes. There's another Star Trek disc with The Cage on it. I'll be getting to that soon.
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