"The Deadly Years" is very much Trek by the numbers. Crew beams down to colony, discovers strange thing going on that starts to affect crew...
In this case the strange thing is that a bunch of young whipper snappers have all turned into old folks, four of which are already dead and the other two (both played by genuine old people, included the earliest born actor to ever appear in the franchise, who was born in 1882 in Switzerland and has a noticeable accent) are heading that way.
All of the landing party are affected, except for Chekov, who is immune for some pseudoscientific reason. With the three main characters plus Scotty all rapidly ageing, the makeup department get to have some fun making the characters look old. This is mostly a ship bound episode; the battle scene later was reused footage from a previous episode and I'm assuming the stuff on the remastered Netflix/DVD version is added specially.
It's interesting to see Kelley and Shatner playing in advance the old men that they would later become in real life. McCoy becomes even more crotchety - and even more Southern - than he normally is. I'm not sure what happened in RL on that front. Kirk on the other hand goes pretty much senile, what Shatner turning in an excellent performance here. It's good to note the now 88-year-old Shatner still seems very compos mentis, although alas Nichelle Nichols, just two years younger, appears to have advanced dementia.
The guest cast... are mostly pretty poor, especially one Commodore. Except for the old guy at the start. He's nice.
The science in all this stretches credibility by a long chalk, with a very quick recovery by Kirk once the solution is found. I'll let it slide partly because of the cool way in which Kirk deals with three Romulan ships without firing a shot.
We also have another old flame of Kirk, who again gets his shirt off and a comedy last scene. Like I said, Trek by the numbers.
Conclusion
For an episode whose deus ex machina involves radiation, it seems appropriate to use the classic line from Chernobyl.
"Not great. Not terrible."
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment