Never Work With Children or Animals (Review: 'Star Trek' 3.4, "And the Children Shall Lead")

With Picard having concluded in brilliant style, I am going back to the original series for a bit, at least until Strange New Worlds starts in June and Lower Decks follows soon after that.

This one is considered one of the worst episodes of Star Trek, full stop, as I found out after I watched it. It seems to be one of those episodes with an interesting concept that falls apart in the execution.

So, some thoughts on all of this:

• It's clear that the budget has been badly cut - we only get two sets beyond the existing Enterprise ones and they look they've used previous bits of scenery.
• Good child actors are hard to come by. You may get one in a production - sometimes, like in Stranger Things, you get an entire cast - but often they're clearly not experienced enough for the job. As in this case.
• When Gorgan turns up for the first time, my immediate thought was about Mystery Science Theater 3000. Hiring a high-profile attorney - Melvin Belli was the lawyer for Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald and was known as the "King of Torts" before that - to play a villain was a publicity stunt that the production team realised was a mistake.
• Gorgan does have an interesting overall plot - kill the adults, then use the kids to get to more adults - but how has he given them the powers to mind control people?
• The mind control gesture is a bit silly looking.
• Uhura seeing herself have a long, slow death hits a bit harder in the light of Nichelle Nichols' later dementia.
• We get two redshirts killed in this - beamed out into space - and we don't even see their deaths in space. Again, clearly budget cuts.
• The costumes for the kids look a bit silly, quite frankly. Then again, in the 1960s, many things looked a bit silly.
• Everyone gets to ham it up under mind-control. Not necessarily very well.
• I am sure that in one of the fight scenes, the redshirt flips himself!
• We also get Chekov's gun! That is different from Chekhov's gun of course.
• The resolution is poorly done - badly acted and filmed as much as anything. At least we don't get a laughing ending, but those kids will be traumatised for years.

Conclusion

It's a pretty poor episode of Star Trek but I've seen a good deal worse in other media.

3/10